John Currin On Islamic Terrorism

Ever since I've arrived in DC, I've been keeping my eyes peeled for exhibitions of John Currin's work. I can't get enough of his paintings. Since his paintings sell in the seven figure range now I guess I'll never have a Currin hanging in the living room. Which is just as well, because the wife says the faces on the women he paints creeps her out.

I was reading an interview GQ did with Currin and it was pretty dull reading until this little curve ball:

"I'm gonna have a fucking fatwa on me for saying this," he says, "but I had a kind of cockamamy political idea that this is what we're fighting the Islamists with: They've got the Koran, and we've got the best porn ever made! I mean that as a joke but also as something that's literally true."

Don't forget the Daisycutter, John. Porn and the Daisycutter will make the world safe for peace, love, and understanding.

I also admire Currin's take on the Danish cartoon controversy. I wasn't too impressed by the spinelessness of the American media when the story first broke. Neither was Currin:

"There was a total capitulation to that on the part The New York Times and other major newspapers," he says. "By not printing the cartoons, they pretty much said, `We've decided we don't need to show them even though people have been killed over them.' Somehow, it was more important to show a picture of Britney Spears. That's of compelling interest, but you can't show what all the hubbub is about? It just made me think, Wow, we're losing this battle because they're winning by intimidation."

GQ is obviously taking a bold stand on this controversy by printing Currin's comments now, when his fellow artists need to hear his opinions the most. I like how they buried the most attention grabbing stuff at the back of the article. Finally, I couldn't help but notice the assumption made by the author of this interview, Howie Kahn:

"In the European theater," he says - and here Currin uses the word porn in a more symbolic sense, as a reference to the sum of his leftist ideals - "the question seemed to be, 'Who's going to win? Allah or porn?' Personally, I hope we win. I hope porn wins."

"Leftist ideals"? There is no mention anywhere about any of Currin's political beliefs. The only political message I got from his comments was his belief in freedom of speech. Currin does refer earlier to "the death of liberal societies" but I assumed he was using it as an adjective, not a specific reference to a political platform. I don't see anything specifically leftist about freedom of speech.

I think Kahn might have come up with something more interesting if he'd investigated these comments a little further:

I ask him what did happen, and he brings up falling European birthrates - "You think about the idealized European sexual creature who can be turned on by anything, the fresh produce from the garden, putting a strawberry on her nipple, but it starts to seem silly when you realize that they don't know how to have babies anymore" - and then launches, with great feeling, into a discourse on pornography as a kind of armament in an ongoing culture war.

It sounds like Currin has been reading Mark Steyn or The New Criterion in his free time, but for reasons that I can't understand Howie Kahn decided to pass on an opportunity to write an article with some teeth.

Lost , Season 3, Episode 14, "Expose"

Grifters. That's just what Lost needed was more con artists. Since one confidence man, Sawyer, wasn't enough the writers decided they needed two more schemers. Come to think of it there are a total of four rip off artistes making appearances on the show at any given time if you count Locke's father. Is it a strained metaphor for how the writers feel about their relationship with their audience?

I felt indifferent to Paulo and Nikki when they were first introduced on the show. I didn't feel as enraged as some Lost fans but their introduction did feel abrupt and forced.

However, after watching this episode I'd have to say that this is one of the better episodes I've seen this season. I didn't feel like posting about the episode last week as I felt I was spinning my wheels critically. This episode gave the fans a lot of red meat.

This is one of those rare occasions when the flashbacks helped advance the plot of the entire episode in a tangible way. The back story moved at a nice clip. The introduction explained who Nikki and Paulo were before they came to the island, and then the flashbacks proceeded to tell their story and filled in some of the gaps from other episodes. It was nice to see some dangling plot threads - Charley confessed to Sun that he and Sawyer were behind her kidnapping - get resolved.

It was well edited and I enjoyed how the writers worked backward to explain how the characters died. The final scene with Sawyer and Hurley burying Paulo and Nikki was straight out of Tales From The Crypt. I still feel ambivalent about the characters. If they stay buried alive that would be horrible, but on the other hand they do strike me as being redundant. I guess if I feel that way the writers still haven't sold me on the necessity of keeping this pair of confidence artists around.

There is nothing sadder than an ageing punk...

Xenu, I feel old. South Park has been on the air for ten years. It's become an institution like The Simpsons, but still funny. Yesterday I finally got around to reading this South Park article in the Rolling Stone, and tonight I got off my fat ass and started blogging about it.

I found it very inspirational:

While Stone is in fact deeply immersed in politics and a serious reader of nonfiction books about the Middle East, I practically have to wrestle him to hear a smidge of his politics: He's against the War on Drugs, pro-gay marriage, against socialized medicine and basically in favor of free markets, except in cases like dropping public funding for roads or education.

Penn Jillette explains why South Park is so funny:

"If Matt and Trey came out and said what they were about, all of a sudden people would watch the show with a map," says Penn Jillette, a close friend. "But you shouldn't have a map to look at during the ride. You must trust the art and not the artist. They'll never say what they're about."

I stopped watching the show for a while but have warmed up to it again over the last year. It can be pretty stupid but it can also be very smart. The Scientology episode that they aired was surprisingly well researched. Here's to ten more years!

Masters of Horror: Homecoming

Masters of Horror: Homecoming. Directed by Joe Dante. Starring Jon Tenney, Thea Gill, Robert Picardo, and Terry David Mulligan.

"This ain't my DC," I said to myself while I was watching this episode of Masters of Horror. Terry David Mulligan, a DJ from Vancouver, British Columbia, was one of the actors starring in homecoming. That's always a clue that a film production was shot in Canada. When the credits rolled my hunch was vindicated, and I cheered when I saw "With the participation of British Columbia Production Services Tax Credit" crawl across the screen.

Joe Dante's take on the zombie genre isn't bad, but the plot does tend to lumber and lurch forward awkwardly not unlike the zombies shuffling across screen. George A. Romero is an obvious influence here - you can even see his name chiseled on a tombstone in Arlington cemetery. It turns out all the zombies want to do is vote. They don't want to eat brains. This makes for a very dull horror movie. Since the zombies aren't trying to eat or dismember anybody, the dialogue and characters are what hold the viewers attention. If it had been longer it would have been a little shrill, but since it clocks in at under an hour I'll say it's not a bad way to pass the time.

Boosterrific!!!

Screw Captain America, his recent death was just a gimmick to boost sales. DC plans to bring back the greatest superhero ever, Booster Gold!

Booster Gold was a high concept hero from the eighties, back when they really knew how to make comics. Alan Moore was still doing his trailblazing work on the Swamp Thing, Crisis On Infinite Earths was just winding down, and the Justice League was still in...Detroit. Well, maybe DC wasn't firing on all cylinders, but they were trying.

Booster started his all too brief career as a yuppie superhero. He didn't have a secret identity or a day job - he used his leverage as a superhero to endorse products and do commercials. A disgraced former football player from the future, he stole a time machine and a lot of high tech equipment from the Space Museum. Basically, he had powers similar to that of Iron Man, but his costume was a lot groovier.

Creator Dan Jurgens apparently got the idea for Booster while watching the summer Olympics. Jurgens had a knack for integrating a lot of old DC mythology, heroes, and villains into the series. The Rose and The Thorn, The 1000 (formerly known as The 100), and The Space Museum all figured prominently in the pages of Booster Gold.

His title came to an end after twenty five issues, a fairly respectable run in the comic book world. Booster soon started appearing in Justice League International. While he was handled well by the writing team of Giffen and DeMatteis, later writers introduced a lot of silly changes to the character.

In order to make him more edgy, he lost an arm or a leg in a fight with some super villain. They even got rid of the slick blue and gold uniform and encased him in clunky exo-skeleton similar to that of Rocket Red.

Booster has been enjoying something of a renaissance lately because he has been featured in 52. In the series he has been written as he was originally conceived, and I'm pleased to note that Geoff Johns wants to continue that in the new series they have planned.

Postscript: snarking gave me a link to the new Booster Gold action figure available May 2.

Lost, Season 3, Episode 14, "Par Avion"

The latest episode of Lost continues it's "not sucking streak". Claire is one of my least favorite characters, and I found myself drifting off during her flashback until the SURPRISE revelation near the end. Jack and Claire have the same father. I didn't see that one coming. On the other hand, the fact that his father did choose to run off to Australia always seemed kind of arbitrary. At least there was never any icky Luke and Leia style incest between Jack and Claire.

Although I've never really cared much for Claire, the one positive thing that can be said about the Claire-centric episodes is the fact that they don't repeat the same themes ad nauseam. Locke, Claire, and Hurley have the most interesting flashbacks because they usually break new ground.

I'm not sure how I feel about how the writers handled the problem of characters keeping information to themselves. Locke addresses it directly when he confronts Sayid about the fact that he was not told that the basement was filled with C-4. Locke later whips out some C-4 that he took from the basement. It looks like Locke is acting in a very passive aggressive fashion. This is consistent behavior from Locke (consider the beating he gave Charlie in season 2) but it does feel that the writers are jerking us around.

Sawyer is reading The Fountainhead on the beach now. It's the kind of book normally spotted in airports so I'm surprised he started reading that before he read Lancelot, which is out of print and was probably in the hatch.

A small complaint when you consider that the plot seems to be advancing at a pretty good clip. We continue to learn more about the island and what happened to the Dharma Initiative with each new episode.

Women: Just Say No To Bush

Janeane Garofalo at The State Theater. Falls Church, VA. March,13.

Most of the people in line were college age. There were quite a few butch looking women, swishy men, and aging hipsters outside the State Theater. The show was sold out. I'd bought tickets to see Janeane Garofalo perform her stand up act, and I was a little nervous. I was really hoping the show was going to be worth it.

I was worried it was going to be two hours of "I hate George Bush." I like political humor as much as the next person, but I didn't know if I could handle two hours of Garofalo hammering away at one theme.

It turned out I had nothing to worry about. Her set started out with the standard observational material. She skated around politics quite nicely - frequently she'd weave in the commentary with her thoughts on the Discovery channel. She used a scalpel when I thought she might try to use a sledgehammer, and it proved to be very effective. She has a tendency to go off on tangents, which takes the edge off some of the more raw aspects of her show.

Her warm up act, Michael Showalter was amazing. I thought his use of powerpoint and iTunes in his act was quite funny and innovative. I've never really cared much for prop comics, but his use of multimedia techniques was a real eye opener.

Abs & Pecs

300. Directed by Zack Snyder. Starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, and Dominic West.

300 is one of the best war movies I've seen in the last decade. Zack Snyder is helping to consolidate my generations takeover of popular culture. Dana Stevens writes:

One of the few war movies I've seen in the past two decades that doesn't include at least some nod in the direction of antiwar sentiment, 300 is a mythic ode to righteous bellicosity.

Maybe Stevens feels guilty for enjoying war movies, but I don't. If the director wants to throw in some anti-war sentiment I'm fine with that. But I don't feel the need to justify my enjoyment of the action on the screen by saying the movie really showed me the horrors of war.

As I've grown older I've come to loathe baby boomer war movies with a passion. Apocalypse Now might be a greater war movie than Three Kings, but I'm not terribly interested in reliving or re-fighting the Vietnam war.

I want to see movies about the battles and wars I've read about in newspapers and magazines in my lifetime. I enjoyed watching Blackhawk Down, Jarhead, Tears of the Sun, and Behind Enemy Lines because they all dealt with current issues I am familiar with.

I've avoided movies like Saving Private Ryan and Kingdom of Heaven because even though they are set in different periods, everything I've read or heard about them has led me to believe that the directors are just trying to relive the Vietnam War all over again. It was cute when Kelly's Heroes and MASH used their respective eras to comment on the Vietnam war, but now it is just tedious.

300 isn't really concerned with current events, but it didn't make it any less enjoyable. I enjoyed the non-stop action and the timeless message of fighting for what you believe in. If more directors of historical war films left the homilies about the futility of war on the cutting room floor, I'd be more inclined to watch them. If I want a sermon, I'll go to church, not a movie theater.

For more on 300, go here and here.

Lost, Season 3 ,Episode 11, "Enter 77"

It was a good episode. No, really. It was a really good episode. It was very frustrating at times, but I enjoyed it. It wasn't as humorous as the last episode, but the "B" storyline with Sawyer trying to get his stuff back helped lighten the atmosphere.

I didn't see the point of the Sayid flashback. We already know he feels contrite for what he did as a Republican guard in Iraq. At this point it seemed like overkill, as if the writers are trying to drive home with a sledgehammer the fact that Sayid is trying to redeem himself.

The flashback took valuable time away from the new bunker and the "B" storyline. I thought the series had hit a really low point when they did that episode on Jack's tats. I thought that Lost had finally jumped the shark. I couldn't imagine a more trivial and pointless flashback until I saw Sayid's flashback.

When the communications bunker was blown up I wanted to scream. I can't believe that Sayid wouldn't tell Locke that the bunker was wired with C4. It was so obvious that, well, I can't believe that someone would be that stupid or forgetful.

Despite that painfully obvious moment this episode was a real pleasure to watch. The island is being explored, and it we're starting to find out what happened to the Dharma Initiative. It is a relief to see that the series is finally picking up momentum.

Bubba

Little James was his usual bubbly self. AP had taken him to the doctor for his shots, but he was in a really good mood. We went to a nice little mediterranean cafe near my apartment for lunch. If you live near the area it is definitely worth checking out - it's called The Mediterranean Bakery & Cafe. Lisa and I usually have lunch there on Saturdays.

They make the best greek salad I've ever had. Most restaurants drench greek salads in dressing, but this place goes easy on the dressing which makes the salad itself more crisp. I had a beef gyro and my sister had a chicken gyro. We bought a hummus platter with pita bread to share with little James, but he wasn't having any of it. He'd pick the pita bread up and then drop it on the floor. Which was okay, as it left more for myself and AP.

Greyware

Rocky has a fun new toy and interesting post about greyware:

To those of you new to the wonderful world of grey market products from China, the R4 allows me to download any game or homebrew software I want onto a Micro SD card and play them on my Nintendo DS. I have always been fascinated by these almost but not quite illegal ways to exploit gaming hardware.

When I was just a young lad of say, 22 or so I remember getting my first modchip for the original Playstation. It was a snowy winters day not unlike today. On campus I had seen advertisements for a company called Modchip Canada and I decided to give them a call. The man on the phone told me to bring my system and gave me the route to his shop. His shop turned out to be a big, brand new house on the outskirts of the city. He told me that kids everywhere were buying these things hand over fist and that this was the house that modchips built. He soldiered a chip onto my motherboard in a few seconds and my days of booking computer labs with the sole purpose of pirating games had begun. I'm not really a gamer per say; my game was in the act of piracy. I enjoyed the challenge of getting what I wasn't supposed to have and unlike my shady run-ins with the music industry, it basically ended in huge spindles of unplayed games. I wasn't eating the meat - this was strictly trophy hunting.

The thing that makes the DS exploit more interesting to me is the sheer power stuffed into my little DS. The wi-fi, the touch screen, the microphone and the all around portability of the device. There are a whole slieu of possibilities built into this thing that are being developed by homebrew designers that can only be made available by having such a supercard as I now own. Whether I will use this card to any real end remains to be seen, but at the $45 Canadian I got it for, it's a chance I'm willing to take. Not to mention the undeniable novelty of playing a round or two of the C-64's Gianna Sisters on my DS.

I enjoyed reading Rocky's post because when I bought my new iPod shuffle, I thought it would make a great jump drive. I use my 40 gigabyte iPod as a back up hard drive, but it looks like there is some bit of code or programming that prevents me from using the shuffle as a jump drive. I enjoy listening to podcasts on the shuffle, but it would be nice if I could use it for more than one function.

Fever!

I still get goosebumps everytime I look at this photo on my wife's blog.

Lost, Season 3, Episode 10, "Tricia Tanaka Is Dead"

A lot of Lost fans will probably disagree with me about this, but I think this is one of the best episodes this season. It had a Hurley flashback, which gave it a humorous edge. After all the melodrama it was nice to see a lighter episode. Cheech Marin's guest appearance was a nice signal that the episode would be not as heavy.

It also had a nice, "What the fuck?" sensibility that the first season had. What exactly was in the hatch drove me nuts, and the bus also poses similar questions. The body and the truck had been abandoned - nobody associated with the Dharma Initiative was in a position to help the driver or clean up the aftermath of the accident.

My wife pointed out an even more obvious question - how did the bus get there in the first place? There aren't any roads or evidence that there was so much as a dirt path in the clearing where they found the bus.

Based on the discovery that Hurley made this episode, I'd speculate that the Dharma Initiative "disappeared" because of a sudden cataclysm rather than an abandonment of the island by the employees of the Dharma Initiative.

For a slightly longer analysis of the episode go here. Of Mice and Men, which was featured prominently in a previous episode on season three, is discussed here.