Unlimited Ride

2009-07-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

Worst Blog Ever Nominee

Like all good crappy blogs this one is updated only intermittently (like once a year), is filled with inane writing, has a title that conveys something completely different than what the blogger intended and has an aggressively ugly layout.

2009-07-21T20:34:00.000-07:00

Stuart Granger

TCM is doing a Stuart Granger film festival today (God knows why). Talk about a closeted gay and a treetrunk of an actor (stealing from Roger Ebert's description of Roger Moore) who starred in an endless series of mediocre flicks. Strangely enough I think everyone at that time probably also sensed that he was gay but didn't really care. I think society has never had a problem with gays as long as it wasn't in their face and there was some distance of plausible deniability -- then they'd get murderous. Most of the time you could fob it off on "sophistication", and since you thought of yourself as sophisticated too, you went along with it.

2009-07-13T22:13:00.000-07:00

Really Stupid Shit

As stupid and monkey-headed a tech article as you're likely to read this year. Slate's Farhad Manjoo claims "The Google OS Is Doomed".

2009-07-13T21:11:00.000-07:00

From Firedog Lake. Not sure if this is the smoking gun we've been waiting for vis-a-vis Cheney.

2005-01-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

The Fake Counter-Culture of "Valley of the Dolls"

"Valley of the Dreck" is what star Patty Duke called the film version of the biggest selling novel of all time, Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of Dolls". The film's guilty-pleasure kitsch factor has been written about many times before and won't be repeated here. What is worth pointing out is the unreal, never-neverland setting of the film, unrecognizable as history.

Though the film is purportedly about the underbelly of the entertainment industry in the mid-to-late 60's, the film makes no acknowlegement of the turmoil and cultural tectonics of its era. In this universe, Broadway theatre is still the dominant media (with only a passing reference to movies) and no attention is paid to the ever-increasing influence of rock and roll on entertainment and mores. Ludicrously, the dominant industry figure that every up-and-comer is gunning for is Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward) an aging star of stage and screen patterned after Judy Garland (originally cast in the role until she was fired for locking herself in her dressing room for two days). The only stylistic concession to the 60's is a scene where Lawson belts out a show tune while hilariously enveloped in a mass of spinning psychedelic mobiles -- an effect comparable to watching Buddy Ebsen shoot heroin.

Instead, the film inserts its own counter-culture. Though the movie is ultimately about drug abuse, you won't see any LSD, speed or marijuana here. Instead the illegal substances depicted here are "Dolls", a slang term for secanols and nembutols that has never been referenced by any other source and is most likely a made-up term. While the "hip" young people in the 60's were going to rock clubs or discotheques (rock festivals and stadium concerts still being a few years away), the with-it young people of "Valley of the Dolls" hang out in Copa Cabanna-type lounges, dining in formal dress while eagerly awaiting performances by "the latest sensation!". It is at one of these anachronistic nightspots where the Sharon Tate character meets her lounge singer boyfriend, Tony Polar, croaking out "Come Live with Me".

This is your father's edgy movie, but its lack of coolness was hardly unusual for the period. Though it is hard to believe today -- with the exception of the recording industry -- youth culture was hermetically sealed off from mainstream culture, impenetrable to anyone over age 35.* In an era where the youth demographic is chased with monomaniacal fervor and the most soul-deadening corporations try to appear rebellious, the squareness of this period is not only quaint but charming.

*This explains the phenomenon of Fake Rock Music seen in many films between 1964 and 1970. Usually heard during swingin' party or nightclub sequences, this inauthentic music was distinguished by Doc Severson-like band arrangements featuring anemic high-pitched electric guitars that conveyed to rube audiences everywhere that seriously hip-happenings were going-on.

2004-12-03T20:28:00.000-08:00

Money Shot -- Why the Porn Industry is Still a Niche Player

As popular culture continues with its campaign of porn-norming, with adult film stars appearing on talk shows and pornography supposedly influencing fashion, one figure continually gets trotted out in an attempt to convince us skeptics that pornography has finally gone mainstream, and why only Mormons and cultural retrogrades should bother fighting it -- $10 billion. That represents the figure the pornography industry takes in each year with its videos, live appearances and websites, a figure they breathlessly tell us exceeds that of the legitimate film industry. Before Mormons and cultural retrogrades cave and buy their mothers Jenna Jamison's biography for Christmas, let's look at this number.

$10 billion does indeed represent the approximate domestic theatrical take for films shown in the U.S. and Canada -- it does not, however, represent international grosses which can double that of domestic grosses. This number also does not include DVD sales which are once again double that of domestic box office. Even with these larger revenue roll-ups, these film studios, in turn, are often the smallest divisions of the multinationals they are a part of (Universal is a tiny part of GE, Columbia is dwarfed by its parent Sony). The point here is that comparing yourself to the film industry in order tout your economic clout and cultural significance is a little like bragging that you're the tallest building in Tulsa. To put it in perspective -- $10 billion is about what Wal-mart generates in revenue every two weeks.

2004-10-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

The World's Tallest Building -- finally

If the news stories are to be believed, the world's tallest building will start construction shortly in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The significance of the building is two-fold: one, in this era of frustratingly incremental height increases, this structure beats all comers with a thorough finality. With skyscrapers like the Petronis Towers (1469 feet tall) and Taiwan's 101 Building (1651 feet tall) claiming top honors by dint of tactics like counting a building's spire (as opposed to the highest occupied floor) to beat the Sears Tower (1450 feet tall) as the world's tallest building , there is something satisfying about a skyscraper that quashes all the hairsplitting equivication to reach a height of 2312 feet. The rules that the Council for Tall Buildings uses to determine the tallest buildings, Highest Occupied Floor, Top of the Roof, and Top of Pinnacle or Antenna -- the engineering equivalent of everyone being special -- are all rendered irrelevant by this monster. At 2312 feet, this structure is almost 1000' taller than the late World Trade Center and represents the first clear advance in building height since the construction of the Empire State Building and Chrysler Buildings in the early 1930s.

Secondly, the location of the tower in the center of the Arab Middle East cannot be ignored. The United Arab Emirates is one of the few progressive and tolerant Arab counties in the region, a model of where the Arab world could move should it decide to chuck its backward and revanchist behavior. The destruction of the World Trade Towers represented Western Enlightenment ideas under attack by the forces of religious intolerance. It is marvelously symbolic that this tower, a product of Western rationalism, will be built in the heart of a malignant, death-centered, anti-intellectual Muslim culture. Building such a structure in the U.A.E cannot help but be a provocative challenge to the rest of the Arab World.

2004-10-03T18:05:00.000-07:00

The Other Stolen Election
Why a Nixon's presidency should have started in 1960 instead of 1968.

In American history it's hard to think of eight years as epic as the span between 1960 and 1968. During that brief, convulsive period we managed to kill a president, finally eliminate the Jim Crow laws, and spawn a war that created a political and societal chasm that pushed the U.S. closer to revolution then at anytime since the Civil War. The easiest benchmark for this eight year gulf is a pop culture reference. Watch any movie, listen to any pop music from either side 1960-68, and marvel in the sheer compression of change. With the bruises of the 2000 election still smarting it seems appropriate to go back four decades and look at the 1960 presidentital election; a contest, that had it gone the other way, would have resulted in a very different history than the one we study today.

Speculation on alternative histories is an old and whorey endeavor that is of more interest to adherents of the Great Man theory of history than to those who believe that the currents of history can only be shaped by its participants, not changed. For years many have speculated on what would have happened if John Kennedy had not been assassinated, if Bobby had survived and won the Democratic nomination in 1968, and if LBJ had retired as Senate majority leader. But the true watershed moment occurred years earlier in 1960. It was in that election year that John Kennedy beat vice president Richard Nixon by a plurality of 118,000 votes out of a total of 68 million votes. Though it is well-known that Kennedy's father, Joe Kennedy, had substantial mob and union connections in the key state of Illinois, Seymour Hersh admits in his book, "Dark Camelot", that mob boss Sam Giancana's help was of an unknown nature -- however, Hersh asserts, Chicago Mayor Richard Daly's assistance wasn't. Kennedy himself related Daly's comments to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee the following evening, "Mr. President, with a little bit of luck and help of a few close friends, you're going to carry Illinois."

Hersh goes on to say:

"Without the state's 27 electoral votes, Kennedy would have had a plurality of only 7 votes over Nixon in the electoral college, with 26 unpledged Democratic electors in Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama threatening to bolt unless they received significant concessions on federal civil rights policy from the Democratic Party. They had the power, if Kennedy lost Illinois, to throw the election into the House of Representatives for the first time in the twentieth century."

Nixon was encouraged to appeal the election by Republican leaders but chose not to because of fears that being labeled a "sore loser" would dog him his whole career and jeopardize "any possibility of a further political career".

If Nixon had been elected president in 1960, instead of 1968, the mind reels. Obviously, the decade's central event, the Kennedy assassination, would not have occurred. U.S. involvement in Viet Nam is a little less sure since Nixon was as much a cold warrior as Kennedy and no doubt would have been lured by the same fears of a communist takeover of South Vietnam as had Kennedy. But if an early-60's Nixon administration had become involved in Viet Nam it would not have been run by Robert MacNamara and the Best and Brightest cadre. The strategy of determining victory by body count, and of fighting only in certain corridors for fear of inviting intervention of the Soviet Union and China, would most certainly not have occurred. How effective the strategy that would have replaced it is unknown.

With his challenge to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, Kennedy is given credit for launching the space race. Since the drivers for the endeavor were cold war politics, not science or exploration, it is entirely possible that an early Nixon administration also might have also heeded the call for a moon landing -- but on what scale and on what timeframe?

It is not clear how much progress Civil Rights legislation would have made under an early 60's Nixon administration, but considering that such legislation as the 1964 Voting Rights act was pushed through congress by an arm-twisting LBJ (playing to a congress's loyalty to a fallen president by finally passing Kennedy sponsored legislation that had been held-up for years) it is likely that it wouldn't have approached the scope of what ultimately was passed. This isn't to say that Nixon's progressive tendencies would not have made themselves known during a '60-'68 term. It was during the real Nixon presidency of '68 to '74 that the EPA was enacted and welfare was expanded.

A Richard Nixon presidency that started long before the beginning of any student demonstrations and ending eight months before Woodstock (had it still occurred) would have muted Nixon's paranoid impulses set off by the war. Indeed, they may have remained dormant and prevented the very scandals that ended his career. Alas, timing would not have allowed for Nixon's greatest triumph, his opening to China. Nixon's '60-'68 term would have run simultaneously with Mao's calamitous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. It is inconceivable in such an ideological hot-house atmosphere that Mao would have been open to any rapprochement with the U.S.

2004-09-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

SETI, Fear and Trembling

Though the recent discovery of what is purported to be an extraterrestrial signal is deemed by SETI (the privately funded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute) as being highly exaggerated, it does raise the question of what happens when -- years, decades, centuries from now -- we eventually determine that humankind has received a signal from an alien intelligence. With 200 million stars in this galaxy alone and (based on initial surveys) most having planets – odds would have it that somewhere in the universe several worlds might produce life technologically advanced enough to announce their presence at great distances.

Throughout the years conventional wisdom has proposed several scenarios that would result from such a find: a) Upon discovering another intelligence not of this world, all religions will be rendered trivial, the sectarian violence that has plagued mankind for two millennia will end and we’ll all become tasteful secular humanists; b) Mankind, forced to view itself as one species instead of a group of divisive, carping nationalities, will band together and realize how silly it is to fight over trivial things like genocide and slavery; c) Mankind, upon finding evidence of another intelligence, will no longer feel alone in the universe.

It is the last of these scenarios that seems the most reasonable and grounded. But for those who have the privilege of pondering such things, I am not convinced that such a discovery would make them feel any better about their place in the universe, and they may feel a whole lot worse. Any signal will most likely not be found in our galactic neighborhood, some five, ten, or one hundred light years away, but will most likely be found many orders of magnitude more distant, perhaps even outside our galaxy. Even at the speed of light, this distance would make practical communication with a civilization impossible, assuming a signal that had traveled some 100,000 light years would still have someone around to hear its reply some two hundred thousand years later.

Arthur Clarke once wrote that space is small; it is planets that are big – you can conceptually put your arms around a planet’s dimensions, but space doesn’t offer that kind of grappling hook. A distant signal would provide scale and heartbreaking perspective to the immensity of the universe, driving home our isolation, putting into sharp relief a question that was previously academic.

2004-09-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

Why Medical Savings Accounts Can't Work

During the last week, in the backdrop the Republican convention, we started to hear again of the "ownership society", where we citizens would have control of our social security and medical savings accounts. Though one might concede the privatization of social security as a possibility due to the prospect of bankruptcy, medical savings accounts will never work, for two reasons:

1. Outside of insurance, even the most routine medical procedures are beyond the savings capacity of most Americans (who are tasked as is with saving for their children's college education). Routine childbirth costs in the neighborhood of $10,000, not to mention the catastrophic diseases that can rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars of bills and are responsible for half of the personal bankruptcies in the U.S. Because of its high costs, medicine requires the leveraging capability of insurance -- for a relatively small premium paid each month, I have access to a vast insurance pool to handle medical bills that I would not otherwise be able to afford.

2. By privatizing even routine procedures such as checkups or early-symptom doctors visits, you discourage the one factor that is crucial to holding down medical costs -- prevention. Even if I have, say, $3000, in my medical savings account, I still have an incentive to not go to the doctor for a slight pain that "might be nothing". I will probably think about saving my limited funds for something more substantial. However, by the time I make the determination that my condition is worth a doctor's visit, my condition may have progressed that much further and be that much more expensive to treat.

Those on the right find this type of scenario essential. They argue than we users of medical care are currently insulated from the true costs of our procedures, and until we are re-attached to the financial consequences of those procedures, we'll never get control of soaring medical costs. The conceptual mistake in this argument is that medicine falls outside of normal market forces. When we are sick we don't price shop doctors or hospitals. As a result, the normal transactional analysis that we make when we buy a house, car or backyard grill, never occurs. The only market force that will work in medical care is the downward pricing pressure that a large insurance pool, such as a city, state, federal government or large corporation, can provide. President Bush alludes to this very advantage in the most workable of his medical reform proposals -- allowing small businesses and individuals to join in multi-state buying groups that would give them the clout of our largest insurance users. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration, in a sop to the drug companies, refused to allow the federal government this very pricing advantage when enacting the Medicare drug benefit, adding billions to its cost.

2004-08-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

Adam Smith Waylaid

The equation for Adam Smith’s “Comparative Advantage” lines up like this: the average wage in China is $.90 per hour, as opposed to $22.00 per hour in the US. If you’re an auto parts supplier and your profit margins are down another 4% for the third consecutive year in a row, your options lay in sharp relief.

Implicit in all discussions of efficiency (and the logical underpinnings of unfettered immigration) is the idea that there is no barrier to ever lower costs, no barrier to ever-better efficiency. This is what has become a mantra, an idea whose converse is viewed as heresy amongst economists. Like Moore’s law and the certainty of the Big Three in the 1950’s that next year would be like this year, plus 10% – might this be a fatal assumption? This is more than academic. If we get this wrong the entire bargain the western democracies have made with their populace is shot. No longer does improving oneself with education mean much when my $100,000 per year coding job can be moved to Hyderabad and done as competently by a worker who is paid $18,000 per year. But there are no pensions in Hyderabad and there are minimal environmental regulations in Bangalore. There are no workplace safety rules resembling those in the U.S. and there is no public infrastructure to be paid for that resembles anything to found in Tokyo, London or Sunnyvale – and there’s no universal public education to pay for. The software outsourcing companies in India have to supply their own water, supply their own security and supply their own power. How do you compete with a country where infrastructure has been privatized and has not yet made that bargain with its citizens?

Even Moore’s law will be running up against the wall of Quantum theory in the next ten years as ever shrinking microprocessors slam into Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s creepy equations (what do you do when circuits become smaller than the electrical pulses they carry?) But might Economics have its own wall that the drive for ever-lower costs is bound to hit? What do you do when your costs are an order of magnitude below what they were five years before? That means your supplier’s costs have also been reduced by a similar amount. What are they paying their employees in 2004 compared to 1999? Is it the same? If it is, how many employees are being paid that wage today as opposed to 1999?

Adam Smith never envisioned aggregated T1 lines with C++ and Java code flying across two oceans at the speed of light, minus the microsecond ping-time-overhead of the Cisco routers playing traffic cop. If my customer needs help they can call my call-center in North Carolina. Or they can call my call-center in Shanghai. There is little difference between the two since my call center in Shanghai has employees who speak flawless English with a modest accent and know Microsoft 2000, Oracle or SAP as well as my employees in Raleigh -- who are paid ten times as much.

In Economics an externality exists whenever there is a separation of costs and benefits. When a business dumps toxic waste into a nearby river and downstream residents are riddled with cancer, the costs of that cancer are an externality. The business is able to lower its costs and pass those lower costs onto its customers while never having to pay for the treatment of cancer patients that it would have to otherwise have to incur.

We have laws in this country against dumping and pollution for this very reason – making sure the costs of certain dangerous behaviors are prevented. But a company that chooses to outsource jobs overseas avoids many of these costs, some of which include:
1) High wages, 2) Organized labor, 3) Social Security or Medicare payments, 4) Unemployment tax, 5) Health benefits for workers, 6) Child labor laws, 7) OSHA or EPA costs or regulations, 8) Retirement or pension costs.

But what about the company that does not export its jobs, but instead stays in its home country and takes advantage of illegal immigrants as employees? How many of these advantages does it incur? What happens if these illegal immigrants are granted guest-worker status within the U.S., as the Bush administration has proposed? How many of these same obligations will be skirted -- will our experiences with a previously illegal labor force just be codified and institutionalized?

The experiences of the construction industry in the American Southwest over the last decade show how an addiction to low wage, illegal immigrant labor can become institutionalized. As illegal labor became a larger and larger part of the various construction trades a common complaint among general contractors was that no one in the industry could afford to not break the law and hire undocumented workers. At least four costs off the above list have been already skirted in certain industries here in the U.S. Agriculture, for example, the largest employer of immigrant labor (legal and otherwise) has historically been able to pay extremely low wages, endure little in the way of organized labor and avoid paying health benefits for workers, as well as retirement or pension costs. In the case of illegal immigrant labor, none of those benefits are demanded, or can be demanded, due to the threat of deportation. If immigrant labor was given guest-worker status, this same group would gain some pricing advantage, but how much? Enough to bridge the current wage gap between legal and illegal labor? Judging from some of the organized boycotts the United Farm Workers in the Sonoma Valley over healthcare benefits not being extended to legal farm workers, one gets the impression that the question might be moot, or at the very least, a difference that is only a matter of degree.

The free movement of labor is an idea that has been embraced one time or another by both Labor and business interests, but for different reasons – the former found it attractive because of the opportunity for worldwide trade unionism, and the latter because of the assumed lower labor costs and more efficient allocation of workers. However, at this time, the free movement of labor has primarily been embraced by business interests. Publications such as the Wall Street Journal call for the complete removal of any and all immigration barriers while Labor is a major player at anti-globalization protests wherever they are held. Strangely enough, in what can be seen as a rear-guard action to increase faltering influence and membership, the Service Employees International Union's has in recent years included illegal custodial workers in Los Angeles as part of its organizing efforts. In the past, unions have viewed illegal workers as a threat to their wage and benefit gains and until recently it would have been inconceivable to see them included in any organizing drive. If this type of organizing expands its scope, wage and benefit floors might be buttressed somewhat for illegal labor and moving it towards some type of parity with legal wages. If so, the logical extension might be for illegal labor to become less and less attractive over time.

In the past conventional wisdom would argue that wage decay would only occur in lower skilled trades, that new higher skilled jobs would more than make up for what was being lost on the lower end. But, as we have seen in the programming field, this is no longer the case. We are now seeing the greatest divide between the perceived interests of corporations and workers (and by extension, society as a whole) since the violent labor unrest of the early 20th century. As business interests find they now can suture themselves to a labor supply 6000 miles away, this fissure will continue to grow wider.

2004-08-14T11:40:00.000-07:00

Crusty Movie Corner
In which we re-visit an unfashionable old movie that is not on the AFI's Top-100 list.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962

John Ford's relatively unappreciated film from late in his career featuring, John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, Edmond O'Brien, Andy Devine, Woody Strode.

When summarizing the American director and reluctant autour with the most impressive and consistent body of work (other than Peter Hyams), the sheer numbers overwhelm: with some 135 films dating back to 1917, 10 can be cataloged as masterpieces, another 10 can be given the designation of "great" and another 20 are films that any other director would be glad to include in their body of work. These are fuzzy numbers since few of us have seen the entire Ford catalog, but to make the claim that Liberty Valance should rank in the top five would be viewed as fighting words by some. After all, who are you going to boot? "The Searchers", "Stagecoach", "The Quiet Man", "My Darling Clementine" "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon"?

For several years I have carried in my wallet a review of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", a brief posting from the events calendar of the Los Angles Times -- author unknown. In under one hundred words, it makes the case succinctly:

"A chamber film about memory, the frontier, civilization, and the ironies and illusions of history. The town is pasteboard, the landscapes almost nonexistent, and most of the actors 20 to 30 years older than the characters they play (in flashback). But this is still a masterpiece: The story of how the wilderness became a garden and how four people -- a lawyer, a woman and two gunmen -- became trapped in the roles legendry thrust on them. The cast makes it almost the Casablanca of westerns."

2004-08-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

Great Daniel Patrick Moynihan Quote

"The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."

2004-08-13T18:20:00.000-07:00

CNBC's "McEnroe" Gets 0.0% Overnight Rating

In what has to be new ratings low, CNBC's new talk show featuring tennis star, John McEnroe, scored a 0.0% overnight rating for July 27 and August 2, with only 39,000 viewers tuning in each evening. Monday's show improved things slightly with a 0.1 rating bringing in 69,000 viewers.

The show isn't horrendous; yes, John McEnroe is stiff, his nasal voice grating and during one opening he begged the audience to applaud louder -- but it does feature some solid and creative guest booking, quite an achievement for a C-level show with little clout (one night's guest list featured character actor, Alfred Molina and New York attorney general, Elliot Spitzer). NBC executives say that they're going to give the show a chance, but when you consider that the program it replaced, Kudlow and Kramer ("My Favorite Plutocrats") was pulling in ratings 10 times that of "McEnroe", it will be an increasingly difficult position to maintain.

2004-08-12T22:40:00.000-07:00

Crusty Movie Corner
In which we re-visit an unfashionable old movie that is not on the AFI’s Top-100 list.

In Harm's Way, 1965

Having been a cable TV staple for years, this is a film that can hardly be considered a forgotten gem. However, it does deserve critical reevaluation and to be put it on par with its cinematic brethren, “From Here to Eternity”. Though at first glance it appears “In Harm’s Way” is an obvious knock-off of the former, I would argue that “In Harm’s Way” is the superior film.

Directed by Otto Preminger, “In Harm's Way” boasts an all star cast made of up John Wayne, Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda, Burgess Meredith and Patricia Neal, plus supporting players, Patrick O'Neal and Paula Prentiss. Like “From Here to Eternity” (number 52 on AFI's Top-100 list) , the film has an epic sprawl encompassing multiple story lines, all taking place in the backdrop of the Pacific theater during WWII. But unlike “Eternity”, the cast of “In Harm’s Way” (especially Wayne) give more attenuated performances than Burt Lancaster’s and feature none of Monty Clift’s tortured Method ticks. It is the only film in which the inflection of the line readings looms so large in my memory.

Both films are sprawling two and a half hour epics that weave various plotlines linked by one or two principal characters. With “In Harm’s Way”, that central link is John Wayne’s Captain (later Admiral) Torrey. The film follows him being stripped of his cruiser command, being busted to deskbound duty and finally his rehabilitation as an Admiral commanding a large task force. He is accompanied by his loyal, but damaged Executive Officer (Kirk Douglas), a complex character whose flawed likeability take a major hit when he succumbs to the lures of the abyss and rapes a young navy nurse (the fiancé of Torrey’s son).

In what as to be one of the wittiest and economical bits of character exposition, Torrey’s roommate, an intelligence officer played by Burgess Meredith, is introduced as he lies sleeping on the couch. Torrey walks up to him, pulls a copy of Photoplay off his face (a movie gossip magazine of the era) and parodying the cover headline asks, “(So) what is “Vicki Marlow’s secret”?” Meredith replies, “Vicky Marlow’s secret” is that she’s making half a million bucks a picture and is still collecting alimony from me.”

Nice touches abound -- often, it is this kind of texture that lingers most from a movie long after the plot has faded -- Wayne arriving home to find his roommate’s parked car in the driveway with the radio still on, music blaring. He turns it off and then walks in the door to find the radio on in the house, tuned to the same station, playing the same song.

The film daringly kills off much of its cast and leaves our protagonist lying wounded on a troop ship after a brutal naval battle. It is strange to watch the film realizing Director Preminger was only one year away from appearing as Mr. Freeze in the Batman TV series (along with Meredith as The Penguin), a casting oddity roughly equivalent to Josef Von Sternberg showing up on Facts of Life. Today, such stunt-casting is a de rigeur, po-mo career move -- in 1966 it was just plain weird.

2004-08-02T20:14:00.000-07:00

ThunderBirds are No-Go

"ThunderBirds", director Jonathon Frakes' re-imagining of the British 60's sci-fi puppet show, is an agonizing endeavo that guarantees alienating the original's cult audience without winning any new fans. Judging from its $2 million opening weekend take it appears to have little chance of making back its $56 million budget, putting it on track to be one of the year's biggest money-losers.

Scrapping original producer Gerry Andersen's shuffling marionettes for jail-bait teens, the film can't decide whether to play off of the original's campy charm or be an ABC AfterSchool Special throttling the viewer with teamwork and empowerment lessons. One is at a loss to see where the film's budget went since the film's computer generated spaceships look abridged, the cockpits containing little detail other than a pilot seat and a rudderstick, giving the impression that the budget ran out before the craft were fully rendered.

Looking like they had gotten lost on their way to somewhere else, Ben Kingsley and Bill Paxton supply the lead adult roles and at least provide the bored viewer a chance to speculate how much each actor got paid for this career body-blow and which one fired their agents first.

2004-08-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

Is 70's Progressive Rock to Blame for New Age Music?

When I first heard this statement made by a Minneapolis-based rock critic, and relayed to me by a friend, I hit the roof. Such sophistry, blaming "Dark Side of Moon" for John Tesh. But when I thought about it some more I realized that he was right -- but the music critic still managed to get it wrong.

Yes, it's true, the progressive rock of Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, Roxy Music, King Crimson etc. did spawn New Age music. But to blame it for spawning New Age is as ridiculous as blaming Jazz for spawning Fusion and Grunge for begetting Emo. Blues begat Rhythm and Blues and Rhythm and Blues begat Rock, with Gospel and Jazz in there somewhere. Celtic music helped spawn Country, and Country helped birth Rockabilly, which fed back into Rock, which begat Hip Hop (with a whole lot of help from Funk) -- so today you're left with bands like Wilco who play a type of Alt-country that wouldn't sound out of place at the Grand 'Ol Oprey, but who would then get kicked out two minutes later when they start sounding like Kraftwerk doing Sonic Youth noise experiments. The point is you can't give credit and blame to music styles as they mutate. If you're going to blame Pink Floyd for New Age, you might as well blame Muddy Waters as well, since Pink Floyd started out as a traditional blues cover band, as did most British bands of that period before they started singing about "Pipers at the Gates of Dawn" and doing 15 minute Mellotron solos.

Late 60's to mid 70's Prog Rock was informed by a whole different sensibility than what created Windom Hill. At its best Prog was lyrically and musically ambitious, heavily influenced by the Western classical tradition and Jazz. Song structures and time signatures were complex and sometimes tortuous, lyrics made allusions to literature, art, science and mysticism (rarely politics) -- but they always rocked. King Crimson could sound as much like Black Sabbath as Miles Davis (as Miles Davis often did himself!). On the other hand, New Age always sought to be meditative, somnambulant, never challenging the listener. It ended up relying on sentiment and cliché with song titles repeatedly featuring words like "crystals", "Sedona", "vortex", "dreams" "Celtic" and "dolphins", having become today the aural equivalent of Hummel figures.

There was also what I call an intermediate step on the way from Prog to New Age -- artists like Tomita and Vangelis. Both, especially the latter, made non-vocal synth music, but featured dramatic and harmonically complex melodies that made no concession to do anything other than totally engage the listener. Today this tradition has stayed alive with such techno bands as The Orb, Aphex Twin and Orbital-- and don't forget Tangerine Dream, they're the actual direct link from Prog rock to New Age that proves the point. In the early 70's they'd be discussed in rock magazines along with Yes, Pink Floyd, Mott The Hoople, etc. -- and today they are now squarely in the New Age camp. While Prog is responsible for New Age, the critic is also forgetting that it spawned two other more positive offshoots, Ambient and Techno (plus all of its offshoots such as Acid, House, Drum and Bass etc.) , genres that are not nearly as derided as New Age. Also today's Prog Rock descendents, "Tool", "Perfect Circle" and "The Mars Volta" are bands that are regularly gushed over by rock critics like Mr. Gilyard.

2004-06-30T20:25:00.000-07:00

A Ghost is Born

I'm not sure if I should recommend the new Wilco album. I loved the 15 minutes of noise on track 11, reminiscent of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (though more benign) but the rest is burdened by an uber-relaxed aesthetic, with Jeff Tweedy's bored vocals acting like protective armor -- as if to say in case we don't like it, he can say that he wasn't really trying .

I have already flip-flopped a few times. It has a cool cover, cool title and cool typeface. And I like to think that this is what Nirvana would be sounding like as Kurt Cobain was approaching 40.

2004-06-22T21:12:00.000-07:00

Not Quite There Yet

Burt Rutan's suborbital flight yesterday probably means more to the future of suborbital hypersonic transport than space travel. Spaceship One's top speed in its 62 mile suborbital flight was some 1800 mph. Compare this to the 17,000 mph velocity required to reach orbital velocity and you realize that the difference between sub-orbital flight and orbital flight is an order of magnitude.

2004-06-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

Is the New Trade Center More TV Tower Than Skyscraper

With all the talk during the last several months about Daniel Libeskind taking a subordinate role to Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein's preferred Skidmore Owings Merrill architect, David Childs, the talk is that Libeskind's World Trade Center plan is being watered down in the name of commerce. While others understand that large commercial developments are always a compromise between art and commercial demands, what might be getting lost here is the possibility that the site's new primary tower may not be nearly as impressive as what came before it.

Plans call for a narrow office tower slated to be the world's tallest, rising 1776 feet above lower Manhattan. Leased up to the 70th floor, the remaining levels will be devoted to open girders and an electricity generating wind farm. At first glance this seems impressive, a tower some 300 feet taller than the previous Trade Towers and 200 feet taller than Petronas Towers, currently the world's tallest. However, the new Trade Center tower will have an extremely narrow footprint. Floor plates at the base of the building are only a quarter the size of the previous Twin Towers' 40,000 square feet and steadily taper to a single point at full height. In fact, the building tapers so sharply that the top third of the structure more resembles a transmission tower than a skyscraper. The imposing quality of an office tower stems as much from its depth and width as it does from its height (the previous Twin Towers being case in point). Aesthetically, Libeskind's tower cannot help but be an improvement over its predecessor but will most likely lack the impact provided by the previous towers' sheer bulk. In fact, it may be no more impressive than Toronto's CN Tower (a radio and television mast) still remaining the world's tallest self-supporting structure at over 1800 feet.

The new Trade Center Tower's unprecedented narrow profile is almost defeatist; as if the building is scrunching itself up, determined to make itself the smallest target possible. Perhaps the compromises brought on by Silverstein's need to create leaseable space will add some heft to this soaring shrinking violet.