An insight

Love hurts.

Hello! I've been napping.

Putting the 'not' in 'noteworthy':

(1) Cynthia "Bruiser" McKinney lost her seat in Congress, to the delight of pacifists everywhere. And me.

(2) Matthew Pearl, in the jacket photo for his (excellent) new book The Poe Shadow, now looks really hot. I can't find the image online, alas.

(3) I read that Disney CEO Dick Cook axed production head Nina Jacobson a few weeks ago after she rang from the hospital delivery room to announce the birth of her third child. Despite some missteps, Jacobson certainly diversified the Mauschwitz development slate, greenlighting projects by the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson; her successor, in his first press announcement, declared that he wants "to make movies like The Pacifier." Ambitious. Talk about failing upwards.

(4) I want a pet leopard.

FOX News should be shot in the face

I'm not even going to link to this: "New York's highest court ruled Thursday that gay marriage is not allowed under state law," their website squawked today, after the State Supreme Court ruled 4-2 that (and I quote) "the constitution does not compel recognition" (my emphasis) of same-sex marriage. There's a fucking difference.

Flame on?

I have never burned a flag before, American or otherwise; but it looks as though I'd better get cracking. I'm really disappointed in John McCain for endorsing this measure -- or indeed any measure that would require constitutional revision. Yes, I know McCain was a POW. I also know that Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye (D) lost an arm in World War II and still opposes the amendment.

Absolutely pathetic, too, how the Republicans are fueling their midterm-election ramp-up with issues that range from trivial to non- -- gay marriage, flag-flameage, what have you -- while treating the Constitution as though it's a dry-erase board.

Another banner day for Duke athletics

How could J.J. be so stupid?

Rightly or wrongly -- wrongly, in fact -- I'm going to pin this on Duke athletic director Joe Alleva, who should have been fired many moons ago.

Give a hoot

My friend Randy Sue Coburn, who wrote the whip-smart screenplay for Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, tomorrow publishes her second novel, Owl Island. It's the tale -- moody, evocative, richly textured -- of a middle-aged Puget Sound woman who must suddenly contend with whirlwind personal crises. Even though I've notably little in common with the protagonist, I find her and her story resonant.

What's that? Is there a group-sex scene? Yes, there is a group-sex scene.

Hail Satan

I don't read Maxim, and I can't say I intend to start, but yesterday's Girl of the Day posting was pretty amusing:

Girl of the Day (6.6.06 EDITION): SATAN

Age: Older than time

Hometown: Hades

Likes: Long walks on the beach, lakes of fire, evil, Matt Lauer

Dislikes: Gene Shalit (even Satan has her limits)

Bat out of hell: After feeding Eve an apple in the Garden of Eden and dooming mankind forever, Satan took a job at ABC News in 1979. Satan's bubbly personality and poor interviewing skills then made her a popular fixture on NBC's Today show ten years later. Soccer moms were going totally apeshit for Satan! Shortly thereafter, Satan vanquished foe Dan Rather to become the first solo female anchor of CBS Evening News. We wish Satan the best of luck in her new career!

Y kant poordani blog

He has been busy of late.

He also needs some new polo shirts.

And a tan.

And a nap.

If you can provide any/all, please get in touch. My information is scrawled on lavatory walls throughout the city.

Bulletin: Research suggests all gay men facially deformed

It was a mistake to register with the Internet Movie Database: As a member, I'm now able to read the user posts caboosed to every project and filmmaker profile. Yesterday, for example, I felt curious about teen_princess244's take on The Cutting Edge 2: Going for the Gold -- teen_princess244 being not, I have concluded, actual adolescent royalty, but instead slumming Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern -- and within moments I found myself trudging through a thread that illustrated the twin Golden Rules of IMDb forums: Every single exchange leads to an argument, and every actor's sexuality is suspect. (As it should be.)

This particular debate swirled around the bedroom preferences of a certain television star who (and I have this on several authorities... ah, but now I sound like an IMDb poster) apparently trafficked regularly in same-sex circles before his recent breakout success. "He IS gay, right?" wondered Allie_Everwood; Allie, an Australian male, ranks Gilmore Girls and The OC among his favorite programs, and has previously initiated incisive discussions of An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, something called The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and the careers of new Superman Brandon Routh ("Why do people think he's gay?"), Mean Girls' Jonathan Bennett ("Hmm gay or not"), a person named David Gallagher ("I wish he was gay"), Matt LeBlanc ("Gaaaaay???"), Jake Gyllenhaal ("Gaaaaay!!!"), and Sergei Parajanov ("THE seminal Soviet geopolitical allegorist... was he gay?"). I would never question the unimpeachable gaydar of such a person, and am prepared to swallow wholesale the bold theory he advances a few postings later:

"Gay guys can be good looking, but slightly... well, not DEFORMED, but slightly peculiar shaped in a certain part of their face. That's the clue."

In Allie's professional estimation, the nose of the actor in question is "odd on an angle" (sic). Gotcha, fags-a-lot! All the macho posturing in the world can't hide that homo-schnoz!

On a personal note, I guess this explains my plus-sized jaw.

Mouse defective

In my zeal for all things Conan Doyle I recently watched Disney's alleged classic The Great Mouse Detective.

It was not very good. I felt bored.

Mice can't really talk.

...This is reading like a dimwit child's book report.

Dream machine

I rejoiced and hummed when Jamba Juice opened a new venue directly across the street back in January. It wasn't that I'd minded the five-minute walk to their location in Columbus Circle; I didn't even care about the throngs of diners mobbing the adjacent restaurant. No, what drove me up the wall about the old locale was Wink.

"Welcome to Jamba Juice! Great big day, isn't it?" Wink would sing, hair flaming beneath his cap, whenever I or anyone approached. Possibly he did this on his own, too.

"Sweet choice!" he'd commend me after I sucked up my pride and requested an Orange Dream Machine by its unfortunate name.

"Thanks a lot -- you've been awesome!" he always cheered as I slunk away. (This reminded me of my college secretary at Oxford, who on occasion asked me to sign and return documents to her; every time I did so, she'd beam, "Great job, Daniel!" ...Not that I object to positive feedback.)

I like happy people. Several of my friends are positive joyboys. Wink, though, made me uncomfortable -- and I wasn't alone: "I knew you were cool the second you walked in!" he once assured a timid Filipino woman while she and I awaited our delightful blended treats.

"Wow," she murmured to me. "That's pretty out there."

I snorted. "Tell me about it. You're totally lame."

As weeks passed, I found myself actively dreading my encounters with Wink, who evidently never left the shop; twelve noon, two o'clock, four-thirty -- there he was, eyes acid-bright, accepting orders from customers and asking, per store policy, for their first names. I began inventing aliases. "Alex," I might say, or "Charlie." Or, when feeling more exotic, "Ebony." It got to the point where I filled out a patron-response card: "Wink terrifies me," I wrote, in the shaky penmanship of the deeply afraid. "No more Wink, please." I stopped short of submitting this, of course, but I did keep it on my person in case Wink should ever attack me and leave me for dead.

And then -- O glorious day! -- the providential news: Jamba Juice had set up shop just down the block. "Hooray!" I sang. "No more Winking!" I rushed to the new store and ordered a power-sized Coldbuster. Wink had once prepared this same drink for me; "Little something for your sniffles!" he laughed, and I wanted to cough up blood.

The months since have passed in a creamy, frosty haze, during which time I've diversified my repertoire, sampling everything from Razz-ma-Tazz (sweet and fruity) to Açaí Blast (hippies only) to Mangos! Mangos! Mangos! (a mistake, as I am allergic to mangos). I have also tried all available nutritional supplements, including Protein, Immunity Boost, and Femme. "What about Homme?" I asked my barrista, who was blessed with the non-onomatopoeic name of Sarah.

"What?"

"Never mind. Fill 'er up!"

Yes, it's been a good spell. This Jamba Juice has begun to feel like home, or graduate school: No one knows my name, and they're principally interested in shunting me out the door.

And then, yesterday, I walked in around one-fifteen, approached the counter, shook my headphones from my misaligned ears, and opened my mouth to speak.

"Hey there, superstar! Welcome to Jamba Juice!"

Not my words. No: There, standing before me, day-glo eyes trained on mine, was Wink.

"It can't be," I whispered.

"Beat that heat with a frozen treat?" he suggested, as though I were there for the conversation.

"No..." I gasped. "No..."

"Hey, howja like to try our new Grape Escape? All-fruit, all-delish!"

"You're dead," I told him. "I killed you."

"And it's seedless!" Wink promised.

Part of me withered inside; I shed a bit of my soul. Yet somehow I made it through; somehow I agreed to a Grape Escape; somehow I mumbled "Fernando" when asked for my name; and, styrofoam cup in hand, I somehow staggered to the door.

"Vitamin C-ya-later!" Wink called.

"Eat bleach and die," I somehow did not answer.

So did the other Jamba Juice shutter up? Does Wink rotate through the various franchises, spreading good cheer and shitting rainbows where'er he wanders? And why does he excite such venom in me? Many customers, I've noticed, seem to enjoy his Ned Flanders vocabulary and musical-theater diction. Many customers also seem to enjoy a certain toxic radish-and-onion beverage that looks like clotted dwarf blood.

I don't know what to do. I need my Jamba Juice, of course, but I'd rather not have to roam another half-mile for a fix. I wonder whether I can ask the manager for Wink's schedule.

Cursed

"[Patrick Kennedy's] car crash near the Capitol may just be the latest installment of what some consider to be the curse over the Kennedy family," says ABC News. Give me a break, says I. The Kennedys' curse is that they're a pack of irresponsible idiots. Getting plastered and installing yourself behind the wheel isn't bad fortune, it's piss-poor judgment; and trying to represent human failing as ill-starred destiny (or whatever) amounts to crude buck-passage.

More from the ABC report: "Patrick Kennedy has spent time in drug rehab.... During his career, he has had to answer questions about personal incidents. In 2000, he was captured on a surveillance camera shoving a female airport security guard. No charges were filed against Kennedy, and he apologized for 'being rude.' The guard's lawsuit was settled out of court. In 2001, the Coast Guard was called after an argument with his girlfriend on a yacht. The woman reported he had been drinking. Kennedy also has been accused by two marina owners of chartering boats and returning them with damage -- sometimes significant."

Man, he's 'unlucky.' I suppose we should be grateful that there wasn't a dead woman in the passenger seat for once.

Still got it!

Pursuant to yesterday's post on Revolution Studios, I just came across the following synopsis: "Shawn Wayans plays a midget bank robber who poses as an infant in order to infiltrate the home of wannabe parents."

Wait, it gets better: "Hijinks ensue when he finds himself developing a taste for breast milk, fending off rectal thermometers, and falling in lust with his adoptive 'mother'!"

Revolution Studios, of course. The project is called Little Man, and already I know it is better than Crash.

Evolution

Some years ago I developed a sixth sense: I could read about a given film and instantly identify it as a Revolution Studios project.

"Tommy Lee Jones guards a squad of federal-witness cheerleaders!" Revolution.

"Eddie Murphy operates a day-care center!" Revolution.

"Adam Sandler controls the universe with a magical remote control!" Revolution.

"Two Wayans brothers pose as Caucasian women!" Revolution.

The company, which specialized in so-called high-concept comedies that more than anything evinced Hollywood's creative bankruptcy, was the production shingle of former Disney chair Joe Roth, who also assumed directing duties for America's Sweethearts ("Married movie stars secretly despise each other!") and Christmas with the Kranks ("Suburban community forces agnostics to celebrate Christian ritual!"). According to an article in today's New York Times, Roth and his Revolution crew originally set out to produce "quality movies with modest budgets." Their maiden release featured a scene in which a prissy surgeon unwittingly eats a testicle.

And now? The Revolution is over. The company couldn't survive Gigli (could anyone?), or XXX: State of the Union, or the direct-to-video release Lil' Pimp, starring the vocal talents of Danny Bonaduce as a person named Ugly Midget (I am not making this up). Happily, the company's current development slate will remain intact, priming audiences everywhere for a feature adaptation of Knight Rider and the much-anticipated sequels to Are We There Yet? and Daddy Day Care.

And at the end of the day, I bet Joe Roth is still worth tens if not hundreds of millions.

I don't understand the universe.

It's an homage!

Another one bites the dust. Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore whose much-hyped debut novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life recently charted on the New York Times extended bestseller list, issued a statement this afternoon: "Recently, I was very surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities between some passages in my novel and passages in these books" -- these last being Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, two bestselling chick-lit novels by Megan McCafferty. One wonders, of course, how the author could be surprised to learn she's a plagiarist; still, Viswanathan apologizes "to any who feel they have been misled by these unintentional errors on my part."

Unintentional. Hmm. Well, by total accident, I have excerpted these passages from The Harvard Crimson:


‘YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE’

From page 6 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart. Guess which one I got. You’ll see where it’s gotten me.”

From page 39 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty. I had long resigned myself to category one, and as long as it got me to Harvard, I was happy. Except, it hadn’t gotten me to Harvard. Clearly, it was time to switch to category two.”


‘I NEEDED IN A BEST FRIEND’

From page 7 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first twelve years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend. But that was before Bridget’s braces came off and her boyfriend Burke got on, before Hope and I met in our seventh-grade honors classes."

From page 14 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first fifteen years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend. We had first bonded over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids. But that was before freshman year, when Priscilla’s glasses came off, and the first in a long string of boyfriends got on.”


‘170 SPECIALTY SHOPS LATER’

From page 237 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Finally, four major department stores and 170 specialty shops later, we were done.”

From page 51 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Five department stores, and 170 specialty shops later, I was sick of listening to her hum along to Alicia Keys….”


‘INVADING MY PERSONAL SPACE’

From page 213 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Marcus then leaned across me to open the passenger-side door. He was invading my personal space, as I had learned in Psych class, and I instinctively sank back into the seat. That just made him move in closer. I was practically one with the leather at this point, and unless I hopped into the backseat, there was nowhere else for me to go.”

From page 175 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Sean stood up and stepped toward me, ostensibly to show me the book. He was definitely invading my personal space, as I had learned in a Human Evolution class last summer, and I instinctively backed up till my legs hit the chair I had been sitting in. That just made him move in closer, until the grommets in the leather embossed the backs of my knees, and he finally tilted the book toward me.”


'TO BUY DIET COKES FROM'

From page 67 of McCafferty's second novel: "...but in a truly sadomasochistic dieting gesture, they chose to buy their Diet Cokes at Cinnabon."

From page 46 of Viswanathan's novel: "In a truly masochistic gesture, they had decided to buy Diet Cokes from Mrs. Fields."


When I first learned of all this -- before I compared the passages above, I mean -- I didn't think much of it: I too have certainly "internalized" the syntax and rhythms of certain authors via repeated exposure; and I'm sure there's a standard vocabulary for a genre like young-adult fiction. The excerpts, however, shoot those theories to hell. Viswanathan has argued that "the central stories of my book and [McCafferty's] are completely different," yet as noted in the Times, "Ms. McCafferty's books... are, like Ms. Viswanathan's, about a young woman from New Jersey trying to get into an Ivy League college -- in her case, Columbia. ...Like the heroine of Opal, Ms. McCafferty's character, Jessica Darling, visits the campus, strives to earn good grades to get in and makes a triumphant high school graduation speech. And the borrowings may be more extensive than have previously been reported. The Crimson cited 13 instances in which Ms. Viswanathan's book closely paralleled Ms. McCafferty's work. But there are at least 29 passages that are strikingly similar." (A more recent Publishers Weekly article ups that figure to forty-five.)

Meanwhile, McCafferty's publisher Random House, already a 2006 headline mainstay in the wake of the James Frey and Dan Brown controversies, has filed a formal complaint with Little, Brown. Gloves are off.

It'll be interesting to see whether this scuppers Viswanathan's DreamWorks deal; movie projects based on books by Frey and J.T. Leroy stalled earlier this year, but those circumstances were somewhat more outrageous.

Crazy kids!

UPDATE: Girl doesn't know when to quit! Seems Viswanathan (still maintaining, as of this writing, that her plagiarism was unintentional) also internalized passages from Rushdie (who's got no sympathy), Meg Cabot's The Princess Diaries, and Sophie Kinsella.

Please stop talking

The fellow behind me is complaining about Brokeback Mountain.

"It was okay," he says, authoritatively. "It was only as good as it was because it's about, you know, gay cowboys."

This is obscenely stupid. It is like saying that Chill Factor was only as bad as it was because it's about, you know, an ice-cream salesman who stores a heat-sensitive explosive device in his cooler.

But maybe this guy's onto something. I think we can all agree that Chill Factor would have been vastly improved had it concerned gay cowboys.

"The sexiest thing you ever did see"

Yesterday I watched The Third Man for the eleventy billionth time... and across the Atlantic, Alida Valli was dying of as-yet undisclosed causes. This has happened before: A month after my high school graduation, I rented Out of the Past; that same night, Robert Mitchum succumbed to lung cancer. I wonder if I should slide a Tara Reid movie into my DVD player and hope for the best.

Lordy, though -- Valli was beautiful. According to IMDb.com, her marriage to surrealist painter Oscar de Mejo "dissolved amid a 1954 drug, sex and murder scandal that involved her former husband and his mistress, [resulting in] a public outbreak that nearly ruined her career." I've never heard anything further about this.

Oklahoma

Kevin Underwood, the Oklahoma grocery stockboy responsible for the murder of ten-year-old Jamie Rose Bolin, maintained a blog. It's formatted just like this one -- we selected the same Blogger template, he and I, though Underwood began documenting his thoughts, which range from the mundane to the deranged, over three years ago -- and its author describes himself in his profile as "single, bored, and lonely, but other than that, pretty happy."

I know I'm going to track this case, if only because much of my graduate research has concerned the development of psychopathy in the undersexed postadolescent male. Underwood is of course a prime specimen; in his blog, he repeatedly cites his frustrated sex life, and even hazards a theory or two himself:

"I mean it, I really need a girlfriend. It's not just depressing anymore, it's actually starting to have a negative effect on my mental state I think. For example, my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird. If people knew the kinds of things I think about anymore, I'd probably be locked away. No probably about it, I know I would be."

The details of his crime are indeed particularly gruesome: In the same apartment where Underwood stashed the asphyxiated, nearly decapitated body of his neighbor, investigators discovered hacksaws, meat tenderizer, and barbecue skewers. Underwood admitted he intended to cannibalize the child. This is a man without a single misdemeanor to his name, and in one fell swoop he's graduated to Dahmerdom.

But I expect it's the blog that will mark this as a landmark case for criminologists and criminal psychologists. Dahmer didn't commit his thoughts to paper; there's no chronicle of Bundy's private neuroses; the Hillside Stranglers never collaborated on a journal; yet here we've got a provocative and detailed record of a psychopathic mind, authored by the subject himself (he even posted a few words the day after his victim disappeared, linking to a Discovery Channel article). Tracts will be excerpted in textbooks. It's fascinating.

Horrifying, too -- all, all horrifying. That poor little girl.

Back in blāK

Coca-Cola BlāK [sic] -- "a soda that blends Coke, natural flavors, and coffee essence. Just like your garbage disposal" (per Tina Fey; even Saturday Night Live couldn't miss with this) -- premiered in France two years ago. Inauspicious beginnings. Now, like hordes of immigrants, bottles of the stuff, which the manufacturer describes as an "innovative carbonated fusion beverage" (catchy!), have breached our virgin shores. Why Coke insists on tinkering with its formula -- despite the graduated failures of Coke Zero, New Coke, and Coke II -- is anyone's guess.

I don't know what's worse about Blāk: the concept or the packaging. Can't wait for the caffeine-free version, though.

Waughsome!

I love Back Bay's Evelyn Waugh reissues. They're so natty. At one point, I owned most of these, but as I shuttled between Durham and Oxford and New York and Nome*, my library was gradually depleted.

Man, I'm boring.


Decline and Fall, 1928


Vile Bodies, 1930


Black Mischief, 1932


A Handful of Dust, 1934


Scoop, 1938


Put Out More Flags, 1942


Brideshead Revisited, 1945


The Loved One, 1948


Men at Arms, 1952


Officers and Gentlemen, 1955

*not true

Attackutani

If you ask me, Ben Yagoda could've wielded a sharper scalpel in his vivisection of abjectly useless New York Times Book Review critic Michiko Kakutani; nowhere, for example, does he describe her as "abjectly useless." (I got your back, Yago!) He's patient, almost plodding, in his description -- not dismissal -- of Kakutani as "a profoundly uninteresting critic," and even manages to acknowledge her intellect ("estimable") and work ethic.

Still, this is an incisive and necessary critique of a profoundly uninspired woman whose "main weakness," Yagoda contends, "is her evaluation fixation.... Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from [Pauline Kael] and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing." He liberally excerpts her reviews as "evidence of Kakutani's solid tin ear," observing that her "prose is even flatter when it praises than when it buries," then finally concludes that she "appears incapable of engaging with language, either playfully or seriously, which puts her at a painful disadvantage when she is supposed to be evaluating writers who can and do."

To this I would add that Kakutani is elsewhere crucially deficient: She doesn't seem to even like books, or reading. Now consider that unabashed sentimentalist Roger Ebert, who pronounced Crash and Monster's Ball the best films of their respective years, and whose standards have sunk like a limbo stick over the past decade (in recent months, She's the Man, Find Me Guilty, and not one but two Paul Walker titles all erected his thumb). I usually disagree with Ebert; yet his criticism and commentary, which often highlight the virtues of otherwise negligible projects, almost invariably communicate a real affection for movies, moviemaking, and the moviegoing experience. The man's work is a sustained celebration of film.

Kakutani, by contrast, reminds me of English classmates and students I've known throughout my school years -- studious, serious, altogether precision-focused on The Final Verdict... and as such completely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading. That sounds like flower-child panegyric, but shouldn't literature be enjoyable? Not, apparently, for Kakutani, who often seems to actually despise the printed word; on her better days, she's simply puzzled by it. Her own writing is inert and frequently bitter.

It is of course perfectly fine not to enjoy something -- I myself dislike video games. I wisely decided against becoming a video-game critic. This is where Michiko K. and I differ in our approach.

There's the rub

My semi-friend Dominic manages a nifty triple-tiered trick. He seems, at first acquaintance, to be ruthless, ambitious, and distinctly amoral; but if you scratch the surface, you'll discover a gold-hearted softie who puts up a tough front. Beneath that, however, he's actually ruthless, ambitious, and distinctly amoral, and his heart is merely a noxious vortex plated in gold. Think of him as you would the earth's geosphere: crust, mantle, core. I give you Dominic.

"My ambition in life is to commit a white-collar crime and then go to prison for it," he told me recently.

"Why don't you just stop after committing the white-collar crime?" I asked, knowing there was no use trying to talk him out of Phase I.

"No. I want everyone to know I got away with it."

I detected a flaw in his logic. "But if you're sent to prison, you won't have gotten away with it. You'll have been caught and convicted," I added.

Within his head the machinery ground. "Fuck."

"Sorry."

"So how," huffed Dominic, "am I supposed to get away with a highly publicized white-collar crime?"

I told him I thought it was one of those abiding mysteries. "Like 'Is there a God?' and 'How can I be happy?' -- that sort of thing."

"But I know how I can be happy. All I have to do is get away with a highly publicized white-collar crime."

"A classic dilemma."

Dominic stewed.

"I'm just kidding about all this," he assured me after a few minutes. "I'm a sweet boy."

"Except you're really not."

"Yeah," he sighed, "I know."

Like a tree-hugger, but with children

Doesn't accused child-hugger and Homeland Security spokesman Brian J. Doyle kinda sorta resemble a certain primate several rungs up the political ladder? My heart juddered when I saw this photo beside the caption "Sex Sting."

But it was Doyle, not the Commander-in-Chief, putting the Ho in Homeland this evening, as he engaged in graphic online discourse with a 14-year-old girl who turned out to be -- this so crazy -- a Florida Computer Crimes detective. I hate when that happens.

Authorities just released a transcription of their fateful chat:

DHSDaddy: Hey, little lady.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: hi!!!! im not a cop!!!!

DHSDaddy: Kewl.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: so if u r looking for cop sex dont look here!!!!!! lol!!!!!

DHSDaddy: Aight.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: talk dirty 2 me!!!!

DHSDaddy: What do you like to hear?

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: hot stuff!!!!

DHSDaddy: How'd you like a mild massage?

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: ok fine but say stuff that could be used against you in a court of law!!!!!

DHSDaddy: I will smooch your cheeks in a respectful manner all night long.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: something more incriminating!!!!! lol!!!!!

DHSDaddy: Can't wait to undress you... with my eyes.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: right lets pretend im a cop EVEN THO IM TOTALLY NOT LOL LOL LOL!!!!! :) :) :p what would u NOT want 2 say 2 me???

DHSDaddy: Let's totally hold hands.

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP: dude u r so not getting me off

DHSDaddy: Wait... you're -- you are a cop, aren't you? This is a set-up! A sting!

HornyUnderageGirlDEFNOTCOP:

DHSDaddy: Aha, just kidding. Get your pubescent ass over here and gargle my balls, missy.

I ♥ Republican hijinks!

All your basic are belong to us

"One for Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction," said my friend Nate, loudly.

"One for Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction," said my friend Nancy, proudly.

"Uh -- same," I mumbled.

The cashier frowned and shook her head at me. We both knew I was a coward. And a traitor, to boot -- for weeks the three of us had been looking forward to BI2RA, reciting its name in full even after the subtitle was dropped from the final cut; when The Los Angeles Times, among other sources, likened the film to Showgirls, there was much rejoicing in our camp. I should have held my held high. I should have divorced my legs. I am a hypocrite.

"Don't be ashamed," Nate advised me as we entered the theater.

"Too late," I told him.

As it turns out, I was early. BI2RA is awful: dank, daft, and, though not without camp value, pretty dreary. Director Michael Caton-Jones also committed Doc Hollywood, so he is obviously the man to helm a lurid erotic thriller. The screenwriters, a pair of husband-and-wife sadists with the whimsical names of Leora Barish and Henry Bean, cannot between them devise a single memorable double entendre for their leading lady -- they stall at that first entendre. "Is this where we're gonna do it?" Stone asks upon entering a therapist's office. And later: "Come with me," she beckons an acquaintance. "You'll enjoy it." It's just witless. When someone offers her a chair, you expect her to answer, "I'd rather stand, because my crotch is sopping wet."

Considering how she micromanaged the production of BI2RA -- filing a $100-million lawsuit against the filmmakers while the project languished in turnaround; nixing a litany of prospective leading men; demanding rewrite upon rewrite -- I was surprised that Stone, as the formerly bisexual novelist Catherine Tramell, doesn't even try; it's an ignoble failure, a joyless sneer of a performance, inert as the actress' bebotoxed face. Her sparring partner, one David Morrissey, was unknown to me before I saw the movie, and remains unknown to me afterwards. He and Stone share the sexual chemistry of Tom Cruise and a woman.

Let it be said, in fairness, that the graceful Charlotte Rampling, playing a Hungarian psychologist who at one point is glimpsed listening to an audiobook entitled Hungarian for Beginners, manages to emerge unscathed. The same almost goes for David Thewlis, until he (very deliberately) throws his final scene, death-rattle shivering in his throat as he slumps against a door. "You cunt," he rasps. I think he was talking to Morrissey, actually.

I can't recommend Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction, but I'm eager to tout the sequel we've envisioned: Basic Instinct 3: Risk Aversion. It's mostly octogenarian Sharon Stone huddled in a corner, conspicuously not having kinky sex.

Crash

Another week, another music video starring my Anberlin friend, this time a collision-themed film for Sanctus Real's "I'm Not Alright," shot on a desolate stretch of California highway.

It's a nuclear show

"Elevator Love Letter," by the Canadian electronic-indie band Stars, is the most affecting pop song I've heard in months -- sad, almost bleak, yet uptempo and fizzing with synthesizer reverb. (Per the Splendid album review: "'Elevator Love Letter' bounces along with a driven punch, dreamy pop hooks rubbing softly against guitar-laden sparkle and snappy beat programming.") It's the heterosexual version of Saint Etienne's "He's on the Phone," another singalong ode to doomed yuppie romance, and the only disco anthem that gets me misty-eyed; both songs evoke that almost exquisite melancholy of feeling lonely in the city.

I think I find these all-is-lost ditties more engaging when they're (bitter)sweetened by studio sheen. Maybe I identify too much with my inner lovelorn British Commonwealth lass. Sometimes she's not so inner, actually.

Anyway, the song available on iTunes, along with the rest of Heart. Good stuff. The Delgados would kill to record a track this melanchoric. (...I just coined that term! Watch out, Dr. Johnson!)

Which brings us to an interesting... well, I hesitate to say "phenomenon"; call it a trend: home-made music videos. YouTube is teeming with amateur versions of everything from
Madonna to OK Go to 50 Cent; while some of these seem like just-for-fun projects, and others are geared as parodies, a sizable percentage have been made in total earnest. This "Elevator Love Letter" enactment, for example. It's kind of sweet.

Inspiring, too. I want to star in "My Humps." I wish I had a camcorder.

Yuck

Grotesquerie in literature is well and good -- I wish, I wish I could find Mervyn Peake in hardcover -- but Martin Amis frequently wallows too damn deep: Witness Dead Babies, a repellent book (with a repellent title) about repellent characters doing repellent things. Grand, I say. So now consider this passage, in which the "tufted" American Marvell Buzhardt catalogues the options at a local restaurant:

"You can have cunt cubes in your drinks. And not just flavored with cunt. Real juice in the cubes. They got... yeah, they got tit soda, cock cocktails, pit popsicles -- oh yeah, and ice cream that tastes of ass. Hell of a place."

The weird thing is, he's describing the Olive Garden.

What the hell is this? It's not clever, it's not snappy, it's not plausible. It's just foul. Juvenile, even (Amis published the novel in his mid-twenties). I hope I'm not now permanently prejudiced against popsicles. Something like that happened when I saw Deliverance; you know how Burt Reynolds gashes his leg in that one scene and blanched muscle bubbles from the wound? That signaled the end of cottage cheese for me.

I think it'd be interesting to read Evelyn Waugh and Amis fils in succession. The first is so acutely uncomfortable in his depictions of sex and private anatomy (there's a line in Brideshead Revisited about "the narrow conveyance of her loins"), while the latter never met a maneuver or a vulva he couldn't render in glistening detail -- yet only eight years separated Waugh's death and Amis' Rachel Papers. Discuss.

Annyong!

Many quotations are not funny out of context. I don't care. Because Arrested Development hurtles forward at such a rapid clip, I can only catch every third line of dialogue; most of these are worth memorizing:

- "I'm a failure. I can't even fake the death of a stripper."

- "Tobias had snuck into the costume closet and disguised himself as an English nanny in an attempt to see his daughter and prove to his wife he had what it took to become a successful actor. It was the exact plot of the movie Mrs. Doubtfire."

- "I have Pop-Pop in the attic."

- "Gob was getting the feeling he could not return a completely frozen dead dove to a pet store and get the full refund the felt he was entitled to."

- "Say goodbye to these!"

- "Why won't you fuck me?"

- "Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over? An analyst and a therapist. The world's first analrapist."

- "He only talks to her because he thinks she has a penis."

- "Hanukkah can be spelled so many ways! Oh, God!"

- "Your husband is dating Kitty, the whore."

- "Annyong!"

If you're able to identify 70% or more of these, please (as Maeby would say) marry me.

"Why was I born with such contemporaries?"

"If an Israeli group wants to march in New York, do you allow neo-Nazis into their parade? If African-Americans are marching in Harlem, do they have to let the Ku Klux Klan into their parade?"

These are the musings of the raging o'bigot who organized New York's Saint Patrick's Day Parade, which for the sixteenth straight year explicitly excluded a gay group. I for one had no idea that homosexuals are to Irish nationalism what the KKK is to African-Americans.

Complaints of vi-o-lins

Considering how I've inveighed against music videos, I sure do seem to post about them often enough.

Good excuse this time, though: A friend of mine stars in the video for Anberlin's hit single "Paperthin Hymn," which I encourage you to watch.

Hello, stranger

This may be more information about Poor Daniel than you require, but I have had remarkably little -- or, rather, remarkably unvaried -- sexual experience in my quarter-odd-century. Perhaps this is because I was never particularly girl-crazy; perhaps it's because I only started seeing guys at age twenty-one; perhaps it's my perpetual raging syphilis. Despite living in England for years, I somehow managed to avoid contact with horny foreigners of almost every strain -- this in stark contrast to, for example, my friend Peter, whose list of conquests reads like a UN delegation, or my friend Lily, with her catholicity of Soviet Bloc bedfellows.

…Actually, I lied: I was inducted into the heady (leave it) world of homo-dating in the spring of 2000, at age twenty, during my junior year abroad in England. Thing is -- things are, if you will -- (a) I didn't know I was gay; (b) I didn't know he was gay; (c) he didn't know he was gay; (d) neither of us knew it was a date. Well, I didn't, at any rate. Can't a couple of casual male friends enjoy a candlelit dinner in Soho before trekking over to Mamma Mia for an evening of choreographed ABBA?

My date's name was, and in fact remains, Geoffrey, complete with stylish G and mini-spare-tire o. This should have tipped me off; by my count, Geoffrey is the seventh-gayest name in all of masculine nomenclature, behind Sebastian, Boniface, Tristan, Kevin Spacey, Jayson, and Faggot. Except this Geoffrey -- my Geoffrey -- was not yet quite worthy of his moniker. Yes, he owned a pair of spats, but he couldn't dance. And while his DVD collection included Ice Castles and several Patrick Swayze flicks (more on that anon), he'd never heard of Gore Vidal; I learned as much on the bus ride back to Oxford, where we said good night and parted, each humming "Under Attack."

I mention all this because last night I encountered Geoffrey in one of New York's filthier gay establishments. I'm not much for The Scene -- it'd been several months since my last circuit tour, in fact -- and so am usually able to wallflower in total anonymity; you can imagine my surprise on hearing my (full) name brayed across the gridlocked Barracuda barroom.

"Hello, stranger!" Geoffrey clucked, flinging his arms around me. I flinched, because I don't, as a rule, really like hugging, unless I'm exceptionally fond of the hugger/huggee, and because his skin was glossy with Joop.

"Let me see you!" he demanded. We exchanged appraising glances. I've been less heinous, I know; Geoffrey, by contrast, looked better than I remembered: He was still pale and elongated, still a bit peaky, and he had bullied his hair into an unconvincing fauxhawk, but on the whole he seemed somehow more relaxed, more confident. Maybe it was his arms, which were toned, or his tank top, which read SLUT. I fidgeted and tugged on my tie.

As I refilled my ice water, he filled me in on his postgraduate years -- law school, court clerkship, midtown firm -- and politely inquired after my own. And then, having jammed his number into my cell phone, Geoffrey vanished into the crowd. I located my friend Tom and made for the exit.

Geoffrey. Huh. Six years now.

I suppose I find it interesting that neither of us went the "Isn't this a surprise!" (or "This really isn't a surprise") route, even when we spoke of our West End outing; yet I kind of wish we had done so -- I'd have been interested to hear about his experiences, his mistakes, his boyfriends. I guess I didn't want him to backboard the questions onto me. Poor Daniel is a private creature.

Still, he seems happy, and I'm glad for that.

And why did I want to discuss Dirty Dancing? Oh, right: the Sittenfeld. According to the critical hosannas packed like cigarettes into the first few pages of her overlong, undergood boarding-school opus Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld is a millennial Salinger (!), a latter-day Plath (?). A few crucial distinctions: (1) Salinger and Plath can/could, you know, write; (2) neither of them ever penned pieces for Salon or Jossip on Dirty Dancing ("best girl movie ever!"; I wonder if Geoffrey agrees) and Hollywood ephemeralia -- cf. "Divorce on the D-list," an article in which Sittenfeld laments the demise of Kathy Griffin's union. She first discovered Griffin while pacing the treadmill at the gym; on dismounting, her legs "felt weird and bouncy." Sylvia Plath, incidentally, authored a famous poem called "Metaphors," in which the phrase "weird and bouncy" appears not once.

Sittenfeld's next book opens with a meticulous, loving description of Julia Roberts' aborted 1991 wedding -- the cake, the flowers, the dreamy would-be groom (Kiefer Sutherland). This woman should be writing for In Touch.

I did, however, recently have the pleasure of discussing the matter with a certain former editor for the New York Times Book Review, who, on learning that Prep had been anointed one of the Times' Ten Best Books of 2005, rang up a certain not-so-former editor and asked (ahem), "Are you fucking shitting me?"

Gather round

One of my British friends, whom I shall call Tumnus, recently described a certain vocabulary-deficient Canadian pop musician as a "song-cow." Song-cow -- what a glorious notion! It could rival the selkie. It could trump the jackalope. I envision a mythic beast running wild over the twilit moors, graceful and diaphanous in the half-light, filaments of bovine melody trailing in its wake. "Hush, children!" Gran Myfanwy would murmur, her milky eyes a-gleam. "'Tis the song-cow!"

"What is a song-cow, Gran?" asked little Flora, the goldilocked younger child, who would later die of scurvy.

"Aye, aye, little one -- the song-cow, yes, 'tis. Shiver and shriek."

"But what is it, Gran?" This was Miles, Flora's cousin, son, daughter, and godfather's lover. Welsh families are complicated.

"Shiver and shriek, lad, shiver and shriek!"

"Ach," cried Flora, "Gran Myfanwy's touched with the moon-fever. Let's put her in a home."

Her brother punched her shoulder. Flora vomited in his ear.

"You've no right to make a pig's dangly of me," argued she, invoking a quaint colloquialism.

"Aye, I do," Miles answered. "For I'm your mother and uncle as well as your son and godfather's lover. Watch your tongue; I'll bide no deny."

"I wonder if anyone will notice that you're plagiarizing Twelfth Night."

"Aye, aye; I hope not."

"The song-cow," said Gran Myfanwy, "is a numinous creature that haunts the hills of Wales, searching the countryside for its calf."

"Ooh," chorused the children.

"It lives in the mists and the fogs."

"Aah," chorused the children. "Can 'fog' be pluralized?" added Miles.

"The song-cow issues a delicate tune from betwixt its mottled lips," their grandmother explained. "It is the siren of the moors."

"I thought cows said 'moo,'" said Flora. "There was that Jane Smiley novel."

Gran Myfanwy wagged her head in every direction. "Aye, aye; nay, nay: The song-cow sings, my lass -- like all the beings of the vapor. It runs with the song-sheep...

...and the song-horse...

...and the song-mastodons...

...and the song-ostrich...

...and the song-pterodactyl...

...and the fearsome song-Nepalese urchins, who eat their own kind...

...and the rare song-Tom Welling, star of the WB's Smallville and the Sony release The Fog."

"What a ruddy pack of mist-dwellers!" exclaimed Miles, whose name had been anglicized a few years earlier. His real name was Wnyllgrpabnbnbylyylllwelly.

"How I love sheep and Nepalese urchins!" cried Flora, whose real name was Essence. She and Miles danced a jig. It looked kind of gay, to be honest.

"It's magical!"

"It's charmant!"

"Long live the song-cow!"

"Long live all creatures of the fogs!"

Flora dropped dead of scurvy.

"Well," said Miles, inspecting her luminous corpse, "we seem to have drifted rather far from the subject at hand."

"Aye, aye," Gran Myfanwy agreed.

And then from without, worrying the curtains, sweetening the air, came the most silken and silvery sound they had ever heard. Gran Myfanwy and Miles were rooted to the spot. They could barely breathe. They both sprouted erections.

"Is that..." Miles gasped.

"It is, boy, it is." His grandmother shook her head, and her thick braids licked the floor. "The song-cow."


QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

(1) Would you like to be a song-cow? Why or why not? Answer in two words or less.

(2) What would you name your song-cow? I would name mine Gloria, but you don't have to. Gloria's a pretty good name, though.

(3) How bad was Michael Cunningham's last novel? Choose either "bad" or "revoke his Pulitzer."

Isn't it ironic?

Irony ('I-r&-nE, n.): Three hours after George Clooney hailed Hollywood's progressive spirit from the Oscar podium, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences awarded Crash Best Picture honors, thumbing its nose at the incalculably superior Brokeback Mountain. Mighty progressive indeed, recognizing a movie that retreads the blunt can't-we-all-just-get-along exhortations of Grand Canyon while turning a blind eye -- well, cataracted, at any rate; Brokeback did scoop the Director and Adapted Screenplay trophies -- to the instantly iconic (but fatally gay!) Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist.

Crash is the most facile, hackneyed, contrived, self-important, dimwitted movie in many a moon, an indigo melodrama that artlessly splices nine or ten LA-set vignettes illustrative of the movie's noble but effectively worthless central tenet -- namely, everyone's a little bit racist sometimes. (This same idea, as you may know, was communicated verbatim with much more brevity, insight, and melody in Avenue Q. The stars of that show are day-glo puppets; the stars of Crash are Sandra Bullock and Ryan Phillippe. No points for guessing which cast is more expressive.) Irony deux: On an evening when the Academy presented Robert Altman with a lifetime-achievement statue, they also saw fit to demonstrate how far their industry has fallen since Altman's heyday by lauding a movie that bears some of the director's hallmarks -- braided narratives, torrents of dialogue (lived-in and voluble, in Altman; didactic and plodding here) -- but none of his intelligence or nuance. In fact, Crash and nuance do not occupy the same dimension. This is the movie equivalent of a primary-color fingerpainting. (I loved, though, how director-producer-screenwriter Paul Haggis, in accepting the prize for Original Screenplay, acknowledged Brecht -- give me a break -- and likened his own work to a hammer. I heard that, pal.)

It's almost too bad, because the project's history is appealing: Haggis and his crew produced the film independently, recruiting a roster of heavyweight Hollywood talent at bargain rates, and ultimately steered their release to healthy commercial returns. This, as critics nationwide have noted, parallels to an eerie degree the storied production of my 1986 stage play Headless Barbie, which I wrote at the green age of six. A parable about the dangers of being both headless and Barbie, the show was to have revolutionized the way we think about the sans-noggined in society and revitalized the moribund genre of decapitated-doll drama; and thanks to my cast, which featured several talented players on suspect loan from my sister Mason's Malibu Dreamhouse, we packed the garage at 55 Whitehall Boulevard. Trouble is, like Crash, Headless Barbie just wasn't any good. At all.

AMPAS, of course, is not really praising Crash in its decision, but insulting Brokeback. (Irony trois: A movie that foams at the mouth in its indictment of bigotry has now become the Academy bigots' weapon of choice.) And this shouldn't surprise: For more than a month, reports from the trenches hinted that Hollywood -- a place where everyone from Tom Cruise to Barry Diller has shuttered himself within the closet; a homophobic (and antisemitic) town governed by gays (and Jews) -- might shy from heralding Ang Lee's same-sex-themed project; instead, some pundits predicted, voters would opt for a film as self-congratulatory and false as the motion-picture industry itself, a film that says a great deal but tells us absolutely nothing (in a style so overwrought it verges on camp -- look at Crash slightly askance, and it's a parody). This movie does not, despite Haggis' assertions to the contrary, break any rules; it is not, whatever else it may be, controversial; it skirts no edges. Exposing the homo-subtext beneath Western iconology -- that's rule-breaking; that's controversy. Fairly explicit gay sex: edgy. Manipulative declamations on the state of racial affairs in the United States? Safe and pat, tried and tired.

I know this doesn't really matter... much. Bragging rights, mostly; and within a month, Crash will be forgotten, thereafter referenced only as one of those head-scratching Oscar-night missteps on par with The Greatest Show on Earth or the thematically similar Driving Miss Daisy. Brokeback, on the other hand, is landmark, immortal, one for the ages, and will endure as such. It's just tough to believe, or accept, that a community of filmmakers could pretend they don't know this -- or, worse still, deliberately flout it. And there's no denying that movies, more than literature or journalism or even politics, exert control over and inform American culture; so I fear that this event -- that sounds a bit dramatic; let's call it an incident -- will be (mis?)construed as a repudiation of homosexuality.

At the end of the day, it's a stupid award -- a banal phenomenon, as Jodie Foster put it -- that much more devalued by this sad, regressive act of highway robbery. Now more than ever, anyone who cites Oscar voters as a collective barometer of taste or sound judgment should be, in the words of Jackie Flynn Clarke, shot in the face.

UPDATE: Kenneth Turan, film critic for The Los Angeles Times, is a more cogent man than I:

"It may be true, as [Crash] producer Cathy Schulman said in accepting the Oscar for best picture, that this was 'one of the most breathtaking and stunning maverick years in American history,' but Crash is not an example of that. I don't care how much trouble Crash had getting financing or getting people on board, the reality of this film, the reason it won the best picture Oscar, is that it is, at its core, a standard Hollywood movie, as manipulative and unrealistic as the day is long. And something more.

"For Crash's biggest asset is its ability to give people a carload of those standard Hollywood satisfactions but make them think they are seeing something groundbreaking and daring. It is, in some ways, a feel-good film about racism, a film you could see and feel like a better person, a film that could make you believe that you had done your moral duty and examined your soul when in fact you were just getting your buttons pushed and your preconceptions reconfirmed.

"So for people who were discomfited by Brokeback Mountain but wanted to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel like they were good, productive liberals, Crash provided the perfect safe harbor. They could vote for it in good conscience, vote for it and feel they had made a progressive move, vote for it and not feel that there was any stain on their liberal credentials for shunning what Brokeback had to offer. And that's exactly what they did.

"Sometimes," concludes Turan, "you win by losing, and nothing has proved what a powerful, taboo-breaking, necessary film Brokeback Mountain was more than its loss Sunday night."

Scratch this tummy

I like dogs.

I like electronic music.

I like the video for Goldfrapp's "Number One."

That kewpie-voiced irritant Gwen Stefani must be clawing her eyes out.

Buzzworthy

Spelling bees are hot again: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on Broadway, the Oscar-nominated documentary Spellbound, Myla Goldberg's novel Bee Season and its failed 2005 movie adaptation, and now Akeelah and the Bee, a new film starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. The principal argument of this project seems to be that black people can spell, too, which is a point that wouldn't need to be made if it weren't for individuals like Ludacris and Ginuwine.

I have considerable personal difficulty with bee-themed stories. They evince my competitive spirit; though I am pretty poor at most things -- soccer, flying, depth perception (cf. "soccer"), dressing myself, heterosexuality -- I've always spelled real good. (Also, my thumbs are double-jointed, which is great for parties.) So when one of the audience participants at Putnam County fumbled the word "stygian," I wanted to cackle and call out "Subliterate!" -- and I would have, too, except I worried she might whap me with her walker.

This Akeelah trailer, though, seems a bit much. "Own it" is not the sort of thing a spelling coach should say to his pupil. "Smack that diphthong like it's your white bitch" isn't, either.

If you can't say something tasteful

At the grocery store this evening, I was approached by my mother's brother Jack, a very Bostonian personage -- stiff upper lip, does not employ contractions in his speech, wears suits in grocery stores, the sort of individual you'd describe as a personage. He found me hovering over the lettuce, gathering materials for a salad; in my hands I held a bottle of vegetable oil and a plump cucumber. I turned at the squeak of his shoes.

"Hello, Poor Daniel," Uncle Jack said.

"Hello, Uncle Jack," I answered.

"Are you making a salad?" he asked.

"Oh, no," I sighed, holding the cucumber and vegetable oil aloft, "I'm just lonely."

He blinked.

Why did I say that? Why? Why? A good vegetable-sodomy joke has its place, of course -- parties, first dates, christenings -- but that place is nowhere within the vicinity of Uncle Jack. Really not his thing. Just as his sister Aunt Bunny is the sort of aunt who misuses the expression "blow my wad," so is Uncle Jack the type of uncle on whom cucumber-penetration jokes are wasted. I fear my relatives are a difficult lot. The only thing we all find amusing is Beth's death scene in Little Women. "Read it again, read it again!" we'll plead at Christmastime, gathered round the fire, as a grudging smile plays upon Aunt Jane's lips. "Oh, all right. Settle down," she'll chide. "'And so with tears and prayers and tender hands, Marmee and sisters made Beth ready for the long sleep that pain would never mar again...'"

Uncle Jack blinked again. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing." I swallowed, the cucumber wagging in my hands like a penis. "Just that... I'm lonely. Salad for one."

He looked uncomfortable and moved to the checkout line without a word. We do not share things in my family. No doubt he feared he'd run into me in the cereal aisle, where I'd admit I was molested at age eight.

I hope this doesn't mean our annual lunch at the University Club is off.

Hot Swedish teenage lesbians

Oh, I have seen a wonderful film: Fucking Åmål (Show Me Love), the movie that first established Lukas Moodysson as a world-class director. (He would top himself two years later with Tillsammans [Together], my favorite foreign film of all time.) Upon its release in 1998, I've learned, Fucking Åmål quickly eclipsed Titanic as Sweden's reigning all-time box-office champ; the two make for a stark and interesting contrast: James Cameron's $200 million spectacular boasted lavish production values, dreadful performances, and a three-hour-plus running time; Moodysson's project, shot on grimy video and impeccably acted, clocks in at a trim 89 minutes.

It's the story of two girls in the dull southwestern town of Åmål. Newly 16, pretty introvert Agnes lusts after Elin, a self-absorbed drama queen just this side of promiscuous. Their paths intersect at Agnes' birthday celebration, where she has evicted her lone guest, a wheelchair-bound young woman who makes the mistake of presenting her hostess with perfume: "If this is the best you can do," stammers Agnes, frustrated with herself, embarrassed by the piddling turnout, "don't bother. Go home, and keep your perfume. We just pretend to be friends because there's no one else to be with." (Something similar, incidentally, happened to me in eighth grade, when Michael Rolfe cast me out of his bar mitzvah, though that was in front of our entire class, and I did in fact elect to keep my gift of Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.) Elin and her sister soon crash the party; on a dare, Elin kisses Agnes, whom she (rightly) supposes to be homosexual, then flees the premises, giggling.

Now, if this were a Hollywood film, our heroine would reinvent herself as a self-assured sexpot, go heteronormative, and upstage her tormentors at the prom by slow-dancing with Freddie Prinze, Jr. Instead, Elin immediately repents and returns to apologize, leading to a development as unexpected as it is convincing. Cue Hot Teenaged-Lesbian Makeout Scene.

This being Sweden and the characters being young, of course, sex soon intervenes, in the bumbling person of Johan, a young technical student who pursues Elin. What will she do? Whom should she choose? It's testament to Moodysson and his actors that we find ourselves sincerely caring about the decisions of a somewhat silly Swedish teen who nearly goes epileptic when she learns that raves, according to a style magazine, are "out."

Almost everything about Fucking Åmål rings absolutely true: Agnes' devotion to Morrissey, the troubador of adolescent anguish; her parents' fumbling efforts to console and understand their daughter -- in this movie, the grown-ups are good-hearted and -intentioned adults, not the brain-dead foils tumbleweeding through American pictures -- and, in particular, the scene in which Agnes' mother tries to discuss sexuality; Elin's impulsive behavior (note, for example, how and why she breaks up with a boy); the insipid cruelties and tiny triumphs of high school life. I'd argue that Moodysson missteps in portraying Agnes' wronged friend as a petty, vindictive turncoat... but then I guess that many young people, having suffered an embarrassment, probably retaliate in kind and at length. I myself told everyone that Michael Rolfe was a bedwetting transsexual.

Also, I think the Swedish language is beautiful, alluvial, the sort of sound that you want to fall asleep to. A friend of mine has likened it to the sound a pelican makes when passing through an electric fan. This, I suppose, is why volume controls were created.

So rent Fucking Åmål. I'd say it's the best movie about adolescent Swedish lesbians of the last ten years.

True romance

Jackson and Marisa were decidedly attractive. This surprised Cross: He had met Horace, of course, and also his sister, parents, and nephew, and beauty had favored none of them. Perhaps Jackson was a second cousin, or a relative by marriage.

But his eyes recalled Horace’s own, a sharp, clear grey; they winked at Cross as the men clasped hands. Cross had to look up into his face: Jackson was long and lean, handily clearing six feet, with a slalom nose and strong teeth bolting from strong gums.

Beside him drifted Marisa, her face lurking within a cave of blue-black hair; she wore a plain dark cocktail dress that exposed her burnished shoulders and the terse slit of her cleavage. Marisa’s mouth was a bit vague, her skin somewhat sfumate, thought Cross, who had studied art history; still, she spoke brightly and carried herself high.

They seated themselves in the living room, where bottles of gin and Glenfiddich stood sentry upon the coffee table. Jackson, Cross soon noted, had the irritating habit of advising his audience, at irregular intervals, to “listen up.” At first Cross assumed he looked disinterested, so he made full moons of his eyes and pitched himself forward whenever Jackson spoke.

“Listen up,” Jackson instructed him after a moment. Cross, vindicated, poured himself a second gin.

He asked them how they had met.

“Oh, that’s a funny story,” said Jackson, refilling his glass. “It’s a good story.”

“It’s true,” Marisa said. “It’s a good story.”

“So I’m in Boston two years back, right?” began Jackson, unknotting his legs. “I’ve just broken up with my girlfriend. I drove up from Hartford to do it, because she told me she was going to do it on the phone, and I tell her, Don’t do it on the phone, babe, do it in person. So I go up to Boston and she does it in person. I’m in and out of there in under two minutes.” Jackson winced, drained his Tanqueray, winced again. “Fucking cold, man. So I’m driving down Commonwealth, in downtown Beantown. It’s midnight, and the place is empty. Listen up: There is nothing going on in Boston after ten o’clock. Place shuts the fuck down. And I’m driving towards a red light at the intersection of—what was it, babe?”

“Comm Ave and Mercer,” answered Marisa, wistfully.

“Comm Ave and Mercer. Listen up: I’m approaching this red light, and I see this woman crossing the street right in front of me. She’s kind of staggering, you know, and cradling her arm, and all I can think is, That is beautiful. That is the most beautiful hooker I’ve ever seen.”

“I was dressed like a hooker,” offered Marisa.

“You were a hooker, babe.”

“It’s true,” Marisa admitted. “I was.”

“So I’m cruising towards this gorgeous hooker staggering across the street. Great legs. Endless legs. Ass like a Cub Scout. And suddenly she stops and gives me the finger with the hand she’s cradling.”

“I was really cranky.”

“And I’m thinking, Oh, man, sweetheart, you just lost yourself a trick.”

“Stop it!” laughed Marisa.

“No, that’s what I thought,” Jackson continued. “I’m thinking I’ll cruise right on by, teach her a lesson.” He dealt her shoulder a playful blow. “Then my brakes seize up. I was driving this shitty old VW Rabbit—falling apart, total highway hazard; it’s out front, if you wanna see it—and the brakes sometimes gave out. The first time it happened it kinda freaked me out, but I figured out that if you pumped them really hard for a minute they started working again.”

“Mm,” nodded Cross, before he saw that Jackson expected more. “Oh? That’s quite resourceful.”

“Thanks, man. So I start pumping. But then I look up and I see the hooker standing in the middle of the crosswalk, still giving me the finger. So I’m pumping the brakes and trying to swerve off the road and then I start laying on the horn. She won’t move! I’m yelling at her, like, Hooker, get out of the way! Don’t just stand there giving me the finger! You know?”

“Certainly,” said Cross, reaching for the gin.

“Right? So I’m pumping and honking and swerving and screaming. But listen up: I run her over anyway. And then—this is the best bit—then my brakes start working.”

“I love that part.”

“Me, too, babe. Pass the Tanqueray, would you, pal? Thanks. Listen up: So I run her over. And I remember—this is wild—I remember thinking that the sound she made, or the sound the car made when it hit her, was just like the drums at the beginning of ‘Always.’ Bon Jovi. Ba-da-buh, ba-da-buh-bum. Weird.” Jackson drowned an index finger in his glass, stirred, blotted his knuckles on a napkin, and sipped. “Now I’m thinking, Oh, shit, I just ran over this whore. What do I do? It’s like one of those classic… moral choices, you know? What do you do after you drive over a whore? Do you take off, or do you try to look after her?”

Cross furrowed his brow and nodded ruminatively, as though he had long dwelt on this very issue.

“Right? So I think about it for a couple minutes and then I make a split decision. I tell myself—” here Jackson’s voice went tumescent with gravitas “—you help that hooker. So I open the car door and I get out and I step on her.”

“It’s true,” confirmed Marisa. “He did.”

“Yeah, turns out I didn’t run her over so much as kind of knock her out of the way,” said Jackson, wreathing Marisa in his arms, “and she landed next to the driver’s door. I’m like, Shit, there she is. And you know what? I was right: She was beautiful.” He angled his face towards hers. “Perfect lips, perfect cheekbones—you could ski off those cheekbones, I always tell her.” His thumb grazed her face; she cooed, quietly, and Jackson applied a kiss to her nose. “Perfect nose,” he proclaimed.

“More ice?” asked Cross.

“What? Oh, no thanks, man.”

Cross fidgeted in his seat, his buttocks compressing.

“So I’m falling in love right there on the street. She’s kinda bruised, though, her arm’s twisted all weird, and she’s got a big scrape on her forehead. Course—” Jackson laughed “—later I learned that she’d just kicked the shit out of her pimp, and he walloped her a couple times, too, and that’s why she had a lot of these cuts and bruises.”

“But it was mostly you.”

“Babe, I was moving at ten miles an hour.”

“I know, but it was mostly you. Vinnie didn’t do much damage.”

“I dunno. Guy sounded mean. Sounded like one mean midget.”

“He was a dwarf.”

“Mm?” asked Jackson, sipping his gin.

“Yes. That’s why they called him Vinnie the Dwarf.”

Jackson swallowed. “What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know, but he was a dwarf. He got really angry if you called him a midget.” Marisa invaginated a cigarette between her lips. Cross cleared his throat.

“Well,” said Jackson with a shrug, “you weren’t in great shape when I ran into you, that’s all I’m saying. And so I’m looking at her arm and her bruises, and the next thing I know—instinct or something, I don’t know—I heave her into the backseat, jump back in the car, and floor it. No idea where I’m going. I’m driving around for ten minutes, no plan, nothing. She’s not moving. I try shaking her, I’m like, Hey, hooker, you alive?” He shook his head solemnly. “Nothing.” Jackson tweezed the Marlboro from Marisa’s mouth, inhaled deeply. “Man, was I pissed: My girlfriend just left me, I got a dead hooker in the backseat, and my car’s for shit.”

When he returned her cigarette, Marisa smiled and stroked his knee.

“Listen up: I’m thinking she’s dead, it was a mistake to bring her on board. I’m looking for, like, a hospital or a church or something, right? Anyplace I can leave her. Then I see this playground and I’m like, Bingo. And I’m just pulling over when she starts to say things.”

Cross wanted them to leave. “What did she say?” he asked.

“‘Oh, shit, my arm.’ ‘Fuck, my arm really fucking hurts’—things like that.”

Marisa sucked on her cigarette.

“There was this bone jutting out of her elbow,” recalled Jackson, “and she said, ‘Fuck, do you see that bone?’”

“It’s true,” said Marisa. “That’s what I said.”

“It was a huge relief. Her talking, I mean. But still she was pretty messed up. Bleeding from the head and shit. And I ask her where the hospital is. But she says no, no, don’t take me to the hospital. So I ask her, Can’t you go to some street clinic or church or someplace? Saint Hooker or something? She just keeps bleeding all over the back and moaning about her arm.”

His fingers snapped a gunshot. “And then I remember—Niall! My buddy from high school—he’s a fucking male nurse at Mass Gen. I hadn’t spoken to him in a couple years, but I had his number in my cell phone. So I call him up and explain the situation, and he gives me directions and says he can take care of the hooker, no questions asked, it happens all the time. Five minutes later we pull up in back of the hospital and I yank her out of the car. But she can’t even walk, ’cause she’s in these fucking high heels.”

“I’m wearing them right now!” Marisa announced.

“Holy shit, you are. So she’s wobbling all over the place like a drunk whore—”

“I wasn’t still drunk by then.”

“I know, babe, it’s an expression. She’s wobbling all over the place, and thank God Niall runs out just then, and we get her inside, and she goes off with him, and I’m standing there at the loading dock thinking, There goes the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

He inclined his head towards Marisa, who accepted the cue.

“Guess who’s waiting for me four hours later when I come back downstairs?” she beamed.

“Ah,” smiled Cross. They looked at him expectantly. “Jackson,” he added.

“Yes!” Marisa was delighted. “There he was.”

“I couldn’t leave,” Jackson grinned. “Hell, I would’ve stayed another four hours.”

“The operation was successful?” Cross asked.

“Oh, totally,” Marisa replied.

“Well…” said Jackson. “It still aches a little when it rains.”

“True. And when I bang it into something.”

“But other than that, good as new.”

“And Niall couldn’t have been sweeter.”

“Yeah, he’s a good guy.”

“Well,” said Cross, “that’s quite a story. Very dramatic.”

“You bet your ass it is.”

“Very dramatic.”

“That’s why ‘Always’ is our song,” volunteered Marisa.

Cross turned to her. “Because the sound your body made when Jackson drove his car into you reminded him of the drums at the beginning.”

She nodded.

A silence dropped suddenly, like a stage curtain. Marisa arrowed smoke from her lips and looked directly at Cross; Jackson’s eyes were closed as he stroked the parenthesis of her ear.

Cross heard ice collapse within his tumbler, a tiny avalanche. When would they leave?

I want my MTV

Though I don't much care for music videos -- they serve no practical purpose, as my proto-Puritan mother once pointed out -- I've recently discovered a few notable specimens:

Robyn, "Be Mine" Lunging strings power this relentless surge of electropop so smoothly that you find yourself joining the chorus -- "You never were and you never will be mine" -- before its lyrics even register. In the video, Swedish ingenue Robyn makes desperate bids for approval, shearing off her hair, performing a frantic striptease, etc.; it's an unpretentious anti-vanity project that casts her, often simultaneously, as a figure of ridicule and sympathy. (Bonus: the "All-Stripper Version" -- Robyn's words, not mine -- which is somehow more poignant still.) You'll have to navigate the artist's website to find the feed (click on the gyrating X, then hit "Go Back," and finally locate the video link near the cuff of her sleeve), but it's worth the search. Demonically catchy song, too.

New Order, "Krafty" There are five or six moments of visual acrobatics in this video that flat-out baffle me: 360-degree rotations, vertiginous Steadicam swoons, sweeping low-angle pans -- how did the cinematographer pull them off? You won't find a single static shot throughout the four-minute runtime; our teenage lovers' every kiss, glance, and last-night-on-earth leap is chronicled in loving, fluid movement. The track itself? Sleek, propulsive, bittersweet ear candy -- surprisingly safe for New Order, perhaps, but head-bobbing nonetheless. (Even more bewildering than the camerawork, though, is the lyric one minute and forty-two seconds into the album edit: "They got violence, wars, and killing, too / All shrunk down in a two-foot Jew." Now, I realize this is not what Bernard Sumner's actually singing, but I prefer to remain ignorant. Who is this abbreviated child of Zion?)

Yes, the "Krafty" link directs you to VH1.com. I'm not cool enough for MTV.

DJ Prydz, "Call On Me" A bestselling single in the UK and Australia, this thumping hi-nrg dance number is almost obnoxiously repetitive -- over and over and over, it samples the refrain from Steve Winwood's "Valerie," to increasingly diminishing effect -- but its video attracted much acclaim (and, from conservative quarters, some criticism) for its in-your-face depiction of what I assume is a typical ladies-only aerobics session. Prydz (a Swede, naturally) and director Huse Monfaradi apparently tapped the 1985 John Travolta bomb Perfect for inspiration.

Be my baby

Last week's Grey's Anatomy introduced (me to) the term "Code Black," which, in this particular episode, signaled a bomb threat. I wondered if such shorthand actually existed, and cornered a medical resident at my earliest opportunity.

"God, I need to get fuggin' drunker," he drawled, slopping vodka into his maw. We were at a party.

"Yes, yes. So does Code Black really exist?"

"What the fug is this?" asked Ernie as he fingered my tie and jacket. It was a costume fête, you see: Our hostess wore a carrot ensemble, complete with lime-green wig-sprig; Ernie had donned chaps and a cowboy hat; and I was dressed as Tina Turner. On the inside. On the outside I looked more like a pigment-deficient WASP in narrow semiformal attire. Inside: WHAT'S LO-OVE GOT TO DO, GOT TO DO WITH IT?; outside: Saville Row and psychological issues. All clear?

"Code Black," I answered, prying my personal effects from his slippery mitts. "Did they make that up?"

"Nooo," Ernie told me. "Noooo. Code Black exists."

"It does not," chimed in another resident. There were about six or seven of them present. I'd only come to this party so I could score some lithium, in fact.

"Does." Ernie nodded. "But it means violence."

"Well, I've never heard of that. At Saint Florian's, Code Orange means violence."

"Oh," Ernie said.

"Oh," I said.

The resident continued: "And Code Yellow means hazardous materials, and Code Red means fire, and Code Silver means hostage situation, and Code Pink means missing infant."

I assumed she was joking. "Are you joking?"

"No." Now Ernie shook his head. "Code Pink means missing infant at Mennonite Memorial, too."

"Really? How often do they flash a Code Pink?"

"More often than you'd think," the other resident told me.

I was aghast. "So infants are just getting misplaced right and left?" I am not a great champion of babies' rights, but it seems fairly poor form to leave newborns scattered around under sofas and on cafeteria trays like so much loose change. I said so.

"Well, it's usually a case of abduction," the she-resident explained. "Like when there's a suspicious character sneaking around baby-snatching."

I find this scarcely more comprehensible: Since when have infant wards been open to the public? In my imagination, these are maximum-security cryochambers lit in moody ultraviolet, with steel cocoons for the inmates and dry-ice vapor slinking along the floor. Not unlike the embryo crypt in Jurassic Park, come to think of it.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to make perfectly clear my stance on infant abduction. I'm against it -- and I think you should be, too. When in doubt, just remember to SNAP (Stop Newborn Abduction, Please)!

Squashed

Too much squash today
Wrists sprained, lumbar region strained
Didn't even win.

Charging down the court
Tried to catch ball in the air
Caught ball in the ear.

Steamroom: two men laughed
And gay-bashed Brokeback Mountain.
Nude. In a sauna.

Shaven and showered
I curl up in bed and cry.
Squash, you break my soul.

This is the remix

My friend Andrew introduced me some months back to a very funny (and weirdly convincing) gag trailer that reimagined Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as a Cameron Crowe/James L. Brooks romantic dramedy. It tickled me pink. Flaming, flamingo pink. ...Holy Hedda Hopper -- did I just stumble upon the etymology of the word "flamingo"?

While I investigate, I've two new faux-previews to recommend: One spins Sleepless in Seattle à la Fatal Attraction; the other pitches Brokeback Mountain via Zemeckis and Spielberg.

The trailer for Se7en doesn't work quite as well, but it's amusing to watch the camera pursue Morgan Freeman through that field as Avril Lavigne whines on the soundtrack.

"Oh, lame," indeed

The Da Vinci Code is like an Easter-egg hunt for slow children. I am not making fun of slow children; I myself was a slow child. My Easter-egg hunts lasted through Memorial Day. And I enjoyed Dan Brown’s silly, engaging novel, even though its puzzles seem to me the sort of cryptograms the crossword editors at People magazine might concoct. (David Sedaris has already mocked these same; I’ll just note that, in this week’s issue, 27-down reads “1939 movie classic Gone with the _ _ _ _”, and 3-across asks for the “first 3 letters of alphabet.”)

Remarkable, though: Time and again, Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, whose credentials alone could power the Enigma machine, find themselves baffled and bewildered by any number of connect-the-dots ruses Brown has tucked into every other chapter. None of the other characters fare much better, either; it’s like an Umberto Eco mystery minus several chromosomes.

So here’s a quiz of my own devising. Read the scenarios described below, and decide whether they feature in The Da Vinci Code or an alternative title from classic mystery literature.


(1) Our hero, a renowned symbologist and global leader in iconology, discovers a message recorded in characters so inscrutable they appear to be of ancient Semitic extraction. We soon learn that the words are in fact plain ol’ English, and have been written in mirror image, instantly decodeable with the use of any reflective surface.

a. The Da Vinci Code
b. Nancy Drew and the Case of the ‘Secret’ Message That Was Obvious to Everyone Except Ulla, the German Exchange Student Who Had Been Kicked in the Head by a Mule at Some Point in Her Childhood and Whom Nancy’s Mother Was Always Inviting Over for Playdates that Nancy Came to Resent Deeply


(2) As he dies in anguished solitude, an elderly museum curator, principal guardian of an historical secret that could blast the foundations of the Western world, leaves a baffling anagram message for his cryptographer granddaughter, directing her to the Mona Lisa: “Oh, lame saint!” he writes, eschewing the equally valid “Am alone -- shit."

a. The Da Vinci Code
b. The Hardy Boys and the Adventure of Passing Notes to Each Other in Homeroom


(3) In order to unlock a time capsule, the intrepid adventurers must enter a five-letter code that has something to do with seeded fruit and Isaac Newton. (Hint: The answer is not “guava.”)

a. The Da Vinci Code
b. Encyclopedia Brown Suffers Debilitating Brain Damage


How did you do? I missed two.