fine whine

This cannot be an original idea; it is just an unimplemented one.

To present it correctly, though, I need to oversimplify some things. Let’s talk about animals. Say, perhaps, that the animals on the Donkey and Elephant farm decided that between them they needed to pick a single ass (or elephant) to lead them. There are, in fact, other animals around such as chickens, fish, owls, pigs and rats, but not in any sort of singular majority.

In other words, they don’t have a shot at being the big cheese. Only donkeys and elephants make it to the top. Which is unfortunate, as there are a lot of other animals on the farm more qualified to be in charge. They just don’t have the numbers or the momentum (it could be said that some animals are more equal than others) to succeed.

Okay, this metaphor (or whatever it is) is getting stretched to the limit. I’m talking about the two party system here in America. I’m not happy with my choices this time around, at least not for the big bwana.

I don’t like supporting a candidate just because he isn’t the other guy. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily the best guy to be in charge of me. I think that the system needs a slight tweak, then, so that I can feel a little better about my one vote.

We’d keep it to one vote per person, but (back to oversimplification) that vote could be for the donkey or for the elephant, or against the donkey or the elephant. Four choices, instead of two. Votes “for” count +1, votes “against” count -1.

So we’d literally be able to vote against the one guy without directly supporting the other guy. Blocs of voters could cancel each other out, so every single vote, plus or minus, matters. And we don’t need to choose the lesser of two evils, but merely not the greater.

Focus sucked. For a movie with such serious subject matter it sure took everything lightly, or at least displayed an utter lack of seriousness. The characters were mostly cut out of paper thinner than the DVD chapter insert. William H. Macy tried hard to portray a conflicted guy who faces apparent persecution in WWII New York after buying glasses that “look Jewish”, but that alone does not a good movie make. Laura Dern gets thrown in, also cast to look Jewish but not be, but she doesn’t elevate the film any more than Meat Loaf (also starring) does.

He plays the alpha bigot, determined to cleanse the neighborhood. He’s also a former friend of Macy’s character, but the two have come into some tension lately, particularly after the glasses purchase. Loaf (actually, Aday) plays him without subtlety or nuance, seemingly channeling all the stereotypical mob villains by way of The Sopranos’s Silvio (Steve Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E-street band).

The real star of the show, tied perhaps with Macy’s performance, is the striking and vivid colors permeating every inch of almost every frame. It could be a touch of irony, to have such a beautiful design for such an ugly idea. Or it could be a former photographer’s sense of something or other seeping through in directing. The film as a whole does not gel right, lapsing often into exaggerated camera angles and distorted dream sequences.

For some reason that strikes me as something of an artsy-fartsy touch. What this movie needed was a human touch, one to give everybody some depth and humanity. Everybody but Dern, Macy and David Paymer (who plays Finkelstein, the real Jew on the street) are either irrelevant or outright evil. I don’t like being told how I am supposed to feel and act, particularly when such instructions are beat into my head with a sledgehammer.

Adding to the whole wrongness of the movie is the poor production design. I know I praised the colors and whatnot, but they seem out of place. Not so out of place as some of the costumes, though; Macy is a snappy dresser but his pants are far too baggy for wartime.

Speaking of clothes, there’s a sequence that I can only assume came from the little-known Arthur Miller source novel. In it we see Macy getting a delivery worth $450 from a department store. We see him next upstairs with his newly wedded wife trying on a number of extravagant outfits. Though he is quite taken with her beauty and fashion sense, we soon see him handing back the boxes to the delivery man, and not long after telling his wife that they shouldn’t be buying and returning such expensive clothes and son on and so forth. In a tenth grade literature class, such a scene in a book or play might be symbolic of something but I’ve been out of tenth grade too long (and I suspect the filmmakers have as well) to care. Skip this movie.

The grifters sucked. Despite its critical acclaim and near-universal high ratings, this “modern noir classic” did not appeal to me once the opening credits ended. Scored by Elmer Bernstein, they were marginally cool. Unfortunately, from that point on even the score stunk. It was wholly inappropriate at least a third of the time, as though being used to create tension, suspense or just creepiness where none could be mustered onscreen. One scene I fail to remember well seemed to have Psycho-shower-scene dissonant strings over visuals of Anjelica Huston putting money into her trunk. Spooky… not.

This is much like 21 grams. Well-liked (or at least respected) actors chosen for their looks and appeal to drum up sympathy for otherwise unsympathetic roles just don’t cut the mustard for me. I just didn’t care about anybody on screen.

Moreover, it’s not even a good movie about con men and women, here referred to as “grifters” in a panoply of repetition remniscient of Mamet’s “the job” or “the thing” except that it fails to roll off the tongue even a bit as naturally.

Mentioning Mamet brings to mind a superior con game film, The Spanish prisoner. It could be argued that Grifters fails as a con movie as it happens to focus on the hapless crooks and not their schemes. That’s not enough of an excuse. Look at the rollicking fun of The flim-flam man or the intricate plotting in The sting. Hell, go out and watch Matchstick men. Just leave The grifters on its critical pedestal to continue collecting dust.

When people ask me about my site and the whole writing-something-every-day thing half of the time they ask something along the lines of, “What, so anybody can read it? Anybody at all?”

To that I can only reply, “Yes, anybody can read it. Fortunately nobody does.”

Seriously, though, some people read this, and here I give nothing back (other than my finely-honed wit and insightful, um, insights) to them that could possibly be useful.

Well, it’s time for that to change. I am going to teach you how to dance like me. That’s right, you will learn the very moves that won me a couple Swiss Cake Rolls in a seventh grade dance contest, and the same ones that have served me so well, ever since.

First of all, loosen up. Don’t worry about doing this in advance or stretching or anything like that, since you will have the first quarter of your dancing duration to loosen up. Be sure to rock back and forth on your toes and heels, and sway from side to side in some semblance of the music’s rhythm, or, failing that, whatever regular motion you can muster. Advanced technique adds the additional “hand bob” whereby the dancer’s right arm is extended at the elbow outward and the hand is bobbed at the wrist to the beat of the song (Imagine, if you must, a person tapping lightly on a bongo). This is also a key time to keep track of any friends in your immediate vicinity. If you do not have any friends, be sure to identify sympathetic bystanders to whom you can speak, or shout, as the night progresses.

Keep close tabs on your talking buddy. Do not stray more than five feet from your buddy or buddies. You must be able to maintain a conversation with them at all times, even mid-song or move, and walkie-talkies do not work well around loud PA systems.

Make sure to approach the dance floor only after your buddy has done so. Discussion of the finer points of this is outside the scope of our lesson. Just do it.

Once you are loosened up and your buddy has entered the main dance area, you are now going to dance. Writhe in a close approximation to the beat of the music, with first your legs, and after at least twelve songs, your arms.

Do not allow your arms to go any higher than your nipples. A good gauge for this, as well as a way to meet people, is to reach around for the nipples of somebody your height. It may help for some of you to visualize the baseball batter’s strike zone. Your arms will be moving around largely within these confines in front and back of your torso.

Do not move your feet more than four inches in any direction. If you manage to turn completely around before the chrous of a song has ended, you are doing something wrong. Here is when the side-to-side and back-and-forth rocking exercises will have paid off, though you may find yourself actually lifting a foot or two at some point.

Though never both at the same point, unless your friends have begun to “pogo”. Pogo only when at least one buddy is doing it first. Synchronicity is essential. This and these other basic steps have served me well for years, even before pogoing was popular.

Above all, do not make eye contact with anyone else on the dance floor. Doing so can be viewed as a sign of aggression, and can only culminate in a fierce dance-off the likes of which the world has not seen since The forbidden dance* left theaters in mid-1990.

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*The other Lambada, which opened the same day. You know, the one that starred Laura Harring? Rita, from Mulholland Drive? No? Well, you don’t get out much at all, do you?

I miss my dreams, in both manners of speaking. Due to my alarm, I don’t generally remember them in the morning, and that makes me sad and wistful for the days of yore when I could awaken gradually and dreamily and happily.

I’m not sure which days those were, of yore, but I recall having more dreams at some point in my life. Come to think of it, you could probably replace “dream” with “ambition” and not lose too much meaning in those last couple sentences. Spooky.

This morning, though, I have some recall of my dreams. There were three of them, and I can see no connection between them other than I was me in all of them, and me of the present. Here I shall present them in reverse order:

• I sat bolt upright in bed and looked at my watch (I sleep with a watch on and have for years, since I cannot trust my clocks for accuracy) and though it said 7:20am I could distinctly hear an alarm sounding. This struck me as odd, since my alarm is set for sometime after 8am and hitting random buttons (as I often do in the morning) would make the alarm later, not earlier. That probably wasn’t what I was thinking at the time, though I sat there for what seemed like ten minutes before getting up and turning off the alarm in the other room (I don’t trust myself to have the alarm in the same room. Paranoid me).
• The middle dream found me spending time with a family with small children and several housecats. As usual, the beginning of this segment is clouded in the all-too-familiar fuzzy recollection, but I do remember it bearing an odd resemblance to the walk to the lighthouse in John Carpenter’s Fog, with the long path and the chain link fence. Anyway, as we were approaching their house I had a weird vision or premonition or hallucination of one of their cats dying and then, through some weird time-lapse, becoming undead, twitching and all-evil-ish. At the time it struck me as a nod to Stephen King, and when we got to the house we were concerned about this “tainted”* cat tainting the other pets. For some reason we needed to climb in via the windows (the small children and I).
• The first (and least remembered) dream I had this morning concerned me somehow returning to Italy. By bus. I got grabbed into a conversation with a couple cute girls (even in my dreams I eavesdrop, apparently) and we had something of a good time on the trip. I’m pretty sure I was worried about what my wife would think of all of this, but before I could do much about it the cats thing started up.

None of these is all that remarkable, other than the fact that most other mornings lately I don’t even get this much to remember.

* I should point out that this was probably a direct rip (in everything but name) from 28 days later… which I watched not two days ago. Screw Steven King. I don’t think he’s ever tackled the undead in quite this fashion.

So apparently it’s against the rules to be seen in Olympic stadium with sponsors’ competitors’ products. We’ve all heard stories about Pepsis confiscated, and whatnot, but what I’d like to see is a guy walking in with a Mattress Mart mattress, and see if the gate people turn him away because it’s not a Sealy, the Official Mattress Supplier of the 2004 Olympic Games.

Does anybody out there want a free Gmail account? I’ve got a couple invites left over and nobody wants them. There’s a guy on Craigslist selling them for seven bucks and whatnot, but nobody can really say how much business he’s really getting.

It would be a pretty easy seven bucks, I have to say.

Anyway, I remember the days that people were trading mp3 and DVD players for these (before I got invited, naturally). Back then they were cool. Now, I can’t seem to get rid of mine, and Google just gave me another batch of them.

Seven bucks, though, hmmm…

Right now, it is now. At the moment I’m writing this, it’s actually the moment under which this will be filed in the database, though I’ve attempted to remove much of the time-relevent information from this section of my site. Doing this (writing, not messing with the internal structures of things) once a day instead of seeveral times simplified things considerably.

If only I had stuff to write about every day. I have a mental backlog, of course, of menial and dumb topics with which to fill an empty day’s space, but today I don’t feel like elaborating on my dislike for Faye Dunaway or automatically flushing urinals. I don’t want to dredge up un-digitized writings frmo high school or college, and I don’t particularly want to say anything about the still-advancing poison ivy, everlasting scourge of my front yard.

I don’t even want / to write a haiku about / summer, or some such nonsense.

I’m watching 28 days later… right now when I wanted to be re-styling the most ancient bits of my site. You know, the ones that show up when you type “www.mikelietz.org” into that address bar up there.

So, yeah, umm, have a nice day.

Sometime along the posting forward and posting backward this last week or so I was able to free up some prime DVD watching time. I spent most of watching television shows, so it was prime time indeed, ha ha ha. This time I focused (inadvertently, really) on the end of two series, Fox’s Family guy and the BBC’s Black Adder. Though both are comedies, the similarities pretty much end there.

Family guy is both hilarious and misguided. It’s misguided in that almost every single episode (perhaps all of them, I cannot be sure without watching them again) included at least one musical number. I’m okay with the occasional musical number, but so many in such a short span of time (I watched the entire third season in under a week) started to wear on me, and eventually even grate. The writing’s great and the animation’s fantastic, but I’m not so much a fan of showtoons or Busby Berkeley or whoever to really need to see that sort of thing every time I hit fast-forward on the remote.

Yes, fast-forward. The damn theme song’s not all that great, and I’m really not a fan of Lois’s singing. Moreover, as I have been tired lately, the song’s been bouncing around in my head more than I’d like. I could complain about this sort of thing much longer but for the fact that there is an incredibly simple fix — all the DVD producers needed to do was put a chapter stop in right after the opening titles. They almost always put one in just before the end credits, damnit. I’d wager more people want to skip through the same thirty seconds of tripe than want to find out who did the celebrity voices or key grip or whatnot.

I for one, despite having watched several hundred DVDs and laserdiscs in my life, cannot recall a single time wherein I skipped right to the end credits, TV show or otherwise.

Maybe I’m just being picky. Or a snob. I know the M*A*S*H discs I’ve watched let me skip “Suicide is painless” every time, though there they didn’t let me watch all of the episodes in sequence without two or three button presses between each episodes. What is it going to take to get simple navigation on every DVD? Don’t people want people to be able to watch these things?

But watch them I did, and Family guy was friggin’ hilarious. The high point, I think, was a couple second throwaway gag taken from Monty Python’s Meaning of life, namely the “modern art” tuxedo-ed guy asking about the fish. You’d know it if you saw it, I’d think. This, after all, is a show that takes parody to ludicrous extremes with several minutes to nearly entire episodes devoted to Logan’s run or Dukes of Hazzard.

Less laugh-out-loud funny but not much less of a farce is the classic BBC series of Black Adder, with Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Tim McInnery, Brian Blessed, Tony Robinson and more. The humo(u)r’s a lot more focused on this show, with each of the four series done in a different era of Britain’s past, from the days of Richard III to the trenches of WWI.

Alas, in this case also the titles were not quite skippable. That said, since this was a BBC series I only sat through the theme music six times, not twenty-some. And it’s much catchier, too, and more interesting as well to listen to the differences between the seasons.

They’re all at your library, check ‘em out. And if you happen to be a DVD producer, put in some better chapter stops. Please.

Just when I thought I was so cool for posting a couple days in advance, something timely happens. Thursday night, sometime after seven o’clock Jessica and I were walking down Northtowne toward Tamarack Circle when we heard a loud crashing noise. I looked forward and saw a black (or really dark blue) Toyota Camry smashing into the first car in a line of four or five, stopping briefly and then continuing on slowly down Northtowne. I made sure to look at the plates as the battered V6 (it was the model after the squarish one but before the most recent tank-styled one) lumbered past. The plates were   DR70BK, but it took me too long to make sure what they were so I didn’t get a great look at the people in the car. Jessica says there were three white guys in it but I couldn’t tell if there were three or five. I got a minor glance at the front passenger, a white guy with short light colored hair, and a goofy fratboy look on his face. He could be anywhere between twenty two and thirty two, but I have to admit I’m not a good witness.

I recognize my limitations. I realize that I didn’t see the Camry actually hit the first car, the older woman’s light blue 2001-2002 Ford Focus station wagon. That impact, with her driver-side tail light, I only heard and did not see. The second one, head on with the younger woman’s black Honda Civic, I saw. None of this happened at too high of speed (nor do I recall hearing any skidding, despite the dampened street) but by the time the Toyota left there was at least two car lengths between the Focus sitting partway into the Circle and the Honda with the now-bashed-in bumper and grille “H” logo resting on the windshield. Not that that part mattered, as since nobody was hurt the crime scene was not scrutinized, well, at all.

The Camry drove away. Jessica and I stuck around since most of the other cars left, though two of them returned (a guy in another, older Camry and a woman in a white Eclipse convertible) having looked for the perpetrators, but alas, no dice. The squad car eventually arrived (#181, a newer Interceptor) and the policeman (sorry, didn’t get his badge number) told us we could get going. I only hope that the guilty are caught, but can’t imagine how they wouldn’t be, as at least five witnesses got the plates. Then again, there’s always the chance that the kids were joyriding (the Camry’s the most stolen car, after all) but for that matter I didn’t recall see them riding around with surgical gloves.

So, if there’s a lesson to be learned there, you’re going to need to figure it out yourself. I’ll still probably post into the future, but I might start lying about the days when something supposedly happens.