Finally, an update
Some of my friends have reminded me that I haven’t blogged in awhile, so here I am.
I’m pretty depressed by the election. Longtime readers may recall my depression during the primaries — as well as my conviction that my guy (Obama) would lose. He didn’t! Huzzah! But now we’re going into the general and the inevitable smear campaign has begun. I used to like John McCain, but now I don’t. He’s become a complete tool, and his incompetence and bad judgment has been on full display, despite the “liberal” media looking the other way.
Apparently the only way he can win is to make everyone think Obama is unacceptable. That means smears — racial, political, even religious. There’s a rumor going around evangelical circles that Obama is the Anti-Christ. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up. Longtime observers of the evangelical movement may recall that there was a time when Mikhail Gorbachev and Saddam Hussein were both the Anti-Christ in the 1980′s and the early 1990′s respectively. The world didn’t end then, and it’s not going to end now. But if it was going to end, I’d say John McCain’s proposed war with Russia would be a good place to start.
If Obama reveals a high school Advanced Dungeons and Dragons habit, we’re all going to be sunk.
On the home front, the girls are getting bigger, but the potty-training is not coming along as well as we liked. Apparently some kids can be resistant to potty-training. It doesn’t surprise me that mine are.
I’ve seen a total of four movies this summer: Indiana Jones, Incredible Hulk, Iron Man and Batman. That’s more than all of 2007. They’re actually letting me out of the house, again. My favorite of the four, shockingly, was Incredible Hulk. Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner is a real guy struggling with his demons — there may be three big action set-pieces in the Hulk sequel, but the meat of the film is with Norton’s struggles with the monster inside him.
Although I liked The Dark Knight, I wasn’t as blown away by it as many of my friends. Heath Ledger was good, but I think he’s suffering from the inevitable halo effect of tragedy. Brenden Lee’s performance in The Crow experienced similar support.
The Dark Knight somehow managed to take the creepy villains of the torture porn genre (i.e. Saw, Hostel, etc.) and apply that archetype to the Joker. This means he’s not a real character so much as an inexplicable force for terror. Granted, it’s watered down, but I was troubled by the amount of marketing dollars spent trying to get children to the theater. The Dark Knight is a dark (I know, haha) film geared towards adults. There’s no good reason for them to have made action figures and sold them at Walmart. If you ask me, the movie should have been rated “R.” My girls would have nightmares for months if they even saw a photograph of the Joker. Being a parent has definitely sensitized me to the sale of violence to children.
On the music front, I’ve bought a number of great records. Throw Me The Statue’s Moonbeams is a phenomenal pop record, and I’ve grown extremely enamored of Bowerbirds’ Hymns for a Dark Horse, which is in the “Americana” genre of indie rock occupied by such favorites of mine as Andrew Bird and Joanna Newsom. Bird’s Soldier On EP is definitely worth a few hundred listens. The addition of American and European folk traditions to indie rock has been an incredible breath of fresh air. Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that guys like Will Oldham and John Darnielle have been doing this for years.
I’ll leave you now with a live performance of Bowerbirds performing “Dark Horse,” which is available on Hymns for a Dark Horse:
By Todd, August 17, 2008 @ 6:59 pm
Thanks for the update, Jeff. I was getting worried!