James Ellroy - Maestro

I've been listening to The Big Nowhere on audiotape again.  I'm following the labyrinthine plot with much more ease this time around.  The killer still seems to come out of nowhere--but it's the story of Danny Upshaw which amazes and humbles me.  When I first read the novel, which is an epic reimagining of the LA police culture circa 1950, I considered it to be the most racist, homophobic pile of shit ever collected between two covers.  Then it grew on me.  Writers of the stature of James Ellroy and Joyce Carol Oates inhabit their characters' skins, they dream their dreams and experience their traumas.  Their characters live and make choices.  Ellroy and Oates aren't afraid of large, operatic gesture, because they're always connected to their characters' inner lives.  Thus, when (*spoiler alert*) Danny Upshaw first puts a gun in his mouth and gags on the taste of oil and then decides not to go out that way, but takes a serrated kitchen knife and slices his own throat ear to ear, rather than come out of the closet as a gay man, it is an act which is firmly rooted in character.  It is also literary hyperbole.  I hated James Ellroy for it.  But that's because I confused the attitudes of the characters with the attitude of the writer.  And the more I meditated on the issue, the greater the divide between the two grew.  Ellroy exposes the mendacity and horror of the 50's, the age of hysteria, nuclear weapons, communism, the birth of sexual politics, with his characters.  He doesn't preach from the point of view of an omnicient narrator.  As a result, his impact is far, far greater.  Danny Upshaw commits suicide because he too greatly fears the truth about himself.  Who among us does not know somebody, somewhere, who has done the same?

The Best Reason to Read William F. Buckley, Jr.

There really is no "best" reason.  There is only one reason.  To increase one's vocabulary.  For example, Mr. Buckley has my enduring gratitude for teaching me a new word for masturbation: onanism.  According to www.dictionary.com, onanism can mean either coitus interruptus or self-stimulation to the point of orgasm.  Two bangs for one buck, as it were.  Another excellent word gleaned from Mr. Buckley's florid dissertations  is encomium, meaning: "warm, glowing praise."  Though I will never provide encomiums for the substance of Mr. Buckley's onanistic prose--I certainly will for his words.  Thank you, Mr.Buckley, for increasing my word power. 

The Mission of the Passion

Mel Gibson's pathogenic cash cow Passion of the Christ returns to the cineplexes today with six minutes of the most extreme violence excised so that you can feel free to take your pre-adolescent confirmands.  According to the IMDB, this Passion re-cut is slated to go into perennial release around this time of the year--much like The Greatest Story Ever Told in the 70's and Jesus of Nazareth in the '80s.  Unlike Passion of the Christ, those two former films actually feature some of the tenants of Christian faith, and depict the crucifiction in context.  Make no mistake, Passion of the Christ is not revealed truth as so many would have it, but a cynical money grab by Hollywood whores.  It's a movie for goodness' sake, not holy writ.  So, with no golden Oscars to show for itself, it returns to secure more lucre from evangelical fools who worship the appearance of faith and belief over its truth and substance: the essence of the golden calf.  Idolatry and blasphemy.

Cest La Vie

Michael Jackson--I hear that Paris is beautiful this time of year.  Time to start thinking about your emigre status and seek asylum in a foreign land which doesn't extradite and would leap at the chance to stick it to the Americans yet again.  That land of wine and cheese is France.  Next year at this time I imagine you will be sipping pernod at an outdoor cafe with Roman Polanski. 

The High Road

When taking the high road. . .

traction tires are often required.

Suddenly Success

Oh, the horrors of trying to set up a wireless router.  The horror of DNS numbers and IP addresses and having to call India for support.  But with all of that behind me, I am able to connect to the internet as well as AOL and I'm happy.  There are still bugs in the system, but things are at least working and with a little tinkering, I'm sure I'll be able to get the home network ship-shape. 

Viewsonic.  Top of the line monitors.  However, there's something in my chemistry that kills them.  About a month ago my monitor at work gave a loud snap, something flashed at the vent on top, and then smoke started to pour out.  It had died extravagantly.  Then, this past Friday, my home unit gave up the ghost.  Blip!  And dead.  So I have a new Samsung SyncMaster 712n flat screen that was on sale at CompUSA and boy am I happy.  The Samsungs are the best.  The secret of great flat screen performance is to let them do what they were meant to do: take your resolution to the highest ratio in your Screen Settings.  Then the text will be crisp and clean and (small) but you get used to it.  It's so much better than the blurriness seen at higher resolutions even though the actual text is larger. 

If you want a larger font, you can always go into the advanced settings and click on 120 DPI--which I have done.  It makes text very readable.

Tried As Adults, Part 3

Today the Supreme Court struck down the practice in 19 states of putting to death criminals who committed their crimes as juveniles.  Once again the split decision was a 5-4 with O'Connor swinging to the right end of the spectrum and joining the Scalia faction in opposition to the majority, which issued an eloquent and cogent opinion rendered by Justice Kennedy.  I have long been suspicious of the term "state's rights" and have considered it little more than an excuse for the Jim Crow laws that dominated the South in the first half of the 20th Century.  Later, it became the cri de cour of those who would defend and excuse the practice of throwing queers in jail for "unnatural acts."  But how times do change!  Nowadays, state's rights (Federalism) is the only thing that allows Massachusetts to legally recognize same gender marriage.  So it is a mixed blessing.  And in our contentious political climate, it's good that we have such staunch defenders of state's rights as Scalia and Rehnquist.  The inner cynic, however, believes that Scalia's thundering denouncement of today's decision: "The court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our nation's moral standards" offends Scalia only because he personally disagrees.  If the court's "moral arbitration" fell on the side of conservative entrenchment rather than enlightened progress, he would find no reason to object.