Take a pill or something

This column by William Powers (link courtesy Romenesko) really struck a chord with me. The author complains about the volume and style of what passes for discourse among the chattering classes.

All media ideologues have one thing in common: anger. Scratch a real ideologue, left or right, and invariably what you find is a person who is working out some ancient vendetta against a parent, a sibling, a school, a company or some social group that rejected them and made them feel small. The anger became a passion, and passion can produce compelling, lucrative media content. But should angry people own the landscape? American radio is a wasteland of niche-driven music programming, frat-boy humor and ideology-driven talk.

Thank God somebody said that. I can't stand to listen for one single minute to those over-amped opinionated loudmouths -- I don't care which side they're on. You can't convince people of anything while you're arguing with them -- unless they already agree with you. The fatal flaw of Bowling for Columbine was the way Michael Moore's anger made him less, not more, articulate. You think you're being really articulate and powerful when you blow your stack, but actually you're just jacking off. It feels good, but it doesn't convince anybody.

Still skirting the issue

Here's another skirt item, from some vapid fashion blog:

U.K. pin-up (and we're just talking about her facelift) Caprice Bourret has apologized for appearing in a recent magazine shoot wearing a pro-drugs skirt. Caprice, who likes to think she's on a first-name basis with fame, appeared in Maxim magazine wearing a mini with the slogan "I Love Cocaine." But now the former glamour model turned singer turned actress -- she's appearing in the London production of Rent -- is backtracking, saying she doesn't condone it and has never tried the drug. (Which sounds about as honest as Liza and David's wedding, but never mind.) A statement from her agent Cassie Mead said: "Caprice apologies for any offence caused by the picture and she deeply regrets wearing the skirt. She does not wish to influence the use of drugs or suggest that the use of drugs is acceptable. Caprice has never tried cocaine."

No, I have no idea who she is either, and don't care. But where would you even get a skirt imprinted with the legend "I love cocaine"? Maybe Japan. No, that's not a hoax.

Are hoaxes satire? I forget

Before anyone pulls your leg with a story and photograph about a Japanese faux-see-through skirt fad -- it's actually a hoax.

That is to say -- At first (seemingly) it was reported that there is a Japanese see-through skirt fad. Then someone reported that they aren't really see-through skirts, but trompe l'oeil skirts that have been painted to look as if the panties are showing through. Finally it was revealed that the whole thing is a hoax -- the skirts don't really exist in any form. The whole thing was an internet hoax.

Is a hoax necessarily satire? And if so, are they satirizing crazy Japanese shit or are they satirizing the internet? It's all starting to move too quickly for me.

Where were we? I rented Minority Report, being too cheap and lazy to see it in theaters. Millions of dollars were spent to make a film involving cops, chases, a murder mystery, a futuristic milieu, and many female victims. Tom Cruise spends a great deal of time with his mouth open, looking startled. And the whole movie goes by before you realize that the crusty old father-figure is actually Max Von Sydow.

I did get a smidgen done on my book yesterday and today, which is a big improvement on nothing, which is what I did for the previous week. Not proud of output though.

For shame

Tonight NBC News broadcast a report from Jacksonville, Fla. about an arch-conservative Baptist who preaches hatred against Islam. The report (which on their website is unfortunately only available in video) said that Jerry Vines, leader of a Baptist megachurch in the Florida city, calls Islam a religion of murder and Mohammed a pedophile. It included statements from shamefaced members of other area Baptist churches disavowing Vines, as well as local Muslims stating they were afraid the villification would lead to violence against them. Well, it's a free country, and you can be as big an asshole as you want, as long as you don't actually suggest going out and shooting someone. But it made this Christian want to fly down to Jacksonville and stand in solidarity beside the amazingly subdued Muslims.

Coverage in the Jacksonville area is apparently nonexistent. A search on Google News turned up only two stories referring to Vines' statements: a neutral-to-positive piece on Pat Robertson's site -- appalling -- and a negative editorial in the liberal Christian magazine Sojourner.

Update: I found more links using the normal Google search:

• Biblical Recorder, 14 Jun 02: Vines calls Mohammed a 'demon-posessed pedophile'
• St. Peter's News, 16 Jun 02: Vines declines to apologize
• WTLV News, 12 Jun 02: Local reaction over pastor's controversial comments
• UCC Press Release, 19 Jun 02: NCC leader condemns Vines

Speaking of writing...

I went yesterday to see Adaptation, the widely-praised house-of-mirrors movie about the perils of various kinds of writing. Daring to use the most sophomoric trick in a college freshman's book -- to write through the difficulty of completing an impossible assignment by writing about how difficult it is -- the movie depicts a neurotic screenwriter who, when awarded a contract to adapt a nonfiction book about orchid cultivation to the screen, freezes. He tries everything to get out of his writer's block, all the while being tormented by his twin brother, who decides to try his hand at this screenwriting thing and through beginner's luck and the use of every cliche in the book manages to write a million-dollar thriller in half the time.

Although it's highly entertaining, not the least because of its roller-coaster plot and its satire of the movie business -- every movie about the movie business is entertaining, for some reason -- I found the movie ultimately depressing, because I identified so deeply with the schlub. A classic self-defeating neurotic, he makes Woody Allen's familiar nebbish characters look positively actualized. It wasn't the writer's block I identified with -- that hasn't troubled me much lately, knock on wood -- it was the constant self-loathing, as expressed in voice-overs that perfectly capture the shy person's dilemma: I am nervous in this situation; I'm afraid everyone can tell how nervous I am; everyone must think I'm an imposter, and any minute now they will attack me; I get even more nervous. These thoughts, expressed in voice-over, sometimes literally drown out the real voices of other characters.

Man, I can identify. At the end of the story, a cathartic encounter with the other main characters resolves these problems for the protagonist. Maybe it's a sign that this isn't done well enough that I found the character's neuroses more believable than the moments where he grows out of them. Or maybe the filmmaker made this resolution deliberately weak, since the protagonist -- ostensibly the writer of the very film you're watching -- screams at one point that he doesn't want a film where there's character growth and resolution. In any case, I found the whole experience ultimately depressing.

Writing advice

No, I have none to offer. But it's never a waste of time to read the New York Times.

From Sunday's NYT Book Review, I quote a review of Norman Mailer's recent book The Spooky Art:

"The Spooky Art" contains a number of sensible observations, including one that seems especially pertinent in the era of the creative writing course: "What ruins most writers of talent is that they don't get enough experience, so their novels tend to develop a certain paranoid perfection." ... This is not a book of dos and don'ts, but the professional tips, when they come, are well primed: "If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material." If only there were more of this. A great deal of "The Spooky Art" has nothing whatever to do with novel writing, serious or otherwise.

I like that bit about not getting enough experience. My own writing shows my sad lack of it.

Today, the Times' regular "Writers on Writing" feature contains a wonderful essay by Joyce Maynard, who tells how faith in one's characters and their integrity means you don't have to worry about story. All you have to do is trust the characters to make their own story. I found this to be true when working on the title story in my book How I Adore You. Now all I have to do is apply that principle to the second draft of my novel.

The truth behind the duct tape suggestion

If you wondered about that suggestion to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting, here's an electrifying revelation from the Washington Post:

The GOP Home Shopping Network

By Al Kamen

Friday, February 21, 2003

That most lamentable duct tape suggestion last week by a Homeland Security official -- which drove countless panicked citizens out to buy the product -- has been widely derided as useless and pretty crazy.

But maybe not so crazy. Turns out that nearly half -- 46 percent to be precise -- of the duct tape sold in this country is manufactured by a company in Avon, Ohio. And the founder of that company, that would be Jack Kahl, gave how much to the Republican National Committee and other GOP committees in the 2000 election cycle? Would that be more than $100,000?

His son, John Kahl, who became CEO after his father stepped down shortly after the election, told CNBC last week that "we're seeing a doubling and tripling of our sales, particularly in certain metro markets and around the coasts and borders." The plant has "gone to a 24/7 operation, which is about a 40 percent increase" over this time last year, Kahl said. The company had more than $300 million in sales in 2001.

Quiet days in San Francisco

Cris left three days ago, but I’ve gotten almost nothing done on my book. If only a single appointment looms in the afternoon, I blow off the whole day. Today I did nothing until my appointment at 2:00 with the tax man.

I have a great tax man. Years ago when I was doing Frighten the Horses, my sex 'n politics magazine, Ralph started doing my taxes. He made it so that everything I bought that was remotely connected to writing or publishing the magazine was tax deductible. He deducts things I would never have the guts to deduct. But when I tell him that, he protests that every single thing he puts down is defensible, and reminds me that I got audited once and the IRS found almost nothing wrong. I think I had to pay about a hundred dollars.

I stopped doing the magazine in 1995, but Ralph still does my taxes and deducts everything because I am now a published writer. My trip to Los Angeles for the reading in August -- all tax-deductible. My trip to New York in September -- ditto. My trip to the desert in December -- also ditto. Almost every year, he figures out a way to get me a refund. The only exception was when I had gotten so much money from Commerce One stock options that I owed the IRS more than $100,000 in taxes at the end of the year. But I had the money in the bank; I hadn't invested it or spent it. So I just wrote a check. I still came out way ahead. I don't know why people get so upset about paying taxes. I made almost $300,000 that year -- entirely through dumb luck -- and paid $100,000 in taxes. So what? I was still $200,000 ahead.

By the time I got home a little before 5:00, I was so sleepy that I tried to take a nap. But I’d drunk too much caffiene and couldn’t even fall asleep. I proceeded to try to round up the cats for their dinner, since it was getting dark, and they aren’t allowed outside after dark. I came out of the bedroom and they took one look at me and both ran outside. They are punishing me for Cris being absent; she pays them much more attention than I do, not that I don’t.

Despite my refusal to even pretend to work on my book, I did have an idea. It will mean restructuring much of the second half of the book, but that’s all right. I haven't even had a rough idea of how to approach the second draft until now. The new idea will help immensely.

After feeding the cats, I went out to rent a movie. As I've said before, I got a film criticism degree in college and it has given me nothing but trouble. I can't even pick out a movie in less than thirty minutes. Almost everything on the shelves falls into the category of 1., complete crap; 2., something I really like but don't want to watch so soon after seeing it the last time; 3. Something I wouldn't mind seeing but which I would much rather see on the big screen. Finally, literally after 30 minutes, I found something perfect: The French Connection II, a 1975 sequel to the original 1971 Gene Hackman movie. This sequel also stars Hackman. He goes after "Frog Number One" -- as he refers to the French heroin kingpin played by Fernando Rey -- in Marseilles. Along the way he does an homage to Frank Sinatra in "The Man with the Golden Arm." It was a lot of fun.

In the middle of the movie, the doorbell rang, and it was three teenagers. One of the girls wanted to use the bathroom. They were on the way to a party next door and couldn't get in -- whatever. I let the girl in and waited apprehensively. Her friend came up the front stairs and stared at me through the glass to make sure I didn't molest the girl -- who was, like, 15 -- and I stared back at her and the boy who was with them. Finally the kid came out, very grateful, and they all skedaddled, and I watched the rest of the movie.

Burning Bush

My friend Jeanne writes on SF Gate about last Sunday's protest that reading the colorful and varied protest signs was part of the fun. One of her picks: "Bush is a servant of Sauron! We hates him!"

Je ne sais quoi

Nineteen years ago I married my French lover, who got a green card and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. She works her butt off at the teenage psych ward at a big East Bay hospital, and thus contributes more to the commonweal than I probably ever have. So she has plenty of ground to stand on when she criticizes the U.S. which, being French, she loves doing. She writes:

Funny after 20 years of favoritism for being the best
lover, the best cook, the most fashionable cutie pie
who wears a beret with a "je ne sais quoi" attitude,
as of last week I am a traitor with outdated wit and
intelligence, a new kind of terrorist with a fanatism
for stinky cheese and a talent for "faux pas."
So have you heard about the French Friday boycott
which is apparently not to buy goods from France -- to
make their economy suffer. So here is the good news.
Every Friday is your chance to dine on French wine
and brie and if you don't drink alcohol you can always
buy a bottle of Perrier or what about a French movie
(there are some good ones at the Castro) or do whatever
you want to counter-boycott the French Friday and of
course you can French kiss any day of the week -- it is
not outlawed yet.

That's my girl.

Imaginary festival of films depicting the lives of writers and artists

Henry and June -- about Henry Miller and Anais Nin
Naked Lunch -- about William S. Burroughs and friends
Pollock -- about Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner
The Fountainhead -- fictitious film about a larger-than-life architect
Next Stop, Greenwich Village -- fictitious film about New York bohemians in the 1950s
'Round Midnight -- fictitious film about jazz musicians in Paris
Artists and Models -- Martin and Lewis portray American artists in Paris
An American in Paris -- Gene Kelly, ditto
Chelsea Walls -- fictitious film about New York bohemians in the 1990s
The Razor's Edge (1941) -- fictitious film about Paris bohemians in the 1930s
Il Postino -- fictitious film in which Pablo Neruda is portrayed
Before Night Falls -- about Reinaldo Arenas
Jack London -- about Jack London
My Dear Secretary -- fictitious comedy about a novelist and his secretary
White Badge -- fictitious drama about a novelist suffering from war-related PTSD
The Front -- fictitious look at the blacklist of the 1950s
Hangover Square -- fictitious drama about a composer suffering from mental illness
Impromptu -- fictitious romance depicting George Sand and Frederic Chopin
Julia -- drama depicting fictionalized events in the lives of Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman
Night and Day -- biopic of Cole Porter
Rhapsody in Blue -- biopic of George Gershwin

Keep repeating it: "'Sellout' is no longer a dirty word"

Evan Williams, founder of Pyra Labs and inventor of the Blogger software that powers this and many other blogs, sold Pyra to Google last week. What's the first thing they made him do? He had to take down his own blog.

Best protest march photo

Of all the thousands of photos taken of millions of people at dozens of protest marches around the world this weekend, this is the best. Marc Brown is the photographer.

Obscure adage of the month

This column in Editor & Publisher about Vietnamese newspapers features this remarkable passage (low in article):

"Which is your favorite?" I asked. He held up a paper with a name -- printed in reverse on green spot color -- that was the same as the nearby city, Can Tho. He could have been an American talking about his hometown paper for a Readership Institute survey: "I like it because it has the local news of Can Tho. I like the local news."

"Is it the most accurate of the three papers?" I asked. He giggled, as Vietnamese will when they're a little nervous, and cast a sidelong glance at two other English-speaking employees hovering nearby. Still, he answered clearly: "You can't believe what you read in any newspaper in Vietnam." He giggled even louder and added, "They print what they are told to print."

"But what about Nam Cam? Isn't that an example of more truth getting in the paper?" I asked.

I'm not sure if his guffaw reflected especially high anxiety or was simply cynical laughter at such a question. If Nam Cam is in the newspaper, he said, it's because there is some struggle among the elites. It was like the old saying throughout Asia: The monkey is being whipped to scare the chickens.

Ah, yes, the old saying. Whip the monkey to scare the chickens. I see.... (nod sagely)

Rise or loaf

I confess I have been very lazy in the last few weeks about working on the second draft of my novel. It's going to take some focussed attention to resolve the big problem in the second half of the book -- the weakness in how well a secondary character, and her relationship with one of the protagonists, is defined -- and my attention has been very scattered. I've gone to see some films, I went to the big peace march, I've been putting in four miles on the treadmill several times a week, but I've also wasted great amount of time.

My friend Ellen, a former architect, now teaches snowboarding for seven months of the year in Alaska and does some architectural model-building work to get her through the warm months. Happily, she gets paid for what she likes to do. But when she's not even doing that, she usually has a quite gleeful attitude about doing nothing, which she calls "loafing."

I don't even have to work at the moment. I have enough time to do exactly what I want to do, namely to write, for the next several months while my unemployment holds out. All I have to do is do it. Yet I don't.

Well, Cris is going to El Salvador for a few weeks tomorrow, so I've been telling myself I'll get a lot done while she's gone. And I'm definitely planning on going away for 4 to 6 weeks starting in May, which should give me plenty of time to finish the second draft.

Meanwhile, I've been getting ideas for new novels that are very unlike the ideas I usually get. My usual ideas are very realistic, to the point of being dull. But in the last ten days I've had two ideas that are sort of fantasy/sci-fi ideas. One was to write about a hyper-consumerist world in which society was organized entirely around buying more and more manufactured crap. The title is "Arise, Bright Engines of Transaction!"

Marching, marching, some rock throwing

Another big peace march in SF today, following huge worldwide protests. The San Francisco march was diverse and peaceful, except for some attention-grabbing hijinks by the usual suspects.

Update: Here are some snapshots I took today.

Peace march numbers

No one mentioned the deity at the U.N. yesterday, or claimed they were fighting for good against evil. Bush, on the other hand, can't keep from mentioning God or good and evil, says this columnist.

Meanwhile, here are conservative estimates of the number of people attending protest marches in world cities:

London -- 750,000
Madrid -- 660,000
Barcelona -- 500,000
New York -- 500,000
Berlin -- 500,000
Damascus -- 200,000
Melbourne -- 150,000
Paris -- 100,000
Amsterdam -- 70,000
Oslo -- 60,000
Glasgow -- 60,000
Dublin -- 80,000
Brussels -- 50,000
Seville -- 60,000
Bern -- 40,000
Stockholm -- 35,000
Los Angeles -- 30,000
Copenhagen -- 25,000
Montreal -- 20,000
Canberra -- 16,000
Vienna -- 15,000
Toronto -- 15,000
Mexico City -- 10,000
Toulouse -- 10,000
Cape Town -- 5000
Tokyo -- 5000
Johannesburg -- 4000
Kiev -- 2000

Today, the world; tomorrow, San Francisco. Yes, I'm going, rain or shine.

Wolf! Wolf!

The information that prompted our nation's leaders to raise the "terror alert status" to "orange" -- a report that a terrorist had somehow smuggled a "dirty bomb" into the country for detonation this weekend -- was the product of a prisoner's imagination, ABC News reported.

Riiiinngg

Lately the unwanted marketing/sales/begging phone calls have gotten out of control. Yesterday we got a call from "Sandra" asking to speak to Cris. I handed the phone to her and watched her expression turn from mildly irritated to crushingly annoyed. Finally she got a word in edgewise: "Excuse me, but my partner thought this was my friend Sandra, so I'm not interested, and can you please take me off your call list??"

Cris is much better than I am at including that request to "take me off your call list" -- a supposedly magic phrase that actually makes them delete your name from their database. But did I really have to say it this morning when I got the following call?

"Hello, can I speak to Mr. or Mrs. Pritchard, please?"

"This is Mr. Pritchard," I answered, although I don't think anyone has called me that since I was teaching high school 17 years ago.

"This is Steven so-and-so from the National Pro-Life Committee or some such thing... Can I ask you, do you consider yourself to be pro-life?"

"Sorry, Steven, but I'm on the other side."

"Oh. All right, thank you for your time."

Sure, I could have engaged him in a discussion about how being "pro-life" might mean, for example, that I am against the war. But I always get off the phone as soon as possible. I'd much rather call up Christine, for example, and ask her whether it's rained at her place in the desert where, even though they've gotten rain in town six miles away, it's just as likely not to have rained at her place one drop. Or call up Marilyn in New York and complain that, since she's moving to Pennsylvania, I will no longer have anyone in New York to visit. Or call up Catherine and talk to her about her trip to France. Talking to some pro-lifer is just about last on my list, even if he was polite.

Hydrophilia

It's finally raining again. Makes me happy, though the last two weeks of brilliant, warm days and chilly nights were the most beutiful extended stretch of weather I've seen here in a while.

The next big peace demo in SF is Feb. 16 -- a day after most cities, on account of the big Chinese New Year's Parade that takes place on the 15th. Sunday the 16th, start down at Justin Hermann Plaza about noon, march tot he Civic Center, as usual. But as today's Chronicle reports, people are also putting a lot of energy into planning demonstrations to take place when the war starts. The flier lists two dozen choke points where a group of a few dozen people holding an intersection can effectively shut down morning commute traffic flowing into the city.

Good idea, but on the first day after the start of the war, won't most people stay home to watch it on CNN?

And because they're focusing on the morning commute, they're ignoring the biggest, easiest choke point of all: the spot on the eastbound approaches to the Bay Bridge where all traffic narrows to three lanes. Not that I'm recommending doing anything like that.

War war blah blah blah

A war on Iraq would only beget more terrorists, many say. But few are as authoritative as this former Northern Ireland leader, whose experience with terrorism, poverty and cycles of reprisal is first-hand.

Courtesy of emmanuelle.net, a joke:

Q. Why are we so eager to include the French in our coalition against Iraq?

A. Who better to teach them how to surrender?

The French may soon be the only people we can make fun of, Cris says, reacting to the controversy over satirical comments by "Dame Edna."

Arts and culture notes

2003 is the centennial year of Mark Rothko, whose transcendant images belie the personal demons that drove him to commit suicide in 1970. Visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a few days ago, I sat transfixed before his painting No. 14, 1960 for fifteen minutes. His images encourage this kind of meditative study, such that the final major commission he fulfilled was for work to decorate a non-denominational chapel -- in Houston, of all places. The National Gallery of Art seems to have the largest collection of his work.

Even more transcendant was the performance Cris and I attended last night at the San Francisco Symphony of Shostakovich's 8th Symphony. Led by visiting conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, the orchestra never sounded better. I was riveted for the symphony's 80-minute length.

In other news: Grad students at UC-Davis are plowing through a collection of the papers of poet Gary Snyder, the beat figure who, along with Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen, was famous for making connections between the beat writers and Zen Buddhism.

Slouching toward Hollywood

Joan Didion hasn't filed a story on the Phil Spector - Lana Clarkson murder, so you'll have to make do with this piece from The Independent (U.K.):

"It's Sunset Boulevard in reverse," said one of the guys at Cantor's, the delicatessen on Fairfax, the next morning. "The chick is the William Holden character. Her car breaks down. She pulls into this mansion up in Alhambra, and there's this little old guy, Phil Spector."

"What chick today has heard of Phil Spector?" asks his companion.

"This chick is 40. And Spector sees her, and he thinks maybe she is the one sent by providence and the William Morris talent agency to save him. Aren't you waiting to be rescued by a gorgeous chick?"

Latest war drumbeat

The war won't start until at least Feb. 14, according to this article:

Speaking Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Powell said a decision on using force would ``start to come to a head'' after Feb. 14, when the two chief U.N. weapons inspectors, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, are to report to the council after two days of talks in Baghdad this weekend.

An internet rumor circulating today predicts war will start the first week of March, saying "don't fly" then. But it's no secret. Meanwhile, we're now on condition orange!

Why "there are no good conservative cartoonists"

Here's a short interview (link courtesy Romenesko) with Dan Perkins, who does the Tom Tomorrow strip. Excerpt:

"I think there are no good conservative cartoonists. Good humor is about the real underdog taking on the powerful. That's what satire is about. Conservative humor is picking on people who have less than you. That's not satire, that's just mean."

(Yes, that link to his strip on Salon will only be worth it if you subscribe to Salon, which I do. I started subscribing around the time they started blocking off "premuim" content. Now they block off nearly all content unless you subscribe. I have no opinion about the wisdom of this, but I do think some things are worth paying for. I subscribe to the New York Times and they deliver it to me at home -- what's wrong with that? Just because the content was free for a few years doesn't mean you have a right to get it for free.)

As for the opinion that there are no good conservative cartoonists, I think you have to qualify that. Bruce Tinsley, who does the Mallard Fillmore strip published in many newspapers, is demonstrably a better artist than Perkins, whose images resemble clip art. (I'll give Perkins the benefit of the doubt and assume he can actually draw really well, but in comparing the art in each of their comics, Tinsley displays much more skill than Perkins does.) I can't think of any other "conservative cartoonists," but let's suppose they're all better artists than Perkins. But then you'd have to deal with whether or not the strip is actually funny, and Mallard Fillmore is never really funny. It's just a collection of mean observations and diehard Limbaugh-like opinions. The only thing remotely funny is that Mallard Fillmore is a duck, and ducks are inherently funny. That's the only thing Tinsley does right.

Curiously, a search on Tinlsey uncovered no extensive interviews, but there is this column, which provides an interesting quote:

Bruce Tinsley has used his "Mallard Fillmore" comic to tweak the media for covering Bush in a negative way. "They portray any military position taken by a Republican president as warmongering," said Tinsley, whose conservative strip runs in 400-plus papers via King Features Syndicate. "But I'm not personally sold on this war. I'm disappointed that the administration hasn't been more forthcoming on the reasons for a war."

Wow, even a rabid Clinton-hater like Tinsley is not sold on the war. Bush still has a lot of explaining to do.

Spector: 'It's all been done!'

In this exclusive interview published in the Sydney Morning Herald, conducted only weeks ago, legendary producer Phil Spector spoke of the depression and mental illness that kept him from the public eye for more than 20 years. A short excerpt:

For years he did nothing. He was incapable of action. Paralysed. Projects came and went, unfulfilled. What could possibly interest him? Disco? "Terrible." Michael Jackson? "The most depressing, heinous thing. I mean, starting out life as a black man and ending up as a white woman, what's that all about?" Rap music? "Like the c got left off at the printers." Spector falls back on the sofa. "It's all been done! It's all been done!"

Spector was arrested Monday morning, charged with the murder of a Hollywood actress.

Artists retake SF neighborhods colonized by dot-com companies

The Wall St. Journal has a nice article about how artists, theater companies, and other bohemians are retaking the loft and office buildings they were forced out of during the dot-com bubble. Let's trace the story, courtesy of the free archives of SFGate:

• Feb. 1999: Office boom blurs boundaries between SOMA, financial district
• June 2000: Arts groups will be pushed out by high tech
• Aug. 2000: Dancers sweat as studio space gets scarce
• Oct. 2000: Economic boom threatens to kill off SF's alternative culture
• Nov. 2000: Artists march to protest rents
• Mar. 2001: Buildings try to fill empty floors amid dot-com collapse
• June 2001: Dot-com demise sends vacancies soaring
• Oct. 2001: Art Explosion -- Ex-Dot-commer artists and tumbling commercial rents come together
• Nov 2001: Arts groups now endangered by dropoffs in donations

And that's about it from the Chronicle. Reason? The story was actually over with more than a year ago -- and the WSJ is now just catching up. Nice of them to notice, though.

Poets, activism, dancing in church

After succeeding in getting a White House poetry event cancelled -- poets against a war in Iraq intended to turn it from a genteel tea party into a protest -- poets are organizing against the war. Wednesday Feb. 12, the date of the cancelled event, will now be A Day of Poetry Against the War. Included on their site is a page listing news stories about their cause.

In other activism, New York Episcopalians are donating money to rebuild a mosque bombed in the recent U.S. war in Afghanistan, despite criticism from conservatives who say things like, "First of all, there are thousands of Christian churches you could be building in Africa, for people who desperately need churches. Secondly, Islam is a religion we are in confrontation with."

Switching coasts, but staying in the same denomination, a San Francisco Episcopal congregation is tearing itself apart over all-night raves held in the church. I heard of this conflict in December and talked it over with some friends who are both journalists and church-goers; we wondered when it would hit the news, and now it has. The news hook: the congregation's rector is quitting over the conflict, which many say is not so much ravers vs. non-ravers, but conservatives vs. liberals.

Spector's victim

The victim in the Phil Spector murder case has been identified as Lana Clarkson, 40, of Los Angeles. I did a search and quickly came up with the fact that Clarkson is a B-movie queen. Assuming it's the same Lana Clarkson.

Update: Yes, that's her.

VL?

This morning I got up at 5:00 a.m. and went to zazen, for the second Tuesday in a row. Dark and cold was the morning, but I put on a long-sleeved silk undershirt and a wool sweater and I was all right. My legs turned into wood to such an extent that I had to move before the bell, but aside from that I was reasonably calm, repeating as a mantra Psalm 62:1: "For God alone my soul in silence waits; from God comes my salvation." Afterward, Y. took care to greet me and welcome me back, and actually smiled, which was the first warmth I've ever seen him show anybody. Maybe he's finally settling in.

I came home to see that my next door neighbor's house had been vandalized, in a very strange way. Someone had painted "VL" on the bricks in white paint, using not spray paint but a brush; and worse, had dumped not just one but two whole cans of white paint onto the sidewalk. It was strange because the "VL" had been done in block letters, and didn't look anything like the typical gang-related grafitti seen all over the Mission District. Little of the paint, which was splashed in thick white streams over the sidewalk, got onto the sidewalk in front of my house, but the mess in front of the house next door was extreme. And of course people had already started tracking the paint up and down the sidewalk.

I rang the doorbell, and the tenant who answered said that it had happened last night around 9:00 pm. She had no idea what it was all about. My theory is that it might have to do with the new guy living in the in-law apartment in the basement. He blocked our driveway on Sunday night, so he must be a ne'er-do-well.

Review: Spike Lee's 25th Hour

I saw Spike Lee's recent 25th Hour the other day, and I felt sufficiently both amused and annoyed to write about it.

The premise of the film, adapted by David Benioff and Lee from Benioff's novel, is simple: a look at the last 24 hours of freedom for a New York heroin dealer who's about to go to prison for seven years. During the course of his last day, Monty the dealer (now, he avows, an ex-dealer) revisits some meaningful places, is taken for a night on the town by his boyhood friends Jakob and Francis, has a showdown with the Russian mafia patron he worked for, and processes emotions with his father and his girlfriend.

Not a bad premise, especially if during those 24 hours Monty (Edward Norton) actually learns something about himself that will both protect him in the next, incarcerated, phase of his life, and keep him from re-entering the criminal life once he gets out. But all he really learns is who really dropped a dime on him and got him arrested -- not his girlfriend, but his obese Ukranian bodyguard -- and whether or not his chums, father and girlfriend will stand by him. But as far as character growth for Monty, none. He's just as resigned to doing his stretch in prison (versus the other two alternatives, killing himself --his own idea -- or fleeing -- his father's) at the end of the film as he is at the beginning.

Meanwhile, there are two overriding concerns. One is loyalty: Was his girlfriend the one who turned him in? Will his friends stand by him? Will his father help him escape? Each of these questions is resolved in turn, with not very much tension one way or the other. For example, we don't get to know his girlfriend -- a bootylicious Puerto Rican princess comically named Naturelle (Rosario Dawson) -- well enough to be able to guess, or care, whether or not she actually turned him in. Her main contribution is as eye candy, and to utter cliched phrases at the end of the film such as "I'll wait for you."

The other theme, much more lovingly explored, is machismo. In an introductory scene that takes place before the major action of the film, Monty rescues an injured mutt from the roadside. When his bloated bodyguard is afraid to deal with the snarling dog, Monty throws his jacket over the pooch and tosses the dog in the trunk of his car. "Quien es mas macho!" he exclaims triumphantly, and this question informs the rest of the film. The main way this shows up is Monty's aprehension about going to prison and getting raped by his fellow convicts. He explains this fear by stating, several times, that his supposedly pretty face will attract the attentions of others; to my mind Norton's visage is discordantly pale and lumpish, but I guess that's where a little suspended disbelief comes in handy. To avoid this most fearsome of fates, he gets a hell of a lot of advice from his friends and associates, including the vicious mafia boss, who offers the standard pointer that Monty should, as soon as possible, beat the crap out of someone to show his fellow prisoners what a tough guy he is. Monty's fear of being raped, and his certainty that he will, give him a different idea. In the movie's climactic scene, he has his pal Francis (Barry Pepper) beat him about the face to "make me ugly when I go in there."

I'm not denying either the reality or the horror of prison rape, but for even a good-looking guy to obsess over the notion that his sheer attractiveness (not) will make him a target, and worry about this to the exclusion of almost anything else -- such as what will happen to his girlfriend, his aging, alcoholic father, his expensive apartment, or his friends -- stretched my credibility. While hapring on machismo, Lee offers neither a real critique nor any alternatives. The only man in the whole film who fails to strut and preen like a steroid-shooting gym monkey -- in other words, the only alternative role model offered -- is Monty's friend Jakob (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Jakob is a repellent schlub of an English teacher, and not a very good one, as is clear from a scene in his class. Not only doesn't he know how to inspire his intelligent, privileged students, he also doesn't know how to deal with a crush he has on one of them (Anna Paquin). Francis, a macho bond trader whose slicked-back hair and aggressive attitude recall Gordon Gecko, repeatedly mocks Jakob and consigns him to "the 62nd percentile" of eligible bachelors -- a further suggestion by Lee that men's worth is tied up in their sexual dominance. And when Jakob's oversexed student, coming on to an ecstacy rush, tries climbing on his lap in a nightclub, Jakob pushes her away, sputtering (quite reasonably), "You're going to get me fired! What if somebody sees us?!" as Francis sneers.

So Jakob doesn't offer much of an alternative. Clearly Lee's on the side of machismo, as if there were any doubt from his previous movies, and if there's anything a macho guy fears, it's getting fucked in the ass. Since most of the movie is spent on this homophobia, it's only fair to assume that must be Spike Lee's greatest fear, too, just ahead of sucking somebody's cock (a practice also mocked during the film). By the end of the movie, I felt kind of sorry for Lee. He's so terrified of having his manhood taken away from him that he has to make a major motion picture about his fear. But that's par for the course not only for Lee's movies, but in general for American movies, where fear, violence and machismo are the driving forces.

As for me, I identified with the weak English teacher. I've been in that situation of trying to teach literature to a bunch of teenagers while worrying about my own life and where it's going. I just wish Lee had allowed Jakob to be a better teacher. Lee depicts the bond trader character as successful -- an interesting choice, since in the book he's unsuccessful -- but can't bear to do the same with the non-macho English teacher. The last we see of Hoffman's character, he has an anguished look on his face, trying to deal with the enormity of having surrendered to the seductiveness of his 17-year-old student. He gave in, for a moment, to his sexual impulses -- thus Lee reassures us that, at the very least, Jakob is not queer. Maybe he will, eventually, become just as big a macho shit as Francis and Monty; Spike Lee would probably consider that a plus.

As for Monty, the end of the film comprises an extended fantasy on what it might be like if, instead of driving him to the prison gates, his father takes the other fork in the road and they light out for the territories. In this fantasy, Lee offers a sweeping cinematic hymn to the American myth of fleeing from your past and reinventing yourself in a Western small town. The fantasy goes so far as to depict Monty, reunited with Naturelle, thirty years in the future, with children and grandchildren. But the car keeps going straight and the fantasy evaporates, only to be replaced by a Bruce Springsteen song as the credits roll. Monty's going to Sing Sing to take his medicine and Bruce Springsteen sings a patriotic number. You can't get much more macho than that.

Small is beautiful

A story in Sunday's Houston Chronicle, about local churches providing services grief-stricken NASA employees, mentions the Lutheran congregation I attended when my family lived in the area, during my high school years. During my time there in the 1970s, the church was a small church with a liberal pastor in a denomination about to grow extremely conservative. Today, the same congregation has managed to remain fairly moderate, but they've grown into a near-megachurch, as their January newsletter shows. It really boggles my mind all the stuff they do. A close examination of the photographs in that newsletter gives you an idea of the kind of strait-laced people that live in that suburb. (I can't call it a town; there is no town, only an enormous sprawl of suburban houses and shopping centers wedged between the NASA facility, a lake, Galveston Bay, and a former Air Force base. The whole time I lived there, while going to high school, I was so eager to get the hell out of there and on to university life in Austin.)

The church I attend in San Francisco is tiny by comparison, though relatively affluent, and so liberal we got kicked out of the more liberal branch of the Lutheran church for supporting gay and lesbian ministers. Our programs are so few in number and so small in comparison to that suburban church. And even though several people join our congregation every year, it's only enough to prevent loss through normal attrition. We never seem to get much bigger or smaller, and it's been that way for the 20 years I've been going there. Sometimes I get a little frustrated with the place and attracted by my friend Sara's church, an Episcopal establishment where they have slightly wild liturgy and more people interested in contemplative prayer. But I can't shake my Lutheran identity.

I'm going to get more of a chance to hang out with the Anglican side of things. We just got a new "interim pastor" who is actually an Anglican priest -- from Canada.

Make love, not war

I had to use that headline sooner or later. In fact I just might use it every day. It's a sentiment I endorse with vigor.

Here's an irresistible bauble from the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald:

Dannii includes ode to her vibrator on new album

Dannii Minogue has apparently turned to more than big sister Kylie for consolation after her latest relationship break-up - recording a raunchy tribute to her vibrator on her new album....The song has failed to impress those in Britain who've heard it, with The Sun's normally generous showbiz writer Dominic Mohan describing it as one of the worst songs, with the worst lyrics, ever written.

The story then goes on to quote the song's lyrics, so be sure to click the link, where you can also see an attractive publicity photo of the daring starlet.

By the way, Cambodia and Thailand have managed to keep from going to war. Cambodia issued an official apology after rioters burned the Thai embassy and several Thai businesses in the Cambodian capital. I guess they realized they'd be SOL without Thai investments.

I learned of the latest space shuttle disaster while driving in the car this morning. I turned on the local AM news station, where two anchors were in the middle of an extended interview with one of those experts trotted out by TV news whenever something unusual happens. Their conversation about technical details of the space shuttle was so amorphous that I listened for three or four minutes without any inkling of what had happened. Then someone said something about having seen television pictures of "scorched earth," and I said to myself, "This doesn't sound good."

I do have to say that my second thought was "I wonder what Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft are going to slide by in the next few days while we're all distracted by this 'tragedy.'" Not that it isn't a real tragedy, but I'm afraid that the way things are going, the deaths of just seven people are going to seem pretty miniscule. (If you want to see something depressing, just do a news.google search on 'war inevitable').