An unfortunate series of words

Seen in the paper today (April 10) was an advertisement for department store bigwigs TJ Maxx. I haven't been able to find this ad online, but the header is "Clearance Gone WILD"! Yeah. Echoing, natch, "Girls Gone Wild", the no-core porn phenom produced by Joe Francis. Joe Francis who is destined for the cheapskate circle of hell. Hey man, go ahead and show the coeds' tits, but get model releases and give them at least enough money for an iced latte. Anyway, it's kind of a not-good association for a sale that includes "misses', juniors' & kids spring tops & bottoms." And yeah, you could read more and more into it.

Of course, this company has also had some hacker trouble. The twenty-first century hasn't been all that good to them.

Now that's a party

Charles on Fire

Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false calms),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
"Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man you are sunk." No one but squated
The shoulders of his own unloveliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served he meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
"Say," said the same young man, "In Paris, France,
They do it this way"--bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once glowed itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.
--James Merrill

Questions for James Carville

Okay, so Bill Clinton hired Bill Richardson for his cabinet back in the day. That apparently means that Bill C can tell Bill R how to vote, at the risk of Bill R being deemed a Judas.

First question: How long is this in effect? Do the Clinton's still have final say in the 2020 election? And can Richardson speed this up? Say he returns his Secretary of Energy salary, is he his own man again now?

Also, why is it a betrayal for Richardson to endorse Obama, but not for him to run for President himself? My understanding was that he was at least tacitly endorsing himself for the nomination back then. Or is that too subtle?

"The only place where a policeman's job is easy is in a police state."

As you can see above, Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine cut the late Charlton Heston down to size. And that was a good thing for both of them. As infamous as the scene came to be, there's very little posturing. It's just an imperfect but bracing exchange of ideas, with some facts and emotions that won't fit in the box. Heston here is neither the bold conservative hero nor a gun lobby shill. He's a man with some interesting ideas and no answers. But his comments on Americans having blood on our hands indicates that while he's starred in Hollywood Westerns, he doesn't believe all the myths of the Western frontier.

Heston, of course, died Saturday. He is much memorialized today. Both Ty Burr's flawed yet sincere elegy in The Boston Globe and Self-Styled Siren's penetrating blog-essay are worth reading. I'd just like to clear up a couple of points.

First of all, it's easy to make too much of his playing a Mexican in Touch of Evil. For most of its history, Latin actors in Hollywood have hidden their roots, and some Anglo or otherwise Northern actors have taken lead parts written as Latin. Cesar Romero and John Gavin are two cases in point. On the other side, so is Romero's sometime lover Tyrone Power, who played the California Spanish adventurer Zorro. And only a few years before TOE that Huguenot-Irish Marlon Brando got an Oscar nomination* for playing Emiliano Zapata.

No, Heston's accomplishment was not in playing an ethnicity, and thankfully he does not straitch out hees vowels, senyor. Rather, he captures a type, a strong moral absolutist who believes in right behavior, clear distinctions, and no shortcuts. Orson Welles, by contrast, is a moral relativist like most of us are. His tragedy is that he has power to back it up, and you know what they say about power.

Heston's seriousness was also not all it seemed. Onscreen, he did have the presence of a preacher and a prophet. And yes, he leant this quality to projects he believed in. But it was both an effect and an affect, and he was aware of this. For Heaven's sake, the man starred in an SNL skit called "The President Has Mustard on his Chin."

His history with the "Planet of the Apes" franchise also shows a skilled tongue in cheek. The 1968 original had a goofed-up premise, but was played absolutely straight, and for the better. Tim Burton's remake played it mostly straight, but not as well. Heston made a memorable cameo, however, as an angry and dying chimp patriarch, one traumatized by the humans' firearms (!). He and Paul Giamatti as the orang slave trader provide signs that the film would have worked better as a fantastique comedy throughout.

Actors in general are not as fascinating as the ink and photons spilled on them would indicate. But some notably make the movies and the world more fun. Charlton Heston succeeded here.

*Much to my embarassment and Elia Kazan's chagrin, Brando didn't actually win. Thanks to Michael in comments for fact-checking.

Where is this town and what are the rents like?

More good stuff from the bestest stick figure site on the net, xkcd.

A triumphant Friday Random Ten

A competitive field, today.

1. TV on the Radio--Dreams
2. Bobby Conn & the Glass Gypsies--Style I Need
3. Neil Young--Sedan Delivery
4. Charlie Parker--These Foolish Things
5. The Who--Our Love Was
6. Fishbone--Change
7. Elvis Costello & the Attractions--Moods for Moderns
8. The White Stripes--I Want to Be the Boy to Warm Your Mother's Heart
9. Nick Drake--Hazey Jane 1
10. The Fiery Furnaces--Black-Hearted Boy

He got a diploma?

Lawyers, it is said, consistently rank among the lowest professions in terms of public respect. This is almost certainly unfair, as any one of use could be in dire need of an attorney tomorrow. It is hard, though, to imagine needing John Yoo, at least in a legal capacity.

The released Yoo memos (no doubt there are unreleased/destroyed ones that are outside our purview) have drawn comment for their most obvious traits, ie sadism and cold evil. But what may be even more disrurbing is the crudity of Yoo's thinking. He seems not to have been a Machiavellian counselor in the Kissinger mode so much as an armchair torturer who happened to have a degree. Case in point.

The document disclosed, for example, that the administration's top lawyers had declared that the president has unfettered power to seize oceangoing ships as commander in chief; that Congress has no ability to pass legislation governing the interrogations of enemy combatants; and that federal laws prohibiting assault and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives.

One section discussed to what extent the president might be allowed to legally maim a prisoner, such as through the use of a "scalding, corrosive, or caustic substance." A footnote argued that Fifth Amendment guarantees of due-process rights "do not address actions the Executive takes in conducting a military campaign against the Nation's enemies."

With that last sentence, in place of "do not address" a sane person might say "do not make exceptions for." The thrust of Yoo's arguments could be refuted by anyone with a copy of the constitution and a working knowledge of the alphabet. Which may be why his federal clients like to stay away from non-rigged trials.

As to why this man is teaching at Berkeley, I can only assume he plays an excellent game of squash.