Category: Personal

Congress is now calling for public comments on the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA). You can post yours here. Also, follow the links over on the right and see why, if you don’t already know. The following is what I wrote:

Have we reached a time when there is no difference between the surreal and the real? Does Congress exist to serve the People, as our lovely yet increasingly honored in name only Constitution says, or to serve the Corporate Interests?

This bill is pitiful and I say this as a creator of original works. My own website has material for which I claim copyright, including poetry, fiction, and commentary. But I fail to see how Senator Hollings’ legislation protects any of my rights. The way it protects the interests of Disney, Fox, and Vivendi are quite clear though, and I would point out that two of those three entities are not even American corporations.

Please remember that phrases like limited term and fair use are important and meaningful to many Americans, more important than enslaving our technology to the interests of business giants.

Thanks.

Enterprise – Great show, re-inventing the Star Trek universe while respecting tradition and what’s gone before. Knowing they have seven years to fill, 175 episodes, Braga and the writing crew have spent time developing the characters and the backstory, while remembering they need to entertain every week. Bakula turned out to be a good choice for captain and most of the regulars are growing into their roles.

Alias – Sure Jennifer Garner has a pretty face but a I don’t see her as the hottie everyone is screaming about. The show, though, really moves and the capers are dense, nary a wasted moment. The continuing thread of retrieving the writing and inventions of 15th century genius Marco Rambaldi is a strokeof originality that helps tie the weekly stories into a bigger whole. Plus the ongoing plot to unravel SD-6 and the Alliance, of course. Tingling!

The Agency – More spies, real ones this time, as we see how hands on the people who run the CIA really are. Okay, that’s got to be totally unrealistic, for the head of the agency and his direct reports to be directly involved in most operations. Daniel Benzali and Gil Bellows really drive this show but I like most of the cast and fortunately for the writers (but unfortunately for us) they have plenty of topical material and the have the brains to use it well.

Jeremiah – Showtime’s new science fiction series, Luke Perry and Malcolm Jamal Warner try and sort out life in a post-apocalyptic America with all six billion of the people over the age of 13 killed 15 years ago. J. Michael Straczynski has really done a good job thinking through the underlying story; this week’s episode was a good example in the way the Burners introduction was handled, since I expect them to play a much larger role down the line.

Greg the Bunny – Seth Green, Eugene Levy, and a bunch of fabricated Americans put on a whacky PBS children’s show. The Fox website, at least, sucks although the show doesn’t.

Andy Richter Saves the Universe – An officeworker and his office buddies stumble through life with the ability to stop time and fantasize about love and violence plus our semi-hero conjures up imaginary people to criticize him. Good thing Andy Richter is funny and Irene Molloy is a dream.

The Shield – Sopranos meet NYPD Blue in Los Angeles. Stretching the boundaries of what is acceptable on a basic cable network in terms of language, nudity, and violence. Michael Chiklis was mediocre as The Commish and totally out of place as Daddio but so far he’s totally coldhearted, scheming, and effective as Vic Mackey. His antagonist, the station’s captain (Benito Martinez), is a little weak so far but hopefully the writers will figure out how to strengthen him without losing focus on his ambition.

The Job – A disappointingly short yet artistically successful second season wherein Dennis Leary unleashes an alcoholic, pill popping, adulterous detective on Manhattan with a strong ensemble of actors backing him up.

Six Feet Under – After a slow start last year, this show picked up steam about halfway through and is now really tops, focusing on a family that owns a mortuary and their close friends. Doesn’t shy away from anything or any topic. Death, drugs, self-help quacks, prostitutes, gay sex, straight sex, underage sex, crime, and more death are all on the storyboard.

Having cried my eyes out over not being able to see Robin Williams in person, we decided to check out Death to Smoochy as a substitute. And what a grand substitute it is! Williams is blast-off superb here and Edward Norton shows why people are calling him a young DeNiro. As opposed to the piece of crap movie Norton was in last year with DeNiro, The Score. This film is as much about children’s television as it is about world politics, what we have is a smash up of a man crashing from the peak and another coming up from the pits, sort of a buddy-buddy, heterosexual version of A Star is Born. Lots of big charicature characters, a weasly Danny Devito, Catherine Keener freeswinging from slutty kiddie show host groupie to romantic, loving partner, Harvey Fierstein showing he’s taking advantage of all the cigarettes he’s smoked before they put him out of the game. Lots of laughs, lots of dark humor, and don’t forget the midgetslittle people.

Irvine Welsh is a highly-rated Scottish author who gave us the Trainspotting novel, from whence came the great yet disgusting Ewan MacGregor film, then wrote Filth. This is an absolutely Post Modern novel, completely with anti-hero and literary invention. Welsh attempts to climb a high mountain but in the end I think he never quite makes the summit even though the book is worth a read if you’re of such a mind. Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is our boy, nasty, scheming, hateful, a cop in Edinburgh whose last month on Earth we live together as he investigates a strange murder, takes a sex and drugs vacation in Amsterdam, and plots to destroy his rivals for promotion.

As is popular in the British Isles these days, the dialog is written as it sounds rather than in the Queen’s English–doesna for does not, shite for shit, hoor for whore–which can make comprehension a little difficult for these American eyes. Further, the only two characters we hear from directly other than Robertson (or dialog for which he is present) are a tapeworm living in his gut, somehow not only self-aware but with access to Robertson’s deeply buried childhood memories, and a few interludes purporting to be from his wife Carol, though I have my doubts on who is really doing the speaking. Carol’s expositions are printed in bold for some unknown reason, as their own chapters more or less, and the tapeworm’s dialog is embedded in the flow of the novel, sort of overprinted on the text. Hard to describe, it’s very visual.

Mean and dangerous to any and all as Robertson is, in the end he turns out to only hate himself. This is mainly revealed by the tapeworm and a key reason for my previous statement that Welsh does not quite reach the summit in this effort. The story, the character, keeps one’s attention to the end, but the tapeworm just goes the easy and obvious route to explain the pain that drives our anti-hero. Plus, for a long time, the reader has no clue who or what is interrupting the story in this strange way, it just appears with a repetition of 0’s and the word eat interspersed in them. An ambitious effort, not to be dismissed lightly.

You can probably see the content on this site much better now. For IE or Opera users there should not really be any visible difference. I’m really not too clear on the changes I made in the CSS (a new-fangled presentation markup language for us web geeks) that had this effect though. One really big weirdness was that Navigator on pages other than the homepage was not correctly using the width attribute set on the style used for the left side site navigation menu, even though the same style is used on the homepage and all the others. The difference between the pages is that on the home page there is also a right side set of links in their own DIV (a CSS thing). So I added an invisible DIV on the other pages and now Navigator obeys the width attribute. Yes, you can have INVISIBLE content on web pages. Anyway, this is strange and someone like Eric Meyers could probably explain it, and also point out that the pages on this site do not validate, but as long as it looks good for now at least I am cool.

The Robin Williams Tour is not going to stop in San Francisco! And he freaking lives here! What’s up with that? I read a great review in the NY Times and thought, oh boy, this is one show I’d bust a gut to see. Only to find out no shows anywhere near here. What a bummer! Still, I’m looking forward to his new film, Death to Smoochy, and he will be playing the bad guy, a wacked out serial killer, in a movie with Al Pacino that will be out in the next few months called Insomnia.

A friend was good enough to share his pass to the exhibit floor at the biggest annual Java conference up at Moscone Center and so I drove up for a couple of hours of booth trolling. The most interesting product I saw was M7 Web Foundry from M7 Corporation, a Palo Alto startup, that aims to simplify the life of web app (J2EE) developers. The company was founded by some of the top managers and architects from Visual Cafe but unfortunately they aren’t doing any hiring now. CNet’s Tech News has a roundup of show highlights but somehow the articles listed are all about the big companies–Sun, SAP, IBM, Microsoft (who isn’t even there, of course)–and nothing about the useful new products from the small companies like M7. Wonder why that is, don’t you? <wink><wink>

I also had the pleasure of running into a few of the old team from iPlanet and Greg Doench from PTR Prentice Hall.

In Abe Lincoln and the internet pirates, Disney chairman Michael Eisner attempts to co-opt Abraham Lincoln and Czeck Republic president/poet/rights activist Vaclav Havel to justify the extreme measures embedded in the recently introduced Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act. He stoops to the level of informing us that his father, like his father’s father and so forth, taught him not to steal. And hey: “For me, theft of property, via the internet or any other way, is not only alarming because of the material loss but also disconcerting because it implies the loss of the moral compass on which our society is based.” Well that makes all the difference in the world, doesn’t it?

I think the CBDTP comes down to the fact that the entertainment industry executives want the laws not only to overwhelmingly favor their interests over those of us consumers but also to require enforcement. No longer will we be able to buy PCs or other recording devices to use as we will but only devices that force us to behave as Hollywood desires. This is a slippery slope, my friends, have no doubt; when will they move to ‘enhance’ the law to allow only professionally prepared content and thereby end the ability of me and other little people to even publish something as simple as this website? And not because they care about what I say here but because they won’t make money off of it and could even think they are losing money since time spent reading here is time not spent consuming their for-fee content.

In his sermon, Eisner quotes a Lincoln speech as praising IP protection but that quote specifically states the protection should be for a limited time. In the CBDPTA legislation, though, the media companies are essentially seeking no time limit to the protections. Recent legislation already gives copyrights a term of the author’s lifetime plus 70 years but even this is not enough. Eisner is desperate since copyright protection for Mickey Mouse apparently will expire in the next few years, soon followed by several other major Disney characters. Zimran has an excellent analysis of the value of extending protection timeframes.

In a sharp bit of reality that contrasts with the gloomy picture Eisner paints, the Mercury news this morning ran a big feature piece on teens and their spending. Of course with their messed-up site redesign I can’t find the article and even if I could the link would evaporate in seven days. Anyway! The article mentions that teens are spending over $100 per week, with entertainment (CDs, movies, concerts) being one of the two largest areas of spending. Where they get $100 per week, I’d like to know, cause I had maybe $10 or 15 back in the day. Anyway, clearly having access to music and movies over the Napster/Gnutella/whatever file sharing networks isn’t preventing them from dropping the dollars on Eisner’s products. As Dave W asks, when is enough enough?

Don’t forget to write your Senators about this abomination of legislation. In the case of our sadly misled Dianne Feinstein, who has co-sponsored this bill, write and mention that you won’t be voting for her again if she doesn’t take her name off it.

Analyze This was sort of funny. Meet the Parents, how that was successful, much less worthy of a sequel, is beyond me. (Okay, I know the only care about the grosses and that’s why there’ll be a sequel.) But in Showtime they’ve finally found a way to really bring out Robert DeNiro’s comic touch. And the answer is…DeNiro doesn’t act funny. He doesn’t try to make the audience laugh. He plays it completely straight. And walks into lots and lots of Eddie Murphy straight lines. Plus, no offense to Ben Stiller, who is funny once in awhile, or Billy Crystal, who has been funny far more regularly, but the producers also found an excellent foil in Murphy. I was sitting in the theater laughing out loud throughout this movie.

Lately, Murphy really seems to have found his way (Shrek, Doctor Dolittle) after some initial brilliance (48 Hrs., Trading Places) and then a period wandering in the desert (Distinguished Gentleman, Harlem Nights, Vampire in Brooklyn). Rene Russo is the dead-on stereotype of a modern news producer. William Shatner continues to use his reputation as a punching bag; the bit where he shows Murphy and DeNiro how to use an eyebrow as the coup de grace in interviewing a perp is just perfect. Lawyer Johnnie Cochran does the same for his own self. DeNiro’s adopted daughter, Drena De Niro, does a sweet job as eyecandy assistant to Russo’s producer; one line even has her father asking her if she’s into a “Daddy thing.” Looking at her IMDB listing, this isn’t her first movie but most of her opportunities come in Dad’s films. Pedro Damián plays the main baddie and he understands the comic book timing perfectly.

Director Tom Dey follows up his Jackie Chan hit Shanghai Noon here and clearly Dey is a director to watch: two times at bat, two very funny movies. I assumed he was directing the currently in production Chan sequel, Shanghai Knights, but according to IMDB he’s not; David Dobkin who gave us the utterly pedestrian Clay Pigeons is helming that one. Oh well. Kudos too to writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who also collaborated with Dey on Shanghai Noon. Key to their success is realizing that this is a perfect opportunity to make a cartoon, to bash all the conventions of cop movies. Think of Schwarzenneger’s Last Action Hero without the actual descent into fantasy. The main case our (of course) reluctant partners pursue is a brand new, amazingly deadly automatic chain gun. The gun is so big and so bad it can blow up police cars or level a small house with just a few rounds. Highly recommended!

Some will criticize the dresses, the makeup, or the jewelry. To me, there was only one really sad site last night at the Oscar’s and that was Jennifer Lopez’s hairdo. Where did she get on the talent train? I mean, her music is formulaic and lowest common denominator and her acting is just sad. Who thinks she has more than a pretty smile going for her and, of course, the world’s bootiest ass? And frankly, her ass doesn’t do much for me.

Props to my high school friend Harlan Coben for hitting the NY Times Paperback Fiction Bestseller List for his new in paper (I of course bought it when the hardcover came out last year) mystery novel Tell No One. This novel is a serious one, excellent and a big change of pace from Harlan’s first seven novels, which were all comic mysteries focused on college basketball superstar/lawyer/FBI agent/sports agent/detective Myron Bolitar. Who was also a fantasized alter ego for Coben but still good. His new novel, straighahead in the vein of Tell No One, is called Gone For Good and goes on sale late next month, look for it as I’m sure it will be worth the money.

Bruce,

I’ve been a fan since 1975, since I spent the summer with nothing but Born to Run on my bedroom turntable. Thanks for all the incredible music over the years. I’ve also been glad that you’ve mostly stayed out of commenting on politics and letting your actions speak for themselves. Not being one to write adoring fan letters but to let my actions (purchasing recordings, concert tickets, sheet music, and so forth) similar speak. I believe, and I hope you agree, that with the introduction this week in the US Senate of the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act by Fritz Hollings a new issue has become significant enough to you and your fans that you will choose to use what influence is available to you to defeat this horrible legislation. I assume that I need not waste your time explaining why I call this horrible legislation and why I have chosen to finally write.

Personally, I will do what I can, writing to my senators and representatives, urging family and friends to do the same, and posting such sentiments to my own website. I’ve never seen you really just come out and, say, issue press releases condemning this or that but I am sure there are appropriate tools and channels for you to use if that is your desire. Your record company, for instance, has to be torn between its IP-generating music and film divisions and its consumer electronics/PC groups over how to proceed and your voice might help executives make the right choice. Similarly, I’m sure the elected officials from New Jersey would take your calls.

I hope your fans will triumph in the end on this issue. I hope you will see fit to add your efforts.

Thanks,

Bill Lazar

Award	Bill’s Picks	Vivian’s Picks
Best Picture	Lord of the Rings	Lord of the Rings
Actor	Tom Wilkinson	Russell Crowe
Actress	Halle Berry	Halle Berry
Supporting Actor	Ian McKellen	Ian McKellen
Supporting Actress	Jennifer Connelly	Jennifer Connelly
Director	Peter Jackson	Ron Howard

This week saw the birthdays of two of our favorite chatters, Michelle (who really does have a pretty smile) and Allen (only he knows why he’s Griff), and there was a party last night. Didn’t get a picture of Allen but here’s one with Michelle. Beforehand, a few of us ate dinner at H’s Lordship at the Berkeley Marina and we took a few photos there too and here’s one of me and Vivian.

A gallery with these two and several other photos is online in Celebrating Michelle’s Birthday

Wesley’s back and bad as ever in Blade II (2002). Kristofferson’s back too as sidekick/mentor Whistler. This sequel is nastier, bloodier, and more violent than the original. Some of the imagery is so disturbing that I wouldn’t go to see this if you’re easily upset. On the other hand, the special effects folks have come up with some cool visuals for when the vampires die, burning them to cinders. The fight scenes are somewhat repetitive and heavily influenced by The Matrix. Luke Goss is nicely nasty as the head Reaper, Leonor Varela looks good in leather and Ron Perlman, who also played a beast in TV’s Beauty and the Beast, makes a surprising but good appearance as one of the vampires (he’ll also show up at the end of the year in Star Trek: Nemesis). Not recommended unless you’re a big Snipes fan or totally into these gorefests.

Phil points to the recently released list (by some NPR show) of the 100 best characters in fiction since 1900 and claims to have read 26%. My count comes up at 23 and I note that the score is only that high because some books (To Kill a Mockingbird, for example) have multiple characters on the list. Phil suggests the Random House list of the 100 Best Novels is more relevant since people generally read for the totality of a book and not just characters. I did much worse on the Random House Board’s list: 13 read, a couple not sure, and a few I started and couldn’t finish. Did much better on the RH Reader’s list with a score of 27. Of course, the reader’s list was apparently targeted by Ayn Rand followers and Scientologists with the top three and seven of the top 10 titlese having been authored by Rand and LR Hubbard. And I have read the three books not by these two in the top 10 (plus two of the Rand titles, when I was young).

I would point out that:

All three of these lists are generally confined to titles written in English plus a few that were popular with the literati when translated into English.

Much of my reading has been of science fiction and there was no SF on two of the lists.

I would like to see sworn affadavits that people who voted for the James Joyce and similar LitPop titles actually read them from cover to cover.

Zaphod and the gang are gone, apparently for good: UserLand Frontier Server Error is what you get when visiting the site. These nasty, somewhat anonymous folks had been punching holes in the self-loving one for quite some time. Got old and repetitive for them, I was told, and so the site that sent me so much traffic is gone.

Bachman Turner Overfed

Did Randy Bachman eat the Overdrive?

Others have raged on about the pedophile priests, but to me these guys are much like any other group of people, weak and sometimes willing to act on temptations they see. Not that I think the priests should avoid punishment for their crimes, far from it, but what I find far more disturbing is the behavior of the so-called princes of the Church, Cardinals like Egan and Law, who directly covered up the disgusting actions of some priests in their dioces, and even more the Pope.

John Paul II issued a 22 page statement today, one whole paragraph of which comments on the Pedophilia Scandals. Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, head of the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy, who presented the report and held a press conference said that “the church had not neglected priestly pedophilia.” Hoyos said sexual abuse was the product of modern culture, where sexual liberties had influenced priests too. Um, yeah, sure. Which covers the actions of the priests who committed these nasty, terrible acts. Notice, though, the report makes no mention of any wrongdoing by higherups in the Church. That’s why after decades of covering scandals by shuffling priests from parish to parish so they can molest more children, when there is no more chance of covering up the truth, throws a few bones to the public, a few dollars, and then no one else need answer for the scandal. Of course, I’m of Jewish heritage, what do I know, but I thought the Pope in this modern age would look to heal rather than throw dirt over such an issue.

[The following was as vivid to me as if I’d actually done it] I was climbing up cold, snow-covered mountain with three close friends, two men and a woman, none of whom I recognized. And I’ve never been mountain climbing, especially in winter weather, but thanks to the movies I knew what I was doing, and we must have been about two thousand feet up, maybe half way to the peak. Out of nowhere, wee saw another group of climbers a few hundred feet away. None of us knew there was another climbing party that day, seemed to be three young guys through binoculars, so we waved to them.

Instead of waving back, the other group took out rifles and started shooting at us! My friends and I immediately started moving down, kind of sliding (it was a dream, okay?) and none of us were hit. The shooters started moving down too, same as us, occasionally sending lead our way, and angling closer towards us. We, of course, did not have guns or anything similar, and focused on getting down the mountain as fast as we could. All of a sudden, maybe 100 feet off the ground, the two of the three shooters hit an outcropping of some sort and lost their grip; they got pushed out into the air, essentially, and plunged to the ground. The third guy was able to stay on the mountainside but then, just before reaching the bottom, he slipped and broke his neck as he hit the ground. Somehow, all four of us made it down safely.

We ran over to where our attackers had fallen and found them all dead. Without touching a thing, one of the guys ran for a phone to call the cops. When they showed up, we had another surprise. Keep in mind this is a small town in the middle of nowhere. The sheriff was the father of one of the three attackers, all three of the attackers were teenagers, and he was mighty pissed at us. I tried to explain to him what happeneed but he was so caught up in his grief he wouldn’t listen. The sheriff kept taking his gun out of the holster and putting it back, sometimes just opening the restraining strap and closing it. Finally one of his deputies came over and took the gun away from him quietly, friendly, with one arm around the sheriff’s shoulders, their two heads touching, whispering, and the sheriff didn’t object.