Yesterday, there was a moment of true (sur)realism you just don’t get on Law and Order. I’ll let Zoe tell it:
Go visit Zoe’s page, she has lots of trial updates and it’s all interesting (and serious) stuff.
Tag Archives: politics
Farenheit 9-11
Laura and I didn’t get to the theater to pick up our tickets in time to sit together so we had to split up. During the previews, I convinced the geezers I was sitting with to see Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. That was fun.
The guy who was sitting in front of me works for a defense contractor and was forbidden by his employer from seeing the movie. While I salute him for going anyway, I wanted to explain to him, “Dude, if you’d shut up about not being allowed to see the movie, no one around you would know you’re not allowed to see the movie.” I didn’t say anything, but I thought it a lot. I also thought a lot about taking the John Kerry bumper sticker out of my purse and adhering it to his back, but I didn’t do that, either.
There was so much applause I missed a lot of the narration – and we saw the movie in Virginia, where I am often told by Marylanders, we are all without exception intolerant, gun-toting, homophobic, rightwing, assholes. Go figure.
I thought the film was well-paced and well-constructed. Moore is really at the top of his game here – I admit I was a bit worries because I often found The Awful Truth to be sort of meandering and hit or miss, but this time he really gets it right. I’d say it’s one of the most important major releases of the year, in fact I’d say it was the most important release of the year but I think that title goes to SuperSize Me. The longstanding health implications and questions that film raises about what we’re feeding the next generation and what we’re teaching them about nutrition need to be screamed from the rooftops.
Fortunately, you don’t have to choose. You can see them both.
register to vote
If you’re going to the 9:30 Club tonight to see Mission of Burma stop by their merch table. I’ll be there signing people up to vote for Music For America.
Making the world safe for literature
“British Author’s Visa Ordeal Is One for the Books”
Halted en route to a West Coast lecture tour, Ian McEwan, an acclaimed British novelist who lunched last fall with first lady Laura Bush, was denied entry into the United States for 36 hours this week.
McEwan, who has won nearly every major British literary prize and whose best-selling novel “Atonement” won a National Book Critics Circle Award, finally landed in Seattle on Wednesday evening, just 90 minutes before he was scheduled to address 2,500 people packed into a downtown auditorium.
Looking relieved and exhausted, he began his speech by thanking the Department of Homeland Security “for protecting the American public from British novelists.”
He also detailed the literary expertise that Homeland Security officials brought to the three interrogations they put him through. McEwan said one official wanted to know: “What kind of novels do you write: fiction or nonfiction?”
[read the rest of the article, it does indeed get sillier]
What he said…
Sampling and remixing is as universal as George Bush’s State of the Union address, says Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid. First, Bush tells us that we have to go to war with Iraq because they have weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein must be defeated. Then, after the invasion, they can’t find any WMDs, and no mention is made of Hussein or Osama Bin Laden. They remixed the public perception of his original performance.
–DJ Spooky in a Feb 1st article in Remix (the rest of the article is well-worth your time if you’re interested in Spooky’s work).