Todd Haynes

When I saw his excellent 2002 film Far From Heaven, I really didn't know anything about writer/director Todd Haynes. I didn't really know anything about Douglas Sirk either, but that didn't stop me from liking Far From Heaven, in which Haynes masterfully creates a world in tribute to Sirk's excellent 1955 film All That Heaven Allows. When I finally saw the Sirk film, my appreciation of Haynes's film went up. It also went up again when I saw Haynes's previous film, Velvet Goldmine, in which a reporter in 1984 tries to figure out whatever happened to that glam rock star who shot to stardom in the 70s, only to crash just as quickly after staging an assassination attempt on himself. While I had mixed feelings about Velvet Goldmine, its style, which is light years away from that of Sirk, gave me an even deeper appreciation of Far From Heaven. It sort of made me feel that Haynes had to restrain himself even more to emulate Sirk's style that I hand initially thought. It made me want to look to see what else Haynes had wrought. That's when I found out about Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

Haynes's first film, Superstar is a 45 minute film shot on 16mm that tells the tragic story of Karen Carpenter's struggle with anorexia. It can't be shown because it was made without the permission of Richard Carpenter, who owns the rights to the duo's songs that comprise a large portion of the film, and who is not portrayed in the most sympathetic light. (I just downloaded and watched it tonight.) This movie is fascinating. Were I to have written this post before I saw it, I would have including this in my initial description--everyone in this film is played by a Barbie doll. (Well, the guys are Ken dolls, but you get the point.) Before watching it, it seems so silly, and indeed, I'll admit that I would not have watched it if he had chosen to use live actors for more than just voices and the occasional close-up of a singing mouth. However, in its very low budget way, this film has a kind of brilliance to it. I'd definitely recommend it, especially if you're a closet Carpenters fan, which you know you are. You don't have to admit it though.

A Tougher Bird

The Arizona Cardinals will have a slightly different logo on their helmets next season. According to their owner Bill Bidwill, "A tougher bird. Hopefully, it will be worn by tougher and faster and meaner players."

The new one is on the bottom, and is indeed tougher, although a neck tattoo and maybe a knife scar would help. Still they probably won't even need to get up early to strike fear in the hearts of worms everywhere anymore. As for the rest of the NFL, we'll have to wait and see.

What's in a name?

In 1961, the American League added an expansion team in Los Angeles. The Dodgers had played there since 1958, the same year the Giants moved to San Francisco, and the American League wanted to join in on the westward migration, and so the Los Angeles Angels were added, owned by Gene Autry. They played their first year in Wrigley Field. No, not that Wrigley Field, the one in south central Los Angeles that was demonlished in 1966. However, the following season, they moved to Dodger Stadium, which had opened the year before and was also the home of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

This arangement lasted for four seasons. Before the 1966 season, the Los Angeles Angels moved out to the OC, settling in Anaheim and changed their name to the California Angels. They played in Anaheim Stadium and they stayed put since then, but doesn't mean things haven't changed.

In 1979-80, Anaheim Stadium was renovated to allow the NFL's Los Angeles Rams to play football there as well. But in 1995, the Rams moved to St. Louis, and shortly thereafter, Anaheim Stadium got a facelift to return it to a baseball only stadium (complete with boulders and a waterfall out beyond the centerfield wall), and when it was complete it was given a new name that just rolled off the tongue--Edison International Field of Anaheim.

It stayed like this lasted until December 29, 2003, when the stadium was renamed Angel Stadium of Anaheim. (No word on when Buffy Stadium of Sunnydale will be built.)

About a month ago, the team announced it's intention to change its name to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. The city of Anaheim felt slighted at losing out to its larger neighbor, and so they sued to block the name change, but that was thrown out. Now however, the city of Los Angeles is suing to block the name change, say that the team has nothing to do with LA and the name would be "misleading and confusing." Wait until they find out the players are actually humans and not really angels.

Become a FEMA Disaster Action Kid

"Disasters come in many shapes and sizes. Most are related to the weather. Some are predictable -- like a hurricane. Some, like an earthquake, surprise us. It’s good for you to know about the different kinds of disasters so you can be prepared! Although disasters themselves aren’t fun, learning about them is!"

I find the FEMA for Kids website to be totally inexplicable. Please, someone, tell me this is just some sort of elaborate hoax by the Daily Show.

Red Signs, Blue Signs

Per Matthew's request (and I prefer Choatean to Choateish, by the way), I have tried to break down the Senate of the new 109th Congress by the senators' sun signs.

• Aries (March 21-April 19) 5
  
  • Republicans--4 (Lincoln Chafey, John Ensign, Orrin Hatch, Richard Lugar)
    
  • Democrats--1 (Patrick Leahy)
    
• Taurus (April 20-May 20) 12
  
  • Republicans--7 (Mike Crapo, Jon Kyl, Dick Shelby, Pat Roberts, David Vitter, Rick Santorum, Pete Domenici)
    
  • Democrats--4 (Bryon Dorgan, Deborah Stabenow, Benjamin Nelson, Ronald Wydon)
    
  • Independent--1 (Jim Jeffords)
    
• Gemini (May 21-June 20) 4
  
  • Republicans--2 (Christopher Dodd, Jay Rockefeller)
    
  • Democrats--2 (Lisa Murkowski, Gordon Smith)
    
• Cancer (June 21-July 22) 8
  
  • Republicans--5 (Lamar Alexander, Larry Craig, Lindsey Graham, Kay Bailey Hutchison, George Voinovich)
    
  • Democrats--3 (Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, Barbara Mikulski)
    
• Leo (July 23-August 22) 3
  
  • Republicans--2 (Norm Coleman, Elizabeth Dole)
    
  • Democrats--1 (Barack Obama)
    
• Virgo (August 23-September 22) 8
  
  • Republicans--6 (Robert Bennett, Sam Brownback, Jim DeMint, Chuck Grassley, John McCain, John Sununu)
    
  • Democrats--2 (Daniel Akaka, Daniel Inouye)
    
• Libra (September 23-October 22) 8
  
  • Democrats--5 (Jeff Bingaman, Maria Cantwell, Blanche Lincoln, Bill Nelson, Pattie Murray)
    
  • Republicans--3 (Chuck Hagel, Trent Lott, James Talent)
    
• Scorpio (October 23-November 21) 12
  
  • Democrats--7 (Joe Biden, Barbara Boxer, Robert Byrd, Hillary Clinton, Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Jack Reed)
    
  • Republicans--5 (Jim Bunning, Saxby Chambliss, James Inhofe, Ted Stevens, Mel Martinez)
    
• Sagittarius (November 22-December 21) 9
  
  • Democrats--5 (John Kerry, Max Baucus, Mary Landrieu, Harry Reid, Chuck Shumer)
    
  • Republicans--4 (Wayne Allard, Richard Burr, Thad Cochran, Susan Collins)
    
• Capricorn (December 22-January 19) 8
  
  • Republicans--4 (Mike DeWine, Johnny Isakson, Jeff Sessions, John Thune)
    
  • Democrats--2 (Evan Bayh, John Corzine, Tim Johnson, Mark Pryor)
    
• Aquarius (January 20-February 18) 12
  
  • Republicans--7 (Conrad Burns, John Cornyn, Michael Enzi, Judd Gregg, Arlen Specter, Craig Thomas, John Warner)
    
  • Democrats--5 (Jim Carper, Mark Dayton, Herb Kohl, Frank Lautenberg, Paul Sarbanes)
    
• Pisces (February 19-March 20) 11
  
  • Republicans--6 (George Allen, Kit Bond, Tom Coburn, Bill Frist, Mitch McConnell, Olympia Snowe)
    
  • Democrats--5 (Kent Conrad, Russ Feingold, Edward Kennedy, Joseph Lieberman, Ken Salazar)
    
  
  

I don't really know exaclty how to crunch these numbers, but here are a couple of thoughts at first glance:

Given that the Senate as a whole has 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and 1 Independent, its seems to me based on this small sample that Aquarius, Taurus, and Virgo are the "red signs"; Libra, Scorpio, and Sagittarius are the "blue signs"; and the remaining six signs are the "swing signs."

I also thought to compare number of senators of a certain sign with the distribution of presidential signs, and I found that the percentages are generally very close, with the exceptions that Leos seem more likely to president, and that Pisceses and Virgos (especially Republican Virgos) are more likely to be in the Senate. If of course it turns out that 12% of the population as a whole turns out to be Scorpio, then maybe this doesn't say much, but if in the general population all the signs occur at the same frequency, then mayber there is something about Scorpios, Aquariuses, and Tauruses being more likely to be elected to a higher office. I may have to check the House of Representatives....

Mixed Berry 7-Up Plus

I just tried some of the new Mixed Berry 7-Up Plus. It contains 5% real fruit juice and one 8 oz serving is fortified with 10% of the USDA's recommended daily dose of vitamin C as well as 10% calcium. It's sweetened with Splenda, and so it has only 10 calories. I think I like it, although it does kind of leave an aftertaste that I don't like.

In the interest of Full Disclosure

It's been revealed that much like that columnist that I had never heard of who was paid by a PR firm hired by the Department of Education to promote the No Child Left Behind program, which advocated things the columnist had apparently advocated for free for many years, bloggers are not immune to accepting money for doing what they would be doing anyway. The Wall Street Journal reveals that the Howard Dean campaign hired bloggers to write good things about the campaign in their blogs.

Also one of the New York Times Magazine's "Ideas of the Year" for 2004 was blogging as advertisement with Nike's now defuct blog, "Art of Speed". Unfortunately I missed the 2003 blog associated with Dr. Pepper/7-Up's roll out of their Raging Cow milk products, and also the associated Raging Cow boycott blog

This has caused me to think that I should, in the interest of full disclosure report that my income comes from the Univerisity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While they do not pay me to blog on their behalf, on the off chance that I were to unearth something big about the university and their policy regarding this or that, I felt this should be made clear. I have never received payment of any kind for blogging. Although I would gladly take some though although I'd prefer it in the form of reader donations. Yes, it's pledge week here at blog_eric(x). Anything you can do to help will be greatly appreciated.

More that just a pit stop

I finally got around to making my write-up of my stop at the I-65 Alabama Welcome Center on my return trip from Nashville to Carrboro on January 2. Yeah it's "out of the way," but it's getting hard to find counties that I haven't been to yet. This time I add 4 in Alabama and something like 17 in Georgia.

Another round of Guinness. Brilliant!

Last night I saw The Man in the White Suit, another of the classic Alec Guinness comedies produced by Ealing Studios in the 1950s. In this one from 1951, Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, an unassuming polymer chemist working for various synthetic textile plants in northern England when he invents an incredibly strong new fiber that can be spun into fabric that never wears out and never gets dirty. Never needs washing? Brilliant! Never wears out? Brilliant! Unless your livelihood is derived from making things that wear out and need replacing, which is why the razor blade that never gets dull and the light bulb that never burns out are not on the market. Therefore the barons of the English Textile industry, including a fantastic absurdly old man who makes Mr. Burns look rather spritely, conspire to keep the new material off the market. They are not the only ones opposed to his invention as the mill's labor union vows to down their tools until they receive a promise that the company will never switch to this new material. Indeed, even an old woman who makes her meager living doing people's laundry wonders why scientists can't just leave things alone.

Also recommending are the other Ealing comedies The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, and Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which Guinness plays all eight family members that must die in order for a man to become the duke. I still have plenty of Guiness's work with director David Lean to go through. Guinness is brilliant in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia is excellent with Guinness in a supporting role, but I have not yet seen the other four film in which Lean directs Guinness--Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Dr. Zhivago, and A Passage to India. Plus, I didn't get to watch my Christmas present to my dad, the DVD of the BBC's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and I haven't seen his other BBC portrayal of Le Carre's George Smiley in Smiley's People.

Also of note is that Alec Guinness was nomination for the Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium Oscar for the only screenplay he wrote, 1958's The Horse's Mouth, in which he also starred.

Music 2004 from Mars or Venus?

I decided to take the Top 90.3 albums of 2004 as ranked by Seattle's KEXP, and break them down by the number and gender of the members of the band. (Exactly who is in the band can sometimes be a little iffy, and so your results may vary. Also, I have ignored the Garden State soundtrack since it is the only album by "Various Artists.")

• Solo Artists
  
  • Male--18
    
  • Female--6
    
  
  
• Duos
  
  • 2 men--12
    
  • 1 man, 1 woman--1
    
  
  
• Trios
  
  • 3 men--8
    
  • 2 men, 1 woman--2
    
  • 3 women--1
    
  
  
• Quartets
  
  • 4 men--15
    
  • 3 men, 1 woman--6
    
  • 2 men, 2 women--1
    
  
  
• Quintets
  
  • 5 men--7
    
  • 4 men, 1 woman--6
    
  • 3 men, 2 women--1
    
  
  
• Septets
  
  • 5 men, 2 women--2
    
  
  
• Octets
  
  
  • 8 men--1
    
  • 5 men, 3 women--1
    
  
  
• Icosotrios
  
  • 15 men, 8 women--1*
    
  
  

*--According to the members section of the website of The Polyphonic Spree, I am in the band, although I seem to have misplaced my robe.

Der 911 ist kühl.

It's hard for me to look at numerals and not seem them as things named in English even though they may be stuck in the context of a sentence from some other language. I don't know if someone from Germany who speaks English at roughly my level of German might ask me "Who will the San Francisco Neunundvierzigers take with their first pick the NFL draft?" but I really want to call all numbers by their English names. Maybe it's just that when I'm reading I don't have to recall that 1917 in the context of a Russian sentence is not "nineteen seventeen," but тысяча девятьсот семнадцатый when used with the year. (Yes, I had to look that up, and it is actually the ordinal 1917th.)

But it just occured to me that the car the Porsche 911 might be seen to be much less desirable in the English speaking world if it was marketed as the Porsche Neunhundertelf. Yes, the German for eleven is elf. I'm not totally sure how they actually say this in German, but I think they would just say their version of "nine-eleven," or "neun-elf." (Remember they pronounce -eu- like our -oi-) As for its gender, I'm not totally sure why, but the de.wikipedia calls it Der 911er, or "der neun-elfer," which is slightly more appealing to my English ears. Although I suppose it would decline to -elfen and -elfem, which aren't that great either.

Medium

I caught the "encore presentation" of the first episode of NBC's midseason replacement show Medium, and I think I am contractually required to say that it is either "Well done" or "Rare" and based on the first episode, I'd have to say it's the former. Patricia Arquette stars as Allison Dubois, a Phoenix woman trying to balance a career--preparing to go to law school and an internship with the DA's office prepping crime scene photos--with being a wife and mother to her three young daughters. Oh, and all her life, she's tried to ignore all the dead people talking to her because she is a very powerful medium.

Her husband, a rocket scientist, is a little unsure of this ability and so she tells him about a case in Texas and he faxes details to the Texas Rangers, who are surprised because she seems to know things that haven't been released to the public. She flies to Texas where she shows them where the body is buried. Of course they can't dig it up because they can't get a warrant based on the word of a medium, and then over night, "the biggest storm to ever hit Texas," which was named Hurricane Allison, washes away the field where the body was. Something about that seemed a little wrong, and the contempt held for the rubes who inhabit Texas seemed a little too thick; however the scene where she is taken to visit with the teenager suspected of molesting and killing a ten-year-old boy shows that there must be some smarts behind this show. I'm intregued by how the show seems to know that using a medium is not valid evidence in court and that having someone who can sometimes read people's minds working for the DA's office might not exactly mesh with the accused's constitutional rights.

She returns to Phoenix where she finds out that her theory about a crime proved to be correct and so she is offered a job as a crime scene consultant for the DA.

Now this morning, I find the website for the real Allison Dubois. As it says on the cover of her book Don't Kiss Them Good-Bye, "The true story of the woman who inspired the NBC television show Medium." Also on the cover is a quote from her friend Kelsey Grammer, who I noticed last night was creditted as a producer of the show.

Its regular timeslot is on Monday nights at 10:00 (9:00 central) or whenever you want to watch your TiVoed copy. Oh, wait TiVo is neither a noun nor a verb. Sorry, that should read "watch your DVRed copy."

Double Feature

Tonight’s double feature was two great art house films filmed in great houses of art--“The Order,” a portion of the third part of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark.

This is my first exposure to the Cremaster Cycle. I suppose having seen the rest will make this make a little more sense, but I don’t really know. (Cremaster 1 is apparently a 50 minute ballet with a woman dragging two miniature Goodyear Blimps around the blue turf at Boise State’s football field.) “The Order” is I believe the third of six parts of Cremaster 3, which was the last of the 5 part cycle to be released, and in its 30 minutes it follows a man in a bright orange kilt, matching orange wig, and blue argyle leg warmers climb up and down the spiral ramp of Guggenheim Museum in New York through five “degrees”:

• 1st Degree: A kickline of dancing girls dress in lamb constumes.
  
• 2nd Degree: Agnostic Front vs. Murphy’s Law, a battle of two New York hardcore bands
  
• 3rd Degree: Aimee Mullins, the runway model/motivational speaker/world’s fastest woman on prosthetic legs, plays some sort of princess with the symbols of Free Masonry cast in plexiglass in her headdress to go along with her plexiglass prosthetic legs, but then turns suddenly into a cheetah woman, with a different pair of prosthetic legs that look like a cheetah’s hind legs. Like most of the film, it’s rather creepy and strangely beautiful at the same time.
  
• 4th Degree: I don’t know how to describe this.
  
• 5th Degree: A guy, who apparently is in another portion of the cycle, shovels molten Vaseline onto the floor at the top of the Guggenheim so that it can flow down a trough through the lower degrees.
  
  

Got all that? Me neither. But the DVD of it, has one video track for each Degree that runs throughout the film. I didn’t fully understand what was going on in the film going into it, and so I started with the 1st Degree, and so I got just 15 minutes of lamblike kickline girls kicking the wall of the Guggenheim. All in all, as odd as this sounds, I do want to see more of the cycle, and even worse, it really makes me want to make my own incomprehensible art film. Look out friends when I come looking for a favor.

Russian Ark is really quite amazing. I think it’s tagline sums it up best: “2000 Actors. 300 Years of Russian History. 33 Rooms at the Hermitage Museum. 3 Live Orchestras. 1 Single Continuous Shot.” Tilman Büttner must be mentioned. He operated the steadicam during the 90 tour through the Hermitage. How on earth could he do this? The crew only had access to the Hermitage for one day, and the first three attempts ended shortly due to technical problems, but they got it on the last possible try. Plus, Büttner speaks only German and director Sokurov speaks only Russian. Amazing. Simply amazing. And complicatiedly amazing too.

Gorram

The American Dialect Society has not yet announced their Word of the Year for 2004 yet, but they do list three different people's lists of nominees. List number 3 is from Grant Barnett, the editor of Double Tongued, "a growing dictionary of old and new words from the fringes of English" nominates this:

gorram, interj., a euphemistic oath, used in place of an actual curse word. From Joss Whedon's space cowboy television series Firefly.

I think the only way that Firefly has affected my use of language is the occasional use of shortening universe to 'verse, but then I've only watched it once. However, since I got it on DVD for Christmas that should soon change. Hopefully one day, I'll get to the point where I only insult people in Chinese though.

Maybe I'll give this football thing a try...

The college football season ended with the "championship" game, with USC handing it to Oklahoma 55-19 in the FedEx Orange Bowl. The Trojans were up 38-10 heading into the halftime show, which featured Kelly Clarkson, Trace Atkins, and Ashlee Simpson, and a few technical problems, including Kelly Clarkson starting with a dead mic, and I noticed that something caused Ashlee Simpson to ditch her in-ear monitors. The show ended with a chorus of boos raining down from the crowd. Maybe this is indicative that Kelly Clarkson, Trace Atkins, and Ashlee Simpson aren't a popular as they have been established to be, but I think it could be possible that the crowd just wanted to watch a good game, but they got a blowout and Ashlee Simpson.

ABC has led the way with their prime time broadcast of not football, but football-based programming. They now kickoff the season with a show with the perfect combination of a white female pop artist wearing the jersey of one team, a rapper featuring another rapper also wearing another team's jersey, and a classic rock band wearing spandex. Maybe I'm reading this all wrong. Maybe they are raising the bar by expect you to have already done your research to know what the big off-season moves were, which 6-10 team from the previous season will win their division, and which dyansty will finally stumble due to salary cap problems. They certainly aren't going to tell you. To me this special just screams out that someone at ABC thinks that there are some people who probably wouldn't watch the first game of the NFL season, but might stay for the three hours of football after being lured to the network by the combination of Usher and Aerosmith.

Although to be fair to the media conglomeration, ABC's sister network ESPN seems to realize that some people are interested in the game. Look at their Sunday morning pregame shows compared to FOX and CBS.

Hint from Heloise

Heloise says when going out of town for two weeks, be sure not to leave a pineapple sitting on your desk.

.
On the other hand, all three fish survived for two weeks with no food, although their colors aren't nearly as bright.