Archive for August, 2008

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I Love Roger Ebert

Friday, August 29th, 2008

The list of reasons for loving Roger Ebert is long and enduring. The man has introduced millions of readers and viewers to the pleasure of good movies. He wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer’s trash classic, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

He encouraged Oprah Winfrey to pursue syndication—while the two were out on a date!—contributing to her powerhouse status. He has been inspirational in continuing to pursue the career he loves, despite serious health problems, ones that have robbed him of his ability to speak.

And he wrote perhaps the best takedown in film review history, eviscerating Rob Schneider’s Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo. (Although it should be noted that Rob Schneider cemented his mensch status by sending Ebert flowers when the film reviewer fell ill.)

So what’s the latest evidence of Roger Ebert being the coolest guy in Chicago? His kiss-off letter to Jay Mariotti, who recently ended his love-hate relationship with Chicago sportsfans by dumping on the Chicago Sun-Times as he walked out the door.

Ebert’s response, published in an open letter at Poynter Online:

Dear Jay,

What an ugly way to leave the Sun-Times. It does not speak well for you. Your timing was exquisite. You signed a new contract, waited until days after the newspaper had paid for your trip to Beijing at great cost, and then resigned with only an e-mail. You saved your
explanation for a local television station.

As someone who was working here for 24 years before you arrived, I think you owed us more than that. You owed us decency. The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat.

Newspapers are not dead, Jay, although you predicted the death of the Sun-Times and the Tribune. Neither paper will die any time soon. Job-hunting tip: It is imprudent to go on TV and predict the collapse of a newspaper you might hope would hire you. Times are hard in the newspaper business, and for the economy as a whole. Did you only sign on for the luxury cruise? There’s an old saying that you might have come across once or twice on the sports beat: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Newspapers are not dead, Jay, because there are still readers who want the whole story, not a sound bite. If you only work on television, viewers may get a little weary of you shouting at them. You were a great shouter in print, that’s for sure, stomping your feet when owners, coaches, players and fans didn’t agree with you. It was an entertaining show. Good luck getting one of your 1,000-word rants on the air.

The rest of us are still at work, still putting out the best paper we can. We believe in our profession, and in the future. And we believe in our internet site, which you also whacked as you slithered out the door. I don’t know how your column was doing, but we have the most popular sports section in Chicago. The reports and blog entries by our Washington editor Lynn Sweet have become a must-stop for millions of Americans in this election year. After a recent blog entry I wrote about the Beijing Olympics, I woke up at 5 a.m. one morning, when North America was asleep, and found that 40 percent of my 100 most
recent visitors had been from China. I don’t have any complaints about our web site. So far this month my web page has been visited from virtually every country on earth, including one visit from the Vatican City. The Pope, no doubt.

You have left us, Jay, at a time when the newspaper is once again in the hands of people who love newspapers and love producing them. You managed to stay here through the dark days of the thieves Conrad Black and David Radler. The paper lost millions. Incredibly, we are still paying Black’s legal fees.

I started here when Marshall Field and Jim Hoge were running the paper. I stayed through the Rupert Murdoch regime. I was asked, “How can you work for a Murdoch paper?” My reply was: “It’s not his paper. It’s my paper. He only owns it.” That’s the way I’ve always felt about the Sun-Times, and I still do. On your way out, don’t let the door bang you on the ass.

Your former colleague,
Roger Ebert

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Posted in Books, Movies | 1 Comment »

Catching Up With The Convention

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

I finally was able to watch some of the Democratic National Convention last night, and I was impressed with the speeches offered by Bill Clinton and John Kerry. (Evan Bayh, on the other hand, did a good job of highlighting why shouldn’t have even been in the running for the Vice Presidential candidate).

I particularly liked the way Kerry reversed the flip-flop meme that targeted him to settle it on McCain instead (transcript from Crooks and Liars).

I have known and been friends with John McCain for almost 22 years, but every day now I learn something new about Candidate McCain. To those who still believe in the myth of a maverick instead of the reality of a politician, I say let’s compare Senator McCain to Candidate McCain.

Candidate McCain now supports the very wartime tax cuts that Senator McCain once called irresponsible. Candidate McCain criticizes Senator McCain’s own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote.

Are you kidding me, folks?

(Laughter, cheers, applause.)

Talk about being for it before you’re against it!

(Cheers, applause.)

Let me tell you, before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself.

McCain has reversed himself on nearly all of the issues that created his supposed “maverick” status. I think pointing out his inconsistencies, along with highlighting his general lockstep agreement with Bush, is the best way to persuade voters not to choose four more years of the same.

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Illegal Use of Joe Zopp is Here!

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

All in all, it’s a pretty good story. A group of friends grow up together in a small Wisconsin town, graduate from high school and then college, and start following their own career paths. One gets a job in insurance; another works for a software company. Some stay at home; some move away. My buddy Nick Holle, co-founder of FLYMF, makes it all the way to Los Angeles, where we attend the Professional Writing Program at USC together.

A couple years down the road, though, they start to get the itch. They want to do something. So they chat on a message board they’ve set up, kicking around one idea after another, and finally they come up with a movie. The concept: “a child prodigy turned social outcast returns to his hometown to investigate the circumstances of his own death.”

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The Dark Knight Is Strongman Claptrap—A Spoiler-Laden Review

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

In The Dark Knight, the latest film featuring Christian Bale’s best attempts at a WWE-Smackdown! voice, the Joker’s greatest asset seems to be his ability to escape from any plot hole, no matter how large.

Want to threaten a meeting of the city’s top crime bosses? Just walk right in the back door. Feel like shooting rockets at police wagons and taking officers hostage? It’s ok—none of them will shoot back! Want to assassinate the mayor by posing as a member of his honor guard? No problem—policeman apparently have no idea what their peers look like, nor are they suspicious of people whose scars match those of the madman terrorizing the city.

For that matter, looking to kill the commissioner of police? Just sneak into his office off-camera. This same tactic can be used to load hospitals, ferries and abandoned warehouses with hundreds of barrels of explosives. It also comes in handy for leaving Bruce Wayne’s penthouse after Batman throws himself out the window. (“What’s that? Batman jumped out the window, leaving us alone in a room full of people we were terrorizing? Well, we might as well just take off then…”)

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If Elected, Obama Needs to Strike While the Iron Is Hot

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Political writer Rick Perlstein has an insightful article, “A Liberal Shock Doctrine,” at the American Prospect pointing out the danger of (fingers crossed) a President Obama taking an incremental approaches to progressive legislation. Evoking Clinton and Carter, Perlstein highlights the obstructive tactics available to legislative minorities within our governmental system (as well as the Republicans’ skill at mud-slinging).

Here’s how he introduces his argument:

Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation’s status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity — which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.

The Oval Office’s most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy’s martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points — our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests — to make change possible any other way.

That is a fact. A fact too many Democrats have trained themselves to ignore. And it sometimes feels like Barack Obama, whose first instinct when faced with ideological resistance seems to be to extend the right hand of fellowship, understands it least of all. Does he grasp that unless all the monuments of lasting, structural change in the American state — banking regulation, public-power generation, Social Security, the minimum wage, the right to join a union, federal funding of education, Medicare, desegregation, Southern voting rights — had happened fast, they wouldn’t have happened at all?

I hope so. Because if Barack Obama is elected president with a significant popular mandate, a number of Democrats riding his coattails to the House, and enough senators to scuttle the filibuster of his legislative agenda — all of which seem entirely possible — he will inherit a historical opportunity to civilize the United States in ways not seen in a generation. To achieve the change he seeks — the monumental trio of universal health care, a sustainable energy policy, and a sane and secure internationalism — he has to completely reverse the way Democrats have habituated themselves to doing business. If they want true progress, they have to be juggernauts. American precedent gives them no other way.

Perlstein’s blog, The Big Con, offers an invaluable look at how 20th-century conservative philosophy and tactics continually re-assert themselves in political campaigns and governing. He’s definitely an author worth reading.

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Jeanne Cook Blogs at Scrivel.com

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

FLYMF contributor Jeanne Cook has been regularly contributing pieces to the collaborative humor blog Scrivel.com. Under the penname The Great Corrupter, she uses a fun, irreverent voice to engage topics ranging from baseball to weaponized temper tantrums to the very special occasion of a group of Catholic-girls-school college students visiting a porno theater for the first time. Check it out!

Jeanne’s pieces for FLYMF include Earmuffs, Pet Psyches and Fun With Nuns.

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Released Detainee Recounts Guantanamo

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Jumah al Dossari has an op/ed piece, “I’m Home, but Still Haunted by Guantanamo,” in today’s Washington Post. In the article, he recounts his mistreatment while in U.S. custody, from the time he was imprisoned in Afghanistan to the day of his return to Saudi Arabia.

We were taken to Camp X-Ray, which consists of cages of the sort that would normally hold animals. Imprisoned in these cages, we were forbidden to move and sometimes forbidden to pray. Later, the guards allowed us to pray and even to turn around, but whenever new detainees arrived, we were again prohibited from doing anything but sitting still.

Physical brutality was not uncommon during those first years at Guantanamo. In Camp X-Ray, several soldiers once beat me so badly that I spent three days in intensive care. My face and body were still swollen and covered in bruises when I left the hospital. During one interrogation, my questioner, apparently dissatisfied with my answers, slammed my head against the table. During others, I was shackled to the floor for hours.

In later years, such physical assaults subsided, but they were replaced by something more painful: I was deprived of human contact. For several months, the military held me in solitary confinement after a suicide attempt. I had no clothes other than a pair of shorts and no bed but a dirty plastic mat. The air conditioner was on 24 hours a day; the cell’s cold metal walls made it feel as though I was living inside a freezer. There was no faucet, so I had to use the water in the toilet for drinking and washing.

I was transferred to the maximum-security Camp Five in May 2004. There I lived — if that word can be used — in a cell with cement walls. I was permitted to exercise once or twice a week; otherwise, I was alone in my cell at all times. I had nothing to occupy my mind except a Koran and some censored letters from my family. Interrogators told me that I would live like that for 50 years.

Hundreds of detainees received similar assurance that they would be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. Many, including al Dossari, attempted suicide during their time at Guantanamo. But despite the government’s assurances that these were terrorists—”the worst of the worst”—the majority have since been released.

All of these prisoners were brutalized by America’s fearfulness. We should familiarize ourselves with each of their stories in the hope that their undeserved misery will provide some small innoculation against torture and tyranny during our next crisis. This is what happens when you don’t care about what happens to people because they’re “bad.”

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A (Very Late) Pitchfork Recap

Friday, August 15th, 2008

Some three weeks after the excellent music festival ended, I’ve compiled a list of bands to check out based on my three days in Chicago’s Union Park. Luckily, good music is timeless.

If you like: Big, dumb garage rock, complete with shouted titles and Ramones-esque buzzsawing

Check out: Jay Reatard (or, as I always preface it in my head, the unfortunately named Jay Reatard

If you like: Mellow guitar runs and beautiful multi-part harmonies, a la the Dead or CSN

Check out: The Fleet Foxes

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Immigrant in U.S. Custody Ignored to Death

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

What the hell is wrong with our country? From the New York Times:

 In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months

…

In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng’s lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.

Instead, the affidavits say, guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., dragged him from his bed on July 30, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.

A political party has seen fit to unleash our collective lizard brain for political gain. Many more monstrous things are sure to happen as a result.

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Recent Reads—Fell, Sandman, Batman: Year 100, A People’s History of Science

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

Clifford Conner’s A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and Low Mechanicks offers a nice corrective to the great-man history that often serves as the discipline’s founding myth. While notable names from Pythagoras to Newton receive attention, Conner’s focus is on the unnamed artisans, craftsman and observers of nature who incrementally created a body of knowledge through countless hours of labor. He inverts the notion that scientific advancements are rooted in theory, showcasing quotes from eminent researchers throughout history about the value of the knowledge possessed by the “miners, midwives and mechanicks” cited in the title. (The relative uselessness of the classical curriculum offered by Oxford and other academies throughout much of their aristocratic past is oft-referenced as well.)

The book is most fascinating at the beginning, when it explores the knowledge and learning of traditional cultures, touching upon the astronomy of prehistoric people and the advanced navigational skills of Polynesian sailors. The book falters a bit as it nears modern times; it lacks a comprehensive take on the successes of modern, professional science, and it also falls into the trap of muddling research and politics. Systematic theories of nature, rightfully frowned upon by Conner when they’re formulated by the Greeks, are presented as a compelling alternative during the French Revolution.

Ultimately, the book is refreshing in presenting a more democratic history of science. Great anecdotes and a lively contrarian nature make for a good read.

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