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Last night I watched X2. I enjoyed it a lot. It was a really good action flick. My favorite scene was when Yuriko and Wolverine were fighting in the underground lab and…

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Wolverine takes the adamantium needle and pumps it into the post-racially beautiful Kelly Hu (portraying Yuriko) and it starts to leak out of her ocular orbits in a mercury-like cascade of death tears.

The Chinese cheekbones that Ms. Hu’s DNA codes for bore those silver streams in a haunting display of sorrow.

It was an outstanding achievement for the make up / special effects artist and it was a great display of director Brian Singer’s eye.

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Today as I’ve been trying to unpack the boxes of my stuff I’ve been watching Chicago. I love Catherine Zeta-Jones’ voice. It’s very strong, almost masculine in its alto strength … I especially the way she delivers in “All That Jazz”..

No, I’m no one’s wife but
Oh! I love my life
..and all that jazz

I also really liked the “Razzle-Dazzle” number, where the girls in red feathery outfits serve as the visual signal of razzle-dazzlement…

All that leads me to conclude is that the Rob Marshall, the director of “Chicago” has correctly realized the balance that produces a correct sythesis of stage and cinema. The spots in the stage performance where a song would have erupted, Marshall sets as act in a club that we, the audience, are privy to.

I just loved the format and the songs - well done and I’m glad it earned the Academy award.

continued from previous post

As cultures desire capital, they face competition mowing their laurels out from under them and must seek the golden fleece of innovation.

As those selfsame cultures seek to find new margins and tools whereby to secure their capital, they will push closer and closer to the walls of taboo and the outmoded, irrelevant rules of religious proscription.

And thus we come to a cave in Afghanistan:

Do we act to safeguard our mores from the reaper of innovation and its attendant capitalism, McDonalds, Lexusus, and Britney Spears?

Do we forego capitalism, Westernization, globalization and attack its symbols and its home?

Aside: Make no doubt, 9/11 was about resolving this dilemma, not strictly an attack on America. It was an attack on the American thought virus, the thorough, pervasive, ubiquitous success of the divorce of church and state in the pursuit of capital.

In short, do we attempt to stop Westernization - even then, could we westerners stop our own culture? Even if (not possible) we were to revert to communism, the presence of even one capitalist nation with and resources would eventually eat our lunch (see USSR v. US 1978-1989).

No, we can’t do that. Our “70’s show”, BMW lifestyles won’t let us tolerate this.

… Or do we dare to move on and shake the dust of ancient, ignorant dicta from our sandals?

Each day the relgious luddites sit and watch Falwell while they wait for their mutual fund indices loaded with big Pharma to appreciate, their dollars and apathy move them culturally where their religion bans their travel.

Pax argentum

Recently I commented to social gadfly MCS:

i can’t wait for [Bush’s and the ] religious right’s backwards stance on this to make sure that the US pharmacological sector falls apart.

Big Pharma is one of the biggest contributors to campaigns and has even had GWB as a speaker at one of their lobby’s gatherings. What should a free-market Republican not like about Pharma? They don’t empty tankers on Alaskan shores, they don’t tend to take pictures of you with their CEO and then implode, they don’t overcharge to line porkets….there’s a lot going for Pharma.

But there can be no doubt for Big Pharma to grow, make money, grow the economy, and remain competitive in the US, they are going to have to get closer and closer to the magic moment of conception. They are going to have to come closer to the blastocyst. In short, they must do stem cell research.

But think about this, a researcher brings together sperm and egg, grows a blastocyst, looks at the cell and finds that it isn’t producing the correctly modified cells and then, like so many Perl scripts and code solutions technical people like myself have created, throws it away. By the conservative doctrine, the doctor has committed an abortion.

This puts Republican candidates in a difficult spot. On the one hand the need to embrance Big Pharm’s cash lined PACs to win. On the other hand their ethics (and, on occasion, constituency’s ethics) are usually contrary to the “abortions” that such research breeds.

In the midst of all that, the latest breakthrough in this area was quickened by South Korean researchers who, like many other Asian nations, are much less picky about where life begins (and if anecdotal stories of infanticide be proven true don’t seem to be too particular about life in- or ex utero).

Make no mistake, failure of US Pharma / Biotech to get into stem stell research will equate to their irrelevance and the loss of thousands of jobs.

So what is a Republican to make of this? Democrats have the advantage of being from the pro-Choice party and while I suspect the great majority are uncomfortable about blastocyst harvesting, they don’t have the plank in the party line that the Republicans do.

The erstwhile head-nodding, top-40, sap-song auters, Incubus, have released a new album (whose title is based upon my favorite gathering of animals term, “murder”) entitled “A Crow Left of the Murder” (Neil Gaiman has an interesting take on this in one of the books of his Sandman series).

Back to the band, the first single released is called “Megalomaniac”. You can find a link to the video here.

director Floria Sigismondi has given us a pastiche of visual gags that point out some of the difficulties of the Right’s rhetoric (“Heroes don’t ask questions”, babies suckling oil from a bottle), images of Adolf Hitler with bomber wings as angellic wings and Rock-ette legs dancing about, a Bush/Blair-like actor atop a Third Reich vintage podium, and stock footage of Stalin, Franco, et. al.

Not exactly hot teens in laytex catsuits.

So the video had my interest, but then I caught the lyrics. While I found the lyrics to all their previous songs absolutely forgettable the refrain of this song refuses to let go:

A warning, I don’t really have any reservations about ‘four letter words’, if you do you might want to cover your eyes here.

Hey, megalomaniac You’re no Jesus Yeah, you’re no fucking Elvis Special, as you know yourself Maniac Step down, step down, step down.

Wait a second here. How did that happen? This is the band that formerly engrossed us with alt-rock platitudes worthy of Coldplay. Check it out:

Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll be there with open arms and open eyes, Yeah Whatever tomorrow brings, I’ll be there..I’ll be there.

Instead we have a driving bass riff and the whispered words “Step down, step down” over and over. I didn’t think these guys had an ounce of passion between them, talk about finding a way to pique my interest. I’m willing to give try a few more songs out to see if this is a fluke or of they got typecast by their alterna-ballads.

Step down, step down, step down

I missed commenting on this while i was in Australia.

A while back I noted that the then-upcoming film, Cheaper By the Dozen would be the first test of my smirk theory of Steve Martin movies.

Rotten Tomatoes tells us how bad this movie was (glad I was out of the country).

Thus the predictive power of my theory holds its first test.

The next movie should be Shopgirl … we wait.

My friend The Social Bobcat is one of the funniest people ever to tread this earth. I have known him since 9th grade where we suffered the slings and verbal arrows of William Maxy’s American History (Reconstruction to Modern) class. A recent sample from IM (red is me, white is TSB, edited for clarity):

whaddaya make of the s. koreans cloning human embryo? i can’t wait for [Bush’s and the ] religious right’s backwards stance on this to make sure that the US pharmacological sector falls apart.

the beginning of the end is nigh
the problem with the extreme religious right is the whole system of beliefs being able to be passed on and instilled in future generations
we can only hope on mtv’s corrupting influence to combat it

More “Milkshake”, less Jesus

Jesus’ power to consistently bring all the boys to the yard has been failing

My associate, BigHoeSmacka, informed me today that he thought I was being delinquent in my blog updating duties. I’ll admit, I’ve been running behind since my return to the South Bay.

The good news is that I’ve found an apartment here in Mountain View (where I am sitting at this very moment). I just took a quick drive through the neighborhood and saw a “for rent” A-frame…a few walk-thrus I was the proud renter of yet another Silicon Valley apartment unit.

(There is a lot more in the extended entry. These insomnia posts achive maximal length very quickly.) (more…)

For the first time in many years I find myself sleeping within the boundaries of the City of San Jose.

In the words of The Old Man from A Christmas Story:

<narrator voice=”Darren McGavin”> O Ralphie, what has brought you to this low, low state? Tell us, son. </narrator>

Instead of being felled by the eyesight-stealing Lifebouy, it is the demon of home-un-havingness. Home-un-havingness is different than being homeless on account of home-un-havingness in not a political issue where Homelessness is. I am clearly not the latter.

Read more if you want to read more…. (more…)