Burn After Reading

Now that we are in the early stages of seasonal change from Summer to Fall in New England, there is finally hope for some good movies for grownups. It seems like we have to wait longer every year to avoid getting our senses assaulted and our intelligence insulted at the cineplex.

“Burn After Reading” provides a glimmer of hope. I sensed that the movie was going to be good shortly after it began, when my eye was distracted by the bright screen of a mobile phone a few rows down on the other side of the aisle. It was young teen, sitting as far away from her mother as she could get so that the mother couldn’t see her texting a friend. I believe that she had seen enough to conclude that even though Brad Pitt and George Clooney were in the movie, she was actually going to have to engage her mind to understand what was going on. As a result, she was no doubt text-whining about how bored she was – until someone got up and asked her to turn the damn thing off, which she did. She then adjourned to the lobby.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s a wonderfully dark and twisted one in which absolutely no one is likeable, and there is no happy ending. There are a lot of laughs along the way if you appreciate a well-written plot, and if you’re willing to engage with it.

At one point in the movie, a senior CIA guy says to one of his underlings:

“Report back to me when it all makes sense.”

He’s the only character in the movie who’s really got a grip.

(Click on the title for a synopsis. Illustration from "The New Yorker" magazine.)

Paglia on Palin

Camille Paglia on Sarah Palin (click on title for more):

"Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist."

"As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco."

"Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end."

"It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin's boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit."

Don't Crush That Dwarf...

For eight years, I’ve been hearing “Where’s the Outrage?” in regard to current events, and recalling all the outrage forty years ago over current events of that time.

Now, finally, we have some outrage. Travelocity has been charged with abuse in the treatment of its iconic garden gnome.



As you may have noticed, Travelocity’s television commercials have repeatedly placed the gnome in harm’s way at various travel destinations around the world. Many viewers, concerned for the gnome’s safety and survival, have become outraged.

In response, an international movement has formed to liberate ALL garden gnomes. Movement tactics thus far have included Campus Outreach and a German embargo. Click on the title to view one of the sites.

It’s heartening to discover what you’ll find if you lean your head out far enough from Desolation Row.

Voldemort Hath No Fury...

... like angry Harry Potter fans: "'Within hours of Warner Bros.'s decision to postpone the release of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" to next July, hate mail began to pour into the studio. An online petition expressing fans' disgust with the decision garnered more than 45,000 signatures. The studio says it even received death threats. "I hope you choke on your own saliva," snarled one fan in an email'" (Click on the title for more)

Change Agents

PETER BAKER
"For the first time since 1952, the party holding the White House has nominated someone other than the sitting president or vice president, someone without a vested interest in running on continuity, and at a moment when the party finds it difficult to defend its record from the last eight years.

But as a matter of history, it is easier to run as the opposition party if you actually are the opposition party."

DAVID BROOKS
"She gave a tough vice presidential speech, with maybe a few more jabs than necessary. Still it was stupendous to see a young woman emerge from nowhere to give a smart and assertive speech.

And what was most impressive was her speech’s freshness. Her words flowed directly from her life experience, her poise and mannerisms from her town and its conversations. She left behind most of the standard tropes of Republican rhetoric (compare her text to the others) and skated over abortion and the social issues. There wasn’t even any tired, old Reagan nostalgia.

Instead, her language resonated more of supermarket aisle than the megachurch pulpit. More than the men on the tickets, she embodies the spirit of the moment: impatient, fed up, tough-minded, but ironical. Even in attack, she projected the cheerfulness of someone confident about the future.

In those 40 minutes, the forces of reform Republicanism took control, at least for a time."
(Click on the title for the full texts from yesterday's New York Times)

Teenage Marriage

"'The median marrying age for women in the late 1950s was about 19, according to David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University and an emeritus professor of sociology there. But a marriage between 19-year-olds — or even 17- or 18-year-olds — then would not have been described as a “teenage marriage,” he said. It was too routine to be given a special label.

There is no way to know how many of those unions were prompted by a pregnancy — a phenomenon that has decreased sharply in the population in recent decades as the marriage rate itself has declined, sociologists say.

Studies show that today teenage marriages are two to three times more likely to end in divorce than are marriages between people 25 years of age and older. The most comprehensive study on marriage and age that sociologists cite was published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2001, from 1995 data, and it found that 48 percent of those who marry before 18 are likely to divorce within 10 years, compared with 24 percent of those who marry after age 25.'"

(Click on the title for more from today's New York Times)

Lipstick

Let me see if I’ve got this straight: Sarah Palin said in her acceptance speech last night that the only difference between a pit bull and Sarah Palin the Hockey Mom is lipstick. (Click on the title to watch the speech)

So that would mean the only difference between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin is…lipstick.

I don’t know how he feels about lipstick on his pit bulls, but I’ll bet Michael Vick will be watching the debate between the candidates for Vice President.

Locks and Bagels


We recently took a ninety minute Boston Harbor cruise on a gorgeous Summer Saturday morning.

Unlike the better-known Boston Harbor Cruise, which departs from (and returns to) Long Wharf in Boston, ours (click on the title) departed from (and returned to) the Charles River, just outside CambridgeSide Galleria in Cambridge (weekend parking $3.99 in the mall garage). And you can get coffee and bagels at Au Bon Pain before you depart.

After passing by the Museum of Science on the Charles River, we waited under the Zakim Bridge for the Boston Harbor Locks to open so that we could enter Boston Harbor.

If you’ve never passed through any kind of locks before, being in a boat as it gradually drops ten feet is certainly a unique experience!

Gail and I must have been the only Bostonians aboard a boat full of tourists, so the Cruise Guide’s chirpy commentary was a little too general for us – especially his take on The Big Dig, which neglected all the ways in which that project has made it easier for us locals to get through and around town.

It’s always a great pleasure to see the USS Constitution, but for me the best part of the cruise was the opportunity it provided to see facets of the city visible only from the water. I never realized that so many beautiful waterfront greenspaces, parks and walking trails had been created as part of the new condominium projects in Charlestown and Cambridge, because they are not visible when you’re trying to navigate the area from behind the wheel of your car.

And in case you were wondering, the new Institute of Contemporary Art is one seriously ugly building when seen from the water. I much prefer the old building on Boylston Street.

Caribou Barbie

“Republicans don’t see the choice of Palin as affirmative action, despite her thin résumé and gaping absence of foreign policy knowledge, because they expect Republicans to put an underqualified “babe,” as Rush Limbaugh calls her, on the ticket. They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West, like the previous Miss Congeniality types Dan Quayle and W., and then letting them learn on the job. So they crash into the globe a few times while they’re learning to drive, what’s the big deal?

This chick flick, naturally, features a wild stroke of fate, when the two-year governor of an oversized igloo becomes commander in chief after the president-elect chokes on a pretzel on day one.

The movie ends with the former beauty queen shaking out her pinned-up hair, taking off her glasses, slipping on ruby red peep-toe platform heels that reveal a pink French-style pedicure, and facing down Vladimir Putin in an island in the Bering Strait. Putting away her breast pump, she points her rifle and informs him frostily that she has some expertise in Russia because it’s close to Alaska. “Back off, Commie dude,” she says. “I’m a much better shot than Cheney.”

Then she takes off in her seaplane and lands on the White House lawn, near the new ice fishing hole and hockey rink. The “First Dude,” as she calls the hunky Eskimo in the East Wing, waits on his snowmobile with the kids — Track (named after high school track meets), Bristol (after Bristol Bay where they did commercial fishing), Willow (after a community in Alaska), Piper (just a cool name) and Trig (Norse for “strength.”)

“The P.T.A. is great preparation for dealing with the K.G.B.,” President Palin murmurs to Todd, as they kiss in the final scene while she changes Trig’s diaper. “Now that Georgia’s safe, how ’bout I cook you up some caribou hot dogs and moose stew for dinner, babe?”’

(Click on the title for the rest of Maureen Dowd's column)

Black and White

I’m really tired of hearing Barack Obama referred to as the first black presidential nominee of a major political party in The United States.

"Sen. Obama embodies contradictions in the community that are starting to bubble to the surface -- largely out of the earshot of whites. He is the biracial son of an African father and a white mother in a community where most people are descended from slavery or whose ancestors had direct experience with segregation. He is the married father of two in a community in which more than 60% of children grow up in a single-parent household. He's a politician who isn't steeped in the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s and didn't grow up in the inner city or in a black neighborhood." (Click on the title for the full Wall Street Journal article).

Barack Obama is in fact the first biracial presidential nominee of a major political party in The United States.

A couple of generations ago in this country Barack Obama's ethnicity might have been referred to in other terms, like "mulatto," but times change; now the politically correct term is "biracial”.

Whatever. Let’s just try to be accurate when we talk about a person's ethnicity, whether it be Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, or Halle Berry.

I'll Be Walking in Memphis

I’m going to Memphis, and I’m trying to fit all that I want to do there into three days.

For a hard core Rhythm and Blues fan like me, Memphis ranks right up there with Chicago as the capitol of the universe. In fact, it was the main stopover on the road from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago.

Here are some of the things I plan to see in Memphis:
National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel
Gibson Guitar Museum
Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum
Sun Studio
Stax Museum of American Soul Music
Graceland

Our hotel is actually on Beale Street, and some of the attractions are within walking distance. The others are a short cab ride away. Also within walking distance: Beale Street’s many live-music bars.

Some music fans long to visit Nashville or Branson; I’ll take Memphis.

Summer Olympic Games Infomercial


I think this is the one image I will take away from the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. It really captures the focus of the China Olympics coverage.

I tried to avoid the opening and closing ceremonies (except for highlights) and as much of the human interest blather as possible. I did manage to catch a lot of Track and Field in between commercials. I’ve posted other observations about the Summer Olympic Games elsewhere on the Freeway.

NBC gave China a big, wet kiss with its coverage – does anyone know if Bob Costas ever alluded to the irony of having Chairman Mao looking over his shoulder whenever the network used the Forbidden City as backdrop to his commentary?