red fuzzy jesus

Panic at the Dixie Chicks

I’m having a bit of a musical identity crisis lately.  There was a time not too long ago when I could rattle off a list of artists I liked with current albums and relevancy.   Even more, I could easily answer what genres I liked with few apologies.  As I round the last base of my twenty-something years tastes are not so easy.  I always worried I would become one of those adults that only liked things released from the time they were 12 to 18.  I’m not… yet.  There are things I like a lot right now but it’s mostly a song here, an album there.  There’s little left of the concrete music preferences that used to be such an identity trait. 

This really became a concern this summer as I found I liked both a Don Henley song and something by Steve Winwood.  I’m surprised the back of my head is still intact after that latter revelation.  A friend of mine introduced me to the Eric Pryde’s cover of Call On Me by Winwood via a You Tube posting on his Vox account (see, I’m not that out of touch).  The video is just an aerobics class… a hot, hot, softcore aerobics class. 

Then there’s Don.  India Arie has a cover of Heart of the Matter that is absolutely haunting.  I heard it somewhere while writing and downloaded it immediately.  I grew up with this song on the soft-rock adult crap radio station but I never paid attention to it before.  If you’ve ever had a prolonged, painful conflict with someone you loved very much this song makes sense.  It never did growing up.  Does that mean it really takes some maturity to appreciate these crappy mid-life crisis anthems?  Oh god, does that mean I’m acting mid-life?

To be fair to myself, I only like the boring men’s songs when the element extracted is the boring man.  Eric Pryde just samples 8 words of Winwood’s voice over a cardio driving baseline; I’m the same boy I used to be.  I’m the same boy I used to be.  India Arie’s voice is so smooth and sweet without being syrupy and she instills tons more emotion than the original.  I love it.   

And then there’s the Dixie Chicks.  They used to epitomize everything I took pride in not being.  They were the heroes of dumb Southern girls who dreamed of growing up and living ordinary Southern lives in ordinary Southern towns.  I decided at a very young age I wouldn’t be Southern and accepted I couldn’t be ordinary.  But this summer I have adored their song Not Ready to Make Nice.  Sure, it’s about their pillorying after daring to say something disparaging of King George the W.  And being a political junkie and fellow Bush basher with far less kind epitaphs I feel a sense of solitude in that song.  But its lyrics are generic enough to apply to anyone who has done you wrong unjustly and for whom you have no intention of sucking up and being sweet.  Again, it relates well in a non-political sense.  (Hint: The person about whom the India Arie song is so moving is the same guy I’d like back over with a Dixie Chick blaring pick-up truck.)

If someone asks me what kind of music I like do I now answer Don Henley and the Dixie Chicks?  Please beat me to death right now - slowly.  If I start developing a taste for Celine Dion I’ll do it myself.  No!  These are exceptios, right!?  They’re mere blips in a long run of relatively good taste.  I did discover Dangerous Muse before they were in all those magazines last spring.  But their tripe gets trite pretty quick.  Sorry fellas.

I still like good stuff… when I hear it.  Earlier this summer at a cookout I kept hearing LCD Sound System and thinking they were someone else.  But my friends, who aren’t suffering from musical disorientation disorder, introduced me to these guys and they’re all over my ipod now.  I’ve even downloaded video content from them - so there. 

The result of my age might not be an inability to find and like new music but rather a lack of capacity to fall in love with it as I once did.  When I was younger certain artists really captured my angsty little life and I adamantly loved, loved, loved them.  I’d argue about them and get really mad.  But nothing affects like that anymore.  By now I’m far more cynical and desensitized to get that crazy about music.  I’m not sure if I should be saddened or grateful for my saner, although less interesting, stability.   Also, when you’re tumbling toward adulthood self-actualization and figuring out your identity is your fulltime job.  The music you’re passionate about is a big part of that.  As you settle into your adult life it becomes less important to vigorously defend why A Perfect Circle can never be as good as Tool.  But it’s still jarring when you like something by the Dixie Chicks.

Maybe it’s not so much that I no longer know what I like it’s that I’ve grown gradually more complex and so have my preferences.  Maybe it’s okay for me to like things that used to be aversive and not love things that used to be worth fighting for.  I cannot easily answer the question ‘What kind of music do I like.’  But I know I like what I like what I like and hope friends will continue to introduce me to stuff or I’ll find it on my own.  And I’ll have to accept that occasionally I will enjoy something Don Henley created.  It doesn’t change the fact that this week I made sure my cable would be installed in time for me to watch the VMA’s and root for Panic at the Disco (…and Madonna!).

I’m the same boy I used to be. 

Cruise (Out Of) Control

As I pointed out last year, Tom Cruise's whacky antics are going to hurt his career.  It goes beyond Jay Leno jokes and spoofs on SNL.  Tom Cruise decided to use time promoting his movie projects to instead promote his spaceman religion.  When your publicist gets you a spot on Oprah or the Today show or any other choice venue you are there to make a studio money.  Now Paramount has DUMPED Cruise in an anything-but-subtle way.  It's a fitting end to their relationship with Mr. "Matt Matt Matt Matt Matt... you're glib." 

But he's not only arrogant and crazy.  He also can't take a joke.  When South Park - who lampoons everyone - made an episode about Tom "Coming out of the Closet" it was immediately pulled.  The South Park guys, Trey and Matt, had to promise that episode would never appear on TV again or on the season's DVD.  Why?  Because Tom is so infinitely powerful at Paramount and he would force Paramount to destroy any entertainer that dared criticize the almight profit of L. Ron Hubbard.  He threatened Comedy Central that if they aired that episode again he'd use his power at Paramount to ruin the network. 

Well, some say the split between Tom and Paramount was about money.  Cruise is such a circus sideshow these days that his movies fail to meet projections.  But Tom isn't just a distraction, he created bad blood between he and Paramount.  By threatening others in the industry with Paramount's wrath Tom conscripted a Hollywood studio into involuntary servitude as his Scientology hit crew.  Again, Paramount is in the business of making and selling movies... not proselytizing mind cleansing cults.  If Tom wants to promote a religion he should do it on his own time, not while he's being paid millions on top of millions to promote a movie.  And he certainly shouldn't use the threat of Paramount as a means to bully other entertainers into not criticizing him. 

I don't care about his baby or even poor Katie anymore.  I'm sure they're both doing just fine getting their Thetons rinsed and toxins removed.  I'm just glad Tom no longer has Paramount as his prod anymore.  If he wants to shoot crazy now he can just do it on his own. 

For those of you who can't stand Tom (like me) here are links to some favorite Tom moments:

The water-squirt incident (Tom takes a joke so well) God I love this!

A clip from that great South Park episode Love this too

Crazy on Oprah

And this is my favorite Tommy clip of all...

Grey Areas and Grey Matter

I sometimes feel sorry for President Bush.  Everything he’s tried to do at home and abroad ends up a big sloppy mess.  His friends don’t like him anymore.  And he’s not sure what to do to get a little support from someone… anyone. 

A good example of this is his contradictory floundering when it comes to the so called “culture of life.”  It used to be so easy.  All he had to do was come out every few months and make some hateful remark about gay people or reference an old hymn and the religious wingnuts loved him unconditionally.  And Congress cowered in their shadow.  But now he’s angered both groups and nothing he tries gains him any friends.   

A couple weeks ago Bush used the first ever veto of his presidency to block stem cell research.  The bill would allow for leftovers at fertility clinics that would otherwise be disposed of to be used for research.  Stem cells hold a lot of promise to cure many terminal illnesses.  But Bush pandered to his old buddies in the religious right and vetoed the bill.  Supposedly organisms in lab dishes that consist of only a few pairs of cells that will never, ever be implanted in a woman count as a person.  And medical research cannot be allowed to advance because in the “culture of life” we allow unused cells to go in the garbage while actual, living, breathing people die slow, painful, youthful deaths. 
That’s how Jesus wanted it. 

Of course, Bush has rolled the dice many times catering to a fringe ideology at the expense of the rest of his party and pragmatic problem solving.  Bush would rather ignore bipartisan support in Congress and the urgings of the entire medical and scientific community in order to meet the demands of a few “religious” leaders who have talk shows on the radio.  After all, who better to set scientific policy in the country than the 700 Club?  Relying on the opinions of medical professionals is liberal and elitist and doesn’t “protect life.”

But Rove and Co. miscalculated this veto and it hurt Bush, badly.  Now more than ever congressional Republicans up for reelection are running from the scary religious man.  Poor Republican Senator Arlen Specter, himself a cancer patient, looked visibly distraught on CNN when commenting on Bush’s veto.  Why in the world would Bush seek to protect the otherwise useless contents of a Petri dish while cancer eats through the Senator’s face?  The answer to that comes directly from Rev. Thomas Euteneuer president of Human Life International and one of the principal fundamentalist puppeteers pulling the strings behind this veto:

“Catholics believe, as do many other Christians…, that human life begins at the moment of fertilization, which is the moment when the sperm and the egg meet and they form a new human person with distinct DNA [that is] biologically different from mother and father,"   

You see, all we are as people are strings of DNA.  And there is no difference between you and me and a one-celled organism as long as the DNA in that cell is human DNA.  A soul or innate personality figures not in our intrinsic worth.  We are no more than cells with distinct DNA whether in a test-tube or in a womb. 
This type of thinking belittles the value of human life.  It fails to capture the complex miracle and mystery that makes people, people.  It’s a nutty ideology that equates people to fertilized eggs.  It also makes for really bad politics.  Preventing research on cells that are going to be destroyed anyway may please some people who take their religious mythologies beyond any limit of reason but it doesn’t garner support from the center of the country or the mainstream of the Republican Party. 

So someone in the Bush White House realizes they made a mistake.  Enter Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, the Bush nominee to head the FDA.  He supports having emergency contraceptive available over the counter and Bush fully backs him.  In the White House a fertilized egg is a person when it is in a medical waste bin but it is not a person when the condom breaks or someone forgets to use birth control.  The President does have some raunchy drunk daughters and he may be thinking of them when he supports the guy that favors OTC morning after pills. 

Bush is trying to appease members of his own party with this nominee who is a little more liked by the medical and scientific community.  Bush is trying to make up for his stoppage of medical research.  But it’s like throwing acid in the face of his old religious right buddies. That Rev. Thomas Euteneuer – the one who believes human beings are nothing more than unique strands of DNA – now says Bush “filed for divorce from his [religious] base.”  Oops.  Dubya’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.   

So Eschenbach’s nomination is held up.  Most in the Senate, Republican and Democrat, think he’s a smart, capable, albeit conservative candidate for the job.  Most think he’s qualified and that it makes sense to have emergency contraception available because, well, in the event of an emergency scheduling a doctor’s appointment and waiting to have a prescription filled is a bit impractical.  But the religious right, who still want to dictate all aspects of government, think he is another example of Satan’s agenda to destroy DNA …or something like that.  They can’t stand the thought of an actual doctor who went to medical school setting FDA policy.  They much prefer the pretend type of doctor such as “Dr.” James Dobson and “Dr.” James Kennedy.  And they’ve gone into full conniption mode doing everything they can to get his nomination rescinded – just as Jesus taught. 

Absent from media coverage of these two events is that middle ground in America that doesn’t fit conveniently into over-simplified ‘Red/Blue state’ explanations.  Remember, we’re supposedly deadlocked in a never ending culture war.  That’s what we’re told.  The politicians often fail to recognize that there are people out there that go to church and believe in God but also want a cure for grandma’s Alzheimer’s.  There are many who are quite faithful but don’t see why we can’t research cells.  Instead, the debate is framed in absolutes… secularists vs. “people of faith,” people are fully people when the sperm meets the egg, and you have to please the “religious” leaders or you are siding with liberals and terrorists.  For too long Bush has thought in these absolutist black and white terms and that’s why he’s incapable of brokering consensus enough to get a miner bureaucratic nominee confirmed. 

I sometimes feel sorry for President Bush.  He doesn’t know who his friends are anymore.  You think you can rely on your old crazy religious pals and they turn their endless energy and hysteria against you at the first sign of disobedience.  You think you can count on your comrades in Congress but they have to get reelected and the anti-cure-for-Parkinson’s-disease position just isn’t marketable back home.  The duck gets lamer every day and a legacy remains elusive.  But fortunately, at in vitro fertilization clinics around the country zygotes are tossed into the trash with dignity as we protect the culture of life. 
Halleluiah, praise the lord.       

Gross

I sometimes think I can't be surprised by anything W does or like him any less.  But then I read all the articles that have come out recently on how he likes to tell fart jokes to staffers all the time and actually thinks its funny when he lets a big fart fly. 

[From U.S. News and World Reports]
He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying                                 to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy                                 loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why                                 President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about                                 his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example,                                 can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for                                 laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about                                 getting people to gas about that.

I can picture him saying something like, "Man, I can't cut the budget but I can cut the cheese...hee hee" and then just letting one rip. 

He seems like he would get along well with Britney and Kevin considering all the internet videos of them belching and farting.  I wish one of those "young aids" would capture the President farting and laughing and put it on You Tube. 

The thing is, I know this guy.  I've worked with him.  He's the guy that snickers and asks you to pull his finger.  Then he tells about how much he drank last night and something about the big game.  Bush is such a dumb manchild it makes me sick - but it certainly explains a lot.

Thoughts on a Movie

From watching Entourage on HBO I have learned that Hollywood is all about expectations.  It’s not how well you do it’s how well you do as compared to projections.  For example, nutty Tom Cruise raked in 50 million and took the no. 1 spot for the opening weekend of M.I.3.  This, by some measures, would be considered a roaring success.  But, for poor Tom it was quite the disappointment as he was expected to, and typically does, open much higher. 

This weekend saw a very strange turn on the expectations game.  What if a movie intentionally made tacky and cheesy – no sign of Oscar gold – was introduced in the dumping ground of late summer cinema disposal?  No matter how poorly it did it would surely beat its expectations, right?  After all, we’ve already had our code and mutants and string of summer blockbusters so there’s no risk in tacking a popcorn flick at the end.  But what if that film also had months and months of publicity via an Internet phenomenon.  What are the expectations then?

Snakes on a Plane gained quick notoriety because of its blunt title.  Instead of ‘Terror at 40 Thousand Feet’ or ‘Flight of Fangs’ or some other awful Hollywood play on words that hints at the film’s content, this movie just says what it is.  Here’s the plot.  There’s a plane.  And, get this, there are snakes on that plane.  In the first few decades of the Academy Awards there was a statuette handed out for best title.  In another time this one might not have been far from Oscar Gold after all.

So you know from the title it’s going to be cheesy, it’s going to be bad.  The question is, just how deliciously bad it would be.  Would it be a Kraft American single or a nice hunk of Gorgonzola?  I was pleasantly surprised that the movie was actually quite good.  I’ve said for a while that I’m frustrated by promised scary movies that fail to even make me jump.  But there was some genuine fear and uneasiness generated by Snakes on a Plane. 

And the cheese was delectable.  The sexist, two dimensional co-pilot, the saccharine honey mooning couple, the swishy male flight attendant all added the one-note archetypical characters necessary for good movie crappiness.  And some of those lines… I can’t believe I’m saying this but, does anyone know how to fly a plane. 

There was also humor.  Oh man – spoilers galore – the mile-high-club boob bite was lovely as was the fat slumbering woman getting molested by a wondering python.  But the best part of the entire movie was toward the end.  Once Sam Jackson blasts a hole in the plane’s wall and snakes go flying out you see the boa constrictor fly by with the legs of the snooty Englishman hanging out its mouth.  My lower intestines ached from laughing so hard at that.  Mary Kate getting thrown to the snake was also priceless although, considering the obvious title, as soon as I saw a little rat-dog I was waiting for that outcome. 

So I left the theater feeling satisfied by my Snakes on a Plane.  No summer’s long build up diluted its enjoyment for me.  Since I saw it opening weekend I was with a good crowd.  There was plenty of laughing and cheering to round out the experience for me.  The emmer-effer lines were so obviously added in post-production that the crowd cheered when Sam finally let’s them fly.  And I’m not sure what to think of the human race when we cheer the poor sweet groom spraying foam out of his eyeballs. 

All and all, Snakes exceeded expectations.  It was awesomely bad, yes, but in some ways really quite good.  When you aren’t looking for a complex plot or compelling characters it’s funny how pleasing a movie can be.  I think Snakes is a good example of the opposite of what happened to the Da Vinci Code.  When something is so hyped for so long to be amazingly good it can’t help but disappoint.  It makes me wonder if some industry executive is rethinking his next move – trying to figure out how to cash in on an intentionally crappy movies with a forced, prolonged Internet campaign. Maybe.  I don’t know. All I know is now I feel obligated to come up with an equally blunt title for this article.  How about Thoughts on a Movie?  That’ll do. 

PASS THAT DUTCH

I'm back from Amsterdam!  Actually I've been back for a couple days but it's taken me a while to get my pics loaded.  There are a lot but you can flip through them really quickly if you want to see them.  I got tired of typing captions for everything though so some appear without comment. 

My trip was wonderful.  The best part was Dutton and Nicolette. They made the visit really special.  Just so you know... they are open for business and excellent hosts.  You may not always have friends in Europe (not to mention youth and freedom) so you may want to seriously consider taking them up on their hospitality. 

While there I went to the van Gogh museum, took a canal boat tour, went shopping a lot, visited Utrecht and Volendam, went to the Anne Frank house, the park, a gay club, the red light district, and ate and ate and ate.  After being in Paris I was ready to come home.  After being in Iceland I was really ready to come home.  But this trip to Amsterdam, while wonderful, was too short and I want to go back.  It's just a great, great city. 

I have so many pics that I divided them up into 3 catagories...  (see Sights)
[x-posted on Vox and Livejournal]