I’m interested less in how you’d like to shuffle off this mortal coil than how you’d prefer your corpus preserved—or not. Because while we can imagine our meat and bone supine in pine six feet under, or flame-kissed to tragic granules not unlike kitty litter and scooped into a decorative receptacle, the previously imaginative among the dead (or their survivors) have taken to more amusing displays.

I read last week that some cremated remains of Fredric J. Baur of Cincinnati, who died May 4th at the age of 89, were interred in a Pringles can—a can design he patented as an organic chemist and “food storage technician” at Procter & Gamble. Did you ever try that trick where you squeeze an empty Pringles can until the lid springs off with a pop? I imagine the Baur family had to affix a label warning not to do that with Fred’s cylindrical crazy-crisp casket, lest one of his more rambunctious grandchildren got any ideas during the wake. As for the ultimate in going out with a pop, I still admire the extravaganza of Hunter S. Thompson’s last gleaming: mingled with fireworks, his cremated remains were shot from 34 mortar tubes during a party at his ranch.

On a larger scale, you may end up preserved whole, or nearly so, for the public eye. Lenin and his tomb bore me; instead recall nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. He sits in a glass-doored mahogany cabinet at University College, London, where underclassmen occasionally steal his head. Or consider this if you’re a Chinese prisoner: your final insult may not be your torture and execution but to remain educationally flayed as a popular American tourist attraction—“$27.50 on weekends and holidays, $21.50 for children 4 to 12, and a dollar less for each on weekdays.”

If I’ve learned anything from the films of Godard, it’s to what degree structure and convention bind other films. I most recently saw his Alphaville but that took place in a future Paris overruled by an omniscient, evil computer and therefore had an excuse to be wacky. Two or Three Things I Know About Her is even more unconventional because it contains the same non-sequitur philosophizing of language/meaning, thought/reality and change/stasis as Alphaville but takes place in present-day Paris (1966), all ennui and contemporary fashions in Kool-Aid colors. Characters address the camera directly, talking off-handedly about what they’re doing, what they’ve done and what they’re going to do. The narrator whispers every time he speaks. A child asks his mother what language is and she replies, “Language is the house man lives in.” You know: the sort of stuff that gets French films slapped as snotty and ponderous.

I liked it anyway, although the frequent cuts to cranes, dump trucks and the construction of skyscrapers confused me. There’s a token American in the film played by a Frenchman who speaks loud, stilted English and introduces himself as John Bogus, a Vietnam War profiteer from Arkansas. He’s wearing a white T-shirt with an American flag on it and even the flame from his cigarette lighter seems blatantly outsized and particularly American. Which is fair enough considering Americans’ takes on stock French characters. (See: Inspector Clouseau and any maître d’ character ever.)

The soundtrack dips in and out and at times disappears. Conversations are overlaid with occasional orchestral snippets but mostly diegetic sounds: traffic, a toy gun, people talking, a pinball machine. The plot has something to do with a woman (Maria Vlady) wandering Paris as a sort-of weekly, half-hearted prostitute to amuse herself while her husband’s off at work. There’s a scene in the film of one guy reading random sentences from a giant stack of paperbacks as another guy transcribes everything, and I wondered if it wasn’t commentary on the abstract dialogue of Two or Three Things itself. “If you can’t afford LSD, try color TV,” whispers the narrator as part of a litany reminiscent of Renton’s “Choose Life” soliloquy from Trainspotting. And if you have neither mind-bending drugs nor television, just watch Two or Three Things I Know About Her.

For us young ones who only remember Jack Palance from his aged turns in Batman, those one-armed push-ups at the Oscars or that Skin Bracer commercial in which he urged viewers to agree that “confidence is very sexy,” it’s startling to see him, in his first movie role, as the spindly villain of the bioterror/noir Panic in the Streets. The dude’s 6'4" with a rasp and sharply angled face custom-hewn for a black-and-white thriller. Very sexy, in a sinister fashion.

Jason

When will the hipster girls adopt those giant, 1980s-professional eyeglasses? Or have they and no one briefed me?

S.

You totally missed the boat. Those are, like, so 2004.

Jason

I’ve been out of it since I let my style consultant go. Desiree spent all her time at sample sales when she should have been attending Fashion Week, planning my winter wardrobe and answering the phone in my apartment-sized closet. Lately, I’ve been using American Apparel ads to let me know what’s cool.

S.

So how come I haven’t seen you at work donning a pair of royal blue tights and nothing else?

Jason

I was totally wearing royal gold tights last Friday. Occasionally I would cup my breasts and arch my back, alive with pleasure. Then I was sent home early.

S.

I can’t believe I missed your shenanigans. If you canned your former assistant, you need a new one, right? Can my nametag say “Fashion Consultant Extraordinaire”? Or maybe “Roving Ambassador” would be nice.

Jason

I dub thee “Roving Ambassador.” Go forth and spread thy riches of snark, fashion sense and myrrh.

An upper-level guy at work sent a group email today that concluded with this sentence:

Thank you for being a part of the team and most of all for being my friend.

Which immediately made me think of a certain phrase and image from Pulp Fiction superimposed with lolcat-style typography. I commissioned my peep in the production department to create it and she fulfilled my request in five minutes for free because she thought it was funny, too. Uncertain whether my upper-level coworker would feel the same way, I decided not to forward my lolvincent to him.

Instant ramen noodles constituted a formative brick of my collegiate food pyramid. I will admit eating many a pack of chicken-, sometimes beef- flavored Maruchan Ramen back in the day, bought for pennies apiece and flavored with a salty powder included in a foil square reminiscent of a wrapped condom.

In my adult life, ramen ranks among my favored home remedies of tempering a sinus headache. I hold my face close over the hot steam as the noodles boil, then fork down the gunk to rebalance my electrolytes and ease my fatigue, or something like that.

My sense before tonight of eating ramen in an actual ramen establishment seems informed by dystopic sci-fi movies¹. In The Fifth Element, Bruce Willis learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s been fired. In Blade Runner, Harrison Ford learns from a wizened Asian ramen-vendor that he’s being arrested by Edward James Olmos. “He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard,” quoth the wizened Asian ramen-vendor. “He say you Blade Runner.”

Taking place in a futuristic Los Angeles (“November, 2019”), Blade Runner visually adds, as I think William Gibson has, that you must eat your ramen while wearing an overcoat and seated at a counter of a stall-like street vendor, beneath a florescent-lit awning, as around you, the cold rain pours and crowds mill by under umbrellas with rods that appear to be light sabers.

Well, it was dark and cold and rainy tonight, and New York, at least the East Village, is probably as grittily deteriorated a match to Los Angeles 2019, so I took the L east then walked over, under my unlit umbrella, to Ramen Setagaya, an outpost of a Japanese noodle chain. There are a scant few tables for two and I sat at the narrow counter on a black-lacquered wooden stool. I was only about two feet away from the two cooks, who scurried about the tiny kitchen preparing dishes in clouds of fragrant steam. Each gentleman wore a yellow T-shirt printed with the chain’s logo and, oddly, had a white terry-cloth hand-towel wrapped around his head and tied in the back, as if he’d just exited a shower.

A flat-screen TV near the entrance looped a bewildering array of cooking shows, gameshows, commercials and promotional videos, all of which seemed to feature Setagaya ramen, and none of which had subtitles or a lick of English otherwise. After calling for a Sapporo, I started out with the Oshinko pickled vegetables, none of which I recognized but all three of which were tasty. For my noodles, I opted for the pork BBQ salt ramen (or “cha-syu-men,” according to the mostly Japanese menu, unless that’s actually a pronunciation guide). The tender, thin-sliced pork floated in a rich noodle broth of various chopped vegetables, seaweed and half of a soft-boiled egg with a vibrant yellow, goopy yolk, floating there like a lifeboat.

Unless this is a prank on Westerners, I’m told that in Japan it is good manners to slurp one’s noodles, as if to audibly yet nonverbally complement the chef. Suspicious of this, I ate mine silently and with a minimum of wet whiplash, although two Asian gentlemen down the counter to my right were consistently and noisily Hoovering in large tangles from their bowls. A sideways glance revealed that, with noodles dangling from their faces, they resembled Cthulhu and his “awful squid-head with writhing feelers.”

All told, and as expected, much heartier and tastier ramen than those dehydrated bricks from my youth, and better yet, nothing bad happened to me during my meal, unless you count that giant puddle I accidentally stepped in on First Avenue afterwards.

Ramen Setagaya

• 141 First Ave. (between St. Marks Place and East 9th Street)
• (212) 529-2740
• Meal 34 of 52: pickled vegetables ($2), pork BBQ ramen ($11) and a bottle of Sapporo ($4).

¹ I’ve seen Tampopo, but I’m going to conveniently ignore that here. [back]

For the New York Asian Film Festival at the IFC Center, I was keen to see the one with sneak-attack breakdancers but Sherry convinced me to see Dasepo Naughty Girls instead. I must give naughty girls a slight edge over sneak-attack breakdancers. Without breaking a sweat, Dasepo should qualify as the strangest movie I will see this year.

Let’s see: it’s a candy-colored teen sex-comedy/soap opera/musical, kind of like if you captured Baz Luhrmann, Porky’s and Grease in a sack and ran it through the “English to Korean” filter on Babel Fish.

Among the horny students and teachers at No-Use High School are a poor girl forced into prostitution who becomes best friends with her first john, a paunchy middle-aged cross-dresser. He’s uninterested in sex but obsessed with putting on makeup and schoolgirl outfits to pose for cellphone snapshots, giggle and gossip about boys; later he becomes the girl’s manager for her sudden and unexpected musical career. There’s another student with one eye who has a transgender sister (brother?). And there’s a teacher who likes getting spanked. Frequently the characters break into song, the Korean lyrics highlighted syllable-by-syllable across the bottom of the screen, just like in karaoke.

The reptilian-eyed principal brainwashes the class into model students while restoring their long-lost virginity. At the showdown conclusion, a Medusa-like dragon-lady emerges from the principal to smite the students, but they gather and use the cosmic power of group masturbation to defeat her. Then everyone assembles in the gym and starts dancing.

I’d say there was something lost in translation but, no, I think Dasepo Naughty Girls is just that weird.

I was excited to learn today that I can get film for the late-’60s Polaroid Model 20 “Swinger” Land Camera I bought for about $5 many years ago at a Goodwill in Cleveland. What a fine specimen, this hefty yet ergonomic white molded plastic that feels solid in my hand. A bank of faceted flash reflectors surrounds the faceplate of the lens. Turning the bright red knob adjusts the exposure, and like some sort of mutant Magic 8 Ball, the word “YES” appears in a window below the viewfinder when it’s set correctly. At last, pressing the white button on the tip of the red knob takes the photo. The instructions are molded in raised type on the back of the camera.

Polaroid began phasing-out SX-70 film for Land Cameras like the “Swinger” in early 2006; I’m surprised it didn’t happen years sooner than that with the popularity of digital cameras. As an alternative, Polaroid recommends messing around with its 600 or 779 film cartridges to sneak them into Land Cameras, but I didn’t want to do that. Then I read that a variant of SX-70 film, SX-70 Blend, is available and has the same vivid colors, saturation and a slight blue cast as the original stuff. It’s made in the Netherlands and only available in Europe unless you go through a U.S. distributor and its hefty markup, which I did. With any luck you’ll see soon the fruits of this expense when I post some scans.

Hard Boiled, notable as John Woo’s final movie prior to his Hollywood-blockbuster directorial career, serves as an action-packed showcase of his signature style combining acrobatic fisticuffs with frequent spurts of slow motion. Also about 230 people are shot dead, if you’re into that sort of thing. The elaborately choreographed gun battles thrill, even though my DVD appeared to be a bootleg with dubbing from one Chinese dialect to another and poorly translated English subtitles. It’s certainly representative of the cop-movie drama, packed with the following cliché plot elements:

1. Our hero (Chow Yun-Fat) has a score to settle.
2. Because a crime syndicate killed his optimistic young partner, who talks lovingly about his children then gets killed in the first 15 minutes of the film, setting up the Revenge Factor.
3. The cocky young replacement partner (Tony Leung) crimps the style of our hero. But they see through their differences and join forces.
4. Bonus: The cocky young partner lives on a houseboat.
5. The crime syndicate features a Boss and a Henchman of the Boss, with renegade flair and long hair to differentiate him from the Boss.
6. A plucky female colleague proves her mettle late in the film: she picks up a gun with a limp-fish grip and shoots dead a bad guy who doesn’t believe she’s capable.
7. All of the handguns fire far more bullets before reloading than one would think possible.
8. And my favorite: imperiled children to magnify our hero’s humanity. In this case they’re quite young: merely newborns in a hospital nursery. The bad guys have hidden a weapons cache in the basement of the hospital, then decide to blow up the whole building. The drawn-out conclusion features SWAT guys getting picked off as they pass the babies out a hospital window down to safety. Our hero rescues the last one personally, leaping through the flames and rubble in slow motion.

Libeled Lady: they sure don’t make fluffy romantic comedies like they used to. I savored the amphetamine-rapid patter of dialogue forged in the fires of the ’30s; the comedic hits come fast and furious and I wished everyone I knew, myself included, spoke as quickly and with as much wicked cleverness as these characters.

William Powell steals the show as Bill Chandler, a Walt Disney-resembling pencil-mustachioed dandy, alternating between foppishly suave and stammering fall-down goof. He’s macking on Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy), a rich socialite haughty enough to probably set cute baby chickens on fire with merely a glance. She’s suing the New York Evening Star for $5 million for printing a saucy bit of untrue gossip about her. The paper’s editor, Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy), thinks he can nullify the suit by getting a photo of her messing around with a married man, so he puts Chandler to the task—after having the dashing fellow temporarily marry his own fiancée, Gladys (a brassy, sassy Jean Harlow). Hilarity ensues.

At first this film shapes up to be perhaps the only romantic comedy featuring two couples that gives balanced plot-time and screen-time to everyone, which practically never works (like in, say, You’ve Got Mail; although maybe Sideways comes close). But the focus grows to be Chandler and Allenbury genuinely falling for each other, but not before he makes a comic ass of himself. There’s a long bit wherein, attempting to ingratiate himself with Allenbury’s fishing-fanatic father, he pretends to know how to angle for trout. Then the father invites Chandler’s on a fishing trip with himself and his daughter. Whuh-oh! Bring on the physical comedy: lots of Chandler falling down in the rapids and grasping at the slippery fish just out of his reach.

Hello, Hollywood: this movie totally begs for a remake, particularly given the continued prevalence of tabloids skirting legal lines and debutante romance. Yes, it was remade [only 10 years later!] in ’46 as Easy to Wed, but I’m talking a remake now. Additionally I ask: why has not Myrna, as in Myrna Loy, become the new hotness in names for baby girls? It’s got that foxiness-by-association that other old-timey names like Ethel somehow haven’t been able to retain.

So you don’t have to, I listened to the actor/director’s commentary on my super-deluxe edition of Say Anything tonight and watched the alternate/deleted/extended scenes. The most amusing group of extras concerns the famous shot of our hero Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) hoisting a boom box to serenade his girl Diane (Ione Skye) as she sleeps with the wistful strains of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”

In the movie, it comes together perfectly (if a touch sentimentally) and the image of Lloyd has become something of my generation’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.

What’s amusing is that director Cameron Crowe originally scripted the boom box music to be Billy Idol’s “To Be A Lover” and as the scene was filmed the song actually playing was a then-favorite of Cusack’s, Fishbone’s “Turn the Other Way,” neither of which fits the scene; Idol is too fast, Fishbone too funky. Gabriel’s song works on an emotional level and the lyrics are written as if for the scene.

Even better is that although it seems perfectly obvious now that Lloyd must elevate that boom box with the confidence and pride of a boxer hoisting the championship belt, alternate takes reveal that Cusack and Crowe first tried every other possible combination of Man with Boom Box before settling on the iconic image just as they lost their light of day.

“This is the first round of holding up the boom box,” says Crowe regarding these first few shots, from footage taken on March 25, 1988, and apparently meant to take place across the street from Diane’s house. “He’s not happy about it,” Crowe adds, unnecessarily, over footage of Cusack handling the boom box like it’s a poo-filled diaper.

The next round of boom box takes (a session that included the one used in the finished film) were shot in a comparatively more scenic park on May 2, 1988, although most of them are ruined by inexplicable and out-of-character gum-chewing by Cusack. “I think that the chewing gum and anything of that sort of indifference was going to be wrong,” comments Crowe, when he probably should have just shouted at Cusack, “The world is full of guys. Be a man!”

Bruce, the family member of Andie and Katie’s I visited last year when Katie and I summered in Rhode Island, was an actor in Wind, the Americas Cup movie that finally popped-up in my Netflix queue. I watched it tonight and it’s a fairly standard sporting movie setup with a down-on-its-luck team triumphing over adversity in The Big Game. Specifically it’s:

1. Boy has girl and boat.
2. Boy loses (in order) girl, race, boat and self-respect.
3. Boy spends a few lost months on the salt flats of Utah.
4. Boy regains self-respect, boat and girl.
5. Boy wins race.

Really what’s impressive (and, I’m told, the reason Bruce likes the movie, too), is the graceful and seemingly effortless cinematography and editing of the boats racing neck-in-neck via a combination of tracking shots from other boats, on-boat action footage and helicopter shots, seamlessly stitched together. Even more impressive is knowing this movie was made in the early-‘90s and likely contains little if any CGI trickery, compared to more recent seaborne fare, like, say, Master and Commander, which was a lot of Industrial Light & Magic and a giant water tank in Mexico.

This screencap depicts Bruce as Sheik, looking pensive about a loss in a race. Although mostly he’s seen in the background, toiling aboard the American boat, he’s one of the lead crew members, addressed directly by stars Matthew Modine and mid-nosejob Jennifer Grey, who yell at him during a crucial moment to “put up the Womper,” a giant spinnaker co-invented by Gray and crafty genius Stellan Skarsgård.

You will agree Bruce is a handsome fellow and I can tell you this is doubly so when he’s in manly action, tacking, scrambling up rigging, getting the jib down, and a bunch of other sailing stuff I didn’t fully understand. (Although Wind’s on-boat maneuvers may be a rush of confusion to landlubbers, the movie explains sailing race strategy by unobtrusive and effective cutaways to live footage of a TV commentator and animated graphics of the races’ turning points.)

Late one recent night in Brooklyn, Ned needed to get from one end of the Slope to the other, so he hailed a cab. Of all the taxis in all the neighborhoods in all of New York City, he walked into Philip Frabosilo’s, an overt Christian who preaches to his fares, dishing out smiley-face advice, miniature paperback bibles with orange covers and hand-labeled copies of his own documentary/biopic, Rolling for Jesus. He gave Ned a copy of this DVD after not charging him for the ride, so it was practically a given that it would be first-up in the rotation for Ned’s Movie Night II tonight.

Phil, who’s had his medallion about 37 years, has removed the partition from his cab and tricked out the interior with dozens of photos, inspirational messages and Beanie Babies, in order to utilize it as a “ministry for Jesus.” A big part of this is acting as a bread truck, stopping by breakfast cart vendors and relieving them of their day-old donuts and bagels. He loads the stale dough into plastic bags, crams them in his trunk and tools around the city donating them to the poor, if a fare happens to take him near a shelter or homeless person. In between stints preaching at storefront churches and missions, Phil takes his rods to the East River and fishes for striped bass. (Thank god he doesn’t eat his catches or attempt to multiply them because they’ve got to be among the filthiest, garbage-choked creatures in all the land.)

Most of Phil’s preaching is Praise the Lord boilerplate but when the camera catches him in slightly less scripted moments, he tosses out funny and confused metaphors, like how he’s “discovered that most New Yorkers are like clams, way down at the bottom of the ocean.” Phil’s married but spends more time at his Mom’s place, where she handles all of his taxi and ministry-related paperwork from her kitchen table and owns some of the coolest, most hideous wallpaper ever.

Most of the times he’s shown with his wife, it’s in 30-year-old wedding photos. She’s interviewed separately wearing a denim shirt that she appears to have embroidered and sewn a bunch of decorative buttons to. In the movie’s best line, she admits, in a statement phrased like a question, “I’m proud of Philip but I’m not [pause] proud of Phillip.” Earlier she’s admitted they have a constant “hot and cold relationship,” in part because Phil’s Mom lives in the same apartment building and demands a lot of his time, and in part because they ‘re both argumentative types.

From the documentary, here’s what would seem to be a typical exchange, best imagined with thick New York accents:

Phil

[proudly waves tube of heat-and-serve biscuits] I bought buttermilk biscuits.

Phil’s Wife

[defensively] For who? What kind of diet are you on?

Phil

These were three for a dollar!

Phil’s Wife

Yeah?

Phil

So I bought four of them.

Phil’s Wife

So who are they for? You buy me diet bread [angrily shakes loaf of “Light Style Wheat” at Phil] and then you buy buttermilk biscuits! Where is the logic?

For the requisite bad movie segment of Movie Night, Megan couldn’t locate a copy of Riding the Bus With My Sister on short notice so she settled for Gigli, which also features an offensive rendition of a mentally disabled person, in this case played by Justin Bartha as a watered-down Rain Man. An ultra-guido Ben Affleck mocks and manhandles the kid while getting cutesy/obnoxious with J-Lo in some of the most stilted dialogue ever scripted. After about 20 minutes in, two things became clear:

1. The Christopher Walken cameo would be the movie’s high point.
2. Ned’s head would explode Scanners-style if we didn’t play another movie fast.

So we put in Jesus Camp. You know those kids in the Middle East who are taught that it’s a good idea to strap on belts of handmade explosives to kill their enemies because their god (who apparently is not the same as their enemies’ god) will smile upon them and grant them afterlife bonus prizes of virgins, goblets of honey and all the free cable television they can handle? The evangelical Christians shown in this documentary are just as scary, if not moreso. In one scene, one of the adults even compares the teaching of their children to the education of young holy warriors. And these folks aren’t strangers living in a desert halfway around the world; they’re from Missouri and more powerful than bombs. The movie reminds that the growing ranks of this “religious right” helped bring our current president to office.

Cute as the devil and just as spooky, the spawn of the adult evangelicals attend bible camp, pray, attempt to convert strangers, speak in tongues, weep in religious ecstasy and talk in ways that sound well-coached. (There they are, praying for the souls of the unborn near the abortion clinic, just like regular fifth-graders.) They’re largely home-schooled and essentially brainwashed by their parents and teachers who keep them closeted from the world in their homes and communities. They’re not even allowed to read Harry Potter books (although some of them do anyway).

I have questions and comments for this film: foremost, what were the filmmakers’ motivations for making it? There is no voiceover, few text overlays other than a handful of stark facts about the staggering numbers of evangelicals in the U.S., and no commentary, other than occasional footage of Mike Papantonio, co-host of the Air America Radio program Ring of Fire, during a live show on evangelicals during which he takes their calls and intelligently knocks holes in their dogma.

Also, I’d be interested in seeing what happens, Seven Up!-style, once these kids hit puberty and/or a time when they might have an option to experience the world beyond all they’ve ever known. Do many of them wise up and leave it behind or do they go on?

Finally, as with any documentary, I wondered about what was left unfilmed or on the cutting room floor and what was magnified by selective editing. When we watched the deleted scenes on the DVD we saw the kids goofing around and playing like normal kids their age; but none of this made the movie, where they’re presented as robots.

Ned’s a Herzog fan (you may recall we watched that director’s Grizzly Man during Ned’s inaugural Movie Night) so we caught the first bit of The Wild Blue Yonder. Brad Dourif stars as a wild-haired, conspiratorial and shifty eyed alien, as if he’ll steal your wheel covers as soon as your back is turned. Then there was a bunch of NASA space travel footage cut in and I lost track. You can slag Herr Herzog as you please but you cannot deny the man takes creative risks and keeps his work always unexpected.

To cap the evening, Ned and Megan were shocked and appalled that neither Katie nor I had ever seen H.R. Pufnstuf (“Sid and Marty Krofft?” they asked, dismayed as we shrugged.) I’d try explaining it but mere words cannot do justice to something so surreal. The pilot episode from 1969 that we watched is an acid-tinged version of The Wizard of Oz, so at least I had a shaky point of reference amid the lumbering Muppets, an amphetamine-cranked witch, singing flute and rapscallion British boy.

For sustenance during this marathon session we ordered in from Song, a fine, very tasty and cheap Thai restaurant. I ordered my favorite Thai dish, tofu pad see ew, which is flat rice noodles, broccoli and bits of grilled scrambled egg in a sweet brown sauce. I would have tried the tasty-looking som tam grated papaya salad but like a lot of Thai food, it was rife with chopped peanuts.

Song

• 295 5th Ave. (between First and Second)
• Brooklyn, New York
• (718) 965-1108
• Meal 10 of 52: pad see ew ($6.50).

Boy, Hitch really liked stories of ordinary men in over their heads, which he never covered more realistically than in The Wrong Man. He even traded his traditional cameo for a brief introduction emphasizing his script was wholly Based on a True Story. Unfortunately that also makes it one of his least engrossing films: linear with few surprises, and, as in many Hitchcock films, dwelling on the director’s phobias and kid fears, in this case, of cops and of wrongful imprisonment. The style and cinematography, unlike most anything else Hitchcock directed, glows like a European arthouse film mixed with film noir, all downturned hats and shadows, and a vivid time capsule of a gritty New York City in 1956. Fifty years later and the bridges and the subway stations look the same.

And what better everyman to play Mr. Guilty Until Proven Innocent than Henry Fonda, a doe-eyed upstanding American with a face like a laborer in a Great Depression breadline.

Vera Miles as his wife portrays a worrisome decent into madness with a beauty you can see would have worked for Vertigo. Hitch wanted her for the role of Madeleine in that film but when she got pregnant, it went to Kim Novak.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, that day when ad agencies thrill to have taken a break from promoting products and services to do whatever they want for half a minute, providing bloggers and white-collar workers grist for excited chatter upwards of 24 hours later.

A theme of physical violence ran through the commercials this year. Characters were struck in the head by a rock, stepped on, slapped in the face, incinerated by comet and felled by office supplies. They leapt off a cliff en masse, tripped into a closed car door and were yelled at for more fries. Great stuff. As comedians such as the Three Stooges proved, insult, injury and death are funnier when they happen to people other than yourself.

My favorite commercial overall was the one by electronics manufacturer Garmin International for its GPS navigation system. In it, a motorist gets lost and unfurls his map, only to have it expand, engulf his car and transform into Maposaurus, a lumbering origami villain.

GPS to the rescue! Another motorist turns into a Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger-style hero in a silver bodysuit who battles Maposaurus in the style of a bad Japanese monster movie from the ’60s. They lunge at each other and knock down the flimsy scale-model trees and buildings. A death metal band provides the soundtrack and appears briefly at the end of the spot over the tagline, “Grab your Garmin/Take on the World.” (Sample song lyric: “GPS power will save the day/Grab Your Garmin, blows maps awaaay!”)

The game had its moments, too, although it got off to a bad start. When Gloria Estefan appeared on the field, I assumed I’d have ample cause to shake my body, baby, and do the conga, but instead she got stuck introducing the surreal stylings of Cirque du Soleil.

During the game, incessant rain added a wildcard Slip ’n Slide element resulting in exciting turnovers and other blunders. Grossman showed off the youthful looks and approximate skill of an eight-year-old Pee Wee player while Manning exhibited post pass-play emotions ranging from angry to very angry.

The highlight of the evening was the halftime extravaganza, during which Prince proved he’s still a sexy mf and The Shortest Working Man In Showbiz. Fireworks and dancers going off all around him, he strut out a fabulously staged medley, the centerpiece of which was “Purple Rain,” in the rain, naturally. In closeup, he appeared to have not aged one day since he last wore ass-baring chaps. Our party enjoyed the Michael Bay fireball that engulfed the stage, the Tron costumes of the marching band and the lingering shot of Prince’s shadow backlit onto a rippling silk banner, dampened by the rain with a humorously unfortunate blot resembling a giant erect penis.

A philosophical French sci-fi film noir inspired by a Paul Éluard poem? Now we’re talking. With a vision strange and new, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville conjures a not-too-distant future despite taking place in black-and-white on the rain-dampened streets and in the mod buildings of mid-’60s Paris with minimal dressing.

Weren’t elements of this plot swiped for an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation? A omniscient computer named Alpha 60, like a digital Big Brother, controls the city’s pill-popping technocratic inhabitants and speaks to them in French with a electronically processed voice that sounds like a belching toad or a deeper version of Boussh. There are few outbursts in Alphaville because there is no memory of the past or hope for the future, and those who behave illogically are condemned to death, as are those who use forbidden words, such as love, why or conscience; revised dictionaries are issued daily so the populace can keep up. The executions are carried out as entertainment at an indoor Olympic swimming pool. The free spirits are lined up along the edge and allowed some final words, which they usually reserve to rally against their hive mind oppressor, then they’re shot. After they topple dead into the pool, a team of synchronized swimmers leap in and perform a routine. Then the audience applauds.

A secret agent by the name of Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) is dispatched to Alphaville and soon sets out on a mission to bring down Alpha 60. Donned in fedora and trenchcoat, he moves about the city under the guise of a newspaper reporter, packing a 35mm Agfa and a revolver, both of which he fires often and with little notice. A classic film noir hero, he’s a hard-bitten chain smoker with a face as chiseled and weathered as Robert Stack’s.

Despite his impassiveness, he has more emotion than anyone else in the city, even more so after he meets Natasha (Anna Karina), a pretty confidante and guide. Alpha 60 is intrigued and has Lemmy brought in for questioning. It begins as boilerplate: what’s your name, where were you born, how old are you. Sensing a higher intelligence, Alpha 60 moves to philosophical abstraction:

Alpha 60: Do you know what illuminates the night?
Lemmy: Poetry.
Alpha 60: What is your religion?
Lemmy: I believe in the inspirations of conscience.
Alpha 60: Do you make any distinction between the mysterious principles of knowledge and those of love?
Lemmy: In my opinion, in love there is no mystery.

With that last answer especially, Alpha 60 is convinced Lemmy is lying and a bad influence. Realizing he’s worn out his welcome, our hero guns his way out with little resistance, killing the computer’s inventor/controller for good measure. The hold on its collective mind severed, Alphaville’s populace staggers around dumbfounded; most of them, we’re told, die eventually. Lemmy steals a car and hustles Natasha inside. As they speed off back to the outlands, he warns her not to look back and she says for the first time, “I love you.” Awww.

Although I can see how you could disparage Alphaville as oh so very French with its pointed artiness and meandering musing, I found it engrossing and entertaining enough.

When I first saw Superman II as a kid, it bothered me the way Zod, Ursa and Non so callously killed those astronauts on the moon. That they were allowed to drift off into space, dead or nearly so, was especially disturbing to me.

Now what startles me, rewatching the movie for the first time in years, is to learn Richard Lester, the guy who directed A Hard Day’s Night, directed the reshoots for this troubled sequel and added most of the annoying camp. I also learned that, like the original, Superman II was written by Godfather author Mario Puzo. That’s weird.

Finally, I noticed that the camera Lois uses at Niagara Falls is a late-’70s OneStep Polaroid Land Camera with rainbow “racing stripe,” a model I own as part of my Polaroid collection.

[See here and here for the two other entries in the Kid Fears series.]

Interesting reportage by Sam Roberts in the New York Times today, that 51 percent of American women live without a spouse:

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results. [...] Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

Although that’s a revealing, far-reaching statistic, I can’t believe the Times chose a photo of a single woman petting her cat to illustrate the article.

“Better than a photo of her eating a pint of Häagen-Dazs,” the photo editor probably reasoned.

Fandango, which I use to reserve tickets for many of the mass-market movies I see, recently added a feature that remembers the theaters you frequent, then provides a quick link to their showtimes. Strange that the character should sort-of resemble me, with the big lips and chin, and messy blonde hair.

He looks even more similar if I Photoshop my glasses onto him.

Ah, to be young and Warren Beatty in mid-’70s Los Angeles. His character in Shampoo, a hairdresser who dreams of one day opening his own salon, alternately coifs and beds the decade’s leading ladies, including Goldie Hawn, Julie Christie and Princess Leia.

What a handsome rake he was. If you attempted to recreate his high-volume hairstyle today, now-bannned emissions from the cases of Aqua Net alone would require a team of short-sleeved nerds from ILM to tease a googol-haired digital ’do via supercomputer. His frilly white Keith Richards blouse-shirts and turquoise rings and bangles are also beautiful, while his bluejeans appear to have been decoupaged directly to his legs and pelvis.

After flimsy excuses and broken promises but plenty of casual pre-AIDS sex, Warren is caught in flagrante delicto by girlfriend Goldie and the man whose mistress he’s schtupping. Goldie hurls a lawnchair through the poolhouse window in disgust. But Warren hasn’t learned much from his escapades other than his heart is temporarily broken and he won’t be getting the loan for his salon from that guy after all. As he observes early in the film, “After a while, women get to be an occupational hazard.”

Fortress of Solitude:

Cone of Silence:

Agony Booth:

My favorite Christmas movie fills me with cheer and testosterone.

I travel for work a lot and today I needed to book a flight for three consecutive days in early December when I’ll fly from New York to Washington, D.C. to Fort Lauderdale and back to New York.

I began with my darling JetBlue and immediately hit a snag with their Multi-City booking option, shown in this squashed screencap.

Was I missing something? How was I supposed to add the third and final leg of my trip with this interface? I called JetBlue, begrudgingly because I get double frequent-flyer miles when I book online. An agent named Barry booked my flights and at the end of the call, I asked him to reveal the secret of using the Multi-City option on JetBlue.com.

After checking with a supervisor, he told me what I needed to have done was book the first two legs of my trip using the Multi-City option, then separately book the final leg. He admitted this wasn’t intuitive, didn’t make sense to him and could have been improved. Words of wisdom from Barry, who ended up awarding me double-points even though I’d made the reservations with him.

As the web-wonks at JetBlue must know, improving this interface is doable. Travelocity, which I use sometimes, has a very intuitive Multi-Destination feature, at least for trips of four legs or fewer, shown here in a screencap. After you enter all of your legs, it even totals the cost of each possible full itinerary, which is one of the main reasons for even using a feature like this.

C’mon, JetBlue. I like everything else about you, particularly your personal televisions and potato chips; get cracking on your website. I guarantee other weary travelers have scratched their heads over this Multi-City confusion.

Like the U.S., South Korea is a country fretting over a sizeable baby boomer population fast becoming senior citizens. Solution? Why, robots!

According to a UPI article yesterday from The Korea Times, scientists at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology are developing a voice-recognition robot, dubbed H-Robot 1.0, that will care for the elderly. When it’s completed circa 2013, it will be able to monitor heart rate and blood pressure, order takeout food, clean the house and “summon help in an emergency when its owner falls to floor and doesn’t get up,” according to researcher Kim Mun-Sang, just like a LifeCall device on wheels.

Meanwhile, Samsung recently finished developing a robot that can help out the booming Korean population by rubbing some of it out. Known as the Samsung Techwin SGR-A1, it can autonomously track humans and fire an automatic weapon at them. According to Robots.net, the robot sentries will be deployed next year along the DMZ between North and South Korea, replacing 650,000 South Korean troops.

Samsung’s spec page includes the rendering shown above and lists all sorts of juicy features, such as “laser range finder,” “Intruder recognition and identification using xoom-in [sic],” even a “weapon antitheft device,” which I imagine sounds like one of those annoying repeating-pattern car alarms.

Jeez, didn’t mankind learn anything from the ED-209 and the SAINT? The nerds at Samsung apparently at least Nexflixed Short Circuit because they’ve picked up the SAINT’s spindly wickedness as well as the Evil Glowing Red Eye that’s been a hallmark of evil computers and robots for years.

When I mentioned to my coworkers that for Andie’s movie-character costume party tonight, I was dressing as mailroom clerk Norville Barnes, The Hudsucker Proxy protagonist played by Tim Robbins, I was met with responses ranging from “No one will know who that is!” to “What?” But of course everyone at the party got the reference, from “I’ve seen that movie, like, five times,” to “That’s the one where the guy jumps out the window, right? And Paul Newman’s in it?”

And that’s why these people and I are friends.

Here are some photos of Tim and myself dressed as Norville.

Costume Ingredients

• shop apron. The apron in the movie is dark gray but a dark blue denim one was the closest I could find. I was thinking of sewing buttons to the top corners like Tim’s, but I can’t sew. Plus, who cares. I bought it from a supplier in California called PK Safety Supply via Amazon.com for a mere $3.50. That’s about what it’s worth: the edges frayed and curled after I laundered it. Fortunately, the shoddy stitching of the breast pocket made it easy to remove for purposes of ironing-on the Hudsucker Industries logo using...
• Avery Ink Jet Dark T-Shirt Transfers. A pack of five iron-on sheets for $14.99 at Staples. I learned this about iron-on transfers: for dark fabrics, definitely use the “dark T-shirt” variety, not the standard “white T-shirt” variety, which will transfer barely visible to a fabric like denim. And all iron-on sheets are meant for transferring solid blocks or blobs of graphics, not detailed things like logotypes. In other words, instead of directly transferring the background-less type, I had to print the white letters on a square colored an approximate denim-blue. It turned out O.K. for the low-light environment of a typical party. I built the logo in FreeHand, opting for solid type instead of the inline type used for the “Hudsucker Industries” part of the logo. The internet identified that typeface as the anachronistic Bodega Sans (Bodega Sans Oldstyle for the S’s) and the design posse at work helped me approximate the typeface used for the logo tagline, “The Future Is Now,” as Harlow Solid.
• brown shoes. These were “Walk-Overs” from George E. Keith Co., pride of Brockton and donated a few years back by my previous boss in Ohio.
• dress shirt. I used an old J. Crew pinstriped variety I’d been planning to donate to Goodwill.
• bow tie. I couldn’t find a mostly solid-colored maroon one so I purchased a ’50s-vintage blue and silver rayon and acetate Botany clip-on. I got this at The Family Jewels, one of those funky thrift shops in Chelsea I hesitate entering because it’s never clear whether they carry any clothing for guys. I’m happy to say they have a handsome collection of bow ties piled into a velvet top hat resting atop a counter in the back corner. It cost $26, which I didn’t mind because I like supporting local shops like this. Yet it pained me to see the original 1950s price-tag still attached: $1.
• visor. Norville wears one in a few scenes, such as when he’s sorting mail. I bought a sporty denim model from Conway on the north side of W. 34th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, a Garment District stretch of intense clothing cheapness. $2.99, although I had to wait in line 10 minutes.
• trousers. I got a pair of tan Claiborne cotton dress pants in my waist size but cut “long” for hiking up above my waist ’50s style for $4.99 at the Goodwill on W. 181st Street, purchased that day I was called Papi.
• suspenders. I had a tough time finding these, unless my problem was that I wasn’t looking in enough geezer shops. I ended up getting a burgundy clip-on Y-back pair online from JCPenney for $14.99.
• a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it. In the film, Norville keeps a folded up piece of paper with him and at a moment’s notice will unfold it for display, explaining, “You know...For kids!” No one knows what the hell he’s talking about and then he goes and invents the toy based on his idea, the Hula Hoop, saving Hudsucker Industries from financial ruin while getting himself and his costume promoted from shop apron to tailored suits.

It’s another exciting video quiz featuring exterior station signage for the 1/9 and 2/3 New York City subway lines! Similar to the previous subway signage quiz, each image below is from a movie and it’s your duty to determine which. You’ll have to trust me that the symbols of the 1/2/3/9 are just visible through the falling snow in the upper-left corner of the first screencap and that the out-of-focus entrance sign in the background of the second screencap reads “Franklin St. Station.”

I suppose there are worse movies to fall asleep to than Contempt, which features Brigitte Bardot naked. Or was that just a dream? Hmm.

It’s reassuring and alarming to know an error like this exists in Microsoft Word. I’d certainly never seen it before. I’m quick to say the document I opened to summon this message wasn’t one I’d composed myself.

Continuing my series of reviewing movies or TV shows with bits that freaked me out when I was young, I recently rewatched Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, which I remember seeing on TV at some early point after it appeared in theaters in 1982. Other than Ricardo Montalban in general and several things Shatneriffic (toupee, girdle, halting speech, “Khaaan!”, etc.), there’s one big kid-freaky thing in this sequel: Ceti eels.

Y’see, to extract information about why Chekov and Captain Terrell are on Ceti Alpha Five, Khan drops a sluglike Ceti eel into each of their space helmets, then puts the helmets back on their heads and has their hands held tight behind their backs. The eels drop onto the faces of Chekov and Terrell, and as for what happens next, Khan explains:

[T]heir young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex. This has the effect of rendering the victim extremely susceptible to suggestion. Later as they [dramatic pause] grow, follows madness. Death.

In closeup, this is quite blatantly a special effect, with ears sculpted from what appear to be glycerin-sweated blocks of Hickory Farms cheese, but it’s still unsettling. No one wants a bug entering that orifice. This scene ranks up there on my list of movies with Unsettling Body Part Torture, which memorably includes teeth (no, not Marathon Man; Cast Away gets my Tremulous Wince Award), eyeballs (A Clockwork Orange or perhaps Blade Runner) and fingernails (Syriana).

Now that I finally have a Netflix account, I’m renting and rewatching movies and TV shows that freaked me out when I saw them as a kid. One of the first such shows I thought to review was from the ’80s revival of The Twilight Zone, specifically a segment from the first episode named “A Little Peace and Quiet” and directed by Wes Craven.

I would have seen this on TV in the autumn of 1985, and the story is simple enough I remembered it fairly well. A stressed out housewife unearths from her flower garden a golden necklace with a small, sundial-shaped pendant. She puts it on and discovers she can stop time by saying “shut up” and restart it by saying “start talking.”

This comes in handy for enjoying relaxing breakfasts without her four demonic children screeching and her idiot husband complaining that she hasn’t laundered something of his. She freezes time in the supermarket to nab the last box of Choco Poppers cereal. Later at home, two young preppies going door to door stop by to raise her awareness about the alarming growth of the country’s nuclear weapons arsenal. She zaps time, drags their stiffened bodies down her walk and lays them flat on her lawn. Then she retreats indoors and restarts time, much to their confusion.

This vague threat of nuclear annihilation runs through the episode, popping up in a radio broadcast early on and later during a televised newscast about stalled peace talks. And it all ends with the Russians launching the Big One, apparently directly at the housewife’s neighborhood. She freezes time at the sound of air raid sirens and wanders outside in her robe to the town’s square, where everyone is panicked and motionless. As she comes to an old man staring at the sky, she follows his gaze to see the missile of doom suspended in midair.

O.K., discard the frozen-time effects, especially earlier in the episode when the actors strain so hard to stand motionless that they waver. Definitely discard that missile, a blatantly cheesy effect even for the mid-’80s. (Sample writer-director commentary on the DVD: “We would have done that a little differently,” followed by laughter.)

Nuclear paranoia wasn’t keeping me up at night in the mid-’80s, but it may have been responsible for a certain malaise, particularly with haunting nuclear-holocaust entertainments like The Day After and the “Russians Are Bad Guys” streak in lighter fare (Rocky IV, Rambo III, etc.).

But what really freaked me out was the idea that this Twilight Zone woman was trapped forever in a purgatory of her own creation: if she restarts time, everyone dies. As I rewatched the episode I realized I had forgotten that it ends simply with a stillframe of the missile. In my mind, I had extended the story to include the woman wandering alone, taking food and making shelter wherever she needed, roaming the abandoned country, maybe at some point growing so lonely or desparate that she restarts time and ends it all. That still kinda freaks me out.

The three-day Animation Block Party wrapped tonight at the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn with a screening of 15 animated shorts, each under 15 minutes.

The biggest draw at the event, which focused on narrative works, was Henry Selick’s first solely computer-generated production, Moongirl, a fairytale of a hayseed kid who catches a jarful of fireflies. He’s spirited to the moon and meets its keeper, a girl named Lorelei who lights the satellite using the insects and an enchanted carousel. Selick made his fame as the stop-motion animator and director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, but the imaginative design and movement of his characters doesn’t translate well digitally. The large-headed kids of Moongirl are too smooth-featured and creepy, like those dolls whose eyes roll open when they’re held upright. Matters aren’t helped by dialogue stuffed with wide-eyed kid-talk clichés. As the credits rolled, I was surprised to learn the dreamy orchestral score was provided by They Might Be Giants in what’s the least They Might Be Giants-sounding music I’ve ever heard from the guys.

One of my favorite shorts was The Wraith of Cobble Hill, directed by Adam Parrish King, a film student who submitted it as the thesis project for his master of fine arts degree at the University of Southern California. He also submitted it to Sundance earlier this year and won a Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking.

It’s refreshing to have a production of wire, latex and clay mimic life instead of the surreal cartoon universes of Selick or Aardman. The antihero here is Felix, a Brooklyn teenager who lives with his apathetic, alcoholic mother. He’s entrusted by the owner of the corner bodega, from whom he shoplifts regularly, to watch the store while he’s away on vacation. The story’s quiet resignation, like something out of Raymond Carver, is a tiny epiphany of trust and duty.

It’s filmed in 16mm B&W on a Bolex, the Fisher-Price My First Camera setup of film students, but the smudged, vignetted look of the picture works in its favor, contributing to the settings of a wet winter and bleak urban interiors. King handled the sound design, too, which is amazing, especially the music and voices Felix hears muffled through the walls of his apartment. There’s some wonderful incidental dialogue, too, as Felix and his friends climb a fire escape to their building’s roof to drink 40s and he debates the merits of Space Invaders with his incredulous friends.

Sprinkled among more staid or experimental works, the funniest short of the evening was The Moustache Contest by artist, animator and comedian Mike Hollingsworth, a black-and-white stick-figure production. It revels in the ridiculousness of four sea creature buddies who challenge each other to grow the baddest-ass moustache. You can watch it here.

The most informative short and one of the most beautiful was McLaren’s Negatives, a 10-minute documentary about the films of Norman McLaren, directed by Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre using footage of and narration by McLaren, as well as his own animation techniques. These involved drawing directly on film, producing thick-lined rotoscopes, even generating sawtoothed music by hash-marking the soundtrack portion of the physical filmstrip as one would transcribe notes.

Pop quiz, hotshot: Can you name the source of these three screengrabs, each featuring exterior station signage for the 1/9 2/3 New York City subway lines?

Hint: each image is from a commercially produced video source, so I’m not putting up anything too obscure. Challenge: as you can see, when widescreen screengrabs are proportionally scaled to my blog-standard image width, they gain the size and quality of a Bazooka Joe comic.

There is additional internet network-naming nerdery going on within wi-fi distance of my home computer, referencing the four-armed Hindu god of wisdom. I’m Argo, as you will recall.

Having viewed in succession The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Weird Science, which Andrew and Jess got me in a three-pack DVD set for my birthday, I can state that it’s not only easier to bask in the magic of Anthony Michael Hall, but to realize one of director John Hughes’ key cinematic themes: the crotch shot.

Here we have the crotch of Molly Ringwald (or a crotch double) from The Breakfast Club:

Here’s the crotch of Haviland Morris (who plays Jake’s girlfriend, Caroline) in Sixteen Candles:

Weird Science doesn’t have what I’d consider a true crotch shot, so I’ll just have to go with this one of Kelly LeBrock’s midsection. Close enough.

Gah! Banana Republic’s website doesn’t work in Safari? How hard can it be to write code for one of the most standards-compliant browsers? What will all those thin WASPs and Asians with their PowerBooks do when they want to online-order something form-fitting and expensive, made of the finest Italian cashmere?

I imagine some fans of the Republic use the now sassier-than-Safari Firefox, which is compatible. And since this incompatibility was first discovered in October, Banana Republic has added the hopeful tagline, “We’re working on supporting Safari. Please check back soon.” But, here we are, three months later, and still nothing for Safari.

Humorously, there’s not a go-no-further warning when I try using the still-supported Internet Explorer 5.2 for Macintosh (Microsoft is officially abandoning the browser this Saturday, citing competition from Safari). However, the site doesn’t work under Explorer either—clicking items for details and potential purchase brings up a curiously blank page.

In what’s become a stupid in-joke (is there any other kind?), whenever this one coworker and I are talking about exacting imaginary revenge on someone particularly despised, we say that he or she needs to be “punched in the neck” or put through “a good neck-punching.”

It’s a phrase I purloined from this guy I used to work with, R.J., who had a lot of bottled up anger and creative turns of phrase. I don’t know why the idea of punching someone in the neck is so amusing to me. It’s not at all that I literally want to punch someone in the neck or otherwise hurt them; I think it’s the specificity of the word “neck.” It’s a funny sounding word, too, and who in their right mind expects to be hit there?

This thought inspired some screen-captures and Photoshop hackwork tonight for a filmstrip-sequence image I’ll be emailing to my neck punch-obsessed coworker tomorrow. (Click image for a larger version in a pop-up window.)

It helps a bit if you’ve seen the movie.

Since my company was acquired by a law journal publisher last year, it has become much more of a “corporate” entity, because the acquiring firm is much larger than ours and because it’s bristling with lawyers. We now receive all sorts of directives from upon high, including the need for all employees to take a sexual harassment training course.

These courses have come a long way since I was last subjected to an awkwardly produced VHS video on the determents of ass grabbing in the workplace. The one I took was available online via any web browser and there was a quiz at the end to ensure I learned my lesson.

The presentation kicks off with an embedded Flash video that tells the tale of Mav, Beth and Katie. “Things are about to get a little uncomfortable,” the voiceover solemnly intones over a jaunty synth-sax riff, but I wasn’t about to get my hopes up. The plot, such as it is, involves Mav, who previously dated Katie, feeling uncomfortable because of her sexual innuendos regarding the nature and precise location of Mav’s tattoo. Beth plays both the conflicted coworker and token non-white person.

Afterwards, I blew through the “what is sexual harassment” overview, which includes a brief summary on what it is, how to report it, and many grammatical errors, such as, “E-mail create’s a permanent record” and “I’m a cat lover and my co-workers constantly bug me with ‘uses for dead cats’ jokes, is this harassment?” (In case you’re wondering, a.) the grammatical error is a run-on sentence; and b.) it’s not unlawful sexual harassment, although the program demands, “Keep all harassment in check—report the behavior to HR or your supervisor.”)

To finish, the program presented me with a 15-question true-or-false quiz, on which I had to score 80% or better. It’s a good thing I passed, or else they would have moved my cubicle next to the cat lady.

The two questions I got wrong were:

Everyone working in the editorial department of one of our publications is often involved in verbal joking behavior with sexual overtones. The new reporter objects and asks for a transfer. Is it true that he is being sexually harassed?

I thought “not necessarily,” and clicked false. Damn.

The other was:

It is sexual harassment if one of our advertisers makes off-color remarks on the telephone to one of our employees.

That, too, I thought was a “not necessarily” false, particularly as the sentence didn’t state whether the magazine employee was also making off-color remarks (and he probably was, if you know anything about ad reps).

Although I passed the test, I don’t know if I learned much other than it’s against the law and/or company policy to harass someone because of his race, national origin, ethnicity, religion, age, disability or cat-love preference, but it’s only illegal “in much of the country” to discriminate because of sexual orientation. So if you’re insecure in your own sexuality, consult your in-house HR representative before making any fag jokes at work.

Why haven’t eBooks caught on? It certainly hasn’t been for a lack of trying. eBook divisions popped up at major print publishing houses a few years back, only to close a short while later. In 2001 alone, failures included Random House’s AtRandom, AOL/Time Warner’s iPublish, and MightyWords, which was majority-shareheld by Barnes & Noble’s online division. (eTexts live on in places like the great Project Gutenberg, although only for works that have fallen out of copyright.)

At the time, Wired reported that eBook failure could be chalked up to the lack of a universal format and an “eBook reading device with a high quality screen and full PDA functionality” for under $100. To my knowledge, such a device has yet to materialize.

But look what we have now: the near-universal PDF format and, as demonstrated by Apple, the price structuring and marketing savvy to sell portable devices with high-quality screens—and, while not for under $100 and not with screens large enough for reading large chunks of text—sold for a price that hasn’t stopped everyone and his brother from snapping up an mp3 player.

Maybe the length of text involved has to do with eBooks’ failure. I know I get antsy reading anything on my computer’s screen that’s more than 100 words or so and usually I’ll print longer documents to read comfortably at my desk. And I still prefer traditional print news sources to their online counterparts, particularly when reading long articles or features, as opposed to comparatively brief news items.

One company that seems to have recognized this length issue (along with the associated pricing issue) is Amazon.com, which on August 19^th quietly launched the unfortunately named Amazon Shorts section of its store, which offers short story downloads for 49 cents each in PDF format.

This sparks my imagination. Why couldn’t a concept like this be integrated with an iTunes Music Store interface or into the iTunes Music Store itself? Then my copy of iTunes could happily resemble the screenshot below. (Click image for a larger version in a pop-up window.)

I’d argue yet another reason eBooks failed was a lack of consumer knowledge that they were even available, much less where to get them. I can’t imagine most consumers ever heard of AtRandom, iPublish and MightyWords. With a iTunes Music Store-like delivery-system for electronic short stories and essays (eStories) you’d have:

1. a storefront with ultra-high name recognition and ease-of-use
2. a universal and low price model everyone can live with
3. a universal format (PDF, presumably)

I picture assembling the equivalent of short-story mixtapes to read on the subway or an airplane: a “Magic Realism Mix,” “Minimalism Mix,” “Hemingway’s Greatest Hits,” and so on. Readers could discover new authors and genres they love! Kids could illegally trade short stories on the Internet! Celebrity short story playlists!

I would think publishers and authors would embrace the concept of getting their short works online, particularly now that the music companies have paved the way for digital distribution. Recording artists like the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson must make most of their greenbacks off their back catalogs, and as such, embrace avenues like the iTunes Music Store. Why wouldn’t print publishers and authors want to dust off all those copies of The Best Short Stories and various authors’ Collected or Complete Short Stories, rescuing them from the oppressive shackles of college courses and rejuvenating them by throwing them online where they could bask in a high profile and bring in some dough?

Although I think at least one missing piece in this potential equation for success is the lack of an appropriate device on which to read eStories. Although Palm devices could be ideal, where’s my ultra-thin, wave-of-the-future folding LCD screen?

Discussing the eBook matter at brunch with Jimi this afternoon, he suggested another reason for their failure is that people simply don’t want them. Consumers prefer passive entertainments—you can’t read your eBook while you’re driving or jogging, for example, but you can listen to music on your iPod. And comsumers already have the option of digital audiobooks.

But hey, I still want my cheap, high-quality reader for eStories! As Leo, the grizzled proprieter of Bowling Green, Ohio’s late, great Paupers Books, once told me, in reference to an oft-shoplifted segment of his stock: “They’re called Pocket Books for a reason.” I want 15,000 short stories in my pocket!

Before yesterday, I had never been phished. Now that I have, I understand why people like my Mom are leery of ordering stuff off the Internet.

It starts with an email. Lord knows how these cretins knew I had just used PayPal to order something off eBay (they better not be in cahoots with the seller or heads will roll). But the email, shown as being sent from update@paypal.com, is very official-looking, with the PayPal logo and type styling. (In retrospect, however, I notice that the wording is a bit Engrish, namely “Please update your records in maximum 24 hours” and not one but two sentences beginning with “Failure to update...”)

Gosh, I better update my billing records quickly. If I don’t, I might not get that CD I just ordered, featuring two of my favorite one-hit-wonder songs from the ’80s: “Major Tom (Coming Home)” by Peter Schilling and “The Promise” by When In Rome. You can understand my concern, I’m sure.

Clicking on “Please click here to update your billing records” links me to an official-looking PayPal page where I’m not asked to log into my PayPal account in order to correct my supposedly faulty billing information, but I am asked to key-in every last shred of my personal details, including the aforementioned Mom’s maiden name, as well as my credit card info.

But what’s this? That web address doesn’t have the word PayPal in it anywhere: “http://80.53.195.18/icons/pp/update.htm?...” Let’s try going to the site from which the page is originating, the obfuscated http://80.53.195.18.

Jiminy Crickets! Why, that’s not PayPal at all, but a site belonging to some Polish hackers. I’d insert some joke here about Polish hackers if their ruse hadn’t been done well enough to likely trick an unassuming novice computer user.

May 4, 2005 Update: Today’s Onion has a story about President Bush’s identity being stolen “when he responded to an e-mail from paypal783@hotmail.com asking him to comply with PayPal security measures by entering all 12 of his credit-card numbers, his Social Security number, his passwords, and his personal identification numbers.”

May 12, 2005 Update: According to an Associated Press story today, “Next week Denver-based First Data Corp., one of the country’s largest electronic financial transaction companies, plans to release survey results showing 43 percent of adults have received a phishing contact. Five percent of those adults gave up personal information.”

Because our apartment is kept at consistently crispy crematorium levels of heat and humidity in the winter, it’s surprisingly difficult to determine how cold it really is outside. Most mornings before work, I launch my browser and go to the weather.com site I’ve bookmarked to view the current forecast. But lately, I’ve found myself wanting to shave the valuable 10 seconds that takes down to maybe 5 seconds or so. So I turned to the web to find a program that would constantly display the current temperature on my computer’s desktop. There’s an abundance of such programs out there, but almost none of them met all of my criteria:

• is free
• is small, simple, stable and compact code
• runs in the background (no icon hogging my Dock, please)
• has an elegant user interface
• shows the current weather in the toolbar

That’s all. But with the many programs I downloaded and tried, it was always something. Either I had to pay for the program or it was unbearably clunky or it had 10 other features that had nothing to do with the weather or—and this was most likely—it didn’t show the weather in the toolbar but in an annoying window hogging my preciously small 12-inch Powerbook screen.

During some intense Googling during lunch at my desk today, I came across Meteorologist. It does exactly what I want and meets all my criteria. If you run Mac OS X, I heartily recommend it. I have mine set as a Startup Item. It loads without comment upon booting my computer, then continually and automatically fetches updates on the weather from Central Park every 15 minutes, displaying it in my toolbar, along with an optional little graphical representation.

(For all y’all non-Mac people, the other thingies depicted below in my toolbar are for other nerdy purposes, like telling me how strong my wireless internet signal is, how soon my battery is going to die, and how many more days before CSI: Miami is on again.)

The program’s real power is unleashed when you click on the weather itself, depicted below in a shrunken-down screenshot.

Boing! Here, you can check details on the current conditions (wind speed, humidity, etc.) and get a forecast for the next several days. You can also add other cities’ weather to appear in these fold-out menus, like, say, Cleveland or Laramie, Wyoming or Dublin. Gravy!

Update, March 7: Now that I’ve tested Meteorologist for a few days, I may need to knock down my appreciation a notch; when my PowerBook wakes from sleep (I rarely turn it off), the current temperature doesn’t automatically refresh, which I think it should do, like the current time does. Hopefully, this change will be made in an new version.

1982. I didn’t own Thriller, but my friend Kevin did. It was cool to own Thriller (in record format, of course) and Kevin had other cool stuff, like a dirt bike, a ColecoVision, mad karate skills, and a way with the ladies. I distinctly recall preferring “Weird Al” Yankovic’s parody version of “Beat It” (one of the many hit singles from Thriller), which was cleverly entitled “Eat It.” Needless to say, I did not have a way with the ladies.

circa 1985-1986. My favorite song during the class roller skate night at Ohio Skate was “ABC” by the Jackson 5. A super joyous rhythm on which to unsteadily circle ‘round, discoball lights flashing on the darkened rink floor. Please don’t forget that the song has the Best Bridge Ever, as shouted out by Michael:

Sit down, girl!
I think I love you!
No!
Get up, girl!
Show me what you can do!

Incidentally, my second favorite song during the class roller skate night at Ohio Skate was “Word Up!” by Cameo.

1988. My junior-high class got to choose a song to play during our “graduation” and we chose “Devil Inside” by INXS, because it clearly summed up our “school spirit,” plus it had a sweet beat. Somehow this choice was overruled and the song ended up being Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror.” Damn you, Mrs. Gray.

late-1990s to present. One of my friend Jimi’s occasional interjections is to say “You ain’t bad! You ain’t nothin’!” in a Michael Jacksonish voice. I never realized what this referenced until he explained that it’s a line of dialogue from the extended version of the “Bad” video. In it, Michael plays a kid named Daryl who berates some hoodlums with the phrase after they try to get him to revert to his “bad” ways. Of course, Jimi also refers to himself as “Jimi” (“Jimi says nothing.”), which apparently is a Seinfeld reference, but I think that one’s just pure Jimi.

today. I’ve been downloading arcade games to play on my Mac using MAME, an emulation program. I’ve long since accrued all the classics from the ’80s, of which Tempest is my favorite. Looking for more recent games today, I came across Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, released into the arcades in 1990 by Sega.

It’s great! The background music includes Muzak versions of Jackson songs like “Bad,” “Smooth Criminal” and “Billie Jean.” Many of the game’s scenes are supposed to be based on the Moonwalker movie from 1988, which I’ve never seen. (But with a cast that includes Mick Jagger, Joe Pesci and Lech Walesa(!), how could I not have seen it?). When you hit the “insert coin” button, there’s a sample of Michael’s high-pitched “whoo-hoo!”; a slower version of this sample is used when Michael “dies” in the game. Ha ha!

Michael’s “special power” is Dance Magic, which causes all enemies on the screen to dance in unison with him until they are magically dispatched in clouds of smoke. Michael can also turn into a giant robot after touching his chimp, Bubbles.

And finally (I really wish I were making this up), bonus points are added by “touching” children in distress throughout the game.

They thank Michael, then they run directly away from him in an amusing fashion.