Feeling Check: today, mad at the television

If Bill Maher saw this finned friend, he surely would jump it

Bill Maher talks to Ron Howard on "Real Time" for a one-on-one sesh lasting no shorter than 25 minutes, allows politically-insignificant filmmaker to ramble on about high school incident whereby his penis pops out of his shorts during basketball game, also allowing said *completely politically-insignificant filmmaker* to discuss entire career including, ironically, the day that "Happy Days" turned bad and The Fonze "jumped the shark" whilst water skiing. Ironically...

Feeling check: I am so mad you guys. I have actually blown off Friday night plans with people to indulge in new "Real Time with Bill Maher" episodes. Even if I find some of his jokes personally offensive or off-color, at least he has intelligent guests that actually engage in thought-provoking dialogue. Where can you find that nowadays?

Let it be noted, however, that I do believe Gore Vidal's later presence nearly made up for it.

Bill Maher what happened?

Feeling Check: Happy Halloween edition

Okay you guys, feeling check: today I am feeling pretty amped. I am gearing up for my Halloween, and in order to do so reacquainting myself with the wisdom of the Log Lady, a character from Twin Peaks that I will dress as. Over the course of doing so, I have come across what sounds like exact quotes from David Lynch's recent book, "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity."

For instance, (from Episode 2):

Sometime ideas, like men, jump up and say "hello." They introduce themselves, these ideas, with words. Are they words? These ideas speak so strangely.

All that we see in this world is based on someone's ideas. Some ideas are destructive, some are constructive. Some ideas can arrive in the form of a dream. I can say it again: some ideas arrive in the form of a dream.

For those not familiar with the LL, here's an intro, I believe from the TP pilot:



For those at home who also wish to have a costume that is not Sarah Palin and would actually like to dress like a lady with glasses and a brain, here are some pictures to help:














I actually found these when I was Googling "Log Lady"! And of all the LL's in the world (which included pics of hot chicks in bikinis sitting on logs), my friends Kasey, Yellie, Gabe and Mike popped up in a search. I know these people! The world is so very small. And sad. To quote the LL:

There is a sadness in this world, for we are ignorant of many things. Yes, we are ignorant of many beautiful things - things like the truth. So sadness, in our ignorance, is very real.

The tears are real. What is this thing called a tear? There are even tiny ducts - tear ducts - to produce these tears should the sadness occur. Then the day when the sadness comes..then we ask: Will this sadness which makes me cry; will this sadness that makes my heart cry out...will it ever end?'

The answer, of course, is yes. One day the sadness will end."

Happy Halloween!

Feeling Check: today, web magazines making me depressed

So today I decide to check in with the Slate.com, only to find that the site's content and ads are a bit on the macabre side. First, there was a picture of a life jacket with the headline: "Life Jacket Capitalism" (a fairly good article for the economic layman which posits potential new names for our sudden, new model of capitalism). Then there was a smaller article about children and suicide. Then this ad:



Now I don't know where this life insurance company was going with this image: perhaps the target consumer is a gold digging wife who marries a man twice her age, or a mafia family. Either way, I am feeling depressed. Thank you web magazine.

Feeling Check: Politically Burnt Out

You guys, I'm really burnt out on the politics these days. I find myself in a strange space of fluctuating stagnation, unable to prioritize the things that matter most in life. For instance, if McCain wins, I have promised myself I will leave the country. I have a plan, I know people, they will prove resourceful, I will be in Spain if you must know but I will leave my email for you to keep in touch. --but I have to stand back and ask myself the question: should lofty ideologies and political intangibles really shape my personal life in such a way that career and family pursuits should be affected? How will my decisions affect those nearest and dearest? If they go down along with the rest of the country, is it not my patriotic duty to go down with them? I do realize that under an Obama administration things could go tits up all the same. But that's besides the point. I refuse to live in a country run by an oil-thirsty madman. Again.

I've been having a difficult time expressing my frustration with the state of the State at the moment. Sometimes I wish we could have a collective "TO" on the election sports for just a second, just to sit back and contemplate everything that's happened to the country, why it happened and how we got here. A "war" nobody wants. An economic collapse to rival the Great Depression. A monkey tyrant imposture for president. A culture war that nobody wanted. An absurd spectacle masquerading as democracy.

I believe it to be true what a lot of lefty commentators are saying these days, that we live in a "post-rational" society.

If we do not, can a conservative economic expert please explain to me why Republicans are resorting to Socialism--and big government more generally--while denouncing such things? Can an Obama adviser explain to me why Democrats can't question and decry a corrupt politician for fear of being sexist as they choose to nominate the first African American for president? Can CNN, the New York Times and their leeching media adherents explain why we pretend, year after year, that there isn't this sick cycle of young men and women losing their innocence more and more each day, who will eventually need to incorporate themselves into society and function after the years of death machine brainwashing wears off? Can anyone, PLEASE, anyone tell me how McCain got away with passing himself off as a man of the militants, celebrated POW action man, who, as a congressman, repeatedly denies benefits to veterans returning from duty? Or how a monstrous fraud like Palin can stand up at a podium, look a television monitor dead-on, and tell the public that they will have a friend in the White House that will support parents of special needs children even as McCain has repeatedly denied further spending on education for special needs children?

That John McCain/Sarah Palin ticket is such a massive hoax on the American electorate, perhaps the biggest hoax since the founding of the nation. I can think of no other presidential ticket comprised of two individuals so blatantly hypocritical and eager to swindle a public that is about to be on its knees financially. If there was a grand taste test, like Pepsi and Coke, where both tickets were left without identity and packaging, shrouded merely in policies and legislation, those Republican bastards would be more laughable than Ross Perot and Alan Keyes combined. In fact, if you took that same taste test, with a Perot/Keyes ticket v. a McCain/Palin one, I'll bet the former would get elected. That is how absurd this system is.

Much to my chagrin, I find myself lashing out by trolling conservative bloggers' sites. I should know better, it's not that there aren't intelligent, passionate people who actually believe John McCain would make a good president. They just look at facts in a really warped way. Like when I question what kind of woman this female conservative blogger was for supporting a man who does not support equal rights and equal pay for women. She responded by quoting him:

"I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what's being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems," McCain told reporters yesterday. "This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system."

I can't correct her on her misconception that McCain is pro-woman on this matter because what was made obvious by this kind of response is that she hasn't fine-tuned her bullshitometer. Plain and simple. Who can argue with someone who only sees what they want to see? Upon reflecting from my own cheap shots, I realized that I do a lot of that myself--seeing only what I want to see. It doesn't help my political viewpoints, living in this liberal bubble and left unable to productively engage, face-to-face, with those from conservative backgrounds. Not that I am saying I would ever agree with one of those bastards on anything that means anything: the war, the economy, social spending, taxes, et al.

I just want a prosperous future for myself and my family. I don't think that's too much to ask. I don't think conservatives don't want that, I just think they've clung to vapid political identities that don't mean anything... and are evil right down to their cold black hearts, which pump not blood like yours and mine, but rather a thick, vomitous oil that oozes through their rotten veins and clots in their pea-sized brains which becomes the cause of their Nazi-esque patterns of violent behavior. (Thank you South Park.)

Anyways I'm retreating into the wilderness for the remainder of the week. Goin' campin. Being away from the media should do me some good.

Until the debates of course. I'll grab my popcorn and a few beers and with supreme glee watch the schadenfreude that should be McCain's public shaming.

P.S. GOOD magazine blows. Just watch their McCain video, with the cutesy Stevie Wonder music in the background. If they're so GOOD what the f**k man?

Feeling Check: Today, wanting to be in London

I stumbled across this review of an opera version of David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway today, which is currently being performed at the Young Vic theatre in London. FYI, Lynch's dream logic horror noir is, as of last week, finally out on DVD. I found this to be one of the director's most inaccessible films to date, and here I'm taking Inland Empire and Eraserhead into consideration. Don't expect Lynch to give any special insight through commentary in the bonus features, though--he doesn't do that because he knows it will piss you off.

The opera version, re-worked by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, began its tour in 2003, and is now making a more high-profile comeback. Today I am feeling that I seriously need to be in London watching this opera--like right now.

But since I'm stuck in an office in San Francisco, I shall try to savor this review and accompanying pictures. And some behind-the-scenes videos. Here are some highlights:

...Neuwirth's text sticks closely to the original screenplay, making just a couple of significant alterations, and delivers most of it as speech: there is no singing at all in the first third of the 90-minute piece. The baffling tale, involving what is known psychologically as psychogenic or dissociative fugue, unfolds as a sequence of disconnected scenes. Jazz musician Fred Madison is sentenced to death for the murder of his wife, and while on death row he is transformed into garage mechanic Pete Dayton, who has his own problems with the underworld. Whether the two men are one and the same, or just unwittingly connected, is never made clear.

The score involves live digital transformations for the ensemble and voices; the resulting sounds are projected around the auditorium. It includes quotations--from Kurt Weill and a Monteverdi madrigal--but otherwise the fine detail gets homogenised by the electronics, an aural emulsion that is generally just a a neutral background to speech and song.

Feeling check: obituaries make me sad but oftentimes happy

This week I was tasked with writing an obituary for my newspaper and, as of Monday, I was really amped you guys. It may sound sick, but for a journalist, I think it can be a very honorable assignment and very humbling in that it can stifle the brio typically associated with a reporter's work. So I was pleased that I was chosen to write it, even though I knew it was handed to me because no one else wanted to do it.

But then I found out who my subject was. I was not to write about the journey of a lengthy, dignified life and the peaceful passing on into the great unknown, thus solidifying the legacy of an old person. Nope. He was a successful lawyer in his late thirties with two kids aged three and five. The man had cancer, and found out he may have less than two years left to live--he didn't make it. His wife was a strong, generous and kind woman who, just less than a week after her husband's death, was joking with me on the phone about this man's biting wit and zeal for insulting his co-workers.

I had a difficult time researching his life and talking to his wife while holding back the tears. I think I was holding up pretty well until I saw a picture of him on a boating expedition, his arms outstretched, glaciers in the distance. The picture screamed, "I'm embracing life, here I am!" But here I was, telling the story of where he wasn't. Talking to those who missed him. It was awful.

But in the end it wasn't, and I did feel good about myself, for helping to keep a man's memory alive. I've begun reading obitiuaries in order to be mindful of what I have, and in order to further honor the memories of others.

A friend of mine, a manager at City Lights books, would come into the bar/restaurant I worked at in North Beach always with a newspaper in hand. He told me that he always read the obituaries first, because he wanted to be mindful of those souls who no longer had the privilege of watching the news of the world unfold along with him.

It's actually kind of refreshing to read obituaries, because it instills the idea that an unknown, "little" person can still be considered a hero, even if only through a beautifully-written obituary. One that I came across from last week's SF Chronicle describes the remarkable life of Mary Ellen Lear Sherry, the first female reporter to cover state politics in Sacramento. If it wasn't for her passing and subsequent obit, I may have never known about this astounding, inspiring life.


That being said, I still think it isn't without tact to satirize the lives of the recently deceased. Upon hearing about William F. Buckley, I began to research some of the books he wrote and am highly intrigued by his series of spy novels. It seems Mr. Buckley fancied himself a writer like Ian Fleming, with the great all-American version of Bond called "Blackford Oakes." In one book, not even the Queen of England is immune to Oakes' charms. He shags her baby, shags her rotten! I hope to provide excerpts from Buckley's series here in the future.

FEELING CHECK #2: Today...nausea


This is my sad, sad lunch.

Feeling check: today I am feeling extremely disappointed with my Trader Joe lunch. Wanting to save some serious cash, combined with the fact that I get really bored with the usual financial district chain food trash, compels me to buy whatever Trader Joe preprepared lunches I can get my mitts on. Sometimes they're supergood: may I recommend the Southwestern Salad? It's crisp iceberg lettuce is topped with sweet yellow corn, hearty black beans, crispy red peppers and queso fresco. The dressing is orange and not so hot, but if used in moderation is slightly more than edible. Or there is the instant Pad Thai, which comes in a nifty Chinese takeout box and contains two plastic pouches--one with noodles and one with sauce. Just open them and microwave for two minutes: you will transported to Bangkok in no time! (Figuratively--jeesh, if Trader Joe's had that kind of power, I would not be eating their food in my cubie.)

But today's lunch was a downright travesity of Mexican food. I thought a five-cheese green chile quesadilla would be hard to fuck up. I was wrong, so so wrong.

I shall now leave you with these lyrics from a song written by the mentally retarded actor who played Corky on "Life Goes On":

Eating is fun, eating is serious
Eat too much, you might get delirious
Don't eat enough, you might disapperious
Eating is so, so serious

(Courtesy of J.Wolf)

FEELING CHECK

Okay, feeling check: I'm feeling really inadequate today. I've been on the horn to Washington all morning and I've had quite enough of it thank you very much. Although I really like the idea of saying I am "on the horn to Washington". I think I'll say I'm "on the horn to Washington" more often. Yep, I was on the horn...nevermind. I'm trying to execute this difficult feature exploring the way in which the two-tiered structure of government, or state/federal partnership functions when so many states must reduce themselves to lobbying groups in order to get their concerns addressed. Apparently no fed on the Hill is at all bothered by their gripes, as no one wants to talk to me. This jerk Joe was the worst though, this geek staff member of a certain mid-western Senator who must live in the shadow of a certain man whose middle name is that of a certain evil dictator overthrown in recent memory.

Anyways, when I got through to his highness grand poobah of media relations, he graciously allowed me 15 seconds to describe the piece before chiming in, "Why did you choose the Senator for this interview?" I said, "Well..(basically I thought the guy would be desperate for media attention)...I see that the Senator is a member of the Subcommittee on the Financial Services and General Government, and..." He interjects, "He is the CHAIR of the Subcommittee, and the Subcommittee is a federal appropriations committee which hardly deals with state legislative issues and I'm afraid I just don't think this interview is in the Senator's best interest as he receives 200-300 interview requests per week (HA! try millennium!)and I'm sorry but I am going to have to respectfully deny your request."

Ouch. Oh well, as a means of catharsis, I would like to join in the mass inadequacies that must penetrate the collective conscious of several world leaders who are making headlines today. First and foremost: Tony Blair, are you feeling a wee bit inadequate today? You must be, otherwise you wouldn't blame the media for your current state of public disapproval. Kindly remove your man parts from our president's backside, and don't let the door hurt your swollen man parts on the way out!

Also, Fidel Castro, are you feeling inadequate today? Yes the world knows you don't care much for our president, but your recent editorial about Bush's visit to Albania left something to be desired. Really, a man whose hatred for W burns like that of a thousand suns can only come up with: "He tried to commit them further to spill generous blood in those peaceful wars"? Really? I know you're no Molly Ivins, and that you may be a bit on the, er, how should I say it, waiting list for God's waiting room, but come on, the entire world has your attention and don't recruit a speech writer?

And Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, everyone knows you're more than a little inadequate at this time. Media types throwin' around the word "Hamasastan" and all. But here, for you, I offer this comic relief. If America's boundaries were re-worked, it might look a little something like this: