Here and There

Finished reading My Life, Bill Clinton’s autobiography, today. Overall, I’m pleased with having read it, but I’m reluctant to recommend it, for many reasons.

One of the reasons, I should make clear here, is not what the book is commonly criticized for: long-windedness. The length of the book never bothered me, as I felt totally engaged (or entertained) the whole time.

My criticism deals more with the tone and substance of the book.

At times in the book, especially once he begins discussing how political career got underway in Arkansas in the early 1970s, I feel he does what politicians do: politicking. Call it sugar-coating, proselytising, or just old-fashioned bullshitting, a large part of the final 600 or so pages read much like a stump speech. This, of course, is when Clinton isn’t bogged down in policy detail.

I did also, at times, get annoyed with the conversational tone of the book. But in hindsight, thinking back on hearing the man speak, and considering his upbring in the South, I can forgive it. I also amused my easily-amused self giving my head voice reading of the book a Clinton drawl.

The things I appreciate about My Life are its telling of the history of the last half of the twentieth century, its insight into the first Democratic president since FDR to hold office for two terms, and its discussion of 1990s politics, bias and all.

Clinton’s discussion of his childhood isn’t particularly inspiring. That’s true mostly due to how abnormal a situation he lived in. It is, overall, very telling as to what kind of politician he would become, from how his values were shaped to his uncanny ability to survive under intense opposition.

Even his writings about his presidency are insightful, and probably because I was more or less apathetic in those days. I came of age, so to speak, in the ’90s, and for a large part of the decade, was more concerned with myself than politics. This came after a good three or four years of latching onto liberal punk rock politics of the late ’80s and early ’90s (The Bush Years). I’m not sure if it was my biological clock or the relief that in 1992, finally, a Democrat was elected. Either way, I dropped out. It was nice to do some catch-up by reading the book.

Ultimately, I’m glad I read it, but I feel the responsible thing to do now would be to search out alternate tellings of the Clinton presidency from some of the key players (Gingrich, Dole, et. al.) or respected historians of the era. We’ll see if I can muster the patience to be less well-entertained reading about the same stuff.

Oh, and as for my non-recommendation: I judge myself to be a bigger dork for history and politics than most. If you feel inclined to read My Life, be warned: you will more than likely be bored out of your mind!

Brilliant!

This from the U.S. representative from the same district in Colorado where the Columbine massacre happened.

Gee, Mr. Tancredo, why not just send some of your angry hometown teenagers over there?

Most people who know me know I don’t watch a lot of television. The fact that I know Jimmy got kicked off “Hell’s Kitchen” last week is pure coincidence, I promise.

I live in San Francisco, and I don’t have cable. For all you non-San Franciscans, that means I pick up a whopping total of five channels, audio AND video. And that’s on a good day.

But this isn’t about TV. Well, not directly.

I add myself to the 1.3 million nightly viewers of The Daily Show, though I’m entirely at the mercy of the clips the show makes available on their Web site.

Last week, Jon Stewart had a guest on his show who really struck a chord with me. His name is Bernard Goldberg, and he’s the author of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37), a book that takes a detailed look at what’s ruining our republic.

Early in the interview, Stewart says of the book, “First of all, thank you. To have a handy guide to America’s 100 enemies …” Who knows, maybe the sarcasm is lost on Goldberg, who replies, “Yeah.”

Stewart goes on, cheapening Goldberg’s thesis by saying, “It’s like one of those bar games … where you sit around going, ‘You know who I hate?’”

Goldberg’s defense, “No, that wasn’t … that wasn’t it. There’s a serious part to the book, and I hope, I hope people find part of it funny” is beyond pathetic.

“A lot of people out there, and I bet a lot of people in this audience, have noticed that we have gotten angrier in the culture, we’ve gotten nastier, we’ve gotten more vulgar.”

A minute later, Goldberg further elucidates his argument. “I don’t think that liberals anymore than conservatives want to sit around during the family hour with their kids and watch a show that has one cheesy sex joke after another. I mean, I’m not the Church Lady … I don’t care what people say.” Then, to stave off Stewart’s obvious opening, he says “Don’t do it, c’mon.” Goldberg’s discomfort is now apparent. He goes on, “… the people who seem to care most about the environment somehow seem not to think that the cultural environment is all that important.”

You know what, Bernard? You’re right. I for one could care less, and it’s not a matter of “Change the channel” if you don’t like it. Not for me.

Stewart makes a point I strongly agree with. “This always seems like a red herring argument to me. People always say this, ‘The culture is getting more crass.’”

Stewart didn’t mention Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin, to name just a few recent examples of people who’ve been accused of “screwing up the country,” an interesting choice of words in and of itself.

As Stewart says, “The culture war seems fake … most everyone in your book is powerless … but there is a larger issue of people in power creating problems, not Barbra Streisand on her blog. So much focus is on culture, and so little is on government and the real seats of power … in Washington, transparency is the real issue. And I wish smart guys like you spend more time, not worrying about Barbra Streisand, but worrying about, you know, Richard Perle, Karl Rove, or whoever the Democrats would’ve had in that position during the Clinton years.“

Modern America is too complex, too connected (yet somehow also isolated), too full of contradictions to spend time worrying about wardrobe malfunctions, “curse” words, and purple dinosaurs. And, c’mon, every generation pushes the boundaries of the last.

There’s a war going on, remember? A couple of wars, really. There’s a grand jury investigation of the current administration going on. We’ve still got record budget deficits, trade deficits, and no agreement for how to fix Social Security. I can handle a couple of epithets by some nitwits in suburbia with a show on public access cable. I’m more concerned with who’s really running the show.

© 2005 Jeff Hunt. All rights reserved.

With “Batman Begins,” we see the origin of the caped crusader, and how he came to be such a dark character with a penchant for treating criminals like the scum that they are. Trust me, it’s not as boring as the unmasking of Deep Throat, or the origins of Darth Vader. It’s truly a darker version than what we’ve been shown in the past.

Batman first hit the screen in the ‘60s with the campy film and TV program where sound effects were visualized, and it wasn’t too hard to imagine the cast breaking out into a surfing number. Adam West has remained faithful to his role as the caped crusader who ran around with a teenaged boy in tiny green shorts, on his personal homepage. I’m not sure how long he’s had his little cave on the Internet, but I think it’s safe to assume that ever since Batman was revamped beginning with Tim Burton’s stab in 1989, West has been using the past as a crutch for his career.

The Atari-2600-with-Flash landing page of West’s site beckons the visitor (with a Pow! Bif! Enter!) to a second main page, where we’re treated to three images that speak volumes: There’s the caped crusader from the ‘60s TV show; another image from the same era with the hero unmasking himself to show the young West underneath; and the prominently-placed image of West now, looking like a version of Robert Redford who left his sunglasses on too long.

West’s site betrays the same actor/character confusion seen on so many of these masked-man fan pages: that’s right, the URL is Adam West’s, but someone, not sure exactly who, is telling us about fighting crime and keeping Gotham safe. There are Bat Photos, none of which loaded properly on several different browsers at the time of this writing; the Bat Computer, a DOS-simulated do-nothing page; the requisite store; and, well, that’s it, really. No real meatiness.

The cheap fun really begins at robintheboywonder.com, the site for Batman’s TV sidekick. Like his co-star, Burt Ward starts things off with a blast from the past: a few images of Boy Wonder juxtaposed with an up-to-date shot of Ward in a brown suit, striking a Raging Bull “come get me, punk” pose. This site could double as the Internet address for a law firm or a bail bondman, with portraits of the actor in a bad suit standing in front of a rocky wall. Ward’s sense of humor shines, though, when he tells us “it’s been almost 40 years since I begrudgingly wrestled with those tights for the first time. I still start to itch just thinking of them!”

These sixties icons are not the only ones playing the forget-me-not game. With the conclusion of the Star Wars saga, “Revenge of the Sith,” there are four masked characters that might be sweating bullets inside of their costumes.

“Sith” wraps up the six-film series with the re-masking of Anakin Skywalker, transforming him into Darth Vader. In the late 1970s, the man behind the original Vader mask, David Prowse, put together an impromptu convention appearance called “Men Behind the Masks” in Pasadena, California. The “Men” consisted of Prowse, Peter Mayhew of Chewbacca fame, and Kenny Baker, the dwarf inside R2-D2. The connection was obvious: these guys weren’t Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Sir Alec Guinness, nor Carrie Fisher, yet their roles in the original trilogy were just as vital. Be they freakishly tall or abnormally short, these three actors stole their own spotlight on the Star Wars convention set.

And where are they now? They’re in cyber space, of course, using their official websites to hang on to (masked) fame for dear life.

Prowse, the bodybuilder-turned-actor to whom Lucas originally offered the role of Chewbacca, ended up choosing Lucas’s second offer — Vader. “[P]eople will always remember the villain,” Prowse writes. Ah, the clairvoyance of this man whom British audiences may also recognize as the Green Cross Code Man, a silly concoction of the Department of Transport in the late 1970s for which Prowse dressed in a green and white spandex outfit and instructed the same kids Vader was scaring the bejesus out of how to cross the street. But will people ever remember the man behind the mask of the villain?

Prowse knows how to run a Star Wars fan site: merchandise is the first link. But there’s nothing actually for sale here; autographed photos and Prowse’s prose volume “Straight From the Force’s Mouth” are found elsewhere.

In his Health Problems section, the actor discusses … his health problems, for which we pity him. But reading of Prowse’s multiple hip surgeries, blood poisonings, and other borderline chronic ailments, you half expect the story to end with “and then I found myself on the fiery shores of Mustafar, my limbs having been sliced off by Obi-Wan, and the rest of my burnt torso a languid stump of my former self.”

The news section of Prowse’s site is really just a bulletin board for fans. Among the sycophantic blah-blahs, one fan writes, lovingly, “Wookie power!!” May I suggest petermayhew.com (see below).

No one in their right mind feels sorry for a little person just because they’re little. And especially not one lucky enough to have played possibly the coolest robot of all time. But looking at the Web site of Kenny Baker, the little man inside R2-D2, you have to wonder whether Lucas could’ve given his friend a little digital help or maybe some kind of stipend to spruce things up. First of all, Baker tells visitors, just below little Flash-powered dancing R2s, that he’s still “waiting the call” to begin filming “Attack of the Clones.” That puts the last update of this page no later than 2002, when photography for the movie finished. Also, Baker’s photo on the page is of him in middle-age. Only by delving further into his barely-digital universe do you learn that he’s currently … getting up there: he’ll be 71 in August.

As is common to these split-personality sites, there’s an R2 section and a Kenny section. The R2-D2 link is a place where a paltry three facts are offered, and the rest are summoned, begged for by the actor.

Then there’s Baker’s slip-up on the FAQ page, where he admits his favorite role was that of “Fidgit” in Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits.”

The Picture Gallery is a diverse well of images, from the strapping youth in a tux playing xylophone and smiling to the nonplused grumpy old man signing an R2-ograph. The images are heavily pixellated and not arranged in any kind of appealing way. George Lucas: you owe this man a redesign!

“I suggest a new strategy: Let the Wookie win,” or so R2 was told by his Stan Laurel-esque counterpart, C3-PO. Chewbacca is the lovable walking carpet who, in four of the six Star Wars films, is always there to lend his strength to the forces of good.

And, as you learn by visiting petermayhew.com, the man behind Chewie’s mask is Peter Mayhew. You may be struck upon arrival by the split image, half Mayhew’s face, half Chewbacca’s, which takes you to the identity of your choice. This “official home page of the mighty Wookie” reiterates that Mayhew was Lucas’s second choice to play Chewbacca, after Prowse. Though carefully delineated, most of the site seems to confuse the two “roles” Mayhew plays. In the “Peter” section, for example, we learn that Mayhew wore the Wookie outfit when he accepted a lifetime achievement award at the 1997 MTV Movie Awards. Shouldn’t this be in Chewbacca’s section of the site?

A little sad, too, that Chewbacca’s biography is a better read than Mayhew’s. As a young Wookie, Chewie was liberated from slavery by Han Solo, was Han and Leia’s babysitter, and eventually brought a Wookling to Luke Skywalker’s Jedi academy. Mayhew (who looks like the hybrid spawn of Howard Stern and Joey Ramone, minus the shades or the bangs), on the other hand, was a 7’ 3” hospital worker who got the role for his height. Yawn…

The website of another Star Wars second-tier celeb, Anthony Daniels, the man behind C3-PO, is more polished, but has features just as mind-boggling as his fellow non-famous actors. There is, for example, an entire section called The Dark Side, in which Daniels implores his loyal followers to beware: C3-PO/Anthony Daniels impostors abound! Don’t be fooled! “And of course, buying from any web site that doesn’t display a clear photo of the actual autograph, is just another way of living stupidly.” Got it. Thanks for being as annoying as the droid you play in movies.

Of those surveyed at here, Burt Ward’s site is the best. It’s practical, well-designed, well-informed, and, well, the least desperate. It’s also the only one that’s openly-Canadian, and maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with it.

But degrees of spiffiness aside, these actors of yesterday are clamoring to reinvent themselves through their websites. Surely they must realize what they’re up against. The niches they’ve carved in the vast and ever-growing world of popular culture are based on their identities as masked-men. While there will never be a shortage of curiosity for who lies behind the mask, these actors efforts to emerge from their roles is in itself a form of entertainment.

But questions remain.

With their respective roles now over, will these actors get a chance to play anything else? Or have they been ghettoized to the corners of the “my personal homepage” universe? And are their
websites helping them land other roles or only cementing their fates as hasbeens (or hardly-wases)?

© 2005 Jeff Hunt. All rights reserved.

I fought the urge to have a blog for a long time. Apparently, it was the right move, evidenced by the few friends who, upon learning I had thrown in the towel on my resistance, laughed in disbelief, then immediately questioned my intentions. Rightly so.

One of my aforementioned friends went so far as to suggest, “surely I’m not your only friend to give you shit for this, Jeff.”

So let me lay it out here for all of you, whether you’re a believer or a skeptic.

There’s a lot wrong with blogs. First, the name. Too close to “blob” and “log,” two things I don’t want to spend a lot of time either producing or consuming.

Then there’s the implicit self-centeredness to them. One of my push-button defenses is to explain to my detractors that I refuse to discuss mood or what I did today or what that girl in science class thinks of me. Basically, this blog is not meant for posts such as the one you’re reading right now. You won’t find any mood icons here.

I aspire to do journalism. I want to write about people, things, places. I want to learn about the world and the gazillion things going on in it every day. I often write about those things, those people and places, and try to get those pieces of writing published so that people can read them and respond, and a dialog will be born.

Setting my stubbornness aside for a moment, I see that having my own forum for such a dialog isn’t such a bad idea. Plus, I have total and ultimate control over communication in this little space. Fun.

As it says in the tagline, this site is meant to discuss topics both serious and ridiculous, from the salient to the absurd. Many topics run the full range, of course, and they’re all the more compelling because of it.

So basically this will be a space for two types of writing: those I would never dream of trying to get published, and those that no one in their right mind would print. Other than that, I’m excited to say I have no idea what I will write about. I never do.

Some of it will be heavily researched and edited, some written off the cuff. Some will be time-sensitive, meant to be read the day or week they’re posted, while others will be evergreen. Some will be long-winded, my attempt to go in-depth, perhaps, or, more likely, me rambling on as if I knew anything; others will be short and to the point. I consider this post you’re reading an example of mid-length, for your reference.

So, for what it’s worth, enjoy. Like I said, my main goal is to create dialog, so feel free to leave comments, especially lewd ones.