Cobb

Tommy Edward Scott

Last week a black man was violently killed on the street. Almost nobody cared.

He got jacked, you see. He was doing his ordinary job when a dangerous fool grabbed his car away from him. The man ended up hanging onto the steering wheel and hanging out of the open driver's door as the fool sped away. The fool hit a fire hydrant, the door slammed shut and it took off the black man's head.

Now you would think that when a black man is dragged from an automobile and gets decapitated, that there would be some outcry, some noise, something. But there's a very particular reason why there wasn't in this case. That's because that black man was Tommy Edward Scott, a police officer.

My brother Doc was furious at the Fungibles and the 'black community' because of this relative silence. I suffered through his tirade against LA Urban League Mogul John Mack whose opinion on the matter was probably not sought by local media, but he sure did make enough noise about the flashlight upside Stanley Miller's head. No charges were brought against the arresting officers in the Miller case because of a lack of evidence. If that sounds too technical, understand this: Miller didn't bleed. He took an aspirin. The LAPD officer's blood was all over the car door, and the sidewalk, and the windshield.

They shut down the city, the LAPD cops. There were about 90 motorcycle cops who shut down the freeways for the motorcade. For Doc, this made up for the silence. The show of strength and pride and loyalty in a police funeral more than helped him cope with the fact that not everybody cares. Saturday night, he went to bed early after the dinner we fixed for Moms so that he could be ready when his shift started at 4am Sunday morning.

I tend to get annoyed with my Progressive friends as they speculate about what institutions we ought to support in assisting with the great task of fulfilling our African American destiny, whatever that may be. My answers these past few years tend to be pretty simple. If you want to get up, you need an accountant, an attorney. I'm glad I have those and a cop too. The cop is in the family and I'm extremely proud of that. But I know that dealing with such people as bankers and cops and accountants as friends don't seem quite right to many. I don't know what to tell them.

I don't need the 'black community' to demonstrate its humanity to me. I'm assured. But I wonder what would happen if for once in the entire history of Los Angeles, somebody would think something of this nature would merit a big turnout from the people who live where I grew up. It's not a revolutionary idea, but it's a good one.

My condolences to the Scott family.

Tommy Edward Scott

Last week a black man was violently killed on the street. Almost nobody cared.

He got jacked, you see. He was doing his ordinary job when a dangerous fool grabbed his car away from him. The man ended up hanging onto the steering wheel and hanging out of the open driver's door as the fool sped away. The fool hit a fire hydrant, the door slammed shut and it took off the black man's head.

Now you would think that when a black man is dragged from an automobile and gets decapitated, that there would be some outcry, some noise, something. But there's a very particular reason why there wasn't in this case. That's because that black man was Tommy Edward Scott, a police officer.

My brother Doc was furious at the Fungibles and the 'black community' because of this relative silence. I suffered through his tirade against LA Urban League Mogul John Mack whose opinion on the matter was probably not sought by local media, but he sure did make enough noise about the flashlight upside Stanley Miller's head. No charges were brought against the arresting officers in the Miller case because of a lack of evidence. If that sounds too technical, understand this: Miller didn't bleed. He took an aspirin. The LAPD officer's blood was all over the car door, and the sidewalk, and the windshield.

They shut down the city, the LAPD cops. There were about 90 motorcycle cops who shut down the freeways for the motorcade. For Doc, this made up for the silence. The show of strength and pride and loyalty in a police funeral more than helped him cope with the fact that not everybody cares. Saturday night, he went to bed early after the dinner we fixed for Moms so that he could be ready when his shift started at 4am Sunday morning.

I tend to get annoyed with my Progressive friends as they speculate about what institutions we ought to support in assisting with the great task of fulfilling our African American destiny, whatever that may be. My answers these past few years tend to be pretty simple. If you want to get up, you need an accountant, an attorney. I'm glad I have those and a cop too. The cop is in the family and I'm extremely proud of that. But I know that dealing with such people as bankers and cops and accountants as friends don't seem quite right to many. I don't know what to tell them.

I don't need the 'black community' to demonstrate its humanity to me. I'm assured. But I wonder what would happen if for once in the entire history of Los Angeles, somebody would think something of this nature would merit a big turnout from the people who live where I grew up. It's not a revolutionary idea, but it's a good one.

My condolences to the Scott family.

Blink

Another Failure

A power outage has destroyed two more of my hard drives. Blogging will be light.

Another Failure

A power outage has destroyed two more of my hard drives. Blogging will be light.

Teh Ghey Reality Check

One of the downsides of being somewhat serious and rather intellectual is that you tend to organize your many thoughts into something sensible. And if one does this with patience and discipline something resembling a system of knowledge emerges. All such systems are a bit hermetic, and certainly mine is. Why is this not good? Because it isolates you often enough from the flow of the real world. So in order to counterbalance that, you need to take a reality check. Generally when you do, you find that the people in that flow harbor ideas that are strange and, relative to your logical edifice, bizarre, unhealthy and straight fricken wack.

It is with such jaundice that I approach the world of hiphop criticism despite the obvious dedication and wit of its mavens. All I can say is let's see how they spit when they turn 40. Needless to say, sooner or later I'm going to have to read Can't Stop Won't Stop, which is being hailed as the reference. Until then let us come to terms with the latest terms out there in the non-hermetic world.

Gay, as much as I can tell, has been transmuted into 'teh ghey'. I don't know how to pronounce that because I don't hang around people who are likely to use it in conversation. Truth be told, I haven't been on XBox Live in about 6 weeks, thanks to my busted machine and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. So my exposure to the dudes has been limited. No Homo.

What? No Homo? Yes this is the other term of art now being promulgated amongst the proletariat. Any time a male expresses some bit of admiration for another, the phrase must be appended, just in case somebody gets the wrong idea. It's rather a reversal of Seinfeld's 'not that there's anything wrong with that'.

For me, homosexuality is not wrong, just thoroughly distasteful, yet not offensively so. And gayness is neither threat nor menace, it's just damned annoying. And so as I approach these new new appellations I wonder if they might be substantial enough to support my own sentiments in the area. But I can already tell you that I won't use them, not the least because I already have my own hermetic system of knowledge and I don't need to borrow the terms. Still, I might hold out some ray of hope that those who do use them are not as homophobic as they sound, or perhaps the liberalization of our culture requires such terms in common conversation because we are called upon more often to voice our particular angles on the gay life.

I have a feeling, according to the weblinks I blinked at Google that no such subtlety is connoted - that these terms are as simpleminded and hostile as they first appear. And I think there's a significant difference between distaste, disgust and hostility.

Anyway. Now you know.

Emmitt Till and the Panopticon

Emmitt Louis Till died about 50 years ago, but it has been decided that his body should be exhumed in order to discover new forensic evidence which might lead to others who might have participated in his killing.

In a related story, a registered Oklahoma sex offender was not captured in a Georgia arrest because of a 'failure' to match his fingerprints with all of his known aliases in the FBI database.

People keep mumbling about national ID cards and drivers license requirements. All three subjects are fueling the fire for construction of the American Panopitcon.

Since I'm a civil libertarian, as is most of the Old School, considering that it was our Civil Rights Movement that gave birth to that infrastructure, I have my reservations about panoptic security. That means that I recognize the tension between liberty and security. If I remember correctly, Patrick Henry didn't say "Give me security and give them death." I think we're on the same side of the fence.

And yet the more we try to get justice 50 years late, by using new techologies, the more we tip the balance towards building the perfect system of security. Sure murder is murder and there is not statute of limitations on that, but such matters cannot be taken in isolation. The proper legacy of Emmitt Till is not to be found in a murder conviction, but the moral conviction his death fired in 1950s America. To ask more of Till's dead body is to enable the panoptic forces.

Gladwell's best aphorism of 'Blink' comes to me in the form of the notion of panoptics and chess. Those who argue that enabling the electronic eyes ears and noses of the Justice Department (or the Defence Department or the Intelligence Services) will make us win, because we'll be able to see and hear everything. But consider a chess game. Surely there is nothing you can't see in a chess game. But does seeing everything help you win? No. You cannot see what your opponent is thinking. All you know are the moves he has made in the past.

Surely providing for our security is more complex than a chess game and it's better to see than to be blind. But there are limits at which the price of seeing is not worth the marginal benefit of security. We should be more robust in ourselves and stop wishing for intervention under all circumstances.

Torture? What Torture?

When I was a kid, we used to play a game called Cowboys & Indians. It worked basically like this. If you were a cowboy, you had a gun. If you were an indian, you had a tomahawk. You both had horses. The cowboys would come around to where he thought the indians were and if they could find them first, they'd use their guns. Bang Bang You're Dead. The indians on the other hand had to sneak up on the cowboys. If they were successful they got to tie the cowboy to a tree, dance around and then scalp him. It was much more fun to be the indian, because we got to tie all the knots and make the cowboy struggle. Sometimes new kids would join the game in the middle and turn things around.

Today, American children are not encouraged to play such games. Chances are that you're not going to see any kids in your neighborhood riding a bicycle and trying to lasso another kid.

I don't think there is anything particularly redeeming about learning how to hogtie a 'cowboy', but it sure was fun. Times change as do a lot of sensibilities about what is supposed to be good for children, what is supposed to be useful knowledge, what is the line between roughhousing and danger. It was not long ago when knowing how to tie a knot was considred more important than mousing skills. But there are still a lot of roughnecks among us.

I've made a literal rut in cyberspace repeating the idea that the atrocities at Abu Grhaib were not particularly atrocious to American sensibilities. I believe the soundbite was directed towards 'Fear Factor'. Basically, there are conventions on the definition of torture, because people's sensitivities vary widely. Yesterday, the judge in the Lynndie England trial agreed with me by declaring a mistrial. He says he doesn't believe that England thought she was torturing prisoners and thus her guilty plea is not legitimate.

The judge, Col. James L. Pohl, ordered the mistrial after Pvt. Charles A. Graner Jr., testifying on behalf of Private England, his former lover, portrayed their handling of a leashed prisoner as legitimate, contradicting her sworn admission of guilt and said she had acted at his request in helping to remove an obstructive prisoner from his cell.

"I was asking her as the senior person at that extraction," Private Graner said.

Clearly taken aback, Colonel Pohl broke in, lecturing the defense lawyers. "If you don't want to plead guilty, don't," he said. "But you can't plead guilty and then say you're not. Am I missing something here?"

There are all kinds of slippery slope arguments to be made here but I won't defend them. The fact of the matter is that what any international conventional definition of cruelty states, one cannot expect anyone to naturally understand that convention. Under a justice system that requires that people understand that they are in violation of a law or treaty, one could hardly expect irregulars like England to be strictly guilty, especially if she's an American who grew up watching cartoons like 'Tom & Jerry'.

This argues for prosecution at a higher level which is probably a dead end. What may be due for public review is the strict policies of interrogation. There are two problems with this. In the first place, it's water under the bridge. Abu Ghraib was extraordinary and the need for it has passed. Secondly, the cries of the outraged will not be satisfied by a policy review, and I am speaking specifically about the noise raised over the candidacy of our current Attorney General.

So where does it leave us? It leaves us in the unfortunate position of being the nation that enslaved one race of people and exterminated another. Which is exactly what we were before Abu Ghraib, and no amount of trials, mistrials or policy wonk sessions is going to change that history. Own up. We bad.

Malcolm Gladwell's Hair

Somewhere in the fourth or fifth chapter of his [damned good] book 'Blink', Malcolm lets the cat out of the bag. He's a brudda. I'm reading it now and am resisting the temptation to thin slice it. But I know a good thing when I read it.

I recorded his interview with Charlie Rose about a month ago and the first thing I notice about this guy is the way that his hair shoots up and accentuates his forehead. As he went on to explain the premise of 'Blink' about the congnitive engine of our first impressions, I was working out what it was about him that struck me as different. It was the hair, it was the bearing, it was the suit.

Then he told Charlie that he was from Canada. Aha! I knew there was something about this guy that made him different from the run of the mill American intellectuals. He's sharp, dammit, he's sharp as a tack. And since he's got this bearing of intellectuality I'm saying that the hair is his Blink signal. It makes him look a little bit like a mad scientist, not quite as mad as Beakman, but close. I like his style, and more importantly I like his concept.

So over the course of the last few weeks on the road, I've been doing a lot more reading and this time out I picked up Gladwell's book. I've been meaning to get around to it and the other one about distributed collective decision making, since that's what I do for a living - build systems that aid in business decision making. Last night I read the sentence, his moms is from Jamaica. What a surprise.

And now suddenly, especially in Googling an image for this blog entry, I see in a series of other pictures that which had not been evident in my first impressions. Negrosity! Funny how that works. What's interesting is that he was discussing his results from Harvard's Racial Implicit Assumption Test which I have taken several times without chagrin. To the extent that this is a brief and light meditation on race, Gladwell's book (and not his appearance) adds yet another drop of reason onto the pile of evidence about Class Three Racism - the background bigotry of American culture. In short, first impressions are significantly determined by a large number of associations which the brain manifests subconsciously. I don't believe that raises it to a significant political level, but the associations and sublime reactions are real nonetheless.

What's fascinating is that I hadn't taken Gladwell's hair as seriously as he had. I had read the following paragraph before and considered him a rather thoughtful guy with that experience. I was not surprised at how he had taken it in stride, neither then nor now.

Believe it or not, it's because I decided, a few years ago, to grow my hair long. If you look at the author photo on my last book, "The Tipping Point," you'll see that it used to be cut very short and conservatively. But, on a whim, I let it grow wild, as it had been when I was teenager. Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets all the time--and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along 14th Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up on the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. They were looking, it turned out, for a rapist, and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me. They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it, and pointed out to them as nicely as I could that in fact the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller, and much heavier, and about fifteen years younger (and, I added, in a largely futile attempt at humor, not nearly as good-looking.) All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. After twenty minutes or so, the officers finally agreed with me, and let me go. On a scale of things, I realize this was a trivial misunderstanding. African-Americans in the United State suffer indignities far worse than this all the time. But what struck me was how even more subtle and absurd the stereotyping was in my case: this wasn't about something really obvious like skin color, or age, or height, or weight. It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist, and the impression formed in those first two seconds exerted a powerful hold over the officers' thinking over the next twenty minutes. That episode on the street got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions.

One of the reasons I have been very specific about not calling people racist when I was a race man is because very few people actually are. Nevertheless we all swim in the same soup they piss in, and few of us are unaffected. Stay tuned for the actual review of the book.

Fuggeddaboudit

Utah Moments

So today I'm struggling with my diet and did something unprecedented I had a salad for lunch and a salad for dinner.

I saw my first black person today in Utah. Now there might have been some at the airport, but that doesn't count. She was the speaker-girl at the McDonalds drive through. As I pulled up to the window, I overheard her saying to her co-worker, "I knew he was black!". That was funny.

The nightly news is actually bearable here. The big news is that there's about 8 feet of snowpack in the mountains and farmers in the flatlands are getting flooded out. The local flood control folks didn't bother to notify people downstream that they were lifting gates on the dams and now people are snarling. They say in 6 months, they'll put together a notification system.

The mayor of Salt Lake is increasing property taxes to pay for 15 new bicycle cops. It doesn't seem controversial.

Some small border town has a polygamist municipal domination by the a sect of the LDS. The feds are cracking down.

The LDS Temple, just a few blocks north of where I'm staying is a gorgeous set of buildings. But I don't have time to do much sightseeing at all. I'm working overtime.

I'm generally unselfconscious to a fault, but I notice the hotel staff freak when I dance around naked as they bring up room service. No, wait. I'm not naked, just black. Who knows? Who cares?

I've been noticing a number of strange germanic accents around here. I'm not sure if it's a Utah thing or if there are a number of out-of-towners. I know that there are many Basques in Boise...

On the whole, the town has a strangely empty feeling. Main Street has empty storefronts, and those annoying chirping traffic signals. The light rail goes down the center. It's busy but not crowded. I haven't been out at night. This place is a bit too far west to be on Mountain Time, so it doesn't get dark until past 8.

I don't suppose one could be in three more different places in a month than Salt Lake, New Orleans and Santa Clara. What a country.

Egocasting, Literacy & Relativism: The Question

Yesterday morning on NPR was a woman, Christine Rosen, who held an interesting thesis about the power of television. In particular, the power of the remote control and what our ability to control our content streams has done to ruin our capacity to encounter and deal with new ideas.

What is true of the television set is also true of its most important accessory, the device that forever altered our viewing habits, transformed television programming itself, and, more broadly, redefined our expectations of mastery over our everyday technologies: the remote control. The creation and near-universal adoption of the remote control arguably marks the beginning of the era of the personalization of technology. The remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that have embraced this principle in its wake—the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod—have created a world where the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute. Retailers and purveyors of entertainment increasingly know our buying history and the vagaries of our unique tastes. As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books “on demand.” We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences.

The long-term effect of this thoroughly individualized, highly technologized culture on literacy, engaged political debate, the appreciation of art, thoughtful criticism, and taste-formation is difficult to discern. But it is worth exploring how the most powerful of these technologies have already succeeded in changing our habits and our pursuits. By giving us the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish. And they contribute to what might be called “egocasting,” the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste. In thrall to our own little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality.

I come at the phenomenon from a different perspective. I think what we are wintessing is the destruction of our ideas about the centrality and value of individual intelligence.

The way I see it is that we are profoundly affected by two simutaneous artifacts of the information age. Firstly, the intelligence of our society is embedded in systems, objects and organizations to a greater extent than ever before. Therefore our loyalty belongs less to people than ever. Secondly, there are more intelligent and literate people in the world than ever before. Consequently, there are countless economies of intellect. Perhaps Rosen fears that brains are a cheap commodity. Well, they are.

But that can be a very good thing. I means that there are a great deal more of us who can live above the reptilian level. There is a reason that Europe had what was known as the Dark Ages. All the books were locked away in monasteries, and they had all of the authority. One could even think of monarchy as a monopoly where there is a scarcity of intellect. Today, however we can all live like kings. There is a lot more authority to go around than ever before. Things that are consequential on a human scale now get out to more humans. There is a greater capacity in today's world for more humans to encounter more of the artifacts of intellect and creativity than ever before.

One consequence of this is that people of average intelligence seem to be fetishizing certain ideas. But I think it's more correct that there are a surfeit of intelligble ideas out there and because we are aware of so many of them, the interests of any individual seems relatively limited. You might consider yourself the King of Monty Python scripts. A thousand years ago, that much memorization might have gotten you a nice comfy seat in the Vatican. Today, you need to command a great deal more. Consider how much knowledge the average contemporary medical student has to absorb before she makes the first incision into someone's belly. More than two decades from birth. What we know about getting someone's appendix out is massive, and as any news junkie knows, what we're supposed to think about wine in our diet, or our optimal weight changes every year.

I caution against the excesses of Eclexia now from the perspective of capacity and sanity. There is a delicate balance to be struck between the quest for novelty & new tribes to hang with, and the quest for transcendant principle. Throughout our young lives we're constantly open, but as adults we need to discriminate. We have to sample and integrate. But when do we stop sampling and decide that we are informed enough? How exactly do we know if we are getting closer to something real if there's already two million Google hits on the subject? If Foucault is to be taken with any seriousness, our hermetic discipline my isolate us from the very reality we seek to master. Are we buried in our preferences, or in real knowledge?

I think there is one sure way to know which is to trust our emotions. I don't think I might have come to this conclusion as a student of science, but I have come to belief that they are critical. More in Part Two.

Michael Eric Dyson on NPR

Dyson is flippin' off the wall on NPR. Do yourself a favor or not.

Magnet

Who Do I Know in Salt Lake City?

I am on the road yet again. This week's work takes me to Salt Lake. I've never been out of the airport before and it just figures that I didn't bring my camera because let me tell you something, this lake is massive. If I had three wishes, one of them would be to fill up the Great Salt Lake, it would make this place one of the most stunningly beautiful places on earth. The ring of snow-capped peaks is just dramatic. It helps that I got up a bit into the hills and looked out. Wow.

As it stands, Salt Lake City looks just like Boise, only bigger. The food is better too, or at least this time I can afford a better class of restaurant, which brings us to Bambara.

I just had one of the best soups in my life. I am ready to say that it is number two, just behind the lobster bisque at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. This was the Utah Corn Bisque. Remarkable. It has got to be the most satisfying bowl I've ever tasted, but nothing's going to outdo the smoothness and flavor of Boston. Still. What's so extraordinary about this is how it just filled my mouth with a kind of warm popcorny flavor. And it had heat. It was as spicy as anything could be without actually being spicy and this just added to the sense of fulfillment. The bisque was very smooth but not buttery so. It was filled with soup, not butter, so everything was flavor and nothing was filler. The texture was perfect, and then the bits of crab were delectable. Add a touch of sweetness with the cilantro oil and it just becomes a miracle. The whole bowl had a beautiful mustard yellow color. Considering that I was 15 years younger when I had that lobster bisque in Boston, this has got to be the better bisque to my more jaded palate. Congrats, Bambara. You are it.

With my Sonoma-Cutrer I had their scallops which were fine, and their nicely spiced mashed potatoes with the bursty bubbles of caviar burre blanc and port wine syrup. I think I'm going to go back Wednesday for the duck.

The service was exceptional and flawless. The attitude was cheery and attentive without being bothersome, you know like when they ostentatiously scrape the breadcrumbs off your table in other restaurants? They went out of their way to mix me up a Ceasar even though it was off the menu. Next time I'm sticking around for dessert too.

The atmosphere was just right, bright with big windows above ground level, not too noisy. They clearly have improvised the place which was not always a restaurant. Yeah. I'm going back, which is rare when I'm out of town.

Hmm. Doug S. is the only person I know here, but I'm stuffed. Time to watch TV and crash.

So That's What It's All About Alfie

From the What-I-Should-Have-Said Files in the All-Men-Are-Dogs Department.

I have been run ragged this weekend, but I did get a quick mo' on the couch with the spousal unit. The object of observation this time out 'Alfie'. (What, you think we do anything else on the couch but watch TV?) I'm a big fan of Michael Caine, and I always knew he had a bit of the devil in him, but I had no idea how much of the in jokes about him were a result of his debut(?) performance in this drecky diary. I come to this realization admittedly late, but what a revelation. OK I'm also the guy who didn't know that Freddy Mercury was gay and kept wondering aloud why he wasn't a bigger star. But there it is.

Not withstanding the fact that I was dead tired, I just couldn't keep watching. I wasn't in the mood to deal with the lovable scamp, and he didn't seem likeable at all, much less lovable.

Have I been feminized or is this guy a real cad? I got up to the part where he starts playing with the kid, so I guess I didn't get to see much of the redemption of his character, if there was any later in the film. But I was just not entertained. For the first 15 or so minutes, I'm cracking up, and then it comes to his attitude with his pregnant girlfriend and I'm ready to crack him one.

Although I'm not feeling particularly racial, I may as well go there. It's the gut again. But I recall suffering through so many what-is-wrong-with-black-men discussions that I wish I would have had this movie to shove in the faces of all those annoying people. Now I don't know how the movie wraps up, but the opening bits are enough to make any judge of character wince, even though it's all a sly joke.

You can be sure Alfie's a seminal moment in white male dog history. I just have to make sure I rip it from my Tivo before they never show it on TV again.

So That's What It's All About Alfie

From the What-I-Should-Have-Said Files in the All-Men-Are-Dogs Department.

I have been run ragged this weekend, but I did get a quick mo' on the couch with the spousal unit. The object of observation this time out 'Alfie'. (What, you think we do anything else on the couch but watch TV?) I'm a big fan of Michael Caine, and I always knew he had a bit of the devil in him, but I had no idea how much of the in jokes about him were a result of his debut(?) performance in this drecky diary. I come to this realization admittedly late, but what a revelation. OK I'm also the guy who didn't know that Freddy Mercury was gay and kept wondering aloud why he wasn't a bigger star. But there it is.

Not withstanding the fact that I was dead tired, I just couldn't keep watching. I wasn't in the mood to deal with the lovable scamp, and he didn't seem likeable at all, much less lovable.

Have I been feminized or is this guy a real cad? I got up to the part where he starts playing with the kid, so I guess I didn't get to see much of the redemption of his character, if there was any later in the film. But I was just not entertained. For the first 15 or so minutes, I'm cracking up, and then it comes to his attitude with his pregnant girlfriend and I'm ready to crack him one.

Although I'm not feeling particularly racial, I may as well go there. It's the gut again. But I recall suffering through so many what-is-wrong-with-black-men discussions that I wish I would have had this movie to shove in the faces of all those annoying people. Now I don't know how the movie wraps up, but the opening bits are enough to make any judge of character wince, even though it's all a sly joke.

You can be sure Alfie's a seminal moment in white male dog history. I just have to make sure I rip it from my Tivo before they never show it on TV again.

Roadblock

The Interpreter: An Emotional Portrait of the UN

I swore that I was not going to see this movie because of the crapstorm its advertisement made in the Tivo community. I changed my mind and it was worth it. As a meditation on the hopes and dreams of non-violent negotiation as the central purpose of the UN it does a fine job, but misses being more by leaving out one crucial dimension.

Sean Penn has created a memorable character that seems to blend Peter Falk & Robert DeNiro into a smoldering soul on the verge of enlightenment, explosion and collapse. For some reason I am reminded of Samuel L. Jackson in 'Red Violin'. There is a combination of strength and sensitivity both characters possess.

I got particularly annoyed by Nicole Kidman's hair which obscured her right eye five different ways in each close-up. Every time the camera would switch away from her and come back, the strands of blonde would be somewhere else on her face. It completely destroyed the continuity of some critical scenes. Where her voice acting was crisp and perfectly precise carrying a perfectly impenetrable subtext, I had to close my eyes to stay in the drama a couple times.

But where there was drama, it was nicely done. As a deeply layered and nuanced mystery, 'The Interpreter' will hold up well. As twisty plotters go, 'The Interpreter' is deliciously emotional. Not since 'The Siege' has the emotional relationship between individuals gone through wrenching changes like this. It's a nice change and makes many more such twisty movies look like cheese mazes and gauntlets. Nobody's agenda is particulary clear and in Pollack's hands it makes restraint the only virtue of consequence.

Pollack captures the run-down, low-tech worn out look and feel of the UN. Never has the place's grit and granduer been captured quite this way. Although the byzantine quality of its operations is not quite revealed, the UN is presented as a functional bureacracy that nevertheless commands respect and attention if not inspiration of any sort from any of the film's characters, save Kidman. Her very life is profoundly influenced by patience with nuance, and yet because of her background she has little faith herself in public spiritedness. Negotiation is her forte and she holds all of cards closely while maintaining a straight face and a demand to be respected. She thus becomes an apt metaphor for the institution, an impractically idealistic and brave creature that lies through its teeth on a daily basis.

'The Interpreter' is full of mystery and competence and handles its subject matter without being preachy. It works on both metaphorical and personal levels. It reminds us that everything remains possible and that the only thing that is final is death. So why not put down the gun?

The central lesson of 'The Interpreter' is revealed as a 'Ku' custom of justice. Whether or not such a Southern African tradition is real is beside the point, it is nonetheless deeply resonant and reflects a dimension of healing and curing I have often been attuned to.

The Ku do not speak the name of the dead until a suitable period of time has elapsed. To call them back into one's life is to prolong the suffering of their loss. It is not until the memory is purged of ill feelings of pain and loss that the name can be spoken, the aim is to defeat grief.

When a 'Ku' family discovers the man who has killed one of their members, a year from the day of the murder they bind and gag the killer and march him into the river. The killer's family stands on one shore and the victim's family on the other. The victim's family decides whether or not to go into the river and save the killer. If they do not, then they are believed to greive for the rest of their lives - they cannot be healed. But if they save the life of the killer, then they prove that the value of life itself transcends that of revenge. They are healed.

I cannot imagine that healing alone can be sufficient. There must also be a cure. But that is an angle of the process of grief that Pollack misses, and so he reduces the dimensions of death and life to the terms of expediency. This is acceptable for an artist who is concerned primarily with matters of the heart, and suitable for the telling of the story 'The Interpreter' tells. But take his call on the use of guns vs words any further than dramatic entertainment we must be compelled to include the matter of cure. Aside from the dimensions of hope and frustration so vividly portrayed in this film, my judgements about the use and value of the UN must include that missing dimension of material practicality. Justice that heals but doesn't cure is not justice.

The Interpreter: An Emotional Portrait of the UN

I swore that I was not going to see this movie because of the crapstorm its advertisement made in the Tivo community. I changed my mind and it was worth it. As a meditation on the hopes and dreams of non-violent negotiation as the central purpose of the UN it does a fine job, but misses being more by leaving out one crucial dimension.

Sean Penn has created a memorable character that seems to blend Peter Falk & Robert DeNiro into a smoldering soul on the verge of enlightenment, explosion and collapse. For some reason I am reminded of Samuel L. Jackson in 'Red Violin'. There is a combination of strength and sensitivity both characters possess.

I got particularly annoyed by Nicole Kidman's hair which obscured her right eye five different ways in each close-up. Every time the camera would switch away from her and come back, the strands of blonde would be somewhere else on her face. It completely destroyed the continuity of some critical scenes. Where her voice acting was crisp and perfectly precise carrying a perfectly impenetrable subtext, I had to close my eyes to stay in the drama a couple times.

But where there was drama, it was nicely done. As a deeply layered and nuanced mystery, 'The Interpreter' will hold up well. As twisty plotters go, 'The Interpreter' is deliciously emotional. Not since 'The Siege' has the emotional relationship between individuals gone through wrenching changes like this. It's a nice change and makes many more such twisty movies look like cheese mazes and gauntlets. Nobody's agenda is particulary clear and in Pollack's hands it makes restraint the only virtue of consequence.

Pollack captures the run-down, low-tech worn out look and feel of the UN. Never has the place's grit and granduer been captured quite this way. Although the byzantine quality of its operations is not quite revealed, the UN is presented as a functional bureacracy that nevertheless commands respect and attention if not inspiration of any sort from any of the film's characters, save Kidman. Her very life is profoundly influenced by patience with nuance, and yet because of her background she has little faith herself in public spiritedness. Negotiation is her forte and she holds all of cards closely while maintaining a straight face and a demand to be respected. She thus becomes an apt metaphor for the institution, an impractically idealistic and brave creature that lies through its teeth on a daily basis.

'The Interpreter' is full of mystery and competence and handles its subject matter without being preachy. It works on both metaphorical and personal levels. It reminds us that everything remains possible and that the only thing that is final is death. So why not put down the gun?

The central lesson of 'The Interpreter' is revealed as a 'Ku' custom of justice. Whether or not such a Southern African tradition is real is beside the point, it is nonetheless deeply resonant and reflects a dimension of healing and curing I have often been attuned to.

The Ku do not speak the name of the dead until a suitable period of time has elapsed. To call them back into one's life is to prolong the suffering of their loss. It is not until the memory is purged of ill feelings of pain and loss that the name can be spoken, the aim is to defeat grief.

When a 'Ku' family discovers the man who has killed one of their members, a year from the day of the murder they bind and gag the killer and march him into the river. The killer's family stands on one shore and the victim's family on the other. The victim's family decides whether or not to go into the river and save the killer. If they do not, then they are believed to greive for the rest of their lives - they cannot be healed. But if they save the life of the killer, then they prove that the value of life itself transcends that of revenge. They are healed.

I cannot imagine that healing alone can be sufficient. There must also be a cure. But that is an angle of the process of grief that Pollack misses, and so he reduces the dimensions of death and life to the terms of expediency. This is acceptable for an artist who is concerned primarily with matters of the heart, and suitable for the telling of the story 'The Interpreter' tells. But take his call on the use of guns vs words any further than dramatic entertainment we must be compelled to include the matter of cure. Aside from the dimensions of hope and frustration so vividly portrayed in this film, my judgements about the use and value of the UN must include that missing dimension of material practicality. Justice that heals but doesn't cure is not justice.

The Hitchhiker's Guide

So it turns out that I missed my introduction to HUB for a conference call that didn't materialize. So in order to make the best of the moment, I directed myself over to the Mercado for a quick dip into pure Silicon Valley geekdom - the 2:30pm showing of The Hitchhiker's Guide, opening day.

It was actually something of a surprise that the theatre was 3/4 full in the middle of the afternoon, but there it was. The skinny on the deal, from a fan of the series is this; good job, but wasn't there some way that you could have gotten John Cleese to be Slartybartfast? In such case, we might have had a movie that was laugh-your-arse-off funny instead of merely laugh-out-loud funny.

I'm a recent reader of the series, having missed the drama of anticipation between novels. In haste, I consumed them all at once, a thoroughly delicious experience. Yet since it has been many years since I read the stuff, and I tend to forget where one book ends and another begins. So I had a vague sense of disappointment that my favorite funny parts were not all included, in particular I was expecting more from the robot. Nevertheless, I think the Vogons as well as all the characters were rather well realized, as was the guide itself. In fact, exerpts from the guide done in bubbly animated poster graphics were some of the funniest scenes in the pic.

I think nobody felt that there was anything untrue or false about the translation, once you suffer through the tedious opening credits. They could have done a bit better with the silent situational British comic pauses, but other than that - no complaints. I imagine it will make it's way to my shelves one of these days. What geek home would be complete without it? I suspect we'll all walk down this road 42 times.

The Hitchhiker's Guide

So it turns out that I missed my introduction to HUB for a conference call that didn't materialize. So in order to make the best of the moment, I directed myself over to the Mercado for a quick dip into pure Silicon Valley geekdom - the 2:30pm showing of The Hitchhiker's Guide, opening day.

It was actually something of a surprise that the theatre was 3/4 full in the middle of the afternoon, but there it was. The skinny on the deal, from a fan of the series is this; good job, but wasn't there some way that you could have gotten John Cleese to be Slartybartfast? In such case, we might have had a movie that was laugh-your-arse-off funny instead of merely laugh-out-loud funny.

I'm a recent reader of the series, having missed the drama of anticipation between novels. In haste, I consumed them all at once, a thoroughly delicious experience. Yet since it has been many years since I read the stuff, and I tend to forget where one book ends and another begins. So I had a vague sense of disappointment that my favorite funny parts were not all included, in particular I was expecting more from the robot. Nevertheless, I think the Vogons as well as all the characters were rather well realized, as was the guide itself. In fact, exerpts from the guide done in bubbly animated poster graphics were some of the funniest scenes in the pic.

I think nobody felt that there was anything untrue or false about the translation, once you suffer through the tedious opening credits. They could have done a bit better with the silent situational British comic pauses, but other than that - no complaints. I imagine it will make it's way to my shelves one of these days. What geek home would be complete without it? I suspect we'll all walk down this road 42 times.

Fools Being Fooled by Foolishness

My gut instinct was to file this under the heading 'Stupid White People' but sometimes my gut gives more than just me indigestion. Nevertheless there are several stupid whitefolks involved in two stories that I happened to be bombarded by over the past week.

Stupid the First
Three stooges, as reported by CNN found about $100k in old dollar bills buried under a tree in their backyard. The story was all over Headline News, 24/7. Every 30 minutes I heard the story. That's part of the pain of being on the road and not having a wide variety of progams to view on cable. Three days later, the men are arrested. It turns out that they just stole the money from the attic of some people they were supposedly working for.

Stupid the Second
250 dupes, as repored by CNN could not find anywhere in their Atlanta neighborhoods, a bride who was to be married. The local police official mumbled into the waiting cameras that foul play was suspected, and as was often reported every 30 minutes on CNN, the bride to be did not have 'cold feet'. Three days later, the bride is found in New Mexico taking a personal time-out. She said she was kidnapped, but that was just a lie.

Today is not a good day to be an editor at CNN.

But why bring up the whitefolks angle? Aside from the fact that I feel the distinct necessity of speaking from the gut, this series of unfortunate events can be seen through the lenses of racial equality, most clearly for the second story, but also for the first. To my way of seeing things, this says a great deal about access to the media and who gets what kind of attention for what reasons.

Call the Annenberg Center, but my guess is that over the past year you can count the number of human interest stories involving non-white, non-celebrity weddings on your thumb. And when is the last time you saw a story about some lucky chinese kids? I'm not the one to answer these questions because, thank God, I don't have to watch CNN that often. Pray for those who do, what a whitified world they must bear.