Feeding the Silence

Friday Review: Mad Men (Season One)

2012-02-17T00:02:00.005-05:00

Yes, yes, I know. I’m late to the Mad Men party. A booze drenched party conducted in a haze of cigarette smoke, from the look of it. Consider me properly scolded. So, have I missed out on the greatest TV thing since sliced bread?

It’s hard to tell. The show is brilliantly put together, in terms of writing, acting, and visuals. But is that enough? The last time I came this late to a critically praised TV series it was with The Wire. By the end of its first season, I was hooked. Partly, I figure, it was due to the subject matter. The futility of the war on drugs, police corruption, and the like is right up my alley, after all.

I haven’t had the same reaction to Mad Men. For one thing, other than anthropological curiosity, I don’t really care that much about the ad business in the 1960s. The tricks of the trade are interesting, yes, but they’re largely the same today. As a result, I think what I really need is a deep hook into the characters to be completely pulled in to the show. That didn’t happen. With a couple of exceptions, I find the characters interesting to observe (in their natural habitats, so to speak), but I don’t really care about them. Yes, Don Draper is a suave motherfucker with a dark side (he looks so good with a smoke I nearly went out to find a pack of Lucky Strikes), but I don’t really have any interest in where he’s going as a character.

The only character who I really cared about, in the sense that I wanted to see her succeed in some way during the first season, was Peggy, perhaps because she is the character most at odds with the world she inhabits. I’ll go ahead and I admit I “care” about Pete Campbell, to the extent that I enjoyed seeing him getting smacked around by Don. I particularly enjoyed when Pete, who I call “Conner” (because, to me, Vincent Kartheiser will always been Angel’s douchebag son once Hotlz brings him back from hell) tries to undermine Don to the boss about Don’s shady past, only to be told that nobody gives a fuck about that kind of thing.

What is more fascinating to me about Mad Men is the world these characters live in. When people talk about “world building” they usually are talking about sci-fi or fantasy writers, who build new universes and worlds from the ground up. But the truth is, every writer of fiction (whether on the page or screen) has to pay attention to world building. Thus, just because Mad Men is set in a real time and place from our recent past doesn’t mean the creators can shirk on the details that lend the world depth and credibility.

And boy, do they ever paint a vivid picture. It’s not pretty, mind you, but it really does draw you in. Keeping in mind that I was born a decade after the period depicted in Mad Men, most of it is as foreign to me as a world as anything out of Asimov or George R.R. Martin books. Seriously, in this recent past alcohol flowed freely in the workplace. Everybody smoked pretty much all the time (except for Conner, bless him). Sexual harassment didn’t just exist in the workplace, it was a way of life. Home life wasn’t much better (especially if you’re a divorced woman who dares to move into the neighborhood). Don’t forget the casual racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism. Speaking of Martin, the world of Mad Men isn’t a whole lot better from an equity standpoint than Westeros!

And yet, it’s a very compelling world to observe (just like Westeros, as it happens). Which is why, for all I said about the characters above, I’m pretty much on the Mad Men train. I’ll definitely queue up season two. I do have a nagging fear that after the whole thing is over I’ll feel a bit more like this, but time will tell.

The Details
-------------------
Mad Men (Season One)
Released 2007
Created by Mathew Weiner
Starring Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, Christina Hendricks, et. al.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Free Speech (Part 2)

2012-02-16T17:00:00.002-05:00

So the Stolen Valor Act makes it a crime to lie about being awarded various military honors, including (in the case of Xavier Alvarez) the Congressional Medal of Honor. This strikes me as generally a bad idea – criminal punishment of speech which doesn’t really do any harm. But why? Why should I give any kind of shit whether a serial fabricator like Alvarez is convicted of a crime?

One of my regular blog reads is Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Ed Brayton is every bit the free speech hawk that I am. He spends a good deal of time discussing cases from around the world involving suppression of speech, some more serious than others. Some of Ed’s regular commenters, however, aren’t always on board with his outrage. Many of those folks tend to come from places in Europe or Canada that have a different conception of free speech and the impact speech has on the community.

A while back, some discussion over at Dispatches (I wish I could remember which one and provide a link – bad blogger, I know) about free speech made me start thinking that the Euros were making some good points. What struck me as I read the discussion was that I kept coming back to the same reason for thinking they were wrong – I don’t trust the government to sift the good speech from the bad. I think this was in the context of Holocaust denial, which is a crime in several places in Europe. Yes, I thought, Holocaust deniers are idiots (at best) and raving bigots (at worst), but do we really want the state stepping in and locking people like that up? I couldn’t come up with a good principled reason why not.

I mean, often times when we think of First Amendment issues we have images of Orwellian thought police (or the Zappa equivalent) and the horror of the state prying inside your mind. But speech is an outward act, of course, almost by definition. For it to have any meaning someone has to hear it. More to the point, for somebody to get pissed off about it, it must have an impact. Let’s face it – the state is all about making sure people don’t do certain harmful things to each other. Why should speech be off limits?

There’s a more utilitarian side to the argument, although I’m not sure I’d call it “principled.” That’s the argument that runs through neatly a century of First Amendment cases from the Supreme Court about the “marketplace of ideas.” The idea being that when the state stays out of things and everybody is free to chip in with ideas and arguments about ideas, the market will sort everything out. To go back to the Holocaust denier example, you could argue that such folks are regarded as buffoons and not worth of serious attention here in the United States, because their ideas have been so thoroughly debunked in the popular culture. By contrast, the very fact that their ideas are illegal in Europe lends them the credence of the outcast and put upon (i.e., “we must be on to something, look how desperate they are to suppress it!”).

But, again, why leave free speech to the whims of the market? We don’t do it with anything else. If anything, we’ve got mounting evidence that the market doesn’t do a good job of filtering out false or misleading speech. Just look at political campaigns and any news coverage having to do with them. Or lay discussions of Supreme Court decisions that show no solid grasp of what the case actually says.

So what else is there to support the hawkish position on free speech? Seems to me it comes down to a very practical concern – that even if we can identify speech that is harmful, we can’t trust the state to actually implement any scheme that would accurately punish wrongdoers. Whether it’s because the line between good speech and bad speech is so squishy to begin with or that unscrupulous enforcers will use their power to protect their friends and go after their enemies. After all, wouldn’t it be wonderful of politicians – those in power as well as those seeking it – could be punished for flat out bullshit? Probably, but do you trust a Democrat to fact-check a Republican or vice-versa? Even theoretically isolated bureaucrats would potentially have some axe to grind and an ability to wield it.

I think, in the end when it comes to brass tacks, that’s what it comes down to. I think a society could get together and pretty confidently identify speech that is so vile and harmful in and of itself that it should be banned (or otherwise heavily regulated). Where the real dispute comes in is whether the enforcement mechanism would be accurate enough to avoid the risk of squelching other speech that really poses no threat to anyone.

So, to circle back to the question I asked in the first post – is my general hawkishness on free speech issues something born of some bedrock principle? Or is it simply a practical recognition that any speech regulation regime is so fraught with enforcement issues that we should avoid such regulation if at all possible? I think it’s the latter.*

But that’s all right, because the end result in the real world is the same. Whether it’s because of some well rooted principle or simple practical expediency, I champion the cause of free speech. Just because I can hypothesize a perfect world where I might change my mind doesn’t mean I waver in the here and now. Which means I throw in on the side of Xavier Alvarez and his lies, not because I think he should spout them, but because I don’t trust the government not to come after me next.

* I should make perfectly clear that I am only talking about speech that causes some real harm. Harmless speech should always be protected.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Free Speech (Part 1)

2012-02-14T17:00:00.005-05:00

I have always prided myself on being a defender of free speech. At times I’ve referred to myself as a “First Amendment hawk,” because I rarely find a situation in which clamping down on speech is justifiable. All of the recent Supreme Court pronouncements on free speech that have been so controversial – striking down limitations on political speech (Citizen’s United), hateful funeral speech (Snyder), “crush” videos (Stevens), and violent video games (Brown) – are cases I think the Court got right. Hell, I don’t think the Supremes go far enough when it comes to something like obscenity. The answer to bad speech is more speech, not regulation.

But lately I’ve been wondering why I subscribe to that viewpoint. More to the point, is my position on free speech issues really a principled one? Or is it more based on the practical concerns of whomever was doing the censoring not getting it right? I’ll talk more about that in the next post. But first, I want to talk about an upcoming Supreme Court case that brings the principle/practical issue into sharp focus.

Next week the Court will hear oral arguments in US v. Alvarez, a criminal case out of the Ninth Circuit. Here’s how Alvarez’s counsel – defense counsel (and a federal defender colleague of mine), keep in mind – starts his brief:

Xavier Alvarez lied. He lied when he claimed to have played professional hockey for the Detroit Red Wings. He lied when he claimed to be married to a Mexican starlet whose appearance in public caused paparazzi to swoon. He lied when he claimed to be an engineer. He lied when he claimed to have rescued the American ambassador during the Iranian hostage crisis, and when he said that he was shot going back to grab the American flag. A colleague was being charitable when he said, ‘I think after anyone meets Mr. Alvarez for the first time, one questions the
veracity of his statements.’

It was another lie that got Alvarez in trouble, when he stood up at a meeting of a local water board (of which he was a member) and claimed to be a Marine who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1987. As a result, he was charged with violating the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to:

falsely represent . . . verbally or in writing, to have been awarded any decoration or medal authorized by Congress for the Armed Forces of the United States.

Alvarez got nothing out of his lie. It didn’t provide him any kind of financial benefit. He didn’t get a better parking place because of it. He just puffed up his own self image (one which those around him knew was inflated anyway). Should that be a crime?

The Ninth Circuit said no. The Stolen Valor Act is a content-based restriction on speech and must therefore satisfy strict scrutiny, the highest level of review when fundamental constitutional rights are involved. False statements in general weren’t excluded from First Amendment protection historically (aside from fraud, libel, and slander, which all lead to tangible harms) and the Act itself wasn’t narrowly tailored to address the problem at which it was directed.

That was the initial opinion of the court, which did prompt a dissent. The Government sought a rehearing en banc.* It was denied, but the denial itself prompted several interesting opinions. In and amongst those opinions was a concurrence (in the denial of the rehearing petition) from Chief Judge Kozinski, who mounted a spirited defense of lying:

So what, exactly, does the dissenters’ ever truthful utopia look like? In a word: terrifying.
If false factual statements are unprotected, then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, but also the JDater who falsely claims he’s Jewish or the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit. Phrases such as ‘I’m working late tonight, hunny,’ ‘I got stuck in traffic’ and ‘I didn’t inhale’ could all be made into crimes. Without the robust protections of the First Amendment, the white lies, exaggerations and deceptions that are an integral part of human intercourse would become targets of censorship, subject only to the rubber stamp known as ‘rational basis review.’

* * *

Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying.

All right, “defense of lying” isn’t quite right. He makes good points, though. A world without any of the polite bullshit we toss at each other would be pretty horrible. Although I think there are deep flaws with the thought experiment that was The Invention of Lying,** its portrayal of a world where everyone is brutally honest with each other, and therefore pretty miserable, seems spot on.

What does that have to do with a principled versus practical view of free speech? Because the arguments on both sides of the Stolen Valor Act issue (though not exactly the ones made by the parties) breakdown along those lines. On the one side, the argument is that knowing false statements have no value and therefore should be regulated because of the harm done. On the other side, the argument is not only do those statements have some value, but regulating them would bring the power of the state into play in ways that will be abused. In other words, it’s a mixture of principle and practicality.

Which objection to things like the Stolen Valor Act gets us the farthest? Does it really make a difference in the end? And if so, what is it? I’ll pick up those questions in the next post.

* “En banc” means review by the entire court, as opposed to the usual three-judge panel. However, the Ninth Circuit is so large that en banc review is really just review by a larger panel (upon which the Chief Judge always sits).

** Funny movie, with lots of great bits, but I question the underlying conclusion that a world without lying means a world without fiction. Fiction, by definition, is not an attempt to accurately depict actual events. Everyone knows going in that the story is not (to cop a phrase from hearsay law) “presented for the truth of the matter asserted.” On the other hand, the idea that religion is spawned only after lying is discovered seems completely on target.

Friday Review: Biutiful

2012-02-10T00:02:00.001-05:00

Is it possible to make a movie that is technically perfect in terms of film making and anchored by a superb lead performance that is, nonetheless, hollow and pointless? I wouldn't have thought so, but Biutiful makes a pretty good case.

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Biutiful is built around a brilliant performance by Javier Bardem as Uxbal, who receives news that he's suffering from advanced prostate cancer and has, at beast, a few months to live. To call Uxbal's life “complicated” is to undersell the bad hand Iñárritu deals him. For a living, Uxbal plays some kind of middleman role in a criminal enterprise that exploits (presumably illegal) immigrants in Barcelona for both the supply (Chinese) and distribution (African) of counterfeit goods. The closest thing to a legitimate job Uxbal has is when he takes money from those who have recently had a loved one die in order to see if they are at peace.

That's right. Uxbal talks to the dead. Given the rest of his criminal life, one would think that would be a scam. But Iñárritu makes it clear that Uxbal really does talk to dead people. So much for realism.

Uxbal has two children, the younger of whom apparently likes to start fires. Their mother, his estranged wife, is nuts, an addict of some persuasion, and a prostitute. Did I mention that she hooks up with Uxbal's brother (who is also part of the illegal immigrant business)?

Into such difficult circumstances, Uxbal's diagnosis makes barely a ripple, except to provide the film's ticking clock. Honestly, aside from one scene of chemo and the general deterioration of Uxbal's health (multiple scenes of Bardem pissing blood!), the cancer thing is hardly the life altering event it would be to most people.

So, the cancer diagnosis becomes just one of the many bad things that happen to Uxbal over the nearly two-and-a-half hour running time. There's a botched reconciliation with the crazy hooker wife. Two dozen of his Chinese immigrants are killed (due to his cheapness, essentially). And, of course, he dies.

Even Biutiful’s admirers admit to its bleakness and the misery that seems to infuse every scene. So what, then exactly, is Iñárritu trying to say? What does he bring to the conversation about the world that others haven’t? Damned if I can tell.

I’ve seen some commenters argue that those who dislike the film simply just can’t handle the reality of it, can’t deal with the fact that it shows the ugly side of life. I don’t think that’s true. For one thing, as I mentioned above, Uxbal talks to dead people. That ain’t real life, people, OK? Any film that aims for gritty realism probably should leave the magical touches for others. For another thing, if you need to watch a fictional movie to be reminded of how much the world sucks for vast swaths of people out there, you’re the one who’s being willfully ignorant. I don’t blame Iñárritu for showing me misery – it confirms what I see in my daily life (certainly in my daily work) – I blame him for not saying anything interesting about it.

In his positive review, Roger Ebert claims that Uxbal is a “good man” trying to come to terms with all this. I don’t see it. Yes, Uxbal loves his kids, but he doesn’t do very well by them.* He never actually tells them about his impending death and his way of securing their future is to give each some mystical doodad that’s supposed to “protect” them. By the end of the film, the kids are left to a world without a father, with a mother who is at best neglectful and at worst destructive, and in the care of an immigrant woman who, while she appears to be a good loving person, is not exactly in a secure situation herself. If that’s what love gets you, that’s not saying much. I fail to see anything else Uxbal does that demonstrates a “good” man trapped in a bad situation. And there are two dozen dead Chinese who probably can’t see it, either.

Given all that, I’m a bit puzzled at Ebert’s reference to Ikiru, the Kurosawa masterpiece. Aside from both being about dying men, those men couldn’t be more different. Uxbal is a criminal who preys on others to make a living. Ikiru’s Kanji is a midlevel bureaucrat who is unsure if his work has any meaning. Not only does Kanji take obvious steps to do good, we see (via a brilliant 45-minute coda) how the world appreciates the work he did once he is dead. No dead people talking in Ikiru either, which has to count for something.

In the end, the closest Iñárritu appears to wander near a point is to give in to some nondescript woo-based kind of “hope.” As A.O Scott in the New York Times so devastatingly put it:

Mr. González Iñárritu does not have the stomach for the stringent moral and spiritual vision of authentically (or even experimentally) religious filmmakers like Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson or the Dardenne brothers. Instead he traffics in a vague theology of uplift, wherein the road to an entirely abstract heaven is paved with noble instincts.

The tension between this director’s methods and his intentions — between his exacting, sometimes amazing craft and his resolutely banal ideas — may ultimately be a problem of audience and genre. ‘Biutiful,’ like ‘Babel,’ looks more daring and more difficult than it is. But if Mr. González Iñárritu were, let’s say, to adapt a novel by Nicholas Sparks, whose views on love and morality are not ultimately all that different from his, the result might be a satisfying and surprising synthesis of styles: a feel-bad art film with an uplifting message for everyone. ‘Biutiful,’ come to think of it, is almost that, but not entirely in a good way.

Ouch. Now that is biutiful.

* Not to go all Godwin, but Goebbels loved his children in Downfall, too, but you can see where that led.

The Details
-------------------
Biutiful
Released 2010
Written by Alejandro González Iñárritu
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Armando Bo, Nicolás Giacobone
Starring Javier Bardem, Maricel Álvarez, Hanaa Bouchaib, et. al.

Theft, Homage, or Just Business?

2012-02-09T17:05:00.004-05:00

Sometimes, a piece of genre fiction is just so damned good, it forces the snobs in the wider world to take notice. 2001 is recognized as not just a great piece of science fiction, but as a great film. Likewise, Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is such a landmark in that genre that it gets props from those who would never otherwise dare to talk of superheroes and comic books.

Which doesn’t mean it exists outside the demands of commerce. Earlier this month, DC Comics announced it would release a series of “prequel” issues, several for each of some of Watchmen’s main characters – Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan ,and Rorschach, for instance – none of them written by Moore or with art by Gibbons. The artist, at least, is on board:

The company has also enlisted the blessing of Gibbons, a move that should mollify many fans. ‘The original series of Watchmen is the complete story that Alan Moore and I wanted to tell. However, I appreciate DC's reasons for this initiative and the wish of the artists and writers involved to pay tribute to our work. May these new additions have the success they desire,’ he said in his statement.

As for the writer, Moore? Yeah, well, not so much:

Mr. Moore, who has disassociated himself from DC Comics and the industry at large, called the new venture ‘completely shameless.’

Speaking by telephone from his home in Northampton, England, Mr. Moore said, ‘I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.’

He went on to explain that he didn’t want money, what he wanted was for the prequels not to happen.

I can understand Moore’s position. After all, when you create something and see it as a whole work, and later on somebody comes along and adds to it, it must chafe a little bit. Still, does Moore really have any basis upon which to get pissy about it?

One of the writers involved in the prequels is J. Michael Straczynski, of Babylon 5 fame. He makes a very good point about Moore:

it should be pointed out that Alan has spent most of the last decade writing very good stories about characters created by other writers, including Alice (from Alice in Wonderland), Dorothy (from Wizard of Oz), Wendy (from Peter Pan), as well as Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, Jekyll and Hyde, and Professor Moriarty (used in the successful League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). I think one loses a little of the moral high ground to say, ‘I can write characters created by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle and Frank Baum, but it’s wrong for anyone else to write my characters.’

Indeed, the characters of Watchmen itself did not spring from Moore’s brain fully formed. They were based on characters DC had acquired when it purchased a defunct competitor, Charlton Comics. Moore took them and twisted them beyond recognition, but still, he wasn’t exactly writing on a completely blank slate.

Moore has an answer for Straczynski:

In literature, I would say that it’s different. I would say, and it might be splitting hairs, but I’m not adapting these characters. I’m not doing an adaptation of Dracula or King Solomon’s Mines. What I am doing is stealing them. There is a difference between doing an adaptation, which is evil, and actually stealing the characters, which, as long as everybody’s dead or you don’t mention the names, is perfectly alright by me. I’m not trying to be glib here, I genuinely do feel that in literature you’ve got a tradition that goes back to Jason And The Argonauts of combining literary characters [...] It’s just irresistible to do these fictional mash-ups. They’ve been going on for hundreds of years and I feel I’m a part of a proud literary tradition in doing that. With taking comic characters that have been created by cheated old men, I feel that that is different.

On the one hand, I see Moore’s point. Writers, and other artists, have pilfered past works for their own creations since the beginning of time (well, right after the beginning of time), after all. And, as a writer myself, I like the idea of other people keeping their hands off until I croak. On the other hand, that sounds more like a rule of etiquette than a hard ethical precept. Let’s face it, once the original creator is dead, he or she is much less likely to complain about appropriation.

In the end, it’s all moot. Neither Moore nor Gibbons control the legal rights to the work, sadly. Which means that DC is free to do whatever the hell they want to. Given the nature of the comic book industry, with its endless series and countless reboots, getting some other big names to play in that sandbox is hardly a unique move.

So let’s hold off until we see whether they fuck up the legacy of Watchmen. And how badly.

The Definition of Irony

2012-02-08T16:56:00.000-05:00

Presented without comment:

Via Reason (which got it via various Twitter Feeds).

Everything Becomes Obsolete

2012-02-07T16:51:00.001-05:00

Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1.

In the United States, we tend to think of constitution making as something that happens once every few centuries, if not once every eon. After all, the US Constitution is the oldest written constitution in the world that’s still in effect. For all its flaws, it’s served us pretty well over the 225 years it’s been around. But times change. History moves on. Things evolve.

So it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that, according to a pair of law profs with an article in the works, the influence of our Constitution on the rest of the world is waning. As recently as 1987, a study of 170 countries showed that 160 had constitutions greatly influenced by our own. Today, however:

‘[a]mong the world’s democracies,’ Professors Law and Versteeg concluded, ‘constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.’

‘The turn of the twenty-first century, however, saw the beginning of a steep plunge that continues through the most recent years for which we have data, to the point that the constitutions of the world’s democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now than they were at the end of World War II.’

Why? That’s where the quote at the top of this post (from Law) comes in. A constitution written in the 18th century is silent on lots of questions that are important to emerging democracies in the 21st Century. We are still clinging to Win 3.1, while everyone else has moved on. The state of the art (or at least Vista, to keep the Widows analogy going) is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982.

There is a lot of talk of rights in the New York Times article, but our Constitution itself (as opposed to the Bill of Rights) has very little to say about individual rights per se. It’s more focused on structural aspects. And while it’s easy to make an argument about the broad benefits of, say, the separation of powers, other things don’t make as much sense in a smaller modern nation. Federalism is basically a holdover from the Articles of Confederation and the unique conception of the states during the founding. That history just isn’t present in, say, modern day Egypt. Why should they use such an outdated model as a base?

As for rights, there’s a nifty chart that’s part of the article that shows, for the most part, the trend is for modern constitutions to broaden rights compared to ours, not limit them. For example, most of the big rights in the First Amendment – freedom of speech, assembly, and religion – as well as a prohibition against arbitrary arrest and detention appear in between 94% and 97% of world constitutions, as well as our own. Where the world moves on from us is in areas like women’s rights (91%), right to work (82%), and right to education (82%). To be fair, some of the areas labeled as not being part of our Constitution – like judicial review and the presumption of innocence – have been recognized by the Supreme Court.

What’s really fascinating to me are the areas where our Constitution explicitly provides rights that don’t hold a lot of sway in other newer constitutions. The prohibition against double jeopardy, for example, only gets into 50% of modern constitutions, while only 49% percent provide for the right to remain silent. Even more striking are a pair of contentious provisions that most people still feel are critical to our Constitutional system that are almost nonexistent elsewhere – the separation of church and state (only 34%) and the right to bear arms (only 2% - you read that right).

At the end of the day, of course, the words on paper aren’t nearly as important as whether the culture as a whole buys into the ideals they represent:

as Justice Antonin Scalia told the Senate Judiciary Committee in October. ‘Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights,’ he said.

‘The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours,’ he said, adding: ‘We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!’

Of course, it was all meaningless. Unfortunately, I fear that the lesson the United States is most poised to give in the 21st Century is what can happen when the guarantees of the Constitution become just words on paper. When ideals upon which we’ve relied for so long are swept away out of concern for security or because of a misguided war on particular behaviors, that can be the result. I hope we recognize it before our influence on the rest of the world is something to avoid, not something to emulate.

Friday Review: Super 8

2012-02-03T00:02:00.005-05:00

This probably shouldn’t be the case, but where you see a movie has a lot to do with how much you like it. If I had seen Super 8 in the theater, sitting in the dark, with a bunch of other people, tub of popcorn propped precariously between myself and K, I’m pretty sure I would have walked out with a big grin on my face. But since I saw it at home on DVD? Meh, not so much.

In Super 8, Lost boy J.J. Abrams transforms Weirton, West Virginia, into a bucolic Ohio town that seems ripped through a time warp from one of Steven Spielberg’s late 1970s/early 1980s movies. That’s no coincidence – Spielberg was a producer of Super 8 – and also not a knock. For about the first hour or so, things hum along in excellent fashion. It’s only when the actual plot needs to unfold do things take a turn for the worse.

The main focus of Super 8 is a bunch of middle school boys (and one older girl who somewhat inexplicably joins them) who are making a zombie movie for a local film festival. The kids are great, the movie making aspect is fun, and we get a good sense of who they are and what this town is like where they live. Then, while shooting late at night at the local train station, a train comes roaring by (“production value!” yells the director, who moves to get the train in the scene). All goes to shit, however, when a pickup truck inexplicably drives onto the tracks and drives head-on into the onrushing train, derailing it in spectacular CGI fashion (also, inexplicably, the driver of said truck is not reduced to a stain on the prairie by the impact – be gone, physics!).

It’s from there that the film starts to go wobbly. Strange things start happening. Unsuspecting townspeople get sucked up by an off-screen baddie. One of them, natch, is the older girl involved with the movie, which gives our main character a damsel to rescue. None of what transpires is really bad, it just doesn’t live up to the what came before. What was once enticing and original becomes formulaic and familiar. The monster turns out to be the fairly standard alien who just wants to go home (unlike ET, he’ll kill any motherfucker who gets in his way, tho’). Maybe I was unjustly thinking, while it was lurking off screen, that it might turn into something like the Shrike, but it didn’t happen.

In the end, all is well, the music swells, and lessons are learned. It’s all very life affirming. There’s nothing wrong with that, it just feels unearned and a little facile. Which is why I think if I had seen Super 8 in the theater I would have walked out a happy man. Two hours of generally good entertainment? Hard to argue with that. But in the cold hard light of my living room . . ..

The Details
-------------------
Super 8
Released 2011
Written & directed by J.J. Abrams
Starring Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler, et. al.

Sometimes a Walking Naked Rotting Corpse Is Just a Walking Naked Rotting Corpse

2012-02-01T16:55:00.004-05:00

Fair warning – I’ve never been the brightest bulb in the box when it comes to deciphering hiding meanings in art. Maybe it’s my lawyer’s argumentativeness or my bent towards skepticism, but I’m wary of concluding that something obvious really means something obscure and “deep.” That being said, I do worry somewhat about the kind of hidden meanings others might dig up out of my own work. There’s a reason the creatures in The Water Road are all shades of blue and green, after all.

Readers of the old blog might remember a series I did called “Mondays With Stanley,” in which I worked my way through a bunch of Kubrick films I had on DVD (due, mostly, to a kind gift from K). One of them was The Shining, which I discussed in an entry cleverly titled “Jack Goes Apeshit.” I felt then, and still do, that The Shining isn’t up there in the pantheon of Kubrick’s great works, but it’s creepy as hell, filled with iconic images, and benefits from a note-perfect electronic score by Wendy Carlos. Nothing wrong with that.

But, perhaps, I wasn’t looking at it the right way. A documentary that premiered at Sundance, Room 237, surveys the wide variety of thought on what The Shining really is all about:

It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

I’d heard the Native American hypothesis before, which at least has some grounding in the film itself. The Overlook Hotel, for one thing, it built over top of a Native American burial ground (and we’re told that the builders had to repel attacks during construction). But some of the tells – there’s a brand of canned food product that uses an Indian logo visible in some scenes! – seem like the kind of stretching that conspiracy theorists engage in. You know what else is visible in those scenes? Jars of Tang and tins of Sanka. Maybe the real message of The Shining is that drinking decaf can perk up your sex life?

The other theories discussed in the story seem on even shakier ground (It’s a Holocaust metaphor because Wendy swings the bat 42 times at Jack, a reference to 1942? The pattern in the carpet in the Overlook mimics the Apollo launch pad? Really?). Which isn’t to say they’re wrong – who knows, since Kubrick’s dead and never addressed them while he was alive. And it’s always fun to see how weird and twisted you can get with something like that.* There’s no harm in that. But, really, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar, know what I mean?

That being said, in the end, when Room 237 makes its way to DVD, I’ll check it out. If nothing else, how people react to art fascinates me. I wonder what subliminal messages are lurking between the frames of Room 237!

*A lot of the alleged symbolism is broken down in a series of YouTube videos, if you’re curious.

A Good Idea Lost in the Weeds?

2012-01-30T17:04:00.001-05:00

This may come as a surprise to you, dear reader(s), but I have not exactly spent my free time over the past several months pouring over the position papers and the like of the GOP presidential candidates. West Virginia’s primary is closed, and I’m not a registered GOPer, so aside from the entertainment value of watching them cannibalize each other, I’ve got no reason to spent a lot of analytical sweat on any of them.

So imagine my surprise when one of those GOP aspirants who has fallen by the wayside, Rick Perry, appears to have picked up on an interesting idea. Yes, I’m talking about this Rick Perry:

At Rancho Perry, every day was Oopsday. Along the trail, he forgot how many Justices the Supreme Court has (eight is not enough); forgot the name of one of them (Sonia Sotomayor); placed the American Revolution in the sixteenth century; identified the voting age (fixed at eighteen four decades ago by constitutional amendment) as twenty-one; and suggested that the chairman of the Federal Reserve is a traitor, that Turkey (a NATO ally of sixty years’ standing) is governed by Islamic terrorists, and that Social Security is not only a Ponzi scheme but also a criminal enterprise, a monstrous lie, and unconstitutional. And there’s this whopper, from his farewell speech: ‘As a former Air Force pilot, I don’t get confused.’

The idea is to amend the Constitution to remove the life term for Supreme Court justices and switch to one-time terms of 18 years, with a new justice being appointed every two years. It’s not Perry’s idea – law professors have been kicking it around for years – but he’s the first politician I’ve heard to pick up on it. The theory behind it is two-fold.

First, by making Supreme Court appointments more regular and more frequent, the rancor and partisan warfare that springs up around them would lessen. At first blush, that makes some sense. The chance to appoint a Supreme Court justice would no longer depend on an odd synergy of fate and political expediency. Every president would get his or her chance to appoint justices, at least two, during their time in office. Regularity would lead to a smoother process.

Given the current political climate, I’m not sure how far that idea would get in reality. Judicial vacancies in the lower courts happen much more often than Supreme Court vacancies and, given their subordinate role, ought to lead to less political rancor. The opposite is true, of course. Individual judicial candidates for the courts of appeals or district courts rarely get the kind of spotlight that potential justices do, but they still get held up by simple partisan bickering. Furthermore, the way in which regularly occurring political events (like, say, agreeing on a damned budget) get turned into partisan battles of will suggests that the regularity of some event is no guarantee that it will go more smoothly.

Second, the constant churning of membership on the Supreme Court would lead to less ideological dogmatism. Fresh blood and new ideas, combined with the inability of partisan politicos to lock in a justice for a term lasting decades, would benefit the Court and the litigants who appear before it. It would also allow for a broader range of prior experience in the justices appointed. I’m all for that. Why, if we had to roll through qualified candidates every two years, we might even get a defense lawyer on the Supreme Court! Alas, that’s just a pipe dream.

As is, ultimately, Perry’s proposal. Not just because his own candidacy flamed out so spectacularly. Amending the Constitution is seriously difficult, for good reason. The idea that enough people could get fired up for this kind of structural change (as opposed to something issue specific) is laughable. I suppose once the overwhelming majority of the citizenry is so apathetic about the whole process a mobilized cadre of legal geeks might get it done, but that’s the stuff of fiction, as far as I can tell.

Still, props to Perry for putting the idea out there. I’m not certain of whether it has any ultimate merit, but it’s a least a serious and thought-provoking proposal. In a campaign filled with “9 9 9” and grand plans for new states on the moon, that’s something to be proud of.

Friday Review: Tabloid

2012-01-20T00:02:00.028-05:00

Errol Morris is one of the most decorated documentary filmmakers of our age. In Standard Operating Procedure he probed the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the urge of the perpetrators to document their crimes. In The Fog of War he laid bare the soul of Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War. And in The Thin Blue Line, he dug deep into a Texas murder case (creating the documentary technique of reenactment in the process) and got an innocent man off of death row. The man makes deep, thoughtful films about deadly serious topics.

Tabloid is not one of those. Don’t get me wrong, it is thoughtful and feints at some broader themes and deep issues. But, really, it’s not destined to go down alongside those films as milestone work in Morris’s career. It is, however, a ripping good story based around one of those real life characters that Morris is so adept at finding (and getting talking).

The real character at the center of Tabloid is Joyce McKinney, who first came to Morris’s attention because of a news story about an ungodly amount of money she spent having her beloved dog Booger (no shit!) cloned in South Korea. The story contained a brief reference to her infamous past, which set Morris on the case. What infamous past?

In 1977, an American named Kirk Anderson was doing his Mormon missionary work in the UK. One day, he was “abducted” from in front of the local Mormon temple. He showed up in London a few days later, explaining that McKinney (with whom Anderson had been involved back in the US) kidnapped him, hauled him off to a cottage in Devon, chained him to a bed, and raped him repeatedly over the course of several days.

McKinney tells a completely different story, as you might imagine. It begins in the US, where after she and Anderson fell madly in love (to the disdain of Anderson’s faithful Mormon mother), he abruptly disappeared. McKinney assembled an odd team, including a private detective, a pilot, and a bodyguard from Gold’s Gym and, having tracked Anderson to the UK, set off to get him back. The pilot and bodyguard didn’t last too long in the operation. McKinney tracked down Anderson, whom she described as having been brainwashed into a cult. He willingly went with her to Devon and was a willing, if not altogether enthusiastic (due to his Mormon indoctrination about sex), participant in all that happened there. He “escaped” when they went to London to get married.

The case, dubbed “The Case of the Manacled Mormon,” blew up in the British media, and particularly in a pair of dueling tabloid newspapers. The Daily Mail threw in on McKinney’s side, paying her for her side of the story. The Daily Mirror, on the other hand, frozen out without access to McKinney, dove into her past in America and dug up all kinds of juicy dirt involving pornography and prostitution. McKinney and her accomplice eventually made bail and fled back the US (according to one article she was apparently convicted and sentenced in absentia, but extradition was never sought).

Tabloid is basically a one-sided narrative. The only direct participant in the affair who talks is McKinney – Anderson refused to be interviewed. Everyone else’s involvement either ended before the disputed events or they are relaying hearsay information. Given that, it’s fascinating that at the end of the film you’re left with more questions than answers about what actually happened. For what it’s worth, I favor a third hypothesis (between McKinney’s romantic tale and the purely criminal escapade) put forward by a former Mormon brought in for some context: that Anderson went with McKinney willingly, but somewhere along the way his conditioning kicked in, he regretted whatever happened, and claimed kidnapping as a way to cover it up. It is entirely possible that McKinney is seductive enough to reel him in, and crazy enough to scare him off (she was later arrested in the US for stalking Anderson – and has sued Morris!).

In the end, Scott Tobias over at the Onion AV Club sums things up well:

McKinney may well be a madwoman, but Morris connects so deeply to her obsessions that the film’s tone never seems exploitative or mocking. Mostly, it’s just endlessly curious in the familiar Morris way: curious about another in his career-long gallery of eccentrics, curious about British tabloid culture, and curious about how radically stories are distorted, both by outlets looking for an angle and by individuals who reserve their greatest deceits for themselves. Tabloid is tonally removed from something like The Fog Of War, but in the end, McKinney and Fog subject Robert McNamara are each trying to control narratives that are out of their hands and have a complicated relationship to the truth.

And that’s always fun to watch, if nothing else.

And now, because I can’t hear about British tabloids without thinking of this song . . . “Paper Lies”:

The Details
-------------------
Tabloid
Released 2010
Directed by Errol Morris

Regulating the Pipeline to God

2012-01-18T17:03:00.001-05:00

You’d think that, as an atheist, I wouldn’t be concerned about how the state dealt with the internal affairs of churches. Don’t have a church, so why should I give a rat’s ass? But that’s asking the wrong question. It’s like not worrying about the shredding of the Fourth Amendment because you’re not actually doing anything wrong and thus have nothing to hide. There are certain things we don’t want the state doing. Weighing the validity of religious doctrine is one of those things.

That’s the underlying concern evidence in a unanimous Supreme Court decision last week involving a private religious school, an ill teacher, and the EEOC. The church school was part of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The teacher, Cheryl Perich, was a “called” teacher (as opposed to a lay teacher), meaning she had been through religious training and was considered by the school to be part of its religious mission. She developed narcolepsy, which led to a dispute over whether she could continue to teach. When she threatened to take legal action, the school fired her.

Perich sued the church anyway (via the EEOC), for firing her based on her threat of legal action. The church sought to dismiss the suit by invoking the “ministerial exception,” a long recognized doctrine in the lower courts that said (in essence), courts won’t wade into a church’s internal business, particularly when it involves church doctrine. In this case, the church argued that by taking her dispute outside the church, Perich had violated its doctrine. And since she was a called teacher and, basically, a minister, the courts couldn’t step in and review the decision to fire her.

The Supreme Court, ultimately, recognized the ministerial exception as an outgrowth of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, surveyed the history of government interference in religious matters in England and the Colonies (my favorite, a missive from Henry II to electors of a bishopric in Winchester commanding them “to hold a free election, but forbid you to elect anyone by Richard my clerk” - It’s good to be the king!). Preventing that kind of interference was part of the reason for enacting the First Amendment’s religion clauses. Therefore, to the point that a court would be required to deal with issues of ministerial competence or what have you, courts have to stay out.

What the Court did not do (although the odd couple concurrence of Justices Alito and Kagan tried) was to provide some real guidance as to when this ministerial exception could be applied. A couple of inconvenient facts (one for each side) show how difficult it could possibly be to figure that out. On the side of the church, the inconvenient fact is that while Perich was a called teacher, her job description was identical to that of the lay teachers, who were not called, or even required to be Lutheran. Given that, why should Perich’s status of being “called” really make a difference? As for Perich, her unfortunate fact is that before this dispute arose she had claimed ministerial status in order to get tax benefits. While that doesn’t answer the question of her status, it at least makes it unclear enough to that caution dictates the courts shouldn’t wade into it.

It will be interesting to see how the lower courts grapple with the scope of the exception. Of course, they’ve been doing it for some time, so it might not be as vague as some are making it out to be. It’s also worth noting that, contrary to what I’ve read in some heated ‘Net comment sections, the decision does not allow churches to discriminate at will against any employee. Only those arguably involved in the church’s core function would be covered. Of course, how broad is any given church’s function? That’s the rub.

Ultimately, the religion clauses of the First Amendment reflect the same fear that the Free Speech clause does when it comes to state regulation. It’s not that bad things are done under the auspices of speech or religion that most people would want regulated. It’s that we don’t trust the state to sort correctly between the good stuff and the bad. Rather than risk the state getting it wrong, we let the market handle it, to the extent it can. Whether that’s born of some ideological position or simply a recognition of how the real world works, you get the same place in the end.

It’s often noted, amongst my unbelieving brethren, that religion isn’t an immutable trait like race, gender, or sexual orientation. Given that religious practice involves choice and free will, why should it enjoy protected status? Whatever arguments for or against that idea, in the United States the decision was made long ago. The First Amendment does put religion in a special place in our society when it comes to how the law deals with it. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it would take more than a Supreme Court case to change it.

Lyin’ Eyes (Redux)

2012-01-17T16:59:00.002-05:00

Last year, I wrote about a case accepted by the Supreme Court that dealt with eyewitness identification. Specifically, it was going to address the issue of whether some kind of police misconduct is required before a court must exclude an out-of-court identification as unduly suggestive (the ID at issue in the case, all agreed, was not the byproduct of any police shenanigans). Defense attorneys across the country hoped that the Court might use the opportunity to seriously reevaluate the whole nature of eyewitness testimony, in light of all we’ve learned in recent years about how unreliable it is. Unfortunately, the Court, by a large majority, played things close to the vest.

The case, Perry v. New Hampshire, involved police responding to a report of car robberies in an apartment complex parking lot. When police arrived, Perry was found in the parking lot with a pair of car stereo amplifiers in his hand. He matched the vague description given of the person breaking into cars. As part of the investigation, an officer went to the fourth-floor apartment from which the initial call had been made and spoke to the caller’s wife, Blandon. She provided the same vague description. When prompted for further detail, she pointed out the window at Perry (who was standing with another officer in the parking lot) and identified him as the perpetrator. Perry was arrested. A month later, Blandon could not pick Perry out of a photo lineup. Perry was charged with theft and criminal mischief.

Perry tried to suppress that on the scene identification, not because the cops did anything wrong, but because the circumstances of the identification were inherently suggestive. The New Hampshire courts wouldn’t go along with that argument and, ultimately, neither did the Supreme Court, which affirmed Perry’s conviction 8-1.

Justice Ginsburg, writing for the Court, rejected Perry’s attempt to decouple the due process issue from the behavior of the police and focus solely on the reliability of the identification at issue. A major purpose of the suppression of an identification is to deter the police from engaging in improper conduct. Where there was no improper conduct, that purpose cannot be in play. Perry’s position would:

open the door to judicial preview, under the banner of due process, of most, if not all, eyewitness identifications.

The court recognized Perry’s argument (supported by numerous amici) that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable, but concludes that the “potential unreliability” of evidence does not preclude its introduction and that confrontation, cross examination, and the like are adequate to deal with the problem.

The only dissenter was Justice Sotomayor, who seems to take more to heart all we’ve learned about eyewitness testimony over the years. She wrote that:

eyewitness identifications’ unique confluence of features — their unreliability, susceptibility to suggestion, powerful impact on the jury, and resistance to the ordinary tests of the adversarial process — can undermine the fairness of a trial.

Among the statistics she used to back up that claim is the staggering figure that 76% of the first 250 exonerations due to DNA evidence involved incorrect identifications by eyewitnesses (and, in some cases, victims). That’s not much better than our terrorist detecting skills I talked about last week.

I understand the reticence of the Court to step beyond regulation of police conduct when it comes to suppression of evidence. Unfortunately, eyewitness testimony still holds a much greater weight with average jurors, and the public at large, than science indicates it deserves. The traditional crucible of cross examination may not be enough, in the large body of cases, to deal with that. Ultimately, the responsibility may lie with the defense bar itself to educate the public at large.

Friday Review: The Sole Inhabitant

2012-01-13T00:05:00.003-05:00

The further along I get when it comes to electronic music, the more I find myself getting into things I once that held no interest for me. As a child of the 1980s, I thought I had just about had enough of Thomas Dolby long before old enough to drive. Strange, then, that I’ve wound back to him and his music and find myself digging it quite a bit more than I would have imagined.

A few years ago, I read an article in Keyboard about Dolby. He was out on tour as a one-man band. Such things are treacherous, but it seemed if anyone could pull it off, it might be someone well schooled in electronic music. So I put The Sole Inhabitant, the CD/DVD commemoration of the tour, on the list of things to check out eventually.

I’m glad I did. Armed with a few synths, an awful lot of MIDI gear (including a 1940’s “impedance bridge” with the guts replaced with MIDI switchery), and a Macbook, Dolby fills out his songs in impressive fashion for just one guy. While there is a certain amount of “canned” stuff going on, based on my observations of the DVD he really is triggering most of the loops and samples in real time. Given the conceit of the tour, that’s to be expected.

Regardless, the whole thing is most impressive when Dolby takes a song and builds it from the ground up, as in “The Flat Earth”:

When it comes to electronic music, I still tend to favor the slow and moody to the more upbeat pop/dance stuff, so I generally dig the first two-thirds of the set more than the rest. That being said, there’s good fun to be had while banging out “Hyperactive” and “She Blinded Me Wit Science.” Besides, I’ve become quite fond of “Europa and the Pirate Twins,” for some reason.

As I said, this is a CD/DVD package, and although the track list for each is the same, they were recorded in different locations. The DVD, in addition to the music, throws in about a half hour total of fun and interesting intros, another half-hour interview with Dolby (who says some particularly interesting thing about Europe v. the United States and notions of history), and a brief tour of his rig. All in all, it’s one of the best concert DVDs that I’ve seen in a long time.

Details
------------
The Sole Inhabitant, by Thomas Dolby
Released 2006

Tracks:
1. Leipzig Is Calling (5:14)
2. One Of Our Submarines (5:39)
3. I Live In A Suitcase (6:24)
4. Flying North (6:02)
5. The Flat Earth (6:46)
6. Budapest By Blimp (7:57)
7. Windpower (4:25)
8. Europa And The Pirate Twins (4:21)
9. Hyperactive (5:22)
10. She Blinded Me With Science (4:53)
11. Airhead (4:51)

Players:
Thomas Dolby (everything)

In Which I Agree With gulp Gary Bauer (Sorta)

2012-01-12T17:03:00.000-05:00

There are few people on the planet that I would say I disagree with more fundamentally – about religion, politics, or ethics – than Gary Bauer. Long a crusader on the religious right (and even a presidential candidate, for a while), Bauer pushes an agenda and holds beliefs that I find odious and disturbing.

‘course, as they say, even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes. Credit where it’s due, Bauer’s found one.

Article 6 of the Constitution states that (emphasis mine):

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Thus, nobody can legally prevent a Muslim, Mormon, or atheist from running for or serving in any political office. The First Amendment bolsters that provision and, through the Fourteenth Amendment, effectively applies it to the states. But it only applies to legal restrictions. What about personal ones. When I go into the polling booth, can I apply a religious test when deciding who to vote for.

Bauer says yes, in a recent USA Today column. And I agree with him, for a couple of reasons.

First, as a practical matter, it’s impossible to police what people think is important to them about a political candidate. As unethical as it would be to not vote for Barrack Obama because he’s black or Hillary Clinton or Michelle Bachman because they’re women, it’s impossible to keep people from making their voting decisions on those grounds. Thus, it seems more than a little pointless to harangue people for something over which you not only have no means to control, but no hope of ever controlling.

Second, Bauer is right that someone’s religious beliefs can say something about them and their fitness for office, although they may not. The important thing is to keep the focus personal, rather than general. The label that one gives to themselves when it comes to religion doesn’t necessarily tell you a whole lot about their view of the proper role of government or how best to solve problems facing the world today. One need only to look at the various flavors of Catholics who pop up in politics to see that being true. Current GOP non-Romney flavor of the week Rick Santorum seems to draw a lot of policy provisions from his Catholic faith, while others like John Kerry come from the same faith and reach radically different positions. In the end, it’s the positions that matter, after all.

That is where, for all his nice talk, Bauer goes wrong, for he does precisely what he argues we shouldn’t and paints with a broad brush:

Though I wouldn't vote for a pagan, I'd vote for a Catholic or a Jew whose policies reflect the traditional understanding of marriage and defend the sanctity of human life much more readily than I would vote for the man next to me in the pew who doesn't support those things.

This after, without any hint of irony, deriding Wicca as “involve[ing] magic, spell-casting and sorcery” (as if a religion involving talking snakes, virgin births, and people who come back from the dead doesn’t). In other words, there are some faiths that are so beyond the pale for Bauer that he wouldn’t vote for a person who espoused those beliefs. That’s silly. I wouldn’t vote for an atheist just because he was an atheist, why should I vote against a Christian, pagan, or whatever simply because they fit into that category?

I wouldn’t, for example, vote against Mitt Romney because he’s a Mormon (although he wouldn’t extend me the same courtesy). I’d vote against him because he’s a feckless flip-flopping douchebag who couldn’t find a principle if it was strapped to the roof of his station wagon shitting down the windows. Two completely different things.

Spot the Terrorist!

2012-01-11T17:02:00.001-05:00

The dystopian world of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is beset by random blasts of violence, explosions laid at the feet of unnamed terrorists. It’s the terrorist threat that drives the world’s administration, one that includes a department of torture with the deliciously euphemistic label “Information Retrieval.” But the film never really shows you any actual terrorists. It’s even brought up in a discussion between the main character, Sam, and the woman of his dreams (literally):

JILL: Who is this war against, Sam?

SAM: Well, terrorists of course.

JILL: How many terrorists have you met? Actual terrorists?

SAM: Actual terrorists? Well...it's only my first day.

That line’s played for laughs, of course, but there’s an uncomfortable truth lurking there about how much of any “war on terror” is really a PR campaign by the state.

That idea flashed through my head when I read the sickening numbers compiled by the ACLU about the inmates confined at Guantanamo Bay (via). It looks like lots of people down there have never met an actual terrorist, either. Of the 779 people detained at Gitmo since 2002, a whopping 92% of them were never al Qaeda fighters. Maybe that’s because only 5% of them were actually captured by US troops in the field. The bulk of them (86%) were turned in for a bounty.

The other numbers are equally depressing (the number of men detained who the Government admits it can’t any allegations against but continue to detain anyway? 46). But that 92% says more about the “war on terror” than just about anything else could.

Another Round for Fleeing Fucks

2012-01-10T16:55:00.000-05:00

There is little doubt that no off the cuff utterance has lived as long in the American legal system as Bono’s remark, in 2002, during the Billboard Music Awards on Fox, about winning a particular award:

[t]his is really, really fucking brilliant.

That statement, along with similar deployment of “fleeting expletives” by Cher and Paris Hilton around the same time, launched a legal battle that’s about to be taken up by the Supreme Court for the second time in three years. When the Court hears oral arguments today in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, the court may dive headlong into an issue they were able to avoid in 2009.

At one time, such isolated utterances of one of Carlin’s seven dirty words weren’t enough to drive the fellas at the freakin’ FCC up the wall. That all changed, as they went after Fox and a couple other networks for the fleeting fucks. In its 2009 decision, a sharply divided Court held that the change in policy was not “arbitrary and capricious” and thus didn’t violate any administrative law provisions. The Court punted on the issue of whether the FCC’s policy actually violated the First Amendment.

On remand, the Second Circuit found that the policy violated the First Amendment because it was too vague. It’s hard to argue otherwise if read the disparate treatment of the same language in similar televised presentations. Saving Private Ryan with all its bad words (and, of course, violence, which bothers nobody) was just fine, but Martin Scorcese’s epic PBS documentary The Blues, in which real people spouted a few real expletives, was not. It’s impossible to make rhyme or reason of the FCC’s rulings in this area.

But that’s not all that is at stake tomorrow. Fox , and some of their amici, argue that the Court should strike down the foundation of any FCC regulation of naughty words on TV, the Pacifica case from 1978. That was the case in which the court held that the FCC could ban Carlin’s routine (which had been broadcast on radio), because of the pervasive nature of the broadcast medium. As the Fox brief makes clear, broadcast TV, while it was once pervasive, today is only a sliver of the media available to 21st-century eyes and ears. Given that reality, Fox argues that the FCC should have the same authority to regulate broadcast TV as to, say, the Internet or cable/satellite TV – which is to say none at all.

It will be interesting to see whether the Court goes that far, or simply smacks down the FCC’s policy on vagueness grounds. I’d like to see them go whole hog, but we’ll see.

For a much more in depth preview of the case, see Lyle Denniston’s write up over at SCOTUSBlog.

A Few BCS Thoughts

2012-01-09T16:54:00.001-05:00

Tonight, Alabama and LSU will lock heads in the BSC Championship Game. Not only do they both come from the same conference (the same division, in fact), but they’ve already played this year, LSU downing Alabama in overtime in what was either a brilliant defensive game or a crushing bore, depending on which side of the 9-6 final your team was on.

Like many college football fans, I’m not really a fan of the rematch in the title game. I’ve always been of the opinion that if you don’t win your conference, you don’t play for the national title. But, again like most college football fans, I’ll tune in tonight and watch. The game’s like a drug and I’m a junkie, I’ll admit. Besides, the buzz of WVU’s crushing Orange Bowl win last week is about to wear off. Stewart Mandel has more on the conflicted feelings of fans here.

I will say this for the BCS – it is blatant about trying to do what no other championship game in the world really can, match the two best teams against each other at the end of the year. Think about it. Any playoff system only works in getting close to that matchup if all the favorites win and all the underdogs lose. But what we love about playoffs is that they are unpredictable. One year, a NFL wild-card team can win the Super Bowl. The next, all the wild-card teams get eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. In a BCS setup, Greece never wins the 2004 European Championship because they never even play in the final. At the end of the day, it’s what makes playoffs worth playing.

So the BCS is bucking the trend, which is admirable. But the errand they set for themselves is a fool’s one. How on earth can you pin down the “top” (whatever that means) two teams out of the 120 that play through the season? If two, and only two, teams wind up unbeaten during the regular season, that might be helpful, but doesn’t deal with the strength of schedule problem. And what about seasons like this one, where only LSU made it through unscathed? You play the same game with the 1-loss teams (see here for a good argument about Alabama and Oklahoma State filling that role). And what if the unthinkable happens – Alabama upends LSU, but only barely, and nobody ends up undefeated? It might be fun just to see what happens.

For the record, my biggest beef with the BCS is there is no way for any team to say “if we do X, Y, and Z, we will play for the national championship.” The best bet is to be undefeated, but even that doesn’t guarantee anything. At least in the NCAA basketball tournament each team as a path to automatic qualification. Something more objective would be a good thing (my setup: a playoff involving only conference champions and the highest ranked independent).

In the end, the current system, while obtuse and completely fucked up, is the one that college football fans largely deserve. It gives us the one big game to decide it all, the focal point of all American sports (even the World Series or Stanley Cup Finals we want come down to a do or die game seven, right?). But it does it in such a way that everybody is free to argue about it until they’re blue in the face, often without any real mooring to the undisputed facts.

Damn it, it’s an American tradition! Sort of like presidential elections. I’ll be watching those until the end, well past my bedtime, too.

Friday Review: The Confession

2012-01-06T00:02:00.007-05:00

Regular readers know that I am against the death penalty. Not because of the inherent injustice in its application or because any human system is flawed and bound to make mistakes, but because I think it’s simply a power that the state should not have. That being said, one would think that would make me a receptive audience to a legal thriller based on the idea of the state of Texas executing an innocent man. I’ll admit that the heart is in the right place, but that still doesn’t make for a compelling piece of fiction.

Two deaths are at the heart of The Confession, John Grisham’s fictional treatment of an area he hit earlier in a non-fiction book, An Innocent Man. The first is the murder of a high school cheerleader named Nicole. The second is the execution, nine years later, of Donte Drumm, who, although convicted by a jury, is absolutely innocent of the crime. As a race-against-the-clock thriller, it has a lot of possibilities. Problem is that the clock runs out about two-thirds of the way through the book, leaving precious little of interest happening thereafter.

By that time, there is absolutely no doubt that Drumm was innocent. Grisham takes several of the more notorious bits of lunacy in death penalty practice over the years (many from Texas) and piles them up in one case. There’s the titular false confession, which is the result of hours upon hours of lies and pressure by cops. Then there’s the fact that the prosecutor and the judge presiding over the trial were sleeping together. Then, with the clock ticking down in the background, the last court that can do something to stop the execution shuts its doors promptly at closing time, even though Drumm’s lawyers have alerted them that they are on the way over with a last-minute filing. All of those things are ripped from the headlines, sadly. Putting them all together in one case, however, is just too much. Grisham doesn’t have a finger on the scales of justice, it’s more like a palm.

Political figures don’t fare much better than the legal ones. All during the book, we drop in on the governor of Texas and his two closest friends and advisors, his “communications director” (aka spin doctor) and chief counsel. The governor himself is a poll-driven political whore, but you’d expect that. What you might assume is the only reason Grisham gives him two advisors always in tow is that one of them might say something profound about what happens or offer some dissenting opinion. Alas, it’s all about politics with all of them. Nobody at all seems concerned that the state has killed an innocent man.

Here’s the thing. If you want to write a convincing fictional takedown of the death penalty, the structure Grisham uses here would work. Most wrongful convictions are a little more complex than this one, however, and you could use the period after the execution to unravel how it all went wrong. Grisham so tilts the playing field, however, that there’s nothing to unravel once the execution goes down. As a race against the clock it fails because, well, they kill the wrong guy. But as a thoughtful exposition of how such a thing could happen, it also fails.

Which is a real shame. Grisham is a big name author who could presumably reach some people who are not entrenched partisans when it comes to the death penalty. Maybe he will someday. He certainly won’t with The Confession.

The Details
-----------------
The Confession, by John Grisham
First published in 2010

Now There's A Defense!

2012-01-04T18:03:00.001-05:00

I can’t imagine anything, aside from powerful psychotropic drugs, that would make Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked anything other than 87 minutes of pure hell. Then again, my imagination doesn’t think of things like going to the theater and getting buck naked, either:

A Chicago man was arrested last week after being spotted sitting fully nude in the front row of a suburban matinee screening of Alvin And The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.

96 other patrons were escorted out, probably by a SWAT team in full regalia, and the dude was arrested. But wait, he’s got a defense:

[The accused] reportedly told police he was duped into nudity not by those wanton temptresses of the Chipettes but by a woman who let him into the theater, told him to strip, and promised that she’d be there shortly to ‘have sex and do drugs.’

You know the old saw about how if something sounds too good to be true? Same applies to offers from women to meet up at a kiddie movie and get freaky. Or so I’ve been told.

But it’s all OK now. He’s in jail ($100,000 bond? Are you kidding me?) and will not doubt wind up as a registered sex offender. Which we all know is the key to being successfully rehabilitated and reintegrated into society.

Maybe I’ll Just Sit This One Out

2012-01-03T17:03:00.014-05:00

It’s only the third day of the year, but already I know one thing about the upcoming year. I will not vote for Barack Obama in November.

I voted for him in 2008, willingly if not enthusiastically. Since then, it’s not the domestic policies that have led me to this point (although many of those aren’t great). It’s been the complete embrace of Bush-era terrorism policies that shifted more and more power to the executive and made review of the exercise of those power almost impossible. It was a bad deal when Bush did it. It’s not any better when Obama does it, just because he’s got a “D” next to his name.

This, finally, was the last straw for me (via):

President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) today, allowing indefinite detention to be codified into law. As you know, the White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had ‘serious reservations’ about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use it and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations.

More details on the NDAA here. Although the powers it sets out have mostly already been exercised by this administration and the previous one, codifying them in the U.S. Code will make it all the more difficult to reign them in at some future point. And while Obama promises not to make full use of them (although there’s no reason to believe that, given his record in the area to this point), that doesn’t bind future presidents. Ed at Dispatches has more on that angle here.

I’m aware of the counterarguments. That anybody the GOP will field in November will be worse, overall. There’s the rallying cry of “what about the Supreme Court?” I don’t disagree, but I can’t go along with that anymore. There’s only so far I can go when it comes to choosing the lesser of two evils. If my vote means anything (logic and sheer numbers says it doesn’t), it has to be cast with some integrity.

So where does that leave me? Probably sitting on the sideline, unless something interesting happens with a third-party candidate (sorry GOP friends – I’m not that far gone). Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.

Friday Review Year In Review

2011-12-30T00:02:00.086-05:00

Nothing special to mark the end of the year, just a easy to navigate list of Feeding the Silence's accidental regular feature, the Friday Reviews. Sorted helpfully by review type, just because I'm that kind of guy:

Music

Snowtorch (2011)
ROSFest 2011
If (2010)
Hybris (1992)
The Wake (1985)
Depois Do Fim (1983)
Triskaidekaphobie/Le Poison Qui Rend Fou (1980/1985)
Ammerland (1978)

Movies & TV

Contagion (2011)
Garrow's Law (2009)
Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008)
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1986)
I, Claudius (1976)
The Wicker Man (1973/2006)
Paths of Glory (1957)

Books

A Dance With Dragons (2011)
The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President (2011)
The Magicians (2009)
"Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers" (1987)
The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Brave New World (1932)

More to come next year!

My Gift to You

2011-12-22T17:46:00.000-05:00

Here's a little musical treat, for you and yours at this festive holiday season:

Carol of the Bells by Infinity Ranch

Because nothing says “Merry Christmas” quite like Minimoogs, Mellotrons, and Taurus pedals.

Yeah, look, I know it's not as rad as, say, Mr. Mackey's arrangement:

Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics
Get More: SOUTH
PARK more...

But I hope it has its own charms.

That’s it for Feeding the Silence in 2011 (aside from a housekeeping post late next week). I’ll be back in the new year with all sorts of stuff, I assume. I guess you’ll have to check back and find out, won’t you?

So whatever holidays you celebrate this time of year, may they be safe and joyous.

A War Movie Without the War

2011-12-21T17:03:00.002-05:00

For years, I’ve seen ads for the play War Horse while I flipped through my New York Times on Sunday mornings. Never had a clue what it was about, but the imagery in the ads was striking. So I wasn’t surprised when I heard it was being made into a movie or that Stephen Spielberg was the one making it. After all, the man’s made a few war movies in his time.

Then, a few weeks ago, I saw an ad for the movie on TV, complete with excerpts from the obligatory John Williams score and a Christmas Day opening. Just based on what I saw, it involved a horse, a boy, and World War I. I turned to K and said, “a feel good Christmas-day movie about the cavalry in World War I? That’s an interesting choice.”

You see, World War I is where the cavalry went to die. Literally. The days of massed men on horseback were numbered as far back as the American Civil War, when smoothbore muskets gave way to rifled ones with greatly increased range and accuracy. By the time the First World War came around, the game was over. Men on horseback were simply no match for machine guns. So how does one make a heartwarming movie in that milieu?

The answer for Spielberg was to ignore it. Seriously:

Despite stunning stagecraft that evokes the horror of war in general, War Horse keeps its focus narrowly on the boy-stallion relationship, saying little about the First World War itself. It sounds like the film treats the conflict in the same way. ‘I didn't pay a lot of attention to the first World War,’ Spielberg said in an interview earlier this month. ‘I didn’t know very much about it. And I also don’t consider War Horse to be a war movie. This is not one of my war movies. This is much more of a real story between the connections that sometimes animals achieve; the way animals can actually connect people together.’

To be fair to Spielberg, War Horse’s source material is a children’s book, so it’s not exactly the hard hitting meditation on the horrors of war those NYT ads suggested to me. It’s a boy-and-his-dog story (except the dog is a horse), not Full Metal Jacket. Nevertheless, it’s hard to call a move that takes place in the middle of a war zone and whose main characters are doing the fighting something other than a “war movie.”

None of which has anything to do with whether the movie is good or not, although at least one early review is not too kind. Kurt Loder called the experience of watching the film like:

being lowered into a vat of warm tears, there to remain for nearly two and a half freakin’ hours

and notes that the

movie so boldly old-fashioned that much of its true target demographic must be long dead, or nearly enough.

Ouch. Maybe I’ll pass on this one.

What Scares Me

2011-12-20T17:01:00.001-05:00

I hate flying. I know, nobody really likes the whole rigmarole that is flying in the 21st century. Dashing through airports to meet connecting flights, since it’s hard, or outrageously expensive, to fly directly from one place to another.* Being crammed into a metal tube with hundreds of strangers whose theories on hygiene and personal space vary in ways unimagined in political discourse. The food sucks. No leg room. There’s always some dipshit who decided the right thing to do was to cram his grand piano in the overhead bin.

Then, of course, there’s the TSA.

But none of that is what really irks me about flying. What really makes me nervous (ask K – I gripped her hand so hard on the way to St. John last year I nearly cut off circulation) is the thought that should anything go wrong, I’m going to die. I know in my rational brain that air travel is an exceptionally safe mode of transit, more so than travel by car. But most of my car travel comes while I’m driving, which gives me some sense of agency over whatever happens. Besides, if you are actually in a crash, odds are better that you walk away from one in a car rather than one in a plane.

It’s the sense of having my destiny in someone else’s hands that really does it, I think. Particularly when you hear about things like this (via).

On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 left Rio bound for Paris. Somewhere over the Atlantic, it simply disappeared. It wasn’t shot down or blown out of the sky by a terrorist. There was no report of some kind of freak structural failure. It just went down, killing all 228 people on board. The wreckage was found two miles below the surface of the ocean.

At first, based on a little bit of data collected by tracking stations, one theory of what happened emerged:

As [Popular Mechanics] found in our cover story about the crash, published two years ago this month, the data implied that the plane had fallen afoul of a technical problem—the icing up of air-speed sensors—which in conjunction with severe weather led to a complex ‘error chain’ that ended in a crash and the loss of 228 lives.

However, once the wreckage was recovered, the black boxes were also recovered and their data able to be recovered. The picture that data paints, as set forth in the new PM article, is even more chilling than one of a “complex error chain.” It’s a story of simple human fuck ups, compounded by inexperience and fear (for the record, French authorities haven’t backed this conclusion). As the article explains:

We now understand that, indeed, AF447 passed into clouds associated with a large system of thunderstorms, its speed sensors became iced over, and the autopilot disengaged. In the ensuing confusion, the pilots lost control of the airplane because they reacted incorrectly to the loss of instrumentation and then seemed unable to comprehend the nature of the problems they had caused. Neither weather nor malfunction doomed AF447, nor a complex chain of error, but a simple but persistent mistake on the part of one of the pilots.

Ironically, there may be some blame in the very fact that commercial aircraft are become so safe that pilots have little experience to fall back on when things go wrong:

Over the decades, airliners have been built with increasingly automated flight-control functions. These have the potential to remove a great deal of uncertainty and danger from aviation. But they also remove important information from the attention of the flight crew. While the airplane's avionics track crucial parameters such as location, speed, and heading, the human beings can pay attention to something else. But when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land—the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what's going on. They'll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can't be trusted? What's the most pressing threat? What's going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers.

Thus, when I fly, my head rages with battle between my rational and irrational selves. My rational self is perfectly calm because the chances of anything really bad happening are so remote, I might as well worry about being struck by lightning. But my irrational side fights back, with the knowledge that if something does go wrong, we’re all well and truly fucked.

In other words, I’ll be in the car.

* As Brock Yates once put it, “if you want to get somewhere fast, fly. If you want to get somewhere on time, drive.”

I Don’t Think That Means What You Think That Means

2011-12-19T17:04:00.001-05:00

There’s an old joke that goes something like this:

Q: What’s the difference between a cult and a religion?

A: The religion has better lawyers.

Of course, what really distinguishes a cult from a religions is numbers. In other words, popularity. If enough people join and the cult grows past a certain point, it becomes a religion. Christianity, after all, started off as a small cult splintering off of Judaism.

That’s an awkward introduction to a more pressing question: what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when someone says “cult movie.” If you’re like me, it’s something like the Rocky Horror Picture Show or, perhaps, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. In either case, we’re talking about movies that didn’t make any real impact when initially released (financially – critical reception is another matter), but found audiences down the road that revere the films and keep the somewhat commercially viable in various new media.

I bet movies that didn’t pop into your mind include things like the Star Wars movies, The Sound of Music, and The Wizard of Oz. Yet, those are among some of the 100 cult movies compiled in a new book by a pair of academics (one Canadian, the other British) who really take a different view on what makes a “cult” movie, one that focuses more on the fans than the films themselves:

I think amidst their popularity, there's a degree of fandom that exceeds the bounds of moderation. It's that very engaged committed and loyal enduring fandom for "The Lord of the Rings" and "Star Wars" and "The Sound of Music" and "The Wizard of Oz" that makes them the cult films as well.

Wait, what? Maybe they’re inspired by the future history set forth in Futurama, whereby an actual cult of Star Trek arose and caused such problems all copies of the series and movies were shot into space.* I’m not sure I buy it:

There's a subset of fans, but those fans, they don’t invent stuff. They latch on to elements of the movie, which they then pull out of normality, if you want, and they start questioning it, discussing it extensively up to the point where then other people, other fans start asking themselves. Yeah, that's right, actually. This isn't quite normal, such as, for instance, the friendship between Luke and Leia.

So, films that are popular enough to inspire discussion about them are now cult films? Are film critics cultists? Academics who study film the way English majors study literature? There’s a touch of elitism in that view that rubs me the wrong way.

Without a doubt, fans of any particular cult film may be inspired to do silly things (as with the aforementioned Rocky Horror Picture Show). But the very point of such shenanigans is that they’ve found something valuable – whether it’s profound truths about the universe or just a reliable good time – in a movie that the mass of film goers didn’t. A cult film, by definition, has to be an outsider experience.

There are probably lots of interesting things you can learn about fans of movies, both popular and less so. Just because they take the damn things more seriously than you do doesn’t make them a cult. Just ask their lawyers.

* The cult members themselves were dealt with in the way most befitting their status as virgins – thrown into a volcano by a pair of heavies quipping “he’s dead, Jim.”

Friday Review: Anvil! The Story of Anvil

2011-12-16T00:02:00.005-05:00

Progressive rock, it should come as a shock to nobody, is a seriously niche phenomenon. Aside from the 1970s pioneers and a few notable others, “underground” barely describes the scene’s profile. Albums are hard to find (if you don’t have a good source). Tours, at least in the States, are maddeningly short, if they happen at all. And, with few exceptions, the people making the music can’t make a living from it. So a lot of the artists I listen to on a regular basis do it because they love to make music. It’s a calling, not a career.

That knowledge added an extra layer of poignancy to Anvil! The Story of Anvil, a documentary of a Canadian heavy metal band that almost nobody has ever heard of. In fact, it’s a little hard to tell in the beginning whether it’s a real documentary or a modern take on Spinal Tap (indeed, the band’s drummer is even named Robb Reiner). But it’s real and the story it tells is both inspiring and pathetic in turns.

Anvil got its start in the late 1970s and, via its first few albums, got just to the edge of making it big. Enough that they were part of a big festival in Japan with a bunch of other rising bands you might have heard of – Scorpions, Bon Jovi, etc. For reasons that the film doesn’t really explore (one of its two major faults), the breakthrough never happened. The core of the band, drummer Reiner and vocalist/guitarist Lips (not his real name!), have nonetheless perservered through the years, banging away for a faithful, if small, following.

The movie shows the band going through a pair of painful musical adventures. One is a poorly organized European tour. After a festival gig in Sweden before a large and appreciative audience, the tour devolves into night after night of playing for a few dozen people in a tiny packed club. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I’ve seen great shows in such places – but it’s not the kind of situation that suggests bigger things are right around the corner. That they don’t get paid for much of the tour (in spite of this, one of the other band members marries the Russian woman who ran the tour – he’s no longer with the band).

The other major music event is the recording of the band’s 13th studio album and their attempts to get it released with some kind of fanfare. They manage to get a respected producer to do the sessions (in England – they visit Stonehenge, thus making another Spinal Tap link), during which Lips and Reiner argue, break up, and then make up again. In the end, they release the album independently, selling directly to the fans (the album would be picked up by a label associated with VH1 when the movie came out).

Two things come through in these episodes. One is the indefatigable spirit of the band, and Lips in particular, to do what they regardless of how hard it is. Lips says at one point he’d play in front of a crowd of nobody, just because he gets off on the energy of playing that much. It may have been a rationalization (at one gig in Europe they played to less than 200 people in a huge gymnasium-type shed), but it sounded sincere. After all, if you really weren’t in it for the music, there’s no way you’d keep up with it year after year, right?

The other thing that comes through is little more depressing and, in touches, even a bit pathetic. Even after all these years in the metal wilderness and after railing about the inequities of the music business, Lips and Reiner appear to genuinely believe that breakthrough success is right around the corner. It’s like a gambler chasing the next big score, certain that the next time will really be different from all the others.

Fact is, rock stardom is a young man’s game. If you’ve made it to your forties and haven’t hit the big time yet, chances are it’s not going to happen. The impression I get from most of the proggers out there who struggle with day jobs is that, aside from a few eager young ‘uns, they know that they will never be a chart topping success playing to sold out arenas. And they’re all right with that. Sure, they want to make a living doing what they love rather than some other job, but who doesn’t? But I think most are happy when the music they love making connects with an audience, no matter how small.*

In end, it’s hard not to root for the guys in Anvil. They’re enthusiastic about their band and their music. Your heart definitely wants them to make it big. But your head knows better and hopes, one day, their heads will overtake their hearts, too. Then they can enjoy more what they’ve got, rather than pining for what they’ll never have.

* Of course, I could be full of shit.

The Details
-------------------
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Released 2008
Directed by Sacha Gervasi

Lawyers, Lies, & Laments

2011-12-15T16:57:00.001-05:00

The reader(s) of the old blog will recall that I’m quite fond of Shattered Glass. The 2003 film charts the fall of writer Stephen Glass. Working primarily for The New Republic, Glass fabricated a load of allegedly nonfiction articles. When his lies were brought to light, his world crashed hard around him. Made for great drama, of course.

If you’ve seen the film, then you know that while things were falling apart, Glass was actually taking classes at Georgetown’s law school. What the film doesn’t show is that Glass went on to get his degree from Georgetown (with honors) and is now trying to become an attorney. In 2002, his application to the New York state bar was rejected due to his history of making shit up wholesale (he even wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about it, The Fabulist). Shot down there, he moved his efforts to California.

Since 2007, Glass has been battling with the legal powers that be in California, trying to join the bar.* A committee denied Glass’s application in 2009, concluding that he hadn’t really changed since things went to shit at The New Republic. However, he appealed to an administrative judge, who came to the opposite conclusion. A 3-member appellate panel affirmed that decision (2-1). Now the California bar has appealed the case to the state’s supreme court.

Since things have reached that point, all the documents involved are now public record. That’s allowed Jack Shafer at Reuters to dig deeply into the case (via). There’s a lot there, from Glass’s overbearing parents to his continued problems dealing with the full scope of his fabrications. Whether he’s really reformed or not (Shafer votes “not”), you’ll have to see for yourself.

More to the point, is the whole exercise a bit silly given the generally shitty reputation lawyers have with the public in the first place? I mean, when the general opinion of people is that the whole profession is full of bullshit artists, what’s wrong with bringing one more into the fold? If nothing else, Glass knows how to tell a hell of a story, which is a key part of being a good advocate. And haven’t there been cases where lawyers commit serious crimes but return to their legal practice years later?

At the risk of sounding like a member of the tribe justifying the protection of his own, I think it might make a difference when your character flaws become apparent. This is assuming, of course, that one’s character should be relevant at all when it comes to getting a license from the state to practice a profession. But I think it makes a difference whether you can evaluate a person’s character flaw in the context of the work he or she has done as a lawyer or not.

Assume you have two people, both with a compulsive gambling problem. One, call her Betty, is an attorney with about a decade’s worth of experience. The other, call him Bob, is of a similar age but has just passed the bar exam. Each of them has a spectacular flameout caused by their gambling problem, which resulted in criminal and civil proceedings against them. Betty notched a felony conviction, had her license to practice law suspended, and is now seeking reinstatement. Bob was hounded into bankruptcy by debts caused by his gambling and now wants to be admitted to the practice of law.

A bar committee looking at those two cases has an important bit of extra information in Betty’s case. They have her record as an attorney and can determine, however severe her gambling problem was, did it impact her practice? Did she, for example, dip into client funds to fuel her habit? Did late night gambling binges at the local casino leave her strung out and unprepared for court appearances the next day? After all, the main question in these proceedings is the fitness of the applicant to practice law.

Bob, by contrast, has no track record in the profession. There is no way to tell how those same questions might be answered in his case. Thus the committee runs the risk of bringing someone into the profession who might screw over clients because he’s not sufficiently reformed or rehabilitated. Unlike Betty, who comes with a track record, Bob only comes with his big character issue.

What this means for Glass, I think, is that he faces an uphill battle to break into the profession. Had he been a lawyer when everything went down at The New Republic, he might have a better chance of getting back in. Does that make sense? I think it does, or at least I think it can. Whether the differential analysis I laid out above goes on in real life, I have no idea. But it’s at least a justifiable rationale for an apparent double standard.

* I assume that he has actually passed the bar exam itself. In West Virginia, at least, you only get the character questions after you cross that bridge.

Is Law School Worthless?

2011-12-14T16:51:00.001-05:00

I have a confession to make: I liked law school. Hard to believe, but it’s true. To be sure, I always enjoyed school and liked learning about new stuff, so that certainly helped. Plus, I made the decision early on to focus on taking classes that interested me intellectually, rather than simply load up on stuff I needed to learn to pass the bar exam (that’s what bar review courses are for, you see).

Here’s another confession: I use very little of the substantive stuff I learned in law school in my current practice. Not because I skipped the bar exam classes, but because the real practice of law involves so many things that don’t fit neatly into the pages of a hornbook. There’s no good way to read about how to tell a client he’s facing life in prison or that, in spite of what the law on the books might say, he’s not going to prevail on appeal.

That split, between what you learn in law school and what you need to know to actually practice law, is getting renewed attention these days, partly due to the fact that going to law school is so fucking expensive. In spite of the tens of thousands of dollars of debt freshly minted lawyers run up, more and more firms have to spend valuable time (and money) training even the best and brightest to actually practice law, rather than merely think like a lawyer. Is it time for legal education to change?

Stanley Fish, who teaches some of the more esoteric stuff at Yale, makes a spirited defense of legal education as something more than a trade school here. For Fish, it’s about being able to work for a client with knowledge of the broader context of things:

One can, however, make the case that the practice of law is more than a technical/strategic exercise in which doctrines, precedents, rules and tests are marshaled in the service of a client’s cause. The marshaling takes place within an enterprise that is purposive. That is, law is more than an aggregation of discrete tactics and procedures; it is an enterprise informed by a vision of how the state can and cannot employ the legalized violence of which it is the sole proprietor. That vision will come into view in the wake of a set of inquiries. What obligations do citizens owe one another? How far can the state go in enforcing those obligations? What restrictions on what the state can do to (and for) its citizens should be in place? How do legal cultures differ with respect to these issues?

On a philosophical level, I agree with Fish. He’s made similar arguments about the demise of liberal arts education in college, and perhaps I’m biased when it comes to such arguments. The focus of my undergrad education – history, philosophy, political science – was not exactly designed to widen my employment prospects (at the time, I didn’t know historians could get millions lobbying for . . . er, I mean, “consulting” for financial institutions). And, as I said, the electives I took in law school were much more about intellectual stimulation than cramming rules into my brain. I’d like to think all that stuff at least informs the way I do may daily work. Besides, I’m a big fan of learning for the sake of it.

But on a practical level, I think he oversimplifies things. Yes, a legal education should include some of the more longhaired stuff Fish champions. That doesn’t mean it can’t also address some of the more practical aspects of being a lawyer. It’s not an either/or proposition. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.

Expanded clinical programs have addressed those issues somewhat over the years, but they’re not big enough at most schools to allow all students to participate. Something more radical is necessary, probably something modeled on the kind of internships doctors in training go through. Whether that would be a replacement for law school’s third year or some sort of compliment to it, I don’t know. What I do know is that while we don’t want law schools turning into simple trade schools, neither do we want them to become so obsessed with theory and the esoteric that they don’t really prepare students to be lawyers.

So, end the end, is law school worthless? I don’t think so. I can be improved, though. And I will say this to anyone weighing whether to go to law school: For the love of your God, don’t do it unless you really want to be a lawyer! It’s too damned expensive (and too hard, frankly) to be a way station on the road to somewhere else.

Beware the Flying Snowman

2011-12-13T17:05:00.001-05:00

There’s a scene in Dogma, Kevin Smith’s religious satire, where Rufus, the overlooked thirteenth apostle, explains to Brittany, the film’s heroine, that she is the last descendent of Christ. She objects:

Bethany: Jesus didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Mary was a virgin.

Rufus: Mary gave birth to Christ without having known a man's touch, that’s true. But she did have a husband. And do you really think he'd have stayed married to her all those years if he wasn’t getting laid? The nature of God and the Virgin birth, those are leaps of faith. But to believe a married couple never got down? Well, that’s just plain gullibility.

That’s the first thing that popped into my head when I read this post by John Scalzi. It stems from the kind of argument only a geek could love – whether the way Gollum dies in The Return of the King lacks realism because the lava that consumes him doesn’t work the way physics says it should. Scalzi makes the reasonable objection that, in a movie filled with fantastic elements that don’t exist in our world, what is it about lava that goes too far? He calls such moments The Flying Snowman (for reasons you’ll have to read the post to understand).

Scalzi is not arguing that just because a story is fantasy (or science fiction, for that matter) that you just switch off your brain and ignore things that don’t seem quite right. Rather:

if you’re going to complain about one specific element as being unrealistic, you should consider the work in its totality and ask whether in the context of the work, this specific thing is inconsistent with the worldbuilding.

I think that’s a fair demand, so I’ll deploy it to analyze one of my personal Flying Snowmen – vampire sex. Regardless of whether we’re talking about the dark brooding Angel type vampire or the sparkly douchebag variety, everybody agrees that vamps are dead. Or the “undead,” whatever the hell that means. As a result they have no pulse. Blood does not circulate through their veins. Yet this seems to not put a damper on their sex life (other things do, but that’s not relevant to the point). So my question is, how they hell do undead beings with no pulse or circulation manage to get erections? It just doesn’t make sense.

Until you apply Scalzi’s analysis. After all, by digging into a story about vampires, you’re already buying into a lot of stuff that’s simply explained by some magical hand waiving. If they’re dead, how do they move at all? How does an inert digestive system evolved to subsist on regular food make energy out of blood? What’s with the no reflections in the mirrors and such? By the time you get to undead boners, “magical Viagra” really isn’t that much of a stretch.

Everybody, I suspect, has their own Flying Snowmen when it comes to fiction. The question becomes whether it’s something that just makes you snicker or completely throws you out of the suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy speculative fiction. It also asks broader question about how readers should approach fictional worlds that are clearly not our own.

One approach is to assume the world is like our own, except when specifically shown otherwise. That’s easier said than down when dealing with modern urban fantasies (like the aforementioned Angel) than heroic or high fantasy, since we know how the world around us operates, but it’s possible. For example, the medieval world into which the heroine of Doomsday Book is dropped behaves just like our own, although she got their via time travel. With such an approach you wind up looking for oddities and things unexplained by the narrative.

The other approach is to say that since we’re in a fantasy world all the rules are off the table, unless otherwise demonstrated. Assume you have a world populated by non-human sentient creatures. One gets hurt, maybe thrown from a great height onto solid ground, in a way that would render a human out of commission for a long time. This creature recovers quickly, however. There’s nothing “wrong” with that, assuming we haven’t learned somewhere else in the story that these creatures are as frail and breakable as humans. Maybe that story element doesn’t work on its own merits, but that’s a different issue.

Which approach works best? It depends on the story, of course. I’ve got one epic fantasy kind of thing with no humans at all (ready for a second draft in 2012!). It’s a completely alien world. I’ve got another one percolating that will have exclusively humans involved. It’s different, but it looks a lot like what we know of the world. I’ll think about those differently as a writer. I’d expect a reader to do the same.

In the end, everybody’s Flying Snowmen moment is different. It’s impossible for authors or directors to be able to anticipate every area of expertise that a reader/viewing might be able to bring to bear on a story. Difficult as it can be, perhaps it’s best to heed the words of the MST3K theme song

repeat to yourself it’s just a show / you should really just relax

Although, in the case of Gollum’s fiery demise, I suspect it has less to do with worldbuilding or the mystical nature of Mount Doom than it does with a very real phenomenon: artistic license. Sometimes, you don’t let the real world get in the way of a good story.

Explanation of Origin, But Not Persistence

2011-12-12T17:12:00.000-05:00

I won’t lie, I’m not a huge hockey fan. On TV, at least, it’s too damn hard to follow what’s going on (I’ve never seen a game in person, so maybe that’s different). Besides, the NHL season goes on way the hell too long before it gets to the Stanley Cup playoffs, which basically everybody gets into anyway. I tend to get into things like the Olympic tournaments, but mainly for the same reason people jump on the USMNT bandwagon during the World Cup – naked patriotism.

That caveat aside, I’ve never understood why fighting is such an inherent part of the game. Yes, hockey is a violent sport in and of itself, but so are sports like football and rugby. Neither of those tolerate, or even celebrate, the kind of fighting that goes on in hockey. The old joke, of course, is that “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.” How did it get to be that way in the first place?

This article (the end piece to a long series in the New York Times about the death of a hockey enforcer) suggests it has to do with the ethnic rivalries inherent in the game’s early days:

The first organized hockey games were played here [in Montreal] in 1875 by English-Canadian rugby players looking for a winter sport. For the first 20 years or so, the players were mostly members of Montreal’s English and Scottish elite; French Canadians joined in the 1890s, when the Catholic Church in Quebec started to drop its resistance to sports. Montreal’s Irish, as English-speaking Catholics, occupied a kind of middle ground between the Protestant Anglo-Scots elite and the Catholic French majority.

They all had their own hockey clubs, some of whose names are still etched on the Stanley Cup: the Scottish, represented by the thistle on Montreal’s flag, had the Victorias; the English, with the rose, had the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association; the Irish had the Shamrocks; and the French, of the fleur-de-lis, had the National and the Montagnards. The Shamrocks often allied with French clubs against the English and the Scottish in disputes over who would be allowed into the top leagues.

The theory goes that ethnic rivalries spilled out onto the ice, where they were dealt with using the violence of the game. In other words, a punch out on the ice was one that didn’t happen on the street. It’s an interesting idea, but other researchers haven’t found any evidence that there was a whole lot of fighting in early hockey in the first place. Violent play, particularly whacking other players with the hockey stick (as got one player convicted of assault in 2000 when he clonked an opposing player on the head), was reported, but not game stopping fights.

Regardless of the origins, fighting is fairly endemic in the modern game:

By 1960-61, the N.H.L. averaged one fight every five games, but the rate rose steadily until 1987-88, when the average game had 1.3 fights. Then the rate dropped, and today the league averages one fight every two games.

But why? And why don’t we see the same thing in other sports? After all, football is more inherently violent and there are soccer teams out there who have served as proxy armies in racial, ethic, and religious rivalries for decades (ask anyone in Glasgow about the Old Firm). What makes hockey different? One theory is that fighting developed as a kind of safety valve after more violent play was cracked down upon.
I’m not sure how far that goes, however, given attitudes like this:

Calls for stricter rules against fighting in hockey have been heard for decades to little effect.

‘You can no more ban fighting in hockey than in any other sport,’ [writer Adam] Proteau said last month. ‘But you can punish it more appropriately, starting with a game misconduct and ejection for any fight, and a sliding scale of fines/suspensions for repeat offenders.’

To an outsider, that sounds an awful lot like a rationalization. If you define “ban” only to mean “completely prevent at any time in the future,” then, yes, you can’t ban fighting in any sport or any other walk of life. But compare the aftermath of this weekend’s Cincinnati/Xavier college basketball brawl with a hockey game. Why is extracurricular fighting a part of one game but not the other?

If fighting really isn’t a part of hockey, seems pretty easy to clamp down on it. First offense? Half-season suspension. Second offense? Full-season suspension. Third offense? Banishment from the game. That would cut down on the problem pretty quickly, yes? Unless, of course, it’s not really a problem at all.

Friday Review: The Magicians

2011-12-09T00:02:00.020-05:00

I’ve read lots of books and seen lots of movies and TV shows with characters that are less than stellar. Heroes, even, who are deeply flawed and, in many cases, assholes. I get it. A complex and tortured protagonist makes for compelling drama. But in all of my life, I’ve never wanted to haul off and hit a fictional character.

Until I met Quentin Coldwater. If I ever, somehow, ran into Quentin, I would no doubt pop him in the mouth on general principles. Quentin is the hero and main character of The Magicians, which more than one reviewer dubbed “Harry Potter for adults.” Quentin is also a complete, utter, and colossal douchebag.

Quentin is an about-to graduate high school student who is whisked away to an exclusive (and invisible) college in upstate New York, where he will study instead of Princeton. During his years there he, along with his friends and rivals, learn to be magicians. To what end? Well, there isn’t really one. There’s no great battle against evil for which they are being trained. Further study of the actual mechanics of magic is discouraged, as it tends to make people go crazy (allowing the author to skirt the issue of how magic in this world actually works – either a clever sidestep or a cowardly dodge, I’m not sure which). Although we’re told that magicians work around the world behind the scenes of governments and other power centers, the world of The Magicians is, in terms of history and society, exactly like ours.

Which is why, for the last hunk of the book, after Quentin and crew have graduated, they spend most of their time in another world, where their training comes in handy. Called Fillory, it’s a lot like C.S. Lewis’s Narnia with the serial numbers filed off. In fact, according to a comment to this review, it was originally supposed to be Narnia but Lewis’s lawyers put the kibosh on that. Exciting things happen in Fillory, and lessons are learned, but none of it really carries much weight.

That’s because Quentin is such a colossal douchebag. He begins the book as the stereotypical moody teenager, completely disaffected with the world around him. And by the end of the book . . . he’s exactly the same, only older (horribly lame attempt at a happy ending/sequel setup notwithstanding). I get the point being made (Quentin is constantly looking for meaning anywhere but where he is and is never able to find it), but it doesn’t make for a protagonist that I can really care about.

Take, for instance, the time Quentin spends in New York City after graduating from college. He reunites with some friends who graduated a year earlier. Unlike his dour home in Brooklyn, they live in Manhattan. They don’t have to work, have mastery over the elements, and spend their days planning lavish dinner parties. They drink too much and fuck (too much, too, as it turns out). All the while, he’s got a girlfriend whose only real problem is that, for all her brilliance, she can’t see what a douchebag Quentin is. With all this going for him, Quentin is still a miserable shit. Seriously? He’s not even the 1%, he’s the 0.01% and he’s still a mopey twit? Arghh!

Given all that, I can’t say I really liked The Magicians, obviously. However, it’s got an episodic feel to it and some of the individual set pieces are worth the trip. Others aren’t, such as the laughably bad ending. It’s definitely a mixed bag.

There’s a sequel, as I mentioned, which I already have to I figure I’ll get around to reading it at some point. I only hope that, a few years on, Quentin’s learned to enjoy himself a little bit. Or I’ll have to pop the douchebag in the mouth.

The Details
-----------------
The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
First published in 2009

Deliver the Kidney (Oh Yeah!)

2011-12-08T17:15:00.005-05:00

In law school, I took a class that was a bioethics seminar (the title of my final paper was a line from a Van der Graaf Generator song!). Among the issues we discussed was whether the law should recognize and enforce commercial contracts for surrogate motherhood. In other words, should you be able to pay someone else to carry a pregnancy to term with you.

A lot of people seemed to be OK with “altruistic” surrogacy, where a friend or family member agrees to carry the pregnancy for free (although usually with some consideration for medical expenses). Add money to the equation, however, and things changed. There was something cheap or tawdry about renting your body out for cold hard cash. I objected to the disparate treatment. It shouldn’t matter whether the surrogate you’ve got is a friend doing a favor or a woman who advertised on Craigslist. Either the whole surrogacy thing is wrong or it isn’t right?

So why don’t I feel the same way about people selling kidneys?

The other day in the New York Times, Alexander Berger made the case for creating a heavily regulated market for kidneys. Not a libertarian free for all, mind you, but federally regulated. Berger suggests paying willing donors $50,000 for their trouble.

The argument is pretty simple. There is currently a vast discrepancy between the number of people who need kidney transplants and available donors. Unless you have a friend or loved one who will make an altruistic donation to you, you pretty much have to wait for somebody to die and move up the list of transplant candidates. Only half of the people who made it onto that waiting list actually got a kidney.

So, offer a cash incentive to the public and the gap disappears, or at least narrows considerably. After all, most folks have two healthy kidneys and can make do with one. The operation, according to Berger, is very low risk, especially if you’re young and healthy. People will line up for the easy payday, right?

Well, maybe. For one thing, Berger oversells things just a bit. If the donation process is so easy, why pay $50,000 for it? After all, the average American only earns a little over $48,000 per year. A year’s salary for one operation? For a few days work, 50 grand is a hell of a payday.

For another, Berger hints at the concern of a lot of people, which is that in dire economic times like this, the wealthy will essentially harvest the poor for spare parts. His federally regulated market would limit purchasers to the government or certain nonprofit organizations, not private citizens. But there is still something skeevy about people needing to sell body parts to make ends meet.

But, then, why is that any different than the surrogacy situation? Why should someone with the connections to procure a volunteer donor live while someone without should die? I can’t really give a good answer to that.

In the end, I think I have to admit that my objection to creating a (legal) market for kidneys, or any other disposable organ, has its basis in the “ick” factor. That’s not good enough. In the end, we need to do better with organ donation. If cold hard cash on the barrel head is the best way to do it, I might have to learn to live with that.

Another Moral Panic Falls Apart

2011-12-06T17:11:00.000-05:00

While I was off doing NaNoWriMo, there were some news reports about one of the more peculiar ideas teenagers were having across the country. It involved vodka, tampons, and . . . well, let’s let Stephen Colbert sort it out:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Field tests showed it didn’t work that well, anyway (via). But it’s a good story on how a moral panic gets rolling, especially when it involves something teenagers do. After all, they’re an alien species to adults, anyway, so who knows what kind of weird shit they’ll come up with. More times than not, however, the facts on the ground don’t really match up to the hysteria that initial media reports stir up.

So, on that front, remember the great threat to civilization known as sexting? You know, where teenagers were taking pictures of themselves in various stages of undress and sending them to other teenagers via cell phone and what not? It was an epidemic, another example of how the sexualization of the culture was reaching young people.

Only, it turns out, it wasn’t. As with the vodka-soaked tampons, the hullabaloo about sexting is more about heat than light. As reported here, a pair of new studies shows that instead of nearly 1 in 5 teens engaging in that kind of behavior, the real numbers are more like 1 in 100:

‘There’s a zeitgeist in America socially that suggests that sexting is something that’s really prevalent,’ Pew research specialist Amanda Lenhart told the [New York] Times. ‘I think this research shows that it actually isn’t that prevalent. It happens, but the likelihood of it happening to any given person is pretty low.’

How does something like that get so blown out of proportion? The co-author of one of the studies explained:

It only takes one or two cases to make people think this is very prevalent behavior. This has been reported as if it were something that everyone was doing...It's really not the case.

That’s particularly true in the modern media world, fed by a 24-hours news cycle and the fertile fields of social media. How do we avoid falling into that kind of trap next time some sensational news story breaks? As usual, a healthy dose of skepticism (nay, even cynicism) goes a long way. You know how when it comes to financial scams that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is? I propose a similar truism when it comes to new stories about the habits of teens – if it sounds too weird to be true, it’s probably bullshit.

A Drummer, A Writer, & West Virginia

2011-12-05T17:03:00.015-05:00

I love Wikipedia.

Dearly and passionately. It’s such a treasure trove of juicy info. Yes, I know, it’s perhaps not the most reliable source in the world on some things, but unless you’re trying to solve the nation’s current political issues or intractable moral problems, it’s really pretty good. It’s just so easy to go, “hey, I wonder about . . .” and go try and find out.

That’s what I did the other day. I was watching a TiVo’d version of the latest Rush DVD, as broadcast on VH1 Classic. It’s from their last tour, which featured a performance of Moving Pictures in its entirety (even the long dormant epic “The Camera Eye”). Somehow, for some reason, I plugged “moving pictures” into the Wikipedia search field and . . . voila! You learn all kinds of things.

Take, for example, the song “Red Barchetta.” Always a favorite of mine, I knew it was based on a short story (“A Nice Morning Drive,” available here) published in Road & Track in 1973. Briefly, it’s about a dystopian future where automobiles, like the titular vehicle (think something like this) have are illegal but a rebellious narrator sticks it to the Man, anyway. Or, more succinctly:

Anyway, I knew all that. What I learned from Wikipedia is that drummer/lyricist Neal Peart tried to contact the author of the story, Richard Foster, while making the album. He never did. Not then, anyway. But, as Wikipedia tells it:

In July 2007, Foster and Peart finally made contact with one another; Foster later posted an online account of their journey by motorcycle through the backwoods of West Virginia between stops on Rush's Snakes and Arrows tour.

Wait, what? The drummer of one of my favorite bands road tripped through my state? Neat! And, hey, it being Wikipedia and all, guess what’s laid out at the bottom of the page – a link to Foster’s post about the trip, over at the BMW Bikers of Metropolitan Washington Message Boards.

It’s a fun read. Foster met up with Peart and the other bikers in the Rush tour group after the band’s show outside of DC, from which they took the very scenic route to Pittsburgh through West Virginia (they stopped in Buckhannon for the night). Lots of pictures. Lots of confusion in the West Virginia wilderness.

Didn’t I say I love Wikipedia?

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

2011-12-01T16:58:00.015-05:00

Wait, what? Where the hell did the last month go?

Oh, right, National Novel Writing Month. Well, hey, guess what . . .

Yes, I managed to hit the 50k mark in thirty days. Slow and steady, too. My daily output only dropped below 1400 twice and never topped 2000. I was right in the 1600-1800 per day sweet spot. I really does add up after a while. Final total was 50,278 words for the month. So, hooray for me!

Alas, the damn thing's not done, yet! Probably another 15-20k in the works, which I'll have to pound out in December. Then put it away and return to an older project for a rewrite. Hey, at least I've got plans.

As for blogging, regular service resumes on Monday. See you then!

Bloggus Interuptus (Novelus Writus)

2011-11-01T00:01:00.003-04:00

Last year, I bailed on National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. But I had a good excuse – K and I took a trip to St. John in the Virgin Islands to celebrate our fifth anniversary (pix here, if you’re curious). It would have been unseemly to take on the task of writing every day while we were away, and impossible to make up for lost time when we got back. But I’m back in the game this year!

This will mark the fourth time I’ve done NaNoWriMo. In 2007 I crashed and burned about 60% of the way to the 50,000-word target for the month, although I expect to revive that novel in a different format someday. I “won” in 2008 and 2009, although neither novel was finished during the month. 2008’s effort is now moldering in a box in my closet, after a second draft convinced me it was shit. 2009’s effort, which is considerably more epic, is set for a second draft in early 2012. I kind of like it, so I expect I’ll push through the polishing it needs. This year I’m taking on immortality and what I might do to people who are and aren’t really cut out for it. We’ll see how it goes.

All of this is a longish way of saying that I’ll be otherwise occupied this month, so there won’t be any updates at Feeding the Silence. See y’all in December!

UPDATE: Track my progress . . .

The Play’s the Thing, But History Still Matters

2011-10-27T16:39:00.004-04:00

Hello. I'm Leonard Nimoy. The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth? The answer is: No.

- The Simpsons, “The Springfield Files”

This past weekend, K and I were out at the West Virginia Book Festival, where we ran into my sister-in-law and my niece plowing through the used book sale. My niece, who’s in high school, already had two armfuls of books. Among them were a boatload of Shakespeare. She got them not to fulfill some requirement for English class, but because Shakespeare references were popping up lots of places and she wanted to know more about them (in contrast to her lunkhead classmates, as I understand it).

Yes, I was one proud uncle.

Perhaps inevitably, discussion slid towards Anonymous, the latest Roland Emmerich opus to hit the silver screen (opening tomorrow). It’s about how Shakespeare really didn’t write the stuff that’s attributed to him, giving the honor instead to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (who, in the movie, is also the son and lover of Queen Elizabeth I). It sounds like riveting, entertaining, popcorn scarfing fun. It’s also complete fiction.

Which, you know, is fine when it comes to drama. The parallel that immediately came to my mind when I heard about Anonymous was Amadeus, which tells the fictional tale of how Mozart was offed by a jealous rival.* It’s fantastic drama, but it ain’t history. Which is fine, as long as that’s all it presents itself as.

If only Anonymous was doing that. Instead, Emmerich and Sony “have produced a documentary and classroom study guide” to go along with the film. Which is why Shakespeare scholars and boosters are pissed.

One scholar laid out the case against Anonymous in the New York Times last week. The de Vere theory has some history behind it, at least:

The case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, dates from 1920, when J. Thomas Looney, an English writer who loathed democracy and modernity, argued that only a worldly nobleman could have created such works of genius; Shakespeare, a glover’s son and money-lender, could never have done so. Looney also showed that episodes in de Vere’s life closely matched events in the plays.

Historian Simon Schama did a similarly caustic putdown here (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/16/film-anonymous-doubts-shakespeare.html).

But what’s so wrong with a theory that’s famous believers include Freud, Antonin Scalia, and John Paul Stevens?

[P]romoters of de Vere’s cause have a lot of evidence to explain away, including testimony of contemporary writers, court records and much else that confirms that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. Meanwhile, not a shred of documentary evidence has ever been found that connects de Vere to any of the plays or poems. As for the argument that the plays rehearse the story of de Vere’s life: since the 1850s, when Shakespeare’s authorship was first questioned, the lives of 70 or so other candidates have also confidently been identified in them. Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing de Vere’s supporters is that he died in 1604, before 10 or so of Shakespeare’s plays were written.

Supporters of the Looney theory get around the lack of evidence in a way well known to modern political observers – a conspiracy theory! Thus, the absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence itself. The usual caveats about such things apply, of course, from the traditional problem of how all those conspirators kept the secret for so long to the equally prevalent issue of why would anyone care to put up and maintain such a façade?

Shakespeare supporters are striking back, too. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is:

is protesting the release of “Anonymous,” . . . by covering Shakespeare’s name on several signs in Warwickshire, the British county that was the playwright’s home.

BBC News reported that the trust had taped over Shakespeare’s name on nine local road signs to coincide with the London Film Festival premiere of “Anonymous.” It said the group would also cover up signs on 10 pubs and drape a sheet over a Shakespeare memorial in the playwright’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon.

I guess the idea is to protest the writing of Shakespeare out of history by . . . writing him out of history, albeit temporarily. It’s not the most clever protest, but it will do.

Although I wonder if the Shakespearians doth protest too much. After all, the Bard himself is well known for his “histories,” most of which have little to do with actual history. They are sublime dramas, but anyone really wanting to know about the fate of Julius Caesar or King Macbeth of Scotland should dive into actual history. Given Shakespeare’s own loose relationship with history, maybe Anonymous is a certain kind of karmic payback?

Or maybe not. A.O. Scott’s review is less than kind:

“Anonymous,” a costume spectacle directed by Roland Emmerich, from a script by John Orloff, is a vulgar prank on the English literary tradition, a travesty of British history and a brutal insult to the human imagination. Apart from that, it’s not bad.

Unless the point of the film is to undermine what Scott calls “a hoary form of literary birtherism” by exposing just how absurd the whole theory is. I suppose you’ll have to buy a ticket and see, which is the best thing for Emmerich’s bottom line, regardless.

And in the end, does any of this matter, anyway? Times theater critic Ben Brantley argues that it doesn’t. After all, the play’s the thing, as somebody or another once said. Nonetheless, there’s nothing wrong with standing up to conspiracy theories that upend the settled historical record. Truth is its own reward. Or at least it should be.

* To be completely fair to Amadeus, it’s told as a series of flashbacks by a man in an asylum, so there’s an obvious unreliable narrator problem staring you right in the face. I have no idea if Anonymous uses the same trick to ensure some plausible deniability.

Evil, But Not Criminal

2011-10-25T17:53:00.000-04:00

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr writes about one of those cases where the law doesn’t really catch up with the wickedness of the world.

It involves a fact pattern straight out of a Hollywood movie. A group of drug enforcement officers go about their usual routine – investigate tips of drug activity, make controlled buys of drugs from dealers, arrest them, etc. Everything is on the up and up, with one exception. Instead of sending the dealers into the criminal justice system, the cops let them go. Then the cops take the drugs they seized from the dealers, sell them, and pocket the cash for themselves.

Now, surely the cops committed a crime, right? Well, yeah, but which one? How about violation of the dealers’ civil rights (their Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, in this case) under color of law, pursuant to 18 USC 242? The Sixth Circuit said, “yes” and affirmed convictions (and life plus 255 year sentence) under that statute. Kerr makes a pretty compelling argument that the Sixth Circuit got it wrong.

The problem that Kerr correctly identifies is a long line of Supreme Court cases interpreting the Fourth Amendment holding that the proper way to analyze those claims is by using an objective, rather than subjective, approach. The only issue is whether there was probable cause to search/arrest, not whether the cop doing the searching/arresting for some other reason.

It’s an outgrowth of a case called Whren, in which a motorist argued that a cop violated the Fourth Amendment by pulling him over because he was black, rather than because he committed a minor traffic violation. The Supreme Court wouldn’t bite and held that as long as there was a legit basis to make the stop, it doesn’t matter if the cop had an ulterior motive in making it. One the one hand, that holding makes sense – to hold otherwise would require some real mind reading on the part of courts. On the other hand, it’s pretty much given cops carte blanche to stop folks for any reason they want, as long as they can gin up some objective “facts” to support it.

At any rate, as Kerr points out, under Whren and subsequent cases, so long as the cops in this case had probable cause when they stopped and searched these dealers (everybody agrees that they did), there was no violation of a “clearly established right.” You have no right to be free from reasonable searches and seizures, after all. That the cops never had any intention on following through with the normal procedure afterwards is irrelevant.

The Sixth Circuit gets around Whren two ways, although the meat off their analysis is that the defendant’s conduct was “thoroughly and objectively illegal from start to finish.” Whren doesn’t apply because the cops weren’t acting as cops (“bona fide law enforcement purposes”), they were acting as criminals. The Sixth Circuit also argues that Whren was all about excluding otherwise valid evidence in a criminal trial, and thus was distinguishable from what went on here.

Kerr isn’t convinced and I’m not sure I am either. He notes that Whren doesn’t mention “bona fide law enforcement purposes” nor really provide any support for that qualification on Fourth Amendment analyses. However, the Fourth Circuit relied on a similar rationale in a case decided last year, although in a very different context. In US v. Taylor (click here for a fuller discussion), the court held that an officer who entered a home while trying to locate the parent of a lost child (and, in the course of doing so, found contraband) didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment. Along the way, it noted that a warrant was not required because the officer was not involved in a law enforcement investigation when he entered the house. In other words, he wasn’t acting for “bona fide law enforcement purposes.”

Obviously, the Fourth Circuit isn’t the Supreme Court and Taylor is very different from the case Kerr is discussing. However, it does show that the Sixth Circuit might not be as far out on a limb as Kerr makes it out to be.

Although this appears to be a case were the court is attempting to ensure that crooked cops don’t get away, the fact is there are lots of other crimes for which these guys were convicted. Among others, there’s garden variety drug trafficking. There’s no need to stretch the law to cover every evil thing these guys did. The garden variety tools are just as effective. Just ask Al Capone.

Friday Review: The Destiny of the Republic

2011-10-21T00:52:00.004-04:00

Everything I learned about presidential assassinations I learned from musical theater.

OK, that’s not entirely true. The details of the Lincoln assassination are so prevalent in the culture that you sort of soak those up during your life. As for JFK’s killing, well, there’s always Oliver Stone (kidding!). But as for our two lesser know victims, James Garfield and William McKinley, my knowledge base really comes from Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant, macabre take on the whole political killing business, his 1990 musical Assassins. Such are the benefits of having a college roommate with both a deep appreciation of musical theater and a skewed view of the world that resembles my own.

Thus, my prior knowledge of the Garfield assassination was pretty much limited to the fact that he was shot by a crazed office seeker named Charles J. Guiteau. Guiteau claimed that he was only doing God’s will, but (as the song says) “God was acquitted, and Charlie committed until he could hang.” Turns out, of course, that the situation had a lot more factors going into it than can be distilled into one song (even a really good one).

Those factors come to life in The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, a detailed examination of the whole incident by Candice Millard. Millard makes a compelling case that Garfield’s eventual death – he lingered for almost three months after shot by Guiteau – was due at least as much to the medical care he received as it was to an assassin’s bullet. American doctors, who at the time were still fighting back Joseph Lister’s theories on antiseptic medicine, poked and prodded the president with numerous unsterile instruments (including their unwashed fingers), triggering infections that eventually led to his death.

While Millard spends a great amount of time (particularly in the book’s second half) on Garfield’s lingering death, the first half of the book is spent setting up not only the lives of Garfield and Guiteau up to that point, but the world in which they lived. It’s a fascinating snapshot, showing both how different the United States of the 1870s-1880s is compared to today, and how disappointingly similar the two eras are.

Both men had formative events that would not happen in the modern era. Guiteau had a long spell as a member of a utopian socialist commune in New York, becoming part of a vibrant movement in the 19th Century that knows no real analog today. Meanwhile, Garfield managed to become President of the United States without ever seeking out the office. Not only did he enter the 1880 Republic convention in Chicago without being a candidate, his role at the convention was to make the nominating speech of a fellow Ohioan, John Sherman (brother of General William Tecuhmsa Sherman). But his speech, part of a back and forth between entrenched spoils-system Republicans and reformers, was so well received (and made, in part, on the behalf of some oppressed delegates from West Virginia), that he began to receive votes during the numerous rounds of ballots. After two days of voting, he was the GOP nominee. Imagine Chris Christie getting drafted in that way today!

The politics of the day, however, would be depressingly familiar to anyone who pays attention to the way the game is played today. While Garfield holed up on his Ohio farm (it was considered unseemly for presidential candidates to actually campaign in that era – outgoing President Hayes suggested to Garfield that he sit on his porch and “look wise”), his surrogates engaged in the kind of negative campaigning we find today. His opponent, former Union General Winfield Scott Hancock (at one point, it seems like every pol in the book can be called “General”), is bashed not only on his lack of a record (printing up blank pamphlets titled “Hancock’s Achievements”), but for being a Democrat and, therefore, quite possibly a Confederate sympathizer (in spite of, you know, being a Union general and all). Undaunted, Hancock’s forces lobbed corruption allegations at Garfield, scrawling “329,” the amount of money he allegedly gained from an insider trading scandal, all over the place – even including inside the homes of prominent Republicans. The result was a comfortable Garfield victory, although the popular vote margin was on 1898 votes (out of nearly 9 million cast).

Guiteau, meanwhile, leads a life that would be familiar to anyone who deals with mental illness and the criminal justice system. There’s little doubt that Guiteau is insane. He was also a crafty con man, managing to repeatedly run up various debts and then simply slip away under cover of darkness. He could be violent, threatening his sister with an axe and tormenting his wife during their short-lived marriage. However, given that he was a pauper and his family had few assets, they couldn’t afford to have him committed. Even his purchase of the gun has a ring of Dirty Harry to it – he knows nothing of firearms, so he goes in an buys the biggest damn pistol he can find.

Even the nation’s reaction to the shooting seems familiar. In spite of popular conceptions of 19th-century America as being a collection of isolated parochial places, fact is the nation was uniting as it never had before, thanks to railroads, telegraphs, and the recent introduction of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone (more of him later). Word of the shooting spread across the wires immediately after it happened. Some papers printed rushed incorrect information that Garfield had already died. Letters of support and advice poured in to the White House from all over.

Sadly, the reaction to Guiteau’s act was also something that would not look out of place today. He was locked up immediately, more for his own protection than because he was charged with anything. One of his jailors took a shot at him. Crowds gathered and called for Guiteau to be lynched (Millard even quotes newspaper editorials in favor of it). Once Garfield died and Guiteau’s legal defense hinged on insanity, it was clear that nothing other than a guilty verdict and the death penalty would do. And, of course, political points were scored, with civil service reformers linking Guiteau’s acts to the politicians most associated with the spoils system (including Chester A. Arthur, who became president when Garfield died).

All of this lends rich context to the basic story Millard tells of the President, the assassin, and incident that linked them in history forever. That being said, the book tends to drag a bit in that second half, partly because the story of Garfield’s slow death is redundant and partly because of an odd shift in focus.

Guiteau slinks to the shadows for much of the second half (at least until his trial), while Bell comes to the fore, feverishly working on an invention that would allow Garfield’s doctors to find the bullet lodged within him. While fascinating that the inventor was involved in the situation at all, there’s really no payoff. For one thing, it’s never clear what the doctors would have down had they known where the bullet was (their guesses, it turned out, were way off). Millard even mentions that many gunshot victims and Civil War vets walked around with bullets still inside them with no ill effects, so it’s an odd thing to focus on. But, more importantly, Bell’s gizmo doesn’t work in the end, so the whole tangent seems a bit pointless. In this interview, Millard explains that she came to the Garfield assassination while doing research on Bell, so maybe she was just reluctant to let that research go to waste.

Instead of leaning on Bell’s story, I wish Millard would have focused more on Guiteau and what happened to him after the shooting. As I said, he was in jail the whole time, but it doesn’t appear he was charged with anything until Garfield died. Did anybody suspect that might be a problem? And we learn that the only lawyer willing to represent Guiteau is his own brother, who practiced patent law, not criminal law. Surely they searched for someone else, the era’s version of Clarence Darrow or Gerry Spence, who would have reveled in the challenge. Did they all say “no”? Did nobody even look into the possibility? Yes, I admit, I’m a criminal procedure geek, but c’mon!

Millard also falls a little short of her title, Destiny of the Republic. Although there is some discussion of the political calculus in when to bring the vice president into the mix, there is no sense of urgency about the matter. Garfield, while dying, was fully lucid and conscious to the end. There was nothing like, say, Ronald Reagan’s unconsciousness following his assassination attempt (or an equivalent to Alexander Haig’s “I am in control here” declaration). And once Garfield was dead, Arthur stepped in and performed admirably. However traumatic Garfield’s lingering death was to the national psyche, it’s hardly a turning point in the nation’s history.

In the end, where the book really shines is in the contrast of Garfield and Guiteau, two men swept into their fatal confrontation by things beyond their control. It’s ironic that Garfield, who never really wanted to be president, is the kind of person who we should want to become president – educated and inquisitive, a voracious reader, and apparently a genuinely decent guy. And yet, even as part of a very select club of assassinated presidents, he’s pretty much forgotten these days. Of course, Guiteau is not exactly a household name, either.

Unless you’ve been to the theater.

The Details
-----------------
The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard
First published in 2011

Talk About Bad Timing

2011-10-19T17:02:00.002-04:00

As the Major League Soccer regular season comes to a conclusion, things in DC United land just took another unexpected turn. The team’s been in a skid for the past few weeks, in spite of the lure of the playoffs dangling right in front of them. Nothing exemplifies that more than Saturday’s home game against Chicago, where DC appeared to salvage a late win on a Dwayne de Rosario penalty kick, only to concede two goals to the Fire in stoppage time.

So the club’s playoff hopes hang by the slenderest of threads (win the last two games and appeal to the fates for help), when this happens.

Two years ago, Charlie Davies was a rising star with the US National Team. A skilled forward with blazing speed scoring goals in a top European league (France’s Ligue 1, with Souchoux), he appeared to be the answer to the perpetual American quest for a true finisher up front. Then, before a World Cup Qualifier against Costa Rica in DC, Davies broke curfew, went to a party, and wound up involved in a horrific car wreck. Davies was severely injured, another passenger was killed, and the driver, who was drunk, was later convicted of manslaughter.

One of the feel good stories at the beginning of the season was Davies’s return, playing for DC United on loan from Souchoux, after recovering from his injuries.. Although he’s not back to his prior form (and has developed a reputation as a bit of a diver), Davies’s 11 goals have helped keep DC in the hunt all season. It’s still a pretty good story.

Save for this latest complication. Davies has sued, for $20 million, both the club at which the party was held and, ironically, Red Bull (which, of course, owns the hated rivals from New York) which organized it. DC, apparently, has a version of a statute commonly called a Dram Shop Act, which allows people injured by someone to sue the providers of the alcohol they consumed, if it was obvious the person was drunk and should have been cut off. The theory, then, would be that the club (and vicariously Red Bull) should not have continued to serve alcohol to the driver because she was visibly intoxicated.

It sounds to me (with the caveat that I have no experience with this kind of litigation – to quote Herman Cain, “I don’t have any facts to back this up, but . . .”) that this will be a tough sell. For one thing, it seems to me that Dram Shop Acts were designed to protect wholly innocent third parties, not others associated with the drunk driver. In other words, to compensate the driver of the other car, not the passengers who rode with the drunk driver. I imagine a jury will want to know how, if the driver was so obviously intoxicated, Davies didn’t see that as well. His lawyer’s already out in front on that question:

We believe the facts will show, among other things, that Mr. Davies had no interaction with the driver at the Shadow Room and was in a separate room. Without getting into detail, as he was leaving, the driver asked if she and her friend could give him a ride to his hotel. In the hustle and bustle of the lobby as he was walking out -- a split-second decision — he said yes. There was no meaningful time in which Mr. Davies had an opportunity to ‘observe’ the driver; he had no knowledge what she had been drinking or whether she had been drinking.

We’ll see how that goes (see Update below). More problematic, at least to the extent that Davies’s suit is looking for compensation due to his missing out on the World Cup last year and his career generally coming to a halt, he’s really go nobody to blame for that but himself. Had he heeded the instructions of his coach, he never would have been out in that situation at all. I don’t know if Dram Shop Act cases deal with contributory/compensatory negligence, but I’ll bet a good defense attorney makes sure that information gets in front of a jury, regardless.

But, above all, what shitty timing. Davies has been a spotlight player for DCU and the league this year. He was in the mix for the Gold Cup squad this summer before he picked up a knock. I understand that the timing is down to the statute of limitations (most states have a 2-year statute of limitation on tort suits), but still. To anyone predisposed to see any lawsuit as a bad thing, Davies looks like a guy who made a bad decision trying to fob it off on someone else, at a time when his team is in desperate need of cohesion. It’s going to leave a bad taste in the mouth of not just DC fans, but many USMNT fans as well.

Davies may very well win his suit, one way or the other. But I wouldn’t count on being welcomed back into the good graces of the American soccer faithful anytime soon.

UPDATE: Of course, he told Sports Illustrated soccer writer Grant Wahl something different earlier this year:

Davies says he didn't drink any alcohol that night, and Roberta and Espinoza, in his words, 'seemed completely normal. There wasn't even a second where I thought they might have had too much to drink.'

Oops.

Wrong and Happy About It

2011-10-18T17:18:00.002-04:00

Let it never be said that I won’t fess up when I get something wrong.

Back in August I blogged about a fascinating case up in Rhode Island, where the state’s governor, Lincoln Chafee, refused a request from the federal government to turn over an inmate in state custody to face trial on federal charges that could carry the death penalty. Invoking a little-known clause of the Interstate Agreement on Detainers, Chafee exercised his right to refuse based on Rhode Island’s long stance against capital punishment. The Feds didn’t like is, so they filed a writ of habeas corpus ad prosequendum to drag the defendant to federal court. Chafee and the defendant sought to have the writ quashed.

At the end of my blog post, I wrote:

In the end, I expect the First Circuit (and maybe the Supremes afterwards) to hold that Chafee has to turn [the defendant] over. But I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised if it turns out otherwise.

Guess what? I’m pleasantly surprised. Last week the First Circuit affirmed Chafee’s ability to refuse to comply with the writ, on the grounds that once the Feds invoke the IAD, they are bound by its terms, including the provision allowing the governor of the state in possession of the inmate to refuse to turn him over. It was a split 2-1 decision, although I did not find the dissent compelling. However, that fact could be a springboard for the Feds to seek en banc review from the entire court or take it to the Supreme Court.

Which, sadly, I expect they will do. The case has an issue that probably should be settled by the Supreme Court, but one would think that in this time of runaway deficits that the Feds could find something better to do with limited resources than spend (potentially) millions of dollars to try, convict, and execute a guy who will die in a Rhode Island prison anyway.

Sure, there are state sovereignty issues at play, too, but as demonstrated by the latest crackdown on state licensed medical marijuana operations, the Obama administration doesn’t give a shit about that. Still, money talks and bullshit walks, right? Yeah, but not when the blood lust runs high and an execution is in the offing.

What will the en banc First Circuit or the Supreme Court do with the case, if the Feds push it further? I don’t know. The majority’s opinion is in depth and compelling, but I still find it hard to believe that it will end up being the last word on things. So I’ll keep my original prediction in play, of the Feds seek further review – this defendant will eventually get turned over to them for trial. Either I’ll be right or, again, pleasantly surprised. I’ll take those odds.

Behind the Scribbling: “The Last Ereph”

2011-10-17T17:15:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, the final edition of The Absent Willow Review went live, which includes my short story, “The Last Ereph.” You can read my story here. Be sure and check out the rest, too. Some of them look pretty good. Thanks again to the AWR folks for publishing my story, and my condolences on going out of business.

That said, I thought I’d provide a little bit of background on that story.

I actually started this story out the old fashioned way, longhand. I took a pen and notebook with me to ProgDay in 2010, figuring that the rustic setting and downtime between sets would provide some good inspiration. Why I didn’t think to take my netbook, I have no idea. My handwriting is legendary in its awfulness and my hand cramps up after a few lines. Regardless, it jotted down about the first half of things in the shade at Storybook Farm, appropriately enough. The rest came together at home, with invaluable editorial assistance from K. Any particularly brilliant turn of phrase is probably due to her. Thanks, honey!

The inspiration for the story came, oddly enough for an atheist, from some sympathy for a dying religion. I read an article a while back in the New York Times about Zoroastrianism and how it was on the verge of dying out. Now, the Zoroastrians were monotheists way before it was hip, worshiping one god in Persia before even the Jews came on the scene, must less the late arriving Christians and Muslims. That being said, they should be legion, yes? Not anymore. From what I remember from the article (caveat – I could have it completely wrong), Zoroastrians don’t prosthyletize, don’t claim an exclusive in to the truths of the universe, and don’t frown on things like intermarriage with folks from other faiths.

What I took away from the article was that the Zoroastrians were disappearing because they were open minded and non-confrontational, which really struck me as kind of a shitty fate. So I decided to write about it. In the universe of “The Last Ereph,” people belong to “cult houses” like people today belong the churches. They’re more philosophical than religious, although there are those about (I guess – maybe we’ll find out sometime later?). The semi-hero, Kol, stumbles into a decrepit house of a cult with only one remaining member. Will it stay that way? You’ll have to read it to find out.

As for the perhaps most critical question, asked by my parents: “how do you pronounce ‘ereph’?” I have no idea. That’s one of the beauties of writing fantasy – I get to make up words and not give a damn what they sound like out loud. I’ll leave the film/television/audiobook adapters to worry about that. And individual readers, of course.

That's it. Enjoy!

A Musical Interlude

2011-10-12T17:34:00.002-04:00

Apparently, the long holiday weekend has drained my blog-fu for this week. So here's a quick ditty I whipped up a couple weeks ago to tide you over until next week.

Friday Night (and My Baby's In Another State) Blues by Infinity Ranch

Friday Review: Contagion

2011-10-07T00:05:00.017-04:00

I’ve seen multiple reviewers quip that watching Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s meditation on a global pandemic, in a movie theater is a bit like watching Jaws in a rowboat. That’s true. Even before Gwyneth Paltrow’s face gets peeled off during an autopsy, the way Soderbergh’s camera lingers on every bit of human contact makes you hyperaware of any cough, sniffle, or wheeze emanating from your fellow moviegoers. In that sense, Contagion is frightening as hell. Shame it’s not a very good movie.

The problem isn’t with what is on the screen. Soderbergh’s a great director with well developed visual chops, which he puts to great use in the beginning of the film as we trace the spread of the disease out of Hong Kong via a handful of people unfortunate enough to have interacted with the aforementioned Paltrow at a casino. We get quickly introduced to a broad range of characters, from public health officials and scientists tracking the disease, to those impacted by the spread, to even a crazed altmed blogger who sees the thing through the lens of conspiracy theories.

A good start. Problem is the movie plows on through the spread of the disease and the eventual development of a vaccine to stop it in a way that is almost completely devoid of the characteristics of engaging drama. The characters are barely fleshed out. Some disappear for long stretches of time for no good reason. The world’s going to hell in the background, we’re told, but it hardly ever shows (electricity flows, the water works, and everybody looks pretty well fed). There’s no real conflict, at least one that’s more concrete than the metaphysical “man v. nature” theme. Yes, obstacles are overcome and (in the end) someone saves the day, but it’s done with all the power of a midlevel documentary produced for high school students.

A part of the problem might be something for which Soderbergh and his collaborators should otherwise be praised. Everything I’ve read suggests that the science in Contagion is spot on. It’s rare enough for Hollywood to get it kind of right, but to get it really right is an achievement in and of itself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t necessarily lead you anywhere, dramatically. Years ago I blogged about a German film, Sophie Sholl - The Final Days, that was so true to the historical record that some scenes had entire stretches of dialogue taken directly from transcripts of the heroine’s interrogation session. Historically interesting? Certainly. Compelling drama? Not so much. Same with Contagion. The process of how things worked out is interesting in its own right, but it’s not particularly enthralling.

To the extent that Contagion goes looking for conflict, it finds it in the contrast between the diligent and persevering scientists/public health types and the nutty blogger mentioned above, played by Jude Law. There’s actually a lot there you could go into – click the link for Respectful Insolence at the right for a blog devoted to that kind of conflict – but Contagion stacks the deck too heavily on the side of the scientists for it to be a fair fight. Not only are the scientists all diligent, competent, and generally good at their jobs, they are also selfless altruists who make grand gestures for the benefit of their fellow human.

Perhaps the best example is Kate Winslet’s character, sent by the CDC to Minneapolis (where poor Gwyneth returns to lose her face) to get a handle on the situation and work with the local public health apparatus. Of course, she gets the disease and dies. With her dying action, she tries to give her coat to the guy in the cot next to hers in the ward where the dying have been stockpiled. On its own, it would be a touching human moment. Combined with a CDC director who gives his dose of the vaccine to the child of one of the facility’s janitors, a researcher who tests the successful vaccine first on herself, and a World Health Organization researcher who develops a quick case of Stockholm Syndrome (off screen, natch’), it’s just one more repetitive beat on the nature of the good guys.

In the face of that, Law’s nutty blogger never really stands a chance. It’s not enough that he floats the idea that the virus is the result of a biological weapons program gone amok (it’s not). It’s not enough that he revels in the standard anti-vax conspiracy theory that drug companies ramp up fear to get people to buy their products. It’s not enough that he promotes a bullshit herbal treatment for the disease that may lure in the gullible (although, to be fair, there’s no other treatment at the time). No, on top of all that, it turns out that he’s actually making a huge payday off the sales of said herbal remedy and, in fact, is arrested for (of all things) insider trading.

I’m not saying that Soderbergh gets it wrong in this conflict when he assigns the white hats and black hats. It’s just that the good guys are so good they border on saintly. Meanwhile, the antagonist is not only a loudmouth of questionable influence, but is a shitty money grubber, too. It’s hard to make compelling drama out of a conflict when you put your thumb on the scales like that. Hell, even movies with Nazis as bad guys try to make them a little more complex than the mustache-twiddling baddies from 1930s serials.

Which is a real shame, because Contagion lays out how something like this would really go. With some tweaking, it could be educational and gripping. As it is, it just comes off as stilted and cold. One thing’s for certain – you’ll never look at a hand shake the same way again. Or Gwyneth Paltrow’s skull.

The Details
-------------------
Contagion
Released 2011
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by Scott Z. Burns
Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, et. al.

In Praise of Profanity

2011-10-05T16:52:00.000-04:00

My thoughts on profanity, and the use of “dirty” words, are neatly summarized by this observation from Henry Drummond (aka Spencer Tracy) in Inherit the Wind:

I don’t swear for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. We’ve got to use all the words we’ve got. Besides, there are damn few words anybody understands.

There’s a time and a place for everything, of course. I try not to drop F-bombs around my niece and nephews. Nor would I respond to a question from a judge like, say, “are you suggesting that this statute is unconstitutional?”, with “fuck yes!” There's a time and a place for everything. But, generally, I think that people who get overly up tight about that kind of stuff need to lighten up a bit.

Which is a long winded way of introducing some wisdom from George Carlin, passed on via Ed at Dispatches (and Paul Provenza’s book Sataristas), from an interview he gave just before he died. He's addressing the oft-repeated argument that people who are profane are compensating for a lack of intellect:

Yeah, that ‘You don’t need to; you’re a funny man, you don’t need that stuff’ thing. Well, my argument is that you don’t need paprika or oregano or a few other things to make a stew, technically, either — but you make a better stew. If you’re inclined to make a stew of that type, ‘seasoning’ helps.

* * *

Why should I deprive myself of a small but important part of language that my fellow humans have developed? Why not use all of what we’ve developed to communicate with?

* * *

I think the folks who choose to deny that part of our language have limited themselves. And that’s fine; that’s good. Good choice over there…but I’m just fine over here.

That being said, simply being filthy isn’t a sure fire way of being funny. Carlin cites Bill Cosby as a guy who never worked ‘blue” but was (at one point) really funny. I've got another example.

There's a classic Monty Python sketch where John Cleese plays a hungry reader who leaves the local library to buy some cheese. Cheese shop owner Michael Palin stymies him at every turn due to his lack of inventory (the shop is “certainly uncontaminated by cheese,” Cleese quips). Finally, after rolling through dozens of different varieties, they come to one Palin actually has:

Wenslydale: Ah! We have Camenbert, yessir.

Customer: (surprised) You do! Excellent.

Wenslydale: Yessir. It's..ah,.....it's a bit runny...

Customer: Oh, I like it runny.

Wenslydale: Well,.. It's very runny, actually, sir.

Customer: No matter. Fetch hither the fromage de la Belle France! Mmmwah!

Wenslydale: I...think it's a bit runnier than you'll like it, sir.

Now, in the version that aired on British TV (a curse-free zone), the next line was, “I don’t care how excrementally runny it is. Hand it over with all speed.” The way Cleese lands on each syllable of “excrementally,” combined with the barely contained anger that’s been building, is brilliantly funny.

By contrast, other versions in free-fire zones (Live at the Hollywood Bowl, for instance), the line is “I don’t care how fucking runny it is.” Maybe it’s because I heard the TV version first, but I just don’t think that’s as funny. There’s something about needing a creative way to work around the censor that can be very inspirational.

Which is not to say that censorship, self-imposed or otherwise, is the way to go. As Carlin points out, if you don’t want to work “blue,” then don’t. The rest of us will continue to use every color Crayon in the box. Put away the profanity? Fuck that shit.

Note: David James Is English

2011-10-04T17:04:00.002-04:00

I mention that right at the outset, because if an American had proposed some of the things James does in this column in The Guardian he would be set upon by defenders of the footy faith, persecuted as another heretic from across the pond, just like the ones who brought us multiple-point goals and artificial turf. Besides, that fact gives some cover to this American, who thinks James might be onto something, at least with most of the five things he identifies as things soccer could learn from its “egg-shaped cousin,” rugby.

The five things James identifies are (1) increased substitution flexibility; (2) making yellow cards more meaningful; (3) using technology to deal with disputed goal calls; (4) doing away with the transfer window; and (5) someone other than the ref keeping time. I’ve got no position one way or the other on transfer windows. And while goal line tech would no doubt help out in some cases, technology does not ensure correct calls (ask Toledo’s football team), so I’ll leave that to the side for now. As for the others, James has a point, if not a particularly good idea for addressing it.

Take substitutions. The sub rules in soccer look barbaric compares to most other modern sports – you get 3 per game, that’s it. If you use all three subs and then somebody else gets hurt or abducted by aliens during a corner kick, tough shit – you’re down to 10 versus 11. It was not always thus. In the good ole’ days no substitutions were allowed at all. As I understand it, substitutions were initially allowed only for injuries, but that rule was quickly abused, so it morphed into its current form.

Is “three” the correct answer for “how many substitutes should be allowed in soccer?” I dunno. I’ve seen plenty of matches where the last 10 or 15 minutes get pretty dire as 16 tired guys or gals just huff the ball around because nobody can actually run anymore. The three subs on each end run around like children gone off their Ritalin, but often with less interesting results. Maybe more subs would be better. Where James completely goes off the rails is his idea of “specialist” subs, with which we are all too familiar with in our own version of football, thank you very much. But there’s a happy medium somewhere, one that allows for a more up-tempo and offensive match during the whole 90 minutes, without turning it into the NFL.

I also agree that making yellow cards more meaningful would be a good thing, although not for the reasons James lays out. He’s concerned that the effects of accumulated yellows only pile up after several matches and the penalty ultimately served does little to benefit the “wronged” parties along the way. My concern is that a yellow card is really no deterrent for the kind of attack killing tackles that squelch interesting soccer. I’m thinking of the “professional foul” committed in the middle of the park during a counter attack simply to bring proceedings to a halt. It happens so often that defenders clearly aren’t troubled by the yellow (unless they’ve already got one). I’m not sure that the “sin bin” (that’s “penalty box” to you frozen pond types) would really work, as teams playing a man up for long stretches of time already rarely make the most of it. Five minute bursts of 11-on-10 action may not really add much to the game.

Where I think James is most correct is the issue of timekeeping. Soccer games are ruled with an iron fist by a single official who is responsible for all discipline, major decisions about things like goals, and the rather mundane job of signaling the end of the half or game. The clock runs continuously through each half, with a discretionary amount of “added time” at the end to make up for stoppages (allegedly). Thus, unlike most sports where the players, coaches, and fans all know precisely how much time is left in a game, soccer keeps everyone but the ref in the dark.

What I’ve seen of rugby timekeeping makes much more sense. Rugby halves run continuously, just like soccer halves (though they are five minutes shorter). The clock doesn’t stop for routine dead ball situations – line outs, scrums, what have you. But it does stop for longer stoppages, such as injuries or after a score. The ref signals the stoppage, the clock stops. It’s that simple. There is no added time at the end of the half or game because there’s no need for it. The half or game ends once the clock hits zero and the next dead ball occurs. Everybody knows what’s going on and what’s at stake.

Truth be told, Major League Soccer was on the right track with its timekeeping when it started, which involve the time being kept on the stadium clock and not by the ref. The mistake in the MLS plan was now allowing for any stoppages, so time wasting was pathetically easy. That being said, I can remember at least one last minute finish that simply wouldn’t have been as dramatic had we been playing the game the way the rest of the world did.

I don’t think anybody who is a soccer fan wants to fundamentally change the sport into something it’s not. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t evolve as technology and the experiences of other sports show ways that little tweaks might enhance the game. Even an Englishman can recognize that.

Friday Review: Brave New World

2011-09-30T00:55:00.001-04:00

One of the few books I’ve returned to repeatedly over the years is Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s audacious dystopian classic. When I was young I read it for pleasure. In college, I read it as part of an independent study project on utopia and dystopia in fiction. A few weeks ago, spurred by a sale at Audible, I decided to read . . . er, listen . . . to it again. Fortuitously, I finished it up just as Banned Book Week began. Given that Brave New World is still one of the most controversial books of all time (in the top 10 books challenged in the United States last year), it seemed like a perfect choice for this week’s Friday Review.

For the unfamiliar, Huxley’s dystopia is developed in a completely different way from the nightmarish authoritarian worlds of, say, 1984 or Anthem. Orwell famously wrote that “[i]f you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” The world of 1984 is grey, depressing, brutal, and no place than any sane person would want to live. Huxley’s world, on the other hand, is at least superficially enticing. Everybody’s happy. Family strife and trauma have been eliminated, since families themselves are obsolete. There’s loads of things to buy and do to keep people occupied outside of work where, by the way, everybody does what they’re designed to do, so nobody gets fed up with their job. Sex as recreation is encouraged, if not mandated. And, if nothing else, there’s soma, a wonder drug that squelches any lingering worries.

Of course, it doesn’t really work out as well as advertised. If it did there’s be no conflict right? Thus no drama, thus no book. We meet characters who are outsiders, even in a world where everyone is so carefully crafted to be one of the horde. Things go completely haywire when a “savage,” that is a man raised outside the carefully crafted world in which most people live, shows up and begins to ask uncomfortable questions. Usually, at this point, I’d say “wackiness ensues,” but any book that ends with a major character killing himself really isn’t all that wacky.

That said, here are a few observations I picked up reading through Brave New World this time.

First, a writerly observation. Huxley starts the book off in a way that just about every “how to” book on writing says you shouldn’t. He doesn’t introduce any of the main characters. He doesn’t kick off the plot to get you hooked. Instead, he spends several chapters data dumping about how the people who live in this world are created and conditioned. It transitions nicely into the introduction of most of the major characters, but I can’t think a modern editor would be pleased with it. Which just goes to show that you follow the rules, unless you’re good enough to break them and get away with it.

A big part of Brave New World is about conditioning. As I said, Huxley spends several chapters at the outset explaining how children are bred, “decanted,” and conditioned via various means into the caste-bound happy adults they will become. What I never really picked up on before was how that conditioning bumps up against a more traditional form of conditioning, in the character of John “the Savage.” Raised on a reservation by a woman from the wider world left behind during vacation, he grows up as hard wired as the two main bottle-raised characters, Lenina and Bernard. That’s particularly evidence in his reaction to Lenina’s sexual advances, his revulsion driven by what he learned about sexuality in the reservation (namely that his mother, who shared Lenina’s conditioning, was outcast and beaten for having sex with several men in the area). Similarly, his drive to seek refuge in Shakespeare seems to come about in the same unthinking way. It all speaks to me as a commentary on how we are all conditioned by our environments, whether intentionally or not.

Which leads to an altogether less comfortable observation. The philosophical climax of the book is a long discussion between John and Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe, who basically runs that part of the world, in which they go back and forth about issues of free will, liberty, and the like. Particularly, John asks about the lower caste workers, who do the truly shit jobs. “Don’t they want better out of life?” he asks (I’m paraphrasing). It’s a question that would come to most us, raised as we are on the importance of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Mond’s answer, of course, is “no,” for the simple reason that they are doing the jobs they are conditioned to do, not just physically by psychologically. They don’t know what they’re missing, in other words.

That conversation resonated to me in that it reminds me of the problem of cultural imperialism and human rights. Like I said, most “Western” nations place a high priority on individual liberty, even at the expense of social order or tranquility. But other cultures – I’m thinking of some Asian ones – don’t place the same emphasis on individuals, instead focusing on group dynamics and social functionality. Does Mond’s explanation of why the lower castes aren’t unhappy with their lot apply equally to people who grow up in other cultures who don’t know they’re being denied the individual liberty others take for granted? Of course, the difference between us and them in the real world is much much less than the difference between the Alphas and Deltas of Brave New World. But I’m not sure that doesn’t just dodge the question.

I always viewed John as “our” representative in the book. After all, he’s the character whose upbringing most closely resembles our own. This time through, I came to the conclusion that I don’t want John representing me. He’s a closed minded fundamentalist asshole, only he quotes Shakespeare instead of the Bible. Not that he doesn’t make some potentially valid criticisms of the world he confronts. He’s just written in such a way that he’s not all that sympathetic. Of course, neither are the representatives of the modern world, either. In that sense, Huxley pushes everyone to the extremes of their positions, for whatever reason. It makes the conflicts ring a bit hollow, in the end, and presents an either/or choice, where something more subtle is possible.

John does have one thing going for him, although it ultimately hastens his demise – empathy. When John and his mother return to society with Lenina and Bernard, she quickly slips into a soma-induced coma and dies. In fact, her convalescence causes quite a spectacle, as people aren’t familiar with aging and are conditioned not to be afraid of death. John behaves in quite recognizable ways when his mother dies – he’s grief stricken, angry at those around him who aren’t, and generally miserable.

By contrast, at the end of the book John leaves the city and tries to live a hermit’s existence in the English countryside. That all goes to hell when a small group of workers catch sight of him flogging himself outside (more problems with sex, of course). Word quickly leaks out about the ritual, which a first brings the press to the area and then a collection of gawkers and curiosity seekers. Looking on from helicopters, they don’t see in John what most of us would – a troubled soul in pain trying to deal with something difficult. They see entertainment, because they’ve been conditioned to treat everything outside of work as entertainment, even other people. As a result, there’s no empathy there and they cheer on John’s flogging for the sake of spectacle. It’s quite nauseating, really. Normally we think of dehumanization as something we do to others, but Huxley turns it around.

Ultimately, what I think struck me most on this go round with Brave New World was my willingness to look critically at whether Huxley’s world is really a dystopia. Yes, the idea of a happy, if shallow, existence free from fear and doubt strikes me as inherently wrong in the gut. In fact, my gut reaction to it is similar to my feelings about transhumanism I wrote about a while back. But as in that piece, I have a hard time making a cogent rational argument as to why a world without pain would be a bad thing. Yes, if we were all eternally healthy we’d take it for granted, but is it necessary to be occasionally ill or injured (perhaps seriously) just to appreciate it? Is my reaction to Huxley’s world mere a result of my own conditioning?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not going to run for president under a “soma for all!” platform anytime soon. In the real world, transitioning to the type of world Huxley proposed would involve so much coercion and violence that, even if the end product would be desirable, the horrors of getting there would be too much. For a fictional world in which to brainstorm ideas, however, I’m much more skeptical of the dystopian label than I’ve been before.

Which just goes to show you why Brave New World endures, both as a work of literature in its own right and as a target for censors. It makes people think, which can lead to all sorts of wackiness.

The Details
-----------------
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
First published in 1932

Why I Love the Multiculture

2011-09-29T17:12:00.000-04:00

I first got online in 1994, as part of a special research project I was doing at WVU. At that time, you didn’t get a university email address just be stepping on to campus and home connections were still in the primitive AOHell stage. Nevertheless, the Net was already alive with the kind of discussions and connections that we see today.

For an impressionable college kid it was awesome. Suddenly I had access to whole communities of people interested in the same weird shit I was. Formula 1, at the time, was decidedly niche in the United States. Being able to connect with scattered fans around the country, not to mention those around the globe (I asked a question on USENET about the first Hungarian Grand Prix and got replies from actual Hungarians!) blew my mind. Not only did those connections nurture my love of niche sports like soccer and sports car racing, it eventually led me into the emerging modern progressive rock underground. The rest, as they say, is history.

All of which is introduction to partly explain why I find this column at Salon by the mononamed Toure to be a complete load of horseshit. In it he pines for what he calls the “monoculture,” that is the mass movement pop culture of the kind that you can’t get away from:

The epic, collective roar -- you know, the kind that followed ‘Thriller,’ ‘Nevermind,’ ‘Purple Rain,’ ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,’ and other albums so gigantic you don't even need to name the artist -- just doesn't happen today. Those Moments made you part of a large tribe linked by sounds that spoke to who you are or who you wanted to be. Today there’s no Moments, just moments. They’re smaller, less intense, shorter in duration and shared by fewer people. The Balkanization of pop culture, the overthrow of the monopoly on distribution, and the fracturing of the collective attention into a million pieces has made it impossible for us to coalesce around one album en masse. We no longer live in a monoculture. We can't even agree to hate the same thing anymore, as we did with disco in the 1970s.

Putting aside some very valid objections from the comments, I’ll take Toure at his word. The monoculture is dead, a victim of the increased number and visibility of niche markets for pop culture works. So? Is he really suggesting that less choice is better when it comes to personal amusements? ‘cause, you know, that’s stupid.

As someone who lived through The Moments(tm) he lists, I can report that I was not swept up by them, except in the sense that I was aware of them. Michael Jackson? Never a fan. Prince? The same, except as the subject of a Kevin Smith monologue. Nirvanna? Meh. I don’t even recognize the other one so, obviously, I could care less. More to the point, at the time those Moments(tm) were happening, I was wandering in the musical desert without any real stuff that was firing my imagination.

You know what changed that? The Net allowed for the niche of all niches, progressive rock, to gain enough of a profile that I found out about it. Not only hadn’t it died in 1975, there were new and vital bands striving to do new and interesting things, as well as harken back to the glory days. It didn’t matter that they weren’t high profile enough to merit being stocked at the local CD store. Thanks to email (and eventually web commerce), I could order directly from the bands. How much more of a niche moment can you have than Alan Morse calling me at home to figure out a problem I had ordering the first Spock’s Beard album, during which he broke into a chorus of “Country Roads?” I wouldn’t trade that to be part of some massive Moment(tm).

The funniest part of Toure’s piece is his example of the devastation that the multiculture has wrought:

Nowadays my music conversations run like this:

‘So what are you listening to?’

‘Aw, you gotta check out Danny Brown and Abbe May and Das Racist.’

‘OK, cool. I've never heard of them.’

‘What are you listening to?’

‘Cat’s Eye and Ariel Pink and Little Dragon.’

‘Oh. I gotta check them out.’

No connection is made.

Wait, what? So the problem today is that when you talk to friends about music you find out about new music you might want to hear? Maybe I’m strange because, but if I had a conversation with a friend about music – presumably one in which I had some faith in his musical tastes (if not, why bother?) – and learned about three bands I’d never heard of before, I’d consider that a good day.

But, then again, maybe I’m just strange. I don’t care about Moments(tm) shared with millions of strangers. I care about finding and experiencing amazing music. New music. Old music. Confusing music. Whatever. To the extent I share those moments with anyone else, it’s in the hope that enough people get into it to keep the artists making more music.

So, fuck the monoculture. Long live the multiculture!

Create-a-Crime

2011-09-28T04:52:00.001-04:00

Years ago I wrote about cops in New York City who, apparently bored with the lack of real crime going on about them, set about creating some, leaving “lost” purses around town and arresting those who walked away with them with theft. Apparently, that do it yourself mentality is alive and well in the Big Apple as a part of the War on (Some People’s) Drugs. Color me stunned.

As the New York Times reports, simple possession of a small amount of marijuana is not a crime (since the 1970s) in New York. However, possession of pot “in public view” is still a misdemeanor. Enter the NYPD:

Critics say that as part of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, officers routinely tell suspects to empty their pockets and then, if marijuana is displayed, arrest them for having the drugs in public view, thereby pushing thousands of people toward criminality and into criminal justice system.

As Orin Kerr notes over at Volokh, the question of whether such an order violates the Fourth Amendment is not as easily answered as it should be. And even if it was a clear violation for cops to make such a request, most lay people won’t know they can refuse. Regardless of the constitutionality of the stops, it’s beyond unjust to punish someone for doing precisely what they’re ordered to by the police.

Thankfully, NYPC Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has issued a memo aimed at stopping the process:

The memo says, ‘A crime will not be charged to an individual who is requested or compelled to engage in the behavior that results in the public display of marihuana.’ The act of displaying it, the order continues, must be ‘actively undertaken of the subject’s own volition.’

That’s a step in the right direction. If we’re going to continue to wage this fruitless War, let’s at least play fair, all right?

Live from Richmond!

2011-09-27T17:01:00.003-04:00

An overwhelming amount of time, my job consists of me sitting in my office either reading or writing. On a few occasions, I’m dragged out into the light, dusted off, and sent to Richmond for oral argument before the Fourth Circuit. Now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can hear me in action.

Last Friday, I argued a case that dealt with the Fourth Amendment and what has to happen before a police officer can transform a traffic stop into an immigration investigation. You can hear the argument, which went on well past the usual 20 minutes per side, here. For a little bit of setup, here's the summary of argument section of my opening brief:

Guijon-Ortiz was a passenger in a truck that was the subject of a traffic stop. Once the legitimate purpose of the stop had been extinguished and it was concluded that the driver was properly licensed and authorized to drive the truck, the traffic stop should have come to an end. The district court erred by denying Guijon-Ortiz’s motion to suppress the evidence of his identity and immigration status that was discovered thereafter. The district court incorrectly concluded that the officer could use time he otherwise would have used to write a traffic citation to pursue other investigative hunches. It also incorrectly concluded that the officer had reasonable suspicion that criminal activity was afoot. Because the evidence discovered as a result of the improperly prolonged traffic stop was the only evidence supporting the charge against Guijon-Ortiz, his conviction must be vacated.

As you can see . . . er, hear . . . the discussion at oral argument went off on a tangent not addressed in the briefs. It happens, sometimes. It’s both thrilling (talk about thinking on your feet!) and frightening, since you’re obviously stepping into uncharted waters. Regardless, we’ll see in a few weeks/months what the end result is.

Church or Jail? Tough Call

2011-09-26T16:55:00.000-04:00

As a criminal defense lawyer, I always appreciate it when judges or others in the criminal justice system come up with sentences for low-level offenders that don’t require them to go to jail. We lock entirely too many people up in this country and we should be more vigorous in pursuing alternatives. Nonetheless, is it too much to expect that they not come up with alternatives that blatantly violate the Constitution?

One small town in Alabama has come up with an alternative sentencing scheme that really makes you shake your head. It presents a simple choice – go to jail or go to church:

Operation Restore Our Community or ‘ROC’...begins next week. The city judge will either let misdemenor [sic] offenders work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine or go to church every Sunday for a year.

If offenders elect church, they’re allowed to pick the place of worship, but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department. If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender's case will be dismissed.

It’s actually not even an alternative sentence, it’s better than that. If you choose jail, you have a criminal record that will follow you for the rest of your days. The church program, on the other hand, operates like a pretrial diversion program and erases your misdeeds if you complete it.

Regardless, it’s a clear First Amendment violation, as Eugene Volokh explains:

Both conservative and liberal Justices agree that coercion of religious practice violates the Establishment Clause. And while they disagree on what counts as coercion of religious practice (e.g., does being exposed to prayer, and socially pressured to stand and remain silent, at a high school graduation ceremony that isn’t legally required, qualify as coercion?), this is not a close case: Just as it would coerce religious practice to say someone who hasn’t been convicted of a crime, ‘go to church or we’ll send you to jail,’ so it coerces religious practice to say someone who has been convicted of a crime, ‘go to church or you’ll stay in jail.’

Apparently violates the Alabama state constitution, too.

It’s not enough, as the local police chief who dreamed up this scheme explained, that you can choose jail or church (assuming there is a particular flavor of “church” that includes your own – there are no references to mosques, synagogues, or other non-Christian services in any of the news coverage). In reality, that’s no choice at all.

Kudos to the powers that be for thinking outside of the box, but, to paraphrase a great being, “so ten out of ten for intent, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?” So, it’s back to the drawing board with you. Read this first. And this. In fact, there’s probably some Alabama statutory law you’ll need to be familiar with, too. Come to think of it, just get together with a law talking guy (or gal) or two. They can set you straight. I hope.

Friday Review: Depois Do Fim

2011-09-23T00:05:00.004-04:00

To paraphrase Frank Zappa, prog in the late 1970s and early 1980s wasn’t dead, it just smelled funny. In fact, lots of bands, inspired by the pioneers who broke out in the early 1970s, got together and made an album or two during that time. Given the generally hostile reception they got, those bands didn’t tend to last very long. Those albums slipped away into the history books.

One of the cool things about the combination of the growth of the Internet and fairly cheap CD production technology in the 1990s was that lots of these lost gems found their way to the light again. How else would a single album released by a Brazlian band (with lyrics in Portugese, natch’) find its way to the ears of someone in West Virginia?

Which is a fine thing, because Depois Do Fim is a real gem. To be sure, it is a creature of its time. Sonically, it sounds a little dated and a little muddy. Bands at the time didn’t have access to top quality home equipment we do these days. That being said, it sounds good, but in a low budget kind of way. Musically, it’s purely second-generation symphonic prog, influenced greatly by the likes of early Genesis and the Italian scene. There is nothing at all ground breaking about the music on Depois Do Fim.

It is gorgeous, however. The tracks alternate between instrumentals and vocal tracks. The instrumentals have a great sense of melody and flow, allowing the players to stretch a bit without going all wanky. Vocalist Jane Duboc stars on the vocal tracks, obviously, with a beautiful, powerful, and expressive voice. I have no idea what she’s saying, but who cares.

This album came to my attention because it’s rated as one of the top symphonic prog albums of all time by users over at Prog Archives. Is it, really? It’s hard to say. Any piece of second-wave music has to take a step back to the ground breakers that came before it, regardless of how exceptionally executed it is. That doesn’t have any impact on whether it’s a wonderful listening experience in its own right. It is. And I’m grateful it made its way north for me to hear.

Details
------------
Depois Do Fim, by Bacamarte
Released 1983

Tracks:
1. UFO (6:26)
2. Smog Alado (4:11)
3. Miragem (4:54)
4. Pássaro De Luz (2:28)
5. Caño (1:59)
6. Último Entardecer (9:29)
7. Controvérsia (1:57)
8. Depois Do Fim (6:31)
9. Mirante Das Estrelas (6:11)

Players:
Jane Duboc (vocals)
Marcus Moura (flute, accordion)
Mario Neto (guitars)
Mr. Paul (percussion)
Delto Simas (basses)
Marco Veríssimo (drums)
Sergio Villarim (keyboards)

Good News, Bad News

2011-09-22T16:42:00.000-04:00

A quick update on the short story I had accepted for publication last month.

First, the good news. The original plan was for "The Last Ereph" to appear in the November edition of The Absent Willow Review, going online on November 16. Things have been pushed up a month, so it will appear in the edition going online on October 16.

Now, the bad news. That edition will be the last edition of The Absent Willow Review, which is sadly going out of business after nearly three years. The site will remain up until December. It's a shame any time a market shuts down, but it's hard not to take this one kind of personally. Poke around the site while it's still around. And, of course, check back on October 16!

Same As It Ever Was

2011-09-21T17:19:00.000-04:00

The scandals rocking major college football continue:

[T]he Carnegie Foundation made headlines with a report, ‘American College Athletics,’ which concluded that the scramble for players had ‘reached the proportions of nationwide commerce.’ Of the 112 schools surveyed, 81 flouted NCAA recommendations with inducements to students ranging from open payrolls and disguised booster funds to no-show jobs at movie studios.

By “continue,” I mean they’ve been going on for nearly a century. That Carnegie Foundation report came out in 1929. 10 years later, freshman players at Pitt went on strike . . . because they weren’t getting paid as much as their more senior teammates.

Those two tidbits are just a part of the fascinating, and depressing, history of the commercial side of college sports laid out in Taylor Branch’s new article in The Atlantic (via). Branch is arguing that college athletes should be paid, although I’m still not convinced (beyond the scholarships, academic assistance, etc.). What he does do is make a good case that NCAA invocation of “amateurism” and “student-athletes,” at least when it comes to the big money sports, is not only hollow, but pretty much always has been.

In fact, the term “student-athlete” first popped up in litigation:

The term came into play in the 1950s, when the widow of Ray Dennison, who had died from a head injury received while playing football in Colorado for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies, filed for workmen’s-compensation death benefits. Did his football scholarship make the fatal collision a ‘work-related’ accident? Was he a school employee, like his peers who worked part-time as teaching assistants and bookstore cashiers? Or was he a fluke victim of extracurricular pursuits? Given the hundreds of incapacitating injuries to college athletes each year, the answers to these questions had enormous consequences. The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed with the school’s contention that he was not eligible for benefits, since the college was ‘not in the football business.’

Equally fascinating is how the NCAA, which wasn’t organized with any real authority over the schools that made up its membership, leveraged the nascent TV coverage of college football (the schools thought TV would kill the sport!) in the 1950s to exert some control over the situation. That control slipped away in 1984, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA couldn’t keep individual schools or conferences from seeking out their own TV deals. Ironically, what kept the NCAA from being crippled financially was college basketball, because only it could sell the TV rights to the men’s national championship tournament, aka March Madness. Starting to see why there’s no similar tournament for major college football?

Of course, it’s TV money that’s largely driving the latest round of conference shifting we’re seeing go on right now. The drive for the ACC, Big (sorta) 10 and the artist formerly known as the PAC-10 to grow big enough to justify a conference championship game was because of the extra revenue, mostly from TV, they generate. Likewise, WVU doesn’t want to be relegated to a crippled Big East and potentially cut out of the windfall that is the BCS sweepstakes.

As I said earlier, I’m still not sold on the idea of paying college athletes. However, Branch does a good job of showing how profoundly fucked up the current system is. It's not quite this bad . . .

Crack Baby Athletic Association
Get More: SOUTH
PARK Eric Cartman,Kyle Broflovski,more...

But it's close. Maybe the best option is to blow it up and start from scratch. There’s no good reason for sports to enmesh with academics at all. Let the NFL, NBA, and what have you set up youth academies like the soccer clubs in Europe and elsewhere do and go from there. Or reduce the whole thing to the level of Division III, where those involved really are student-athletes.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. So this Saturday I’ll choke down my concerns, put on my bright yellow WVU shirt, and cheer as “we” beat up on LSU on national TV in primetime. Hopefully. ‘cause if we don’t, it’s only a game, right? At least I have the luxury of looking at it that way.

Same as it ever was, indeed.

A Quick Word on Criminal Procedure

2011-09-20T16:55:00.001-04:00

It appears that Troy Davis, convicted of murdering an off-duty police officer in Savannah, Georgia in 1991, will be executed on Wednesday night. The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected Davis’s request for clemency this morning, clearing the way for his scheduled death. He’s already exhausted his other legal avenues, barring some kind of last minute Hail Mary.

For more on the background of the Davis case and the issues raised regarding his guilt or innocence, this dairy at Daily Kos hits all the high notes. I don’t know enough about the case to opine one way or the other on the man’s guilt, although I did skim the federal judge’s lengthy opinion after an unprecedented procedural remand by the Supreme Court a couple of years ago and found the case much less clear than either side portrays it. Given my opposition to the death penalty in all situations, whether Davis is guilty or not is not an issue to me with regards to whether he should be killed.

But I wanted to chime in on one facet of the discussion, particularly as raised by comments to the New York Time article I linked to above. The article makes multiple references to Davis’s failure to prove his innocence, to which many folks in the comments respond with shock and horror. As summed up by one person:

Am I reading this correctly? The goober judge who refused to grant a new trial said that the defense had failed 'to prove the defendant's innocence?' What law school did he go to? In Georgia defendants have to prove their innocence?

Not to stick up for any particular "goober judge," but, yes, in Georgia and the rest of the United States, defendants have to prove their innocence if they have already been convicted by a jury.

Our system, for better or worse, reveres trial court fact finding, particularly jury verdicts. I’ve written before about how deferential appellate courts are to verdicts in criminal cases. That deference continues all through the process. It simply is not enough for a defendant to poke holes in the prosecution’s case years down the road. It’s not enough to show that a new trial based on the evidence as it stands now would result in a different outcome. You must prove that you are innocent, a staggeringly high burden to meet without some sort of forensic breakthrough to hang your hat on. It may be a shitty system (I’m inclined to think so), but it’s the one we’ve got and it’s no use harping on isolated high-profile cases like Davis’s when the problem lies in the bigger picture, not it’s peculiar brush strokes.

None of that has any bearing on the ultimate truth of whether Davis murdered that officer decades ago, of course. But, as I’ve written before, courts aren’t designed to be places to learn the truth. They’re about justice which, sometimes, doesn’t wind up being all that just.

Cruel and Unusual

2011-09-19T18:34:00.002-04:00

Is any of this deposition true? Any instance or detail? Any goddamn word of it? Because if it is, I'll be practicing divorce law in West Virginia.

ADA Burano (Lance Henriksen) - Prince of the City

No sin requires that much penance. I spent a lifetime doing West Virginia divorce law one year. Makes dealing with killers, rapists, and drug dealers all the more appealing.

Friday Review: A Dance With Dragons

2011-09-16T12:48:00.000-04:00

George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire got off to a fast start, relatively speaking. The first three books appeared in only four years, which, given their doorstop size, is pretty impressive. No surprise, then, that legions of fans were hooked in those years. Things slowed down, considerably, with book four, A Feast For Crows, taking five years to hit the shelves.

Feast was disappointing, partly because three major characters from the earlier books were entirely absent. But no fear - Martin explained in an author's note that Feast as originally conceived was too sprawling for one volume. Rather than split it chronologically, he split it up by location. Those three characters would return in the next book, which was well on the way to being finished, anyway.

That was six years ago. Was it worth the wait? Does Dance measure up to the hype? Yes and no.

The good news is that we do get lots of those three missing characters. Tyrion Lannister, the hard drinking, smart ass dwarf, has his adventures, while the dragon queen Danerys and Night Watch commander Jon Snow deal with the problems of rule in their distinct lands.

The bad news is that, all things considered, the overall plot of the series hasn't advanced all that much by the end of the book. It would be wrong to say that nothing happens - lots of stuff happens. But our main characters spend the book dealing with specific problems, only to have the rug pulled out from under them in the end and essentially reset everything. What happens along the way is interesting enough, but it seems like filler when it has very little payoff in the end.

Thankfully, Martin throws in a couple of new faces along the way who (unlike the ones in Feast) actually make some impact on the plot. One, in particular, shows up with yet another claim on the throne of Westeros and takes some action to get it back.

In the end, it's hard for me to really get a handle on Dance. For one thing, I just came to the series recently, so I haven't been waiting six years for this installment to appear. I don't have the issues with Martin that some fans do. But, I'm deep enough into the series that it's like a favorite TV show - I'm happy to get back into the world and meet up with interesting characters, even if the end result isn't completely satisfactory.

The bottom line? The next book can't get here fast enough.

The Details
-----------------
A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin
Book five of A Song of Ice and Fire
First published in 2011

Rock Rulz! Bach Droolz!

2011-09-15T16:53:00.001-04:00

I stumbled across a couple of posts from one of the New York Times's blogs over the past few days that discussed music education in the schools. The substance of the posts, and the program they discuss, are interesting in their own right. More interesting, or at least more fun to read and snicker at, is the elitist pearl clutching going on in the comments. For the end is nigh, citizens – rock and roll is going to school.

The program discussed in the first post is called Little Kids Rock. It seeks to add a new track to the traditional public school music programs (band, orchestra, etc.) called "contemporary band," along with providing instruments (guitars, mostly) to make it possible. Instead of relying on a well-worn repertoire of "traditional" music, the program focuses on pop stuff that the kids know and are interested in:

On the first day of class, Little Kids Rock teachers place guitars in the hands of their students and get them practicing chords that will enable them to play thousands of songs. (Many simple lessons are freely available online here.) The kids decide what songs they want to learn and the class is off and running. Their progress is remarkable. Within a year, eight- and nine-year-olds are playing electric guitar, bass guitar, drums and keyboards, and giving concerts, even performing their own songs. And the effect is predictable: the children can’t get enough of it.

The idea is that presenting kids with established methods based on traditional music – be it from the classical repertoire or old folk songs – not only fails to get the kids excited by music, it turns them off from it altogether. That may be a false assumption from which the start, but it seems reasonable to me. Depending, of course, on what the purpose of music education programs is going to be. If it's to being training the next generation of players, that might not work. On the other hand, if the goal is to create kids (and, therefore, adults) for whom music becomes important in their lives, it makes a great deal of sense.

Predictably, the idea that rock music might have a legitimate pedagogical position alongside the old masters freaked some people completely out, to the point where the original writer addressed them in a second post. Putting aside one very relevant criticism (that I'll get to in a minute) and the simple misunderstandings, what shines through is an elitist fear that the barbarians have truly breached the ivory tower: allowing pop in the classroom will "dumb down" music education, or letting kids choose what kind of music to learn about is "quite ridiculous" because "[m]ost popular music that students listen to is redundant and simplistic."

That attitude, it seems to me, is most evident in a pair of comments that are less direct, but still elitist:

Many were upset by the idea that schools should teach anything but serious music — like classical music or jazz. (It's worth remembering that people raged against the introduction of school jazz bands 40 years ago, too.) Diekunstder, from Menlo Park, Calif. (25), commented: '[T]here is no classical music industry shoving its values down the public's throat, rather, it is popular music which pervades every corner of contemporary 'culture.'' And Fed Up (44), worried: 'Is this the death knell for classical music and opera? Methinks so. Sad!'

In other words, school music programs aren't about really teaching kids about music, they're a front in the culture wars, a place to beat back the heathen hordes of the Lady Gagas and Kanye Wests of the world. I'm not going to concede that introducing students to new things and ideas isn't an essential part of education, but if the goal is to link "music" to "dull stuff I have to do in school," I can think of few better ways to do it than place the whole of pop culture beyond the reach of teachers and their students.

And, anyway, as the second post points out, programs like Little Kids Rock aren't out to displace more traditional musical programs from the schools. It’s an additional way of reaching kids, which is never a bad thing. Hook kids on the nuts and bolts of music using what they like, then they might more easily appreciate new things thrown at them later. It's not an either/or proposition.

Now, the one very valid criticism I noted earlier. As several comments pointed out, the arguments in favor of programs like Little Kids Rock appear to assume that they have healthy existing traditional school music programs upon which they can build. Sadly, in 21st-century America, few things are more easily brushed aside than arts programs in schools. Never mind the evidence that kids who participate in arts programs do better in school and tend to be more successful down the road. It's fluff and it doesn’t have a standardized test at the end, so cash strapped school districts see it as a place to trim the fat.

But that's no reason to reconsider how music education programs work where they exist. And, maybe, if the ones that are around are perceived as being more successful (however that's measured), it will be easier to ensure their survival down the road.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

2011-09-14T16:58:00.001-04:00

Over the past couple of days, Slate has been hosting an interesting discussion on the pros and cons of “transhumanism.” That’s the theory/philosophy that essentially holds that human life will be greatly benefited by its entwining with technology. It runs the gamut from folks who argue about various sci-fi tech that could extend lifespans well into triple digits to those like Ray Kurzweil who envision a future when someone can be uploaded into a computer and, essentially, live forever.

Unless I’ve missed something over the past few years, none of the tech really necessary to bring about this kind of thing is remotely feasible at this point. That makes discussions about whether it’s a good thing or bad thing purely theoretical, but interesting nonetheless. So far, the writers involved in the Slate discussion are running two to one in favor.

I kind of wish Nicholas Agar, who’s post title declares “why I don’t want to be a cyborg,” would have tried a little harder at explaining why. Aside from vague assertions about losing our “humanity” (whatever that means), he doesn’t offer any solid reasons why longer living via technology would be a bad thing. I’m not unsympathetic to his position, but I’m struggling to see how it’s any different than arguing that modern medicine and the like has fundamentally changed our humanity.

That being said, I do see two potential problems with embracing transhumanism. The first is brought up by Brad Allenby, who cynically (I mean that in a good way) suggests that whether such coming changes are a good or bad thing, society as a whole will be powerless to stop them. The march of technology and all that. I tend to agree with him. But he points out that the cost of this tech would further widen the gap between rich and poor, essentially creating separate classes of “transhumans” and regular (read “poor”) humans. However, he also points out that folks in developed countries already live twice as long as those in developing nations, without much metaphysical concern about it. Regardless of where we are now, I think it’s something that transhuman proponents need to deal with.

The other problem I see is what I reluctantly call the Miracle Day problem, after the latest (horribly botched) season of Torchwood. On Miracle Day, everybody on the planet stopped dying. Things went to shit almost immediately and the threat of overpopulation loomed over the planet. Now, transhuman tech would presumably produce healthier longer lives, not just stave off death (Miracle Day only stopped death, not disease), but doubling lifespans would still lead to serious resource scarcity. Again, it’s an issue that the proponents need to address.

From what little I’ve read about it, most transhumanists are scientific Utopians, placing faith in technology to deliver us from the reality of life and death. Maybe it will someday – what do I know? But I do know that history is rife with amazing new technologies that produced negative unintended consequences and spawned their own problems. Dreaming about the future is fun and exciting. Ignoring the past while doing so is irresponsible and short sighted.

On Writers Reading

2011-09-13T16:59:00.001-04:00

There is a plague upon the land, my friends. You probably didn’t notice it, what with all the natural disasters, political shenanigans, and football going on. But it’s important enough to be discussed in the vague sort of terms usually reserved for nebulous terrorist threats. Brace yourself. Are you sitting down?

Some people say that there are would be writers out there who “don’t read.” See, even Salon is writing about it!

Take a moment. Breathe. It will be all right, I promise.

Not because writers who don’t read wouldn’t be a problem. I’m just not convinced that such people exist. Or even could. Now, I’ll concede that there are some non-reader people out there who wake up one day and say to themselves, “Self, I’m going to write a novel.” He or she will set upon the task and . . . fail miserably. We will never be subjected to the result, even in the ever widening world of electronic on demand publishing.

But I think it’s impossible for anyone who seriously wants to write a novel, short story, play or whatever to have never read one. How would you even know what you wanted to do if you didn’t have some idea of what it was? For most things, you could just go read a book. You can do that with writing, too (as an overstuffed shelf in my library can attest), but then you’re reading. So, I don’t think it’s actually possible to write without reading.

What I really think people are saying when they fret about writers not reading is that either aspiring writers don’t read enough or they don’t read the right things. The first may be true, but I’ve yet to see any evidence, at least that matters. If someone who doesn’t read all that much writes a book or play and it’s awful, who cares? Only professional critics, I suppose, who have to read those things for work. I don’t think it says anything meaningful about writers whose work is actually read by something resembling a wide audience. When someone without any real reading background poots forth the next Harry Potter or whatever, get back to me.

In addition, given the explosion of media platforms in the 21st century, stories are being told in more numerous and interesting ways. Writing is, for most of us, about telling stories, rather than the pure mechanics of writing itself. With that in mind, writers can learn a lot from movies or TV or other places and improve the finished product of their writing. To suggest that writers only learn from reading is near sighted in a 19th-century kind of way.

My suspicion – completely without evidence, I’ll admit – is that when critics complain that writers these days don’t read what they’re really saying is they don’t read what they, the critics, think they should. That doesn’t strike me as a very valid complaint. I don’t read esoteric modern literary fiction, but I don’t write it, either. I write science fiction and fantasy stuff which, it also happens, is primarily what I read, at least for fun. Why should it be any different? John Scalzi’s advice is sound: write a story you would want to read. If you really don’t want to read anything, you won’t write anything.

I will say this, however, on the side of those who freak out about this supposed problem. Writing, like any art, is more craft than mystic creative experience. Few people are able to simply sit down, summon a muse, and whip out anything worth reading. They people do exist and the rest of us hate them, trust me. But for the vast majority of us, who have to learn how to do it like we learned to do anything else, seeing how other people do it is invaluable. And I’m pretty sure anybody who takes the whole enterprise seriously knows that.

So, really, everything’s all right. Continue your lives untroubled, my friends.

Borders Requiem

2011-09-12T17:09:00.001-04:00

Over at CNN’s website, Todd Leopold has a nice piece about the end of the road for Borders, particularly the chain’s flagship store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Although it’s a natural part of the circle of corporate life, it still sucks.

What first grabbed me about Borders wasn’t the books (sorry, honey), but the music. At the store down the road in Barboursville, I could walk in and paw through racks of CDs that actually had some of the music I listened to in it – Marillion! Porcupine Tree! Van der fucking Graff Generator! Try doing that elsewhere in a small city like Charleston or Huntington and you’re likely to come up short.

Magazines, too. In addition to the normal essential American car magazines, they regularly carried both Grassroots Motorsports and their vintage cousin, neither of which is exactly mainstream. Same goes for European soccer mags like Four Four Two and music rags like Q and the newly established Prog (from the folks at Classic Rock).

Oh, yeah, and they sold books, too. And as a writer, any place that sells books that goes out of business is a bad thing.

I know I should look at Borders (and its chain store ilk like Barnes & Noble and Books a Million) as the corporate monstrosity it was, gobbling up and pushing out real independent bookstores over the years. Maybe that’s true in larger cities, but in places where I’ve lived, the truth is closer to what Leopold writes:

The best bookstores have a certain feel, a certain comfort to them. They're stately but not forbidding. The employees are a mix of the young and the eccentric, college students and lifers. The front of the store features their recommendations, a little offbeat, a little intriguing. If you're looking for something specific, they know where to find it; if you don't know what you're looking for, they can be your Virgil and Beatrice, guiding you through the world.

It is a place with a soul.

For much of its 40-year history, that was Borders. Though it was a chain, with hundreds of locations around the world, during its best years it maintained the feel of a great, expansive local bookstore, the 800-foot space multiplied by 10 or 20 (and much better organized). The choices were manifold, the employees passionate, the adventure always beginning.

In some towns and cities, Borders was it.

Now, Charleston has a wonderful, if small, indie in Taylor Books, but it could never match the range or selection that Borders had in its prime. Besides, it was alive and kicking while Borders was in business down the highway.

K, the girlfriend, worked for Borders when we met (she jumped ship back when it was merely taking on water, not yet sinking), first as an assistant manager then as grand poohbah of one of the stores in the Pittsburgh area. With few exceptions, the folks she worked with were as Leopold describes – bright, knowledgeable, and exceptionally helpful. They were hamstrung by a corporate leadership that didn’t know which end was up when it came to the 21st century retail however. As a result, they wound up another dinosaur along the side of the road, dead as the world marches slowly onwards.

So, like Leopold and many others, I’ll raise a glass to the Borders that once was, say thank you, and move on with my cultural life. Things change, after all.

Friday Review: The Wake

2011-09-02T00:21:00.023-04:00

I’m methodically going through my CD collection at work (as once memorialized in the Album of the Day posts on the old blog), this time in reverse chronological order. With my Prog Primer on Marillion fresh in my head, it turned out that one of my recommended albums of theirs, Misplaced Childhood, wound up playing back to back with The Wake, the early high point of their neo-prog contemporaries, IQ. They make for an interesting contrast.

By 1985, Marillion had emerged as the commercial victors among the neo-prog movement, with major label backing and something resembling popularity. IQ never made that breakthrough (national TV appearance on Live from London notwithstanding). Misplaced Childhood was released by EMI (who still own it) and pushed to the top of the charts. The Wake was originally released by Sahara Records and eventually rereleased on CD (multiple times) by the band’s own Giant Electric Pea label. I bought Misplaced Childhood at the music store in the mall. The Wake had to come from a prog-specialist mail order company.

Sonically, the difference is most stark by comparing arsenals deployed by the keyboard players. Mark Kelly had access to the latest and greatest tech, including the Emulator and PPG Wave, which ain’t cheap. Martin Orford, by contrast, was largely making due with vintage 1970s tech, but wielding it with great effect. “Outer Limits” wouldn’t be the same without that warbling Logan String Synth accompanying the driving bass line, nor would “Widow’s Peak” work without that shaky Mellotron.

Musically, of course, they’re both brilliant. The Wake is darker, both lyrically and musically, and lacks anything close to the hit singles Misplaced Childhood spawned. It also makes more room for instrumental interplay between Orford and guitarist Mike Holmes. All in all, IQ comes across as the more muscular of the two.

Where things really diverge, however, is the paths the bands travelled after these albums were released. I couldn’t pick just one Marillion album as a starting point the other day because they’ve been prolific and have shifted their sound so much over the years. IQ, by contrast, has had long periods of dormancy and have pretty much the same sound these days as they did back then. That’s not a bad thing – they do it better than just about anybody else. But it makes it much easier for me to pick a starting point for their catalog. The Wake is it. They’ve not yet done any better.

Details
-------------
The Wake, by IQ
Released 1985

Tracks:
1. Outer Limits (8:15)
2. The Wake (3:12)
3. The Magic Roundabout (8:18)
4. Corners (6:20)
5. Widow's Peak (9:12)
6. The Thousand Days (5:12)
7. Headlong (7:25)

The Players:
Paul Cook (drums & percussion)
Tim Esau (basses & bass pedals)
Mike Holmes (guitars)
Peter Nicholls (vocals, tambourine)
Martin Orford (keyboards)

With Harun (tablas on "Corners") & Dave Stewart (loan of the Sitar guitar)

When Sports Really Matter

2011-09-01T17:02:00.000-04:00

This is a big weekend for sports that I follow. The US takes on Costa Rica in a Friday friendly that will continue to mark the transition into the Klinsman era. On Sunday, WVU kicks off its football season against cross-state semi-rivals Marshall in a game that means a lot to those of us inside the state, if not to many others. And throughout the weekend the American Le Mans Series and the Indycars break in a new street circuit in Baltimore. I’ll miss a good bit of those, as I’ll be off spending time with friends and loved ones away from sporting concerns. But that’s not a problem, because sports are a pleasant diversion in my life, nothing more.

That’s not true for everyone. I’m not talking about idiots who wrap their self worth up in whether some team or another wins a game. I’m talking about people for whom the diversion of sports is a true lifeline. I’m talking about the well and truly oppressed.

Take this article in today’s New York Times about the popularity of the fledging pro soccer league in Burma (aka Myanmar), which was started in 2008:

'I don’t come here to support any particular team,' said Kyaw Lin, 15, a high school student standing in an especially rowdy section of bleachers during a recent match. 'I come for the freedom to yell anything I want.' Sports is an escape nearly everywhere from the tedium of life. But in Myanmar, with its layers of secret police and prison sentences of as much as 100 years for those who speak out against the government, a soccer match seems something more: an island of raucous merriment in a sea of grinding poverty and fear.

That freedom can get ugly, at times. A World Cup qualifier against Oman was halted in the first half because of objects being thrown onto the field by fans. Speaking of ugly:

The outdoor grandstand reeked of cheap liquor and the occasional pool of vomit. Shirtless fans exhibited a variety of creative, roughly sketched tattoos.

Ewww.

Yes, it appears that the junta that runs Burma is supporting all this as a sort of “rice and circuses” policy. Nonetheless, the breathing room allowed inside the stadium counts for something. And it seems to exist outside to a certain extent, as well:

[U Ko Htut, one of the country’s prominent writers on soccer] was imprisoned for 13 years and tortured for perceived crimes related to his student activism during a major uprising in 1988. Writing about sports, he says, is the closest thing to freedom of expression in Myanmar. The censors rarely bother him, he said, unlike political journalists who spend their careers having their work excised and redacted. (The name of this article’s author is being withheld because foreign journalists, with rare exceptions, are not officially allowed to report in the country.)

I read a book recently in which a character in China communicated with the outside world about dissident crackdowns under the veil of a blog devoted to Chinese professional basketball. Maybe something similar will leak out in reports of Burmese soccer?

So remember, friends, when you’re tempted to burn a couch or yell nasty things about the parentage of the guy who just punted you favorite driver out of the lead, we’ve got it lucky. We can get wrapped up in these silly things (or not) just for the fun of it. It’s not an act of rebellion just watching a damned game.

In Defense of Remakes (Sorta)

2011-08-31T16:55:00.001-04:00

One common complaint about Hollywood these days is that nobody there has any original ideas. It’s not true, of course, but that perception is fed by the big budget blockbusters that seem to be either sequels, remakes, or adaptations from some other source. As luminaries like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee embark no remakes, Matt Seitz over at Salon defends the whole concept of remakes. In the process, all he does is prove that any given remake is about as likely to suck or be great as any other movie.

He does makes one important historical point first, however: none of this is new. Hollywood’s always been a remake factory, to the point that in earlier generations directors would remake their own films a few years after the fact. I suspect it seems more prevalent these days because, thanks to DVDs and cable/satellite TV, the originals don’t slip quietly into memory any more. It’s hard not to compare the remake of, say, Fright Night* with the original when it’s on Starz every few days.

That being said, it seems obvious that some remakes suck and some don’t. But not all remakes start out with the same goal and I think that what the remake is trying to do. Simple recycling usually doesn’t get the work done.

In that sense, the most infamous remake of recent times is Gus van Zant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. Aside from some sort of performance art experiment, that seems pointless to me, but what do I know? Still, I wouldn’t expect any remake taking that route to appeal to a large audience, particularly where the original is so iconic.

More common are remakes like the aforementioned Fright Night (or an earlier Friday Review subject, The Wicker Man), which takes a decent mainstream movie and updates it for modern technology and tastes. I’ll be the first to admit that the inspiration for such remakes is probably completely financial (to tap into an existing fanbase), but that doesn’t mean the end product will inevitably suck. It does run a good chance of backfiring if said fanbase is pissed because the remake ruins the memory of the original.

Other types of remakes strike me as completely different beasts, though, and probably have a better chance of being interesting products in their own right. I’m thinking particularly of something like the Spike Lee project, Oldboy, which is a remake of a recent highly praised South Korean film. Taking a movie made in another culture and language and translating it into your own seems like a worthy justification for a remake.

If done correctly, you get both a new and entertaining/interesting film exposed to a wider audience as well as the original for the auteurs to seek out. People who decide they’ll never see a foreign flick because they don’t want to “read the movie” shut themselves out from a lot of meaningful movie experiences. But I’m not naive enough to know that The Magnificent Seven reached a lot more people in this country than Seven Samurai. As long as the adaptation is cognizant of what it loses and gains by changing settings, I’m all for it.

Beyond that, you really start moving out of the realm of “remakes” and into new works inspired by older ones. West Side Story, after all, isn’t a “remake” of Romeo & Juliet, any more than Ran (to keep the Kurosawa theme going) a “remake” of King Lear. Given that no idea in the 21st Century is truly original, it’s hard to take issue with anybody doing such reinterpretations.

So, as I said, that’s a long winded way of saying remakes are just like any other movie. Apply Sturgeon’s Law: 95% of them will be crap. Not because they’re remakes, mind you. Just because.

* FWIW, the remake is pretty good fun. It’s almost worth the price of admission alone to see The Doctor as a lush foul mouthed con artist.

Lyin’ Eyes

2011-08-30T16:50:00.000-04:00

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past few years, you should know by now that eyewitness identification testimony, which often comes as the dramatic highlight of a criminal trial, is not nearly the ironclad evidence it was once made out to be. As one study showed:

In one experiment, a 'customer' went into a convenience store to buy a soft drink with a traveler's check, which required him to provide an ID and spend a few minutes conversing with the clerk. Later, the clerks were asked to find the person in a group of photos. Forty-one percent made a wrong pick.

Errors don't happen because crime witnesses choose to lie. Most of them sincerely believe what they say. But their memories may be addled by shock, colored by a desire to punish the villain, or led astray by police suggestions.

But the proof is out in the real world, too:

The idea that human memory is frail and suggestible has gradually gained acceptance among leaders in law enforcement, buttressed by more than 2,000 scientific studies demonstrating problems with witness accounts and the DNA exonerations of at least 190 people whose wrongful convictions involved mistaken identifications. About 75,000 witness identifications take place each year, and studies suggest that about a third are incorrect.

Thankfully, courts are finally starting to take notice and change the way eyewitness identification is presented in court. Last week, the New Jersey Supreme Court, in an opinion of Proustian length, put more responsibility on the trial court judge’s shoulders to assure bogus ID testimony doesn’t get in front of a jury:

The justices said that 'courts must carefully consider identification evidence before it is admitted to weed out unreliable identifications' and 'juries must receive thorough instructions tailored to the facts of the case to be able to evaluate the identification evidence they hear.'

Like other evidence, it must be subject to careful scrutiny and challenge. The burden of disproof will still fall on the accused, but it will be easier to meet. Chances are good that, as a result, some blameless individuals will be spared.

And, as the New York Times article I linked above shows, some police departments are coming around to adopting recommendations from researchers about how to do non-suggestive and more accurate lineups (which are mostly done with pictures these days).

Even the Supreme Court is getting involved. Perry v. New Hampshire, on the Court’s docket for argument in November, involves an on-the-scene identification by a witness of the defendant. The officer who was talking with the witness did nothing improper. Nevertheless, the circumstances of the ID (including that the witness could not ID the defendant in a later photo lineup), raised questions about its veracity. The issue the Supreme Court will consider is whether Perry’s due process rights can still be violated by a problematic ID, even when the police didn’t do anything sleazy to procure the ID.

We’ll have to wait to see whether the Court will use Perry as a vehicle to revisit eyewitness ID testimony on the whole or maintain a narrow focus. Regardless of the outcome, the real change will only come when jurors learn to treat eyewitness ID with the skepticism and scrutiny all testimony deserves.

Coming to a Viewing Screen Near You

2011-08-29T17:06:00.000-04:00

I'm very happy to announce that one of my short stories has found a home.

"The Last Ereph" has been accepted for publication by ezine The Absent Willow Review in their November 16, 2011 issue. Is the story of a thief on the run and the dying cult in which he seeks refuge, set (as they say) a long time ago in a land far far away. I'll got into a little more detail about it when it goes online in November.

Appropriately enough, this story was written largely by hand in a notebook on the lawn at Storybook Farm between sets at ProgDay during Labor Day weekend last year.

If you're keeping score, this is my first "sale," the first thing I've convinced total strangers to try and get people I don't know to read some of my fiction. So I'm pretty fucking pleased, just at the moment. The first of many? We'll see!

Friday Review: Triskaidekaphobie/Le Poison Qui Rend Fou

2011-08-26T16:43:00.002-04:00

My first exposure to Present, the Belgian RIO band, was the DVD Rising to the Surface, composed of highlights from the 2005 version of NEARFest. Each band was given about 20 minutes on the DVD. Present’s time was taken up by one long track, filled with hypnotic and ferociously repetitive rhythms and musical motives. No vocals. No melodies, really, to speak of. The weirdness of the scene completed by an older guy on stage sort of 'conducting,' but only in the loosest sense and by a dude who came out about five minutes from the end wearing only a kilt and face paint, with a metal pipe he proceeded to beat the hell out of for the rest of the song.

After I saw and heard that, I said to myself, 'Self, you’ve got to hear some more from these guys.' It was not something you would walk away humming. But it was compelling, interesting, and deeply odd.

Turns out that the guy semi-conducting was Roger Trigaux, who had been one of the founding members of the other Belgian gift to RIO, Univers Zero. Trigaux, a guitar play, left Univers Zero to form his own band (although Univers Zero drummer/guiding light Daniel Denis worked with both). Given the shared histories, comparison is inevitable and, I think, unusually useful. Univers Zero takes more of a chamber music approach, so much so that I once wondered in a review if they could be called a “rock” band at all. Present is a little more obviously a rock band, given that Trigaux is primarily a guitar player. What both bands share is a commitment to making wonderfully uncommercial music that really calls out for close attentive listening.

Triskaidekaphobie is the band’s first album, released in 1980, while Le Poison Qui Rend Fou followed in 1985. In 1989, the wonderful Cuneiform label released them both on the same CD. They are precisely what I expect from Present at this point, even if they were the ones that set the standard in the first place (that lengthy workout on the NEARFest DVD is actually the lead off track from Triskaidekaphobie). I’d be lying if I said I had completely absorbed all this music, or even that I prefer it to 2001’s High Infidelity (definitely not a cover of the REO Speedwagon chart topper!), which I’ve had for a while.

Sometimes when I listen to stuff like this I’m reminded of the description of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: it "is like having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick." But in a good way. Seriously!

Details
-----------------
Triskaidekaphobie and Le Poison Qui Rend Fou, by Present
Released 1980, 1985, and 1989

Tracks, Triskaidekaphobie:
1. Promenade Au Fond D'un Canal (19:16)
2. Quatre-vingt Douze (15:34)
3. Repulsion (3:21)

Tracks, Le Poison Qui Rend Fou
4. Le Poison Qui Rend Fou, Part 1: Ram Ram Va Faire "Pif Paf" (15:25)
5. Ersatz (5:07)
6. Le Poison Qui Rend Fou, Part 2: "Didi, Dans Ta Chambre!" (9:42)
7. Samana (9:15)

Players:
Roger Trigaux (guitars, pianos)
Alain Rochette (pianos, synthesizes)
Daniel Denis (percussion)
Chistian Genet (electric bass on Triskaidekaphobie)
Ferdinand Philippot (electric bass on Le Poison Qui Rend Fou)
Marie-Anne Polaris (vocals)

Who Are You Suing, Dave?

2011-08-25T17:04:00.000-04:00

In the wake of the news that Steve Jobs is stepping down as the head of the cult . . . er, company that he helped found, Apple, here’s some interesting litigation action going on over one of their patents for the iPad.

Apple has sued Samsung for infringing on its patent for the iPad. In its defense, Samsung is arguing that the form of the iPad wasn’t really all that groundbreaking anyway, and so the patent Apple received should never have been granted in the first place (my understanding is that this a common line of argument in such cases). To bolster their argument, Samsung has turned to an unlikely source of legal support – Stanley Kubrick.

Specifically, his masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey:

'In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers,' the lawyer wrote . . .. As with the design claimed by Apple’s patent, 'the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor.'

See for yourself (Samsung lawyers included this link in their filing):

Full disclosure – I know next to nothing about patent law, so I have no opinion on whether this is a winning argument. According to one of the comments to the Wall Street Journal blog piece, the litigation is entirely about the look of the products, not their actual function (in other words, it’s about the outside, not the electronic guts inside). If that’s the case, Apple seems to be reaching to “own” such a generic design.

And it wouldn’t be the first time that a forward thinking piece of science fiction scuttled a later inventors quest for a monopoly:

Science fiction has been used as prior art in patent lawsuits before — Robert A. Heinlein described something like a waterbed in a 1930s short story, and this was cited in a successful case against someone who wanted to patent the waterbed in the 1960s.

Maybe I should start working in patent law. That way I could read sci-fi all day and call it "legal research!"

Prog Primer: Marillion

2011-08-22T17:12:00.001-04:00

A question from one of my loyal readers (I know! I'm just as surprised as you!):

Best Marillion album for a newbie? I am enjoying Glass Hammer per your blog.

Happy as I am to try and answer that question, it's really a tricky one. Marillion has been around so long and shifted sounds so much that it's hard to tell a newb where to start. To understand why, you have to know a little about the band.

The obvious dividing line in the band's history is when original front man Fish left after four studio albums. It's not really that simple, however, as Steve Hogarth (aka "H"), the "new" guy has not been around for 22 years and a dozen studio albums is own damn self. More to the point, he's the face of the band now, so if you're interested in getting in on the train moving forward, he's your guy.

The Fish Years

But let's start with the beginning, which means the Fish years. Marillion, along with IQ, Twelfth Night, and Pallas, were part of an early 80s resurgence of progressive rock dubbed neo-prog. Heavily influenced by Genesis, Pink Floyd, and Camel, they took the 70s prog formula and streamlined it a bit, updating it for a new decade.

One of things that set Marillion apart from that pack was that Fish owed more to Peter Hammill than Peter Gabriel as a lyricist (or vocalist. Songs about drug addiction ("He Knows You Know"), vengeful ex-lovers ("Incubus"), and the resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe ("White Russian") aren't quite the airy fairy nonsense that populated most early prog albums.

That being said, if you're a fan of early Genesis albums, early Marillion will resonate with you. From Script for a Jester's Tear each album gets further away from that sound (or stereotype, if you will), until the band was the very definition of neo-prog. My entry into Marillion was Misplaced Childhood, their most successful album, commercially. It hit the top of the UK charts and spawned a set of hit singles. Nonetheless, it's two original sides basically ran together and it was played all the way through live, so it's epic beyond the singles. Any album born of a 10-hour acid trip is bound to be. Although I prefer Clutching at Straws more often than not these days, Misplaced is the place to start for the Fish years.

The H Years: Major Label Era

Musically, the H years pick up where the band left off with Clutching, moving further and further away from the Genesis influenced neo-prog blueprint. Some folks never got over that and parted ways with the band. Others stuck it out and have been rewarded with a band that is constantly taking on new influences and new ideas. As a result, they're producing music that is still modern and interesting.

When H came along, Marillion was still riding a pretty high profile in Europe, with major label support at a time when their contemporaries were struggling. But diminishing commercial returns meant those days were numbers. Perhaps appropriately, H got four studio-backed albums with the band, just like Fish did. One of them, Holidays in Eden, was a conscious attempt to be more commercially successful and suffers for it, although it still had some great music.

That being said, perhaps the failure of Holidays in Eden to please most anybody led the band to one of it's perceived heights in of the H years, Brave. A return to the concept album format, it was spawned by news reports about a teenaged girl found unwilling (or unable) to speak while wandering the Severn Bridge between England and Wales. The album explores various themes about how she might have gotten there and how the world reacts to such things. It's utterly brilliant and marks the beginning of the band's experimentation with looser more ambient material.

They followed that up with Afraid of Sunlight, the first album I got when it was new. Although it didn't completely grab me at first, it's grown into not only one of my favorite Marillion albums, but one of my favorites of all time. On the surface, it seems little lighter and more radio friendly than Brave. But dig past a couple of tracks and the expansive soundscapes that band hinted at on Brave explode on songs like the title track, "Beyond You," and "King." Afraid of Sunlight also contains "Out of This World," about the death of water speed record seeker Donald Campbell and inspired the salvage of his doomed "boat" Bluebird.

You'd be hard pressed to go wrong with either of those albums as a starter. Pick Brave if the concept album idea appeals to you, Afraid of Sunlight if stand alone tracks strike your fancy.

The H Years: Transitional Era

Brilliant as Brave and Afraid of Sunlight were, they were not particularly successful on the charts. As a result, the band's tenure on a major label came to an end. Over the next few years they found their footing going forward, both musically and financially.

Although the three albums in this period - This Strange Engine, Radiation, and Marillion.com - all have their moments, they're all kind of patchy when it comes to quality. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend anybody start with any of these to begin with. They're most interesting to listen to now knowing what came next.

The H Years: The Modern Era

When the band emerged from the wilderness, they had discovered how to tap into their loyal, if not huge, fanbase to support them in making the kind of music they were interested making, from tour funds to album preorders to finance recording. The music they wanted to make, turns out, doesn't bear a whole lot of resemblance to what they were doing a decade or so before.

The first real musical statement they made was Anoraknophobia, which further explored some of the ambient influenced soundscapes and trip hop. It was also packaged and marketed in a way that screamed "we're not that band that sounds like Genesis anymore!" They're right (and it's a good thing), but the eagerness to escape the "prog" label on that album always struck me as kind of a slap at those of us who had supported the band for a long time.

The real masterpiece of the band's current era, however, is Marbles. It takes what was going on before, adds a healthy dose of Floydian scope and some melodic overlays for all the lush stuff in the background to make the definitive statement of modern Marillion. Epic and intimate, lush and sparse, floating and rocking. If you don't find anything on Marbles that flips your switch, then modern Marillion just isn't for you.

Marbles was originally released in two versions, the 2-CD deluxe version for those (like me) who ordered it way ahead of time, and a 1-disc version released to retail shops. Since then, the 2-CD version (minus the lengthy book artwork from the original release) has become available on the band's website. I'd recommend going with that one, as the 1-disc version omits the epic "Ocean Cloud," which is worth the extra price of admission.

The couple of albums since Marbles have been a little hit and miss, although Happiness is the Road (another 2-CD set) has a lot to recommend it. For beginners, though, I'd hold off on those until later. For the record, I don't consider Less Is More, the recent album of acoustic versions of some songs as an "album" proper, since there was nothing new on it.

So, Start With . . .

So, the short answer after that lengthy explanation as to where to start with Marillion is, "it depends."* If you're interested in the band's early days, at their most obviously proggy, go with Misplaced Childhood. For a feeling of the early high points of the Hogarth era, it's Brave or Afraid of Sunlight. For what they're up to now, head for the 2-CD version of Marbles.

Or . . .

If you're the kind of person who goes for DVD things, there's another option. For the past decade or so, the band has put on festival-style weekends in Europe and Montreal, with three full nights of music (one usually built around a particular album). There are DVD releases from many of these events, but the two from the last run, Live in Montreal or Out of Season would be good starters. Each is 3 DVDs, one with the entire Seasons End album (plus some extras), one with a chronological walk through their discography, and another focusing on the epic tracks. Here's a teaser for Out of Season:

Again, if there's nothing in those discs that flips your switch, you're just not cut out to be a Marillion fan.

* I learned in law school that's the right answer to damn near every question.

Friday Review:Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills

2011-08-19T19:06:00.001-04:00

This is kind of a cheat, as I saw this documentary a while back. But it's relevant as ever today, and not just because it popped up on Morgan Spurlock's countdown of 50 Documentaries to See Before You Die that's running on the Keith Olberman Netwo . . . I mean Current TV.

On May 5, 1993, three 8-year-old boys were reported missing in West Memphis, Arkansas. The next day, the bodies of the three boys were found in a ditch, stripped naked and hogtied. From the beginning, there was a dispute about whether the boys had been killed there or the bodies dumped there after killings elsewhere.

Suspicion fell on three teenagers - Jessie Misskelley, Jr., Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols - who were outsiders in the small town. Each had been in trouble for minor crimes and two had dropped out of high school. They shared an interest in heavy metal. A theory developed that the murders had been committed as part of some sort of occult ritual.

The three teens went to trial and were convicted. One, Echols, was sentenced to death. You can read more details about the case here.

As all this was going on, filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were covering the investigation. They even became a part of it when a knife that may have been involved in the killings was delivered to them. The result of their work, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, not only became a powerful documentary of a heinous murder case, but kicked off a nationwide campaign to have the convictions of the teenagers, labeled the West Memphis 3, reversed.

Paradise Lost is a compelling piece of work (it's sequel somewhat less so, if only because we sort of know what's happening going on). It doesn't come to a conclusion as to who killed the three 8-year-olds, but it certainly leaves the impression that something was rotten in the trial of the West Memphis 3. For years, they've fought to get out.

Today, the West Memphis 3 walked free. Sort of. As Jerlalyn sorts it out, the state agreed to a plea agreement by which the three pleaded guilty using a process known as an Alford plea, meaning they do not actually admit guilt, but admit the state could prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Although they were all sentenced to, essentially, time served sentences, they are subject to 10-year terms of what look like something akin to unsupervised probation. So any little fuck up could send them right back.

Paradise Lost didn't lead directly to exoneration of an innocent man the way Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line did. But it certainly raised the profile of the case to a level that made it impossible for authorities in West Memphis to just sweep the whole thing under the rug. The West Memphis 3 will never get back the hunk of their lives they spent in prison. And, at least for a little while, they're not really "free." But it's certainly an improvement.

Details
----------------
Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, followed by Paradise Lost 2: Revelations
Released 1996
Directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky

"I Don’t Know" Only Goes So Far

2011-08-18T17:03:00.000-04:00

Penn Jillette, half of the famous magic duo and a co-host of Showtime’s mostly brilliant Bullshit!, has a new book out called, God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales. So he’s been making the rounds on the TV book circuit. Last week, he went on Piers Morgan’s show and was grilled about his atheism and libertarianism. In this column at CNN’s website, he follows up on that conversation (at least he didn’t walk off in a huff like Christine “I am not a witch!” O’Donnell did last night).

Jillette’s main point is the power of being able to say “I don’t know” about something and how that lead him to both be an atheist and a libertarian. I certainly agree that not only recognizing that you, personally, are ignorant of some things (in a humble sort of way), is important, but so is being comfortable with that fact. After all, there are a lot of “God of the gaps” arguments deployed be believers that basically comes down to their inability to accept “I don’t know” as an answer for the universe’s big questions. Atheists and agnostics, on the other hand, don’t have that problem. I can see the intersection there.

I’m not convinced that what applies in one arena applies in the other. Questions about the existence of God, how the universe came to be, or why we’re here are important (and fun!) ones to consider, but they’re also largely irrelevant to daily life. God or no God, everybody’s got to find food, shelter, clothing, sex, and provide for the needs of their families. That I don’t believe in God impacts the rest of the world not at all.*

Here’s how Jillette explains it:

What makes me libertarian is what makes me an atheist -- I don't know. If I don't know, I don't believe. I don't know exactly how we got here, and I don't think anyone else does, either. We have some of the pieces of the puzzle and we'll get more, but I'm not going to use faith to fill in the gaps. I'm not going to believe things that TV hosts state without proof. I'll wait for real evidence and then I'll believe.

And I don't think anyone really knows how to help everyone. I don't even know what's best for me. Take my uncertainty about what's best for me and multiply that by every combination of the over 300 million people in the United States and I have no idea what the government should do.

That argument doesn’t really lead to libertarianism, though, or any other political ideology. What it really leads to is political disengagement. It’s somewhat similar to what Ilya Somin often writes about at the Volokh Conspiracy – the rational ignorance of voters (put simply, that a single vote means so little that the voter casting it has little reason to educate himself before casting it). Staying out of the political process because “I don’t know” makes some sense in that case.

But it’s not a persuasive reason to become a libertarian. Libertarianism isn’t disengagement with the political process. It’s an affirmative ideology that holds certain base principles and applies them to the real world. You’ve got to “know” stuff in order to sign on to those base principles. The same is true of any political ideology.

If anything, a rigorous adherence to a skeptical “I don’t know” position should lead one away from a fixed political ideology. Dogmatic adherence to ideology is rarely the best answer to every question, regardless of the venue. Politics is no different. Skepticism would counsel questioning all the first principles and examining the evidence of how a particular problem has been solved (or not) in other places.

We’d all be better off if we could get ourselves comfortable with giving “I don’t know” as an answer to questions big and small. It would lead to people being more open to rational solutions to problems and less reliant on the knee-jerk responses common to ideologues of all stripes. So I applaud Jillette for embracing his not knowing. I’m just not why it leads him to drink the libertarian Kool-Aid.

* Acting on beliefs, regardless of what they are, is a different story, of course. But we’re just talking about belief itself, or lack thereof, right now.

The Neverending Campaign

2011-08-17T17:12:00.000-04:00

I don’t remember when the 24-hour news cycle kicked in. My big reference point is the days after 9/11, once the actual news died down, when the tickers that CNN and the rest started running along the bottom of the screen held on and became fixtures. But I’m sure it started well before then.

Likewise, I’m not certain when the political realm kicked into perpetual campaign mode. Nobody actually governs anymore, they just lurch from one electoral contest to the other. Maybe it’s always been like that and I was once too young to notice. Maybe it took the 24-hours news cycle to feed it. After all, when you’ve got no other news to digest, handicapping the presidential horserace is an easy way to fill time. Even if the first real vote is months away.

Which is a long way of saying I agree with just about everything that Glenn Greenwald had to say in his column yesterday. Far from simply noting the ongoing campaign season and bemoaning it, he does a good job of arguing why it’s actually bad for the country as a whole.

For one thing, Greenwald argues that the near exclusive focus on the campaigns helps obscure what those same politicians are actually doing in office. It also impacts the way the news media treats the whole business, turning into just another reality show that’s more focused on style and personalities rather than substance. That the bloviators are often wrong when it comes to the handicapping of the race in which they allegedly have some expertise (Greenwald mentions a Washington Post columnist who three weeks ago argued that questioning Tim Pawlenty’s chances was “silly,” but said of his withdrawal from the race over the weekend that it was “no great surprise”) is icing on the cake.

More detrimental, in my eyes, is how the relentless campaigning feeds the political tribalism that forms the debate in this country. Elections are either/or affairs (for the most part) and the constant campaign drumbeat makes it easy for people to slip into “my team rules, your team sucks!” positions without much thought. As Greenwald points out, that makes criticism of “your guy” more difficult and, therefore, less frequent and less helpful to the overall discussion.

And it goes beyond that:

Those depressing, destructive trends are exacerbated by the manipulative fear-mongering that drives these campaigns. Every four years, The Other Side is turned into the evil spawn of Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden. Each and every election cycle, each party claims that -- unlike in the past, when Responsible Moderates ruled and the "crazies" and radicals were relegated to the fringes (the Democrats were once the Party of Truman!; Ronald Reagan was a compromising moderate!) -- the other party has now been taken over by the extremists, making it More Dangerous Than Ever Before. That the Other Side is now ruled by Supreme Evil-Doers means that anything other than full-scale fealty to their defeat is viewed as heresy. Defeat of the Real Enemy is the only acceptable goal. Election-time partisan loyalty becomes the ultimate Litmus Test of whether you're on the side of Good: it's the supreme With-Us-or-With-the-Terrorists test, and few are willing to endure the punishments for failing it. It's an enforcement mechanism for Party loyalty that -- by design -- breeds slavish partisan fealty.

None of this has anything to do with reality.

How to solve the problem? I have no clue. Greenwald doesn’t offer any ideas, either. I sometimes hear people ask why we can’t have short to-the-point campaigns like they do in, say, the United Kingdom. That overlooks the wholesale differences in political structures and the presence of the First Amendment. It would be nearly impossible (and clearly unwise) to try and muzzle a potential candidate, or media outlet willing to cover her, for a certain amount of time before an election. We could always rely on the good taste and common sense of the American people, but only if we’re willing to ignore the fact that it’s what got us here in the first place.

The one place I disagree with Greenwald in this piece is the lament (as I’ve read elsewhere) that Ron Paul is being unfairly ignored in the wake of the results in Iowa last weekend. Greenwald argues he’s being made “all but an ‘unperson’ in Orwellian terms.” John Stewart, of course, makes the case in a more amusing way:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

I think that overlooks two things.

First, the Ames Straw Poll is of dubious use as a predictor of electoral success. Of the five prior winners only one-and-a-half (Bob Dole and Phil Gramm shared the title in 1995) went on to win the GOP nomination and only one of them, Bush the Younger, went on to become president. It’s not quite the curse of death that the Best New Artist Grammy is, but it’s not much better.*

Second, the nature of the straw poll is that it serves candidates like Ron Paul, who have small but dedicated followings, very well. He’s done well in such forums before, as when he won the CPAC straw polls in 2010 and 2011, but those results never materialize into wider electoral support in caucuses and primaries. In other words, the media has seen this story before and knows how it ends. If there’s one thing the news media doesn’t want, it’s old news and Paul appears to be it.

I’m not saying the media should ignore Paul while he’s still in the race. The coverage would probably be richer for it. But it’s not “unfair” and I understand why they’ve moved on to newer, shinier people to cover.

Which, I suppose, goes back to Greenwald’s main point. So maybe he’s right after all. Fuck.

* Ironically enough, today at work I was listening to a lot of stuff from Frank Zappa’s 1988 tour, which including lots of digs at the idea of a Pat Robertson presidency. Robertson won the Ames poll in 1987. He didn’t get the GOP nomination.

Spoilers Are Good for You!

2011-08-16T17:26:00.000-04:00

All right, well, maybe not "good," but not nearly as bad as some people make them out to be.

A couple of years ago, over on the old blog, I took aim at people who bitch and complain about "spoilers," information that discloses crucial plot twists or endings of movies, TV shows, or books. As I said at the time:

if the only thing that moves you about a movie or TV show is the mechanics of the plot, you're pretty much beyond hope.

Or maybe it says more about what you're watching/reading. But, honestly, if this is your impression of Citizen Kane once you know the big secret:

I'm afraid I can't help you.

But not to fear! New research from UC San Diego shows that the presence of spoilers doesn't really impact a reader's enjoyment of a particular story. Researchers took several short stories with "twist" kind of endings and had some people read the original and others read a version with spoilers in the introductory paragraph. The results:

Subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions of ironic-twist stories, where, for example, it was revealed before reading that a condemned man’s daring escape is all a fantasy before the noose snaps tight around his neck.

The same held true for mysteries. Knowing ahead of time that Poirot will discover that the apparent target of attempted murder is, in fact, the perpetrator not only didn’t hurt enjoyment of the story but actually improved it.

Subjects liked the literary, evocative stories least overall, but still preferred the spoiled versions over the unspoiled ones.

A brief aside as the genre writer in my notes that even when they know the ending, people still don't like the high-brow stuff as much. Ha!

Why, exactly, would people prefer the spoiled stories? That's beyond the reach off the study itself, but one researcher speculates that:

'Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing,' said Christenfeld, a UC San Diego professor of social psychology.

'Monet’s paintings aren’t really about water lilies,' he said.

I wouldn't go quite that far. Plot surely isn't nearly irrelevant, but perhaps the brutal outline of the story - the Joe Friday version, if you will - is. It's really only an excuse to get characters moving, talking, and thinking about things. In other words, coming up with a story isn't the hard part. Telling it is.

*gulp*

Second City Visions

2011-08-15T17:11:00.000-04:00

Last week, K and I spend a few days in Chicago in honor of her birthday. Birthday trips have become a sort of tradition for us. We'll load up the car, head for a not-too-far-away metropolis, plop down in the middle of it, and enjoy ourselves. We chose Chicago because K had never been there and I really enjoyed the couple of days I spent there while I was in law school.

Here are some pics to give you an idea of where we went and why. Unless otherwise noted, they were all taken by K, the official photographer of Feeding the Silence.

Of course, we were not alone in our travels. Maia, the One-Eyed Wonder Pup, and Uzume the Perpetual Motion Pup came along, too. This was Uzume's first big city trip. She adjusted pretty well.

She even found time for one of her favorite pastimes - sitting and growling at her food for no apparent reason.

We stayed just north of the river, near Trump Tower, and so had to navigate down to The Loop on foot. Here's a shot down river from the North Street bridge. We had dinner that night at the restaurant on the right.

We only had two real targets for this trip, one of which was The Art Institute of Chicago, famous home of Seurat's Sunday Afternoon . . ., Hopper's Nighthawks, and, as of 1999 when I was last there, a bizarre installation called "Clown Torture." Sadly, that last one appears to have gone away. Regardless, the building is still guarded by a a pair of sturdy lions.

K took several pictures of interesting paintings and others things you can see in the set on my Flickr feed. Here are a couple of the more gargantuan pieces.

I have no idea who sculpted this guy, or who he is supposed to be. He's just plopped in the lobby of the Institutes's modern wing. It called out for photography.

This stairwell (which has several different bits, as you can see), contained an installation called Public Notice 3, by Jitish Kallat, which takes the words of a speech given at the 1893 First World Parliament of Religions urging the end of fanaticism and emphasizing tolerance of all beliefs and lays them out under the steps. K posed for this one, so I must have taken it.

As I said, we dined that night in a restaurant right on the river beside the North Street bridge. Here's a picture I took from our table up North Street.

Our other "must do" was a concert on Wednesday night at Ravinia Festival, Chicago's big outdoor concert venue in the northern suburb of Highland Park. We decided to take the scenic route up there and catch a couple of interesting sights along the way.

The Bahá'í Faith emerged from 19th-century Persia and teaches a message of the unity of mankind and its religions. If you've never heard of them, don't feel bad - they claim only 155,000 adherents in the United States (we marginalized atheists, by contrast, can at least muster a few million). Regardless, their house of worship in Wilmette (one of only seven in the world and the only one in the United States) is a breathtaking building.

As you can see, the architecture carries on the unity theme, incorporating several religious symbols.

Photography of the dome inside isn't allowed, but apparently that doesn't stop everybody.

Photo by ctot_not_def, taken from Wikimedia Commons

The Arabic script at the top translates to "O thou glory of glories." Here's an arty shot of the sun peaking out over the dome.

From the Bahá'í house of worship, we proceeded to the Chicago Botanic Garden. Unlike the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, the Chicago Botanic Garden is mostly outside and covers a lot of ground. They've got water lilies.

And a waterfall.

And some lovely sculptured islands for the Japanese portion of the gardens.

A portion of the Japanese section include some willow trees that hung out over the surrounding water. K took this really neat picture under one of them. Check out the full sized version in the Flickr feed.

No pictures of the concert, featuring Los Lonely Boys and Los Lobos. It was excellent, with the end of each set evolving into a jam session featuring both bands. Good times.

The next day, we took a tour on the river given by the Chicago Architecture Foundation. It's a great way to get a feel for the city's history and see some pretty neat buildings. Like the Tribune Building, built for the newspaper, which tops a high rise with a Gothic temple type device.

Or this building (it lacks a cool name, just has an address) of with curved green glass that matches the bend in the river. It also reflects the buildings across the river.

This is part of the Boeing headquarters, which has both a tall tower and this shorter annex. The superstructure at the top there isn't ornamental - it's actually the support from which the rest of the building hangs. Traditional underground supports wouldn't work because the train runs underneath.

And then we came home. It was a wonderful little trip with lots of cool things to see. But with all the pictures, this one is my favorite.

Friday Review: I, Claudius

2011-08-05T00:05:00.002-04:00

When modern TV critics write wistfully of the good ol' days, when high-class miniseries produced for broadcast networks roamed the Earth, they'll inevitably cite Roots and I, Claudius as touchstones. After spending a few days working my way through the 13-episode British tour of the early Roman Empire, I can see why.

Produced by the BBC in 1976, and brought to the US by PBS a year later, I, Claudius roams well beyond the life and times of Rome's fourth emperor. In fact, were it not for a clever framing device lifted from the novels upon which it's based, we wouldn't even see Claudius until the third or fourth episode. Instead, the run covers Rome's first four emperors, including the illustrious founder Augustus and that batshit star of 1970s high-form porn, Caligula.

The frame device that allows Claudius, and Derek Jacobi (in a career making role), to show up from word one is that the story that follows is a history of his family that Claudius himself wrote. He cleverly buried a copy to avoid the destructive fires of other (his successor, Nero - you know what happened to him) so that the truth can be known to posterity. That device also allows a clever out for anything presented that might not be faithful to the historical record - it's only the word of Claudius, who might not be the most reliable of narrators.

And what a story Claudius tells. Over the first six episodes, things are driven by Livia, wife of Augustus and grandmother to Claudius. She has but one goal in life - to see her son, Tiberius, follow Augustus as emperor, preferably to exercise unquestioned authority (whether Rome's lost republic will rise from the ashes hangs over the entire series. She lets nothings stand in her way and gets her hands pretty bloody (metaphorically - she's a champion poisoner). Livia, at least as presented here, makes Cersei Lannister look like the MILF who brings the orange slices to soccer practice.

Those first several episodes set the tone for all that comes after. Alliances wax and wane, the inconvenient are killed for that sin, and occasionally there are orgies. History, as we generally learn it, goes on off set, but usually only mentioned in passing. The scheming lives of the imperials is the focus here. Unfortunately, that means that once Livia dies (Claudius later makes her a goddess), things get a little repetitive. Nobody who comes after is as compelling a focus.

What saves the series is an unholy collection of British acting talent, many of whom would go on to prominence in the sci-fi/fantasy world:

Sian Phillips - Clash of the Titans, Dune
Brian Blessed - Flash Gordon, Dr. Who
John Hurt - Alien, 1984
Patrick Stewart - Star Trek: The Next Generation
George Baker - Dr. Who
John Rhys-Davies - Lord of the Rings, Sliders

Even Derek Jacobi himself wound up on Dr. Who (there may be a BAFTA bylaw requiring every actor in Britain to be on that show, or a spin off, at one point). Watching Vultan and Picard plot and scheme is just fun on a bun.

That being said, the series shows some signs of age. Aside from technical issues (it looks pretty good, but the sound needs remixed), the biggest drawback is that the whole spectacle is obviously playing out on sound stages. It works, most of the time, but it leads to scenes where we only know the characters are (say) at a gladiatorial contest because they're in the stands reacting to what they're seeing. There's no outside location shots and no real attempt and creating a "realistic" feel. The result is more like an extended theater piece than modern historical series like (obviously) Rome or even Game of Thrones. That staginess sometimes carries over to the performances, which can go overboard at times.

In fact, given the juiciness of the material, I'm surprised HBO or even the BBC hasn't made a remake yet. The script lends itself to the type of stylized debauchery that's so in vogue today. This version isn't even the first attempt to put this story on the screen. In 1937, Alexander Korda started production on an epic movie version (with Charles Loughton as Claudius), but it fell apart only a month into shooting.

Thankfully, the original is still eminently watchable. It lacks the spectacle of its 21st-century decedents, but, at bottom, it tells a simple story. In the end, it's all about power, what people will do to get it, and what it does to them. You don't need a big effects budget to pull that off.

Details
------------------
I, Claudius
Originally broadcast 1976
Written by Jack Pulman
Based on I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert Graves
Starring Derek Jacobi, Sian Phillips, John Hurt, et. al

The Sweet Sting of Rejection

2011-08-03T17:03:00.005-04:00

I spend my free time over the weekend trying to get my writerly life organized, at least somewhat. Figured now as as good a time as any to take stock of things.

The motivating event for that organization was that I finished the second draft of my 2008 NaNoWriMo project, Plausible Reliability. I had started to revised it once before, but couldn't slog through more than about 80 pages. What triggered the second (successful) attempt was getting a red-penned copy of the first draft back from my father. He handed it back to me with some kind words of encouragement, so I took another whack at it.

Second draft finished, I went out Saturday and had it printed up and collected in a spiffy three-ring binder. Then I stuck it in a box. And put the box in the closet. There it will moulder forever, or at least until I kick the bucket and my executor decides to ignore my wishes and try and publish it anyway.*

That second pass through, unfortunately, reinforced my conclusion that Plausible Reliability sucks, and sucks pretty hard. It's slow, nothing really happens until the final fifth of the book, and then when it does it's kind of an anticlimax. I still like the general idea, and might return to it someday. But for now, it's into the box it goes.

That's not an entirely bad, or even unusual, thing. Nearly every writer's first novel sucks. Many of them wind up "trunked," which is just a shorter way of saying "dumped in a box in the closet for eternity." Plausible Reliability will always be a milestone for me because it was the first novel I finished and let me prove to myself that I could string together a long-form story. The fact that I can look at it now, see that it sucks, and figure out why will only make things easier going forward with other projects.

Speaking of other projects, my attempts to sell one my short stories continues to be like bashing my head against a brick wall. Since January I've shopped around six different stories to 24 different markets and received . . . 23 rejections! The only hold out right now is Tor's website, which takes forever to get back to people. I sent the other five, and a new one, back out last night, all to new (to me) markets, to change things up a bit.

I know, logically, that this sort of rejection is par for the course for writers, new and unpublished ones especially. It's one of the gauntlets you have to run in order to break into the biz. Sort of like why I had to take a tax law course at WVU even though it wasn't on the bar exam - everybody else had to suffer, damn it, now you will, too!

Nevertheless, it can get disheartening. I take some comfort in the fact that, in spite of what seems like a lot of shoot downs, I haven't even been at this for a whole year. So, I'll keep plugging away at it, at least until my email account is overrun by rejection notices so that the entire system crashes under their weight.

Hey, that gives me an idea for a story . . .

* Did I just compare myself with Kafka? Maybe, sorta. I've got some nerve, huh?

Don't Trust, Just Verify

2011-08-02T17:07:00.007-04:00

Back in 2007, I wrote about how conflicted I was over the issue of criminal defendants "rolling" on one another in order to try and get a lower sentence. In other words, "snitches." As I said back then, cooperating with authorities is often the only way a defendant in the federal system can reduce his sentence, so defense attorneys are bound to pursue that option when it presents itself. On the other hand, when someone else is doing the cooperating against our client, we rail about the unreliability of testimony bought for a reduced sentence.

With that in mind, I'm intrigued by what might come of a law California Governor Jerry Brown just signed that takes aim at jailhouse informants:

Jerry brown jailhouse informant law signed The new law requires prosecutors to present forensic evidence or uncompromised testimony that corroborates information provided by in-custody witnesses who claim to have been told or overheard incriminating statements by the defendant.

In other words, a jury could not convict someone on the word of a snitch alone. According to Scott at Simple Justice, the law is a stricter version of one passed in Texas (and was vetoed by Cali's interim governor in 2008 because it would make it too hard to convict people). Scott also has some of the evidence that shows how unreliable snitch testimony can be.

Since snitches get a benefit for their testimony, in at least the possibility of a reduced sentence, doesn't that quid pro quo raise other questions? For a while late in the 20th century, one court said it did.

In 1998, the Tenth Circuit, in a case called US v. Singleton, held that such arrangements violated a federal statute providing that "whomever . . .directly or indirectly" gives "anything of value" to a witness based on his testimony commits a crime. The court specifically rejected the Government's attempt to read a "law enforcement exception" into that statute and held that the testimony of Singleton's codefendant at her trial, produced as result of a plea agreement requiring cooperation, should have been suppressed. I was in law school when Singleton came down and remember what a shock wave it sent through the legal community.

Of course, such a ground breaking precedent couldn't stand. The entire Tenth Circuit reheard the case en banc and decided, 9-3, that the statute did not apply to snitch situations. "Whomever," the court concluded, did not include prosecutors acting in their official capacity. Crisis averted, things returned to normal.

But, as Scott points out, the status quo has serious problems. Maybe laws like California's will help change it. Not every snitch is unreliable, but the nature of the beast is that there is motive to make stuff up. As usual, skepticism is the best bet. Don't trust, just verify.

Know Your Regionalisms

2011-08-01T21:28:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, Britain's The Telegraph newspaper had an article about the strange case of DB Cooper, who disappeared after he jumped from a plane he hijacked in 1971. Along with $200,000. It's still and open case and, according to the article, the FBI is even tracking down a potential new lead.

That's fine and all, but one line in the article made me nearly laugh Diet Coke out through my nose. Writer Alex Hannaford is trying to establish just how fascinated some folks are with the case, even all these decades later, when he writes:

As one person told me, Cooper is the Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest. He is an enigma and a huge subculture has sprung up devoted to sleuthing his story.

Ahem. Actually, to be completely accurate, you know what the Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest is? Bigfoot! The legend dates back to Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, although there have been sightings in other areas. And, of course, Bigfoot has an Asian cousin, the Yeti. He does get around.

I wonder who the Loch Ness Monster of Scotland is?

Tossing a Mokney Wrench Into the Machinery of Death

2011-08-01T16:44:00.000-04:00

West Virginia has it's issues, but one thing I take a great deal of pride in about my home state is that we got rid of the death penalty in 1965. Although there are some occasional rumblings about bringing it back, it never really gets anywhere. Why should it? The state has one of the lowest crime rates in the nation and couldn't really afford the cost of actually implementing it, anyway.

But the state's law isn't the final word on whether somebody in West Virginia might face the death penalty. The feds can step in and prosecute a case that falls within their jurisdiction and can, if they so desire, seek the death penalty. They did just that a few years ago in the case of a Mingo County man charged with killing a drug informant. After securing a conviction and death sentence, the conviction was tossed out due to some issues with a juror. The retrial ended in another conviction, but no death sentence. The feds squandered millions of dollars in the effort.

That case sprang to mind when I read about a battle of wills going on between the governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee and the local United States Attorney over the fate of Jason Wayne Pleau. Pleau is serving a state sentence in Rhode Island that's set to expire in 2028. He is also charged, in federal court, with a robbery and murder for which the feds could seek the death penalty.

The feds submitted a request to the governor under the Interstate Agreement on Detainers Act asking for Pleau to be turned over for proceedings in federal court. The governor said no:

Chafee based his denial, believed a first in the nation, on Rhode Island’s longstanding rejection of the death penalty. Chafee said Pleau’s lawyers told him their client would agree to plead guilty in state court and face life without parole, the maximum penalty under Rhode Island law.

Undeterred, the feds went to the federal district court and applied for a writ of habeas corpus ad prosequendum, which is the usual means of bringing someone in state custody into federal court to, say, testify in someone else's trial. Chafee's lawyers (and Pleau's) argued last week to the First Circuit Court of Appeals that the feds couldn't get the writ because, once they invoked the IADA, they were bound by Chafee's decision to not hand Pleau over. The IADA does give a governor that power, but apparently nobody else ever thought to actually exercise it.

Chafee's argument has some gut appeal, but I'm not sure it will ultimately prevail (it didn't in the court below). For one thing, I'm not sure that Congress ever intended the IADA to act as a permanent bar on transferring someone from state custody. For another, it seems that if Chafee prevails it means that, in the future, the feds should just avoid the IADA all together and apply for the writ. Cut out the possibility of gubernatorial obstruction completely. If that happens, what's the point of the federal government being a part of the IADA?

That being said, the IADA provision allowing Chafee to decline the feds' request has to mean something, too. After all, he can't prevent Pleau from being tried by the feds completely - they'll just have to wait until he's released from the Rhode Island prison. And given the difference between the feds and Rhode Island when it comes to the death penalty, isn't that a legitimate basis to deny the request? Other countries, when dealing with extradition matters, can force the feds to take the death penalty off the table before they turn over a defendant, why shouldn't the states do the same?

In the end, I expect the First Circuit (and maybe the Supremes afterwards) to hold that Chafee has to turn Pleau over. But I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised if it turns out otherwise.

Friday Review Double Feature: The Wicker Man

2011-07-22T17:04:00.001-04:00

Here's the sum total of what I knew about The Wicker Man prior to this week. I knew that the original British film, from the 1970s, has become a cult classic. That it stars Edward Woodward, who was the lead in one of my favorite flicks, Breaker Morant. That it involved some sort of weird religious rites and a twist ending. That it was remade a few years ago, with Nicholas Cage taking over for the Breaker and that the remake was universally panned.

I had put the original version in the Netflix queue because of Woodward and general curiosity. After I finally got around to watching it this week, I had to follow up with the Cage version. It's an interesting case study in how Hollywood can take something that earned goodwill the hard way and piss it all away in under two hours.

First, the basics. The Wicker Man is about a cop dispatched to a remote island to investigate the disappearance, or maybe the murder, of a child. The island's inhabitants have, to put it mildly, some non-traditional religious beliefs. The cop tries to get to the bottom of the mystery, only to find himself . . . well, I won't ruin the big twist for you. I'm not generally big on avoiding spoilers, particularly for flicks that are as old as I am, but this one went somewhere I wasn't suspecting, so I'll give it some credit.

The release of the original film was bungled by the studio, which forced some cuts and didn't give it any publicity upon release. In spite of that, it's gone on to achieve such cult status that it's been dubbed the Citizen Kane of horror films. I wouldn't go nearly that far - it's sluggish, silly, and not really all that horrific. But it's also unique and fun, in it's own peculiar way. It's cult status is no doubt helped by the difficulty of its release and how that lent it an air of mystery. I can certaily see why some people really love it.

And I can see precisely why any big budget Hollywood remake was doomed to failure. Everything that makes the original fun to watch disappears. Yes, the plot is basically the same, but the ambiance of the whole movie is quite different, not to mention the execution. So to speak.

Take, for instance, the odd religious society into which our hero cop is thrust. In the original, it's old European pagans (Druish, for most part), who, for all their weird ways, are at least fun to hang around with. They drink. They sing (the film has several musical numbers). They wander around nekkid. Watching that libertine lifestyle bump up against Woodward's rigid (but sincere) Christianity is actually interesting.

For the remake, however, the fun drunken pagans are gone. Replaced, inexplicitly, but a dour colony of joyless matriarchal scolds (the only men on the island are used for manual labor and breeding). They're like something out of Rush Limbaugh's nightmares. Cage, meanwhile, has none of the religious background of his predecessor, so it really doesn't do anything for the film.

I can understand why merely transporting the pagans to Puget Sound (where, inexplicitly, Cage's California cop tries to wield the same legal authority as Woodward, who was actually in his jurisdiction, did) wouldn't work, but is a bunch of murderous shrews the best Labute could come up with? Maybe. After his excellent debut, In the Company of Men, and pretty good follow up, Your Friends and Neighbors, his film career has cratered. Certainly, his rebooted version of The Wicker Man did not right the ship. It does give Cage an excuse to beat up several women, though. If you've ever really wanted to see that kind of thing, this movie is for you.

In the end, the remake of The Wicker Man is a series of poor choices, summarized neatly by Brett Cullum from DVD Verdict:

LaBute's final insult to injury? He dedicates the film to the memory of Joey Ramone. Joey would have at least had the good sense to make this remake fast, loud, and two minutes long.

No doubt. I wanna' be sedated . . .

The Details
-------------------
The Wicker Man
Released 1973
Directed by Robin Hardy
Written by Anthony Shaffer
From the novel Ritual, by David Pinner
Starring Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland, et. al.

The Wicker Man
Released 2006
Written & Directed by Neil LaBute
Starring Nicholas Cage, Ellen Burstyn, Leelee Sobieski, et. al.

Who Dictates Meaning?

2011-07-21T17:44:00.000-04:00

The other day I stumbled across this article at Cracked, which deals with a bunch of books “everyone (including your English teacher) got wrong.” Considering the source, I’m not all that certain of the conclusions (the one about Alice in Wonderland seems particularly out there), but I do know of one that is on the money. Kind of.

Contrary to everything you’ve ever thought after reading Fahrenheit 451 (or seeing Truffaut’s film version), Ray Bradbury insists that it’s not really about censorship. Rather, it’s about how television would destroy the will and/or ability of the populace at large to read and what that meant for society. At least that’s what Bradbury says now, as he slides into grumpy old man ludditehood. In earlier years, however, he’s played up the censorship angle.

But what Bradbury says the “true” meaning of Fahrenheit 451 isn’t really what I’m interested in. What I’m interested in is who gets to make that decision in the first place: us as readers/viewers, or Bradbury (and Truffaut, for that matter) as the creator?

Take a less literary example, “Uninvited Guest,” from Marillion’s first post-Fish album, Seasons End:

Some fans dealing with the song latched onto this bit of the bridge:

I'm the evil in your bloodstream
I'm the rash upon your skin
And you made a big mistake all right
The day you let me in
And you can fly to the other side of the world
You know you'll only find
I've reserved the seat behind you
We can talk about old times

They concluded that the song was about AIDS, it being a nasty infectious disease with moral overtones (particularly back then). That came as a surprise to Steve Hogarth and John Helmer, who wrote the lyrics. The song’s not about AIDS, it’s about your conscience. But, as I recall, when discussing it, neither H said to the AIDS group "you're wrong" when it came to their interpretation. They seemed to recognize that, once a creator lets a work out into the wild, his interpretation is no more "correct" than any others.

As a reader/viewer/listener, I appreciate that approach. Art is so subjective it's nearly impossible to define the correct reaction to a piece of it. It's one thing to say that my take on, say, Slaughterhouse-5, is in the minority of opinion on the novel (I have no idea if that's true - I just pulled that example out of my ass). It's quite another to say it's "wrong." After all, perceptions of art change through time. Context matters, and all that. It would be odd if we in the 21st Century got the same thing out of the Illiad and the Odyssey as the audiences to whom Homer first told them.

As a writer, it doesn't seem as if I have much choice. Writer of fiction, at any rate. It's not as if I'm trying to persuade readers about a certain topic. I'm just trying to persuade them to keep reading. If someone comes up to me one day, love my work, and thinks "Fine Print" is a parable of man's relationship with nature in the 21st Century (it's not, but that's not important right now), it would be rude beyond belief to say, "thanks, but you're full of shit." Readers are entitled to their opinions, after all.

Which is not to say I'd go so far as to gut this kind of classic call out:

If you're writing nonfiction and a large hunk of your audience don't get what you're trying to say, that's a whole different problem. If I had a judge tell me that the brief I'm filing tomorrow is a parable of man's relationship to nature in the 21st Century, I still can't say "thanks, but you're full of shit." It's up to me to make sure she gets the point I'm trying to make. if she doesn't, what's the point of making it in the first place?

The bottom line, then, is that when it comes to what art is "about," everybody gets to have their own idea and line up however they want. What the creator thinks is an interesting data point, but it's not the last word on the subject.