Debt On

So I haven’t been posting in a while… since August, actually. There’s been a lot of big things happening since then that have kept me pretty busy, but not too busy where I should have neglected all 50 of you who apparently may have been reading this web site.

Most of those two months were spent staring at the TV in disbelief, as a major U.S. city was destroyed and George W. Bush just didn’t know what to do about it. The whole thing continues to be a complete disaster and a hideous tragedy. I’m just not sure how I feel that something positive can actually be gleamed from all the doom and death beamed into everyone’s living rooms for weeks: the walls just keep crashing down on the Republicans, and nobody seems to like them anymore. And props to Kanye West for saying it, and to these guys for writing a song about it, cuz George Bush just don’t like black people. (That’s an MP3)

On the topic of New Orleans, I’d just like to shout out to my boy Noah who is down there right now giving some much needed medical care to some of the unfortunate souls in that neck of the woods. Congratulations, Noah, we’re all damn proud of you out here in the Bay. I’ll try to hit you up real soon. Noah’s group is actually on the Internet, and they can take donations of money and supplies, check it out.

But as far as my life goes, I was living in Montana for sixth months, a very wide-open and empty place. I think I briefly mentioned that move but never really discussed enough of my road trip to get into details. Maybe I’ll do something about that. Anyway, Montana is beautiful countryside, but the outdoors can only do so much for you, so I’ve felt pretty out of touch these last few months. It didn’t help that there was no convenient way for me to jump on the Internet with my laptop, which was constantly on the fritz anyway.

Briefly, without too many details: I was working for my now brother-in-law as a bartender in his resort restaurant. It was a fun little gig, and I met some interesting customers, but it couldn’t have been long-term since the whole state seems to close down in the winter except for skiers. Montana is a huge place, with what seems to be a higher population of grizzly bears than people. The third largest state in the country, it has a population of less than 1 million. Which is an eighth of New York, or a seventh of the San Francisco Bay Area.

A lot of Canadians come in there, too. Canadians order the weirdest drinks I ever made. Take the Paralyzer. You make a white Russian in a big glass: vodka, coffee liqueur, and cream over ice, and splash some coke on top. The worst part is the acid of the coke will curdle the cream so it’s just raunchy, like an Irish car bomb left on the bar, or lemon and cream in your tea.

They also like clam juice in their bloody Marys, and tomato juice in their beer. Every once in a while they would try to put tomato in one of the good ales, and my brother-in-law, the other bartender, would absolutely refuse to make them. What a waste of good beer.

They have the strangest names for their drinks too: rocks glasses are “buckets”, and pitchers are “jugs”. The best Canadian story I ever heard was from this dirty old man from Calgary, Alberta. One night, completely loaded off paralyzers, he told me about a gorgeous bartender that used to work in Whitefish, Montana. She told a Canadian who ordered “two jugs”, “these are pitchers” and she held up two pitchers. Then she grabbed both of her breasts and said: “these are jugs.”

Anyway, the best part of the whole experience was at the end, when I got to perform the ceremony that joined my sister and her fiancé. That’s right, I’m an ordained minister in the Universal Church of Life. All you could be too, really. But how many weddings will you have done, hmm? Anyway, I’d just like to say if you’re reading, congrats to J & C, you guys are awesome together and I know you’ll do just fine.

So after all that was over, I moved to Oakland, CA, where I now sit anxiously hoping I get a call about a job any minute. I’ve got a pretty good thing going on here, I think, so long as I play it right. And I’d really like to get back to doing comics, but I’ve got a long way to go towards being really settled here. I will try to keep writing on the blog, maybe a little less politics and a little more straightforward shit. Straight from the heart, y’know? My computer’s lovin’ the wireless Internet for now, but it is pretty buggy. Hopefully I’ll start working with a little bread left over for a new one.

Oh, and the comments have been officially spammed. If you have been, don’t leave your e-mail addresses on the blog, use user@host.com instead. And I’ll look into turning that off, but that may make the problem worse. I may have to move to a registration or invitation model, or lose ’em altogether. Nobody uses ’em anyway. We’ll see.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been getting a lot of good press lately for his withdrawl of settlers from the Gaza Strip. But is the praise really all that deserved? From the moment Sharon was elected he was widely considered to be an obstacle to the peace process in the region as a supporter of Israeli settlements. The recent pullout was seen as a massive turnaround in policy for Sharon and an enormous step toward peace and a Palistinian state. But was it?

NYT: Israel on Monday wrapped up its withdrawal of the nearly 9,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip. Despite the pullout, there will almost certainly be more Jewish settlers at the end of this year than at the beginning, said Yariv Oppenheimer, the leader of Peace Now, an Israeli group that opposes settlement building.

The West Bank settler population is about 240,000. With the number increasing by more than 10,000 a year, the growth will offset those who have been removed, even if none of the evacuees resettle in the West Bank. The figures do not include Israelis in East Jerusalem.

Palestinians, as well as Israeli critics of the settlements, say the Gaza evacuation was welcomed, but they note that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says he plans to continue strengthening the much larger West Bank settlements.

Mr. Oppenheimer said he expected settler leaders to push for the Gaza evacuees to relocate in the West Bank. “The settler leadership has a political interest in showing that this was not a defeat, and that it will only result in the further building of West Bank settlements,” he said.

If the Gaza settlements are to be disbanded only to bolster West Bank settlements, how are we any closer to a peaceful arrangement? It would seem that Sharon has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes by demonstrating a massive sacrifice on the part of Israel complete with heart-wrenching news feeds of people being dragged from their homes for the sake of peace, while continuing to provoke Palestinians with West Bank settlements.

Before we applaud Israel, it is important to scrutinize what exactly this will accomplish. While even the most skeptical of us is willing to concede that this is a sacrifice on the part of Israel, what does it really accomplish? If violence suddenly ceases in the Gaza Strip only to escalate in the West Bank, this only weakens the Palestinian position while further solidifying the Israeli grip on the territory. While I of course commend the Gaza pullout, I believe if Sharon were truly interested in peace he would be interested in evacuating West Bank settlements as well, as per UN Security Council Resolution 446, March 1979:

The Security Council, […] Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East;

Instead twenty-five years later we still can’t achieve much more than token gestures and visual overtures.

The New York Times featured an article on a few upcoming films that will be based on the stories of twenties novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many, many films have been made from his work, none of which I have seen, but apparently thus far not one has done justice to the power of his writing. One sentence in particular from the Times’ article grabbed my attention: “To date, more than 20 films have been drawn from Fitzgerald’s life and books – and their almost unalloyed failure to do justice to his work is rivaled only by Fitzgerald’s own failure to make it in Hollywood as a screenwriter.”

This immediately reminded me of a scene in Fitzgerald’s final, unifinished novel The Last Tycoon: a meeting between the novelist-turned-screenwriter Mr. George Boxley and the master producer Monroe Stahr. Boxley is clearly unhappy as a screenwriter, and is trying desperately to quit. As the passage demonstrates, Boxley’s opinion of Hollywood is so low that his writing suffers from his perception of far lower standards for screenwriting:

Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kind fatherly smile Stahr had developed inversely when he was a young man pushed into high places. Originally it had been a smile of respect toward his elders, then as his own decisions grew rapidly to displace theirs, a smile so that they should not feel it–finally emerging as what it was: a smile of kindness–sometimes a little hurried and tired, but always there–toward anyone who had not angered him within the hour. Or anyone he did not intend to insult, aggressive and outright.

Mr. Boxley did not smile back. He came in with the air of being violently dragged, though no one apparently had a hand on him. He stood in front of a chair, and again it was as if two invisible attendants seized his arms and set him down forcibly into it. He sat there morosely. Even when he lit a cigarette on Stahr’s invitation, one felt that the match was held to it by exterior forces he disdained to control.

Stahr looked at him courteously.

“Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?”

The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence.

“I read your letter,” said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference.

“I can’t get what I write on paper,” broke out Boxley. “You’ve all been very decent, but it’s a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you’ve teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it–they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words.”

“Why don’t you write it yourself?” asked Stahr.

“I have. I sent you some.”

“But it was just talk, back and forth,” said Stahr mildly. “Interesting talk but nothing more.”

Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but none to amusement, and said:

“I don’t think you people read things. The men are deulling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket.”

He barked again and subsided.

“Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?”

“What? Naturally not.”

“You’d consider it too cheap.”

“Movie standards are different,” said Boxley, hedging.

“Do you ever go to them?”

“No–almost never.”

“Isn’t it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?”

“Yes–and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue.”

“Skip the dialogue for a minute,” said Stahr. “Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write–that’s why we brought you out here. But let’s imagine something that isn’t either bad dialogue or jumping down a well. Has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?”

“I think it has,” said Boxley stiffly, “–but I never use it.”

“Suppose you’re in your office. You’ve been fighting deuls or writing all day and you’re too tired to fight or write any more. You’re sitting there staring–dull, like we all get sometimes. A pretty stenographer that you’ve seen before comes into the room and you watch her– idly. She doesn’t see you, though you’re very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on the table–“

Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk.

“She has two dimes and a nickel–and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black glvoes to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the match box and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there’s a stiff wind blowing in the window–but just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello–listens–and says deliberately into the phone, ‘I’ve never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.’ She hangs up, kneels by the stove again, and just as she lights the match, you glance around very suddenly and see that there’s another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes–“

Stahr paused. He picked up his keys and put them in his pocket.

“Go on,” said Boxley smiling. “What happens?”

“I don’t know,” said Stahr. “I was just making pictures.”

My point? At a glance (which is about as much thought as I lent this idea–I have no real historical basis for this) Mr. Boxley is a window to Fitzgerald’s feelings as a screenwriter. If this is true, what’s amazing to me is that someone so incredibly suited to one medium can find himself so completely inadequate in another.

I finally got the comments back up and running after a very minor bug took them down months ago. I’m so happy I’m feeling a little verklemt. Discuss amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic: August points out that while you can lose weight at McDonalds, their overwhelming agenda is to take your money and make you fat. Discuss.

That was the headline on Fox News about twenty minutes ago. Apparently the Iraqi Parlaiment has been holed up for weeks trying to approve a constitution.

BBC: Its 71 members met late into the night on Sunday to consider their progress.

The US and Britain fear that a delay might play in the hands of insurgent groups, which have intensified their attacks.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad last week to insist that the panel meet the original 15 August deadline.

So there they are, burning the midnight oil, cramming through this constitution like its some kind of college term paper. Our eager pupils of democracy, who’ll turn in their frantically prepared project at the last minute and wait nervously for their grade.

It sure feels good to be the professor, passing down grades in democratic structure, imposing deadlines and making sure our students stick to them. The thing is, when I stayed up all night on a term paper, I rarely got more than a B-minus on it. Is that really any way to write a constitution?

Edit: Oooh.. and they didn’t make it. And nobody gave them the extension. That’s gonna hurt their GPA.

by retired Gen. William E. Odom, head of the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration.

Years ago South Park did an episode featuring the “North American Man-Boy Love Association” which plotted to seduce the grade-school protagonists. The boys all think it’s fun to hang around with adults until they’re lured into a hotel room and it becomes clear that the intentions of NAMBLA are… more than platonic.

Today I found out that NAMBLA, in fact, exists and has existed since 1978. Part of their mission, from their web site:

We call for fundamental reform of the laws regarding relations between youths and adults. Today, many thousands of men and boys are unjustly ground into the disfunctional criminal justice system. Blindly, this system condemns consensual, loving relationships between younger and older people. NAMBLA’s Prisoner Program, with limited resources, works to provide a modicum of humanity to some of these people.

And I want to call attention to this part: many thousands of men and boys are unjustly ground into the disfunctional criminal justice system. You know, guys, I don’t think that it’s the boys they’re sending to jail.

Rockstar games has changed the rating and pulled copies of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas because it was pulled from Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart when they discovered the game contained “explicit s3xual content.” I’ve heard Hilary Clinton’s involved in this one, too. So, the graphic violence, murder of police officers, rocket launchers and expolsions wasn’t enough to try to keep this game away from kids, but when a n@ked woman walks on camera, the walls come crashing down. I’m glad to know we have such a moral center in this country.

Edit: 10/13 It was this stupid post! This damn thing got my comments pages spammed. It also was responsible for some… funky… Google ads. I may have to disable the comments, or add a registration system. Nobody uses ’em anyway.

The illustrated Tell-Tale Heart

Big comic. Lots of artists. Very creative. Check it out. (flash)