flights

Some kind of silly excuse for a Golden Globe Awards ceremony took place last night, with no speeches, performances or jokes – just winners announced by unknown non-celebrities who had the look of Star Search contestants in the “spokesmodel” category.

The impact of the writers’ strike on the event and activities surrounding it reportedly cost the Los Angeles economy anywhere from 75 to 100 million dollars. If the Oscars suffer the same fate – which looks likely – the blow will be much bigger.

The producers who are the target of the strike represent only a slice of that pie, but even if you consider the whole thing, $100 million is small potatoes compared to the amount the producers would give up by submitting to the writers’ demands, so a couple of missed awards shows probably won’t cause them to blink an eye.

The other problem for the writers is that the strike hasn’t had the expected crippling effect on the quality or quantity of television available to viewers like me. Sure I miss a couple of shows, but I was watching too many anyway. Now, with the writers’ strike going on, I can still watch my favorite reality shows (lately, Kitchen Nightmares, The Dog Whisperer, Survivorman, No Reservations and Top Chef), and I can watch other shows in reruns that I didn’t make room for before. With my favorite scripted shows on hold for a while, I’m enjoying my chance to give my second choices – shows like Friday Night Lights, The Office and Lost – their due.

The only show I was really painfully missing was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but that’s back on now. Woohoo!

The bottom line is, I’m not sure how much pain the strike is delivering to the wallets of the producers, which is why no one expects it to end anytime soon. There’s simply too much good TV left on the air for the strike to make much of a financial impact.

Even if this was not true, or even if the writers hold out long enough to dent the supply of good television, they still might not hit the producers where it hurts, because, as a product, television follows a demand curve much like that of a controlled substance. With television, as with cocaine or cigarettes, a reduction in supply has little effect on demand. Watching television is the default leisure activity for Americans. We do it out of habit. We’ll keep doing it whether or not there’s anything worth watching.

The thing is, the writers are in the right. They deserve a piece of the web revenues, and the producers are greedy bastards for not allowing that. Maybe the force of public opinion will ultimately be enough to sway the producers. Maybe the strike will hurt their moral sensibilities, and that will be enough.

Or maybe there are enough good people in Hollywood to eventually force a bottom-up victory. Maybe the string of isolated side deals already happening between shows and their respective writers will reach a critical mass and lead to an industry-wide agreement.

It has happened before.

Whoa.

I saw this trailer for J.J. Abrams’ new movie, Cloverfield, a while back, and it looks awesome. I love the idea of a big budget Hollywood movie shot as home video.

Am I the only one who wants to punch my TV whenever I see Chad on those Alltel commercials? He reminds me of the pretty rich boy from every teen movie – the one who dates the popular girl, drives a fancy car and treats everyone around him like shit. It doesn’t help that the other characters in the commercials are the kinds of lovable geeks we remember fondly from those same movies.

Wouldn’t the Alltel commercials be much better if the archetypes were reversed – one scrappy geek vs. the big popular kids – and we could root for the underdog? Wouldn’t that make much more sense, since Alltel is an underdog company in its industry?

Even Alltel seems to sort of think so, based on the fact that the geeks (who represent other mobile phone companies) are the main focus of each commercial – because they’re funny – while Chad gets barely a frame and has almost no lines.

Along with the usual flow of annual family newsletters and photographic Christmas cards, featuring matching cable-knit sweaters and first visits to Santa, this year I received a handful of emails with links to online photo albums. Lots and lots of pictures of babies and toddlers – many clearly taken within seconds of each other. Dozens from a single evening.

It occurred to me that this generation of kids will certainly be the most recorded one in human history.

A couple of hundred years ago, only the wealthiest people in only the most advanced civilizations could acquire portraits of their kids. Even so, such a family during that time might have one or two at most. The advent of photography democratized the portrait, but until just a generation ago, pictures were still special. For one thing, you had to pay for film. You had to go to a store, choose a film stock based on camera type, optimal ISO speed and number of frames per roll, and shell out real money before you captured your first shot. You had to load your camera – carefully – and because you’d paid for the film, you had to consider and reconsider each picture before, during and after you shot it. When you reached the end of the roll, you had to go back to a store and hand it over for processing, which often took a few days – unless you were willing to pay a premium for a 1-hour turnaround.

Fetching your pictures from the store was always kind of magical, because you had no way of knowing whether you’d aimed right or focused right, or whether your mom had blinked at the wrong moment or your friend’s face was hidden by an unforeseen shadow. Also, the photographed events themselves had already started their slide into memory and forgetting, so to see the pictures was to get to relive a little.

In the era of digital cameras, pictures have joined the growing list of things that have stopped being special. It’s a bit sad, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. I would never suggest we return to the medium of film, with its chemicals and waste, but I like the idea of reintroducing some restraint into the act of picture taking.

The other day, I learned about something called the 36 Exposures Challenge that aims to do just that:

…this ease of use and surfeit of images comes with a price. In the analog era, when we had to pay to see what we shot, we were more careful when we took photographs. This forced a discipline that is hard to imagine today. In the words of Stephen Shore, “[Today] there seems to be a greater freedom and lack of restraint…as one considers one’s pictures less, one produces fewer truly considered pictures.”

Well, it’s not the Jetta. It’s two women in a Passat blindsided by an SUV as they discuss Volkswagen’s controversial Jetta commercials that depict… well… the same thing:

A commercial referencing a commercial to make real more real. Too meta for me.

YouTube got a lot of flack for making a recent deal with NBC, so perhaps it was not NBC’s prerogative to lampoon it. Still, you gotta respect the network’s moxie for going head on at the controversy with this video:

As long as the root cause isn’t killing anyone, this is exactly what a company should to address a sticky PR situation. Respond directly, with humility and a sense of humor. Props NBC. I see a must-see TV comeback in your near future.

Did that get your attention?

That’s the name of the movie I saw last night, as part of the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. It’s a documentary about the word, not a portrayal of the act, so don’t be offended.

Or be offended. That’s the power of fuck I suppose.

After indulging in Monday’s all-you-can-eat pizza night at Goat Hill with my nerd friends, I took my favorite girl to the perfect Valentine’s Day date movie.

It explored the modern history of this most versatile word through anecdotes and interviews with a variety of notables, including Ice T, Pat Boone, Sam Donaldson, Judith Martin, Bill Maher, Hunter S. Thompson, Sandra Tsing Lo, and dozens of other actors, directors, commedians, linguists, news commentators, politicians, scholars and people on the street.

It gathered some of the most famous fucks ever uttered in film and television. And in real life, from the likes of Lenny Bruce, Richard Nixon, Bono, Dick Cheney and both George Bushes.

The word of course makes a most forceful denunciation (fuck you or fuck off) or insult (fucker, dumbfuck or fuckhead), but it also works perfectly to emphasize (abso-fucking-lutely), sometimes to seduce (fuck me) and often simply to interject (fuck!). It can be almost any – and every – word in a sentence. Sometimes it simply feels good to say it. Sometimes it’s the only word that seems to work at all.

We worry about our society’s children hearing it or, god forbid, saying it, and great pains are taken to protect them. But we all learned it eventually – mostly on the street and not from movies or television or music as commonly decried by the self-appointed advocates of common decency and family values.

Ultimately, however, we need the word, and we need it to continue to have the power that it does. So I hope Lenny Bruce is the last person ever jailed for saying it, and I hope the FCC is never successful in levying another fine against someone for exercising his first ammendment right to utter it.

But may it always offend the moral majority, in every context.

And may it always offend the rest of us whenever our children and grandmothers are around.

Because it would be tragic if fuck became just another word.

Yesterday I went to see The Exorcism of Emily Rose with L. In the movie, 3am has special significance as the devil’s hour. Apparently, it’s an inversion of 3pm, the “miracle hour”, when Jesus is said to have been crucified. All the scariest stuff in the movie happens at 3am. Characters wake up alone in their dark homes at that exact hour, night after night. They hear strange noises, see awful things, and by the end of the the movie, you pretty much hate 3am.

After the movie, I met up with my buddies “Hayes” and B**** for drinks and a night out among hook-up-hungry North Beach crowds. We started at Herbivore for dinner, where I had a delicious vegetarian schwarma and a couple pints of Sierra Nevada.

We moved on to a bar called Amante. I switched to whiskey – Jamison’s – which the bartender would not serve on the rocks. I guess I’m uncouth. But jeez, it’s not like we’re talking about a twelve-year-old cask aged single malt.

Hayes connected with a couple of his buddies at Amante and introduced them to Brett and me, describing them as “pros”. Their sport, such as it is, is collecting phone numbers from women. They’re goal is quantity more than anything else. One of them, “Joe”, demonstrated one of the standard opening gambits of his “game” to me, as follows:

I go up to a girl and I say, can I get your opinion on something? If your girlfriend makes out with another girl, is it cheating?

What was a little skeevey (and not immediately clear) to me about this demonstration was that he was role playing. I was the girl. After a pause, I said “um…that’s pretty good.” This was apparently close enough to something an erstwhile target might say, so he replied, “oh, so you don’t think it’s cheating, eh? You’re kind of a bad girl, aren’t you?” He was pretending to come on to me, and it was skeevey. I wasn’t skeeved out in a homophobic way. I was just amazed that there was a girl in the world who would be hooked by this.

But I guess it doesn’t matter how cheesy a car salesman is, if you’re there at the dealership and determined to buy a car.

Joe demonstrated a couple more of these gambits. Unfortunately they’ve slipped away from me, but the main objective of these openings is several-pronged (pardon the pun). The first is to initiate a conversation. For this, a question obviously works much better than a statement, and a request for an opinion (no matter how inane the topic, apparently) suggests one party’s genuine interest in getting to know the other. The second objective is to get a quick read on one’s chances of “scoring” with (i.e. getting laid by) the targeted party. That explains the nature of the question; the answer to which, presumably, will provide some indication of the targeted party’s general willingness to play (and more specifically, level of inebriation, promiscuity, etc.). The third objective, assuming the targeted party is part of a group, is to spark a lively debate among the group and thereby generate opportunities to toss out witty bon mots, etc. etc.

It’s not entirely unclever, really, and it’s certainly effective. I watched the guy and his friend “Sammy” work their way through several unsuspecting targets. I watched them go from first contact to giggly arm-around-the-waist chumminess several times in the course of the night, in a matter of minutes each time.

From Amante, we went to a place called Kells. Presumably (from the name) an Irish bar, but unrecognizable as such. It was a pretty standard loud, crowded pick-up bar. American Pie was blaring when we walked in, followed by Let’s Go Crazy and Sweet Child of Mine.

The highlight of my night, looking back on it, was either the very kind “you’re hella cute” compliment some girl felt compelled to shout into my face as she squeezed past me through the crowd, or the thoughtful embrace I received from a profusely sweaty Japanese girl who descended from her perch on the bar to dance with the group of us for a few minutes.

Anyway, that was basically enough for me to call it a night. It was 1:30, and I phoned L. She was still awake and a little freaked out at the thought of 3am (and so was I, to be honest). So I made my way over to her place to keep her company through the devil’s hour.

It passed without incident, and I woke up to one of the sunniest mornings we’ve seen here in months.

I just watched the end of Something’s Gotta Give, and I was pleasantly surprised to see a good performance out of the reliably wooden, Keanu Reeves.

Alright, I only caught the last 15 minutes or so, but in his bits, Keanu had to manage subtlety. He arrives at a Parisian bistro to meet the older woman (Diane Keaton) he loves, to find that her old flame (Jack Nicholson) is seated across from her. Keanu sits down beside Diane Keaton, and over the course of the meal, he gradually realises she is still in love with Nicholson.

And he has to communicate this to the audience… with his face.

And he does this perfectly, and (I’ll say it again) with subtlety.

In our glib little discourses on pop culture, we come to rely on opportunities to make fun of things like the acting prowess of Keanu Reeves, and I imagine that some people are disappointed to see him defy their expectations.

I imagine plenty of these people could watch Something’s Gotta Give and deny that he actually did defy them.

But I say, go Keanu.

Last week was the first week of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, and there are a lot of good things to see.

I saw three shows over the weekend, including one called Pandora 88 by a German duo calling themselves Fabrik Companie. The piece was a beautiful blurring of the line between theatre and dance, staged inside a box roughly 1 1/2 times the size of a refrigerator.

It began with the children’s games of tag, hide-and-seek and charades. Then it shifted into an outer-space motif that looked and felt exactly like old school video effects I remember from TV shows I loved as a child – Zoom, Sesame Street…

Toward the end, the piece became heavier and more dramatic. Like growing up.

In its final moments, one of the characters discovered a way out, and with the help of his friend he escaped the confines of the box, through a small hole in the ceiling. He looked around nervously for a moment and then reached down to help his friend.

His friend declined, and the stage went dark.