Creekside Review

Jason Newsted Finally Gets Props

"Finally, (Metallica) released Load, which will go down in history as one of the greatest adult contemporary albums ever released -- easily equaling anything released by Carly Simon or Bread."

Five Reasons Why Metallica Will Doom Bonnaroo Forever

Also, it's a throwaway line, but this is righter than right: "(T)he biggest problem facing Lollapalooza . . . was Billy Corgan getting pissed off because people liked the Beastie Boys better than his band." I was there in 1994 and it was the first time I'd ever been insulted by a band's performance. It wouldn't be the last, but it was definitely the first.

The Aggregate Effect

Over coffee this morning I browsed through a link to hundreds of photos taken on Obama's campaign trail by a talented photographer (awesomely) named Scout Tufankjian. I got through the first two sets, "Early Days" and "The Leadup to Iowa." Weird to half-recognize so many mundane locations and near-familiar faces being given a historic and hagiographic feel. Some of these photographs are completely arresting. Lots of shots of the Obama family and plenty of behind-the-scenes angles give you a fresh perspective on the candidate and the tolls of a campaign.

I'm not sure what someone who doesn't support Obama might see if they clicked through a few dozen of these pictures. (Wish I could link to particular favorites. Numbers 37 and 67 in "Early Days" are particularly good.) Would he or she find preconceptions confirmed (Number 74 in the first set might be an interesting Rorschach test for an Obama and a Clinton supporter.) or do these serve as a different kind of campaign ad with powers of persuasion all its own? I don't know. I think if I were asked to look at a photo essay like this, say, of Dick Cheney, I might be persuaded he is less evil or a little more human than I tend to think about him. (In his case, I can't remember who first suggested this to me, but when Mary Cheney had her baby, someone reminded me that the VP would be "Grandpa" to that child, however odious his actions and statements. Perspective, I guess.)

So I'm curious what the aggregate effect might be on someone who only knows Obama through a lot of scurrilous emails or FOX News stories. Would he or she still believe him to be an "empty suit" or dangerous to the country? Would they see the effect he has on people who got to meet him face-to-face and think he was worth a second look?

Because I can tell you what the effect of these photos is on me: confidence in my choice and certainty that someone who pours his own tea (#37 in the "The Leadup to Iowa") or gives a high-five to a kid (#52, same set) is likely someone who will remember his past and use it to guide future decisions. These pictures fit very neatly with the larger picture I already have of him. I might just be seeing what I want to see. But I don't think so.

What's the Nickel For?

Let's bump down the depression, shall we? I just had a conversation about the studio system in the '20s and '30s and was reminded of a beloved scene from a movie I've never seen based on a book I've never read. Is it on the Youtubes, I wondered?

Yes. A bit of background: Donald Pleasance (the seated bald man) is a staff writer for DeNiro's studio. He's been called on the carpet by DeNiro because of a crappy first draft of a screenplay that's far too literary and not imagistic enough. As this clip begins, DeNiro describes a scene that "works" as contrast to the dead scene Pleasance wrote. Enjoy.

Remember Walter Reed Hospital?

That was evidence of how little we cared for our wounded veterans. Here's evidence of how little we care for the rest of our veterans.

Seriously. We'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an embassy in Baghdad and the people who made it possible have to live here when they get back. Until they have to go back on their third or fourth deployment.

More information in this article. The Army spokesman's excuse is that this company came home 3 weeks early. Did you see the video? Were they really going to fix all of that in less than a month? I kind of doubt it. Everybody cue up the right-wing dismissals of "It's all Clinton's fault." As if the "pro-military" party hadn't controlled every lever of government for the bulk of the last 7 years.

And, speaking of that embassy . . . Brother, can you spare a dime? It's still not done and it's probably going to cost more.

"Character" Flaws

So-and-so-dude was  (again!) "sittinginfor" Terry Gross today on Fresh Air. He was interviewing Casey Affleck about the underrated Lehane-adaptation Gone Baby Gone. (Why? I don't know. It's been on DVD for a while now. He just was.) Sittinginfor-dude was just getting warmed up about the film's realistic feel and says that the bars and streets of Boston become a "character" in the film.

Stop. Boston, its bars, its streets, the look, tone, angle, costumes, whatever you're dressing your frame with besides the actors themselves, are not "characters." Those things are part of setting. Setting isn't a character. It's setting.

Now, I know what Sittinginfor-dude was trying to say. The audience comes to feel a connection with the setting; it feels real, we can see the cracks in the sidewalk or smell the nicotine stains on the tenement walls, whatever. The rooms feel both lived in and three-dimensional, which helps the actual characters feel more believable and give the actors a space to fully inhabit. But until that room or bar or street corner has lines of dialogue or something at stake to be lost or loved, then we can't call it a character. Until then, setting is setting. To equate it with character as the only means of evaluating its success diminishes its importance as a separate and equally important component of fiction.

Look, here's some quick study aids the next time you feel like calling setting anything other than setting:

“Setting exists so that the character has someplace to stand, something that can help define him, something he can pick up and throw, if necessary, or eat, or give to his girlfriend.” John Gardner

“Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and more conviction that charge out from the story in its course. These charges need the warm hard earth underfoot, the light and lift of air, the stir and play of mood, the softening bath of atmosphere that give the likeness-to-life that life needs.” Eudora Welty

“The novel that fails is a novel in which there is no sense of place, and in which feeling is, by that much, diminished. Its action occurs in an abstracted setting that could be anywhere or nowhere. This reduces its dimensions drastically and cuts down on those tensions that keep fiction from being facile and slick.” Flannery O’Connor

More here.

Good Luck in Indiana, Sen. Obama

Here's one of their candidates for Congress:

"I'll speak before any group that invites me," (Tony) Zirkle said Monday. "I've spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta."

The group Zirkle compares to a media outlet? The American National Socialist Workers Party. You might know them better by their nickname: Nazis.

Go Hoosiers!

ADDING: Not to malign Indiana readers (one, in particular), just those Indiana voters who nominated this particular GOP candidate, who seems unconcerned with who signs his paychecks.

Parenting, Summed Up

My friend Oz has been writing a parenting blog for almost a year now, documenting the final months of her pregnancy and the months since Axel was born. She's funny and witty, he's got a great face, and if you're into those kinds of things, you should be reading her site. Oz and Sean have been having trouble getting Axel to sleep through the night, and she offers a Top 10 list of tips that basically only needed to be one item long and covers more than just sleeping. This item:

9.  What worked before may not work again.  But it might.  Then again, it might not.

It's true for sleeping at night or for naps. It's true for meals and baths and car rides and convincing your kid that he probably shouldn't walk out into the street because he sees a dog on the opposite sidewalk. Anything that happens more than once will happen differently. Each. Time. We live and die* by our flexibility.

*Not literally. But it feels that way when your kid screams for ten minutes straight in his high chair because you won't let him clutch his blankie through dinner.

Slightly Less Than Two Minutes

That's how long it took me to figure out that this was an April Fool's joke. It wasn't until I read the second testimonial that I thought, Wait a minute. Also the "deliver as read" function smelled too good to be true.

Reality Outpaces Parody

I'm afraid I'm just going to have to keep linking to him until he lands that MacArthur grant. If anyone's a genius, it's this guy:

So I'll up the ante, and predict that they will next demand Obama answer for Fat Albert, whose self-destructive abuse of carbohydrates for years set a negative example that has done so much to hold black people down.

Or that Urkel kid? If there was anyone who perpetuated the stereotype of uncool intelligence it was Jaleel White. Until Obama answers for Family Matters, I'll know he's not serious about racial healing.

Hy-pathetic-al

Must be a slow day at The Corner. Here's Rich "We're Winning" Lowry:

I did notice Richardson's endorsement of Obama. What a blatant suck-up that guy is. Is there any doubt if Hillary was ahead by 100 pledged delegates, Richardson would find some high-minded reason to support her?

I'll answer that one. Yes. There is some doubt. But then, maybe if Clinton wasn't running such a craptastic campaign, she wouldn't be behind in so many delegates. Or maybe if Obama had eaten a live bunny on TV last week instead of giving an important speech on race relations in this country, Richardson might have endorsed Mike Gravel. Who knows?

Here's a hypothetical: If Richardson was such a "blatant suck-up" wouldn't he have endorsed Obama weeks ago when it became clear that Clinton couldn't win the nomination via pledged delegates? Also, somewhat related: If Richardson was such a "blatant suck-up" wouldn't it be easy (you know, given the definition of "blatant") to provide some evidence of his ass-kissery nature?

Question

How often do people, when discussing how much they liked her in Gone Baby Gone, confuse Amy Ryan with Amy Adams?

I bet it happens a lot. Gotta drive Amy Ryan up a tree. Maybe she should start using her middle name.

Let's be clear, folks:

Beadie Russell = Amy Ryan

Ashley Johnston = Amy Adams

This Year's Big Thing

Some private-sector employees under contract with the State Department got busted for sneaking peeks at Barack Obama's passport file on three separate occasions in the last few months. Obama's campaign responded with some righteous anger about the security lapse and the fact that it wasn't discovered and reported sooner. Their camp and even Clinton's camp are using the lapse as an opportunity to take shots at the Bush administration.

What's going on here? Did the Bush administration just get busted using some of its famed sneaky tactics to dig for some damaging information about the leading Democratic candidate? Is the State Department looking for ammunition on behalf of the Republicans. Those are some pretty fishy dates.

I doubt it.

The Times piece linked above uses the phrase "imprudent curiosity" to describe the motivations of the employees. That was my first guess too.

In the late '90's I worked for a company with a federal contract granting us access to a database containing millions and millions of names. I won't go into details about the nature of the contract or the information we had access to, but I will say we exercised occasional "imprudent curiosity" ourselves and looked up names we didn't need to look up. We managed to learn benign bits of information about celebrities or, in less admirable moments, our friends and neighbors. (Information we continued to keep secret, he stresses.) To us, it was no different than googling someone (before it was a verb). We had to look up names in the database all the time and it was a chance to see behind the curtain of someone famous for a glimpse of the real person. It was fun and, again, totally benign in intention even if unnecessary and containing a potential for more serious mischief.

The difference is that the information we had access to wasn't related to the movements of political figures under protection from the Secret Service. It's no surprise that Obama's passport  file would be flagged and attempts to access it logged. By the third time, I'm sure, the pattern became noticeable. That's when the staffers were identified and sacked for the security breach. As in this case, they should have been.

So my guess is that the investigation will reveal no conspiracy here, just people being nosy. It's easy to lose perspective about the nature of the information you have access to.

UPDATE: Sheesh. What a difference a day makes. Turns out there were actually four documented "breaches" (Is it a breach if you have your own password?) and all three candidates had their records scoped. It is strange that only two of the four peeks were firing offenses, but I'm still not seeing nefarity nefariousness evil deeds.

The Black Crowes - "A Conspiracy"

Biggest Surprise of the Day (and it's not even 5:00)

They're still making lonelygirl15 videos.

If you remember back in the fall of '06, there was a lot of talk about whether a series of strangely well-made and well-edited videos featuring  a girl named Bree and her controlling and weird parents were fictional. It was and is.

The plot has apparently moved from mildly mysterious teen drama into soap opera / adventure territory.

There have been 274 videos added in that channel! Why would I want to bother ever trying to catch up with this story? But if you've been with it from the beginning, I bet that number feels pretty good. And with over 100,000 subscribers, there's plenty of impetus to keep going. I'd love to see a graph of their video view rates from the time when it wasn't clear whether the videos were real to the discovery/revelation to now. I guess I could look it up myself.

It's strange. A quick scan of the last dozen or so "episodes" show a pretty big range of results: 80k views for one video and 400k for another. Digging farther back the only pattern I can quickly see is that if the still frame shows one of the guys in the show, the numbers are way down. One video has only 2,500 views, which is still a lot but is low relative to some others. But if the still is of Bree, the original lonelygirl15--the star, I guess--then the numbers shoot way up: 300k, 800k. It's clear that they manipulate that still frame, too. Once they figure out what the halfway point is, the editor(s) inserts a still frame with the show's logo. It flashes for a second when you watch an episode. Fascinating manipulation of the medium.

The other big question is: How are they making money?

Some Are Funny, Others Sting Like the Truth

You've probably seen this. A simple, but powerful discovery: Garfield without the cat. Just a lonely guy named Jon, who is the most depressing character in comics history. Jim Davis (or his interns, now) may be the cruelest misanthrope to ever have a world of fans.

The thing is, Jon has always been there, quietly despairing between moments of mania, we've just been too busy watching the cat. This website takes the cat out, in order that we may bear witness to the suffering of this loser. Brilliant and pathetic.

And frankly, a little too much to take in heavy doses. I don't recommend going more than once a day. I mean, good god, there's this one, and this one, and I really think you should stop after this one.

Barely related:
Drive-by Truckers - "Goddamn Lonely Love"

Post When the Spirit Moves

Knee-jerk thought in response to the random of iTunes shuffle:

Why isn't Ted Leo a superstar?

Ted Leo - "The High Party (solo)"

Check this second line break. Inspired.

"What do you make of nights / when you thought you'd make much more / than being too drunk to turn the lights out / and too tired to drink more?"

And, one other thing: Happy Birthday to the Goatiest of Earthgoats, Grendel!

The Tie that Binds

Can anyone explain to me why Eliot Spitzer is "tied to a prostitution ring" because he paid for prostitutes?

I'm not excusing his infidelity, his hypocrisy, or the means by which he went about paying for the service. But this phrase is misleading. When I first saw the headlines, I assumed he was involved in the operation of the ring. But, it seems, he was only one of their many high-rolling clients. (Btw, feh on "Emperors' Club": To hell with these guys dropping more in an hour to feel more important than they already are than I make in a month.)

It's like saying I'm tied to a big-box chain because I bought some laundry detergent from Target. Absent the legality, he's just another paying customer.

When you try to come up with alternative ways to phrase it, you begin to understand the problem for the writers in the media. How do you phrase it: "Spitzer secretly paid for sex"; "Governor drops $80k on high-price hookers"? Notice how the focus changes slightly from the sex to the money. To me, this is the more publicly relevant bit of information. Concealing the movement of the money is more important to me--the betrayal of my trust (were I a New York voter)--than the betrayal of his marital vows.

But those alternative headlines aren't as sexy or inflammatory. So, he gets "tied to a ring."

It's just something that struck me as odd. Any defenders of this rhetoric want to help me understand? Maybe it's the "ring" that bugs me. He's "tied" to prostitutes, not the operation of the business. Are they merely trying to distinguish that he's using an escort service rather than picking up a streetwalker? Seems irrelevant to the headline to me.

UPDATE: See. This is what I'm talking about. Anybody can be "tied" to anything if the rope is long enough.

Roy Edroso, National Treasure. Part LXIII.

"I see a lot of my subjects engaging in rhetorical tactics that at first look merely flawed or inept, but which repetition reveals to be conscious and deliberate. The purpose seems to be to short-circuit logical argument; they're like anti-logic viruses. When I get around to taxonomizing right-wing propaganda tactics, I'll need to include an entry for the Argument from Irrelevant Authority."

Read the whole thing.

(Huh. I guess this site does still work.)

The Format Quit

Holy crap. (via)

Bet those people who knocked themselves out to get some freaking water wings feel pretty silly now.

All joking aside, I'm torqued that I got shut out of the show they did at the Picador last fall. Guess I won't be seeing them play. Ever.

The Format - "The Compromise" (acoustic)

Lost Time and Following

Last night was the season premiere (at last) of the fourth season of Lost. Last season's finale cleverly up-ended its usual narrative approach of integrating flashbacks with the present action of the crash survivors exploring the mysteries of the island. Instead, the finale presented viewers with a flash-forward, not explicitly revealed until the end of the episode when Jack and Kate meet one another near the airport. "We've got to go back," Jack says. "I don't think we were supposed to leave."

The episode last night used another flash-forward, this time focusing on Hurley, the affable and slightly nuts lottery winner, post-rescue. After trashing his Camaro in a car chase, Hurley declares himself to be one of the Oceanic Six, as if this celebrity will save him from arrest. Of course the question is raised, who are the other three? This question--in addition to the meaning of the mysterious Lance Reddick's question to Hurley: "Are they still alive?"--will likely consume at least the next three episodes. That is to say, I expect the next episodes to all be flash-forwards (FFs), answering the question of what happens after The Rescue?

With that in mind, the show has a much more delicate line to walk in fixing these FFs in time. With all the flashbacks, we know when all those storylines will converge: the boarding and crashing of Oceanic Flight 815. But with the FFs, viewers have to make assumptions about when these storylines separate, trying to fix the FF of the current episode in relation to others. Doing this takes a bit of attention and reminded me of Christopher Nolan's pre-Memento experiment in narrative chronology, Following.

The movie tells its story completely out of order, but the viewer is rarely at a loss for knowing where he or she is in the narrative. The way Nolan grounds the viewer is in the appearance of the main character, primarily via wardrobe changes or visible bruises and scrapes. These visual cues help the viewer locate a particular scene in the narrative, for example as either pre- or post-beating or pre- or post-clean-up. It's a delicate procedure and a successful one to my memory. (It's been years since I saw it.)

In a similar fashion, last night's Lost gives the viewer at least two clues to fix the new FF in relation to the FF of the season finale. In the finale's FF, Jack is a wreck, drunk, popping pills, and suicidal, desperate to return to the island. He is also wearing an unkempt--and oddly, ungray--beard. The season opener's FF finds Jack clean-shaven but this is not enough to tell us if this FF is later or earlier to the finale's FF. But then he pours some orange juice and uses just a splash of vodka. This is a careful sign that this FF precedes the fully debauched Jack of the finale's FF.

The other clue is much more ham-handed but certainly definitive. When Jack goes to visit the institution where Hurley is hiding out, they discuss whether Hurley intends to keep secret what the later FF-Jack is "tired of lying" about. Most likely this secret is the fact that the majority of the crash survivors chose to remain on the island rather than be rescued. It is during this conversation that Jack tells Hurley he's considering growing a beard. "You'd look weird with a beard, dude," Hurley tells Jack.

This exchange is oddly inserted, but serves the obvious purpose of confirming the careful viewer's earlier suspicion that the season opener's FF precedes the FF of the finale. I'm sure that there are other clues, but these were the two that stuck out most to me. I'll be curious to see how any other future FF's handle this necessary but difficult process of situating itself in time. So far, and as always, the show's got its hooks in me.

I'll Take Grisly Metaphors for $400, Alex.

From Chris Hayes' otherwise eloquent endorsement of Obama in The Nation comes this over-reach in describing the effects of the attacks on the Clintons from the Right:

Like an animal caught in a trap that chews off its leg to wriggle away, the Clinton crew by the end of its tenure had hardly any limbs left to propel an agenda. The benefit of this experience, much touted by the Clintons, is that they know how to fight and how to survive. But the cost has been high: those who lived through those years are habituated to playing defense and fighting rear-guard actions. We know how progressives fared under Clintonism: they were the bloodied limbs left in the trap.

Really, though, this is one small quibble with a well-written piece. Give it a read.