The wheel in the sky

In which Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak reveals himself to be an outraged conservative living among Hollywood elites.

Pictured here with Ann Coulter. Who knew?

What? He's on Fox News too?

That's it. I'm never watching that show again.

Don't tell me they've got Vanna too. Bastards.

Putting the bustle in your hedgerow

"You don't have to 'listen very hard.' I'm 'Stairway.'"

Aubernica

If you're getting a little tired of watching rerun footage of that donnybrook in Detroit...

Garden State

I realize this is really yesterday's news, but I'll post about it anyway: I went down to the Balboa Theater yesterday to see Garden State. I’ll admit that there were a few John Hughesy moments, especially as the story wraps up, as well as a few indie-film clichés. But overall it's a great story, with a smartly assembled soundtrack to boot. (Nice choice of Colin Hay material, by the way.) File in the DVD collection (eventually) next to The Station Agent and You Can Count On Me: small stories about fewer than five people with no special effects.

As a former New Jersey resident who's returned there from California about four times in five years, I certainly saw a bit of myself in Zach Braff's character. I can't say I related to the role of antidepressants in the film, but I imagine you can take his discontinuation of their use as either a comment on overprescription or as a metaphor for discovering real adult feelings or intimacy. (I prefer the latter.) I was also reminded of the New Yorker piece last month about how people don't seem to get over tragedies as well as they used to, in which Malcolm Gladwell observes that people's imagined feelings about traumatic events are worse than the feelings of people actually experiencing those events.

As for Natalie Portman’s portrayal, she nailed the accent (like the way they pronounce the name of the school as "Ruckgers" there), for one thing. All those people remind me of kids with whom I grew up, and I know some of them are pretty much hanging around doing the same thing. I can’t decide whether the Aunt Sylvia character is a caricature or the real thing, because there are so many ridiculous people like that where I grew up. Loved the Method Man cameo too.

I hadn't seen a bit of Braff's work on TV when I walked into the theater, but I'll be keeping an eye out for him in the future.

I stayed for the second feature, which was a remake of Alfie starring Jude Law. I would've paid $5 to see Garden State, so I’ll assume I saw Alfie for free. (As you may know, the Balboa has the best matinee deal around.) With that in mind, the only question is whether I had something better to do for 90 minutes. Probably should've taken a nap instead.

The icy sky at night

More great aurora borealis photos here, and especially here.

"People pay to see others believe in themselves."

That's a quote from Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, and a quote I'll apply to last night's Devendra Banhart gig at Bimbo's 365 Club. He's a wandering spirit, often a fascinating songwriter, but his greatest gift (or skill) is his total commitment to his material, no matter how idiosyncratic it may be. That, friends, is inspiring.

Devendra and band attracted a few hundred people to this tour-ending homecoming show. I suspect I was in the five oldest percent of the crowd -- I guess that means there were maybe fifteen or twenty people older than me there. Devendra himself was born in the 80s, which means that the 70s touchstones he sometimes uses as a stylistic base are a cultural memory to him, not things he actually experienced. (Just think, he was six years old when R.E.M.'s Document was new. Six! But I digress.) Maybe it's easier to discern the good and bad things about a past era's styles when you haven't actually experienced them yourself.

Which is not to say that Devendra's work is totally retro. I know he likes prewar folk music, i.e. Harry Smith stuff, and its influence on him is apparent; the warm, natural sound of his band does say late-60s-early-70s to me. But the guy's bread and butter is, essentially, his own weirdness -- his ability to tap into an interior creative voice, and his conviction that that voice is telling the truth more clearly than it could be told any other way. His throaty, tremulous vocal tics and bizarre songwriting devices are the most prominent evidence of that, but his knack for turning simple words into poetry is a subtler sign. Plus he knows that folk music used to be dance music too.

There is one person who kept springing into my mind during the show, and that is Shawn Phillips. (I've never even gotten a glimmer of recognition in anyone's eye when I mentioned that name, but he did sell a fair number of records on a major label in the early 70s. I guess he's in the great lost record store, in the bin beside Judee Sill and Val Stoecklein.) The similarities between Banhart and Phillips can be eerie, but I suspect Banhart will leave a deeper impression when all is said and done -- in some ways, he already has.

Big blue marble

If you're a geography buff, this awesome NASA picture repository should keep you occupied for awhile. I especially recommend the San Francisco and Sierra snowfall images. (Make sure you blow them up to full size.) Also these two old ones are especially arresting.

I keep thinking of David Byrne in the airplane. In fact I've been thinking about him since the election.

It's also true that I lost the map

When I look at the 3-D electoral map that's made the rounds these past few days, I think several thoughts.

*Why is Chicago the tallest one? I guess New York has five separate counties, but what about L.A.?

*Man, Atlanta and St. Louis are small towns these days. And I guess that population boom in Vegas isn't as big as I thought.

*The somewhat disproportionate height and size of Alaska (pop. c. 650,000) highlights a (relatively minor) flaw in these kind of maps. They don't have any counties up there, do they?

*Thanks, Mono County. You too, Imperial.

*Though Dan Savage says every city with a population over half a million went to Kerry, it sure looks like two-million-plus Houston belonged to GWB. Also Dallas, San Diego, Salt Lake City, OKC, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and some other places of considerable size. Not sure exactly what's happening in Denver. I guess some of those counties include suburbs too. I'm not sure what the population is in all those cities. But some of them are pretty substantial towns.

*What's the deal with all these Blue counties across central Alabama, down along the lower Mississippi, and tucked away in places like Eastern Kentucky, the Piedmont of South Carolina and western South Dakota? What don't you have in common with all the other rural places that went Red?

*Hawaii got electoral votes, didn't they?

The dick of Cheney

Maybe you heard about this photo.

Blue on blue

Dan Savage goes for the throat in this impressive diatribe, in which he tells Red America to do the anatomically impossible.

There are so many things wrong with this idea I can hardly bring myself to comment on it, except to say that he's basically right.

Aurora Borealis

Few things are cooler than the Northern Lights. I have half a mind to drive to Eastern Oregon this weekend and take a peek.

Liberty for our friend

My bro passes along this eyebrow-raising comment from Canada regarding this year's balloting in Nevada. I can't say I'm surprised, though, that Nevada voters backed both Bush and prostitutes. It's a very intriguing state politically: a historically Red(neck) state that is getting Bluer as greater Las Vegas grows. In some ways, it's the model of Libertarianism: the people tend to favor low taxes, small government, legal drugs, gambling and hookers. They're not really into environmentalists -- "every time you dig a hole, you have to call Washington, D.C.," they say -- and they love an enormous dam that brings cheap water and power to the City of Sin.

I wonder about Libertarians. My old roommate read a lot of Libertarian literature, and she believed the philosophy was very consistent with itself, because it mixed individual and economic freedoms. (She also believed Golden Gate Park should have an entrance fee, to relieve the tax burden on those people who didn't really use the park all that much.) I hear from quite a few Republicans that deep down, they're really Libertarians, or that they're part of some nebulous "Libertarian wing" of the GOP. And of course there was much speculation prior to the election that if Bush had lost, the GOP would have to decide whether it was the party of Christian moral police or the party of small-government Libertarianism.

If we're to believe that the Christian Right -- excuse me, Evangelical Christians -- are really the ones who carried the 2004 election, it'd take a deep rift in the GOP to call attention to the Libertarians within. It may even take a divisive Nader-like candidate (or Perot-like, if you wish) to really put Libertarian ideas onto the national stage. I think much of America has been hinting for some time that people like both economic conservatism and personal freedom, but it'd still be strange to think that Nevada, of all places, might be politically ahead of the curve.

The flat baritone

My amigo, who was somewhat horrified that I might believe a flat tax would frustrate red-state working Americans, passes along Thomas Frank's remarks on the apparent contradictions implied by their voting habits. And the Times offers an analysis that calls drastic forms of tax reform "politically risky." Clinton-era economic advisor Gene Sperling says it's nigh on impossible to flatten the tax code without creating "tens of millions of losers," though interestingly, Barack Obama seems willing to negotiate.

I suppose the idea of kicking tax policy back into the pre-World War I era goes hand-in-hand with new attempts to set science and education back a couple of hundred years. Bah.

They called it Levelland

Get ready for the flat tax. In his remarks yesterday, President Bush said he's looking to make the tax code "simpler and fairer" as he reforms the "outdated" tax code.

This was predicted by John Cassidy in the New Yorker about two months ago, though Cassidy's remarks were read primarily by coastal liberals who didn't elect Bush.

Also read chiefly on the coasts were Andrew Sullivan's "The Simple Solution" (January 2000), which attempted to make the flat tax appealing rather than appalling to liberals, and James Surowiecki's immediate rebuttal. (The two continued to squabble here.)

While the flat tax has been a conservative holy grail for many years, I wonder how it will play in reality. Bush carried a lot of relatively poor states. Will he and his party lose support in those places when working people realize that their take-home pay is shrinking?

Read my lips: the flat tax will hurt working Americans. If Bush and his people can push it through, tax policy could be the biggest issue in the 2008 campaign.

Political magnetics

I'm somewhere around Gandhi, Mandela and the Dalai Lama -- 5.38 points left of center economically, and 3.69 points toward social libertarian.

Slow...down...to...vote?

It's not all that surprising that San Francisco's voter turnout was highest in wealthier neighborhoods like the Marina, Pacific Heights, Seacliff and West of Twin Peaks, and in notorious activist neighborhoods such as the Haight-Ashbury. But it is astonishing to me that citywide turnout was slightly less than the national turnout.

Seventy-seven percent of Minnesotans voted.

Sorry, everyone.

The day after

Bummer about last night. Despite the saddening results, I'm not sure if American life as I experience it will be much different in the next four years compared to the present time. Many circumstances of my life could change in the event of an attack. My taxes could either rise or fall. My job could go poof, but I'm guessing the election won't powerfully influence the existence of my employer one way or the other. My gasoline prices will almost certainly rise. The parks I visit could be despoiled. My energy bill could be exorbitant.

I see that Harper's has helpfully published a guide to leaving the country.

I see that more Democrats voted than Republicans, and that more Democrats voted for Bush than Republicans voted for Kerry. I see that more people voted than ever before.

I see that people are already taking this as a moral mandate for a "man of deep conviction."

At the very least, they're going to have to be truly accountable now. For the first time in his life, Bush will have to clean up his own messes. He will have to answer for himself, to some extent. But he will also be a prisoner of history. His will be regarded as the Presidency that is the source of a new set of problems he, sadly, cannot even imagine.

The fifty-first swing state?

The view from over there.

Big log

More evidence of the blogosphere's arrival in mainstream politics: the NYT editorial page gives ink to twelve pixelpushers. While one writer takes credit for exposing the 60 Minutes forgery incident, one other serves solely as a reminder of the form's irreverence.

Signal to snow ratio

I sure hope this thing is decided tomorrow, because I just can't take it anymore. The waiting, as they say, is the hardest part. It's soothing to hear that the bin Laden tape changed few opinions, but it's equally discouraging to turn on CNN and see Paula Zahn in a town hall meeting in which 20% of the attendees haven't made up their minds yet. Twenty percent! I mean, I wonder about people sometimes.

I know, I'm making it worse by talking about it even more. May this be the blogging equivalent of throwing my hands up in the air in frustration.

OK, I'll do one more: Alterman predicts a Kerry landslide. What liberal mania.

P.S. - Turns out that my freaky Republican correspondent in Texas is actually a plagiarist. He admitted it too.