Thanks to Blogdex, we can keep track of what the blogsphere is saying about "Picture Pages," the Slate article about "Web sites for people who hate to read."

• At his lightningfield.com blog—sorry, "photolog," David F. Gallagher, author of the article in question, plugs his work.

  After some waffling I decided to call these sites 'photologs' instead of 'photoblogs.' The latter is just a little... overcrowded. The masses seem to agree with me.

• The collective blog Blogroots has a thread running on the subject of photologs.

  Picture Pages David F. Gallagher explores photo weblogs in Slate. "Unlike standard Weblogs, they have been largely ignored, perhaps because they make no claims to revolutionary status. But photologs are a powerful idea in their own right—they combine some of the best aspects of Weblogs, such as instantaneous self-publishing...they might just become the standard format for presenting personal photos on the Web." His own photo weblog is an excellent example of the genre.

• Bob Mong shares how he was inspired by Mr. Gallagher at Bobby's Sports and News.

  EVER HEARD OF A PHOTOBLOG? Me neither. But David Gallagher has, and he wrote an article in Slate.com about them. Inspired me to set one up at fotolog.net myself. It's pretty ghetto, but check it out if you want to see me kicking a strange balloon-soccer-ball at Downtown Disney.

• Jason Levine of Q Daily News illuminates us on just who the hell is David F. Gallagher.

  Another intrepid urban adventurer, David F. Gallagher, took a trip along the High Line and brought back some damn fine pictures. (Proving that there isn’t always a concrete divide between word people and picture people, you might recognize David’s name from the pages of the New York Times and Slate; don’t mistake him for Simon from 7th Heaven, though!)

• Ben Logman just doesn't buy it. On B.Longman.

  A picture is worth a thousand words etc etc, but it doesn't half seem like hard work to go out and find something interesting to take a photo of each day, unless of course you live somewhere like NYC where something is always happening. And anyway, does this not go against one of the founding tenets of geekdom that you are supposed to stay hooked to your computer like it's a dialysis machine. This will never catch on......

What has been written about Cowboy Bebop by a mainstream newspaper?

I guess that depends on which papers you want to consider as mainstream, but let's stick to the five main ones, the national papers that are summarized daily by Slate's "Today's Papers": The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Let's check the NY Times first: Back on January 20, Dave Kehr took stock of the increasing popularity of anime, explaining that "Anime is not a genre in itself, but a style that can be applied to a wide variety of subject matter. The Japanese cartoon can and has embraced a dizzying number of genres, from Disney-like childhood adventure... to astonishingly violent, graphic pornography... In fact, many anime films take pleasure in mixing and matching various genres and periods, as does the very popular 'Cowboy Bebop' television series with its blend of westerns, samurai dramas, 'Blade Runner' style retro-futurism and cuddly character interactions that suggest American sitcoms."

The Times also has a synopsys of Cowboy Bebop: The Movie as part of it's Holiday Movie Guide:

COWBOY BEBOP: THE MOVIE Mars in the year 2071, and the outer-space bounty hunters Spike Siegel [sic; should be Spiegel] and Jet Black are on the job. They're looking for the bad guys responsible for a huge tanker explosion, partly because there's an equally huge reward. These are the animated lead characters of "Cowboy Bebop," a Japanese anime series on the Cartoon Network, where it's scheduled at night for grown-up viewers. It's a little bit western, a little bit samurai and a little bit "Jetsons" all at the same time. Directed by Shinichiro Watanabe. January.

The movie was first screened in NYC on August 30 during the Big Apple Anime Fest 2002, a film festival which coincided with a separate anime convention, the Anime Expo New York. Back then, Jesse McKinley described the movie as "a noirish sci-fi thriller about a slacker bounty hunter and an evil plot to eliminate life on Mars..."

And that's it! As much as I searched the Washington Post, USA Today and the La-La Times, I couldn't find anything they'd written about the show or the movie. Oh well...

What about the Wall Street Journal? Are you kidding? That thing costs money. I'm not willing to pay for a website I'm not even used to reading. Go subscribe yourself and then come back and tell me if you found anything.

It's One Long Dirty Joke but Hey, Man, It's a Classic
By Stuart Klawans
November 17, 2002

Russ Meyer's "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" bears the distinction of being the first exploitation picture made at a major studio.

The exploitation classic, which was made by 20th Century Fox, is currently screening at NYC's Film Forum. Regarding its particular distinction, Stuart Klawans notes: "That's why it deserves to be seen as Film Forum... is showing it, in the kind of pristine print more often struck for Lawrence of Arabia. As [Beyond scriptwriter and thumb-man Roger] Ebert recalls, 'Russ always said this was the time he went up the mountain.'"

Does all this TLC mean Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a honest-to-life film milestone deserving critical recognition? But I had the impression this was an awful film, full of phony acting and characters! ("Z-Man's [the movie's dandy impresario who talks in pseudo-Shakespearean jive] 'forsooths' are not very convincing; but then, neither are the 'hey, mans' mouthed by the other characters, the costumes with their post-Carnaby Street flash or the Carrie Nations [the all-girl rock band the movie focuses on] with their lip-synched, Top 40 pop.")

On an article Ebert wrote for Film Comment at the movie's 10th anniversary, he explained the choices that lead to such phoniness:

...Meyer wanted everything in the screenplay except the kitchen sink. The movie, he theorized, should simultaneously be a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick and a moralistic expose (so soon after the Sharon Tate murders) of what the opening crawl called "the oft-times nightmarish world of Show Business."

What was the correct acting style for such a hybrid? Meyer directed his actors with a poker face, solemnly, discussing the motivations behind each scene. Some of the actors asked me whether their dialogue wasn't supposed to be humorous, but Meyer discussed it so seriously with them that they hesitated to risk offending him by voicing such a suggestion. The result is that BVD has a curious tone all of its own. There have been movies in which the actors played straight knowing they were in satires, and movies which were unintentionally funny because they were so bad or camp. But the tone of BVD comes from actors directed at right angles to the material. "If the actors perform as if they know they have funny lines, it won't work," Meyer said, and he was right.

Klawans chimes in:

...That inauthenticity — a touch of "Austin Powers" before the fact — is perhaps the point of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." Here is 60's youth culture as seen, and warped, by a World War II vet — someone who had based his aesthetic on the comic strip "Li'l Abner" and the pictures that G.I.'s scrawl on walls. A satirist of violent bent, whose hyperkinetic eyes were alert mostly to greed, ambition and anatomical exaggeration, Mr. Meyer had by this time reduced other social milieus to burlesque. Now it was the hippies' turn.

You might say, then, that "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" offered a distanced view of its era from the day it was made. When today's audiences seek it out, just to laugh at it, they're not merely indulging in that most dishonest form of nostalgia, the arrogance of the present. They're also slipping into the film's own dirty-joke spirit.

OK, maybe it's not a "film milestone," but it wasn't as aimless as it seemed to me. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is available on video from Fox itself, which seems to have dismissed the days it tried to distance itself from the movie. With the restored print, could there be a DVD coming our way? (Remember, "commentary track!") Here's Amazon's synopsys:

Amazon.com video review: You either love Russ Meyer's garishly sexist movies about bodacious babes and priapic men or you find them utterly disgusting. The response to his work is that clear-cut. This film, which features a screenplay by critic Roger Ebert, barely qualifies as a sequel to the film based on Jacqueline Susann's trashy bestseller. Rather, it's a broad, trashy remake on its own terms about what happens to a trio of female rock musicians when they leave the Midwest and head for Hollywood. Sex, drugs, murder--the only thing it doesn't have is cannibalism, the gold standard when it comes to trashy entertainment. --Marshall Fine

A Duel With Tradition
American Popular Culture Upholds the Notion That We Never Draw First
By Ken Ringle
November 19, 2002

With Bush parroting non-stop his case to shoot at Iraq first before Saddam can even put his nukes up, Ken Ringle observes how this preemptive strategy goes against an essential American myth: the good guys don't shoot first.

From frontiersman Natty Bumppo in "The Deerslayer" to Gary Cooper in "High Noon" to a hundred other literary and cinematic personifications of the mythic American (not excluding Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone), we have traditionally seen ourselves as optimistic and patient, cautious and slow to anger, not looking for a battle yet absolutely deadly when attacked.

Be that as it may, the US of A hasn't always taken to arms after the first volley of gunfire

Granted, Saddam Hussein has violated the treaty that ended the Gulf War. But Germany in the 1930s violated the treaty that ended World War I, and we didn't invade Germany then. Granted, Iraq has continued to threaten its neighbors. But so has North Korea since the Korean War, and we still haven't found that to be cause for war.

neither has it been above pulling the trigger right from the start.

We probably provoked the Mexican War with our actions -- if not our guns -- in Texas in the 1840s, and the best we can claim about our intermittent wars against Native Americans is 300 years of cultural and political miscommunication.

But from other examples mentioned in the article, the American way has been to follow a Puritanical code of behavior, which Brandeis University professor David Hacket Fischer describes as "something done for the right reason must also be done in the right way." So what about sticking to United Nation's resolutions, marshall?

Remember how Han Solo was "relieved" from shooting first in Lucas' revised Star Wars? I guess Lucas had a little pilgrim raving mad in his head, unable to excuse the original faux pas. But wasn't Solo supposed to be an all-around rogue anyway?