Mel-Anon

Talk to the wall...

...'cause the world's not listening!

Don't be hasty

So I was going to remark on how the New American Hero did not come soon enough to save the television ratings for the post-Lance Tour de France, but perhaps the American public was prescient on this one, as Mr. Floyd Landis has perhaps not been able to escape the significant underworld of doping that has enraptured many top cyclists over the last decade but somehow never, never our Dear Lance.  Your cheatin' heart.   

That Landis winning was unable to prevent a sudden drop in American interest in the Tour is not surprising; although the average American sports fan claims to loathe the act of bandwagoning, they do so because they know the art so well.  Americans won't waste their time watching if their countrymen aren't tipped to win, and Landis was a relative unknown before the race who was greatly aided by PED suspensions that eliminated the 2005 second-through-fifth place finishers. 

Much of that can be traced to the 1980 Olympic hockey tournament, where the American win over the USSR has since been retconned into a symbolic example of capitalist superiority and an adrenaline boost for a lackluster public personality.  Had the outcome been different, as was expected, it would have been none of those things, of course, which hardly seems fair.  The game itself was in the afternoon, there was no live television, and most people were not aware of the outcome until after it was over. 

It reminds me of a first-round game of the  recent World Cup between England and its former colony Trinidad & Tobago.  The Caribbean archipelago, the smallest nation to ever qualify for the World Cup, held the football powerhouse to a draw for most of the game before a late goal spoiled one of the unlikeliest results in World Cup history.  Had it been the USA in their shoes, I imagine most people couldn't've been bothered to watch a game where their side is doomed to be annihilated, and would've waited to see the ho-hum results in the 53rd minute of SportsCenter. 

Somehow, I don't think that's how the T&Ters reacted.

EDIT:  I just now read the Landis was raised in a Mennonite family in Lancaster County, PA.  This makes him a far more fascinating character to me, of cour.se, although I don't really have any thoughts on it at the moment.

Now stay tuned for Armageddon

My last bit on the Rapture-hoopla did not take into account remarks by Condoleezza Rice on Friday.  And boy howdy, is this ever the motherlode.

"What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East. And whatever we do, we have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one. "

Hm, now what else do we know described as birth pains/pangs that might be the basis for this unusual choice of metaphor?  Could it be...this?

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.

Although anybody who's had Rapturemania shoved down their throats from an early age recognizes this passage, credit goes to Street Prophets for alerting me to the Rice quote. 

Happy catastrophe

Both Harpers and Echidne have some choice selections from the fringe website raptureready.com, whose denizens have been sent into a kind of earthly rapture over the Israel/Hezbollah conflict: 

Praise God! We are chosen to be in these times and also watch and spread the word. Something inside me is exploding to get                out, and I don't know what it is. Its kind of like I want to do cartwheels around the neighborhood.
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Damascus becomes ruinous heap, this eventually leads to the attempted Gog-Magog invasion of Israel. Russia is supernaturally obliterated. Makes sense to me.
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This is the busiest I've ever seen this website in a few years! I have been having rapture dreams and I can't believe that                this is really it! We are on the edge of eternity!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nothing like a conflict in the Middle East to get the ol' Rapture Index pushing red.  I've been around end-times nuts for as long as I can remember, and there are two things I'm dying to ask them: 

1)  I can remember solemn last-days proclemations since I was old enough to remember, and I know the modern eschatology fascination predates me by a couple of decades as well.  I'm gettin' old, and I'm still here.  What's taking so long?

and

2) Furthermore, how is it possible to screw the prophetic Rubik's Cube in place so that the world of 1990 and the world of 2006 both match all the parts needed for the magic to happen?  This suggests either that no time has yet fulfilled the "requirements," or that the prescription you're reading is far too broad to make any kind of judgement.  I suspect the latter.

Echidne writes:

The dangers of a wide-spread belief in the Rapture for the rest of us nonbelievers are obvious. Those who expect end-times all the time will not be bothered about the tsunamis, for example. They will quite rejoice in them. Neither will they worry about environmental degradation or people dying in unnecessary wars, because all these are just signs of the great events to come soon. And no believer in Rapture wants peace in the Middle East, because a war in Israel is a necessary prerequisite of the second coming of Christ.

Though I'm not ready to believe that the eschatologists are actively shaping US policy, there's little doubt that this is beyond bad theology, it's certifiably evil.  While there has been a surprising and fortuitous emergence of evangelical interest in addressing the climate change problem, there remain many who see the potential destruction of humanity as worthy of little more than a shrug, since the glorious return of Jesus arbitrarily pulling the plug on our celestial game of musical chairs will accomplish the same regardless.

Obviously the obliviousness to the little matter of universal genocide did a great deal to turn me off on that brand of faith in my younger years, but in truth, most of the casual Last Days types I've been around (including my mother) do not have the same giddy outlook as the RaptureReady zealots above.  I do ascribe some of the fascination to uncreative small-town preachers needing an easy way to persuade conversion, but there's a certain solemnity which suggests that they can see the desolation of what they force themselves to believe and are confused why they are not as happy about it as they believe they ought to be.  But that is country religion for you, but Tim Lehaye and the like could stand to take a lesson from it.

Review dump--las peliculas

* rating out of 5

"Walk the Line" (***)  Johnny Cash and June Carter were married for 35 years---after they had been divorced three times between them.  God hates divorce, according to the fundies, but he apparently doesn't keep up much with the times. 

This movie frustrated me, in the way that many movies do, with the convention of Woman Falling in Love with Man despite having no rational basis for doing so, and indeed many reasons not to.  Well, the cows still came home at night, so I guess I'll leave it be.  I suppose I'll be forced to admit that this kind of thing, or something resembling it, happens in real life, but if you want to know what I think, I think there are reasons but they're embarrassed to reveal their superficiality.  I'm confident in saying that I'm personally not going to see this phenomenon, not because I"m a a social train wreck, but because I'm ugly. 

Oh yeah, this movie.  Average.

Me and You and Everyone We Know (****) This movie was made by performance artist Miranda July, not the Danielson Famile, but they're on the same page;  filled with a surrealistic and sometiems twisted childlike enthusiasm and innocence that leaves you feeling not quite able to describe what the hell it was you just saw except that it was somehow remarkable. 

Capote (*****) I imagine that if Truman Capote were alive in 2006, he could have saved himself a great deal of personal turmoil by outletting his narcissistic guilt on the internet in a blog.  But then he might never have gotten around to writing any books.  It is somehow fitting, then, that we exploit his personal tragedy for our own gain in the same manner as he did with the subjects of In Cold Blood. 

Syriana & The Constant Gardener (**** each)  Both of these movies attract the kind of criticism that they are left-wing geopolitical fantasies that have never happened in the real world.  Never have, perhaps.  But if you're thinking "never will," consider what has happened since the exportation of democracy led to the present governments of Palestine, Iraq, and Iran.  "Democracy" is a good public relations campaign, but the goal, of course, is to get the governments Washington wants, and it has not proved succesful at that.  Should the circumstances in either of these films come to pass, I am reasonably convinced they will prove prophetic. 

Brokeback Mountain (*****) Every bit as good as it is cracked up to be.  The thing I appreciated most about this movie is that, while it is a long movie, it doesn't waste my dawdling on "emotional" moments trying to tell me how I'm supposed to feel unlike a certain other film I saw recently (*coughKingKongcough*).  I knocked "Walk the Line" for a similar thing, the difference is that movie had something it needed to explain to me; this one doesn't, and is aware of that. 

I am not convinced Jake Gylenhaal is a very good actor, but he seems to find himself in good movies. 

Everything is Illuminated (***)  I was not aware until after I did some research that this film was supposed to be fiction.  I should have noticed it was a little incredulous, but who wrote this, Jonathan Safran Foer or 50 Cent?  Eugene Hutz outshines Elijah Wood in this movie, but his other gig is more entertaining.  It has some humor and some gravity but not enough of either to make it memorable. 

Transamerica (***) A sweet road movie that I wanted to like more than I did.  See above.  Clearly someone's run off and stolen my sense of humor. 

That's all I remember for now. 

No respect

From this month's Harper's Index:

Number of films since 1960 that feature an evil albino:  55

If only I were available as a trade-in; I'm half-blind, half-albino, and half-assed 'cause I haven't done a substantive post in awhile!

The summer makes me drowsier than usual. 

Won't kiss no potty mouth

"What they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over," Bush says with his mouth full as he buttered a piece of bread.

Fun with BoxOfficeMojo

The new "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie raked in $153 million in it's opening weekend.  I don't know how many asses in theaters that translates out to be, but regardless it's an absurdly high number.  Want to erase what doubts you had that American consumers are suckers?  Consider this trivia question:  When was the last time a mega-budget film was a genuine bomb?  The last time a movie with Jerry Bruckheimer's fingerprints on it and a huge marketing campaign with fast-food tie-ins opened to the public and rejected by same as a bad movie and did no business after the first weekend?   I don't know the answer, but I'm legitimately curious.  In his New York Times review A.O. Scott writes:

But there's a catch, as there usually is. "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" is not just a movie. It's a glistening, sushi-grade chunk of franchise entertainment, which means that maximal enjoyment of it comes with certain obligations. It is the second episode in what will be at least a trilogy — the third installment is scheduled for release next summer — and full appreciation of its whirligig plot will depend on thorough acquaintance with the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" picture, conveniently available for purchase on DVD. And since "Dead Man's Chest" brazenly dispenses with the convention of an ending — it's pretty much all middle — you will, by virtue of buying that ticket, have committed yourself to buying another one a year from now if you're the least bit curious about how the whole thing turns out. By then, chances are good that you will have forgotten most of what happened in "Dead Man's Chest," so you'll have another disc to add to the shopping cart.

I assume this is not a "bad" movie, but that doesn't by default make it anything worthwhile.  All it means is that Bruckheimer and Disney/Pixar et.al. have figured out a formula to "bomb-proof" themselves with safe, derivative pictures.  (Seriously, "Cars"?  After that moralistic pap I hope we're spared the "liberal Hollywood nonsense for awhile.  The critics may be starting to see through the sugar as well; it's only managed a near-heretical 76% on the Tomatometer).

One of the criticisms heaped on "Brokeback Mountain" by culture warriors was that it was an issues pet-project that no one would go watch.  They were forced into a tactical retreat.  Despite the movie seemingly taking forever to get wide release, it did $83 million business domestically, proving that people will still go to a movie because it's damn good and not because of the confusing press hype (I admit it, when I first heard of this film, I thought the chance of it not being totally kitsch were about zero.  But I didn't know the short story either.) 

Argument clinic

Naturally, the whole family was in town last weekend.  My family is not monochromatic, of course, but it's safe to say I'm the most dramatically removed from them culturally and philosophically.  I play the good soldier, though, because there's not much point in arguing with them about anything, and I find the value of face-to-face arguments spurious in most cases anyway.  The likelihood you're going to get an argument where both sides have committed enough to memory and are deft enough to recall it at appropriate times is quite slim.  Trying to argue with fundamentalists is especially futile, since I'm not aware enough of whatever quack science or revisionist history they're peddling lately and failing to come up with an immediate response gives them a false sense of smugness.  (I remember being drilled on proselytization by memorizing some swift rhetorical moves intended to gain a quick upper hand on an unsuspecting heathen.)

My brother-in-law in particular is one of those people who oozes confidence in being able to pin down anyone who doubts him.  His most recent cause du jour is Mennonite churches who don't pay their pastor.  Part of the quirky egalitarianism that runs through the Mennonites includes the belief that pastors are not professionals; new preachers are chosen right out of the congregation with no seminary training and aren't given any special stipend by the church.  He sees this as anti-biblical as the apostle Paul somewhere dictates that church elders should be paid (he shares most fundamentalists' Paul-ophilia).  I am ambivalent on the matter, but it shows the futility of arguing with Biblical literalists when all they will inevitably do is point to a sentence in the English Bible and insist on its obvious relevance to the 21st century, daring you to scramble for some textual nuance or abandon an idea of absolute Biblical authority.  (One can easily do the latter, of course, but for them this is as good as a win, since it shows you must be some kind of compromising Bizarro-christian.)

So I let 'em go, because I'm not going to get them into a favorable position for me (by the way, is it creepy that they have children's songs now ridiculing evolution?  Weird...)  I don't really believe it's honest philosophy to memorize pat arguments and beat people over the head with them.  But I'm always seeing these blurbs for "how to win arguments with a liberal," so maybe this is what makes us easy to run over. 

The duchess

Amelie Mauresmo won the women's singles title at Wimbledon Saturday, coming back from dropping the first set against Justine Henin-Hardenne.  Mauresmo got rid of her own career doughnut in slams in Australia this year and has now quickly added a second at the ripe old age of 27. 

"Now that I see all the names on the trophy, and my name is on there -- Wow! That's not so bad," Mauresmo said. "I was thinking about the trophy all morning, and then I got my hands on it. It was bizarre."

She triumphed despite having fewer winners (31-28) and more unforced errors (22-20) than Henin-Hardenne, who won last month's French Open for her fifth major title.

Mauresmo is a lesbian, which I wasn't aware of until this week.  That's not particularly earth-shattering in women's tennis; two of the greatest female players of all-time are gay (Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King).  I have noticed that, curiously or not, NBC's producers, who typically love the girlfriend/boyfriend shot of the player's box don't seem to show Mauresmo's box much when she plays.  (Of course, there may be nothing foul afoot; I am not that voyeuristic about the player's personal lives to know whether she is with anyone or not.)