Some friends who are having a baby in six weeks or so asked me to put together a CD to play during the birth! I imagine they had soothing strings and breathing sounds, perhaps some whales, in mind, but I’ve always had a soft spot for thematic compilations, so I’m thinking more along the lines of “(Push Push) in the Bush” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
Any more ideas?
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Manchester, So Much To Answer For
My mysterious absence over the last two weeks is explained here (two entries published so far; three more TK—one for each day of the week sort of thing).
Two weeks in a five-star hotel was very nice indeed, thank you very much. That it happened to be the one in which Madonna stayed (though I had absolutely no idea—I was totally jetlagged the night we slept under the same roof), and that we were woken one morning (not that it was early) by screaming fans of the group (adopts old-style high-court judge intonation) "Westlife" was merely an added bonus. R, whose knowledge of pop culture is gained exclusively by walking through the room when I’m watching television, asked a young girlie who on earth Westlife were. The young woman just proffered a photo of the group that she happened to be holding. R just nodded and said, “Ah!”
Actually, my biggest thrill was seeing so many Mancunian males sporting the “funky chop” haircut. Not because I liked it, but because I can finally picture WTP is going on with K’s hair.
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Friday, August 13, 2004
I [Heart] the CBC Olympic Coverage
My love letter to the CBC is in Slate today. In the interests of snark, I had to exaggerate my feelings rather. Should anyone doubt it, let me say it loud and pround: I love you, Canada!
Only 30 minutes to go. (Thank God I have a television in my office. For keeping up with the news. Yeah, that's the ticket.)
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Wednesday, August 11, 2004
I Didn't Hate It
I’ve never seen worse reviews for an important director’s movie than Spike Lee got for She Hate Me.* (Slate’s “Summary Judgment” rounded them up here. An example: Entertainment Weekly called it "racist, homophobic, utterly fake, and unbearably tedious.")
I saw it last night, and while there’s no doubt it is deeply, deeply flawed, I certainly didn't hate it. First, the movie’s problems: At two hours 20 minutes, it’s at least 50 minutes too long. There are about eight big themes, which is about six more than it needed and could handle. Similarly, there are WAY too many characters (just because you can get big stars to do cameos, it doesn’t mean you should). Some of the acting was atrocious (Woody Harrelson should be banned from movies on the basis of this performance). The political content was laughably lame and tin-eared (though, predictably, it was very well-received by the Seattle audience). And, I swear, I would’ve walked out if they’d inserted one more absolutely unnecessary explanatory clause along the lines of (NOT verbatim; the real thing was even worse) “Watergate, a break-in that revealed massive corruption at the very highest levels of government and brought down a president” or “The XFL, that lame-ass fake National Football League rip-off.”
The highlight was very definitely Kerry Washington, who played the “she” of She Hate Me: the main protagonist’s former girlfriend, now a lesbian who brings him some serious cash by introducing him to 18 rich, successful, and mostly glamorous Sapphists who want his sperm for $10,000 a sex act. It’s a ridiculous role, but she manages to turn a character written as a two-dimensional ball-buster into a sympathetic, loving person we’d all be overjoyed to spend the rest of our lives with. For a young actor, she’s done some amazingly good work, apparently under the radar. She was the lead in the underappreciated movie Lift (which also starred SHM actor Lonette McKee, who doesn’t seem to get much work even though she’s always wonderful). She was also outstanding in The Human Stain, where for my money she outshone Nicole Kidman and Sir Anthony Hopkins, which is no small feat. (She was also excellent in the very hot girl-on-girl action in She Hate Me.)
Spike Lee does something intangible very well. Even when I dislike the characters, the setting, and the plot, I almost always end up being emotionally overwhelmed by his films. For all its many faults, that was definitely the case with She Hate Me, and it counts for a lot.
*OK, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut got even bigger pans, but c’mon, it deserved them.
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Thursday, August 05, 2004
I [Heart] American Candidate
I put off watching American Candidate for a couple of days—it seemed like the kind of show that you record because it sounds worthy and then don’t watch because you’re too busy taking in the ancient episodes of The Simpsons and Law & Order that TiVo has gathered in its suggestions folder. I’m glad I hit play before its place was taken by English soaps and Olympic documentaries.
Poor Chrissy Gephardt—she turned out to be a sacrificial lamb. Being the first person eliminated is the reality show equivalent of finishing fourth in the Olympic trials: “the worst place in the world,” as they liked to tell us on NBC. First her dad drops out after he’s expected to do well (wasn’t he the first candidate eliminated during the primaries?), then the pretend candidate with the real-world political pedigree gets sent home the first week. 2004 hasn’t been kind to the Gephardts’ electoral ambitions. The triumphalism of the other candidates was a little hard to take—weird LA guy Bob had a ridiculous speech in the voting booth in which he said he’d been looking forward to making change with her, but then after watching her in action, he was disappointed to find “she couldn’t joust.” Joust? Well, he had just gotten medieval on her ass in the booth.
It’s clear that the most important element to the game is a good campaign manager. Chrissy chose a pal, which is nice—John was a sweet, loving guy who gave her great support when she got the ax—but he wasted too much time at the beginning, pratting about waiting to find out if Patrick Kennedy was going to make it to the rally (and I guess that was a no—never trust a Kennedy, Chrissy!). And in the end, press releases just didn’t matter—it was all about getting bums on seats in the rally venue. With Chrissy’s contacts, she should’ve been working the phones, lining up people to pack her rally. It didn’t matter who they were—you don’t get more points for one of the attendees being a Kennedy or a former majority leader. Hell, Joyce didn’t even have a venue for her rally until a few hours before the event, and she got the third-largest tally. (She also has a very tall, pale shadow for a campaign manager. He’s about as much use as a plastic poker.)
Chrissy and her campaign manager disparaged Keith’s decision to have his boyfriend be his campaign manager (“there’s a breakup [waiting to happen]”), but Keith was fierce, voting with his heart rather than tactically to remove the other gay candidate, even though his partner recommended otherwise. I love Bruce’s CM, transsexual Kayla, though she seems a strange choice for the job, since she doesn’t seem to have any experience, nor does she seem to feel particularly comfortable with people, which would seem to be requirement of retail politics. I usually don’t care for animal-rights activists (they tend not to support a woman’s right to enjoy bullfighting), but Bruce sure seemed like a cool Christian.
Park is going down—or I sure hope so. He’s the front-runner because he’s from Hicksville and could turn out a lot of folks to his rally. It gave him a lot of power in the tied first elimination event, but his heavy-handed attempts teach Chrissy Gephardt a lesson about the evils of abortion weren’t very tactful. I guess I shouldn’t be so harsh on a guy who’s done relief work in Africa, but he is one unbearable Bob Jones U. graduate.
I saw The Manchurian Candidate on Sunday—a nice bit of mainstream Hollywood fare well worth the 50-minute wait for the bus (as the woman waiting with me said, “I defend Metro to all my friends, and then …”). Meryl Streep is amazingly, brilliantly, wickedly fabulous. (Though why everyone’s comparing her character to Hillary Clinton, just because they’re both white, fiftysomething, female senators who were married to powerful but disappointing men before they were elected to the upper chamber, I just can’t fathom. All the reviews that make this parallel cite similar hairstyles as evidence for the claim. Streep had the same hair-do in The Hours; critics, if you’re going to make the comparison, at least have the guts to do it for the right reasons!)
As you may have heard, the queen of diamonds is absent from this version of the movie, replaced by a trigger phrase. At school, my friends and I were obsessed with developing a secret word that would—how to put this tactfully, or at least without grossing out every single reader that wanders over here—act as a laxative. We all claimed we wanted to achieve this trick in order to solve the terrible problem of constipation, but we knew it really was so we could whisper said word when one of us was called to the front of the class to solve a math problem.
Perhaps the oddest part of the movie was the echo between the implausible whiff of incest between Streep’s Sen. Eleanor Prentiss Shaw and her son, vice-presidential nominee Rep. Raymond Shaw, and the very odd (though, I’m sure, quite innocent) opening line of Vanessa Kerry’s speech to the Democratic Convention last Thursday: “As someone who knows all 6 foot 4 inches of my dad best …”
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Sunday, August 01, 2004
Sitting in the Garden, Looking at the Peaches
Garden peaches
Yesterday evening, R came in from the garden bearing peaches. Last year, it was all about the plums. This year the plums are underachieving, but the peaches and pears are in overdrive.
I feel slightly odd eating fruit from the garden—it feels like stealing. Everyone knows you're supposed to get your food from the store. (The exception to this rule is the tomato—my dad and grandad were both keen tomato-growers, and family gatherings often included discussions of trusses.)
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Invasion of the Body-Snatchers
I just finished reading Murder in the 4th Estate, by Peter Deeley and Christopher Walker, a 1971 book about Britain’s first kidnapping, which I bought last week, more or less randomly, at Powell’s in Portland.
I’m not quite sure why I even picked it up—though I suspect it was its location in the journalism section of the store. Muriel McKay, the victim, was married to Alick McKay, an Australian newspaper executive, who a few weeks before the Dec. 29, 1969, kidnapping, had been named to the No. 2 spot at what was at the time the world’s largest-circulation newspaper, the News of the World. He’d been hired from rival publishing group IPC by his compatriot Rupert Murdoch, who’d just survived a drawn-out and acrimonious battle for the paper with Robert Maxwell. The crime occurred just weeks after Murdoch launched the Sun, in the words of the book, “a brash, campaigning tabloid with a healthy predilection for printing photographs of semi-naked girls.” Apparently, the kidnappers, two Trinidadian brothers with little talent for crime, were after Murdoch’s wife (of the time), Anna.
Told in a very straightforward, non-sensationalistic style by two broadsheet-newspaper staff writers, the details were hardly very scintillating (there’s no attempt to speculate on McKay’s treatment post-abduction, for example), but it was fascinating to see how rudimentary British police methods were 35 years ago—even elite London police had no access to tape recorders, much less effective bugging devices or helicopters. In these days of CSI, Cold Case Files, and Without a Trace, the 1969 investigation seems like the work of the Keystone Kops.
The police never found Muriel McKay’s body, and the contrast between the apparently efficient abduction and the laughable attempts to squeeze a ransom out of the victim’s family led to speculation that a third party was involved at the beginning of the crime but that he or she walked away when they realized that the person snatched was not Anna Murdoch. At the trial, Arthur Hosein, the older brother, claimed that Robert Maxwell was behind the kidnapping. At the time the book was written, Maxwell was an outsider in elite British society—as an Eastern European Jew he never exactly fit in—but he’d been an MP and was part of the Establishment, and the claim was dismissed as "untenable." These days, 13 years after his mysterious death at sea, outlandish speculation about his wild life of crime and intrigue is pretty much the norm.
Because of McKay’s journalism connections, I was reminded of the Patty Hearst case, which obsessed me when I was a kid. At this year’s SIFF I saw Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (which now appears to have been renamed Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army), a slightly credulous documentary whose interesting topic almost makes up for bog-standard storytelling technique. As in the case of the Hearsts, the McKay family’s press connections fed a media frenzy that severely hampered the investigation of the crime.
I don’t remember anything about the McKay case, but I have a very clear memory of the 1975 kidnapping and death of Lesley Whittle, by Leslie Nielson, the "Black Panther." Adam Mars-Jones, whose father was a high-court judge, wrote an incredible story about Nielson, his crimes, and his trial called “Bathpool Park.” (In Britain it appeared in the collection Lantern Lecture and Other Stories; it’s available in Fabrications in the United States.) If you only read one creepy and brilliant story about a British kidnapping, let it be “Bathpool Park.” Weirdly enough, I was just looking at the story, and according to Mars-Jones, Nielson studied Murder in the 4th Estate when he was planning his own kidnap operation.
(I hadn’t thought what good literature kidnapping has helped create before tonight. I loved Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping, and although the crime in Bel Canto isn’t a standard kidnapping, holding hostages for ransom is, well, kidnapping, right? I’ve also written quite a bit about body-snatching myself.)
