Kelly Joyner’s Final Days

I was a little saddened by the spectacle of Michael Phelps apologizing profusely and multimedially* for taking a bong rip on his day off. Nobody would have expected him to apologize if he’d drunk a case of beer instead, and I am ashamed to live in a country where we’re expected to publicly pretend that probably the most harmless recreational substance in existence is the nuclear weapon of intoxication and requires a prolonged public mea culpa every time a public figure is caught toking up. But this business with USA Swimming suspending a national hero for three months is a goddamned travesty, and they’ll never get a penny of my money again. Sorry mister Phelps, but I won’t be watching any more televised competitive swimming sanctioned by USA swimming. To paraphrase the late**, great Dan O’Brien: Dear USA Swimming: eat all the dicks.

*–It is a word because I say it’s a word. You can coin shit once you know all the words. It’s a fact. Look it up. Neal Stephenson just proved you can make a whole book using nothing but made-up words. Lewis Carrol taught the whole world a very important lesson using made-up words.

**–Okay, he’s actually not dead at all.

Also available at my Final Days.

Every honeymoon comes to an end, I suppose, but I was disappointed to see Obama nominate Tom Daschle for HHS secretary. It’s not so much that he didn’t pay $140000 in taxes on a driver and limo provided by a “private equity firm”, it’s that a private equity firm was providing him a limo and driver. It’s that he’s made five million bucks off special interests since he left Congress. It’s that his wife is one of most slatternly lobbyists in Washington and regularly received large sums of money from companies with legislation in front of her husband. In the words of Matt Taibbi, “In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger.” Fuck off and die, Tom, or at least go back to Utah or South Dakota or whatever irrelevant state you came from.

I’m not going to say that the Republicans blocking the stimulus package are traitors–I believe that conscientious dissent is an important part of democracy and who we are as a people. I’m just saying that if the Democrats had pulled this shit a few years back that’s what we’d be hearing all over Fox news right about now.

Now, I know Republicans in Congress believe that tax cuts are best in good times, and in bad times, and in the worst of times. A Republican never saw a tax cut he didn’t like, although as we’ve learned over the last eight years or so, they also never saw a spending increase they didn’t like. But here’s the thing about tax cuts: they haven’t worked, not in this crisis. Last year the richest people in America paid taxes at the lowest rate since tracking started, and it did no wonders for the economy. The stimulus checks sent out last year were essentially a tax break for poor people, and people didn’t go out and spend them, either. They saved the money or paid down debt. Next we tried the Bush Republican solution, which was to give money to
rich bankers. They did the same thing: they covered their own asses, and didn’t loan anything to anybody.

The problem is that people aren’t spending money. 70% of the US economy is consumer spending. That’s not really a nefarious figure. It just means that we spend most of our money buying things we need, or think we need, in order to live our lives. That extra 30% of the economy is basically our “profit margin”, in a sense, the excess output we produce above and beyond our collective “operating costs”. Businesses would kill for margins like that.

Now, that 70% figure needs to go down. We need to start saving some money: we’ve had a negative savings rate for the last several years, which means, on average, that we’ve been taking money our of our collective savings to spend it on houses and iPods and other stuff. That has to change. However, a 5% savings rate is pretty impressive. A 10% savings rate might be too much. If all of that comes out of consumer spending, it will drop to 60% or 65% of GDP. That’s going to be a painful adjustment to make, long term, and part of what the nation is experiencing right now is the result of that.

But Americans have gone overboard in the opposite direction: they’re not spending any money, and that’s killing the people who sell them stuff–i.e., ourselves. People don’t spend money, so AT&T and Microsoft and Sprint and GMC and all these other companies lay off the people that make and sell the goods and services that people aren’t buying any more. Those people then don’t have money to spend, so they spend less, which causes more layoffs, and it all becomes a vicious circle.

Tax cuts won’t fix this. If you give tax cuts to people with jobs, they’ll save the money, which will then go to banks, which will use it to shore up their balance sheets. If you give tax cuts to people without jobs, it will get spent, but only the once: once they’ve spent their tax cut, they’ll be broke again.

The only way to possibly get out of this cycle is to create jobs that give money to jobless people, who will have no choice but to spend it: on food, on clothing, on housing, on the necessities of life. With any luck, this increase in consumer spending will spur some recreation of jobs in the retail and service sector, and help out with the recovery. I don’t have high hopes for a huge bump or anything, but I see more bang for the buck there than anywhere else.

The Post-Bush Republican plan is to do nothing, to argue that Keynes and FDR were full of shit. I don’t believe we can afford to do nothing. We’re all going to be broke as hell for a long time if we do that, which is the worst-case scenario if none of these stimuli work anyway, so we might as well try something. Lead, follow, or get out of the way, jackasses.

Obama continued to make mostly the right moves in his first week in office.

• Closing GITMO and secret overseas CIA prisons: These two things here are why a lot of justice-loving people around the world have turned their back on America. I wouldn’t think it needed saying, but I’ll say it: torturing people is wrong. Holding people indefinitely without a trial is wrong. These things are illegal not only under a host of treaties we signed, but under our own fucking constitution, you remember, that document that founded our country and used to mean something? Republicans ask “what are we supposed to do, let these terrorists into the United States?!?!” Well, yeah. It’s not like we’re sending them to fucking Disney World. We got us plenty of high-value terrorists in US prisons right now.

  I swear I remember living in a country once that wasn’t full of pussies. Then somebody blew up a measly 3000 people and all of a sudden we’re ready to give up all our moral convictions and the principles we’ve at least always said we wanted to live by, give everything over to a bunch of Mayberry Machiavellis in exchange for a bare illusion of safety. Sack up, America.

• Lifting the gag rule: Denying money to organizations that do good work overseas because they provide abortions is wrong. The world will be a better place without this rule.
• Restricting the CIA to interrogation techniques in the Army field manual: See above. Torture is wrong and does not make us safer. Ask John McCain.

On the civil liberties front, I was disappointed to see that Obama took Bush’s position on a secret wiretapping case that provides the only known remaining avenue for legal review of warrantless wiretapping. It’s a setback for the fourth amendment and the rule of law (specifically, FISA). I do believe that the government, ultimately, may have compelling reasons to do more monitoring of communications, perhaps even Americans’ communications, in the quickly changing world we live in. However, I think it is vitally important to preserving our way of life that such issues be hashed out in court and in Congress, not in smoky back rooms where the next Nixon can start watching the people on his enemies list–and there’s evidence that some of that went on during that slimy fuck W’s administration.

I hope somebody someday strings that sumbitch up, and Cheney with him. Fuck them in their earholes. There are too many people dead for too little reason, and too many rich motherfuckers that lined their pockets on the backs of the poor and dead soldiers over the last eight years to just let this shit slide. As much as irony demands that they be tried by a military tribunal with secret evidence they’re not allowed to see (and gained under duress by leashing them up and making the sodomize each other), I’m afraid I hope they get a fair trial in open court.

Here are the incredibly important things I think the new President did right today (see this New York Times article for complete story):

1. He suspended the GITMO military tribunals for 120 days, with an obvious eye toward ending them.

2. He reversed Bush’s “keep everything secret you have any nominal reason to” policy toward Freedom of Information Act requests and replaced it with a presumption of disclosure. He also made all the right sounds about replacing a culture of secrecy with a culture of transparency.

3. He barred people who leave his administration from lobbying their former colleagues for as long as he is in office. I believe this practice is in no small part responsible for the tight integration of the government with the military-industrial complex for the last eight years.

4. He banned every appointee from receiving any gifts from lobbyists or lobbying organizations. No more Scottish golfing junkets, assholes.

5. He banned lobbyists for coming to work for the agencies they lobbied for two years. That will mean fewer lobbyists directly running the bureaucracies that are supposed to regulate the industries they previously worked for.

There are a lot of things that could go wrong, a lot of things Obama could not do or do wrong, but this isn’t rhetoric: it’s concrete, legally-binding steps the new President is taking, and so far they’re all exactly right as far as I’m concerned.

Here’s hoping tomorrow is as full of hope.

The first time I lived in California, I knew this one beach that was just about my favorite place in all the world. Actually, it was two beaches: one called Panther beach, and another, accessible only through a hole in the sandstone cliff at the south end of Panther, called Hole in the Wall beach. I didn’t know the names of these beaches, only that they were peaceful, and there were naked people at them, and I found this amusing.

The hole in the wall is only passable at low tide; at high tide, much of both beaches disappear, and if you were stranded on the wrong side of the hole, you’d have to climb some fairly treacherous cliffs to get off the beach. If you’re like me, however, Treacherous* is your middle name, and you’d give those cliffs some what-for.

Both beaches have some pretty spectacular sedimentary rock peninsulas that stick out into the bay, covered with mussels and anemones and other intertidal life. At the south end of Hole in the Wall is a huge pyramid of rock with a shallow, pleasant cave perched high above the water; from it, you can see miles and miles of beaches to the southeast, with a thin, pale blue line of Santa Cruz mountains in the background, behind the water.

The cliffs on both beaches are thirty feet tall and hard sandstone, carved by the pounding surf and wind into alien shapes. Sandstone is never a good thing to entrust your life to unnecessarily, but the bottoms of the cliffs are undercut by the water, and with their eroded handholds make for some great bouldering, with only soft sand to fall onto.

When I used to come to this beach eight years ago, I remember it as a beautiful, lonely, almost abandoned place. At times I would literally have it to myself.

I’m not sure if I came at a different time of year or if my fading memories fail me, but when I returned last Sunday the beach was pretty hopping, full of Santa Cruz students and families out for, uh, a day at the beach. Virtually everybody, sadly, was wearing clothes. There was plenty of sand to go around, a boatload of beautiful women and a German shepherd that really, really wanted to play catch. I only wish I’d brought some beer with me. Maybe a book, too. I had a camera, instead, and hope you enjoy the pictures I took (links go to Flickr set with more pictures).

*–Actually, it’s Ray.

I just finished watching Ed Harris’ second feature, a western called Appaloosa. I never saw Pollock, but based on its reputation, I was expecting something different than what I got. Ed Harris is not a terribly engaging director. He has a good eye for composition, and a workmanlike mastery of how to move a camera through a scene (on the rare occasions when the camera moves); it’s just that he isn’t that great at pacing, or getting good performances out of so-so actors.

It’s not that the movie is bad; it’s all right, I’d say even pretty good. Harris’ pacing issues don’t leave the movie any more limpid than any other westerns of the last few years, and the deliberate pace sometimes plays into the wry humor that is its strongest suit. Harris’s extras and bit players come across horribly, with stilted, over-delivered lines, but, fortunately, the main roles in the film are anchored by strong actors–Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons, Renee Zellweger, and Harris himself–who don’t need an actor’s director to turn in sterling performances.

Harris and Mortensen, in particular, create interesting, idiosyncratic, believable characters that keep you involved in the movie from beginning to end. Jeremy Irons spends the movie chewing scenery, and Renee Zellweger turns in a realistically false performance as my favorite of real-life characters, the honestly dishonest woman of easy virtue.

The movie really earns its two hours of my life, however, with wry, oddball comedy, snarky lines and situations that often leave you with the impression that you’re laughing at something that wasn’t supposed to be funny, or isn’t to the characters at least.

I recommend it.

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Vicky Christina Barcelona is a modest rennaissance for Woody Allen. Javier Bardem, who I’d only seen before as the sinister hitman in No Country for Old Men, turns in an utterly opposite, astounding performance as a suave Spanish painter and lover. Rebecca Hall, a British actress playing one of two American girls vacationing in Spain, is Allen’s alter ego: a quintessentially neurotic, implicitly Jewish woman whose words could only have sprung from Allen’s pen. Given their physical differences, it is remarkable to watch her spend the entire movie doing an entirely credible impression of Allen himself.

Scarlet Johansson, the other American girl, spends the movie playing the same sexy, louche, conflicted character she always seems to play. She does such a good job of it, and looks so good doing it, though, that it’s hard to find any fault with what she’s doing. Nobody blames Harrison Ford for playing Harrison Ford.

If there is one high point to the movie, it’s that you get to see Johnansson (briefly) make out with Penélope Cruz, here playing Bardem’s fiery, crazy ex-wife. Ape shit insane, and she makes you believe it, too.

If the performances are fantastic, the writing is, meh, pretty good. Dialogue is one of Allen’s strong points, but like Kevin Smith, he can overdo it from time to time, and his clever word play sometimes serves to obscure the triteness of the subject matter. At his best, it doesn’t even matter what he’s talking about (egg salad recipe, anyone?); at his worst, you don’t care what he’s talking about. Vicky Christina Barcelona falls somewhere in between. Its study of the many shades and shapes of romantic love, loyalty, and relationships is sometimes pretty ham-handed, and isn’t going to shed much useful light on the subject for anybody who’s been fucking their way across the last decade, but it stops well short of boring or embarrassing.

The movie is beautifully composed and shot, and the beauty of the Catalan city and countryside really adds that extra touch of aesthetic awesome.

I highly recommend it.

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Defiance is a Daniel Craig vehicle that tells the true story of the Bielski partisans, a group of Polish jews who hid in the forest and attacked German troops while supporting Russians during wold ward II. Shot, predictably, in shades of blue and gray, it gives Mr. Craig and Liev Schreiber a chance to grimace and practice their Jewish/Polish accents, provides them with occasional opportunities to shoot Germans, and parades us around the now familiar spectacles of the horrors of Nazi Germany (SEE the helpless civilians shot! HEAR the cries of the condemned in the ghettos!)

The movie would be better if the director, Ed Zwick (who also co-wrote the screen play), was not so ham-handed, hammering every thematic and moral point home with a five-pound sledge. As it is, the movie is a slick, craftsmanlike entertainment, and I recommend putting it on your Netflix list.

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Zack and Miri Make a Porno is one of the most hilarious goddamned movies I’ve seen in years. Seth Rogan and Elizabeth banks give predictable and predictably hilarious performances as two life-long friends who decide to make a porno to get some quick cash, after their electricity gets turned off and they’re reduced to burning bills in a barrel in their living room for warmth. Kevin Smith is not the kind of director who surprises so much with a crazy, unexpected plot structure. His movies are comedies, and you know how they’re going to end. You know more or less what kind of things are going to happen along the way.

Where Smith really shines is with his characters, small plot twists, and, of course, his dialogue. Here, it all wins. MEGA WINS. I only wish I’d turned it off ten minutes before the end, when it goes all Jersey Girl for no good reason. Still, I very much recommend. Justin Long has the funniest gay-guy small parts since Russell Sams played Dick in Rules of Attraction.

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Igor sucks ass. Lame jokes, stupid story, dumb themes, crappy voice acting. It might make you giggle once every half hour or so, but at what cost?

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RockNRolla is a good movie; given that it’s a spiritual sequel to two great movies, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, that’s not high praise. There’s nothing actually wrong with it, per se. It’s the same kind of wacky east London ensemble crime caper as the previous movies; the mostly unknown actors put in solid performances, and it’s got the same gritty visual feel.

There is one chase scene that rises to the level of madcap awesome the previous movies spent their entire time at, but, by and large, RockNRolla falls short. The characters aren’t as memorable, the story isn’t as memorable, and the camera tricks that seemed so integral to the previous flicks seem a little belabored and gratuitous.

If you haven’t seen the other movies, watch them instead. If you have seen the previous movies, see it based on whether you liked them.

The fog outside my house is so pea-soup thick today that I suspect, viewed from the valley, it’s actually low-lying cloud cover. Even the house next door is difficult to pick out. I’m not about to drive down to find out, though: I’m staying right here.

Normally when I have a day off like I do today, I’m hard-pressed not to use it to visit some park or trail I haven’t seen yet. It’s difficult for me to justify to myself staying home when there’s so much beautiful stuff I haven’t seen yet. I still haven’t been, for example, to Almaden Quicksilver or to Ed Levin county parks. Today, though, It’s foggy and wet out, so I’ve finally got an excuse to sit at home, play some Fallout 3, take stock of the last week, and tell you about it.

My buddy Jay flew out for the week of Christmas. This was pretty exciting for me because, my brother aside, he’s the first familiar face I’ve seen since October. I picked him up at the airport and we went back to spend the rest of the night chilling at our place, drinking the Tito’s Vodka he brought to remind us of home and staring out at the view.

The next morning we wanted to go to Lick observatory Mount Hamilton to check out the snow, but found the road cloased by a police officer just above the snow line. On the way back down the mountain we puzzled over what to do next, and decided that on a day clear as that Saturday, San Francisco was as good a place to visit as any. It was a real blast, too. We parked SoMA and ate lunch at the rich people’s food court in the basement of Westfield San Francisco Center. The cost isn’t actually that bad, although finding a seat to sit in six days before Christmas took us almost ten minutes. When we left there we realized we didn’t have a real plan, so we walked down market to The Embarcadero, then walked alongside the port to Fisherman’s Wharf. We then did the most touristy things imaginable, having a beer at a bar on Pier 39, gawking at the Christmas tree, and walking out to the end of Pier 41 to sit and gawk amazed at the view of the bay.

The view of the bay was amazing, too. The air was clear, the sky was blue, you could see Alcatraz and Oakland and the Golden Gate bridge, Angel Island and tiny boats sailing in the bay. I had, of course, forgotten to charge my camera, and ran down tha battery in Jay’s before we got there.

On the plus side, I only live about an hour away.

After resting at the end of the pier, we worked our way further along The Embarcadero, with the intention of catching a cable car. One amazing thing we saw on the way was Boudin Bakery, known, of course, for its sourdough, and with roots that go all the way back to the gold rush. The backers there were forming loaves into the shapes of lobsters, teddy bears, turtles, and, most amazingly, a three-foot-long alligator. It was just about the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen made out of bread, and that’s saying a lot.

We didn’t catch that cable car, because the line looked long enough that it would probably be quicker just to walk the two miles back–so we did. That was a hella good decision. Our path back wasn’t as terribly hilly as you might think, and took us straight through North Beach, San Francisco’s sublime Italian neighborhood. It almost killed me to walk past all those delicious-looking eateries and neighborhood bars (half of them Irish pubs) without partaking, but I made it, and I know exactly where I’m eating the next time I’m in town. As we approached the financial district, We saw a huge tree wrapped entirely and tightly in thousands and thousands of tiny LED lights. It was, bar none, the most amazing Christmas tree I’ve ever seen. Looking at it closely was hard on the eyes and the mind, as the lights were so numerous, and the black limbs so tightly wrapped, that my mind began to confuse figure and ground. I can’t really describe it: you’ll have to come out next Christmas and see for yourself.

So that was that. On Sunday the weather started out nice so we headed for the Santa Cruz mountains, so we could show Jay Big Basin. We didn’t spend too terribly much time there, as a light rain had developed by the time we showed up, but it was enough to see the tallest and largest trees in the park. The tallest has a hollow base so large you could easily have ten people stand in it at the same time.

After that we decided to hit up Santa Cruz, since neither Travis nor I had seen the sea in daylight since we moved here. We grabbed some food at Planet Fresh Burritos (it’s no Freebirds, but for California it’s pretty close), then headed directly for the municipal wharf. Since we were a bit chilly and the weather a bit harsh, we decided first to fortify ourselves at Ideal Bar & Grill at the entrance, and that was no mistake. We had a friendly barmaid and a panoramic view of the bay without all the pesky water and wind.

A brief stint on the beach was followed by an hour or so in the arcade at the Boardwalk, where you can buy Heineken in 24-ounce cans and buy a tortilla-wrapped deep-fried cheesecake chimichanga (I took the former and passed on the latter). After the boardwalk we walked out to the end of the pier; by now it was dark, but we could just see a noisy pack of sea lions, at least a couple dozen of them, milling around the pier and apparently heading out to sea. By then home and sleep was starting to seem like a good idea.

So, that was how we spent the first two days of Jay’s vacation. I’ll write later about the two days we spent in Napa Valley, the day at Pebble Beach and Big Sur, our trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and our drunkariffic Christmas day. If you follow the linked pictures above, however, you can get see the pictures in my photo stream.

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Also: Check out Cracked’s 8 Celebrities you didn’t know were geeks; and, in honor of the web site you’re probably reading this on, ‘Watchmen’ Fan Cordially Invites Fox to Eat Several Dicks. Actually, just go read the whole goddamned web site, okay? ‘Cuz it’s hilarious.

My buddy Jay has been up here since last Friday, and we’ve been having too much fun painting California red for me to waste too much time posting to my blog; that’ll come later, but if anybody was wondering why I loves mah Trixie, it’s because I see this before I step behind the wheel on the way back from our second day in Napa valley:

Happie’s puppy Casca came over. It was basically already dark, so not many pictures came out good, but a couple came out interesting:

Haven’t been writing much lately. Guess I’ve just haven’t been seized with the pathos.

Hey, did I already mention that magazine Eat & Drink Austin that’s been popping up free at area restaurants? I like it. Pretty pictures, good reviews that square up with my experiences at the places they cover (Manny Hattan’s and a short review of the new Hyde Park Bar & Grill location on West Gate this month).

So, I figure I’ve got a fair chance of trusting them when they write about how I should eat at Joe’s Bar and Grill (it was started by one of the co-owners of Louie’s 106, so I don’t see how it could go far wrong in any case). I’m going to order two mini-burgers and a side of macaroni and cheese tomorrow.

They also made the Buenos Aires Cafe on South 1st sound like a really, really good idea. I’m so down.

I also read in this issue, although more in the vein of an announcement than a review, about this new Italian place, Cibo, that opened next to Little City near 10th and Congress. I went to eat there today, and had the Ricotta gnocchi, bathed in basil and olive oil with halved grape tomatoes and…some kind of cheese sprinkled on top. The cheese on top was hard to pick out because it was overpowered by…pretty much everything else. It added a little bit of creamy sharpness. It was good stuff, even if the portions were a little small and the price a little…pricy. It came with a damned good small ciabatta.

They had paninis for $8-10, pasta dishes for $10-$20, tending more toward $20 (the gnocchi were $10.50), and a section called “big plates” that were $40-$50. I didn’t even much look at those. For that kind of money I can think of a couple spaces I’d rather hang out in. I didn’t have my shirt tucked in, and neither did my waiter, but his shirt was a lot nicer than mine. I liked their glasses and plates and silverware; overall, the presentation of the food was nice, too.

A good lunch, but a little too rich for my blood on a very regular basis. They had a prixe fix menu in some kind of communal eating thing on the balcony over the kitchen that filled half the two-story tall space, but I didn’t check it out.

Also, the date’s on the menu, so they must print new ones every day, but I don’t know how much it changes.

I write about restaurants too much.

I kept trying not to think this was funny, but I kept failing. I won’t be buying a bodygroom any time soon, though. I shave my balls with a 3″ lock-back, like any real man would.