The stuff dreams are made of

For no particular reason—except the new season of “Mad Men”—film noir has been on my mind a lot lately. Also too, I like to talk about dark stuff on spring holidays.

So two questions:

(a) What is the best film noir that I am unlikely to have seen? I’ve seen most of the famous ones.

(b) What is the best film noir theme song? I’ll go with “Portrait of Jennie” just edging out the theme from “Laura”.

Finally, I love parodies of film noir, so much so that I enjoyed most of “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”, so I’m going to share with you an intro to a proposed film noir project that a friend of mine wrote about gerrymandering in New York State politics. It was supposed to be for my old blog, but the other people there took things a bit too seriously.

It was the kind of shape that kept the booze business going; cute on the bottom, big up top, and curves in all the right places. It should have come with a sign that said, “Danger! Hands Off!”. Instead, it read, “Map of Senate Districts in New York State” and was gerrymandered so screwy, the only way incumbents left office was in a wooden box or a jumpsuit. Running against them was a one way ticket to Palookaville. I looked at the set up. The pachyderms still ran the joint, but if the smart asses could get three more seats, they could redraw the lines in big blue markers and deep six the protection racket wholesale. Sure, I thought; about as likely as a three-legged pony winning the Preakness.

I looked across the street as mercury vapor lamps poured a head on the High Falls Brewery. It smelled like Cream of Wheat and syrup. It smelled like time for a drink. I reached for the bottle.

That’s when she walked in.

Song of the week

A few people have been asking me, “Who are you?” ever since DougJ tossed me the keys and I started posting this “Song of the week” thing myself a couple months ago. I was OK with everybody thinking I was secretly DougJ, but I probably should have just introduced myself earlier. I’m a long-time lurker/faithful follower of Balloon Juice—I used to come here via those Atrios links years ago and gawp at the freakshow. I even happened to be on hand the day of the showdown with Hamsher, and I laughed a lot following that comments thread. But Cole back then basically affected me the way Atrios affected him. I got too mad and couldn’t hang around long. I can’t remember why I came back in the summer of ‘08 but I did and I couldn’t believe it was the same place. It’s ridiculous but Cole’s conversion somehow continues to inspire me and I have spent a lot of time here since. On the spectrum, since this is a politics blog, I’m probably closer to being a firebagger than an Obot—but to a lot of my friends I’m probably more of an Obot, and that doesn’t even include my lunatic neighbor who still literally worships Glenn Beck. I have the mixed blessing of coming from a 98% homogenous Democratic family, so I learn a lot talking to him. It truly is a visit to a Bizarro world. But I’m no good arguing politics, it’s bad for my blood pressure and general outlook, which puts a damper on making my case, so I just listen to people mostly.

I used to be a music journalist. Now I’m a freelance copy editor. Like approximately every human being on the planet I love music and listen to it every day. I love to talk about it and swap opinions and information. Like approximately every human being on the planet I also hate a lot of music so I know where you all are coming from when you hate my picks. I hate a lot of yours too. No hard feelings (or anyway I’ll keep them to myself). To me, that’s the give and take of it. As they say, there’s no accounting for taste and there’s certainly no accounting for mine. I have a blog, Can’t Explain, which is how DougJ found and eventually invited me to chip in picks for this weekly Friday afternoon thing.

So that’s who I am. The song picks are things I’m listening to, things I heard that week that surprised me, sometimes old favorites, or types of music I’m interested in knowing more about—all kinds of things. Stuff to talk about. For example, this last week I happened to notice that Robert Cray is playing casino dates now (maybe he has been for years?) and that reminded me how much I liked him once (and still do), and how long it’s been. So wondering what anyone might think of Cray nowadays, or back then.

Or, as always, share your own favorites of the week, or treat as an open thread.

Robert Cray, “Right Next Door (Because of Me)” (1986)

Mid-morning open thread

I’ve got this Pretenders song in my head where the chorus goes “every day, every day”, then some other stuff, kind of midtempo and cheerful. What’s it called? Last night, the google let me down.

Update. Thanks to Boots Day …now I try to be amused, it is this song.

Unrelated update. Does anyone know anything about the War on Women marches?

Open thread

Creep to the mic like a phantom.

Late Night Open Thread: Moving Pictures

(h/t commentor Martin)

Also, (h/t commentor lamh), let the DVRs be programmed:

President Barack Obama will provide a special introduction to USA Network’s airing of the 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Saturday at 8 p.m.

“I’m deeply honored that President Obama will be celebrating the 50th Anniversary of To Kill A Mockingbird by introducing it to a national audience,” Pulitzer prize winner and famously media-shy Lee says. “I believe it remains the best translation of a book to film ever made and I’m proud to know that Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch lives on — in a world that needs him now more than ever.”

(If you click over to Paul Constant’s Stranger blog, you can vote for the movie Romney should introduce. I did not know that Mitt once told the NYTimes that his favorite novel was Battlefield Earth... )

Just because I haunt the same old places

I’ve been suffering from blog ennui recently, so what blogs do you recommend that I might not already be reading? I’m too lazy to remember which ones I read, so just say which ones you read that you think I might like. Feel free to pimp your own blog here.

Late Night Open Thread: Games of GRRMartin

I know that some Balloon Juicers are extremely enthusiastic about HBO’s Game of Thrones, but I don’t know how many of you read Laura Miller’s pre-first-season New Yorker report on “A fantasy writer and his impatient fans“:

The writer George R. R. Martin left Hollywood in 1994, determined to do what he wanted for a change. He’d had some success in television, working on a new version of “The Twilight Zone” and on the fantasy series “Beauty and the Beast.” But the pilot for “Doorways,” a series he’d developed, hadn’t been picked up, and he was tired of the medium’s limitations. “Everything I did was too big and too expensive in the first draft,” he told me recently. He wanted castles and vistas and armies, and producers always made him cut that stuff. A line producer for “The Twilight Zone” once explained to him, “You can have horses or you can have Stonehenge. But you can’t have horses and Stonehenge.”

On the printed page, however, he could have it all. He recalls telling himself, “I’m going to write a fantasy and it’s going to be huge. I’m going to have all the characters I want and all the battles I want.” In 1996, he published a novel of seven hundred pages, “A Game of Thrones,” the first volume of a projected trilogy called “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The series chronicles the struggle for power among several aristocratic families in the Seven Kingdoms, an imaginary medieval nation. In a genre crowded with stale variations on what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” with plots distilled from ancient legends, Martin took his inspiration from history instead of from mythology; he based his tale, loosely, on the Wars of the Roses, the bloody dynastic struggles in medieval England. Compared with most epic fantasy fiction, Martin’s story contained relatively little magic, and it felt dangerous, lusty, and real…

The days when nobody showed up for a Martin signing are long gone. In January, at a hastily scheduled appearance at Vroman’s Bookstore, in Pasadena, hundreds of fans waited in a line that coiled around the store. They presented Martin with volumes from “A Song of Ice and Fire” and works from his early years as a science-fiction writer, as well as with calendars, posters, e-readers, yellowing pulp magazines, and replica swords. Three young women wore handmade T-shirts emblazoned with the coats of arms of their favorite clans from the series. Martin was unflaggingly attentive to his supplicants, including the couple who asked him to pose for a photograph with their infant daughter, who was named Daenerys, for one of his heroines…

A typical post-Tolkien epic fantasy is the best-selling “Wheel of Time” series, by Robert Jordan. David McCaman, a marketing executive and one of the founding members of the Brotherhood Without Banners, dismissively summarizes the genre this way: “The young kid on the farm discovers he has powers, and no one dies, and they find the magic to rule the world.” He calls it “Nerf fantasy,” meaning that “it’s really safe.” By contrast, “A Song of Ice and Fire” doesn’t truck with “orcs and goblins and dark lords and bad and good. It revolves around people, really gritty people, and real situations, things that you don’t see in fantasy—sex and language and betrayal.” Benioff once told New York that “Game of Thrones” was “ ‘The Sopranos’ in Middle-earth,” and although he now winces at the formulation, it remains sound; the book’s intricate, racy narrative practically feels custom-built for HBO. The series especially resembles “Rome” and “Deadwood,” although, unlike them, it’s free from even the most perfunctory obligation to be historically accurate…

Miller’s story mostly covers the fandom that grew up around the “Song of Ice & Fire” books, which developed (like Martin himself) out of an established sf fandom / community. I haven’t yet read the books, nor watched the HBO series, but I was part of another corner of that larger fannish community from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. So were some of the early, daring progressive political bloggers—people like Avedon Carol and Gary Farber and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. It sometimes fascinates me how much the current political-blogging subculture seems to be recapitulating the post-Star Trek, pre-millenial fannish era, as an influx of newbies attracted by big new shiny popcult “fads” threatens to overwhelm the original self-sufficient (if somewhat inbred) community…

Late morning open thread

For those who watched “Mad Men” instead of whatever that show is that John put up ten open threads about last night (via).

But talk about whatever.

ABL Talks About #TrayvonMartin on the AlterNet Radio Hour with Joshua Holland

Today, I yammered about the Trayvon Martin case on the AlterNet Radio Hour, hosted by Joshua Holland.

Actually, I yammered via Skype on Friday, but the show aired this afternoon on We Act Radio in D.C.  I, of course, streamed it on my iPad while tweeting about it, because it’s the twenty-first century and I’m nothing if not a slave to my iCrap.

The show is a good one, and has the added bonus of being fully-estrogenated.  Three guests. Three women.

I’m second up (at around the 28 minute mark), after Dahlia Lithwick and before Sara Robinson. So… semper uteri!—or something.

Just roll the damn tape!

You know what I n-n-n-need

It’s the last day of the first quarter, so let’s go out with a bang.

Obama

E-Dub

I will add one in for the Scott Walker recall if I can find a link.

I need a sanctified mind to help me out right now

Religion is always a contentious topic ‘round these parts, but I found the discussion of ultra-orthodox Judaism in this thread very interesting, so I thought I might do another free-wheeling religious thread so we can all scream at each other about how we’re all ignorant bigots (though mostly that only happens when it’s Catholicism we’re discussing).

By chance, I’ve had a few long discussions with Hindu friends of mine recently, one a practicing believer, the other a cultural Hindu who has read a lot about religions but doesn’t believe or practice (beyond the annual excruciating Diwali festivities). One explained to me why people in India could build palaces next to ghettos and not have the plebes come and kill them and steal all their shit, because violent acts give you bad karma. The other told me that he thought the big difference between Hinduism/Budhism and western religions is that in western religion, you can repent and not have to pay for your crimes, whereas in eastern religions, you’d get my name’s Krish, and you ain’t talking your way out of this shit. And then I read in a Times article about Tibetan dumplings (it was annoying, so I’m not going to link) that Tibetans liked red meat because the karmic load of killing a single large yak was not as bad as killing a bunch of smaller, say, chickens.

Is that accurate, that the idea that you’ll have to pay via reincarnation for everything you do wrong—no excuses—is something that makes eastern religions fundamentally different from western ones?

Somewhere in my youth or childhood

I heard the Lauryn Hill song “Every Ghetto, Every City” while I was riding the train yesterday and it got me thinking: what’s the best song ever about looking back on childhood? I’ll go with “I Wish” by Stevie Wonder, but I also like the Van Morrison song “Take Me Back” (especially the whacked out version JLL does in “Georgia”, as awful as it is). What else is good?

Please, don’t mention that Nickelback song “Photograph”, not even as a joke. There’s nothing funny about an existential threat.

Baby I like it raw

Congrats to ABL on her move to RawStory. You can hit the tip jar for her here. People think her appearance here was all John’s doing but it was really me who first started linking to her because I liked this phrase:

Yesterday on my way back from San Francisco, I stopped to buy a couple magazines for those excruciating 10 minutes during take off and landing when those asshole flight attendants make me turn my iCrap off. What am I supposed to do? Read the SkyMall catalog?

Tuesday Morning Open Thread

Also worth reading, if you missed it: Shelby Knox talks about “My Roommate, Gloria Steinem“:

IF young feminists believed in fairy tales, then moving to New York City and winding up with Gloria Steinem as your roommate would definitely count as one.

That is what happened to Shelby Knox when she came here in 2007 from Lubbock, Tex., to work at a summer program dedicated to empowering teenage girls. Then 20, Ms. Knox was already somewhat known in the feminist world: In high school she was the subject of a documentary, “The Education of Shelby Knox,” about her fight to change Lubbock’s sex education curriculum, which taught abstinence-only, and how the battle gradually distanced her from the Baptist church in which she had been raised….

At first, “I was incredibly intimidated,” said Ms. Knox, now 25. “As a 20-year-old would, I was like, ‘I’m not smart enough to talk to her.’ ”

But then Ms. Steinem watched the documentary, and they started talking about Ms. Knox’s experience promoting it, when she traveled around the country talking to young people about her experience coming of age as a feminist in an evangelical community.

“She said, ‘You’re an itinerant feminist organizer,’ ” Ms. Knox said. “And I was like: ‘What? This has a name? This isn’t just me avoiding getting a job?’ ” ...

“There’s all these stories about ‘someone will give you your chance,’ and she did,” Ms. Knox said. “It’s not like she did anything magical. It’s not like she anointed me ‘feminist whatever.’ She just said, ‘I’ll give you a roof over your head while you try to learn to make it in New York.’”

A Peace Offering

Please gaze at the splendor that is Tunch’s girth while we work on the website:

PS- I am ignoring all complaints in every thread until I specifically call for comments/suggestions. In other words, your whining whinging comments are pointless exercises for now.