Three peas in a pod

I'm struck by the resemblence between:

Malachi from Children of the Corn ...












... Flying Tomato Shaun White ...













... and Blue Devil gay-beater and accused rapist Collin Finnerty.












See? Same haircuts and roughly similar facial features. At first I thought they should get together for a sitcom, perhaps playing three half-brothers who find out that they have the same sperm-donor father. They room together as freshmen at U.C.-Davis, and hijinks ensue.

Now I'm thinking they should cut out the middleman and go the reality TV route.

The Rude Pundit on the Sovietization of America

The Rude Pundit has a post today about a cult of personality that's taken root since this president assumed office. It includes an episode so strange and horrible that it reads like a piece from The Onion, although to be fair, most news lately reads like The Onion.

While the Times reports today that Hurricane Katrina evacuees have suffered disproportionate problems with their physical and mental health, a group of so-called "Katrina Kids" performed a crazed hymn praising President Bush and FEMA at the White House Easter Egg Roll last weekend. The lyrics, via Think Progress:

Our country’s stood beside us
People have sent us aid.
Katrina could not stop us, our hopes will never fade.
Congress, Bush and FEMA
People across our land
Together have come to rebuild us and we join them hand-in-hand!

Reading these books will not get you laid

I know our readership well enough to know what you've all been thinking: Why isn't CrimeNotes writing about books more, because if there's anything I love, it's a 1,000-word review of a book I'm not interested in.

I'll keep it short. A few weeks back, I read a breezy book called The Know It All, by A.J. Jacobs, an autobiographical account about a gregarious and neurotic man's effort to read the Encyclopedia Britannica, and in the process, make sense of his life. It's a truly fun read -- laugh-out-loud funny, much more light and chipper than my usual fare. Read it and you'll feel happy.

Exhausted by A.J. Jacobs's good cheer, I changed directions and read Orhan Pamuk's Snow, a novel about Islamic fundamentalism and state-imposed liberalism in Turkey. It's tremendous. Having read Snow and Marjan Satrapi's Persepolis books, I've concluded that fiction in translation is the only way I'll understand the thinking of people who live in that part of the world.

Keeping with a theme, I then read The End of Faith, Sam Harris's searing indictment of religion -- Islam in particular, but Christianity takes quite the pounding as well. Won't get into the details, but if you want to jump into the void, join the Easter backlash, and do some thinking about the immorality of pacifism and where contemporary standards of tolerance have led us, I highly recommend it.

Less so, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, which makes an argument on behalf of more scientific and empirical inquiry into the biological impulses behind religious belief. I buy the thesis, but in contrast with Harris, Dennett is so concerned about offending the faithful that he never lands the plane. His good arguments get lost in constant hedging and qualification.

In the last couple of weeks I've gone on a book-buying binge. This happens every so often. I buy much more than I'll digest in the near term, knowing I'll get around to reading them eventually. Here's a preliminary summer reading list:

• Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea
• Michael R. Gordon and Bernard Trainer, Cobra II
• Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution & the Erosion of American Democracy
• Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire
• Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
• Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
• Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
• Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy
• Sara Vowell, Assassination Vacation
• Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy

My enduring love for Whit Stillman's "Metropolitan"

Growing up in a small town in the Upper Midwest, one of my only lifelines to the outside world was a well stocked video rental store. (The town couldn't support a bookstore, and the single-screen movie theater once screened "Ernest Saves Christmas" for six consecutive months.) When I was 13 or 14, I first rented Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, a movie about a group of very wealthy, very likeable prep school kids who come home to the Upper East Side for the Christmas break debutante season. They gossip, worry about declining social standards, and argue about Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

An outsider, Tom Townshend, enters the group. Tom Townshend teeters between his distaste for the trappings of privilege and the comfort of hanging out with a group of people who are too nice to resist. He's from the Upper West Side, which is a reason for concern. Claiming to reject debutante balls and everything they symbolize, he politely espouses utopian socialism and the writings of Charles Fourier. Brook Farm, he insists, was not a failure: it merely ceased to exist, and if your definition of failure is ceasing to exist, all people are failures by definition. Gradually, though, he assimilates. The sweetest and kindest of the girls, Audrey Rouget, falls for him, while others question Tom's sincerity. Only the worst kind of hypocrite, they argue, could both despise the debutante season and attend the balls, not to mention the confused status of his relationship with notorious boarding school vixen Serena Slocum.

Metropolitan couldn't have been further removed from my own life, but I loved it. When I read last week that the Criterion Collection had issued a new DVD of the movie, I ran to J&R, and spent a good part of Friday night dreaming at my TV. It's a rare movie that convincingly depicts how friendships develop; here, it comes with a highly specific backdrop (New York's debutante season) that serves as a platform for the universal (what's the tradeoff between sticking to your ideals while seeking happiness?).

I was happy to see how well Metropolitan has aged, and how much of it has stayed with me. Although I've probably seen it 20 times, it had been awhile. Probably four or five years. It was still there, better than ever.

But this time, it was poignant. Though I've recently read on this site about how love multiplies, and I'm about to enter confessional territory, we're not going to be one of those sites about personal lives and emotions, because those things are for girls, and they're boring to boot. And this shouldn't be mistaken as self-pity so much as a rare moment of self-reflection triggered by a charming and sentimental movie. What was so striking about seeing Metropolitan this time was watching it and realizing that what's kept me interested in this movie for so many years wasn't just its hyper-articulate dialogue or the voyeur's peek into a faded world of WASP privilege, but Tom Townshend's endless ambivalence and displacement.

Like Tom, I'm always a half-step of the rhythm, generally slightly befuddled by the things that keep everyone else going. Like Tom, when the conversation turns to salacious gossip or emotional conversation, I'd rather step away from the group and have a conversation about the last book I read. Frequently, my befuddlement at human frailty leads to bruised feelings -- another strand that runs through the movie. I never know when I'm an anthropologist and when I'm a participant.

Sixteen years after falling in love with it, at a time when I lived in the middle of the woods and didn't know what the Upper East Side was, I've now figured out why I love a movie about a bunch of rich kids who go to deb parties and dread a future of downward mobility.

You must watch this movie.

Love multiplied

Last week, I spent six days traveling in the other half of the country. The reason: One of my best friends from high school was getting married in Surf City, U.S.A.

I decided to make my transcontinental trip into a mini-vacation. So I stopped to see a former work friend in Denver on the way to California, then planned time after the wedding to spend with college friends who live in Los Angeles. Everywhere I went, I was with good friends who were in different stages of relationships, but unmistakably part of a couple nonetheless.

In Denver, my friend's new boyfriend let my drunk ass (stupid altitude always gets me) sit on his counter and eat Del Taco, then crash in his spare bedroom. At the wedding reception, my friend's wife entertained the girl I was been talking to while I avoided disaster by retrieving the lost key to the room I was sharing with three other guests. And the next day when I stayed with a college friend in Los Angeles, his girlfriend made up the couch for me with sheets and everything, left me a towel in the bathroom and generally made me feel as if I'd made her day by showing up, unshaven and slightly hung over on a Sunday afternoon.

Now, my friends would have done that for me, too. But that's what was so cool about this. In the first case, I'd met my friend's boyfriend earlier that night. The other two, I've met only a handful of times. And yet, all three treated me like I imagine they'd treat their own best friend, too. And I'm pretty sure that's how my friends treat the close friends of their significant others.

Not to be cheesy, but it was like love multiplied. It's as if I have twice the friends now. I found the whole thing was completely inspiring. My friends, as well as their new boyfriend, live-in girlfriend and wife, all make me want to be a better person.

"Brick"

It takes 20 or 30 minutes of Brick to conclude that it's 1.) not a bitter parody like Heathers, 2.) a transplanted melodrama like Cruel Intentions, or 3.) an existential riff like Donnie Darko. The realization comes in a scene where the protagonist has a run-in with a vice-principal played by Shaft star Richard Roundtree, where the dialogue and one-upsmanship is so quick and edgy that you realize this is a high school movie that's tapped into virgin territory.

Virgin territory for a high school movie, but not in film at large. I'm not enough of a movie geek that I've sat down and watched the black-and-white noir classics that are Brick's inspiration. The only film noir I've seen have been homages like The Grifters, L.A. Confidential, and Chinatown. And while Brick is not as great as those movies, the wit and novelty of its high school setting make it as pleasurable.

The plot of the movie unfolds so tightly and convincingly that it wouldn't be right to spoil the fun. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays a character named Brendan, who has the hardboiled manners of Chinatown's Jake Gittes and the deductive skills of Encyclopedia Brown. At the start of the movie, his ex-girlfriend Emily finds herself in trouble, and after tapping the advice of his plugged-in sidekick The Brain, Brendan sets to work saving the girl.

This is not as cute as it sounds. I found myself thinking about L.A. Confidential, but also the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple the high school underworld of Twin Peaks. Aside from the hard-boiled, anachronistic, but effective dialogue, the movie doesn't wink. There aren't inside jokes, the cast isn't as pretty as The O.C., and the delivery doesn't come with a whiff of parody.

James Wolcott recently wrote about how audiences and movie reviewers don't often notice high quality performance in movies. People are blinded by celebrity. But this is a movie that wouldn't have been workable without its pitch-perfect performances, particularly by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He's a long way from Third Rock, but everything about his work here is persuasive. The hard-boiled, slang-filled dialogue rolls off his tongue as smoothly as if he were Humphrey Bogart.

CNN: failing again

I can't watch CNN anymore. I just can't. I've been getting uneasy about the whole nuclear war thing since the owner-operator of kleinbaum.org informed me of Seymour Hersh's article while I was in Los Angeles. Since then, I've returned home and watched CNN several times. The stories?

• How Iran could have nukes in 16 days.
• How puppies are smuggled from Mexico.
• How drivers sometimes don't stop for school buses.

Now, I realize this is one of those little rants about how CNN isn't covering what I want them to cover. And normally, I try to avoid those. I'm going to carve out a little exception in that rule of mine. I like to call it the "Nuclear Frickin' War" exception. I think the reasoning for it is self-explanatory.

And don't get me started on how media outlets need to apologize for reporting about what and when President Bush knew about the phony bioweapons trailers. Or even about the way the Vice-President's shitty reception at RFK stadium was soft-soaped by the obsequious careerists in the White House press corps.

Enough. Enough of the bullshit. I'm going outside to enjoy a world in which the United States is not (yet) a country that launches nuclear wars. You'll notice I didn't link to any stories. That's part laziness and part because if you don't know what I'm talking about, then you too, gentle reader, need to turn off CNN and start paying attention to the world around you. Of course, most CSB readers are exceedingly well-informed, so I'm not worried about the latter.

Also, I promise tales from my journey out West soon.

King Hippo is down for the count

In the painful 2005 football season, Flop and I often enjoyed the mealy-mouth, spazzed-out stylings of ABC college football personality Aaron Taylor. We nicknamed him King Hippo for his resemblance to the character from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, and used Tivo to watch his facial expressions in slow motion. The King Hippo nickname was affectionate. Sort of.

Taylor is resigning from his commenting gig, and EDSBS sends him out in style:

To Aaron Taylor fans: A Valediction Against Mourning.

Thy call from television screen
Did rattle the tables and chairs;
The eight-buttoned suits and bald pate sheen
Did afright the eyes and ee-yars.

Thy mouth was ere slight askew;
Comments, cliched and hoary.
Thy waistline, waxing, grew and grew;
Your feature pieces: wan and bore-y.

So lunkheaded Aaron, we bid you well
In life’s great frothing pool;
Should education prove to be hell
You’ve always got law school.

King Hippo, we barely knew ye.

Is he talking about the U.S. or Iran?

From a typo-laden A.P. article:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday, "Defiant statements and actions only further isolate the regime from the rest of the world."

"This is a regime that needs to be building confidence with the international community," McClellan said. "Instead, they're moving in the wrong direction."

Sometimes, you're in a serious mood

Skimming through some of my recent posts, I've noticed that they've either been a little dark or a little strident. Sorry that there's no good explanation. I've been reading two very intense books -- The End of Faith by Sam Harris, and Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett (yeah, there's a little trend) -- that don't exactly make a boy giddy.

In the remainder of my spare time, I've been thinking about Iran. Speaking of which, this post at Billmon's Whiskey Bar is an example of blogging (and writing) at its finest. Every so often I come across a blog post that renews my faith in the ideals of the internet. This is one of those times. (See? Strident!)

Anyway, we're inching into that time of year. As the weather turns, a young man's fancies turn to other things: drinking outside, being drunk outside, walking around drunk, and watching other drunk people. Silly season is around the corner, so enjoy this sobriety while it lasts.