Pristine Angie’s Good Homemaker Adventures at www.d332.com

Shortly after 9/11, a friend of mine came over enraged about some “Anti-American” remarks Richard Gere made. Whenever the mention of “Anti-American” hits my ears, it always provokes one of those silent mouth repetition of the phrase while looking off into space. I told my friend that the very act of hearing someone make a comment which he or the government won’t appreciate, and the freedom of the speaker to intone those words, is really a thing that makes this country truly great.

There are Michael Moore haters and there are Michael Moore lovers. I don’t agree with everything he’s said and I often groan at his methods of presenting his views, but I definitely think it’s 100% patriotic of him to make that tremendous effort in using our constitutional freedom of speech.

Whenever I hear the phrase: “If you don’t like this country, then shut the hell up and get out,” I think THAT is THE MOST ANTI-AMERICAN comment possible. Only dictators in dictatorial countries say things like that.

Therefore, promising never to get involved in politics, but breaking that promise anyway (maybe I do have a career in politics after all!), I will insert a little quip for Michael Moore’s new and free little film to all Americans.

Watch it all here

The note below is from Michael Moore:
P.S. Remember, we’re doing something that’s never been done, so I have no idea how it will all go! Don’t give up if it seems to go slow (like with any streaming, give the downloading a head start before you hit play), and don’t forget there are two places where you can actually download it to your hard drive and three ways to stream it. You can get to all of them at the link above.

P.P.S. If you’re not yet registered to vote, here’s a good link: https://www.voteforchange.com/. There’s less than two weeks for you to get registered, especially if you have moved since the last time you voted.

This has been a particularly brutal summer. Those of you who know me will understand. I am so glad my favorite season is starting. I can’t wait to return to covering up my neck.

Sorry, didn’t mean to complain on the anniversary of 9/11. I plan to spend the day reading the beautiful story of Philipe Petit: To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers. There is a documentary film recently released called Man On Wire by filmmaker James Marsh.

The Twin Towers was one of my favorite structures as a child. A lesser known fact is that it’s designer and architect (Leslie Robertson is the structural engineer) was Japanese: Minoru Yamasaki also designed the Dharan Internation Airport in Saudi Arabia. The Twin Towers appealed to me in the same way the repetitive structures of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Phil Corner enabled my imagination to read into the space between matter.

I spent decades admiring the Twin Towers in all I found in the unsaid. And now, it’s difficult to find something to say for all that is no longer there.

I just noticed today that if you look at a Obama/Biden button quickly, you almost have all the necessary tools to construct Osama Bin Laden.

Childish? Yes, but who knows to what extent subconscious suggestion may come to play here? Mental midgets may be discouraged from voting for these guys without knowing why.

I think they should name their campaign trail Wide Minded Democrats ( WMD ) so Repubs can spend all their resources trying to track them down and end up empty handed.

Me, I’m smarter than that. I never let word association get the best of me. I voted for Ron Paul.

Washington Post Article “Job-Seeker Who Changed Her Gender Goes to Court”

Diane Schroer was a star candidate for the position of Terrorism Research Analyst at the Library of Congress. She was proactive and went ahead to inform her future supervisor Charlotte Preece, of her intentions before she started her job. Preece, armed with this knowledge, then rescinded the job offer.

It doesn’t pay to be forthright and honest. News of this sort will only encourage people to deceive their potential employers of their transgender intentions.

To be fair, Bob Dardano of the Library of Congress did go on the record to say that the library does have in its employment, several transgendered persons.

Predictably, there’s also an outpouring of intolerance online.

Nothing new there either: only cowards hide behind an internet connection.

deja vu: Mamma Mia and Across the Universe

I was recently asked why I opposed the spate of movies and Broadway plays that retrofitted new images and storylines to old pop hits. Phyllida Lloyd’s Mamma Mia to the music of Abba, and Julie Tamor’s “Across the Universe” to the music of the Beatles.

The most apparent reason is the aural experience of listening to music. Similar to reading, listening to music forces the participant to bridge abstract representation with mental images. Th act of mental bridge-building is a creative act in itself. Music videos were criticized for deciding what images to go with a piece of music from which we would have needed, otherwise, to form our personal vista. When developed to its logical extreme, image association turned into simulacra, and beautiful people were utilized to sell music.

George Michael’s “Freedom! 90″ video, enlisting Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington marked the height of the era: It combined beautiful people (who had nothing to do with the song) with a recycled song.

Where could we go from there?

The Retrofitted Music Movie was the next plateau.

Images superimposed on music frees us from the task of creating images alongside the abstraction of lyrics and sound. It makes us lazy, supplying us with prefabricated imagery when we should be constructing our own. I guess that’s why you often hear people dismiss a movie with “the book was better.”

The second reason I oppose Retrofitted Music Movies is this: musicians and songwriters publish their works under one publisher. After a long career, the publisher owns the catalog of their songs. Companies and buyers bid on purchasing and reselling the publishing rights to the entire catalog en-block. Once in possession of this catalog, they subtract a huge chunk of royalties that need to be paid out to the musicians and songwriters whenever the songs in the catalog are redistributed. If you look at the retrofitted music movies, you’ll realize that the birth of the concept probably had little to do with someone wanting to create a new work*. If anything, it looks suspiciously as if it had been motivated by a pure business decision to cut cost and maximize gain. How did I arrive at this conclusion? Well, I had a hunch, being in the music and music publishing business for five years.

Today I finally checked the credentials to see if it supported my theory. Here was what I came up with:

Mamma Mia is created by NBC/Universal Studios. If you Google the Abba Catalog, you will see that NBC and Universal also owns the entire catalog to all their works.

Across the Universe is distributed by Sony. According to Wikipedia, “Revolution was a strategic partner of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which distributed and marketed Revolution’s films. The company shut down in October 2007, coinciding with the end of the five year deal with Sony Pictures.” The company is called Revolution Pictures, and Revolution was one of the Beatles’ biggest songs. Someone must have planned the creation of this subsidiary company for the sole purpose of manufacturing Across the Universe, which was made in 2007. Upon it’s completion, the task was achieved, the company was no longer needed.

So why does all this bother me, you ask?

I realize it’s the entertainment world’s age-old strategy to cash in on the familiar. Up-and-coming bands and even nowadays with surgery, movie stars, need to look or sound like a proven commodity if they want to have a higher chance of signing a contract. Pushed to it’s logical conclusion, movies utilized soundtrack that have been proven hits, to reduce the investment risk factor by, if not more than half: even if the movie was horrible, at least audience members still walk away misty-eyed with the sentimentality of hearing their favorite hits when they were in their youthful prime.

In a larger picture, however, recycling and retrofitting old music is actually detrimental to pushing the continuum of the art form ahead. I will always remember the notorious quote bold explorer Miles Davis made about conservationist Wynton Marsalis, who championed preserving “traditional” jazz heritage by continuous reiteration versus forging ahead into new territory. It was something to the effect that if jazz musicians did what Marsalis wanted, “we’d all be back in the fields picking cotton.”

For every remake of an old hit, a new original artist/songwriter is deprived of exposure to the public. We stagnate in nostalgia to put money in the pockets of entertainment execs, but years from now, when people asks us about our fond memories (many of which are indelibly interwoven with music) of the great millennium, we can only say “it was…uh…kinda like the 70s?”

*I have to be fair here. Bach wrote parts of his greatest cantatas as variations on old hymns. A bust of George Washington is really nothing more than a reiteration of Caesar’s profile. The continuum of the arts have trudged forward with an ebb-and-flow progress, reiterating between the retelling of well-worn stories and entirely new creations.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn passed away yesterday. I am in the midst of reading Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. There is a wonderful documentary of the Russian writer by Aleksandr Sukorov. I wrote a review of it here on Amazon.

Solzhenitsyn’s humanity dovetails with a documentary I watched on the Dalai Lama “10 Questions for the Dalai Lama with Rick Ray.” (I just had to mention this: Did you know that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all agreed to block all hyperlinks that tell the TRUTH about what China is doing to Tibet on their search engines in Mainland China’s internet?!) Whenever I watch the Dalai Lama speak, I always think about how complex the rituals of true Buddhist monks are. The wonder of the Mandala Wheel “Wheel of Life” as a flattened, 3-dimensional, chambers in the meditational scheme of Buddhist rituals come to mind.

More importantly, it fascinates me that the Dalai Lama speaks only in simple sentences and concepts, given in to the consideration of the Western demographic he is interviewing for.

I think it’s far more complicated than what you’re hearing.

I know it’s very fashionable to fight for a free Tibet. It’s been a fashion statement in Hollywood for years…even though there are as many, if not more people in mainland China suffering from government oppression…Hollywood does not seem to notice. While I want nothing more than for China to get the hell out of Tibet, release the REAL Panchen Lama (the successor to the Dalai Lama, who is presently held hostage by the Chinese government while a FAKE PRETENDER is named by the mainland Chinese), and let the Tibetans be, I also feel that to a certain extent, our fascination with the Dalai Lama is indicative of a spirituality that is missing in our lives.

We can contribute hundreds…even thousands of dollars to the cause of Tibet, but to really keep the spirit of Tibet alive, worldwide, would require something more.

I think love for humanity, for people, life, animals, nature, and most importantly, forgiveness and acceptance for who and what people are, are what both Solzhenitsyn and the Dalai Lama sees as “truths” that cannot be suppressed. Both the Dalai Lama and Solzhenitsyn also instruct by example, the concept of breaking the cycle of an eye for an eye. The notion of tit-for-tat is really nothing but the seeds of war.

It’s extremely difficult to decipher what is going on within the head of a person who also the leader of a community that practices the creation of the Mandala Wheel. Take a glance at Martin Brauen’s The Mandala Wheel if you’d like to investigate further.

Solzhenitsyn said that suffering is essential to the fortification of one’s character. He quickly added that one shouldn’t go looking for bad times simply for this purpose.

While what I am going through presently may be construed by some as suffering, I never begrudge those who have never had a taste of suffering. I think it’s perfectly possible to rise and attain awareness without having tasted a moment of grief.

However, if you’re suffering. Remember the Dalai Lama’s and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s greatest life lesson: make the most of it. Come out on top, not below.

That, is the triumph, of the human spirit.

One often hears accounts or reminiscences of the old days, when ladies would put on their lipstick just to walk from the house to the mailbox to check the day’s deliveries. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for air travelers to show up in first class in their sweats, lugging around a big bag of Mickey-D’s, and reeking up the whole cabin. Well research historians will tell you it wasn’t all like that in the 1950s. However, my point is, people at least made an effort.

With the evolution of the me generations in the 80s and 90s, the dress code is all about personal comfort these days. There’s no longer any consideration for public presentation. And if one needs to dress up, well, there’s always the POLO Ralph Lauren t-shirt with a big fat jockey logo on it. That’s class.

What interests me is the effort and time it took in the era gone by. Do people need to wake up a few hours earlier to groom oneself and dress properly simply to walk around the house? I still believe it’s a worthwhile effort. I’ve conducted experiments where I simply trudged around all day long in my underwear vs. getting dressed properly, bright and early.

In the latter, I retrieved the mail in high style.

In the latter, admittedly, I had problems getting the mailman off my doorstep.

In one of the most fascinating pieces I have seen on tv so far this year, Nova’s Kings Of Camouflage features Giant Cuttlefish off the coast of Australia. When the smaller males wee unable to enter the mating grounds- patrolled by large roughneck males surrounding the female (sound familiar?)- the undersized male undergoes a remarkable transformation, instantly transgendering from male to female to bypass the surly guys. Marine biologists will also tell you that Coral Reef fish often change sex in the course of their lifetime.

Lucky for me, I’m not a seafood fan. And whenever I’m in the ocean, I (like Kevin James) also scream like a little girl the moment my feet touches anything other than sand. Unfortunately, I have consumed calamari, and I’m stopping from this point onwards. Our world is filled with so many fascinating creatures, it seems indicative of a dearth in the human imagination when the greatest tribute we could pay that fascination is to chop it up, fry it, and stick it in our tummies.

I have often heard that to be an “animal lover” is a Western concept. That is inaccurate. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn prefaces his Gulag Archipelago by recounting the story of excavators at the Kolyma River discovering a fish tens of thousands of years old. Upon finding it alive, they immediately tossed it on the barbie and chowed down. While traveling in rural China, I myself had the great entertainment of watching white American tourists sitting down at restaurants, expecting to feast on Chicken Chow Mein and Pu Pu Platter. To their chagrin, the entire table was loaded with twelve different colors of steam vegetables and soy. Devout Buddhists, if they are truly so, are staunch vegetarians as well.

I want to be honest: I am a social carnivore, and will eat beef and chicken once or twice a month. Whenever I live alone, it’s been a round-the-clock vegetarian diet. I simply can’t justify compassion for certain cuter animals over other “utilitarian” animals like chickens and cows. At the same time however, though all god’s creations deserve equal kindness, multiply any of them by 1000, and most of us will call the exterminator.

Garden shrews get basketed across the street from my house to be released into the conservation area. I always bring bugs outside my home. Spiders get undisturbed residence. (I consider it proactive decorative measures for Halloween.) Moths, of course, fly around with a contract on their heads and get whacked on the spot. Nobody seen anything, nobody heard nothing.

I am in a state of wonder at God’s creations. But I’m sorry, when it comes down to my fuzzy pink sweater and that good-for-nothing wool-munching punk butterfly, I instantly transform into a wiseguy with a swat.

As most of you may have already heard, Tim Russert passed away on June 13th. If you get a chance to watch the MSNBC special or NBC this morning, you should do it. I guarantee you will walk away a different person. It’s not just about a newsman. It’s about the idea of quality, the commitment to excellence, and the great can-do optimism that made this country great.

The internet is piling up with blog and news entries about this, so there’s really no need to repeat too much here. Predictably, there are bloggers who shrug and go “big deal, he was just a newsman, what’s the fuss all about?”

It’s about so much more than just a newsman.

Russert’s story and life was one of enthusiasm, joy, hard work and a belief that the American viewer deserved more than mere punditry. He was also respected for being well-prepared, thoroughly researching the politicians who come to sit on the Meet The Press hot seat, and going medieval on their seats when they try to worm their way out of accountability. I can’t count how many times reporters and anchormen and women have backed down when a politician refuses to provide an answer that every American has a right to know.

One doesn’t really appreciate this until “journalism” from other countries are inspected. There are places where news is doctored to such a degree that no locals even treat it as truth. My country of birth, for example, has government -to this day - who can conveniently arrange for a journalist with Russert’s persistence to disappear overnight. Even though I have lived in the US for thirty years, not a day goes by when I don’t appreciate the freedom of speech.

I know people in the armed forces are fond of saying “freedom isn’t free.” Though the cost of freedom is debatable, what Russert did was to make that earned freedom worthwhile. Not a breath was squandered when accountability was demanded. I just hope the new generation of journalists don’t get inspired by the loud, shouting FOX-News brand of critical inquiry.

What is quite endearing about Russert on this special day, was his love of life, work, and family. Look at any of the pictures of him outside the shots from Meet The Press. The fellow had the biggest, most optimistic smile that I love. It was a smile loaded with promises and the great Kerouac American spirit. He had also written a book about his close relationship with his dad, Big Russ & Me. For a man who was not only all about family, but dedicated himself to sharing the joyful wonder of his Father-Son relationship, it’s heartbreaking that he should go two days before Father’s Day. Just…sigh.

I once asked my first art teacher what decade he thought was the greatest in American history. His answer would come to play a big role in who I am today: “The 50s saw America at the height of the nation. The GI Bill had produced the highest percentage of college-educated people in the population, war was behind us, the technology left over from wartime was producing products with the highest quality the country had ever seen. The future looked bright and full of possibilities and companies were committed to excellence.”

It’s no surprise Tim Russert was born in the beginning of the 50s.

The fabulous and hilariously witty art of Robert de Michiell will be on display at the Alden Gallery in Provincetown, in his first solo show ever. This comes after decades of distinguished illustrations for Entertainment Weekly, Premiere, Time Magazine, and the cover and pages of The New Yorker Magazine.

Alongside movie critic and sometimes housewife Libby Gelman-Waxner, De Michiell has gently poked fun of all the celebs in Gelman Waxner’s movie column “If You Ask Me.” (Now compiled in the paperback collection If You Ask Me: The Collected Columns of America’s Most Beloved and Irresponsible Critic .

De Michiell’s work is a household item even if you may not have heard of him; his familiar style has been unabashedly copied by magazine illustrators from all corners of the globe. Combining an economy of strokes with a cheerful minimalistic, sometimes cubist palette, this American artist captures the essence of both famous personalities and familiar personae while revealing interior angles we have often thought about but never possessed the tools to vocalize.

His exhibit will also coincide with Provincetown’s 10th Annual International Film Festival which will run from June 18-June 22.