Fuck her.
Easily the most underhanded political maneuver I’ve ever seen, even after seven years of Bush.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou4JnWQsxKw
Shame on those of you that still support this megalomaniacal creature.
Fuck her.
…to endorse Barack Obama.
Some friends of mine started a website to collect public letters urging former Vice President Al Gore to endorse Barack Obama for President. Check it out.
http://www.algoreyourcountryneedsyou.com/
With the days to Super Tuesday counting down, it’s critical that Gore steps in to endorse Obama. It could be enough to erase the last of Clinton’s lead in key states such as California and New York. If you support Obama, please take a few minutes to write to Gore via this site.
I can’t even describe how excited I am for this movie. You can see from a mile away that’s going to be one of the best movies of all time and that in 20 years Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance is going to be mentioned in the same sentence as Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane or Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone. Similarly, Paul Thomas Anderson is going to propel himself to the same plane of brilliance as his idols Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese.
The greatest illegal file-sharing service (read: terrorist organization) in the history of everything finally got shut down by Dutch police this morning. If anyone wants to tell me how to steal music now, I’d really appreciate it. Until then I’ll just be hanging out and waiting for my subpoena from the RIAA.
The article is pretty hilarious though.
“This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online.”
I feel so…sinister.
I heard on Michigan Radio this morning that the RNC has officially decided to strip Michigan of half of its delegates to their party convention next year. This follows the even more dramatic sanctions from the DNC that have led to all of the major candidates except Hillary Clinton to withdraw their names from our primary ballot. This display of pigheadedness by our state legislators angers me to no end as I was really looking forward to meaningful participation in the primary process. The practical consequences are minimal - the nominees would be all but decided if we didn’t have an early primary and our delegates were certainly not going to be the deciding factor at the conventions. But still, there would have been some campaigning here, right? The candidates would have a presence on campus whereas now there’s almost nothing. I was truly eager to see Barack Obama give a stump speech, but now there’s no chance. Hell, I was eager just to vote for him in at least one election!
Obviously, this whole business about the Atlanta metropolitan area running out of water really sucks. But I just can’t seem to make myself care because these sorts of catastrophes are easily predicted and usually avoidable, whether by engaging in sustainable development, diligently managing the water supply, or by not overpopulating areas that don’t have enough water (Phoenix and Las Vegas, I’m looking at you). And of course, none of these precautions appear to have taken place here as Atlanta is often cited as a textbook example of unplanned urban sprawl run amok. I was just listening to the governor carry on about how the needs of endangered species are secondary to the needs of humans. Maybe, just maybe, if we tried to meet the needs of both in an intelligent way, these sorts of decisions wouldn’t arise in such a dramatic fashion.
Disclaimer: I really don’t know the first thing about conservation, sustainable development, and good water-use policy beyond thinking that they sound like good things. I simply have a long-running habit of taking simplistic and callous stances on the human consequences of preventable environmental catastrophes.
I dare you to suppress the urge to eat a burrito that just swept over you. I almost want to switch to Firefox so I can AdBlock it and save money.
Not that I’m qualified to make this kind of categorical statement, but this has gotta be the best show on network television since Arrested Development. It’s Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Tim Burton, and Wes Anderson in perfect proportions, with one of the most inventive premises in ages. The writing is taught and clever, the visuals are breathtaking (especially in HD), and the casting could not be more perfect. Get the first two episodes from your favorite torrent site or stream them from ABC so you can tune in for Wednesday’s episode. Until The Wire comes back in January, this is the best the tube has to offer.
The new issue of the New Yorker has a feature about David Simon, the creator of the HBO series The Wire. If you’ve been around me for more than five minutes in the last year, I’d be shocked if you haven’t heard me proselytizing the show in grandiose terms, comparing Simon to the second coming of Shakespeare and calling it the greatest artistic achievement in the history of moving pictures. Well, for once I wasn’t using hyperbole. The show really is that good and David Simon really is that brilliant.
This article is quite easily the best piece yet written about Simon and his creation. It makes it quite clear that Simon sought to redefine what a television show was capable of from the outset; he set out to create something more provocative, more probing, more visceral, and bleaker than anything else ever attempted on TV.
Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. “ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” He also likes to say that “The Wire” is a story about the “decline of the American empire.” Simon’s belief in the show is a formidable thing, and it leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not. Recently, he spoke at Loyola College, in Baltimore; he described the show in lofty terms that left many of the students in the audience puzzled—at least, those who had come hoping to hear how they might get a job in Hollywood. In creating “The Wire,” Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”
Nowhere is this ambition more apparent than in the second season’s tragic chronicle of the fall of Frank Sobotka, the beleaguered boss of Baltimore’s increasingly marginalized longshoremen, as he struggles to sustain the livelihood of his men through morally dubious dealings with organized crime. As the season winds down, Frank finds himself broken and helpless, but he clings to his identity in the face of his delinquent son’s sobbing: “You’re more like me than you know. You’re a Sobotka.” In Simon’s world, this is how people persevere against the institutional hurricane into which they’re helplessly cast - they play the part they know. Bubbles keeps copping vials and running capers, Omar keeps rippin’ and runnin’, Bodie keeps being the good soldier, the narcos doing street rips, Clay Davis keeps taking money, and the American city keeps dying.
But despite the dreary subject matter, The Wire manages to maintain a sense of lightness.
If Simon’s characters were to deliver the kind of doomy social criticism that Simon does, “The Wire” would, as he likes to say, “lay there like a bagel.” Fortunately, his characters bristle with humor, quirks, private sorrows; his drug dealers express intricate opinions about Baltimore radio stations, chicken nuggets, and chess.
The human condition isn’t all sadness and sorrow, after all. The show’s world-weary pathos easily drifts into warm, deeply-felt humor when Bunk’s one night stands ends in drunken mumbling and a pink bathrobe or Omar schools a court clerk in Greek mythology.
The bottom line is that The Wire is drama on a level that few works have ever approached. If it were only about the deft hand with which Simon weaves the staggering number of plot threads, it would still be a vital creation, but its blow by blow dissection of contemporary urban America, pulling no punches and landing every single blow with surgical precision, makes it a masterwork on a historic scale. Watch it because my ramblings can’t possibly do it justice.
image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace