Month: June 2004

The history of rock music is eponymous with the consumption of epic quantities of booze. Most famous rock bands in history have also consisted of famous drinkers. I am not old enough to have personally been able to see some of the legendary rock and roll alcoholic preform personally. I am sure Keith Moon and John Bonham were true epic drinkers not to be quarrelled with- they are both dead now.

Keith Richards has lived his life notoriously wasted, but has released nothing but shit for a very long time.

Sure, Motley Crue claims to have mainlined Jack Daniels, but they sucked. I am going to postulate the Guided By Voices are the drunkest bastards to play true ass kicking rock music. They are rock stars.

While it might be true that GBV have never been huge, it is a testiment to their music that after 20 years they can still sell out clubs on weekdays in small towns. Although they fall into the catagory of "indie" there music supercedes genre. It falls into the greater catagory of "rock." They are fabled to have written somewhere between 1200 and 1500 songs. I personally have about 800 of them in mp3 format, so I don't doubt it. However, the fact that most of their recordings are true examples of low-fi art, where this band really shines is while on stage.

They typically play for about 3 hours. When they go on stage they are visibly intoxicated. It is then all the more impressive that while playing 3 minute songs the band members are able to drink a beer per song, mixing it up with whole bottles of tequila and whiskey. What is even more amazing is that they have been doing it (Robert Pollard at least) for 21 years, and the fact that Robert Pollard is 46 years old.

Toward the end of their show they are clearly wasted in a way that would even make Local H's Scott Lucas's jaw drop. Robert Pollard is filling the time between songs glorifying himself and his band members while making fun of other bands on his label (specifically made fun of at the show I saw last night: Yo La Tengo and Cat Power). Despite the fact that most of the band can barely speak between songs, somehow they channel superior rock genetics and play perfectly.

To punctuate this, here are two examples. New years eve two years ago GBV opened for The Strokes.

Numerous reviews of the show indicated that Robert Pollard gave The Strokes a lesson in being rock stars. This of course means that he got them so wasted they could barely play, then went on stage with them and showed them how it was done.

More down to home, after their show last night I saw their bass player in the Steak and Shake buying food for the band at 3am… it is clear that they did not stop drinking when they got off stage.

Guided By Voices is playing their final tour as a band. I am sure Robert Pollard will be touring as a solo artist, and that there will be a GBV reunion in two years, but the moral is that theoretically this is their last tour. They are playing Chicago new years eve, their last show ever. You would have to be insane to not try and go.

1) Method and Red, a new TV show debuts on fox tonight, Wednesday, at 8:30pm. Thematically, it will pick up where "How High", in which Wu-Tang rappers Method Man and Redman smoke magic weed that makes them smart enough to get into Harvard, left off. Here they move into an upscale suburban gated community. They manage to upset the locals somehow. Do a shot every time a rich person falls into a pool.

I really hope Ol' Dirty shows up in a future episode.
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Wu-Tang! Wu-Tang!

2) Adrian Tomine signing, Thursday, at Borders. Tomine is everywhere the past couple of years – his comic Optic Nerve has really taken off, both in quality and popularity.
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He does art for the New Yorker now, and even did that Weezer poster everyone loves. Regardless of a few complaints, I like Optic Nerve moving to longer stories, as opposed to short anthologies of stories in each issue. He's at a point where he needs to be doing more ambitious comics – his talent is growing quicker than his output suggests.
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I'm really pissed he's doing a signing at a Border's instead of Quimby's or Chicago Comics, stores that worked their asses off promoting his stuff to the faithful, but I can only imagine that he's involved in some sort of exclusivity contract with the giant bookseller. Hope that works out for him. See ya there!

In case you are extremely bored today, I'm listing off my favorite New Yorker articles from the past year – I had to renew today and, while determining whether or not it was worth it I realized I had read a lot of great stuff from them. Here is some of it.

10 Holden at Fifty. Ok much older than a year, but it's so good it deserves to get included. After thinking about it, I was surprised by how much I read Catcher in the Rye the same way these days as I did when I was 15 (like, forgetting that Holden is in mourning and such). This is definitely a different way to approach a lot of the Salinger catalogue.

9 Lunch with the Chairman. It's all about Richard Perle meeting with investors from Saudia Arabia and the possibility of him being linked to a company that is making a lot of money off the war. Just to give you an idea about how intense it was, Perle immediately went on CNN and accused the author Hersh of being a terrorist.

8 The Thin Envelope. Louis Menand covers why college admissions have been such a horrid process over the past decade, and blows some strong holes in the theory of meritocracy.

7 Review of An End to Evil. The first couple of paragraphs puts a nice view on the days leading into the Iraq war in the U.N. and how we couldn't even get Guinea and Angola to back us on a resolution. The reviewer also does a great job handling Perle's book (which was read as the main source material for neocon bingo).

6 Torture at Abu Ghraib, The Grey Zone, Chain of Command The stories that helped break the Abu Ghraib scandal.

5 Faith, Hope and Clarity Again older than a year, but it blows everything else out of the water. Menand covers books concerning September 11th, and points out what should be obvious – the attack has been used by everyone to argue for what they already believed. He gives critical (for a magazine anyway) reviews of Chomsky, Baudrillard, Zizek, D'Souza and Bennett, among others.

4 Big and Bad (link not from newyorker.com). A history of the rise of the SUV. Getting to hear some of the things people say in auto focus groups is amazing. Here's my favorite thing one person said about why they bought an SUV: "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it.
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" Is this a problem for most people? People lurking under their cars?

3 Kingdom of Silence. A seasoned US newspaper editor takes over at a newspaper in Saudi Arabia for several months. The culture shock he writes about is stunning.
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Women who weren't allowed to leave a burning building because their burqa's had fallen off while they were running (they were told to go back and get them) – sullen, out of work, young men (one of them notably a graduate-level library science student) wanting to become suicide bombers, and the country becoming even more extreme and closed off. A father from the country puts it best: " 'My kid is in the fifth grade…Out of twelve subjects, seven are pure religion.'…The religious establishment, however, wants education to become even more Islamic."

2 Jumpers. A story about the large number of suicides that occur at the Golden Gate Bridge every year. It's quite harrowing to hear from the few survivors that were interviewed for the article, and it's mind-numbing to watch the debate between those who want to install nets to save lives and those who don't want to impact the aesthetic of the bridge itself.

1 What Comes Naturally. I've never felt sorry for a book after getting a negative review, but I almost feel pity after Menand tears this book, about genetics and "the way people really are", a new one. He dismantles current personality theories, and shreds the book's take on everything from Darwin to modern literature. I hope the book was at least bought dinner beforehand.

I can't find a link to the Jonathan Franzen profile of Dennis Hastert, which I wanted to give a special award to as the worst thing I've read in the New Yorker last year. It's possibly the worst thing I've read in any magazine, and I read a lot of trashy magazines. Just to imagine Franzen getting in a fight with the oldest son of Hastert over who is a bigger Mekons fan is surreal. I really like Frazen, but as his recent collection of essays show, when he isn't all that interested in writing about something man is it horrible.

This list was obviously biased in favor of Louis Menand, who is a hero to ginandtacos.com, and someday soon we'll have a mini-page up about him where we will catalogue his stuff and encourage him to come to Chicago and eat tacos and drink gin and sleep on our couch.

Few things other than terrorists seem to offend republicans more than the concept of two homosexuals getting married to each other. For the, seeming, vast majority of us out there, we can't really understand the issue.

Even if you do not approve of homosexuality, it appears to me that the only value opposing gay marriage has is the age old "If I can't see it, it doesn't exist." arguement.

If we accept that people are gay and like most people agree that there is really nothing wrong with that, then all you are doing by not allowing their marriage is denying a substantial portion of the population rights everyone else has. In fairness there are a substantial number of reasons why allowing gay marriage is just the right thing to do. There is really no point in talking about this here.

The opposition seems to generally make the case that either, by allowing gays to marry they are somehow less married or that homosexuals are all clearly going to hell and don't deserve any rights period. It is this "reasoning" that has led to the discussion of an amendment to the constitution forbidding same sex marriage.

For the moment I am going to assume that everone thought the same thing I did when George Bush alluded to this during his last state of the union address- that talk of an amendment is simply political maneuvering and no one really expects it to actually occur. Yes, sure enough that seems to be the case. The Drudge Report indicated this morning that there is talk in Washington about a July vote on the amendment. Don't worry, there aren't nearly enough votes for it to pass. So what good does it do? Well, it forces democrats up for election to publically take a stand on the issue.

Isn't that swell? The Republicans would like to have on record for campaigning who is for or against gay marriage.

Aint politics fun?

Wow. I can't think of a time that a sequel has blown me away like this. It's even more impressive as I thought that the first movie was such a so-so experience. There were things I liked and things I didn't, but I did not care to see it again. This is not the case here.

Everything that I didn't like about the first Spiderman has been accounted for. Where the special effects and fight scenes in the first Spiderman looked about as real as a claymation episode of Davey and Goliath, here they have really gotten it together. We've all already seen two people punch and kick each other in a movie; I don't know if it's ever going to be done better than The Matrix or Fist of Legends. Instead Spiderman 2 gives us something far more playful: Doc Ock's mechanical arms fly around ripping around the scenery as Spidey jumps wall to wall avoiding him. They climb up a building, just to fall back down. It has a timing that you can't get anywhere else these days.

Doc Ock

And Doctor Octopus is so much fun here. Speaking as a comic book geek, I have to say that the good Doctor is still my favorite member of spidey's old rogue gallery (let's discount Venom for the purposes of this discussion). I'll always prefer Hobgoblin to the either of the tired Green Goblins and anyway, I thought Willem Dafoe was way too hammy as the Goblin; he played up for laughs like Evil Ash of Army of Darkness than someone who was an actual villian. Alfred Molina does it just right, as some guy who really isn't in control of any of the things he's doing: science or superpowers.

And since I just recently saw Frida, I kept thinking it was Diego Rivera throwing bank vaults and taxi cabs at Spiderman ("You knew I was supervillian with mechanical arms when you married me Frida!"), which I could totally see happening for some reason.

Sam Raimi : "My movies have chainsaws in them."

Where the first movie felt very rushed and formulaic, as if it had to get from point A to point B without making any stop, this movie takes its time filling in the corners and throwing you unexpected, sometimes hilarious, suprises. A lot of the deeper character development and humor may be due to Michael Chabon presence as a screenwriter, whose "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" is a 700 page Pulitizer award winning ode to the love and power of comic books.

And the actors actually get to act for a change. Toby McGuire and Kristin Dunst are the cutest couple on screen, taking the eternal drama of the romantic relationship of Parker and MJ in all kinds of new directions. James Franco helps flush out the cast with a sharp performance of the unstable Harry Osborn. Sam Raimi keeps it all in check with the right balance of action, pathos and humor (the scene of Peter having a great day for a change is priceless). And he even gets to throw his old fans a bone: watch for a cameo by Bruce Campbell and a scene in an operation room that has all the quick cuts, tilted angles, violence and chainsaws of any of the two Evil Dead movies.

I sometimes felt as if the first Spiderman movie, while very long, was far too short. They had to cover the lengthy origin of Spiderman and the Goblin and their inevitable showdown. There was no time left over to actually create something that had much beyond the simple story. I simply misjudged – this was the actual movie I was waiting for, and it was definitely worth the wait.

Was It All a Dream?
Fahrenheit 9/11, the new documentary by Michael Moore, begins with a scene that is likely to take the breath away from any American liberal. Not the bombings in Iraq, not the Pentagon attack, but instead Al Gore celebrating victory in Florida back in 2000.

It plays out as a dream, and you want to believe for a moment that none of it every happened – no Patriot Act, no Iraq war, no trillions of dollars in top-tier tax cuts, no Halliburton, no Bush. You want to believe that scene – Al Gore, with Ben Affleck and Robert De Niro cheering him on in the background as he thanked Florida for their votes – is actually true, that he would go and get the electoral votes and we can do it all over again. But we can't.

Allan Ball aside, there's nothing to ruin an arts career more than going from your first major success straight into television, and I think nobody has suffered worse than Michael Moore over the past several years. The amazing, personal vision shown in "Roger and Me" was followed up with two television shows, "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth." Both shows were exercises in self-promoting sketch comedy which made Saturday Night Live seem like a meditation in humility. Every skit was Moore berating a lower-level manager with some sort of cheap comic set piece. This "look-at-me" mentality coupled with TV's need to short attention-reducing comedy gags lurked in the background of "Bowling for Columbine" – the movie often felt like a series of TV sketches strung together by a very loose thread.

So it's good to know that Moore has once again returned to full form with Farhenheit 9/11. No matter what you think about the President, or the War in Iraq, or Moore himself, this is a movie that should be seen. Moore has grown by leaps and bounds, and he has assembled a movie that, even if you find it flawed or outright wrong, will leave you unsettled with some horrific images of what is going on in the background of our country.

He Finally Knows what He Should and Shouldn't Be Doing.

Stylistically Moore has never been more aware of his strengths and weakness. I think he knows that the "let's do a pratical joke!" style of ambush journalism, while a perfect match for television, is getting old, and definitely not appropriate for the subject matter of this movie. When it does show up, which it does twice, it's under a minute and feels like it was thrown in just to appease the fan base. The music has also become more scene specific and are a perfect match. "Vacation" by the Go-Gos plays over Bush's endless vacations pre-Sept 11th and itmake the montage. Bush seems like a 13-year old girl having the time of her life during her junior high summer vacation instead of the most important person in the world.. The theme from the "Greatest American Hero" ('Believe it or Not') gives the aircraft carrier landing Bush did an extra layer of surreality and fakeness – it's even more like a child dreaming of becoming a comic book hero now.

And the bad choices are left out. Something like "What a Wonderful World" ending with the second plane hitting the second tower, one of the cheapest and offensive parts of Bowling for Columbine, is nowhere to be found here. In fact, the scenes of the tower crashes will numb you. In a scene which proves that you need to see movies in a theater to get the full experience, the screen goes black and all you hear are screamings and sirens. At home on a TV screen, it would be a nothing experience – "hey look the screens dark." In the theater, you feel as if it's happening all over again. Everything goes black, and the sound of the terror surrounds you. It feel like something is genuinely wrong all over again, at that very moment.

Moore's voice is his strongest weapon here. It can go from projecting a slight sense of dread while talking about complex business relations between the Bush family and prominent Saudis to extreme compassion while interviewing people who have lost loved ones to Iraq, to snide sarcasm while condescending to members of Congress. He also leaves a lot of voice for other people. Much of the footage is archival: news broadcasts, newspaper columns, press conferences, and the President speaking.

It's clear that this is intended to do end run past complaints that he is lying or biased – and it helps, though it doesn't work entirely by itself. But whether or not Moore is completely objective is besides the point.

Unbalanced? Maybe More Like Counter-Balance
Sure there are all the normal complaints. People have this quaint, but naive, view on how objectivity should work in a documentary. People who make documentaries are not journalists. There needs to be no "equal time" to make for an excellent documentary. That said, there needs to be a consideration of the alternative, if only to discredit it properly. Moore has said publically (though not in the movie) that this movie is so slanted as a counter-balance to the media not doing it's job over the past 4 years. I'm willing to give him this. Sure, in 20 years it may look like yet more rabid propaganda, but to see rows and rows of amputeed American soldiers in a failing Veteran's hospital, while the media isn't fighting to show the caskets of American's wartime dead, is a completely shocking experience, one you can't find in major American news.

Another major complaint is that Moore's conspiracy theories having holes in them. The first third of the movie is spent laying out connections between the Bushes and various Saudi oil tycoons, including the Bin Ladens. Many people are criticizing the movie for not having a full proof explaination for a quid pro quo tradeoff.
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There isn't one, and Moore does want any prosecutor does when there is no smoking gun – he piles on loads and loads of circumstantial evidence. Tons of it. And though you don't leave thinking that any specific action was taken on behalf of the Sauds, you leave thinking that they played a major part in the process of our government's thoughts. One might even say an inappropriate part.

Still there could have been more at some points. The examples of the excesses of the Patriot Act have nothing really to do with the Patriot Act itself – there's no mention of secret trials, or seizing medical records, or Ashcroft doing jumping-jacks on behalf of the gun lobby. We could have seen more on how Halliburton came to the place of power that they are now, and how a former Secretary of Defense named Dick Cheney began the wheels of making our military dependent on this private corporation to operate.

All in all, it's something that needs to be seen. I think the area in which Moore has grown the most is being able to create a setting that doesn't involve himself. You rarely, espeically compared to his other movies, see him at all. Everyone has talked about the footage of Bush sitting in the classroom while the towers crumble being in the movie. What nobody has talked about, which is surprising as it's one of the more powerful things in the movie, is Moore asking in a voice over what Bush was thinking.
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Instead of assuming he was dumb-founded, Moore wonders if Bush is wondering which of the powerful Middle East interest, whom he and his family has considered friends over the years, has betrayed him. It's followed up shortly thereafter by the image of Bush and the Saudi ambassador sitting on a balcony on the White House, having a cigar, while watching the pentagon smoldering in ruins. They are two powerful moments, likely to give you pause to re-think Bush, no matter what you thought going in.

From Chicagoist: As if living in the far west suburbs of Chicago wasn't already a degrading enough experience, Governor Blagojevich is renaming I-88 the Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway. The Gipper will join other famous Illinois superstars such as Adlai Stevenson and Dan Ryan in having a highway named after him.
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"Now, when people drive on I-88, they'll remember Ronald Reagan and everything he did for our country," the governor said in a statement. "They'll remember his strength and convictions. They'll remember the way he restored our belief in the American dream.

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"

For you non-Illinois people, I-88 goes from the western suburbs of Chicago to the Iowa state line. It's primary use is to get people to the mind-numbing sprawl of far west suburbs like Naperville.

It's widely considered one of the most depressing expressways to commute on in Chicagoland, and that's saying a lot.

When people complain that there aren't any good movies, I really have no choice but to groan and roll my eyes. Movies right now haven't been this good in two decades.

Sure, they are hard to find and never advertised. But between the internet for promotion and a strong and growing niche theater market, movies are getting around. Some are even getting critical praise. And nowhere is this more obvious than with American documentaries.

I'm still amazed at how much it has grown and matured. Plotlines that 10 years ago would have sounded like fodder for PBS ("it's about a spelling bee", "it's about birds flying from place to place") have become such magical experiences as "Spellbound" and "Winged Migration." It's gotten so good, that even the "Best Documentary Oscar", which 5 years ago was a joke, having never even nominated Errol Morris, awarded him the trophy over other also-qualified achievements like "Capturing the Friedmans" and "My Architect."

But it's also a critical time for documentaries. Michael Moore, who is more talented than his critics give him credit for, has proven that one can take a formula for political op-ed pieces glossed over as documentary and make quite a commerical success. And it's with this mindset that we have to approach Super-Size Me.

Super-Size Me

Everything about Super-Size Me made me uncomfortable on the first viewing. First, it's gimmicky. In case you don't know, this is the story about a healthy man who binges on McDonald's, eating only three servings of it a day for 30 days, and his subsequent health breakdown. He puts on weight. He becomes depressed. He loses his sex drive. The gimmick doesn't bother me per se.
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What bothers me is the way it handles itself. This movie is of the type that makes it's "argument" within the first 4 minutes, and then plays out the remaining 83 laughing it's way to the climax.

Say what you will about Michael Moore, but the man has extreme heart. I always find it funny when critics point out how much money he has made. His notable charity aside, everything about Moore screams with compassion for people down on their luck. It's immediately checked by a contempt for those in power, but his considerable girth and sloppy, gravy-stained fashion sense, isn't a ploy. It's what the man is. He is blue-collar America, pissed off and with access to a camera.
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He can also connect with people well: be it a blue-collar auto worker having a breakdown after being layed off or a security expert crying just by thinking about the Columbine massacre.

Super-Size Me is a lot like Moore without any of this compassion.

It shows sequence after sequence of obese people with a sense of morbid delight, instead of concern for their well-being. While Moore's narrator voice can register sympathy and humor, Super-Size's narrator's voice is always one of glib condescension. I had a hard time believing that I should give him any credit when he was trying to take the moral high ground against a food industry lobbyist – I kept thinking "shouldn't you be thanking him for giving you people to look down at?"

And like Moore, Spurlock (the guinea pig/director of the movie) will always take a cheap shot instead of developing an argument. One example is when Spurlock is talking with a principal over the unhealthy choices at a high school which serves fast food. Instead of asking how much money lobbyists got for the school boards and parential communities from the fast food lobby, he picks on the poor principal, asking why her kids are eating chocolate and soda for lunch. Like the security guards and cops Moore always goes after, this poor principal has no real influence over what the school board does with their budget (she is employed by them, after all). He completely avoids the argument that Americans are exercising less by only leaving it to a compromised fast-food industry lobbyist to develop it.

In the end, there isn't much here that will be new if you've read the excellent "Fast Food Nation", or "Fatland", or any of the other literature about the effects of fast food on our health and the malling of our country. However there is one level that the movie worked on, and it competely surprised me, because it's the last level it should have worked on: the effects of fast food on one man. Going in, I thought that I would see him get fat, and yeah it would be kinda funny and sad that this poor healthy guy is now a fat American like everyone else in the movie. Ha-ha, roll credits.

Instead, you get to see this man fall apart at the seems. You know he doesn't die, but when his doctors find his liver crumbling like an alcoholic's, you are genuinely worried about him. You see how he changes, how his eyes look glazed over after eating a hamburger, and how he becomes irratible and defeated. He changes from being energetic and lively, and enters what looks like a mind-dead slumber where drinking a 50oz Pepsi and downing french fries robs him of the energy necessary to do trivial tasks like watch TV or talk with his girlfriend. Everyone eats fast food now and then, and everyone feels a little sick and regretful afterwards. But to actually see the changes of a lifetime condensed into 30 days editing into 87 minutes is powerful – does our entire nation feel this miserable, this irratible, this unhappy because of all the crap that we are putting into our bodies?

My Architect

Where Super-Size Me presents most of what it is going to say within 10 minutes of the opening credits, "My Architect" never presents you with what it wants you to believe. This amazing documentary, put together by the illigitimate son of great modernist architect Louis Kahn, is created almost 20 years after Kahn's death. His son was 11 when his father died, and this movie is his attempt to try and figure out what his father was all about.

The first thing that becomes obvious is how impossible it is to know someone that has already gone. Even with most of his contemporaries alive, and a large collection of video, letters, notes and other archival matters, we leave with no idea of what the man was really like outside of anecdotal evidence. And everyone's opinion of the man seems completely influenced by themselves, as if the dad was focused through a personal prism each time. The co-worker who left his job to spend more time with his kids feels that Kahn didn't spend enough time with his kids, an architect from Bangladesh believes that Kahn exists only as a demi-god of architecture who brought democracy to his country with design, and his put-upon mom, who was Kahn's girlfriend on the side, still believes that Kahn was about to take off from his family to be with her.

Even by the end, the movie gives you now easy answers. And even the simplest things are difficult to work your mind around. Kahn would spend weekends with his son, using his secretary to lie to his wife so he could play with him and draw with him. Is this because he was a great dad, very concerned about his child in difficult situations? Or is was this an excuse to play make-believe a with family that caused him no real stress, to escape from what seemed to be a horrible wife and failing marriage? There's no way to know once it is gone. And the movie turns into a quest for peace of mind rather than an actual biography.

The film is very emotional, which is surprising considering how unemotional the narrator is. I was almost disappointed in him at times – all around him are people talking about his father as a quick-tempered man prone to arguments, and we see in his son nothing more than a sense of curiousity. No anger, no sadness, and not even all that much glee: just someone trying very hard to make sense of something. At his worst he loses his temper with his mother over the way his father treated her, but even this sounds less like him speaking as an adult and more like a hurt 8 year old wondering why they just couldn't be a family.