Cartoonist Report: Julie Larson and The Dinette Set

My favorite cartoon in our local newspaper is relegated to the classified advertising section, but it is funnier than anything on the comics page. It is called The Dinette Set and is drawn by Julie Larson, who lives in the small town of Lincoln, Illinois, about an hour west of here.

Ms. Larson came over to our town this afternoon to speak at the local library and to sell and sign her books. I missed her the last time she was here, so I made sure to get over there today. She is as delightful as her cartoons, with a very dry, understated humor. She said there is a "Midwestern humor" that plays well everywhere, because Midwesterners move all over the country, except in the Northeast. They don't get it she said.

The Dinette Set is about the banality of small town life. Ms. Larson's characters, the Penny's and their family and friends, are good hearted people, but totally self-absorbed. She said her characters have a "sheep mentality" and are incurious. She gets her material at Wal Mart -- the Wal Mart shoppers, that is, not its shelves.

I asked Ms. Larson if she gets any flack from her neighbors who see themselves, or think they have been picked on in her cartoons. "All the time," she laughed. She said sometimes people will out themselves, accusing her of using them as fodder for an episode in her drawing when she was thinking of someone else. "I don't want to see myself in your cartoons," is what people tell her, she said.

Lincoln, Illinois, besides having the distinction of being named for Abraham Lincoln before he became president, has a rich literary tradition. It is the hometown of William Maxwell, the novelist and revered editor of The New Yorker magazine, and the writer, Langston Hughes, spent several of his growing up years there. (Not that the people of Lincoln care, according to Larson. "All they care about is basketball," and they're more excited that Brian Cook, a minor NBA basketball player is from Lincoln.) Julie Larson is in 75 newspaper markets across the country, and people in Hollywood have been talking to her about using her strip as the basis for a television cartoon series. Some day soon, Larson will be in that Lincoln literary pantheon, and, I predict, she will be remembered for her work, long after the shots have stopped falling for Brian Cook.

Movie Report: The Bucket List

Everything that made me rave about Juno in the movie report below is missing in The Bucket List. It has big stars all right. They don't come any bigger than Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. It has an A-list director and producer in Rob "Meathead" Reiner, scion of Carl Reiner. But it is a formulaic Hollywood movie that has been done hundreds of times, not an original thought or line in it.

Suspension of disbelief? Not for a second. This movie exists solely to sell popcorn, and it did well tonight at our local multiplex, the 4:30 p.m. showing being packed with geezers and geezettes, munching popcorn, cackling at familiar lines (come on, I have heard Nicholson's line, "Three things you got to remember at our age, 'Never pass a bathroom, never waste a hard on and never trust a fart,'" for nearly 50 years, even if he did deliver them well.) On the other hand, I doubt that the showings after 8:00 were nearly as profitable as the target audience will have taken out its false teeth, taken off its support hose, and be snoring in their beds after sundown.

Nicholson and Freeman, who in real life will both be 71 in the next several months, play a couple of guys diagnosed with terminal cancer and are given several months to live. Edward Cole, Nicholson's character, is a multi-millionaire who owns a chain of private hospitals. Carter Chambers, Freeman's character, is an automobile mechanic who dropped out of college after one year and got married because his wife got pregnant. No doubt because of Freeman's experience as God in Bruce Almighty, he knows everything.

Improbably, Cole, the multi-millionaire, is made to share a hospital room with Chambers, the mechanic. Cole is misanthropic, doesn't get along with anyone until he meets his new best friend, Chambers. Even in his youth, Chambers was wise (well, God doesn't need education or experience to figure things out) and he had started compiling a "bucket list," things he wanted to do before he "kicked the bucket." In the hospital, he works on and then discards the list, which is found and improved by Cole. When they're discharged from the hospital, they embark on a round-the-world adventure to get as many things crossed off their list as they can before they die. The list is amazingly ordinary. One would think that with all the high priced writers in Hollywood, they could find more unusual things for the bucket list than to jump out of an airplane, drive a Shelby Ford around a race track, go on an African safari, look at Mt. Everest and kiss the most beautiful woman in the world, but that was it.

If you've seen the trailers, then you've seen the most interesting parts of the film. It turns out that both men have relationship troubles with family members, and, guess what, after working on the bucket list, they decide that the family relationships are worth working on. And, SPOILER ALERT, guess who is the most beautiful woman in the world. But, Reiner is a professional schlockmeister, and he was able to make me wipe my eye (but only once) despite my cynicism and disbelief.

So, in summary, not a very good movie and not very good performances by the stars. If you want to see Nicholson playing the aging codger, his 2002 movie, About Schmidt is much better. I came home prepared to give it two out of five stars, but The Wife lobbied for four because it is better than a lot of the dreck in the theaters these days, so I finally compromised at three stars.

Let's see, I better work an Amish connection in here somewhere. Ah, yes, I would have been much less rootchi about this movie, if they had given the script to Diablo Cody for an injection of quirk.

Movie Report: Juno

If you haven't heard yet of the quirky little movie, Juno, you soon will. I predict it will be the sleeper hit of the year. The plot sounds sappy. Juno is the name of a 16-year-old girl who gets pregnant by a befuddled nerd ("It was my idea," she says. "It was?" he replies looking puzzled.) She decides to have an abortion but is dissuaded by a single picketer, a young Asian girl who yells at her, "It has fingernails." She finds a yuppie couple to adopt the baby. In the end she finds love and happiness with the nerd.

Although the plot sounds like a recipe for sap, the movie takes unexpected turns and has such a unique outlook, that the poignancy is disguised by the originality and authenticity. I have never met a 16-year-old girl like Juno, but she is absolutely believable. As regular readers of this blog know, the "suspension of disbelief" is important to me in watching a movie, and I was absolutely engaged in this one.

Juno reminds me a lot of another favorite of mine, Napoleon Dynamite in its ordinary strangeness. I have seen the movie described as a "dark comedy," but I fail to see the dark side. It is better described as a "serious comedy," in my view. It does not have the feel of Hollywood, like for instance another recent unplanned pregnancy movie, Knocked Up, which was not a bad movie, but felt contrived, the way mainstream movies do. Juno feels real.

Despite the PG-13 rating, this is not a movie that a fundamentalist church will send its youth group to see for its anti-abortion message. Juno is very hip, very smart and very earthy. I'm not sure that even I, with my liberal values, would want Juno for a daughter, but I surely would love to sit down and listen to her talk.

When I asked Son Number One whether he and his wife would like to go see the movie with us (I liked it so much I was ready to go see it again the next day,) he asked who is in it, and I told him that it was no one he has ever heard of. (Actually that statement stands a good chance of being wrong as SNO is a walking encyclopedia of arcane movie knowledge, but most people have never heard of any of the people connected with the movie.) The director is Jason Reitman, who is semi-well known for the movie Thank You For Smoking from 2005. Other than directing some of The Office television episodes,that's about it for Reitman's previous directing work.

But the writer, oh the writer! The heart and soul of the movie is clearly the work of the writer, who calls herself Diablo Cody. She grew up in the Village of Lemont, Illinois, a small town between Aurora and Chicago. She was working as a writer in an advertising agency in Minneapolis and hating it when she had an epiphany one day. She told herself she would rather be naked than do that job, so she quit and got a job as a striper. She wrote the movie while she was working as a striper. She also wrote a book around the same time, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Striper which had modest success but got her on the David Letterman show for this hilarious interview.



And, get this: There's an Amish connection! (Everything has to have an Amish connection on this blog.) Cody writes, or until recently did, a blog called. . . well, never mind what it's called, but you can visit it here. In the blog (scroll way down) she says she used to date a guy from Pennsylvania "a million years ago" (a little bit of an exaggeration since she's only 29) who taught her "weird Amish expressions" like "rootchi," meaning squirmy, a word which she still uses. So, who in Pennsylvania is going to teach Cody Amish expressions except an Amishman? Easy, are you reading? Find out for me who the Amishman is that used to date Cody.

This movie gets my highest rating, five stars. Go see it.

Some Further Thoughts About Politics: What Now?

I don't intend to turn this into a political blog, but I should follow up after my Obama-Gushing last post, now that New Hampshire has knocked the props out of my high hopes. I still don't understand what happened. When all of the polls, by the media, independent agencies and the candidates showed Obama winning by a minimum of four points to a high of more than 10 points, and when the exit polls, where people who have already voted are asked how they voted, and they report Obama winning, how is it possible that Obama lost?

Granted, Hillary did a good job in the debate, and the show of emotion at the diner when someone asked her how she kept herself looking so good helped her, but an overnight swing that huge? And why wouldn't the exit polls show Hillary winning?

The only explanation that makes sense to me is the Bradley Effect. That is a phenomena first observed 25 years ago, when Tom Bradley, black mayor of California, ran for govenor against a white candidate. Bradley had consistent leads in the polls, and the exit polls taken after people had voted on election day showed Bradley winning, but he lost. The same phenomena has been observed with other black candidates, such as Douglas Wilder, the black governor of Virginia, and others.

The theory is that white people are reluctant to admit prejudice or to appear prejudiced and will tell pollsters that they will vote for the black candidate, but once in the polling booth, when no one knows how they voted, they vote for the white candidate. The Bradley Effect would not have come into play in the Iowa caucuses that Obama won so handily because there are no secret ballots; everyone can see who everyone else is supporting.

The Bradley Effect does not mean a black candidate can never win a secret ballot; Obama won the Illinois Senate race handily and other black candidates have won elections. It does mean that in a very close election, the black candidate would be at a disadvantage.

My initial reaction last night to the Obama defeat is that if it was the Bradley Effect that beat him, he's done as a candidate. Democrats do not have the luxury of nominating a candidate who might lose a close election, like the last two elections have been, because of the candidate's race. In looking around the blogosphere, I see there are bloggers, like the Daily Kos, making the argument that there could not have been a Bradley Effect in New Hampshire because Obama pulled about the same percentage of actual votes as had been predicted, Clinton won because she exceeded the percentage of votes that had been predicted for her. I don't understand that argument but I'm hoping it is correct.

At this point, I'm not abandoning my support for Obama. I still think he would make the best candidate and the best president. We'll just have to see how this plays out.

Now, I will not bore you with any more political ramblings. I need to tell you about the great movie I saw last weekend, Juno, my first five-star movie of the year. But that will have to wait until later.

Later note: Here's an Op-Ed piece in Thursday's New York Times by the head of the Pew Research Center offering support for the idea that the Bradley Effect was the determining factor in the New Hampshire voting.

Some Thoughts About Politics

As veterans of this blog know, I have long been a Barack Obama fan. Not always, though. When Obama first ran for the U.S. Senate, in 2004, he was in a Democratic primary crowded with better known and better funded candidates. Son Number Two called my attention to him as someone worthy of support, but I didn't want to waste my vote on someone who had no chance. He seemed to come out of nowhere to win the Democratic primary that year, and then, when he gave the electrifying speech at the Democratic convention that year, I was convinced that this is a man destined for great things.

The knock on Obama has been that a black man cannot get enough votes from the white majority to win a presidential election. I didn't buy that argument even before the Iowa caucuses last night. Obama won white votes in the Democratic senatorial primary in Illinois, enough to defeat better funded and better known white candidates, and elections of people like Wilder, the black governor of Virginia, the capital of the old Confederacy, show that things like race are not as important as they once were. Sure there are overt racists who will not vote for Obama because of his race, but they weren't going to vote for the Democratic candidate in any event, certainly not for Hillary Clinton.

I have also long disliked Hillary Clinton. I went to hear her speak on the campus of the Big U in our town in 1992 when her husband was running for president, and came away impressed only with what a bad impression she made. Although she has my sympathy for how badly she has been treated by her husband, the media and professional Hilary Haters, like Rush Limbaugh, I do not think she has the capacity to lead. Not to say she isn't smart, but there is a difference between brain power and leadership.

As I have observed politics over all these many years, I have come to believe that a candidate's ability to reach people trumps almost everything else. The candidate has to come across as understanding the concerns of ordinary people and to be likeable, someone you'd want to have a beer with (if you were a beer drinker.) Hillary has a tin ear for how she comes across, in contrast to her husband who is almost magical in his abilities.

Hillary's campaign seems to have been built primarily on her inevitability as the Democratic candidate, the one with the money, the organization and the toughness to beat the Republicans. Lately, she has embraced "change" as a mantra, but she has a fundamental problem having to argue both that she is the most experienced candidate and she is the candidate of change. Although it is not impossible for an experienced person to also be an agent of change (think Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964,) those two concepts are not usually associated. Bill Clinton could probably make the sale on that idea; Hillary cannot (or more precisely has not up to this point.)

Obama has that undefinable ability to reach people. As does Mike Huckabee. I noticed the banner behind the stage on which Huckabee gave his victory speech last night in Iowa read, "I Like Mike." Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency twice with the almost identical slogan (minus one letter) "I Like Ike." Another thing I noticed, having watched both the Obama and the Huckabee victory speeches last night is that their messages were almost identical. Huckabee could have been reading from an Obama script as he proclaimed that people were tired of the bickering in Washington; that Americans were one people, that we should not be tearing each other down, etc.

I don't think Obama has the nomination wrapped up. Clinton still has a substantial lead in the opinion polls in New Hampshire. She has her husband stumping for her full time. She has money and organization. But she has lost the argument on electability and inevitability, and without those what are her assets? I do not believe she will get many votes because of her likeability. With five days to turn things around in New Hampshire, what is she going to do that she hasn't already tried?

If Obama does win New Hampshire and wins South Carolina, then I think the battle is all over and Obama will be the Democratic nominee.

Which leads me to my next subject: "Heartbreak." Time after time, I have gotten excited about a president, only to have become disillusioned. I thought Jimmy Carter really was going to make a difference. After four years of his bungling, I voted for Ronald Reagan, as a protest. I really did think Bill Clinton was going to make a difference. Actually, he did accomplish many things, including getting rid of a deficit that had been predicted to balloon indefinitely for years; getting an economy to boom nonstop for eight years; passing legislation that helped people like the Family Medical Leave Act and other things. But his inability to keep his pants zipped, eventually distracted from his many accomplishments.

Nevertheless, I haven't learned my lesson. I still have hope. Go Obama, go.

Movie Report: The Great Debaters

The Great Debaters is a movie that is good for you; like the books recommended by Oprah Winfrey (who is one of the producers of the movie.) Like the books Winfrey recommends, the fact that the movie is good for you does not necessarily mean that it is not also entertaining, but it probably would not be playing at the multiplex near you did it not have the star power of Winfrey and Denzel Washington, the director as well as the lead actor, associated with it.

The movie tells the more or less true story of the debate team at all-black Wiley College in Texas in the 1930s. Washington plays the role of Melvin Tolson, the English professor, who coached the debate team to a record of no losses over a period of 10 years, with very demanding coaching. James Farmer, Jr., who went on to found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and become a leader in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, was a 14-year-old member of the debate team. After beating all the other black colleges in the southwest, Wiley took on The University of Oklahoma City in 1930, in the first interracial debate in the South. An interesting article on the actual history behind the movie can be found in this article in the Marshal (Texas) News-Messenger, found here.

The movie left my Korean-born daughter-in-law, in this country for just six months, asking a lot of questions. "Did they really not allow blacks to attend certain colleges?" "Why wouldn't white colleges debate black colleges?" "Did they lynch blacks?" "Why?" It was hard for her to conceive of the racism that our country took for granted until so recently. The movie was good for giving her a more detailed picture of the great country that she loves so much.

The movie takes a little liberty with the actual facts, concluding with a climactic debate against Harvard College, that was actually against the University of Southern California. It skillfully pulls the heartstrings, and I had a lump in my throat at the end.

Not to damn with faint praise, but I did not leave the theater thinking the movie is groundbreaking, or should be in line for any big awards. It was good for me, which is more than I can say for a lot of movies. For that, I award it four stars.

It's A Merry Christmas

Everyone is here; gathered around the fire, reading their new books. Son Number One, with The Bride. Son Number Two with The Girlfriend. As I told them when we were feasting tonight on ham, mashed potatoes, green beans, salad, and chocolate cake: "If I had realized how much it means to parents to have everyone home, I would have made more effort to visit more often." Not that I'm trying to lay any guilt on anyone. My kids have done nothing to feel guilty about, compared to my own sins. (Of omission, not commission, in case anyone is parsing.)

The New York Times had an article in yesterday's paper about how great it is to travel on holidays, like Christmas Day because no one else is traveling and the crews are particularly nice. Don't believe it. SNT and TG were flying from New York to Indianapolis via Chicago on United Airlines. First, the flight from New York was delayed an hour and a half. That was going to make them miss their connecting flight. No big deal, we would just go to Chicago and pick them up, although that's about an hour further than Indianapolis. Then the flight was cancelled. But eventually they were put on another flight and they got here, so I'm not complaining.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Movie Report: Charlie Wilson's War

Charlie Wilson's War has all the ingredients of a good movie. Big stars in Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Big director in Mike Nichols. Big writer in Aaron Sorokin (creator of The West Wing on television. The story is pretty much true. There really is a big-haired socialite in Houston by the name of Joanne King Herring (she even has a website here and she looks a lot like Julia Roberts) who was romantically involved with a playboy Texas congressman named Charlie Wilson, who resembles Tom Hanks. Herring and Wilson really did work with the CIA to covertly supply the mujahadeen of Afghanistan with arms to fight the Russians, back in the 80s.

Any Hollywood executive looking at the ingredients for this movie would reasonably conclude this is a sure fire winner. It may be a sure fire winner; I won't attempt to predict what the public and the Motion Picture Academy will think of it. I was disappointed, however. There were long stretches in which I was looking at my watch, wondering when it was going to be over, this despite the fact that the movie is relatively short, only 90 some minutes long. It felt formulaic; insert sex scene here; violent scene here; p.c. political pontification here; show Julia Roberts in a bikini, that will attract viewers. Putting the right colors on a paint-by-numbers scene does not turn it into a great piece of art.

What the Hollywood suits forgot is what any good cook knows: the right ingredients by themselves don't make a great meal; it all depends on how they're put together.

Having said that, I did like Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performance as a rogue CIA agent. I would not have predicted that he would steal the picture from stars like Hanks and Roberts, but he did, despite his unglamorous appearance.

The movie reminded me a lot of Robert Redford's recent bad political movie about Afghanistan, Lions for Lambs. It, too, had an impeccable pedigree, with Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep involved in it. It, too, bombed because of an over supply of earnestness and an absence of entertainment. The sad thing is that Charlie Wilson's War could have been better; it just wasn't.

I left the theater prepared to give it two stars, the same rating I gave to Lions for Lambs, but after thinking some more about Hoffman's performance I finally upgraded it to three stars, which is average. But this should have been a five star movie.

Movie Report: What Would Jesus Buy?

I left the theater last night after having seen What Would Jesus Buy, not sure whether I had just watched a documentary or a fake documentary. It was that over the top.

It turns out it was a real documentary. There really is a man in New York City, Billy Talen, a cross between Elvis Presley and Jimmy Swaggert, who goes by the name "Reverend Billy," and has a church called "The Church of Stop Shopping." The Church has a website, and (what more proof do you need that it's really a church,) you can even donate money to it.

Fundamentalist Christians might have a little problem with the theology of The Church of Stop Shopping. In a New York Times article in 2000, (might require registration) Rev. Billy is quoted as saying, "We believe in the God that people who do not believe in God believe in. Hallelujah!" Hardly a sermon that will get many amens at your local Southern Baptist or Assemblies of God congregation.

Rev. Billy engages in street theater. The movie documents a road trip he and choir members from his church took to the gates of hell. The Mall of America, in Minneapolis, Wal-Mart and Disney are favorite targets of Rev. Billy's righteous wrath. He is quoted in the Times article as saying, "We are drowning in a sea of identical details. . . . Mickey Mouse is the Antichrist. . . . Times Square has been blown up by 10,000 smiling stuffed animals. . . . Don't shop, children, save your souls!"

Actually, as I understand the Bible, the message of the Church of Stop Shopping is entirely in line with the message of Jesus, who was about as anti-materialist as anyone could be. (I suppose the skeptics among us might say, "But Jesus is not a fair comparison; he didn't have to shop when he could turn five loaves and three fishes into a feast of thousands.") The real heresy is The "Gospel of Prosperity" preached in so many of the mega-churches these days.

Rev. Billy is backed up by a gospel choir who sings anti-shopping songs, and has been known to engage in a little anti-shopping glossolalia. (Try saying "I bought a Honda, but I should have bought a Hyundai" really fast several times if you want to practice your anti-shopping glossolalia.)

But despite my sympathies for Rev. Billy's message, the movie is flawed. It lacks focus or much dramatic interest, until the Church bus gets rammed on the interstate by a semi-truck. What one hears of the choir sounds good, but we are just given snippets of the singing without really letting the choir turn loose. The movie, like the church, is pretty much a one-man show, Rev. Billy, and he can wear you out pretty quickly.

The A.V. Club ranks the movie 14th in its list of the 16 worst films of 2007, a rating harsher than I would give it. (Interestingly, the A.V. Club lists Lions For Lambs as No. 7 on its list of worst films for 2007, a movie which I didn't much like, but to which I still gave three stars, which is an average rating.) I gave the movie three stars, while The Wife gave it only two. I thought it deserved the extra star for daring to be different, particularly in this holiday season. We have enough sappy stuff; it's nice to see something a little more daring, even if it falls short.

The real question, of course, is not what The Wife or I thought of the movie but what Jesus thought of it. I think he would give it five stars, bearing in mind that they really didn't get to watch many movies 2,000 years ago, so they would probably rate any movie highly.

Annual Book and Movie Ratings

In the unlikely event that I have any readers left after a two-month hiatus, I will do my annual book and movie ratings. The books are ones I have read or listened to this year, some of them for the second or third time. The movies are ones I have seen in theaters (watching flickering images on a 19-inch television with tinny speakers is not watching movies.) I have read 52 books, which is my annual goal. I have only seen 34 movies so far this year, partly because I missed the bulk of Ebertfest because duty called me East to see my son play his fiddle at Carnegie Hall.

My ratings are based on five stars, with five being the best possible rating, except an exceptional book or movie will get five plus stars, the highest rating known to humankind. I notice I didn't give any zeros this year, and only one single star, that to a lone really bad movie. I try to read books and see movies that I think I will like, so my sample should be skewed towards the higher ratings, but it was probably just the luck of the draw that I didn't get stuck with any really bad selections. Feel free to argue with me. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, no matter how wrong.

Books

Five Plus Stars

Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky

Five Stars

A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines
The Optimist's Daughter, Eudora Weldy
Empire Falls, Richard Russo
The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
Mr. Paradise, Elmore Leonard
The View From Castle Rock, Alice Munro
Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Defining Moment, Jonathan Alter
Little Follies, Eric Kraft
On Chesel Beach, Ian McEwen

Four Stars

Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer
Secret Smile, Nicci French
The March, E.L. Doctorow
Liar's Diary, Patry Francis
The Dead Father's Club, Matt Haig
American Theocracy, Philip Roth
Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
Changing Light, Nora Gallagher
The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards
The Known World, Edward P. Jones
A Spot of Bother, Bruce Haddon
Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley and Ron Powers
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood
The Echo Maker, Richard Powers
Girls of Riyadh, Rajaa Absanea
The Tin Drum, Gunther Grass
Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
On Saturday The Rabbi Went Hungry, Harry Kimmerman
Scoring From Second, Phillip Deaver
Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance, Richard Powers
Galatea; 2.2, Richard Powers
Possession, A.S. Byatt
Where Do You Stop?, Eric Kraft
The Maytrees, Annie Dillard
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Three Stars

My Name Is Red, Orhan Parmuk
Resurrection, Leo Tolstoy
Welcome to the World, Baby Girl, Fannie Flagg
Buddha, Karen Armstrong
Everlasting Flower, Keith Pratt
Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott
At Canaan's Edge, Taylor Branch
Jane and the Wandering Eye, Stephanie Burron
Understanding Richard Powers, Joseph Dewey
Prisoner's Dilemna, Richard Powers
Smart Money, Dave Barry

Two Stars
Finn, Jon Clinch
M is For Malice, Sue Grafton
The Nonviolent Atonement, J. Denny Weaver
Building Peace, Holsopple, Krall & Pittman

Movies

Five Stars

Venus, Peter O'Toole
Lives of Others
Sicko, Michael Moore
No End In Sight

Four Stars

Volver, Almodovar
Notes On A Scandal, Judi Dentch
Letters From Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood
Because I Said So, Diane Keaton
The Namesake
Georgia Rules
Knocked Up
Hairspray
Lady Chatterly
Mash
Death and the Funeral
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Three Stars

The Painted Veil, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts
Breach, Chris Cooper
Zodiac
Fracture, Anthony Hopkins
The Simpsons
Darjeeling Limited
All The President's Men
Lions or Lambs
This Christmas

Two Stars

Dreamgirls, Beyounce, Eddie Murphy
Music and Lyrics, Hugh Grant
Amazing Grace
Astronaut Farmer, Billy Bob Thornton
Once
La Vie En Rose
Mr. Woodcock, Billy Bob Thornton
Across The Universe

One Star

Hot Fuzz

Illinois Sky

Although usually nothing can compare to the Southwestern sky, last night, we had one of the most spectacular sunsets I have seen in a long time. It was fading by the time I got to the house to get a camera, so I didn't try to get a picture. But local photograher Dan O'Brien has this incredible shot here. (But don't move to Illinois for the sunsets. Although we do often have nice sunsets, this one was way above average.)

What I Did in New Mexico

Among other things (playing rook until late at night, talking about old times and new ones,) my buddies and I on Saturday hiked up into a canyon in the foothills of the Organ mountains where we saw these remains of the Dripping Springs Resort, built originally in the 1870s. For a time it was used as a TB sanatorium. But now the buildings are falling down and the place is reverting to nature.







We hiked a little further and found ourselves on the edge of a live fire range on the grounds of Fort Bliss. We were brave. But not so brave that we went more than a foot onto the live fire range. (I was scratching my nose.)




My friend, Marv, is a great photo- grapher and went off the trail here to get a shot framed by the branches of a little tree. He needed some pictures of sky to take back to Oregon and Photo Shop into some cloudy Northwestern shots. The sky in New Mexico is amazing. I love the Southwest. This is where I would like to go to retire. The Wife says, "Nope." She likes trees, grass and four seasons. Give me low humidity and wonderful skies and you can have your trees and grass and pollen.

A Narrow Stance

I'm pretty broad-minded and I certainly am not in favor of discriminating against or harassing gays (nor lesbians, trans-gendered, transvestites, etc., etc.) Yet, I have to confess to a perverse pleasure watching yet another family values Republican get caught with his foot under the bathroom stall divider.

Despite my delight at seeing the discomfiture of the hypocrites, I also have to confess to feeling a little sorry for Sen. Larry Craig, who was arrested at the Minneapolis airport a month or so ago for "disorderly conduct." The "disorderly conduct," using the undercover policeman's version, was taking his rolling suitcase into the bathroom stall with him and placing it against the door, looking through the crack of the stall door when the policeman looked in at him, tapping his foot up and down, moving his foot into the stall next to his (by then occupied by the undercover policeman) so that the shoes touched and moving his hand along the bottom of the stall divider. Craig's version is that he is not gay, but he is fastidious about the tidiness of bathroom stalls, and that he has a wide stance. So, he says, he went into the stall, picked up his toilet paper lying on the floor and, because of his wide stance, may have let his foot stray into the next stall far enough to touch the policeman's foot. (The problem with Craig's version is that he has been forced to keep announcing that he is not gay for more than 20 years, while men keep coming forward claiming to have engaged in sexual encounters with him. I suspect that it's all in the definition of the word "gay." The sad thing is that we live in a society where gay politicians still get a political advantage in outwardly condemning their own sexuality.)

I may be oblivious, but in my half century or more of using public bathrooms, I have never encountered anyone who I thought was making a sexual solicitation. No feet into my stall; no tapping; no hands under the divider. I'm not particularly buff, so it may be just a matter of disinterest in me personally rather than proof of the infrequency of disorderly activity in men's restrooms. But why in the world is the Minneapolis police department assigning scarce resources to nab toe tappers at the airport? I just was not aware that this was such a problem that undercover police officers would be patrolling the bathrooms.

So, it was that I found myself at O'Hare Airport this weekend with a need to use the bathroom. And I found myself being reluctant to go in there, now that my eyes have been opened as to what's really going on in airport bathrooms. Might I discover that some of the noises I hear are not coming from the relief of flatulence but baser activities? And what if some undercover cop spotted me doing something that I didn't realize was a secret code? Maybe putting soap on my hands before I wet them is some kind of signal that I didn't know about. But the need to go finally overcame my reluctance, so I bravely started to go into the first men's bathroom I found that was open (several were closed for one reason or another.) What I saw when I got in there was a line of men (waiting to use the facilities, I hoped.) One appeared to be peering, or at least glancing longingly through the crack of what appeared to be an occupied stall. The man just ahead of me appeared to weigh about 450 pounds and I just could not envision the stall he would occupy to be very neat after he left it, and I knew I couldn't do any tidying up without the fear of arrest. The whole lot of them looked slightly disreputable and seedy; they might have all been cops.

So I just left. I told The Wife I would just wait and use the bathroom on the plane. Those plane bathrooms might be tiny, but I have a narrow stance.

Land of Enchantment

This was the view from our hotel room this morning about 7:00 a.m. I have always loved the Southwest. I had forgotten how blue the sky is out here. I even love the cacti.
This is a view of the front of our hosts' house. I suppose it's the novelty factor. Our hostess longs for trees and grass, and can't wait to get back to the Northwest where it is cloudy all day. I guess the grass is always greener somewhere else -- literally if you're in New Mexico, although it is amazing how much people out here use irrigation to try to recreate the grass lawns of less arid locations.

Blogging has been a little sparse here for the last couple of weeks -- okay, nonexistent. As I've noted before, sometimes inspiration just dries up and one has to wait until the well is replenished. I'm all wet again.

It's not that I've had nothing to blog about. Lots of bloggable events have been happening and I was going to write much about them, but it never happened. Maybe I was waiting for the perfect thing to say instead of going with "good enough." That's a weakness of mine.

Rachel Ries, folk singer and songwriter from Chicago was here at the end of September for a house concert at the house of my brother, the Humble Philosopher/Carpenter, in our twin city. Rachel has a clear, musical voice and she writes songs with idiosyncratic lyrics. She has developed a cult following all over the country. She grew up in South Dakota of Mennonite stock, attended a Mennonite college for a semester and then dropped out to become a full time musician. The Crockheads got to know her a few months ago in Kentucky when her brother married my niece. She is on tour to points west, promoting her new album, Without a Bird. You can read a review of the album, an interview of her and sample some excerpts of her songs here. One neat thing about the concert is that one of her fans, who had heard her in Chicago, was checking her website to see when she would be playing again and discovered she was playing at that very moment in the house concert just a few blocks from his house, so he came over and heard the last half of the concert.

The day after Rachel Ries, our reading group met at our house to discuss The Echo Maker, the new book by Richard Powers. The book won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Powers lives in the twin city and rode his bike over to join our group for the discussion. He was with us once before, to discuss his book, The Time of Our Singing. This time, like the last, Powers was most gracious with out little group of amateur readers; answering each question as if it was the first time he had heard it. Powers is easily the smartest person I have ever met, but he wears his intelligence easily, never condescending or acting bored to have to interact with mere mortals like us. He hung around until almost everyone else had left and then rode his bike home in the gathering dusk, to the distress of one of our members who thought it was too dark to ride on city streets without a light and without a helmet.

I'm in Las Cruces, New Mexico, this weekend, hanging out with my buddies from 40 years ago, doing our now annual reunion. This is the home of Earl, the surveying professor, and his lovely wife, who stuffed us with Mexican lasagna and pecan pie. Our plane left Bloomington this morning at 6:00 a.m., which meant I had to get up at 3:00 a.m. in order to shower and get to Bloomington an hour before takeoff. The flight was uneventful except I have to tell you about going to the bathroom at O'Hare. (No, I didn't get arrested.) That will have to wait for a later blog.