ALLABOUTGEORGE.com

August 26, 2004

Required reading for once-and-future Nader voters, pt. 9.

[...] With independent voters splitting evenly in the survey between the two men, one key to Bush's tentative new advantage was his greater success at consolidating his base. While 3% of voters who called themselves Republicans said they would vote for Kerry, Bush drew 15% of all Democrats, and 20% of Democrats who consider themselves moderate or conservative, the poll found.

Bush's advantage remained 3 percentage points when independent candidate Ralph Nader was added to the mix. In a three-way race, Bush drew 47%, compared with 44% for Kerry and 3% for Nader, whose access to the ballot in many key states remains uncertain. [...]

That's from Ronald Brownstein's Los Angeles Times article "Bush Edges Ahead of Kerry for 1st Time" (with Nader's current ballot standing)

Also noticed recently: Slacktivist's "The Nader Concession," Washington Monthly's "Nader Raided," Jonathan Finer and Brian Faler's Washington Post article "Nader Still Unsure of Ballot Spot in Many States," Diesel Sweeties' "Indie Rock the Vote" and Sam Hananel's Associated Press (via San Francisco Chronicle) article "Nader hired conservative firm to help him gather ballot signatures"

00.26.40 | comments (1) | trackback (0) | nader

August 25, 2004

Dollars for Darfur

Today, August 25th, is the Save Darfur Coalition's Day of Conscience. If you've got free time today, give a look, spread a link, read a report or just sit and think.

That said, I want to raise $1,000 for Amnesty International and $1,000 for the International Committee for the Red Cross. You can also visit Amnesty International's donation page or the ICRC's donation page for Darfur.

05.31.05 | comments (0) | trackback (0) | love

August 23, 2004

"She Hate Me," quote-unquote.

The best parts of "Gigli" (the homily-spouting mobster, the jargon-gibbering homunculi, the violent death, the lesbians who sleep with straight men -- but only before making them cut their nails) and the worst parts of "The Matrix" (the convoluted plot based on conspiracies among powerful figures, Monica Bellucci sulking and skulking her way through her lines, animated flying sperm set to a martial-charge soundtrack and a sex-scene montage that may as well have been set at a rave) make this Spike Lee joint a George Tenet slam-dunk for this year's Razzies.

"Coffee is a drink. A latte is an experience."
"A man should be married by age 31."
"Not to know is bad and not to want to know is worse."
"Let me give you a heads-up. Start selling."
"Perception, Jack [...] Now get behind us."
"Hey, cabron, I'm not Brazilian. I'm Dominican."
"It wouldn't have worked, that's all."
"TMGDI! Too much goddamned information!"
"We need that man-milk."
"But you're lesbians, right?" "We're businesswomen."
"And we hope you've got a full tank, because we want every drop you've got."
"I want my money!"
"Word on the nigganet is that your net worth is somewhere between zero and the national debt."
"Maybe it's good news."
"The dynamic we got ain't working."
"That's that peculiar kind of love."
"And all I want is 10 percent."
"I've never been with a man before."
"Just strip, bitch!"
"Now you know what it feels like to be a sexual object."
"I know how those lesbians are. They're worse than men."
"I love pussy, too. Are you happy now?"
"I'm going to back you down and then post you up, bitch boy."
"I don't even feel like a woman. You've made everyone in the world pregnant but me."
"Spiritually, morally, this shit ain't cool."
"Good deal!" "No shit."
"You a 30-second motherfucker who can't get no ass because he nut too fast!"
"It's just that time of the month. Excuse me."
"There's only one 'ho in here and it sure as hell isn't you."
"Why do men have to be so complicazione?"
"Oh, my God! I felt it! Your sperm!"
"How they were raised on Sinatra and ended up with Snoopy Dogg, I'll never know."
"It's 6 a.m. Why are you still fuckin' with me?"
"Don't go hormonal on me, Margo!"
"All that baby mess is fucked up."
"Mafia proverb: The man who does not hear and does not speak will live."
"He is me and I am him. [...] Frank Wills and I are one."
"Handcuffs on cufflinks. Ain't irony a motherfucker?"

Also useful: Armond White's "Gigli" and "She Hate Me" reviews; my "Gigli" review

(cross-posted at The Unnamed Network)

20.53.46 | comments (1) | trackback (0) | cinema

Trackback a Go-Go, pt. 1.

i got a new pair of prescription sunglasses

Download "Prescription Sunglasses (So Bright)" (3:50; 3.52 MB)

01.51.47 | comments (1) | trackback (1) | trackback a go-go

August 20, 2004

Sort of a swoop and a cross, Osidius Emphatic.

Erin Moran (no, not that one) is size-15-combat-booting my midtempo-moody, sub-Bacharach-girlsinger-susceptible mien. She's sticking a shivery shiv between my ribs with every maudlin major-seventh chord, making like Karen Carpenter over top of those "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"-soundtrack-like snippets.

I'm relieved I don't have to exchange my PowerBook's battery.

Not just me, Mr. T and ~~probably~~ Art at BloggerCon, but D.C. (whose pique over Verizon's Motorola V710 I'll co-sign) and Oliver Willis! (D.C. and I will have to lose our facial hair so that we blogroes (BlogForce Five? West Coast Blog Family Reunion starter kit?) may be properly mistaken for one another.

Both Gwen and Eric elbowed me at one point about conferences like these, but I'm glad they (and a bunch of other folks) will be there.

I'm going to sign up for African Ancestry. (Perhaps I should take bets on what will show up. My Uncle Dougie's mapped out a lot of the family tree, but there's always room for surprises.)

18.46.17 | comments (2) | trackback (0) | living

August 16, 2004

Tricksy trail track.

Hopped on the bike for a sunny jaunt south along the Iron Horse Trail before work (though like many, I like taking it to work and back when I start early enough) with some Cidade de Deus remixes in my ears. Surprised to see it end! Couldn't find where it started up again. (Upon further review, it apparently goes eastward of I-680 around Rudgear Road. Crafty, tricksy trail, vanishing out from under me. It hates us, it does!) Wound up rolling along South Main Street, soaking up rays and taking in for-sale signs outside the manses, until it turned into Danville Road (and along the way, I saw signs indicating road crews' plans to lay down fresh slurry this week). Stopped in at a Starbucks in Alamo for some water, coffee and a couple of those crispy-rice snacks. Then it was time to head back up the trail to the sounds of Zero 7's "Another Late Night" compilation.

SFist appears to have thrown open its doors. Hail website, well met! Now, add a little mo' East Bay flavor to the blogroll and you'll really be cookin'!

16.49.26 | comments (2) | trackback (0) | whoa creek

Agre on conservatism.

In a few days, I'll have some thoughts on the seventeen prescriptions at the end of Phil Agre's "What is conservatism and what is wrong with it?"

12.56.58 | comments (2) | trackback (1) | politics

August 15, 2004

Required reading for once-and-future Nader voters, pt. 8.

Today, just the press release "Cobb Calls For an End to THE RACIST DRUG WAR AND THE PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX," Mireya Navarro's New York Times article "The Secret Shame of the Nader Booster" and Brian Faler's "Nader vs. the ADL"

08.13.42 | comments (0) | trackback (0) | nader

August 13, 2004

Triskadeikafridayfunky.

[...] He credits Spike Lee with inspiring in him the determination to become a successful filmmaker and, when they met at the première of his last film, he sought him out to tell him. "I told him how I was 13 and at JFK airport in New York waiting for my grandparents to go to India and the flight was delayed so I strolled off to a book store," he says.

"On one of the racks was Spike Lee's book on filmmaking, Gotta Have It. I had enough cash to buy it and I sat down and started reading it. I was like, 'You can make movies for a living? You don't have to be in Los Angeles? Your dad or uncle doesn't have to be in movies?' I remember gobbling it up and my whole life shifted. If the flight hadn't been delayed and I hadn't walked into that store I might be treating you as a doctor." [...]

John Hiscock's Telegraph UK article "Something of the Night" on M. Night Shyamalan. Imagine that!

zagg's "Fighting to Get Nader on the Ballot," "More on Nader, Greens" and "Nader, the Democrats and Movements" has been keeping up any slack I might have felt obliged to grip with all of my required-reading for once and future Nader voters. To zagg's posts, I might only add Jim Kunstler's Clusterfuck Nation posts "Kerry Nominated" and "What's Happening" and The Power of Many's "Democrats still taking black voters for granted?" linking to Erin Aubry Kaplan's L.A. Weekly article "Bringin' Da Funk: Dems call on blacks to carry that weight"

Rob Horning's Marginal Utility post on "The diet alibi" riffs interestingly on Steven Shapin's London Review of Books' diet-book review The Great Neurotic Art"

16.49.49 | comments (0) | trackback (0) | cinema , food , nader

Main maut se nahin darta -- maut mujh se darti hai!

Post's title is ganked from Under the Fire Star

[...] Friends call him Captain Correction. He tells the story that if he ever used black slang such as 'Where y'all going to be at?' his mother would tell him: 'We're going to be behind that preposition.' [...]

"Crown prince," Paul Harris' Guardian UK profile on Will Smith is really lazy, but that anecdote briefly put a smile on my face.

[...] 'Get some green seedless grapes, take them off the stems and freeze them. They become like hard, little marbles. They're great to feed your lover in bed. You can imagine the rest. But use the green ones, not the red ones because the red ones stain the sheet. Just keep them in the fridge - you never know when a date is going to end up back at your place.' [...]

Rachel Cooke's "A model who eats? She wrote the book" has that handy tip. I rather liked Padma Lakshmi's take on being bored by people whose arrogance prevents them from seeing her as she is. This goes well with the looky-new-looky Republic of T.'s "Peel Me a Grape?"

Consider writing and marriage in Priya Lal's latest Bollywood From Beyond column "Beyond the Horse and Carriage: Understanding Arranged Marriage" for PopMatters and Jeffrey Eugenides' Slate e-mail exchange "The Carnival of Bloomsday, and the Death of the Western Novel"

03.25.36 | comments (0) | trackback (0) | wunderkammerer

August 11, 2004

De rigueur picturing of what matters.

John Lee told me about Yahoo's "Picture What Matters" camera-phone contest a week and a half ago, but I'm tardy in posting about it. If I were going to enter, I'd probably post about those bus-stop ads I saw in Berkeley yesterday or something like Boing Boing's latest snapshot-zen.

13.34.02 | comments (0) | trackback (1) | photography

August 08, 2004

Here's his chance to disjunctive-text his way out of his constriction.

Misconception No. 2: "She Hate Me" is a mess. A sex farce married to a corporate thriller with politics as a side dish. Or as New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane put it, "the melange of plots, subplots, reveries, gags, cartoons, dirty bits and hissy fits points to a work that is structurally modeled less on the classic narratives of cinema than on, say, a portion of Russian salad."

All deliberate, according to Lee. Yes, he thought a flashback involving Frank Wills, the long-forgotten security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in, whom Jack feels an affinity with, was relevant to today's political situation. The fact that Jack's father, played by pro football Hall-of-Famer Jim Brown, suffers from crippling diabetes, a disease that strikes minority communities in disproportionate numbers, belonged in there as well. Opening the film with a depiction of George Bush's face grinning up from a $3 bill, a swipe at the president that Lee never elaborates on, well, that made sense, too.

Lee wanted his movie to look and feel like the front page of a newspaper, a snapshot of a dozen stories that might not have any obvious relevance to each other.

"We wanted to capture the climate," he says. "The flavor of the time. The blueprint of the film was to jam-pack as much stuff as we could into it, to bombard the audience with all this stuff. We wanted it to feel like what it is to be alive today, to reflect what it's like to have 900 channels on the satellite dish."

Spike Lee needs a weblog like you need to read Mary F. Pols' Contra Costa Times interview "Setting the record straight on 'Hate,'" Jack Rosenthal's "What to Do When News Grows Old Before Its Time" and David Edelstein's "You're Entering a World of Lebowski" in today's New York Times

05.09.00 | comments (4) | trackback (0) | cinema , media , men , women

August 07, 2004

Two long(-shot) bets.

I'd forgotten discussing this with P6 (at least, I think he means me) but it sounds like something I'd tempt fate by vocalizing, so I'll step out on it: First bet's that Clarence Thomas, not Antonin Scalia, will be the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. (Of course, the One Condition is that Bush wins this November.) Second bet's from a weekend conversation with dj. I say Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee beats Illinois state senator Barack Obama to a vice-presidential or presidential nomination. (What's the One Condition in this one? Haven't decided yet.)

03.13.37 | comments (15) | trackback (1) | politics

Installing an Asian American in your head.

[...] I feel like in some ways, few films have spoken to my experience as an Asian American. Do you guys identify with your characters, Harold and Kumar?

KP: I think personality-wise, in real life, I'm more of a Harold. Not as laid back. But larger than that, I definitely feel like I identify with them, because like he was saying, in reality we don't walk around going, "I'm going to wake up today as a South Asian actor, I'm going to think about my South Asian identity, and I'm going to eat my South Asian food." That's not how it is. So it's refreshing to play and be a human being who happens to be South Asian.

JC: You identify with both characters, and the revolution of this movie is that you follow Asian American protagonists. That how a film's story works—you follow the protagonists. We all watched Sixteen Candles. We didn't identify with Long Duck Dong's character. We identified with Molly Ringwald's character. So if there is a revolution to this movie—and I think that this can be—is that audiences everywhere who watch this movie, because of it's structure, will have to identify with an Asian American male. And that's going to be Asian people, white people, whoever. And that experience is emotional—you engage yourself and put yourself in the shoes' of these characters.

KP: We saw the movie in Columbus, Ohio, and they packed these three theaters with a bunch of Ohio State students. This was the first time that both of us had seen the movie with a real audience. A couple of times this happened, but namely the part in the movie where Harold steals the car, and Kumar flips off those white guys and says, "Thank you, come again!" I knew that Indian dudes would like it, because of Apu on The Simpsons we get tormented all the time with that line. But this white audience just started applauding at that moment. They identified so much with these characters that it doesn't matter what we look like. [...]

I'm feeling Angry Asian Man's "Q & A with John Cho and Kal Penn," especially after going to see my second "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle" matinee yesterday.

01.46.53 | comments (2) | trackback (1) | race/ethnicity

Augustine.

Edge of 34: Another eleven months before my birthday, but the Seattle Post-Intelligencer runs Lee Bowman's Scripps Howard article "For today's teens, growing up really is taking longer" and Hal R. Varian's New York Times article "Men who tie the knot make a lot more money than single ones -- but why?" has me cueing up Stevie Nicks and thinking about the ways I feel like an adult, like I'm grown, like I've made some progress (or haven't). Mr. Bernie and Ms. Lissa are also contributing to my subroutine meditations.

Feeds don't fail me now: 730 in that NetNewsWire 1.0.9 beta (and stone-cold fiendin' for v2.0 to drop). Strange feeling to clean out old MT feeds for blogs now running WordPress.

01.02.26 | comments (1) | trackback (0) | living

August 02, 2004

Let me take you to the heart of the city, let me misunderstand you.

Jennifer Bleyer's Autonomedia interview "An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley: In conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson" (via MeFi)

Guy Trebay's New York Times article "When Did Skivvies Get Rated NC-17?" [...] According to a survey conducted by Freshpair.com, an online retailer of undergarments, 82 percent of women have tried on men's underwear, 31 percent of men have tried on women's and married men change theirs twice as often as single guys. [...] The answer to the question you weren't thinking is "no, no I haven't, but thanks for asking."

At least one of my friends would enjoy Eileen Bordy's special to the San Francisco Chronicle "The Damon and Ms. Jones." If only her site were still up.

Phoenix's "Alphabetical" is Paul Simon (or Bernard Sumner) fronting Level 42, or a ProTool'd version of Spoon meets Maroon 5, or itchy Elliott Smith-meets-glitchy-Beck, or a deadpan New Radicals-gone-Debarge. True or false? Mr. 101-in-1001 and I'll see you in Austin next March, bro would know, but he's halway (dis)qualified.

Is Scott Fornek's Chicago Sun-Times article "Doctor explores running for GOP Senate seat" about Barack Obama's Senate opponent? We'll know tomorrow.

Mark Leibovich, Washington Post, "The Other Man of the Hour": [...] Obama has done all of his scheduled TV interviews for the day and all that's left on the schedule is a reception hosted by the Illinois delegation and another one later by Gov. Rod Blagojevich. And, he boasts, "I can stagger through receptions with the best of them."

He runs his finger down his cheek to reveal a smudge of TV makeup. He is concerned that he looks like Michael Jackson. He looks toward his wife, Michelle, who is walking with him.

"Does anybody have any of that stuff that takes makeup off?" Obama asks. The question goes unanswered, and the most celebrated state senator in America mentions again that he needs a nap.

Jill Lawless, San Francisco Chronicle (via Associated Press), "Families of Iraqis allegedly killed by British troops seek inquiry into their deaths": Laughing British soldiers beat Iraqi prisoners, doused them with icy water and demanded they "dance like Michael Jackson," lawyers for families of six Iraqis allegedly killed by British troops said Wednesday as they sought to force an independent inquiry into the deaths. [...]

You know, I shouldn't have rented "Three Kings" before reading that one.

Salon.com's "Woman sentenced for anti-semitism lie" (via AP): [...] On July 9, she walked into her local police station and described the fictitious attack. None of her fellow passengers moved a muscle as the youths slashed her clothes, cut off locks of her hair, knocked over her 13-month-old baby's pushchair and scrawled swastikas on her stomach with a marker pen, she said.

She retracted her story four days later, saying she had inflicted the wounds on herself.

Asked by the judge, Jean Idrac-Virebent, if she had not realised that her allegations of anti-semitism — she is not Jewish — would "unleash passions", she said she had not. Asked why she had pointed the finger at north Africans and black people, she said: "When I watch the telly, they are always the ones who are blamed." [...]

Tony Karon's Time magazine article "Never Mind the Goals, Focus on the Brand": "(Ronaldinho)'s so ugly that he'd sink you as a brand. Between Ronaldinho and Beckham, I'd go for Beckham a hundred times. Just look how handsome Beckham is, the class he has, the image. The whole of Asia has fallen in love with us because of Beckham. Ronaldinho is too ugly." I want a Ronaldhino jersey right now. And a D.C. United one, too.

Timothy Noah's Slate article "Sex, Greens, and Robert Altman": Being a reporter at a political convention is a lot like having sex. Hey there, gorgeous, would you like to interview me? The American people this, the American people that. Oh … cliché. Cliché, cliché, witticism, cliché, insight borrowed from the New York Times. Fact retrieved from an appropriately obscure … please keep ask-ask-ask-ask-ask-asking … Oh yeah … cliché—don't stop asking!—evasion of difficult … Yeeeeeesssss!

(Pause. Smoke cigarette. Straighten tie.)

OK, now I'll interview you. What do you think of this dubious claim, do you agree with that empty generalization. How would you compare … what does Joe Sixpack … what does the Bible belt … what do minority groups … was the candidate trying to, trying to, trying to ….

Did you sum up?

Then tell me how the new campaign finance lim—Oh. My darling. You are so pithy. So very, very pithy. Your succinctness—it moves me so.

(Pause again.)

Now what do you say we try interviewing each other?

02.49.26 | comments (0) | trackback (0) | wunderkammerer