Riddick Immersion

These days before I go see a movie, I basically see one review in the form of a letter grade over at Yahoo. The Chronicles of Riddick got a C from the critics. I wonder what they were smoking.

Yesterday, at the Puente Hills Mall in their best theatre, which rivals the best I've been anywhere including the Bridge in Culver City, I saw the Chronicles of Riddick with the sound punched up to the max. This movie has the best sci-fi production design since Alien Resurrection. When it comes to other worlds and oddities in space, there are several flicks that come to mind. If you like, we can get into a top ten discussion here. Alien Resurrection, Minority Report, Event Horizon, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element. I'm putting Chronicles of Riddick into that company. Somebody needs to get an art direction and set design award here. No question.

The goofily named Necromongers' architecture is a burnished iron Roman motif that simply oozes power and pain. It's overwhelmingly masculine and stylistically dominating. When compared to the brute ugliness of Middle Earth's baddies, you kind of wonder why everyone was so afraid. Of course the Necros flip dice to decide which way they want to capture entire planets, no real comparison here. It's a good thing that the acting was so stiff, or the theory behind their evil would have been a bit more compelling. (The theory is essentially a ripoff of the Borg, but the Necros are way cooler than the Borg - as fanatic totalitarians go.)

The action sequences in COR are a mix of old and new. What's new is fairly exciting. Riddick is just about as violent as one can manage without a substantial amount of gore. As he rips through enemy after enemy, he does so with a blur of speed that makes it much less explicit than say Brad Pitt's Achilles. And while you must suspend logic for a moment to accept that he's stabbing warriors through armor plate that looks as thick as manhole covers, he does a convincing job of being almost unstoppable.

It also must be said that the environment plays a good role in this flick as well. On a planet with yet another cornball name: Crematoria, its sun is the implacable foe. This was done once with Armageddon, but this time the effect is way better. Freakin' scary that sunrise is.

The CG in COR is first rate. Swirly waves of anti-gravity exhale from the Necro spacecraft. Some truly frightening beasts rampage through an underground prison. A wispy Judy Dench proves to be the first *ever* believable apparitional creature (even better than the albino Matrix twins).

A lot of people thought Vin Diesel was off his nut when he turned down Fast & Furious 2, to do a Pitch Black prequel. It turns out that this film has everything it takes to become a cult classic. And guess what, the ending is brilliant.

Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin just sang the National Anthem for the opening of the NBA game this evening. It's rather impossible to forget what country you live in when there's a voice like that singing. Wow!

I'm leaving work. By the time I get home, the Lakers should have brought everybody to their senses.

Tortured Logic

People with a great deal more patience than I have with the tangle of legal concepts being twisted in the memos regarding torture and culpability seem to have concluded that there's much to be concerned about. Why is it that I can't seem to give a gnat's 'nads? Am I really so insensitive?

Not really. I found, while lurking through my journal, a full sense of outrage and despair over a question of torture. The victim in question was Amadou Diallo. I found it utterly dispicable that American police officers would even attempt, much less get away with such acts as sodomy with a broom handle. The memory of the event is rather blurred with that of the other New Yorker who got shot 34 times. His name escapes me at the moment, but it was clear that my prior sense of respect and admiration for Rudy Guiliani as a law and order type guy was completely destroyed by those events. Further, the departure of Chief Bratton sealed the lid on Giuliani's political tomb which was hardly loosened by his subsequent demeanor in the wake of nine-eleven.

Death with dignity is the reason we can make war. Indeed it is the reason war can be honorable. A man shot in battle whose body is turned over to his own army is what allows us to respect our enemy, and respect for the enemy is the only thing that makes an honorable peace possible. But a man whose body is desecrated is always an invitation to slaughter. No matter what one makes of the particular definitions the Geneva Conventions have established, lines must be drawn. And yet there are always huns among us. We share this planet with people whose suffering would make them particularly brutal warriors. Indeed I am inclined to believe that matters of imprisonment, interrogation, arrest and yes even torture are much more subjective than those of life and death.

Bait

George brings up a good point with his three references:

Perhaps useful: Jack White's Time article "Lott, Reagan and Republican Racism," Steven Hayward's National Review article Reagan, Lott, and Race Baiting" and Kevin Baker's Harper's review "The magic Reagan: more misguided arguments for his greatness"

Before I go there, I find it interesting to note that I am Enneagram 9w8, which means that very little of this caca fazes me. Or as Phife says, "I wear New Balance sneakers to avoid a narrow path". So in the midst of strife, I tend to see things a different way.

To the heart of the matter, I still believe we are talking about rhetorical patronage. While many folks are ready to suggest that Reagan courted the white racist vote, they also say that Reagan did little to help poor whites. This underscores my point. As the Great Communicator, Reagan appealed to a wide spectrum of Americans, and while he lowered the tax rate dramatically for the very wealthiest Americans, he wasn't exactly evenhanded about it for the poor. So the same headscratching that goes on about what he actually did for poor whites, should go on about what he actually did for racist whites.

I happen to believe this argument is a standard part of the 'racist, sexist, homophobic' cluster bomb thrown by the Left to tar Reagan.
But how much of that sticks when it comes to policy? Is Reagan sexist because he opposed passage of the ERA? So I will continue to ignore the labels and continue to respond to the real effects of real legislation passed by Congress.

Lakers Collapse

The Lakers came within 6 in the final 5 minutes but just sucked. Kobe converted nothing. The Pistons didn't drop the ball and the Lakers couldn't force any turnovers. Jackson was right to make Kobe pass the ball because he wasn't hitting for shit. Trade him and get some depth on the bench. It's perfectly clear that the rest of the Lakers ain't shit. When Rush was sinking baskets, they dominated but now Jackson doesn't seem to be able to put them in.

Shaq did his job. If I were him I'd be pissed. Where are all the shooters on the Laker team? Can't any of the drive the lane? I haven't been following the team so maybe this is obvious, but where the hell is their power forward? If Karl Malone is lame then put somebody else in and stop passing to Shaq mid post. Walton is the only one that makes that work with any flair and creativity anyway. The rest of the team is just afraid to shoot from the outside or too slow to beat the Piston coverage.

If I were Larry Brown I would make the next game physically punishing on the Lakers. They will come unglued.

If I were Phil Jackson, I would make Karl Malone play until he was bloody. Run his ass into the ground and make him get offensive boards. Make Fisher and Kobe shoot the outside and drive and then bring Shaq upcourt. This passing to the baseline was a complete failure. Nobody hit those shots and nobody got the long rebounds. Force the shooting guards to force some fouls instead of playing safe on the perimeter and passing to Shaq. If they can't get Ben Wallace in foul trouble and take out his rebounding it's over.

Then again what do I know? I know I'm pissed.

Cobb on the Air

I will be on the air this evening defending the Reagan Legacy from a black perspective. At 7pm Pacific time, I'll be a guest on the 'PowerPoint' radio talkshow originating out of Atlanta's WCLK. It's a call in show and will go for an hour.

WCLK is a Pacifica affilliate, so I'm pretty sure that the other two guests will be trying to shoot me down, but I think it will be an interesting opportunity to reach a lot of folks that wouldn't ordinarily hear my particular point of view. I'm looking forward to this and I owe a debt of thanks to my man Spence.

I have my own of course, but are there any talking points you think I should bring up?

Jamie Foxx

The spousal unit has subscribed to Entertainment Weekly. It is for that reason alone that I know somebody somewhere in Hollywood is thinking about putting together a Marvin Gaye biopic.

Jamie Foxx should play it. You would know this if you've ever heard him sing.

Canned Peaches

Every day when the kids come home from school they have a snack. If I'm working from my home office, then it's my job. The other day we had canned peaches.

I had spoken to my mother about our memorial day weekend and asked her about other veterans in the family. Her father was in the Army, which I didn't know, and her Uncle Adam served in the Pacific. In fact, he was one of the marines who fought on Guadalcanal. The short summary of the story was that he landed there and his ship was sunk. So for one month, he lived on canned peaches. When he came home (he survived!), he never wanted to eat another canned peach.

So my kids know about Uncle Adam, 30 days, canned peaches and Guadalcanal. But they really don't know about Guadalcanal and neither did I until I looked it up.

The battle for Guadalcanal was fought between August of 1942 and February of 1943. There are many different accounts of the battle. This is my favorite, the first account that I read.

On January 3rd 1943, Japanese headquarters conceded defeat and ordered the evacuation of their remaining troops from Guadalcanal and on the 7th the last of the defeated Japanese left the island via destroyers. They left 25,000 dead on the island and between 600 and 900 pilots in the sea. I don't have any figures on the number of sailors killed. 1,600 Americans were killed on the island and many more killed at sea. The rest of the Solomon Islands chain would take almost another year of fighting before being entirely in American hands.

We lost at least six ships in those six months. And Uncle Adam survived on canned peaches. Just a little perspective on our little occupation of Iraq.

On Assault Weapons

I note in passing, this diatribe against the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban.

If I were president, I would have the language amended to conform with our own military's assessment of the lethality of the weapons against regular troops if deployed by militias. I think that by now in our Iraqi occupation, we know what's dangerous and what's not. Yes we should keep assault weapons out of the hands of the civilian population.

Gun control is impossible, but it's a good idea. Doesn't the failure to find WMDs prove that? It does to me.

As far as I'm concerned with regard to the right to bear and keep arms for a well-regulated militia, the contingency is fully accounted for by the National Guard and Reserves. If we're going to have a Civil War in this nation, there will be plenty brothers and cousins on the wrong side of the fence with access to National Guard Armories, and plenty of black market trade to supply any American rebellions. There is absolutely no need for citizens to defend themselves from their own government which needs Constitutional protection. Demanding that concession is like requesting unfettered access to 'protest zones'. The Constitution in that regard is a clue, not a guarantee.

The suppression of gun crime is a different matter altogether. I have few ideas on that matter which go beyond the thinking given to any night's episode of 'The Shield'. Street gangs do enough damage with knives and drugs. We're back to the axiom that it's not the gun, it's the sick mind. True.

Just in case you're wondering, I love battlefield sims, cloak and dagger work and all that stuff. Had I a bit more disposable income, I might have become something of a paintball warrior in my youth. I've fired a real gun and I wouldn't mind owning one for the fun of target shooting. But I also hate revolution and I think a lot of militant blowhards are not only full of caca but one eighth as lethal as they think they are. Suppress 'em.

Red Blue Myth

John Tierney throws a well needed wrench in the Red vs Blue debate. Nota bene:

If you've been following the election coverage, you know how angry you're supposed to be. This has been called the Armageddon election in the 50-50 nation, a civil war between the Blue and the Red states, a clash between churchgoers and secularists hopelessly separated by a values chasm and a culture gap.

But do Americans really despise the beliefs of half of their fellow citizens? Have Americans really changed so much since the day when a candidate with Ronald Reagan's soothing message could carry 49 of 50 states?

To some scholars, the answer is no. They say that our basic differences have actually been shrinking over the past two decades, and that the polarized nation is largely a myth created by people inside the Beltway talking to each another or, more precisely, shouting at each other.

And this in particular:

"The two big surprises in our research," Professor DiMaggio said, "were the increasing agreement between churchgoing evangelicals and mainline Protestants, even on abortion, and the lack of increasing polarization between African-Americans and whites. Evangelicals have become less doctrinaire and more liberal on issues like gender roles. African-Americans are showing more diversity in straying from the liberal line on issues like government programs that assist minorities."

I thought I'd just pass that along without comment.

Threes

Defeat

Beasts

Lynette Boggs McDonald

Lynette Boggs McDonald narrowly missed being the first black woman elected to the Congress on the Republican ticket. The man who told me about this practically had tears in his eyes about the missed opportunity. I feel him. She appears to be a sterling public servant, and please note her sorority affiliation. Bam!

Lynette Boggs McDonald was appointed by Governor Kenny Guinn to be the commissioner for District F, effective April 20, 2004. She replaces Mark James, whose resignation was effective April 2.

McDonald served on the Las Vegas City Council from 1999 until her appointment on the county commission. She was the first woman to lead a city council ward in the history of the city of Las Vegas, receiving 70 percent of the vote in Ward 2 during the 2001 election. From 1994 to 1997, she served as assistant city manager for the city of Las Vegas.

McDonald spent her childhood on American Army bases in Germany and Italy and has lived in Las Vegas for the last 13 years. She is a business graduate of the University of Notre Dame, attended the University of Oregon Graduate School of Journalism and received a master's in Public Administration from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

She is married to Steven D. McDonald, J.D., and has a son.

Peer Recognition

A Word on Ray

My sister sung with Ray Charles. She was one of the Uh Huh girls of the Pepsi commercials. Well, not one of the models who did the commercials, but one of the real singers who did the voice over. She also toured with him various places here and around the world back in those days.

What she told me was that Ray Charles was a musical perfectionist, and when he was on stage giving a performance he was one man, but during rehearsals and recordings he was somebody else. Certainly a stage personna is going to be dfferent from the real man, but it's something I never really thought of when it came to Ray.

Ray Charles had a staggering work ethic, and brooked no BS when it came to the music. If you can imagine that I've been tough on hiphop, try to think what this blind black international superstar composer would be like. I recall hearing that he had absolutely no tolerance for people who couldn't read music. Sometimes he would, depending on the room, decide to perform a song in another key and anyone who couldn't hack the transformation got kicked to the curb. He was a tough old dog.

I've never been a fan of his music, but there was no escaping it. He was a man who got his due, and yet somehow didn't. All people wanted to hear were the same old songs. Georgia, America the Beautiful, Hit the Road Jack. How that must have worn on his nerves. But he delivered. Those songs are Ray Charles, and really nobody else can do them. I do remember when he played America the Beautiful for Ronald Reagan. That song was never the same.

Ray was another man who at some point in his career lived near 'The Dons'. We used to drive by and point out his house. Ray Charles lives there, we'd say. Of course we'd never see him. Ray, we only knew the half.

Coup

Mike Ruppert is at it again. I had almost forgot about this ex-LAPD officer who shouted down DCI Deutch when he came to Los Angeles' First AME Church to try and explain the CIA-Crack connection. This time Ruppert sees devilish doings in the resignation of Tenet having to do with the Plame investigation. His angle? It's part of a setup by the CIA to take W down.

If you have nothing better to do than stew in Ruppert's juices, take a peek. Of course there's more than a grain of truth. But who can tell which through his breathlessness?

For the record, I think Ruppert's not a loony, but he'll never get dignified. He's a muckraker whom any day might find himself in a politically engineered character assassination. In other words, he's pissed off the powers that be, and for that he has earned the title of lone wacko, whether or not he deserves it. He has been deep enough undercover in joint LAPD / intelligence community activities to understand how twisted our tactics can get, but he's betrayed the colors. He's always looking over his shoulder, poor blighter.

CCR South Central

The South Central chapter of the California College of Republicans had its monthly meeting this evening. The two hours flew by. I am so jazzed about the opportunity these guys are offering that I didn't even mind much that the Lakers got smashed.

We got off to a rousing start over the issue of the County Seal. Several of the people in attendance had been to the hearing the other day. I don't have a great deal to compare this with, but the passion over this issue is a real hornet's nest. I just wrote that this is a stupid fight, but I think it's a lot bigger than I imagined. There was plenty of ACLU bashing going on, and while I agree that this was a dumb move by the ACLU, sometimes they are right. But I wasn't about to speak up for them tonight. Mike Antonovich, it is rumored, will be trying to put the question up to the public. Republicans are going to get a petition going. This is going to be a litmus issue and I suspect that Yvonne Burke, Gloria Molina and Zev are going to be regretting their intemperate characterizations of the defenders of the cross. Molina says she's willing to go down for this. Good.

There was a touching presentation on Reagan by Jay Master, the man who created in 1981 the biggest political club on Cal Berkeley's campus - a Republican club. His experience reminds us that impossible odds can be defied.

There was much to comment about in this, the first of my meetings with the CCR, but what impresses me the most was the enthusiasm and sense of serious mission that all the folks in the room had. Men and women, young and old, black, white, latino and asian. Everyone had their individual connections and people wanted to know more people, get connected and meet up.

There was a palpable collective concern about Republicans willingness and ability to 'march down Crenshaw', but one of the the black old timers in the room reminded us that's exactly what George Deukmejian did and it wasn't too difficult. This same gent reminded us that he had run for office and managed to get over 50,000 votes with only $1,500 in campaign funds.

The manager for the Bush campaign for the Valley was there and we spoke for a short time. He told me of a candidate from Las Vegas who narrowly missed becoming the first black female Republican to be elected to Congress. His hunger for candidates was palpable.

I can't help but notice, from my own perspective, how similar this desire for African American participation is to other experiences. I'm telling you now, from my own eyeballs, that it's genuine. I've been in rooms full of fanatics before and I know what it's like to have a scary kind of feeling in your gut when you really don't want people around you to succeed. I didn't expect for a minute that it would be that way and it certainly wasn't, and I can't say that I was surprised by the enthusiasm. Yet it felt very oddly like a tremendous secret, and like a new adventure.

In many ways it reminded me of my first days with NSBE. In college, blacks in engineering along with the business majors were often the butt of jokes. There were always those who mocked our ambition to work in Corporate America. But we did what we set out to do, and there are still plenty of people who don't know NSBE, and cannot imagine the kind of successes it has delivered.

What excites me most, of course, is the machine. I'm in on the ground floor of Republican inroads to West LA and LA County which is dominated by Democrats. There's nothing but opportunity ahead.

You See This?

A PhD in Mortal Kombat

(full reprint)
A PhD in Mortal Kombat
By Mary McNamara
Times Staff Writer

June 6, 2004

A pioneering USC group tries to get into the heads of players to learn if the pastime harms or can help.

Ever since they were children, Steve Choi, Ethan Levy and Elaine Chan have been told by people who never met them that the great passion of their lives, the thing that captivated and moved them, was the enemy of intellect, emotionally damaging and quite possibly the end of civilization as we know it.

Choi, Levy and Chan are gamers. That is, they play video games with serious devotion and intensity. They are also students at the University of Southern California — Choi and Levy, both 22, are entering their senior year, and Chan, 21, is working on her PhD. But far from merely overcoming their digital predilections to succeed in college, these three and others like them are using their knowledge of games like Mortal Kombat and the Sims to further their education. As members of USC's Computer Games project, they are the local vanguard of a new academic discipline: video game scholarship.

Choi recalls that his mother gave him a computer when he was 8 because she felt computer science was the career path of the future; she was, however, less then thrilled when her son began spending much of his on-screen time playing games.

"All our lives we've heard how terrible it is," Choi says. "I wanted to offer the other side of the question."

Created through the Annenberg School for Communication, the Annenberg Studies on Computer Games is a multidisciplinary, multigenerational, multilingual research group dedicated to the study of computer games. The year-old group is one of several game-related projects springing up at universities around the country. MIT, Stanford, the University of Michigan and Northwestern University have various projects researching different aspects of interactive media. But USC's computer games project is probably the largest and most diverse collection of professors and students studying the vast yet mysterious world of video games. The research at USC focuses on the gamer rather than game design or development, and much of what they are doing is groundbreaking.

The project is the creation of Peter Vorderer, who heads the school's entertainment studies program, and Ute Ritterfeld, a German research associate professor with a background in health sciences and psychology. "We are trying to find out not only what is bad but what is good," Ritterfeld says. "Every new technology is met with fear and criticism. When picture books first came out, people said they would ruin children's imaginations; with radio it was the same; movies, television the same. We are trying to find out what is real and what is just fear."

After years of snubbing video games as a phenomenon not worth researching, scholars are now frantically attempting to catch up with an interactive media industry that is increasingly prevalent, seemingly permanent and still so new that the people developing it are the ones who are using it.

Ritterfeld says the topic itself is polarizing. "The nongamers consistently criticize the games, the gamers defend them. They honestly can't imagine any harm in them. What's really needed is more research."

Chan knows what true gamers face — she spent one summer doing nothing but playing the online role-playing games she favors. Over the years, though, she has learned to keep her gaming habits to herself. "Whenever I mention that I'm sort of obsessed with video games everyone is shocked and horrified and asks, 'Well, how did you make it to USC?' " she says. "Even in the computer group," she adds with a laugh.

The 20-person USC group is an international lot, including members from Germany, China, Ukraine, India and Korea as well as all over the U.S. In the past years, it's developed or launched studies into areas as diverse as the effect of violent games on brain activity, the motivation of gamers, the benefits of interactive learning, and the role of narrative and character development in the games themselves.

While two of the studies will focus on the hot-button issue of violence, most are geared toward discovering what psychological needs the games fill and what role they can have in education and mass audience entertainment.

In one study planned for this summer, researchers will test the conventional wisdom that interactive learning is more productive than rote. "Everyone assumes children will learn more if they are playing a game," Ritterfeld says. "But we do not know that because it has never been tested."

Vorderer, who has edited several books on the psychology of entertainment, is already compiling a book about gaming, which he believes is changing not just the industry but the definition of entertainment.

"When we started, we thought, 'Well, games are cool and under-researched so this will be a good area,' " Vorderer said. "But the more work we do, it is so striking how everything is connected to games. The military, the movies, education, everyone is doing games."

There's Always a Bigger Fish

Today I had an extraordinary conversation with somebody who used to be rich. He was the first black somebody to buy property in a snooty neighborhood. He got heavily involved in local politics in this snooty city over such issues and got in trouble with the city fathers.

Once upon a time when all we had was Eddie Murphy movies, there were all sorts of dramatizations about what happens to blackfolks who piss off the wrong whitefolks. These days we pretend that everything is cool, and it's true to the extent that for most of us below the glass ceiling, it is. But what happens when a black multimillionaire pisses off several white multi-multi-millionaires. Well, if this brother's story is to be believed, it aint much different from Rodney King.

I exaggerate slightly. But let me ask you this. What would you do if you had a choice of being beat down like Rodney or sued for $15 million (that you actually have?). Well it turns out that this is what happened to homeboy; he faced cops that were, how shall we say, connected to a spiteful district attorney. They lied and it cost him more money than most of us make in a lifetime.

At every level of society, we all have our struggles. There is nothing gained that cannot be lost and there is no immunity from predators. You just bump up a class to where the sharks have platinum teeth.

Now in case I'm sounding alarmist, understand that this happened quite a while ago and he has recovered nicely, thank you. But the story served to remind me that petty vindictive bullies are at all levels of society, and there are a great number of creative ways to destroy people, even wealthy people.

Watch your back and remember Cobb's Rule #7.

Where?

Not long ago I was talking about rhetorical patronage. Here's an example of the kind of reaction to a failure to get rhetorical patronage.

"Politically, African-Americans can hardly get past that he started his campaign in Philadelphia, Miss.," said Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), referring to the area where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. "It was such a strong statement that the KKK endorsed him on the same day."

"You can't forget that," Jackson added.

Somebody send the Rev a Hallmark card and a box of tissue.