A Phoenix rising from the Ashes (on two vastly different fronts)

There was news today that my favorite Hollywood head case, Joaquin Phoenix, had resurfaced in a public service video with Miley Cyrus and Liv Tyler. It's for a good cause (suicide prevention) but nonetheless is meandering and strange, two things Joaquin is pretty adept at.

Joaquin's infamous (non) interview with David Letterman early last year was perhaps my single favorite television moment of 2009. Then he stumbled off the stage into self-proclaimed thespian requirement so he could concentrate on his fledgling rap music career, but it's nearly a year later and we've not yet seen the fruits of his hip-hop labor. And now he's back, sort of. Sadly, it looks like he's since gotten a haircut and a shave, looking much less Unibomberesqe, but acting as dingy as ever.

As a fellow head case, I have to tip my psychosis to him, for his madness seems a lot more interesting than mine. I'd expect no less from a member of the Phoenix family. For those who missed his scintillating chat with Dave, here it is (it's worth watching again, even if you caught it the first time 'round).

On a more serious note, watching the Hope for Haiti telethon tonight affected me strongly. I'm usually a pretty cynical guy, but I drained the vitriol out of the gas tank at least for the evening. I'm not suggesting I'm so naive that I believe the celebs answering the phones and singing the songs are all coming together purely out of the goodness of their hearts (though I imagine many of them are on the face of it). Did they all suddenly have some sort of moral epiphany and decide to sell off their expensive rides, ditch their Hollywood Hills mansions and latest movie shoots or concert tours, heading instead to Haiti for the long haul to supplement relief workers? I hope not - they'll raise a lot more money and do a lot more good as untouchable figureheads who deign to look down out of their ivory towers every now and then, pushing the celeb-obsessed into ponying up some hard earned duckets because "Brad and Julia said so."

And it doesn't matter if it's from the heart or peer pressure or simply the desire to polish up a tarnished public image.

The situation is too dire and the need too great to give a shit about motives, and what we do in the next days, and months and years for the people of this little island will reverberate through the region (and world) for a long while. What happens to the Haitian people will likely have little direct influence on the goings on in our country but it could have a lasting effect on our national soul ... for good or ill.

It will happen this way ...

I had completely forgotten about one of my favorite movies until it popped up on cable this morning: Three Days of the Condor.  My favorite scene - one of my favorite scenes in cinema - is the second-to-last.  The subtext is palpable as Max von Sydow's dispassionate professional killer Jourbert schools Redford's idealistic CIA researcher bookworm Joe Turner on some hard lessons in betrayal and trust.



Condor is in the great tradition of the best of the conspiracy thrillers that found their voice in the cold war of the late 50s/early 60s (Manchurian Candidate!), caught steam in the mid/late 60s with the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam (Seven Days in May! Dr. Strangelove!), and perhaps found their zenith in the 1970s Watergate era.  Of the 70's ilk, I'm talkin' The Conversation, Executive Action, The Parallax View, All the President's Men and so on.  Strangelove may be my favorite movie of all time, but it is a (very dark) comedy (mostly).  Condor is certainly my all-time conspiracy thriller runner up and gets top billing in the playing-it-straight category (which is where virtually all of them live).

It has some great one-liners:

• "You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?"
•  "I don't interest myself in 'why'. I think more often in terms of 'when', sometimes 'where'; always 'how much'." 
• "Not now - then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!"
  
•  "Well, the fact is, what I do is not a bad occupation. Someone is always willing to pay ... it's quite restful. It's almost peaceful. No need to believe in either side, or any side. There is no cause. There's only yourself. The belief is in your own precision."
• "Listen. I work for the CIA. I am not a spy. I just read books!"
  

And of course:

• "You have not much future there. It will happen this way. You may be walking. Maybe the first sunny day of the spring. And a car will slow beside you, and a door will open, and someone you know, maybe even trust, will get out of the car. And he will smile, a becoming smile. But he will leave open the door of the car and offer to give you a lift. [offering him his gun] ... For that day."

The Gang that couldn't Shoot Govern Straight

John Stewart let loose with a great analogy last night on the Daily Show in regard to the ineptitude of the Dems getting any legislation passed: "It's not that the Republicans are playing chess while the Democrats are playing checkers, it's that the Republicans are playing chess while the Democrats are in the nurse's office because they glued their balls to their thigh again."

It'll be interesting to see how much more glue the Massachusetts voters ends up wagging in the Dem's drooling face with today's special election, daring them to apply it to their gonads and then laughing all the way to a filibuster as the dingy donkeys rub the sticky stuff all over their junk yet again. Like Lucy with Charlie Brown and the football.

Notice I say "they" when referring to the donkey party since although it might surprise some readers of this blog, I don't consider myself among their ranks. Clearly, I'm politically and philosophically aligned with the Dems far more often than I am with the Republicans; in fact, the party of Jefferson is often too conservative for my taste on a broad number of issues. You might even label me a socialist of a sort (though certainly one with strong capitalist tendencies). But I can't stand the exclusivity of the two-party system and hate the idea that something as complex as a political philosophy can be consistently shoehorned into right/left, black/white, up/down, etc.

I am aligned in theory with the Republicans on one thing: smaller is usually better when it comes to government.

A small government socialist? Isn't that an oxymoron? Actually, not so much as you'd think. Like most philosophies, socialism has a multitude of sometimes conflicting variations, most of which can be broadly lumped into two categories: one authoritarian (expansive government) - by far the most popular - and the other libertarian. I fall firmly into the latter camp (my Facebook Political Compass result to the right testifies to this). I don't go to the orthodox extreme of "no government" (that's not very practical or even necessarily desirable) but rather am generally aligned with the tenant that big government and big corporations alike are inherently troublesome, not necessarily intentionally but simply in their natural inclination to get comfortable with ever increasing power.

So, like some Republicans, I'd prefer that government not grow. Now, where I part company with them is in what portions of the government I'd like to see shrink significantly and what portions might still benefit with some expansion. The elephants tend to want massive increases on "defense" and equally large reductions in social services whereas I want exactly the inverse. An inflated defense budget simply emboldens and stockpiles power in the corporations already greedily suckling at the teet of the DOD cash cow rather than actually assisting the military with their necessary missions (I worked in that world for over 17 years so I know from where I speak).

Alarming numbers today are screaming "socialism" and "communism" at McCarthyesque volume in Pavlovian response to talk of a public option for health care. But health care, like education and national defense, are basic things all citizens should be afforded. And health care (like education) is far more innocuous than military power.  People should fear the latter running amok more so than they should the former.  Why aren't the anti-socialism crowd crying out for private corporate armies? Nobody is worried about the "public" military, it seems. Shouldn't firms like Blackwater just take over the whole thing? Wouldn't they, as a for-profit enterprise, be more efficient than the "public" army, to use the right-wing anti-health care reformer argument? No? I didn't think so ...

But to get back to the point of this post, you have to give it to the Republicans when it comes to execution; they seem to have it all over the Democrats in that arena. Of course, the things they tend to get done are usually those I abhor, but still. Too bad the Dems can't hire the Republicans to get their agenda past ... well, past the Republicans.

Ahh, why bother? The Dems would still get in their own way somehow and fuck it up. It's amazing to me that some of them even manage to get dressed in the morning without polling focus groups, hemming and hawing over color and style and stuffing the pockets of the clothing they've finally chosen so that it satisfies no one. It's a wonder they don't walk out of their homes dressed like rainbow colored, bloated circus clowns. As the old saying goes, "they couldn't sell ice in hell." By the time they showed it to potential buyers, chances are they'd have compromised the refreshing cubes of frozen water into flaming cauldrons of gasoline.

Sadly, this donkey infused legislative ineptitude - or, to be more precise, the perception of ineptitude - seems to extend to the executive branch as well, though there have been exceptions (Bill Clinton being the most recent). Sadly, the Obama administration is looking less Clintonesque and more Carter-like in its (in)ability to get things done (or at least with the appearance that they're getting nothing accomplished, which is in the end almost as bad). That's not exactly fair, though (at least not yet): Obama was given a downright impossible task in the worst mess handed to an incoming chief executive since Franklin Delano (and Roosevelt didn't have wars on two fronts when he took the helm). Through all that, he's still done more in his first year than W did in his first eight (at least more of the things that I wanted to see done; Georgie did a whole truckload of abhorrent stuff). I hope Obama's learned some lessons over the past year and applies them going forward (lesson #1: no more Mr. Nice Guy, please, please).

I don't know what's worse: getting the wrong thing done or nothing done at all. Meanwhile, I'll keep my fingers - and expectations - crossed.

Of Glen "Taco" Bell and Haiti's Heaven and Hell

My first Gastrointestinal Physician died over the weekend. The importance of his revolutionary research into the stool softening properties inherent when combining certain very cheap oils, spices, cheeses and ground meat cannot be over stated. Certainly not to those of us who had until that point suffered in silence. Remember, this was in the dark days before the advent of Activia. If there's any justice, they'll honor his wishes and bury him in an actual coffin-size Tortilla shell. Drop the Chalupa, my friend, for you're now in a better place (up in heaven, walking Gidget the Taco Bell Chihuahua and picking up her droppings in the clouds) ...

And speaking of diarrhea, thank God for the good folks at the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. Sure, they're still docking ships near the heavily guarded Labadee resort of Haiti - less than 100 miles from the epicenter of the devastating earthquake - so that the passengers can come ashore, hang out at the swanky private resort, enjoy barbecues and snorkeling, and so forth ...

... and some might say that's a bit insensitive ...

... but not so, they say!

They're donating any extra Sun Loungers for use by the relief effort! You know, in case the wounded want to soak up some sun during the days-long "down time" waiting for medical attention.

And I'm sure they have promised to instruct the guards surrounding the resort to avoid unnecessarily killing any of the pleading mobs pounding on the gates outside, crying out for a scrap of food or a sip of water or perhaps some antibiotics. Here, have a Sun Lounger instead! Let them eat cake! If they can find some!

Now seriously, it's easy to get all holier-than-thou about business-as-usual anywhere on Haiti, with such unimaginable suffering taking place just down the road; however, as distasteful as it seems, it's only slightly more reprehensible than it was a month ago or a year ago. When the rest of Haiti was quietly living in squalor and oppression pre-earthquake. And perhaps there is some validity to Royal Caribbean's claims that they are providing logistics services to the relief efforts while in-port and that to go elsewhere and deny locals employed in such resorts a way to earn some money only adds to the suffering.

Would re-directing the Royal Caribbean cruise ships to Barbados make anything better? Perhaps it would ease the consciences of the passengers but fuck their consciences. I know a way to ease them, cruisers: end your vacation early and pressure Royal Caribbean to pony up a partial refund so that you can donate it to the relief efforts.  But it's every fuckhead's right to stick his or her head in the proverbial sand (just remember to apply sun block to the exposed parts).

All that said, doesn't make it any less reprehensible; however, self righteous indignation isn't all that helpful in lessening the horror that continues into its second week around Port-au-Prince.

My 2 cents.

And on that hilarious note, I'll bid adieu.

X marks the Spot (on the floor I can now see)

A lazy, rainy Sunday finds me cleaning out my "office" (i.e., the place where I throw all the shit that doesn't fit in the other rooms). Mainly it's a graveyard for computers in my life that have since gone to that big bit bucket in the sky. And cables. Lots and lots of cables. CATV, Ethernet, RGB Component, HDMI, extension cords, telephone line, and several whose purpose I can't readily discern. But amidst this twisted rat's nest of wiring, I came up with gold: an audio cable long enough to reach from my laptop on the coffee table to the stereo.

I can finally play my iTunes collection directly off my computer through my stereo!

You'd think I'd have found - or just bought - one of these cables many, many years ago. But no, I'm a notorious procrastinator and have been making do simply plugging my iPod into the three foot audio cable previously protruding from the stereo audio-in. How primitive! I can only fit a small fraction of my collection on those devices and can't control them from the comfort of my recliner when they're tethered to that shorty wire across the room. It took me quitting my job - and thus not having any work to do over the weekend - to get me to dig up what I should have had all along. Perhaps one day I'll even hook my computer up to the television!

Good ol' Steve, living out on the bleeding edge of technology circa 2002 ...

And now with my music all stereoawesomeified - that should be a word - I'm jamming to lots of the brilliant late 70's/early 80's LA punk band X. Calling them punk really doesn't do them justice because they're about much more musically than the three super-fast cords, attitude and two minute songs defining the bulk of the genre. I don't say that to disparage others of the punk persuasion: three chords, two minutes, speed and an attitude is what great rock and roll is all about and why punk is my favorite flavor. And X had all that in spades; however, like the best of anything, they layered more on top. John Doe, Exene Cervenka, Billy Zoom and DJ Bonebrake had range and style and a thirst for experimentation, all within the confines of the punk rock spirit. Most of all, they were smart.

In fact, I'm enjoying the music so much I just realized I've stopped cleaning up the "office", but that's okay because I've moved onto another important task: importing into iTunes the CDs my friend John gave me upon his departure with the family to the Rocky Mountain wilderness of Adolph Coors and Mork & Mindy (thanks again, John).

Well, I've got to get back to cleaning again. If you've read this far, you're a masochist for sure and should get that checked out.

[Postscript: spending a surreal evening flipping back and forth between the daily news cycle focused on Haiti and the Golden Globes. One juxtaposed on the other makes for a really bad acid trip.]

Sun Drenched Island of Horrors

It's a tropical paradise on the edges, with a poverty-stricken core.  Sadly, this arrangement seems to typify so many of the islands in the Caribbean. With Haiti, though, those glorious edges are especially razor thin and the broken down core practically swallows the nation whole. Corruption and abuse of power runs rampant as is often the case when wealth and educational opportunities for the people are scarce, and that makes the chaos arising in the aftermath of a crisis such as the one they're in now especially dangerous.  Finally, the island's infrastructure - especially in the most financially bereft neighborhoods - is simply not built to withstand a major earthquake and certainly not to enable any subsequent relief efforts, even if most of it hadn't been reduced to rubble.

The Haitian people have in the past held fast to their proud heritage through times of pain, as though they understood that this too shall pass.  After all, they've fought through a long history of tragedy and oppression.  In many ways this history is intertwined with the rich tapestry of the vibrant culture that often serves to document their perseverance.  But this time the hammer might have come down too suddenly and the damage inflicted could be too great. And that in the end is what makes it so heart wrenching.

I've spent the last half hour watching news footage of the dead and dying in Haiti, and in particular of an 11 year old girl who had been half trapped under rubble for two days with her friends and relatives powerless to free her (they contemplated sawing off her one crushed leg, but they had no blood supply to stem the hemmorging sure to follow so that option was abandoned).  They did finally break her free, partly by removing the dead bodies of other family members caught in the same concrete trap.  She died, though, during the subsequent four hour drive to the nearest hospital (likely she would have waited hours or days more in line to retrieve medical attention, so the odds were always long against her survival).  What really slammed me was the close-up of her face, trapped and crying, little black rimmed glasses on and looking like nothing so much as the scared, hurt kid she was; a once happy-go-lucky child caught in a horrifying situation.

When I hear and see these stories, my snotty whining over trivial matters seems so conceited.  Which it is in any case, but it's magnified now in the wake of these horrors.  Of course, nightmares like these unfortunately go on the world over every day. Scenes like this take place in our inner cities regularly. But it's the sheer concentrated scale of the Haiti situation that is overwhelming to me, even far removed physically and emotionally from the carnage, safe and warm on my living room couch. I don't know anyone in Haiti nor am I close with anyone of Haitian ancestry.  And still it's just overwhelming to me.  You'd have to be dead inside or Rush Limbaugh for it not to get to you at least a little.  I can't imagine the intensity of the emotions on the ground there.  Television images don't nearly do it justice, I imagine.  Thank God for that.

I've donated several times to the Red Cross and other like agencies this week, but I don't think this is something that money (or anything) can solve in the right now.  The infrastructure just isn't there and by the time the foundation is properly laid to help the many, a great percentage will be long dead.  It's hard to say, but I just hope the relief workers can get it into place in time to recover the bodies before decease rising from the deceased gives rise to a secondary catastrophe and an unthinkable chain reaction.  Until then, let's be grateful for the many little miracles they perform along the way.

All Play and No Work makes for a Confused Boy

Saturday. January 16th, 2010.  High noon.  I left the safety of full-time employment yesterday to dip my toes back into the world of consulting, this time as an independent.  I've had a lot of folks asking if I'd been laid off but in fact it was quite the contrary: my now-former employer is looking for and hiring technology folks with my skill set pretty extensively these days and were thoroughly disappointed to see me leave.  The follow-up questions are the same once folks hear I left of my own accord without a guaranteed job and with the national unemployment rate still hovering around 10%:

• So why'd ya do it?  Life's too short.  Enough said.   
• In this economy?  I'm lucky in that the market's pretty active for my particular niche and I have several interesting consulting engagement possibilities on the horizon as well as a couple short-term gigs in the bag.
  
• Are you insane?  Yes, on multiple levels.   
• What you did is like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane and then searching the sky for a parachute on the way down.  That's not really a question and the analogy isn't completely apt.  From my perspective, this particular aircraft has major structural defects and several of my fellow passengers look disturbingly dangerous (in fact, so does most of the crew).  That said, I do have a standing offer to climb back into this particular plane if I so choose.  Besides, the sky seems filled with functioning chutes I can reach out and touch.

So I'll be okay.  And I feel a giddy sense of freedom.  But I also feel a bit empty today.  I tend to be a workaholic and am going through withdrawal as I take the rest of the month off.  I need a fix or something that'll take my mind off this "no work and all play" thing staring me in the face.  Books, movies, exercise, withdrawing all my savings and going to Atlantic City, coming up with a sure-fire get-rich business plan, writing a novel, fixing up the house to sell.  All are possibilities I've contemplated.  My A.D.D keeps getting in the way of going further.

Perhaps baby steps are in order.  Finish reading the six books I've started over the past several months. Watch at least a few of the flicks that sit untouched on the DVR or in unwrapped DVD/Blu-Ray cases next to the tube. Writing?  How 'bout I write a whole short story instead of the fragments/"moments" I've churned out to date before tackling my War and Peace tome?  Just a thought.  Fix up the house?  I did call a roofer, who'll be here Monday for an estimate.  That's a start.  And I did go for a run just a bit ago to (try and) make up for the Girl Scout cookies I bought - and ate - this morning.   The kid at the door was adorable and I was hungry.  Now my feet hurt from the run and the downside of the earlier sugar rush is catching up with me.  But one run does not my "regular exercise" New Year's Resolution make.  So why not devise a daily regiment?

Things to ponder.  Meanwhile, I've been catching up with some music.

Elvis Costello at Hollywood High came out on CD/MP3 this week and I'm loving it.  Recorded in 1978, it catches Costello and the Attractions at the height of their craft.  They were a great live band and this is grand evidence of that fact.  I also picked up Graham Parker and the Rumour live in San Francisco 1979 which was likewise recently released (last month).  Parker and company are equally wonderful. Perhaps I'm showing my age just a bit, but the best of first generation punk and new wave circa 1976 - 1979 is likely my favorite era in music, certainly the best of the eras I experienced first hand as a music consumer (the heart of the "60's era" roughly book-ended around 1964 - 1968 is my other fav period but I was just a toddler then and only later enjoyed the tuneage in reruns).

Well, this post has been meandering, unfunny, and thoroughly boring.  Not altogether to be unexpected given my track record, but it's sub-par even when compared to that.  Better luck next time, dear reader.

And so I'm off for the evening, fighting a cold - a parting gift from my employer - while flipping between play-off football and Closer, one of my fav flicks of the 00's (I discovered it today sitting there in my DVR fresh from a recording off IFC earlier in the week).  Ahh, Leon's sweet young Mathilda all grown up.  Natalie's just a notch down from my all-time pantheon of Hollywood crushes but climbs higher every year.  She took a big leap up with the one-two punch of Closer and Garden State stuck in the middle of the "Noughties" decade.

And so it is
Just like you said it should be
We'll both forget the breeze
Most of the time
And so it is
The colder water
The blower's daughter
The pupil in denial
I can't take my eyes off of you ... I can't take my mind off of you ...