I've been appalled by the story of one James Frey, who gulled the most rich and powerful woman in Chicago, Oprah Winfrey; and what is much worse, before Oprah, Nan Talese, head of Doubleday Books. Talese is the publisher of Frey's book, A Million Little Pieces. Frey told her that his book was fact and she, dollar signs in her eyes, I guess, believed him. Frey had tried to peddle his fiction, or -- if he were as critical of himself as he is of people he was in treatment with, he would have characterized his drivel as "bullshit fantasies" -- as nonfiction. But he got clean away with it. Of course, we're 22 years past 1984. Lies = truth, truth = lies. Frey is nothing, compared to Herr Karl Rove, Fuhrer Georg Busch, undsoweiter.
P.S. I listened to the first chapter of A Million Little Pieces (of shit) and it was bad, in my opinion, as literature (although I am not an esteemed publisher with the discriminative acumen of Ms Talese) -- and as a self-help work, which millions of suckers think it is.
And you should read Roger Ebert's review of the movie, Kissing a Fool, the script of which Frey co-wrote. (Frey needed help on this. I read once that there were six writers for Mr. Ed.) Bear in mind that Ebert is far and away the most charitable reviewer of movies there is, period.
Friday, January 27, 2006
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Keep FDA* Off the Farm
(*Freaking Dumb Asses)
Forlorn River (aka Madison, Indiana, USA) had a public hearing the other night on a proposed non-smoking ordinance. I didn't attend because I no longer have a dog in the fight: I quit smoking and drinking almost 25 years ago. I don't frequent bars or locally owned greasy spoons, and there is now a public transport service on which no smoking is allowed.
Well, there is one lunch counter where I occasionally eat, and often some inconsiderate person there lights up, poisoning others' air with second-hand smoke. I hate it but say nothing. No one says anything because we non-smokers don't want to have the effrontery to tell the smoker that his -- or her -- behavior is obnoxious. Our silence gives smokers the notion that we tolerate their smoking.
We put up with it but we don't welcome it. In this town, nobody who has the gall to smoke in an enclosed area such as a restaurant or a retail store or a taxicab says, "Mind if I light up?" But if they did, there'd be few who would say, "Matter of fact, I do." It wouldn't be nice. It would make a scene. It wouldn't be Christian. It wouldn't be patriotic. (The smoker might be a vet. Or a Republican.) So (sigh -- cough! cough!) -- live and let live. It's about "freedom," right?
There were people at this protest who objected to a smoking ban on libertarian grounds, i.e. governmental intervention is generally bad and we should have as little of it as possible. A lawyer said that the proposed ordinance would be "government interference in property rights," and added, "I will decide for myself whether I will ban smoking in my business." (I detected a militant tone there: will we see civil disobedience from the counselor? Perhaps a class action suit? Will she be joined by the owners of bars and pool halls, who appeared to be, along with their patrons, the chief protesters the other night?)
I remember a Madison teacher once saying, "My freedom to swing my fist ends where the other person's nose begins." Fair enough. And my freedom to poison my lungs ends where someone else's lungs begin. The analogy of restricting people's right to eat junk food, from Hinkle's or elsewhere, does not hold -- unless in doing so they throw it up on others.
Tobacco smoke is dangerous: "Public health officials have concluded that secondhand smoke from cigarettes causes disease, including lung cancer and heart disease, in non-smoking adults, as well as causes conditions in children such as asthma, respiratory infections, cough, wheeze, otitis media (middle ear infection) and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome." Source: www.philipmorrisusa.com/en/health_issues
And -- just in case you decide that discretion is the better part of valor and therefore to fight your own tobacco addiction instead of the rights of non-smokers to breathe clean air in public places, I quote from the same source:
"Philip Morris USA agrees with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers. Smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases, like lung cancer, than non-smokers."
Since (1) smoking is the leading preventable cause of ill health in the United States, claiming 400,000 premature deaths every year, and (2) ours is the only wealthy country in the world without affordable health care for all, then (3) it would make sense in terms of both health and wealth to quit smoking.
Forlorn River (aka Madison, Indiana, USA) had a public hearing the other night on a proposed non-smoking ordinance. I didn't attend because I no longer have a dog in the fight: I quit smoking and drinking almost 25 years ago. I don't frequent bars or locally owned greasy spoons, and there is now a public transport service on which no smoking is allowed.
Well, there is one lunch counter where I occasionally eat, and often some inconsiderate person there lights up, poisoning others' air with second-hand smoke. I hate it but say nothing. No one says anything because we non-smokers don't want to have the effrontery to tell the smoker that his -- or her -- behavior is obnoxious. Our silence gives smokers the notion that we tolerate their smoking.
We put up with it but we don't welcome it. In this town, nobody who has the gall to smoke in an enclosed area such as a restaurant or a retail store or a taxicab says, "Mind if I light up?" But if they did, there'd be few who would say, "Matter of fact, I do." It wouldn't be nice. It would make a scene. It wouldn't be Christian. It wouldn't be patriotic. (The smoker might be a vet. Or a Republican.) So (sigh -- cough! cough!) -- live and let live. It's about "freedom," right?
There were people at this protest who objected to a smoking ban on libertarian grounds, i.e. governmental intervention is generally bad and we should have as little of it as possible. A lawyer said that the proposed ordinance would be "government interference in property rights," and added, "I will decide for myself whether I will ban smoking in my business." (I detected a militant tone there: will we see civil disobedience from the counselor? Perhaps a class action suit? Will she be joined by the owners of bars and pool halls, who appeared to be, along with their patrons, the chief protesters the other night?)
I remember a Madison teacher once saying, "My freedom to swing my fist ends where the other person's nose begins." Fair enough. And my freedom to poison my lungs ends where someone else's lungs begin. The analogy of restricting people's right to eat junk food, from Hinkle's or elsewhere, does not hold -- unless in doing so they throw it up on others.
Tobacco smoke is dangerous: "Public health officials have concluded that secondhand smoke from cigarettes causes disease, including lung cancer and heart disease, in non-smoking adults, as well as causes conditions in children such as asthma, respiratory infections, cough, wheeze, otitis media (middle ear infection) and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome." Source: www.philipmorrisusa.com/en/health_issues
And -- just in case you decide that discretion is the better part of valor and therefore to fight your own tobacco addiction instead of the rights of non-smokers to breathe clean air in public places, I quote from the same source:
"Philip Morris USA agrees with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers. Smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases, like lung cancer, than non-smokers."
Since (1) smoking is the leading preventable cause of ill health in the United States, claiming 400,000 premature deaths every year, and (2) ours is the only wealthy country in the world without affordable health care for all, then (3) it would make sense in terms of both health and wealth to quit smoking.
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Apocalypse Now and Then
Friday morning a week ago, I caught an item on a cable network saying that members of the Christian right are making an outcry against a TV show to air on NBC, The Book of Daniel. I would have ignored it if I hadn't heard about the flap; since then I decided to tape the show to judge for myself if it was an outrage.
From the snippets I had then, it stars Aidan Quinn as a clergyman who has, I think, a gay son, and Jesus appears to the cleric as a more or less comic figure, it looks like from the commercials I’ve glanced at. Then I heard that the Christian rightwing element is protesting the program and trying to stop it from being broadcast altogether because it doesn't conform to their theology. In other words, they are going to pull the same shit they did with God, The Devil, and Bob. That was a cartoon that I really liked and it was shouted down and bullied off the air by them a few years back.
Saturday, a week ago:
Well, I taped Daniel last night, and it was so-so, I guess. It is satire, I'd say, a soap-opera in the fashion of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. It shows up everybody except Jesus as a fool. Which is -- by the way -- pretty much the way I see the human condition and therefore is, in my opinion, an accurate depiction.
And an accurate depiction of humanity is good theology, as far as I’m concerned. If one scriptural quotation comes across loud and clear in this show, it's "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (That's Paul the Apostle writing.)
The reverend is a good, well-meaning man who tries to do the right thing but is overwhelmed by the evil around and within him. His most obvious vice is "Canadian headache pills," which Jesus gently chides him about ("I thought you were cutting back on those"), and perhaps the preacher's worse sin is pride, represented by his ambition to become bishop.
His wife seems to be a pretty good skate, the obvious problem for her being "martinis" -- also when the pressure is on, which is always, as in the case of the rector.
Ellen Burstyn is Daniel's bishop and, besides hitting him up for his Vicodin, it turns out she sleeps with Daniel’s father (James Rebhorn), who is also a bishop, and who is the husband of a woman with Alzheimer’s, whose cerebral lapses tend to bawdy remarks in the company of everyone.
Then there are the children -- a daughter, Grace, who is busted at the outset for selling pot (to buy anime software), a son, Peter, who is openly gay, at least to his decent parents, and Adam, a rather amoral, smug, cruel son, adopted, of Chinese birth. Humor, or a facsimile thereof, takes place around the dinner table with the kids slamming each other as the stoner, the queer, and the -- what? -- asshole?
Speaking of which, Adam is boffing one of the parishioner’s daughters -- in the reverend's garage -- and the main objection the girl’s mother seems to have is that the boy is likely to make “oriental grandchildren running around [her] Christmas tree” -- not that the two children are having sex per se without the spiritual maturity to appreciate its meaning or consequences.
In the extended family, Daniel's brother-in-law absconds with $3.2 million in the church's funds. Daniel goes to a fellow cleric, the Catholic priest, played by Dan Hedaya (Dan played Cher's father in Clueless, in case you were expecting gravitas in a member of the clergy) and asks the priest to employ the parish mafiosos to find the brother-in-law and strong-arm him to get the money back ("It's not like I'm asking you to have him whacked, Frank."). Charlie does die (Frank protests it's strangers who are involved). His widow takes up sexually with the 28-year-old secretary that Charlie ran off with. And so forth.
The show has the potential to be of prophetic value, and it has its truly worthwhile moments, but I'm afraid it's a little too silly overall to be of much value to this lost world. I do hope, however -- and pray -- it will succeed beyond the most fearsome belief of those righteous naysayers of the religious right (wrong) -- the likes of Albert Mohler and James Dobson -- so that they and their Pharasaic clan might be confounded. (Again, Paul says words to the effect, "for God made foolish things to confound the wise..."). Amen.
From the snippets I had then, it stars Aidan Quinn as a clergyman who has, I think, a gay son, and Jesus appears to the cleric as a more or less comic figure, it looks like from the commercials I’ve glanced at. Then I heard that the Christian rightwing element is protesting the program and trying to stop it from being broadcast altogether because it doesn't conform to their theology. In other words, they are going to pull the same shit they did with God, The Devil, and Bob. That was a cartoon that I really liked and it was shouted down and bullied off the air by them a few years back.
Saturday, a week ago:
Well, I taped Daniel last night, and it was so-so, I guess. It is satire, I'd say, a soap-opera in the fashion of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. It shows up everybody except Jesus as a fool. Which is -- by the way -- pretty much the way I see the human condition and therefore is, in my opinion, an accurate depiction.
And an accurate depiction of humanity is good theology, as far as I’m concerned. If one scriptural quotation comes across loud and clear in this show, it's "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (That's Paul the Apostle writing.)
The reverend is a good, well-meaning man who tries to do the right thing but is overwhelmed by the evil around and within him. His most obvious vice is "Canadian headache pills," which Jesus gently chides him about ("I thought you were cutting back on those"), and perhaps the preacher's worse sin is pride, represented by his ambition to become bishop.
His wife seems to be a pretty good skate, the obvious problem for her being "martinis" -- also when the pressure is on, which is always, as in the case of the rector.
Ellen Burstyn is Daniel's bishop and, besides hitting him up for his Vicodin, it turns out she sleeps with Daniel’s father (James Rebhorn), who is also a bishop, and who is the husband of a woman with Alzheimer’s, whose cerebral lapses tend to bawdy remarks in the company of everyone.
Then there are the children -- a daughter, Grace, who is busted at the outset for selling pot (to buy anime software), a son, Peter, who is openly gay, at least to his decent parents, and Adam, a rather amoral, smug, cruel son, adopted, of Chinese birth. Humor, or a facsimile thereof, takes place around the dinner table with the kids slamming each other as the stoner, the queer, and the -- what? -- asshole?
Speaking of which, Adam is boffing one of the parishioner’s daughters -- in the reverend's garage -- and the main objection the girl’s mother seems to have is that the boy is likely to make “oriental grandchildren running around [her] Christmas tree” -- not that the two children are having sex per se without the spiritual maturity to appreciate its meaning or consequences.
In the extended family, Daniel's brother-in-law absconds with $3.2 million in the church's funds. Daniel goes to a fellow cleric, the Catholic priest, played by Dan Hedaya (Dan played Cher's father in Clueless, in case you were expecting gravitas in a member of the clergy) and asks the priest to employ the parish mafiosos to find the brother-in-law and strong-arm him to get the money back ("It's not like I'm asking you to have him whacked, Frank."). Charlie does die (Frank protests it's strangers who are involved). His widow takes up sexually with the 28-year-old secretary that Charlie ran off with. And so forth.
The show has the potential to be of prophetic value, and it has its truly worthwhile moments, but I'm afraid it's a little too silly overall to be of much value to this lost world. I do hope, however -- and pray -- it will succeed beyond the most fearsome belief of those righteous naysayers of the religious right (wrong) -- the likes of Albert Mohler and James Dobson -- so that they and their Pharasaic clan might be confounded. (Again, Paul says words to the effect, "for God made foolish things to confound the wise..."). Amen.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Still Here in Ought-Six
In the first scene of The Milagro Beanfield War, the viejo, Amarante Cordova, rises from bed, dodders to a mirror, looks in it to find himself still here, and says "Thank You, God, for letting me have another day." Ditto.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)