Please please please let this be so.
UPDATE: Apparently, in addition to being a closet case who likes anonymous sex in public restrooms, Larry Craig is bad at dialing the phone. Here is a voicemail he left at the wrong phone number.
What I did on my summer vacation
click on images for larger view.
The first three pages of my long-in-development graphic novel are done, and the reviews are ecstatic!
“Those look — pretty good — ” — Robbie Busch
“They do look good, and I can definitely tell what’s going on.” — R. Sikoryak
“Great work! I don’t know how you learned to draw so quickly.” — Tony Millionaire
“Those pages look great. Good on you!” — Jackson Publick
“I mean, I don’t know anything about comics, but they look great to me.” — James Urbaniak
With ringing endorsements like this, I am hugely encouraged to continue. Messers Busch and Millionaire both detect a Kirby influence in the “big hand,” which is weird because I’ve never particularly looked at Kirby, and Mr. Busch, in a moment of extreme generosity, compared these pages to the work of Jim Sterenko. I said that these pages look like Sterenko — if Sterenko drew with a meat cleaver instead of a pen.
For the non-comics creators in my readership, please keep in mind that there will eventually be speech balloons taking up all the blank space you see here and sound effects added to make it all more dramatic.
I post these partly to promote my work and partly to comfort Senator Larry Craig, to remind him that a bathroom encounter with a strange man could end a whole lot worse.
Movie Night With Urbaniak: Pickup on South Street
Neither
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nor I have ever seen Pickup on South Street, but after The Naked Kiss I’m curious to hear his take on Samuel Fuller’s, erm, unique approach to screen acting. So he comes over and we watch the movie.
“A maddening director,” says Urbaniak. And “maddening” is certainly an apt description. You’re watching a Sam Fuller movie and you’rethinking, “this guy is so bad, he doesn’t understand the first thing about what film is,” and then out of nowhere he’ll produce some effect so daring, so creative and so sophisticated that it’ll make your head spin. And he’ll do this, mmm, about sixty times in the course of a 90-minute feature.
In Pickup there’s an actor named Murvyn Vye playing “Detective Tiger,” and there isn’t a single spontaneous, heartfelt or natural line reading, gesture or movement in his entire performance. I mean, this is a guy who looks out a window and says “He’s here,” and not only do you not believe he’s seeing anyone, you don’t believe he’s ever looked out a window before. And you despair because you’re watching a lame police drama. Then, out of nowhere, ace pro Thelma Ritter walks in, acting as though she’s in a completely different movie, and just mops up the floor with the guy. Just takes the mop handle out of the closet, screws it into the guy’s navel, and literally mops the floor with him. And just as you’re about done marveling at the great Thelma Ritter’s performance, you realize that the scene you’ve been watching has been an eight-minute long extended take, full of dollies and zooms and tracking movements, and you remember that you’re watching a movie by one of the true mad geniuses of American film.
Similarly, there’s Jean Peters as The Girl. The Girl is supposed to be a hard-nose, hard-luck dame who’s been around the block a few times, and she honestly looks like a perfectly nice young lady who’s watched a few movies. You can’t believe she’s the lead, she’s fake and flat and all surface. Then, she goes to see co-lead Richard Widmark and a weird thing happens. He picked her purse, she needs the maguffin back or its her head, and next thing you know, Widmark is putting the moves on her and she’s totally falling for him. The scene shouldn’t work on about ten different levels, but it does because Peters suddenly explodes with passion, vulnerability and deep sensuality. And suddenly a movie you could barely believe got released becomes something so intense and deeply personal that you can’t believe you’re watching it. And you realize, “that’s the audition scene,” that’s the scene that got her the part,” Fuller cast her because he knew she’d be able to sell the weirdest-ass scenes in the movie, the ones the narrative won’t work without. To give you an idea of how weird her scenes with Widmark are, imagine the famous encounter between Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe in Wild at Heart, but instead of Willem ending up with his head blown off outside a bank, Laura Dern runs off with him and it turns out he’s really a really sweet guy and a patriot to boot.
Fuller the filmmaker is no less idiosyncratic. He’ll mark time through any number of ho-hum procedural scenes, then uncork a fight scene as intense, frightening and real as anything in Raging Bull, or, conversely, he’ll ruin a beautiful death-bed monologue with an utterly unnecessary reaction shot, or spoil a love scene with a shot out of focus. It’s almost like he’s playing with you, lulling you into a false set of expectations, waiting for the next opportunity to blow your mind.
to make you cry
I’m reading Lynn Hirschberg’s long profile of music producer Rick Rubin. I like Rick Rubin — who doesn’t like Rick Rubin? — and I am surprised to learn that he’s crossing to the other side of the desk and becoming a record-company executive. No, not a record-company executive, the record-company executive, co-president of Columbia Records. Columbia Records! Jiminy!
Anyway, the article is a great read and a fascinating glimpse into the mind, or the acts anyway, of a true weird genius. Rubin going from LL Cool J to Def Jam to the Geto Boys to Johnny Cash and on and on is a pretty staggering story, and I’m always interested to know what he’s going to do next. Him getting a boat as big as Columbia Records to steer is a big story indeed.
And he says one of the first acts he will sign is this guy he saw on the UK’s version of American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent! (which is a wonderful, self-conscious, defensive title if I ever heard one). The guy’s name is Paul Potts, and Rubin says his appearance on Britian’s Got Talent! makes him cry every time he watches it.
Well, I think, Rubin’s a sensitive soul, isn’t he? But I’m curious, so I bop on over to YouTube and check the guy out.
Oh. My. God.
After recovering my wits, I show this to my wife, to see if I’ve been genuinely moved or have merely been set up for a sucker-punch. She tries to remain calm, says that she doesn’t know anything about opera, has no idea if the guy’s “any good” or not, doesn’t know if she’s reacting to the quality of the guy’s voice or the situation he’s been placed into. But yeah, she’s floored too.
Me, I say it’s only partly his voice and it’s only partly the situation. For me it’s his face. Look at his face before he goes on, and as he stands there before his judges. “Judges” being a loaded word here — he looks like he’s facing his executioners. He looks like a beaten man. He looks like a man who’s had every ounce of hope beaten out of his soul by life, by Britain, by whatever dead-end grind he’s required to endure in order to make ends meet. He looks like he doesn’t even want to be there. Hell, if I had music like that going around in my head, Britain’s Got Talent! is probably the last place I’d want to be. Who with music like that going around in his head would choose to seek the approval of Simon Cowell? And yet here he is.
Then he starts singing, and his face completely changes. First it gains a sense of power, something he controls. My guess (projecting here, obviously) is that he feels very little control over anything in his life, but God Damn It, he knows how to singthis goddamn aria. Then, as the tune builds to its climax, something else comes into his features. It’s not just power, or control, or happiness — it’s defiance. Paul Potts has looked at the dawn of the 21st century and said “You know what? Not everything has to be crappy and ugly and shiny and cheap and brutal. People don’t know that beauty and truth are still possible in this world, and damn it all, I’m going to do something about it.
When he takes the stage he looks like the cell-phone salesman I would cross the store to avoid, but the look on his face as he sings the climax of this aria is one of a general leading his troops into battle. This is madness? THIS! IS! OP-ERA!! Then he finishes and becomes that shy young man again. Incredible.
The fact that he chose a venue like Britain’s Got Talent!, a show dedicated to the idea that art is a competition to be “won” or “lost,” to launch his tiny cultural offensive, makes him a kind of cultural suicide-bomber. Into the temple of the cheap and shiny he has smuggled his brave message of defiance and hope.
Wow!
The ever-indispensable Occasional Superheroine directs us to Crypto Kids, the NSA’s “kid page,” luring a generation of pre-teens to a life of spying. It must be seen to be believed.
Senator Craig resigns
Well I for one am disappointed — I was truly hoping this would drag out for a long, long time. Partly because this guy is fascinating in a way that fellow vicious, hypocritical Republican lawmakers (Gingrich, Vitter, Ney, Foley, Abramoff, etc etc etc) aren’t, partly because I was looking forward to what Craig was going to do next. What legal recourses are there available to a man who was caught red-handed (so to speak) in a crime, then pleaded guilty, on tape, and paid the fine? That would have been a fine legal proceeding to follow indeed, and would have, I’m guessing, done much to expose the Republicans for what they are — the party of Nero, drunk on absolute power and engaging not just in lewd behavior in public restrooms but, essentially, engaging in any behavior that pleases them. Honestly, at this point it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that George Bush has sex with animals and ritually sacrifices children on a stone altar in the Oval Office.
(The latter is, of course unnecessary — Bush has no need to ritually sacrifice children in the Oval Office, he ritually sacrifices other people’s children every day in Iraq. And don’t think he doesn’t fully realize that and glory in it every day. Face it — The man likes to kill people. His actions in Texas prove that. I’m honestly surprised he never actually sat in on any of the executions he ordered, licking his thin lizard lips as the condemned man/woman made their last convulsions.)
Meanwhile, once-beloved actor and game-show host Ben Stein has, apparently, lost his mind. Stein argues that the Minneapolis police were using Gestapo tactics on poor, innocent Senator Craig. And in case you’re thinking he perhaps is exaggerating or misspeaking, he repeats it — “gestapo, gestapo, gestapo.” Yes, I see now, that’s why Senator Craig resigned — because he did nothing wrong. Yes, it’s all so clear now. It’s not the blatant hypocrisy, it’s not the staggering levels of delusion and denial, it’s not the no-doubt long list of others who would come forward to say that they, too, had had illegal sex with Senator Craig in public restrooms, furthering damaging his reputation and the Republican party. It’s because of the gestapo tactics of the Minneapolis police.
Stein goes on to bravely confess that he’s been to Idaho, as though it were not a large state within the contiguous US, but some exotic, foreign locale. He characterizes Idahoans as nice, innocent people, rather like one would talk about the Tasaday. Then, his rhetorical bucket almost empty, he reaches down and scoops out another bizarre argument, “and so what if he was soliciting gay sex in an airport men’s room? That’s not a crime.” Um, well, except that it is, a misdemeanor specifically, a point the arresting officer makes several times during Craig’s apprehension.
But Stein isn’t done yet. In a stunning WTF moment, he goes on to suggest that the White House is somehow responsible for setting up a sting operation to entrap senator Craig and destroy his career. Hey, listen, I fully believe the Bush White House to be completely capable of executing such an operation — anyone who can blithely order the surveillance of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans and the torture of American whistleblowers is clearly capable of anything — but I can’t for the life of me figure out why they would do it to Craig instead of, say, you know, A POLITICAL ENEMY instead of a loyal Republican who, as far as I know, served his party and constituency with honor and integrity for thirty years.
In fact, now that I’m thinking about it (it’s always dangerous to think too much about the Republican mindset), I have no idea what the hell Stein is talking about. The issue of Larry Craig is, first and last, the hypocrisy. There is nothing else to make the story interesting. I AGREE: there’s nothing wrong with men having sex with each other. HOWEVER: there is a law against soliciting sex in an airport men’s room, and senator Craig BROKE that law, and KNEW he had broken that law, and THEREFORE pleaded guilty and paid his fine. That’s all hunky-dory, and unworthy of a media circus. He didn’t tell his wife or staff or constituency or even his lawyer — well fine, it was an embarrassing predicament to be in.
The only thing that makes the case interesting is that senator Craig is a major, long-standing opponent of gay-rights legislation, and has, with one toe-tap, probably demolished the Republican’s ability to use the threat of gay marriage as a swing-voter (hey, I don’t make up these terms) issue in 2008. That’s why his party has not rallied around him, that’s why they’ve pressured him to resign, now, only days after issuing his stern denial of everything (and I mean everything). Preferably on, say, oh, a Saturday, during a four-day holiday weekend.
But Stein, like all other Republicans today, sees his party’s problems as anything other than their own actions. It’s the newspapers, it’s the cops, it’s the Democrats, it’s the media, it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the pink-gun-toting lesbian gangs.