The Blog of Chloë and Pete

2003-08-21T13:13:00.000-04:00

So all the i's have been dotted, t's crossed, colors changed, images uploaded, and links checked. I think we're good.

As for this blog: I'll leave it up and running, because exporting's a pain, but from now on updating will take place pretty much exclusively at the new site. The watchmail.com email address will still work, but if you leave comments on this site, I'm less likely to see them than I am at the new site.

2003-08-18T17:09:00.000-04:00

I got Instalinked! Hello, Instareaders!

I'm in New York right now, alternating between trying to find a new apartment, working, seeing friends, and seeing Korean films -- Road Movie and Jail Breakers tonight, YMCA Baseball Team tomorrow. Hence the lack of postage, or real progress on the Future Spiffy Blog Under My Real Name Thank You Very Much. It is coming. Soon. Very soon. Soon as I figure out the mysteries of CSS soon.

Also, I turn 25 on Friday, and you know for the quarter-century mark a girl's got to throw an exciting party. A friend of mine in his thirties (Beta Reader D, actually) said to me yesterday, "That's not too young." "Yes, it is!" I cried in anguish.

I feel like I ought to post something, y'know, substantial, to justify all this sudden traffic. I'm not feeling particularly substantial, despite being able to wax at great length, earlier today, on Bob Riley's political acumen, or lack thereof. Riley is trying to justify a tax increase on the idea that Alabama Christians have to look after the poor among them. It is not going well. When a rabidly pro-tax Republican gets into office by a very narrow margin and then, after just nine months, turns around and says it is not only necessary for the state to charge more but a moral duty for residents to pay more . . . I'd be skeptical too, if I lived in Alabama. That said, it is nice to see Grover Norquist so upset. (A Minority of One, which is firmly pro-plan and pro-Riley, has more details, as does Chip Taylor.)

Part of Riley's problem is that he's trying to sell an extremely complicated tax package: it goes up for some, down for others, up for some businesses but not for DaimlerChrysler, and so on and so forth. And he has this sudden read-my-lips reversal to explain. I suppose you could give him credit for doing something big, instead of hemming and hawing and weaseling his way into a budget and then finally blaming the legislature for anything that doesn't work (as did a certain governor whose name rhymes with "Honey Fleur-dew"). But if I were an Alabamian I'd be asking why, at a time when Alabama is working overtime to attract businesses -- and not just the high-profile Hyundais and Hondas, but lower-tier suppliers and manufacturers -- that the state would suddenly want to take on a $1.2 billion tax increase. On the one hand, a more smoothly functioning state will look more attractive to investors. On the other hand, will a $1.2 billion increase lead to a more smoothly functioning state? There's Riley's problem in a nutshell, as best I can tell -- it's not that he has to sell Alabamians on the idea of a hole in the state budget, because that's well-known, or that the state's K-12 educational system needs to be upgraded, because that generally sells well, even in Alabama. But I don't see him selling well this idea that they can solve the state's problems by allowing the government to handle more money. That's a tough sell, especially in Alabama, and I'm not entirely sure Riley understands the magnitude of the challenge he's set for himself. To sum up, I don't see this tax plan passing.

It occurred to me as I was writing this that I haven't heard a damn peep out of South Carolina. Remember Mark Sanford? Mr. I'm-Going-to-Ostentatiously-Close-the-Governor's-Mansion-and-Host-Barbecues-to-Save-Money? I was about to say that Riley could take a few PR tips from Sanford, and then I realized I'm woefully ignorant of what Sanford's been up to lately. PolState.com and Stateline.org, while usually super-helpful, aren't producing much. Maybe one of my new Instareaders has the dirt on South Carolina.

2003-08-15T13:32:00.000-04:00

I'm not using that template.

I'm also not buying a house. It was proven, rather quickly and decisively, that I cannot afford to right now.

I had the luxury of avoiding the blackout, being safe in the ATL at the time; if I'd been at the place I was last living in New York I wouldn't have made it to the office today -- I'm fairly certain very few of my co-workers did. My cell phone went down, briefly. And I noticed -- did anyone else notice this? -- that last night I got considerably less spam than usual.

So I'm still working on The Named Blog of Great Consequence, which right now does not look anything like what I want it to, but we'll get there. In the meantime, celebrate the 56th anniversary of India's independence with Blog Mela. Vande mataram! And hooray for long-functioning democracies!

2003-08-14T12:10:00.000-04:00

So I found a template on Blogskins that I'd like to use. Here's the problem: this particular template is clearly designed for Blogger, not MT, and doesn't allow for such things as comments. Also, MT seems to store its stylesheet information and its HTML separately, and the template throws it all into one file (as Blogger would want), and I'm having a hard time figuring out what should be replaced with what. So I stick in the code and not everything appears on the new page. No comments, for one. No actual entry, for another.

Not quite sure what to do. You can see and download the template here, for what it's worth.

2003-08-14T07:26:00.000-04:00

A note of advice to future professional sports team owners: should you ever decide to purchase an NBA team, an NHL team, and the arena in which they play all at once, from a very large, publicly traded company with a lot on its hive-mind, and a reporter asks you why it's taking so long to complete the sale, do not respond with complete befuddlement.

In this case the would-be owner is the hilariously named David McDavid, set to take over the Atlanta Hawks and Thrashers, third and fourth, respectively, in Atlanta's professional sports pecking order. (Among the men's teams, at least; I don't know where I'd put the Beat.) The Hawks, for as long as I can remember, have been one of those NBA teams that forever make the eighth seed of the playoffs in the Eastern Conference and last, at most, one round; the only difference is that in the 1980s, with both the Braves and Falcons sunk in utter misery, the eighth seed looked pretty nifty by comparison, and now the collective fandom has higher standards. That, and things haven't been the same since Dikembe Mutombo left. The Thrashers are newer, which means they have never been good, or shown any promise of goodness.

If McDavid can turn these two franchises into good teams, or at least mildly interesting ones, bully for him. It's certainly better for someone who wants to own the teams to own them, rather than Maybe-AOL Time Warner, who inherited them from Ted Turner. But the man isn't exactly inspiring confidence.

In other sports-related news, Tuesday Morning Quarterback is back! But it's not his best outing, not by a long shot. I'm fairly sure he's completely wrong about Alcatel running those "I Have a Dream" cell phone ads -- I distinctly remember it being Cingular, because I remember finding the ads ridiculous. But Cingular is based in Atlanta, not France -- maybe Alcatel owns Cingular? Hmm. At any rate, hopefully when TMQ actually has some football to talk about, things will get better.

2003-08-08T13:46:00.000-04:00

Well, now that Movable Type version 2.64 is up and running on the New-Site-to-Be -- thanks for the support, Paul! -- I have a new project to tackle. Namely, moving. My lease is up September 14th. I'm not happy with my current place, for a number of reasons, and they're apparently not happy with me either, as they were supposed to give me the renewal terms a month ago. So, looking to move.

And as anyone who has ever dealt with the treacherous swamp that is Atlanta real estate can tell you, there's now a little voice whispering in my ear: Buy! Buy! Because that cute little townhouse just straddling the border between Decatur and Avondale Estates will slide up to purr sweet nothings: what property bubble bursting, honey? That's so silly. Don't worry about your 401(k); you didn't need it anyway. You need the sweet, sweet love of equity, and I'm here to give it to you.

Feel free to knock some sense into my head anytime. I'm going to need it.

2003-08-07T12:17:00.000-04:00

I ought to have sworn off City Journal altogether after that piece of homophobic, poorly-argued tripe they published a few months back, but no, here comes Theodore Dalrymple, with a new candidate for the decline and fall of Western civilization: Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Granted, it's not a very good book. No, it's not. I got a hold of it sometime in my teens, and was rapidly bored and disappointed by all the John Thomases here and Lady Janes there; as far as Novels That Will Turn Your Children Into Raging Sex Fiends go, it's nowhere near, say, Peyton Place, or, for that matter, the two books my parents half-heartedly tried and failed to hide from me, White Palace and The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. LCL is narrow in its view; but so is Dalrymple in his:

It is, of course, a common prejudice that censorship is bad for art and therefore always unjustified: though, if this were so, mankind would have little in the way of an artistic heritage and we should now be living in an artistic golden age.

Does anyone, at the time of living in an artistic golden age, look around and say, "This is an artistic golden age!" Come to think of it, when was the last artistic golden age? And where? For whom?

In focusing exclusively on LCL -- published, conveniently, in 1960 -- Dalrymple gets to throw out all the preceding great contributions of the obscene, the vulgar, and the just plain dirty: from Catullus's rhymes to Boccaccio's story of putting the devil back into Hell (which I hope to read, out loud, at a party someday. In fact, I hope Dalrymple is there) to medieval Japanese shunga prints to Ulysses. Poor Constance Chatterley has to stand condemned while Molly Bloom gets off scot-free. I think Dalrymple knows that if he tried looking beyond a particular vision of Britain -- as a proud descendant of residents of Bedlam and Newgate, I laughed at loud at his "A nation famed not so long ago for the restraint of its manners is now notorious for the coarseness of its appetites" -- his argument in favor of government censorship would fall apart.

Or is he? I'm not sure. I'm not sure he's sure. By blaming the 1960 trial, he makes it sound as if the government dam was the only thing holding back the massive tide of British coarseness; yet his overall argument seems to be that society has failed in reining itself in (or that the upper classes have failed in reining the lower classes in), not that the government has failed in reining society in. Somehow I find it hard to believe that, in his heart, Dalrymple wants Tony Blair deciding what City Journal can publish and what it can't. He doesn't seem entirely willing to consider the legal and political implications of his cultural hissyfit.

I find all this despair a little silly, in truth. It depends heavily on the idea that once we cross some particular threshhold of coarseness, there's no going back, which is just not true, because coarseness, like anything else in the popular taste, goes in and out of style. It would be unthinkable now for an NC-17 rated movie to get the kind of wide release and discussion that Last Tango in Paris did. India has its bawdy history, with Krishna as representative, but actresses working out of Mumbai fear for their reputations if they kiss onscreen. Marilyn Manson may get ink in the UK but the US has more or less moved on. The same culture that produced Fanny Hill and "What, with my tongue in your tail?" also produced the Victorian era and its famed emphasis on modesty; so who knows what the British beer-guzzling louts and their crass American counterparts will come up with eventually.

I should say, though, that a similar argument to Dalrymple's was made -- but far better, and with much less condescension and confusion of logic -- by Margaret Talbot for The New Republic once, on Bettie Page, no less. If you ever find an essay in the magazine's archives titled "Chicks and Chuckles," I highly recommend it.

2003-08-06T15:27:00.000-04:00

Y'know, there's nothing like agreeing to a mix CD swap with someone else to make your music collection shrink before your very eyes.

2003-08-05T16:14:00.000-04:00

Y'all know that the Brothers Chaps are Braves fans, right? Not only is there a Braves cameo in Dangeresque 2: This Time It's Not Dangeresque 1, but on this version of the home page, put your cursor on "Store" and let it linger. Yeah, I miss him too.

I bring that up because my dear Alastair and I have taken to quoting Homestar Runner to each other. We are officially about six months behind that particular curve, but I don't care; "I'm sad because I'm flying" is just too good.

2003-08-05T16:04:00.000-04:00

As for the New, Improved, Sassy Blogger-Free Site: it's not going well. Let's just say that, while I generally flatter myself that I can work my way around a computer, MySQL is not mine at all. Frankenstein points to the potentially more clueless-user-friendly TypePad; maybe I should switch over.

Meanwhile, last night in a bookstore I picked up a copy of Le Divorce, saw the promotional bits for the upcoming movie, saw Thierry Lhermitte's name in the cast list, and said, "Oooooooooh." But my secret California goyishe blogging boyfriend (as opposed to my not-so-secret and not-so-goyishe one) says to stay away. I'm torn. On the one hand, Thierry Lhermitte! On the other hand, Matt Welch! Every person who finds the male body attractive should have this problem.

2003-08-04T16:38:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to put together some thoughts on South Korea's film quota -- namely, the rule that South Korean cinemas must spend a certain amount of time per year showing home-grown films. The closest equivalent Americans would be familiar with would be the rules governing Canada's radio and television industries. There's a really good discussion going on at the Korean Film Discussion Board, with most people against eliminating the quota outright.

The general belief is that "Hollywood" would swamp Korean cinemas, mainly by building their own multiplexes (illegal under the current rules, if I'm following Grady's arguments correctly -- Grady being Grady Hendrix, of Subway Cinema fame; scroll down about a third of the way of the KFDB page to see his argument) and drive out the Korean films. That wouldn't necessarily mean, I should point out, eliminating the crappy films. I suspect that people like me, who see fewer than 50 foreign films per year, have a slightly distorted view of the strength of non-American film industries: I'm more likely to see a highly praised film like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance or Barking Dogs Never Bite than I am a low-brow comedy like Wet Dreams, simply because the former are more likely to filter up to me. Arguing that the Korean film industry doesn't "need" the quota system because of its recent strong showings (my beloved Attack the Gas Station! beat Star Wars Episode I at the domestic box office) and the quality of its films is a little myopic; there's no guarantee the industry will continue to flourish.

Generally, however, I don't like this idea of "cultural exceptions" to be preserved by government regulation; does it then get to decree what films are "culture" and what are not? (The Korean film industry, as I understand it, was under fairly heavy censorship until the early 1990s; the government can still reject films it thinks doesn't portray the Korean military in a favorable enough light, and Too Young to Die was originally rated too sexually graphic to show in Korean theaters.) Not every Korean film is worth protecting from the Hollywood juggernaut, especially with tax dollars; just as Christians might object to "Piss Christ" getting NEA funding here, some Koreans might not necessarily appreciate their money going towards making sure that adulterous sex in arcardes, murderous families, self-mutilation with fishing hooks, and gas station robbers get their time onscreen. Included in Grady's passionate pro-quota argument:

Movies are made by corporations, to promote corporate interests. They are not a public service to an audience. American studios have more money to promote and manufacture their product. Without legal protection, every other film industry on earth is a lamb to the slaughter.

But since movies aren't a "public service" (which I agree with), then why should the Korean government be in the business of helping out Cinema Service, any more than it helps out Hyundai or Samsung?

It's the distribution side of the equation that makes me stop. Quite frankly, I don't know how film distribution works, here, in Korea, or anywhere. If film distribution were a perfect market, then good Korean films ought to be able to knock bad American films out of the park; but I don't think it is -- although I can't entirely say how it isn't, or why not. What, exactly, is the mechanism that puts Gigli on thousands of screens while I have to bend over backward to see YMCA Baseball Team and Jail Breakers -- or, for that matter, an independently made American film such as Chance? And how, exactly, would that mechanism work in Korea if the trade barriers came down?

This is a time when I wish I had a quarter of Megan's eagerly argumentative readers. Megan m'dear, do any of your readers know anything about the film industry? If so, could you send them over here?

2003-07-31T22:16:00.000-04:00

Signed up with Hosting Matters now. Not sure what myrealname.com is actually going to look like. I'd like something a little spiffier than the average template, but what I know about website design can fit in a thimble. I like this template, but I don't think I can cart it wholesale to the new site. And while it would probably make sense in the long run to hire someone to design me something minimally spiffy, the fact is that that Mastercard I mentioned is feeling a little drunk at the moment. Which is to say I probably spent my entire website design budget at an Origins store earlier this week.

A has finished the third draft. In fact, she read it all the way through before I did. I'm hoping she enjoyed it; whether or not she did, it's nice to have such quick friends.

Wait -- here we go: my first control panel! (That's what Hosting Matters gives you to start configuring your site.) Think of this as Portrait of the Artist as a Complete Newbie.

2003-07-31T21:36:00.000-04:00

So myrealname.com is duly registered and paid for. (Well, not yet, really. Mastercard has, out of the goodness of its self-interest, made me a small loan to pay for myrealname.com, and kicked in some near-useless-but-hey Continental frequent flyer miles to boot, and in due time I will pay Mastercard back.)

Anyway, it's mine, MINE, you knaves. No stealing myrealname.com. Not that you would -- it's a common last name, and God knows "Jessica" is a common American first name, but the two together I don't encounter that often -- but now you definitely can't.

On a related note, God bless Mr. Douglas, and not just because he's much more realistic and less ego-dependent about publishing a novel than I am.

2003-07-31T07:50:00.000-04:00

I understand that one cannot construct an adequate public defense of a private life.

Yet Wendell Berry will go on for pages and pages anyway.

I should say that few things irritate me more than a writer who self-righteously thumps his or her (I know there are women writers who've done it, though I can only think of Paul Auster right now) chest and proclaims that the only way to write is with a typewriter, and no amount of public scorn will convince him (or her) to switch to one of those newfangled computer thingies. These are, apparently, people who have never, not once, lost anything, because the reason to write on a computer is not "ease of use." It is contained in one simple and brilliant little word: backup. The original draft of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Conversations at Midnight, and the draft of another book of poems, burned in a Florida hotel fire. Is the world really a richer place because Millay couldn't go home and open up her Zip drive?

So Wendell Berry and I are already not getting along. (Or, rather, I am disagreeing, and Wendell Berry doesn't much care.) And then he goes on to construct a slightly sounder, but still rootless, anti-technology argument. I say "rootless" because it doesn't seem to be grounded in any facts or real observations about the world, other than that Wendell Berry can't find anything to watch on TV. For example:

The statistics of life expectancy are favorites of the industrial apologists, because they are perhaps the hardest to argue with. Nevertheless, this emphasis on longevity is an excellent example of the way the isolated aims of the industrial mind reduce and distort human life, and also the way statistics corrupt the truth. A long life has indeed always been thought desirable; everything that is alive apparently wishes to continue to live. But . . . it was generally agreed that a good life was preferable to one that was merely long, and that the goodness of a life could not be determined by its length. The statisticians of longevity ignore good in both its senses; they do not ask if the prolonged life is virtuous, or if it is satisfactory.

This is a lovely argument until you start thinking about what life expectancy actually means: that people live longer because there are fewer things to kill them young. Berry writes as if some band of scientists took life, like a rubber band, and stretched it, thereby making it thinner; rather than as if, which is closer to the truth, that a great many people (not all, by a long shot, obviously) live not only longer but more comfortable lives, free of polio, malaria, sepsis, smallpox, measles, et cetera. In his world, apparently everybody dropped of painless heart attacks at 60 with smiles on their faces.

Or take this part:

The question of how to end or reduce dependence on some of the technological innovations already adopted is a baffling one. At least, it baffles me. I have not been able to see, for example, how people living in the country, where there is no public transportation, can give up their automobiles without becoming less useful to each other. And this is because, owing largely to the influence of the automobile, we live too far from each other, and from the things we need, to be able to get about by any other means . . .

But if we have paid attention to the influence of the automobile on country communities, we know that the desirability of technological innovation is an issue that requires thinking about, and we should have acquired some ability to think about it.

But what about the influence of the truck on country communities? Not the car, the truck. The truck which picks up food and takes it to distribution centers which ships it to markets where I buy it, thus making money for those country communities -- or it picks up the copies of Harper's that people can then buy, thus making money for that magazine, which can then commission articles in which Berry complains that he doesn't see the positive effects of automobiles.

Skipping ahead:

It is odd that simply because of its “sexual freedom” our time should be considered extraordinarily physical. In fact, our “sexual revolution” is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as an idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of “freeing” natural pleasure from natural consequence. Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty.

Does this argument really hold weight anymore? AIDS has been around pretty much my entire lifetime; teenage pregnancy was a hot topic during the 1990s; even the women on Sex and the City have had to deal with disease, humiliation and unplanned pregnancy out of wedlock; but we are all still, somehow, a bunch of irresponsible pleasure-obsessed hedonists. In a paranoid mood I am tempted to read that last sentence as, "We shouldn't be getting so upset if gay people get sick," but that's not fair to Berry; he's writing, it seems, strictly in a heterosexual domain. And yet:

I don’t want to deny myself the

of bodily involvement in my work, for that pleasure seems to me to be the sign of an indispensable integrity.

Okay, check that. Everybody else is an irresponsible hedonist. Wendell Berry, however, is not only pleasure-seeking but full of integrity -- indispensible integrity! -- in his pleasure-seeking. I don't deny myself the pleasure of bodily involvement in bed, myself, but I don't get up here and tell you that such actions somehow make me a more worthwhile or less flawed person.

It is easy—it is even a luxury—to deny oneself the use of a television set, and I zealously practice that form of self-denial. Every time I see television (at other people’s houses), I am more inclined to congratulate myself on my deprivation.

I have a friend -- Beta Reader D; he used to keep a blog, but had to give it up for graduate school and a forthcoming novel -- with whom I've disagreed violently, in the past, about moral instruction. I think -- I could be putting words in his mouth -- that he would find Berry's efforts to educate the reader in this way at worst inoffensive, possibly laudable and admirable. I find it obnoxious and vapid. But it's part and parcel of my general attempt (to my own eyes; y'all might think me hypocritical) to stay away from the moral lecturing. After some basic absolutes I become a relativist; or, rather, I'm reluctant to generalize from my own experiences. I have a television, unlike Berry, but it doesn't get any reception. This is not to say I have some moral high ground; it's because if I had a TV I'd never get anything done except taping Good Eats reruns. It doesn't mean that other people shouldn't own a TV. By contrast, when Wendell Berry thinks differently -- takes joy in his handwriting, in his non-TV-owning, in his wood-chopping -- and wants to tell other people that they, too, might find joy in such things, I think, "Obnoxious twit." And it's only fair to say that Beta Reader D probably would not. (Hopefully Beta Reader D will show up in the comments section; I haven't seen him around in a while.)

That said: Obnoxious twit.

One last quote:

We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a “world of the future”; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid “futurology” available to us is to take care of those things . . . If you love the freedom and elegance of simple tools, why encumber yourself with something complicated?
And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is

easily drawn.

I wonder -- I really do -- if David Brooks would characterize Berry as a Bobo. I think he would. Which amuses me a great deal.

2003-07-25T15:47:00.000-04:00

Okay. I've looked at Bravenet, I've looked at PowWeb and Lunarpages and iPowerWeb. If anyone wants to recommend a hosting company, feel free. I'm aware that Movable Type is the must-have accessory for the cool blog nowadays. I'm wondering if I could afford EK. Wonder, wonder, wonder.

Note how good I've been at updating this week. Next week there'll be less, since I'll be having lots of work-related meetings. Meanwhile I'll be trying to figure out a damn domain name. myfirstnamemylastname.com? jessicalynn.com is taken, and sounds like a porn site anyway. Anna Beth, who's been at this longer than I have, used to have her first name and last name as her URL and then got some very strange people finding her, if I'm remembering right. I could go with some nifty concept, but who would remember it?

The English translation of my IM screenname (how's that for obscure?) isn't taken. Hmm.

2003-07-24T11:59:00.000-04:00

The good A. C. Douglas has suggested that yes, I should get my own domain and furthermore, don't worry about the Asian film stuff. But I like posting about the Asian film stuff, ACD, even if probably ninety percent of my readers can't do more than say "Ohh-kay, now" when I talk about Lee Jung-jae looking hot in a black leather coat. (Or a blazer. See proof.) It's a public service! Y'all are better people for your increased knowledge of hot Korean actors. Really!

Besides, it makes me feel a little less narcisisstic. Just because I talk about myself all the damn time doesn't mean I'm proud of the tendency.

So I did have dinner with M last night at a nice little kosher sushi place. She showed me a picture of her fiancé, a big guy with a big smile. "The rebbetzin set us up," she said. "She knew I was looking to get married and he was looking to get married, and so . . . " She smiled. "I just knew. Right away." They'd been dating a month when they got engaged. I have not yet reported all the juicy details to my mother, though I can imagine her reaction if I'd gotten engaged to a man I'd been dating a month. "Mazel tov" would not be her choice of words.

I strongly dispute this whole "just know" business. It doesn't seem to work for me, at any rate. I had long and fairly serious conversations about eventual marriage with both of my last two boyfriends, and in both cases, it seems now -- I could always be proven wrong later -- it turned out to be a good thing that we never got as far as ring-buying. But the occasional time I have tried a relationship, or a version thereof, with someone I knew I wasn't going to marry, it's generally ended badly. I usually want the long-term faith even if it flies in the face of all reason. O reason not the need, in a very different, much less tragic context.

If you know, as M does, what your life will be in the long term and the values that will guide it -- she wanted someone, for example, who prays three times a day, as she does -- then I could see how you could just know that another person would fit perfectly into that puzzle. But I don't know what I want. I don't even know where I'm going to be living in July 2005, much less with whom. What I want keeps changing. A commentor on Megan's blog (or Megan and Mindles's blog, I should say) once raised the question: if a relationship doesn't lead to marriage, can you really call it successful? And I thought, well, yeah. I consider both of those relationships successful. At the time the men gave me exactly the love and support and humor I needed, and I gave them (I hope) what they needed, and there just came a time when we needed different things.

I'm a little jealous of her certainty. And she did come dangerously close to pitying me (that "You just broke up with your boyfriend, right?" came almost immediately after showing me the pictures). But -- I might well end up single and Fabulous! at 30 or 35 or 40. I'm not sure. I know I'd like to be married, someday, but I also am learning not to depend so heavily on certain pictures of the future.

Speaking of weddings, if you're wondering what to get that special transcontinental blogging couple, guidance is here.

2003-07-23T10:20:00.000-04:00

The very, very smart Megan has done an admirable job of summing up why she's not posting about Niger, yellowcake, exit plans, Paul Bremer, et cetera, et cetera. If I tried I wouldn't sound nearly that intelligent.

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of Asian film news for y'all, except that The Uninvited, the new film starring the potential future Mrs. Frankenstein, will be out in Korea August 8th.

Oh, no, wait, I do! It's "Secret Wonderland," the title of this year's New York Korean Film Festival. Yay! The schedule includes YMCA Baseball Team, starring Song Kang-ho, whom, as I've said before, I would watch read the phone book; Jail Breakers, from the Attack the Gas Station! / Kick the Moon directing team; Road Movie, which is said to be one of the most thoughtful treatments of a gay character in Korean film, ever; Oasis, which has kicked ass at every festival that's hosted it; and 1997's near-legendary No. 3, which launched the aforementioned Song Kang-ho into stardom.

It's not the best schedule in the world, with many weekday afternoon screenings and all the Jail Breakers screenings taking place after 9 p.m. And no Jeon Ji-hyun just yet. But if you're in New York in August and you want to see good movies, or just spend two hours with Song Yun-ah on a big screen, now you know what to do.

2003-07-22T14:45:00.000-04:00

Archaeologists now believe that the lost portions of the Rosetta Stone largely consist of speculation about Javier Vazquez coming to Atlanta.

Hee! Now that the Skip Caray-Joe Simpson and Pete Van Wieren-Don Sutton teams have been restored, I can be less ambivalent about my hometown team even under the thumb of AOL Time Reallyshouldn'tbeowningsportsteams. Hence linking to the Braves Journal, home of news, rumors and much invective against Shane Reynolds.

By the way, if the Braves picked up Tsuyoshi Shinjo, that would probably be enough to lure me to The Field That Ought to Have Been Named for Hank Aaron. Probably he got signed by someone else ages ago. Sigh . . .

2003-07-21T17:30:00.000-04:00

While mulling over the less-than-compelling question of whether the world needs one more blog, and avoiding work like the plague, I decided to check and see what my future husband Neal Pollack is up to. And found:

Many topics array themselves today on the table of my mind. First, we have last weekend's suicide of the British scientist who served as the point man for the intelligence that may or may not allegedly have been forged but nonetheless led us to depose one of the most brutal tyrants ever, and therefore it doesn't matter. While a dead man is a dead man, certain deaths mean less than others, and could even be called useful. I'll just let that lie fallow for your cogitation.

I think this is a test. If I fail, Neal Pollack will cross me off his list of potential wives, mistresses, and one-night stands, and never will I know the fan-fic-able beauty of a night in the arms of Neal Pollack. Mary Sue, my name is apparently not.

So I'm trying to cogitate. Useful how? Useful for whom? Are people seriously picturing Tony Blair wiping his brow and saying, "Oh, thank God, Cherie, they got rid of that Kelly, we're in the clear now"? Is Neal Pollack trying to imply that Kelly was either mysteriously done away with or pressured into suicide, and thus his death was "useful", or is he making fun of those making fuss over "intelligence that may or may not allegedly have been forged"? Perhaps both. Which would be, in sum, nothing at all. And yet I have spent ten minutes trying to figure out one paragraph, and have cogitated myself into uneasiness. Maybe something sinister did happen. Or not. And we should be upset. Or just mocking.

I still hope Neal Pollack will marry me, though. If he doesn't marry me I'll never know whether he was serious. Or kidding. Or just manipulative. Or hung over. Or he'll marry me but remain forever aloof. Damn you, Neal Pollack! Damn you! Call me!

2003-07-21T10:57:00.000-04:00

It's early. Coffee good. Sluggy Freelance also good. Go give The Artist money!

Was reading the piece on Random House's Peter Olson yesterday. It's not very good -- on and on and on about how Olson is taking a New, Hard-Headed, Cost-Cutting Approach to book publishing, and barely a word about why a New, Hard-Headed, Cost-Cutting Approach might be necessary; lots and lots about how Ann Godoff wasn't making any money, but no actual numbers. It's such an inconsequential piece of journalism Bookslut hasn't even bothered to blog it.

But I was reminded, for the 9,000th time, that even if I do get an agent and a publisher and a contract and so on for The Adventures of Chloë and Pete, it will not mean success -- and when I say "success" I don't mean "the next Jonathan Safran Foer," I mean "sell copies to people who aren't my family and friends, and avoid the Barnes & Noble inventory kiss of death." If publishing is becoming a harder-headed, colder-hearted, more-bottom-line-oriented business, then it is highly unlikely that anybody -- agent, editor, publisher, anybody -- is going to care much about the success or failure of this novel, save its author.

More than a year ago I started this blog in the hope that it would get oodles of hits and make a name for me, a little bit of publicity to help the novel along. See that little rainbow button at the bottom of the screen once you've scrolled down? Press it. See average daily number of hits. Feel free to indulge in Schadenfreude.

If I really do want to follow this plan -- and I'm not even sure it's a good plan anymore, now that everybody from Howard Dean to Neil Gaiman has a blog -- the next step is, I guess, to bite the bullet, buy myrealname.com, and finally start really asking for publicity, as opposed to, "You linked to me? Aw, shucks!" I've thought about buying asianfilmblog.com, I've thought about Movable Type, I've thought about asking Little Willow to design me a nice website. What have I got to hide, at this point?

I think what's stopping me is that then the blog will stop being a lark I can drop for a month and become an obligation, something official and professional. (Plus it would need money, and the idea of spending money on anything before Gus's massive insurance and ad valorem tax bills come due, in August/September, is not particularly appealing.) Am I ready for that? Is this book ready to see the light of day? Am I finally, after four years of writing the novel and three years of writing online without putting my name to my words, going to walk the walk?

Feedback, encouragement, advice, anything of that nature would be much appreciated. It always is, but especially on this point.

2003-07-18T12:01:00.000-04:00

Just left a slightly awkward message on the voicemail of M, who is one of my acquaintances of longest duration: she and I have known each other since we were five or so, when our little brothers ended up in the same playgroup. There are pictures at my parents' house of Halloween 1984 or 1985, with me in a Scooby-Doo mask and M dressed up as a princess.

Acquaintances fall out, obviously, but M and I haven't had a real conversation in several years. The change has less to do with us (I suspect) and more to do with our families, specifically our mothers. M's mother and my mother have always had this strange, somewhat competitive friendship, basically looking at each other's children and saying, "Well, I'm glad my kids don't do that." The competitive aspect has only gotten worse as M's family has moved, over the years, from Conservative to Orthodox Judaism, which has made my mother -- a non-practicing Conservative happily married to a non-practicing Lutheran for 27 years and counting -- very uncomfortable. The last time I saw M, it was at a kosher Chinese restuarant with her parents and younger brother, and her parents did most of the talking.

M is getting married on August 24th, in a sex-segregated, traditionally Orthodox (I think) ceremony. I'm not serving in the wedding (there was a long time, perhaps my entire adolescence, when I just assumed that I would be one of her bridesmaids, and she would be one of mine) but I am invited, and I am going, Korean film festival be damned. I called her in the hopes that I'll be able to see her before the wedding. Good luck getting a bride's calendar a month before her wedding, I know.

I'd like to have a friendship with her independent of the dysfunctional relationship of our mothers. My mother, who believes in God and keeps a few traditions but absolutely cannot understand the idea of living life by a set of hard-and-fast religious rules, thinks M is throwing her life away, and M's mother probably has nothing but pity for me, not-quite-25, chomping down on the bacon, three moves and two car wrecks since college, unmarried, unsettled, and with no nice Jewish boys in sight (Los Angeles not counting as "in sight"). I can understand the appeal of an Orthodox life better than my mother can, even though pretty much everyone I've ever dated has been atheist, goyishe, or both, but I don't know if M thinks less of me for remaining so relentlessly secular.

I hope she's happy with her guy. And I hope she calls me back.

2003-07-18T11:43:00.000-04:00

Attention Beta Readers PW, HBM, MH, and AT, and Potential Beta Readers SE and BB: (1) do you want a copy of the third draft? (2) if so, in what format? (It's about 30,000 words shorter than the draft you read.) If the answer to #1 is no, I won't be offended, I promise. I know y'all got a lot going on. Leave comments or email me.

2003-07-09T12:16:00.000-04:00

So I'm on the blogroll of some poor schmuck. Hi, poor retired-Army schmuck, and thanks for the link.

But I have to say that this make me think of nothing so much as Rowan Atkinson's monologue as the devil: "I'm afraid the Jews were right."

2003-07-09T10:02:00.000-04:00

Two of the most interesting women to ever have spent time in Austin, Pamie and Jessa Crispin, sit down together to talk books and the book business. Whether or not you are taking time today to support Iranian democracy movements -- Pejman will have all the info you could possibly need, as will OxBlog, Winds of Change, Jeff Jarvis, and Hossein Derakhshan, while Brooke has details on the New York rally -- don't forget that every day can be Smart Women Talking About Books Day.

2003-07-09T00:55:00.000-04:00

InstaProf linked today (technically, yesterday) to one of the first gay bloggers to be legally married. And the happy couple are Atlantans, no less. And appropriately adorable. Congratulations, Michael and Robert!

2003-07-08T21:23:00.000-04:00

Today I am a Slithering Reptile. Again, I'm flattered.

Especially since apparently the thing for ex-Swatties to do is have a LiveJournal, not a blog. Meet my ex-boyfriend Fred, now graduate student, eBay entrepreneur, and LJ user; he links to Melissa and Dan (who used to have an LJ, at any rate) and Besh (who's engaged now! Yay!) and Arcadia and that has to be Amy and Rebecca and my dear Greg and of course there's Chaos and if it's Morris dancing it must be Will and of course I already knew about the LJs of my ex-roommate Elizabeth, my fabulous Alastair, and Dave and Sarah, who I got to see this past weekend.

("What's new?" Dave asked. "Not much," I said, "y'know, single now." I thought they'd be surprised but they nodded in sympathy; a moment later Sarah said they'd seen references to the now-ex here.)

I went to school with all of these people, save Besh, who I didn't meet until AWA '99. And now I can just open up a window and hear about their lives, or at least see what parts of themselves that they want to present to the online world. As Allison keeps saying, God bless the Internet.

I feel like saying: hi, it's me. Remember? I was the only cheerleader ever to be a SWIL non-member; I went away to France for a semester; I did College Bowl and worked on the Phoenix until it near drove me crazy; I co-hosted the Botticelli show on WSRN . . . damn, only four years since I graduated, and yet it feels like a long time.

Hi, y'all. I'm in Atlanta right now; I was driving through Alabama yesterday. My car is a 1996 Volvo 850 named Gustavus Adolphus, Gus for short, and we love each other even though he doesn't get great mileage and I haven't checked his fluid levels in ages. I'm single. Live alone. Just finished the third draft of a novel. No, not the novel I was working on in college, another one. Yes, another one. No, that earlier one's not seeing the light of day anytime soon. Maybe someday, in a vastly reworked form. My job rocks. My co-workers rock, and I would say this even if they hadn't one and all discovered this damn thing. And I don't miss Swarthmore, even now -- I miss y'all but I want to reunite in different contexts. Boston or New York makes more sense to me than any reunions on Parrish Beach, right now. But you know -- online works, too.

2003-07-08T13:30:00.000-04:00

Sitemeter says that a couple new people have added this blog to their blogrolls. I'm very, very flattered. Hey, new blogrollers! If I don't add you to my own list in the next couple days, holler over at me via email and remind me -- I've got a busy week at work this week.

Further in the department of Yay!, I just got email from Todd, one of the head honchos at Mobius Home Video Forum. I typically post in the Asian section of MHVF, but there are interesting discussions at all four of its boards, so if you're a film buff (and you know who you are), head on over there. Especially now, as they're in the midst of a pledge drive to buff up their servers.

2003-07-04T23:23:00.000-04:00

Among the bottles of alcohol I bought during a brief side trip to a liquor store in Dallas last Christmas was a bottle of chartreuse. I love chartreuse more than any other form of alcohol in the world, including the runners-up, Guinness and Stoli Vanil. Chartreuse is produced in a monastery about a half-hour's drive from Grenoble, so Grenoble is flooded with the stuff. In the spring you can get chartreuse ice cream at any ice cream stand in centre-ville. I didn't think you could get chartreuse anywhere in America, much less in Dallas, but the boy was more confident. He led me up one aisle and down another until he spotted both the yellow and green bottles.

I hadn't touched the bottle of chartreuse since we broke up; I didn't feel like drinking alone. Tonight I poured myself a glass of chartreuse and added two ice cubes.

It's July 4th. It's eleven years since the night that I cried, inexplicably, during the fireworks at Wallace Wade Stadium, and A comforted me. It's three years to the day since I heard my cell phone ringing and nearly leaped across my friend's kitchen with the sure knowledge that the guy I'd met three days earlier, the one I already liked more than I cared to admit to myself, was calling. It's two years and one day since my grandfather died.

I think for the rest of my life I'll be circling the first week of July on my calendar. First week of July, 2000, I met a man who kissed me around 4 a.m. First week of July, 2001, my mother called me and said, "I'm going down to Florida," and I could tell from the choke in her throat why. First week of July, 2003, the same man who kissed me three years earlier said, "It's probably better if we don't see each other -- we'll both just start crying."

Today I walked out of the Borders at Peachtree and 25th Street with a copy of Pamie's book and my laptop, with the third draft of my own book, finished, finally.

I'm almost twenty-five. I'm alone, listening to fireworks popping outside. I have a big work assignment next week which is, frankly, scaring me. I have a 90,000-word novel that may never be published. I hurt a good man who used to be here and isn't now.

But I did finally finish. Chloë, bless her distrustful chain-smoking heart (there'll be a surprise for my beta readers: Chloë didn't smoke in the second draft), and Pete, a better DDR player than I am and a better person than he thinks he is, are a tiny bit closer to getting the prose they deserve. And I'm okay. And my ex, who hopefully had a good time today, will be okay too.

It's the fourth of July. Our lovely imperfect country was declared independent 227 years ago today. Hannah Beth's friend Kim is on her honeymoon. Thomas Maxwell, son of Beta Reader Melissa, is home and adorable. A is in California, with her girl; Beta Reader D's first novel is due out this fall; Miss Maggie is doing nicely; my grandmother's in town. And I'm okay. All of those seemed like very good reasons to break out the chartreuse.

2003-07-03T10:29:00.000-04:00

Coming to a blog near you: When Smart Men Disagree, With Great Amounts of Name-Calling on Both Sides, About Weapons of Mass Destruction! (See the comments.)

2003-07-02T10:38:00.000-04:00

More on the deal that made AirTran Boeing's bitch, or Boeing AirTran's bitch, I'm not sure which yet. The good folks at AirDisaster.com -- one of the most informative sites I know of, although by no means should you go there just before flying -- are also discussing it in their forum, though their attitude is more "Yay for Boeing!" and less "So how is this going to help AirTran, exactly?"

While it's nifty that AirTran will soon (if speculation is correct) be flying a lot more places than just Atlanta to Moline-Quad Cities and back, where's its competitive advantage? When AirTran was competing with the major airlines -- mostly Delta/ASA, but also United, US Air, Northwest, and Continental -- out of Hartsfield, it had the advantage of being cheap and not significantly worse in service than the majors. That, and its snack mix. Y'all won't believe me on this, but in the late 1990s AirTran had the best snack mix in the airlines. I'm sure there's a Best Onboard Snack Mix trophy, in the shape of a crumpled baggie, somewhere in Joe Leonard's office.

The problem now is, AirTran is losing its competitive advantage. Some of its price innovations, such as being able to buy a one-way ticket without a significant markup, are being adopted by the big shots -- Delta has done this with Song, for example. (And ten points to the person who can find a mention, a mention, of Song on Delta's website. Seriously, who dropped the marketing ball on that one? Delta: We love to shoot ourselves in the foot, and it shows.) JetBlue is cheap and cheerful, as I mentioned yesterday, and as it expands the competition will be between "cheap and leather seats" and "just cheap." The changes in AirTran's frequent-flyer program have lowered the incentive for people to stick with AirTran. It's still much easier to get a free flight on AirTran than it is on the majors -- I have 25,000+ Continental OnePass miles, thanks to a lovely no-annual-fee credit card, and no idea what to do with said miles -- but while new customers might be comparing A-Plus Rewards to Skymiles, existing customers like me will be comparing old A-Plus Rewards to new A-Plus Rewards. And old A-Plus Rewards beat new A-Plus Rewards hands down.

And they lost the yummy snack mix. Is bringbackairtransnackmix.com taken?

So what is AirTran going to do to set itself apart now that it's not the only cheap airline around? Its customer service has gotten much better since I started flying it regularly in 1998-99, but it's still not known for exceptionally outstanding customer service. ("Exceptionally outstanding customer service" and "cheap" are hard to combine anyway, as Southwest seems to have realized.) Its website is very user-friendly as airline websites go, but again, that's not enough to make a reputation on. It can't lower fares much more than it already has. The Boeing 717s are nice and clean, and far preferable to those creaky DC-9s I occasionally get stuck on, but nothing memorable. Moreover, I've never, that I can remember, flown in an AirTran plane with a TV -- fine for Atlanta-NY or even Atlanta-Boston (2 1/2 hours), but Atlanta-LA is a longer flight; are they going to continue to not offer in-flight entertainment? That's fine by me, but other people might find a five-hour flight with no movie a turnoff when there's JetBlue with its DirectTV and video games and MP3s and whatnot.

In case you can't tell, I don't get to write about the airline industry at work.

I would say to AirTran: bring back the super-fast fly-three-get-one-free Amex deal, put a book of crossword puzzles in the back of every seat, keep offering one-day web-only sales that people can easily access, something, anything that will make you stand out when JetBlue and Southwest are breathing down your neck. And please, please, oh-pretty-please, bring back the snack mix.

2003-07-01T17:11:00.000-04:00

In other news, the incredibly resilient Allison has summed up her last few months online. Y'all know you can still help her and Chris out, right?

In other news, Miss Hannah Beth is 27 as of yesterday.

In other news, Pamie got to see her book in bookstores the other day. I haven't picked up a copy yet but I hear it's damn good.

In other news, my book is still not finished. Two scenes left.

2003-07-01T17:07:00.000-04:00

A while ago My Secret Agent Lawyer Man Who Now Has Both My Home and Cell Number had a post about US-based airlines using bad Eurosuppliers (i.e. Airbus) instead of doing the patriotic thing (i.e. Boeing). So I was going to suggest he write something about AirTran ordering 50 new jets from Boeing, and then thought, "Screw that, I've got my own blog."

I'm not exactly cheering. AirTran! My love! First you go all wacky with the frequent flyer reward system and kill the Amex bonus that made it so much easier to get free flights, then you order 50 more jets, now? You made a profit of $2 million last quarter, which in the airline industry is the equivalent of ending the month with $50 in your bank account and feeling proud because all your friends are racking up the credit-card debt. And, that's great about the $2 million, but have you noticed the state of your general industry right now? Have you noticed that JetBlue is all, look at me, I've got leather seats and TVs and I'm cheap and pretty? This feels like the airline equivalent of Scarlett O'Hara buying a new dress because she heard that Rhett was with that Watling woman. And last year's style of dress, to boot. Boeing 737s are so Southwest.

Now, it might be a good time to purchase planes; apparently, Boeing and Airbus fought over this order like another one was never coming along. So hopefully AirTran got itself a decent deal, though from what I've read deals to order airplanes are never straightforward.

2003-06-26T11:01:00.000-04:00

YES!

2003-06-25T12:41:00.000-04:00

While writing a memo for work I came across "The Lessons of ValuJet 592," a really thoughtful and interesting article by William Langeswieche; it mentions The Challenger Launch Decision, which is still under my bed, waiting to be finished.

For what it's worth, the article didn't sour me on flying AirTran. Or flying generally. I can see how it might -- Langeswieche discusses the level of "acceptable risk" that emerges in increasingly complex organizations, and how there's only so much built-in safety procedures can do. But I just bought AirTran tickets last night. The cheap-and-cheerful model that Langeswieche decries at ValuJet has meant a lot to me over the last five years -- I wouldn't have been able to see friends in DC and Boston in April if not for AirTran. The relationship that just ended wouldn't have had a prayer of lasting as long as it did without AirTran. RyanAir, cheap in every sense of the word, allowed me to see Scotland for the first time in October 2001.

(That said, having read several interviews with RyanAir's founder over the last few weeks, I'd be wary of flying them again. That airline's motto is definitely "Safety first" or even "Customers first", and, well . . . it's part superstition on my part, I suppose. Still, the cheap-aggressive-cheap atmosphere Langeswieche describes at ValuJet reminds me of RyanAir.)

For balance, here's a memorial website to the victims of Flight 592. The site's writers, unlike Langeswieche, don't accept the NTSB's verdict that improperly stored oxygen canisters caused the fire that downed the plane.

2003-06-25T10:21:00.000-04:00

Note to Michelle: The store where I play board games every Sunday night makes a profit by doubling as a comics and games store -- left side for comics, right side for games. The comics draw people in but I think the owner makes more money off the games (I don't know what the markup is for imported German board games, but it's not uncommon to pay $40 for a decent game). His manga section is decent, though a little wacky. The first volume of the Battle Royale manga has been calling my name for about a month now and I keep telling it I have no money.

It is also, probably not coincidentally, the cleanest, best-lit, nicest comics and games store I've ever been in.

Speaking of manga, why, in the name of all holy, are Junko Mizuno's works printed on such crappy paper? Every time I want to buy Cinderalla or Hansel and Gretel or both, I pick up the book and flip through it and note that sort of grainy, dark paper that six-year-olds' pencils tear through as they're practicing penmanship. So I'm holding out in hopes that the two stories will be published together in a book that won't threaten to disintegrate in my hands every time I pick it up.

I usually don't buy comic books or manga, though I own the first book of the Preacher series (intended as a gift for the now-ex, who's from Dallas, but he'd already read the series), and a couple scattered manga books here and there, some translated, some not. (No, I can't read Japanese.) Oh, and I own From Hell. Every time I pick up From Hell, two things happen: (1) I don't put it down for two hours; and (2) I spend half the time going, "But the Stephen Knight royal conspiracy theory was put to rest a long time ago! And Abberline didn't have any crushes on East End prostitutes! And . . . and . . . " which is not the way to approach the book. I can say I'm a member of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, though I'm behind on my membership dues.

When Free Comic Book Day came around in May I picked up a bunch, including one on how to get people who don't currently read comics to read comics, which I gave to Hannah Beth. And I'm going to have to get her something else, because that comic, in all frankness, was terrible, as an introduction to the genre. The author/artist, a woman -- I didn't keep a copy for myself, and I forget who she was -- was bound and determined to explain, in roughly 6,000 word balloons per page, Why Women Should Not Be Afraid of Comics, and to prove the point used a bunch of clichéd illustrations (her example of how comics could deal with "serious issues" was a small two-pager of a girl getting beat up by her boyfriend, complete with cries of "No! Don't!"). The only bit worthwhile was a list in the back: "If you like ____, you'll like ___ comic book series." I'm half-afraid I've turned Hannah off of comics forever.

I'm not sure what to get her to make up for that fiasco. The comics that got me interested in the genre -- the "Tickle Me Hellmo" sequence that led me to blithering idiocy last year, various French bandes dessinés and Art Spiegelman's work, especially Maus and The Wild Party -- might not be the best place to start. I love Maison Ikkoku but it's best consumed in small doses, otherwise the repetition of the plot will get to you. I'm not a big Daniel Clowes fan, and I have learned from experience that trying to start a non-comic-book reader with Chris Ware, as much of a genius as Chris Ware is, doesn't work very well. Love and Rockets, maybe? Jessica Abel? Some of the non-From Hell Alan Moore stuff? Any suggestions would be welcome.

2003-06-24T17:15:00.000-04:00

The two CDs alternating in Gus's stereo right now (Gus being my beloved car) are Silly Wizard's Live Wizardry -- generally not a good idea, as it has been proven impossible for me to listen to "Donald McGillavry" without speeding -- and Rhett Miller's The Instigator, which sometimes makes me grin and sing along and sometimes makes me cry: Can I kiss your furrowed brow / and calm your nervous heart?

Without my now-ex I never would have heard of Rhett Miller. After his brother's wedding two years ago he gave me a CD with a bunch of songs: Old 97's and Jerry Jeff Walker and Austin Lounge Lizards (authors of some of the best song titles ever: "Teenage Immigrant Welfare Mothers on Drugs" and "Jesus Loves Me, But He Can't Stand You") and I think there was a little Buck Owens thrown in for good measure. So I can listen to Rhett Miller's voice now, but I'm strenuously skipping past "Oppenheimer" on my mp3 player -- and any David Grey right now is just a bad idea.

These things happen, you know? I'm doing okay. Just preoccupied, and choosing my music carefully.

2003-06-23T11:30:00.000-04:00

Maynard Jackson is dead? Well, I shouldn't use a question mark; the man apparently died in Washington over the weekend. But it seems almost unbelievable. The man was Atlanta politics for nearly four decades. He was the city's first black mayor; he more than anyone shaped the black political elite (including Sister Shirley, the current mayor) that has dominated city politics since his election in 1973. For both good and bad, really -- Jackson and Andy Young laid the groundwork for the metro area's explosive growth in the 1990s (Jackson was mayor when we won the Olympics, for example) but he also helped create the cronyism that dominated Bill Campbell's administration and left the airport, and all the airport contracts, a sticky mess, as you can guess well enough from the Journal-Constitution's obit:

Of historic import, Jackson instituted a controversial affirmative action program that elevated the percentage of city contracts awarded to minorities in Atlanta from less than 1 percent in 1973 to 38.6 percent five years later. He applied his program of "joint venture," which brought together white and minority-owned firms, most promiently at the Atlanta airport.

Years later, Jackson would crow, "We built the Atlanta airport, biggest terminal building complex in the world, ahead of schedule and within budget -- and simultaneously rewrote the books on affirmative action." He also would boast that, under his watch, joint venture produced about 25 new black millionaires, most as a result of the airport.

Don't get me wrong: as airports go, Hartsfield is pretty nice. And Jackson recognized that it would have to be if Atlanta was going to be the "world-class city" that could host an Olympics and so on. That said, the airport commissioner got convicted during his third term.

Jackson's main accomplishment, and the AJC's obit doesn't really do it justice, was his pragmatism. He could have taken Atlanta down the same path Coleman Young took Detroit, but he did help cement Atlanta's image as a business-friendly place. In truth he probably did more for Atlanta the metro area than Atlanta the city, which looks better than it did in the 1970s, but is still extremely poor in places and generally dysfunctional. It's striking that the AJC doesn't mention the low point in Jackson's tenure as mayor, the Missing and Murdered Children of 1979-1981. Whether or not Wayne Williams was actually responsible for the 30-some-odd deaths -- and there are still people who believe he wasn't; see, for example, the arguments presented in the novel These Bones Are Not My Child -- a lot of people at the time were unconvinced that Jackson could actually take care of Atlanta the city.

It's a strange town, Atlanta. It's a troubled, careless, forgetful, fast-changing, eternally hopeful, money-obsessed town. It's the most capitalist town I know, which is part of the reason why I find it so interesting. White, black, Asian, Latino -- almost everyone here is united in the pursuit of the dollar. Jackson knew that and ran with it, and in doing so helped make Atlanta as successful and as schizophrenic as it is now. Save William Hartsfield, he may have been the most important mayor Atlanta has ever had. He may be gone but the city is going to bear his mark for a long, long time.

2003-06-19T13:33:00.000-04:00

Last night:

Incredibly Suave Voice: Is this Jessica, Author of Much?
Me: It is.
ISV: This is Pejman.
Me: (swoons)

Well, it didn't go exactly like that -- there was some Alterman-bashing included. But, yeah. Y'all envy me. I know you do.

In other good news, Miss Hannah Beth has not only dug out her digital camera (go on over to her site and see what I mean) but has promised me time to veg out and eat cookie dough at her place while I recover from the Personal Issues I mentioned last time. Or maybe I'll just hop a flight to Los Angeles. At any moment now AirTran and JetBlue will start bidding for me. Maybe they'll merge seamlessly into one big airline, AirBlue, known for leather seats, really good snack mix (at least, AirTran used to be known for really good snack mix), domination of Concourse C, and service to Moline-Quad Cities whenever you want it.

I tried to calculate the number of airlines I've flown on the other day, while cursing Lester B. Pearson International Airport and the gods that have not yet seen fit to strike it down with a bolt of lightning. (An international traveler's idea of hell is a constant round trip between Pearson and Charles de Gaulle, landing at a different terminal each time.) It's up to: Eastern (way back when), Delta, Continental, Air Canada, Virgin Atlantic, US Air (which I used to use between Atlanta and Philadelphia for school, until they infuriated me), AirTran (of course), Air France, United, American, and . . . hmmm. Maybe Northwest, once? Never Pan Am, I don't think, though they used to have a large Atlanta presence. That makes me sad. I'm not even sure I ever flew TWA, for that matter. No British Airways, no Southwest, no JetBlue as of yet.

I'm babbling. I have a cold, and Personal Issues, which are, it should be added, largely my own fault. Y'all can deal.

If ever there's a Ten Good Things About Capitalism list, one item ought to be "The possibility of flying to Moline-Quad Cities in a leather seat." Granted, it's not necessarily a given that AirBlue would make money on said flight, or that cows should be slaughtered for the comfort of visitors to Moline-Quad Cities, or that AirBlue might have to pay certain people on the Moline-Quad Cities City Council to overturn that pesky 1935 anti-leather-seat law -- but the fact that the possibility exists, that someday people can settle into a nice comfy leather chair and say, "Ah, Moline-Quad Cities, I've missed you" -- that deserves some cheers, I think.

Now I feel obligated to link to the Quad Cities' Chamber of Commerce. I've never been. Been to London, been to Paris, to Montréal and Madrid and Venice and Milan, not to Quad Cities. Which in a weird way seems very provincial.

2003-06-18T14:58:00.000-04:00

I was under the impression that Stanley Kwan directed He's a Woman, She's a Man and Peter Chan directed the similarly-titled Who's the Woman, Who's the Man. Ian Hamet says otherwise, and the Hong Kong Movie Database is down. So I'll defer to Ian; go over there and let him tell you why you absolutely must see Comrades: Almost a Love Story.

I've got the day off today, after traveling for work for the last two weeks. That's part of the reason posting has been light. That, and Personal Issues I Don't Really Want to Discuss on the Blog, thank you. Suffice to say that, unlike a certain person who never friggin' posts anymore, I'm not getting married anytime soon.

In the meantime, check out this excellent piece by Timothy Garton Ash on "the banality of the good" in Europe. It's all about trans-continental sex, unabashed consumerism, and hope, with a special cameo appearance by your favorite Eurogreen ex-hothead and mine, Joschka Fischer! It'll probably go behind a pay barrier soon, so go quickly.

2003-06-10T07:02:00.000-04:00

Men kissing each other on stage. Drag queens. Children. It's a perfect world. As it should be. -- Michelle Pawk, accepting an award at the 2003 Tonys.

For the record, my favorite Tony acceptance speech is still Stephen Spinella thanking "the husband of my heart" after he won an acting award for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches.

Joe Mantello, who was also in Angels in America and whom I have loved ever since just for being in Angels in America, won the Best Director of a Play award for Take Me Out this year. And let me say, the man looks good. He does not look ten years older than when I saw him on stage. (We had seats very close to the front -- I think this was for Perestroika -- and I remember writing enthusiastically in my diary that night that Joe Mantello looked right at me and smiled! With multiple exclamation points, probably.) Are he and Jon Robin Baitz still together, and happy? I hope so.

2003-06-06T12:53:00.000-04:00

Dear co-worker, who has actually known about this blog for a while,

There is more to the blogosphere than the Kaus-Sullivan-Instapundit axis, I promise. You'd probably like the Sexy Scourgers, Caracas Chronicles, and Sofia Sideshow. And I'm doing those links from memory, so they're probably wrong; check the column on the left, if they are.

Name recognition is more difficult now than it was a year or so ago; industrious bloggers like Megan and Brooke got in at the right time. Now everybody and his ex-girlfriend has a blog. Still, a well-crafted personal site will turn the right heads. It seems to me there are two ways to get noticed: the post-lots-of-new-stuff all-day-every-day-route (Instapundit is the champion of this, and Vodkapundit used to be on his heels), or write longer, thorough, knowledgable posts, which is the route Eugene Volokh and Steven Den Beste have taken, to give two prominent examples. Since you're not a big fan of praying to the porcelain keyboard, as it were, you'd probably want to go the latter route, which is probably the wiser one. I also think that the more personal a blog is, the less staying power it has, which has been something of a problem for me. I don't have a good niche -- I could be "the Asian film blog," only I don't write exclusively about Asian films. Or being bisexual. Or the joys of the World Cup. Or the &$&%*! novel. Et cetera.

Anyway. I suspect if you get started, you'll have a fan base in no time. The really fun part is getting a person or two who cheers you on even when you're utterly convinced everything you do is crrrrrrrap.

Give the tyke a kiss for me,
Jessica

2003-06-06T08:51:00.000-04:00

I have seen, actually, a lot of movies in the last month or so, both in theaters and on VHS/DVD, and looking back I'm surprised by how many of them I didn't like. I used to be extremely reluctant to go to movies; my parents once had to bribe me to get me into a matinee screening of Patriot Games. So because I only attended movies I was almost certain I would like, my success rate was much higher.

But I had a few disappointments in the last month or so: The Matrix Reloaded, Over the Rainbow, The Quiet Family, Resurrection of the Little Match Girl, The Killer, and the jury's still out on Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Hard Boiled, and Just One Look (it wasn't bad, and Anthony Wong in particular was excellent, but I fell asleep for twenty minutes in the middle and did not miss a thing). On the other hand, the list of movies I've enjoyed is pretty long: So Close, Nights of Cabiria, Ping Pong, My Left Eye Sees Ghosts, The Chinese Feast, Space Travelers, and Secretary.

I can stand disappointments more easily now, I think, so I can risk seeing more movies. It used to be I got very upset at the possibility of spending two hours trapped with a bad movie; even now, as I take my seat, I feel a little tremor that I don't know what I'm in for. But even a movie as bad as Matrix Reloaded -- and it was pretty damn bad, people -- or as excruciatingly obtuse as Pistol Opera (though I want to see it again, my initial response was, "Grinding dull pencils into my eye sockets for two hours would have been more pleasurable") can have its rewards. If nothing else, you get to join in the conversation about the movie afterwards.

The strangest, as it were, movie-viewing experience I've had lately was Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. I'm not kidding when I say I'd been looking forward to this movie for a year and a half. (Song Kang-ho + Shin Ha-kyun + Bae Doo-na = guarantee of a well-acted movie.) Unfortunately I got spoiled for a major plot development long before I actually got to see the film, and knew, to some degree, what I was in for, which I didn't with Joint Security Area (same director -- Park Chan-wook -- as well as same actors in Song and Shin). I'm certain that I would not have enjoyed JSA as much had I known the big twist in advance; I'm not certain I would have enjoyed, or maybe appreciated, Sympathy more had I not been spoiled.

It's a film that is deliberately designed to leave you drained and shattered, and it was odd to watch it and not feel shattered -- or, rather, to shut down, literally look away from the screen, to resist the pressure to feel shattered. (I kept hoping the actors were going home at the end of shooting days to happy families.) Afterwards I wondered: did I watch the film badly, or did it fail in its goals as a drama? L called it "the ultimate sucks-to-be-you film." She and a couple others I've talked to have recategorized it as a black comedy. I'm more reluctant, since Sympathy didn't treat its characters with the same detachment that black comedies (such as The Quiet Family or Humanist, which I liked a lot) often do.

I wonder if I'm starting to bring too much knowledge to a movie. It really shouldn't matter to Secretary that James Spader was also in Pretty in Pink, should it? I keep thinking about the actors, the directors, the offscreen context, and I ought to just stick to the movie.

That said, a good movie will keep even the most filmography-addled brain quiet.

2003-06-05T06:57:00.000-04:00

The scariest headline I've seen on a website this year: "Curzon Soho Closure."

Fortunately, the Best Movie Theater Evah is just undergoing renovations and will re-open in the fall. And its Mayfair cousin is currently screening Chihwaseon (with the charming English title "Drunk on Women and Poetry") and Russian Ark.

I once saw Saffron Burrows posing for pictures outside the Curzon Mayfair, having just introduced a film there. You know how some actors, in real life, are not quite as impressively tall and attractive as they appear onscreen? Saffron Burrows is every bit as impressively tall and attractive as she appears onscreen, and very polite to photographers to boot. (I didn't try to approach her. What was I going to say, that I admired the way she fought off killer sharks?)

Speaking of things that live up to the advance notice, Space Travelers is every bit as good a movie as Ian Hamet told you it was, and then some. And Ando Masanobu is every bit as cute as I told you he was, and then some.

My current fantasy is to get to come back to London in October and see Battle Royale II at the Curzon Soho, where I saw Battle Royale. BRII is apparently being hyped to hell and back in Japan -- Tokyo now boasts a special store just for movie tie-ins -- but from the rumors and Chinese whispers (or, we should say, Sinophilic whispers) I've been hearing, it's best to go in with lower expectations, or at least an open mind: Fukasaku Kenta is simply not going to be his father's directing twin. I'll just be happy if Shugo Oshinari gets more than ten minutes of screen time.

2003-06-02T09:27:00.000-04:00

My Secret Agent Lawyer Man is 31 today. I am trying -- and so far, failing -- to give him the present of a link to a decent picture of co-birthday-celebrator, quintuple-language-speaker, and multiple-genre-star (King of Comedy, Black Mask, So Close, you get the picture) Karen Mok. Oh, heck, Pej, just get your hands on a copy of Viva Erotica; it's got to be on sale somewhere in LA.

Here's an interview with her, at any rate.

2003-05-31T16:16:00.000-04:00

I am, normally, not a vengeful woman. Nor do I usually have much faith that justice can be done in a murder case.

But I read this and thought, YES!

And I hope the motherfucker gets exactly what he deserves, whatever that might be.

And I hope they give Richard Jewell a comfortable spot in the gallery, with free peanuts. Actually, I hope they ask him to serve as bailliff. With the peanuts.

In other Atlanta-related news, Greg has changed to a new, Movable-Type-supported home.

2003-05-29T09:28:00.000-04:00

"So I found your blog," said my boss. The next sentence was not " . . .and you're fired." It was more along the lines of "Where do you find the time to write all this?"

So, hi, boss. Haven't exactly been long on the pithy, insightful commentary lately, but you're free to browse. Links on the left: nifty people, all of 'em. Novel: not finished yet. Readers: hanging out, getting a break from law school, having babies.

I keep meaning to write. On, say, my apparent tin ear for poetry. I studied poetry in high school, with men (for some reason all my important English teachers were men) who loved poetry, and yet I'm not particularly good at appreciating poetry. I have my odd affections. I like Auden, mainly because in ninth grade we had to pick a poem to memorize for one important test and I picked "Musée des Beaux Arts." I like Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Rimbaud's "Roman", and Shakespeare's sonnets. Liz and I had a running joke about making a rock song out of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," complete with crashing guitar immediately after like a patient etherized upon a table. One of my English teachers tried to sell me on Roethke; I wasn't buying, for whatever reason made sense at the time. Not fond of Wallace Stevens, either, or, rather, more fond of Beck doing Wallace Stevens ("Tropicalia") than of Wallace Stevens himself.

I bring this up after having read a Joseph Epstein essay (and y'all know I have a weakness for Joseph Epstein) on Karl Shapiro, a poet I have to confess to never having heard of before reading said essay. Epstein argues that Shapiro fell out of favor not because he was a bad poet, but because he was unwilling to go along with the T.S. Eliot-led school of modernist poetry, relying on symbols rather than language. Along the way Epstein approvingly quotes some lines from a poem titled "Auto Wreck":

But this invites the occult mind,
Cancels our physics with a sneer,
And spatters all we knew of denouement
Across the expedient and wicked stones.

I read those lines, then read them again. It's the "spatters" that gets me. The first two lines are fine; the spattering on the wicked stones seems like a rapid turn towards Vogon territory. ("Wicked stones"? Auden at least knew to blame the torturer and not his horse.)

None of the lines Epstein quotes sound as clunky to my (tin?) ear as the spattering couplet, but none of them sound particularly rhythmic or beautiful, either. Granted, Shapiro's work is miles above, say, Jayson Blair's poetry, but I read the article and thought: was Shapiro really a victim of academic groupthink, or just another in a long line of deservedly obscure poets? And I'm honestly not sure, since, as earlier stated, I'm never particularly secure when it comes to poetry.

I had a similar feeling after watching Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance as part of the latest Subway-fest. While I had no expectations for the poetry of Karl Shapiro, I'd been looking forward to seeing Sympathy for a year and a half (it came out in South Korea in early 2002). Song Kang-ho and Shin Ha-kyun in a drama directed by the man who made Joint Security Area? I was salivating. "Am I going to need Kleenex?" I asked Brian, one of the awesome Subway men, before the screening. "No," he replied. "Bandages, maybe."

I didn't. I could see what the film was trying to do, I could appreciate the enormous toll the story was taking on the characters (and the actors -- I spent most of the middle section praying that Song Kang-ho got to go home to a happy marriage and an appreciative family), but I couldn't go with the film and let it rip me to shreds the way JSA did (or Barking Dogs Never Bite could have, if it had chosen to go that route). And again I wondered: was it me? Did I make some error in watching the film? Did Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance fail as a film, or did I fail as a viewer? Similarly: is Karl Shapiro not that great a poet, or am I not that great a poetry reader?

To each her own viewing experience, to some degree. But I do think Park Chan-wook, or Karl Shapiro, ought to expect a certain amount of give from me when they present their contributions -- a willingness to suspend disbelief, clear the mind of fears and prejudices, approach the work optimistically. I'm not good at that. The same brain that my AP English teacher (not the Roethke fan) praised for being able to see metaphors quickly -- leap from twentieth-century American poetry to twenty-first-century South Korean cinema without pause for breath, if you will -- gets cluttered easily, rushes in with allusions, knowing asides, pop-culture references. Sometimes I wish I could just take a vacuum to it, store everything neatly in its place, and be able to read without tripping.

2003-05-21T12:10:00.000-04:00

The Observer articles on Jayson Blair are just too much fun to read. I've been following the story with the usual journalistic heapings of Schadenfreude and gratitude for a wonderful factchecker, and I don't feel guilty about it in the least. Condemn the Times? For every Blair there are probably a dozen reporters busting ass for the stories (I'm biased; I have a high school friend who writes for the Times, and he has never been anything but a sweet, honest, razor-sharp guy). Affirmative action? It's hard to get all huffy about the role race may have played when Blair's trying to exploit that angle himself. Decline of western civilization? No more so than than Clay and Ruben singing "Fun, Fun, Fun" on American Idol. Just a juicy story, like the ones about J. Lo and Ben Affleck.

Of course, Jayson Blair won't really have made it until Pamie does a play about him. That's the new standard, now.

I saw Chris and Al last night just before the Buffy finale. They miss Murphy terribly, and I think they're still shellshocked, but they're acting with amazing grace; I'd still be hysterical at this point. They at least managed to get through the fire-heavy finale without comment, which I don't think I would have been able to do.

Y'all know I couldn't not write about the finale, right? "I miss Spike already," Hannah said.

I thought I might cry, and I didn't, though my throat constricted a little when Xander learned that Anya died saving Andrew's life and said, "That's my girl, always doing the stupid thing." (I didn't think his later entering into the conversation about the mall ruined that. Buffy, Willow, and Giles start bantering about the Sunnydale mall, but Xander sounds bitter.) Maybe because I was so spoiled, I watched the finale almost clinically. The snappy exchange between Xander, Willow, Buffy, and Giles -- the "Core Four" -- seemed forced, as if Joss Whedon said, "Oh, let's throw that in to make the fans happy." The reconciliation between Buffy and Giles, much as I loved it, came out of nowhere. The Faith/Wood banter? Excruciating. The final battle? Peter Jackson did it better. And why, when the First could have shown up as the Master, as Joyce, as Angel, was it stuck playing Buffy? And how did Dawn forget a year of supposed training?

I could go on . . . but it really is just a show. A lot of people found the fictive universe fascinating, and were eager to enter it, and then got upset when Buffy proved to be just a show, with imperfect writers, crappy plot developments, actors leaving at the wrong time (I'm looking at you, Seth Green).

I won't necessarily miss the show, since my viewing this season was off-and-on at best. What I'll miss is the fan dialogue that grew up around the show. There was, strangely enough, a Buffy community, however loose and scattered and fractured, and with the passing of the show that community will dwindle down. I'll miss the back-and-forth that followed every episode -- the various 'shippers, the nitpickers, the bitterness competitions ("you thought it went downhill after Season 3? Well, I thought it went downhill as soon as Spike and Drusilla showed up . . . ") -- more than I'll miss the episodes themselves. Buffy is gone, but obsessed, crazed geeks are forever! Something like that.

I really want to watch "Manchild" now.

At least the universe is letting up on my friends a bit. My co-worker's hospitalized father seems to be past the worst, my dear dear reader Melissa welcomed her son Thomas Maxwell into the world, and Megan is gainfully employed, and I happen to know, 'cause I'm connected like that, that the job is absolutely perfect for her, and her for it. Whee! The media world gains Megan and loses Jayson Blair? The net gain is so large the loss gets buried.

2003-05-19T14:19:00.000-04:00

Apparently the universe is mad at my friends. It should not be. Bad universe.

Specifically, Allison and Chris saw their apartment burn to the ground last week. They lost pretty much everything, including their beloved dog Murphy.

You can click below to help:

Pamie will love you just as much, or more, for helping them as for helping the Oakland Public Library. And so will I.

2003-05-16T11:43:00.000-04:00

Traveling this week, so my copy of Live at Folsom Prison is at home. But I'm tempted to call my boyfriend and ask him to play "Jackson" for me, very loud, in honor of June Carter Cash, who died yesterday.

I do have "When It's Springtime in Alaska (It's Forty Below)," but that would be too spooky right now. She sounds deliberately ghostlike, the echoing chorus who knew all along she was going to get the trapper killed. She plays the part of a death-wish. It would be hard to process that deliberately toned-down voice alongside the image of the worried woman in the "Hurt" video -- see that video and you'd never believe she'd go first.

No, "Jackson" is best. The part where she's clearly having a grand old time telling Johnny Cash to go make a big fool of himself, with a voice so big you'd think she was going to rip your stereo open. But only the rest of us should need to hear that voice; I hope Johnny Cash doesn't have to, that he's still got it with him.

2003-05-06T10:51:00.000-04:00

I have an uncle who's a die-hard professional wrestling fan; at family gatherings we'll sit and he'll update me on who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. I was better at keeping track in the '80s, when I watched far more "Hulk Hogan's Rock 'N' Wrestling" than any child should ever have been allowed to -- so I remember Miss Elizabeth and I remember the Iron Sheik well enough to be shocked by a report that Miss Elizabeth died last Thursday and the Iron Sheik's daughter died over the weekend.

Here's Bret Hart's tribute to Miss Elizabeth. For those of y'all who never have followed professional wrestling and never will, Hart's been in the business a while.

My condolences to Miss Elizabeth's family, and the Iron Sheik and his family; I hope that, his current grief notwithstanding, he's had a decent and comfortable retirement. Decent and comfortable retirements, in my understanding, are relatively rare in the professional wrestling business. Andre the Giant was eventually killed by his acromegaly; Junkyard Dog, if I'm remembering correctly, died in a car crash a few years ago; Bobby "The Brain" Heenan -- again, if I'm remembering correctly -- is suffering from cancer; and while I'm willing to swear I had the "Is that Rowdy Roddy Piper?" conversation while watching TV with my uncle last Christmas, my understanding is, about the time Lyle Alzado died, Rowdy Roddy testified that he had been crippled, perhaps permanently, by steroid use. Now, I hope for every one of those there's a Mr. Fuji and a Nikolai Volkov and a Hillbilly Jim and a Tito Santana quietly enjoying titled properties and families and ice cream and so on -- I hope, but I'm not sure.

(Any of my readers who follow professional wrestling more closely than I do, please, please feel free to weigh in.)

And it makes me worry -- what's going to happen to the current crop of wrestlers? I'm not worried about the MacMahon family. They'll be fine. I actually suspect that privately they're one of the healthiest families ever to own a business, since they can channel all their tensions into the WWE storyline. Certain wrestlers seem to have enough of a head on their shoulders that they'll be fine even after their careers end -- I'm thinking of Goldberg, Mick Foley, Rob Van Dam (based on his participation and generally level-headed presentation in The Backyard), and The Rock. But Stone Cold's already had his share of personal problems. Booker T was apparently having some well before he joined the WWE. I'm not sure what to predict for Triple-H and have absolutely no idea about Kurt Angle. And what about what I think of as the newest generation -- the Hardy boys and Lita, Brock Lesnar, Edge and Christian, the Dudleys? Is it me, or are there a lot more new faces to be potentially chewed up and spit out?

Y'all are probably thinking, "It's wrestling. Dear Christ. Move on." But there's something about the commedia dell'arte qualities of professional wrestling that keep me interested. Maybe it's tied up with my affection for my uncle. Maybe it's just postmodern: professional wrestling has so many layers of artifice that somehow it comes through as compelling. Maybe I'm just feeling ornery. All the same -- even if it is violent and ridiculous, a refuge for rednecks -- sometimes the people performing seem to be completely exposed even as they're up there acting arrogant and supposedly basking in the adoration of millions. I just hope more of them get to live long, healthy, happy lives after they come back down.

2003-05-05T11:59:00.000-04:00

Meet Joey de Villa. Some of you may have already met him via Brooke's summary of his recent run-in with an apparent incorrigible liar and generally unpleasant human being.

I feel obliged to point out, however, that Mr. Accordion Guy is actually pretty cute. And since I have a weakness for Philippine-born geek boys with ties to Canada and much more musical knowledge than my own self, I think I might have a new addition for the blogroll.

Anyway. Little news. Little new. Still don't have an ending to the book; I'm in one of those moods when the entire thing reeks of futility, and right now I'm somewhat regretting putting the piece of shite -- I mean, second draft -- into the hands of strangers. My boyfriend -- the one whose point about the book's essential lack of movement (for lack of a better word) hit closer to home than he intended -- is now pointing out that I ought to finish what I started. He's got a point.

But one can only wallow in self-pity for so long when there's news like this. Awww! Mazel tov and many, many congratulations to the happy couple.

2003-05-01T10:12:00.000-04:00

So, the good Marie de France of the blogosphere is not the Anthony Comstock of the blogosphere, thank goodness. "Write about sex,", says he, and get more traffic.

Yeah. Probably shouldn't have said that about the novel having less sex. The boyfriend pointed out the other day that between the not-necessarily-Moby-Dick-level plot and the reduction of sex, this novel is not necessarily all that sellable. Or sellable at all.

What? The lawyer knocks on the door. "Sex," he says. "Not self-pity. Sex."

(Bless the libertarian-leaning lawyers. Here's hoping they score victory in Lawrence v. Texas.)

The problem with writing about sex is that everything is eventually going to end up unearthed years later by the 2040 equivalent of The Smoking Gun. The other problem with writing about sex is that very fine line between turning your reader on and making him or her flinch: "Did you need to go there? No, really. Did you?" And I tend to overshare as it is.

In Boston, during a marathon five-hour conversation, one of the many topics on the table was my sexuality, and the unfortunate political implications thereof: namely, I could be the happy little inconsistent bisexual (she likes boys! no, wait, girls! no, boys and girls! and so on, like I'm on a swing) if there were not such strong and nasty stereotypes of (a) all lesbians just needing a good deep dicking and (b) all bisexuals, especially bisexual women, being happy, inconsistent little sluts. But since those stereotypes do exist, I should know better than to play to them. Know what your actions are saying, was the message. Know the context.

This seems as good a time as any to bring up a piece in City Journal, titled "Queering the Schools," I mentioned to My Secret Agent Lawyer Man. I'm not exactly sure where City Journal stands on the scale of conservative respectability -- A&L Daily keeps linking to it, which probably means very little -- but it's got John McWhorter hanging around, so let's say it's right-wing but not shockingly so: no Journal of the John Birch Society, this. Yet it's still running "Queering the Schools," which left me practically frothing at the mouth after I'd read it.

Let's take paragraph 3, for example:

During the eighties, when gay activism first became a major cultural force, homosexual leaders launched a campaign that mirrored the civil rights movement. To claim their rights, homosexuals argued (without scientific evidence) that their orientation was a genetic inheritance, like race, and thus deserved the same kind of civil protections the nation had guaranteed to blacks. An inborn, unchangeable fact, after all, could not be subject to moral disapproval. There ensued a successful effort to normalize homosexuality throughout the culture, including a strong push for homosexual marriage, gays in the military, and other signs of civic equality.

Oh, where do we start? With the beautifully disngenuous "during the eighties" without even bothering to mention AIDS. Which is something along the lines of discussing Bush's foreign policy by starting with, "In the late fall of 2001, the President launched a campaign . . . " And let's take that word normalize that Ms. King likes to throw around. "Normalize," as in "become the norm." As in, playing nicely to that part of her closed-minded, ridiculously paranoid thesis that The Gays! Are Out! To Turn! Your Children! "To normalize" is not the same as "to make acceptable" or even "to decriminalize." Even in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when ACT-UP and similarly angry groups were at their most prominent, was anybody arguing that homosexuality should be "the norm", i.e. more than 50% of people ought to be gay? At that time 10% was considered a radical, politically charged number, and the argument that "everybody's bisexual in one way or another" wasn't fully agreed upon by any means. In other words, King would rather rewrite history, or outright ignore it, rather than face the possibility that her argument might be completely specious and contemptible.

Rutgers English professor Michael Warner, a leading queer theorist, observes that categories like “heterosexual” and “homosexual” are part of “the regime of the normal” that queer theory wants to explode. “What identity,” he writes, “encompasses queer girls who f*&k queer boys with strap-ons, or FTMs (female-to-male transsexuals) who think of themselves as queer, FTMs who think of themselves as straights, or FTMs for whom life is a project of transition and screw the categories anyway?”

Well, what's the answer? Or how about girls who date boys but like girls too and sometimes kiss boys who dress as girls? (Note: when making out with drag queens, be prepared for much smearing of lipstick.) But I don't think King would find the question even comprehensible. She certainly doesn't want to address it, or address the need for it.

That GLSEN embraces queer theory is clear from the addition of transgendered students to the gays and lesbians the group claims to represent. By definition, the transgendered are those who choose to change their gender identity by demeanor, dress, hormones, or surgery. Nothing could be more profoundly opposed to the notion of a natural sexual identity.

Here we go with "natural" and its implied cousin, "unnatural," as if transgendered people are Macbeth with the handle in his hand (so to speak). Why would it not be "natural" to have a range of gender identities? Is surgery to make yourself conform more closely to a heterosexual identity -- breast enhancement surgery, for example -- also "profoundly opposed" to "natural sexual identity"? But how can someone be "profoundly opposed" to heterosexuality and try to play up a heterosexual identity at the same time? We could continue debating this point in circles for hours, or come to the much simpler conclusion that King's spaceship is nowhere near the orbit of Planet Logic at this point.

Here's a goody:

One of the mildest of such programs, “Healing the Hate,” released in 1997 under Department of Justice sposorship, implicitly likens disapproval of homosexual behavior with the prejudices that in the past have led to lynchings, church burnings, and the Holocaust.

"Implicitly." As opposed to "explicitly." As opposed to the well-known -- on this planet, at least -- that homosexuality was one of the things that could have you arrested and sent to a concentration camp during -- you guessed it -- the Holocaust. But this is the kind of thing King considers a radical and dangerous assertion. No wonder she finds any and all attempts to introduce discussion of homosexuality into public classrooms an outrage.

There is possibly -- possibly -- a valid criticism of GLSEN's tactics here (although I'm not sure why King is against teaching "fisting" in public schools, as that seems the surest possible way to get kids not to fist). But any criticism ought to come from someone who's not reduced to sputtering about "values" and shrinking in horror at the idea that a teacher's gender identity, let alone an adolescent's, might not be perfectly set in stone. (Notice that she hasn't been able to come up with any group other than GLSEN in this hell-bent, nefarious gay takeover of our nation's schools.)

In the end King lurches back towards conventional conservatism:

No compulsory public school system can be justified unless what it teaches is a worldview that the taxpayers who fund it can support. The “common schools” came into existence, after all, to acculturate immigrants to American values. For schools to try to indoctrinate children in a radical, minority worldview like that promoted by GLSEN and its allies—a vision that will form those children’s values and shape their sense of selfhood—is a kind of tyranny, one that, in addition, intentionally drives a wedge between parents and children and, as queer theorist Michael Warner boasts, “opposes society itself.” We must not let an appeal to our belief in tolerance and decency blind us to indecency—and to the individual and social damage that will result from it.

I'm not exactly sure her educational history is perfectly on target -- Joanne? -- but that's a minor sin compared to "oh, gays are acting like they might have been hurt by the Holocaust!" But can she be so sure that her view isn't the radical, minority worldview? Part of her protest, after all, is that GLSEN's tactics enjoy a good deal of support from organizations such as the ACLU, school administrators, and even (though she doesn't even dare admit it) the students themselves (you can't exactly found a student Gay-Straight Alliance if there aren't any students who want to join). If she would have an outraged parent demand sovereignity over teachers' gender identity, isn't that the exact form of tyranny she claims to protest?

There's no logic in this, and little coherence. You can't sustain an argument entirely on revulsion, especially when it forces you to distort and ignore to make your point. And it's utterly infuriating to watch, from the Texas police busting into men's bedrooms, and people like King on the sidelines sniffing, "Well, they're not really persecuted at all, and it's not natural anyway."

This, Pej -- since it came up a while ago -- is why I don't like being called a conservative. Libertarian, sure. Free-market, yay. Conversative? Not if it puts me on the same side as Marjorie King. One of the things I've liked about the part of the blogosphere I entered is that people like Pej himself and Instaman and (especially) Brooke and even (though maybe to a lesser extent) Eugene Volokh and Den Beste and The Happily Married Vodkaman -- is that they seem to understand, and accept, that embracing a free-market, small-government society is based to a certain degree on trusting your fellow human being to do the right thing, and that applies to the bedroom as well. It seems silly, in my opinion, to be willing to trust people with more of their tax dollars but not with their own bodies.

I hear the word "conservatism" and I don't see or feel trust in fellow human beings. I see a cramped, scared, bitter philosophy, that regards the world as constantly falling into a moral and personal sinkhole, that distrusts democracy, that professes humility but takes fearful refuge in self-righteousness. It desperately seeks the imposition of a very particular set of "values" for fear that, left alone, people might turn to that pursuit of happiness in unacceptable ways. And at every turn it cries, "Think of the children!", creating, fetishizing, and pandering more to the supposed innocence and fragility than Dr. Spock ever could.

F*&k it, as City Journal would say. If that's conservatism, I'm throwing in my lot, and my collection from Toys in Babeland, with the gun-toting, IRS-hating libertarians. I don't want to be scared of sex, scared of every adult left alone in a room with my child, scared constantly that the people around me won't act decently if given a chance. Maybe when I'm older I'll be bitter and paranoid -- but for now, I like the fact that I live in a country where I can be a girl and still wear pants and work hard and hold hands with my boyfriend in public and kiss the occasional friendly and comforting drag queen. And I wish it were the same way everywhere.

So there's my talk about sex for you.

2003-04-28T20:56:00.000-04:00

Took this quiz, to learn that if I were a country, I'd be Switzerland.

But I would also be Strongbad, which would seem contradictory.

2003-04-28T14:13:00.000-04:00

Kickin' it FAQ-style:

So, is the third draft finished yet?
Nope. About five, six scenes to go 'til the end.

Which scenes?
Without giving too much away: the opening night at the art gallery (which occurs much earlier in the second draft); the run-up and aftermath of the Georgia Tech-Clemson game, and Pete's unsuccessful trek to campus; the barbecue.

How is the third draft different from the second draft?
Less sex.

Really?
Yeah. It just turned out in that most of the cases, it didn't make sense for the two characters involved to be in bed, or near bed, or planning on going to bed on an ongoing basis. There is still some sex, just less sex.

And that's it? Less sex?
Well, no -- there are a few plot changes, and quite a bit more about Chloë's not knowing what to do with her life. The essential plot is still basically the same, just changes along the way -- Chloë and Pete's first meeting is slightly different, their relationship develops differently, et cetera. The biggest plot change is that Chloë finds out why her brother joined the army much, much earlier -- my original idea was to keep it an up-in-the-air question until the very end, but it's just too flimsy a plot point to hang suspense on.

And less sex.
More cocaine, if that helps.

What happens when you finish the third draft?
Start sending it to agents. Which I've never done before; my first novel got shelved before I got as far as agent-hunting. I'll probably follow the tips mom-to-be-any-minute-now Jennifer Weiner graciously provides on her site. I know a couple people who either have published books or are in the publishing industry, but I don't think networking in this case is going to get me particularly far -- either my book's not funny enough, or the wrong genre, or fiction, or not targeted at young adults, et cetera.

Nervous?
Why do you think it's taken me so long to finish the third draft?

Will the third draft get beta read?
I will probably send copies to a small number -- Larry, Beta Reader D and his longtime friend P, Hannah, A, my boyfriend, a co-worker. But it won't be so much a beta reading as a follow-up: "So here's what happened to my novel."

Might the Blog of Chloë and Pete acquire a new, spiffy, domain-registered, Blogger-free, Googlable home later this year?
Still considering it. Opinions among those who love me vary between "yes, definitely continue the blog" and "no, it's not good for you" (my best friend J and my boyfriend, who otherwise see eye-to-eye on absolutely nothing, agree on this one). So I'm not sure how much blogging I'd be doing. But I'm definitely thinking that a personal, legitimate site would at least help promote my book.

Well, while you're twiddling your thumbs, I'd like to meet some cool published authors. Any suggestions?
You can go to the Book Expo of America, in LA from May 28th to June 1st, and meet a number of nifty authors, including Pamie. (Note to flirty LA bloggers everywhere: while Pamie is sweet and funny and doubleplusnifty and all that, she is also taken. But don't let that stop you.) Or, if you're in or near Warren, Michigan, this weekend, you can meet Pete Abrams, author of seven books (the first book starts here), as well as Terry Pratchett, author and/or co-author of lots and lots of books. And that little Trekker Tux is just too. damn. cute.

2003-04-28T13:10:00.000-04:00

Much as I love Gregg Easterbrook -- SUV-disliker, haiku-writer, cheerleader-ogler, and (if you read his pre-NFL draft column on ESPN) Buffy spoilerwhore -- his last New Republic dispatch, which covers the idea of reparations to the families of the 1,300 or so Iraqi civilians killed, leaves me slightly queasy. The whole idea reminds me too much of one of Saddam's tactics: to pay out $25,000 (if I'm remembering correctly) to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Let's face it: shelling out $10,000, or $100,000, per family is not exactly sending out a message of caring: more like a message of We're powerful enough to kill your loved ones without suffering any ill effects ourselves, and then rich enough to toss money at you for it. Paying money to specific families would, I suspect, just cause more resentment.

And is it really worth it to draw such a fine line between Iraqi civilians and soldiers? We know there was forced conscription. We cannot say, as we could of our own army (or even the German army of World War II), that the Iraqi soldiers chose to put their lives on the live. Even if they did, it seems like there were enough threats involved to make it not much of a choice at all.

A little while ago Instaman floated the idea (or, rather, as these things go, somebody floated the idea and Instaman re-floated it) of putting the money from newly re-pumping Iraqi oil into a trust fund to be split among all Iraqi citizens. (Hopefully if this ever came to fruition there would be someone from Kuwait on the advisory board.) I like that better than the idea of paying blood money to individuals.

I've had my head stuck so far in the metaphorical sand over the last few weeks I'm not even sure what's going on -- Jay Garner? Sadr City? The what and the who, now? My work has been primarily concerned with non-Iraqi events. I was in New Orleans for a conference last week, for example. Iraq didn't come up. SARS did, since there were delegates from Asia who couldn't attend, but Iraq didn't. So I've been admittedly ignorant -- another reason not to be blogging.

At any rate, send your congratulations to Greg, who got his hoped-for tobacco tax increase (though I'm not clear on the details yet).

Still don't know what that song was. I can at least remember the tune at this point; I'm tempted to call WDVX and hum it into my phone. But work and emails to attend to first.

2003-04-19T01:17:00.000-04:00

All right, good folks, I need your musical sleuthing skills again.

In a bookstore today I was sitting and looking through Iris Murdoch novels I am too intimidated to read (and if anyone wants to tell me where to start with Iris Murdoch, please do) and I heard over the PA system this very beautiful, bluegrass-y song. The singer was female -- I initially thought it was Alison Krauss -- and I listened hard to the four-line chorus but still don't remember it well: it proved far more ephemeral than it seemed at the time. I know it had the word "God" in it: I wish to God, something, something. And I think I know you don't understand why I love him. The mood of the song, sad but hopeful, made a much stronger impression than the actual lyrics. It was followed by a song with a male vocalist, so it may have been on some sort of compilation album.

Out of sheer desperation, a few hours later, I cornered a nice clerk. "Cat Power," she said authoritatively. I almost believed her, but my former roommate played "Bathosphere" one too many times on her radio show back in college. I know Cat Power. It wasn't Cat Power.

Fairly sure it wasn't Lucinda Williams, either; the voice was high and clear, not husky.

So: female singer, relatively slow-paced, bluegrass-but-not-traditionally-so song with four-line chorus; she seems to be explaining things, trying to comfort the listener and comfort herself, knowing she can't put things right entirely but when she looks back it strengthens her. Can you help?

By the way -- one of my sleuths, Melissa H, is expecting a cute baby boy fairly soon (~May 22nd). Hooray! If you want to help her name Baby H, go here and post your suggestions.

2003-04-16T08:56:00.000-04:00

I know -- it's been a while. A lot's been going on; I was in Washington, DC, the weekend before last, and Boston this past weekend (where I finally got to see A again, and it was quite nice), and when I haven't been traveling there's been work, and more work, and more and more and more work.

I made a mistake in the last post, by the way. It was Nicky Wu, not Leslie Cheung, in The Lovers.

So there's not much to report, other than a few days ago I changed my passwords to a lot of sites, including Blogger, with the specific purpose of making it harder for me to go babbling about online. In theory this would allow me more time to work. Theory has not yet led to practice.

Honestly? I haven't decided if I want to continue this yet. I told Greg that I felt I ought to either commit to it or give it up: either spend the money and get a proper domain name and a proper design and a non-Blogger input mechanism and so on, or not do it at all, but not tentatively, the way I do now. (Ever noticed you don't get me on Google? That's not by accident.)

So -- I shouldn't waffle, and I'm waffling. I got definite confirmation (long story) that I wouldn't get fired for blogging, long as it didn't interfere with work, but that still doesn't necessarily mean blogging is healthy for me. Sometimes it seems I spend more time writing my life than living it.

I think y'all will cope if my posting continues to be sparse. You see that list of links on the left? Lots of interesting stuff there. Or you could be busy preparing for Asian Films Are Go!! 2003 or the Spirited Away / Kiki's Delivery Service / Laputa triple DVD release coming next month. And maybe next time I check in -- cross your fingers -- I'll have a third draft to tell you about.

2003-04-01T14:27:00.000-05:00

Leslie Cheung, the actor, died today in Hong Kong. This is not an April Fool's joke. I wish it were.

Western viewers would probably know him best as the Peking Opera actor who falls in love with his friend in Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993) or one of the two leads in Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together (1997), but his list of credits was enormous. This is just off the top of my head:

A Chinese Ghost Story
A Chinese Ghost Story II
A Chinese Ghost Story III
Ashes of Time
A Better Tomorrow
A Better Tomorrow II
The Chinese Feast
The Lovers
He's a Woman, She's a Man
The Bride with White Hair

You can see his entire filmography here (although that page may get overloaded). The Subway guys posted a shorter bio here as part of their Tsui Hark film festival in 2001. For their 2002 In the Mood for Gore fest they have a description of Inner Senses, which may have been his last major film.

This is truly sad. He was only 46, and hugely respected as an actor and singer; he should have been able to enjoy his success. He was not only a great actor but a courageous one. Rest well, Mr. Cheung -- you will be remembered fondly.

Grady, of the Subway men, has posted a fitting eulogy.

2003-03-31T12:01:00.000-05:00

A few random, non-war-related, non-novel-related updates:

First, word has it (on the MHVF board, and hopefully the news-bringer will be rewarded well in the afterlife for the service) that Turner Classic Movies is planning a Bollywoodfest every Thursday night in June. Mark your calendars now: Thursday, June 12th, will feature Rangeela and Dil Chahta Hai back-to-back. For those of you not familiar with Hindi titles, that's "the movie where Aamir and Urmila play childhood best friends" and "the movie where Aamir wears a soul patch and reportedly took up with Preity Zinta offscreen, thus wrecking his marriage." (I don't believe it, personally. Given that Preity has been rumored to be involved with every. single. one. of her male co-stars, and given that Aamir has a history of being platonic friends with actresses -- Juhi Chalwa, for instance -- it's perfectly plausible that the two could be texting each other like mad and still not having an actual affair.) Six promised hours of Aamir fabulousness? I've already cleared my calendar.

On an only tangentially related note, if you haven't seen Spirited Away in the theaters, you have a second chance. Go. Go now. I liked it better than Princess Mononoke, even. (The English dub is certainly better than Mononoke's was.) It's probably on par with My Neighbor Totoro as to sheer imaginative enjoyment.

In blog news, My Secret Agent Lawyer Man has gotten a new URL and gone to Code Orange. I'm just happy I can finally load the page now. Also check out Baseball Musings, by a former ESPN researcher. He apparently doesn't have comments, or else I would have written in on his very good discussion of the Braves' broadcasting issues. Still looking for an American League alternative until my beloved Braves are released from the grasp of AOL Time Suckmyleftone. The case for the Red Sox is, admittedly, fairly compelling, but I'll have to give it some thought -- one can't make these commitments lightly.

I'd go for the Orioles, for some sort of strange pro-Baltimore sentiment I've had for a while, but I don't really like their style, and I don't like the idea of tossing their owner a bone, so . . .

(Not that I'm saying it's strange to be pro-Baltimore, mind you. It's just strange when you've never spent more than five minutes in Baltimore that wasn't on the Hopkins campus.)

And finally, the first part of The Ghosts of Albion, the new online-only, Cosgrove-Hall-animated, early-Victorian-set spooky drama by Amber Benson and Christopher Golden, is now up and running. And not half-bad, though it might work better as a radio play than as Flash animation. Check it out, and if you liked it, stop by Golden's site and tell him so; he's a pretty cool, down-to-earth guy, from what I can tell.

2003-03-27T11:58:00.000-05:00

Noooooooo!

I was feeling ambivalent enough about America Online's Team as it was, what with Tom Glavine in a new uniform this spring and so on. If people can boycott teams because they dislike the team name, the way stadia are financed, the trading of a particularly well-liked player, or the rise in ticket prices, then I can boycott the Braves as a protest against what might go down as the dumbest takeover in American corporate history. (Not to mention those awful CDs.) Now they're breaking up the Skip Caray-Joe Simpson and Don Sutton-Pete Van Wieren teams that have worked so well for so long.

I'm not actually a big fan of Skip -- when he and Joe Simpson had the radio turn last summer I did a lot of eye-rolling and muttering, "Okay, Skip, whatever you say" -- but the two teams balanced each other. Caray had the firm presence; Simpson is a little more muted and bland. Van Wieren has a very distinctive voice; Sutton is more genial. So AOL Time Biteme, in all its wisdom, has put the two lesser-known, less distinctive guys on TV and consigned the two more distinctive voices to radio.

The plan is to change the TBS games to "MLB on TBS" and focus more on the opposing team, less exclusively on the Braves. This despite the fact that every single game TBS will show features the Braves. Despite the fact that TBS has been showing Braves games for three decades. Despite the fact that TBS has been so closely connected with the Braves that in the late 1970s it was joked that the Braves were the only team to lose 200 games in a season, since TBS showed every game twice.

This is the sort of foresight and audience awareness that has consistently characterized AOL Time Bitchslap's decisions. The results speak for themselves. I just hope this is true and not rumor.

In the meantime, what am I going to do? To not root for the Braves . . . sacrilege. Maybe I can adopt an American league team this season. Let's see . . . not the Yankees, not the Angels, not the Orioles . . . anyone got any suggestions?

2003-03-26T18:17:00.000-05:00

Confession: for years -- I'm not sure how long -- I've thought Howie Long was hot. Yes, that Howie Long, former Raider, Radio Shack commercial star, and and FOX pregame show aider and abetter. Something about the glasses, I think. I know it's a complete fallacy to think that glasses = more going on behind the eyes, but it's not exactly a fallacy I want to see fall away, if you know what I'm saying, and I think you do.

(I wear glasses very poorly, for what it's worth. One ear is slightly higher than the other, so my glasses, no matter what, always end up crooked.)

At any rate -- finding out that he recorded an introductory video on behalf of the Air Force Aid Society did nothing to change my mind.

I'm as guilty as anyone else of wanting to believe the best of my chosen celebrities. It may well be that Howie Long is a complete prick. If that's true -- don't tell me. I like my little fantasy world, in which Howie Long would not only be ideal company at a barebecue, to the point that somewhere around the second beer it would be okay to start saying, "Okay -- Radio Shack? Really, now." And Howie Long would just laugh.

2003-03-26T17:58:00.000-05:00

Can someone more computer-familiar than myself explain this one?

I was at Lt Smash's new mirror site, and clicked on the comments for this entry about a fallen Navy man. Up comes a Java error: "Unterminated string constant. Do you wish to debug?" For some reason I get Java (or Javascript? I've gotten the two confused before) errors all the time -- they're the reason I can read the Pejpage in Netscape but not in IE -- so I clicked on "No" like I always do.

But instead of going to the comments, I got another message:
No war!
and then:
No WAR!
and finally:
You are going to die!!
and then it kicks me out without getting to read the comments.

I've checked on several other entries -- I can read the comments, no problem. It seems to be only that one entry.

Brooke? Anyone?

If it is a hacker -- that's the only explanation I can come up with -- that's a hell of a thing to do to a salute to a dead soldier, of all places.

2003-03-26T13:57:00.000-05:00

Pamie has turned her index page into a list of reported casualties on both sides. (If you go to her page via Damn Hell Ass Kings you won't see it.) She's gotten some evil troll mail since she made the change, so go email her and tell her she's doing a great and necessary job.

2003-03-25T10:11:00.000-05:00

Wooo!

I get to meet Greg today! Wooo!

And Brooke got profiled by the L. A. Times! Wooo!

And I'm almost -- as in, a few paragraphs, maybe a page or two, away from -- the scene at the Krispy Kreme, and once that gets done there will only be one big section left for the third draft. ('Cause, you know, how could I write a novel set in Atlanta and not have a scene at the Krispy Kreme? Admittedly, it's not particularly subtle, but has the charm of Krispy Kremes ever been in the subtlety?)

(By this logic I also need a scene at the Clairmont Lounge. Maybe in the sequel.)

(My boyfriend and I took a visiting friend of his to the Clairmont last fall. The poor boy, who was expecting something along the lines of the Gold Club or the Cheetah, refused to look up from his drink the entire time -- not even when Kathleen hectored him into giving money, not even when the stoned bikers started a fight. I tried to tip generously to make up for it, and Blondie called me "sweetie," which was the highlight of my night.)

(If Pejman ever comes to visit, I will totally take him to the Clairmont. Without my boyfriend.)

(Parentheses. Wooo!)

2003-03-24T13:08:00.000-05:00

"Dude," Alastair just said to me (over IM), "opendemocracy.net so rad."

Which was sweet. He's been peace-protesting, he said. I spent eight hours last night playing board games, blithely ignoring everything outside: no basketball scores, no Oscars, no war, nothing except the company of friends and a whole bunch of little wooden and plastic tokens. (And for my blinkers played my worst game of Puerto Rico to date.)

Alastair referred me to the Ariel Dorfman poem, "Pablo Picasso Has Words for Colin Powell from the Other Side of Death."

I want to say a hundred thousand things about responsibility and war and whether being a voluntary citizen of the most powerful nation in the world is going to send me straight to hell -- and I write them and they never come out right.

Friends are good things.

Meet Grace, by the way. (Via Beta Reader Larry). She's an Atlanta resident who throws poetry parties and leaves graffiti messages, and she sounds like a really interesting, sweet person.

2003-03-21T16:49:00.000-05:00

So, wait. The new Gwyneth Paltrow movie View from the Top is not actually set in the late 1960s? I had just assumed it was, from the trails on TV -- the flight attendants' outfits, the eyeshadow, et cetera. I figured Mike Myers's character was possibly a satire on early Herb Kelleher. But apparently it's set in the present day, and thus makes no sense.

Darn. I was actually looking forward to seeing it -- if only because I kind of miss Marc Blucas. Not Riley, mind you, just the actor who played him.

2003-03-21T15:59:00.000-05:00

Paul is against the war. As is Tony Pierce (whose photo essay is really, really funny). So are Professor Jeff Cooper (I think) and Jason Rylander. So is Ampersand, so is Jim, so is Rabbit (at least, judging by her Salon pieces), the guy behind Long Story Short Pier, Greg Greene, and Jackie Collins (who's not a blogger, but will turn into one if she keeps up this posting schedule).

My point is that the idea of the blogosphere being pro-war is pretty much an outdated meme. The guys who shot to prominence in late 2001 and early 2002 may still be pro-war, but they're not representative of the whole. They're not even representative anymore of my little corner of the blogosphere, and considering I entered it under Brooke's auspices, that's saying something.

2003-03-21T13:13:00.000-05:00

Maybe I'm being naïve, or maybe it's because I was twelve when Gulf War I happened and don't remember the grand international coalition we had back then, but I'm not particularly inclined to view Bush's diplomatic failures in the run-up to the war as particularly long-lasting or permanent. It'll leave marks, yes, and it may have sealed Tony Blair's doom (though it should be noted that he still has the support of a majority of Britons polled). I don't even think US-French relations are permanently damaged. To a large part, I think, it'll depend on not Chirac but Nicolas Sarkozy. If his anti-crime tactics work and he gets a reputation as the (pre-September 11th) Rudy Giuliani of France, the French may stick it out with Chirac and his positioning. If crime, and stories about dangerous Beurs running wild around La Défence, grow, then the French attitude towards Chirac may sour a bit. As much as this has been playing out internationally, really it all comes back to the home front -- and I hope Bush and his advisors are smart enough to realize that.

I read some speculation earlier today that Bush had struck a bargain with South Korea: Roh Moo-hyun supports the war on Iraq (and in his country, that's not a particularly popular move, as best I understand) and Bush seeks a "diplomatic" solution to North Korea. That doesn't surprise me at all.

Wow, this attempt to not talk about the war is really working out. You want to know how much work I've gotten done in the last few days? At least Scott is feeling better, I think.

2003-03-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

Instapundit and I are apparently living in two different countries. He says the antiwar movement is dying out, and points to a small rally he saw. In Knoxville, Tennessee. Hotbed of liberal activism, that Knoxville, Tennessee. Meanwhile, that Boston protest I mentioned yesterday? Thousands.

If anything, the number of antiwar voices I've been hearing in the last week have only increased. Almost no one with whom I talk (or "talk") online supports this war. I could count on one hand the number of college friends who might support the war, possibly, maybe. With many casual acquaintances I'm afraid to even find out their position, for fear they'll declare, passionately and strongly, that this war is a grievous wrong and a mistake and they are sorry it's happening, and then I'll be, "Well . . . okay! How's the wife and kids?"

My cool ex-professor Tim Burke is having trouble sleeping because of the war. (Via Greg Greene. Now there's a meeting of the minds! And I'd like to take credit for it.) I don't blame him. Justin Raimondo (and for those of you who flinch merely at reading his name, hang in there) proposes a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates, make the pro-war people explain themselves. Those of y'all who've been reading know what a crappy job I've done explaining my own position (namely, that leaving Saddam Hussein in power is more dangerous and nastier, in the long run, than taking him out).

I'm here, safe at home, watching basketball, being a capitalist American. I wouldn't be able to handle being out there, and I know it. I wouldn't even be able to handle my boyfriend being out there, and he knows it.

I still think, in the long run, what with all the bungling and sniping and bitching and Kyoto-treaty-rejecting and PATRIOT-Act-abusing and other ham-handedness on the part of the Bush administration -- I still think the world will turn out for the better for America having made this move. I'm fairly sure I'm in the minority among people I know. And it's an easy thing for me to say, safe at home. I hope everyone concerned, with the exception of Saddam Hussein, is also safe at home very soon.

Two blogs from the front: The Primary Main Objective . . . , by Kevin, and that of Lt Smash.

2003-03-20T10:52:00.000-05:00

I've already lost one reader over the last post. But really -- what more is there to say? Is there anyone happy that war has started? Relieved, maybe, that we finally got to this point after all the buildup, but happy? I'm just feeling grim and queasy, mostly.

Said reader is attending an antiwar rally today at 5 p.m. at the JFK Federal Building, if any of my other Boston-based readers care to join her.

2003-03-19T18:42:00.000-05:00

A New York Times article about libertarian organizations and the Lawrence case. (Via Instapundit.) Go, sodomy, go!

Y'all don't mind if I just ignore the war, right? Let me say that I hope that Saddam gets toppled with as few shots and bombs as possible, and two months from now the news from Iraq is along the lines of "Shipment of X-Ray Machines, Other Equipment Signed For at Baghdad Hospital." And that's all I have to say, really.

Such is my luxury.

Listening to Kylie Minogue. On the way back from London I watched a documentary about Kylie -- twice. Partly because there was nothing. else. on. after watching Lilo and Stitch, and partly because -- well, Kylie. Do I really need to explain this? Kylie.

(Happily Married Vodkaman once called upon female bloggers to gush about their girlcrushes. Somehow since he missed the first twenty-six thousand times I mentioned the Amber-love, I don't think he'll notice . . . well, Kylie. Sigh. You try getting the attention of a happily married man.)

For what it's worth: Lilo and Stitch is far and away the best film Disney's done since Beauty and the Beast. Though this is the opinion of someone who has gone to great lengths to avoid seeing The Lion King.

Scattered thoughts continue: it seems that Scott is feeling a little -- well, churlish, would be the best word. What's with the knocking on Rabbit and using obscenities for Chrissie Hynde? Look, Scott -- you get to go to a rockin' film festival, you seem to be doing reasonably well in your chosen profession, you're getting married soon. Roll with it. Listen to Kylie. Kylie wants you to be happy.

Book stalled again. I think I may go to my favorite Starbucks tonight and try and start it up. Yeah, I know, Starbucks -- but Atlanta is not a haven for independent coffeeshops. If anyone wants to suggest a friendly independent coffeeshop or teahouse with a decent amount of parking, feel free.

And for those who wonder if this is a personal blog, an Asian film blog, a book blog: well, it ought to be a book blog. The problem is that I literally have spent an hour on the book in the last three weeks (two of which I was traveling). If I only blogged when I wrote, y'all would never hear from me.

Come to think it, that's not a bad motivating tactic.

So, cryptically: Pete's suicidal (maybe), Chloë's not in touch with her feelings (heh), Cecelia's the cutest rat in unpublished modern fiction, and that email I owe Pej is going to have to wait, since Kylie's telling me to get moving.

2003-03-19T09:44:00.000-05:00

Hey, Emily! Over here!

A nice guy named Mike is maintaining a detailed (and spoilerrific) fan site for Battle Royale 2, written and directed by Fukasaku Kenta, the son of the late Fukasaku Kinji. The best news on the site is that Shugo Oshinari, best known as the lovable nerd-turned-bully Hoshino in All About Lily Chou-Chou, is in it. (Well, not lovable, maybe, but certainly memorable: I couldn't pick the leading kid out of a police lineup, but Hoshino -- and the actor who played him -- has stuck with me, and it's been seven months now since I saw All About Lily Chou-Chou.)

Sonny Chiba -- Sonny Chiba! -- is also listed as a cast member. Many of the most memorable actors and actresses of the original aren't in it, unsurprisingly -- no Ando Masanobu this time around -- but it looks quite promising.

2003-03-18T10:33:00.000-05:00

Supposed to be working. Clearly, not.

I just found out I was completely off in what I thought were the lyrics to my favorite Elvis Costello song. He's singing "the mums and dads" and I thought it was "the merchandise."

I don't know why "Clubland" is my favorite Elvis Costello song. In the week or so after I found out my grandfather had the cancer that eventually killed him I would drive to work, play "Clubland," and cry. I'm not sure why "Clubland" in that case, either.

A, I'm sorry I missed your birthday.

2003-03-17T15:14:00.000-05:00

My site stats turned up a reference from this Swiss blog.

I'm not quite sure how, frankly. There doesn't seem to be any links from the blog. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any incentive to leave that blog. In fact, I suspect that once many of my male readers (and perhaps some of my female readers) click that link, they may never find their way back.

But hey -- enjoy the Swiss cheesecake.

2003-03-17T13:19:00.000-05:00

I almost forgot:

Globalization, n. A recent phenomenon, best demonstrated by a college student from Cairo hitting on a nice Jewish American girl (of Hungarian and Latvian origins) at a bus stop at five in the morning. In London.

2003-03-17T13:16:00.000-05:00

Well, one criticism that came out of the poll was that I don't post enough. Hi, Megan! (I know several Megans, so apologies if I ought to be saying more than just, "Hi, Megan!") I should note that in the past posting more often has not produced a viable uptick in my hit count. And, y'know, Anna Beth has updated twice in 2003 and people still love her like she's the cutest, funniest, Aveda-est journal writer they ever did see. Of course, she probably is the cutest, funniest, Aveda-est . . . darn.

So, updating. Back in the States. As of yet I do not have the Killer Flying Flu. And apparently I slept with AirTran on the first date, because now AirTran is taking my love for granted and suspending its fabulous buy-three-coach-roundtrips-get-one-coach-roundtrip-free Amex deal and going with this crappy points system on their own Visa. Note to AirTran: this is not the way to keep me from running into the arms of JetBlue.

My current obsession is the song "Everything Needs Love," by Mondo Grosso featuring BoA -- the latter being neither the film that brought Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan together nor a type of snake, but a Korean pop star. (Warning: that first link isn't likely to stay stable.) There's something about J-pop, or Asian pop in general, that just gets into your brain and sets itself to "repeat". I swear, some group of scientists at Waseda University got together, isolated that little part of the brain, named it the Dance Dance Revolution cortex, and got busy calling Coco Lee and BoA and whoever's behind the theme song for Revolutionary Girl Utena and charting the path to world domination via slightly accented English and house beats. I suspect that if Naoki Maeda (the guy behind many of the Dance Dance Revolution songs) and Shinichi Osawa (the man behind Mondo Grosso) got together with Kylie Minogue, within weeks they would command six billion helpless, pop-addled, dancing zombies.

2003-03-14T12:02:00.000-05:00

I'll look like I'll hit about 10,000 page views in a few days. Not visits. Views. Over six months.

One could reasonably conclude that this blog is not accomplishing its supposed objective, which was to be popular, and make me more popular, and thus make my eventually published (in theory) book more popular. I supsect part of it is the no-last-name policy, part of it was that there already quite a few established Hot Bloggin' Babes by the time I started last May, and part of it is . . . hmm. I'm not sure. Too few pictures of Sexy Khans? The war waffling? A breach of shoutout etiquette?

Let's try a poll:

This blog is not terribly popular because:
(a) Dude, there are only so many blogs in a given day.
(b) I'm afraid Pejman will rip my eyes out of my head if I flirt with you.
(c) Look, bitch, take a position on the war and stick with it. Christ. I haven't seen so much equivocating since ninth grade Lincoln-Douglas practice.
(d) Is it a book blog? A personal blog? An Asian film blog? I'm confused!
(e) Not enough sexy pictures of Asian actors and actresses.
(f) Not enough sexy pictures, period.
(g) Worrying about getting fired is so 2002; a real blogger would post her last name.
(h) You are the best-kept secret in the blogosphere, and we hoard you to ourselves like a gold vein in 1849 California.
(i) I gave you a permalink, you ingrate! And you didn't link me back!
(j) Everyone's busy with the prewar nookie.

2003-03-13T13:26:00.000-05:00

Matthew Stinson is harsher to the Beastie Boys than I was. He doesn't bring up the question of violent movements in Tibet, though.

2003-03-13T06:03:00.000-05:00

I'm far too jealous. Ian Michael Hamet, the man behind Banana Oil, has seen Space Travelers. I haven't yet, because of my pesky Playstation 2 refusing to play R3 DVDs. (Except for Sonatine, apparently R0 masquerading as R3.) But check out Banana Oil; it looks to be an interesting, thoughtful blog.

Meanwhile, another benefit of UK TV: turn it on and there's Rani Mukharjee onscreen, looking decidedly nonplussed at the idea of having an affair with Vivek Oberoi. (She's not, she said, fairly convincingly. I'm with her: I don't get the Vivek thing yet either. It's exhausting enough keeping up with the Sexy Khans.) All the more reason to block out three hours for Nayak once I get home.

Sonatine, for what it's worth, was one of those movies where my reaction was, "What? . . . Okay, what's going on? . . . Why'd she do that? . . . The who in the what, now? . . . I need to see it again." It's not that incomprehensible; it's laid out relatively clearly on screen what's going on. It's just disorienting, which I think may have been deliberate on Takeshi Kitano's part. The pace of the film will be slow, slow, slow and then suddenly the action kicks in, then back (sometimes immediately) to slow, slow, slow. It reminded me of Fukasaku Kinji's* Graveyard of Honor, in that both movies start by showing what an amoral sadist the hero can be, then slowly set up the viewer's sympathy. It also requires the audience to fill in the blanks as how the characters feel about each other, which is more easily done with the quieter Sonatine than the jerky Graveyard of Honor (which I nearly walked out of).

Some movies grow in stature after I've seen them, some shrink. I'd put Sonatine alongside Mar's Villa and maybe Pistol Opera in the former category, with Storyteller, Gosford Park and The Isle in the latter.

* = A while ago I said that Sonatine was the movie Takeshi Kitano took over directing duties for after Fukasaku Kinji left. I was wrong: that was the earlier Violent Cop.

2003-03-12T07:01:00.000-05:00

The Beastie Boys have released, free online, a new anti-war song. The chorus goes:

In a world gone mad it's hard to think right
So much violence hate and spite
Murder going on all day and night
Due time we fight the non-violent fight

My question is: what do they think of the violent element in the Free Tibet forces?

No, I'm not being sarcastic. The Beastie Boys have been at the forefront of the non-violent fight to free Tibet for over a decade now -- heck, Adam Yauch met his wife through Students for a Free Tibet -- and it has gotten them and the rest of the free-Tibet movement very little, as best I can tell: the occasional corporate pullout, but China's still there, still repressive, still flooding the region with ethnic Chinese so that they can legitimately claim a "majority" of the people want to be part of China.

So at this point you couldn't blame the free-Tibet movement, and the Beastie Boys, for feeling a little frustrated. But have they -- by which I mean the Beastie Boys, not the entire free-Tibet movement or the Tibetans themselves -- completely rejected violence as a solution? If so, on what grounds? Do the Beastie Boys have any concerns that supporting the anti-war movement will strengthen China, who seems to be in the French camp and who has sold weapons to Iran and Pakistan (and possibly Iraq as well) in the recent past?

Because I cannot believe that Adam Yauch wouldn't have sat down and figured out how his free-Tibet views square with his anti-war-on-Iraq views. And I like the Beastie Boys. So I want to know.

2003-03-12T06:11:00.000-05:00

Now this I was not expecting:

Green - You believe that small economic units
should control the goods, and that the
government should be permissive of
"victimless crimes," respectful of
civil liberties and very strict towards big
business. You also believe in either a
socialist tax structure or more power to local
communities. You think that environmental
policies should be written into law. Your
historical role model is Ralph Nader.

Which political stereotype are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I really did think I was going to get libertarian on that one.

(Found on &'s blog. Thanks for the link, &!)

2003-03-11T07:30:00.000-05:00

In London, for work -- got to see Tony Blair take on a group of anti-war British women on ITV last night. I did my fair bit of arguing with the screen -- more with the women than with Blair himself, though I thought he didn't do as good a job of presenting his case as he could have. He kept saying over and over, "I know I'm not going to convince you, but . . . " He seemed frustrated. I kept thinking there was no way in hell Bush would subject himself to such an ordeal on prime time.

The women varied in their questions. There was an Iraqi exile who made one of the best arguments, that Saddam would rather bomb his own people than lose power; there was a woman who had lost her son at the World Trade Center, who was melodramatic to the point that I wished Blair had asked her why her grief had any more claim on him than a woman who might have lost her son to a car wreck or cancer; there was a young possibly-ex-Labour-Party-volunteer -- that was my guess, but she seemed more angry that Blair had led Labour into this situation than anything else; there was a woman who volunteered the information that her husband is in Iraq as a human shield, and at one point was reduced to yelling, "They're poor! They can't have any bombs, they're too poor!" They were ruder to Blair than he was to them -- another reason Bush would never do such a program; he'd be snapping back nastily within three minutes.

At the end the presenter said, "But if you don't get that second resolution, you're finished, aren't you?" and Blair smiled the most brittle smile I've yet seen on a politician's face. He's probably finished regardless; even if he were to get the second resolution and the war were to go smoothly, I can't see the Labour faithful forgiving him for taking them down this path. He probably knows he's finished, which makes these public forays out into hostile crowds all the more impressive.

I don't know how much good it does him, though. All he got for his troubles in the show last night was slow handclapping. The mood here in London seems resolutely anti-war. The boy last week bought a book of Spider Robinson stories, originally published in the mid-1970s; in one of them the narrator (Robinson's stand-in) wonders out loud how a supposedly democratic country could be dragged into a devastating war the public didn't want (Vietnam, in this case). The answer lies with a race of aliens who cannot kill themselves but need to eat -- so instead they convince, through persuasion and the granting of technology, the humans to kill themselves en masse.

I liked every story in the book but that one. It struck me as a cheap way out: the aliens made us do it! But I was reminded of it last night. "There is no right and wrong in this situation," Tony Blair pleaded, and the women stared at him as if he was the alien.

2003-03-06T12:37:00.000-05:00

Y'know, I don't think Neal Pollack was trying to satirize Brooke when he wrote this.

But reading one right after the other is really funny.

Hell, Neal Pollack in general is really funny. He is apparently trying to pick a wife. He supports fanfic, distrusts Jonathan Safran Foer, and thinks Bookslut is nifty, which gives us three things in common. Many happy marriages have thrived on less. Pick me, Neal! Pick me! I can say, "AirTran is punk!" and you can say, "Fuck no, bitch!" and then the passionate anger will give way to equally passionate sex. Plus, when your friends come over, you can point to me scrubbing the floor and say that I got an email from Paul Berman once.

But if AirTran becomes punk then it will be hip, and then it will be over. How about: Southwest: formerly punk. JetBlue: bourgeois punk. AirTran: just cheap.

Oh, Neal, I would sing "Pardesi, Pardesi" to you, but BollyWHAT? is down.

2003-03-05T11:59:00.000-05:00

Yay! Apparently aware of my hopes to visit Pejman and my father-in-law, my favorite cheap-ass airline, AirTran, will start flying between Atlanta and Los Angeles in June. They're also going to Vegas, so we can fly AirTran to the boyfriend's best friend's wedding in October. Go, AirTran!

I'm completely serious. If AirTran hadn't offered flights between New York and Atlanta for $180 a pop I don't know how I'd still be in a relationship now. The planes and the gate agents are nicer than they were three years ago. They have the easiest frequent-flyer program I know of (buy three roundtrips on an American Express card, get the next roundtrip free). They allow you to buy one-way and to stand by for an earlier flight if you get to the airport early enough, neither of which is easy on Delta. Or as Michael Palin might have put it:

AirTran, AirTran, AirTran,
The only cheap airline for me,
I can't stand fucking Delta,
So hello Concourse C!

2003-03-04T17:57:00.000-05:00

Now, this is interesting: a new book titled Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists -- written by two finance professors at the University of Chicago. I'll have to keep my eyes open for it.

2003-03-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

A brief look at the New York Times today:

Is Art Spiegelman's praising Jules Feiffer as having "reinvented comics" a subtle swipe at Scott McCloud? I'll wait to see what Franklin Harris, who holds McCloud in much lower esteem than I do, has to say.

What do you do when you want to write on t.A.T.u. and can't get access to the girls themselves? You write this, including what has to be one of the dumbest comparisons in history: Bob Guccione, Jr., saying the t.A.T.u. controversy is "like getting worked up over kabuki." Yes, kabuki. Somewhere, Donald Keene is planning to squash Bob Guccione, Jr., like a bug.

Jim Harrick, UGA's basketball coach, is under investigation. Approximately three people are surprised, and one of them is the new guy in UGA's public relations office.

Actually, now that I think of it, in the very long run, Donald Keene probably squashes Bob Guccione, Jr., like a bug anyway.

2003-03-04T13:04:00.000-05:00

Finally have gotten around to reading, or at least reading part of, No Logo, after months of being curious. (It was for work. It's a long story.) It's been very interesting -- and more than a little frustrating.

There's a sequence late in the book where Naomi Klein is discussing Nike. It comes after chapters and chapters on sweatshop labor and brand saturation, so the case against Nike and Phil Knight is fairly well established at this point. So, Klein writes, after years of pressure, Nike raises wages. But activists aren't satisfied. So it implements a corporate code of ethics. But the activists (and Klein) think corporate codes are mostly self-serving bullshit. So Nike raises wages again. And again the activists come out with long lists of what else Nike is doing wrong.

This is not to say that Nike is blameless, or that Klein is shortsighted -- to her credit, a few pages later she brings up the possibility that the intense scrutiny of Nike has allowed Reebok and Adidas to act worse, with fewer consequences. But the way it read, I could all too easily imagine Phil Knight throwing up his hands and saying, "No matter what I do, I'm the bad guy. So fine. I'll be the bad guy. Less to worry about."

Klein isn't simply a critic of corporations -- she's "anti-corporate," which is another thing altogether. As her 2002 afterword to No Logo and this excerpt from her website make clear, she doesn't even really have much faith in the free market:

For example, if you own a manufacturing company in a market system that puts you in competition with other manufacturers, one way you maximize profit is by trying to produce things at lower cost than other companies. If that means reducing the wages of your employees-so be it. And if people in one country won't work for less than you're paying them, you can move the factory to a locale where farmers displaced from their land by the construction of trade corridors or other industrial investment plans will work for slave-wages . . .
But capitalism, and the colonialism and imperialism that found it, can only be challenged if we understand ourselves as people and as political agents struggling against a web of interconnected systems of domination—not merely as consumers trying to make the least evil choice.

To her example I would rebut that in many industries, lowering wages is a bad, bad idea, even in non-unionized firms. You run the risk of the worker leaving, which means spending money on hiring the new worker, training, and so on. Granted, there are many industries for which this doesn't hold true and high turnover is built into the system, but it's a stupid manager who thinks he/she can lower wages in a vacuum.

But Klein probably wouldn't be satisfied with my rebuttal, just as she isn't satisfied with Nike's corporate codes or Starbucks's free-trade offerings or Shell's efforts to clean up its act in Nigeria. The very existence of such large corporations seems to offend her. And that's what frustrates me the most -- her critiques are often good and valid, not to mention necessary, but she's like the doctor who says to the patient, "I hope you die. Oh, and you should take this medicine." Why should the patient listen? What incentive does Nike, Starbucks, or Shell have to reform their business practices, if such reform only shows the power of their implacable opponents?

What frustrates me is the seeming lack of critics who can simultaneously acknowledge the value in Klein's argument and the value of free markets. There are places in business today where people are discussing how to deal with such questions, but they're relatively few and far between. Take the Body Shop, for example. The pro-capitalists are content to hold it up as a shining light of social responsibility (Klein, again to her credit, isn't) and the anti-capitalists either swallow that whole ("Look! It says 'fair trade' on the label!") or lump it in with the rest of the Big Mean Evil Corporations. The Body Shop is, to my mind, worse than many of the supposedly less socially-friendly companies, because its hypocrises cast doubt on the whole possibility of socially responsible capitalism at that size. (And it's probably hypocritical on my part to rail against the Body Shop, since I used to shop there before switching to Lush, whose hands are not entirely clean.) There doesn't seem to be a constructive way yet to criticize companies such as the Body Shop, or Coca-Cola, or Nike, while favoring the system that produced said companies. Without that loyal opposition, it seems to me, less will get done.

I've been trying to think of a way for companies to turn a profit on socially responsible -- if momentarily costly -- actions, such as raising wages well above the mean; Henry Ford was able to do it, but (a) he needed skill, (b) he had first-mover advantage, and (c) he's not the best paragon to hold up. It seems to me branding is one of the few ways it can get done -- creating an image of a socially responsible company, à la Ben and Jerry's or the Body Shop -- but that kind of branding is particularly vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy or "selling out." Then there is the problem of the company's long-term interests versus the manager's short-term interests: the need to turn a profit this quarter versus the need to be around twenty years from now. That, I think, is the real obstacle to corporate social responsibility: the short-term self-interests of its managers and executives, who can make the decisions that lead to worker exploitation, environmental destruction, or similarly damaging circumstances without fear of adverse consequences (or, depending on the company structure, much knowledge of the consequences). But somebody has to be willing to turn the question around and look at the situation from that manager's point of view. Klein isn't.

She is also, apparently, pro-Chavez, which Francisco of Caracas Chronicles has already noticed. I have to say it's the first time I've ever read something in the Nation arguing that press censorship is actually a good thing.

I have to say -- I know people (not bloggers) who have responded to Klein and No Logo pretty virulently, and I don't want to attack her like that. I've found that I don't feel particularly comfortable in attack mode, and it doesn't seem to win me more readers, so -- I'll stay wishy-washy. What she's doing is valuable. But I do think that her anti-market, anti-corporate outlook will keep it from being valuable enough.

2003-02-28T14:02:00.000-05:00

My boy's bike is actually a Yamaha ('83 Midnight Virago, for those interested) and he doesn't have a Jewish bone in his body, but I think he'd like the Stars of Davidson anyway.

2003-02-28T12:08:00.000-05:00

Okay, this is pretty nifty:

If you feel more comfortable donating to something established, you can go directly through the USO. Unfortunately I don't know what the British and Australian equivalents would be.

2003-02-27T11:13:00.000-05:00

I love airports. Or rather, I love the feeling of being alone in an airport. I am a sophisticated lady; I am Marlo Thomas in That Girl; I am the one with the laptop, or the one browsing through the lad-rags at the Hudson News, or the one eating overpriced yogurt, and it doesn't matter long as I make it onto the plane.

I love Hartsfield, even with the screamingly misplaced atrium and the disappearance of Chris the friendly bartender from Concourse C, because for a year and a half being at Hartsfield meant being home and with the boy for a few precious days. I love the steely, too-clean, upscale, self-consciously modernist Terminal One at JFK, and I'd probably love Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal if I got to see it. I love Heathrow with its cheerful black-on-yellow signs, and I love the sunken food court in the nice part of LaGuardia, and I can even love DFW, one of the most unlovable airports in America, because the boy and I spent a lovely hour playing rummy at one of its gates just after Christmas 2001.

I don't love Charles de Gaulle, though. I respect it, but I don't love it.

My father got to take a business trip to China in 1998; he now claims to have arrived in one of the last planes to fly into Hong Kong's old airport and have left in one of the first planes to depart from Chek Lap Kok. Lucky man.

I'm doing some traveling over the next two weeks, but to no new airports. One of my hopes for 2003 is that I get to meet some nifty new airports. There are very few sensations like getting off the plane for the first time in a new city and the rush of excitement from the different people, different language on the signs, different ads, different chain stores -- it's nice to be in an airport you know, but it's definitely not the same.

2003-02-24T13:15:00.000-05:00

Regarding the last post, and general will-we-or-won't-we be at war talk: my thoughts are getting less and less coherent on the subject, and I'm enjoying the arguments less and less. I spent a very nice weekend hanging out with old friends and new ones -- last night we were gaming late, very late, late enough that people got punchy and funny, and I generally like seeing new friends get punchy and funny for the first time. And there was no discussion of getting anyone's war on. It was all silly and ephemeral, and it made me happy.

This morning I woke up, went to the computer, went to this blog, and felt my mood start to sink. Either way -- go to war, not go to war -- I see potential for disaster. And I know my arguments are starting to spiral in on themselves.

I know, I know -- participatory democracy, if you're not outraged you're not paying attention and if you're not paying attention then what are you doing, other than staring glass-eyed into space? But, frankly, staring glass-eyed into space would be more productive for me at this point.

I feel guilty, now -- I usually do; I ought to be fighting the rhetorical good fight for the cause I think best. But I simply don't know. If we go to war I'll support my country and my president and I'll pray that we're not sitting in a handbasket bound for hell. If there's more I should be doing . . . there's always more I should be doing, just like there's always something to feel guilty about, but I think the world will go on without my agonizing.

Parents, this is why you should not tell your children that they are intelligent and amazing and will grow up to do wonderful, world-changing things -- because they will harp on such praise long after it ceases to have any bearing on the situation at hand.

2003-02-21T12:32:00.000-05:00

Ana Marie Cox, former Suck editor, now has a blog, in which she asks the strangely simple question: Why are we at Code Orange, anyway?

The whole Code Orange alert has gone completely over my head; there isn't a bit of duct tape or bottle of water to be found in the apartment. You'd think I'd be piling up, since I'm one of those who've been saying for a while that it's a question of where and when, not if, the next terrorist attack will be, regardless of whether we end up fighting in Iraq or not. I just don't see a terrorist attack as something you prepare for. If I really wanted to defend myself, I wouldn't be shuttling between two of the larger and better internationally known American cities.

I suppose the question would be: how could I be relatively cynical about the administration's use of Code Orange signals and yet still in favor of the war? Ampersand has a retort (not aimed specifically at me) for practically every argument I've trotted out so far: war won't necessarily end the destructive sanctions -- in fact, we could have the ultimate worst-case scenario: war and Saddam and sanctions. Nor will it necessarily lead to a stable, democratic Iraq, because said Iraq might not necessarily be America-friendly -- in fact, it would almost certainly not be in ten years' time (nor would a stable, democratic Iran). Nor can we necessarily assume that the war will be quick and relatively painless for American troops or Iraqi civilians. So why go to war at this point?

Unfortunately, one of the answers is "Because we've been saying we will for months now." I've seen that line of thinking ridiculed -- geopolitics should not be a game of chicken. But a country that talks tough and doesn't follow through looks very, very vulnerable on the geopolitical front. Donald Kagan, in On the Origins of War, discusses this at length in relation to Athens and Sparta. I don't mean the moral dimension here; I'm talking self-defense.

Look at it from the point of view of a prospective America-bomber. You look at what the 19 of September 11th did. Then you look at what's transpired in the 17 months since: the Taliban were pushed out of Kabul -- but they still control good parts of Afghanistan; Osama bin Laden is probably still alive; anti-American sentiment around the globe is more visible than ever; Israel is isolated and desperate; North Korea is suddenly boldly talking about nukes. For all the posturing and bluster and froth . . . there's still not much reason not to carry out your plan. If anything you might be more motivated, now that you're been harrassed by the INS a few times.

To bring down Saddam at this point would at least mean there are some consequences to threatening the United States. If we actually brought him down, that is. It most likely wouldn't make a dent in al-Qaeda or other international terrorist groups, who probably severed their links to Saddam months ago, nor would it win the US any friends in the short- or medium-term, nor is it likely -- it's possible, but not likely -- to bring about a stable, economically viable, relatively not corrupt, democratic Iraq. But the alternative, to slap Saddam on the wrist -- with more sanctions, with diplomacy, with anything short of force -- while simultaneously trying to pretend that Kim Jong-il doesn't exist? This is the hyperpuissance that gets the world so steamed? Somewhere, Margaret Thatcher is laughing. Or crying.

I don't sound very pro-war, do I? Mr. Green is going to remove me from his Cool Girls list, and My Secret Agent Lawyer Man will go find some other girl to flirt with. I'm starting to think we're damned if we do go to war and damned if we don't. The people of Iraq are also damned if we do and damned if we don't. We can actively get blood on our hands, or we can just hold our hands out and wait for the blood to drip.

I think the best thing for me to do is take Neal Pollack's advice and shut up. There's a use of the duct tape for you.

2003-02-14T10:55:00.000-05:00

Meet Laura Antoniou, woman with a girlfriend, self-described pro-war liberal, and (like me) an Ian Buruma fan. Cool. (Via Vodkapundit.)

2003-02-13T17:54:00.000-05:00

So your boyfriend is very funny
And so are your cats
And today I thought of you
'Cause there's going to be this new show, Earthlings,
And Kate Moenning will be on it.
Remember? Jake/Jacqueline?
From Young Americans?
The Steel Drums of Non-Gay Love?
Yeah. That.
Nobody remembers that show, just the recaps.
So I think you should recap Earthlings
Even after your book comes out
And you're all famous and shit
And you say you're just Pamie from the block
And then say, "That's old now, isn't it? Damn. I'm old."
But seriously,
I'm sorry I didn't get to talk to you more at the wedding post-party
But things were weird and I was drunk
(Apparently things were weird and people were drunk all around)
And I didn't get a chance to tell you
I hope good things continue to happen to you.
Happy Valentine's Day to you too.

2003-02-13T13:40:00.000-05:00

There are times to hate evil. And then there are times to simply step back and salute evil in all its surprising, devious, brilliant evilness.

Meet Sonny Perdue, transformed at a stroke from a bumbling would-be small-town principal to the kind of archvillain you bow to before trying to kill him.

Here's the deal: Perdue wants a referendum on the state flag on March 2, 2004 -- the day Georgia votes in the presidential primaries. (Keep in mind that in Georgia, you don't have to be registered in a party to vote in that party's primary -- you can just show up.) There will be two questions. Q1: Do you want to keep the current flag, yes or no? Since the current flag is pretty much universally despised, that will probably be a no. But your vote in Q1 can only count if you vote in Q2: Which flag would you choose as a replacement -- the 1920-1956 flag or the 1956-2001 flag?

Well, the pre-1956 flag, you might say, since that gets rid of the awful Confederate battle symbol. But if the pre-1956 flag isn't modeled after the Stars and Bars, I'm blind. In fact, the 1920-1956 version is a not-too-distant descendant of the first official state flag, which is explicitly modeled after the Stars and Bars.

So, you either have to vote for an aesthetic monstrosity, or a Confederate symbol. You can't opt out. You can't vote for any other flag. You can't vote to just bin the idea of a state flag altogether. Either way, Sonny Perdue wins: if the current flag wins, he can say he delivered the right-wing battle-flag champions what they wanted; if either of the two proposals win, the Confederate heritage is restored, and he can say it was the will of the people. Perfect! Evil!

That is, if Herr Perdue's proposal passes the Legislature. Which it well might. I almost hope it does. I haven't gotten to see such splendid evil so up close and personal since the first season of The Amazing Race, or the death of the Mayor.

2003-02-13T10:27:00.000-05:00

Linking to this for my Teach-for-America alumnus reader. Warning: City Journal is cranky conservative, and the article is pretty much right in line with their editorial tone.

2003-02-13T10:02:00.000-05:00

Continuing along the Willow/Kennedy lack-of-chemistry theme, Iyari Limon (the actress who plays Kennedy) reveals that she wasn't really "in the moment." But some of her coolest friends are gay! No, she actually says that. Either that, or someone was trying to make her look horribly stupid: I also love fiction that has to do with witches, fairies, vamps, etc…. is there a word for that? I probably should know.

Sometimes finding out more about an actor pays off, and sometimes . . .

Yes, I'm biased. Point and laugh all you like. But part of the reason why I became a fan of Amber Benson in the first place was that she's an exception to what seems to be the general rule: there aren't that many mainstream Hollywood actresses that co-write comic books, write/direct/produce their own films, co-write/direct an animated series for the BBC, and so on. Even if she never does another creative thing again, just working with the studio that created Dangermouse renders her eternally crushworthy, far as I'm concerned.

2003-02-12T17:30:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I'm the only person mildly obsessed with t.A.T.u., the fake lesbian Russian pop duet. Well, me and Rob Walker, apparently. Come skulk in the dimly lit corner with me, Mr. Walker. But really, where are all you salacious bloggers? They're Russian! They're making out! They're wet, and in schoolgirl outfits, and born during Reagan's presidency, and making out!

They're apparently not actually dating each other, by the way. Or maybe. Or maybe not. They're being coy, which is either a testament to their handler's devotion to his ideas of "pedo-pop" or refreshing, at least compared to say, Kerr Smith yelling, "I'm not really gay! No, sir! Gay? Ick!" for all and sundry to hear. (And all and sundry's response: "Dawson's Creek is still on the air?")

Of course, I'm of about six minds as to the fake lesbian Russian pop schoolgirls. On the one hand, I'm all for more women making out on my television screen, and since the Memento Mori DVD is relatively hard to get as Korean DVDs go, t.A.T.u. is pretty much it for fulfilling the desperate-girls-in-love-and-plaid-skirts quota. And "All the Things She Said" actually sounds like it could be about two teenage girls in love and freaked out about it. (It could also be a summary of the first two-thirds of Memento Mori, minus the cool, observing third girl. Memento Mori is a brilliant film, by the way.) And, hell, they have more chemistry than Willow and Kennedy. (The Moscow Times says that they kiss "as passionately as two aunts." Sadly, that still means they have more chemistry than Willow and Kennedy.)

On the other, it's so exploitative as to be almost parodic -- wet! Russian! teenage! schoolgirls! kissing! They make Posh Spice look like Simone de Beauvoir. It only feeds into this whole idea that female-female love is just another peep show, to be either admired if the women are hot, or ridiculed if they're "dykes." Even when there are only women's bodies in the picture, it's the men's eyes that make the difference.

And seeing as how my boyfriend looooves it when I tell him about my girlcrushes, I'm not exactly one to talk. He swears he's just trying to make sure I'm not going to leave him for a woman, but what gay woman would take my sexual flip-flopping seriously? I like boys! I like girls! I like boys and girls! But I'm faithful! But I'm not! God almighty.

If female homosexuality were no big deal, if there weren't this element of male gaze and male power to depictions of girl-girl action, then we could dismiss t.A.T.u. as subpar Europop and me as just a flake. But we haven't reached that point yet.

On the third hand (fourth? fifth?) I've seen, online, younger women who are so, so glad to hear a song like "All the Things She Said." And just like I would have been glad to have Willow and Tara (if not Willow and Kennedy) around when I was 13, so I might have secretly watched the video over and over and over again.

2003-02-12T15:45:00.000-05:00

Because y'all love me so much, you can help me out: Who sings the song "Chocolate and Strawberries"? The lead singer sounds a little like Sarah Cracknell, but it's definitely not Saint Etienne. I thought it was the Sundays; I was wrong.

And as for my ill-fated lyrics quiz -- answers in the first comment for this entry.

2003-02-11T11:43:00.000-05:00

S. T. Kerrick doesn't sound like he'd know a Hong Kong flick if Sally Yeh stuck a semiautomatic up his butt, so he probably wasn't the right guy to review Shanghai Knights for the National Review. The clue? "[Jackie Chan] worked for so many years in the Hong Kong movie industry, a very different place . . . " and that's all the background Kerrick can deign to provide. No King Hu, no wuxia films, no one-armed swordsmen or Shaolin fighters or monkey/drunken/eagle fighters or any sort of context whatsoever for this idea of Jackie Chan as an action hero more American than the Americans.

"Chan is known, among aficionados of the martial-arts film, for his innovations in fusing action and comedy," Kerrick writes. Ehhhhhhh. Somewhat. Not alone, he isn't. There's Drunken Master and its sequel, yes, go Jackie. But it's hard to discuss his "innovations" as if he always worked alone, instead of with Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao; his collaborations with them -- Dragons Forever, Eastern Condors, Wheels on Meals -- probably did as much to establish his reputation as his solo work, and if anyone should get the credit for "innovations" there it's Sammo Hung, who has served as director and/or action director more often than Chan has. (He directed both of those, plus The Victim, Encounter of the Spooky Kind and its hopping vampires, The Prodigal Son, and Pedicab Driver, to name just a few.) Then there's the Yuen Clan films of the late 1970s, which are more strictly in the "kung-fu" tradition than Chan's, the Aces Go Places series of the early 1980s, the action-comedy-period-drama Peking Opera Blues, none of which featured Jackie Chan. Hell, you might argue that Chow Yun-fat, who crossed over from star of silly frothy comedies (Eighth Happiness) to bloody Triad battles, was more innovative than Jackie Chan, who started out in action films and never really left. Put it this way: it's not easy to picture Jackie Chan going from pure comedy (Eighth Happiness, again) to martial-arts (Swordsman) to comedy-horror (A Chinese Ghost Story II) to modern Triad pathos (As Tears Go By) to modern drama (July Rhapsody) -- that's Jacky Cheung, and acting isn't even really considered his main career!

Impressive? Yes. Innovative? Not all that much. Part of a much larger and more complicated film picture than Kerrick can apparently begin to grasp? Certainly. But Jackie Chan is cheerful and Harrison Ford is not, and somehow this proves that "relativism" has sucked the life out of American culture. All it proves is that Owen Wilson is bloody funny. (Notice that Kerrick can't even be bothered to mention the Rush Hour films or The Tuxedo.) And if Kerrick's argument were really true, wouldn't Chan's films bomb and Jet Li's more somber American work be more successful? But Kerrick thinks he can pick Jackie Chan up out of any context whatsoever and plop him in the midst of a labored, nonsensical, snippy argument. Please, National Review, stick to Francophobia. Don't try talking about Hong Kong films again until your writers can at least tell Shaolin Soccer from Kids From Shaolin at fifty paces.