I'm There!

Waiting Out the Clock

President's Job's credibility is shot, and his capital long since spent. He's incapable of saying anything new, let alone coherently, so why anyone gives a crap what he has to offer during the State of the Union tonight is beyond me. All it does is mark the next stage of what may be the longest lame duck presidency in U.S. history.

History Repeats

The parallels between Lyndon B. Johnson's 1967 Vietnam-era State of the Union speech and President Job's last night are eerie and frightening. Check out this link for a line by line comparison.

In more positive news, I followed the more or less worthless "The Ruins" with the most recent Peter Carey novel "Theft: A Love Story." Said story probably could have been fleshed out a bit more, but man, that guy can write. He's without question the greatest living Australian novelist.

Ok, he may as well be the only living Australian novelist, for all I know, but he's great all the same.

Eleanor? Simon? Am I missing some other major antipodean man of letters?

Children of Men

"Children of Men" is among the most frightening, challenging, thrilling films I have seen in a long, long time.

The message I took away from the film is very much related to the here and now. It's one of the first sci-fi films I've seen that's rife with realism, a disconcerting irony. So in this sense the "plot" was very much secondary for me to the sense that, premise aside, this sort of reality really wasn't that far out of the realm of possibility. Which is to say, the message I took was not of the generic "a child will save them" type, but of the "treat your children well, now" type, since the type of future depicted in the movie may be just around the corner, and could sneak up on us much faster than we think.

["That looks just like Guantanamo," muttered the otherwise demonstrably dense woman sitting behind me, who perhaps didn't notice all of the other troubling elements in the film that either already exist today or that have contemporary parallels..]

From a filmmaking standpoint, I think "Children of Men" has a whole lot in common with "Y Tu Mama Tambien," more than most have noted. In particular I was struck by Cuaron's trust in the audience by dolling out key visual information in the corners and periphery rather than in close-ups. There's a moment in "Y Tu..." where the (wealthy) protagonists drive down a road and see an abandoned dead body just decomposing along the shoulder. That's set in Mexico City today. "Children of Men" depicts a world in the not so distance future where that kind of stuff is just the tip of the iceberg.

Home Depot: What a Bunch of Jerks

Alma and I have had several bad experiences at Home Depot. Their stuff is junk, breaks easily, and their service is dubious. But adding insult to injury comes the stats that lead to and followed the resignation of the company's CEO. Between 2000, when he was hired, and this year, the guy made over $200 million in paychecks, stock options and bonuses, and his post-resignation severnece amounts to more or less the same huge number. That's over $400 million dollars in 6 years. For perspective, that much money would employ just under 14,000 people for a full year, paying them a generous $10 an hour.

That's just obscene.

Home Depot: What a Bunch of Jerks

Alma and I have had several bad experiences at Home Depot. Their stuff is junk, breaks easily, and their service is dubious. But adding insult to injury comes the stats that lead to and followed the resignation of the company's CEO. Between 2000, when he was hired, and this year, the guy made over $200 million in paychecks, stock options and bonuses, and his post-resignation severnece amounts to more or less the same huge number. That's over $400 million dollars in 6 years. For perspective, that much money would employ just under 14,000 people for a full year, paying them a generous $10 an hour.

That's just obscene.

I (Don't) Want My CBC!!!

About a year ago, Chicago's national public radio station WBEZ inexplicably swapped its locally produced international news show "The World" for an hour long taste of Canada's CBC. "The World" was relegated to the popular radio listening time of, oh, 2pm or so, while the latest headlines in Canada got prime placement at primetime, 7pm. The question I asked when this first happened: why? Why was Canadian news being broadcast in Chicago? Who the hell wants to tune in to the equivalent of some other city's nightly local news broadcast, only with all the detours - sports, weather, politics - absolutely useless?

The CBC broadcast is basically 70% the news of the day, which essentially means the same news I just heard on All Things Considered, but from a Canadian perspective. Big whoop. The remaining 30% comprises esoteric crap like logging laws and other things of interest exclusively to Canadians (if that). Needless to say, I turned off the radio when the CBC came on. I wrote the station a letter, complaining. Alma did, too. When the pledge drive came around, Alma decided not to donate.

Did we make a difference? Not by ourselves, but apparently enough people were miffed that "The World" is coming back! Now we can get all our thrilling news about Uganda, and Chad, and the Sudan, and Argentina and the rest of the gloriously dysfunctional globe, and less of these boring-ass pieces on Canadian zamboni minutiae.

Not that Canada isn't part of the world, mind. But it's certainly not a terribly interesting part.

Holdin' Steady

The Hold Steady released what was possibly the best album last year, "Boys and Girls in America," their third strong record in three years. They were also responsible for two of the best shows I saw last year, one at Lollapalooza and the other at the Metro (the largest proper venue they'd played in Chicago to date, which they sold out). At the last minute they were added to the House of Blues on New Year's Eve, and the next night as well.

I didn't go out NYE, but since the band's so reliable I caught them last night. I had a hunch it might be the hoarse and hungover holiday special - the Hold Steady is a hard drinkin' band in the best of circumstances - but I was still surprised to hear singer Craig Finn, an essential part of the band's appeal, almost completely without voice. The rest of the band was pretty solid, but Finn? It was as if his mic had been all but shut off.

I had friends who left one or two songs in, not wanting to see one of the best live bands in the world play a sub-par show. But you know what? They were still pretty good, and Finn, despite his rasp of a barely audible shout, still gave it his all. That's rock and roll for you, and something the all ages crowd probably appreciated.

Besides, at this point I've become so spoiled, catching great or historic shows left and right. Off-nights, on the other hand, are remarkably rare no matter the performer, and in a weird way an enjoyable experience in their own right. So I wouldn't be surprised if, several years down the line, it's this messy, bad-sounding Hold Steady show I remember the best of the three times I saw them in 2006. Time will tell.

The Ruins

An early resolution (well-pre-New Year's) was to read more this year, which really means reading, period. So I've pledged to take advantage of time I know I have by getting back in the habit and tackling some books. Unfortunately, I started with "The Ruins," the new novel by Scott Smith, who wrote the more or less perfect thriller "A Simple Plan," also the source of the excellent film of the same name. Smith's adaptation of his own novel earned him an Oscar nod several years ago.

That was the last anyone heard from Smith, but a barrage of hype, good reviews and a rave from Stephen King (whose opinion I trust, even if I don't generally like his writing) made me pick up the new one at the library. And you know what? It sucks. It's repetative, it's ridiculolus, and it goes nowhere. It's a slim short story premise padded out to a sadistic (in every sense) 300 pages. It's pulpy to the extreme, yet takes itself too seriously. It's -- and would-be readers, I'm giving away the whole thing here -- about a handful of vacationing college kids in Mexico, trapped on a mound of dirt and surrounding by sentient, flesh-eating vines.

Yes, you read that right. Killer, thinking, carnivorous vines. Oh, and they sometimes talk, too. And they're inexplicably mean.

So all they do is sweat, sometimes fight and wait around to die or be eaten, while these fast, smart, devious, malicious plant-monsters wait for ... what? Why don't they just eat them? Oh, right. Because then the book would only be a third as long.

It reads like a humorless take on the same ground covered by the gross-out horror flick "Cabin Fever" a few years ago, minus any hint of cleverness. It also reads like - surprise, surprise - one of Stephen King's early short stories, but stttrrrrrrreeeetched out well past the plot's brittle breaking point.

Smith must have let the movie biz get to his head, or at least his wallet, as Ben Stiller is among those thanked in "The Ruins," conspicuous alongside relatively anonymous friends, families and editors. Why? Because Stiller's production company allegedly optioned the rights to the film version of "The Ruins" before the book was even published, which is dubious to the extreme (see also: the diminishing returns of Thomas Harris). It does, however, explain why such a simple, silly premise of a novel got stretched out much longer than the story could support. Not that that ever stopped any Hollywood hack from making one of King's short stories into a feature, but I guess Smith just wanted to make their job a little easier.