Ledger
I dreamt I woke up this morning to find the strings from my venetian blinds wrapped around my neck and a thug from the Joker’s clown gang crouched by my bed. “They can’t all look like suicides,” he said. “Some have to look like accidental death or home invasions.” Then I woke up, and resisted the urge to clasp at my neck to see if the cords were really tangled around my throat.
Like Bryan, I don’t know why I have been pursuing the new reports of Heath Ledger’s death with such relentless fervor. I’d only even seen him in 10 Things I Hate About You and The Brothers Grimm, and he was not a ping on my Hollywood radar. I think the reason it — “resonate” is the wrong word, but I’m going to use it anyway — has resonated with me is because I read an Associated Press story after Brad Refro’s death about whether certain young celebrities and their trepidatious lifestyles necessitated the preparation of early obituaries. I don’t think that Ledger would have merited such preparation, nor do I hold much truck with the Rule of Three with celebrity deaths (inspired, I assume, by the Valens/Bopper/Holly crash), but thinking about the potential need for young obituaries and then reading one has left me with a need for details, as if specifics would provide me with a perspective that would allow me to not think about it again. And certainly to stop dreaming about it.
One last thing: for those who haven’t see it, this is a flier from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, calling for a picketing of Ledger’s funeral in order to gleefully send him off to Hell for participating in Brokeback Mountain, claiming his death as a victory for God, and saying that this performance, this sin, is the only thing “relevant or consequential” he ever did. My first instinct was to picket the picketing with a simple Let He Who Is Without Sin… placard, but I prefer Jon Sung‘s idea: “a bunch of people dressed as Batman and the Joker beat the living shit out of [the WBC] in full view of news cameras.”
Unreadable
I was going to do a little collection of some of the best nasty reviews I’d even encountered, but the internet is not being cooperative. Which is a good lesson for me… I tend to forget that while almost everything has existed in both print and digital form for the past ten years and that lots of antiquities are being added as digital archives, that there is a plentiful amount of stuff that exists only in the temporal print form in which is originated.
So while I would like to link to some of these marvelous, cutting dismissals, I cannot. Instead, I link to their placeholders for the digital future, or the place where they would be if you were a paid subscriber.
Review of: Wilson, by David Mamet
Reviewer: Rebecca Pidgeon, aka “Mrs. Mamet”
Substance of review: “Impenetrable.“
Review of review: Why wasn’t this pithy quote plastered all over the book jacket? If I had read that even the wife of the celebrated author found the book to be almost unreadable, I would have been perversely moved to take a crack at it! Much more so than whatever standard one-word superlatives normally grace a given dust cover. What a missed opportunity!
Review of: “The Fugitive” soundtrack by James Newton Howard
Reviewer: Anthony Lane, of The New Yorker
Substance of review: “The only thing that [Howard] seems to think is more suspenseful than banging a drum is banging a drum more loudly.”
Review of review: The above is a paraphrase of a dearly cherished memory of the moment that I realized I wanted to be a film reviewer. That is fantastically mean. I want more! I want in! But, there is the possibility that I have remembered the line wrong, as the article doesn’t exist online yet. However, I feel it must be close, because in his one-paragraph summary, he still takes the time to typify Howard’s score as a “rude horror“. Ouch.
Phenomena (Doot Doo Do Doo Doo!)
It’s 4:30pm, and the sun ain’t set yet. You winter people can complain about the rain and the fog and the fifty degree days and the other things that are melting and destroying your precious, precious snow. I got news for you: the days are getting noticeably longer again. The end is near.
Sure, not near enough that we won’t have to suffer through a frigid couple of weeks after this annual January thaw (read: “tease”) and the bleakness of February, the longest month of the year… but it’s acomin’. Be sure of that.
In other news, the ever popular Mahna Mahna phenomena is actually from the soundtrack to an Italian sex travelogue of Sweden. God love the Muppets. And god love the A.V. Club, who provided me with this particular fact.
LIVEBLOG: Primary or Primate?
10:52pm: with 73% of districts reporting, NPR has called it for Hillary. Over an hour ago, they had called the Republican side for McCain, with something between 50% and 60% reporting (my notes are unclear).
Of course, in 2004, the Associated Press called it for Kerry with only 19% of districts reporting, so I’m slightly more pleased with the press this time out.
I’m off to bed. I’ll listen to the speeches and the pontification about what this all means tomorrow on my way to work. I’ll only say, 1) that the New Hampshire primary is lousy at predicting actual victorious presidents. 2) That said, I did hear an article telling me that in the last twenty or so years — perhaps more, I can’t put my fingers on the article — the person eventually elected president has never finished lower than second in the New Hampshire primary. So, statistically, we’re down to four possible people who could be sworn in on January 20, 2009. Woo.
9:21pm: Dave Barry sums everything up:
The voters of New Hampshire have made their decision, and the big winner is: Change. Here’s the final vote tally:
- Change — 43 percent
- Hope — 28 percent
- Hope For Change — 17 percent
- Hair — 9 percent
- Experience — 2 percent
- Dennis Kucinich — 1 percent:
Now it’s time for the politicians and the press to drop New Hampshire like an ant-covered corn dog and sprint for the airport, leaving the residents of The Granite State to spend the rest of the winter plucking 239 billion candidate signs out of their snowbanks, all the while wondering if there ever really was a candidate named “Mike Gravel,” or if that was just teenagers playing a sign-planting prank.
In actuality, though, the final tally is far from in at this point. National Public Radio has the reporting districts at only 44%, and New Hampshire Public Radio doesn’t yet have the all-important Epping and Newmarket results in their town-by-town results.
Mr. Barry’s other columns on the primary are worth reading, if only for his keen observation on New Hampshire’s state-run liquor stores — “One of them is located — I am not making this up — in a turnpike service plaza, apparently for the benefit of motorists who are, for whatever reason, running low on gin.” — and to familiarize yourself with the name “Dick Harpootlian“.
3:26pm: The recorded voice of Ron Paul’s wife greets me from my answering machine. I don’t know how I get calls from a Republican candidate. If I were registered as an independent, I would have expected barrages of calls from candidates of both parties, but it’s only in the past week that I’ve been getting autocalls from the Paul campaign. Maybe it’s because he’s only pretending to be a Republican, and so he’s either bought both the Democratic and Republican registers. Or maybe he’s cold-calling the whole state.
Or perhaps Anthony and Christine Fay, for whom I still get phone messages, yea these eighteen months after I procured this phone number, gave out their number to the Paul campaign. They give out their number to Realtors, car salesmen… the sort of people who plead for a number and who you’d rather not have actually call you. Instead of giving out a fake number, the Fays have been known to give out their old number… their old number which has been reassigned to me. Oy! Tony! Stop giving out my phone number! Oh, and your grandmother wishes you a happy Christmas.
3:11pm: My Nixon/Agnew button gets the approval of the guy manning the ballot box, though he informs me that he saw a button for Adlai Stevenson the previous day at a rally, so I’m not quite wearing the coolest button so far. I could quibble with him that, I’m certainly wearing the coolest button so far on election day, but it doesn’t seem worthwhile. He at least didn’t seem to care that I was far too young to wear a Nixon button, whereas two or three people holding candidate placards outside the City Auditorium were taken back. But even they weren’t as flummoxed as the woman who confirmed my registration. She seemed momentarily at sea due to the fact that I was registered as a Democrat and wearing the badge of a former Republican president.
2:19pm: Rhu, my assistant, brings over the Concord Monitor’s Primary Election Guide for my perusal, specifically because there is a candidate in both the Republican and Democratic columns of whom she’s never heard: on the former side, is the traditional Silly Party candidate Vermin Supreme, but on the other side of the aisle was the putative Democratic candidate O. Savior. In the Monitor’s helpful guide, all the candidates had website addresses to head to in order to find out additional information, except for O. Savior. Perhaps we’ll just have to try the Bible?
10:45am: These are not, I repeat, not the results of the official town polling station located in the gymnasium of Belmont High School. This is an informal poll of voting-age and non-voting-age Belmont and Canterbury students.
Belmont High School Mock Primary:
School Population: 480
Total votes: 305 (63%)
Results compiled by Dane Loomer
Democrat
- Barack Obama: 145
- Hillary Clinton: 33
- John Edwards: 18
- Bill Richardson: 8
- Dennis Kucinich: 4
Total votes: 208 (68%)
Republican
- Mike Huckabee: 34
- Mitt Romney: 22
- John McCain: 21
- Rudy Guliani: 15
- Ron Paul: 5
Total votes: 97 (31%)
This looks like a standard case of votes equating to a certain media popularity, more than any issues-based alliance on the part of the voters. Of course, if Huckabee and Obama carry their respective nominations, that will be the national story anyway: the new breed of populaism.
7:03am: The city polls have officially opened, and the race is on. Carl Kasell has just told me that Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location have had their traditional midnight ballot, and successfully polled each of their fewer-than-100 eligible residents. Both towns ended their vote with John McCain and Barack Obama in the majority position.
Despite the midnight cache that each of these towns enjoys, New Hampshire Public Radio informs me that the two towns considered to be bellwethers for the state are Epping and Newmarket.
I’ll be voting in Ward 5, Concord, later today. Belmont High School is hosting polling in the gymnasium right now (the school is doing some self hype/entertainment for people waiting in the lobby by doing a clipshow of BHS News segments, including my promo spot for 24 Hour Comic Day). We did an informal poll of the students yesterday, and for what is generally considered to be a socially conservative town, the results were fairly interesting. More on that when I can sit down with the hard numbers.
Ring-A-Ding-Ding-Along With Me
Bits and bobs to begin being the beguine, if you take my meaning…
+ I’ve closed down The Brothel, an internet forum I’ve hosted since March of 2003. It was good fun, and good conversation. If you participated in it in any way, thanks for hanging out. I find that I miss it, and still have regular instances where I find I’m itching to go there and type out something. My hope is to start writing this stuff in letters again, like I used to. If I used to e-mail you a lot and don’t any longer, now would be a good time to hit me up again for my patented brand of twitchy correspondence.
+ Aileen regularly gives her fellow statemates a bit of a going over for complaining about the weather. And she’s got a point. Complaining about the weather is a particularly ineffectual use of one’s vitriol, whether one is bitching about the unpredictability of the daily expression of the climate, or whether one is moaning about the totally predictable display of living someplace where there are seasons. And even if one had gotten used to the past three years of warmer winters, brown Christmases, and less frequent shoveling, one really can’t find much in the way of forensic ground to complain about a return to normalcy.
That said, the guy who who plows my driveway got stuck in the snow and ice that had accumulated there over the past few days. It’s a hoary old joke, but yeah. The plow. Got stuck. In the snow. I think it’s time to call a moratorium on precipitation for a little while, okay, Old Man Weather?
+ My mother has just called me to recommend that I go see Lars and the Real Girl, the heartfelt tale of one man’s relationship with his Real Doll. I can’t tell if this is because she thought it was weird and funny, or is that she’s given up on my ever getting married and has switched to a twisted new tactic.
+ There are a couple of films that I watch annually. While Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo recently debated the best Christmas movie of all time (Die Hard all the way, baby!), I find myself deviating from their list and regularly rewatching Billy Wilder’s The Apartment as my sole piece of personal seasonal entertainment. Bridging the gap between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, it’s my touchstone of a certain kind of solitary melancholy.
This year, upon rewatching, I was suddenly struck by the presence of a Chagall painting in the background in one scene.
How odd, I thought, that this Chagall would be used as a print in both The Apartment and years later in Notting Hill. It was an odd sort of subtle tribute. Or maybe it was because the rights to displaying the image were held by the studio. Or something else. In any case, it was an interesting coincidence, and the sort of blog post that Glenn Kenny would have been proud of. I scampered off to grab a screencap from both films, only to find out that it wasn’t the same painting at all.
I haven’t the faintest idea where else I’ve seen the painting in The Apartment, then. I had a suspicion that it was in the Chagall exhibit at the Kunstmuseum Heidenheim, but a review of the programme indicates otherwise.
So I got nothin’. Instead, I’ll merely quote the endearing Richard Curtis dialogue from Notting Hill:
ANNA:
I can't believe you have
that picture on your wall.
WILLIAM:
You like Chagall?
ANNA:
I do. It feels like how
being in love should be.
Floating through a dark blue sky.
WILLIAM:
With a goat playing the violin.
ANNA:
Yes... happiness isn't happiness
without a violin-playing goat.
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