I love to go to the movies. However, with all the alternative paths that those movies can take on their way to my eyes, when I do go out to the movies, I would like very much for the experience to be worth my while.
When I end up feeling as though the meetings that took place in order to get the movie made in the first place, then I start to feel regret for driving out to find a parking space and buying that ticket and one for my wife and maybe some popcorn and a big old Sprite and sitting there in the dark wondering, "I bet the meetings that took place in order to get this movie made in the first place was more interesting than this movie itself." Which is probably not the optimum response to any movie-going experience. It was, however, the way I felt after I went out to see Creed II.
I really enjoyed Creed. The story of Apollo Creed's illegitimate son finding his way in the gritty world of professional boxing was a good ride. It was a way to bring new life to the Rocky saga, a saga that had managed to go the distance over the course of six films, into the twenty-first century. It was Ryan Coogler, writer/director of Fruitvale Station, who helped make this leap. And that was fine. This was a story that deserved some screen time.
And it made a lot of money. So of course there was a discussion to be had about how money could continue to be made, along the lines of the thirty years of Rocky movies turned out by Sylvester Stallone and company. Who benefits from this exchange? Sylvester Stallone. He wrote and produced Creed II. His supporting role as the trainer got a little heftier in this sequel to a reboot. He was also able to wrangle stars Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson, fresh off their successes in Marvel super hero franchises to reprise their roles as the boxer and his lady. Mix in a little Dolph Lundgren as the Russian beast who has fallen on hard times since his defeat at the hands of the Italian Stallion, and a cameo by Brigette Nielsen as the Russian ice queen and you have a retro-sundae of a return to what used to be.
Without any of the soul that once made Rocky and Creed great stories in the first place. Underdog stories became a cliche because of the success of Rocky Balboa. Delivering that to a new generation deserves some praise, but banking on it by using the same formula without even bothering to write new characters. Boxer loses first fight, has to find his way back and wins the second. The other stuff is essentially window dressing. And yes, I paid to see it. There was some comfort to be gained in all that familiarity, but do I wish I would have waited for it to show up on some streaming service?
Yo.
Wednesday, December 05, 2018
Tuesday, December 04, 2018
One Less Point Of Light
The first time I attended a real protest, I was brought there by the policies of George H.W. Bush. I shouted along with the crowd outside the local armed forces recruiting offices, "No Blood For Oil!" This was on the eve of Operation Desert Shield. This was how "Poppy" and his administration proposed the United States should protect our oil in Kuwait. Did I say oil? I'm sure I meant "friends." Not oil. That would be a horrible suggestion, especially in this time of national mourning.
No. I meant oil.
And once we got all those tanks and soldiers over there in Shield formation, it was only a matter of time before it turned into a Storm. No longer content to merely stand around protecting our oil friends, the decision was made to chase the bad guys back into Iraq. Where they came from. For their part, the bad guys insisted that Kuwait had always been a part of Iraq, and they were just going down to protect their coastline. The coastline with all the oil and harbors for shipping oil and so forth.
And if all of this sounds familiar, A) you may have lived through it, or B) you may have caught the rerun a little more than a decade later. Conveniently enough, Poppy's little boy had found his way into the White House by then, and he was gifted with the opportunity to go raging back into the Middle East in search of the man who shot his Poppy. Well, they didn't exactly shoot him so much as embarrass him out of the White House.
And now time has done us all the favor of making a kinder, gentler version of this chunk of history. The Bushes and the Obamas have been hanging around together at various funerals and natural disasters. It would seem that time heals all wounds, except those of the two thousand U.S. soldiers wounded or killed in Desert Storm, or the hundred thousand wounded or killed in Gulf War Part Deux.
Yes, I understand that comparing the failed policies of another generation allows twenty-twenty hindsight. But I knew it way back then. And I know it now. The passing of a leader is always a chance to reflect, and I hope that given our current regime's proclivities, we are getting a clear picture. George H.W. Bush caused a lot of Terra to be stomped upon, but it didn't need to happen. Those thousand points of light could have been run on solar power. Not oil.
No. I meant oil.
And once we got all those tanks and soldiers over there in Shield formation, it was only a matter of time before it turned into a Storm. No longer content to merely stand around protecting our oil friends, the decision was made to chase the bad guys back into Iraq. Where they came from. For their part, the bad guys insisted that Kuwait had always been a part of Iraq, and they were just going down to protect their coastline. The coastline with all the oil and harbors for shipping oil and so forth.
And if all of this sounds familiar, A) you may have lived through it, or B) you may have caught the rerun a little more than a decade later. Conveniently enough, Poppy's little boy had found his way into the White House by then, and he was gifted with the opportunity to go raging back into the Middle East in search of the man who shot his Poppy. Well, they didn't exactly shoot him so much as embarrass him out of the White House.
And now time has done us all the favor of making a kinder, gentler version of this chunk of history. The Bushes and the Obamas have been hanging around together at various funerals and natural disasters. It would seem that time heals all wounds, except those of the two thousand U.S. soldiers wounded or killed in Desert Storm, or the hundred thousand wounded or killed in Gulf War Part Deux.
Yes, I understand that comparing the failed policies of another generation allows twenty-twenty hindsight. But I knew it way back then. And I know it now. The passing of a leader is always a chance to reflect, and I hope that given our current regime's proclivities, we are getting a clear picture. George H.W. Bush caused a lot of Terra to be stomped upon, but it didn't need to happen. Those thousand points of light could have been run on solar power. Not oil.
Monday, December 03, 2018
The Effects Of Radiation On Vegetables
What would you call it if a lawyer walked into a courthouse and told the judge, "I was lying?" You might call it a pretty good start. If you're like me, you might call it The Beginning Of The End.
If you are not like me, but perhaps aspire to be, you should know that this is a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to a 1957 movie about locusts that eat radiation enhanced vegetables that grow to gigantic size and terrorize the city of Chicago. You would also know that this film stars Peter Graves, who ended up becoming famous as Jim Phelps the leader of the Impossible Mission Force, was also the little brother of actor James Arness who played The Thing From Another World. A giant carrot. His brother Peter, who made those giant vegetables in the first place and started the mess with giant locusts attacking the City With The Big Shoulders eventually figured out that those enormous insects could be lured by a sound that mimicked that of locust mating calls. Right into Lake Michigan. Sorry. Spoiler alert. Anyway the whole doom and gloom part of the title comes from the moment shortly after the big bugs have drowned that scientist Graves wonders what other insects, animals and so forth might have made a meal of his irradiated vegetables.
All of which brings us back to the lawyer: Michael Cohen, who admitted that he had lied to Congress out of loyalty to the "President" and to align with his boss's “political messaging.” He had been lying about his involvement along with his boss, referred to in court documents as "Individual 1," in the 2016 discussions about building a giant skyscraper in Moscow. Moscow being the capital of the country that had been under economic sanctions by the Obama administration. Moscow being the capital of the country that had been meddling in the U.S. electoral process. Moscow being the capital of the country that had been involved in secret experiments on the effects of radiation on vegetables and certain insects.
Okay, I might be lying about that last part, but the other stuff? Lying to Congress about then Candidate Trump's business affairs with Russia? Collusion? I looked it up: "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others." Keep your eyes out for the giant grasshoppers.
If you are not like me, but perhaps aspire to be, you should know that this is a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to a 1957 movie about locusts that eat radiation enhanced vegetables that grow to gigantic size and terrorize the city of Chicago. You would also know that this film stars Peter Graves, who ended up becoming famous as Jim Phelps the leader of the Impossible Mission Force, was also the little brother of actor James Arness who played The Thing From Another World. A giant carrot. His brother Peter, who made those giant vegetables in the first place and started the mess with giant locusts attacking the City With The Big Shoulders eventually figured out that those enormous insects could be lured by a sound that mimicked that of locust mating calls. Right into Lake Michigan. Sorry. Spoiler alert. Anyway the whole doom and gloom part of the title comes from the moment shortly after the big bugs have drowned that scientist Graves wonders what other insects, animals and so forth might have made a meal of his irradiated vegetables.
All of which brings us back to the lawyer: Michael Cohen, who admitted that he had lied to Congress out of loyalty to the "President" and to align with his boss's “political messaging.” He had been lying about his involvement along with his boss, referred to in court documents as "Individual 1," in the 2016 discussions about building a giant skyscraper in Moscow. Moscow being the capital of the country that had been under economic sanctions by the Obama administration. Moscow being the capital of the country that had been meddling in the U.S. electoral process. Moscow being the capital of the country that had been involved in secret experiments on the effects of radiation on vegetables and certain insects.
Okay, I might be lying about that last part, but the other stuff? Lying to Congress about then Candidate Trump's business affairs with Russia? Collusion? I looked it up: "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others." Keep your eyes out for the giant grasshoppers.
Sunday, December 02, 2018
Dispensing Widsom
When I was in ninth grade, I suddenly felt that I had acquired the gift of foresight. I believed that my experiences on the outside looking in gave me some additional sense of what really was instead of what was supposed to be. I began matter-of-factly labeling my peers as "plastic" and "real." Having lived to the ripe old age of fourteen, I was pretty sure that I could judge someone's character by the tangential interactions I had with them. I wrote a forty-two page epistle describing these distinctions. "Plastic" people were those who lived in that bubble of the social hierarchy. They had boyfriends and girlfriends. They went to dances. They sat at the cool table. The table itself wasn't that cool, but the people at it were (or were purported to be). They were not like the "real" people with whom I chose to consort. These were the ones with real feelings and cared about the feelings of those around them. They were the ones who kept quiet in class. They were the ones who carried the whole day's books with them in their backpacks to avoid an uncomfortable interaction at their locker. They were my friends.
This was the dawning of the geeksurge that would hit its peak through the films of John Hughes. Before my eyes were opened to the potential that it really was the nerds who were running things, I thought it was simply our job to provide shoulders to punch. Whether we were flinching or not.
What I hadn't counted on, way back then, was that I was generating my own private cult. All that matter-of-factness was being spooned out in great big globs to my friends and then to their associates such that I started receiving terrified notes from girls asking, "Am I plastic?"
Only now, after all these years, does it occur to me that I might have used this moment to my social advantage. That is the kind of thing that turns a social outcast into a campus hero. And just as often, it required him or her to have some kind of comeuppance which would require the revelation that we are all "real," but we wear many masks.
That's not what happened to me. That was the John Hughes path. In the late nineteen-seventies in Boulder, Colorado the way it turned out was this: I slowly began to realize that I was putting myself further into a corner, and as an oracle of sorts I was only making myself more and more untouchable. That was not what I wanted. Thankfully, I was afforded a summer with my family at our mountain cabin which allowed me to become more of a memory to those I had so callously labeled. When I entered high school in the fall, I was just another nerdy sophomore. Surrounded by a school full of teenagers trying to find their own way.
This was the dawning of the geeksurge that would hit its peak through the films of John Hughes. Before my eyes were opened to the potential that it really was the nerds who were running things, I thought it was simply our job to provide shoulders to punch. Whether we were flinching or not.
What I hadn't counted on, way back then, was that I was generating my own private cult. All that matter-of-factness was being spooned out in great big globs to my friends and then to their associates such that I started receiving terrified notes from girls asking, "Am I plastic?"
Only now, after all these years, does it occur to me that I might have used this moment to my social advantage. That is the kind of thing that turns a social outcast into a campus hero. And just as often, it required him or her to have some kind of comeuppance which would require the revelation that we are all "real," but we wear many masks.
That's not what happened to me. That was the John Hughes path. In the late nineteen-seventies in Boulder, Colorado the way it turned out was this: I slowly began to realize that I was putting myself further into a corner, and as an oracle of sorts I was only making myself more and more untouchable. That was not what I wanted. Thankfully, I was afforded a summer with my family at our mountain cabin which allowed me to become more of a memory to those I had so callously labeled. When I entered high school in the fall, I was just another nerdy sophomore. Surrounded by a school full of teenagers trying to find their own way.
Saturday, December 01, 2018
The Price You Pay
General Motors stock went up after the automotive gigantus announced that they were cutting fourteen thousand jobs and closing seven factories across the globe. For me, this is a terrific illustration of just how the stock market does not work for the American worker. As of 2013, the top one percent of households by wealth owned nearly thirty-eight percent of all stock shares. Stock ownership by individuals has fallen since the recession of 2006, and as of 2013 the top twenty percent of Americans owned ninety-two percent of the stocks, leaving eight percent for the rest of us. General Motors shutters factories, and the top eight percent wins.
Meanwhile, our "President" wants to get all fighty with GM because he had been promising American workers, specifically those who held jobs in some of those auto plants, that he would make America Great Again by keeping their jobs here in the once great but soon to be great again land of the free and home of the brave.
And out of work.
Meanwhile, as the "President" continually touts the peaks and records of the stock market, he is threatening to end subsidies to General Motors because they laid people off. Last year, the "President" told workers, “Let me tell you folks in Ohio and in this area, don’t sell your house. We’re going to get those jobs coming back, and we’re going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build brand-new ones. It’s going to happen.”
Back in the recession of 2006, as American automakers were teetering on the edge of collapse, the United States government gave them billions of dollars to stay afloat. Thirteen billion went to General Motors. Now they are closing factories. And their stock goes up. All of those big corporations that benefited from big tax cuts from the current administration are making money again. Including General Motors. Money is being made in lost in vast troughs that never seem to land on the workers, specifically those who are losing their jobs.
All that winning. Some of us are tired of all of that winning. The "President" wants to take away the subsidies from GM? What sort of impact will that make? Maybe it will cause another trillion dollar bailout. Winning, winning, winning.
Meanwhile, our "President" wants to get all fighty with GM because he had been promising American workers, specifically those who held jobs in some of those auto plants, that he would make America Great Again by keeping their jobs here in the once great but soon to be great again land of the free and home of the brave.
And out of work.
Meanwhile, as the "President" continually touts the peaks and records of the stock market, he is threatening to end subsidies to General Motors because they laid people off. Last year, the "President" told workers, “Let me tell you folks in Ohio and in this area, don’t sell your house. We’re going to get those jobs coming back, and we’re going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build brand-new ones. It’s going to happen.”
Back in the recession of 2006, as American automakers were teetering on the edge of collapse, the United States government gave them billions of dollars to stay afloat. Thirteen billion went to General Motors. Now they are closing factories. And their stock goes up. All of those big corporations that benefited from big tax cuts from the current administration are making money again. Including General Motors. Money is being made in lost in vast troughs that never seem to land on the workers, specifically those who are losing their jobs.
All that winning. Some of us are tired of all of that winning. The "President" wants to take away the subsidies from GM? What sort of impact will that make? Maybe it will cause another trillion dollar bailout. Winning, winning, winning.
Friday, November 30, 2018
The Sporting Life
The Bay Area professional football teams have not had a lot to shout about this season. The Forty-Niners and the Raiders are battling it out for the cellar in their perspective conferences, while injuries and poor management make it hard to bet against either one in their race to the bottom. And all of this might be easier to take if it were just football related.
You may remember the San Francisco Forty-Niners as a once proud franchise with a history of Super Bowls and superstars. Currently in search of their third win for the season, they are perhaps more easily remembered currently for their handling of one Colin Kapernick. The Niners' ex-quarterback has not played a down for them or any other professional football team since 2016, but remains a recognizable face due to Nike's pop-culture savvy ad campaign featuring him. Kaepernick is currently more recognizable as the leader of a movement than the leader of a football team. By taking a knee during the National Anthem to raise awareness for police brutality on people of color. His actions led to him being let go by the team he took to a Super Bowl in 2012. And made him a Twitter-target for the "President." And led to all manner of knee-related sports protests, including a Forty-Niners cheerleader who took a knee at the beginning of two games this season.
This being the Left Coast, and a perennial hotbed of social activism, you might expect that this kind of forward thinking would be reflected if not rewarded by the team. You might believe that cutting linebacker Reuben Foster after he was arrested for domestic violence while on a road trip to Tampa Bay is an example of such forward thinking. Except that Mister Foster had been arrested just last spring on the same charge. With the same woman. This is a guy who failed a drug test before he was drafted into the NFL. He served a two game suspension last year for marijuana possession and a gun charge. Last year when both of those things were still illegal.
Two arrests for domestic violence. One suspension for gun and drug charges. Reuben Foster was let go by the San Francisco Forty-Niners. Colin Kaepernick, who has not been arrested for anything is still looking for a job. That's the sporting life.
You may remember the San Francisco Forty-Niners as a once proud franchise with a history of Super Bowls and superstars. Currently in search of their third win for the season, they are perhaps more easily remembered currently for their handling of one Colin Kapernick. The Niners' ex-quarterback has not played a down for them or any other professional football team since 2016, but remains a recognizable face due to Nike's pop-culture savvy ad campaign featuring him. Kaepernick is currently more recognizable as the leader of a movement than the leader of a football team. By taking a knee during the National Anthem to raise awareness for police brutality on people of color. His actions led to him being let go by the team he took to a Super Bowl in 2012. And made him a Twitter-target for the "President." And led to all manner of knee-related sports protests, including a Forty-Niners cheerleader who took a knee at the beginning of two games this season.
This being the Left Coast, and a perennial hotbed of social activism, you might expect that this kind of forward thinking would be reflected if not rewarded by the team. You might believe that cutting linebacker Reuben Foster after he was arrested for domestic violence while on a road trip to Tampa Bay is an example of such forward thinking. Except that Mister Foster had been arrested just last spring on the same charge. With the same woman. This is a guy who failed a drug test before he was drafted into the NFL. He served a two game suspension last year for marijuana possession and a gun charge. Last year when both of those things were still illegal.
Two arrests for domestic violence. One suspension for gun and drug charges. Reuben Foster was let go by the San Francisco Forty-Niners. Colin Kaepernick, who has not been arrested for anything is still looking for a job. That's the sporting life.
Thursday, November 29, 2018
Mornings Are Broken
How do I feel about morning radio? What has been referred to as "drive time" was always my "time to wander around my classroom time." I no longer wake up to the radio. The alarm I set is on my Google home assistant. On mornings that both my wife and I are getting out of bed at the same time, I ask Google to play me something off Al Gore's Internet. We hear music, and the chatter between songs is the conversation we are having as we prepare to go about our day.
The idea of a "morning show" in which a little music is played and a little traffic news is discussed and a taste of national and local events are ruminated upon is one two which I surrendered many years ago. I accepted that listeners might want or need some kind of chat to begin their day. I shuddered to think that one of the local stations had become part of the Howard Stern Radio Domination Network, but I needn't have worried. Howard took his peculiar brand of talk to the satellite and our airwaves were once again peaceful and quiet. But only for a moment. Syndicated sounds from across the country came swooping in to fill the void. That comfortable relationship that I had once endured with Dave Morey on KFOG was replaced by a series of cleverly matched voices chosen to stir my brain cells in a manner I had not been accustomed.
I stuck with KFOG primarily because it meant I didn't have to tune the analog dial I had in my classroom for all those years. This fall when I returned to start a new school term, I quickly tired of the babble streaming from the speakers and retreated up the frequencies until I landed on a place that gave me one voice followed by a little music, followed by that same voice with a little bit of music. It sounded like a radio show.
This lasted a couple of months. Then suddenly I was gifted with another voice on this station. Now there was both chit and chat. There were "segments" with discussions of roommates and shopping and boyfriends and the incidence of music became more spread out. Apparently there was a lot more roommate, shopping and boyfriend concerns than I had originally imagined. Music? That was to take us to the top of the hour.
So I went back down to KFOG, only to discover that The Woody Show had taken up residence at that frequency. Plenty of surveys and contests and "can you believe this?" And music to take us to the top of the hour. I surrendered. Now there is noise coming from the corner where my radio sits. I try not to pay attention to the types of noise, just make sure to turn it off before I go outside for yard duty. If I want music, I'll ask Google.
The idea of a "morning show" in which a little music is played and a little traffic news is discussed and a taste of national and local events are ruminated upon is one two which I surrendered many years ago. I accepted that listeners might want or need some kind of chat to begin their day. I shuddered to think that one of the local stations had become part of the Howard Stern Radio Domination Network, but I needn't have worried. Howard took his peculiar brand of talk to the satellite and our airwaves were once again peaceful and quiet. But only for a moment. Syndicated sounds from across the country came swooping in to fill the void. That comfortable relationship that I had once endured with Dave Morey on KFOG was replaced by a series of cleverly matched voices chosen to stir my brain cells in a manner I had not been accustomed.
I stuck with KFOG primarily because it meant I didn't have to tune the analog dial I had in my classroom for all those years. This fall when I returned to start a new school term, I quickly tired of the babble streaming from the speakers and retreated up the frequencies until I landed on a place that gave me one voice followed by a little music, followed by that same voice with a little bit of music. It sounded like a radio show.
This lasted a couple of months. Then suddenly I was gifted with another voice on this station. Now there was both chit and chat. There were "segments" with discussions of roommates and shopping and boyfriends and the incidence of music became more spread out. Apparently there was a lot more roommate, shopping and boyfriend concerns than I had originally imagined. Music? That was to take us to the top of the hour.
So I went back down to KFOG, only to discover that The Woody Show had taken up residence at that frequency. Plenty of surveys and contests and "can you believe this?" And music to take us to the top of the hour. I surrendered. Now there is noise coming from the corner where my radio sits. I try not to pay attention to the types of noise, just make sure to turn it off before I go outside for yard duty. If I want music, I'll ask Google.
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