U.S. as World Sex Cop

This column perfectly expresses why Great Leader's pandering to the Armies of Jesus pisses me off. You can follow their moral directives to the letter--but since it's more important to protect people around the world from the horrors of birth control (maybe leading to nonmatrimonial sex!) than to save lives, you can follow their rules and still die of AIDS. 'Cause boys will be boys, you know.

Mark Goes To The Movies

Melinda and Melinda (dir. Woody Allen) I think Woody's problem in the last 10 years is that his writing has stagnated--he's run out of new or interesting themes for his movies to explore and for his characters to discuss. You've probably heard about the creaky framework of the new film: two stories involving the same setup (character arrives unannounced at a dinner party), one "tragic," one "comic," both employing similar plot elements and settings. But it's just another Woody riff on life and death, love and restlessness, and how rough it is to be sensitive, creative, well-off, and still miserable in uptown Manhattan. This is sad, because as usual a terrific cast tries to animate the cliches. My favorite is Radha Mitchell, who again exemplifies Mark's Rule #24 of Film ("Australia produces the most beautiful and talented actresses on Planet Earth.") in her portrayal of a truly damaged soul. Also good are Chloe Sevigny as her friend, Jonny Lee Miller as Chloe's obnoxious drunk-artiste husband, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as one of Radha's suitors. But much as I like Will Ferrell, his portrayal of The Woody Character grates--maybe because The Woody Character Itself has grated since right about the time Stardust Memories came out. Mark's review: **½

We love Great Leader! 6

Well, kind of.

There goes Peter Cottontail!

Bringing baskets full of Easter joys to all the good little boys!

Tort Reform Now! 2

Oh, wait--never mind. How about tort reform now! just for annoying little shallow-pocketed plebians?

National Security Democrats? Gawd.

This man is fucking awesome.

The political battle now in CA

As a quasi-disinterested political observer, I find this story fascinating. What I find heartening in California's story, like the year's big national political stories--Bush's push on Social Security, the threat to end fillibusters in the Senate, and the heartwarming display of concern for Terry Schiavo--isn't necessarily that our side is winning but that the ideological battle is finally being fought out in the open. Rethuglican rulers have to figure out how to move beyond demonizing people who fail to support the Iraq adventure. And the political fronts they're opening make it pretty easy to see what these guys want government to look like, and what that'll mean for people who vote for them. Not everyone knows the difference between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, but a lot of Red Staters who vote Republican are kind of counting on that Social Security money (Wal-Mart not being known for generosity with the 401(k) benefit). Of course, the Rethugs are still lying about their intentions, but at least some of the big media are willing to start asking questions about the "reforms" being proposed and observe how the polling numbers move when people begin to find out more about those proposals. (Ruy Texeira, whom I haven't been reading a lot since the election, has a lot of data on polls the past three months.)

Alter on Schiavo

That bastion of the liberal media, Newsweek, sums up the case pretty well, I think.

Listening: KAOS Olympia

Playing a weird mix of Floyd/English psych circa-'69 plus some Xtian rock for Easter, plus Mississipi John Hurt? God Bless the Left of the Dial. "Just sittin' here with my pot full of gremlins," right.

Hearing this show reminds me of how exciting it was as a kid to hear John Hurt and Lightning Hopkins and all those mountain wailers on KPFK over at my dad and Erma's. God bless them, through whom I discovered country music wasn't (just) music for drunk hicks, that an acoustic guitar could really move people. Oh, and first heard, let's see: Shostakovich, Miles Davis, the Carter Family, Josh White, Jonathan Hartford, Sonny Terry, Lightning Hopkins, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey and the Morgan/Shorter Messengers, Ian and Sylvia, and on the radio R & B on KDAY and Kinks and Stones and Beatles on the rock and roll AM station. Music, music, all the time which is why to this day new things to hear and make for others to hear represent the expanding universe for me.

Right To Life--1

Hee hee hee...

The "Dirty Dozen" option

Okay, everyone remember that grimly funny little action movie Robert Aldrich made back in the smartass Sixties? It's World War II, and they need a bunch of insane people to carry out a dangerous commando attack on a villa full of German officers. Their solution is to round up what Arlo Guthrie called "the 'Group W' bench" (aka the stone cold scariest) prisoners they had, train them for the mission, and offer reduced sentences if they returned. Wonderfully cynical idea, right?

Well, why not? Prisons are incredibly expensive, but politicians are bound by constituents to be tough on crime. So prisons end up occupying a bigger and bigger chunk of the state budget and spawn a whole bunch of people with vested interests in keeping jails full at all times. So the conservative side of me asks, wouldn't your average prisoner love to serve in the military instead of being in San Quentin or Pelican Bay? Aren't some of these people trained in the basics of weapons handling and military-style squad tactics (to say nothing of distribution logistics)? And you don't need to go through that process of training people out of being normal and civilized and into being able to kill people effectively--creating soldiers!

Consider, too, that the public isn't likely to look unkindly on any horrible thing the current system wants to do to prisoners. A guy in that repository of great thinkers the Washington State Legislature introduced legislation to use roadkill to feed prisoners. Don't know if it got anywhere. (I'm sure it would have passed both chambers in Arizona unanimously.) I've never had the pleasure of eating prison food, but I"d bet dollars to donuts that military rations are better.

Common ground

This is one political move on which I am definitely prepared to shake hands with my opponents.

Joyce McGreevy on "America Lite"

You'll have to sit through a stupid ad to read this, but trust me, it's worth it. Definitely Diatribe of the Week.

Enjoy that SUV this summer! SUCKA!

An interesting bit from this article:

If it were not for the speculation, some analysts believe oil prices would fall, since there are no supply shortages.

The state of play on SS

This blog deserves major props for keeping really on top of this story. (And Josh Marshall is no frothing lockstep liberal.) But this story is just so nice. That's what these bozos get for not caring about history. (Or did William McKinley not make the mistake of treating a sliver-thin victory as a mandate and completely overreaching in his second term?)

Great Leader's Party of Compasionate Conservatism

Hey, we know it hurts to cut off food aid for poor people. But heck, if that's what it takes to keep subsidies to corporate farmers (and permanent enactment of tax cuts) part of the federal budget, I guess we gotta bite the bullet.

Mark Goes to the Movies

Be Cool (dir. F. Gary Gray) This movie, like Oceans 12, was a letdown from a first version (counting Soderberg's Ocean as the first). One thing Steve Soderbergh knows (or used to) : for this kind of a comedy to work it's gotta be light on its feet, and it's gotta move fast. Neither is much the case in this movie. Genuninely funny bits rise up out of the plot dough every 20 minutes or so. John Travolta phones his blue-eyed cool role in. Uma Thurman tries really hard, and I think she's getting to be a better, looser actress as she gets older. And I loved Robert Pastorelli 's very greasy hit man and Andre 3000's trigger-happy gunslinger. But there's no chemistry between Uma and John (Pulp Fiction was obviously a lucky one-shot--though Tarantino sure knows better how to direct a dance scene than Gary Gray), too much time is spent trying to move multiple plot threads along, and the level of product pimping (hmm, must be time to bust out a new Aerosmith single!) is high. Markie score (stupid points): ??

Markie Listening Notes 4: M.I.A.

M.I.A., Arular (advance--everntually supposed to be released on XL) The hype album of the spring, and perfectly fed into the hype by not being released in the U.S. on 2/22 as originally scheduled. So this is one of those albums that's almost completely beat-driven, and you can hear how she likes dancehall reggae in how she raps and how all her beats sound like two drum machines colliding halfway between Rio and Kingston. But the reason this has been throwing a nonstop dance party in my car the past two days is that the beats are crazy--I can hear this woman jamming with Ornette and Prime Time, or with a samba troupe (if the samba troupe played nonstop at 150 bpm). And the beats are as much with all of her overdubbed voices as with all of the crazy rhythm tracks. She sounds like she's having a ball, the way the Band used to on their first two records, or the way Funky 4 + 1 sounded on "That's the Joint." And whatever media-damaged gibberish she's dropping about freedom fighters and bombings, at least she's trying to telescope a lot of unstable news into the street party she's throwing with her unstable jump-rope rhymes. And in a perfect world, the baddest-assed 10-year-old-girls on the block would be doing the Double Dutch to it.

Mark Goes To the Movies: Diary of a Mad Black Woman

Diary of a Mad Black Woman (dir. Darren Grant) Forget The Jacket. Cool movie, but you want to see the most subversive thing on the screen, go see this. (You semiologists and Charlie Kaufman fans will go nuts checking all of the connections of race, religion, gender, esp. the collisions.) Basically it's two movies not-too-expertly pasted together. One is a pretty but S-L-O-W romance between two pretty people who keep bouncing in and out of relationships but only sleep with people they're married to. The other is a bunch of colorful nutcases around tribal elder Medea, expertly played by resident Orson Welles on Cough Syrup Tyler Perry. She's the kick-ass aunt everyone wants, and she's got your back with a 9mm pistol if that's what it takes. Perry also does a hilarious Cedric the Entertainer ripoff in another (male) character. Of course it's also explicitly Christian, but it's the kind of Christian that understands that sometimes people aren't designed to be married forever, that being a Christian means taking care of those you consider family, that it's okay for women to work and to be outspoken, strong characters; that it's not a wife's duty to continue absorbing abuse from her husband. (That's the kind of Christian I can get with--also with the gospel kind). Then it veers from spiritual contemplation to a revenge fantasy out of Lifetime Movie Network to a sequence where Medea destroys all her ex-son-in-law's expensive furniture with a chainsaw. Compared with some of the alternatives out there, I can live with this version just fine. Markie Review (stupid points): ????

The money man talks Social Security

President of a Manhattan asset mangement firm speculates about the real rationale behind privatization. And has some questions. (Pointed by Talking Points Memo.)

Blog Crosslink 1

Very nice, very nice--but where's John Goodman's? That'd be something to read!

The Rethugs, triumphant

Over their own!

Great Leader loves the U.N.

"There is no such thing as the United Nations," Bolton said a decade ago on a panel of the World Federalist Association. "If the U.N. Secretariat Building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

- John Bolton, nominated for U.N. Ambassador from the U.S.

Markie Listening Notes 3: Max Roach

Max Roach, Percussion Bitter Sweet (Impulse!) Heard one great track off this, looked at the lineup and understood why it was so hot. In addition to the great drummer, he has Eric Dolphy, Booker Little on trumpet, Clifford Jordan on tenor, Mal Waldron on piano, Julian Priester on trombone. Roach's rhythms really drive Dolphy, who continues to play the most outlandish horn lines in very nice, 30's-swing rhythms.

Tax Cut Chickens Coming Home To Roost

And the governors (even Rethugs) aren't happy! (Mike Huckabee?????)

Aww....Kitties!

MEEEEOOOOOWWW!!!!!!!!!!!

A Velvet Underground Tidbit

Listening to The Bootleg Series Vol. 1: The Quine Tapes and noticing Lou Reed's introductions to some of the songs included one for "Femme Fatale" that claimed they wrote it for Edie Sedgwick. Which, if you also count Dylan's "Just Like a Woman," made two pretty amazing songs she inspired. (And I can't help thinking that Alex Chilton, who covered "Femme Fatale" on Big Star's Sister Lovers, would have totally been her kind of destructo rock idol.)

Markie Listens and Puzzles

The Mars Volta, Frances the Mute (Universal) Every once in awhile, when I listen to good noise lead guitar players like Blackbyrd McKnight (or good guitar players who inspired metal players, like Jimi Hendrix), I think, "I shouldn't be so closed-minded about metal. What might be good to listen to?" So given the other kinds of music I like, I think: how about Rage Against the Machine? Metallica? Living Colour? Queens of the Stone Age? Hell, I love Bad Brains and Soundgarden (up to a point). So reading about this album it sounded just nuts enough to be interesting--Dada poetry in English and Spanish inspired by the notebook their sound guy who ODed found someplace, 10+ minute songs, lots of guitar. And it's weird enough, angst-synth and musique concrete interludes, great guitar playing, nice breakbeat-influenced live drumming, and metal always sounds better to me in Spanish (or Portuguese). And then I run up against it: I am just not a metalhead. Too much high squalling, and the guitar pummeling turns from noise to foolproof virtuosity a little too easily. Give me noise over professionalism any day.

We Love Great Leader! 6

Well, kind of.

Save the lobster!

A story with a happy ending. (Courtesy of brother Dan!)

Update: Well, almost!

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy!

While we're on the subject of smackdowns, here's a great one for Fred Phelps, my nominee as Most Obnoxious Pseudo-Christian in America. Way to go, Topeka!!!!

Smackdown for Great Leader's Legal Eagles

Never thought I'd be singing huzzah to the South Carolina District Court, but this decision is a nice way of telling Great Leader where to shove his Executive Privilege to imprison people indefinitely without trial.

Supremes Surprise

Take that, Right-to-Lifers! I'll enjoy decisions like this one while we got 'em. (And marvel that someday we'll look back fondly on the Rehnquist Court.)