1) John Edwards will forever be remembered as the man who lost the nomination due to a $400 haircut. Tina and I had a bit of an argument about it on Sunday, but I’m of the opinion that any man who dares run as a “populist” should at the very least get his hair cut for less than $15. Call me old-fashioned, but you can’t get the union vote if you’re getting your hair shampooed down at the salon. I like John Edwards, and I really wanted to vote for him in the primary, but that’s a deal breaker for me.

2) Barack Obama came off to me as an amateur. He seemed incapable of answering a direct question. Every thing that came out of his mouth was pre-packaged and he lacked the improvisational chops to roll with the punches. I’m now convinced that people want Barack Obama to be something that he is not — maybe with a few years in the senate, Obama will be able to become that man, but I don’t think he’s ready.

3) Chris Dodd and Joe Biden both have tremendous experience, and I even agree with a lot of their positions. But they’re both creatures of the senate, and there’s no way either of them can escape it. There’s just too much baggage. They sounded like Senators, and that’s the kiss of death.

4) Bill Richardson — so many people talk about his experience, but the guy seems like a stuffed suit to me. He just didn’t seem ready for prime time. He reminds me more of Fred Flintstone than a serious candidate.

5) This leaves me with the only real choice. She was poised, mature and reasoned — in many ways she was the only true candidate on stage. As much as I find her triangulation hopelessly pandering and calculated, and her personality overbearing and cold, I’m afraid Hillary Clinton was the only person on that stage that seemed Presidential. Her performance was nothing spectacular, but I thought that she certainly wants the Presidency enough to be competent. And after Bush, maybe competent is all we need? At this point, I’m afraid to say that I’m actually leaning towards supporting her in the election. I don’t have confidence in any of the others.

My god, these are supposed to be our superstar candidates? Obama can’t answer a straight question. Hillary looks like she was programmed down at the Third Way factory for political robots, and Edwards can’t explain why he paid $400 for a hair cut. Biden, Dodd and Richardson might as well not even be there. And this guy from Alaska — whoa. How did they even let him into the room?

I hope somewhere in America Al Gore is watching this and telling his people to get his campaign rolling.

I haven’t blogged about parenthood in awhile. Mostly, because Tina does such a good job of it, herself, that anything I write feels inadequate in comparison to her experience.

The girls are about 21 months old, and they are really coming into their own as people and as opposites. Rachel frequently defines herself by what she’s against, while Anya defines herself by what she is for. It is not uncommon for Rachel to be telling someone or something to “go away,” while Anya spontaneously blurts: “I love babies!” I often wonder how they will get along when they’re older, when at the moment the contrasts in personality are pretty significant.

At the playground, Anya is bold and adventurous. She rushes up to the top of the biggest slide, and sends herself down the ramp with speed and gusto. Meanwhile, Rachel is more timid, preferring to sit at the foot of the slide, scared of climbing. She likes swings, though, and smiles and laughs as she soars through the air. Anya will swing if you strap her in, but it’s not her favorite thing.

It’s also weird to note how different my relationship with each of them is. Rachel and I are very close — some mornings, she will wake up shouting, “Daddy, where are you?!” when I’m actually right next to her, just obscured by a sheet or blanket. Some nights, I rock her to sleep in my arms just as I have since she was little, often by request. Anya won’t let me rock her at all — she prefers to fall asleep with her mommy. These bonds formed when they were tiny, and Tina and I spent more time individually with one over the other — now, despite all the trading off we’ve done, they seem more or less permanent. I’m saddened that Anya and I aren’t as close as Rachel and I. I love her dearly. But it seems that what they say is true — each twin does favor one parent.

Why is it that Tim Minear continues to work for Fox? I know criticizing the “auteur” behind WONDERFALLS is a big no-no among genre fans, but it has to be said. Every single show he’s produced since leaving his post at ANGEL has resulted in ratings failure. This is not to say that FIREFLY wasn’t good, or that WONDERFALLS didn’t have its moments, but you have to wonder about the judgement that keeps him working.

Take his latest outing, DRIVE. Essentially LOST on wheels, it strives to have the same kind of sprawling cast and overarcing mythology that brought LOST, HEROES and even JERICHO their success, but it lacks … something. Sincerity, maybe, or a belief in its own concept. I just watched the first hour of the opening, and I found myself underwhelmed. The characters were thin, cliched, and the jokes fell flat. Even Nathan Fillion, who is great in nearly everything he’s in, can’t keep the first hour up. I wanted desperately to like the show because of Fillion, but found myself laughing and groaning at the hackneyed dialogue and cliches.

In some ways, DRIVE feels like a fictionalized version of THE AMAZING RACE, except THE AMAZING RACE is actually entertaining and engaging. Throughout the show, Tina scolded me for not burning this week’s DOCTOR WHO onto DVD so we could watch it, and I found myself checking the timeline on the DVR to see how close we were to the end. I just couldn’t get into the show — its mysteries lacked the teeth necessary to keep you coming back.

Surprisingly, the twist at the end of the first hour — though not particularly original — was enough for me to give the show a second chance with hour two. But if they can’t pull it off, I’m deleting hour three from the cable box and moving on. Though, I have to say that the show stinks of early cancellation.

Maybe Minear, who isn’t a bad writer on other peoples’ shows, could go back to writing under another showrunner. He wrote some great episodes of ANGEL and FIREFLY — maybe all he needs is someone else’s material.

Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD is one of the best books I’ve ever read. But to get me to read it again, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush would have to waterboard me, beat me, tie me to a chair and shine bright lights in my eyes. The thought of delving in that beautiful, horrifying nightmare world again makes me want to swear of reading books forever.

However, I’m pleased to note that it just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Surprisingly, it looks like Oprah had it in her book club. That’s one messed up book club, in my honest opinion. I could never imagine my mom getting the first chapter, much less the millions of women around the country who delve into Oprah’s reading list.

From MSNBC:

Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said President Bush was horrified by the rampage and offered his prayers to the victims and the people of Virginia.

“The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed,” Perino said.

So, why do they feel the need to invoke the Second Amendment in regards to something like this? It’s pretty puzzling. Is the Republican base so insane that denouncing a shooter who just killed 31 people has to be qualified with support for gun ownership?

Why not qualify every murder the same way: “I’m sorry your daughter was killed by a stray bullet, but I support the right to bear arms.”

It’s sad to say, but the Bush administration can even screw up attempts at offering condolences to victims of a killing spree.

A quote from recent Vonnegut:

“But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

Read more here.

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. He was 84, yet I find myself filled with a strange saddness. It’s been years since I last read his work, but his writing had a profound impact on me. “Slaughterhouse Five,” which tells the story of a man come unstuck from time and forced to relive the events of his life in random order, is perhaps one of the greatest comments on post-war America. More memoir than novel, it gets to the core of how hopeless our lives have become.

Between the news that the Bush administration has systematically turned the federal bureaucracy into a Republican patronage operation, to the endless drip-drip-drip of war news (more Americans killed by IED’s, a bomb in the Iraqi Parliament), it’s hard not to feel like we ourselves have become unstuck in time, forced into some terrible nightmare where everything we took for granted about our country is gone.

Vonnegut practically foretold the world we’re living in, possibly even more so than George Orwell. He was among the great 20th Century writers, more important than elitist blowhards like Gore Vidal and Tom Wolfe, and more humane than Norman Mailer. As withdrawn as he was from the media scene in recent years, I will miss the occasional essay or interview that would illuminate current events so vividly.

We’ve lost something great, here, and it’s sad to say that he has no true successor.

Farewell, Mr. Vonnegut.

I finally finished up Charles Stross’ ACCELERANDO late last week. Although it was filled with some amazing ideas, I’m afraid I can’t endorse it as a coherent novel. I’m still not quite sure what I read, or what the point of the book was. Something vaguely to do with post humans threatening organic life in the universe, possibly even effecting the universe on a subatomic level.

Still, you can’t beat ideas like a mission to find an extraterrestrial internet, accessible from a router in orbit around a brown dwarf star, or lawsuits used as a denial of service attack to businesses, or a man uploading a copy of his consciousness into a flock of artificial pigeons.

Next up: THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE by Max Brooks. Light reading, to say the least.

So, GRINDHOUSE, the double-bill by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, came in fourth place this weekend and has been officially declared a bomb. I can’t say this doesn’t surprise me, but Tina and I managed to go see it this weekend, and I have to say that as post-modern commentary on b-grade cinema goes, Grindhouse is a roaring success. I haven’t had that much fun at a movie in a long, long time, and I have to say that the themes of feminism and empowerment found in both Rodriguez’s PLANET TERROR and Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF were a very nice reminder of how “bad” movies once celebrated female power, quite unlike the grueling horror films of present day. It’s too smart and weird to ever gain a mass audience, but if you have an appreciation for post modern cinema, then you should go see this in the theatre while you can.

PLANET TERROR is a zombie film starring Rose McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez (”Rico” on SIX FEET UNDER) — in many ways it’s an echo of the early films of John Carpenter, or the more raucous work of Roger Corman. The story is simple — zombies come to small town Texas, and a Go-Go dancer and her ex-boyfriend, a mysterious man with a big truck, lead the fight against the monsters. In many ways, it reminds me of the b-classic NIGHT OF THE COMET, except with the violence amped up to impossible levels.

As a director, Robert Rodriguez has an inspiring sense of independence, shooting all his films — even the hit childrens’ series, SPY KIDS — in his own Austin studios. However, I’ve found his work to be largely uneven — for every SIN CITY, he also has a FACULTY or THE ADVENTURES OF SHARK GIRL AND LAVA BOY to throw up as a counterpoint. Still, PLANET TERROR is exciting in a way that his films rarely are. By dispensing with the gloss of his previous work, the naturalistic approach (which includes exploding heads full of red Kero syrup) takes him out of the cold confines of slick CGI and into a place where great characters get to carry the film.

DEATH PROOF, Quentin Tarantion’s ode to the “Road Demon” genre, is a harder movie to talk about. The first two thirds of the film are spent in the company of two different sets of female victims stalked by a psychopathic serial killer named “Stuntman Mike,” who is played with stunning bravado by Kurt Russell in his “John Travolta in PULP FICTION” moment. The women hold endless conversations about their lives, conversations that lull the audience into a state of boredom, or as in my case, squirming, “gotta get out of the theatre” boredom. However, there is a point in the film where everything changes — where you realize that the first two acts were set-up for an amazing finale. I won’t tell you what it is, just that the last thirty minutes of DEATH PROOF are sublime. You still have to sit through the first hour, but trust me, it’s worth it.

In the end, there’s something appealing about contemporary filmmakers actually dispensing with the usual “references” and making films that employ the cinematic tools and conventions of a dead genre. By resurrecting the grindhouse film, they’re sending a pretty clear message about modern cinema — chiefly, that it sucks. And looking at what passes as horror these days — fictional snuff films that glorify torture and sadism, where all the protagonists ultimately die — we forget that horror films used to be about triumph over fear. That the great horror films of the 70’s and 80’s had improbable characters standing up to the monsters with a wink and gallons of fake, fake blood and winning.