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The Clean, "Tally Ho!" Wait a minute...New Zealand had a '60s? Interpol, "PDA" The "we have 200 couches where you can sleep tonight" line sounds like they're describing some fantasy Williamsburgh bar that would exist if the NYC of my dreams and the NYC of fact were a little more closely acquainted with each other. And no, they really don't sound that much like Joy Division. Christopher Hitchens, "Machiavelli in Mesopotamia" "From conversations I have had on this subject in Washington, I would say that the most fascinating and suggestive conclusion is this: After Sept. 11, several conservative policy-makers decided in effect that there were "root causes" behind the murder-attacks. These "root causes" lay in the political slum that the United States has been running in the region, and in the rotten nexus of client-states from Riyadh to Islamabad. Such causes cannot be publicly admitted, nor can they be addressed all at once. But a slum-clearance program is beginning to form in the political mind." The burning question is: will they take the Robert Moses approach to slum-clearing or the Jane Jacobs approach? Who could possibly think it's anything but the former? Hitchens starts from the same arrogant premise that everyone from Bush to Gore Vidal does in their arguments:trust me on this one, I know better than you, I've got an inside track, I've got sources I can't divulge. Trust me. Hank Stuever, "Unspooled" "'There's something about pointing and clicking,' he says. 'It's not quite the same.'" Well, OK...how, exactly? From a few stray references near the beginning, you can tell the author just don't like the move away from the cassette and the move to digital. Fine, then. But rather than clearly and forcefully address just what the hell bugs him about the situation, the only thing he can offer in defense of the cassette is -- insert sigh here -- memories. Even that's compromised by his utter loathing for the past and the people who populate it: the audiophile ex-brother-in-law playing Chicago V on his reel-to-reel, the fourteen-tape woman and her tropical-drink friends, and most of all, himself and his hopeless geekdom. What the fuck does this asshole want? A deeply passive-agressive essay. He might as well tell the reader "oh no, that's OK, I'm not angry at all, I'll just sit here in a corner and sulk, alright?" "Pray with me that this doesn't make it into next year's Da Capo book." Buick's "Harley Earl" ad campaign It's always disconcerting to find my latest pop culture lust-object is some character actor in a commercial, and this unease has as much to do with the character actor aspect as the commercial. Character actors are very hard to track down -- commercials don't have credits after all -- but this quasi-anonymity and lack of overt sex appeal is precisely why I find them so much more interesting than their big-name Hollywood counterparts. Take the "Harley Earl" simulation on this one. Killer smile, craggy voice, nice suit, a body of a big beefy bull in retirement. Maybe a little cocky, but not insufferable about it. I like the guy, or the idea of "Harly Earl," anyway. The actor isn't really that anonymous at all, though, and here's where it gets really weird. A quick check of Google Groups reveals the actor in question is John Diehl, and a trip to imdb.com transforms a vaugely familiar name into a certain. He's in the 1985 City Limits, which unless you're a MST3K fan, means nothing to you. It's just a dreary mid-eighties apocalypse movie with motorcycles and an empty L.A. So convincingly, that Diehl '85 and Diehl '02 are just too different to spring from the same guy -- one's a something of a dope, IIRC, the other full of jock gravitas. So when I think on it some, I think: Hmm. I'm finding a guy from City Limits cute/attractive/whatever. Hmmm. Nope. Does not compute. Uh-uh. While it looks like Diehl made plenty of interesting, even class pictures after the fact, I think I'd rather him stay the anonymous character actor in my mind than connect him to THAT particular movie. |
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