The Billiken's Bluff

Okay... my sound drenches, each of the five senses
And hold the shock value of electrified fences
It's truth or consequences, ride wit us or against us
Is you a dedicated soldier, or you a princess, dog?
I'm in it to win it and not for the wealth
Got a crib with a Grammy and a gat on the shelf
Nan nigga competition, gotta battle myself

I watched Prison Break and 24 last night and was under/overwhelmed with melodrama and cliche and I can't turn away.












But after hearing Hillary throw her hat in the ring,



I'm in it to win it.

the clichés are endemic, tremendous.





Pandemic, ubiquitous.






She sounds like a game show host, a band leader, an MC, a bar mitzvah DJ, a carnival kiosk employee. Not a presidential candidate or maybe precisely a presidential candidate. Either way i'm nonplussed.

On NPR tonight, One G.O.P. strategist, when asked about Barack Obama's chances to win the presidency in 2008 or even the Democratic party's nomination, referred to him as Barack "Hussein" Obama. I assumed this "Hussein" was in quotes and italics and that the strategist was insinuating that the American voting public would associate Obama with Osama by way of homonym, and lump him in with the Saddam Hussein by way of him sounding like a foreign other, brother.



But, fleshing it all out, which is bound to happen with greater scrutiny during a run at the commander in chief, Barack H. Obama will verily become Barack Hussein Obama. This is his full given name.



Obama is well-spoken, multi-racial, he embodies change, if not actually having ideas for policy change, although he did oppose the 2nd Iraq War from its conception. He would certainly energize the disenchanted just by taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.



One of us in power, or at least not one of them, again for the last 232 years later.



Something along the lines of:

Why is Bush acting like he trying to get Osama
Why don't we impeach him and elect Obama

But this fight will be about nomenclature, color(s), pedigree, perception and a game of Guesstures.



It sounds like....







This election will expose American politics for what it really is. Prejudice, pre-conceived notions, public relations, and gut-feelings.



A name that will unite center city liberals. A name that is so laden with meaning that it requires no spin doctoring. You can't even spin it because it would be like taking advantage of a disabled person.



It is such an obvious impairment, that it's clear that it requires not a single iteration.



But who will vote for a disabled man that will alienate entire swaths of states?



Barack Hussein Obama is handicapped by birth, by birth certificate and this will be his undoing.



But this is important, we need this.



Who's coming with me?

Belligerence moves quickly.

ARBIL, Iraq, Jan 11 (Reuters) - U.S. forces stormed an Iranian consular office in the northern Iraqi Kurdish city of Arbil early on Thursday and arrested five people, including diplomats and staff, Iranian officials said.

The U.S. military made no direct mention of Iranians but in answer to a query issued a statement saying six "individuals" were arrested during "routine" operations in the area.

As the overnight raid was in progress, President George W. Bush was vowing in a keynote address on American television to disrupt what he called the "flow of support" from Iran and Syria for insurgent attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.

US doesn't want Iraq to have all the fun.

This is a GLOBAL war on terrorism and we'll prove it.



All 7 continents. Lions and Tamil Tigers and Bay of Bengal, oh my. Indian Ocean, both sides, two coats, two fronts.





All this talk of Black Hawk Down, Mogadishu, the Islamic Court Union and Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys. And the US Army said wait a second Gotim, we'll call your bluff, we don't just drop bombs over baghdad.

What did that mean? nothing. But why is this not a big story today?

If something is slightly confusing we don't discuss. If there are competing offensives we only have so much energy and so much room in the WORLD section of YahooNews. There are sports and technology and entertainment. And didn't we stop talking about Somalia in the 6th grade? Didn't we take yo mama jokes out of Snaps that talked about "well yo mama is so small she went hang gliding on a Dorito" or "yo mama is so skinny she, she, she's like a Somalian."



Well maybe that isn't exactly how it went down in grammar school but Somalia and it's war(lord) torn country was the butt of bloated stomach hunger jokes, don't forget I ran with a rugged crowd in 6th grade(forgive me NYTimes, Jodi Kantor, for reprinting, quoting racist statements that may be perceived as perpetuating stereotypes (yea - I listen to NPR and the Leonard Lopate Show and features on overt/covert racism in the search for quality nannies - yea)).







And today...





"the first U.S. offensives in the African country since 18 American soldiers were killed here in 1993."

US says...

"In Washington, a U.S. intelligence official said American forces killed five to 10 people in an attack on one target in southern Somalia believed to be associated with al-Qaida."

Somalia says...

"A Somali lawmaker said 31 civilians, including a newlywed couple, died in Tuesday's assault by two helicopters near Afmadow, a town in a forested area close to the Kenyan border."

We say...

Tonight N Dot and I discussed Apple's product debuts and it's headline grabbing (and 6 billion dollar stock increasing) announcement - Steve Jobs changed their name from "Apple Computers" to "Apple Inc".

Here is what the unearthing of a new paradigm looks like.









"Nobody can exactly explain what is going on inside these forested areas," said Somali commander Col. Shino Moalin Nur.

And you can capture it all on your new camera, video, mp3, email blackberry, planner phone.

Alfonso Cuaròn’s new film Children of Men is conspicuously devoid of explanation. Brought along on the journey of a journalist named Theodore (played by Clive Owen) in a future where the worlds population has become infertile, we come across characters and events so starkly filmed and acutely realized that they refuse to be forgotten, even while their origins and back-stories are so mysterious as to defy comprehension in the ordinary cinematic sense.

In the world of futuristic science fiction movie, your ten dollars usually buys you the quick facts you need to understand the world you have walked into so you can focus on the what next - who is chasing who or what’s exploding or who might get naked. For instance: the world is underwater because we melted the ice caps, or the city is rubble because we built robots that took it over. In Children, the future world has gone to a hell that is every bit as palpable as any of these familiar scenarios. But rather than hand over the all-important why by feeding the audience a prologue or preachy mid-film revelation, Children achieves an unexpected greatness by demanding of the audience that they look for answers in the faces of its characters and find out about the fictional world by considering their own. As with every great story, part of Children of Men is what you bring in with you; you aren’t going to wrap up the story up unless you are willing to do a little bit of the work yourself.

As such, it’s a rare moment for the film when the aging hippie Jasper ( Michael Caine) explains to the miraculously pregnant Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) a bit about Theo’s past, revealing that he and his ex-wife (Julianne Moore) once lost their own child. It is a rare moment for two reasons. First, the revelation is rare within the film because the filmgoer is otherwise left as much in the dark about the main characters’ pasts as he is about such larger questions as why the world has suddenly gone infertile in the first place.

Secondly, it is unique choice to have Caine’s work as actor happen entirely out of focus in the distance while the audience is left watching only Theo's face as he hears the story of his own pain. Michael Caine is Michael Caine, after all; as is he is delivering the most important monologue in the film you would normally expect a least a few seconds where you could see his face. But Children doesn’t ask you to remember characters and performances as much as it asks you to remember what it might feel like to be them. Unlike other science fiction films, Owen’s own character isn’t important because he’s the last hope from the future, or the map that will save everyone is tattooed on his back, or because hes the ONE – hes important only because of what his face shows in this one scene: that he is despair in human form, walking barefoot and armed only with a flask of jack.

With the exception of one key scene, we see the rest of the film’s terrifying 2027 landscape through Theo's eyes and are invited to experience it the way he does as he leads humanity’s last hope through it. There is a great deal along the way to comment on: allusions to the nativity story, the interesting use of pets, haunting references to holocaust and Abu Ghraib imagery and war-torn Baghdad streets, the looming “Report Suspicious Activity!" signs of the modern Amercican subways, the ever present immigration issue.

To me, the film feels like the disturbing dream of someone who drifted off while watching the news in 2006 and is forced to revisit these images in a self-invented storyline that wanders through his fears about the world. The fact that Theo inexplicably finds it impossible to keep shoes on his feet throughout the film in particular feels like the kind of problem you might have in a dream – improbable in the real world but unsurprising and vivid as it recurs to the dreamer.

I have my own amateur opinions about many of these details – but you will too, so I won’t bother too much with mine. Interpreting this film – from its unseen beginning to its ambiguous end – will depend on your willingness to address your own questions about humanity. Let it suffice to say that ultimately what you think and feel during the film will be affected by what you think and feel about the world you live in. The only question is whether the same stands true for the reverse.

SIDE NOTE
Amusing to me, both the Got and I were surprised that the other liked the film. I remember the Got had hated Black Hawk Down and I would have thought the combat scenes in this movie provided a similarly unpleasant experience – getting that faint shadow-of-a taste of what it might feel like to get shot at, dialogue through gunfire. The Got, for his part, knows that N-Dot hates it when movies inject politically-charged imagery or material without a defined and important reason.

Sure enough, my eyes were already rolling when I read a review of the movie and saw that the word “Orwellian” was being thrown around. But having walked into a movie that I expected to be an undeservedly praised (provocative!) condemnation of the war on terrorism or western immigration policies, I was surprised to instead find a thoughtful film that conjured up all these charged images and issues with the same vehemence with which it demanded that you set aside what you think about them. Sure, there are enough of the expected totalitarian government clichés lurking in the movie that a reasonable lefty could walk out feeling that this or that policy of Bush or Blair’s got targeted and the dirty facists somehow got their usual cinematic flogging. But the movie admirably goes beyond all this; whatever political points might be under construction here they seem secondary to the greater aim of making the audience think about what it means to be human. In that sense, the movie seems to grasp that whatever one personally believes about the best policies to address the threat of terrorism or immigrant deportation or living in a war zone, the dehumanizing aspects these conditions have in common must first be fully felt and understood.

I guess people often see in movies (like events) what they see or expected to see, and I don’t pretend to be different. Some people, for instance, apparently managed to see the amusing, half-staged Borat movie as a serious piece of journalism documenting the evils of American society (I'm looking at you, A-Wood!). For what its worth, I was snacking on a bag of buttered cynicism when I saw Children, and a couple days later I feel like it was the second best movie I’ve seen in a while – frustrating and disturbing, but makes you think. I did not enjoy Children of Men, and I highly recommend seeing it. But get at me if I’m wrong about all this.

Henna Stained and Heading for the Hills

Riddle me this ... can you be accurately described by the US as the radical cleric leader of the Islamic Court Union, the de facto government of Somalia based out of Mogadishu, (disbanded by Ethiopian troops and John Bolton's blessing over the holiday week) when you look this damn merry?




Orange goatee. Bright blue shirt. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys looks downright chipper.



like Scott Spiezio in the 2006 NLCS



Bin Laden, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, or Muqtada al-Sadr he is not.





Speaking of Muqtada. Reports, circulating, swirling, critiquing THE execution - the timing (on a holy day, Eid al-Adha, i.e., a slap in the collective Sunni face), motivations (al-Maliki seeking revenge for his country or on behalf of his radical comrade in Sadr City) and etiquette (unruly guards, out of Abu Ghraib or an al-Zarqawi video). Another rousing success on the international stage.

When the appeal was denied on Dec. 26, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, described as “frantic” to see his enemy executed, signed a death warrant of dubious legitimacy in violation of Iraqi law. On a secretly recorded video, the hanging looks and sounds much like an old-fashioned lynching. The noose is fitted and the trap door springs while a jeering mob screams “Muqtada! Muqtada!” in homage to Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite warlord.

Nervous, no?

The trial and punishment of the late Saddam Hussein ought to have been accomplished with respect for law and human dignity—not necessarily because the former dictator deserved such consideration, but because all who have died in the name of democracy over the past three years certainly do.

I went to see Alfonso Cuaron's (Y Tu Mama Tambien) movie Children of Men yesterday which was based on a science fiction novel where women become infertile in the not too distant future and the world goes to shit - fear, panic, depression, government issued suicide machines, closing borders, persecuting foreigners, forced refugee camps - an Orwellian police state (not an Orwell novel).

I don't need to write the review, applauding cinematography, and Clive Owen's acting, you can read that here. Worth mentioning though is that despite the setting of movie, in the nearly apocalyptic 2030s,



it couldn't be anymore about Iraq.





Scenes from a refugee camp featured newly intaked foreigners perched atop boxes, live wire attached to hands, hood over head, Abu Ghraib style. The culture of closing borders and Homeland Security was out of our (this) world (!!!)



But this wasn't comic book violence, fancy daggers and silly masks with undeserved references to Operation Iraqi Freedom like the Weinsteins' V for Vendetta.



This was ear drum rupturing, ashen urban warfare. With words or images like
terrorist
insurgents
death squads
roadside bomb
refugees
preachers
politicians
evangelists
and
Allahu Akbar.

The last battle scene fought between British soldiers and a combination of opposition groups, random refugees, foreigners and thugs was relentless (like Danger Mouse's remix of Jay-Z's Encore w/ Beatles' White Album, which is to say - a relentless beat, bullets, bombs (over Baghdad)). And after the battle scene fought on the streets and apartments of the refugee camp you felt uncomfortable at how visceral it was and then like a bad dream you were relieved because it's only a dream or only a movie and whatever adrenaline was racing or hands were sweating aren't really real but then you think, oh yeah - urban warfare, insurgents, apartment buildings blown up_out - it is real and happening and you hear about people dying 80 from a car bomb at a police station or fish market or school, 300, 400 per day citizens, soldiers, insurgents, everyone and it doesn't mean much other than a number we've heard for 3, 4 years each day but if it looks anything like it did in this movie, which it must, and worse - than it is completely brutal and gratuitous.