Crack

I got a big shipment of my drug of choice yesterday. The fruits of the Deep Discount DVD sales last month finally showed up on my doorstep. “Drug of choice?” you ask. Yes. What else are movies but a mind-altering substance that changes your perceptions and offers you a halucination for an hour or two?

The pretext for last month’s order was making some space on  my video shelves: I am in the process of replacing some of my VHS collection with DVD editions. Naturally, I bought twice as many movies as I am replacing, so the actual savings in space is obliterated. Oh, the ignominy. Most of what I’m buying right now is film noir, but this week brought in Warners’ “Classic Comedy” box set, too. Included in this set are the films Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, Dinner at Eight, Libeled Lady, Stage Door, and To Be or Not To Be. This usually retails for 60 bucks, but DDD had it for $24 on sale. “Hook it to my veins!” is my usual response to a deal like that.

The first disc I sampled from this set was Bringing Up Baby, which is loaded. Not only do you get the movie, you get two long documentaries (about Cary Grant and director Howard Hawks), a short film, a cartoon (“A Star is Hatched”), commentaries, and other goodies. But all of that is secondary to the movie. I’ve seen Bringing Up Baby a bunch of times–twice on the big screen–and I’ve never seen a print of the film that looked as good as Warners’ transfer for this DVD. It looks like it was made yesterday. It’s THAT clean. It makes me feel like a doofus for not replacing my old VHS copy sooner. I’ve never seen Libeled Lady, but it co-stars William Powell and Myrna Loy, so it is therefore essential that I watch it. Heh.

All of this is just in time for the long weekend. After sequestering myself in the dark for hours on end this weekend–the shipment contained 17 movies in all–I’m sure to emerge with a pale cast to my features and a sensitivity to the bright light of day. Home theater or opium den? What’s the difference, eh?

Cheers.

Odds and Ends

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1148161459-hr-4461.jpg\”

Well, we got the cat back from the vet and she has a urinary infection, as expected. This is something of a relief because if it was behavioral, we probably would have had to get rid of her. So we have her locked in a bathroom with a litter box and a water dish and we give her an eyedropper full of amoxicillin twice a day. She\’s none too happy about that bit. Every time we administer the medicine, it\’s a race to see if we get it in her mouth first or if she manages to disembowel whoever has the task of holding her. Such fun.

I\’ve been mostly successful getting the  cat piss cleaned up. Our vet recommended a product that used to be called \”Nature\’s Miracle,\” but is now called Petastic for Cats. We shall see how it turns out long term.

In other news, my garden is blooming. Having a garden is one of the reasons I finally ditched my long-standing status as a \”renter\” and bought a house. Here are some of the sights in my garden right now:

Plus, we had a strange, alien visitor:

My favorite special effect in all of cinema is in a sci fi epic from the 1950s called The Deadly Mantis, in which a giant preying mantis the size of a 747 rampages through a typical American city. At one point, the mantis knocks over a bus and for one instant, you can see the word \”Tonka\” stamped on the bottom. They don\’t make \’em like that any more. Priceless.

Odds and Ends

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1148161459-hr-446.jpg\”

Well, we got the cat back from the vet and she has a urinary infection, as expected. This is something of a relief because if it was behavioral, we probably would have had to get rid of her. So we have her locked in a bathroom with a litter box and a water dish and we give her an eyedropper full of amoxicillin twice a day. She\’s none too happy about that bit. Every time we administer the medicine, it\’s a race to see if we get it in her mouth first or if she manages to disembowel whoever has the task of holding her. Such fun.

I\’ve been mostly successful getting the  cat piss cleaned up. Our vet recommended a product that used to be called \”Nature\’s Miracle,\” but is now called Petastic for Cats. We shall see how it turns out long term.

In other news, my garden is blooming. Having a garden is one of the reasons I finally ditched my long-standing status as a \”renter\” and bought a house. Here are some of the sights in my garden right now:

Plus, we had a strange, alien visitor:

My favorite special effect in all of cinema is in a sci fi epic from the 1950s called The Deadly Mantis, in which a giant preying mantis the size of a 747 rampages through a typical American city. At one point, the mantis knocks over a bus and for one instant, you can see the word \”Tonka\” stamped on the bottom. They don\’t make \’em like that any more. Priceless.

Cat Piss Blues

Our eight year-old cat, Oreo, seems to be having urinary problems. She pissed on my new fainting couch two days ago, and pissed on my bed last night. I hope that this is just a urinary infection, but I don’t know with Oreo. She’s a very vocal cat, particularly when she doesn’t get her way, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s angry about something (what that something may be, I know not–she has food and the litter box is clean). It’s possible that she’s fed up with the dog. I any event, she’s at the vet today and I’ll know later.

Cat piss is your best buy in pet odors, by the way. Once you’ve bought it, it’s yours to keep…

grrrrr….

Top o’ the Shuffle, remixed again…

Here’s the top of my iTunes shuffle this morning:

Happy & Bleeding by PJ Harvey
Tear Stained Letter by Richard Thompson
Brown-Eyed Handsome Man by Buddy Holly
I Don’t Need No Doctor by Ray Charles
You Make Me Feel So Good by The Chips
Feel It by Sam Cooke
Doin’ The Shout by John Lee Hooker
Gold Dust Woman by Fleetwood Mac
Cretin Hop by The Ramones
Autonomy by The Buzzcocks
Should Have Known by Madder Rose
Before You Go by Buck Owens
Rebel Waltz by The Clash
Get Rid Of That Girl by The Donnas
The Ballad of El Goodo by Big Star
Spanish Harlem by Aretha Franklin
Crumbs From Your Table by U2
I Feel Like Going Home by Muddy Waters
Finger Poppin’ Time by Hank Ballard
Saint Dominic’s Preview by Van Morrison
Rub ‘Til It Bleeds by PJ Harvey
I Wanna Be Your Boyfied (Demo) by The Ramones
Harbor Lights by Elvis Presley
Hit The Road Jack by Ray Charles
Sundazed to the Core by Bettie Serveert
What Do I Care by Johnny Cash
I Left My Heart In Texas by Moon Mullican
Thrill Me by Roy Milton & His Solid Senders
Love In Vain by The Rolling Stones
I Wish I Knew by Solomon Burke

Interesting that the two PJ Harvey songs involve blood. In looking back at the previous installments of this post, I’m interested at the sheer number of artists who resolutely refuse to rise to the top of the shuffle. No Beatles (there’s a bunch in my iTunes), no James Brown (ditto), no glam rock (no Bowie, no Lou Reed, no New York Dolls), no psychobilly, no girl groups from either the sixties or the nineties besides The Donnas. Strange.

Cheers.

Who Are the Sons and Daughters of Patrick Henry?

I used to work in the gun industry. With a ringside seat, I got to see the politics of the gun lobby in action. For example, I was at the NRA conventions in both Denver and Charlotte that wound up in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, so I got to see first hand how the opponents of the gun lobby operate. If you watch the film, you’ll see and hear Mr. Moore claim that the NRA staged a “pro-gun” rally in Denver the week after the shootings in Columbine. Cut to a clip of Charleton Heston holding a gun over his head and ranting “You’ll pry this gun out of my cold dead hands.” I’m sure you remember this if you saw the movie. You may even have been properly appalled. Except, as someone who was present at the event(s) in question, I can tell you that it didn’t happen that way. The NRA national meeting in Denver–required in the NRA’s bylaws–had been scheduled far, far in advance of the events in Columbine. The national meeting usually has a trade show/gun show attached to it. The NRA cancelled this part of the meeting in deferrence to Columbine. Did Moore tell you this? He did not. Further, the clip of Mr. Heston was not filmed in Denver. It was filmed in Charlotte, a year later. Did Moore attribute this? He did not. There are other inaccuracies (we’ll be generous) in the movie that I know of at second hand, but these are the ones of which I have first-hand knowledge.

I mention all of this to establish that I’m somewhat sympathetic to the NRA and what they have to deal with. (I also mention it to bemoan the fact that the Left’s noisiest mouthpiece of late has been such a poor debater that he has to resort to these kinds of prevarications, but I digress). I understand the NRA’s mission, even if I don’t agree with the way they go about it. I’ll gladly acknowledge the fact that the gun lobby engages in distortions that are easily as outrageous, too. Lately, I’ve been kinda glad that they’ve been successful with it. I’ll come back to this point in a bit, but I want to point out another matter of principle upon which the NRA has been immovable, intractable, and adamantine: they have opposed at every turn a “National Gun Registry.” There is no database of every gun owner in the country. Given the wide variations in gun regulation in the country, this isn’t surprising (for example: long guns are not regulated at all where I live–no paper goes to the government at any level). I want to emphasize the Gun Lobby’s opposition to a national gun registry. It’s important to their mission, to how they view the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.

The Gun Lobby maintains that an armed populace is a guarantee against tyrrany. They are talking about a Constitutional check on the power of government granting the people the final recourse of armed resistance to the government.* The politics of gun control is really a philosophical one: should the State have the exclusive right to deadly force? Should that right remain in the hands of the people? Because the NRA (and groups like them) view the right to bear arms as a check on the government, they view a national gun registry as a subversion of that check. If the government knows who has guns, they can collect them at their whim, the argument goes. The gun lobby occasionally connects the Second Amendment with the Fourth Amendment in this argument: The Supreme Court has deduced a “right of privacy” from the Fourth Amendment (and from the Ninth Amendment, which places rights not specified in the Constitution in the hands of the people rather than with the State). A national gun registry, so the argument goes, is an unreasonable government search into the “persons, houses, papers, and effects” of the people without probable cause, which is the legal standard prescribed by the Fourth Amendment.

---

*This has so far proved a philosophical point of view only, by the way. Every attempt by “the people” to invoke this right has been brutally crushed; The Whiskey Rebellion didn’t work out, nor did The American Civil War.

---

It is an accident of politics that gun control is viewed as a “liberal” or “leftist” cause while preservation of gun rights is viewed as a “conservative” cause. The NRA almost universally supports conservative Republican candidates through their political action arm, which is one of the reasons I left the gun industry. I didn’t want my labor to indirectly enrich candidates who might erode the separation of church and state–but that’s off the point I want to make here. The point I DO want to make is that privacy is a core tenent of the belief of a very powerful segment of the Republican constituency.

You may have heard about the latest uproar over the NSA’s surveilance of US citizens in the news today. This follows on the heels of the LAST uproar, in which it was revealed that they were wire-tapping phones without warrants. Bush’s lapdog, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, assured Congress that that program–whose legality has yet to be vetted before the public because it is probably outrageously illegal–was the only one of which he had any knowledge. He wasn’t under oath at the time, which is good for him because he was lying. Today’s scandal–this junta appears to have a new scandal every day or so–is that there is ANOTHER NSA surveilance program, one that is attempting to build a database of every phone call placed within the United States. The NSA’s collaborators in this effort are three large telecommunications firms: Verison, Bell South, and AT&T. A fourth, Qwest, stonewalled the NSA’s efforts on sound legal advice. Here’s an overview of the position into which the collaborating companies have put themselves from the liberal Think Progress blog:

1. It violates the Stored Communications Act. The Stored Communications Act, Section 2703(c), provides exactly five exceptions that would permit a phone company to disclose to the government the list of calls to or from a subscriber: (i) a warrant; (ii) a court order; (iii) the customer’s consent; (iv) for telemarketing enforcement; or (v) by “administrative subpoena.” The first four clearly don’t apply. As for administrative subpoenas, where a government agency asks for records without court approval, there is a simple answer – the NSA has no administrative subpoena authority, and it is the NSA that reportedly got the phone records.

2. The penalty for violating the Stored Communications Act is $1000 per individual violation. Section 2707 of the Stored Communications Act gives a private right of action to any telephone customer “aggrieved by any violation.” If the phone company acted with a “knowing or intentional state of mind,” then the customer wins actual harm, attorney’s fees, and “in no case shall a person entitled to recover receive less than the sum of $1,000.”

(The phone companies might say they didn’t “know” they were violating the law. But USA Today reports that Qwest’s lawyers knew about the legal risks, which are bright and clear in the statute book.)

3. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act doesn’t get the telcos off the hook. According to USA Today, the NSA did not go to the FISA court to get a court order. And Qwest is quoted as saying that the Attorney General would not certify that the request was lawful under FISA. So FISA provides no defense for the phone companies, either.

Now, you can consider the source of that and take it with a grain of salt if you like, but from my point of view, this activity isn’t a lot different from the gun lobby’s favorite bogey, the national gun registry. In fact, it’s even more pernicious because it goes to the heart of the right of citizens to freely associate, to freely exchange ideas, to freely assemble with like-minded individuals. Is an infringement of this right merely theoretical? Can we trust the government with this kind of power?

There are currently lawsuits pending against the Department of Defense for illegally spying on gay and lesbian groups. The Executive branch has had anti-war groups under surveillance since the Afghan campaign began. They’ve been spying on the Quakers, fer Pete’s sake! Quakers, I say! That hotbed of terrorist activity! Can we trust the government–especially THIS government–with this kind of power? Fuck no!

So why aren’t the gun lobby and other more libertarian groups up in arms over this? To an extent, I guess they are, even if their organizations haven’t made anything like a stand on the matter. The latest poll numbers are in the toilet if you’re a Republican. 71 percent disapprove of the President right now. Even more disapprove of Congress. That’s more than the paranoid left and the wishy-washy center. That’s into the conservative base. And well it should be. The activities of this government are patently un-American regardless of which side of the aisle you’re on.

I’ve framed this in terms of the gun lobby for two reasons. First, it’s a useful comparison to show that you can’t pick and choose which parts of the Constitution you have to defend if you believe in that document or, more specifically, have sworn an oath to defend it–as all government servants must do. But second, I want to take a big stick to the ass of the Left. Gun control is the Left’s version of gay marriage: it’s a wedge issue that gets people so worked up that they stop thinking straight. It’s good for distracting people from the real issues. It’s also a kind of third rail that candidates touch at their peril. I mentioned above that I’m kinda glad that the NRA has had the success it has had in preserving some semblance of the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment and here’s why: if this government manages to somehow hold onto power–not necessarily George Bush, but someone like him–then I want the redress of the Second Amendment available. If this government wants to continue torturing its enemies in secret prisons, if this government wants to destroy another country that has not attacked us, if this government wants to continue a forced march towards theocracy, if this government wants to continue looting the public coffers for a cabal of robber barons, I want that redress. I WANT a gun in my hand.

President Bush has said that he will do everything in his power to “protect” the lives of American citizens from terrorism. If everything in his power includes the dismantling of the ordinary freedoms that makes America America, then I say, no thanks. I don’t want safety. I want freedom. If that means a violent death at the hands of terrorists hangs over my head like the Sword of Damocles, then so be it. In the words of Patrick Henry:

“Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

---

As a closing thought, I have this to say to the telecom companies that have collaborated in this latest outrage:

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
–Samuel Adams

They would be wise to heed this because the alternative may well be “Up against the wall, mother fuckers” some day.

Cheers.

Testing, testing….

I’m trying to see if I can imbed images from the internet into the text of my blog (I know that other blog sites–livejournal and blogger, for example–will do this). So…here goes nothing:

Edit: Success! No more worrying about the puny little window Yahoo allows when you put a photo on the heading!

Into the Redline

I’m noticing a huge uptick in traffic to my page in the last week. This in spite of the fact that I haven’t done anything to provoke this (I haven’t talked about sex in weeks). I can only speculate that it’s one of these causes:

1. Sunspots.

2. My posts on cooking have made me into the next Jamie Oliver. Cable series to follow: The Crossdressing Chef!

3. My friends list has hit critical mass.

4. I have secret naughty pictures that are a secret even to me.

5. The government has put me on a watch list and the watchers are showing up in the  hit counter.

That last bit is a little paranoid, I admit. Paranoids share a common narcissism with crossdressers, by the way. It’s all about me….Of course, there’s certainly a crossover between these two populations.

Cheers.

Son of Christi\’s Movie Pics

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1146942928-hr-4061.jpg\”

I turned out to be a film nut in part because of my mother. During my formative years, she would occasionally wake me up to watch movies with her late at night. My dad worked into the wee hours of the morning, so she wanted company. Much later, I realize that she never woke either of my brothers for this. Only me. I can only assume that she recognized an incipient passion for film in me and that she wanted to encourage it. She was a canny parent when it came to educating her children.

The first movie she ever woke me to see was Billy Wilder\’s One, Two, Three, a film she had seen with my father on its original release in 1961. I may have been 13 at the time. I don\’t remember the time frame. I DO remember being groggy at the outset, and in real pain at the end of the film from laughing too hard. I may have given myself hiccups at one point. It\’s that funny.

A lot of people think of Wilder\’s Some Like It Hot as the pinnacle of his comedy, but I like this film more. Some Like It Hot is a totally subversive sex comedy, but subversive sex comedies–even comedies questioning gender roles–are fairly common from the late 5os and early 60s. One, Two, Three is a different kind of subversive altogether, one that stings even today (William Holden once said that Wilder \”had a mind full of razor blades\”–a fact on full display in this movie).

The story follows Coca-Cola\’s man in West Berlin–played with machine-gun delivery by the great James Cagney–at the height of the Cold War. When the wild-child daughter of the Chairman of the Board comes to visit, he has his hands full. When she marries a communist from the eastern sector, he has a major problem. Either he turns the poor shlub into an upstanding capitalist before the family shows up to meet him, or its HIS head on the chopping block. The gags come fast and furious in the back half of the film, so fast and so furious that one almost misses the savage skewering of Communism, Capitalism, and the Cold War itself. A typical example: the Russian Trade Commisioner offers Cagney a cigar. \”Havana?\” he asks. The commisioner says: \”We send them rockets, they send us cigars.\” \”Say, this is a pretty crummy cigar!\” \”We send them pretty crummy rockets.\” Mind you, this film was made and released BEFORE the Cuban Missile Crisis. My favorite gag is one of the East German torture techniques, involving \”Itsy, Bitsy, Teenie, Weenie, Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini.\” Amnesty International would be all over it.

Everyone in this film is corrupt–and the microcosmic implications of this in the world beyond the film frame are not ignored. Watching these characters circle each other trying to gain advantage, all marching to the beat of all-destroying Capitalism, is fascinating in an H.L. Mencken sort of way (\”It is precisely when people are at their worst that they are the most interesting). By the end, most of the institutions the film places in its gunsites are a smoking ruin. And the final gag is magnificent.

Enjoy.

Son of Christi\’s Movie Pics

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1146942928-hr-406.jpg\”

I turned out to be a film nut in part because of my mother. During my formative years, she would occasionally wake me up to watch movies with her late at night. My dad worked into the wee hours of the morning, so she wanted company. Much later, I realize that she never woke either of my brothers for this. Only me. I can only assume that she recognized an incipient passion for film in me and that she wanted to encourage it. She was a canny parent when it came to educating her children.

The first movie she ever woke me to see was Billy Wilder\’s One, Two, Three, a film she had seen with my father on its original release in 1961. I may have been 13 at the time. I don\’t remember the time frame. I DO remember being groggy at the outset, and in real pain at the end of the film from laughing too hard. I may have given myself hiccups at one point. It\’s that funny.

A lot of people think of Wilder\’s Some Like It Hot as the pinnacle of his comedy, but I like this film more. Some Like It Hot is a totally subversive sex comedy, but subversive sex comedies–even comedies questioning gender roles–are fairly common from the late 5os and early 60s. One, Two, Three is a different kind of subversive altogether, one that stings even today (William Holden once said that Wilder \”had a mind full of razor blades\”–a fact on full display in this movie).

The story follows Coca-Cola\’s man in West Berlin–played with machine-gun delivery by the great James Cagney–at the height of the Cold War. When the wild-child daughter of the Chairman of the Board comes to visit, he has his hands full. When she marries a communist from the eastern sector, he has a major problem. Either he turns the poor shlub into an upstanding capitalist before the family shows up to meet him, or its HIS head on the chopping block. The gags come fast and furious in the back half of the film, so fast and so furious that one almost misses the savage skewering of Communism, Capitalism, and the Cold War itself. A typical example: the Russian Trade Commisioner offers Cagney a cigar. \”Havana?\” he asks. The commisioner says: \”We send them rockets, they send us cigars.\” \”Say, this is a pretty crummy cigar!\” \”We send them pretty crummy rockets.\” Mind you, this film was made and released BEFORE the Cuban Missile Crisis. My favorite gag is one of the East German torture techniques, involving \”Itsy, Bitsy, Teenie, Weenie, Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini.\” Amnesty International would be all over it.

Everyone in this film is corrupt–and the microcosmic implications of this in the world beyond the film frame are not ignored. Watching these characters circle each other trying to gain advantage, all marching to the beat of all-destroying Capitalism, is fascinating in an H.L. Mencken sort of way (\”It is precisely when people are at their worst that they are the most interesting). By the end, most of the institutions the film places in its gunsites are a smoking ruin. And the final gag is magnificent.

Enjoy.