Issue 151

News: Licensed Parenthood.
Honestly, the more I hear about child abuse in the media, the more I think that it should be mandatory for anybody who wants to raise a child to have a license to do so. Here is a plan that I have for this: SImply, any couple, or single parent who wants to adopt or raise a child would have to take a test to see how fit they are to raise a child, and if they fail to pass muster, they wouldn't be allowed to raise children. If they do, in fact, have a child, despite having failed the parenthood test the last time they took it, what would happen to the child is simply this: it would be given to a couple who has passed the test. There would likely need to be no penalties for the parents (maybe a "slap on the wrist" fine), but I think that having a child taken away because of their negligence would likely be enough. Indeed, the way I see it, everybody would win. Potentially abusive parents would not have children, so the children benefit, and, in addition, as a result of this, domestic adoption businesses would have much more business and likely be much more solvent than they have in decades.

Band Name of the Day: The The Orchestra. See Below.

Film Idea of the Day: Untitled. The plot: two stoners discover that their dealer has discovered a new strain of Marijuana that is so rare that they have to get it from a time vortex from the 1930s (anybody who's seen Reefer Madness and compared the effects of marijuana there with a later film should notice the joke.) Once there, they end up having adventures in Hollywood trying to find it, while being followed by another set of time travellers; the world's largest rock band, a 30-some piece band called "THe The Orchestra."

Film review of the Day: Walker. In keeping with my increasing interest in the latter-day western, I recently rented this movie. It was supposedly so poorly recieved that not only has it not received much of a home video release since its original release 20 years ago, but it actually got the director "Blacklisted" from Hollywood productions. Of course, in hindsight, even though I was not as immersed on the Nicaraguan Civil War that this movie was indirectly commenting upon as the original audience would have been, I actually found this movie to be very interesting. I suppose my background in Brechtian technique actually helped me, especially with its increasingly obvious anachronisms. I would reccomend that anybody who watches this movie not only get some information on America's involvement with the Contras (for background on the allegory), and read Brecht's Mother Courage (for the technique).

Quote of the Day: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
________Lewis Carroll

Issue 150

News: Wacko JAcko at Rest.
Long before the world had gotten innundated with footage of Michael Jackson's passing, I had really only known him as a freakish, rich pedophile who used to be a singer. I had not really been into the music, apparently I was too young to get into his music when he was a musical God, and women fainted at the sight of him instead of fainting at the sight of him, but before I keep on plagiarizing the Nostalgia Critic, I just didn't really become a big fan of Michael Jackson. But now that the television is flooded with coverage of his death, and as I am writing, the funeral, I eventually decided to buy a copy of Thriller, as millions of others have done, and if it makes you feel any better, Mum, it has Paul McCartney guesting on one track (not that I'm above getting things that are guaranteed to shock you). Of course, I suppose that, for me, it was always easy for me to separate the artist from his art, especially when it came to unsavory aspects of a writer's life when I deeply savor his works. I mean, J.D. Salinger, the author of my favorite book, is said to have joined every religious tradition known to man, and inflicted the worst of them all on his children. In addition, all the Beat authors had something deeply disturbing about their lives, like that Burroughs and Ginsberg might have been pedophiles, and Kerouac was a conservative Catholic, while the most famous of their works were little short of brilliant, helping transform my writing styles; Furthermore, the activities around the destruction of the parts of Dead Souls (look in the Book of lost Books or Wikipedia for more details) we don't have disturbed me, but at least what we do have of it is still great, despite its necessarily fragmentary nature, and the less that is said about Louis-Ferdinand Celine's activities around the time that the French invaded, the better, but it is very likely that, if not for that, he would have won the Nobel Literature Prize.

Band Name of the Day: Squirrels on Crack. A park near where I live had a secret trove of crack cocaine and apparently some squirrels got into it.

Film Review of the Day: Two Films will be reviewed today, one I liked, one I hated.
Stalker. I recently became a fan of Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky. In fact, I have seem most of his features (The Mirror and Nostalghia being the only ones I haven't seen.) This movie, however, is likely the best of the seven films he made, although, to most critics, I'm sure most of his films would likely make many critics' list of the best films of all time. Indeed, while it is hardly his most accessible film (Ivan's Childhood would certainly take that honor), it is certainly very well done. I cannot find a single flaw with the film, and I like it so much that I intend to make the film (and the script of a remake thereof) a major plot point in my "Once and Future Princess" novella. Certainly, many people would be put off by a slowly moving film in Russian that plays like Beckett doing Wizard of Oz, but, I can honestly say it works for me. The only real flaw that I can find is with the disc and not the film itself; The english soundtrack, it should be warned, is not really a dub as most would expect, but is in fact, a voiceover, performed Manos-style, with just one guy doing all the voices (except for a woman who does the voice of the only two female speaking parts, with no more than 5 minutes' screen time between them), and for that matter, more often than not, the readings are flat and emotionless, but fortunately, the original russian soundtrack is still audible.

Edmond. I got a book called Cinemascopes, two years ago. It's about personality types that can be gleamed from favorite movies. Looking into a lot of my favorite films (or at least the ones I could find on the list; Stalker is not on the list), I found that my personality types tended to go with two of these types: Existential Savior and Passionate Maverick (before I continue, I must say: Nietzsche was a maverick, McCain and Palin are just two people who can fake being an angstrom to the left of the Republican Party Line). In fact, my favorite movie, A Clockwork Orange actually had both of these types. Eventually, I compiled a list of the films that also had both types. Many of the films that had both types I've liked, from established classics like Dr. Strangelove, Tarantino's first two films, anf the aforementioned ACO and a few buried treasures like SFW, Bad Lieutenant, and Auto Focus. However, a few of these films, in my opinions, were very bad. This is one of them. The plot is that a 47-year old man, on the prompting of a fortune teller, decides to leave his family and become a homophobic, racist mysoginist in New York's slums. I would say that Mamet is just ripping off Mike Leigh's Naked, but, in fact, the play on which this film is based is actually 10 years older than Naked, which leaves the impression that, if Leigh ripped off Mamet, he actually vastly improved on the original. In Naked, the protagonist's anger at society and his habit of preaching whatever's on his mind to whomever's around makes him a compelling character, but in Edmond's case, it just makes him annoying. The only thing that makes Edmond better is its ending, specifically that it's less than 90 minutes long.

QUOTE: "I'm dying of Cirrhosis of the liver. Doctor says I've got about 3 weeks. So, Shall we drink to that?"
______________Daughter, "THe Bully" (reviewed below)

Tract Review: The Bully. In it, a drunk cautions his daughter against accepting Jesus, but later has a near-death experience and converts (let's set aside the fact that NDEs have been shown repeatedly to be hallucinations from the loss of oxygen to the brain), and eventually gets his daughter saved just before she dies of cirrhosis. I cannot help but imagine the dad as Ken Titus (from Titus), and the daughter as drunk Toot Braunstein.