Stave It Off: 1, 2, 3. And Now You Can Count to Three

Mexico 2012

2012-01-13T22:07:00.001-08:00

When I go to Mexico, I apparently like to take photographs. Here are the latest. This is my attempt at art, so please be awed and send me flattering emails.

The Laughing Door is Always Locked.

Bell Weather Fan

Christmas!

The Downfall of Dog.

The Bleeding Armadillos of Christ.

Red Wires #7

Science!

Money Driven

2011-10-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

Apparently it's National Blog Post Writing Month. Seems pretty easy. And I, unlike the many lazy bloggers cluttering up the internet, will be finished well before November 30th. So here you go... Streimikes inspired by NBPWM. Perhaps you can look forward to another blog post next November!

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A few weeks ago I listened to an NPR story about kids from a Lakota reservation being taken by South Dakota state child welfare workers and placed in foster care. This was a common practice in the old days. Native kids would be restricted from practicing their religion, have their heads shaved, and were generally forced to assimilate. But things changed. The Indian Child Welfare Act was passed and there are federal regulations now about taking children from tribes. But this NPR reporter had dug up some profoundly disturbing things about what was happening in the Lakota Nation. In South Dakota, children were still being regularly taken away from the reservation. They weren't being placed with relatives or other Indian families. And there seemed to be very little communication or cooperation with the local tribal authorities about what was happening.

The journalist found out that the State of Dakota was getting millions of dollars every year from the federal government to help subsidize these placements. Federal matching funds are used to help pay for the very expensive foster care system. And every native kid was classified as "special needs" simply due to their race. That meant additional revenues for the state. The reporter also found former officials willing to testify that there was corruption. These officials went on record to say that South Dakota is a very poor state... and that the millions of dollars that were streaming in to pay for these programs meant valuable jobs for an industry-poor region.

The story went on to talk about one family's fight to get their children back, and about a plucky lawyer willing to fight the state government's unwritten policies. But mostly, it was just a sad story about what happens when money trumps humanity.

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Naturally, this made me think of dentists. I have been amazed by the pressure all dentists seem to exert regarding night guards. It's not that I think night guards are a bad idea. It just seems preposterous to pay $500 for one. People have argued that they have to cost this much because they are molded perfectly to your mouth. But the $5 athletic mouth guards that I wear playing softball are also form-fitted. I heat up the new mouth guard over steam until it's pliable, then put it into my mouth and bite down on the softened plastic. It cools and hardens in the exact shape my mouth requires. This amazing technology costs peanuts... and yet dentists push the $500 night guards on everyone. I have never heard a dentist suggest the $5 version to a low-income client... and I've overheard a lot of conversations between my dentists and the other patients sitting ten feet to my left or right.

Recently I got my first crown. I decided that I trusted the dentist's word. He said that I needed it to avoid a future root canal. But it really bothered me that between my insurance and me, I paid over $1200 for a procedure that took the dentist about an hour. To be fair, it also seemed to require about 50 cents worth of porcelain. Given the profitability of this procedure, what would stop dentists from prescribing crowns to almost every person that walked in... regardless of how necessary or helpful they would be? Why should I believe that money isn't trumping humanity here as well?

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This line of thinking made me want to call that NPR reporter... But not because I want him to investigate dentists and the corrupt night guard and crown manufacturing industries. I've decided that everyone knows dentists are evil. That would just be beating a dead horse.

The story I want cracked involves the strange rates of emergency c-sections being performed on immigrant and refugee women. C-sections are a legitimate procedure when natural child birth is not an option. And there can be all sorts of reasons for this... but being an immigrant is not one of them. In my job I see a great many women (women who have already successfully given birth many times!) ordered to get c-sections. There is usually no justification given to these clients... just a doctor's recommendation.

A quick bit of research found this study from the State of New Hampshire. Here's a money quote: "The rate of c-sections nationally has increased 53 percent between 1996 and 2007, to an average rate of 32 percent. There is no consensus about the short and long term benefits and risks to the mother and infant, and even though c-sections are performed routinely, many patients do not realize that the procedure involves major abdominal surgery and is associated with surgical complications and maternal readmissions. C-section provider charges and payments are often substantially higher than for vaginal deliveries, increasing medical care costs to the patient, the insurer, and they health care system in general."

Has the birthing process also succumbed to the same level of greed that child welfare and dentistry have?! And should I fight this? Should I be fighting this trend in my work as a social worker and advocate for vulnerable refugee women in south Seattle?

Prepainting

2011-09-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

I posted the original version of this painting before. I have reworked it to emphasize the figures I enjoyed the most. It is less abstract in this way, but more entertaining for me. The new title is Murder on 5th Avenue.

This piece, called Tree of Pestilence and Famine, is a bit of a companion piece. Together they make me smile like only the Horsemen of the Apocalypse usually can.

But these are both smallish... about 11 x 14. Looming in the corner of my room is the hulking 30 x 40 canvas that demands to be painted. It's been sitting there for awhile. Apparently it has an impressive intimidate skill.

Soul Brother Sessions

2011-06-26T17:46:00.000-07:00

Down low, almost flat on the floor, the camera sees things differently. It shoots the smile on a dog but never the teeth.

As we drilled past the meridian, the shutter speeds were epic. I held my breath for a full five seconds. And I offered up praise to the universe for all of my blankets. The haze was nothing if not warm. I closed my eyes. I felt a community of languid heartbeats. And finally my exposure was complete.

Soul Brother #1

Soul Brother #2

Project Runway

2011-06-21T21:33:00.000-07:00

When my alarm goes off, I want to keep hitting the snooze button for hours. Instead, I have a method. I contract my stomach muscles and then my back and then my legs. I do it in a circular pattern. I imagine I'm spinning... building up the required escape velocity to break free from the gravitational field of my blankets. Eventually I will fling myself out of bed violently. Then I immediately run to the shower and stand under the pour until I can stand being awake. It feels brutal but necessary.

Sometimes I have to do something creative, something ambitious. This is all about gathering momentum. I have crashed, and in order to feel like I'm flying again, I need this. I need projects to get me feeling alive again, to feel like I'm propelling myself down a runway and starting to catch enough wind for lift off. So I've started painting. Painting feels a bit like contracting my stomach and my back and my legs. It feels like I'm willing myself to bust out of something dark and wet and loathsome. I don't like it. It's not peaceful. I feel angry at the paper. I want to spit on my canvas and cut it with a knife.

Here are the first three paintings that I've done in years.

This one looks so much like a mountain that it makes me want to puke. I was trying to paint an abstract and wound up with a cliche.

This was an attempt to paint an abstract that wound up being a self-portrait. Even more cliche?

This was my first attempt to paint on canvas. Painting on canvas is so cliche. Painting sucks.

And so the World Must be Remade

2011-02-20T22:15:00.000-08:00

As I wrote over at the Little Spark blog, it's the end of an era. Shortly after my last blog post on November 10th, my five-year romantic relationship with Olaiya ended. A week later I announced this momentous change to the universe by updating my Facebook status. The world has come undone, so the world must be remade.

The last two months have been spent thinking about what stays and what blows. I find myself lacking so much and wondering how to replace what's been lost, and about how to staunch the bleeding after half my identity has been ripped away. But the process has come with surprising clarity. I knew I needed to reorder my space (my apartment and my head.) I knew I needed to reconnect with things that I'd lost along the way. I needed to remember laughter at dinner parties and game nights, art projects, exercise, music, and what it feels like to have a good day at work. I built myself a new bed frame. I scoured craigslist for comfortable chairs and found coffee mugs at Value Village. I reached out for help from old friends and found it easily given and comforting.

I remembered this blog... and how, despite being on life support, it's actually older than my relationship with Olaiya. And it is something that I wish to return to. But to do that, I think I have to examine the roots and the trunk of this old tree. I don't want to breath life into new branches or paint vibrant Spring leaves until I'm satisfied with what's already here.

So my next project, self-indulgent though it may be, will be to go back and reread every Stave It Off entry, eliminating the boring, the unworthy, the pointless. I know there are posts that I'm proud of and I will leave those standing, but I may have also written a post or two about what I was intending to have for lunch that day. Those must die. I don't know if the urge to write will return in earnest, but I know what it feels like when your house is out of order... how impossible it feels to do anything when you don't even know if you own a can-opener anymore. It feels good and necessary when you buy that new can-opener. I spent a half hour picking it out after looking at four different models. If nothing else happened that day, I know that I took that small step in remaking my world.

Just as I have redesigned my apartment to match my tastes and my needs, so I will reorder my online diary. Maybe I'll repost old favorites to Facebook in the hopes that a reader or two will also enjoy the fruits of this exercise.

RIP Dave

2010-11-10T18:56:00.000-08:00

Click here to listen to Dave

Somewhere around twenty years ago Ken Griffey Jr. was coming into his own. His talent was welcomed by every baseball fan in the Northwest, but there wasn't a happier soul than long-suffering Mariners announcer Dave Niehaus. He recorded an homage to Griffey, comparing him to his own childhood hero Stan Musial. It was part of the Mariners weekly Saturday Magazine radio show. Twenty years ago, I popped a tape into my deck and recorded that story. I dug it out tonight, digitized it, and present it here for your benefit.

Stalkable #1: The World's Greatest Person

2010-06-30T15:09:00.001-07:00

I first saw Sherman Alexie in person when he spoke at my college graduation. I was aware of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, but didn't have any particular idea of the man until I saw him stand before thousands of fresh-faced grads (and our proud parents) and rip into the Catholic church for half an hour. I don't know what it had to do with the class of 1995, full of world-changing ideas and paralyzing fears (our official graduation motto was "Do you want fries with that?") but it made me laugh until I was crying.

Here was a man that showed us how to succeed: Have huge brass balls. Say what you feel. Be real. Be funny. Don't be afraid to try to make something beautiful. And don't be afraid to point out the relative nudity of your local emperor.

I fell in love.

Since I hate language and books and readin' and stuff... I never did consume much of his fiction. But I saw his two films: Smoke Signals and the (significantly better) follow up: The Business of Fancy-Dancing; and I read some of his poetry and short stories. I paid attention to his occasional column in The Stranger and his editorializing around the time when Clay Bennett and NBA commissioner David Stern dropped a colossal deuce on the city of Seattle.

Everything I read or see of the man impresses me, so the mancrush has been steadily nourished over the last 15 years. And he finally got a haircut which didn't hurt things one bit.

Sherman Alexie... then and now

A month ago Olaiya and I went down to the new Elliot Bay Book Store in Capitol Hill to see Sherman moderate a reading by two international writers. Ayn Rand wannabe Tommy Wieringa and slack-jawed soap operaist Christos Tsiolkas technically shared the stage with my man. But in a stunning move Sherman kicked off the event by reading one of his own poems. There wasn't a single word spoken by either writers that compared. Alexie, accidentally but incontrovertibly, pwned. Sadly, both writers trotted out their little novels and gamely answered questions about their process. But you could see it in their eyes... in everyone's eyes. It was as if Abraham Lincoln had come out to introduce a 2003 debate between George Bush and John Kerry. In a way, it was remarkable these two very small men were even able to carry out the charade. It would have been kinder had they elected to just quit and go home.

Olaiya could feel it too... Sherman's radiance. He's a blazing ball of fusion-luminescent gases in the otherwise inky void of writerliness.

The next day we saw him distorted through a glass window. A plastic cup of white wine (or maybe it was Martinelli's) in his hand, he was hosting a reception next door to Elliot Bay. We were walking down to purchase a copy of his latest book as a present for Olaiya's best friend in Wichita. The idea crossed my mind that we should purchase it, and then crash the reception, asking Mr. Alexie to autograph his novel to "Binky Bunkers in Witchita." Unfortunately, Elliot Bay was selling pre-autographed copies of the book... so my moment had to wait.

Two weeks later, I accepted an invitation to a party at my friend Erik's apartment. He lives in South Lake Union aka Allentown. His posh new building features a built-in basketball court, which strikes me as the second greatest luxury possible... coming in just behind living with a gourmet chef. Since Erik wanted to impress his guests, he took us on a tour of the building. We saw the rooftop deck, the TV room, the pool table, and finally the hoops court. As we were entering, a group of men (just having finished their game) were leaving. One of them held the door for us. I looked up to thank the guy and found myself face to face with Sherman Alexie.

A glow of fresh sweat. A broad smile. A gracious air.

I froze. I looked at him with a marked and comical double take. I cocked my head and smiled. He smiled back, as if saying, "Yeah, I look familiar but you can't quite place it... no worries buddy." But I did "place it". I knew exactly who he was but I just couldn't find the words to convey 15 years worth of admiration! I couldn't say the right thing, so my brain locked and I said nothing at all.

I was gliding. I drained 8/10 three pointers to win a friendly bet with Erik. I was telling everyone that would listen that Sherman freakin' Alexie just held the door for us. And then my brain started working overtime. Sweet sweet machinations.

Basketball is a rhythmic sport. It has a flow and an ebb. You have to respect the game. You can't force things. The best players (and I've heard that Sherman is an active and passionate baller) commit to the game. They play on a routine. For example, I try to play every Thursday night in Wallingford. If I miss a week, I'm off. My wrist doesn't snap right, my legs don't bounce right... I throw up bricks and telegraph my passes.

Maybe Sherman plays here often. Maybe he's here every Saturday night. Let's see... it was about 9pm when we showed up... so he probably got here to play at 7:30. I wonder what would happen if Erik and I showed up at 7:30 and looked like we were hoping to shoot hoops. Might they invite us to join their game? Could it come to pass that I play in a basketball game with Sherman Alexie? And then, might we become friends that go out for a beer afterwards? And maybe he's looking for a Thursday night game too and I can invite him to join my Wallingford crew. Excluding the freaky cosmic accident wherein I get to play pick-up ball with Barack Obama, this might be the best thing I can imagine.

I haven't put Operation Sherman Stalking into action yet. I'm still debating it. On the one hand, I don't want to be a creepy jerk that follows people around and makes them uncomfortable. Nobody wants more Chuck and Buck in the world. On the other hand, I'd hate to remember the time when I met Sherman Alexie face-to-face and just smiled stupidly at him.

Thanks Jim

2010-06-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

The last blogger standing has elected not to turn off the lights, but to shine a little instead.

Yojimbo, who writes Lets Not Talk About Movies, never flinched as the casual blogosphere meekly acquiesced to a nation drunk on Facebook. Defective Yeti hasn't posted in a month and missed all of April. Last Plane to Jakarta has downgraded from fever pitch to just tepid. And I've had to delete the links to all of my friends' dead blogs. But as so many of us gave up the rigors of weekly posts, sculpted essays and original thought, Jim continued to write at a faster pace than I can read. He has developed a loyal following and has even received sponsorship offers. LNTAM continues to blossom and I couldn't be happier for its meticulous curator.

So I was pleasantly surprised when he gifted me an ice cream sundae worth of praise. Thank you for honoring me as one of your "versatile blogger" award recipients Jim. I suppose I am the "very definition of versatile." It's a blessing and a curse. I often berate myself: "If only I could care more about a single topic, I could really get somewhere." Then I think on the long-standing success of Orangette, and the new-found success of LNTAM, and feel a welling of self-pity. These writers bring nuance to their observations that can only come when a person has dedicated a lifetime to their chosen topic. Woe to the ADD writers of the world! Woe to us that must hunt our topics the way pigs snuffle for truffles.

Perhaps Facebook will suffer a backlash. Perhaps I'll find inspiration to start writing in a new vein. Perhaps someone will leave the perfect comment that spurs me on. But more likely, I'll continue with Stave It Off at my own churlish pace, stubbornly insisting that I write for an audience of one: My own future self who will someday look back on these posts and smile.

PS Not sure why, but I hate being known as the guy that posts gnarly-looking sports injuries. It represents about 5% of my posts, and ought to only count as 5% of my blogger persona... but for most people it seems to be the most impactful thing on Stave It Off... which makes me sort of sad.

Unemployment Blues

2010-06-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

Having wrestled, and having been overcome, by the unemployment benefits angels of the State of Washington, I have the following report of the battle:

I applied for benefits in the middle of April. I filled out the application and began making weekly claims at that time. Additionally I was required to fill out job logs detailing at least three employment contacts per week. Within three weeks I received a letter of denial, explaining that my reasons for quitting the position were not within the legal guidelines for being awarded benefits. According to the relevant RCW, quitting due to an inappropriate change in job description is not sufficient reason.

I appealed the denial, and today (almost two months since first applying) I had my telephone trial with an appeals judge in Olympia. After calling in at 8:50 AM, the trial began at 10:30 and lasted until 11:30. I based my appeal on two acceptable provisions within the RCW: That I left the position due to health consequences (depression and anxiety) that stemmed directly from changes in my job description; and that I was unable to perform my job within the ethical standards of the National Association of Social Workers due to the same changes.

Toward the end of the trial, the judge made it clear that the WACs that govern the RCWs demand that if you quit due to medical necessity, you must first provide written documentation of that disability to your employer so that they have an opportunity to accommodate your needs. This makes sense, and also completely scuttled the bulk of my appeal. The fact that I didn't quite understand the nature or extent of the psychological toll I was enduring at the time of my resignation did not matter.

By the time I attempted to address the ethical concerns I had about the changes in job description, the judge's language made it pretty clear that she thought this case was settled and was already writing her decision summary in her mind. And although she didn't explicitly state what her decision would be, everything she said implied that the decision would go against me.

So be it. I didn't count on getting any benefits when I quit. I quit to save my sanity and to pursue greater professional fulfillment. I quit because those who love me gave me strength by telling me that they believed in me and would support me. I quit in order to force a next chapter in my life to reveal itself. Maybe now that this unemployment benefit segue has resolved itself, that will come sooner rather than later.

And after listening to my former director's testimony during the phone trial... "I was quit when I walked in here. I'm twice as quit now."

Case Management (The Return)

2010-05-22T14:18:00.000-07:00

Streimikes Comes Alive

2010-05-20T12:57:00.001-07:00

Four days under the Mozama sun playing tennis will do wonders for the soul. Sadly, O wasn't able to play this year. She trained hard, joining teams, taking private lessons and bumping her game into the 2.5 ranks. She was ready to destroy this tourney, but injured her knee just a week before we were scheduled to drive to Eastern Washington. Half the fun comes from getting out of town, enjoying some blissful weather and spending a bunch of time with a gracious, funny group of people. So Olaiya gracefully accepted that she'd have to wait another year to join the invitational, but came with me to cheer us on, take photos and work on her tan.

I was paired up with Andy, who didn't have much experience but a wealth of natural talent. Our first match was pathetic though. I let us down by playing tight. Never feeling comfortable, I couldn't let loose with my shots. It seemed like I couldn't hit a single volley all day. We limped into the consolation bracket after falling 6-3.

I took a fresh attitude into day two. Having a beer earlier in the day might have helped. Andy and I played much better in this match, eventually prevailing 7-5.

The Good Guys

The Bad Guys

Our Host and Line Judge Kelly Fulcher

The running forehand was working!

The lunging backhand was working!

The standing backhand was working!

The overhead volley was working!

The post-game congratulatory handshake was working too!

The victory over Matt and Cathy put us into the consolation bracket finals: The Chump Cup. This match was just as vigorous as the previous, but Andy and I outlasted Lee and Donna 7-6 (7-3) in a tiebreaker.

I returned to Seattle a happy man. And Olaiya is even more determined to hone her game so she can win the whole shebang next year. In the meantime I expect she'll be giving me all the practice I can handle.

Softball Injury 2010 #1

2010-05-06T14:19:00.000-07:00

A fact well-known to Stave It Off loyalists is that I cannot make it through a softball season without injury. The first of the season was a two-for-one special. While pitching some batting practice last week, I took a line drive off my left ankle. I decided it wasn't too bad, so I continued with practice... moving back to play shortstop for the next hitter. I wasn't trying too hard, since every step was causing a throbbing pain in my left ankle. When a long throw came in from the outfield, I lazily decided to just short hop the ball rather than getting in better position. The ball skipped just under my mitt but was stopped nicely by my right ankle. And thus I am doubly gimped just in time for the start of the season.

Bruises on the right leg are above and below the point of impact. You can almost see a softball sized circle of unblemished flesh between the two bruises. That's where I was actually hit. The big purple area on my lower left foot appears to be internal bleeding that oozed down and settled below my ankle. I know, totally gross right? The actual impact on my left leg was just above the ankle.

Lists

2010-04-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

Inspired by this song by The Dining Rooms, I starting thinking of my own list of "Hiphopper... Punk Rockers". But in my version they are called "Truth Farmers... Snake Charmers". It's a pleasant way to kill an evening or two... sitting around and reflecting on the artists, writers, film makers and musicians that have brought great joy and meaning to your life. Here is my silent tribute to the list.

Can you spot the crossover between my list and the song?

Harry Dean Stanton
Robert Pirsig
David Lee
Carl Rogers
Jaime Hernandez
Chris Ware
Alan Moore
Elliott Smith
Thick Nhat Hanh
Mike Mignola
Sylvia Plath
Dave Chappelle
H. Jon Benjamin
Matt Groening
Jill Scott
Built to Spill
Jay Smooth
Howe Gelb
John Darnielle
Spike Jonze
Michel Gondry
Laurie Anderson
Kent Williams
Bill Murray
Jim Jarmusch
Charlie Kaufman
The Coen Brothers
Sigur Ros
Feargus Urquhart
Pedro Almodovar
Chris Sands
Philip Pullman
Michael Cera
Pharaoh Sanders
Tony Kushner
Wes Anderson
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Aubrey Beardsley
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Tom Waits
Will Shortz
The Dirty 3
Rennie Sparks
Joss Whedon
Ian McKellen
David Byrne
Mark Lanegan
Paul Thomas Anderson
Ze Frank
Spalding Gray
Sherman Alexie
Brad Neely
Reggie Watts

Nada Mucho

2010-03-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

Looking through the Metacritic scores for new albums had me looking up stuff on YouTube for hours today. Here's a little list of my favorite finds from March 2010 YouTube Spelunking:

Talking 'Bout a Revolution

2010-03-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

Those of us who talk about our dreams
suffer a sad tendency not to fulfill them.
There is something about voicing the ambition
that robs it of its potency.

Those who keep closed council
and chart their course with only the stars as guideposts...
they are never tired; action is their lifeblood.
But I know little of them for they do not speak.

Once loosed from the lips, I lunge and clutch at my words
trying vainly to re-ingest them.
One day I'll brim with motivation and it won't matter,
or else I'll join that brotherhood of the comfortable silence.

Bummerman's 2010 Pre-Oscars Review

2010-02-25T15:26:00.000-08:00

The Oscars don't air until March 7th... presumably so that idiotic rom-coms released around Valentines Day can still snag a nomination for the 2009 Best Picture. Pushing it out this far past the holiday Oscar buzz season is a mistake, but given the number of blunders the academy makes every year, that's hardly newsworthy. Conversely, doubling the number of Best Pic nominees from 5 to 10 is actually smart... so... that's a surprise.

I finished my quest of trying to watch every significant film of 2009. I came up a few short, but just couldn't bring myself to watch Crazy Heart... and couldn't find illegal copies of 35 Rhums or Panique au Village with English subtitles. So, I'll just have to do my best. I previously listed my own selections for the most interesting films of the year... but I'm not here to talk about good movies, I'm here now to talk about the Oscars. So here you go.

And the Nominees for Best Picture are:
Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air

Apparently Avatar and The Hurt Locker are frontrunners, which is all very dramatic because the respective directors used to date or something. Which is all very E-Newsy to me... which is all very "Who gives a crap!?" Avatar is a bloated mess, and has no more business being nominated for this award than Inglourious Basterds does. Oh wait, I forgot to include my "People are friggin' morons" factor into the equation. Seriously, these films are the cinematic equivalent of a cheeseburger. I'm not saying cheeseburgers can't be delicious... but do you really think a cheeseburger (ANY cheeseburger) should be in the running for best meal of the year? If you answered yes, you're an idiot. But take heart. You'll be vindicated when Avatar actually wins this stupid contest. And I'll feel yet another stake driven through my cold black heart. Seriously, screw you guys.

And to those who think I'm just immune to any movie with emotion or sentimentality... you're wrong. The best picture of the year was Up.

Other nominees that don't make me angry: District 9, Hurt Locker, and A Serious Man.

For Best Actor: well, crap. I didn't see 3 of the 5 relevant pictures. This is supposed to be Jeff Bridges' year... and if you subscribe to the idea that this award should occasionally be a lifetime achievement award... I think he probably deserves it.

For Best Actress: If you subscribe to the theory that acting is a measure of how well you can inhabit someone else, then it's tough to root against Meryl Streep's portrayal of Julia Child. And if you think.... wait... seriously... is Sandra Bullock seriously being considered for an Oscar?! JFC.

For Supporting Actor: who cares?

For Supporting Actress: This should go to Mo'Nique. But, it can be hard to vote for someone playing such an unlovable character. So I'll be happy if it goes to Vera Farmiga instead. Up in the Air isn't perfect, but her performance was.

For Best Animated Feature: Exactly one of the five nominees is also being considered in the Best Picture category. That should make this a no-brainer. Instead, I expect the academy to select Disney's Princess and the Frog. I will laugh as America collectively sees nothing wrong with this at all.

For Art Direction: Avatar actually should be credited here... but the award could also go to Sherlock Holmes and I'd be happy.

For Cinematography: This absolutely belongs to Hurt Locker. Any other pick is criminal. So of course, don't be surprised when Harry Potter wins. Dear lord, what a rancid sack of pig feces.

For Costumes: I dunno. Ask a girl or something. I didn't see any of these films.

For Directing: My guess is that Katheryn Bigelow wins this... as compensation for losing on Best Picture to a steaming pile of 3D chest-beating. The funny thing is, Tarentino actually believes he deserves this award. It will be a little satisfying to see him lose.

For Best Original Screenplay: A Serious Man should win. Up would be okay. Inglourious Basterds or The Hurt Locker would be mistakes. Maybe I should see the 5th selection: The Messenger. Films that get nods in this category are usually the kind that I like best.

For Best Adapted Screenplay: I don't believe it! These are actually all good nominees. I'd kind of like to see In the Loop honored here. It probably won't happen for the same reason Precious won't get it: They can't really show any clips of the best bits of writing due to the excessive profanity. I'll guess that it goes to An Education... because everyone loves Nick Hornby's safe-but-awkward stabs at profundity. Whatever.

Feeling Defensive

2010-02-17T20:15:00.000-08:00

Some recent clinical work at my day job has me thinking about defensiveness. Specifically, I've been considering the defenses of the ego, the cataloging of which began with the early Freudians... and the interpretation and categorizing of which continues today. Pop culture includes a fairly intuitive definition of defense mechanisms: self-protective thoughts, attitudes and behaviors that people exhibit when they are threatened by internal or external stimuli. Most people have heard of some of these and have an idea how they work. Some examples you've probably run across include projection, denial, and passive-aggression. Here's an illustrated example of another common defense: when Mary's boss tries to confront her about a chronic tardiness problem, Mary starts to indulge a vivid daydream about a guillotine decapitating that boss. The image allows Mary to avoid the brunt of the criticism, preoccupying her conscious mind with playful mayhem instead. After the supervision meeting is over, Mary has successfully avoided being challenged by her boss's feedback. Her ego (or self image) has been protected by virtue of the defense mechanism.

According to George Vaillant's classification of ego defenses, Mary is exhibiting the "fantasy" defense. It's classified in his second tier of defenses labeled "Immature". His other tiers are "Pathological", "Neurotic" and "Mature". Immature defenses like fantasy escape are considered developmentally typical of children. If Mary was a 4th grader, this behavior would be normal and expected. But if she's a 28 year old professional file clerk... this behavior signals an unhealthy defense tactic. It's unhealthy because it succeeded in protecting Mary, but at too high a cost. The cost was that she was unable to actually engage with the criticism or consider a change to her long-term behavior.

So, since most of us strive to improve our mental health, what are the healthy defenses? Vaillant's list of the "Mature" defenses includes:

Altruism - Achieving satisfaction by doing for others.
Anticipation - Wisely planning for future distress with self-care.
Humor - Laughing while confronting the absurdity and frustrating truths of life.
Identification and Introjection - Allying your self-image with that of another person or object.
Sublimation - Transforming negative thoughts/feelings into some positive activity or expression.
Thought Suppression - Consciously pushing a difficult thought "back down" so that it can be dealt with later.

How might Mary utilize these defenses instead of her violent escape fantasy? She might accept the tardiness criticism as valid but balance the blow to her ego with bolstering thoughts that she's a good person and will continue to do good works for others. She might have anticipated and prepared for the meeting with her boss, bracing herself for the impact of the criticism. She might try to find aspects of her shortcomings that she can laugh at, accepting the feedback as something she struggles with even if it seems ridiculous. She might soften the criticism by identifying with a respected coworker who is also often late, but admirable in other ways. She might deal with the feelings of shame at being called out by her boss by creating art, exercising, or putting extra energy into preparing a lavish dinner party for friends later that night. And instead of melting down in her boss's office, she might decide to suppress her emotional reactions until she's alone in her own office and it feels like a safe place to cry or vent.

These are all preferable, or more "mature" reactions, from a mental health therapist perspective... though they aren't terribly fun to talk about or laugh at. If I'm to look at myself, I think I have issues with a couple of Neurotic-tier defense mechanisms: Intellectualization and Rationalization. I think much of my own self-work involves trying to get over these old habits and to embrace some healthier options.

The Road (Less Traveled)

2010-02-09T11:44:00.000-08:00

Given my recent criticism of The Book of Eli, it seems important to mention that someone else had already taken my advice. In contrast to Eli's cartoonishness, Cormac McCarthy's The Road has been adapted for the screen in tones both subtle and logical. It's thematic goals are permeated with balance and ambiguity instead of abject moralism and posing. It's rare and refreshing to see Hollywood take that path. The Road is also the best punch in the gut that I've endured since watching Grave of the Fireflies.

Based on his previous film The Proposition, John Hillcoat works in my favorite colors: sad and beautiful. And he has painted a quiet masterpiece in The Road. Unlike The Book of Eli, there are no superheroics in this film. But there is a significant meditation on everyday heroism... on the hellbent dedication of a father who has only one thing to live for (his son) and the compassion exhibited by his raison d'etre. The two characters, father and boy, are contrasted throughout the film in its efforts to strip away everything unimportant about man and find what lives at his core.

An example of this soul-spelunking: they've made cannibalism far more terrifying than the Book of Eli by showing just how awful starvation is. Viggo Mortensen strips down in one scene to show off a holocaust physique reminiscent of Christian Bale's body in The Machinist. Only when we can genuinely imagine the horror of starvation does it awaken the possibility of cannibalism. And only then do we see the dehumanization of man at his worst. Where The Book of Eli makes eating people seem like a disturbing fetish, The Road views it as a watershed of what men will do to survive, and casts grim light on the price it commands.

This type of inquiry into the human spirit is exactly what post-apocalyptic tales should do. So I tip my cap to both Cormac McCarthy, who writes devastatingly bleak but fascinating stories, and to John Hillcoat who birthed McCarthy's vision into a stark spectacle.

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Update: I'm still hoping to finish all of the interesting films of 2009 before the Oscars, but time is running out, and I seem to keep adding a film or two to the list every time I cross one off. >:(

More Photos about Buildings and Flowers

2010-02-02T20:33:00.000-08:00

Photos de mi Sobrino

2010-02-02T18:34:00.000-08:00

Danny menaced the beach with his general badassery

Danny then rocked the beach's socks off

Bob and Cher take in Danny's awesomeness

A plague of darkness falls upon the land in honor of Danny's power

This was followed by a plague of lizard-painted butterflies

After the plagues, Danny expressed his displeasure with some nearby crips

I was honored to have this single photo taken with "El Chingador de Todos Santos"

The Book of Rewrites

2010-01-18T21:32:00.000-08:00

Denzel Washington stars in The Book of Eli

Caution: Major Spoilers Ahead. Seriously. Don't read this post until you've already seen The Book of Eli... unless you have no interest whatsoever in seeing the film. And if you don't... then you probably don't care about this post anyway. And if you did, and you LOVED it... then you probably don't want to read my criticism of it... So basically, this post is only for those people who already saw The Book of Eli, liked it, but didn't quite love it. So, um... Hi.

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I'm a pretty big fan of the apocalypse. Or rather, what happens afterward. A common dinner conversation with me is: If the radioactive mutant zombies are taking over Seattle tomorrow, what would you pack the truck of your car with before heading for the hills? Seeds? Shotgun shells? Disinfectant? Skin moisturizer? Morphine? Pornography? Butane? Blank paper? Or would you skip the hills and try to make it on a decent sized sail boat? If you can avoid the inevitable pirates, perhaps that's the ticket to survival. I think about this stuff a little too much... perhaps because it asks us to think about what is truly valuable, and what we would miss the most if the infrastructure of our fair civilization completely collapsed.

The Book of Eli is a success. It's a good movie. The filmmakers took on a serious challenge in bringing this world and these characters to life. The undertaking is ambitious... not quite on the same scale as the Matrix or Lord of the Rings trilogies... but they still painted a gorgeous representation of the genre. While the Wachowski Brothers brought Cyberpunk to life, and Peter Jackson animated Middle Earth... The Hughes Brothers breathed arid virulent life into Post-Apocalyptia. And since I'm a fan of the genre, I left the theater wanting several more stories to be told in this exact same world.

The movie is like a video game. To be less kind, the movie is a video game... called Fallout. And the sequels have been quite successful... especially Fallout 3, the latest incarnation from Bethesda Game Studios. This entire film could have been the plot to Fallout 4 and it would have worked seamlessly. Fans of the game will notice the various stylistic details lifted straight from the Fallout universe, including the muted color palette and sandblasted landscapes, the use of certain weapons (did I notice a bottlecap mine in there?) desert raider culture, the mystical role of Christian theology, creepifying cannibals, and steampunk style scavenger-engineers (great to see Tom Waits properly cast.) The only thing missing was Ron Perlman. But Denzel did a better job as warrior/monk than Perlman would have anyway. (See The Mutant Chronicles for proof.)

I'm sure the filmmakers worried about people claiming they ripped off Fallout 3. Which is why they erred when it came to soundtrack choices. Fallout has a signature sound (the doo-wop sound of The Inkspots) that harkens back to an innocent 40's style America... when the American Dream thrived, and we started building bomb shelters and filming Duck and Cover educational films to protect it. The juxtaposition of this classic sound with a gritty post-nuclear wasteland is particularly haunting. When Denzel whips out his iPod and jams out to some sweet 70's soul music instead, I tried to play along. But having the old cannibal couple George and Martha crank up a vintage record player and spin disco classic Ring My Bell? Not really funny or haunting. They should have just given the nudge-and-wink hat tip to Fallout and given us 30 seconds of The Inkspots instead. It would have been the classier move and made a lot of fanboys happy.

Then there's the whole Zatoichi-style blind swordsman hook. Toward the end of the film it's revealed that the main ass-kicking character is blind. It feels strangely tacked on and I spent a long time thinking back to every scene trying to remember if there were telltale signs that Denzel's Eli was sightless. It would just be an unnecessary strain on our disbelief, but then they reveal a plot device in which the contested Book turns out to be in Braille. So just when you thought the evil Carnegie would prove unstoppable, it turns out he's screwed. And evil's defeat is doubly poetic since Carnegie was such a bastard to his blind wife, who was the only other person who could have read the Braille manuscript. And if cribbing Zatoichi isn't bad enough, Eli's loss of the book sets up a Fahrenheit 451 ending. His daily reading has allowed him to memorize every word... which he spills to a scribe as he lays dying from a mortal gunshot wound. When your denouement mainly consists of gluing together a Japanese pulp hero and a Ray Bradbury gimmick, you could use a little editing.

So I propose a modest rewrite to the final act. In my version, Eli can be blind or not. It doesn't matter. It should probably be scrapped though, because it distracts from what is otherwise a fairly believable world. Leave the blind superheroes for Daredevil comics. He doesn't have to be blind to have memorized the entire bible, just devoted. In my version, Eli still winds up going west to the promised land and delivering the King James Bible to the scribes. He still finds his peace and there's hope that some folks will use the Word for their spiritual betterment.

But, there should remain an uncomfortable duality. If Eli isn't blind, then the Bible he carried would have been legible. Paid for in blood and betrayal... Carnegie too should have the Word. The film created a brilliant paradox about the Bible being useful to those who would exploit, manipulate and subjugate the fearful masses; and those who seek it as a script for spiritual emancipation. The official ending short circuits this contradiction. The gritty realism is reduced to a morality tale and a testament to faith. The far better ending would be for Eli to find his haven, while Carnegie is left plotting in the squalor of his own little fiefdom of hell. Rather than a Hollywood ending, we would see that both have used the Book for their own ends... and the world will have to deal with their coexisting and opposite outcomes.

I was willing to buy into Denzel's defense of the scripture. In fact, it was often beautiful. I just wanted to see it balanced with an equally valid prosecution.

Geek Boy Moviegasms for 2010?

2010-01-07T18:06:00.000-08:00

When I saw Avatar at the Cinerama, this trailer was more exciting than the following 2.5 hours. It'll probably suck, but I'm a sucker for mythological monsters.

And in case you loved the video game Fallout 3, there's this bit of tasty cheese:

And then there's this one. Apparently Paul Bettany is still drunk on communion wine after slumming it Dan Brown style.

And we always need more Vampire movies... or more Ethan Hawke movies... or... um... okay, but it looks slightly more intelligent than Underworld.

And Marvel is hoping this sequel keeps the fire alive for superheroes, so that their plans for an Avengers movie will still pan out... since Hulk, Thor, Nick Fury and Captain America have yet to make any money or any sense on the screen.

Anyway, it's a fair crop of blockbustery blockheadedness to look forward to in the next few months. And I'll probably wind up seeing all five of them. Any guesses which will end up on the Worst of 2010 list?

Interesting Movies of 2009

2010-01-07T13:43:00.000-08:00

I punted the 2008 top 10 films list, opting instead to write a spoof piece. While it remains one of the funniest things I've written on Stave It Off... A return to form in 2009 is in order. So I'll write genuinely about this year's crop of films. Don't worry about looking for sarcasm. I promise not to use any. I also learned (from the sheer number of people who missed the irony of 2008's list) that no one wants to read blurbs about the actual movie in these sorts of lists... they just want to see your names and compare them to their own.

This year, I'm also changing up the format slightly. I figure there are five categories of films worth talking about. All of them deserve some sort of credit or notice. Together, they represent the most interesting films of the year. You can think of the categories as 5 stars, 4 stars, 3 stars, movies I still need to see, and embarrassing disappointments.

Late edits are made it italics.

Brilliant Films
These five knocked it out of the park. These are the best and brightest, and I recommend them without hesitation. If you haven't seen these films, you're a boogerhead. If you've seen them and weren't impressed, I hate you.

Where the Wild Things Are
Hurt Locker
Up
District 9
Moon
A Serious Man

Flawed, But Still Very Good Films
This category is a place to honor films that won't necessarily appeal to everyone. They have some wrinkles... but manage to do something intensely well and are impressive achievements. I might still like you if you avoided or disliked one of these films. But you're really missing out on some good stuff here.

Watchmen
Away We Go
Fantastic Mr Fox
Coraline
Star Trek
Zombieland
Sugar
The Girlfriend Experience
Sherlock Holmes
Up in the Air
In the Loop
Youth in Revolt
9
The Road
Precious
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Also-Rans
These were either merely enjoyable but little more, or seriously flawed. By all means, go see them... but if any of these made your Top 10 list... then you have suspect taste, or don't see enough movies.

Avatar
500 Days of Summer
Julie and Julia
Whip It
The Hangover
Paranormal Activity
Capitalism
The Hangover
World's Greatest Dad
Ink
Observe and Report
An Education
Broken Embraces
Inglourious Basterds

Unseen/Unranked
As with every year, I feel a great swelling of shame when I'm stuck trying to rate the best of cinema despite missing so many important contenders. These are the films I still intend to see. I cannot comment on their worthiness... but either the hype or the trailer or the cast/director has me curious. I'm going to try to watch as many as possible in the next week and update this post accordingly. Anyone up for a double-feature?

A Town Called Panic
35 Shots of Rum
Crazy Heart

Bombs
Sorry, I didn't see many this year. I managed to avoid all the flashy fantasy/sci-fi trainwrecks like GI Joe, Transformers 2, Twilight and Dragonball Z. And I never see films like Couples Retreat. I don't think I had the time or money to waste on films that I knew were going to blow chunks. Here's a shortlist of the films that disappointed me though. Even if I had low expectations to begin with, these were all pretty feeble.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Inkheart
Year One
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Public Enemies
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
Paper Heart

The Yin and Yang of Affect

2009-12-22T14:25:00.001-08:00

This article from the BBC got me thinking about an old conversation with Science Officer Alex Tokar. A few years ago Alex related an unintuitive theory to me. He explained that certain mental illnesses serve an evolutionary purpose for the species. The premise is that certain fragilities set us up to be metaphorical canaries in the coal mine. If some people are more prone to depression, perhaps they'll be the first to see that we should give up and run away from an unwinnable war. Or perhaps the more anxious among us will be the first to notice that an economy that doesn't produce anything is unstable by definition. And the most paranoid among us may be the first to notice that the government has repealed many civil liberties that we had taken for granted. All of these observations can be helpful to our society, and evolution may smile upon these traits. Those who think so far outside the norm as to be labeled "mentally ill" can serve an important function (if we listen to them) to those of us who tend to think inside the lines and may be blinded to dangerous realities.

(Please note: I am not so naive as to romanticize the disabling effects of mental illnesses. But this is a strengths-based model... so we're focusing on the upside here, not the hardship.)

The article I linked to doesn't actually mention mental illness, but it points out that "grumpiness" as opposed to "cheerfulness" actually has serious advantages. Researchers have demonstrated that people in a grumpy state of affect are able to process information more quickly and more accurately. They are also better observers and reporters than cheerful folk. However, this is not a one-sided finding. Happiness seems to promote creativity, flexible thinking and cooperation.

It would appear to me that we need a combination of both to thrive... that they fit together like white and black fields in the yin and yang symbol. Together, they dovetail and create a powerful whole. While each individual may be stuck being "happy" or "grumpy", each group of people ought to aspire to incorporate (and maximize) the skills associated with each side. It would be silly to label either side more important than the other.

An old colleague of mine, a moderately functional IT specialist named Ward, used to tell me that every good company should hire at least one crackpot... one guy that's really different. And that nutjob would provide a tremendous benefit to that company by thinking differently, predicting problems that no one else could foresee and making suggestions that no one else was likely to imagine. Ward, of course, was our company crackpot... so it stands to reason that he would have such an elegant theory at hand for his defense. Anyway, his theory holds water according to this model.

Most of what I'm saying seems like common sense and common knowledge. And yet, we still have a tendency to pathologize whichever end of the spectrum we don't inhabit. When it comes to the grumpy/cheerful continuum, those who sit in the soft blue glow of pessimistic rationality see our sanguine-hued brethren as muppet morons... While the red-cheeked optimists often look down with pity at the cranky Blue Meanies. One of the universe's laws is that of opposites attracting, and its utility seems obvious. We need to bond with other entities that complete us.

So why do we deride these potential partners? Why do we resent those who embody what we lack and need? Is it because they remind us of our inadequacies? Is it that we fear ceding power to the "other"? Certainly many of us resist allowing the "other" into our lives, preferring to find like-minded people to blend in with. It appears that "opposites attract" is directly countered by the universal truth that "birds of a feather flock together." What to do, what to do?

New Cipher

2009-12-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

Stave If Off is a longtime advocate of Cockney rhyming slang.

The most colorful origin story maintains that the criminal classes in London invented the cipher in order to speak openly without fear of constabulary repercussion. The system works by replacing key words with commonly paired words that rhyme with the original. Thus... the key word "road" is subbed out for commonly paired words "frog and toad". Hearing someone in a thick Cockney accent saying, "The pub is just down the frog and toad," makes me smile. It becomes even more surreal when the word that actually rhymes with the original word is omitted. "The pub is just down the frog," makes me smile uncontrollably.

If you're unfamiliar with the common examples, try to decipher these phrases yourself:

"She's got lovely bacons."
"Pass the army, will you?"
"Hand over the bees!"

Start by looking at the code words: bacon, army and bees. What words are they commonly paired with? If we guess that bacon's pair word is sausage (as in "bacon and sausage") then we would look for a word that rhymes with sausage that fits into the expression "She's got lovely ___s." Since nothing really rhymes with sausage... we can conclude that sausage was the wrong pair word. Or... maybe she does have lovely Gossages. Who knows? Better bet is to go back and find another word that is frequently paired with bacon.

Following the first link in this post will lead you to the answers if you're stumped.

A fun new cipher has been created by the phenomenon of cell phone texting. Most cell phones include a predictive texting function that guesses at what you're trying to spell. Since each number corresponds to 3 letters... there are quite a number of possible permutations if you hit the 4,6,5 buttons in that order. 4 could be any of GHI, 6 could be MNO and 5 could be JKL. Basic math will reveal that there are 27 different possible letter combinations in this example. But only one spells an English word: INK. So your very smart cell phone assumes you are trying to spell INK.

This doesn't always work perfectly however. As you might surmise, many words have the same numerical formula... and my very smart cell phone doesn't know if I want to "eat" a bagel or "fat" a bagel. Both words are spelled when you punch in 327. Luckily for my bagel, the phone defaults to "eat". It is often wrong though... which creates the opportunity for a new cipher. Incorrect predictive texting results give us many examples of words that can be replaced with seemingly nonsensical alternatives.

Por exemplo:

"Beer" defaults to "adds"
"Cool" results in "book"
"Autumn" comes out as "buttons"

To make it more interesting, we also have to transcend the medium. We can't just be texting these substitute words, we have to add them to our everyday parlance. So I'm advocating that instead of saying, "Cool!" we should say "Book!" And minors should be talking about "processing some adds" instead of "drinking beers". Thwart that constabulary, kids! And from now on, "school starts in the buttons."

Do you have other examples of texting cipher speak?

Preferably something more novel than "them" vs. "then" or "ball" vs. "call".

Attempting to Join the 21st Century

2009-12-01T12:07:00.000-08:00

Audio/Visual technology, once an area of expertise, has left me behind. In the bowels of my apartment building, I'm storing tangled masses of RCA cables, various adapters, switch boxes, ethernet cables, patchcords and speaker wire. I have no less than three boxes full of these accessories. 20 years ago, I was a video toaster guy. Then I was overdubbing audio on super-VHS dubbing decks. 15 years ago, I went through a turntable revival period and picked up any pair of oversized headphones I could find at garage sales. I rocked a Tascam 4-track until I could upgrade to my Fostex. I bought early on full-duplex sound cards and digital multi-track recording technology. And I bit hard on MP3 when it first appeared.

But now, I'm a dinosaur. I feel like one of those old college roommates of mine that needed help connecting their computer to their stereo. I've avoided iPhones, X-Boxes, and HDTV. My router busted, and I never replaced it... so I can't even offer wi-fi to my house guests. And I've never synced my Outlook calendar to anything. I'm an embarrassment to A/V geekdom.

So this week, I'm taking a plunge. I just ordered a 40" LCD HDTV. They've been driven all the way down into the troposphere by the emergence of LED technology and the attraction of 120Hz and 240Hz models. To maximize its powers, I ordered a Blu-Ray player that also streams movies straight from Netflix. To enable this option, I had to purchase a wireless router. I guess I'm going to have to figure out an awful lot of stuff in the next few weeks. But I still haven't read the manual for my digital camera... so I'm hoping that 90% of this stuff is intuitive to an old A/V guy like myself.

The District

2009-11-20T09:47:00.000-08:00

I recently had a minor confrontation with someone who claimed that comic book artist and counter-culture icon Robert Crumb is a misogynist. To be fair, I cannot exactly refute the claim. But I've watched the Crumb documentary (which is amazing!) and looked at a great number of his works. And I think that accusing Crumb of being a misogynist is like accusing him of being a racist. He certainly depicts disturbingly racist and sexually violent things in his work. He's deliberately provocative and occasionally pornographic. But as he has said, he's not here to be polite.

Crumb throws a mix of intense imagery onto the page. He can be crude, he can be sublime. He can be bitterly sarcastic and he can be utterly reverent. Labeling him misogynistic feels like labeling Nabokov a pedophile or Oscar Wilde a degenerate. Perhaps they were. But you're really boxing yourself in if that's all you see.

Which is all to say that I watched an animated Hungarian film called The District this week. And while I found it mesmerizing... I'm having a devil of a time thinking of anyone to recommend it to. Its portrayal of a cruel urban landscape with corrupt cops, degraded sexuality, prostitutes and pimps, and an ongoing racial tension between a Gypsy gang and the Ukrainian mob is rendered with surprising color, humor and verve. There is a pride taken in portraying the dirtiness of The District that makes an American blush. This is not supposed to be the setting for an absurdist comedy. At the same time that high brow audiences might frown at the constant swearing and sexism of the film, typical "dudes" that I know would probably miss all the subtle humor and surreal charm. When a gypsy thug recounts the glory of punching countless mastodons to death... or when Budapest is spared because President Bush accidentally nukes Bucharest instead... well, I think these moments of comic gold are lost on my lowenbrau friends.

But if you're a tweener... If you're someone that enjoys the artful debauchery of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde and Robert Crumb... then perhaps this is the perfect film for you.

Here's a sample scene from early in the movie that reminds one of a hipper Eastern European retooling of West Side Story. This is fairly typical of the film's tendency to break out into song... and of the animation style. The clip has no subtitles... but imagine that they are insulting each other with a variety of clever but obvious homophobic/xenophobic jabs.

Sharks vs. Jets battle rap

Capitalism: An Open Letter to Michael Moore

2009-10-16T10:07:00.000-07:00

Curse you Michael... for being an unapologetic cheat. You do this every time, and it kills me. You do a ton of quality investigative reporting and great interviews, you stage impressive public demonstrations... and then you make conclusions that are populist rhetoric crap with no substance. It just kills me.

Yes, by all means... let's get rid of capitalism (as you suggest) and "Replace it with democracy." What the heck does that even mean Mr. Moore? Are you saying we should get rid of banks, private property, the marketplace, Wall Street, and Amazon.com and replace it all with public forums where every citizen gets one vote? That makes no sense. How do you replace an economic system with a decision-making system?

I suppose you probably meant, "Let's tear down this plutocracy with massive rebellion and put the power back in the hands of the people." But that's not democracy... that's revolution. And if you're ballsy enough to state overtly that "Capitalism is evil"... it's hard to imagine you're afraid to openly say "Let's get the revolution started." But, most importantly, you dodged the question. Just what are we supposed to replace capitalism with? Democracy doesn't cut it. That might work for the angry masses... but when you rally people with false ideas, you're little better than the petty dictators that constantly rise and fall in unstable regions of the world... each one promising the people liberation, but delivering just another flavor of genocide, servitude and torture.

Maybe what you were trying to say is, "Let's replace capitalism with socialism!" That would have made sense. It would have been consistent with your stance that Canada and Europe have better health care models. It would have given you an honest platform to stand upon. You could have allowed for continuing the banking system, the investment process, the practice of small business ownership and a competitive marketplace. All these things can happily exist within socialism... there are just more protections and regulations. You definitely waxed nostalgic for the Roosevelt administration: when taxes on the richest class of people were significantly higher, protections for unions were significantly better, and the ruling class seemed to understand the value of wealth redistribution. Well, that was still capitalism. There was just a better class of people at the highest level of government.

Your chapters about the moral bankruptcy of our leaders was interesting. I never expected you to get two priests and a bishop to agree that capitalism was "evil". It wasn't until I read Mountains Beyond Mountains, a book about Dr. Paul Farmer's work in Haiti, that I even considered Catholicism as anything but a force of tyranny by bamboozlement. That book introduced me to the idea of "liberation theology"... that many of the priests and nuns in devastated parts of the world are staunch advocates of the poor in the face of hostile governments. The idea that the Catholic priesthoods of Chicago and Detroit have become the same thing (an ally to the poor in a forsaken land) is... compelling. I'm not sure I'm willing to completely buy this line... but I'm interested in hearing more if you need an idea for your next movie. And I hope to God that you weren't suggesting we replace capitalism with theocracy!

I still love you and your work Michael. I wish you'd quit cheating, but you're the only one putting this much humor and style into these kinds of documentaries and I've appreciated all of them. You may never produce another one quite as brilliant as Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 911, but I'll still be giving you my dollars at the box office... it's the capitalist way.

By the way... I thought that this was the most effective 58 seconds of the whole film:

This snippet makes your central point about government being hijacked by the banking industry better than any of the anti-capitalist rhetoric.

Update:
I found this audio interview between Howard Stern and Michael Moore on Youtube. The clip should auto-load parts 2, 3, 4, etc. In the interview he discusses his motivations and relationship with capitalism in greater depth... and in an uncensored fashion. I found myself appreciating his work even more as I listened.

Ode to a 1984 Audi GT Coupe

2009-10-03T19:07:00.000-07:00

Back to square one. My foray into "writing a whole song" was a whole lot more work than I imagined... and terribly frustrating... so I'm back to writing fragments. Today's is a simple meditation on the gold Audi that I owned during my undergrad years in Olympia. If I'm stretching myself in any way here... it's probably in the pacing. This tune is a little faster than my typically glacial bpm. But not so fast as to get a speeding ticket.

My First Car

Photographic Evidence

2009-08-30T16:56:00.000-07:00

The Olympics are still beautiful and mysterious. Here's a first series of photos of the trip. These are the "artsy" ones. Snapshots of Olaiya and me will come later.

Pipe Organ

Clown Fish

Polish

Topography

Coffin Mates

Pancakes

Depth

Stark

Deep

You Can't Fall Off a Mountain

2009-08-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

Olaiya and I are off to the woods. The Olympic peninsula beckons, with its lush Hoh River Valley rainforest, turquoise waters of Lake Crescent and labyrinthine bunkers high atop the hills of Fort Worden. We'll take the whole work week to hike and camp and cook simple meals over a single butane flame. To prepare, I've dug my tent and sleeping bag out of storage and purchased/borrowed strange devices: signifiers of manhood and independence: a compass, a pocketknife, waterproof matches, iodine pills, 100' of sturdy rope.

I remember backpacking with my parents when I was just 13... and going later with high school friends Andres, Calvin and Garrett. Arcane challenges like building a fire in damp conditions or nagivating a waist high river rekindle something in me. In my mind, I'm already riding the flume. I'm running down the mountain. I'm John Muir mixing it up with an avalanche. I know it won't be like that anymore. I'm too old and smart to leave the trail behind and get into any real trouble, but getting out of Seattle for a while and into some moss-covered riverbanks sounds like the perfect prescription for all my urban anxiety and fretting about health-care reform. Please don't blow up civilization while I'm gone.

Getting Consistent

2009-08-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

Jeering and howling, the ugly faces of the indignant and the ignorant are ambushing congressmen and townhalls across the country. They cannot abide this socialist administration trying to force health care upon its people. They spread misinformation and shout down opposition. If you read the news, it sounds like they're trying to start a goddamn civil war.

At first, I came here to make a tired argument. It goes something like this: We do not need to fear government-run programs. Everyday we take all kinds of government run programs for granted. We count on the mailman and the fire department and the school teacher and the police department and the coast guard to keep society safe and running smoothly. Cue the 1950's music and old educational video montage. We count on government programs to provide social security and Medicare for our elderly, student loans to our youth, and to preserve green spaces for everyone. The government makes sure that streets are paved, homes have electricity, and that we're notified if a child molester moves in next door. These programs have all been run by the government for years, and they work. They work quite well. So you see America... there's no reason to fear socialized medicine... you've been enjoying a socialized fire department for years!

As I was rehearsing this argument, I was struck by a thought. Why the hell have we allowed so many critical aspects of our society to be run by corporations instead of the government?! The government exists to ensure the public interest... and they have been the only ones we can rely on to provide many fundamental services that were too important to leave to the marketplace.

Clearly there are many systems that private corporations would love to get their profiteering hands on. Corporations love running prisons (they not only get government money to handle the prisoners, they also get to use the inmates as slave labor in sweatshops... it's win-win!) Frankly, there's good reason to fear corporations running the programs that we rely on to keep society running smoothly. They may handle things more efficiently, but they also take greater risks and don't have a strong track record of planning for sustainability. Their motivations are not ultimately to serve the public interest. While I think corporate competition and innovation are great for fields like movie-making, restaurants, biochemistry and car manufacturing... There are certain services in our society that shouldn't be left to chance or influenced by corporate ethics.

What are they?

Well, there's education. I'm very happy that we have a public school option all the way through university studies. I'm not saying we shouldn't have corporate or religious alternatives; I'm just wedded to the idea that there should ALWAYS be a government option.

There are the police and armed services. I'm not always very happy with them, but I'm VERY thankful that they are operated by the government instead of private industry. Just look at Blackwater's record to see why.

There's... um... waste management. And environmental protection. We NEED clean air and water to survive. What else are requirements for survival? Obviously, there's food, clothing and shelter. And here's where I'm flabbergasted. For all these years we've allowed food, clothing and shelter to be run by corporations. America seems to nurture a fear about Soviet living... that we'd all be wearing burlap sacks, chowing on Soylent Green and living in miniature gray hexagonal pods if the government had its way. But that is nonsense. Except for maybe the hexagonal pods part. That could really happen. I suppose there has been a "government option" in these fields... the government has subsidized food and clothing banks, and there are a lot of subsidized housing projects. But these are government/private partnerships at best. I think we need a genuine, 100% government-controlled, non-profit option in these fields.

And I'd add energy to the list. Sure we have some state-run electrical grids... but I mean gasoline, oil, and natural gas. And high-speed internet, and cell coverage, and mass transit. These things are too important to be left to the whims of the marketplace. Maybe you can think of some other things that I'm missing?

So, I started out thinking that all this paranoia about a government option for health insurance was silly... but now I'm feeling more and more outraged. Why are we not demanding a public option for a variety of other services we all depend on? Let's get consistent on this!

Bummerman Strikes Again!

2009-07-30T00:04:00.000-07:00

So it was 102 degrees in Seattle today. Dingo, Moose and I decided to sit out the afternoon swelter in the air-conditioned opulence of the Pacific Place theater. To kill four hours, we saw (500) Days of ~~Dumber~~ Summer... a rom-com that dares to ask, "What if... boy doesn't get girl?!" One of the producers was apparently so stricken with this novelty that he insisted that the film have a lame narrator that immediately points this twist out after the opening credits. If only the narrator had instead said, "You probably won't like this film very much because, even if it's a bit novel, the charisma of the lead actors only goes so far and the film doesn't really have that much to say." That would have been awesome. At one point, the film actually takes a lampooning jab at European cinema (Bergman among others) which takes an awful lot of balls for a film this shallow.

We walked out and I had to buy a calorie-laced icecream cookie sandwich to get the sacharrine flavor out of my mouth. Next stop was Public ~~Embarrassment~~ Enemies. I cannot imagine a better cast or a more fascinating and roguish lead character being more completely squandered. Note to Michael Mann: Your hi-def video cameras look like TOTAL CRAP. If I wanted to watch TV, I'd stay at home and watch my FREAKIN' TV. The great thing about film is that it looks distinctively like film... not like outtakes from an episode of COPS. Also: How is it even possible that two and a half hours of Johnny Depp could be this boring. The script is partially to blame... but the editing was even worse. It showed all of Peter Jackson's restraint combined with all of Uwe Boll's talent. Not only did the tommy guns sound exactly like a string of firecrackers, at one point a gun suddenly goes off about 3 inches from a hostage's head. The actor doesn't even flinch. If there's one unforgiveable sin in action flicks, it's impotence... and this one had about as much punch as a Dustin Diamond haymaker.

These films rated 70 and 75 respectively on Metacritic.... Higher on Rotten Tomatoes. Is it possible that the heat made me a tad grumpy and that these are actually above average offerings? Or is it more likely that the REST OF THE WORLD SUCKS and that ONLY BUMMERMAN SEES THE TRUTH!?!

Stave It Off's Official Sexiest Women

2009-07-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, I published my list of the Stave It Off 20 sexiest guys. It was one of the most commented upon posts my blog has ever seen. At the time, I intended to do this companion piece honoring my list of sexiest women, but for some reason it took me three years to complete. I was very wary of publishing this, cautiously adding names to a theoretical list over the years, but never figuring it would see the light of day. It seemed safe and playful to objectify men at the time. I didn't worry about reactions to the piece, or anyone complaining about it being shallow. Writing about women in the same vein however is fraught with peril. Even choosing the photographs was dangerous. (Google image search quickly reveals that most of these folks have been photographed in various states of undress.)

Ultimately, I decided to post this because I don't want to be so careful and PC as to ignore how delightfully sexy all these women are. I don't want to downplay how much I look forward to seeing them continue to create, perform and evolve. While none of them compare to my own wonderful and lovely Olaiya, they are luminous.

You'll probably notice that vapid is not sexy in Stave It Off land. There are no Paris Hiltons, no Jessica Simpsons, no Jessica Albas. Also, there are a few close calls that missed the list due to some of their professional endeavors. Beyonce Knowles was amazing singing At Last at the Obama presidential ball... but often looks like a posing tool in the rest of her professional work. Similarly Scarlett Johansson was a lot more likable before all the makeup ads and Tom Waits covers. Some of you may roll your eyes at my inclusion of some famous sex symbols like Salma Hayek, Monica Bellucci and Angelina Jolie. Fair enough; I'm an indie kind of guy and didn't want to publish a list that looks suspiciously like a Maxim magazine cover girl gallery. But I can't bash these ladies just because "being sexy" is what they do. That's a deceptively difficult task. Those who embrace it and carry it off deserve some credit too.

In the original post about men, I eventually broke the list into subgroups... categories of sexiness if you will. There were the intellectuals, the bad boys, the golden boys, the sensitive artists, and the man's man types. With this list, I see the warrior, the seductress, the geek, and the girl-next-door. All 20 selections to the official Stave It Off sexiest ladies list seem to fall into one of these four categories. You can probably guess which is which. In no particular order... here they are:

Serena Williams

Salma Hayek

America Ferrera

Rose Marshack

Janeane Garofalo

Lucy Liu

Bjork Gudmundsdottir

Emily Watson

Christina Hendricks

Gillian Anderson

Gina Torres

Michelle Yeoh

Jennifer Tilly

Jennifer Connelly

Macy Gray

Monica Bellucci

Sarah Silverman

Angelina Jolie

Lauryn Hill

Jenna Fischer

Others strongly considered for the list: Parker Posey, Kim Deal, Natalie Merchant, Grace Park and John Leguizamo.

I hope that none of you readers find this offensive, but feel free to comment if you do. Or feel free to comment if you don't. While I find the idea of beauty pageants repulsive because we honor stereotypical forms of physical beauty with little appreciation of character, poise, talent, intelligence, humor, etc... This list isn't meant to be another document supporting the idea of that a woman's role is to be sexy to men, and that there is only one prescribed method to achieve that. I'm hoping, instead, that this document testifies to the fact that there are all kinds of sexiness... and that appreciating sexiness doesn't mean that we have to demean anyone or demand anything of anyone.

Not Gonna Do It

2009-07-13T10:27:00.000-07:00

I was just Googling the lyrics to Kodachrome, so that I could create a Paul Simon-referencing title for this post. I couldn't remember if he sang, "I love to take the photographs" or "I love to take a photograph." What I quickly discovered on Google is that everybody and their cousin has used that line on the main page of the photo blog or Flickr account, so I'll restrain myself.

I got a Nikon camera. A D60 SLR. It's the nicest camera I'll probably ever own. I broke it in at the last Little Spark event... and the early results look promising. I don't have any idea how to use the advanced features yet. The manual is a 190 page beast that I'll probably read in chunks over the next year. But the low-light color balance seems a million times better than my old camera. Not to mention the better shutter speeds, autofocusing mechanism, etc. New pics will be up on the Little Spark blog within a day or so. Now all I need is a snazzy zoom lens!

Update: Here's my first low-light food pic: A margherita pizza from Delancey's Little Spark Event. Looks pretty appetizing to me (even without any Photoshopping!)

My Movie Has a Trailer!

2009-06-29T22:39:00.000-07:00

Last August I got to be an extra in a major motion picture. The film, World's Greatest Dad, apparently did okay at Sundance, and I'm hoping it'll be in a theater near me someday soon. Warning! The trailer is approved for "Restricted Audiences Only" and may offend your delicate sensibilities.

Que Es Mas Macho: Punk Country Edition

2009-06-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

The genre of music I've had the hardest time embracing is Country and Western. I associate it with hicks, intolerance and chewing tobacco. These associations go back to growing up in a very provincial area of rural Washington. I never wanted to have anything to do with the music or the lifestyle that I saw in front of me. I don't wear jeans. I can't stand cowboy boots. And mustaches creep me out.

As I grew older, I started appreciating indie-country... slices of Americana laid down with banjos and acoustic guitars. Whether quiet or raging, these tunes rebelled against the factory mold of what country was supposed to be and followed their own vision. The easy entree into this underappreciated world was Johnny Cash... because, after all, what could be more punk rock than this:

More recently, I've run across a couple of songs by country artists that surprised me. They embody the true meaning of punk rock. Like rappers that incorporate sentimentality into their lyrics, these artists are bucking the norms of the genre in ways that show courage. Both of these songs run the risk of alienating audiences that normally support the country music industry.

The first example, played a bit tongue-in-cheek, is Willie Nelson's Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other. And he may be confusing cross-gender identification with homosexuality, but I'm still proud of Willie for recording this tune.

The second example is Steve Earle's John Walker's Blues. I'm not sure I've heard any musician, of any genre, pen a tune that tries to humanify Islam for American audiences. Earle's gravelly twang may be an acquired taste, but this song absolutely blew me away.

So, gentle reader, que es mas macho?

Humanity is NOT a Virus

2009-06-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

We're actually much more like a cancer.

This happy realization came to me while listening to James Lovelock on NPR the other morning. He's a right chipper English bloke, member of the Royal Society of Fellows, and proponent of the Gaia Theory. This theory holds that the Earth is a living organism made up of subsystems... that various species of flora and fauna operate the way different organs work in a human body. They all work in concert to achieve a self-regulating stability. The human race can be compared to the central nervous system or "brain" of this earth-organism. As Lovelock points out, the earth can now actually defend itself from a potential asteroid collision thanks to the miraculous efforts of it's brain organ. Hurray for growing brains. Hurray for Gaia's evolution. Hurray for humanity.

However...

We're also growing at a completely unsustainable pace. We're savaging many of the other "organs" in order to feed our own advancement. As Al Gore and any other environmentalist will tell you: when we cut down rain forests to build cattle ranches or burn fossil fuels for energy, we're causing a breakdown in the delicate balance that sustains Gaia, and soon the planet will become a lot less inhabitable. But I no longer see us as a parasitic virus... feasting on the husk of a depleted planet. Instead, I see us like a cancerous tumor... multiplying in size despite the adverse consequences to our own species and to all of our neighboring species. The good news is that there is nothing inherently wrong with humanity... no more than there is something inherently wrong with evolving a brain. We just happen to represent a nasty case of cancer to our mother Gaia at the moment. I'm hoping we don't have to resort to radiation treatment.

The Greatest Album Ever Recorded (#2 in a series)

2009-06-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

Back in undergrad, I took a music appreciation module that was centered around the theory that the most worthwhile quality music can have is to evoke an emotional response in the listener. Our quest to locate and quantify evocative music led us to various genres of music, and the effect that certain instruments, keys and chords seem to have on the human brain (i.e. why do those swelling strings in the movie soundtrack make us tear up? And why does the clarinet make me want to swing my hips?)

Noticing that you're being manipulated can completely destroy the experience however... so subtlety becomes critical if you're creating music for a sophisticated cochlea. This is one of the reasons I've had my beef with overtly "emo" bands. I don't see anything wrong with conveying depressed emotions (sadness, angst, loneliness, ennui, disillusionment) but too often they feel commercial and skin-deep. When a band can convey sadness and beauty in a way I find compelling, I treasure the listening experience.

Enter Sigur Ros's record Ágætis Byrjun. Sigur Ros are an Icelandic group creating avant rock compositions bubbling over with epic orchestral flavor and with unusual attention paid to the minute details of sound sculpture. They demonstrate the same kind of innovative musicianship (exploring the timbre of their instruments and pulling together sound collages) that Radiohead's OK Computer release blew me away with. This record feels every bit as ambitious as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon... with just a tad more sincerity and less hallucinocentric pretension.

Ágætis Byrjun (translated: "An Alright Start") was their first release to get major label pimpage to the international market. They have followed this up with a few more full length releases and some oddities, EPs and collaborations.

Many of their tracks feature lyrics sung in an invented language that's been dubbed "Vonlenska" or "Hopelandic". It's similar to the nonsensical syllables of scat in jazz music... but it reflects an entirely different aesthetic here. Hopelandic is composed of sounds that work within the emotive structure of Sigur Ros's compositions. Their website once encouraged people to submit their interpretations of these nonsense lyrics... generating countless fascinating poetic "translations" of what the song conveyed to each subjective listener. I've never bothered to read the translations of those tracks that do have intended meanings. I prefer to turn the verbal part of my brain off when listening to their CDs. The fact that the band has also opted for this path with its gibberish vocals strikes me as completely awesome.

The tracks themselves:

Intro -1:36
Simple and elegant... Backmasked vocals introduce the falsetto style of the lead vocalist. Gives the listener a brief chance to acclimate to their vibe.

Svefn-g-englar [Sleepwalkers] – 10:04

"Official" band-made video

The huge opening salvo track... gently drops a sonar ping into our consciousness, then brings on waves of their signature electric guitar sound (using a cello bow.) At some point I remind myself that the Icelandic vocals aren't actually saying "It's you!" The CD version of this track (not featured in the video above) ends with a remarkable little heart beat (lub-dub) drum pattern that transforms as it escalates and then is snuffed out like a candle before we move to the next masterpiece.

Starálfur [Staring Elf] – 6:48

Fan-made video using a shortened mix of the song

(Listening notes refer to the full version of this track, not the above video.)
Keyboards come in front and center, bolstered with lovely strings, then yielding to the vocalist. At 2:55, the strings disappear and are replaced by strums of a tinny, unplugged electric guitar (one of my favorite little moments in the album.) This is followed by grand fireworks explosions of percussion (or perhaps the beats are huge boulders falling into a deep mountain lake?) which, in turn, yields to a bouncy Beatles-esque string melody at 4:10. Then resolution as the gentle strings and vocals return.

Flugufrelsarinn [The Fly's Saviour] – 7:49

Fan-made video

Something that sounds like an old school pump organ lays down a bass line. Then we hear the tidal ebb and flow with the bowed guitar. It drifts away and returns occasionally to bring emotional weight to the next line of vocals. I imagine the singer is my therapy client, telling me something vitally important about his childhood, choosing each word with precision.

Ný batteri [New Batteries] – 8:10
Muted brass opens the track, like mewling seals on a birthing beach. Pan back reveals a craggy stretch of wind-blown sea shore. Then the welcome debut of an electric bass guitar line like gulls in flight. Drums appear and buffet our ship at the 4:36 mark. Then 6:13 is a defiant swell of vocals and brass perfectly woven into that bassline. The resolution clicks and creaks with the industrial sounds of nautical pulleys and rigging.

Hjartað hamast [The Heart Pounds] – 7:11
Urgent and tense, with vocals that breath intimately into my ear. Piano comes in to dovetail with the bassline... brilliant sense of composition that straddles pop and neoclassical. Strings (and a touch of harmonica?) come in to delineate the thump-thump-thump rhythm. Some smokey wisps of violin and piano spiral upward until we are overtaken by a wash of white noise.

Viðrar vel til loftárása [Good Weather for an Airstrike] – 10:17
A track that quietly meanders its way into the most memorable piano melody on the album (starting at the 1:30 mark, switching gears at 3:00, and again at 4:00.) Some vocals come in at 4:50 but stay in the backseat. The piano is clearly driving this vehicle. The last two minutes build up to a crescendo of orchestra pit mayhem. This song sets the foundations for the style of their next two major albums, which increasingly embrace the Godspeed You Black Emperor school of 10+ minute epic compositions, heavy use of a full orchestra and a tendency to build up from minimalism into a neoclassical frenzy.

Olsen Olsen – 8:03
One of the tracks featuring "Hopelandic" vocals, they are run through echo and distortion and overlaid with gorgeous complexity. Then at 2:25, my second favorite cameo of the album... a little penny whistle line dancing its medieval charms for measure or two. Later we get a full men's chorus of la-la-la-las and degeneration into improv brass solos. The track closes with the reanimation of the penny whistle melody... a minstrel skipping over the grassy fields.

Ágætis byrjun [A Good Beginning] – 7:56

Band-made acoustic version video

(Listening notes refer to the full version of this track, not the above video.)
Modestly named after the faint praise offered to the band by an early listener to this track. I enjoy the pronounced sound of fingers sliding over steel guitar strings... making their way to the next chord. This is a straightforward example of piano/guitar composition propping up the plaintive vocals.

Avalon – 4:00
Cellos swirl about, reminiscent of Gorecki's Symphony #3. An untuned acoustic bass is strummed... like lurching footsteps down an empty hall. The lights are off, the show is over. It's time to go home.

Rethinking Life's Many Choices

2009-06-05T13:58:00.000-07:00

For the last several years, my softball jersey has sported the number 17 on the back (in honor of the great Mark Grace) and has been adorned with the name "Grasshopper". My team, Happy Hour, had the brilliant idea of putting drink names on backs of our jerseys. So instead of picking Harvey Wallbanger or Velvet Hammer #2... or any other overtly baseball-related name... I went with Grasshopper. I was playing centerfield at the time, so Grasshopper was sort of apt. I think the drink is made with creme de menth and is probably disgusting. But I didn't pick the name because of the beverage or its relation to playing the outfield. I chose it almost entirely because of David Carradine's character in the TV show Kung Fu.

Kwai Chang Caine (nicknamed "Grasshopper") was one of the great pulpy influences on my childhood formation of what it meant to be masculine and heroic. He represented integrity, fortitude, sacrifice, quiet intensity, and the mysterious, exotic powers granted to those who practice the extreme self-discipline of the Orient. He was a beacon of honor in a dusty land of outlaws and harsh realities. He was an idealist surviving in a land hellbent on crushing the nobility out of any man. His dignity was unflappable. He was my hero.

And now he's dead. Found naked in the closet of his Bangkok hotel room with shoestrings tied around his neck and genitals. Nice. Way to destroy my universe David. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to the ridicule I'm going to face at softball this Sunday wearing my Grasshopper jersey.

In Case you're too Lame to watch Ill Doctrine

2009-05-21T18:56:00.001-07:00

Here's an example of why I love J Smooth and Ill Doctrine so much. I don't give a crap about Asher Roth... In fact, I'd never heard of him before this video... but J has a way of connecting the dots for people around the tricky topic of race relations. I wish there was a way to give Ill Doctrine an internet hug.

Tragic and Impossible Love between Man and Kraken

2009-05-20T16:55:00.001-07:00

This Hurts My Brain in all the Good Ways

2009-05-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

Waning and Waxing Moons of Athletic Endeavor

2009-05-19T14:14:00.000-07:00

After a bruising, conflict-ridden night at basketball a couple of weeks ago, a novel thought crossed my mind: "Why am I doing this?"

Why have I played basketball every Thursday night for the last eight years? Am I getting better or working toward any particular goal? Does the wear and tear on my body make up for the cardio workout I get? Is basketball inherently more enjoyable to me than other forms of exercise?

For lo these many years I have guarded Thursday night at the gym as a religious rite, only to be missed in the direst of circumstances. I've persevered through injuries, illnesses, worn out shoes, knee pads, ankle braces and countless pairs of contact lenses. But a couple weeks ago, I decided I was done. At least for now.

The decision might have been prompted by having had a great time dancing at a Thievery Corporation concert the previous week. Jimmimoose and I scored free tickets, had a few beers and I danced until I was a sweaty ball of exhaustion. At no point was I angry with anyone, causing myself pain, or frustrated at my lack of ability to execute a maneuver. In short, it was a thousand times better than basketball... and being tipsy was actually a benefit rather than a hindrance.

In the following days, I thought of all the things that I might enjoy more than basketball (and that I may be able to continue enjoying into old age.) In the summertime, the thought of tossing a frisbee around on a grassy field, playing softball and improving my tennis game all came to mind. So now begins my quest to pursue these interests and to see what else sparks my curiosity.

The first bold stroke of this campaign was to participate in a weekend mixed-doubles tennis tournament hosted by my friend Kelly. Olaiya and I drove out past the mountains, rivers and snow-packed pine forests to the isolated town of Mozama, WA. We spent the weekend in the company of cheery people who knew how to eat, drink, dance and play tennis. The Mozama Country Inn played host to the invasion of tennis players.

Me and O at a scenic view rest stop along the North Cascade Highway.

Friday, I played in my first ever competitive tennis match. It had been years since I had even played an actual game of tennis (as opposed to just rallying back and forth, never keeping score.) I had to be reminded of subtleties like which side of the court was mine after we changed ends, or who served first during a tie-breaker. But with Olaiya rooting me on, my partner Janine and I triumphed 7-6 (10-8) in the longest (and most exciting!) match of the whole tourney.

Janine and I kicking butt.

Saturday's match was pretty anticlimactic, as we drew an easy match and won 6-4 despite playing poorly. This meant we would play Sunday in the semifinals. Knowing that I had a match at 9am the next morning, I stayed up late drinking beer from a local microbrew pub (Twisp River Pub dunkle weiss) and dancing to 70's funk rock under a disco ball. O and I were having way too good of a time to be conservative.

The only thing standing between us and the finals was my partner's husband's team... and he was a tennis pro that teaches down in California. I had watched him and his partner take out some very good players in the tourney already (including knocking out Kelly, the tourney organizer.) We played them tough (maybe tougher than anyone else) but ultimately lost 7-6 (9-7). We had our shot, but couldn't string together any points or break his serve during the tie-breaker. Our consolation was watching the team that beat us go on to win the final fairly easily.

Dressed in black and feeling deadly.

Olaiya and I made the long, gorgeous drive home back to Seattle. Then drove down to the courts and played another hour of tennis against each other. I think next year she'll be ready to jump into the tournament herself. In the meantime, I can't get enough tennis.

Joss Whedon Explains His Pain

2009-05-05T09:54:00.000-07:00

Falling into a Stave it Off favorites category: "great-writer-mediocre-musician", Joss Whedon offers us this little glimpse into what it's like to record the director's track to a movie or TV show. If you sort of love Joss for giving you things like Firefly, Buffy, Angel or Dollhouse... then maybe you'll enjoy this as much as I did. And you can thank NPR's This American Life for bringing it to us.

Performance Enhancement: Now It's Our Turn!

2009-05-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker just ran an interesting article about the use of neuro-enhancing drugs. Drugs like Adderall, typically prescribed for people suffering from ADHD, create higher levels of concentration and focus for normal people. College students have flocked to them as they once did nicotine and caffeine. They're seen as survival aids in the more competitive schools, or for hyper-achieving students that want straight A's while devoting time to full time jobs, weekend partying, social action committees, student politics and playing violin for a neo-classical math-rock septet.

As I read the article, it seemed a perfect parallel to the dilemma facing professional athletes and the choice of whether or not to abuse steroids. Many of us have some pretty absolute convictions when it comes to the morality of steroid users like Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire. But it seems a bit grayer when we consider the risks taken by driven young scholars.

Here's a key bit of dialog between the writer and an admitted neuro-enhancement user:

I suggested that adults, too, might feel coerced into using the drugs.

"Yeah, in a competitive field—if suddenly a quarter of the people are more equipped, but you don’t want to take the risks with your body—it could begin to seem terribly unfair," he said. "I don’t think we need to be turning up the crank another notch on how hard we work. But the fact is, the baseline competitive level is going to reorient around what these drugs make possible, and you can choose to compete or not."

The interviewee above used Provigil in order to boost his performance at competitive poker. It seems disingenuous when he says that we don't need to be "turning up the crank another notch on how hard we work" when that's exactly what he wanted to do.

The steroid dilemma has gone from baseball to your workplace. Imagine if you could easily secure some drugs (that reported only mild side effects) that would make you alert and focused and productive, even on days when you felt sleepy, unproductive or depressed. Imagine that your competition is already doing so. Are you ready to make a decision on which competitive risks you'd be willing to take?

Costume Idea for Olaiya

2009-05-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

I'm lobbying for Olaiya to be Bessie Coleman for this year's Halloween festivities. Who's Bessie Coleman you ask. Well, it's long past February, but here's your black history lesson for the month!

"Bessie was the first Black woman to earn a pilots license in America. No flight school would accept her in the US because she was Black, so she learned to fly in France. Bessie performed spectacular air shows across the US and her fearless spirit and flare for drama made her queen of the air. Tearing up the skies with her daredevil dives, barnstorming Bessie Coleman flew low and zoomed high. Audiences gasped when Bessie performed barrel rolls and the wings of her plane touched the tips of the clouds like a bird on high." (From Dolls Like Me.)

For a much more thorough and touching story of her triumphs and tragic death, check out her Wikipedia entry. I'm a sucker for barnstormers to begin with, but "Queen" Bessie's combination of intelligence, fortitude, courage, audacity and beauty seems storybook perfect. It's a wonder Hollywood hasn't exploited this yet. I guess there was a 2008 musical about her (titled Barnstormer) so maybe a feature film isn't far behind.

If anyone has any 1920's aviation gear to donate to Olaiya's costume, let me know. (And yes, I know everyone will ask if she's supposed to be Amelia Earhart... I think she'll have to have a patch on her jacket that says "Bessie".)

I know Olaiya would love to rock a pair of those boots.

A couple of close ups in full aviator dress.

Bessie's soft-focus glamour shot!

And maybe Olaiya can reuse some of the clothes to dress up as Zoe from Firefly the following year?

Race Relations

2009-04-28T15:07:00.000-07:00

Following the Obama presidential election victory, newspaper nitwits and news channel "pundits" jumped to ask the ridiculously stupid question, "Is racism dead?"... As if white America had been waiting for the right opportunity to heave a collective sigh of relief. Well, it isn't. Duh.

But it might be time for a less timid discussion of race. It might be time to stop turning the easy targets from Jimmy Snyder to Don Imus into sacrificial lambs to appease our guilt about the history of racism and engage in the subject with genuine interest and openness. Overtly racist curiosities like this are an undeniable component of our cultural blooper reel of history. But that's a far cry from someone losing their job because they said that African Americans were genetically gifted athletes. I don't think anyone benefits from overreactions like that.

My new favorite jerk, Steve Sailer, has written extensively on race in America. He writes for publications like the National Post and is a confessed conservative. But he writes better than Stave It Off whipping boy George Will and comes off like less of an ass. He's the sort of guy that walks a thin line. Before Obama was elected, I think I would have found his work more objectionable. Since there are plenty of racist pricks blogging their unreadable hatespeech, I immediately write off anyone that suggests America needs to limit immigration. Interestingly, I found myself willing to keep reading this time. I guess I was more willing to give him a chance (because I feel less defensive these days?)... and found that he had some interesting things to say.

If you're shopping for a new conservative know-it-all to bash, I encourage readers to engage his works in these three easy pieces: an article about how racial diversity might make for superior breeding, a straw-man assault on the naive critics of miscegenation, and finally an interesting article on who is really hurt by interracial coupling.

I was expecting to find his articles slanted and pathetic, but instead found myself fascinated at how objective he was about things. He's like one of those pesky libertarians who I half agree with and find it difficult to argue against. It's evident that he isn't willing to go post-modern on how he perceives some social constructs like gender roles, but he still comes to some pretty interesting conclusions... some of which might surprise you.

PS For an interesting overview of Sailer's definition of race, check out this article.

What Started as a Simple Movie Review

2009-04-11T14:03:00.000-07:00

I have now seen Watchmen four times. Never before in my life have I seen a movie four times in the theater. Under the right conditions, I would even see it again. During the latest viewing, I picked up a few details that I had previously missed... some subtle inside jokes happening in the background or a nuance to a portrayal. But I didn't really see it in the hopes of noticing more... I saw it in the hopes that it would still impact me emotionally. And sure enough, even though I know every line of dialogue and every stunt and every cheesy comic book pose that the characters strike, I still cry every time.

I am somewhat stunned by that. It seems out of character for me. I don't really have a list of favorite tearjerker movies. So I sat down and tried to think of what other movies have hooked me emotionally time after time. There's really only one. And I'm not proud of it. It isn't exactly a good movie; it just speaks to me.

The film is called Powder. It was released when I was about 18 years old. It's a tragic fantasy tale revolving around a young man with a strange kinship to electricity. He is ash white and completely bald (he's the embodiment of electrolysis.) His "powers" are that he can manipulate magnetic fields and the electricity running through power lines. Incredibly sensitive and intelligent, he feels like an alien in our modern brutal society. It ends in bittersweet tragedy.

This is Powder

When I realized that Powder was the only other movie I had seen more than three times that still brings out tears, I was startled. There is a marked similarity between Powder's main character and the character in Watchmen that I feel the most emotional resonance with: Dr. Manhattan.

This is Dr. Manhattan

Both are completely bald. Both exude a kind of post-human quality, with the twin traits of extreme mental prowess and electrical/magnetic manipulation (though Manhattan's powers are of an atomic nature and near godlike in their capacity.) Both are baffled by the human drive toward cruelty, violence and chaos. Both ultimately choose to leave this world behind in a self-sacrificing but redeeming gesture. I suppose they could be considered aloof Christ figures. (If Jesus had been more intellectually detached and bald as a naked molerat, maybe I'd be a Christian!)

I don't know what this means exactly, but it strikes me as a significant insight into my own personal mythology. Whatever these characters represent must be profound for me at some level, conscious or subconscious. And what if I told you that one of my other favorite comic book heros was this guy?!

Blogging about Blogging and What I Had for Lunch

2009-03-30T14:44:00.000-07:00

Updating Stave It Off has become embarrassingly erratic. I'm having a creative crisis when it comes to determining what should be considered worthwhile content. I've long refused to write about the minutia of my day or even give voice to the sorts of "random thoughts" posts I once indulged twice a week. Sadly, having higher standards seems to have resulted in only posting once or twice a month. It's only rarely that I feel like fleshing out a full-fledged essay (or bothering to play with alliteration in a sentence.) And even if I'm playing more guitar these days, I'm not exactly planning to post a new song each week.

I could fill these pages with the news that yesterday was very sunny, and I played tennis for the first time this year. I could comment that I'm preparing to brew my own beer (I'm in a bottle gathering stage - collecting five gallons worth of resealable "flip-top" bottles.) I could tell you that I'm excited about the onset of softball season. I could babble on and on about how nervous I am about the prospect of trying to buy a house this year.

Or I could post links to cool videos and let YouTube do my job:

Soapy says he already posted this last summer, but I discovered its glory last night.
Also, I had the vegan chicken salad from Madison Market and a multi-grain roll for lunch today.

But frankly, I'm my own most consistent reader, and I bore myself when I write about these things.

Further Adventures in Baby Sitting

2009-03-17T23:42:00.000-07:00

I'm still vainly trying to record something that feels like a "song". This is my latest attempt, although it's taking every bit of courage to share it here. I, like many people, cannot stand the sound of my own recorded voice. This goes doubly for my singing voice. Nevertheless, here's a song. It's about how life is impossible, so at some point you have to give up, fall in love, and make a baby... hoping that the next generation has better luck.

Click on my face! Click on my face!

So, how is this more "like a song" than previous recordings? And why do I care about that?

The most obvious difference between this tune and the others is the presence of vocals. They're even presented in a verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure. And beyond that, there is a modest effort at creating a guitar solo, a genuine outro, some melody, a bridge (although the transitions in the song still seem weak,) and a rhythm track. The bass is very understated, and the outro is gimmicky... but they still contribute to the sense of composition.

Even if I don't want to evolve into some sort of singer-songwriter type, I think it's a valuable exercise to attempt this sort of thing. After all, you're supposed to know the rules before you start breaking them. One thing I noticed in the editing and tinkering phase: I was very resistant to redoing either the vocals or the guitar solo. These were the components that I was the most insecure about going in... and after recording something that felt passable I didn't want to drive myself crazy trying to get it perfect. That may change in the future though... I've already thought I was finished three times so far. A future iteration will probably involve redoing the vocals, smoothing the transitions at 0:30 and 1:20, and redoing the drums.

The Greatest Album Ever Recorded (#1 in a series)

2009-03-12T12:14:00.000-07:00

The Mountain Goats ~ Tallahassee

John Darnielle, who records under the name The Mountain Goats, and who also pens a blog called Last Plane to Jakarta, has been releasing his homebaked music since the early 90s. He might occupy the same zipcode as Bob Dylan: a nasal twang in his voice, but lyrics that rip through anyone that might dare to complain about his timber. And rather than obsessing on Rimbaud, Blind Willie McTell or the cultural revolution of the 60's, John Darnielle writes travelogues for exotic and mundane locations across the globe and describes the heartbreaks we might expect to encounter there.

After a long series of brilliant acoustic recordings, rough and demanding of the listener's attention, Darnielle started incorporating more complicated instrumentation and cleaner studio recording techniques to mixed results. A collaboration with Nothing Painted Blue called Martial Arts Weekend almost sounds like he's playing at being a "real" musician. The songs feel weaker than his solo material. It's nice not to hear the tape hiss from his cassette recorder anymore, but the stark emotionality that Darnielle is known for is missing from these creations. On Tallahassee however, he finds the perfect balance. The anger of his lyrics is paired with the alternately delicate and rampaging acoustic guitar, all of it perfectly propped up with bass and piano.

There are many brilliant Mountain Goats records to choose from, but this lovely 4AD release is the most consistent and engaging of his records. Its higher production values also make it more accessible to the first time listener.

The songs themselves:

1. Tallahassee - A gentle introduction. Eases you into his sensibility. Imagery pours forth as John invites you to explore his particular blend of angst and insight mouldering somewhere in the Florida heat. "Plums on the tree heavy with nectar. Prayers to summon the destroying angel. Moon stuttering in the sky like film stuck in a projector."

2. First Few Desperate Hours - The second song is a return to his trademark urgent guitar strum, but the lyrics swirl and coalesce rather than beat you over the head.

3. Southwood Plantation Road - A bouncy riff is paired with a gimpy electric guitar. "Our conversations are like minefields, no one's found a safe way through one yet."

4. Game Shows Touch our Lives - is absolutely gorgeous... building a lush atmosphere with miniature cymbal ride crescendos. Slow motion collisions of imagery and meditations on loss and failure. "People say friends don't destroy one another... what do they know about friends?"

5. The House that Dripped Blood - Sluggish acoustic and electric guitar pairing. Odd harmonica appearance. Emo-laden emphasis on the line, "The cellar door is an open throat" adds to a general macabre southern gothic feeling.

6. Idylls of the King - John puts the acoustic guitar down and comes up with a lovely delicate tune with just an electric guitar and some keyboard accompaniments. Who else can sing about "the shrieking of innumerable gibbons" and make it sound natural?

7. No Children - Shows off a true strength of the Mountain Goats... playfully urgent tunes with optimistic chords showcasing the most misanthropic lyrics you've ever heard. John giddily rejoices, "I am drowning, there is no sign of land. You are coming down with me... hand in unloveable hand. And I hope you die. I hope we both die."

8. See America Right - Copping a bit of Jonathon Richmond attitude from his Modern Lovers years. Short and in your face... drunken self-loathing... "My love is like a dark cloud full of rain that's always right there up above you."

9. Peacocks - Back to the composition style that makes track 6 so lovely... warm electric guitar nestling with some acoustic strums. Shows off an unexpected gift for melody. Dreamy macerated quality. This is the sort of tune I would compose if I had talent approaching his.

10. International Small Arms Traffic Blues - Another stand out... this all acoustic track was tapped for the soundtrack of the forth season of Weeds. No one ever compared love to "the border between Greece and Albania" so eloquently before. Achingly beautiful.

11. Have to Explode - Quiet and wistful... restraining itself on every level while promising that "something here will have to explode."

12. Old College Try - Gorgeous organ chords give body to another acoustic prayer that again heralds a crisis looming just ahead. "Things will shortly get completely out of hand. I can feel it in the rotten air tonight. In the tips of my fingers, in the skin on my face. In the weak last gasp of the evening's dying light. In the way those eyes I've always loved illuminate this place. Like a trashcan fire in a prison cell. Like the searchlights in the parking lots of hell. I will walk down to the end with you if you will come all the way down with me."

13. Oceanographer's Choice - This pivotal song fails to be as aggressive as I'd like. Here the electric guitar and synth let John down a bit. The violent imagery provides a climax to the promises of destruction laid out in the previous tracks. But instead of allowing his voice to crack and tremble and his old acoustic guitar to convey a raw power (something he did perfectly for so many years) he reins in his vocals and lets the instruments speak. It works well, but lacks some of the visceral quality that I like.

14. Alpha Rats Nest - The finale is another in his Alpha Series... tributes to a dysfunctional marriage. This provides a fitting close to the album... a return to his traditional vocal and guitar arrangement. Bright happy chords masking the bitterness of a man brutally betrayed by the promise of love. "Sing sing sing for the dying of the day. Sing for the flames that will rip through here and the smoke that will carry us away."

Daddy'll Sing Bass

2009-02-23T18:38:00.000-08:00

After putting up with a broken-down piece of crap for years, I've purchased a new used Fender P-Bass... hecho en Mexico. Soapy came over and helped me figure out how to use a tiny hex wrench to adjust the bridge action... and a fatty hex wrench to adjust the neck. I got the action lowered nicely, and put some flat-wound strings on it so that it felt a lot like my old bass. In celebration I recorded a new ditty. I broke the 2 minute barrier on this one but have still managed to completely avoid chord changes, verse-chorus-verse song structure, or anything resembling musical sophistication. Enjoy regardless.

Click this sweet axe for new music.

Mexico Revisited

2009-02-16T19:03:00.000-08:00

My second trip to Mexico was a more relaxing and rejuvenating sort of vacation than the first. My parents' house is complete now, and the guest accommodations are perfect... like private motel rooms in the downstairs part of the house. So I slept better, and also had a place to curl up, pull out my laptop, and check my email. My mom finally has a full kitchen to use, and there's a makeshift studio and theater room upstairs.

We spent a fair amount of time down at the beach, where Danny learned how to surf and I wiped out a few times before giving up. As you can see, crowds aren't exactly a problem around Todos Santos.

Here's a shot of somebody's house... built atop a cliff near the beach. The sun was setting behind their place... creating this silhouette of their humble abode.

February in southern Baja feels like mid-summer in Seattle. There was even fully-bloomed flora to prove it.

During a day trip to La Paz, I took some snaps of people and graffiti. This is the only shot worth a damn though.

That's it for my photographs from Mexico.

Top Ten Films of 2008

2009-02-04T12:23:00.000-08:00

The annual movie rankings are due... perhaps past due. So here you go: Stave It Off's guaranteed winners, the slamdunk ten best films released in 2008 (presented in dramatic countdown-style format.)

10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
I can't say too much about this movie without giving away spoilers. Oh what the heck, it appears that Brad Pitt actually ages backwards! So when he's a child he looks like an old man, and when he's an old man he looks like a child. How crazy is that?! When he meets his lover "in the middle" they are both sexy as hell 40 year olds... but you can't help but think there's a tragic doom impending as he turns into a young boy and she turns into a vamping cougar. I can't comment more than that though because I haven't actually seen the movie.

9. Gran Torino
By most accounts this is a tour de force. Clint Eastwood continues to pummel us all senseless with his gritty performances and redeem himself for making countless crappy movies during the 80's. In one trailer, Clint Eastwood actually snarls, "Get out of my yard, you damn kids" while shaking a .44 magnum most crankily. Well, I got out of Clint Eastwood's yard a long time ago, so I passed on this instant classic. Hope the rest of you enjoyed it though... and I'm absolutely positive it warrants its slot on the top ten list.

8. Taken
How much ass does Liam Neeson kick? Well I guess we'd actually have to watch the movie to find out! But I can tell you for certain that the trailer looks absolutely kick ass. Liam is all mean and serious and you can tell that the men who abducted his child are in for a brutal beat down. He looks like he's got Matt Damon (Jason Bourne) meets Daniel Craig (James Bond) written all over him.

7. Revolutionary Road
This film reminds me so much of all those Neil Simon plays... where there's always a bar in the living room... and most of the characters are downing four fingers of whiskey in every scene. Back in my acting days, I was all about those scenes. That apple juice tasted good. And we couldn't really afford apple juice at home, so it was a real treat. My guess is that Kate Winslet and "old man" DiCaprio probably muffed a few scenes on purpose, just so they could get another glass of "whiskey". My educated guess is that this film is totally worth seeing. I'm hoping to get to it myself.

6. Rachel Getting Married
Indie dramas always rock. Especially ones about getting hitched. Remember how good Margot at the Wedding was?! Well, this one got an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I'm pretty sure it was good. And, quite frankly, it's important to sneak a few "small" movies into your top ten list so you don't come off as too Hollywood! I wouldn't want to lose my credibility as an ace movie-reviewer guy!

5. Vicki Christina Barcelona
Woody Allen is still alive, and still working through his sexual neuroses. This is a sure bet formula for a great movie. And now that he's quit casting himself as the male lead, you no longer get that creepy feeling as a scrawny old man gets it on with hot young stars. And the cast doesn't get much hotter than this! My sources tell me that there's even a hot threesome featuring Stave It Off 20 Sexiest Men poster boy Javier Bardem. And who are the buns for this man-mean sandwich? None other than Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johanssen! Va-va-va-voom!!!

4. Waltz with Bashir
Some of you are probably thinking that this is just a rip off of Persepolis... another animated middle-eastern autobiography. But I say, anything a woman can do, a man can do better! What's wrong with a little healthy competition anyway? If Munich taught me anything, it's that Steven Spielberg is the greatest film maker in history... and that it takes a man's perspective (someone that's really been there) to understand why war is bad. It was obvious while watching Munich that Spielberg and screen writer Tony Kushner knew a thing or two about war first hand. I'm betting this film wins the best foreign film Oscar and might even help create peace in the middle east.

3. Doubt
This is probably one of those did-he-or-didn't-he kinds of movies. Lots of shots of the mega-talented Phillip Seymour Hoffman looking either pious or guilty... it's hard to tell (because he's THAT good!) Now I'm categorically against the raping of altar boys, and I'm guessing this film probes that sensitive material... I'm not sure though since I haven't seen it yet. But if this film can get me to "doubt" my stance on Catholic priest sexual abuse, then it must be one hell of a picture. Let it never be said that Stave It Off doesn't seek out challenging films!

2. The Wrestler
I didn't need to see this film to know it deserved the #2 slot. The trailer ALONE made me cry. There's that scene when Mickey Rourke is all, "I'm just a broken old piece of meat, and I don't deserve your love... I just don't want you to hate me" and then tears roll down his face! OMG, that is acting gentlemen! (Too bad the academy won't recognize him with a deserved best actor Oscar.) And with that Bruce Springsteen song in the background... I was bawling halfway into the credits of the film I had gone to see.

1. Synecdoche, NY
Let me start off with a modest confession. I haven't actually seen this film either. However, let me follow it up with an even more modest confession. Writer/Director Charlie Kauffman is WAY smarter than me. He's maybe one of the smartest people alive. I don't really get what he's doing 78% of the time. That's how smart he is. So I can tell you unequivocally that this is the best film of 2008, never even having seen a trailer for it. Because if I saw it and didn't like it, I would know that the reason is that I'm just not smart enough to understand it. And neither are you (haha) so go see it right now folks!

Lastly, I want to put out an honorable mention to Let the Right One In. I couldn't actually include it in the top ten list because I haven't seen it yet... but my friend Dan says it's dynamite.

There you go loyal readers. I may not have seen a lot of movies this year, but that never stopped me from sharing my opinions on them anyway! Stave If Off wishes you a happy 2009 and hopes that we'll keep getting this kind of quality entertainment out of Hollywood for another year.

Talentless Hack Though I Am

2009-01-28T18:23:00.000-08:00

It's fun to pull out my guitar and try to record something. Once again I can only manage a 45 second evocation... a fragment of emotion... rather than a whole song. Regardless, I put it out there for you to hear if only to confirm that I did something creative this week.

Click Me

Sun Dreams

2009-01-27T09:46:00.000-08:00

Walked to work today in the snow. After a week of bitter sub-freezing cold, we finally got a bit of precipitation to turn everything white. This is easily the coldest winter I can remember.

Which is why it feels so good to know that I've booked my tickets to Mexico. In just over a week I'll be flying down to Los Cabos with my nephew. I've never been one to soak in the sun or try to get a tan... but nothing sounds better right now than slathering myself up with coconut oil and roasting myself to a nice brown.

Until then... I have this:

M Ward Moment

2009-01-21T18:23:00.001-08:00

Fear of a Successful Black Man

2009-01-03T11:01:00.000-08:00

George Will's latest article may make you dizzy, so I've tried to distill his point for the loyal Stave It Off readers. He claims that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. By way of example, he depicts a civil rights issue.

Forty years ago, in an attempt to prevent racist discrimination in the workplace, the Supreme Court made it very difficult on employers to use aptitude tests during hiring and promotion processes. After all, many of these standardized tests had been shown to have cultural biases. The result (according to Will) was that employers could no longer directly gauge your intelligence, and had to use college degrees as evidence instead. This wound up being even more discriminatory, since the college system had built-in cultural and economic barriers for African Americans. I guess millions of smart young blacks were being told "Sorry, we'd love to hire you, but you've got to go get a degree first!" Will seals his point with an alarming statistic... between 1970 and 2005 the total college attendance nearly tripled in America! This is somehow a bad thing.

Will then concludes his essay with a poorly executed paragraph pointing the bony finger of doom at the incoming Obama administration. Using this half-assed example from the 70's (which really just shows that affirmative action is still needed in both work and education sectors) Will suggests that Obama's reform plans will have the same sort of disastrous outcomes. When are we going to learn NOT to have good intentions!? Apparently "wealth redistribution" just causes greater hardship on the poor, environmental regulation causes a hastening of global warming, and supporting labor unions causes greater abuse of the working class.

Be wary progressives, lest someone forty years from now cherry pick some data and sort of prove that you weren't quite as successful as you tried to be. But George Will is not a stupid man, nor does he live in Bizarro World. So what is really going on? Why is he casting such meager aspersions? And why did he choose to use the example of intelligent blacks being discriminated against to demonstrate his point about unintended consequences?

Well, first of all, George Will is an unapologetic racist. In his book Men at Work - The Craft of Baseball he chose Cal Ripken as his exemplar of defensive skill. In an era where Ozzie Smith (a black man) was destroying Ripken in every defensive metric imaginable, there is no excuse for this. And what token black did he choose for his book? Tony Gwynn. Tony freakin' Gwynn... with his squeaky little voice and his astonishing lack of power... he was the Urkel of baseball.

It seems quite obvious to me what Will's underlying message is here. If Barack Obama could have gotten a high-paying job without having to go to college, we'd all be a lot better off right now. We wouldn't have uppity Negroes with college degrees trying to bust down the doors of power in Washington. That could be reserved for white men of privilege... like it had been for the 43 previous administrations.

What we're really talking about here is the fear of a fully-realized black man. The old rules were: If you're going to be sexy, be dumb. If you're going to be smart, be effeminate. We didn't want to see black role models that were both sexy and smart. And frankly, that's a fear that we all need to face. God knows I can't watch too many Will Smith movies without starting to feel woefully inadequate myself. But now there's a new bench mark. Barack Obama has raised the stakes. Just take a look at the checklist George Will:

He's better at sports than you are. Okay, lots of black men are better at sports than you are... but usually that's okay because you're better at other things. It's important to note that he still has skillz though. This is no Carlton Banks we're talking about here.

He's smarter than you are. He hangs out with a higher class of college professors, has published better books than you and probably finishes the Saturday NYT crossword puzzle every week. He was even the first guy to pronounce Pakistan correctly.

His smile is brighter than yours. Good lord that's a winning grin. I mean, how do you compete with that. You're certainly not going to win with that grimace.

He seems to genuinely love his wife and children. Compare that to the usual slew of mistresses, divorces and catty Clintonesque power games usually going on in Washington. And compare his class act children to the typical parade of troglodytes farting all over their 4-8 years of spotlight. This guy even has family values locked down.

He did better drugs than you when he was a kid. Sure, you and Clinton may have tried some "grass" that your roommates were smoking, but Obama was trippin' balls on LSD and tootin' coke off of Studio 54 bathroom mirrors. He didn't squander his youth attending William F. Buckley summer camps.

He's lived and traveled all over the world. Kinda leaves that whole, "I spent a summer studying in England" thing in the dust.

And now there's this. This. THIS. THIS is what's haunting your dreams George Will. This is what white male America wasn't expecting and is still staggered by. You knew he was smart. You knew he had Chicagoan bad-boy charm. You knew he was poised. But you were not prepared for the glistening abs and pecs of our new president elect. You weren't prepared for the photoshoot of the century as Obama frolicked in the Hawaiian surf. It has rocked you to your soul, and you pray each night that Mrs. Will isn't having fantasies of Barack in her dreams.

Well, deal with it instead of writing crooked finger posts on your blog.

Who Needs MTV

2009-01-01T13:30:00.000-08:00

It's not like you can see great independent music videos on MTV anyway. Here's to the YouTube, making life easy for a blogger since it's inception. Start off 2009 with these brilliant Iron and Wine videos. First "Naked as they Come" where a single shot reveals two completely different picnic tables. It's nice when simplicity isn't quite as simple as you first imagine.

And secondly, "Boy with a Coin" featuring some of those flamenco arms that John Singer Sargent loved so much. And if you aren't watching carefully (given the bad resolution) you might miss the magic dress worn by this troupe's teacher.

More Comcast Bombast

2008-12-22T14:12:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago, I had a Comcast technician come out and investigate my highspeed internet. My service had gotten really choppy... lots of lost connections and bad connection speed. The tech said that Comcast was working on new lines and that the old modems "couldn't sync up with the new preferred frequency." This sounded bogus to me. Previous experience told me that the culprit was probably a bad feed coming through my building's cable box. But he was pretty insistent that I needed a new modem... so my old box went goodbye, and now I have a new RCA modem that sits flat instead of upright and has a slightly different configuration of solid and flashing green lights.

The tech gave me his cell number and told me to call him if anything else went wrong. After a week, I tossed the paperwork because this new set up was running like a top. All was right with the world. Until yesterday afternoon.

The four happy flashing lights suddenly became two. And they somehow looked glum and listless instead. No email. No web browsing. No internet piracy.

But I'm no reactionary about this kind of stuff. I started with the basics. I unplugged and reset the modem. But it came back up with just two whimpering beady little lights. I rebooted my PC. I waited. I wondered if the snow and ice was interfering with the cable. I made sure my television signal was still okay. Eventually, I concluded that this great new frequency-syncing modem was a lemon. Sure it looked great out of the box... with blazing speeds and a funky new design. But less than a week later it had obviously fried.

So today I made the call to Comcast. The automated system sent a reboot signal to my modem. After waiting 30 seconds for that to prove fruitless, I connected to a live person. I explained the situation. I told him about the problem with the building's wiring a couple years ago. I explained the recent tech visit and the new modem. I patiently explained to him that I wasn't an idiot and knew how to reboot things... and that while rebooting may fix 90% of the customer complaints, it wasn't going to fix mine. I asked him to run a proximity health check to determine if my neighbors were having any problems. He agreed to this troubleshooting step. After a minute, he said they were fine. He asked me which of the flickering green lights were on. He then ran a remote health check, and told me that there was nothing wrong with my modem. I paused and said, "... ok..." and waited for him to tell me what his genius solution was.

He then asked me to push the button on the front of my new modem that says ON/OFF.

Comcast 1, Idiot Home user 0

BTW, this is really funny:

Auction Inaction

2008-12-15T12:09:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I attended an auction for fifteen condos at a schwanky building on Capitol Hill. Three years after opening, this place hadn't sold all of its units yet. They were probably getting a little desperate in this economy and decided to let the market decide what these homes were worth.

Originally priced in the low to mid 400's, they were accepting opening bids in the low 200's. The rock bottom starting prices drew in the crowds. There were probably 200 people at the Grand Hyatt, waiting for the auctioneer to kick things off. Although I knew it was unlikely that any would go in my price range, I attended anyway. I was hoping for an educational, if not a participatory experience. And that's exactly what I got.

All the units quickly vaulted past my cap. They sold for around halfway between the original cost and the minimum bid (around the mid 300's.) There were quite a few obvious speculators in the room (they had different-colored bidding plaques that allowed them to bid on multiple units)... and I couldn't help despising them. Even though I was out of the bidding pretty early on every unit... there were a lot of young families obviously looking for a home and bidding nervously. They were all outbid by the big money... at least when it came to the nicer units. These buyers had an easy time of it... they could see exactly what the market was willing to pay (in the form of these young families) and then just eclipse that amount. This is a safe strategy if you are banking on the economy rebounding and the housing market coming back up in the next few years. I didn't really see two of these speculators squaring off on a property and bidding the price up beyond what an actual homeowner would pay. That aspect of the auction felt a bit like collusion to me.

Anyway, as my search for a property to invest in continues, I feel a bit disheartened. I'm now quite convinced that I won't find anything close to the size and quality of my current apartment in my price range. I'm not sure whether I should move to a different part of the state, accept a much smaller place, wait and hope that the market keeps crashing, or embrace that my apartment is a sweetheart deal in a great neighborhood and look to bury my savings into soybean futures.

Comic Book Philosophy Part 3

2008-11-30T00:45:00.000-08:00

One of the great favors Hollywood gifted to us comic book fans was letting Christopher Nolan helm the Batman franchise for the last few years. Prior to Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, Nolan made a career out of examining the dark side of obsession and giving brilliant breath to madness. Whether it's Hugh Jackman vs. Christian Bale in The Prestige or Guy Pearce vs. his amnesia in Memento, Nolan shines brightest when he's making us uncomfortable.

In the second installment of his Batman run, The Dark Knight, he does something very subtle and very powerful in its macabre implications.

The first film enacted one of our common myths: that of a champion rising up to battle evil in the world. This is Joseph Campbell 101... "hero journey" stuff. But The Dark Knight depicts a kind of "equal but opposite reaction". This time the universe conjures up an avatar of chaos (in the form of Heath Ledger's Joker) to combat Bruce Wayne’s attempt to impose order and civility on society. This is a much more disturbing story, one that challenges our faith that anything good can come of heroism. If the very existence of Batman necessitates a Joker... what has Gotham really gained?

Michael Cain, as Alfred the Butler, gives us a chilling distillation of this dilemma. He relates a story of what happened in southeast Asia years ago when his secret ops squad tried to capture a rogue warlord. Alfred explains that this warlord had no intelligible purpose; he was someone who “just wanted to see the world burn.” So how did they finally capture him? They burned down the whole jungle.

At work, I know a man embroiled in a difficult marriage. He sees himself as a provider of reason. He feels he can “out-logistic” the chaos and dysfunction of his wife. As he described their relationship, I saw them as two figures balanced on a teeter-totter… slowly bobbing up and down but more or less balanced on a fulcrum. But they are both reactionary by nature, and every step he takes back to keep her weight in check results in her moving further from the center as well... becoming more and more bizarre in her reactions. At this point they have moved so far apart that they can barely see each other anymore. Any sense of intimacy has long dissolved. He said tearfully that he cannot even remember how it felt when they could still see and appreciate each other. But he also cannot imagine life without this person... after all, his whole identity is wrapped up in countering her energy.

Like Nolan's Batman and Joker, they "complete each other". And this is a dangerous thought, especially for those of us who believe that we are capable of acting with some sense of heroism. Are we not just provoking the universe? And might the consequences of this provocation result in the burning of our entire jungle?

Post Election Ruminations

2008-11-10T09:58:00.000-08:00

I think Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire owes Obama her job.

I heard on one report that McCain got the same basic number of votes that Bush did... it just wasn't enough this time. With record numbers of voters showing up at the polls, inspired to vote for Obama, lots of other progressive candidates and agendas did well on election day. Color me a pessimist, but I thought Gregoire's opponent Dino Rossi was a lock. And I didn't think the death with dignity bill had much of a chance. Both did very well on election night, and I think (with the sad exception of the California gay marriage ban) progressive leadership ruled the day across the country. It's amazing what an inspiring presidential candidate can do for your whole party and platform.

Fear is the mind-killer.

I maintain that we attacked Iraq out of fear... not fear of Saddam Hussein's military... or his mischaracterization as a "wacko Muslim with nukes." Not out of fear of terrorist cells or weapons of mass destruction. The fear that lead us to attack Iraq wasn't even directed at the country we decimated. Our fear was of "foreign dependence"... a catchphrase that rang through the speeches of both presidential candidates this fall.

The neocon plan was to control oil reserves on a par with Saudi Arabia (and carving them up amongst various private oil companies is still "controlling" them.) The desire to eliminate America's international energy dependence is symptomatic of a basic American fear: having to negotiate interdependency. Instead, we seek Empire.

"Empire-building" is a drive to dominate and control everything you need until there are no more external threats in the world. It seems to me to be a very male instinct to eliminate any sense of vulnerability. One example is our established "slavery culture" with Hispanic migrant labor. Our agribusiness depends on their sub-minimum wage, non-unionized, no benefits labor. But rather than honor a symbiotic relationship, we demand all the power. Complain and you can be deported. No OSHA, no payroll taxes, no worries about skyrocketing health care costs. We need them, so we better make sure to keep them under our heel.

Because OPEC and the House of Saud actually have some power over their natural resources, and aren't under our heel, we hate them. We refuse to accept interdependent relationships. They need us (we're their best customer) as much as we need them... but we can't abide such relationships.

Actually, America under the neocons wasn't able to sustain any healthy international relations at all. We were like an abusive husband who controlled and manipulated (at best) and raped (at worst) the other states of the world.

If a person behaved in this fashion, you would have to conclude that they were sociopathic and solipsistic... a serious danger to other people. Under our laws, that would mean incarceration and isolation. Unless America was a black man arrested in Texas... then he'd probably be executed.

RIP Tuba Man

2008-11-04T13:40:00.000-08:00

A Seattle icon has died, and the details are grisly.

Tuba Man is inextricably linked to my very first memories of going to Mariners games back in the mid to late 80’s. The team was terrible but I didn't care. Stealing one out of three when the fearsome Oakland A's came to town was all I really wanted.

I always brought my mitt (with the crossed out "Jose Canseco" signature where I wrote in "Lyman Bostock" instead) even though we were sitting up in the 300 level. By the second inning, it was easy to sneak down to one of the prime seats along the first baseline. I came across the ferry from Bainbridge Island and walked down through Pioneer Square to the stadium. My friends and I laughing and feeling the thrill of the "big city" the whole time.

Tuba Man was a fixture of the carnival atmosphere outside any Seattle sporting event. I can’t remember a game when I didn't hear him from at least a block away from the stadium. I remember Mark James and I asking him if he would play Stairway to Heaven. He had this baritone chortle of a response… "How does it go?" It was the only time I ever actually talked to him.

He seemed like one of those eccentric and committed fans who you can’t help but love. It seems grossly unfair for him to leave this world in such a way. He was mugged and beaten by teenagers, and died in the hospital shortly thereafter.

I wish that those kids could attend the funeral… and that there would be thousands of people there... and eulogies by long-time public servants like Ron Sims or Seattle historians like Greg Palmer who might explain the value that such people bring to our city… so that their eyes might be widened.

City of Ember

2008-10-22T16:05:00.000-07:00

Viewing City of Ember took me back to memories of Siskel and Ebert arguing about children's films. Siskel inevitably panned the kiddie flicks for lacking depth, acting and plausibility. Ebert would accuse him of being a curmudgeon and then cite the film's various charms... usually imagination and a healthy sense of adventure. And here I sit, of two minds... Siskel and Ebert sitting on my respective shoulders like a fat gray angel and sadly deceased devil.

The film itself is set in a post nuclear holocaust world where the last of humanity lives in an underground city, waiting for the day when they can return to the surface. But somewhere along the way, everyone forgot about returning and are content to lead fearful and obedient lives in a grim subterranean 19th century London. Two young heroes shake off the city's collective torpor and make a predictably challenging yet successful dash for freedom.

Ebert, still reviewing films for the Chicago Sun-Times, actually illuminates most of the plot holes in his own lukewarm 2.5 star review. The most egregious gaffs (to me at least) were casting a 24 year old Harry Treadaway to portray a young adolescent, the use of a utilitool as a deus ex machina device, and the entirely unbelievable roller coaster ride toward the end. But Ebert the angel reminds me that roller coaster rides through a dark underground river delight the imagination... and creating a deeply immersive and imaginative setting is the film's primary strength. Then Siskel the devil whispers back, "Too bad the characters lack any compelling or imaginative dialogue."

At a deeper level though, Siskel and Ebert would probably agree on the film's transparent politics. The film's underlying symbolism is troubling for a politically left-leaning viewer like myself. As the primary villain, Bill Murray plays a gluttonous simpleton. His role as the obese mayor of the City of Ember, along with his two henchmen (one effete and the other club-footed,) create a clear portrayal of the enemy. They are fat, lazy, corrupt, and deformed. The heroes are young, attractive, strong and equally quick of foot and mind. This already calls to mind the sort of bigotry that permeated the film 300. And most telling, the two heroes are depicted as unnaturally industrious, eager to work hard, putting them in stark contrast to everyone else in the movie. Their challenge is to overcome the stagnation of their society and recapture humanity's potential. As such, they are Ayn Rand repackaged for the middle school set. Every social institution is portrayed as ineffective at best, and criminally corrupt at worst. Religion even takes it on the nose, portrayed as a bunch of singing enthusiasts with their heads in the sand.

It's a dangerously naive view of society (even in a microcosm) to depict it as a grossly inept set of systems in desperate need of a savior. It sets up an antisocial set of beliefs about being above the law, entitled to whatever freedoms you desire, and that rebellion is the only answer. But of course, stories marketed toward youth are unlikely to trumpet wisdom or temperance as worthwhile virtues. If the true test of a film like this is whether or not you'd take your kids to go see it... be forewarned that it's a libertarian manifesto posing as fantasy.

Comic Book Philosophy Part 2

2008-10-17T16:19:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview I was asked why I wanted to work in the public defense system. How could I dovetail my concept of social justice with a job description that included digging up loopholes and lame defenses for pimps, crooks and wifebeaters? This is a massively difficult question. This is an interview-making or breaking question. It's a question I stumbled on mightily because I found it impossible to give my real answer. I couldn't do it because I couldn't bring myself to talk about Daredevil in a job interview.

Instead of giving my real answer I mumbled a bit about creating a boundary between your work and your life and not investing all of your social work self-image into your job. I maintained that I'd be okay with the work load because I also volunteer, fundraise for international non-profits, and try to be a caring person in a whole range of domains. Really, it wasn't a terrible answer... but my eyes would have lit up and I would have spoken with passion and truth if I had been willing to talk about Matthew Murdock.

I grew up reading comic books. And like many of my generation, fed my moral development a steady diet of X-Men, Spider-Man, The Punisher, Captain America, Iron Man and The Avengers. I didn't always agree with the protagonist's position, but Marvel had a penchant for injecting their stories with sophomoric moral quandaries that stimulated the adolescent mind. The most fascinating of which to me was ol' hornhead... a blind defense attorney named Matthew by day, and a costumed vigilante known as Daredevil, the Man Without Fear by night.

A bad sketch I once did of Daredevil and his arch nemesis Bullseye

Why such a fascination?

Daredevil always had morally complex relationships with his villains. One of his villains, a buffalo-sized man named Melvin Potter (who was also known as The Gladiator) was also shown as a gentle man who was a victim of his own mental illness. And while DD might beat him up on page four, he'd be defending him in court by page 15. One of DD's main villains, The Kingpin, was often shown in a sympathetic light... especially when the book described how brutal and chaotic organized crime would look without a strong central boss. Stoolies and low-level thugs (like the recurring character Turk Barrett) were shown as pathetic victims of their environment... people who just never really had enough smarts to think themselves off the streets. And of course, there was Bullseye, the centerpiece villain of the Daredevil series. Bullseye upped the ante. He wasn't a villain that blustered and threatened and had their plans foiled at the last minute. He actually killed people. He killed main characters. He raised the stakes of the moral conundrums. How could Daredevil see the humanity in a cold-blooded killer? Could he save the life of a scumbag like that?

In posing and answering these questions, Daredevil gave me an interesting definition of heroism. I developed a sense that heroism wasn't always about jumping into the way of danger, it wasn't just using your powers to defend the little guy from a bully. Daredevil posited a kind of heroism that challenged us to do the hardest things... to think deeper and show compassion in the face of your enemy. It suggested that heroism could also be protecting the worst of us from our own desire to punish and purge such villainy from society.

I think one of the most noble things about western civilization is the commitment to public defense. It is surely imperfect, and there are not enough genuine attempts within the penal system to actually help people get better. But to look into the faces of some of the most vile flaunters of the social contract and think, "This is still a person" is what protects us from the devolution of mob rule and the court of public opinion. I believe in it. And it's too bad that interview didn't go better, because I would have done a damn fine job... even when it made my stomach turn, because of the example Daredevil laid out for me.

The Importance of Games: Avunculitis

2008-09-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

My nephew Danny, practically becoming an old man himself these days, was on my mind last week. I was reminiscing about those halcyon days when I lived in Kingston and took my job as an uncle quite seriously.

Dan was a kid possessed with remarkable dexterity. Skateboarding, snowboarding and showboating came naturally to him. As a teen, he could add an acrobatic flair to any mundane activity. Within a week of acquiring a trampoline, he was already bouncing twelve feet in the air and doing double back flips. He was also an aspiring drummer who would pound out a beat on anything nearby: the wall, his pocket full of loose change, the plate you were trying to eat dinner off... anything. He was equal parts maddening and adorable.

I taught him to play hackeysack. It was his kind of game: a test of grace and skillfulness... and not competitive (he shied away from team sports.) He closed the skill gap from my ten-year head start within a few weeks. And within months, he was executing all kinds of tricks I could never get the hang of. But we continued to play regularly anyway. It was fun. It was exercise. It was an excuse to play outside and talk to each other.

Then he made up a game and taught it to me. He dubbed it "bonus mode"... a name swiped from a common component of Nintendo video games. It was similar in concept to hackeysack. It featured the same dynamic of cooperative showmanship and gravity-defying challenge. But in bonus mode, hands were used instead of feet. Instead of deftly bouncing a bean-stuffed sack into the air with your knees and feet, the players try to keep a ball aloft while passing it back and forth with their hands. The challenge came from the game's only real rule: you were never allowed to directly oppose the momentum of the ball. Even the goal of not letting the ball touch the ground stemmed from this rule... after all, if the ball hit the ground, it's momentum would bounce violently back in the other direction. Everything had to be circular. To reroute the ball back to your teammate, you had to employ Tai Chi style swirling motions. Spinning and slinging patterns of movement became our signature moves. It was a silent dance. After all, sound was usually the result of impact... and this game was designed to eliminate any sense of impact. All our efforts went into making these complex circular redirections of energy look effortless.

At the same time, Dan was a master at introducing new techniques... scooping the ball between his legs or behind his back... popping it up into the air and catching it again on the way down, then funneling that momentum into a lob back in my direction. He created illusions by pretending that the density of the ball was so great that it spun him around or dropped him to the ground before he could slingshot it back around to me.

This was the perfect forum for him to shine... and I feel greatly blessed that we were able to share these moments. There were a lot of chips stacked against him as he grew up... but the time we spent playing these games was pure happiness. It was one of the only venues where he got to make the rules, and success was predicated on things he was actually quite good at.

Plus, I think bonus mode was a pretty cool game. I miss playing it.

Comic Book Philosophy Part One

2008-09-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

Magneto

was right

I saw these words spray painted on the sidewalk in front of my house. Obvious stencil job... the paint was magenta.

I found myself liking this graffiti tag... and thinking about it more than I normally would. Who was this tagger... Why did he or she agree with Magneto so passionately? In trying to figure out why it was on my mind, I realized what a pithy little statement this is. There's a lot of philosophy packed into those three words.

Magneto, for those who don't know, is the primary villain of the X-Men comic book franchise. A former Holocaust survivor, he learned first hand humanity's capacity to brutally persecute anyone "different." Magneto is pitted against Professor Charles Xavier, the hero. They are two opposing leaders within the same community, each with their own nuanced ideologies.

In the fictional X-Men world, there are thousands of people who experience profound genetic mutations (like sudden leaps forward in the evolutionary process.) Their mutations often give them super powers. They might also look freakish, and they may accidentally hurt people as their mutations manifest (usually in puberty.) They represent a community of people in serious danger. The rest of humanity is very suspicious and wary of these powerful young "mutants". The comic books often depict youngsters chased by angry mobs, as well as Washington politicians advocating internment camps.

While Professor Xavier starts a school, helps young mutants accept themselves and preaches peace... Magneto takes the other side. He sees another Holocaust in the making. He is the Malcolm X to Xavier's Martin Luther King. Both leaders recruit from the same pool of confused and hurt adolescents. At Xavier's school, students are lovingly taught to harness their mutant powers, and are supported through a process of developing self-esteem and groundedness. Xavier's approach is all about acceptance and patience. Magneto believes this only encourages a sheep-like acquiescence to increasing racism and hostility towards "his people". He encourages strength, rebellion and violent self-protection. His flock is not a school, but an army. He might be compared to those Jews who, after WWII, sought an Israeli homeland and were willing to become militant defenders of that homeland. The books also call to mind various civil rights era issues... occasionally comparing Magneto to those American blacks who would "go back to Africa," to those who sought to infiltrate the power system, and to those who would overthrow the power system in violent ways.

Magneto clearly represents a philosophy that power is currently held by people that do not understand those among us who are different. This lack of understanding will inevitably lead to attempts at oppression... in both spontaneous and in systemic forms. This power, and these encroachments upon the freedom and liberty of the "different" class, must be violently resisted.

In the comics, "difference" is represented by mutantkind, but the parallels to Jews, African Americans or other persecuted minorities is apparent. Given the popularity of the series, I believe that Marvel's white adolescent male readership has expanded the definition to allow self-defined freaks and geeks into the fold. Otherwise they would not identify with the product.

So I imagine this skateboard tagger kid... committing his act of civil disobedience late at night with a can of magenta spray paint... feeling so strongly bonded with the persecuted. This kid, still young... still creative... is already so hurt, or so cynical, that he's giving the finger to all the wannabe Professor X types in the world. He's saying, "No Mr. Social Worker... No Mr. Community Organizer... No Mr. English Teacher... I won't be co-opted. I won't be healed. To be accepted by you people would cost me too much. I'll maintain my minority status. I'll maintain my identity... and my people will run the underground. I'll have a home there... and if you mess with us, you'll regret it." And when I realize the power of that conviction I feel saddened at how hurtful this world can be to people.

But he's not just giving all of us peace advocates the finger; He's also pointing out how lazy and corrupt we've become... how accepting of "lesser-evilism" we've become... how much we've lost our spine. To say that "magneto was right" is to say that I'm proud of who I am and what I stand for... and I won't suffer indignities to those truths. He is our radical communist friend that chides us for supporting an insider like Obama. He is our inner vegan that knows that even organic milk promotes suffering and environmental damage. He's the neighbor that bicycles to work everyday and smiles smugly about it. He pushes us to stand up... he pushes us to accept our extreme beliefs rather than hiding them... which is an essential part of how one becomes more "heroic".

And that is why I smile everyday when I walk home past the little red letters on my sidewalk.

15 Minutes

2008-08-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

A couple of Fridays ago, my showbiz friend Tiger called me up and asked me to be an extra in a genuwine Hollywood movie. I flashed on the idea that this was my big chance to be "discovered". I ditched work and went home to put on my sexiest short shorts and dazzlingly white hoop shoes. Apparently they needed basketball-playing extras. They were probably expecting some soft and lazy "actor" types to show up... not a hardened cager like myself! I was going to shine out there baby. I geared up with my knee braces and ankle braces and mouth guard. I was going to Rainn Wilson this mofo.

We hustled to get there by the 12 o'clock call time. This enabled us to sit in a room eating leftover crew food for the next three hours waiting for something to happen. I let them photocopy my passport and driver's license so that someday I may or may not get a $75 check in the mail. The room was full of wannabe actors... Guys that sat around swapping stories of being extras in all sorts of important movies. They shared their strongly held opinions that such and such a director was a jerk, or that so and so actress was really nice. I held my basketball (I brought my own) in my hands and visualized soaring in for a rebound and rifling an outlet pass to start a fast break or swishing a three pointer.

Three hours later, bloated with egg & mushroom empanadas, lemon-cream cookies and peanut butter cracker packs, we were lined up and judged. The wardrobe lady (she of the boss tattoo sleeve) came in and immediately looked right at me. She said to her assistant, "He's tall. That'll help." The assistant pointed at me and said, "You!" I tried to stride with the right combination of swagger and nonchalance to the other side of the room. First pick baby! I was in like Flynn and now the rest of these misfit munchkins and morbidly obese losers had to sweat the draft.

For the first scene they just picked five of us. We met with the stunt coordinator whose first words were, "Don't touch the actor unless you're directed to." He also discouraged talking to him or making direct eye contact. This could have made playing basketball difficult for a lesser extra than myself!

Stuntman Spiff then explained the choreography. The star was going to brick a free throw. We needed to be lined up in rebounding position. He put me down on the post. I just needed to mime a basic block out, then jump in and clear the rebound. Then pass it to Spiff (a jumpy little Italian guy that seemed to want to prove he was a physical specimen to be taken seriously) and we'd run up the floor and out of the camera's view. As simple as this was, we had to do a half dozen takes... mostly because the actor couldn't nail his blocking during the end of the scene. Oddly enough, he actually had some pretty good b-ball skills. On the first take, I had my gut properly sucked in, my eyes locked on the ball, my blockout form was superb, and I soared in for the dominant Barkley-style board with the signature ball slap. I made a crisp chest pass to Spiff and we pealed out of backcourt like people who actually knew how to play basketball. By the sixth take, I probably had my hands on my hips, beer belly hanging out. I think I bobbled the rebound slightly before limp-wristing it over to Spiff and jogging up the court. I'm a little scared to see how this winds up looking (assuming we don't wind up on the cutting-room floor.)

After a half-hour break, we set up the next scene... a far more complicated affair. This was to be the game-winning basket (scored by our Hollywood talent natch.) But the scene needed to be drawn out to take about ten seconds (an eternity!) so that a voiceover could complete while the final play developed. Spiff brought in four more extras, so that we could set up the more natural-looking four against five game that most people play. Also, three of the extras were frickin' huge. These guys took up half the key, making maneuvering almost impossible. Then he set up the teams, deciding that he needed to be the one playing defense against our star... because short little guys often guard the opposing team's legitimate 6'3" guy. He also had me switch teams (another common tactic during basketball games) so that I could be on offense, backing down my guy on the post, then kicking it out to the open wing after the double team comes. Then I had to circle back up to the top of the key, stall with a couple more passes back and forth, and then find our star down beneath the basket, towering over his defender. His job was to catch my entry pass, pivot toward the middle and finish with a layup. He botched that about five times though, so we had to do it over and over again.

Between takes, one of the extras was actually showing the star pictures of his hospitalized mother on his cell phone. Others were feigning interest in where he studied, or whether he preferred TV or film work. I seriously thought one of them was going to invite him to a party later that night.

The director, Mr. Bobcat Goldthwait, came out and said, "That's some nice basketball you guys." That part was awesome. But it would have been doubly awesome if he had done it in his famous Bobcat voice. Instead he was just like some old dude in a straw cowboy hat.

The film, World's Greatest Dad, is legitimate enough to star Robin Williams (he wasn't at the set that day though) and have its very own IMDB entry. Not sure why IMDB doesn't list me among the cast yet though. That must be coming soon, for I have surely been discovered now and the offers will come pouring in.

Electronica and Anime

2008-08-11T23:16:00.000-07:00

The entire second half of this song makes me giddy with happiness. Check out this clip from Daftpunk's weird film, Interstella 5555, even if you don't like electronica or anime.

The Importance of Games Part Four

2008-08-06T15:34:00.000-07:00

In the wake of Gary Gygax's death last year, my friend Walaka suggested a friendly game of Dungeons and Dragons. He had missed out on the role-playing experience growing up and the death of D&D's famous founder was a good reason to finally give it a try. I still had an old box of outdated books, a set of translucent red multi-sided dice and a crapload of miniature lead figurines. And tucked away in an old peechee, I found a grand and glorious campaign I wrote in my twenties but never played. To those unfamiliar with the parlance, a "campaign" is a series of adventures that all string together and connect to a single story arc. The adventures are all set in the same land and feature the same characters. So armed, I told Walaka, "Game on!"

Approaching the game of Dungeons and Dragons as a 34 year old is a vastly different experience. In my youth, we reveled in the bloodlust of vanquishing foes. There were clear cut evildoers out there on the steppes, in the moors, moldering down in dungeons or ensconced in their mountain caves. They were all stirring up trouble and needing a good smiting. Our games revolved around combat tactics and buffing up our characters with better skills and increasingly spiffy monster-slaying gear. But my view of "evil" as a preteen boy and as a 34 year old social worker differed radically. The most central dynamic in D&D is dice-rolling combat. Armed conflict is a must, but it was much harder to justify/motivate characters to engage in slaughter as an adult.

The campaign I wrote in my twenties was much more about chaos and order than about good and evil. It was about redemption and tradition. The objectives put before the players were more about getting factions to cooperate than razing the land of evil influence. In short, we were playing a Democratic adventure, rather than a Republican one.

Since I knew the rules and had a campaign all written and ready to go... I served as the Dungeon Master. This means I had to forgo playing a character. Instead I was responsible for setting up the world around the players and posing challenges for them to overcome. One of the biggest struggles I had was painting an enemy worth killing. As children, we needed no reason to slaughter a party of orcs. They were bad guys and we were just doing our job as adventurers. But this group included several first-timers, an uncommonly balanced gender ratio, and a lot of pacifistic vegetarianism!

The most horrific scene I described was in an aside conversation with a pacifistic and spiritual kind of player. I described the war crimes being perpetrated by a desperate clan of isolated dwarves in need of spiritual redemption. I told the story of "battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster." This was the sort of theme I could identify with and enjoy exploring. In order to properly motivate her to care about the atrocities that were being committed I had to go into lengthy detail about decapitated heads mounted on pikes... guts strewn across craggy mountain passes... women and children hunted down and burned alive as examples to the enemy horde. But I found it nearly impossible to adequately depict the workaday evil of the old familiar rogues gallery. Kobolds, ettercaps, gnolls, giants, and troglodytes were all there... but mostly they became enemies by proxy as they were embroiled in conflict with the group's allies.

It was much more palatable for me to illustrate our own weakness or capacity for corruption than to point the spotlight at some evil "other". I don't know if this reflects a more nuanced (more mature) view of good and evil, or if I was just unwilling to play into "demonize and execute" strategies. Either way, I'm totally not voting for John McCain.

Bluster vs. Fillibuster (w/ Youtube!)

2008-07-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

Warren Ellis: Think you'll just bust on the scene and steal my thunder, eh mate? I've been shredding violins with righteous riffs for years now. No one wants to hear yer warbling Jeff Buckley wannabe ass stealing my spotlight. Yer about to get stomped in the "dirty three" as soon as I jump up on this table and kick over my amplifier.

Andrew Bird: [Activates the whirly speaker behind him while pushing mop of hair out of eyes; squints and says] Sorry?

Warren Ellis: [Smashes top of beer bottle on nearby table] Give it up or I'll gut ya throat to gizzard, ya prissy college puke! I'm not losing mah rock star violin badass crown to a bodgy crooner like yerself.

Andrew Bird: Indeed, once I was a merry upstart, gaily climbing last year's pop chart. But now my only ambition's to successfully raise 28 chickens. Wanna join my band?

Warren Ellis: Me and my trademarked pirate shirt are gonna be here long after you and the ridiculous vest are a faded memory chump. Ever hear of the Bad Seeds jackass? You think Nick Cave would be a pop icon if it wasn't for my violin chops?! I don't just do soundtracks and arty crap, bub. I'm the god damn Ian Anderson of the violin!

Andrew Bird: I just like to compose layered riffs of plucked violin with overlapping solos. I'm more of a classical guy myself. I can't really help it if the fans flock to it.

Warren Ellis: Listen Birdman. I'm going to send you to Alcatraz if you don't shutup. Do you realize I played my last gig in front of 40 frequent flippin' shoppers at a god damn Tower Records?

Andrew Bird: Um... you know Alcatraz is a prison, not a hospital right... [whistles a gay tune]

Warren Ellis: [Brandishes broken bottle] I had to grow this crazy Charlie Manson beard just so Chan Marshall would take me seriously. Most of the time, she wouldn't even make eye contact. I'm so sick of you talented mutherhumpers just cuttin' past everyone else in line and saying excuse me, comin' through. We got this thing back in Australia. It's called a god damn sense o' decorum!

Andrew Bird: If you'd just put down that broken bottle [suffers minor neck spasm] I'm sure we could make solve this like gentlemen.

Warren Ellis: Charlie Daniels style, eh? All right... bring it you moppet bitzer. I'm going to cut you into a bloody sack of ribbons fer mah purty hair!

Wall-E

2008-07-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

Classic story of love.

PC lives alone in a world of office drugery.
PC meets Mac.
Mac tries to kill PC.
PC falls in love with Mac.
Mac breaks down and has to be returned to the factory.
PC goes along and meets Mac overlord Hal 9000.
Hal 9000 tries to kill PC.
Mac (now fixed) gets mad at Hal 9000 because only she can try to kill PC.
PC and Mac fall in love and kill Hal 9000 together.

Spontaneous Urban Hike

2008-07-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

Left Olaiya's house about noon today. After fueling up on a slice of Whole Foods pizza, I walked down Roosevelt til I met up with Roanoke and then took 10th up the hill until I turned onto Boston. Then I walked south on 15th until jogging over to 18th once I was past Volunteer Park. It took me about an hour and a half to walk home. Must have been 5.5-6 miles.

Distilled as Much as Possible

2008-06-24T11:31:00.000-07:00

Starting Premise:
There is no God. There is no higher purpose to life. We live and die in an endless stream of evolving, interconnected organisms. We eat and will some day be eaten. There is no goal or destination. If you don't buy this premise, and have a higher purpose in life, you probably can't help me here.

Conclusion:
There is no good reason to choose to continue living in this random, purposeless universe unless you are either able to enjoy life, or you have reasonable cause to think you will enjoy life again in the future. If you are bedbound due to a car accident, your life may be miserable, but you have a good chance to recover and enjoy life again. If you have advanced Alzheimers-related dementia, you are unlikely to enjoy life ever again.

Question:
What is the best way to maximize your enjoyment of life? Hedonism beckons, but we must also use our wisdom to make sure we don't overindulge. Enjoying everything to the maximum extent can cause hurtful consequences. For example, eating twenty cupcakes for breakfast is pleasurable, but being obese can deprive someone of the enjoyment of walking in the mountains.

And... how do we weigh our own level of happiness/satisfaction against that of others? Some methods of achieving maximum enjoyment in life may be hurtful to others. We obviously have responsibility there, as life would be far less simple if we didn't have a supportive society around us. Where would we get the breakfast cupcakes if we didn't have a complex set of social norms encouraging us to cooperate.

What is your path?

All This Talk About Hattiesburg

2008-06-16T21:19:00.000-07:00

Made me think of this... the greatest episode of the greatest television show ever. At the 3:55 mark... Hattiesburg makes an appearance and the world changed forever.

And the second greatest episode (thanks to Busta Rhymes):

Games Part Three: MoneyBall

2008-06-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

Michael Lewis's book Moneyball has been called scintillating, controversial and "the most important sports book ever written." In fact, it's garnered so much hype over the last few years that, when given a free copy of it, I was actually willing to read it cover to cover... Illiterate though I am.

The book profiles the front office of the Oakland Athletics baseball team... the first team to openly start using modern statistical analysis and probe the question of which baseball skills most directly lead to scoring runs and winning ballgames. Lewis focuses on Billy Beane, the general manager of the team. Beane assembled a team of data crunching Harvard nerds to inform his decisions. He took decision-making responsibilities away from the manager and called most of the shots from upstairs. These pioneers threw out the old cliches and conventional wisdom. Batting average and stolen bases? Worthless... maybe even worse than worthless since those statistics tend to fool old-school talent evaluators... which leads to bad trades and bad contracts. To oversimplify: The new gospel was on-base percentage (which adds all your walks to your batting average - a much more valuable statistic.) And surprisingly, players with unspectacular batting averages often were among the league leaders in on-base percentage. There was a whole crop of underappreciated stars out there... or at least Billy Beane saw them as stars.

Secondly, they looked at how the market compensated athletes for these skills. Players adept at hitting homeruns and stealing bases were commanding disproportionate amounts of money on the free agent market. They went looking for cheap talent, because they didn't have the bucks to compete with the New York Yankees. They signed guys like Scott Hatteberg because he never swung at bad pitches and walked a lot. Wearing down the opposing pitcher (and getting a free base on balls) wasn't an expensive skill in baseball. The A's could afford to sign guys like that... so they did. And they won... a lot.

Michael Lewis spent a lot of time with the A's organization, and learned what General Manager Billy Beane and his assistants Paul DePodesta and J.P. Riccardi were up to. (DePodesta later got a shot to GM for the Dodgers and Riccardi wound up running the Toronto Blue Jays.) And Lewis does not hide his admiration for their zealous adherence to unorthodoxy.

Baseball executives have famously bragged about "not having read the book." Former Mariner's GM Pat Gillick decried it as "in poor taste". Joe Morgan, former all-star second baseman and current broadcaster repeatedly misstated that Billy Beane had written the book, and that he must be one arrogant bastard. Everyone of them felt slighted... since the book implied that the reason Beane was so successful is that everyone else in the old boys network of baseball management was incompetent at best and willfully ignorant at worst. After all, for the A's to beat the odds, they had to be screwing somebody.

However, Lewis's worship breaks down for me when I look at the bigger picture of the importance of games in my life. He sees himself documenting the triumph of reason over stupidity... as if baseball were a reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Science and reason are unassailable heroes. Lewis salivates at the prospect of Harvard grads with laptops and databases figuring out a smarter way to run a ballclub. He chortles at clubs who were repeatedly fleeced by Billy Beane's famous trades. He points out the genius of Beane's strategy at every point. But it's more like corporate ethics masquerading as science. To be ruthlessly efficient and to exploit market inefficiencies is a pathway to winning ballgames. It's the same path that Wallmart founders used to build an economic juggernaut. There is a science to it, but it isn't a paragon of "the scientific approach." And it may have unforeseen consequences.

The broader impact is that it rips away the facade of baseball. The game of baseball... a child's game played by adults and paid for by fans that want entertainment... isn't supposed to be all about maximizing your market leverage. It's about hometown heroes. It's about clutch performances. It's about which player you want to be when you grow up.

The problem is that no one ever wanted to be Scott Hatteberg.

And I dug up some actual data to make this case:

In the seven seasons from 2000-2006, the A's had a monster run... They sustained a near .600 winning percentage despite their woeful payroll. They made the playoffs five of those seven seasons. During that time span the league-average yearly attendance was around 2.3 million fans. Oakland averaged a meager 2.1 over that time frame. Their season total attendance eclipsed league average exactly once... in 2003, the year after they had won 103 games. In 2006, a year when they won 93 games and the division title, they actually drew less than 2 million fans... one of the worst showings in the league. Despite their amazing success in the win column, fans really didn't care. They didn't show up because watching guys take walks and go from base to base rather than risk an exciting stolen base attempt is boring. As much as I have tried to like this team (I always root for underdogs) I was never able to latch on to any of their players either.

Compare this to 1988-92, when Tony LaRussa's club made it to the post-season four out of five years. Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire powered a high-octane offense. Rickey Henderson stole every base in sight. These were a rip-snorting, steroids-injecting bunch of bashers. The average attendance per year for that half-decade was significantly above league-average (about 2.6 million fans per season compared to a league-average of 2.2 million.) People just 12 years earlier had shown up in droves for this same team.

Billy Beane decided somewhere along the line that winning ballgames was the most important goal... Win and everybody's happy. The Mariner's front office conversely seems to have decided that making money is the bottom line, so they worry more about drawing 3+ million fans every year than they do about winning. They put more thought into their funny advertising campaign each year than they do the annual draft.

Personally, I find that the real bottom line... the line that everyone keeps smudging... is entertainment. Professional baseball shouldn't exist. It's ridiculous that we pay grown men tens of millions of dollars a year to play a kid's game. It's ridiculous that I follow it as closely as I do. The only reason I pay any attention to this game is for its entertainment value.

Beane and company are changing the way the game is played behind the scenes (constantly evaluating the market to see what skills are undervalued.) They're also changing the way the game is played on the field (fewer stolen base attempts, more emphasis on taking pitches.) These changes have resulted in more wins. More wins means that other teams are adapting to this approach. Already on-base percentage has become overvalued and the A's have had to start searching for other interesting stats. It's an ever evolving process of trying to outshark the next guy.

The problem is that walks are a loophole. They are a penalty invented by the framers of the game. They aren't what baseball is supposed to be about. The core of the game, which is what made the game popular in the first place, is a pitcher trying to throw the ball past a guy doing his best to knock the stuffing out of it. Walks are boring. They slow down an already glacial game even more. And yet, Beane's success is changing the landscape of baseball so that more and more players are trained to look for walks. This is, as reflected in the attendance data cited above, BAD FOR BASEBALL... because baseball is still about entertainment and walks can never replace the core dynamic of the game.

Hopefully this has just been a market-correction blip, rather than a permanent change. Otherwise baseball is in trouble. Someone upset the applecart and now Bud Selig and the rest of the game's leadership is going to be hardpressed to fix it. Michael Lewis sees this as something to celebrate... a new kind of enlightenment. I don't think I can agree.

YouTube Rescues Lazy Blogger

2008-06-13T13:52:00.000-07:00

If this doesn't bring tears to your eyes, you are a monster. Really... you're a despicable human being.

Games Part Two

2008-06-02T18:20:00.000-07:00

Beyond the world of sports, children's games also help us develop the necessary life skills for future success. Playing Jacks helps children develop manual dexterity and counting skills. Hopscotch is both good exercise and a simple lesson in spacial relations. Playing with blocks prepares us for the complex world of civil engineering. And did you ever consider that your Hot Wheels collection might be the perfect learning tool to be a municipal traffic planner? And how about cards... what boy didn't learn that "bigger is better" in a friendly game of War; and what girl didn't play that helpful cautionary tale, Old Maid?

But my favorite were the boardgames. Milton Bradley was more than just a household name for me... he was my life coach. Without all the endless boring hours of Hasbro's Monopoly, I would be hard pressed to handle a career as a high-stakes real estate developer, wouldn't I? And how about the game Sorry... Ever wonder why so many people are adept at being insincerely apologetic when they've just screwed you over? Next time, just ask them what their favorite Parker Brothers game was! And perhaps the most useful was John Spinello's creation, Operation... teaching kids (since 1965!) how to avoid lethal electrocution when you just have to stick a fork in your toaster to fish out a broken piece of Pop Tart.

The Importance of Games Part One

2008-06-02T13:35:00.001-07:00

Late at the bar, after a bruising night of basketball, the question arises: "Who's the greatest athlete of all time?" The answers fly... Jim Thorpe, Jim Brown, Bo Jackson, Barry Sanders (my pick), Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Jesse Owens, Pele, Gretsky... the argument goes on. No one mentions Sergei Bubka (who was absolutely dominating in his field) because pole vaulting is too much of a specialized skill. No one says Kasparov because concentration and competitiveness are not enough to make someone a world-class "athlete". Someone says Tiger Woods and I groan loudly. I counter with Lance Armstrong and the rest of the table groans.

I ponder the etymology of the question. What are we really asking here? Why do we put so much stock into someone's ability to excel at sports? What are we actually measuring when we ask who is the "best"? Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game, but Bill Russell won eleven championships. Which feat is more impressive?

And one level deeper: why do we play these games? What purpose do they serve? Why do we admire these athletes to the point of paying them tens of millions of dollars per year? All I can come up with is that games (and specifically sports) are so important to us because they play two indispensable roles in society: we use them as indoctrination for our youth, and we use them in our adulthood as a way to sublimate our human blood lust into socially acceptable outlets.

The second path (sublimation) is most prevalent among middle-aged men who follow sports religiously. We have fantasy teams, watch ESPN highlights nightly and attend several games a year in person. We are looking for gladiators here. We follow athletes that act as our avatar on the battlefield. We honor athletic endeavors that are thinly veiled approximations of warfare. Football is perhaps the most warlike... with its sideline generals, teams comprised of field leaders, grunts and "skill guys" who use speed and deception to outflank the front lines and wreck havoc in enemy territory. Many sports like basketball, soccer and hockey follow a similar "penetrate the defense and attack the goal" model. Boxing, wrestling and martial arts are a stripped down version of the man-to-man "erete in combat" that the Greeks used to wax on about. The qualities we measure in our sports heroes are guile, speed, strength, endurance, coordination, mental discipline, and leadership... exactly what the US Army is looking for in their special units recruits.

As for the other path... the training (conditioning?) of our nation's youth... I reflect on my own childhood and see these same qualities being glorified as far back as 3rd grade. That was the year that I finally caught five balls during our morning "Flies Up" game... when one boy would huck a football as far and high as he could and all the other kids would crowd beneath, shoving and kicking and biting, and attempt to catch the ball. Whoever was tough, fast or lucky enough to catch five had the privilege of being the next to throw it. When I finally got my chance, the crowd gathered at a medium distance (unsure of what to expect of me.) I wound up and threw it ten yards beyond the furthest kid back, drawing a few oohs and ahhs from the crowd. The next day, during the longer lunchtime recess when we all played football, I was invited to play quarterback for the first time. This was an extreme honor, and something that young boys took very seriously. And even though I could throw the ball a long way, I didn't have the leadership and play-calling chops to survive long at the position before being ousted. Still, one week of getting to play QB was the highlight of the year for this 8 year old.

I don't know why it mattered so much... or what flaw in my character allowed me to accept being demoted without a fight. Perhaps I am missing the gene that allows Hillary to keep slugging even with her chances fading and the pressure to quit mounting. Maybe this is the Rocky Balboa gene? But I kept playing football, and developed a kind of respect for the early manifestations of athleticism we prepubescent boys displayed. I respected Jason Lindblad's speed, Eugene Madayag's size and power, and Mike Forbes' trickery in baiting opposing quarterbacks into throwing him the ball even though he was on the opposing team. And it even started making sense to me when some games would deteriorate into fist fights (this started happening in the fourth grade.) I wasn't involved in any of these fights... but it is curious that it didn't even seem "wrong" to me. After all, I was a very pacifistic child... I didn't even kill ants or torture grasshoppers the way other boys did. Along side the rest of my elementary schoolmates, I was being trained to respect athletic success beyond academic or artistic excellence... and way beyond simple traits like honesty, humility, common sense or decency.

As I endured high school, it was sickeningly apparent that popularity was entirely controlled by the jocks... those who had demonstrated and cultivated athletic aptitudes since the third grade. Luckily, as a nerd, it was easy to opt out. Popularity really didn't matter to us. We accepted that sports, dances, student government and pep-rallies weren't made for us... And they accepted that biology, foreign languages, mathematics, physics, history, acting, painting, and literature weren't made for them. It amazes me to this day how much importance my school (and our society) placed on these athletes... It's almost as difficult as understanding why I continue to play so many of these sports, and why it feels so good (as a 34 year old social worker fergawdsake) to have hit a game-tying home run in the final inning of my softball game last night.

JCC Softball

2008-05-28T13:30:00.001-07:00

Look at that adorable woman in the front row with the red-rimmed glasses! Man, I love a girl in uniform.

Getting Dirty

2008-05-20T21:30:00.000-07:00

Spring means dirt.

And lately, the hands have been awfully dirty.

First Olaiya's new pad needed a garden installed so Eric, Silvio, Diane, Andres, Molly and Walter all helped her build some raised planting beds using an abandoned stack of chimney bricks. Then we filled 'em with several yards of topsoil. Olaiya's resplendent table will soon feature her own homegrown tomatoes, fennel, salad greens, bush beans, golden beets and more.

Then Otis wanted to surprise her parents with some gardening efforts. So, while they were away, we rocked their Lake Forest Park estate: repairing rotten deck planks, tearing out blackberry infestation, weeding beds, planting flowers, and power washing everything. Otis's slide show can be found here.

I've barely had any energy left for SOFTBALL... my life's greatest passion... but we're 3-0 even with Olaiya and I being tired and sore for all the recent games!

Hey Lauren Hill!

2008-05-17T04:00:00.000-07:00

You're no longer the only female MC that's wowed me.

Last Week's Spirit Animal: The Billygoat

2008-05-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

My scruff was getting long... Three weeks without shaving. And the spring air had me operating at "ramming speed." After coming out of the Cinerama (where I had just taken in the action-packed Iron Man) I spontaneously headbutted my friend Dan in the chest. Luckily Dan expects this kind of behavior and takes it as well as he dishes.

The next night, in a heated basketball contest, my friend JohnB and I slammed foreheads as we both lunged after a loose ball. After the initial dizziness wore off (the circling stars and bluebirds all went back to their roosts) I felt strangely... energized. Instead of wanting to sit out for a few minutes, I felt like I wanted to get back into action immediately.

And the next day at work, I found myself playfully headbutting my coworker.

What's going on? I hadn't headbutting anyone (accidentally or intentionally) in years. Now I feel like I'm on a rampage. Is this just a springtime rutting season instinct making its primal force known?

Whatever, the cause, I realize I need to be careful. I've been feeling like taking on all comers lately. Some stresses at work have made me feel like headbutting managers, board members and consultants alike. A CEO from the Eastcoast that represents a newly trademarked Full Belly Project, who wants us to "cease and desist" from using the name, is practically begging for an "Irish Kiss" straight to his noggin. Somewhere the Buddha is sending me compassion... but my first reaction is to ram him right in the belly!

As Does the Bee, So Do I

2008-05-04T14:39:00.000-07:00

Friday night: Helped Olaiya get moved into her new place. Dinner with Walaka and Otis at Pies and Pints where I got the greatest meal ever invented: a veggie potpie floating in a bowl of creamy potato soup (accompanied by sweet potato fries and a pint of porter!) Spent our first night together over at O's new house.

Saturday: Discovered source of strange smell coming from basement of O's new house. Ew... don't ask. Got up at butt crack of dawn (7ish) to volunteer with Andres over at the Habitat for Humanity Site down by I-90. Spent next 8 hours laying subflooring: Sort of like a giant build-your-own jigsaw puzzle. Got home, showered and changed and carpooled with CC Rider + friendo Bob, O and Dingo down to the Showbox Sodo for the Devotchka concert. A truly amazing experience, they featured more instrument changes than I've ever seen at a show. The bandleader played rhythm guitar, a stringed instrument that looked like a long-necked mandolin, sang, whistled (sometimes through a second mic with LOTS of reverb) and played a theremin! The drummer occasionally pulled out a trumpet for horn parts. The bass player whipped out a bow for some tunes, and often laid her stand up bass aside to strap on a sousaphone. The genius of the outfit was the bespectacled and balding accordion player. He also played violin, piano, one of those keyboards with a blowtube attached and a few other odd instruments. The band had a full string section (violin, viola and cello to accompany the bassist) on many numbers. For their encore they also had a lovely and talented aerialist performing on silk curtains hung from the rafters. We danced to song after song as they never seemed to slow down... They were like Gogol Bordello marrying the Gypsy Kings presided over by a Ukrainian Elvis impersonator with a Morrissey vocal range.

Sunday: Made sumptuous three course breakfast for O and myself. Sat in the sunshine of my dining room eating and talking about families and the future. This was one the most pleasant ways to spend a Sunday morning I can think of.

Then it was off to opening day of JCC Softball. Olaiya played in her first organized team sport game EVER. Despite some nerves, she hit the ball well and fielded her positions (catcher and outfielder) admirably. She got on base three out of four trips to the plate, scored a couple runs and knocked in three RBI! In my second at bat, I just missed my first dinger of the season, settling for a ground rule double. I was a bit wobbly at pitcher, but our team romped to a 24-14 victory.

Got home and scarfed dinner before dashing to the Cinerama to see one of Stave It Off's Officially Anticipated Summer Movies: Iron Man. The film was universally enjoyed by our crew: Walaka, Otis, Soapy, O, Dingo, Andres, Dan and myself. Lots of toss ins for the geeks to appreciate, lots of Robert Downey Jr. being ridiculously dashing, lots of big robotic armored suits going bang, whoosh, crack, pow. The script indulges in a sort of "fight violence with... um... better violence" mentality... but it was too much fun to worry about philosophical cheats.

Monday: Slammed all day at work. Made dinner for Courtney, emergency trip to grocery store because I've simultaneously run out of toilet paper, deodorant, toothpaste, dish soap, and bath soap. Good planning, eh!? Got my computer back to Wayne to look at the RAM issue, and because one of the two hard drives is failing (good thing I backed everything up lately.) Finally got a chance to watch a Mariner's game, which turned out to be the first one they've won in the last week. I'm looking forward to a whole season of watching the M's two rookies, Wladimir Balentien and Jeff Clement, prove themselves.

Whew.

Sleeze

2008-04-29T21:22:00.000-07:00

Ever heard of The Gold Kit? They offer an amazing service. They'll give you honest to goodness greenbacks for all your "scrap gold". And they've really simplified the process: you just mail them all your annoying heirlooms and tacky gold items, and they'll send you a check. If you agree with how much they send you, just cash the check! It's as easy as that! One elderly woman in the advertisement positively beamed, "I got $600 for my scrap gold!!!"

After seeing the commercial during the Mariner's game, I googled the service and found others have already been similarly impressed. An endeavoring blogger posted this must-read about his experience with The Gold Kit here!

Thank God someone is out there really thinking about my needs. I was considering just throwing away all my scrap gold. Not only do I have another option, now a brotha can even get PAID!

Song of the Day

2008-04-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

Even if she doesn't read this blog, this is for Erynnis.

The Wages of Sin

2008-04-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

The laws of karma are screwing with me. For years I've sat back smugly and chortled at the woes of other computer owners... Always complaining about their hard drives crashing or their precious Macs going belly-up. Meanwhile, I've never lost a single byte of data... never had virus issues... never had to sweat the whopping repair bill of the PC doctor. Until this week. My trusty rig suddenly stopped booting. Lights came on and the fans were spinning, but no startup. No amount of powering down, cleaning up the dust and reconnecting everything helped. Pride goeth before the fall. Deadly Sin #1 for today.

A very cool PC repairman offered me all sorts of troubleshooting advice for free over the phone. I tried powering up after first removing one of my sticks of ram, then again after swapping out the other, in case I was being done in by a fried ram module. No luck. Then tried pulling out each PCI card (first the Soundblaster, then the video card) one at a time... still no change. Disconnected the PC from everything but the monitor... same result. Then swapped out a jumper from some arcane part of the motherboard that apparently resets the BIOS, just in case I had somehow corrupted my startup configurations. Still nothing. Sigh. No easy solution for this hubris-monkey.

At this point PC Man suspects a motherboard issue, although he was amazed to hear that an ASUS motherboard had failed... apparently it's almost always something else. Sunday I take my baby over to his shop and hope for the best. If it is just the motherboard, at least that's a fairly cheap fix and all my data should be fine.

---

I'm feeling jealous. Deadly sin #2 for the day. CC Rider has been accepted into the MSW program at UW. Come autumn, she'll leave JFS and head off on a new adventure. Two other coworkers are leaving this week... off to other jobs. My boss Steve is gone for three weeks to Spain and Portugal. A fellow counselor Carol is spending a week in Ireland. Meanwhile, my job has been haywire the last week... I've dealt with about double the number of cases of a typical week.

While toiling away, I've been indulging every escape fantasy I can think of. I'm jealous of people on vacation, people leaving for new pastures... I'm even jealous of the admin assistant that got laid off last week. Each morning I consider the repercussions of calling in sick for the next week. I hit snooze as many times as possible and only with great begrudgement do I force myself to shower and dress for work. Often I boycott applying deodorant, shaving or brushing my teeth in a plaintive protest against the world. By midday, I shake off my torpor and remember that I actually like what I do and even get to feel proud of the work I've done. But this feeling never lasts.

---

One solution to these doldrums is to lust after consumer goods. (Deadly Sin #3)

This week, I've pondered throwing down $600-$700 on a laptop. It occurs to me that having a laptop would sure be handy for times when my desktop goes all Mac on me. Plus, the greatest thing about having a laptop is that you can set it up in the bathroom and watch movies while taking a luxurious bath. (No dummy, I put the laptop on a shelf across the room. I don't hold it over the bathwater!) If you haven't tried this... I recommend it highly. It's far better than the pleasure of eating crackers in bed.

I've also been thinking about one of these: A 42" hi-def plasma television. Why? Because they're under a thousand dollars now. Because I like watching movies and sporting events at home. Because I have an odd need to spend a lot of money on something so that I'll feel better about my dead PC and my dissatisfaction at work. Hmm... I guess those aren't really great reasons.

Lastly, and I'm loath to admit this, I've been looking at shoes. I know, I know. This makes me doubt my own y chromosome as well. But it's true. I spent an extra thirty minutes at work yesterday browsing the shoe selection on Amazon.com. I'm thinking about a pair of black or brown slip-ons suitable for work. Something like these:

The weekend can't come soon enough: dinner parties, softball practices, and a volunteer day for Habitat for Humanity with Andres.

Sabrina Harman

2008-03-28T15:19:00.000-07:00

This is Sabrina Harman. She is the rather infamous US Army Specialist that was court martialed (along with others) for her conduct at the Abu Ghraib prison. A coworker showed me some of her photos recently appearing in the New Yorker. This one is haunting me... I guess because she looks like a smiling, optimistic, all-American Rosie the Riveter. And, devoid of any sophisticated artistic intentions, she is being juxtaposed here next to the disgusting rotting body of a murdered Iraqi prisoner of war. Somehow these military idiots armed with a cheap digital camera concocted the most chilling and deplorable symbol of American foreign policy that I can imagine. If I were an Iraqi, this (not our "freedom") is why I would hate America.*

* Since I'm not an Iraqi, and my interaction with America is much more layered than this... I don't hate America. I am very sad about where we are right now as a nation. And images like this reinforce why I voted against Bush, and why I'll vote against McCain. I know McCain is no fan of military torture, but he'll continue a warmongering foreign policy that is doomed to recreate situations like this and worse.

Friday Afternoon at Work

2008-03-28T12:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, though it was bitter cold and windy, the sun shone through my office window from 4:30 to 5:00 causing me to actually put my head down on my desk and get all catnappy at the end of my workday.

Today, I'm watching wet snowflakes dump against a cold grey sky over the tops of barren spindly trees.

I rotate and water my african violet. And sip my cup of decaf. Life is good.

Oh Yeah, I Still Have a Blog

2008-03-26T11:16:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the lack of content lately. I've been all wrapped up in playing fantasy baseball. This is something that I've avoided for the last three years because of how addictive it is. I used to spend my afternoons refreshing ESPN.com updates on every game being played, looking at how all of my players were doing. It was worse than crack. So I walked away and vowed never to return.

But a funny thing happened this year. I started getting very involved with a blog called Lookout Landing. We actually get together and play softball, whiffleball and football year round. We meet up at the bar occasionally to drink beer and have developed some nice friendships. Some of those guys invited all the Lookout Landing regulars to play in a fantasy baseball league. Next thing I knew, I was signed up for three different teams!

So... the official baseball season actually began two days ago. The Oakland Athletics and the Boston Redsox opened the season by playing a two-game series in Japan. The rest of the regular season doesn't start for another week or so. This was just an exhibition thing. Guess who was up at 3:00am this morning to catch some of the game live (I had to see how Rich Harden was pitching, since he's on two of my fantasy baseball teams.)

Luckily, I'm fully aware of how cracked out this behavior is (and OMG I'm tired today.) I'm hoping that no intervention is necessary. If I decide to completely abandon Stave It Off, or start only writing about fantasy baseball, someone please punch me. Mebbe I can chalk it up to how much I just love baseball.

BTW, Olaiya is playing on my softball team this year! That totally rocks. I always wanted to date a softball player.

Coolest Video Game Evah?

2008-03-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

The Reverend's Right

2008-03-18T13:49:00.000-07:00

Fox News is spreading a fear campaign... and the people are biting. Obama has had to publicly distance himself from the "controversial" comments of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It would be great if Obama could stand up and translate what the Reverend is saying so that white people wouldn't be so afraid. Since Barak has to tread the middle path, I'll try.

The reverend is VERY concerned about the day-to-day racism that poor black citizens have to deal with in today's America.

The reverend is NOT saying that Jesus was literally black. He is comparing the plight of the Jewish people in a land ruled by the Roman empire to that of black people in white America. I'm sure half of America freaked out when they heard a "crazed militant negro" saying that Jesus was black. Listen harder you Fox News loving idiots.

The reverend IS suggesting that Jesus would have cared about the plight of poor black people.

The reverend IS saying that most American presidents (and even candidates) have been rich white men. I'm not sure why this is controversial. This seems unequivocally true.

The reverend IS saying that Hillary (even though a woman) fits the mold of rich, white privilege.

The reverend is addressing a black church audience. The people running up to him and "hitting him on the back" or standing up and shouting are not being disrespectful or assaultive. They are actually encouraging/agreeing with the speaker.

The reverend NEVER actually attacks the white race... but he does extol the character of Obama as a champion of the underprivileged, essentially comparing Obama's path to that of his lord Jesus Christ. He even draws the parallel that Obama is being betrayed (as Jesus was) by his own people. He IS excoriating black America for claiming that Obama is not "black enough" by comparing them to the Jews that betrayed Jesus.

The reverend is clearly suggesting that America, which IS currently run by rich white men, is not the best environment for black people, and that black voters ought to support Obama over Clinton because she will never truly understand their experience.

I do not understand how this is being construed as hate speech. This is an emotional sermon from a black person to a black audience about his belief that there is ONE candidate that truly understands them. Would anyone complain if a Planned Parenthood representative spoke out that Hillary is the only candidate that can really empathize with the female perspective on reproductive rights issues? No. What if she spoke passionately about the persecution suffered by young women unable to choose whether or not they carry a child... about a history of back-alley medical mishaps and family disownment? Still no. You would nod your head and judge just how relevant that information is to you. And that's exactly how white America should respond to Reverend Wright.

Urged to disavow Reverend Wright by various groups, Barak Obama had this to say... and it's pretty awesome:

"Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way. But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man.

"The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS... Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

"And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."

People More Talented Than I

2008-03-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

Irish Molly's step-da Greg has posted a very stylish little website showing off his drawerings. Click on the sample to load up his page, then click on "The Daily Drawings" to be wowed. So far, he's talking about printing a book, but I have no idea if he's selling anything.

Meanwhile, Olaiya's almost step-da Brian is sharing his art on his own new blog,
The Art of Being Brian. Both are inspiring.

Return of the Queen Party

2008-03-08T21:52:00.000-08:00

Carole "Sachet" Vacher just flew back to Seattle for a long weekend vacation... the perfect excuse to host a big ol' party at my apartment. I invited all the old crew to come fete Carole and hear about life in Montreal. A few people made up excuses about being out of town, but we wound up with a rollicking crowd of 13, and I think Carole felt very honored.

Diane and Courtney generously offered to come over early and help me get ready.

Courtney made a smashing kale and chickpea soup to go along with my lasagna and some appetisers. Nedrita brought some lovely sharp Spanish cheese and chutney to go with Tall Grass bread. Then the beautiful and talented Emily showed up with an amazing arroz con pollo y camarones dish.

I think that Carole really just came back to surround herself in the company of good looking men. Here she is lapping up the attention. ;-)

In Memoriam

2008-03-07T11:21:00.001-08:00

As Soapy pointed out yesterday, a legend has passed away. Gary Gygax is commemorated, in cartoon form, here. Nice to see the Order of the Stick make room for a Gygax appearance, and wax sentimental for a minute. Tucked away in my closet, I too have a little box filled with mysterious red translucent dice.

I tend to plot people (especially politicians) on the alignment graph that is integral to Dungeons and Dragons. The graph works a lot like the Pirate/Ninja, Monkey/Robot meme. But in this case, one axis represents the continuum from Good (usually defined as self-sacrificing or concerned for the well-being of the downtrodden) to Evil (usually defined as greedy/cruel.) The second axis spans the range from Chaotic (random, unpredictable) to Lawful (planned, organized and systematic.) The grid looks like this:

The most effective villains in D&D were Lawful Evil... they were the Dick Cheneys of the land... ruthless robber barons and devils of the Nine Hells. Lawful Good characters were usually prissy paladin types like John Edwards. John McCain is Neutral Good. He isn't quite lawful, but clearly isn't chaotic either. His limp "maverick" status places him in neutral-land. And while some would argue that he's more evil than good... that's only because you're missing one of the true shortfalls of "Good" types. In D&D terms, Good spends an awful lot of time smiting Evil. McCain's willingness to engage in perpetual war doesn't make him evil... just slightly deluded.

Barack is Lawful Neutral. Neutrality on the Good/Evil continuum often comes with perspective and wisdom... so this is not a bad thing. Hillary is more true neutral. She's much like Obama, but probably willing to bend the rules a bit more, sliding her from Lawful into the Neutral zone.

Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are Chaotic Evil. They don't care who they hurt. They are all about self-aggrandisement. They have no true allegiances, only temporary alliances with those that will help them line their pockets. They are the random monsters most often found on the end of a paladin's spear. They are the trolls/goblins/kobolds/bugbears of the world.

Gygax and company also introduced another brilliant grid... this time juxtaposing Race and Class. Existing in the Tolkien high fantasy realm, race could mean Human, Gnome, Dwarf, Hobbit (called Halflings), or Elf... and, since the game has evolved into dizzying levels of complexity, you also get to choose whether you are wood elf, a high elf, a dark elf, etc. Class refers to your occupation. Are you a grunt: a dimwitted barbarian with a big axe like Conan? Are you an aspiring mage like Harry Potter? Or perhaps a sneaky shadowy type like the Gray Mouser. It's harder to pinpoint the race and class of various politicians. But I'm going to call McCain a dwarven fighter (high constitution, sense of honor, general thickheadedness... although real dwarves would mock his total lack of manly facial hair.) Huckaby is a hobbit ranger. Hillary is a human wizard (intelligent, untrustworthy, usually up to things that leave the rest of us scratching our heads.) And Obama is a high elf cleric (stiff and sanctimonious at times, but generally well-meaning.)

Not Bloody Likely

2008-03-04T16:26:00.000-08:00

Scarlett Johansson is auctioning off a date with her to the premier of her new film this July. The proceeds benefit OxFam. Currently there are 96 bids and the total is up to $15,000.

I think if everyone just pitches in a few thousand dollars I could win this thing. If you are able to sponsor my fundraising, I'll be sure to post some great photos and myself and Scarlett at the event. If you're unable to attend a Full Belly Event, this is a great way to show support for my charitable endeavors anyway.

Sunshine, Lollipops, etc.

2008-03-02T15:33:00.000-08:00

The days are gorgeous. Spring beckons, in a way that only happens after months of winter. A few images below... a remembrance of why I don't live in California.

Sunlight streaming through my dining room windows

Courtney absorbing some vitamin D

Blossoms forming on the trees right outside my windows