Underground Media is AWAY!!!

Well, folks. Episode #1 of Underground Media is up and away after a month of fooling around with editing, re-editing, finding a host, and figuring out that whole RSS thing. We're recording the next ep today with hopes of putting it out tonight, and then getting on a once per week rhythm. Anyway, jump on over to our Underground Media page and take a listen. Still working out the kinks, but we had fun!

My sister's Route 66 wisdom

My sis recently did a road-trip on historic Route 66 with a buddy of hers. If you want a really good, soul-fulfilling laugh, trek on over to her blog and read the rules. My favorite exerps:

#4 Don't stay with friends in Lake Havasu, esp. white trash friends who chain smoke and booze while pregnant. It is too sad. The strangest thing I heard on the entire trip was this:
White trash friend - Honey, where's the washing machine?
White trash friend's boyfriend - Xyz took it.
White trash friend - Wa huh?
White trash friend's boyfriend - He needed to wash some clothes and I didn't want him to use up our electricity.

#9 Do go hiking at Walnut Canyon and wonder why years of smoking, sporadic exercise, and thin-ass high altitude air is making your lungs collapse.

My sister is the coolest...

Great Movies - 2fer Monday?!

Wxman usually does a 2fer Tuesday post, but he inspired me recently with his Grosse Pointe Blank review (this is an awesome flick, by the way), and I simply could not wait till Tuesday. It would seem that we are both Cusack fans, so I would like to recommend two of my favorite Cusack flicks.

The first is another Charlie Kaufman classic. The one that landed him on the map, actually. Being John Malkovich stars Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, and......you guessed it.....John Malkovich. This movie is a hoot! It's got that dry and absurdist Kaufman humor throughout the whole flick. Sort of like Wes Anderson, with some Terry Gilliam sprinkled in.


Cusack plays a "puppeteer (John Cusack) who discovers a door in his office that allows him to enter the mind and life of John Malkovich (John Malkovich) for 15 minutes. The puppeteer then tries to turn the portal into a small business."


My favorite part is pictured above as Cusack finds his office on the 6th and a half floor, which was created by the company founder who married what he thought was a Leprechaun. Yes, that kind of humor.

My second Cusack flick is a complete flip. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a bayou mystery with a hint of supernatural. I LOVE stuff like this! The cast includes Cusack at his best, Kevin Spacey, Jack Thompson, Irma Hall, and Jude Law.


I won't give away the plot, but suffice to say there are secrets upon secrets to be revealed. Including some that come out of left field!

Cusack has been acting since the 80's, and he's been good right out of the gates. Here's my quick list of Cusack faves. And as Wxman said, his sister Joan only spices things up when she also appears. I've noted movies where they both star with an asterisk.

Better Off Dead
Say Anything*
The Grifters
Grosse Pointe Blank*
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Being John Malkovich
High Fidelity*
Identity

Great Movies - Clockers

I was not an early Spike Lee fan. I remember sneaking into my living-room late at night to watch a rented copy of She's Gotta Have It when I was 13, because my mother wouldn't let me see it in the theater. EVERYONE was talking about this low-budget movie from a relatively unknown film-maker. And remarkably, there were no pimps, prostitutes, gang-violence, drugs, guns, thugs, or any of the other elements usually present in "black" movies. Just a critical look at a black woman and the men who she is most intimately connected to. Of course, as a 13-year-old boy, the most important part of the flick was that Tracy Camilla Johns got naked. I had seen her in a Tone Loc video (Wild Thing), and I KNEW I had to see this movie! And so I watched it. And I laughed a couple of times. And I fell asleep on it. Yes, there were some lovely brown boobies. No, there were not enough of them to distract from the boringly slow pace of the film. Again, this was through the eyes of a 13-year-old.

Later, came Do The Right Thing. Remember a while back when I said that movies, for me, are very much about where I was at the time when I saw them? VERY true about Do The Right Thing. I was just becoming socially conscious, prep school had become very confining, and I was basically a bundle of energy looking for an outlet. Thus, I thought the movie was a masterpiece. Instant classic. And there were Rosie Perez boobs. (Remember, I was 15, so this was a very important part of a movie-going experience.)

Today, neither movie would make my top list, and I'll tell you why. Spike Lee was not a great film-maker in his early career. His plot-lines meandered, his dialogue was stilted, his characters aspired to be 3-dimesional, and his attempts at artful cinematography ended up looking like poor imitations of masters like Scorsese and De Palma. But he got better. Really, he did! Mo' Betta Blues, Malcolm X (Denzel was ROBBED of the Oscar!), and then a surprise return to the low-budget realm with an often overlooked gem called Crooklyn. I saw it with my girlfriend (now my wife) in the theater, and that's when I realized that Spike had come into his own in only three short films.

That's what drove me to Clockers on opening night.

The cast is simply phenomenal. Harvey Keitel, John Turturro, Delroy Lindo, Regina Taylor, and Mekhi Phifer in his debut role. The use of imagery and symbolism in this film is amazing, and many say that it's more vivid in its characterizations than it's parent novel. Clockers is a gritty portrayal of how so many different elements in the ghetto work to cannabilize our children and maintain a cycle of crime and drug abuse. From the abusive surrogate father figures to the crooked cops, it shows how one guy who represented the worst makes an escape and ultimately earns redemption. And he does earn it. Hmmm, I sense a pattern in my recent blog entries. I think it started with Blade Runner and has continued through the Jude case. I need to focus on some lighter material...

Anyways, the movie is among my top ten, so check it out!

Not Guilty??? - Give me a f*cking break!

"An all-white jury deliberated for more than 25 hours before finding three former Milwaukee police officers not guilty Friday night on four of five charges in the brutal beating of Frank Jude Jr., who is biracial."

Yes, I was around in LA several years ago when a similar verdict was reached in another case of police brutality. We studied the Rodney King case extensively in a criminal justice class in college. Our professor asked us, just for one minute, to put ourselves in the place of the officers chasing King. I'm all for looking at things from different perspectives, so I went along, even with my preconceived notions that no one is EVER justified for brutalizing another human being to that degree. And you know what? Through a series of role-playing exercises, I began to see that being a police officer in a large, high crime city is freakin' dangerous work that gets to you on a mental level. You're chasing some guy, he's pretty big and looks high, you taser him and he won't go down, and you think he may be on PCP and that if you don't subdue him, your life may end pretty damn quickly. Eh, well, it still doesn't justify the beating I saw on tape. Sorry, it just doesn't. There reached a point where King was immobilized and the cops were beating on him UNTIL YOU COULD SEE THE FATIGUE ON THEIR FACES! They were TIRED of beating him!

Now, the Jude case is quite a different story. No chase, no perceived threat to the (off-duty) cops, no nothing. Just an alleged theft of a badge, which was never recovered by the way, and a beating so severe that the emergency room doctor took extra pictures because, "he had the worst ear injuries she had ever seen in 15 years of practice." Ears?! Not only was Jude kicked, punched, and throttled, but he also had foreign objects jammed into his ears and anus! This was not a beating one receives from someone defending themselves or trying to subdue someone, this was a beating to exact revenge. It smacks outwardly of a hate-crime, similar to the lynchings of old.

However, I'm not sure that the jury's acquittal was related to racism. At least not directly. Sure it was an all-white jury in Wisconsin. I'm not stupid. But far more interesting was the fact that most of the off-duty police officers present at the "party" denied witnessing the beating. HUH?!
Apparently, their testifying would run afoul of a Milwaukee police officer unofficial code of silence on such matters. What's a jury to do, right?

Wait, I have a joke about this. Two black men go to a party with a couple of white women. Stop me if you've heard it. In fact, I think I've heard it before. Something similar, at least...

Race and Identity - A podcast?

If you didn't notice the picture of me in my virtual postcard from Belize, I'm black. REALLY black, actually. Darker skinned than probably anyone you know (except for Wxman who claims to have met the darkest black man in the world). And yet, what you probably didn't know is that I am ultimately the product of a mixed ethnic background. Let me explain.

Most black people in this country can only trace their lineage back for a few generations before records become hopelessly muddled. As we were considered second-class citizens as recently as forty years ago, let's just say that our birth and death records were relegated to the same status. Luckily, my mother's side of the family is EXTREMELY long lived. My great-grandmother Cornelia Ross-Murphy recently passed at the age of 104. I had met her only twice in my life, and I was just a little squirt at the time so I didn't really remember what she looked like. That is, until I saw the copy of her funeral program.

Her picture is striking on two counts. First, in her day, she was gorgeous. Sorry, but I just don't typically think of someone over the age of....oh say 70 as being beautiful. Clearly this picture of her was taken when she was in her 20's or 30's. Second, she doesn't look a THING like me! It was actually quite a shock to notice how light-skinned she was. I decided to ask my aunt about any mixed heritage we might have, and she hinted that we needed more than a few hours for THAT conversation. There was also some quality text in the funeral program that spoke to this issue:

Cornelia spoke openly of her grandfather, Wiley Parker, who was stolen from Indians in Alabama and brought to Texas where he was raised and educated by his abductors...

Maybe some creative license was taken with how the story has been handed down, but clearly if I wanted to trace my bloodline, it would lead in more directions than just West Africa.

Thus it baffles me how children of direct mixed ethnic heritage think of themselves as something "different" than other black people in this country.
Being black in America spans the spectrum from the lightest of light to the darkest of dark, and everything in between. Slavery CREATED this heritage (I'll avoid the gory details), and it defines the very origins of ethicity in America, and indeed the entire western hemisphere. My wife, for example, is actually not an African-American, appearances to the contrary. What most Americans do not know is that Belizians are a diverse ethnic mixture of Native, African, and European heritage. But if you ask her if she is black, she would not hesitate to say yes. Because she understands that the diversity of ethnicity is what defines black people from Canada to Argentina. And yet, each successive generation in the US thinks their particular struggle to identify themselves is unique. I first experienced this with multi-racial friends in college. Their attitude on having a "different" identity continued to baffle me well into my 20's. But later I began to understand the deepening class-related issues that currently afflict America. Often these class-related issues cross-cut with mixed-race issues, more now probably than any time in history as there are more interracial relationships today than ever. Middle-class multi-racial children look out at popular black culture which has remained ghetto-ized without progress for decades, and find they have more in common with their white middle-class counterparts. NEWSFLASH: Middleclass black people feel the SAME WAY! Just listen to Bill Cosby's or Barak Obama's latest rants, and you'll get the gist. Doesn't mean we're any less black, but it does mean increasingly this is the ONLY connection we feel with black ghetto culture.

But if class is our next big hurdle, why is mainstream white America still obsessed with race? Yes, I said obsessed. Especially in the Midwest. Interracial realtionships are still shocking to mainstream Wisconsin-ers. My wife and I still get stared at while walking through our little town. At a restaurant or at the video store. I'd like to think everyone is staring at her rack, but it's just not true, as awesome as her rack is. I watch the lady at the post office flinch as I approach her to ask for some stamps. I see the man at the gas station's eyes nervously dart from my hands to his telephone as I come in to pay for a full tank. White America still has some soul searching to do. Conservatives think that Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice, and two decades of affirmative action make them IMMUNE to racism. Liberals think that racism just doesn't apply to them because...... they're liberals. Yeah, right. I ask both white liberals and conservatives, what would you do if your son or daughter brought home a black girlfriend or boyfriend. Have you talked about it? What does your wife think? Your husband? Your neighbors? Your parents? Your church? We've talked about it and we don't even have any kids yet! Odds are that our child will go to schools where he or she will not be in the majority, and thus will probably end up dating outside of their race. We're okay with this. Are you? That's the true definition of tolerance.

And this all brings me to a new podcast I found. Addicted to Race. I haven't listened to it yet, but it seems interesting. I'll give it a spin this evening and post a quick review later this week...

More Retail Tales... I think I'm going to hell.

So, we've got about three kids who come into the store regularly to just play with our displays and hang out. For hours at a time. Now these kids have varying degrees of mental health issues, so I tend to be a bit more tolerant of them than I am with the local "mentally stable" kids who decide that it will be fun to go into [INSERT NAME OF BIG BOX RETAILER HERE] on a Saturday night after the movie and tear up the displays that took the employees about a week to build. (But that's another story.) However, if anyone (mentally ill or not) is too loud, belligerent, or disruptive I will ask them to leave. Period. And that's how I ended up getting cursed.

The kid who I see most often appears to be mildly autistic. Very focused, never looks in a person's eyes, non-communicative, but apparently intelligent. He's attends the local high school and walks EVERYWHERE around town. He comes into the store about three times a day on the weekends to either sing country karaoke, play Madden on the X-Box 360 big-screen display, or play hardcore gangster rap on a laptop that's conected to iTunes while rapping along and looking at his reflection on the plastic partition in the computer department laptop display. Which do you think he does when I'm working? Yup, it's all Fitty-Cent, all the time. Before you decide that I'm a heartless sonofab*tch who deserves to be burnt at the stake for taking this entry in the direction we all know it's going, let's pause to get a mental picture.

17-year-old white kid, 5'9" and 140lbs soaking wet with a scruffy beard, wearing a t-shirt, jeans and boots. He is standing over a laptop in the computer department. The only laptop with speakers, by the way. The volume is cranked to 10, 50-Cent is swearing up a storm, and the kid is staring at himself in the reflective plastic partition, bobbing his head, and making faces and hand-gestures while rapping along with Fitty at full "outside-voice" volume. Okay, you got that image? Now picture yourself shopping for a laptop at my store.

Ray: Looks like they have the new Gateway on display over......WHOA. WOW. Uh...hang on, honey. Let's grab those DVD's first and we'll come back to look at the laptops.

I watched it happen once, twice, three times till I finally decided something had to be done. The computer dept employees were already having a pow-wow as I approached.

A: You know, he's not retarded.
Me: Yeah, I know. He just seems to be mildly autistic. You need to do something about this...
Dept Mgr: Me?! This is my first week! What do you want ME to do?
Me: Okay, I'll do it. I'm just going to let him know that there's a time-limit on the displays, and that he's just got to tone it down. You'll need to do this going forward.
A: You know he's a genius. K goes to school with him. He gets straight A's. The only thing missing is social skills. He's just not moving with the flow of traffic socially.
Me: Clearly. I just feel bad.
In Unison: Yeah.
Me: Okay, I'll give him five more minutes.
(In that time THREE more customers veer off as the kid continues to yell and gesture wildly about bitches, niggas, and gangsta hijinks. The word "frenzy" would not be inaccurate.)
Me: (Walking over to the kid as the others hold their breath. He turns the volume down and pauses as I approach.) Hey, can you take a break from this computer for a while?
Kid: (softly) Yes.
Me: Thanks. I don't care if you use the demo's, but please keep it to 10 minutes or so. Other customers want to check them out.
Kid: Okay.

As I walk away, the Kid bolts from the display and makes makes a quick loop around the department while.......growling. Yes, growling. As he circles in front of me again, he hisses at me and curls his fingers into what he probably believes are gang signs. If it was New Orleans or Jamaica, I'm sure it would have been called a curse or the evil eye. So be it. Maybe I deserved a curse...

Great Movies #5 - Fight Club

I'm watching it right now. I think once every six months is just about right. It serves to remind me of the truly important things in life. Corporate life sometimes robs you of this perspective.

Another boy meets girls story. :-)
Boy meets girl. Boy has passionate, freaky sex with girl. Boy goes a little crazy and scares girl off. Boy gets girl back by leveling half of downtown with high-yield explosives.


Tyler Durden: Do you know what a duvet is?
Jack: It's a comfortor.
Tyler: It's a blanket. It's just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is? Is this essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word?
Jack: No.
Tyler: What are we then?
Jack: I dunno. Consumers?
Tyler: Right. We are consumers. We are byproducts of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty. These things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, viagra, olestra.
Jack: Martha Stewart.
Tyler: Fuck Martha Stewart! Martha's poliching the brass on the Titanic. It's all going DOWN, man!


Fight Club (1999), starring Ed Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter is the epitome of what I would call a male-ist film. (I would define male-ism as the male form of feminism.) In fact, I think it is truly the only one of it's kind. Now don't get this confused with chick-flick (anything starring Sandra Bullock) vs. dude-flick (anything starring Bruce Willis). Fight Club provides the first look on a cinematic level at the 21st century ego of an entire generation of men who grew up without fathers. We are macho and vulnerable, ignorant yet intelligent, full of rage and yet in need of love. Why are our relationships with women difficult? Because we do not truly understand how to relate to each other. Hence our passion for violent sport wherein we watch the only male intimacy we've ever known: fist connecting to skull. It's intoxicating. Give me boxing over the NCAA any day. Team sports are about such complex issues as leadership and teamwork. But one-on-one fighting grasps at something primal. Something that provokes a reaction even within an observer. Your pulse and breathing quicken, your lips curl back, your teeth clench, and your fists tighten. I remember getting into a fight OVER a fight! An argument about the victor in a Holyfield match.

"Sometimes all you could hear were the flat, hard packing sounds over the yelling. Or the wet choke when someone caught their breath and sprayed. You weren't alive anywhere like you were there."


As Tyler and Ed Norton's character share a house, they begin to share their rage with each other.

Tyler: If you could fight anyone, who would you fight?
Jack: I'd fight by boss, probably.
Tyler: Really.
Jack: Yeah. Why? Who would you fight?
Tyler: I would fight my dad.
Jack: I don't know my dad. I mean I know him, but he left when I was like six years old. He had this other woman, and these other kids. And he did this like every six years. He goes to a new city and starts a new family.
Tyler: Fucker's setting up franchises. My dad never went to college, but he thought it was REAL important that I go.
Jack: Sounds familiar.
Tyler: So I graduate and I call him up long distance and I say, now what? He says get a job.
Jack: Same here.
Tyler: Now I'm 25. I make my yearly call again. I say dad, now what? He says, I dunno. Get married.
Jack: I can't get married. I'm a 30-year-old boy.
Tyler: We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.

In fact the answer lies is an analysis of our OWN values. And in a deep, hard look in the mirror. Sometimes, we don't like what we see. But we'd better get used to it.

I warn you. This, like some of the other movies listed on this blog, is a cult classic. Watching it is more than habit-forming. If you're a guy who can't relate, there's still violence and sex. And if you're a woman..... Well, my wife hates it. And to be honest, most women I know hate it. But if you're a woman, watching it just may provide you with a few answers to questions I KNOW you think about. In parting, I leave you with one of my favolite quotes:


"I felt bad for guys packed into gyms trying to look like how Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfigger said they should."
Jack: (Pointing to a Calvin Klein ad) Is that what a man looks like?
Tyler: Self-improvement is masturbation. And self-destruction.

Life (call it a tag)

My buddy Wxman has a funny entry over at Not As Good As I Once Was. Here's my take on MY life in as many words...

Life
I have a job that is frustrating at times and I have to drive too far to get there. I'm trying to start my own thing. Actually 3 or 4 things. My wife and I talk about kids, but I'm wondering if we're getting too old to have them. I need to exercise more. I wish I had Fight Night (X-Box 360). It is still too cold to grill. I sometimes drink too much. Oh, such is life. I miss these times:

Belizian food

My sister asks, so I will tell. Belizian food is not something that can be easily categorized. If you go to a restaurant in some of the smaller cities, you'll likely be disappointed. They only serve the national dish of "rice & beans", plantain, and stewed chicken or beef. No menus. Just your choice of beef or chicken. VERY tasty, but boring after a few days. Most people cook at home, and that's where the cool Belizian dishes are prepared. If you get to a nice restaurant in Belize City, you can also sample some of those cool dishes. There's fish, lamb, a dozen different pastries and breads, and even some Mexican fusion dishes. Those who don't like their food spicy should beware. Belizian heat is legendary. Pay heed or your asshole will hold you accountable...

40 gigs of porn?!

That's what we found in the computer of a customer yesterday. 40 gigabytes, and that was just video! That's like my entire amount of harddrive space from my three year old computer! That's DAYS of video!

Let me take this moment to explain that I have NOTHING against porn. I worked in the San Fernando Valley for eight years, so I am intimately familiar with the industry. Personally, in my old age I've found that I prefer tease to a gynecology exam, but who am I to piss in some other pervert's cornflakes. And that brings me to the weird part of the porn we discovered.

Watching naked people is one thing. Watching them have sex is another. Watching them perform other bodily functions is in a whole different realm. And watching them have sex with farm animals is...... well, it's just plain downright f*cked up. I have no other words for what I witnessed residing on this person's computer. Some of the things were fairly run-of-the-mill, and others made me want to gouge my eyes out and scrub my brain so that I could UN-WATCH THEM!!! To use instant-messaging phraseology: OMFG!!!

Blade Runner - Part 2

Yes, this movie is so good, I needed a follow up to my original post as I just remembered something weird.

About six years ago, I went to see a special screening of Blade Runner at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood with one of my best buddies. For me, this was an incredibly special moment as it was the first time I had EVER seen it on the big screen. I was enthralled watching the whole flick as it was intended to be viewed. About 3/4's of the way through, during the scene where Roy Batty (android) confronts Tyrell (his creator), I noticed that the dialog was different than I had heard on video. The dialog I was familiar with had Roy saying to Tyrell, "I want more life, f*cker." (Replicants were not built to last, unfortunately. Only a four year life span...) However, in the version I saw at the dome (supposedly the original from 1982), Roy said this instead: "I want more life, father." Small, but significant alteration. Does anyone know why the dialog was changed?