Politics Post: And Now For Something That Actually Matters

There’s an old/new joke about how being president has aged Obama. It goes like this. ‘He used to be half-black and half-white. But now he’s just completely gray.’

Being president does age you severely. You age two years for every year in the first term, three years for every year in the second term, and four years for every year of scandal. Look at Bush and Clinton at the end of their presidencies. Their hair is shock-white and deadened-gray, hard deep lines cut into their faces, barely able to smile because to do so would be like cracking granite.

But Obama, much like Al Pacino in Godfather III, has actually gone gray in the face. Black + White + Presidential Stress + Republican Assholes + Not Smoking = Gray. Maybe somewhere in the White House attic, there’s a picture of Obama getting younger, blacker, and less of a over-compromising pushover pussy…but it’s unlikely.

Still…he’ll win reelection easily.

Obama can still play the master orator when he needs to, getting behind a podium and sounding like Denzel Washington playing an idealistic preacher…so he’s got that going for him. And as much as people seem to dislike him now, they hate the Republican table-scraps even worse. Sure, Obama’s a soft-touch union-friendly born-compromiser who has always been better talkin’ than doin’ and would rather negotiate than invade but…we all knew that four years ago. So what else is new? He’s Jimmy Carter sans the Iran Hostage crisis. He’s the wimp you wanted. Deal with it.

Besides, people aren’t ready for the first black president to become the first black one-term president. What’ll that say about the country? How much would that reverse the ‘first black president’ goodwill? Because as bad as things are all over…and they’re mighty bad…on the upside, ‘Hey, we elected a black president, remember?’ Take that silver lining away…and it’s all gray doom like Obama in the face.

So…as for the Republican slate of candidates? This is the best you got? Really?

Rick Santorum. The biggest tool I’ve ever seen. You could put a socket-wrench in a sweater-vest and it would still not be as big a tool as him. He looks like the type of guy who is most uncomfortable around unmarried black women. And his last name was a bad fit for a ‘President _______’ nametag even before Dan Savage made his play. Really, Christian Right? This is the best you had in their back pocket? This is your holy savior? The guy who’s against women in the military and thinks abortion is the worst thing ever ever? And I thought it was bad when Rick Perry was the front-runner…

Newt Gingrich. That sack of waterlogged potatoes with an overinflated Goodyear blimp for a head. He metaphorically and literally represents government bureaucracy at its most bloated. Cheated on two wives, married his mistresses, left one wife on her cancer-bed…and that’s still not the worst thing about him. Time Magazine 1995’s Man of the Year (back before it was PC-ified into ‘Person of the Year’ – wow, must’ve been a bad year that year). Newt, you can call yourself an outsider, you can call Obama a socialist, you can prophesize the coming American apocalypse for a Democratic second term…you still don’t have a fucking chance in holy hell, not with all the dirty money in the world.

Mitt Romney. Aka ‘The Mechanical Mormon.’ Looks like he popped out of a ‘Republican Politician Cloning Machine.’ He loves corporations, he’s filthy rich, and he’s flip-flopped his position on everything to veer as far to the right as possible. If he wasn’t a follower of the teachings of Joseph Smith and the LDS church, he’d be the perfect republican candidate. Unfortunately, people look at him and think, ‘Your Jesus isn’t my Jesus’ so…he’ll probably make it. He’s the Bob Dole of this election, the sacrificial political lamb, the ‘seriously, dude, this is the best you could come up with?’ The winner by default, split-decision, and mass apathy…

Ron Paul. He has new ideas, he sticks by his convictions, he has a plan that’ll actually work, he’s willing to stand up to the special interests and corporations and unions, and he has the strongest support among the independents…so he doesn’t have a fucking shot in Hell. Ron Paul has the best chance of winning general election…and no chance of getting Republican nomination. The party would rather lose without him than win with him. 

Ron Paul is like McCain in 2000 but better. No compromise. He'll cut foreign aid, slash the budgets, and he refuses to pander even while he's running for president. That's why the core Republicans and Democrats both hate him. He’s the only guy who hasn’t been promoted to front-runner status yet…and that’s because he’s the best. So he’ll pay the way for his son. Rand Paul 2028!

Who knows? Anything’s possible.

Here's my prediction for the next president (based on current lineups of republicans, Obama seems guaranteed a second term so this is for 2016).

I'm calling it now. Based on the last three presidential trends (Clinton, Bush, Obama – each increasingly younger, unknown, inexperienced, and admitted drug use – from denied pothead to denied pothead and cokehead to admitted dope-smoker and coke-snorter) and the fact that Americans are losing faith in their own government, the next president of the US will be a young (39-41 years old) single-minority (either female or Latino - Americans can only accept one minority at a time) war hero (haven't had one of these in a long time, not since Kennedy).

A young Latina war hero. Sounds about right.

Someone young and inspirational and idealistic but not a suit, no politician, no rich kid, a real salt-of-the-earth average joe. I was thinking that a young female war hero would be great. Maybe even one married to a Latino war hero. That would be awesome. Make her famous and opinionated, very smart, well-educated, but not a politician. An outsider who is famous for something non-political. She has to be good-looking enough to get men to like her but not so much so that she intimidates women. And also the whole war hero thing might allay the 'What if she's PMSing with her finger on the button?' fears.

A female president? Really? Hey, like I said…anything’s possible.

Maybe in 4 years, there will be a female/Hispanic president. Maybe in 16-20 years, there will be a Libertarian president. Maybe in 50 years, there will be an atheist president. Maybe in 100 years, there will be a Jewish president. Or maybe in 10 years, the American economy will have collapsed, the world will be a nuclear wasteland, and we’ll all be scavenging mobs of dehumanized barbarians, killing and raping our way across the country in search of oil, water, and ‘fresh meat.’ Oh well…I’ve got my fingers crossed for a mix of all five possible outcomes.

The Oscars: Predictions and Predilections - Part II

The Oscars don’t matter. The Oscars only matter because people think they matter.

The recurring motif here is 'Interesting but overrated. You'll have no reason to ever watch it again.' Most of these films aren't horrible (with the exception of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close if you have a brain or The Help if you have a penis) but they're nothing special. So...no different than most Oscar nights. Another safe mediocre crowd-pleaser, another night of self-congratulation and few surprises. Just like every other year.

So…once more and into the breach.

Tree of Life

The Pitch: The most ‘nothing happens’ Gus Van Sant film meets the most ‘What the fuck’ Lars von Trier film meets the most ‘Wow, pretty scenery/pictures’ Terrence Malick film.

An existentialist minimalist interpretation of life, family, and the world. In other words, less a film with a story than a collection of images and ideas. Tree of Life is experimental artsy-fartsy bullshit (the opposite end of the spectrum of Transformers 3, an excruciating 2 1/2 hour waste of time either way). For the pretentious cinephile in all of us. Along with 2012’s Melancholia and Restless, this is yet another a movie for people who hate movies. A film that’s boring in a beautiful way. Half dull family drama, half IMAX ‘History of the Universe’ documentary, all insomnia-inducing.

The Moral: “All your problems are your parents’ fault. And we’re all boring.”

War Horse

The Pitch: “Saving Private Ryan minus the violence multiplied by The Horse Whisperer with two extra scoops of self-indulgence filmmaking.”

Spielberg is full-on Jewish-grandfather mode. A Frank Capra war movie. So schmaltzy and soft. No scenes of violence, just the build-up and the aftermath with none of the squibs-and-screams in between. If you can stay awake until the end...and if the phrase 'the story of WWI told from the point-of-view of a horse' doesn't make you run in fear or collapse in giggles...then maybe you'll like it. Maybe the play is great, I’ve never seen it, but this is 140 minutes of sickly-and-sweet sentimentality and bait-and-switch battle scenes.

The Moral: “When people die, there’s no blood or messy icky stuff. And also, animals are equal and/or better than people. Especially horses.”

Midnight in Paris

The Pitch: “Purple Rose of Cairo meets Small Time Crooks meets a Woody Allen New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs piece from 30 years ago.”

It's a chocolate soufflé of films. It's light, it's sweet, and it's gone quickly/it’s sweet, it’s light, it’s amusing, it’s enjoyable, it’s a good time at the movies and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome or throw in third-act tragedy just for the sake of depressing the audience…and it doesn’t have a fucking chance in hell of winning. At only 95 minutes, it's the bare bones of storytelling. More fun than funny, more interesting than involving, you'll enjoy yourself while you're watching it and never think about it again. Considering the outright disasters that Woody Allen seems to have 3-out-of-4 films, this is good for what it is. and speaking of backhanded compliments...

The Moral: “Every generation thinks that the previous generation had it better.” (and in case you missed it, it’s spelled out in dialogue and preached into camera)

The Artist

The Pitch: "Amelie meets Chaplin with very little dialogue and stupid pet tricks."

A decent movie but a minor achievement. One-third light-comic parody, two-thirds deadly-serious melodrama when the opposite combination would have worked better (although in its current incarnation of depression and redemption, it’s much more likely to win Best Picture – the academy loves their mawkish schmaltz). Interestingly, while Hugo is an American movie set in France which celebrates silent film, The Artist is a French movie set in America which celebrates silent film. Like Hugo, a love letter to films that no longer exist for good reason. Nostalgic piffle. A clear front-runner. A film self-infatuated that you couldn’t possibly love it more than it loves itself.

The Moral: “Suicidal people can always be cured at the last minute by nothing.”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The Pitch: "Remember Me meets Rain Man meets Forrest Gump: The Early Years."

Interestingly, both this film and Hugo feature a poor weird Bambi-eyed adorably-annoying little moppet-child who goes on a mystery-quest as he searches for a secret meaning in an object left behind by his dead father…but ends up finding something even better/discovering something even more important in the end (I just threw up, a little bit, in my mouth, just now). So…yeah. The War Horse and We Bought a Zoo all came out at the same time, all sappy syrupy schmaltzy horseshit…and somehow, this managed to be the worse one of the treacle trifecta. So…you know it must be REALLY bad.

The Moral: “If a little boy with Asperger’s comes to your door, run as far away as you can. Oh, and also, ‘9/11! 9/11! 9/11!’.”

The Help

The Pitch: “Crash meets The Blind Side with an equal sprinkling of white guilt and shit jokes."

Featuring Viola Davis (the patron saint of long-suffering-yet-ultra-noble-black-women-in-frumpy-clothing roles). The type of overhyped overwrought self-important schlock that can only be made by smug over-privileged white people who think they’re doing something noble. Yet another book-club book (like Ya Ya Sisterhood and Water for Elephants) which women love more than life itself and men endure yet another reminder that they’ll never understand the female mind. A movie so awful and misguided and brimming over with white-guilt apologist preachiness. This movie deserves to eat a feces-filled chocolate cake and die of intestinal parasites.

The Moral: “Be nice to black people or they’ll take a shit in your food.”

Hugo

The Pitch: "Oliver Twist meets Edward Scissorhands meets Iron Giant…in France."

Um…I wanted to like this movie. It’s technically great...but the story is underwhelming and the child acting is (as it usually is) pretty bad. It seems too slow and strange for kids...but also too light and child-centric for adults. It felt like a Tim Burton film, with all the weird gadgets and the unnecessarily-complex set design and the Edwards-Scissorhands-robot and the dead father-figure creator…or maybe a Spieblerg film, with his affinity for children adventure stories and daddy issues themes. Scorsese is...an odd fit. It's a good film, a family film, just one that will leave most anticipated viewers disappointed. It’s technically very well-done, a 3D feast for the eyes and a celebration all things silent-film but…it's a movie you more respect than enjoy.

The Moral: “Movies were better when nobody talked and everybody cared.”

Moneyball

The Pitch: The Social Network meets Bull Durham meets every Brad Pitt movie where he talks with his hands while eating and smiling reassuringly.

Not a bad movie. Very watchable, considering the lack of scenes with players actually playing baseball. It’s well-written, well-acted, well-directed, very competent. You’ll never need to watch it again but what it is, it’s great. Only two big problems; first, the scenes with the daughter are boring and distract from the main story (wow, she plays guitar and sings too, who gives a fuck?), they only make the movie longer and the ending drive (which mirrors Elizabethtown) more ridiculous (Brad Pitt was likeable enough without being an ‘aw shucks’ divorced dad trying to make his daughter proud of him). And second, the biggie; there’s no ending. No big game (well, no BIG big game). They don’t win. It just sort of peters out. Oh, and also, the system hasn’t really worked since, like, at all. So there’s that.

The Moral: “Baseball movies would be better off with fewer scenes of baseball being played.

The Descendents

The Pitch: "Sideways meets American Beauty in Hawaii."

More of Alexander Payne and his schlubby schmuck sad-sacks who are emasculated by all the type-A foul-mouthed domineering females in their lives and forced to deal with all the young dumb-jock-surfer-dude morons with nice hair. In the universe of Payne, everyone’s a cuckold or being cuckolded and nobody is happy. Not depressing enough yet? Hey, the daughter has a drinking problem and the mother is in a coma with a feeding tube…and also lots of hospital-deathbed scenes and the grandmother has Alzheimer’s and everyone’s marriage is falling apart! I’m a big Alexander Payne fan but…this is bad. The big exposition dump voiceovers at the beginning are an early giveaway. The first 15 minutes are just George Clooney's nauseatingly charming voice telling you everything about the plot (1 line of dialogue for every 4 lines of voiceover). And then after that...no voiceover for the rest of the movie. Lazy screenwriting.  Oh, and the endless montages set to horrible Hawaiian songs...the music wasn't actually that bad but the singing was insufferable. For the entire second half of the movie, almost every other scene is a scenic montage set to bad Don-Ho-lite music. After the tenth time, it was driving me nuts. I miss Rolfe Kent and Jim Taylor and the old Alexander Payne who did Election and Sideways and Citizen Ruth. You’re better than this, man.

The Moral: “Life is shit and your wife cheats on you and then she dies. The End.”

The Oscars: Predictions and Predilections - Part I

Quick Note: In my previous columns, I forgot to mention My Week with Marilyn, one of the most smug, hollow, worthless, candy-coated wank-fests in a year full of them. Yet another period-piece pseudo-biopic (why so many? Because they write themselves. The great thing about using real people in your script is that you don’t have to create characters and can just coast by on nostalgic recognition). But this over-costumed navel-gazing is the worst kind of tripe; a film about a film production (ooh, how meta).

And look, by an amazing coincidence, the two films most nominated this year at the Oscars are Hugo and The Artist, two movies about making movies. The only thing the Academy loves more than movies ABOUT movies….is honoring those movies with all those shiny gold statues that they give themselves (oh, what a web of self-infatuated masturbatory excess they weave). And with that…onto the show.

ACTUAL CONVERSATION (after watching The Descendants)

“I didn’t really like it.”
“Me neither. It’ll probably win best picture.”
“But it doesn’t deserve to win.”
“Exactly. That’s why it’s a lock.”

The key to accurate predictions is not letting your personal feelings towards the movie or the actual quality of the film...get in the way and affect your judgment. These things have nothing to do with what wins. Just remember; 'Best Picture is rarely the best film of the year. Usually, it's not even that good.' That's why Oscar prognosticating is all about the secondary factors like raincheck awards and message movies that end in tragedy and whether the nominee is black/gay/in possession of some kind of other tragic backstory?

Stop asking yourself “Does it deserve to win?” and ask yourself, "Is it safe and mediocre enough to win?" (see: Crash, A Beautiful Mind, The King’s Speech, and most other Best Picture winners whose titles I’ve forgotten for the reasons stated above). Your feelings towards the movies you love (and want to see triumph) or the actual quality of the movie itself…these things are irrelevant. To predict the Oscars most effectively, flash forward in your mind into the future. Imagine that the Academy Awards are over and the winners have been announced and you feel both bored and disappointed. Now think, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ And voila; you’ll have your answer in all the categories that count.

There's a science, not an art, to picking the Oscars.

The Descendants seemed like a lock a while ago (it had all the requirements – big star, 50+ million, director long overdue for an Oscar). But The Artist and Hugo have the most nominations…and like I said, both those movies stroke Hollywood’s ego in just the right way. Hugo will probably win most of the technical awards and The Artist will win the awards that matter. Descendants might steal a few but…not the big prizes. Not director, not picture, not actor...well, probably not.

The screenwriting category is usually the only one that gets it right (excluding exceptions like Precious and Milk and the aforementioned King’s Speech, which won for all the wrong reasons that Best Pictures usually win). The smart money is on Alexander Payne and Woody Allen. The fact that The Artist is nominated for Best Screenplay at all is hilarious (the only script with less dialogue than Lost in Translation) and only further points to a sweep for that middling whimsically-average Weinstein-express-of-a-film.

As for acting awards…who cares? The only reason why acting awards matter is that actors make up the largest block of Academy members and usually, a movie can't win best picture without at least getting nominated for acting (this is why Crash won - full of famous actors). Usually, the movie that wins an Oscar for script and an Oscar or two for acting is the lock for best picture. But if not, it's the winning screenplay and the most acting nominations (Titanic being one of the few exceptions to this rule).

Who will win? Either George Clooney for playing sadsack with his face frozen in ‘concerned-parent’ for 120 minutes or Jean Dujardin for being French and smug (is that even acting?). For supporting male, Christopher Plummer (because he plays a dying homosexual - he's a lock).  For supporting, Bérénice Bejo for being french and adorable or Octavia Spencer for being black and sassy (again, is this acting? Well, if Monique and Jennifer Hudson can win…at least she’s much more talented than both of them combined). And then there’s Best Actress…

It’ll either be Meryl Streep getting her trifecta raincheck oscar after 20 years of not winning and mostly deserving to…or it'll be Viola Davis for playing yet another long-suffering morally-uncorrupted black woman. Yessiree, here come the Academy Awards, the great liberal bastion of equality and political correctness…planning to give another golden statue to a black woman for playing a maid (or worse, two golden statues to two different black women for playing a pair of maids).

If the Help wins, it'll be 1940 all over again, Hattie McDaniel, for playing maids...except this time, we let the black folks sit at the same tables as the white folks (as opposed to Hattie and her escort who were forced to sit alone at a segregated ‘table for two’). 70 years later…nothing’s really changed. There are three non-white nominees in the four acting categories: Two are black women nominated for playing maids. And one is a Hispanic man (Demián Bichir) nominated for playing a gardener.


You can't make this shit up, folks.

Tomorrow, I’ll give my thoughts on the top nine nominees for Best Picture (really, nine movies, Academy committee? Not 10? Not 8? Up to 9? That precise?). As if there were nine great movies made this year. I’m not even sure there were five. This is the first year in a while without a Holocaust movie (thank Christ – the ‘Not another Holocaust movie!’ groaners can take a breather). But more importantly, this is the first year in a while without a Coen Brothers movie. And that actually matters.

No Coen brothers movie this year? Where are my saviors, where art thou?

No Coens? No Good. Their absence makes 2011 the worst year for movies since last year...which was the worst year for movies since the year before...which was…etc, etc.

There are actually critics saying that 2011 has been one of the best years for movies, if you can believe the insanity. Of course, these are people who think that Tree of Life was classic-film-making perfection and Bridesmaids was a non-stop-hilarious laugh riot. These people need their brains examined, for both holes and rot. 2011 is the worst year since 2010. And Bridesmaids isn't funny (it's better than most comedies written by women but that's not saying much - again, lowered expectations with a dash of political correctness, that 'women are just as funny as men can be too so we're all equals' bullshit).

But the critics just eat this shit up. Lowered expectations. 'Better than bad is not good.' Hey, if you had to see every movie, you’d think these were the ‘best’ too.

Every year for the past decade, I look at the recent year of movies and think, “It can’t possibly get any worse than this.” And every year, Hollywood and the major studios manage to top themselves. Then they wonder why attendance is shrinking and nobody is buying DVDs. “Must be piracy. Yup, that’s it. (sighs contently) Problem solved.”

Ouroboros Culture Wars #2 - "My childhood wasn't raped, just molested for years.”

A couple quick egregious examples of self-plagiarism to illustrate a point: 

1. Michael Bay, who continues to remake the same movie over and over (military helicopters at sunset + explosions + highway chases + explosions + soldiers screaming and/or dying in slow-motion + explosions = money. Multiplied by robots? = BIG money). In previous films, he's ripped off his own helicopter-at-dusk shots and battleships-at-midday shots (for Pearl Harbor, Transformers, etc). But for Transformers 3, he reused car-crash shots from The Island chase scene and just added robots (nobody saw that movie anyway and every Bay movie follows the same blueprint so who cares?). Still, it's lazy.

2. I saw this SNL sketch called 'Rehearsal Scene' from 2001 with Amy Poehler, Will Ferrell, and Kirsten Dunst. It was pretty funny. They played background extras in a scene who overact and ruin every take. I thought, 'Pretty funny...but it's weird that it took the show 25+ years to think up such a simple sketch.' Then I saw on Youtube a sketch from the New Show (Lorne Michaels' shortlived failed primetime sketch show) with Catherine O'Hara, Buck Henry, and Steve Martin....performing almost the exact same sketch but 20 years earlier (slightly different writing but the same premise and beats).

The moral? It's okay to steal from yourself if nobody notices. 

That's why the best remakes are movies that had a great idea but mediocre execution, either due to the constraints of the era or simply purposeful underachievement (Ocean's Eleven, True Grit, Scarface, etc) or movies that don't so much remake the same material but take it and extrapolate it into new directions until it becomes something completely different (The Magnificent Seven, Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, Star Wars, Reservoir Dogs, etc).

Why is this important? Because nothing feels new anymore. And worse, even the stuff that wasn't that good to begin with...somehow manages to seem superior next to the new 'updated-and-improved' version.

The 1980’s has become the new go-to decade for a quickie childhood-raping cash-in. It started with stuff like The Karate Kid and Tron 2 and Clash of the Titans and pretty much every single horror movie franchise reboot (Friday the 13^th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, etc). But just this past year, we had Arthur, Fright Night, Conan the Barbarian, Footloose, The Thing (the Red Dawn remake was pushed into 2012), with Total Recall and 21 Jump Street and a new Clash of the Titans sequel due out this year and with many more in development (Aliens, Robocop, Romancing the Stone, even fucking Short Circuit, for chrissakes). All nice bland Xeroxes of the originals, everything shinier and CGIer without being different or better. More namebrand repackagings. Set in the past or the present, doesn’t matter, it’s still more of the same shit.

Stuff like The Muppets or The Smurfs and the unslayable atrocity that is the Transformers franchise (yes, I just lumped those three together, they’re the same in my book - new remixes of an old favorite) is aimed at young parents. People in their 30’s or 40’s who were kids or teens when this stuff first came out. And now they’re parents. With little kids. Who will literally watch anything. So they all go to the movies. The parents watch the movie through rose-tinted nostalgia goggles, the kids watch the movie on a cracked-out sugar-high, and everyone convinces themselves that they enjoyed themselves. It’s fun, it’s safe, you don’t have to think for 100 minutes as Hollywood preps your vein, prepares the hypodermic, and injects a syringe full of pure nostalgia-euphoria into your waiting bloodstream.

However, the new rule for movies (as seen by the numerous franchises that refuse to die and unnecessary sequels and prequels and reboots and retreads and remakes and reimaginings and resuscitations and resurrections of 'shit from your childhood that we adapted to film because we like to profit off your memories' - well it's not going away.

The fear of new ideas (oh no, it's new, it's unexpected, it's an unknown entity that might actually entertain people, kill it, kill it!') has permeated the Hollywood studio system to the point where even the new movies feel like stale rehashed & reheated remakes. (see – Safe House – when I read the script, I thought, 'Great title, good premise, horrible execution.' And the finished film is even less than that).

For movies, it’s always better to be bad than to be boring.

So many dull, predictable, safe, obvious generic movie studios make the same boringly dull, predictable, obvious generic choices. Why? Laziness? Extreme CYA? Fear of alienating audiences who want the same recycled garbage slop spoon-fed into their glutinous waiting mouths? All of the above? Fuck it, who knows, all I know is that...we used to go to the movies to be entertained. Now we go to eat popcorn and fall asleep. I know why movies have to be this slick and commercial and dumbed-down...but I don't understand why they have to be so bland and boring too.

This summer's Green Lantern wasn't the odd one out, it was the nadir of a pattern. All the comic book movies were bad, just in different ways (from watchable to generic to coma-inducing). Big budget doesn't have to be so fucking horrible. But for some reason, it almost always is (see: Battleship, GI Joe: Retaliation, Men in Black III aka ‘Who Needs a Script, This is a Will Smith Sequel,’ every movie which features famous historical figures fighting zombies or vampires, et all).

And 2012 looks to bring us more of the same. And we love it, scarfing it down and throwing it up and gobbling it back down again like the Monty Python Mr. Creosote scene. We’re the Nostalgia Critic generation, pop-culture regurgitation, "Hey, look at this stuff from our childhoods, lets mock it and revere it at the same time." All these remakes and reboots and re-adaptations. They're doing a new Spiderman, no surprise there -10 years later, it's time to reboot it again. We're ouroboros culture, the land of redos all summer long and reruns all year round.

And worse…we don’t seem to care.

Ouroboros Culture Wars #1 - "You’re living in the past, man!”

“Has Hollywood Run Out of Ideas?” 

That's the only entertainment headline more clichéd than “Saturday Night Dead” or “Celebrity Junkie Found Dead.” But these days, it seems truer than ever. Forget the blockbuster borefests, the recycled rehashes of sequel-prequel-requel garbage shoveled into summer multiplexes for the lobotomized teens. Let’s just focus on ‘good’ movies (and I use that term very loosely).

Aren’t there good present-day stories to tell? Have we really run out of new ideas? Some would say that there haven’t been new story ideas since Shakespeare. And those people are English professors…and retarded. Sure, they’re all basic variations on ‘stranger comes to town’ or ‘family goes on vacation’ or ‘strange teen with amazing abilities’ or ‘two people so much in love but the whole world is against them’ but…there’s always a new or extra twist you can put on it. If you care enough to try.

The movies are an escape. Into a new world we’ve never seen before…or a world which no longer exists. The alternate future or the forgotten past. Choose your destiny.

Out of the nine movies nominated for Best Picture, only Alexander Payne’s The Descendants is set entirely in the present day. The Artist (1927-1932), Moneyball (2002-2003), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2001-2003), The Help (early 1960s), Hugo (1931 with flashbacks to early 20^th century), Tree of Life (present day with flashbacks set in the 1950s), War Horse (1914, 1918, set during WWI), and Midnight in Paris (present day with flashbacks set in the 1920s and 1890s), either have sequences or are entirely based in the past.

Even Superhero movies like Captain America and X-Men: First Class were all period films. Cowboys & Aliens had an Old West setting, Transformers 3 threw in a moon landing opening bit, and both POTC: On Stranger Tides and The Three Musketeers both rode on the coattails of that one good pirate movie all those years ago. Was it just the fun of rewriting history to make American audiences just a little bit dumber…or was it part of this ‘everything-old-is-new-again’ kick? What is it with this nostalgic kick that everyone seems to be on? A Mad Men hangover? That would explain the Pan Am and Playboy Club fiascos…but not this. Do audiences really want to escape into the past? Do they care? I mean, for the filmmakers and performers, I get it. It's enjoyable for the actors to play dress-up with wigs and costumes and accents...and I’m sure it’s plenty of fun for the hair and makeup and props people and set decorators and set designers and directors to lovingly and meticulously recreate a time period but…c’mon.

There are plenty of great modern-day-set stories out there. To quote Christopher Walken in Joe Dirt, “The past is past, the future’s now!” Words to live by.

Normally, I'd blame the meticulous tediousness of the big-budget biopics but they're merely a symptom, not the disease itself. In 2011, we also had The Iron Lady and A Dangerous Method. J. Edgar was a period piece too (although you’d barely know it, since Clint Eastwood shot everything in murky shadows so the whole movie looks like the print was accidentally dropped in octopus ink – seriously, it makes Gordon Willis cinematography look like Disney sitcom lighting). They were well-researched and competently-made but mostly uninvolving and kinda boring. But hey, that's what the Academy loves, right? Slow and historical wins the Oscar race...

Which is why for 2012, we get more hairdo-costume-accent-gasms with the release of The Master (P.T. Anderson's thinly-veiled L. Ron Hubbard biopic), Hysteria (the Brits love their Victorian-era-set films, especially if they're Jane Austen adaptations), Lincoln (Spielberg's long-gestating project about the second-most-famous assassinated US president), Django Unchained (Tarantino's escape-slave-revenge-love-story that uses the word 'nigger' more than all his other films combined), and the adaptation of my most hated of all forced-reading books, The Great Gatsby (it can't be any worse than the last adaptation starring Robert Redford with a botched Coppola script), and On the Road (a belated adaptation of a beatnik 'trapped-in-amber classic' that Coppola's been trying to get made for over 30+ years). And of course, the 'Why even bother?' trifecta of yet another whack at the scratching post for Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, and Great Expectations.

Oy.

Ouroboros, for those of you who don't know, is a serpent or a dragon which eats its own tail, satisfied in perpetuity by the consumption of itself. It's synonymous with the symbol for infinity (∞) and that's the problem here; it feels like we're stagnating. Woody Allen pulls out an idea he had in the 1970's, does a quick rewrite, 'good enough,' shoots it. Martin Scorcese makes a movie where the most interesting parts are the old footage of films shot 100 years ago. Whether it's segregation or baseball economics or the invention of Facebook or the stuttering saga of King Louis VI or 9/11 (over and over and over), it usually has all the impact of a made-for-TV movie-of-the-week...only released in theaters and nominated for awards.

"Hey! Remember that? That shit that just happened! Remember? Well here it is again! Enjoy!"

We're an ouroboros culture. We just want to feast on what's familiar, cannibalizing the past for our own entertainment (we're never surprised by how good we taste because we expected as much). We want to eat something when we're young, have children, and then see that same thing again regurgitated into our children's open waiting mouths (like a robin redbreast caught in a time warp - only with bad movies posing as comfort food). We want to hear others mocking the same shit we just consumed (literally, if the success of Human Centipede series is to be believed). But mostly...we just want more of the same old same.

Framing Devices: A Grave Warning

Two movies this year, J. Edgar and The Iron Lady, represent everything wrong with biopics. And both contain a use of the most awkward of framing devices; old people remembering their lives in the past. From Water for Elephants to Chaplin to Little Big Man (hell, even a League of Our Own pads its runtime with this plot machination), it's an easy shortcut for the anti-voiceover crowd. "See? It's not voiceover, it's a person talking about their life to a third-party or their own hallucinations, totally different!"

At first, it seems necessary, utilizing an audience surrogate (usually a young naive man or a biographer - see Anthony Hopkins in Chaplin as the writer-surrogate character) to over-explain to the audience who everyone is and what's going on (see also: J. Edgar's "The first lady..." "You mean Mrs. Roosevelt?" line for how stupid it thinks its audience is). The audience surrogate (who is also the filmmaker surrogate, allowing the writer-director to voice all the possible character criticisms through dialogue in awkward 'please explain yourself, sir' pseudo-conversations).

This framing device is usually done under the guise of ‘I’m dictating my memoirs’ or ‘I’m testifying in open court’ as a way of tying together fragments of memory. For a while, it works, as we seesaw between time periods and the not-voiceover guides us along the gentle storytelling current. But it becomes this tortured, strained, creaky contraption, wheezing as it shifts back and forth in time, becoming more unnecessarily complicated as it attempts to simplify what began as a very simple story. By the end, the film collapses under the weight of its own pretensions and gimmicks, becoming a chore to sit through instead of just an enjoyable piece of biopic fluff.

And at the end of the day, all you're left with are good actors buried under bad old-age makeup, which, despite using many of the best makeup artists in town, always makes the actors resemble James Woods in Mississippi Burning (or worse, Billy Crystal in old-age makeup - see also Mr. Saturday Night, The Princess Bride, The 2012 Oscars, etc). They become musty, dusty, decomposing half-melted-wax sculptures/mausoleum figurines, all while they wax nostalgic with folksy recitations of their history in their trademark 'old-person voices.' So yeah, the actors get to have their over-the-top dramatic fun with age-spotted makeup and wispy-haired bald-caps (latex-assisted acting that I like to call ‘histrionics in prosthetics’), embracing all the joys of ‘playing old’ (which, for actors, is a joy akin to ‘playing ugly’ or ‘playing asshole’ or ‘playing retarded’) but what about the audience? Why should we care?

Does anyone want to see these parts? Are they interesting? Did anyone say, 'I don't want to see Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in the 80's, when all the interesting stuff happens, I want to see her in the present day, old and decrepit and babbling near-incoherently to her dead husband and looking like Julia Sweeney's Dame Sarah Kensington on Saturday Night Live's Theatre Stories  (endless scenes which constitute the first 20 minutes and last 10 minutes of a 110 minute movie). Does anyone want to see Robert Downey Jr. or Leonardo DiCaprio fat and bald and wrinkled like a young Benjamin Button, stumbling and mumbling around like the grandfathers of vaudeville, instead of more scenes with them young and energetic and, oh-I-don't-know, actually doing stuff that interesting and important instead of the modern day scenes which are usually just them in bad makeup, sitting around and thinking to themselves?

Note to filmmakers; we know what voiceover is. We like it. We accept it.

The Shawshank Redemption didn't need a scene at the beginning and the end of Morgan Freeman in bad old-age makeup on a park bench, 'Lemme tell ya a story there, young fella,' because...we've seen movies before. Neither did Goodfellas. Main characters talk directly to the audience all the time. This is allowed. Just use voiceover. It serves the same purpose as the framing devices but it cuts out 20-30 minutes of boring useless scenes and refocuses the story tighter. You're already cramming an entire life into 100-150 minutes. Don't waste time that you don't have with extraneous monologues to fictional characters. Just let the main character be the narrator, reliable or unreliable, without pretext. Let them tell their story and let the viewer decide what to believe. This half-assed workaround is a contrivance (and worse, always a fictional one at that).

Not that most of these movies would be great films if you just cut out all the old-person-makeup-framing-devices but...they would have been more watchable and bearable.

She's Still Dead, Right?: Part II

Whitney died the night before the Grammy’s (she planned that well – if she planned it at all). Perfectly timed to capitalize on that event…but she also happened to die during black history month (the irony of this was apparently lost on everyone). Still, like most dead celebrities, it was the best thing to happen to her career. The Phantom-of-the-Paradise effect kicked into full swing. Which brings me to the iTunes controversy…

So…iTunes UK has a suspicious conveniently-timed price hike on a couple of Whitney albums and the greedy Sony is behind it (the way Amazon does the price-fixing based on internet cookies – so what else is new?). And? So? Sony anticipated our dead-artist fascination and priced accordingly. Really, what’s more disturbing; raising the prices of an artist’s recordings right after they die…or the public’s insatiable need to buy up an artist’s recordings BECAUSE they just died?

Sony is merely capitalizing, albeit quite greedily, on our morbid curiosity. We’re the real sick ones here. I’m still not sure why everyone tuned into the Grammy Awards – a record 14.1 rating (did they think her ghost was going to make a special appearance? For the clips easily available on Youtube? For LL Cool J and his ‘let’s everyone pray to Jesus together’ moment? What?). The corporations start the fire, we fan the flames.

See…there are two phases of celebrity death.

Phase I: Tearful mourning. 'What an unexpected unavoidable tragedy that took everyone by surprise and was in no way the end result of years of stupid self-destructive behavior which resulted in a death that was a long time coming and God and Jesus and our prayers go out to the family and I know he/she's looking down upon us right now." This phase doesn’t last long (but everyone pretends that it lasts forever).

Phase II: Capitalization and Commercialization. Like all tragically-dead musicians, her albums will sell big for the next month or so (the ones you would expect; Greatest Hits, Ultimate Collection, and Bodyguard OST) climbing the charts. Then they'll move up the release date for her last completed film. And then of course, the Tupac-ization. New best-of collections, new unreleased recordings, new concert CDs and DVDs...the dead have no claim to the profits that the living reap from squeezing every last drop from their corpses. Then they'll fast-track a Bodyguard sequel into development (probably Rihanna and Channing Tatum...or maybe they'll do something really creative and flip-flop the races/genders, like Taylor Swift and Shaq or Justin Bieber and Halle Berry or maybe even Usher and Scarlett Johansson).

We’re still riding out the second wave. Phase II is a dead horse of corporate greed.

Speaking of flog-worthy dead horses…Saturday Night Live was on the other night. Hosted by Maya Rudolph. It was alright but free of any surprises (SNL hasn’t had balls since they fired Norm MacDonald). I knew they wouldn’t do a “Whitney Houston in Heaven” joke (smuggling crack cocaine through the pearly gates?). 

No, they’ll mock her in life but not in death. That’s bad taste? Why? You can’t drive the dead to kill themselves. Oh, so apparently, it’s only okay to make fun of celebrity junkies when they’re still alive. It’s only when they die that those jokes aren’t funny (see that Britney Murphy update piece that was pulled from online when she died two weeks after it aired). Nice hypocrisy.

 

If you ever want to know why Mad TV in the late-90's-to-early-00's was funnier than SNL, catch the Whitney-Bobby sketches. SNL played it safe, with Maya Rudolph's Whitney who is just a little crazy, more diva than crackwhore. Mad TV had their Whitney (played to perfection by Debra Wilson) turning her home into a crackhouse and wandering around in a crack-haze stupor, singing her words as a coke-nosed Bobby slapped her ass (see on Youtube - Whitney's MTV Cribs, Whitney's Christmas Interview, Whitney’s MTV Tribute – always ripping off her wig and spontaneously bursting into eyes-closed high-notes). SNL always had to toe the line, play it safe, just in case they could get Whitney on the show or not to piss off her record company. But Mad TV knew they could never get any big name star hosts or musical guests...so they had nothing to lose by ripping celebrities apart limb-by-limb. Satire with a sledgehammer. My favorite kind.

Where was I? Oh yeah…

TOO SOON!

Doesn’t matter what it is, Holocaust or AIDS or 9/11 or the latest dead celebrity (especially those who died from their own stupidity)…it’s always too soon.

“Bad taste?” No, bad taste is doing ‘Whitney’s a crazy crackhead’ jokes for 15 years and then the day after she dies, wiping her slate clean and tearfully mourning her (reference SNL + Brittany Murphy shit). Death doesn’t erase the past. There’s being respectful and there’s rewriting history.

“Too soon?” Not true. These jokes are either always okay or never okay. It’s either always funny or it’s never funny. But you can’t pick and choose. Celebrities will be junkies. That’s what they do. Either mock them in life AND in death…or never at all. But make fun of them in life and then pretend that you never did in death…that’s really inappropriate. Actually, it's just plain wrong.

As The Onion always says, 'Death is funny.' And as I always say, 'Tragedy is no excuse for concealing the truth. And death is no reason to lie about someone's life.’ 

Hey, I’m compassionate. I can feel grief and sorrow. I feel sorry for Whitney's daughter but...that young girl's parents are Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown. She never really had a chance. I'm not saying this to be mean-spirited, I just think death is no reason to lie about someone's life.

The tragedy wasn't just now. The tragedy wasn't her death. The tragedy happened 10, 15, 20 years ago, when she fell headfirst into drug addiction and celebrity crazy. The late-night-punchline transformation. Her voice was gone, her career was shattered, her life was flushed away long ago. She didn't have much left to offer the world. She's dead. It's sad. But when the real tragedy happened (the sweaty cracked-out drug days), everyone treated it like one big joke. So now that the last gasp is gone and her addiction finally took her life, everyone is playing serious again. And to me, that just rings hollow.

Why do we do this? Because we don’t want people to make fun of us after we’re dead. But that’s still no excuse for lying about the deceased while the rest of us are still alive.

Whitney Houston - She's Still Dead, Right?

A conversation from yesterday.

“Whitney Houston’s funeral is today.”

“Oh…she’s still dead, right?”
“Yeah. I’m taping it. Aretha Franklin and Alicia Keyes are going to sing. Kevin Costner is going to be there too...”
“He’s not going to sing, is he?”
“No.”
“Good. I still won’t watch it though…”

The funeral. A star-studded event, just like the Grammy’s…the Whitney’s? Sure! Why not do this as an annual thing? The only difference between the Grammy’s and Whitney’s funeral is that the Grammy’s had slightly less music and Whitney’s funeral had slightly fewer sermons about God and faith (see: acceptance speeches – “Thank you Jesus!”). Meanwhile, everyone competes for who can be the most tearfully earnest and drop the most references to ‘Heaven’ or ‘the Holy Spirit’ or some variation on the phrase ‘I know she’s looking down upon us right now and smiling.’

Still, I’ll take Jesse Jackson over LL Cool J any day (it’s like choosing between being hit by a car or run over by a bus…but still). I still can’t believe they allowed Sir LL to lead the Grammy audience in prayer, to "our fallen sister, Whitney Houston." "Heavenly father, we thank you for sharing our sister Whitney with us...though she is gone too soon, we remain truly blessed to have been touched by her beautiful spirit." Sure, let’s just assume that everyone here is religious and Christian and wants to pray...where the fuck was God for 15 years when she was smoking crack and killing herself? Better point, where were her friends in the music industry? But no, let's have this self-congratulatory schmaltzy bullshit shoutout to another dead waste of talent on the night where we give each other golden trinkets and pretend we’re all good people.

So…yeah. The funeral was much better than the Grammy’s. Better guest stars. The funeral was like a benefit concert. “With special appearances by…” The social event of the season. Dionne Warwick. Stevie Wonder. Mariah Carey. Chaka Khan. Jennifer Hudson. And for someone reason, Tyler Perry (aka “The Worst Thing to Happen to Black People since Crack Cocaine”). Mostly musicians, playing their instruments, dedicating their songs to her, “Whitney…this next one’s for you.” It was great theater.

And, to explain the title of this post (my intent is not to denigrate the dead but to mock the media), I want to focus on the press coverage. So...it's been a week since Whitney Houston died. She's still dead, right? I only ask because they've been doing news stories every day since, with very little in the way of actual factual updates. It's hard to do 'more on this story as it develops' when your story is about a corpse and it can't get any deader.

And the media stories have been, at best, incongruous. They spin the ‘beautiful martyr’ angle, showing her angelic ‘proud strong black sister’ images singing the national anthem or starring in The Bodyguard…then they say ‘What went wrong?’ and show the Diane Sawyer/Oprah interviews with her crack-smoked hoarse voice ("I don't do crack, crack is cheap, crack is whack!") or and sweaty-breakdown clips from her short-lived reality show with her braying ‘BOBBBAY!” over and over…it doesn’t fit. 

If you’re going to reverse spin and rewrite history, at least be consistent. She’s either artist-extraordinaire-cut-down-in-her-prime…or she’s the good-girl-gone-bad-offa-drug-addicted-toxic-lovin'.

She’s either Selina or Dana Plato…but she can’t be both.

And Whitney just got divorced too. Maybe Bobby Brown was the one keeping her alive (that's a scary thought). But people coming on TV and saying, "It was so shocking, I'm so surprised, I never thought this would happen, etc." Really? The only surprising thing is that she didn't die a decade ago. Is this what we're doing, just pretending that this is a great tragedy which nobody saw coming and couldn't have been avoided (and ignoring the fact that she hadn't released a decent album in over 15 years and her voice was seriously shot and her tours were bombing because people walked out and demanded refunds and she had outlived her usefulness and destroyed her own life)? Apparently so.

The great whitewash has already begun, just like Elvis and Michael Jackson and the rest. Her slate cleansed of all sins. The post-mortem cannonization has already begun. 'She was a saint! She was an angel! She was just a troubled soul seeking acceptance!'  Painting her not as a victim but as a martyr to the music industry. Death washes away all your transgressions and leaves you shiny and new. Now all of a sudden she was the greatest musical artist in the history of the universe and her untimely death was an unforeseeable shocking event that nobody could have predicted.

Sad fact is...Whitney Houston looked at Tina Turner's life with Ike and said, 'I want me some of that!" And so she married Bobby and smoked her crackpipe and threw away 15 years of hard work. And now the media is dining out on this story, intent on squeezing every drop of news juice from the rind and sucking every bit of gossipy marrow from the bone, elevating from 'another pathetic celebrity death' to 'national tragedy on par with JFK or Elvis.' Does it matter? Of course not. But it's a nice distraction. To most of us, just like with Elizabeth Taylor or Michael Jackson, we assumed that she was dead already...because technically, in terms of artistic output and celebrity profile, she already was.

I'm sure the toxicology reports will come back with a prescription drug overdose from many mixed medications, along with a little weed, a little coke, and a lot of alcohol. But just like with Anna Nicole and Heath Ledger and all the others, this big-top media carnivalé will continue at least until the toxicology reports come back (probably later still) and will be resurrected and repackaged again when the next celebrity drug addict dies ‘tragically and unavoidably before their time.’ 

That’s the circle of 24-hour news. The circle of life.

More Fucking Shit about Me

To Blog or Not To Blog? That is the question (somewhere, Diablo Cody's head just exploded).

I debated it for a while (why bother, why even try, why waste your time, the world needs another blog from another unpublished writer like it needs another hole in its ozone layer). But then I surrendered to inevitability.

Sure, at first I resisted. I was always that kid in class who wouldn't raise his hand if anyone else had theirs raised (partly for lower expectations if I was wrong, partly because I enjoyed being the only one possibly in the know). Now everyone and their mother has a blog (literally, in most cases) so the novelty has worn off. Now it's vlog...and after that, it'll be iLogs (presumably, Apple-compatible holographic vlog-blogs scanned directly into your retina via a large hypodermic needle protruding from your computer screen).

But too many writers are using blogs as a booster seat to success. It’s adapt or die. If I don’t, I won’t get published at all, I’ll get left behind while lesser-talenteds move ahead of me in line. And that’s even worse. The only thing worse than not succeeding is seeing others succeed instead of you (to paraphrase Gore Vidal).

A prime example being Diablo Cody and her striptease-to-success story (her blog was called ‘The Pussy Ranch’ and had all her stripper stories on it and some LA talent manager-agent-producer was searching for whack-off material, googles ‘pussy,’ stumbles across her stripper blog, 'Hey, ever consider writing a book?’ she does, ‘Hey, ever consider writing a screenplay?’ and boom, fame, money, Oscar, career, backlash, etc).

You can’t make this shit up.

If Diablo Cody, that talentless succubus, that bloated carbuncle of quirkfest teenspeak and eco-whimsy indie-songs, that living symbol of everything wrong with (although I hear Young Adult is quite good) then why not me? (I've never met her, I'm sure she's very nice, I bet she was a good stripper in her day and she comes across as good-humoredly self-effacing in interviews but...goddamn, no offence to her but she sucks).

The main thing that convinced me was when I was sending out queries for my novel (yes, I have a novel, so what, shut up!) and one of the agents sent me back this reply.

I might be interested in looking at the full manuscript. But publishers are always very concerned about an author's ability to market a novel and in his "platform." Have you put together a proposal in which you outline your plans for marketing and promotion in the event that you get the book published? Do you have a Website and an evolving fan base? These are the things publishers will look for. Please let me know if this is the case.

Catch 22: Version 2.0.

Nobody wants you if you don't have a blog - aka 'a viable web presence' and ‘built-in social-network platform’ in buzzword marketingspeak - but if you're unpublished, nobody out there cares what you have to say because they're all just like you. “You can’t be published without already being published” has become “You can’t be published without already publishing yourself online for years…and then also being published in print, where it counts.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So...the phrase 'I'm fucked either way' comes to mind (as does the visual image of the literary industry as that rape-kill dildo from the movie Seven). Might as well give in.

Conventional wisdom states, ‘Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?’ Why buy someone’s book if I can read their blog posts gratis? It’s like if you get daily blowjobs from the girl around the corner…you don’t go and marry her without a prenup. It doesn’t make sense. But a web presence, the blog-twit-self-flagellation shit is no longer optional. It’s mandatory. Sharing your innermost thoughts and personal details online, especially for writers, is as mandatory as masturbation, internet connection, or daily fiber supplements.

Apparently, this is a thing.

Among the main reasons for writers to NOT start a blog:

1. It distracts and takes time away from your main writing.
2. Wasting good material for free.
3. Who will read it, who will care? 

So it's fine. I don't care. If nobody reads this, if I'm just writing for myself, that’s okay too. As the late composure Y.S. Bach said about his music, "I don't write my music for money, I am writing it for God!". Perhaps that was his way of saying he was writing it for you and me and, for him (him being himself, God, who cares).

I'm a big fan of low expectations (expect nothing of anything or anyone and they'll rarely disappoint you). So I'll do this for a while, at least until I get bored or die suddenly, whichever comes first (if these posts stop coming, assume the latter - it's the more interesting variation).

As one of my favorite expressions goes, 'It's all the same shit.' And it is. It really is.

First Impressions and Secondary Expectations

A quick word on titles.

I've been thinking about doing this for a while. But I'm a late arrival to this game. And many of the best site names are already taken. So I decided to go esoteric. Phrases like 'Ouroboros Culture' or 'Anhedoniacs Anonymous' came to mind. Maybe a 'Heaven/Hell' religio joke? The possibilities were endless. But it all seemed so unrelated to the main purpose; to fill empty space with the pencil shavings off the top of my brain (i.e. write about stuff that only I care about and rip apart stuff that other people care about).

Then the Tintin movie was released. And my brain exploded with a euphoric snifter of nostalgia, remembering how much I loved those comics as a kid. The globe-trotting adventures, the drunken comic-relief, and especially, the gleefully ignorant casual racism (see: Tintin in the Congo, The Blue Lotus, etc). No ethnic-stereotype stone was left unturned, from big-nosed Jewish bankers to big-red-lipped Black natives/henchmen to the big-teeth-small-eyes evil Japanese opium dealers...great fun was had by all.

But the best by far was the Arabs. In the land of Tintin, where there were deserts, there were camels, and where there were camels, there were Arabs (well, technically Muslims, but it's never stated specifically). Bearded and belligerent, their heads wrapped up in black or white scarves, they were perfect faceless one-dimensional stereotypes. And when they cursed in anger, they said things like "Lying infidel dogs!" or "Son of a mangy dog!" or, most often (and my personal favorite), "By the beard of the prophet!" (Herge really liked his facial-hair-centric exclamations - see also "By the whiskers of Kurvi-Tasch!")

So I figured...I have a beard. I can accurately predict the future, no different than all the other pundits and prophets out there. Why can’t I call it that? And so it was. 

But I don't want people to get the wrong impression. Despite the blog title, I'm not a religious Muslim. I'm actually an atheist Jew (which is the farthest you can get from 'religious Muslim'). Nobody I've spoken to so far, seems to like the title as much as I do but it's funny and it's memorable, so I'm keeping it.

I told a friend of mine about my decision. Naturally, he was concerned for my safety. 

"The Muslims won't like that." 

"Fuck 'em," I replied cheerily.

"Could you call it, 'By the Beard of a Prophet?'" 

"No. That's not as funny."

"But what if they come after you and try to kill you?" he pleaded. “The Muslims have no sense of humor. That's why they're called Muslims." (if you don't get that joke, you're probably a Muslim)

"Fuck 'em," I reiterated, "They don't know where I live." 

So...yeah, that starts us off on a nice note. Embracing ethnic stereotypes, pissing off the Muslims, a general disregard for all things politically correct...yup. It's all uphill from here...