Sunday, October 23, 2005

Good Music Tonight we are having problems getting our kids to settle down and go to sleep.  A few minutes ago we went up to their room and read them the riot act, and took the drastic measure of taking out their beloved Here Come the ABC's! CD by They Might Be Giants, in favor of something calmer.  Jane chose Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis, an excellent choice to mellow out to. They aren't aware that we have the baby monitor on and can hear everything they say and do.  It provides comic relief for us, mostly.  After we came downstairs we heard Linus's voice come over the monitor.  He said, "Boooring.  This is NOT good music.  I want some Rock and Roll!" Lo and behold, it's 10 minutes later and I hear him snoring as Flamenco Sketches drifts over the monitor.  But Lily is still counting to 20, skipping several of the teens in the process.  Damn you kids!  Go to sleep!  Don't make me come up there and play that Mingus live album! 10:22:51 PM    Say what?[]

Good Night, and Good Luck Jane and I had big plans to see the New Pornographers at First Avenue Saturday night with our friends Brad and Katy.  But then some sort of illness forced a cancellation of the show (a real bummer because I had been looking forward to it), and we had to come up with an alternative plan.  We ended up having Thai food and seeing a movie, the George Clooney/Grant Heslov project "Good Night, and Good Luck", about Edward R. Murrow and CBS's decision to take on Joe McCarthy in the mid-1950s. It's one of the best movies I've seen in a long, long time.  Maybe the best.  Strong words, indeed.  The film works as strait historical examination of McCarthyism, the junior senator from Wisconsin's techniques, his lies, his desparation.  Clooney makes McCarthy himself a star of the movie; you have to remind yourself that you aren't watching an actor play McCarthy, that you actually are watching McCarthy.  You have to do the opposite with David Straithairn's portrayal of Murrow and remind yourself that you aren't watching Murrow but rather an Oscar-worthy doppelganger.  But Clooney and Heslov never speak down to the audience; they assume you know enough about one of the watershed moments in our country's history and build from there.  Likewise, they don't rely on goofy Speilbergesque musical cues to clue you in to when the dramatic moments happen.  This is a movie for people who don't need to be told how to follow a story. The parallels to what is happening today are plain for everyone to see.  McCarthyism was about political opportunism embodied by the denial of due process, all of which was allowed to happen because of a climate of fear and paranoia.  And the media waited too long to expose what were at best glaring misstatements and at worst outright lies.  Sound familiar?  But Clooney and Heslov (who co-wrote the screenplay, with Clooney directing) never once get heavy-handed trying to draw any parallels to today's situation.  In fact, they never say anything at all about it.  We are on our own to reflect on McCarthy, and history, and what we see today.  But when a film paints such a clear picture of that history, reflection on the parallels is a lot easier. I'm curious what the Right's reaction to this film will be.  I think it puts them in the awkward (and appropriate) position of having to defend McCarthy and his methods.  This film is one of the most brazen and artful examples of speaking truth to power I have ever seen; Michael Moore wishes he could make movies like this.  Moore's in-your-face style and talent for wit and juxtaposition is it's own gift, of course, and his films are important in their own way.  But I'm certainly not breaking any ground in saying that Moore's films are really just the flipside of the conservative talk radio coin, a message specifically crafted to provoke a reaction in even the most obtuse of thinkers, be they on the Left or Right of the political divide.  You don't have to put a lot of brainpower into thinking about a Michael Moore film, you just have to react to what he's saying. Clooney's film isn't like that.  It is many things at once: a commentary on the media, on the medium of TV, on power, on advertising, on the importance of due process and on the slipperly slope to mob mentality.  At each level, it is quietly brilliant.  I fully expect it to be nominated for Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor and Screenplay.  As a film, it's that good.  As political commentary, it's even better.  10:11:51 PM    Say what?[]

The Strangest Team I've Ever Seen During halftime of today's Vikings/Packers game, I was trying to think of how I would describe the team in this column.  I concluded that they were simply the worst team I had ever seen.  I've never seen a team commit so many costly mistakes on and off the field at exactly the most inopportune moment.  I was actually starting to pity Sam Rosen and Bill Maas, who have had to broadcast the Vikings nearly every week this year.  After going into the lockerroom down 17-0 to a bad Packer team with an identical 1-4 record, Rosen and Maas didn't even have the heart to rip the team.  Even if they had, they had used up their best material last week when the Vikings got manhandled by an extremely pedestrian Bears team. Plain and simple, the season was over at halftime today.  Not a single person who had watched this team would have argued with that assessment.  Dead men walking. And then they came out of the lockerroom and dominated the second half, ultimately winning on a Paul Edinger 56-yard field goal as time expired.  You had to see it to believe it, and even then you probably didn't believe it. Perspective, please.  They just beat a bad, bad Packers team riddled by injuries, while at home.  But they needed confidence almost as badly as they needed a win, and today should have provided that in some measure.  They go to Carolina next week, and they'll have to be a lot better than they were today. This is the craziest team I've ever watched.  I have zero idea what's going to happen on Sunday. 9:26:48 PM    Say what?[]

Hot Chocolate I love hot chocolate.  Love it.  Other people love coffee, but not me.  In fact, I've never even tried coffee.  Why would I when I could be drinking hot chocolate instead?  Of course, not being a coffee drinker does have disadvantages, the main one being that I often feel left out among my coffee drinking friends.  When we were in Seattle last month with our friends Kevin and Rae Anne, I swear the two of them and Jane must have drank 800 cups of coffee in one morning.  Hot chocolate isn't the kind of thing you can just guzzle, as you apparently can with coffee, so I limited myself to four or five nice coffee house hot chocolates, which I mostly enjoyed while waiting for the other three to constantly use the restroom. I don't require top shelf hot chocolate to be happy.  My current "home brew" consists of Swiss Miss with mini-marshmallows, some milk, a dash of cinnamon and allspice, and some Hershey's chocolate syrup.  I mix it all up in a nice 32 oz. mug and then it's down the hatch!  There's so much sugar in that my head starts to make a buzzing sound other people can actually hear if they stand close enough to me.  9:18:02 PM    Say what?[]

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