Posted 11:18 PM by Michael
WIGGLE TOWN

Everywhere in Chicago there are lessons for children, if only we have the eyes to see them. Take for instance my experience buying tickets at the Chicago Theatre for The Wiggles (if you're a parent of a toddler, you know, and if you're not, you don't need to).

My son and I stood in line, anticipation on his little face. Tickets went on sale at 10:00 am and by 10:03 we were at the box office window. "Two $20 seats please," I said.

"We only have rear balcony left," came the terse reply.

And so we walked away ticketless, tears welling up in my son's little brown eyes as he struggled to understand how all those tickets could have been purchased in just three minutes. "So we don't get to see... The Wiggles, daddy?" the little tousle-haired lad asked me sadly.

"Fear not, son," I replied, and pulled out my cell phone, dialing a local ticket broker. "Do you have tickets for The Wiggles?" I asked.

"We just got them," came the answer at the other end. A quick depletion of my son's college fund, and we had seats close enough to be tickled by Captain Feathersword's hat.

"How come they got tickets and we didn't, even though we were right at the beginning of the line, daddy?" asked the little fellow.

"Because this is Chicago, my son, and standing in line and playing by the rules is for chumps and downstaters," I replied sagely. "If you want something in this town, you have to know where to go and whose palm to grease."

"Didn't that cost a lot more money?" my bright-eyed urchin asked, and then a new enthusiasm overtook him: "Wow, maybe we could sell the tickets for even more money!"

"No, son," I replied, "if we were to sell the tickets for more money, we'd be scalpers and breaking the law."

His little face clouded. Then it brightened again. "At least this way, The Wiggles get lots of money to make more videos!"

"No, son," I explained, patting his little towhead, "they do it this way so the artist doesn't get any of the extra money. Ticketmaster and the ticket brokers keep it all."

We walked a little further, as my adorable moppet took in this new understanding of the way things work in this old world of ours. Finally he had another question for me. "But Dad, if the artists don't get the money— that's just as bad as burning a CD of music, isn't it? Isn't that what they say, that it's wrong because you're stealing from the artists?"

"Yes, son," I said, marveling at the ragamuffin's wisdom beyond his years, "it is wrong for you and me to steal from the artists. But stealing's different for Ticketmaster and the ticket brokers, my son. Because this is Chicago and they have a license for it."

Posted 4:50 PM by Michael
BLITHERING DIGITAL

Think about the most awkward, unconvincing dialogue delivery you've seen in recent movies—Keanu Reeves in one of Branagh's Shakespeare films, Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence, things like that. Normal American teenager types forced to speak the arch historical stuff meant only for the mellifluous tones of Ian McKellen. Now imagine such obvious actorly discomfort lasting for an entire movie, and you have Star Wars V: Attack of the Clones.

Once or twice in the genuinely painful (but endlessly protracted) scenes recounting the budding love of Darth Teenager and Queen Senator Whatever, you can see the possibility of the kind of amusingly offhand, self-kidding moment of repartee that makes Spiderman tolerable and Maguire and Dunst so likable (or that, in a galaxy far far away, made Ford and Fisher likable, too). But as Jack Benny said to me, timing is everything, and you can't have comic timing when what should be a three-word throwaway line has to be intoned in an unnatural pseudo-Sir Walter Scott-speak that takes 10 seconds to spit out. You have to go back to the very earliest days of sound cinema to find dialogue this overwritten and unsayable; if Lucas had written Casablanca, its most famous line would be "Truly the playing of that song again would not disturb my heart more than it has hers, my piano-playing friend Sam."

More disturbing than Lucas's tin ear for dialogue is his tin eye for our awareness of plagiarism; in what must be some sort of speed record for getting someone else's scenes into your movie, he blatantly rips off high points from Fellowship of the Ring almost line for line, not that the comparison is ever to Lucas's benefit. To be sure, the Peter Jackson movies only got made because they resemble Star Wars, which is because Lucas stole Gandalf in particular from Tolkien eons ago, and so on. But it would have been one thing to, say, rip off a technique from The Matrix (as a zillion movies did), and another to do so while literally casting Hugo Weaving in a dark suit and sunglasses, which nobody dared do. Yet here's Christopher Lee again, falling under the spell of a greater evil wizard, and making unnatural armies deep below the ground, and shooting sparks at a good wizard in the prison of his tall, pointy castle. The only difference is his haircut. When Lucas stole from The Searchers nearly line for line in the first movie, at least only film critics recognized the fact, but everyone must notice what a pale ripoff these scenes are. (He steals from The Searchers again, too, by the way.)

Yet it's not that Lucas is a mere hack. If he were, he might manage something as trashily watchable, and forgettable, as Independence Day. What's so awkward is that Lucas has gotten himself into a project of Shakespearean darkness while still being trapped in a comic book reader's body. The one-time pal/protege of Francis Coppola wants to make his own Godfather II, yet the character he's chosen to plumb as deeply as Michael Corleone is a pulp villain out of Batman. (That's not a slam, either; thanks to the combination of his walking-black-dashboard look and James Earl Jones' mighty voice, the determined, semi-cursed Darth Vader was about as good as pulp villains get.) The hints we had of his past helped make his evil interesting and multidimensional (in a way that, say, Peter Cushing's bureaucratic Grand Moff Tarkin never was), but to put it mildly, Lucas's made-up cartoon universe does not compare to the Italian-American experience in the 20th century when it comes to providing a backdrop rich and meaningful enough to support the exploration of such a character's descent into evil. It's like making a movie exploring what drove Colonel Klink to become a Nazi. (Actually, it's like making three movies.)

So, a pretty dispiriting experience, as I had to have known it would be. Why did I bother, you ask? My curiosity about digital projection got the better of me. I saw a DLP system (in the company of a friend who had earlier seen the Boeing system at another theater) and from a position of extreme doubt I now must admit, I can believe this technology is here to stay—if the economics can be made to work for theater owners, that is. My friend considered this system plainly inferior to the Boeing system—there were too-hot video colors in some scenes (although they worked in some places, as when the light sabers truly seemed to glow), and a lack of contrast in darker scenes. And clearly there's a learning curve ahead for cinematographers in achieving a look as pretty as film's, since the video-harshness of direct lighting was not always flattering to Natalie Portman in particular. There were also jaggies on type, which my friend said he didn't see with the Boeing system. But if you want this kind of super-clear look (and I'm not sure you always do) for the kind of computer-created imagery that a film like this has, it is astonishingly crisp and may very well lead to a certain audience dissatisfaction with plain old film. I didn't believe the epic battle of film vs. digital cinema had truly been joined yet, but it has been.

This is the lesson of Star Wars V. The technology keeps advancing. And everything else Hollywood ever knew has been forgotten.

Posted 10:33 AM by Michael
FATHER OCCUPANT

The Catholic Church has, as all the world knows, proven very resistant to the notion of its top leaders stepping down for sins that would have sent secular leaders of any sort to jail. One priest blogger (perhaps the only priest blogger) suggested that a reason for this is that the Church doesn't see things the way that a corporation does—an archbishopric is not a vice presidency, the repository of a bunch of privileges and rewards; instead, it's a duty, and one that may in fact become more of a punishment when it has to be carried on, with dignity, in the face of the kind of shame and contempt that a Bernard Law must now face.

That sounds nice and medieval, and I have no reason to doubt that the priest who said it is sincere. But somehow I doubt Bernard Law, to name one, sees it that way. I'm sure he's holding on to his privileges as tightly as a Hollywood studio chief negotiating a development deal, and would find ending his days running a file room in the Vatican (or a prison) considerably greater punishment than sequestering himself away from parishioners in his mansion and only seeing subordinates who still address him as "your eminence."

It also neglects the purpose of the Church, which is not to serve as an elaborate apparatus for the cleansing of Bernard Law's soul, sort of like the fake environments they'd create on Mission Impossible to get some Soviet general to confess. That may be an admirable side product, but it should be secondary to ministering to parishioners, running schools, and a few other things like that. The problem right now is that quite plainly Bernard Law and his ilk are not secondary to much of anything.

If the ordinary Catholic has a hard time seeing why a Law (and an Egan and so on) should not step down, the reason has a lot to do with the policies of church leaders themselves. If the Laws of the church have been as favored and untouchable as CEOs, the ordinary priest in recent years has become as dispensable as a Lucent employee. Not that they're drummed out of the church for anything short of murder (or speaking their consciences on divorce or birth control), as the cases of priests like Shanley and Geoghan prove. But priests are shuffled from church to church in a constant game of filling temporary vacancies that there simply aren't enough priests to fill permanently.

Take the example of the church in the neighborhood where I grew up. Two priests seemed to be there through most of my childhood. One eventually moved on (though he hardly disappeared, since he was also a teacher at my high school). The other led a highly successful campaign to get the church out of the school basement and into a handsome new building of its own. In a real sense he devoted the best years of his life to making it happen. And halfway through the construction, after 20 years in the parish, he was transferred away, like Moses denied entry to the promised land. Not like a corporation? No, it isn't. A corporation wouldn't have been as cruel.

Is it any wonder that parishioners have come to see the priest as being a sort of temporary visitor in a community, to see themselves as the true continuity and management of an individual church—and to wonder why, of all priests, only a muckety-muck like Law can't be dislodged?

Posted 12:23 AM by Michael
WHERE IS THE SAUDI SOROS?

It is one of the heartwarming stories of wealth of our time, the sort that probably makes up for a dozen Enrons or even a Marge Schott. George Soros, born Jewish into one nightmare (Nazi-collaborationist Hungary), teenaged escapee from another (the post-WWII Stalinist regime), graduate of the London School of Economics, self-made billionaire in the American/global financial system. And, when it came time to give something back, a man who found and funded creative ways to prevent the nightmares from rising again—fax machines for dissidents, financial support for Solidarity, even making himself a too-rich-to-be-completely-ignored voice of reason against America's drug war.

The oil wealth of the Middle East has also produced a figure with that kind of creative thinking about his philanthropy and dedication to fostering grass roots political change. Unfortunately, his name is Osama bin Laden, and it isn't fax machines he likes to send other countries. It is perhaps not surprising that out of all that wealth, all those rich and idle sons, the Saudi kingdom should have produced the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur of terror. But why aren't we more surprised that it hasn't produced a single rich man willing to stand up for the unmistakably good things the West and the Western example have to offer the Arab world? In other words, where is the Saudi Soros?

It's not as if the Arab rich haven't been exposed to life in the West—far from it. They own Western horses, produce Western movies, co-own Western amusement parks, cavort with Western pop stars like Michael Jackson, become favored customers of Western plastic surgery clinics, and die in high-speed car crashes with Western princesses. But a hundred years ago Kemal Ataturk became the first of a series of Middle Eastern leaders to say that his nation had to put religion in its place, learn from the West, adopt its best features (separation of church and state, democracy, education for women), and stop wasting its energy on futile wars of anger and revenge. Ataturk was the first, and we're still waiting for the second.

In fact, you could cover the whole Arab world before you found a Muslim of any position who would endorse an Ataturkian view of how to build a modern society—because you wouldn't find one until you reached Mahathir in Malaysia. In the Middle East, no one dares raise his voice for these things—or even against murder.

After September 11th, some of the more westernized members of the Binladen family suggested that some public statement of apology, or at least weaselly shared sorrow, might be in order. If nothing else, such a gesture might be good for business—given that Binladen is one of the most famous brand names in that part of the world, and brother Osama had just done something for the family brand on a par with August Busch IV peeing in the Budweiser vats on live TV. But Daddy Binladen's dozens of surviving widows back in Saudi Arabia apparently vetoed it, for fear that even saying, "uh, sorry one of ours killed 3000 of yours" would inflame the Arab street against them.

So even those with the most direct business relationships to the West—at least until September 11th—dare not practice even the most basic decencies of modern civilization, for fear that jihad will be visited upon their mansions. What do you want to bet they've actually increased their secret donations to Al-Qaeda, as the industrialists of Germany probably upped their contributions to Hitler as they felt their puppet escape from their grasp? Osama-Hitler analogies are often overdone, but Binladen-Krupp sounds just about right.

H.L. Mencken once wrote how disappointed he was that John D. Rockefeller had put his fortune behind such banally respectable causes as Presybterianism. If he'd really wanted to have fun with that unprecedented fortune, Mencken suggested, he should have poured it into the Mohammedan cults flourishing among uneducated Southern blacks, and set the sparks flying in bastions of feudal white power like Mississippi. Mencken was half a world off, but otherwise he got it exactly right—unimaginable wealth was visited upon some of the least educated, least prepared people on earth—not just Arabs, but the Saudi nomads. And they in turn used it to spread the most regressive, backwater fire-and-brimstone versions of Islam on earth to their better-educated and once more reasonable neighbors.

Is it too much to say that any rich Saudi who has had so much as a tonsillectomy in a western medical clinic, who owns even a single German car, whose homes display even a single representational painting, who has enjoyed so much as a glass of California Cab in a four-star restaurant, has a moral obligation to stop being such a hypocrite and start lifting his people out of the murderous religious morass into which he and his privileged class have helped them sink?

Posted 9:49 PM by Michael

BUT IT'S WAAAAFER THIN!

In the interest of kicking this off with the most insanely eclectic mix of political/cultural material possible, I am now going to describe my dinner last night.

This was not any dinner. This was the 20-course "Tour de Force" menu at Trio in Evanston, IL. Actually 23, if you count everything from the amuse-bouche at the beginning to the Mango Lassi (just wait) at the end.

This adventure really starts with Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook, which is a wonderful cookbook if you want to look at pictures and read cooking philosophy, it only falls down when it comes to recipes that a normal person could possibly make. But it certainly makes you want to eat at a place where you get two bites of amazing, concentratedly gorgeous flavors, in a combination you would never have thought of in a million years (confit of electric eel with butterscotch topping! This Gigondas would go perfectly with that) and then it's off to the next one before you could possibly get tired of anything. And that's the philosophy that its ex-sous-chef, Grant Achatz, has imported (pretty directly) to Trio, along with a few other of Keller's tics (like making things that look like something mundane, like ice cream cones, but taste like something else entirely, like fungus).

We didn't plan on the 20-course menu at first, in fact we joked about its excessiveness on the way up. But as we were looking at the menu... well, there must be a lot of dangerous and foolish things in life that begin with two people saying to each other, "It's really the choice that makes the most sense, isn't it, honey?" It did seem to be the only way to try the most out-there things we'd read about (spiced water—a water course! Their meal had a water course! Yuppies will pay good money for anything!) By making valiant efforts to avoid eating a couple of baskets of bread along the way, we were able to ensure that after 23 courses, not only had no fish died in vain, no seaweed had even dried in vain for our meal.

By now it should be clear that this is the sort of meal that it's all too easy to make fun of. Tiny portions on big plates (well, with 20 courses they have to be tiny, unless you're Mr. Creosote), descriptions that practically give you the family tree of the animal you're eating, insanely "creative" combinations like chocolate and green olives, most dishes turned into something precious like foam (now I know who Charlie Trotter was sniping at when he said something in the Chicago Tribune about places that go crazy foaming everything), and one particularly pretentious innovation-- precise instructions on how to eat something. If the food didn't live up to it, there'd be a lot to mock here.

But it did live up to it. 6 or 7 things were astonishingly creative and delightful. Most were at least very satisfying. Only a few were questionable-to-icky (arguably nothing should be icky at these prices, but we're talking not just high cuisine but highwire cuisine, there are going to be a few falls). The other thing that made a real difference was that the service, anticipating how uncomfortable a meal like this could be if it was as highfaluting as the food, was uniformly gracious and disarming. I've been served well, but I've never before quite had the feeling that the staff was looking at me thinking, Ooh, you are so lucky that you're about to taste this.

So, herewith the lineup (using the names as given on the menu), plus notes on the accompanying wines when they were striking enough to remember something about:

Amuse-bouche: “Ice cream sandwich” of parmesan cracker and olive oil ice cream. Definite effect of cognitive dissonance, as your mouth says Baskin-Robbins and your tongue says Italian food.

[Champagne, with some vermouth added to it for Osetra Caviar course, which was interesting.]

Hot Coconut-Cold Coconut: Shooter with a top level of hot frothed coconut milk and lower level of cold coconut water (or something) scented with vanilla, served in a bud-vase-like glass sitting in a metal stand. Intended to be shot so hot salty milk and cold perfumy whatever swirl sensuously as they go down. Interesting, but a better example of this hot-cold effect was to come.

Morocco: Match A to B quiz, consisting of five dollops of whipped olive oil each seasoned with a typical Moroccan spice (saffron, coriander, cinnamon, etc.) to be mixed and matched with five little dabs of Moroccan foods (meyer lemon, green olive, eggplant, date and almond, sumac bread with couscous). Fun to play with, but you mainly tasted the whipped olive oil (which is not THAT different from mayo).

Osetra Caviar: The first knockout on the menu and one of the most memorable items: a cup with a lime foam on the bottom, a coriander-flavored disc of crisp sugar, and caviar on creamy avocado on top. The lime-caviar combination is so good and natural I can’t believe I’ve never seen it before (for that matter, so was the avocado-caviar combination, giving the roe a creamy richness); this is caviar for people who don’t care for caviar.

“Oysters and Beer”: Oysters and salmon roe in a froth of Anchor Steam beer. Not being an oyster fan, this was probably my least favorite thing of the night.

[Premium sake, served cold. All right, I guess. Not a huge sake fan, either.]

Wild Cobia Belly: Another seafood knockout, a great mix of Asian seafood flavors. Cobia belly, lobster crackers and a couple of seaweeds or something in a tamari foam. You know when you eat Japanese food and a piece of seaweed overpowers everything else with too strong a fishy flavor? That’s what this didn't do.

[French white wine, mostly viognier.]

Green and White Asparagus: Salad of itsy-bitsy asparagus, a dab of crab salad, a swash of lemon/chamomile foam and a glob of walnut jelly or gelee or something. Kind of an intermission between more ambitious things, the woodsy walnut flavor being the most interesting part.

Sherry Vinegar Sorbet: I can’t imagine having a big bowl of this palate cleanser on a hot summer day, but it was among the top courses in creativity. Sherry vinegar ice cream was surprisingly subtle and pleasant, the lurid green basil sauce it sat in (with a few miniature nubs of mandarin orange) was a trumpet blast to wake the dead.

Chilled Ramp-Top Soup: Ramps are like wild onions (yup, it’s hillbilly food at $20/plate); another lurid green item (served in a very pretty, not-quite-impractical gull-wing or Flying Nun's-habit dish), with wild abalone and “pine ice” (a granite made out of pine extract of some sort) in which oniony and sweet flavors kept surprising each other.

[White Bordeaux.]

Liquid Black Truffle Ravioli: One of the two dishes mentioned in every review, mainly because it illustrates the thing they do of instructing you how to eat something; pop the whole ravioli in your mouth and let it explode. One was topped with shaved parmesan, the other with a slice of truffle, there were pancetta and favas involved as well, and explode was the right word.

Spice Water: The other dish mentioned in every review along with its eating instructions, also because the idea of a “water” course seems so silly. Well, tasting is at least sort of believing. A top layer of salty-smoky hot froth, a lower level of cold spiced water, and the flavors (I forget which were on which level) were Jamaican peppercorn, star anise, allspice, black truffle oil (must have been on top), toasted hazelnut (likewise). This was like pure flavor without the distraction of food being involved.

Pushed Foie Gras: One combination I felt outright did not work. Foie gras was pushed through something so it looked like shredded wheat, and melted on the tongue. A licorice foam added something—not especially licoricey—to it. So far so good. But the red beet gelee was the wrong flavor to add on top of it, I thought, too fruity and root/dirt-tasting for the foie gras.

[White burgundy, much richer than previous whites, buttery, best white of evening.]

Frog Legs and Fenugreek Seeds: With caramelized cauliflower. Unusually subtle dish, fried frog legs only a little more exotic than you’d get at Phil Smidt’s thanks to a hint of fenugreek (an ingredient in curry) and a stripe of apricot-flavored sauce along the plate. Actually the caramelized cauliflower is what I want to try to replicate at home.

Maine Lobster With Rosemary Vapor: Candidate for next dish most likely to be mentioned in every review. Chunks of lobster in a wild mushroom sauce (including a whole morel head) were terrific. But then, the plate was surrounded with rosemary, over which steaming water was poured at the table, so you smelled rosemary “vapor” as you ate the dish. (It was sort of like being in a sauna for lambs.) Sounds preposterous (like Luis Bunuel's martini recipe—hold the bottle of vermouth up to the glass to let light pass through it to the gin), but it worked— in fact it worked so well we could tell when others in the room were being served the dish.

[Baga, an Italian red.]

Lavender-Scented Elysian Fields Farm Lamb: Slices of rare lamb in a sauce I seem to have failed to take notes on (some kind of cream, out-there things like little bits of citrus fruit, maybe the Ramp-Bottoms?) It was good, but evidently not as memorable as other things…

Grapefruit Cells--Smoke and Anisette-Cinnamon: A palate-cleanser of two spoons, the one facing left containing grapefruit pips and bitter chocolate diced, the one facing right holding a little clear gelatin cube with a center of brown anisette. The grapefruit and chocolate I thought made each other more bitter (and strangely brought back a seaweedy flavor from earlier), and prompted “yuck” faces on both sides of the table; the cube was fine.

[Peter Lehmann shiraz, one of the best Australian wines I’ve ever had, usual fruity characteristics but more structure and subtlety, not just grape flavors.]

White Pekin Duck: Ah, here are the ramp bottoms, pickled with slices of duck and a duck leg confit, and a bit of melysol melon, whatever that is. Not very Asian to me (guess that's why it's White), this improved with each bite, partly because the duck was especially strong and flavorful.

[Italian red, Dolcetto.]

Prime Ribeye of Beef: To be honest, after so many ethereal flavors and vapors it was kind of time for a bit of red meat in a robust wine sauce, and here it was. Crusted with pine nuts and something green, on the side there was not only a wine reduction but then a roux-like puree of bread crumbs with the wine sauce (another peasant food at aristocrat prices).

[Pommeau de Normandie—sort an apple eau-de-vie, harder than cider, not as distilled/high proof as Calvados. Much better than the food it inspired below.]

Wild Mushroom Cheesecake: This was odd. Said to be inspired by the wine above, and thus a savory-to-sweet transition to dessert, they said, this was a kind of mini camembert cheesecake with wild mushroom flavors. Pretty strong, far more savory than dessert-like, I wouldn’t have eaten a whole slice.

Sparkling Rhubarb Parfait: The hands-down winner of the desserts. One glass held a rhubarb parfait, nicely tart; a carafe held a homemade ginger soda which wasn’t ginger-ale-tart but light and floral; pour them together and drink with a straw, the result was wonderful, even for people who don’t like rhubarb.

[A Loire dessert wine, botrytisized Chenin Blanc, quite nice.]

Tea-Simmered Pear-Crystallized Nori: I’m not convinced that Japanese desserts are entirely a good idea, but this proved to be a strong argument for them—little slices of pear with a tea and toasted sesame flavor, a bit of pear sorbet, and surprisingly, a very successful little thing of ice cream and poached or baked pear between squares of a sugar-coated seaweed. (When I asked what nori was they promised I wouldn’t taste the seaweed; I did, but it was quite good anyway, if not quite so good that it didn’t make me wish those dark squares were simply chocolate.)

[“Curious & Ancient” 20-year Tawny Port. Probably best Port I’ve had, wine complexity and not just sherry astringency.]

Chocolate and Olives: Skeptical about that combination? Well, you still may be after eating it. A layer of dark on top, a layer of tart strawberry jam below, and in the middle—green olive ice cream, as strong as it sounds. My wife scraped it out entirely, I made sure to lead with the strawberry side tongue-first. On the whole, one of the failures.

Mango Lassi: With real confit of collie in a Little Tommy sauce! No, we conclude with one more glass of cumin-scented hot foam on top and cold something or other below. Too salty and too strong for the last stop on the dinner, I thought. Though technically speaking it wasn’t, since we received a pair of truffles (chocolate, that is) in a box as a parting gift. Unlike Mr. Creosote, we decided to save them for another day, and say "Enough."

Posted 1:02 PM by Michael
LOVE FINDS ANNAKIN HARDY

If the poster for the latest Star Wars sequel, which makes it look like a Jane Seymour TV miniseries circa 1982, hasn't convinced you to stay away, then there's nothing I can add to get you to skip it and finally see Y Tu Mama Tambien or Frailty or Enigma instead.

But there is one thing I hope to persuade you, and that is: do not give in to the marketing machine by calling this Episode II.

Renumbering the Star Wars movies has been a remarkably successful, but wholly deceptive, effort to attempt to conceal the obvious fact that this is a series of sequels which has behaved like every other series of sequels. Which is to say, on the whole it has gotten worse as it has gone along, just like the Batman movies or the Lethal Weapon movies or the damn Leprechaun movies, for that matter.

This is the inexorable law of sequeldom. The first one has to have something good about it, or else why would sequels be made? (Okay, so Pet Sematary 2 exists to prove me wrong.) The second one can sometimes even be an improvement on the original—because it usually has a higher budget, thanks to the first one's success (Terminator 2 was the most extreme example of this, a sequel to a low-budget B movie that briefly ranked as the most expensive movie of all time).

By the third, though, exhaustion is inevitably setting in. And any series that makes it as high as five, well, it's purely for the fans who can even remember that there was such a character as Boba Fett four pictures back. (Is that who Han shoots under the table in the cantina? Or is Boba Fett someone that character merely talks about? Did we ever see him before we were expected to be excited to meet his dad, Chester "Chet" Fett? It kind of says everything about how lost Lucas is in his little world that he thinks the character we desperately want to see and know more of is Boba Fett and not, say, Han Solo.)

So it is a pernicious fraud to take the movie that started the whole cycle, Star Wars, and call it Episode IV: A New Hope, as if an overblown dud like The Phantom Menace could have spawned two more equally deadly sequels before suddenly bursting into life with its fourth entry. It just doesn't work that way. (If it did, we'd all be talking about how good Willow IV is, wouldn't we?)

But, you say, by all accounts this new one is at least a little more fun (and a lot less Jar-Jarred) than the last butt-number. Well, there's nothing that unusual about that. Octopussy is a lot better than The Man With the Golden Gun, but that doesn't make it Goldfinger.

But it has cool new special effects, you say. Well, The Howling II had a nude Sybil Danning covered with a full (but far from unrevealing) coat of werewolf fur, and what could be more special than that? But in the absence of a John Sayles screenplay, it still wasn't any good.

But it has Christopher Lee, you say in desperation. So did Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow. That's the artistic territory we're in, folks. If you want to see Christopher Lee, there's a perfecftly fine DVD of The Devil Rides Out in a bin somewhere waiting for you. Stay home and watch it.

It's the fifth movie in the series, the last two (yes, two) were downright painful experiences, and the only actor who's left from the original good ones is the voice of the green guy. Can you think of any other circumstances under which you'd wait in line for a movie matching that description?

Posted 12:14 AM by Michael
JAMES MADISON, FLIGHT ATTENDANT

Got the following email about how Amerika has turned into Nazi Germany (what, again?):

> Dear Usual Suspects,
Ever hanker back to the good old days...? You know, back when there was a Bill of Rights and stuff...? Protecting the innocent till they were proven guilty of SOME damn thing or other...?

GOVERNMENT TO TRACK FOREIGN STUDENTS ONLINE

On Friday Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the intention of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to use a Web-based system to track foreign students studying in the United States. The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) will replace the current paper-based system for keeping tabs on students who are granted visas, which is slow and extremely outdated. Work on SEVIS began several years ago, though it was routinely delayed. The events of September 11 urged federal officials to jump-start work on the system, which will reportedly be available July 1. Mandatory participation is scheduled to begin January 30 of next year. ITWorld, 13 May 2002

http://www.idg.net/ic_860807_1794_9-10000.html

The Bill of Rights? Yeah, you all remember those debates in The Federalist Papers where Madison is arguing for an amendment guaranteeing the right of foreign nationals to roam the country freely, with no recordkeeping at the borders whatsoever. Even to take courses learning how to steer riverboats (not dock, just steer) without anyone asking why. Actually making sure that people on student visas are students—that's where it always starts, it's straight from there to the Kamps!

All this says is, they're computerizing records they already keep—something that plainly should have been done long before The Present Emergency. (Those darn "routine delays.") You know, John Ashcroft creeps me out as much as the next guy, mainly because of his resemblance to the guy who always played slightly camp bad guys on The Monkees (and the prof in the Dragnet where Jack Webb busts one of his classmates for possessing pot and delivers his classic Domino Theory of Drugs speech—"Sure, it starts with a little maryjane. Then somebody turns up at a party with happy pills. Pretty soon it's the hard stuff. LSD. Morphine. Smack.").

But let's wait until he does something real, like have his goons smash the presses of The Onion for the headline "John Ashcroft Romps in Secret Vault of Winnie The Pooh Toys," before declaring the End of the American Experiment, huh?

Posted 3:31 PM by Michael
CHOMSKY: THREAT OR MENACE?

It's not actually in the Blogger terms of service that one must have a position on Noam Chomsky (negative, preferably) in order to have a blog. In my case, it actually worked the other way—I was putting enough effort into Chomsky-related emails to friends that it seemed as if I might as well start a blog to put them out there for the world to see. (Since I have been informed that Chomsky Says the Internet is being taken over by corporations and can't possibly be the free speech realm it's claimed to be.) So let us establish our position Chomskywise, straight out of the box, and count ourselves among the cool kids in school.

After September 11, Chomsky’s name quickly became so radioactive as a symbol of the We-Deserved-It Left that one is tempted to think that anybody the mainstream hates that much must be right about something. Though unaccountably I've never had the urge to read one of his weightier tomes (America Killed Everybody, Nike Killed Everybody Too, and Obviously Since You Disagree With Me You're Just a Programmed Dupe of the Media Elite), I did give some serious minutes over to reading his exchange with Christopher Hitchens in The Nation over the September 11th attacks, as well as the interviews in his bestselling Insta-Book 9-11.

To be honest, I found the Hitchens-Chomsky debate no contest, and felt that Hitchens had captured the essence of the left half of rationality with admirable conciseness:

What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state.

Exactly. Hear, hear, and pass the pink gin. This land is your land; fly the flag because it represents your liberal values as well as the next guy's conservative ones; fly it for feminism, gay rights, free speech, Napster, home brewing, the Independent Film Channel, whatever you cherish about living here and wish there was more of. Refusing to rally behind it now because gays can't marry this second is just petulantly abandoning the whole idea of America to the Pat Robertsons among us—and certainly doesn't bring the day you're waiting for any closer. Hitchens' clarity, both moral and rhetorical, is unmistakable.

By comparison, Chomsky uses the ordinarily laudable aim of keeping a long historical perspective as a way to envelope recent events in a cause and effect fog, the better to bash America unscathed. For instance, in one 9-11 interview he states:

If the rich and powerful choose to keep to their traditions of hundreds of years and resort to extreme violence, they will contribute to the escalation of a cycle of violence, in a familiar dynamic, with long-term consequences that could be awesome.

Set aside that to most people, the violent destruction of two of the world's largest buildings by hijacked passenger jets was pretty "awesome." I don't think I'm giving American foreign policy a free pass when I feel that something rather essential has been missed in a sentence in which an attack that killed 3000+ American civilians is us "resorting" to our "tradition" of "extreme violence." (Clearly, before the cycle escalates further, Osama needs to send peacekeepers to take control of our nuclear facilities, or there's no telling what we might do....)

Likewise, when Chomsky makes a big point of saying that America is the world's leading terrorist country (and in Chomsky's view, any use of American force, such as saving Kosovar Muslims from Milosevician thugs, is terror by definition), you have to ask why he wants to use that word in particular to describe us, rather than make the more standard argument that our "imperialism" is worse than somebody else's "terrorism." Plainly it's because if he can get you to agree that what we do is terrorism too, then all the other terrorists look small by comparison—and can be ignored outright, which is so much easier than trying to make the argument that this or that act of terror was somehow justified in spite of its cost in innocent blood. If that's not mendacity, I'm not Big Daddy.

9-11 is made up of interviews given in a very short period after September 11th, distinguished mainly by confident predictions (the Pentagon knows perfectly well that they're going to cause millions of deaths in the famine that the undoubtedly prolonged war against the Taliban will cause), and a conviction that Osama bin Laden— if it was him and not the CIA, which would be so typical— must be angered by the exact same things that an MIT professor is mad about (Nicaragua in the 80s, Cambodia in the 70s, stuff like that).

In fact, we now know (from Osama's own videos) that what mainly fueled his actions was the unmanly indignity of seeing American women (some of them Jews, no less!) bearing arms on his holy land's soil. Not a reason that most of us would consider good enough to warrant a nasty email, let alone 3000 deaths. That leaves Chomsky sounding like the kind of person who, upon hearing that Reagan has been shot, immediately launches into a ten-minute tirade on the Contras and El Salvador and how you had to expect some kind of payback for the death squads, only to be told that, uh, actually... it seems to be about Jodie Foster.

Everyone fights the last war; to Marxists every problem looks like the class struggle, to Scientologists they're all the work of Xenu. And to Chomsky, apparently, it will always be 1975 and Henry Kissinger is bombing Cambodia. So when he sees two things happen on the same planet, clearly the second one must be a result of America's brutal global realpolitik. Yet if American meddling, or globalization, or whatever produced terror as reliably as McDonald’s produces cheeseburgers, then shouldn’t we be facing a wave of bombings from Mexico or South Korea? Instead, as Ahmed Rashid’s book Jihad describes, even Islamic countries which have never had any dealings with the US at all (like the “Stans” within the former USSR) produce volunteers to fight with the Taliban against the mere idea of America. (For the Afghans to hate us after their war with the Soviets is like coming out of World War II hating Canada.)

The reason, plainly, is that it’s our cultural influence, not our military presence, that does reach even to the Stans and offends mullahs everywhere. But you will not have an easy time separating the things we should be proud to export (feminism) from the ones some of us admittedly might feel a bit sheepish about (Madonna). Unfortunately, more than a few Westerners made fools of themselves by speaking up for the Taliban’s resentment of our cultural influence—thus presenting the remarkable spectacle of, say, American women writers like Barbara Kingsolver defending the integrity of a society which keeps women illiterate.

So 9-11 is just a work of perishable journalism, created on the basis of extremely incomplete information and unwisely preserved past its natural expiration date. Maybe in those older, fatter Chomsky books there is a more nuanced worldview. But it's hard not to see him today as having turned into the kind of old crank who automatically takes the opposite side from his avowed enemy, no matter the issue.

There was a revealing thing this week. One of Chomsky's other main issues is the concentration of media control in fewer and fewer hands—which unfortunately he then reduces to the supremely condescending notion of "manufactured consent," which means anybody who doesn't agree with him is a puppet of the ruling elite. (The usual example of this is how his own ideas are kept from the public. As I write this, in the last week he's been on Fox News, in the Washington Post and in the Chicago Tribune, among others; and the Insta-Book continues to fly off the Amazon shelves.)

It's a legitimate issue—in fact, right now it's a real legitimate issue, what with things like the Hollings-Disney bill threatening to screw up everybody's Internet for the sake of a few Hollywood studios. So Chomsky is surely at the forefront of efforts to block the Hollings bill, right? Well, he was in the news with a cause this week—urging Harvard to divest from Israel. This is a jawdroppingly immoral notion—that an American college should pressure a foreign democracy to stop defending its civilians—and also, of course, an absurdly ineffectual one, since surely if Harvard were to divest, a whole bunch of Jewish Harvard alumni would stop sending money to Harvard and instead invest it in precisely the companies Harvard had gotten out of.

But clearly it has one thing going for it that the other cause did not—it was so far out, so contrary to those "manufactured" mainstream views, that Chomsky would be sure to be the only famous person lending his name to it. And that, of course, would only add to his stature among his acolytes as The Only Honest Man, the only one who tells it like it really is. In the globalized marketplace of ideas, the Chomsky brand doesn't like to share airtime with others aiming at the same target demographic.

Posted 2:36 PM by Michael
VORPAL BLOG: STATEMENT OF INTENT

In the United States the business of getting a living is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land— so easy, in fact, that a forehanded man who fails at it must almost make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head. And here, more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly— the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances— is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night. —H.L. Mencken