Well, that new podcast I mentioned last week is now one step closer. Today, I ordered about $200 in audio recording gear.

Yes, we’re serious. More later.

Tina and I are currently finishing plans for a new joint project that we’ll announce soon. It’s been a while since the awkwardly named RF Seamonsters podcast sputtered out, but that collaboration was largely fueled by our mutual excitement and anxiety about parenthood. Once the kids came, it was difficult to maintain our previous chemistry. Several attempts to restart it failed. Part of the problem was that the RF Seamonsters podcast was started on a lark. It wasn’t planned so much as a spontaneous attempt to do a podcast — and once its original purpose ended, there was really no reason to go through the motions.

This new project is better planned, and we’re planning on building a more professional setup. More later.

I am pretty ambivalent about the issue of illegal immigration. I have friends and family who live in the south and southwestern states that bare the brunt of it, but in D.C. my interactions with illegal immigrants have largely been postive. In general, I don’t buy into the crushing hysteria that these people are going to bring about the end of the union — Latin American immigrants have brought a lot to U.S., most of it positive. Horror stories about Salvadoran street gangs aren’t enough to convince me that these are bad people.

Still, I’m also not a firm believer in the hard left position that illegal immigration should be encoruaged. Any son of the working class can tell you that cheap labor depresses wages, making life difficult for blue collar people. There was a time when the construction trade was a good way to make middle class living, but the influx of undocumented workers has depressed wages to the point where unskilled high school graduates have seen their wage potential drop significantly. This is just another way for employers to abuse workers and pay them next to nothing. I think people should have the opportunity to come to America, but not when they become low wage workers with no hope of achieving the American middle class.

Trapper John at DailyKos has a pretty convincing progressive argument against the immigration bill. Read it here.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about the girls.

They’re now almost two. Rachel is a tank, bulldozing her way through life. She climbs anything that’s taller than she is — the more challenging, the better. We have to watch her closely now, for fear that she’ll kill herself. She’s so small, so petite compared to her sister, but also incredibly strong and determined. Whenever we come back from Target with supplies, she grabs the biggest bag she can find and drags it down the hall to the apartment. She loves to help.

Anya is more complicated. Although her sister is smart, Anya is another league of awareness and language ability. She asks what everything is, even things she already knows, and plays with the words we give back until she’s mastered them. We have this joke when I’m changing her, when I sing the theme to “Elmo’s World,” but substitute “Elmo” with “Daddy.” She thinks this is terribly wrong and funny, exploding with laugher while correcting me: “No, Elmo’s World!” There were a few weeks there when she didn’t want anything to do with me, but that song has been a breakthrough. Now she brings me books and insists that I read them over and over. And she calls for me when she’s in the bath.

Her sister used to call for me. Now she’s more interested in climbing.

I never thought during those hard early months, that I would soon find myself — now more or less free of that intense responsibility — striving to gain my daughters’ attention, and yet, here I am, thinking up games I can play with them, new books to read. I think I understand my father more clearly, now — and how much like him I am. I want to spend time with my children, and I’m saddened when they brush me off for other things. My dad struggled to get me to do things with him, but he always tried to engage me in the things he liked, never what I was interested in. So compulsory games of “catch” ended in frustration, him throwing the ball at me, as did all those Sunday mornings he woke me up to help him work on his car, and furiously sent me back inside after I was clearly bored.

But I’m trying to reach out to the girls through their interests. I understand that they are their own people, and to have a good relationship with them means finding common ground, something we both like, or even, something only they like. So I sit with them and watch Dora the Explorer, and read the same books about animals over and over again, because it clearly makes them happy and it helps forge my relationship with them. Because I’m their father, not their mother — I didn’t carry them, I don’t that connection. Our relationship is not automatic, particularly considering the complexity and strength of the twin bond, or the special mother-daughter bond.

Love for fathers must be earned. That’s the lesson my dad never quite got, and the reason why I never quite loved him. I can’t let myself make the same mistake with my girls.

Years ago, I remember going into the University of Maryland book store and religiously picking up PUNK PLANET, which in those days was the kind of newsprint zine that turned your hands a charcoal gray. I’d sit in my old Chevy Malibu station wagon in the College Park metro parking lot and read PUNK PLANET while I waited for Tina to get off work. I was crushed when they stopped carrying PP, and desperately sought out another store that carried it.

I also remember sitting in my boss’ office, chatting with editor Dave Sinker on the PUNK PLANET chat room, while nervously hoping that she wouldn’t walk in to find me on her computer. I was so surprised that he knew about RESTAURANT FUEL (the ‘zine, not the blog), and that he actually liked it! I was a huge fan of PUNK PLANET, and that meant a lot to me.

Over the years, PUNK PLANET grew to be a thick magazine full of great independent reporting, interviews and reviews. I can’t say that I read it as often as it should have, but I’m proud to say that PP reviewed every record, ‘zine and comic book I ever produced. Its death more or less signifies the inevitable demise of the ‘zine movement of which I was a part. An era really has come to an end, never to return.

One forgets in the age of the internet just how difficult it was to get information on independent music, ‘zines, books and comics. PUNK PLANET was as valuable for its advertisements as it was for its actual content. I remember going through all the ads, picking out records I thought sounded good and mailing off checks direct to the record labels in the hopes of finding something I liked. This was before online record stores, when the only way you might hear a record was sending off an order cold from an advertisment in a magazine, or being lucky enough to see a band live. PUNK PLANET was a place to get information about all kinds of indie media.

Nowadays, we have the internet. In 1996, PUNK PLANET was almost all we had. Even though I haven’t read it regularly in awhile, I’m definitely going to miss it.

The following records are currently in heavy rotation on my iPod:

1) The Clash, “London Calling”
2) The National, “Boxer”
3) Of Montreal, “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?”
4) Bauhaus, “Mask”
5) The Thermals, “The Body, The Blood, The Machine”

The following podcasts are high priority listens:

1) Gamespot: On the Hotspot
2) This American Life
3) 1up Yours

So, I just finished the extraordinary novel SPIN by Robert Charles Wilson. It seems now that every Christmas I’m innundated with a supply of Borders gift cards, which I use to buy about a dozen or so books. SPIN was near the top of the stack, but it took me quite a long time to get to it.

“Breathtaking,” says the blurb from Publisher’s Weekly on the cover. I have to agree. I step away with a sense of satisfaction I haven’t gotten from a novel in quite awhile, and a genuine sadness for parting ways with its engaging characters.

SPIN is a story of three children — Tyler, the narrator, and Jason and Diane, twin siblings — and the effect on their lives of a cosmic event called “Spin.” On one cold winter night, the three are out stargazing when the stars suddenly go out and the sky turns black. The Earth is encased within a membrane that slows the passage of time, with millions of years in the universe passing on Earth within minutes. As the three age and find their lives linked to cosmic forces greater than themselves, it becomes apparent that someday soon the sun will die, as will all life on Earth.

To say more will spoil the novel, but readers looking for a great hard science fiction novel about human relationships should look no further. Permeated with sadness and longing, SPIN is a remarkable read. I’m probably going to put reading aside for the next few weeks until the release of the final HARRY POTTER novel. It would be unfair to compare lesser works to this beautiful book.

How can I put this politely?

I just tried to sit through David (DEADWOOD) Milch’s new opus, JOHN FROM CINCINNATI. It is, I’m sorry to say, complete ass.

I was a fan of DEADWOOD’S first year, but the show declined steadily in years two and three, until it was barely recognizable self-parody. JOHN FROM CINCINNATI, like later-era DEADWOOD is an incomprehensible bore. Three generations of surfers, a traveling soothsayer, a “Lawyer for the surf community,” and Luke Perry may sound great on paper, but in practice it’s just a mess.

JOHN was added to the DVR subscription a week ago, and 13 minutes after starting the premiere, I cancelled that subscription.

Everything is about Iraq, even when it’s not.

Last night, I finally got around to watching FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, which deals with the famous flag raising on Iwo Jima (both of them, actually), and the effects that moment had on the men who were there. Although Clint Eastwood isn’t exactly my idea of a great director, I have to say I came away impressed by what is in truth an anti-war film, one that lingers on the senseless cruelty of conflict and the losses — psychological and moral — suffered by war’s participants. It also deals quite significantly with the use of propaganda to engender public support, and provides one of the only unvarnished, unsentimental portrayals of World War II America you’ll ever see on film.

I haven’t even gotten to the racial subtext of the film, the constant indignities foisted upon Ira Hayes, the Native American “hero” who was tormented by Iwo Jima until his death by “exposure” a few years after the war. Some may remember Hayes as the subject of the Johnny Cash antiwar classic, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” and his experiences are emphasized heavily in the film.

This film is most certainly not the overly sentimental SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, which fictionalized and romanticized the war for a generation of Americans, myself included, who then went on to relive in a thousand times over in video games like MEDAL OF HONOR and CALL OF DUTY. RYAN’s main conceit is that the men of World War II were brave and noble heroes, ordinary men called to extraordinary acts by fate. They suffer, yes, but they were noble and good. FLAGS OF OUR FATHER takes a different tact — these were men traumatized by a brutal experience bigger than themselves. They sacrificed themselves for their friends, and did what they did on the battlefield to survive and help their friends live. And yet after that survival, they were tortured by guilt for having gotten off that mountain of rock in the Pacific, when deep down they felt they should have died there, too.

Although Eastwood quite accurately depicts the deep racial hatred that drove combat on Iwo Jima, both on the American and Japanese side, unlike Spielberg’s RYAN, the Japanese are more than just stock villains. As the camera lingers on their dead young faces, the dead Japanese soldiers, so fanatical and brutal moments before, also seem tragically human. They are also victims of the war.

I can’t wait to see the companion piece, Eastwood’s LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, which tells the story of the same battle from the Japanese perspective. I have no doubt that it will tell the same story.

“Don’t worry, he’s not that desperate …”

I have to say, something this funny and postmodern would never have existed before YouTube. There’s so much irony and stupidity in re-subtitling and re-conceptualizing the great German film “DOWNFALL,” which chronicles Hitler’s last days into a tale of Hitler being banned from XBOX Live.

I have to warn you, if you’re not a gamer you probably won’t get most of the jokes, or the subtext that the cheaters, smactalkers, homophobes, racists and sociopaths on XBOX Live have much in common with Hitler.

If you are, you’ll probably think this his hilariously inappropriate.