Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Question: “ The findings of a new study show that low-fat diets do not reduce risk of cancer or heart disease. What do YOU think?”
Answer 1: " Yes! Personal accountability takes another blow?"
Answer 2: " I've never heard of the Hardee's Institute For Health, but they've put out a very convincing study here." 
Answer 3: " What did it say about smoking? Was there anything in there about smoking? Can we start smoking again?"Question: “ According to the Government Accountability Office, the Bush Administration spent $1.6 billion in public relations and advertising in the past 30 months. What do you think?”
Answer 1: " I'd say the ads were successful. George Bush has become a household name."
Answer 2: " I didn't realize it cost so much to make oneself look like an apocalyptic nightmare. "
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Monday, February 27, 2006
Worth 1,000 Words
John Ford's 1940 film 'The Grapes Of Wrath' is probably the most affecting, subtly heart-rending Depression story I've ever seen. Steinbeck considered the film superior to his own boo, and it's certainly more compact and tightly-constructed. What bats this ball out of the park are the images, reproduced below. Here you see American families, evicted from their homes, fleeing westward in impossibly overloaded vehicles, just looking for honest work, to see their hopes dashed to pieces in a humanity-sapping supply-and-demand nightmare. Somehow John Ford manages a light touch to this state of affairs, as does the humble dignity of the characters. He largely avoids heavy-handedness. The images, though, say it all.
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Sunday, February 26, 2006
Saturday, February 25, 2006
A Love That Will Never Grow Old
a.k.a. Taiwan's poignant inability to quit us...
It struck me as sweet and sad that Taiwan's President commented yesterday that his country has a "Brokeback Mountain" relationship with the US. Some highlights:
"It motivates us...to understand all of us are bound to make difficult decisions in life, yet we must strive to dispel prejudice...," President Chen Shui-bian told more than 500 American business leaders in Taipei.
"There is a 'Brokeback Mountain' in each and every one of us."
He should have also said "if this democracy and independence thing catches us in the wrong place... at the wrong time... then we're dead..."
Brokeback director Ang Lee is of course from Taiwan, which is claimed by China, which has banned Brokeback Mountain, among other appalling deeds. "Brokeback" is playing to packed theaters in Taiwan, where Ang Lee is revered.
This is an aerial photo of Taiwan, which crams 22 million people, more than in Texas, into its 13,000 square miles, which is about the combined size of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
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Friday, February 24, 2006
Question: “Frank Miller and DC Comics Announced that they would be publishing a comic in which Batman hunted down Ossama bin Laden. What do you think?”
Answer 1: " Did Katrina teach us nothing? We need Batman here, at home." Answer 2: " A cartoon targeting the Muslim world. I bet that'll go over great." Answer 3: " Superheroes taking on real-life enemies doesn't always work, if you recall the Incredible Hulk vs. Pol Pot cross-over "Many are voicing concern over Bush’s recent approval of a deal allowing a company based in the United Arab Emirates, who had ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers, to monitor security of select U.S. ports. What do you think?
Answer 1: “Why not? Some of those al-Qaeda people have probably done much more research on our ports than anybody else."Answer 2: " I think that we should have a little faith in these people. I mean, they were gracious enough to take Michael Jackson off our hands."
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Thursday, February 23, 2006
A Web Site You Can't Quit
My friend Peter's unveiling his Brokeback Mountain website, www.brokebackmountaintour.com, with news, video clips, and all manner of Brokebackiana. I encourage you to go take a look.
More on Miami later, including the creation of a WonderSalad, a trio of films, and two very different national parks, one of which spells the end of Florida.
You heard me. The end of Florida.
I'm falling a bit behind on my posts, I'm afraid - heavy workload, and I took Tuesday off. But I feel renewed. And tonight, I concocted my own version of the WonderSalad.
My pal David and I did a tad of shopping, wherein I purchased pink salt and pink pepper, with the serious intention of doing more pink cooking : - )
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Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
One Man's Ceiling Is...
I'm back from Miami, fully immersed in work, right up to my eyebrows.. At least it's interesting work... The excellent news: I'm 100% healthy and feeling great, for the first time in weeks!
Yet another cartoon about my favorite film:
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Monday, February 20, 2006
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Friday, February 17, 2006
Paddle Your Own Canoe
This is Mrs Henderson. She's self-centered, quirky, eccentric, and comically rude. She presents naked ladies to horny young soldiers.
This was a fanciful, somewhat escapist but very engaging entertainment. Perfect period recreation, lots of music and costumes and one-liners and naked women and a poor, naked, Bob Hoskins.
Oscar-calibre acting? This dame looks Oscar-quality when she's brushing her teeth.
If she still has teeth. She doesn't have any sex in the movie, though she certain has a romp. With no visible scenery-chewing, she always makes it seem natural and effortless.
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Thursday, February 16, 2006
Under The Gun
I'm trying to crank out one of the most complex research reports of my career, with a throng of salespeople and investors chomping at the bit, breathing down my back. Precious little time for entertainment. I did manage to finish "Stagecoach," the magnificent 1939 proto-Western that launched John Wayne and set the bar high not only for Westerns, but for multi-plot, multi-character ensemble action movies. It's about a motley crew of diverse characters making a dangerous trip across New Mexico and Arizona... via Stagecoach It contains... an Apache attack! wa wa wa! This is not a revisionist Western : - ) Nor can I guarantee you with any assurance that actual horses were not harmed during the filming of this movie....
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Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Captured By The Game
From The Onion, my favorite feature, “What Do YOU Think?
Question: “This weekend, Vice President Cheney accidentally shot a 78-year-old companion on a hunting trip in Texas. What do you think?”
Answer 1: " I think it might be time to take a closer look at Dick Cheney's series of geriatric 'hunting accidents."Answer 2: " Being a compassionate conservative, Cheney immediately apologized and offered to snap the poor man's neck." Answer 3: " It's nice to see that Cheney brings the same clear-headed approach to arms deployment in his personal life that he does in formulating foreign policy." Question: “A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Apple, claiming that iPods have the potential to cause hearing damage. What do you think?”
Answer 1: " I don't know if it causes hearing damage, but the ability to listen discreetly to Britney Spears has done major damage to my musical taste ." Answer 2: " This is like when no one warned me my gas bill could skyrocket by turning up my thermostat all the way." Answer 3: " Doesn't matter. The only thing I use my ears for is to listen to my iPod."
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Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Happy V.D.
Every Day's The 14th, as Outkast would sing... But the initials V.D. once had other connotations, less innocent that Hallmark and red boxes of chocolate. Way back in primitive times, in the 1970s, before ATMs, ADD, and AIDS, we had a different term for what are now called 'sexually transmitted diseases,' or STDs We invoked the god Venus herself to avoid such and explicit phrase - these were 'venereal diseases,' VD for short. Taught in high school health or sex education classes, VD was the subject of endless giggles and jokes, since at the time, nothing was permanent or lethal. Having VD back then was cause shot of penicillin, not estate planning.
Way way back, in the first half of the 20th century, soldiers were warned of that 'terrible diseases' were among dangers of cavorting with prostitutes (see poster left). I doubt this detrerred many soldiers, but it certainly encouraged condom use.
Rebel Without A Plot: My classic movie festival continued Sunday with the James Dean classic 1955 'Rebel Without A Cause.' Though it's a short, plotless film where the troubled teens act too much as textbook diagnoses of various adjustment problems, it's made memorable mostly by Dean's tortured 'method acting,' creating tormented characters from the inside out. The style, pioneered in the early 1950s by Marlon Brando and others, still has repercussions today, right up to Heath Ledger's trasnformation into Ennis del Mar on our favorite Rocky Mountain. Speaking of things gay, pretty boy Sal Mineo (pictured left) plays 'Plato', a misunderstood kid who idolizes Dean's character (pictured right) in what feels like homoerotic infatuation, and meets a tragic end, though he's never rejected by Dean. Dean's enduring reputation rests solely on three films, since he died at 22 in a car crash: the other two are Steinbeck adaptation 'East of Eden' and family dynasty saga 'Giant,' the latter of which is high in my Netflix queue.
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Monday, February 13, 2006
Doesn't Feel Like The Great Blizzard...
Maybe because nothing was shut down, not even the subways - maybe because it accumulated quickly on a weekend and stopped. In 1994 and 1996, the city ground to a halt for at least two full workdays. Anyway, here are some images:
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Sunday, February 12, 2006
Forces of Nature
New York is now buried under a foot of powdery white snow.
I also saw 'Brokeback Mountain' for the fourth time, with my close friend Christi - I'd seen it thrice in late December with other friends and family - and it was really worthwhile once again. It reallly is a exquisitely well-crafted film, built for the ages, and each time I picking up new insights and subtleties. This was also the first time I viewed it after listening dozens of times to its excellent soundtrack. The songs are all gems and fit the scenes very well, and Santaolalla's instrumentals really capture and enhance the deep feelings of mountainous isolation and the sudden, bittersweet melting of lonely cowboy hearts....
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Saturday, February 11, 2006
Zap!
Lunch is a terrible thing to lose... Thus, I suggest that you avoid, at all costs, 'The Aristocrats,' a documentary built around the ultimate gross-out joke. I ejected this DVD, nauseated, after about 4 minutes.Snow is blanketing New York. I am still waging nuclear war on my stubborn cough/bug.
Last night, I watched the 1949 quirky postwar mystery classic 'The Third Man,' set amid the rubble of charming Vienna with its bizarre zither music, 'The Third Man Theme' which became an elevator music standard in the ensuing decades. Orson Welles is particularly effective as a callous, amoral black marketeer.
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Friday, February 10, 2006
Weapons Of Mass Dis-infection
Enough is enough! It's been a month since I've been 100% well, and I'm not messing around no more. First my doctor tried codeine cough syrup (a narcotic!) which my cough just laughed at, then the ridiculous purple breathing contraption that supposedly anesthesizes your lungs, to no avail. So... it's antibiotics time... I've been very, very patient. But that has come to an end. Nuke this fucker!
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Thursday, February 09, 2006
Moving Mountains
Meet a beautiful woman: Annie Proulx (on the left, pronounced Proo), author of "Brokeback Mountain" and "The Shipping News." I just read her wonderful essay "Getting Movied" from a terrific book my sister gave me: "Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay." Reading a screenplay is interesting. You learn details about how a the screenwriter believes that a character is supposed to look or feel inside that can be altered or interpreted differently by the director, the actor, and/or the viewer. I'm also reminded of a story about the lefty consumer-advocate magazine Mother Jones - magazine dealers kept asking them to put a beautiful woman on the cover so it would sell more, so, one day, they adorned page 1 with a picture of their inspiration, mining union leader/patron saint Mary Harris Jones (above right). Here's to women moving mountains....
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Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Zap!
I tried for the second time to watch "The Upside of Anger" on DVD, and, as much as I love Joan Allen (pictured left), I find the characters unappealing, the dialogue mediocre, and the plot boring. Woman left by husband, old baseball hero going to seed... Eject! Life's too short to waste one's leisure time. I'll try to catch Allen in "The Contender," about the female Senator who's nominated to be Vice President when it comes out that she participated in an orgy as a 20-year old. I liked Allen very much in "Nixon," "Pleasantville," and, above all, "The Ice Storm." And it just hit me, first time ever, that Allen played Toby Maguire's Mom in both "Pleasantville" and "Ice Storm." Toby Maguire is talented and delicious, like Jake Gyllenhaal, only my height. Like Jake, he's also played a gay role - as the student in the delightful "Wonder Boys" who hooks up with Rob Lowe. "The Ice Storm," of course, is among the 1990s ten best films - and merits a separate post at some point.
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Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Come Back, Shane!
Long before Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar lit up the Wyoming Rockies with their passion, a 10 year old frontier boy loved and idolized Shane (see black and white photo far left), a gentle but strong drifter with a gunslinger past. "Shane,"a true classic from 1953, is set on those same Wyoming plains, in the shadow of the Grand Tetons' sharp peaks. The film concerns the effect this drifter has on a family and a group of farmers struggling to survive against greedy ranchers that want them gone. Shane agrees to work as decent homesteader Joe Starret's farm hand and strongly attracts both Starret's 10-year old son, Joey, and his wife, Marion, in spite of herself. The ranchers hire a deadly gunman and the conflict escalates. But this Western is built on relationships and character as much as action. Highly recommended. Of course, the Batman TV Series parodied this film in 1966 with a villain called Shame (see color photo above), played by Cliff Robertson, and aided by Calamity Jan and Frontier Fanny : - ) As with all Batman two-part episodes the titles were a rhyming couplet: "Come Back, Shame" and "It's The Way You Play The Game." A 10-year old boy cries after Shame to come back not out of love, but because the villain thoughtlessly took his toy wagon. The cliff-hanger left Batman and Robin tied to stakes on the ground as a stampede of cattle rushes toward them. Batman's comment: "Shame on you, Shame."this entry's permalink
Monday, February 06, 2006
Three Funerals and a Quixotic Journey
I must confess I've always liked the biblically-sounding name 'Melquíades,' remembered from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's '100 Years of Solitude' as the ageless wandering gypsy that brings marvelous new inventions to the isolated town of Macondo. "Three Burials of Melquíades Estrada" takes places in the equally isolated landscape of a small, dusty town on the US-Mexican border, where Melquíades, an illegal Mexican worker, is accidentally gunned down by a brutish, angry border patrolman. This outrages the victim's employer, played by director Tommy Lee Jones, who takes surprising actions and begins a dangerous journey to keep a promise made to Melquíades to be buried in his home village should he meet his end. This quietly suspenseful and thought-provoking film takes many surprising twists, and the stark yet diverse desert landscape might well be considered a supporting player. 'Burials' won at Cannes for Best Actor and Best Screenplay last year, and disappeared quickly after a handful of good reviews in December, buried and ignored in the Oscar deluge. To my delight, it was released a week ago here and Peter and I seized the opportunity.
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Sunday, February 05, 2006
Gods and Monsters
Since I returned I've seen the dead chopped up and brought back to life, but I also saw Melquíades Estrada buried no less than three times. "Frankenstein" is of course the first of those two references, and I highly recommend James Whale's ultra-high-quality 71 minute masterpiece by that name, filmed in 1931. Whale set the bar high, and raised it further with 1935's 'Bride of Frankenstein' Atmospheric and succinct, Whale created the Frankenstein images which have become iconic and almost clichés through years of parody and copying - hunchback digging in graveyards, stretchers hoisted up dark castles toward lightning bolts, villagers with torches pursuing the monster. But of course Whale's 1931 audience had never before seen these images, and found them quite horrifying. It's sad that we, too, are unable to see this movie with 'virgin eyes.' I do look forward to re-watching 'Gods and Monsters,' a tale of the gay director's later years and his curious bond with a hunky but troubled gardener.The Future:
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Saturday, February 04, 2006
Flying Home
I arrive in NY around 8pm. I've reached the conclusion that it's better to watch movies than TV shows on long flights. In particular, most sitcoms, even quality shows like Sex in the City, just weren't meant to be consumed one after the other - it all blends in. Movies are better at taking you completely out of yourself, into another world. Movies are more special and unique. My humble view.
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Friday, February 03, 2006
Happy Birthday, David!
Just arrived last night in Newport Beach after a 6 1/2 hour flight from Boston - this is the final stretch. I'm through at 3pm today and can relax with Brian before I fly home tomorrow. I watched no less than 8 Sex and the City episodes on my DVD player - that's almost force-feeding : - )
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Thursday, February 02, 2006
If It's Thursday, This Must Be Boston
Happy Groundhog Day from Boston, my birthplace. Yesterday we were driven from NY to a meeting in well-heeled Greenwich, Connecticut, then 1 1/2 hours up to two insurance company meetings in Hartford, insurance capitol of the nation, looking out on the baroque and angular state capitol building. Finally, we were taken 2 more hours northwest to Boston. I slept in the town car a bit, and later met my friend Erik for a light but tasty dinner in Back Bay. This morning, three meetings and off to LA.
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Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Happy Birthday, Sunil (slightly late)
Koi Polloi
Forward to 1963, my 3rd birthday, pictured below. That's my Mom far left, at age 26. Today I spent on Amtrack, in Philadelphia, in Princeton, New Jersey, and at hip, beautiful and crowded Sushi restaurant Koi (see below), on 40th between 5th & 6th, stuffing myself with clients.... Tomorrow: Ugh, I must be driven to Hartford & Boston. Little sleep. Up early to pack. Check out Thomas and his Mountain of Spices.
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