Monsanto Westinghouses's New York Times/Los Angeles Times ReCaps
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mashups
1. A plus D – Bootie Intro
2. DJ Moule – Black Sabotage (Beastie Boys vs. Led Zeppelin) - Paris, France
3. DJ M.I.F. – Tricky Sandman (Run-DMC vs. Metallica) - Denmark
4. DJ Jay-R – Sweet Sovereign (Lady Sovereign vs. Eurythmics vs. Shiny Grey) - Oakland, USA
5. Divide & Kreate – Temperaturized (Sean Paul vs. Yaz) - Stockholm, Sweden
6. Party Ben – Hung Up On Soul (Death Cab For Cutie vs. Madonna) - San Francisco, USA
7. A plus D – Love Will Tear You Apart (She Wants Originality) (She Wants Revenge vs. Joy Division vs. Bauhaus) - San Francisco, USA
8. A plus D – Sexy Peek-A-Boo (Justin Timberlake vs. Siouxsie & the Banshees) - San Francisco, USA
9. Arty Fufkin – Crazy Logic (Gnarls Barkley vs. Supertramp vs. Rockwell) - Melbourne, Australia
10. Max Entropy – Short Skirt, London Bridge (Fergie vs. Cake) - Philadelphia, USA
11. DJ Axel – Real Back Poppin' (Cheryl Lynn vs. Fat Joe vs. Nelly) - Los Angeles, USA
12. A plus D – Beethoven's Fifth Gold Digger (Kanye West vs. Beethoven vs. Walter Murphy) - San Francisco, USA
13. team9 – The Money Song (Hard-Fi vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers vs. Flying Lizards vs. Abba vs. Jay-Z) - Perth, Australia
14. Go Home Productions – Don't Hold Back, Sweet Jane (Chemical Brothers vs. Velvet Underground vs. U2 vs. Sugababes vs. MARRS) - Watford, UK
15. DJ Topcat – Dec. 4th, Oh What A Night (Jay-Z vs. Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons) - Seattle, USA
16. DJ Topcat – The Safety Booty (Bubba Sparxxx vs. Men Without Hats) - Seattle, USA
17. Pilchard – Fox Problems (Jimi Hendrix vs. Jimi Bo Horne vs. Eric B & Rakim) - Royal Berkshire, UK
18. Lenlow – Work It Out (Beyonce vs. Dave Matthews vs. Jurassic 5 vs. Deee-Lite) - Boston, USA
19. Victor Menegaux – Going Back To Dani (Notorious B.I.G. vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers) - Seattle, USA
20. The Kleptones – Careless Or Dead (Bon Jovi vs. George Michael) - Brighton, UK
21. Divide & Kreate – Always With You (Willie Nelson vs. U2 vs. MARRS) - Stockholm, Sweden
BONUS TRACKS
Here are more of our favorite mashups from 2006 that didn't quite fit into the 78-minute continuous mix, but we wanted you to have them. For your downloading pleasure, right-click and "save as."
Earworm – Over the Confluence of Giants (Under The Influence of Giants vs. Steely Dan vs. Queen vs. Steve Miller vs. David Bowie vs. Common) - San Francisco, USA
DJ Zebra – Ya Bossy (Kelis vs. Rachid Taha) - Paris, France
Tripp – Super Freaks On Film (Rick James vs. Duran Duran) - Santa Cruz, USA
Matt Hite – Step To Silence (Coolio vs. INXS vs. Ciara vs. Depeche Mode vs. Survivor vs. Blondie vs. Chemical Brothers) - San Francisco, USA
Disfunctional DJ – You're The One That I Want In The Next Episode (Olivia Newton-John & John Travolta vs. Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg) - The Netherlands
Voicedude – Dead Or Aguilera (Christina Aguilera vs. Dead Or Alive) - Orange County, USA
Aber N. Stein - Gimme Some Supermassive Green Onions (Muse vs. Booker T & the MGs vs. Spinal Tap) - Toronto, Canada
Party Ben - Confused Tobaco Rump (Bonde do Role vs. New Order vs. Spank Rock) - San Francisco, USA
Oli Clifford – Bum Breath (Destiny's Child vs. Arctic Monkeys) - Birmingham, UK
Victor Menegaux – Easy Maneater (Nelly Furtado vs. Phil Collins) - Seattle, USA
BOOTLEGGER LINKS
A plus D ... DJ Moule ... DJ M.I.F. ... Jay-R ... Divide & Kreate
Party Ben ... Arty Fufkin ... Max Entropy ... DJ Axel ... team9
Go Home Productions ... DJ Topcat ... Pilchard ... Lenlow ... Tripp
Victor Menegaux ... The Kleptones ... Earworm ... DJ Zebra
Matt Hite ... DJ John ... Oli Clifford ... Voicedude ...
Disfunctional DJ ... Aber N. Stein
BOOTIE LINKS
A PLUS D
DJs Adrian and the Mysterious D are the creators and masterminds behind Bootie.
They also create their own mashups under the moniker A plus D
GET YOUR
BOOTLEG ON
Created by McSleazy, this is the granddaddy of bootleg/mashup message boards
Salon Comics Directory
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Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling
The K Chronicles by Keith Knight
Story Minute by Carol Lay
This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow
Story Minute by Carol Lay
Good times for Dilbert
The world's best-loved cartoon engineer gets off on the tight job market, while his creator, Scott Adams, talks about Zippergate and the enduring stupidity of humankind.
Tijuana Bibles
Those Dirty Little Comics: By Art Spiegelman.
The introduction to 'Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s.'
Duty-Free Art
Jesse Helms thinks artists must be socially responsible. So do many of the shocking artists he reviles. They're all wrong.
===
Arts & Life
October 21, 2007
Chinese museums exhibit candor
In China's Sichuan province, a complex of new, privately owned museums dedicated to the Cultural Revolution (1969-76), the War of Resistance against the Japanese (1937-45) and 20th century Chinese folk culture reflects increasing openness about the way recent history is viewed in China. Fan Jianchuan, a Chinese industrialist and Communist Party member, collected 2 million historical artifacts displayed in 25 galleries, including a Gallery of Women's Tiny Shoes on foot-binding and a kitschy Cultural Revolution Porcelain Art Gallery. Noteworthy are displays on the role America played in the Sino-Japanese War and the Plaza of Handprints of 3,000 Soldiers, a rare recognition that Nationalist soldiers as well as Communists gave their lives in the long struggle to liberate China from the Japanese. The Jianchuan Museum Cluster is about 20 miles west of the city of Chengdu, in the town of Anren; www.jc-museum.cn.
--
Bound for glory
Martin Gray, the photographer and anthropologist behind "Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power," has spent more than 20 years shooting hundreds of sacred sites around the world. He created www.sacredsites.com to share his work, and now he's given us this 276-page coffee-table tome. Many of the hundreds of color images in it are arresting and inspiring, although not every reader will be ready to swallow all the high-flown, semi-scientific prose about how these places differ from the rest of workaday Earth. (I could have used more information about exactly how and when he made some of these striking pictures, but there's none of that.) Ah, well. It should be enough to see these places, to learn a little about them, to be reminded how they have inspired humans to all sorts of actions, including raising the megalithic stones of Stenness, Scotland, and sculpting the boulders at Kalasasaya Temple in Tiwanacu, Bolivia. The book, $35, is from Sterling Publishing, www.sterlingpublishing.com.
* fraywatch
A list of grievances against current movie offerings.
* today's pictures
Makeup!
* chatterbox
Lynne Cheney and the anxiety of influence.
* history lesson
The Rockefellers and class warfare.
* low concept
Happy birthday, Jean-Claude Van Damme!
* philanthropy
A special issue on philanthropy.
* philanthropy
Which microlender makes best use of my $20?
* philanthropy
Since he fell in love with the Bronx during a visit in 2005, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has been funneling millions of dollars to the area through Citgo PETROLEum.
* philanthropy
Why big donors back Teach for America.
* philanthropy
Compete for capital!
* culturebox
The trouble with indie rock.
* culturebox
What's wrong with The Office and how to fix it.
* movies
Reese Witherspoon in Rendition, reviewed.
* dialogues
Debating The Year of Living Biblically.
* books
Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought.
* art
A history of the American snapshot.
* dvd extras
Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, reviewed.
* music box
The German emo boys are coming!
* television
Terrorism plus slackerism equals Chuck.
* poem
"Failure"
* fighting words
The Nobel committee gets it right, for once.
* recycled
Is Radiohead screwing over its fans with low-quality MP3s?
* family
Why don't parents like to play with their kids?
* dear prudence
Advice on manners and morals.
* explainer
Where did Pamela Anderson find a fake wedding cake?
* television
A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila.
* Introducing "Interviews 50 Cents."
Andy Warhol’s films, in retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, are records of a world in which an artist worked, played and built his identity.
What Do You Do After Nothing?
No, Jerry Seinfeld hasn’t been idle; he’s been as busy as a ... well, you know.
Judge a book not by its cover, author or store position
but by its track record and the writer's motivation, experts say.
Business & Tech
THE CONSCIENCE OF A LIBERAL
Paul Krugman is a justly renowned professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. His abundant accolades include the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded biannually to an outstanding economist under the age of 40 — a distinction said to be predictive of, and perhaps even more prestigious than, receipt of the Nobel in economic science. His twice-weekly column in The New York Times routinely and authoritatively demystifies complex economic arcana.
And yet maybe Krugman is not really an economist — at least not according to the definition offered more than a century ago by Francis Amasa Walker, the first president of the American Economic Association, who wrote that laissez-faire “was not made the test of economic orthodoxy, merely. It was used to decide whether a man were an economist at all.”
Most modern economists continue to celebrate Walker’s orthodoxy, and behind it, the classical doctrines of Adam Smith, whose fabled “invisible hand” regularly works wonders of production, distribution, innovation and efficiency, provided it is kept free of the meddlesome “nanny state.” Against the constant threat of encroachment from that benighted quarter the free-market faithful are ever vigilant.
Krugman will have none of this — well, very little of it (he won the Clark Medal for work demonstrating the limitations, but not the total illogic, of free trade). Where the orthodox see nothing but market miracles, he sees many a market failure. And where they detect the invisible hand, he finds manipulation by the richest Americans to rig the game in their favor.
In our time, Krugman argues, the malefactors of megawealth have triumphed. He recites the now-familiar data that the wealthiest 0.01 percent of Americans are seven times richer than they were three decades ago, while the inflation-adjusted income of most American households has barely nudged upward. Chief executives who typically earned 30 times more than their average employee in the 1970s now take home more than 300 times as much. The American plutocracy, Krugman concludes, “have become rich enough to buy themselves a party” — and readers are left in no doubt which party we’re talking about.
But Krugman the anti-economist does not believe that growing economic inequality incubated modern political conservatism. In his view, the “arrow of causation” points the other way: political change, cunningly engineered by “radicals of the right,” has spawned egregious economic disparity, as well as a toxic level of partisanship. Ever the iconoclast, Krugman says “this strongly suggests that institutions, norms and the political environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income — and that the impersonal market forces matter less — than Economics 101 might lead you to believe.” In short, it’s the politics, stupid.
The bulk of this book consists of a historical explanation for how this sorry state of affairs came to be. It’s a story that is as factually shaky as it is narratively simplified. (Kansas, whatever its other crimes and misdemeanors, is not customarily regarded as the birthplace of Prohibition; the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, not 1964.) History according to Krugman goes something like this: the nation suffered through a “Long Gilded Age” of let-’er-rip, dog-eat-dog capitalism until the New Deal created a new social order characterized by income-leveling taxes, job security, strong labor unions, a prosperous middle class, bipartisan solidarity and general social bliss. Krugman invokes that post-World War II “paradise lost” in his first paragraph, and his yearning to restore that Edenic moment informs all the pages that follow.
But as the story unfolds, serpents slither into the garden, in the form of pesky “movement conservatives.” Those upstarts set out in the 1960s to exploit racial tensions, national security anxieties and volatile value-laden matters like abortion, school prayer and gay rights “to change the subject away from bread and butter issues.” By century’s end they had managed to fasten upon their hapless fellow citizens “a second Gilded Age” in which inequality is on the rise and even the modest American version of the welfare state that the New Deal put in place is in danger of being dismantled.
For this dismal state of affairs the Democratic Party is held to be blameless. Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics, or Democratic condescension toward the ungrammatical yokels who consider their spiritual and moral commitments no less important than the minimum wage or the Endangered Species Act, nor even the Democrats’ vulnerable post-Vietnam record on national security. As Krugman sees it, the modern Republican Party has been taken over by radicals. “There hasn’t been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the G.O.P. is the underlying cause of today’s bitter partisanship.” No two to tango for him. The ascendancy of modern conservatism is “an almost embarrassingly simple story,” he says, and race is the key. “Much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican. ... End of story.”
A fuller and more nuanced story might at least gesture toward the role that environmental and natural-resource issues have played in making red-state country out of the interior West, not to mention the unsettling effects of the “value issues” on voters well beyond Dixie. And as for national security — well, as Krugman sees things, it was not Democratic bungling in the Iranian hostage crisis or humiliation in Somalia or feeble responses to the first bombing attack on the World Trade Center or the assault on the U.S.S. Cole, but the runaway popularity of the Rambo films (I’m not making this up) that hoodwinked the public into believing that the party of Carter and Clinton (not to mention McGovern and Kucinich) might not be the most steadfast guardian of the Republic’s safety.
For all that he inveighs against the evils of partisanship, Krugman astonishingly concludes by repudiating the chimera of “bipartisan compromise” and declaring that “to be a progressive, then, means being a partisan — at least for now.” Indeed, at times he seems more intent on settling his neocon adversaries’ hash than on advancing solutions to vexed policy issues. “Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy,” he writes, a sentence that both stylistically and substantively says much about the shortcomings of this book.
That assorted wing nuts have pretty much managed to hijack the Republican Party in recent years is scarcely in doubt. That the market is at least occasionally fallible is also not at issue. Nor is it deniable that the New Deal rendered the lives of millions of Americans more secure, and that they have become markedly less so in recent decades. A tidal wave of risk-shifting — from defined-benefit to defined-contribution retirement plans, and from employer-financed to individually-paid health care insurance, to cite but two examples — has set millions of American families anxiously adrift on a sea of uncertainty. Krugman’s chapter on the imperative need for health care reform is the best in this book, a rueful reminder of the kind of skilled and accessible economic analysis of which he is capable, and how little of it is on display here. Like the rants of Rush Limbaugh or the films of Michael Moore, Krugman’s shrill polemic may hearten the faithful, but it will do little to persuade the unconvinced or to advance the national discussion of the important issues it addresses. It may even deepen the very partisan divide he denounces. Where is the distinguished economist when we need him?
-
EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS
The Gloomsayers Should Look Up
This country does not look like a country in economic trouble.
DEALBOOK
Real Losses Have Nothing to Do With Money
The human beings behind the business headlines can sometimes become lost.
* moneybox
Is nuclear power's comeback for real?
* the dismal science
Will customers pay more to do good?
* moneybox
The Spinal Tap economy.
* technology
What's the future of iTunes?
* moneybox
The subprime collapse didn't bother the Bush administration, until Paulson's pals began whimpering.
* ad report card
A disgusting new All-Bran ad.
* the undercover economist
Do magicians "own" their tricks?
* moneybox
Why are the wealthy abandoning the Republicans?
* the browser
Does Google know too much about us?
* moneybox
Banks that say "sorry," and the investors who love them too much.
* moneybox
How Wal-Mart and the government are killing the incandescent light bulb.
* moneybox
Is the ethanol boom going bust?
* technology
Unlocking Apple's iPhone is legal, ethical, and just plain fun.
* the dismal science
The tyranny of the market.
* moneybox
Why European banks were the big losers in the U.S. subprime meltdown.
* gaming
Halo 3, reviewed.
* moneybox
Why won't the government admit that inflation is rising?
* the undercover economist
The obscure game-theory problem that explains why rich countries are rich.
* the chat room
Reihan Salam talks with readers about Facebook etiquette and managing online friendships.
* technology
Why have municipal Wi-Fi networks been such a flop?
* moneybox
Hollywood's alarming obsession with hedge funds.
* explainer
What does the weakening of the dollar mean for me?
* technology
The Facebook commandments.
In Search of Wireless Wiggle Room
Will the F.C.C. open new doors to spectrum access?
What’s Russian for ‘Hacker’?
A formula for Web schemes: a lot of mathematicians, a lax legal system and Western targets.
What to Do About Pixels of Hate
Jihadi Web sites may be useful for terrorists, but they are also helping terror fighters.
Style & Shopping
_____Luxxcorp is opening U.S. stores. 'Bout Time!
The search for the ultimate snoring remedy.
Emily Yoffe talks with readers about trampy 'tween styles.
Backpacks you and your first-grader will love.
Shopping for clothes that will—and won't!—make your daughter look like a tramp.
Reusable water bottles you'll actually want to use.
Are some white folk superior to others?
To The Hospital On Heelys, the sneakers with wheels.
Kiddie pools your children will drown in.
How Life-Hackers conquered the world.
Gun Club targets the best water guns.
A brief history of the bikini.
Finding the best portable beach chair.
Sussing out the best hang-over removers.
Which House music cranks up the heat?
Elegy for the tie clip.
How Poiret freed men from the corset.
We wade through the software manuals so you don't have to.
Which pig iron can conquer my hardware needs?
Can American Apparel breach the Chinese Wall?
The rise of shmatte chic.
R.I.P. Forth & Towne
Which Oscar dresses were Aqua?
This Kevlar coat could save American fashion.
A field guide to young American killionaires.
Fashion Week: accessories hell.
Digital projectors worth the Xenon.
Which book outshines the others?
_____Nicky Hilton's Chick Count
PARTY CONFIDENTIAL:
The Belle of the Bash - "MR. THING."
Can a man be too well dressed?
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George Lucas is repackaging “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.”
The Indiana Jones adventure George Lucas is most proud of
is a short-lived TV series from the early '90s.
By Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 21, 2007
SKYWALKER RANCH, MARIN COUNTY -- There may be nothing that George Lucas enjoys more than watching someone's jaw drop in an expression of marvel. That explains the existence of this leafy 5,200-acre retreat, which has a hilltop observatory, a vineyard (the grapes are trucked over to Francis Ford Coppola's winery) and its own fire department, which presumably blares heroic scores by John Williams on its way to brush fires.
And then there's his stunning collection of pop-culture artifacts. The man who once aspired to be an anthropologist now has a personal Smithsonian of sorts here in Marin County. In the Victorian-style main house, for instance, you can find Charlie Chaplin's cane and slightly dimpled bowler sharing a bookcase with the badges worn by the Keystone Kops. Norman Rockwell paintings hang on the walls and Rudolph Valentino's whip is perched on a shelf near the parlor. Remember how hard it was for Indiana Jones to track down the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail? Now they're safe and sound here in an immaculate warehouse along with R2-D2 and C-3PO, all museum pieces in a museum that never opens to the public.
But the loneliest artifact of Skywalker Ranch -- or, to be more precise, the most underappreciated treasure that belongs to Lucas -- is the one that could be seen a few weeks ago flickering on the screen of the plush theater inside the main house. When Lucas spoke of it, he even sounded a bit like an archaeologist cradling a long-lost relic.
"We have another chance to let the world see it," he said, "and that's exciting for me."
The artifact in need of rescue is an early 1990s television series, "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," which is, by the stellar standards of the 63-year-old filmmaker's career, a beautiful loser. It was also, he says, "the single most fun I ever had with any project." For both of those reasons, he is back for more.
Over the past four years, Lucas and Paramount Home Video have pumped millions of dollars into reframing "Young Indiana" as a lavish, three-volume library of DVDs with a staggering number of extras, including 94 highly polished documentaries on famous people and moments in history. That grand content and the packaging and marketing commitment to the project are the sort you might expect for an anniversary reissue of "Gone With the Wind," not a show that was dropped by ABC after two seasons and moved on to the smaller stage of the Family Channel.
From a distance, the reverential treatment of "Young Indiana" might look like pure Lucas overkill. But to the filmmaker who changed the course of American cinema by creating his own universe, all of it is the logical conclusion of a project he considers one of his great achievements.
"Believe it or not, I've never been that involved in making commercial product, that is just not what I do," said Lucas, whose "Star Wars" films have a global box office gross of $4.3 billion. "What I do is get an idea of something I want to do, and I do it. It's about coming up with a great idea . . . in terms of the commercial [risks], I knew I was breaking all the rules."
Lucas said he won as soon as he persuaded Paramount and ABC to let him make "Young Indiana," which was filmed in unprecedented ways.
"They let me do it and do it in the way I wanted to do it," he said. "The main thing I was really after was to see how many shows I could get done before they woke up and said enough is enough. And, you know, we managed to get 44 hours of material out there. I felt grateful I got as much done as I did."
Critics and cultural observers were grateful too. "By far," the New York Times weighed in, "the most impressively mounted weekly show on television." Time said no show had "more ambition or style," and the Wall Street Journal said it raised the standards of television production to "the caliber of theatrical film." James Michener expressed awe and called the series a "daring venture," and Bill Moyers wistfully wished that the series would be "my grandson's companion far into the 21st century." Industry peers embraced it as well, handing the show 11 Emmy Awards. Looking back too, the show was a gathering point for an impressive amount of talent, both on-screen and off, with actors such as Max von Sydow, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Daniel Craig passing through its stories and directors such as Mike Newell working with writers like Frank Darabont.
But the ratings revealed that the show was more respected than loved. Lucas, always savvy to the desires of a mass audience, understood the problem; he had given the world the Indiana Jones he wanted, not the one they wanted. In 1993, talking to the The Times about the show's decline, he sounded weary. "It didn't matter how many times I said it was a coming-of-age series about a young boy's exploration of history," he said, "people still expected to see that rolling boulder."
Things 'you just can't do'
"YOUNG INDIANA" alternately presented the hero as a boy of about 9 (portrayed by Corey Carrier) and a young man between 16 and 19 (Sean Patrick Flanery), which, Lucas said with a bit of pride, is another "thing you just can't do on television" if you're following the rules.
The pace and tone of the episodes jumped around in a jolting way too; some were funny, others scary, some action-packed and others wistful and at times a bit windy. In each episode, the hero meets a key historical figure and learns a valuable lesson. His travels put him next to Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka, Woodrow Wilson and Ho Chi Minh, Sidney Bechet and George Gershwin, Mata Hari and Al Capone. "He is," Lucas said, "sort of like Forrest Gump with a whip."
Lucas came to "Young Indiana" with a vision that was more heart-warming than it was heart-pounding. Like Walt Disney decades before, Lucas saw a chance to reach into the living rooms of America with something that aspired to be both wholesome and thoughtful and educational between the chase scenes.
That's one reason Lucas has always described "Young Indiana Jones" as an "old-fashioned television show," a term that must have landed with quite the thud during concept discussions at ABC. But "Young Indiana" also came with the promise of visual innovation (it was a pioneer in digital production for television) and an outlandish production plan that now seems like a mix between Phileas Fogg and "The Amazing Race."
Lucas basically sent a 29-member film crew across 35 countries to use exotic locales as backdrops, which put them at the mercy of armed bandits, snakes, storms, dysentery, customs agents and crocodiles. Meanwhile, like some old newspaper tycoon monitoring a distant war, the impresario waited in Marin, where he watched the fruits of their labor and answered with dispatches regarding the next day's story and mission.
The film crew was led by Rick McCallum (who would go on to be producer of the second trilogy of "Star Wars" films), who compares his hearty team to "the French Foreign Legion with camera equipment" and said their mission was "a great adventure none of them will ever forget, and one that ended a few marriages and started a few others."
Directors who worked on the series included Newell, Terry Jones, David Hare and Bille August.
On-screen, Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Lee were among the veterans who joined the expeditionary project, while a number of new faces appeared and later went on to bigger things, among them Zeta-Jones, who portrayed a belly-dancing spy when Indy meets T.E. Lawrence, and Tony winner Jeffrey Wright, who blows the horn as Bechet. McCallum said he especially remembers a performance by Elizabeth Hurley, who played the daughter of a London suffragette.
"She just lit up, it was amazing to see her in that performance," McCallum said during an interview at the ranch. "There were so many shows where we caught people at interesting points in their careers, and there was a sense that we were doing something very different and important."
And, at times, dangerous. While traveling in Kenya, a raiding party descended on the crew's encampment looking for the weapons they had heard firing. "They had real guns, ours were plastic," McCallum said. "But they didn't get it, they took them anyway. They thought there was just some new kind of American gun, real lightweight and made of plastic instead of metal. No one got hurt, that's the good news."
The show itself, though, didn't have that same knack for survival. The network likely contributed to the downfall by moving it around to different nights and, at one point, putting it opposite "Seinfeld." (Lucas said it was "common sense" that the show should have been on Sunday nights, like "Disney did it" years ago.)
The adult Indy is back too
IN the films, which began with "Raiders" in 1981, Indiana Jones was, of course, portrayed by Harrison Ford, who as the adventurer-archeologist was a charming blend of minor scoundrel and major scholar. Ford is reprising his most famous role for "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," the fourth film in the franchise, which just wrapped shooting in Los Angeles and is due in theaters next year. Lucas is executive producer and has a "story by" credit. The screenplay is by David Koepp; Steven Spielberg is directing.
"It went amazing, I'm thrilled with it and the look of it and what Steven was able to do to capture that time -- it's set in the 1950s -- and we were very happy with the story," Lucas said. "It had to be a great story or we weren't going to do the movie. I mean, nobody involved needed the money."
That may sound a bit brassy, but really it speaks to the patience of Lucas. It's been 18 years since the last Indiana Jones film, and Lucas was willing to bide his time. That seems to apply to the television show as well. He said the notion of creating a massive history lesson wrapped inside an adventure series was the plan all along for "Young Indiana Jones," it just took this long to deliver it in the way he deemed worthy. "That was actually the original idea when I started the whole thing, and it's just taken me this long to get it all done," he said with a chuckle. "It's a lot of hours of material, and it was expensive and hard and, of course, it was something that the industry wasn't interested in."
Lucas is his own industry, however, and his interest and budget appear to be boundless. Back in Modesto, young George had a solitary word printed next to his high school yearbook photo: "History." The avid scholar in him is still alive and well. Last week, he got "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume 1" ($117.99, in stores Tuesday) and its 12 discs.
The Wizard of Skywalker Ranch was mightily pleased.
The best part of the DVD series may be the new documentaries (there are 38 in Volume 1), which were led by CBS News veteran David Schneider. They are replete with rare photos and footage, as well as new contextual interviews with notable names such as Henry Kissinger, Gloria Steinem, Martin Scorsese, Colin Powell and Deepak Chopra. In a Skywalker Ranch screening room, Schneider gave a preview of one documentary, a biography of Paul Robeson that gave a measured but poignant account of his rise in American consciousness as a star of stage and screen and the dismantling of his life after he became a target of the anti-communist movement in America.
"Our goal was to tell the stories of history but also capture the drama of these lives, which sometimes is missing from documentaries," Schneider said. He talked in awe about lives that zigzagged between triumph and ignominy and how moments of serendipity and awful luck changed the course of nations. "There's incredible drama if you treat these as stories waiting to be told."
One core mission that Lucas gave Schneider was to make sure the documentaries would have a shelf life, that they were constructed in a way that would make them hold the attention of a student sitting in a classroom in 2020 or beyond.
That makes sense for a man who knows artifacts don't become less valuable as the years pass, nor do they suffer if they were underappreciated at first. The filmmaker laughed out loud as he imitated one of the naysayer opinions that confronted his young fedora-wearing hero in the 1990s. "The show, well, it's about history," he said in a mock voice dripping with disdain, "and, you know, forget that."
-
On Oct. 21, 1879, Thomas "THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK" Edison
invented a workable electric light at his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J.
============================================
Film comedies no laughing matter for actresses
Female roles nowadays are either so bland as to be invisible or missing altogether.
The careers of blowup dolls have more upside.
Spears gets a new lease, Malibu style
By Ruth Ryon
Britney Spears . . . again?
===========================================
Audio and Photos: Sure Shot
Whatever any of us does individually matters a tiny bit. But when leaders change the rules, you get scale change across the whole marketplace.
===========================================
A political meltdown in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and nuclear weapons are all in play, could be a disaster for the Bush administration.-
The Iran’s nuclear envoy resigned, signaling that Iran may have closed the door to a possible negotiated settlement.-
Syria has closed its borders to Iraqis and imposed new visa rules that will legally require 1.5 million Iraqis currently in Syria to return to Iraq.
A Counter History
Will there ever be room again for an old-style, family-run Jewish deli?
===========================================
His Meteoric Days Gone, Quiet Dean Leads Party
Cougars, Archers, Snipers
Why rely on a candidate’s beliefs if you can break down the country into microconstituencies and then devise policies to appeal to them?
==========================================================
THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER
==========================================================
By Tom Perrotta.
True Believers
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
Published: October 21, 2007
Children, even good children, hide some part of their private lives from their parents; and parents, having been young and furtive themselves, remember the impulse. So when Ruth Ramsey, the divorced 41-year-old mother who is the protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” learns that her teenage daughter, Eliza (who could be a grumpy, pimply poster child for “The Awkward Years”), has concealed a book from her, she’s not surprised. “She must have kept it hidden in a drawer or under a mattress,” she reflects — just as she herself once hid books like “The Godfather” and “The Happy Hooker.” But the book Eliza has been keeping under wraps is not a pulp fiction fable of vice and libertinage: it’s the Bible. And Eliza has yet another secret to spring on her mother: she and her little sister, Maggie, want to start going to church. To Ruth, a tolerant, progressive sex-ed teacher, her daughters’ embrace of “Goody Two-Shoes Christianity” comes as a slap in the face. “I don’t think you’re a born-again, fundamentalist, evangelical, nut-job Christian,” she tells Eliza, not imagining she would disagree. “I believe in God,” Eliza stubbornly replies. “And I believe that Jesus is His only son, and that He died on the cross for my sins.”
Ruth is a protective mother and wants a say in whom her daughters choose for friends. But can a parent tell her kids she thinks Jesus is a bad influence and retain the moral high ground?
Tom Perrotta is a truth-telling, unshowy chronicler of modern-day America: the strong, silent type on paper. Readers are most aware of his books that became hit movies — the black comedy “Election,” about a high school teacher who coaxes a shy jock to run for school president against a sexually predatory alpha girl; and the wistful romance “Little Children,” about a lonely man and woman, both married to others, both parents of toddlers, who slip into a love affair. But Perrotta’s unmassaged realism runs through all of his writing — from “Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies,” a coming-of-age collection so alive in detail that you can practically touch the tube socks and pastel tuxes; to his first novel, “The Wishbones,” about a small-time rocker with wedding jitters; to “Joe College,” a novel about a working-class kid from Jersey who reinvents himself at Yale, callously breaking ties with his girlfriend back home. Perrotta is a master of the lump-in-the-throat reversal, as in his story “Snowman,” when a pack of tough kids smash a giant snowman to punish an “enemy,” then realize, “wild with remorse,” that it was made for their target’s congenitally impaired kid brother. Usually, when you ask yourself, “What would a Perrotta character do?” you know the answer: he’d do the familiar, guiltily compromised, self-interested thing that any normal guy would do ... and you understand him, even if you don’t applaud him.
But the male lead of “The Abstinence Teacher” — the tacit lead, that is — is not one of Perrotta’s normal guys: it’s Jesus, who has come to visit the town of Stonewood Heights, and apparently means to stay. Stonewood Heights, a “well-to-do Northeastern suburb, not liberal by any means, but not especially conservative, either,” could be any of Perrotta’s traditional cruising strips, with its schools, malls, streets and sports fields. This time, however, he sets his cast of flawed parents and un-airbrushed kids against the stained-glass background of muscular Christianity on the march. A new church, the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, has come to town, bent on ridding the community of “all manner of godlessness and moral decay,” and the first weed their scythe of righteousness mows down is Ruth Ramsey’s ninth-grade sex-ed class. After a churchgoing snitch reports her teacher’s blasé endorsement of oral sex to her parents, the school forces Ruth to push an abstinence agenda, something she regards as “a farce, an attack on sexuality itself, nothing more than officially sanctioned ignorance.” Other secular-minded townspeople are slow to catch on, but to Ruth, who is on the crusade’s firing line, watching the Tabernacle’s influence spread feels like “living in a horror movie. ... ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,’ or something. You never knew who they were going to get to next.”
For the purposes of the narrative, Christ’s spokesman takes the form of a divorced dad named Tim Mason, a Tabernacle congregant who was booted out of his marriage after an “epic coke binge” that “ultimately brought him face-to-face with his Savior.” Mason clings to his newfound belief as if it were a life preserver. (His mother accuses him of “using Jesus like a substitute for drugs, like methadone.”) To keep close to his daughter, Abby, who lives with her remarried, irreligious
mother, Mason coaches fifth-grade girls’ soccer; Ruth’s daughter Maggie is his star player. After an emotional match, in a transport of spiritual fervor, Mason leads his team in prayer — enraging his ex-wife and Ruth, and setting off a holy war among the soccer moms and dads of Stonewood Heights.
The conflicts Perrotta invents here feel both instantly recognizable and queerly portentous, calling to mind dystopic science fictions from “Body Snatchers,” to Ira Levin’s “Stepford Wives,” to Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles.” As in the Bradbury story “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” in which an Earth family, resettled on Mars, slowly acquires alien customs and language, the characters in “The Abstinence Teacher” shift uneasily between two tongues: the unscripted cadences of ordinary speech and the exalted language of sin, salvation and belief. On one page, Mason dreams of taking his daughter to the Tabernacle: “What a pleasure it would be, walking into church with his little girl,” he thinks, “to stand beside her as she listened to God’s word.” But the wrench comes further on, in a rough moment any divorced father — whatever his faith — might feel, as he lingers with his child in the car, the motor idling, before returning her to her mother. “It was a way of prolonging their time together,” Perrotta writes: “as if his custodial rights didn’t officially come to an end until he shut off his ignition.”
In Perrotta’s fearful new world, religion injects uncomfortable ironies into lives that have already yawed off-kilter. A mother tells her born-again son: “Please don’t talk to me about Jesus. I feel like I don’t know you anymore.” A pious wife tries to cure her husband’s lack of interest in her by studying a book called “Hot Christian Sex: The Godly Way to Spice Up Your Marriage.” (Alas, naught availeth.) And, in a scene that could have come from Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” a troubled Best Buy clerk named Dennis, stirred to action by the Bible, goes on a rampage, lobbing printers through the air, deploring “the sinful works of man,” and shouting “Whore!” and “Abomination!” as he hurls a boombox into a plasma TV playing “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.” The scene appears in flashback; it’s the epiphany that led the clerk to create the Tabernacle, to reinvent himself as Pastor Dennis and to embark on a new career as a fisher of men, rather than a seller of electronics.
What does the author think of Pastor Dennis and his flock? As in Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow,” a novel that devotes hundreds of pages to a heated battle between religious fanatics and educated secularists in a Turkish town without explicitly taking sides, Perrotta does not spell it out. Instead, he gives space and speeches to proselytizers and scoffers alike, letting readers form their own conclusions. Religion is no less controversial a subject to weave into fiction in this country than it is in Turkey. In any case, Perrotta has never been one to cast stones.
-
Related Books: A Writer’s Search for the Sex in Abstinence (October 14, 2007)
==========================================
Making peace with Americans
Beneath the ominous calm that has settled,
uncertainty and hopelessness.=====================================
Where did Mexicans come from?
They have a choice of 'origin myths'
-- one a tale of betrayal, another a story of beauty
=====================================
==========================================
mashups
1. A plus D – Bootie Intro
2. DJ Moule – Black Sabotage (Beastie Boys vs. Led Zeppelin) - Paris, France
3. DJ M.I.F. – Tricky Sandman (Run-DMC vs. Metallica) - Denmark
4. DJ Jay-R – Sweet Sovereign (Lady Sovereign vs. Eurythmics vs. Shiny Grey) - Oakland, USA
5. Divide & Kreate – Temperaturized (Sean Paul vs. Yaz) - Stockholm, Sweden
6. Party Ben – Hung Up On Soul (Death Cab For Cutie vs. Madonna) - San Francisco, USA
7. A plus D – Love Will Tear You Apart (She Wants Originality) (She Wants Revenge vs. Joy Division vs. Bauhaus) - San Francisco, USA
8. A plus D – Sexy Peek-A-Boo (Justin Timberlake vs. Siouxsie & the Banshees) - San Francisco, USA
9. Arty Fufkin – Crazy Logic (Gnarls Barkley vs. Supertramp vs. Rockwell) - Melbourne, Australia
10. Max Entropy – Short Skirt, London Bridge (Fergie vs. Cake) - Philadelphia, USA
11. DJ Axel – Real Back Poppin' (Cheryl Lynn vs. Fat Joe vs. Nelly) - Los Angeles, USA
12. A plus D – Beethoven's Fifth Gold Digger (Kanye West vs. Beethoven vs. Walter Murphy) - San Francisco, USA
13. team9 – The Money Song (Hard-Fi vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers vs. Flying Lizards vs. Abba vs. Jay-Z) - Perth, Australia
14. Go Home Productions – Don't Hold Back, Sweet Jane (Chemical Brothers vs. Velvet Underground vs. U2 vs. Sugababes vs. MARRS) - Watford, UK
15. DJ Topcat – Dec. 4th, Oh What A Night (Jay-Z vs. Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons) - Seattle, USA
16. DJ Topcat – The Safety Booty (Bubba Sparxxx vs. Men Without Hats) - Seattle, USA
17. Pilchard – Fox Problems (Jimi Hendrix vs. Jimi Bo Horne vs. Eric B & Rakim) - Royal Berkshire, UK
18. Lenlow – Work It Out (Beyonce vs. Dave Matthews vs. Jurassic 5 vs. Deee-Lite) - Boston, USA
19. Victor Menegaux – Going Back To Dani (Notorious B.I.G. vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers) - Seattle, USA
20. The Kleptones – Careless Or Dead (Bon Jovi vs. George Michael) - Brighton, UK
21. Divide & Kreate – Always With You (Willie Nelson vs. U2 vs. MARRS) - Stockholm, Sweden
BONUS TRACKS
Here are more of our favorite mashups from 2006 that didn't quite fit into the 78-minute continuous mix, but we wanted you to have them. For your downloading pleasure, right-click and "save as."
Earworm – Over the Confluence of Giants (Under The Influence of Giants vs. Steely Dan vs. Queen vs. Steve Miller vs. David Bowie vs. Common) - San Francisco, USA
DJ Zebra – Ya Bossy (Kelis vs. Rachid Taha) - Paris, France
Tripp – Super Freaks On Film (Rick James vs. Duran Duran) - Santa Cruz, USA
Matt Hite – Step To Silence (Coolio vs. INXS vs. Ciara vs. Depeche Mode vs. Survivor vs. Blondie vs. Chemical Brothers) - San Francisco, USA
Disfunctional DJ – You're The One That I Want In The Next Episode (Olivia Newton-John & John Travolta vs. Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg) - The Netherlands
Voicedude – Dead Or Aguilera (Christina Aguilera vs. Dead Or Alive) - Orange County, USA
Aber N. Stein - Gimme Some Supermassive Green Onions (Muse vs. Booker T & the MGs vs. Spinal Tap) - Toronto, Canada
Party Ben - Confused Tobaco Rump (Bonde do Role vs. New Order vs. Spank Rock) - San Francisco, USA
Oli Clifford – Bum Breath (Destiny's Child vs. Arctic Monkeys) - Birmingham, UK
Victor Menegaux – Easy Maneater (Nelly Furtado vs. Phil Collins) - Seattle, USA
BOOTLEGGER LINKS
A plus D ... DJ Moule ... DJ M.I.F. ... Jay-R ... Divide & Kreate
Party Ben ... Arty Fufkin ... Max Entropy ... DJ Axel ... team9
Go Home Productions ... DJ Topcat ... Pilchard ... Lenlow ... Tripp
Victor Menegaux ... The Kleptones ... Earworm ... DJ Zebra
Matt Hite ... DJ John ... Oli Clifford ... Voicedude ...
Disfunctional DJ ... Aber N. Stein
BOOTIE LINKS
A PLUS D
DJs Adrian and the Mysterious D are the creators and masterminds behind Bootie.
They also create their own mashups under the moniker A plus D
GET YOUR
BOOTLEG ON
Created by McSleazy, this is the granddaddy of bootleg/mashup message boards
Salon Comics Directory
==========
Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling
The K Chronicles by Keith Knight
Story Minute by Carol Lay
This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow
Story Minute by Carol Lay
Good times for Dilbert
The world's best-loved cartoon engineer gets off on the tight job market, while his creator, Scott Adams, talks about Zippergate and the enduring stupidity of humankind.
Tijuana Bibles
Those Dirty Little Comics: By Art Spiegelman.
The introduction to 'Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s.'
Duty-Free Art
Jesse Helms thinks artists must be socially responsible. So do many of the shocking artists he reviles. They're all wrong.
===
Arts & Life
October 21, 2007
Chinese museums exhibit candor
In China's Sichuan province, a complex of new, privately owned museums dedicated to the Cultural Revolution (1969-76), the War of Resistance against the Japanese (1937-45) and 20th century Chinese folk culture reflects increasing openness about the way recent history is viewed in China. Fan Jianchuan, a Chinese industrialist and Communist Party member, collected 2 million historical artifacts displayed in 25 galleries, including a Gallery of Women's Tiny Shoes on foot-binding and a kitschy Cultural Revolution Porcelain Art Gallery. Noteworthy are displays on the role America played in the Sino-Japanese War and the Plaza of Handprints of 3,000 Soldiers, a rare recognition that Nationalist soldiers as well as Communists gave their lives in the long struggle to liberate China from the Japanese. The Jianchuan Museum Cluster is about 20 miles west of the city of Chengdu, in the town of Anren; www.jc-museum.cn.
--
Bound for glory
Martin Gray, the photographer and anthropologist behind "Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power," has spent more than 20 years shooting hundreds of sacred sites around the world. He created www.sacredsites.com to share his work, and now he's given us this 276-page coffee-table tome. Many of the hundreds of color images in it are arresting and inspiring, although not every reader will be ready to swallow all the high-flown, semi-scientific prose about how these places differ from the rest of workaday Earth. (I could have used more information about exactly how and when he made some of these striking pictures, but there's none of that.) Ah, well. It should be enough to see these places, to learn a little about them, to be reminded how they have inspired humans to all sorts of actions, including raising the megalithic stones of Stenness, Scotland, and sculpting the boulders at Kalasasaya Temple in Tiwanacu, Bolivia. The book, $35, is from Sterling Publishing, www.sterlingpublishing.com.
* fraywatch
A list of grievances against current movie offerings.
* today's pictures
Makeup!
* chatterbox
Lynne Cheney and the anxiety of influence.
* history lesson
The Rockefellers and class warfare.
* low concept
Happy birthday, Jean-Claude Van Damme!
* philanthropy
A special issue on philanthropy.
* philanthropy
Which microlender makes best use of my $20?
* philanthropy
Since he fell in love with the Bronx during a visit in 2005, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has been funneling millions of dollars to the area through Citgo PETROLEum.
* philanthropy
Why big donors back Teach for America.
* philanthropy
Compete for capital!
* culturebox
The trouble with indie rock.
* culturebox
What's wrong with The Office and how to fix it.
* movies
Reese Witherspoon in Rendition, reviewed.
* dialogues
Debating The Year of Living Biblically.
* books
Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought.
* art
A history of the American snapshot.
* dvd extras
Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, reviewed.
* music box
The German emo boys are coming!
* television
Terrorism plus slackerism equals Chuck.
* poem
"Failure"
* fighting words
The Nobel committee gets it right, for once.
* recycled
Is Radiohead screwing over its fans with low-quality MP3s?
* family
Why don't parents like to play with their kids?
* dear prudence
Advice on manners and morals.
* explainer
Where did Pamela Anderson find a fake wedding cake?
* television
A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila.
* Introducing "Interviews 50 Cents."
Andy Warhol’s films, in retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, are records of a world in which an artist worked, played and built his identity.
What Do You Do After Nothing?
No, Jerry Seinfeld hasn’t been idle; he’s been as busy as a ... well, you know.
Judge a book not by its cover, author or store position
but by its track record and the writer's motivation, experts say.
Business & Tech
THE CONSCIENCE OF A LIBERAL
Paul Krugman is a justly renowned professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. His abundant accolades include the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded biannually to an outstanding economist under the age of 40 — a distinction said to be predictive of, and perhaps even more prestigious than, receipt of the Nobel in economic science. His twice-weekly column in The New York Times routinely and authoritatively demystifies complex economic arcana.
And yet maybe Krugman is not really an economist — at least not according to the definition offered more than a century ago by Francis Amasa Walker, the first president of the American Economic Association, who wrote that laissez-faire “was not made the test of economic orthodoxy, merely. It was used to decide whether a man were an economist at all.”
Most modern economists continue to celebrate Walker’s orthodoxy, and behind it, the classical doctrines of Adam Smith, whose fabled “invisible hand” regularly works wonders of production, distribution, innovation and efficiency, provided it is kept free of the meddlesome “nanny state.” Against the constant threat of encroachment from that benighted quarter the free-market faithful are ever vigilant.
Krugman will have none of this — well, very little of it (he won the Clark Medal for work demonstrating the limitations, but not the total illogic, of free trade). Where the orthodox see nothing but market miracles, he sees many a market failure. And where they detect the invisible hand, he finds manipulation by the richest Americans to rig the game in their favor.
In our time, Krugman argues, the malefactors of megawealth have triumphed. He recites the now-familiar data that the wealthiest 0.01 percent of Americans are seven times richer than they were three decades ago, while the inflation-adjusted income of most American households has barely nudged upward. Chief executives who typically earned 30 times more than their average employee in the 1970s now take home more than 300 times as much. The American plutocracy, Krugman concludes, “have become rich enough to buy themselves a party” — and readers are left in no doubt which party we’re talking about.
But Krugman the anti-economist does not believe that growing economic inequality incubated modern political conservatism. In his view, the “arrow of causation” points the other way: political change, cunningly engineered by “radicals of the right,” has spawned egregious economic disparity, as well as a toxic level of partisanship. Ever the iconoclast, Krugman says “this strongly suggests that institutions, norms and the political environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income — and that the impersonal market forces matter less — than Economics 101 might lead you to believe.” In short, it’s the politics, stupid.
The bulk of this book consists of a historical explanation for how this sorry state of affairs came to be. It’s a story that is as factually shaky as it is narratively simplified. (Kansas, whatever its other crimes and misdemeanors, is not customarily regarded as the birthplace of Prohibition; the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, not 1964.) History according to Krugman goes something like this: the nation suffered through a “Long Gilded Age” of let-’er-rip, dog-eat-dog capitalism until the New Deal created a new social order characterized by income-leveling taxes, job security, strong labor unions, a prosperous middle class, bipartisan solidarity and general social bliss. Krugman invokes that post-World War II “paradise lost” in his first paragraph, and his yearning to restore that Edenic moment informs all the pages that follow.
But as the story unfolds, serpents slither into the garden, in the form of pesky “movement conservatives.” Those upstarts set out in the 1960s to exploit racial tensions, national security anxieties and volatile value-laden matters like abortion, school prayer and gay rights “to change the subject away from bread and butter issues.” By century’s end they had managed to fasten upon their hapless fellow citizens “a second Gilded Age” in which inequality is on the rise and even the modest American version of the welfare state that the New Deal put in place is in danger of being dismantled.
For this dismal state of affairs the Democratic Party is held to be blameless. Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics, or Democratic condescension toward the ungrammatical yokels who consider their spiritual and moral commitments no less important than the minimum wage or the Endangered Species Act, nor even the Democrats’ vulnerable post-Vietnam record on national security. As Krugman sees it, the modern Republican Party has been taken over by radicals. “There hasn’t been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the G.O.P. is the underlying cause of today’s bitter partisanship.” No two to tango for him. The ascendancy of modern conservatism is “an almost embarrassingly simple story,” he says, and race is the key. “Much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican. ... End of story.”
A fuller and more nuanced story might at least gesture toward the role that environmental and natural-resource issues have played in making red-state country out of the interior West, not to mention the unsettling effects of the “value issues” on voters well beyond Dixie. And as for national security — well, as Krugman sees things, it was not Democratic bungling in the Iranian hostage crisis or humiliation in Somalia or feeble responses to the first bombing attack on the World Trade Center or the assault on the U.S.S. Cole, but the runaway popularity of the Rambo films (I’m not making this up) that hoodwinked the public into believing that the party of Carter and Clinton (not to mention McGovern and Kucinich) might not be the most steadfast guardian of the Republic’s safety.
For all that he inveighs against the evils of partisanship, Krugman astonishingly concludes by repudiating the chimera of “bipartisan compromise” and declaring that “to be a progressive, then, means being a partisan — at least for now.” Indeed, at times he seems more intent on settling his neocon adversaries’ hash than on advancing solutions to vexed policy issues. “Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy,” he writes, a sentence that both stylistically and substantively says much about the shortcomings of this book.
That assorted wing nuts have pretty much managed to hijack the Republican Party in recent years is scarcely in doubt. That the market is at least occasionally fallible is also not at issue. Nor is it deniable that the New Deal rendered the lives of millions of Americans more secure, and that they have become markedly less so in recent decades. A tidal wave of risk-shifting — from defined-benefit to defined-contribution retirement plans, and from employer-financed to individually-paid health care insurance, to cite but two examples — has set millions of American families anxiously adrift on a sea of uncertainty. Krugman’s chapter on the imperative need for health care reform is the best in this book, a rueful reminder of the kind of skilled and accessible economic analysis of which he is capable, and how little of it is on display here. Like the rants of Rush Limbaugh or the films of Michael Moore, Krugman’s shrill polemic may hearten the faithful, but it will do little to persuade the unconvinced or to advance the national discussion of the important issues it addresses. It may even deepen the very partisan divide he denounces. Where is the distinguished economist when we need him?
-
EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS
The Gloomsayers Should Look Up
This country does not look like a country in economic trouble.
DEALBOOK
Real Losses Have Nothing to Do With Money
The human beings behind the business headlines can sometimes become lost.
* moneybox
Is nuclear power's comeback for real?
* the dismal science
Will customers pay more to do good?
* moneybox
The Spinal Tap economy.
* technology
What's the future of iTunes?
* moneybox
The subprime collapse didn't bother the Bush administration, until Paulson's pals began whimpering.
* ad report card
A disgusting new All-Bran ad.
* the undercover economist
Do magicians "own" their tricks?
* moneybox
Why are the wealthy abandoning the Republicans?
* the browser
Does Google know too much about us?
* moneybox
Banks that say "sorry," and the investors who love them too much.
* moneybox
How Wal-Mart and the government are killing the incandescent light bulb.
* moneybox
Is the ethanol boom going bust?
* technology
Unlocking Apple's iPhone is legal, ethical, and just plain fun.
* the dismal science
The tyranny of the market.
* moneybox
Why European banks were the big losers in the U.S. subprime meltdown.
* gaming
Halo 3, reviewed.
* moneybox
Why won't the government admit that inflation is rising?
* the undercover economist
The obscure game-theory problem that explains why rich countries are rich.
* the chat room
Reihan Salam talks with readers about Facebook etiquette and managing online friendships.
* technology
Why have municipal Wi-Fi networks been such a flop?
* moneybox
Hollywood's alarming obsession with hedge funds.
* explainer
What does the weakening of the dollar mean for me?
* technology
The Facebook commandments.
In Search of Wireless Wiggle Room
Will the F.C.C. open new doors to spectrum access?
What’s Russian for ‘Hacker’?
A formula for Web schemes: a lot of mathematicians, a lax legal system and Western targets.
What to Do About Pixels of Hate
Jihadi Web sites may be useful for terrorists, but they are also helping terror fighters.
Style & Shopping
_____Luxxcorp is opening U.S. stores. 'Bout Time!
The search for the ultimate snoring remedy.
Emily Yoffe talks with readers about trampy 'tween styles.
Backpacks you and your first-grader will love.
Shopping for clothes that will—and won't!—make your daughter look like a tramp.
Reusable water bottles you'll actually want to use.
Are some white folk superior to others?
To The Hospital On Heelys, the sneakers with wheels.
Kiddie pools your children will drown in.
How Life-Hackers conquered the world.
Gun Club targets the best water guns.
A brief history of the bikini.
Finding the best portable beach chair.
Sussing out the best hang-over removers.
Which House music cranks up the heat?
Elegy for the tie clip.
How Poiret freed men from the corset.
We wade through the software manuals so you don't have to.
Which pig iron can conquer my hardware needs?
Can American Apparel breach the Chinese Wall?
The rise of shmatte chic.
R.I.P. Forth & Towne
Which Oscar dresses were Aqua?
This Kevlar coat could save American fashion.
A field guide to young American killionaires.
Fashion Week: accessories hell.
Digital projectors worth the Xenon.
Which book outshines the others?
_____Nicky Hilton's Chick Count
PARTY CONFIDENTIAL:
The Belle of the Bash - "MR. THING."
Can a man be too well dressed?
===========================================
George Lucas is repackaging “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.”
The Indiana Jones adventure George Lucas is most proud of
is a short-lived TV series from the early '90s.
By Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 21, 2007
SKYWALKER RANCH, MARIN COUNTY -- There may be nothing that George Lucas enjoys more than watching someone's jaw drop in an expression of marvel. That explains the existence of this leafy 5,200-acre retreat, which has a hilltop observatory, a vineyard (the grapes are trucked over to Francis Ford Coppola's winery) and its own fire department, which presumably blares heroic scores by John Williams on its way to brush fires.
And then there's his stunning collection of pop-culture artifacts. The man who once aspired to be an anthropologist now has a personal Smithsonian of sorts here in Marin County. In the Victorian-style main house, for instance, you can find Charlie Chaplin's cane and slightly dimpled bowler sharing a bookcase with the badges worn by the Keystone Kops. Norman Rockwell paintings hang on the walls and Rudolph Valentino's whip is perched on a shelf near the parlor. Remember how hard it was for Indiana Jones to track down the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail? Now they're safe and sound here in an immaculate warehouse along with R2-D2 and C-3PO, all museum pieces in a museum that never opens to the public.
But the loneliest artifact of Skywalker Ranch -- or, to be more precise, the most underappreciated treasure that belongs to Lucas -- is the one that could be seen a few weeks ago flickering on the screen of the plush theater inside the main house. When Lucas spoke of it, he even sounded a bit like an archaeologist cradling a long-lost relic.
"We have another chance to let the world see it," he said, "and that's exciting for me."
The artifact in need of rescue is an early 1990s television series, "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," which is, by the stellar standards of the 63-year-old filmmaker's career, a beautiful loser. It was also, he says, "the single most fun I ever had with any project." For both of those reasons, he is back for more.
Over the past four years, Lucas and Paramount Home Video have pumped millions of dollars into reframing "Young Indiana" as a lavish, three-volume library of DVDs with a staggering number of extras, including 94 highly polished documentaries on famous people and moments in history. That grand content and the packaging and marketing commitment to the project are the sort you might expect for an anniversary reissue of "Gone With the Wind," not a show that was dropped by ABC after two seasons and moved on to the smaller stage of the Family Channel.
From a distance, the reverential treatment of "Young Indiana" might look like pure Lucas overkill. But to the filmmaker who changed the course of American cinema by creating his own universe, all of it is the logical conclusion of a project he considers one of his great achievements.
"Believe it or not, I've never been that involved in making commercial product, that is just not what I do," said Lucas, whose "Star Wars" films have a global box office gross of $4.3 billion. "What I do is get an idea of something I want to do, and I do it. It's about coming up with a great idea . . . in terms of the commercial [risks], I knew I was breaking all the rules."
Lucas said he won as soon as he persuaded Paramount and ABC to let him make "Young Indiana," which was filmed in unprecedented ways.
"They let me do it and do it in the way I wanted to do it," he said. "The main thing I was really after was to see how many shows I could get done before they woke up and said enough is enough. And, you know, we managed to get 44 hours of material out there. I felt grateful I got as much done as I did."
Critics and cultural observers were grateful too. "By far," the New York Times weighed in, "the most impressively mounted weekly show on television." Time said no show had "more ambition or style," and the Wall Street Journal said it raised the standards of television production to "the caliber of theatrical film." James Michener expressed awe and called the series a "daring venture," and Bill Moyers wistfully wished that the series would be "my grandson's companion far into the 21st century." Industry peers embraced it as well, handing the show 11 Emmy Awards. Looking back too, the show was a gathering point for an impressive amount of talent, both on-screen and off, with actors such as Max von Sydow, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Daniel Craig passing through its stories and directors such as Mike Newell working with writers like Frank Darabont.
But the ratings revealed that the show was more respected than loved. Lucas, always savvy to the desires of a mass audience, understood the problem; he had given the world the Indiana Jones he wanted, not the one they wanted. In 1993, talking to the The Times about the show's decline, he sounded weary. "It didn't matter how many times I said it was a coming-of-age series about a young boy's exploration of history," he said, "people still expected to see that rolling boulder."
Things 'you just can't do'
"YOUNG INDIANA" alternately presented the hero as a boy of about 9 (portrayed by Corey Carrier) and a young man between 16 and 19 (Sean Patrick Flanery), which, Lucas said with a bit of pride, is another "thing you just can't do on television" if you're following the rules.
The pace and tone of the episodes jumped around in a jolting way too; some were funny, others scary, some action-packed and others wistful and at times a bit windy. In each episode, the hero meets a key historical figure and learns a valuable lesson. His travels put him next to Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka, Woodrow Wilson and Ho Chi Minh, Sidney Bechet and George Gershwin, Mata Hari and Al Capone. "He is," Lucas said, "sort of like Forrest Gump with a whip."
Lucas came to "Young Indiana" with a vision that was more heart-warming than it was heart-pounding. Like Walt Disney decades before, Lucas saw a chance to reach into the living rooms of America with something that aspired to be both wholesome and thoughtful and educational between the chase scenes.
That's one reason Lucas has always described "Young Indiana Jones" as an "old-fashioned television show," a term that must have landed with quite the thud during concept discussions at ABC. But "Young Indiana" also came with the promise of visual innovation (it was a pioneer in digital production for television) and an outlandish production plan that now seems like a mix between Phileas Fogg and "The Amazing Race."
Lucas basically sent a 29-member film crew across 35 countries to use exotic locales as backdrops, which put them at the mercy of armed bandits, snakes, storms, dysentery, customs agents and crocodiles. Meanwhile, like some old newspaper tycoon monitoring a distant war, the impresario waited in Marin, where he watched the fruits of their labor and answered with dispatches regarding the next day's story and mission.
The film crew was led by Rick McCallum (who would go on to be producer of the second trilogy of "Star Wars" films), who compares his hearty team to "the French Foreign Legion with camera equipment" and said their mission was "a great adventure none of them will ever forget, and one that ended a few marriages and started a few others."
Directors who worked on the series included Newell, Terry Jones, David Hare and Bille August.
On-screen, Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Lee were among the veterans who joined the expeditionary project, while a number of new faces appeared and later went on to bigger things, among them Zeta-Jones, who portrayed a belly-dancing spy when Indy meets T.E. Lawrence, and Tony winner Jeffrey Wright, who blows the horn as Bechet. McCallum said he especially remembers a performance by Elizabeth Hurley, who played the daughter of a London suffragette.
"She just lit up, it was amazing to see her in that performance," McCallum said during an interview at the ranch. "There were so many shows where we caught people at interesting points in their careers, and there was a sense that we were doing something very different and important."
And, at times, dangerous. While traveling in Kenya, a raiding party descended on the crew's encampment looking for the weapons they had heard firing. "They had real guns, ours were plastic," McCallum said. "But they didn't get it, they took them anyway. They thought there was just some new kind of American gun, real lightweight and made of plastic instead of metal. No one got hurt, that's the good news."
The show itself, though, didn't have that same knack for survival. The network likely contributed to the downfall by moving it around to different nights and, at one point, putting it opposite "Seinfeld." (Lucas said it was "common sense" that the show should have been on Sunday nights, like "Disney did it" years ago.)
The adult Indy is back too
IN the films, which began with "Raiders" in 1981, Indiana Jones was, of course, portrayed by Harrison Ford, who as the adventurer-archeologist was a charming blend of minor scoundrel and major scholar. Ford is reprising his most famous role for "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," the fourth film in the franchise, which just wrapped shooting in Los Angeles and is due in theaters next year. Lucas is executive producer and has a "story by" credit. The screenplay is by David Koepp; Steven Spielberg is directing.
"It went amazing, I'm thrilled with it and the look of it and what Steven was able to do to capture that time -- it's set in the 1950s -- and we were very happy with the story," Lucas said. "It had to be a great story or we weren't going to do the movie. I mean, nobody involved needed the money."
That may sound a bit brassy, but really it speaks to the patience of Lucas. It's been 18 years since the last Indiana Jones film, and Lucas was willing to bide his time. That seems to apply to the television show as well. He said the notion of creating a massive history lesson wrapped inside an adventure series was the plan all along for "Young Indiana Jones," it just took this long to deliver it in the way he deemed worthy. "That was actually the original idea when I started the whole thing, and it's just taken me this long to get it all done," he said with a chuckle. "It's a lot of hours of material, and it was expensive and hard and, of course, it was something that the industry wasn't interested in."
Lucas is his own industry, however, and his interest and budget appear to be boundless. Back in Modesto, young George had a solitary word printed next to his high school yearbook photo: "History." The avid scholar in him is still alive and well. Last week, he got "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Volume 1" ($117.99, in stores Tuesday) and its 12 discs.
The Wizard of Skywalker Ranch was mightily pleased.
The best part of the DVD series may be the new documentaries (there are 38 in Volume 1), which were led by CBS News veteran David Schneider. They are replete with rare photos and footage, as well as new contextual interviews with notable names such as Henry Kissinger, Gloria Steinem, Martin Scorsese, Colin Powell and Deepak Chopra. In a Skywalker Ranch screening room, Schneider gave a preview of one documentary, a biography of Paul Robeson that gave a measured but poignant account of his rise in American consciousness as a star of stage and screen and the dismantling of his life after he became a target of the anti-communist movement in America.
"Our goal was to tell the stories of history but also capture the drama of these lives, which sometimes is missing from documentaries," Schneider said. He talked in awe about lives that zigzagged between triumph and ignominy and how moments of serendipity and awful luck changed the course of nations. "There's incredible drama if you treat these as stories waiting to be told."
One core mission that Lucas gave Schneider was to make sure the documentaries would have a shelf life, that they were constructed in a way that would make them hold the attention of a student sitting in a classroom in 2020 or beyond.
That makes sense for a man who knows artifacts don't become less valuable as the years pass, nor do they suffer if they were underappreciated at first. The filmmaker laughed out loud as he imitated one of the naysayer opinions that confronted his young fedora-wearing hero in the 1990s. "The show, well, it's about history," he said in a mock voice dripping with disdain, "and, you know, forget that."
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On Oct. 21, 1879, Thomas "THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK" Edison
invented a workable electric light at his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J.
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Film comedies no laughing matter for actresses
Female roles nowadays are either so bland as to be invisible or missing altogether.
The careers of blowup dolls have more upside.
Spears gets a new lease, Malibu style
By Ruth Ryon
Britney Spears . . . again?
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Audio and Photos: Sure Shot
Whatever any of us does individually matters a tiny bit. But when leaders change the rules, you get scale change across the whole marketplace.
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A political meltdown in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and nuclear weapons are all in play, could be a disaster for the Bush administration.-
The Iran’s nuclear envoy resigned, signaling that Iran may have closed the door to a possible negotiated settlement.-
Syria has closed its borders to Iraqis and imposed new visa rules that will legally require 1.5 million Iraqis currently in Syria to return to Iraq.
A Counter History
Will there ever be room again for an old-style, family-run Jewish deli?
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His Meteoric Days Gone, Quiet Dean Leads Party
Cougars, Archers, Snipers
Why rely on a candidate’s beliefs if you can break down the country into microconstituencies and then devise policies to appeal to them?
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THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER
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By Tom Perrotta.
True Believers
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
Published: October 21, 2007
Children, even good children, hide some part of their private lives from their parents; and parents, having been young and furtive themselves, remember the impulse. So when Ruth Ramsey, the divorced 41-year-old mother who is the protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” learns that her teenage daughter, Eliza (who could be a grumpy, pimply poster child for “The Awkward Years”), has concealed a book from her, she’s not surprised. “She must have kept it hidden in a drawer or under a mattress,” she reflects — just as she herself once hid books like “The Godfather” and “The Happy Hooker.” But the book Eliza has been keeping under wraps is not a pulp fiction fable of vice and libertinage: it’s the Bible. And Eliza has yet another secret to spring on her mother: she and her little sister, Maggie, want to start going to church. To Ruth, a tolerant, progressive sex-ed teacher, her daughters’ embrace of “Goody Two-Shoes Christianity” comes as a slap in the face. “I don’t think you’re a born-again, fundamentalist, evangelical, nut-job Christian,” she tells Eliza, not imagining she would disagree. “I believe in God,” Eliza stubbornly replies. “And I believe that Jesus is His only son, and that He died on the cross for my sins.”
Ruth is a protective mother and wants a say in whom her daughters choose for friends. But can a parent tell her kids she thinks Jesus is a bad influence and retain the moral high ground?
Tom Perrotta is a truth-telling, unshowy chronicler of modern-day America: the strong, silent type on paper. Readers are most aware of his books that became hit movies — the black comedy “Election,” about a high school teacher who coaxes a shy jock to run for school president against a sexually predatory alpha girl; and the wistful romance “Little Children,” about a lonely man and woman, both married to others, both parents of toddlers, who slip into a love affair. But Perrotta’s unmassaged realism runs through all of his writing — from “Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies,” a coming-of-age collection so alive in detail that you can practically touch the tube socks and pastel tuxes; to his first novel, “The Wishbones,” about a small-time rocker with wedding jitters; to “Joe College,” a novel about a working-class kid from Jersey who reinvents himself at Yale, callously breaking ties with his girlfriend back home. Perrotta is a master of the lump-in-the-throat reversal, as in his story “Snowman,” when a pack of tough kids smash a giant snowman to punish an “enemy,” then realize, “wild with remorse,” that it was made for their target’s congenitally impaired kid brother. Usually, when you ask yourself, “What would a Perrotta character do?” you know the answer: he’d do the familiar, guiltily compromised, self-interested thing that any normal guy would do ... and you understand him, even if you don’t applaud him.
But the male lead of “The Abstinence Teacher” — the tacit lead, that is — is not one of Perrotta’s normal guys: it’s Jesus, who has come to visit the town of Stonewood Heights, and apparently means to stay. Stonewood Heights, a “well-to-do Northeastern suburb, not liberal by any means, but not especially conservative, either,” could be any of Perrotta’s traditional cruising strips, with its schools, malls, streets and sports fields. This time, however, he sets his cast of flawed parents and un-airbrushed kids against the stained-glass background of muscular Christianity on the march. A new church, the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, has come to town, bent on ridding the community of “all manner of godlessness and moral decay,” and the first weed their scythe of righteousness mows down is Ruth Ramsey’s ninth-grade sex-ed class. After a churchgoing snitch reports her teacher’s blasé endorsement of oral sex to her parents, the school forces Ruth to push an abstinence agenda, something she regards as “a farce, an attack on sexuality itself, nothing more than officially sanctioned ignorance.” Other secular-minded townspeople are slow to catch on, but to Ruth, who is on the crusade’s firing line, watching the Tabernacle’s influence spread feels like “living in a horror movie. ... ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,’ or something. You never knew who they were going to get to next.”
For the purposes of the narrative, Christ’s spokesman takes the form of a divorced dad named Tim Mason, a Tabernacle congregant who was booted out of his marriage after an “epic coke binge” that “ultimately brought him face-to-face with his Savior.” Mason clings to his newfound belief as if it were a life preserver. (His mother accuses him of “using Jesus like a substitute for drugs, like methadone.”) To keep close to his daughter, Abby, who lives with her remarried, irreligious
mother, Mason coaches fifth-grade girls’ soccer; Ruth’s daughter Maggie is his star player. After an emotional match, in a transport of spiritual fervor, Mason leads his team in prayer — enraging his ex-wife and Ruth, and setting off a holy war among the soccer moms and dads of Stonewood Heights.
The conflicts Perrotta invents here feel both instantly recognizable and queerly portentous, calling to mind dystopic science fictions from “Body Snatchers,” to Ira Levin’s “Stepford Wives,” to Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles.” As in the Bradbury story “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” in which an Earth family, resettled on Mars, slowly acquires alien customs and language, the characters in “The Abstinence Teacher” shift uneasily between two tongues: the unscripted cadences of ordinary speech and the exalted language of sin, salvation and belief. On one page, Mason dreams of taking his daughter to the Tabernacle: “What a pleasure it would be, walking into church with his little girl,” he thinks, “to stand beside her as she listened to God’s word.” But the wrench comes further on, in a rough moment any divorced father — whatever his faith — might feel, as he lingers with his child in the car, the motor idling, before returning her to her mother. “It was a way of prolonging their time together,” Perrotta writes: “as if his custodial rights didn’t officially come to an end until he shut off his ignition.”
In Perrotta’s fearful new world, religion injects uncomfortable ironies into lives that have already yawed off-kilter. A mother tells her born-again son: “Please don’t talk to me about Jesus. I feel like I don’t know you anymore.” A pious wife tries to cure her husband’s lack of interest in her by studying a book called “Hot Christian Sex: The Godly Way to Spice Up Your Marriage.” (Alas, naught availeth.) And, in a scene that could have come from Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” a troubled Best Buy clerk named Dennis, stirred to action by the Bible, goes on a rampage, lobbing printers through the air, deploring “the sinful works of man,” and shouting “Whore!” and “Abomination!” as he hurls a boombox into a plasma TV playing “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.” The scene appears in flashback; it’s the epiphany that led the clerk to create the Tabernacle, to reinvent himself as Pastor Dennis and to embark on a new career as a fisher of men, rather than a seller of electronics.
What does the author think of Pastor Dennis and his flock? As in Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow,” a novel that devotes hundreds of pages to a heated battle between religious fanatics and educated secularists in a Turkish town without explicitly taking sides, Perrotta does not spell it out. Instead, he gives space and speeches to proselytizers and scoffers alike, letting readers form their own conclusions. Religion is no less controversial a subject to weave into fiction in this country than it is in Turkey. In any case, Perrotta has never been one to cast stones.
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Related Books: A Writer’s Search for the Sex in Abstinence (October 14, 2007)
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Making peace with Americans
Beneath the ominous calm that has settled,
uncertainty and hopelessness.=====================================
Where did Mexicans come from?
They have a choice of 'origin myths'
-- one a tale of betrayal, another a story of beauty
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Labels: Monsanto Westinghouses's New York Times/Los Angeles Times ReCaps
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