10 Things

Since pretty much nobody reads this thing besides me, it seems to be an appropriate forum for my stupid self-help tips. Some rules to live by from now on:

1. Call at least one person that you don't feel like calling every day. I'm so guilty of putting this stuff off until it gets ridiculous. If I don't need to do it at work, I should do it at home. This feels like a serious undertaking, since I never feel like calling anybody. At least there are plenty of candidates.

2. Get out of the door in the morning no more than one hour after you get up. Seriously, how hard is this? NO MORE FUCKING ABOUT ON THE COMPUTER PRE-WORK. Sometimes it's all so simple.

3. Run 5 days a week. That's all - doesn't matter how far. Just fucking do it.

4. Stop reading EVERYTHING in the sportswriting universe. I'm obsessed. Addicted. Can't help myself. All I really need are the box scores, Bill Simmons, and the Quickie. And that's all.

5. Floss. All the time. Yep, that's my March 3rd dentist appointment looming in the distance. Hi there.

6. Keep the room clean. Hang up those clothes. Throw away that flyer. Thattaboy.

7. Clean the desk at the end of every day. Should be easy, right?

8. Look at your planner every day. And thus, stop forgetting every appointment ever.

9. Develop a cheap drinking strategy. 'Cause you ain't got one right now.

10. Be friendly, motherfucker! So yeah - there's that. I lack basic "what's going on in your life?" skills. Sort of a prerequisite for my job.

Comedy Will Eat Itself

I was never a huge fan of The State on MTV - it always seemed like a less-anarchic tribute to The Kids in the Hall, which in turn seemed like a queer, Canadian Monty Python. I remember it being pretty big in my junior high school, though; there was a point at which I was ready to club the next guy who yelled out "I wanna dip my balls in it!" in the hallway.

The Baxter is the latest film by those guys, written and directed by Michael Showalter, who also wrote the last film by "those guys from The State", Wet Hot American Summer. I remember Summer as being intermittently hilarious - I did, however, see it at the end of a long, long night of drinking, so my sense of humour may not have been calibrated to the delicate absurdities of the movie.

The Baxter is a little like a neutered version of that; whereas Summer was a hipster parody of the '80s summer-camp flick, The Baxter isn't really equipped with the teeth to go after its romantic-comedy ancestors. Instead, it plays out a little like a sweet indie comedy in which people inexplicably act stilted and weird. One of the reasons that it's not that funny is that it's so stylistically dedicated to the idea of itself as movie that knows its genre, and yet it never really manages to subvert its own incredibly formulaic plotline.

This kind of knowing, ironic archness - comedy for comedians, if you will - only works with performers good enough to completely transcend the meta-stuff happening onscreen. You think about Will Ferrell and Steve Carrell in Anchorman; Bill Murray in Groundhog Day; or Owen Wilson in almost anything. Justin Theroux's character is meant to satirize eclectic NYC cool - he studies geodes, breakdances, makes a big deal of knowing where the best off-the-map burger joints are. Theroux does it well, but don't these kind of assholes satirize themselves to begin with? What does the movie add that two dozen Woody Allen movies haven't already said?

For all this, The Baxter really ain't all that bad - it's sweet, and sometimes funny, and an okay way to spend 90 minutes. The real bright spot is its confirmation of the arrival of Michelle Williams. After watching her consistenly and silently swallow her own pain in Brokeback Mountain, it's amazing to see her so participatory and magnetic in this movie. I'm as surprised as anyone to find myself acclaiming Jen from Dawson's as one of the premiere actresses of our day. Her movie choices, while not infallible, have always been interesting, and she has more range than I ever would have given her credit for.

Three Cheers for Mr. Sam

Wow. Ride the High Country is Peckinpah's first major film, and it's really a Western without any sort of precedent or successful imitator. It's a film about old men and dying - with enough action and sentiment to keep you hooked, but with Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea keeping you convinced that this time around isn't anything special. Scott and McCrea's tales of the old West keep you plugged into the myth, even as McCrea claims that the "poor man dies with the clothes of pride on his back" and when quizzed about good and bad, right and wrong, Scott grudgingly acknowledges that "it doesn't always work that way."

Also, there's the scene where the great Randolph Scott calls some guys "redneck peckerwoods." Which is worth the price of the rental alone.

It's an early Peckinpah film, and although the spectacular, balletic violence of his later films hasn't yet kicked in, his interest in human mortality and myth fading into the absurd is already apparent. There's only a little violence, and Peckinpah's recognition of the weight of killing is there throughout the movie. In one scene, a young gunslinger surprises and shoots a badman - a hick would-be rapist who we lack sympathy for entirely. Even so, the scene is remarkable: instead of the quick death-agony of your usual villain, the guy keeps breathing - still, silent - and the young "good guy" hesitantly takes the gun from his passive, living hands. The scene is almost singular in film history - what other moments of righteous killing are so shot through with regret, resignation, and love?

I know these posts are meandering - what I mean to do - besides writing more, obviously, is put things into concrete categories. We'll do "art", "politics", "movies & TV", "music", and "sports" or something like that. Brilliant, original categories - that's what we're about here.

Back with a little on Deadwood tomorrow - I just finished Season 1 tonight.

Well, Call Me Bill O'Reilly

OK - those of you who know me know that I'm not down with people who bash "political correctness" in order to tar-and-feather people who enter into dialogue with a little bit of ol'-fashioned politeness and cultural sensitivity. It's a manipulative, bullying posture, a favorite tool of white guys pissed off because their power share in America (and elsewhere) has dropped from 99 to 90 percent.

That having been said, can we not have any apologies for people who burn down embassies because of editorial cartoons?

I'm aware of the deep offensiveness of these images, doctored up by a Danish newspaper looking for a cheap - but, presumably, controllable - source of controversy. It seems worth mentioning that I've seen them, and they're not funny. Nevertheless, how hard is it to understand that once a government starts to censor images based on their religious appropriateness, we lose any sort of ability to stop zealots everywhere from shutting up people whose views they don't share. Laugh now, but wait 'til Brent Bozell takes over the FCC and you can't watch South Park anymore.

Also - cutting off trade with Denmark because of the cartoons, as Iran recently did? Wow. So very, very dumb. The Danish government and the Danish people merely agreed to a social contract that would allow someone to say (or draw) something offensive. Many countries on Earth have set themselves up in this fashion. The lack of a reachable target - in this case, the douchebag (douchebags?) who drew the cartoons in the first place - doesn't mean that you should just go ahead and slam the entire country with an embargo. Although it's hard to imagine what the withdrawal of Iranian goods will mean to the Danes anyway.

Lost in all of the controversy is the fact that Denmark, which hasn't seen much controversy since the events recounted in Hamlet, has all of the sudden become Public Enemy #1. It's like the quiet, studious kid in class has abruptly started drawing tits on the blackboard when the teacher turns away.