My Colbert Rapport

It’s a great thing to do in New York. For me, there’s this buzz of anxiety that I may not get in. When I do, it’s like a personal achievement, not just something like The Lion King that’s assured for anyone who can purchase a ticket. This time, I was with Svetx, and we didn’t merely want to get in -- I had comments to voice to Colbert during his question and answer session. He and I have walked the same ground, at the same time. We have a commonality in our pasts. I had to make sure I was called on and spoke about this without sounding like an idiot in front of the other audience members.


Svetx and I approached from the west, Riverside Park, and there was a guy already there, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, reading his business magazines. He was 1st standby, and we claimed 2nd and 3rd. I had told Svetx that if we were to be separated, with one of us admitted in and the other not, that she should be the one to go in.

We sat. The sidewalk smelled like piss, but I could not find an actual puddle anywhere. I figured it was dry piss we were sitting in -- piss baked into the concrete along with the dried and blackened chewing gum. Thank goodness for whatever sanitizing properties the sun provides, in summer at least.

I tried to sleep, something I’d never tried to do in the past on the sidewalks of Manhattan. I guess I’m getting used to the place. I closed my eyes, but noises played across the insides of my lids like richocheting billiard balls, sometimes coming toward me and making me start and open my eyes again.

The standby line built up to maybe 8 or 10 people. In December of 2005 I had done this, and there had only been 3 standbys. Being the first back then, I had read all the signs and directed others, as they had arrived, to whatever line was appropriate for them: ticket holder, standby, and VIP. One ticket holder that I assisted came back to me from her line a few minutes later and said “I guess I should offer my extra ticket to you -- I have a friend who’s not coming.”

Her name was Wendy and she had purple hair. I joined her in line, and she talked about how she had looked up Colbert’s wife and thought she looked kind of plain; how she imagined that Jon Stewart was the “voice” of the text which appears in counterpoint to Colbert’s monologue, “The Word.”

Wendy’s friends arrived. She told them how winter was always hard for her in the city because she thinks about the animals, particularly the horses who have to stand in the cold, blindered, for the benefit of tourists. I’ve thought a lot about Wendy since then, in light of how my Dad thinks liberals, such as the attendees at Woodstock or students at Oberlin, his alma mater, are all sick and depressed people. And I’ve previously written about my family member who said, with the support of most of the rest of the family, that a bomb should have been dropped on Woodstock. I think Wendy is the type of person they are denigrating, and psychologically, I find myself more aligned with her than with my family. Sure, we’re kind of melancholic, it’s because we are sensitive. She sees the horse and buggy ride worries about the horse. I see my country taking the fight to the terrorists in a short-sighted manner, and I worry about the implications for the people of the Middle East, most of whom have nothing to do with 9/11.

This time, there was not Wendy. There was the guy in front of us who would start an entry-level job at an investment firm the next day, and expected to be working 70 hours weeks for pretty low pay, until he had proven himself and could move up the ladder.

And behind us was a couple from Seattle who had come to New York because their daughter had won a chance to meet J.K. Rowling. Their daughter was not with them. They looked like such suburbanites that I was surprised to find them at Colbert. I talked about the time in 2005 when I had been to Stewart’s show, the night before I had been to Colbert’s. Some audience members had asked Stewart if he could get them into Colbert’s taping right after Stewart’s that same night, so during a commercial break Stewart set up a remote link to Colbert just to ask this question. Stewart put his feet up on his desk and posed the question to Colbert. Colbert asked if they were cute. Then he said, “I’ve got a seat right here,” and slapped his hands in his lap.

The suburbanites laughed, and I decided they were cool.

The ticket holder line was shorter than it had been in 2005, and when the doors opened, we were all admitted, all ticket holders and standbys.

Security was tighter now too. More guards were on hand, all dressed in blue blazers and kakhi pants, all very nice and professional and respectful of us. I imagine that Colbert himself had vetted them with an eye toward keeping an air of good humor. They searched our bags and ushered us through a metal detector.

Inside the holding room, a TV was mounted up on a wall. It showed highlights from past shows. This had not been there in 2005. Colbert’s interviews with Eleanor Holmes Norton were among the clips playing.

The audience manager stood on a pedestal and got our attention. He said he was going to ask us questions, and those who gave correct answers would get free T-shirts. Though it’s against the positive attitude my therapist and Svetx and other friends advise me to maintain, I felt inadequate for this challenge. Through 2006 and the first part of 2007, I could not find anyone who knew Colbert’s shows better than I. But I have not had cable at my house for a year, and my advantage has slipped. The first question was to name 4 musical guests that have appeared on the show. I did the wrong thing, which was to think. I thought of Toby Keith, who said that our war in Afghanistan is going great; I thought of Willie Nelson, who had told Colbert that his ice cream flavor was “Right good.” I thought of Barry Manilow, about how Colbert often sings harmony on one verse when the musical guest performs. While I was thinking all this, someone else was answering. The audience manager threw a wadded T-shirt to him. It seemed to travel in a straight line over the audience members’ heads, without unfurling.

This hesitation would never do if I was going to have my interaction with Colbert during Q&A.

Next question was: Name 4 items on Colbert’s set. Again I froze, feeling rusty, though of course I could name 4 items. The guy who answered listed Colbert’s C-shaped desk as one. The audience manager said this was lame, but he threw him a T-shirt anyway.

Then: Name Colbert’s home state.

My arm shot up with all the earnestness of that guy in the front row on Welcome Back Kotter.

“Yes, go ahead,” the audience manager said to me. He was like Colbert -- he had dark hair parted on one side, glasses, a way of raising one eyebrow with affected earnestness. Behind those glasses, it was hard to see who his roving eyes had lit upon, but it seemed it was me, and for an instant I forgot the ridiculously easy answer. Then I remembered it: South Carolina.

A T-shirt came hurtling at me, above the heads. I snagged it and pulled it in. It was mine.

Questions were over, and the audience manager stepped down for a little while. Another audience member came up to me. “You look familiar,” he said.

I looked at him. The beard wasn’t right, but the glasses were, and so were the voice and the small eyes behind the glasses.

“You look familiar to me too,” I said.

He explained himself in a stream of words in which I caught “casting call” and “South Carolina.”

“Beauty and the Geek!” I said. “Nathan!” The host geek!

He had been a geek on the first season of the show, and had attracted notice from the producers as having a good presence on camera and in real life, a well-rounded personality that extended well beyond his role as a “geek.” Beauty Jennylee had similar qualities, and the two became friends. They were given jobs as co-hosts for the second season. He and Jennylee went around the country doing casting calls, and I had been their audio guy in North Carolina.

In fact, here is Jennylee taking a picture of herself in front of one of the places where we did the casting calls. On the right edge of frame is the local cameraman who hired me on the job. I was probably standing just off frame to the right.

Nate said he was now teaching middle school social studies in Brooklyn. He had thought he recognized me by sight, but when I spoke out loud "South Carolina," he knew exactly where he knew me from. He said Jennylee was in LA doing some modeling and acting stuff. It was great to see him.

The audience manager came back to answer questions. We learned that Colbert was very upset when he was disqualified from running for president of the U.S. in South Carolina because you can’t have a TV show about yourself and be a candidate; that the day of Colbert’s accident that broke his wrist had come after many weeks of Colbert staying at the studio every night after taping the show, until midnight, to work on his book. His exhaustion had lead to his slipping that day when he had run into the studio to greet the audience. And yet, in great pain, Colbert had done the show, then still delayed going to the doctor for another two weeks.

We learned that when Colbert stole Bill O’Reilly’s microwave oven, they found O’Reilly’s lunch in it. Colbert had just walked out through O’Reilly’s security carrying it in the manner of Jeff Lebowski: “He said I could have any rug in the house.”

And we learned that Rahm Emanuel, head of the House Democratic Caucus, has forbidden all Democrats from appearing on Colbert’s Better Know of District series. Colbert can hardly get any congressman to appear any more.

We were told that while the audience manager was keeping us entertained, Stephen and the crew were in rehearsal, and that when they were through they would go into rewrites while the audience would be ushered into the studio.

We were told not to ask for autographs or to ask Colbert his political affiliation.

We entered the studio behind the tiered stands where we would sit. Hanging black curtains guided us to the end of the stands where we would walk around to the front, but as we walked I peered backward between some curtains to see if I could glimpse the man himself engaged in rewrites. All I saw were a production assistant and some hanging work lights and orange extension cords.

We were seated and told that the interview for the night, with Kevin Costner, had been previously taped because of scheduling problems. We watched the tape before Colbert appeared.

Then Colbert did appear, running out from the aisle between the two sets of stands, his hands out as if he had just made a touchdown, a stick mic in one hand. This was the run that lead to his fall that broke his wrist. He gets a standing ovation just for doing this, and then he goes to Q&A.

The first question came from a young woman who asked him to sing her Happy Birthday. He asked how old she was. 21, she said. He asked to see some I.D., so she showed him her driver’s license. Then he sang her Happy Birthday . . .

. . . in Latin. Lord knows where he learned that. It could be one of the geeky things he taught himself, like Aragorn’s genealogy, or the Apostle’s Creed. But this did tie in to what I had to ask him. See, I grew up at a small college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. My dad was a biology teacher there. Colbert had attended Hampden-Sydney for two years, been turned on to acting by the acting teacher there whom I knew (named in the previous link), and went to Northwestern to finish college. Colbert had said that Hampden-Sydney was a hard school for him at the time. He had studied classics and had a rough time of it.

I had asked a classics and Latin professor, JA, if he had had Colbert in his class. He said promptly, “No.” This was at one Christmas dinner back home.

This past Christmas, at another dinner, I asked HS, a retired professor of English, if he had had Colbert as a student. “Yes,” he promptly said. He said Colbert had asked him for a recommendation to go to Northwestern, and he had not heard from Colbert since. He seemed a little hurt by that.

Another audience member stood up and started talking about Colbert’s favorite Bollywood star. Having been out of touch with the show for a year, this was a little over my head. After they had talked about this a bit, Colbert said, “We are alienating the rest of the audience.”

This audience member asking the question claimed to know this Bollywood star, said the star is in town this week, and said the star wants to be on his show. Colbert looked over at an assistant, a real assistant, not the Bobby that appears on the show, and asked in what sounded like a genuinely stern tone why the Bollywood star had not been invited. The assistant had no answer.

Then the audience member said, “And I know you don’t do autographs, but for [the Bollywood star], would you?” He held up a magazine and Sharpie.

I thought, oh shit, he’s going to piss Colbert off and he won’t take any more questions.

The audience manager appeared out of nowhere frowning and said in exasperation, “Give it to me.”

Colbert was now discussing something with the assistant. The audience manager took the magazine and Sharpie to him. I didn’t see what happened with all that.

Colbert then took another question from the other side of the stands. Each time he asked for questions I raised my hand with all the earnestness I could muster, feeling like a kid in a class about to burst with his answers. Colbert was alternating sides of the room calling on people. This one was on the opposite end. If it were not the last one he would take, he would next come to my side.

And he did. I couldn’t believe he was actually looking at me, calling on me.

I had deliberated on how to phrase this. I had decided against saying “I bring greetings from Hampden-Sydney college,” because I’m not really in touch with the college these days, and who knows if someone currently living there actually had come to Colbert recently and spoken about it. So I said, “I grew up at Hampden-Sydney college in Virginia.”

“Hampden-Sydney!” Colbert said, standing up a little straighter as though being called to duty by some old sworn fealty.

“My father was a professor there-”

“Who was he?” Colbert said.

“___ in biology,” I said, “but you didn’t have him.”

“No,” he said.

“But I know HS-”

“HS!” Colbert said, standing straighter still, that old fealty gripping him more deeply.

“Yes,” I said, “And when I was growing up and playing Dungeons and Dragons, it was with his kids that I played.”

The audience gave a little “Awwww,” at this.

“We are alienating the audience again,” Colbert said. Then, to fill them in, he went on. “My whole time at Hampden-Sydney, I felt like I was in a 19th century monastery. All Latin and classics. It is all-male. When I transferred to Northwestern, I couldn’t believe that there were women. There were women two floors away. One of our professors came to our room and smoked pot with us and ended up sleeping with my roommate. I was a lot more at home there.”

I said, “And did you have JA?”

“Yes, absolutely,” he said without hesitation. Then, continuing the background for the audience, “The place is a stalwart rock of southern conservatism founded by Patrick Henry in 1776. Tell me, are you conservative?”

He was asking me, and I had to say something intelligent right then, in front of all those people. I said, “Well, I formed my idea of spirituality playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I love your show.”

“You are seriously damaged,” he said.

Svetx and I were elated. I had won a T-shirt during the quiz (though the quiz was laughably easy), and managed to have some exchange with him. Whatever would happen next we did not care. We had completed our mission.

Colbert took his seat at his desk and his director started the countdown “5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . .” not speaking the “2” “1” because, in television, the on-camera talent always finishes the numbers in his head and starts on “0”.

I remember very little of the show. I remember more from the 2005 show I went to, in which Colbert’s final statement of the Table of Contents portion was, “Step aside Oprah -- every member of this studio audience gets a free gift -- of the truth!”

In 2005 when I attended, both Colbert and Stewart did their shows straight through with no editing. This time, Colbert did stumble. It was right after they showed a clip of Obama rebutting McCain for making fun of him about the tire gauges. Obama reiterated that experts say Americans could save 3 % to 4% of our oil consumption by keeping our tires properly inflated. “It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant,” Obama said.

When the video cut back to Colbert he fumbled his line, said “Fuck,” and put his head down on his desk. He stayed there for a few seconds, an eternity in TV. I thought they would keep taping straight through, but Colbert raised his head and told the technicians to run the clip back.

“From the beginning?” the director said.

“Play the whole Obama clip,” Colbert said. “We need to get into it.” Colbert, behind his desk, is not only the talent but the boss as well.

Some switcher or whatever backstage really has his act together. Without delay they rolled the clip again. “ . . . take pride in being ignorant.”

Colbert started with a more dramatic air this time, fumbled, and cursed again.

Take 3: “ . . . take pride in being ignorant.”

This time we audience members had our part down. “Ooooooohhhhh!” we went. And Colbert nailed his response, as if, in part, drawing from our input.

“Yes sir, we do,” he said, narrowing his eyes. He went on to declare one week of September “National Ignorance Month.”



Also on our night, he chose a spider to be named after himself.



Then, with the first and second acts done, there was nothing left. The Costner interview had already been taped. Colbert stood up and said, “It’s over already! Here, I’ll interview you,” he said, putting his arm around the shoulders of his floor director, who made like he was going to speak, then waved the mic away.

We were through. Outside, I called my dad and told him what had just happened, that Colbert had studied under HS and JA and remembered them both.

The audience manager came out a side door and took the magazine and Sharpie to the guy who had asked for Colbert’s autograph. “I’m sorry, sometimes it happens that way,” the manager said to him.

I told the manager he was doing a great job.

Nathan walked by with his friends, and we said our “laters . . .”

We had done it. Svetx and I had made it to Colbert. It’s always a thrill. It seems that it doesn’t matter what happens in New York after that.

Next time I see JA I’m going to tell him that his former student in classics, now a famous comedian and late-night show host, a ground breaker in political and social satire, the next big thing after post-modernism, is singing Happy Birthday in Latin. I’m gonna tell JA that maybe he should start remembering this student of his.

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The South has Risen Again

This time it’s Alaska.

Forget comparisons to Harriet Miers or Dan Quayle. Having been governor in one of our two biggest states, and with her connections to evangelicals and oil companies, Sarah Palin is really just another George W. Bush.

. . . with a few contradictions. Community organizing, something which Bush might have supported as Faith Based Initiatives, is now out. We’re not having any more of that grassroots foolishness. And teenage pregnancy is in. It makes for a beautiful family, as McCain said. Forget whatever message this may send to other teenage girls and boys (“Bristol did it and the Republican presidential nominee (perhaps president someday) is cool with it . . .so maybe I can do it too”). Forget what kind of marriage an 18 year old boy and 17 year old girl will actually have, under pressure from the U.S. government to look all nice and white and religious. We’re all sinners. What’s important is that they get married.

Still, many have asked, if experience is really so important as McCain has said it is, then why did he choose someone who would Palin comparison?

I think the GOP remained undecided between several VP candidate possibilities until the last minute, at which point they said "Aw hell, let’s go with the cute one who’s all about religion, guns, and oil." As Svetx says, while McCain is for the Republicans who have turned against Bush and want to change to different Republicans, Palin's purpose is to appeal to the ones who do want to keep Bush's likeness in the White House.

And in the last-minute rush to make their decision, I think McCain's people accidentally overlooked that underage sex/teenage pregnancy aspect of Palin's family. It’s like their showing the image of the Walter Reed Middle School when they meant to be showing Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Someone was rushing to put things together and they didn't pay close enough attention.

Regardless of that, I fear it will work. Bush got elected for a second time. People just aren't inquisitive enough to doubt his abilities, and I think the same goes for Palin. If any of us want to inquire, Palin and company will just accuse us of being elite. How dare we question the war? According to them, America has the inherent quality of being victorious; therefore we are victorious in this war. We are just supposed to believe.

Republicans are so undiscerning they don't even know when they've started to look like a liberal. They talk about Palin's good looks, but clearly this one-time beauty queen has now acquired the geek-chick look of Tina Fey, one of the leaders in Satan's army of late-night liberal humorists -- but with Pentecostal hair. They adopt the song Barracuda written and performed by one-time purveyors of sexualized imagery on MTV. And two of her children share names with prime-time practitioners of pagan witchcraft.

It used to be that only liberals gave their children names from nature or paganism, eschewing the more Judeo-Christian Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Mary, etc. I know some fantastic people named River, Lake, Zephyr, and Lorien, the last stemming from the forest in Lord of the Rings. And then there's me of course, Elrond.

But such names, bestowed upon liberals, are like Birkenstocks or hybrid cars. We wear them well, and we usually don't take ourselves too seriously. But here comes Palin talking about how her oldest, "Track," is going into The Army. And we're like, wow, that's cool, he's theoretically going to defend our country and, also, more politicians need children in the military. But at the same time, we're like . . . Track? This was something Rangers did in Dungeons and Dragons. The Army has Rangers. Is he going to be an Army Ranger?

Seriously, did they find this name floating in a bowl of alphabet soup? Or could he be named in honor of a series of moose hoofprints in the mud -- or, the act of following such prints? I guess he was conceived on a hunting trip. That's a safe bet. That trip earned them not only a dead head for the living room wall but also a new living mouth to feed.

Then came Bristol after, I presume, Bristol Bay. Why not Prudhoe? I'm from Virginia. I could have been Chesapeake. I once had some rich newlywed neighbors who named their dog Cayman.

Then Willow. Born in 1998, after Buffy had been on TV for a year, she might have been named after Buffy's witch-friend. Is it okay now, Fox News, to be a fan of this show that celebrates paganism?

Piper? She, too, was born after her sorcerous namesake had appeared on TV. Piping is what you do when you're hot, and piping up is good . . . except, in this family, when it's to protest dumb policy. In the face of that, just smile and hold that newborn prominently.

With Palin's incurious approach to energy policy, wouldn't children's names like Clear, Drill, and Pump have been more appropriate?

"All their names are retarded," Housemate D said to me the other day. "Yeah," I said, "Except for the retard. He's named for a branch of mathematics." Was he conceived during a romantic analysis of a simple harmonic oscillation? A derivation of Euler's equation? Maybe Palin liked it since "Euler" is pronounced "oiler." And young Trig could grow up to be a politician like his mother and sign and co-sign new bills. It's the circle of life.

Do you suppose Palin took trigonometry? If one has taken trigonometry, then how can one name one's child Trig? What about Calc? Certainly not Algebra, that's a word based in Arabic.

Or is it short for Trigger? That which you pull when you're bringing down a moose or self-determinism to a distant country. Or the Lone Ranger's horse.

Never mind. This is not a time for inquisitiveness. On the heels of Cowboy Diplomacy comes Taxidermy Policy -- kill first, then contemplate your subject after it's been mounted on your wall. It's like naming housing developments after the thing that used to be there -- "Deer Hollow" for instance. Or putting the American Indians on reservations and naming professional sports teams after them. And of course, democracy can't be given to a nation without a good rousing shock and awe campaign to demonstrate who's the boss.

Watch out for brown paneled walls to adorn the vice presidential suite too.

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I'm Trying to Get This Straight

We invaded and took out an inarguably awful dictator. Without his absolute rule, there was a need for security but not enough U.S. soldiers to provide it. Colonel Paul Hughes worked with officers of the Iraqi military to recall its soldiers into its ranks. Then Paul Bremer arrived and disbanded the Iraqi military, sending 250,000 trained and armed soldiers into the streets, unemployed. This affair is described in detail in The Assassin’s Gate by George Packer.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran said in Imperial Life in the Emerald City that members of the defeated Iraqi military had been hanging around outside the Assassin’s Gate looking for continuing work in the military after the U.S. had set up camp in the Green Zone. When the announcement went out that Bremer had disbanded the Iraqi military, these guys stopped hanging around. Weeks later, Chandrasekaran saw them in a cafe in Baghdad. He asked them what they were doing now that the military had been disbanded. They told him they had become insurgents.

The insurgency gained momentum, and there were reports that former members of the Iraqi military were involved. Also, non-Iraqi al Qaeda members joined, but al Qaeda would not have had this opportunity if we had not invaded.

In 2006 some Sunni tribesmen started to become disillusioned with al Qaeda and its fundamentalism. Also, General Petraeus and other U.S. military leaders started working with Sunni tribesmen to get control of the insurgency. In a Talking Points Memo video made in September 2007, Juan Cole talked about these allegiances -- how Petraeus is to be commended for realizing that working with tribal leaders was the way to get things done in the Sunni regions, but that our support of the tribes amounts to basically bribing them to take our side. Given the fluidity of political relationships in that part of the world, there is no certainty of what these tribes will do in the long run.

By March of 2008 some U.S. military leaders had started to question the long-term ramifications of this empowerment of Sunni militias.

Fred Kagan, even, praised the efforts of the Anbar Awakening against al Qaeda, but expressed concern about reconciliation between the Sunni tribes and the Shiite government.

Now, reports are coming out, linked from two previous posts, that Maliki and the Shiite-lead government is taking an openly antagonistic stance against these Sunni militias. Today two analysts warn Maliki about this. They note that, like the Sunni militias, he has been emboldened by our unconditional support.

So now, the Maliki government and the Sunni militias allied with us, both of have been hailed as manifestations of "progress" in Iraq, both of whom we are aiding and arming, might start renewed fighting against each other.

What was it we were trying to do over there again?

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My Superbowl Commercial

I've found it online, the TV commercial that I did the location audio for back in January. It aired just as halftime started, and only as a local spot. Girlfriend Svetx was an extra in the auditorium.

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Whose Daddy Are We, Exactly?

Maliki's, or the Awakening/Sons of Iraq tribes'?

This growing antagonistic stance by the Maliki government against the Awakening and Sons of Iraq militias is very disturbing. I was just telling a friend this morning how, it seems to me, that the Bush administration never has had a policy in Iraq since the fall of Saddam. It has merely repeated its mantras about "freedom" and "war on terror" and so on. So our military devised what policy it could and started working with tribes and local groups to bring stability to certain areas. But now, with Maliki turning against these groups, it leaves the military reluctantly standing by, as this LA Times article says. What will this mean to the Sons and Awakening people? That we are abandoning them? I fear these (paid) allies of ours, one of our few signs of "progress" in that country, will turn into renewed enemies . . . which is what the "liberal" (i.e. knowledgeable) press and even some military leaders have been warning about for a long time.

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Shifting Bases

It got more surreal today.

The Iraqi government is now openly antagonistic toward the Sons of Iraq and Awakening Council militias. Juan Cole linked to a McClatchy article saying that the Maliki government will not incorporate more Sunni militia members into the Iraqi military than the handful it already has, and Maliki is considering forcing the remaining militia members to give up their weapons by November 1 or face arrest. The NY Times talks of active pursuit of some Awakening movement members by the Iraqi military.

Until now, these Awakening movements in Sunni areas of Iraq have been touted by the pro-war press as one of the major accomplishments there.

This article from February 2008 said that while the success of the Awakening groups leads to a risk of renewed Sunni hubris and friction with the Shiite dominated government, “slowly but surely,” the government is incorporating Sunni militia members into the Iraqi military, a sign of reconciliation.

But now, General Petraeus has said that the Iraqi government has been dragging its feet on incorporating Sunni militia members.

So far this year, according to the McClatchy article, the U.S. military has spent $303 million on Sons of Iraq salaries. There are over 100,000 members of of the Sons of Iraq and Awakening militias.

So if Maliki’s government is not reconciling with these Sunni militia members, and is even taking action against them, then can’t it be said that he is in direct conflict with our proxies? Where does that leave the U.S.?

But I have always felt that this “success” of the Awakening and Sons of Iraq militias in kicking out al Qaeda (which, in Iraq, consisted largely of Iraqis and was not a significant element in Iraq before we invaded) represents a major deficiency with respect to having a unified democracy there. Neither the U.S. army nor the Iraqi army fought al Qaeda as effectively as the tribal militias. This means to me that in the Sunni areas, the true loyalties are to tribes. And these tribes never indicated that they would support Maliki’s government in the long run.

This kind of inherent contradiction is also in the alleged “success” of the Iraqi military’s operation in Basra this past spring. Juan Cole says that the military inducted many members of the Badr corps into its ranks to enable it to fight the Sadr militia. The Badr corps is the militia associated with the Supreme Islamic Council in Iraq (SICI). In March of 2008, Dick Cheney thanked the leader of the SICI for his help in advancing the cause of democracy in Iraq. Cheney even called him a “friend.”

But the SICI was born in Iran and, of all political groups in Iraq, seems to be the most heavily influenced by Iran.

Juan Cole gives brief historical sketches of the SICI in several different places. Here is one, in which he says,

The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI or SAIRI) was formed as an umbrella group by Iraqi Shiite exiles in Tehran in 1982, in the wake of Saddam's big crackdown on the Shiite al-Dawa Party and other similar groupings. In 1984 it came to be headed up by Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, and was until his death in Najaf in a huge car bombing on August 29, 2003. During the 1980s SCIRI developed a paramilitary wing, the Badr Corps, headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the brother of Muhammad Baqir. Both were sons of Muhsin al-Hakim, who had been the leading authority in Najaf (the equivalent of Sistani today) circa 1960-1970.

And yet, Iran has been cited by the Bush administration as one of the major threats to world peace and a cause of trouble in Iraq. Here is Seymour Hersh talking about this.

So it appears we support both the Sunni militias and Maliki whose opposition to each other grows; and we support the Iran-influenced SICI while holding Iran in highest suspicion.

Can someone explain this to me?

Or maybe this is all moot. Looks like, whether the next president wants to continue a 100-year presence of military bases in Iraq, he won't be able to. If the Iraqi's ask us to leave anyway, then what basis will McCain have for his campaign?

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All Those Hours Rolling Tape on Their Yammering Just Might Pay Off

This documentary that I worked on -- gosh, must have started in 2004 and run through 2005, 2006, to spring of 2007, and then editing seriously began -- finally is coming out. Go to www.movingmidway.com and check it out. You’ll have to paste that link in your browser’s address bar. Can’t be leaving a link trail, see. Do watch the preview linked off that page, it’s good.

I happen to know that the first couple of edited versions sucked balls. All this brew-ha-ha about moving this house was about as exciting as watching its paint peel naturally, over years, like the skin on my rash-striken foot, down to the original layers laid well before our nation’s birth. Also, I was always upset that they wouldn’t let me hide the body mics. So, I apologize to you, a potential viewer, for the visibility of the microphones. Everyone was too uptight to let me fool with their shirts much. They said they speak in front of people all the time and wear those things, so they could put them on themselves. I didn’t really let them do it themselves, but I did have to slap the mics on them quickly and call it art.

One day, probably summer of ‘07, I was driving home from some other hot outdoor gig, oozing sweat into the cloth seats of my car, and my phone rang. It was the producer, and he said, “I’ve got news. Are you sitting down?”

“Are we gonna get paid?” I said.

“We’ve redone Midway. And it’s good," he said.

And it is pretty darn good, if I may say so. Even if it doesn’t tell the real story about the strife in the family; the reputed failed attempts to farm the land; the need to sell the land and move the house just to stay solvent; the fact that a bypass was being built that would relieve the traffic troubles on the road and reduce the need to move the house anyway; the old jealousies and bitterness that kept the brothers and other family members away on the actual moving day . . .

. . . the intrinsic desire on the part of the homeowner to fire people. One of the main carpenters slated to work on reconstruction after the house was moved, and shown in the movie before the move, was fired and did not actually work on reconstruction.

. . . and one of our production assistants was blamed for the drive shaft on the primary towing truck shearing apart because it was said that he hollered something that sounded like “Ho.” Coming from the boss-man, “Ho” meant “Stop,”which is what the drivers of the two winch trucks which provide auxiliary pulling-power via stranded steel cables did, though nobody knows whether “Ho” was spoken or not, or who said it if it was. When they stopped pulling, the entire weight of the house was left to be born by the main towing truck, causing its drive shaft to shear and a production assistant to be fired, whether it was his fault or not.

But little pity goes to the drive shaft and the folks who paid for extra working time. I had to dive under the house while it was moving because my cameraman did and I was tethered to him by audio cable. We got those awesome shots of its underside moving overhead, like a close encounter with a blue whale. The moving workers were accustomed to all this and spent whole days walking along underneath the house watching the various clusters of wheels to be sure that the hydraulics were working properly. Each set of wheels supported the house on a hydraulic piston, and the pistons were linked by hoses which distributed the fluid among them. The way I understood it, if the ground rose under one set of wheels, it pushed these wheels upward against the piston supporting the house. This pushed hydraulic fluid to other pistons -- or maybe just the opposite corner piston -- which extended to keep equal force on all portions of the house.

Those guys walking under the house also had big levers and ratchets and chains. They would watch all the wheels very carefully to see if any were being pulled out of alignment. The house moved so slowly that they had time to do this as it moved. If some wheels strayed, they worked the levers and tightened chains on the ratchets and pulled the wheels back into line.

When the house first started to move, with us under it, it let out a groan like some monster in a Tolkien movie, and I wished like hell that we had ordered a stereo mic to capture a better sound field. Even so, with only the shotgun mic capturing house noises, I was told that the folks at the answer print screening asked if the house noises had been Foleyed. “No,” the producer told them. “It was [Elrond Hubbard] who got those sounds on the day.”

I had to remind the producer that I did not work on any house moving days after it reached the halfway point which was a holding area in a field. Indeed, really, I only worked on about a third of all the footage that made it into the movie. Other sound guys did the other days -- and, lots of days, 2 or 3 of us worked simultaneously. I think all of us can be glimpsed in the movie at various times. My appearance is near the end, when the elderly Black man is brought to the house by his son for the party to celebrate the house on its new ground. He enters the house and, beyond him down the hall, you can see me cross in the background. Exciting, I know. That’s worth the price of your ticket.

On one of the moving days that I did not work, the audio guy in my place disconnected himself from the cameraman when he dove under the house. That audio guy wasn’t going under there -- not on his pay scale. I should have been that smart. But going under the house was not the most dangerous thing.

The most dangerous place to be was what should have been a no-man’s land, the area right in front of the main towing truck between the stranded steel winch cables going to the auxiliary trucks. That same fearless cameraman was hanging out in that space, getting exciting shots of the slowly turning wheels, the taught cables. The audio guy saw a steel cable making little jumps like a self-vibrating guitar string, dust popping out of the little grooves between strands. He hollered for everyone to look out just as that cable broke and flew BAM into the metal shield on the back of its winch truck. No one was hurt. But remember how that drive shaft was broken? When one towing vehicle stops towing, the weight goes to the others. Right away, the other winch started jumping in the same manner. It too broke and went BAM against the back of its winch truck.

I wasn’t there that day. Someone’s head could have been ripped off by that flying cable, but no one was hurt. Nobody talks about this, and the incident did not make it into the movie.

Other things I did not work on were the sit-down interviews with the filmmaker’s mom. But I did do the audio where she’s riding in the SUV past the shopping center that has been built on the former plantation. I was actually driving and running audio at the same time, looking down at the mixer on the floor between seats, maybe wearing headphones on one ear. Bully for me.

I worked on very little of any scenes or interviews with the NYU professor, though I did do one near Washington Square which I don’t think made it into the movie.

I did work on countless interviews with the house owners in their living room, before the house was moved, much of which never made it into the movie.

I worked on the interview with the owner/husband’s brother who said, “It’s dumb as shit.” He had a lot of good lines. His kids play with lawnmower engines and make go-carts that go 40 mph. A third brother dumps old lawnmowers in their yard for the kids to play with, and he wishes he wouldn’t. We spent two days at the coast shooting him and his artwork and looking for the third brother to shoot but not finding him. We stayed at the family beach house and shot the filmmaker there, but that footage was never used. Someone else had to go back on a different tripo and do the interview with the third brother, the one wearing the paper crown in the movie.

I worked on an interview with Lee Smith and Hal Crowther which did not make it into the movie.

Some stuff in there I don’t remember whether I worked on.

Oh, that conversation between the filmmaker and the owner/husband in the front yard, before the house was moved, talking about the traffic and how the house would be moved, I did work on. That plays pretty well in the movie, after editing.

But you know, you can’t really tell the truth in a documentary because someone’s feelings will be hurt. This is why we have fiction. Tell the truth but change the names and the hair color and nobody gets hurt.

So if you want to see this piece of narrative partial truth and fiction, please come to the Raleigh premiere on September 19 at the Rialto.

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With All Due Respect to Heath Ledger . . .

Dark Knight was actually right good.

See, you thought I was going to pan it, didn't you? Friend Bartcow was disappointed that I was not scathingly critical while I slumped in my chair watching the credits roll. Next to me, girlfriend Svetx said she felt like she had felt right after Schindler's List. This is not to belittle the holocaust or exalt the exploits of the Joker and Batman. But Knight did weigh us down psychologically. To relate it to another movie, midway through Knight she and I looked at each other as we had during There Will Be Blood, feeling what we felt then. The distasteful sides of humanity portrayed in the movie were making us uneasy, and there was no indication how, or if, the movie would get us out of that state.

Granted, Blood was a far better movie, but Knight is a superhero movie. You judge it on a different scale. Click "Continue" only if you've already seen it, or don't care if it gets spoiled for you.

I'd say it was better than the first two X-Men in terms of characterization, and those were good. The interplay between Commissioner Gorden, Harvey Dent, Bruce Wayne, and Batman was excellent, and the admiration Batman and Gorden have for Dent even after he goes through his trauma and becomes psychotic reminds me of many a rooftop conversation between Gordon and Batman in the comics. They miss the old Harvey deeply.

The feeling of desperation over a large population being threatened by an evil villain was the best I've ever seen it in a superhero movie. It got to a point where I could not tell where the Joker and his henchmen would turn up next. As long as I'm not belittling major real-world tragedies and calamities, I'll go ahead and say the Joker's aggression was like an insurgency, and the police could not deal with it using traditional methods. Actually, the insurgency was within the police force as well -- sound familiar? And here's Batman, the guy who doesn't have to play by the rules, who is interesting because he walks a thin line between justice and barbarism, starting to delve into the barbaric. He gets brutal with the Joker during an interrogation session, and I was disturbed. I don't view this as my hero beating up the bad guys, like I had when I was little. This was a good guy being driven crazy by a crazy guy, thereby granting the crazy guy homefield advantage. The Joker knew how to get under everyone's skin, how to send them into a rage and get battalions of police dispatched to abandoned warehouses and banks and hospitals, only to find that they had been duped, distracted, their resources depleted with little gain.

Sound familiar?

Parallels continue when the Joker's final scheme was foiled in part by an extensive domestic spying endeavor over which Lucius Fox almost resigned.

Batman does use his wits. He makes plans, he thinks and reacts quickly, he does unpredicted things, he gets stymied, he gets mad, he jumps into fights and off of buildings and never gives up. A crime boss says, "You're not scaring me. This is two stories. The fall won't kill me." Batman says, "I'm counting on that," and drops him, breaking his legs. Now that's the Dark Knight of Frank Miller and the good comics! And, the writers, director, and Christian Bale showed a pretty well-rounded Bruce Wayne/Batman that held firm as the centerpiece of the movie. Wayne has to fake his way through daily life while his nighttime antics are the "real life" for him. And he pays the price in relationships. But banal speeches about this state of affairs were kept to a minimum, thank goodness. And a lot of the cliche dialog and gratuitous "heroic" shots that burden superhero movies were not present. Though some were.

Like Schindler's List, it also had some stupid stuff. Did he wreck the Batmobile yet again? Yep. Was there a smaller vehicle inside the Batmobile that afforded him expensive, elaborate escape from the silly wreck? Yep.

Did Batman, in the space of 5 minutes of movie time, decide to divulge his identity and give up crime-fighting, then get re-inspired and decide to continue as Batman? Yep -- although the circumstances that lead to his re-inspiration were not predictable and were well grounded in character.

Did Batman, in one of his high-tech vehicles complete with armor and machine guns, charge at a pistol-wielding Joker in a game of chicken as he had at the end of Burton's 1989 movie? Yep. And while this time the Joker did not shoot, Batman lost the game of chicken by veering, for no good reason, and crashing his vehicle, and being knocked unconscious. Our highly skilled, armored, and technologically advanced hero lost that little face-off with the unarmored cackling clown and had to be rescued by the regular old police. It's like the writers just wanted to pay homage to the 1989 movie.

And after surviving bullets and beating countless thugs and S.W.A.T. team members to pulp, was our hero staggered by a little tussle with the Joker? Kind of. It wasn't as stupid as the showdown in the 1989 movie, but it was there. But at least, in the end of that battle, Batman did win by his own devices, pun intended, and not just by luck. And in a welcome reversal from the 1989 movie, Batman did knock the Joker over the edge of the building; the Joker did not fall by accident. Then, in a welcome reversal from the barbarism that had been infusing Batman's character throughout the movie, he shoots a grappling hook down, snags the Joker, and prevents his death.

I don't like Batman destroying so much property. In Begins and Knight, he's pretty wanton when he gets in one of his vehicles. I much prefer the time in Batman: Year One when Batman escapes from the cops in a cloud of bats, and later, a mens clothing store is found to have been broken into and robbed -- but payment for damages and the suit was left on the counter.

More on the good aspects: The mystique of Batman as viewed by criminals was well developed. The 1989 movie had a trace of this in the beginning, when one crook asked if his partner has heard what happens to someone else. "I heard the bat got him," he says. This aspect of Batman was lost in the movies until now, when Knight begins with a couple of scenes of crooks and mobsters talking in their usual style about "money" and "the boss" and dropping last names of mob leaders. (Scarecrow shows up in a few of these scenes -- he's gotten loose again! And his tiny amount of screen time in Knight is far better than anything he did as the main criminal in Batman Begins.) But now, the name of Batman crops up too as one of the players in their larger game, an antagonist to them separate from the police but also separate from themselves.

Heath Ledger was great. It's not that he changed his voice. It's not because he has tragically died. Bartcow said it best: Ledger seemed to really be a psychotic serial killer, not a caricature like Nicholson was. He was part of the story, not overblown as if the rest of the movie were just a setting for him. Thank you for this, writers, director, and Ledger!

There was interesting pacing overall in the movie. Lots of filler, transitional stuff, that a lesser movie would have included, was left out. Sometimes, when violence was about to occur, the scene was cut short and the outcome indicated in a later scene. That's cool -- we all need to cut back on violence. Anyway, there was still plenty of it.

The next day, the movie was staying with me. I was dwelling on it. Not as much as I had after There Will Be Blood, but still. This is a superhero movie. I'm not really supposed to dwell on it at all. Some of the movie's haunting nature comes from some pithy lines uttered by the Joker. One is, "Insanity is like gravity. Sometimes all it needs is a little push." For folks who have dealt with mental illness in themselves or others, this is not funny. And, when Harvey Dent is lying in a hospital bed, newly two-faced, Joker tells him, "Chaos is fair."

I agree. Not that this is a comforting thought. We spend a lot of time worried about whether rules and laws and societal structures are fair, and usually they are not. All the Batman stories, when well done, are about breakdowns in a structure, subversion for both good and evil ends. Often a trade-off is necessary. A price is paid somewhere. The only thing that is truly even-handed is absolute random chance.

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Here We Go Again

Walking out of Tim Burton’s first back in 1989, none of us felt so good. My friend Peter shrugged and said, “Well, that was Batman.” We had been anticipating it for months, and what the movie gave us was basically an exposition of its own title -- a movie’s worth of Batman stuff, imagery, the Batmobile, the Joker, Alfred, and so on. Peter said he had heard that the director had decided on an operatic approach, and this sounded to me like an excuse for a movie consisting merely of characters entering and exiting the stage.

Another friend said that his problem with the movie was that Batman didn’t yell -- he never acted like he wanted something. Some folks blame Michael Keaton, saying he was miscast.

I say, any of the Batman actors -- Keaton under Burton’s direction and all the ones since -- could have done a great job in a good script. The problem was, the way the movies have been written, Batman does not really do anything. He shows up like Santa Claus at a Christmas party. He’s there, in costume, but beyond that, mostly the other characters are who affect the outcome of the story, particularly the ending. In the first Burton movie, the Joker had knocked Batman over the edge of the tower and Batman was hanging on for life; then the Joker fell off himself by accident. That’s no way for a superhero to vanquish his opponent. In the second, Catwoman is able to knock Batman around in a fist fight -- she should be elusive and crafty but not able to beat up our trained martial artist hero wearing an armored suit -- and, as best I can recall, she and happenstance have more to do with defeating the Penguin and the Christopher Walken villain than anything Batman does.

I call it the Luke Skywalker complex when the central character is the least interesting. It’s not that I would tone down Nicholson’s Joker, DeVito’s Penguin, Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, who were all great. It’s that I would raise Batman to their level of importance. The villians in his world are the most memorable and interesting in mainstream comics. But Batman has got to be the baddest ass in Gotham City. The villians are trying to subvert a society whose people and police are mystified by them; Batman needs to be shown as the guy who can subvert and mystify the criminals. I suggest that he is able to do this because, while both he and the criminals have troubled backgrounds and deal with psychological trauma, Batman has faced his own more deeply and, except in extreme situations, is less governed by them. He is much more in control. As he says to a crooked politician he has cornered in Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, “I know pain. And sometimes I share it with people like you.”

There is one great thing Burton’s movies did, and that was to give him the perfect musical theme. Before, we had only the blues from the TV show, which was great for that. But we did need something sinister, heroic, and distinctive for the movies, and Danny Elfman delivered, starting in a minor key, moving to the six chord, but then letting the melody slink down chromatically to something very unusual, jazzy even, to my ear -- a major triad based on the second note of the original minor scale. I don’t know what you would call this. But here it is, after a short intro.

Superman received an excellent theme from John Williams. But what other superheros in movies have been awarded memorable themes? None of the X-Men. Those movies were rich in opportunity for a composer to create leitmotifs and assemble them in various combinations, as called for by each scene, in a manner similar to Wagner’s. But nooo. That would have been work. Spiderman? His music is in 3/4 time to imply swinging, which is cool. Actually, I kind of dig it, and there is some kind of melody, but it’s nowhere near Batman’s. His music was also written by Elfman, by the way. Ironman? Some electric guitar riff consisting of one note. His was a good movie though, with the best superhero romance because of the importance of Pepper Potts to his life. She is not only the woman in his life, she is also the Alfred, so her role is dual as pit crew and love interest. She and Tony Stark can talk their flirtatious smack a la Han and Leia while repairing his suit together.

When Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down came out, I said to myself while watching it, “This director needs to make a Batman movie.” Michael Douglas’ vigilante seemed sort of like Batman, a guy going beyond the norm to “clean up” his city, his character woven into the hot LA daytime as Batman’s is to the Gotham night. And Robert Duvall’s cop seemed like a commissioner Gordon, the guy inside the department who understands what the vigilante is up to.

Then I learned that Schumacher was slated to make a Batman movie, and I was ecstatic. I think that was the year my housemate spearheaded a Batman party at our house, complete with a bat-signal on the roof. Our activities included watching the campy movie from the Sixties and a guest lecture by an English professor from down the street who had done an extensive analysis of the Batman oevre.

I went to the midnight showing on opening day, and found Schumacher to have played up the camp while keeping Batman as ineffective as ever. One thing I can say for the TV series is that the mannerisms and sincerety of Adam Wests’s character, while part of the camp, were well developed and seemed to speak to a heroic soul that has been missing from every live-action Batman since.

I didn’t bother seeing Schumacher’s second Batman, the one with Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze. But I do recall Idiom writing a review for a website that we both worked for back then saying something like this: that watching that movie was like being strapped into your chair and force-fed jelly beans while having brightly colored sandbags dropped into your lap.

Then Hollywood started Batman over with Batman Begins. The camp was gone, and the director Christopher Nolan seemed to really want to portray a dark and effectively functioning Batman. But this movie merely went down the list of things Batman needs to have. Martial arts training? Check. Batmobile? Got one just collecting dust in storage. Suit? Got one of those too, bulletproof in fact, right here in a drawer. The finale took place on a train, and we had had a train sequence in the previous summer’s Spiderman II. And at the end, Bruce Wayne blew up Wayne Manor, something that had already been done, actually, in Frank Miller’s Batman comic The Dark Knight Returns. But in Milller’s tale, Batman was changing his whole life. He had been in retirement, then had come out to fight crime again, and now was going underground with his new army of fanatic teenagers to fight crime in an entirely different way. Batman can’t be blowing up Wayne Manor when he’s just beginning. And the demolition didn’t contribute to the story anyway.

What’s with Batman’s stuff being destroyed for no good reason in these movies? In Burton’s first, Batman’s plane was shot down with one bullet from the Joker’s comical pistol. In Burton’s second, Batman intentionally broke his car apart to form the Bat-missile simply to allow Batman to escape down a narrow alley. One gets the idea that this can happen only one time and the car is destroyed. You can’t tell me Batman does this everytime he needs to go down a narrow alley. And later in that movie, Batman goes to visit the Penguin in some vehicle that seems designed for going through sewers, and Batman crashes it like a spoiled teenager in his new Ferrari upon arrival at the Penguin’s lair.

I know Batman is supposed to be rich, but this is going too far, like an over-extravagant wedding. At this rate he’s gonna burn his money off and have nothing left, hardly the responsible thing to do.

I say Batman needs to be sustainable. Keep it simple with a fancy car, the suit, the cave, the mansion, maybe a bat-like hang glider or something, but no freaking airplane, no flying suit. Batman has to rely on his skills. The intrigue of his character is that he needs to use his wits to create the impression of being supernatural without actually being so. It’s cheating to essentially give him supernatural powers under the guise of technological achievements.

I want to see him moving, leaping, hiding, lurking. Show him doing his own detective work and piecing clues together. Show him spying, hanging out on building ledges, planting microphones for eavesdropping. Show his psychological effect on crooks. The thing about Batman Begins was, everytime a crook went around a dark corner, Batman was there to sock him. A better movie would have Batman not always being there, but still keeping the criminals on edge. Batman should fool the audience too. Have him do unexpected things, strange things that make him seem a little crazy, but then show these actions to be a result of his being a step ahead of everyone else.

Batman Begins had unimaginative sound design, in my recollection. Every punch had the same exact bass “thud.” It got old quickly, but it was unrelenting. Also, Scarecrow was not the slightest bit scary. And the musical theme has been lost since Burton gave up the franchise. Go on youtube and listen to the music from Batman begins. Sing me the Batman theme. Sounds to me like it’s one note. But go see for yourself and correct me if I’m wrong.



Previewers are saying this new Batman is darker and more psychologically deep than any of the previous movies. We’ll see about that. Tim Burton’s movies were dark, and some people equate that with “psychologically deep,” but Burton didn’t understand or do anything with the character. And Christopher Nolan’s first was dark, but one-dimensional and extremely predictable.

And folks are raving about Ledger’s Joker. This raises red flags. I fear Batman is taking a supporting role in his own movie again. Friend Bartcow has even dared to suggest that folks are raving about Ledger because he has tragically committed suicide.

So we’ll see. If this movie is what it is cracked up to be, it will mean Nolan has undergone some serious changes in his storytelling practice. But hey, Tiger Woods, already famous, still made some deep adjustments that improved his golf swing, right?

I leave you with Elfman's wonderful Richard Straussian finale, the likes of which we surely won't hear in the new Nolan movie.

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Israeli Algae Presentation uses Wagner Soundtrack

Seambiotic earns a place in my algae watchlist (see left-side menu column) with its production of algae using emissions from a coal burning power plant. The algae turns the CO2 into vegetable oil which can be refined into fossil fuels for transportation and other purposes.

In an earlier post, we saw how Greenfuels is growing algae in emissions from a gas burning power plant. Greenfuels uses closed tubes to grow the algae while Seambiotic, at this plant, is using open-air ponds. Unchewable Center commented that the Greenfuels operation is using a lot of water in the Arizona desert, a process that may not be feasible on a large scale. Seambiotic is using water from the Mediterranean.

CORRECTION: I had stated, earlier today in this post, that algae was separated from oil in this process using a centrifuge. This is not the case, as Unchewable Center pointed out in the first comment. The centrifuge is used to separate algae from water when the algae is to be used as food supplement. They don't say how they separate oil from algae for use as fuel. This stage is not described in any description of any algae oil production process that I know of, so it remains a mystery to me.

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Be Nice 'Cause Without Us, You'd be Nobody

I was told on the phone, “Watch out for the mom. She’s very persnickety. She won’t let you put things on a table or on a chair. She may snap at you. Don’t take it personally.”

The current producer says he’s glad to have only just started the show. It’s harder for the crewmembers who have been on this show from the beginning and seen the family go from being average overtaxed bickerers praying on the jumbotron to spoiled celebrities who have flexed their control-freak powers and gotten someone fired already.

I’m coming in just now, so I don’t know all the stories, but they’ve told me bits and pieces.

Apparently, the behavior of the parents got crazy and drove some producers to the point of tears, or shouting anger, but just between themselves, not in front of the family.

One normally even-tempered producer took herself off the show because of how she was being spoken to by the mom. Her replacement, whom I’m working for, had to lie to the family for a while to cover for his predecessor’s absence.

There was a conference call with the family where it all got worked out. The family aired its complaints. “We don’t like it when someone other than the cameraman picks up the camera,” they said.

Huh? Sometimes the PA’s use the camera to shoot stuff. It’s just a bullshit complaint. But it was noted to keep everyone happy.

It was thought to be all cool then, but then the mom was heard griping on the phone to someone about the crew while she was wearing a microphone. Bad move there, persnickety Mom.

One PA, let’s call him Dale, says that the Mom keeps looking at him like he doesn’t know what it’s like to have “eight crumbcrunchers come out of his nook,” to use his words.

“You’re damn right,” he said to us crew today in the car. “I thank the Lord every day I have a cock. Women just have too much shit to figure out, comparing their skin color to swatches every day, trying to find out what’s going on. ‘Am I dying, or am I just eating too much cabbage?’”

Apparently some church paid for the beach house.The family makes trips to churches and talks about their experiences. The other PA, let’s call him Steve, says they think they are closer to God or something. The mom doesn’t like people to cuss, and she makes us take our shoes off when we go into the house.

So when the phone rang today, on the way to the location, and PA Steve answered while driving and said “Shit,” I presumed it wasn’t the mom.

It was. He later told us what she had said.

Mom to Steve, first thing out of her mouth: “I love you.”

Steve, first thing out of his mouth: “Shit. I mean, shoot. Sorry. What do you need?” He knew, from her first words, that she wanted something.

Mom: “Organic broccoli.”

Steve controlled his tone, knowing the mom was pushing him and the production to do something for her. He had to say, “Sure.” But he goes on. “Well, I don’t know if I can get organic on the island. But I can get broccoli. Anything else?”

Mom: “No, that’s all. Do you need anything from me?”

Steve: “A good performance.”

By now I know he’s talking to the mom, and I’m thinking he’s going to get fired for cussing at her. But Steve’s been on the show for 4 years now. He can cuss, excuse himself but not really mean it, and life goes on. And apparently, the producers of the show are not so anxious that they feel they need to change crew around to find the right personnel to create the least friction with the family. Unlike the producers on some jobs. As a new guy coming in on this show, I appreciate that they didn’t tell me how to act. They presumed I’m not going to cause trouble, and they let me and the others do our jobs, and deal with the friction as it arises. I mean, the mom has to deal with us just as we’re dealing with her. She’s getting paid, she can deal.

On the phone, Steve went on with his statement about the mom’s performance, as if he were the director. “I mean, happiness. I just want you to be happy.”

When he brought the broccoli later, he wrote on its bag, “Super Delicious Amazing Organic Broccoli.” The mom told him she didn’t appreciate that, but he said he thought he could tell she thought it was funny.

The other sound guy, Mitchell, who has also been working on this show for four years, told me that when he mics the mom, she usually takes it from him and tapes it somewhere in her shirt without care. She may turn and walk away from him before he’s put the transmitter on her, and he may have to walk behind her trying to clip it to her belt. And when the shooting is over, she’ll rip it out against the tape, the $300.00 tiny cable and mic which, though sturdy, can only be yanked so many times. They’ve told her its cost, and she rips it anyway. She hands the mic and transmitter back to Mitchell with the transmitter dangling from the mic cable.

It makes you wary of buying your own equipment. You spend $300 on a body mic, and they rip it out like it’s part of some striptease act, a sudden shedding of something to be tossed to an audience. I had a doctor do that back on those superbowl ads. I had to take the mic off another person, and the doctor marched into the makeup room and ripped the mic out of her labcoat before I could get to her. Often, the tape is stubborn, and they look at it as if surprised that it resists their ripping, and they rip harder. Excuse me folks, the tape I use is very sticky. It stays on you. Did you notice how it stayed all day and I didn’t have to keep hassling you to retape it? You can’t just rip it out like that. Not to mention, I don’t rip your stethoscope off of you. I don’t rip catheters out of your patients, or those brainwave pad things off their shaved heads. I bet all that costs $300.00. Why is it okay then when it comes to my mic?

With any luck, I won’t have to mic the mom on this show. I’ll be more in the background booming the kids as they either stand speechless with fingers in their mouths, or scream.

Today I was told that since I was sending wireless audio to camera, I would not need to go into the surf. But I wore my Keens anyway, and sure enough, when Dad took the kids by the hands and lead them into the water, the camera man went in front of them to shoot their faces, and I went to get their audio. The surf could break about our knees, and that was okay. Any higher, and it could splash into the equipment zone on my body where the audio bag was suspended around my belly.

Once you get out there with the camera and audio running, and you’re watching the cameraman’s frame and watching for surf coming in and for your boom shadow and where the kids are standing so you don’t step on them and trying to stay on axis to the dialog of the dad and the kids, you forget about the politics and you have fun. You’re glad for your Keens -- that is something that worked out right. Let the soothing salt water flow through them, then wear them home and hose them off. It’s just what they’re for.

Tonight, back at the crew house, the producer passed around a hash pipe. “It’s what makes you a good producer,” PA Dale said. I declined. I don’t think a working trip is the time to try pot for the first time. Everyone else took a hit though, and they were drinking too. I would have loved a beer, but I’ve had to give it up since going on the pill.

After two beers and a few hits off the pipe, the main cameraman got up to try out the underwater camera rig. The producer carried its 48 pounds to the edge of he pool for him. The cameraman jumped in and took the underwater rig and together they bobbed like two apples. He would turn the camera, and his own body would turn in counter-motion.

“This is hard after two beers and two hits,” he said. “Maybe they are right. Maybe we are unprofessional and slack.”

PA Dale did awful water ballet for him while he shot him, and then we all looked at the footage.

“I’m fat,” said Dale.

“I like the above/below water split,” someone said.

PA Steve joked that, after those pipe hits, the camera man would be playing with the underwater rig in the bathtub tonight, checking out his own penis on the above/below water split.

Lord, I hope I don't have to mic the mom tomorrow.

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Neocons at the Beach

My Neocon step-sister-in-law, let’s call her Elsa, told me she would not talk about politics this year. I said I’d love to hear what she had to say and would give her 15 minutes to talk uninterrupted by me. With an air of self-assuredness, she said she did not want to scare me. I said I knew what she would say anyway because I’ve been reading The Weekly Standard. She said, “What I’ve been parroting.” Yep.

I doubt she’s been reading what I parrot.

I wondered what she thinks would scare me. Last summer she told me, “Syria is useless. They should be bombed into glass.” Could it get more scary than that? It can get equally scary, at least. Here’s what came up over dinner one night.

Elsa was talking about the movie Parenthood in which a mother complains that she is having to police her son who is suspected of doing drugs. “I was at Woodstock for Chrissakes,” the mother says.


My family members all agreed it was a great line. Then Dad had to go into his standard line about Woodstock which is that the U.S. Army had to fly in portalets because there was no place for all those people to go to the bathroom. “People talk about peace and love,” my dad said, ”and here, it takes the Army to save them from disease. These people were just tramping around in mud. They had to have been miserable. You know, I was at Haight-Ashbury in the late 60’s, and most of the people I saw there looked pretty sullen.”

Elsa’s husband said, “They [the Army] should have dropped a bomb on them.”

Elsa piped up, “I know. These Bohemians are so . . .” she trailed off here, but I can imagine she meant that so-called Bohemians are self-righteous, or PC, or something like that. “I mean, I’m sorry,” she said, making her usual vague admission that she could be offending someone somewhere while presuming that everyone in the room agrees with her.

I tried to make a stand. “Well, if you’d dropped a bomb on them, you would have killed Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar.” I could not think of any more. Those are the only musicians I could name who I were at Woodstock. I don’t really know jack about Woodstock, actually.

“But they all died anyway,” Elsa’s husband said.

I had no response to that. I wish I had said, “Okay, who else is going to die anyway that we can go ahead and kill now?” Sounds like a good case for abortion if I ever saw one, Honk!

Did I mention that Elsa's husband is a surgeon?

I did think about bringing up another issue. While the Neocons would like to bomb the unsanitary Bohemians, following their urging our country has bombed Baghdad into un-sanitation. Why doesn’t our army drop a few portalets there? Instead of setting up those concrete barriers, they could make a wall of portalets. Kill two birds with one stone. Then, insurgents and merchants alike, wishing they could access the neighboring neighborhood, could at least pause to relieve themselves in a manner befitting American constructions workers. But I did not mention this because we were not talking about the war, and I don’t bring it up around family -- someone else needs to bring it up first.

Later that day, I was helping Dad grill salmon outdoors. Elsa was nearby. We heard an ice cream truck go by playing Swan Lake, and I said, “It’s playing Tchaikovsky. There’s something wrong with that.”

Elsa said, “Yeah. I can imagine Tchaikovsky coming from a music box--”

“--a nice music box,” I said,

“--yeah,” she said. “But not some Slav in an ice cream truck.”

Some Slav? Where did that come from? Okay, to be fair, many service jobs like that of grocery clerk on the island are filled by European teenagers on some kind of summer work arrangement. The island has no permanent residents, no indigenous teenagers to take those summer jobs. I’ve met Poles and Czechs in the grocery store, so I guess there are some Slavs somewhere.

Sounds like she presumes superiority to Slavs though. This makes me sorry I even presumed my own superiority to ice cream truck drivers and their listeners who do not know who wrote that tune. I mean, heck, I don’t know who wrote the circus music it normally plays.

Here is what I did say to her. “Well, it was March Slav, so it was okay.”



Dad said, “Is that the tune that goes Daaaa, Daa Da Da Dummmm?” He can sing. He used to sing and act in community theater. He played Nanki Poo in The Mikado and Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. Most of this was before I was born.

“That’s it,” I said.

“Oh, I didn’t get the reference,” Elsa said.

For the moment I had superiority over her.

Her own ethnic heritage is Irish. And she’s Catholic. Would there ever be “some Irishman in an ice cream truck”? It would be far more appropriate to talk about Irishmen in Irish Pubs, institutions which seem to be spreading according to some social ink-blot theory in the centers of some American towns including my own. We have at least 3 Irish pubs in the downtown area. One local blogger has discovered the master plan to set aside a whole block downtown for the Irish, a true Green Zone, if you will. Maybe someone should start Irish Pubs in the real Green Zone. They can invent a new mixed drink called The Mortar. There are already Car Bombs.

Maybe Irish pubs are like kudzu or the Nile perch -- they grow better outside their natural habitat.

If I were to open a bar, I’d call it the Non-Irish Pub. I would not exclude Irish any more than an Irish pub excludes non-Irish. It’s just that, you know, non-Irish has a certain flair, a certain atmosphere that everyone can enjoy. You get a waiter or bartender who has a non-Irish accent, you feel like it’s a special occasion. Americans who spent a semester abroad enjoying the hospitality of the friendly people outside Ireland get a little feeling of nostalgia. A non-Irish pub is just a place, you know, where folks in the community can gather and have a drink, let off some steam. Its something that all people, Tartars, Hittites, Turks, Druze can relate to.

You know, I’m really sorry I talked a little smack about an ice cream truck playing Tchaikovsky. Let them play freaking Berg’s violin concerto, for crying in a bucket. I don’t care who’s driving, be it a Jew or Serb. Heck, bring on the Mongols. I’m all about the hordes, as long as they’re bringing ice cream.

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