SELF-PROMOTION: Nearly two years after I moved to Baltimore, I've finally written a piece for the hometown paper: an op-ed in today's Sun about the politics of animation. Specifically: the libertarianism of South Park, the populism of King of the Hill, and the less precisely defined anti-authoritarianism of The Simpsons.

It's a tricky territory to cover in less than 800 words, especially considering the danger of inappropriately projecting your own views onto what you're watching. I didn't want to end up like National Review's Jonah Goldberg, who once singled out Homer Simpson's defense of the Second Amendment ("If I didn't have this gun, the king of England could just walk in here anytime he wants and start shoving you around") as evidence that the series is "the only sitcom in memory to treat gun control with any fairness." Out of context, that might sound credible. In context, the writers were clearly trying to make Homer look like an ass.

On the other hand, a few years later the show really did mock gun control, during one of its Halloween episodes. I guess one writer likes guns and another one doesn't.

And hey -- looks like they just captured Saddam Hussein. This is good news, even to an antiwar type like me. Not just because the old tyrant might actually get what's coming to him, but because it'll allow a real-world test for the oft-stated proposition that with Saddam gone, the resistance will falter. This may require us pundit types to stop talking out of our asses and actually take some new data into account, but I figure that's a small price to pay.

posted by Jesse 12:57 PM

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MOVIE-LIST SEASON: When the critics started to announce their top ten movie lists last December, I realized I hadn't seen enough of the past year's pictures to produce a credible list of my own. So instead I vaulted back a decade, and listed my favorite films of 1992. That was fun, so I kept skipping backwards: to 1982, to 1972, and to 1962. And now, 12 months later, I'm going to start all over again.

Without further ado, I give you the top ten movies of 1993:

1. Short Cuts
Directed by Robert Altman
Written by Altman and Frank Barhydt, from stories by Raymond Carver

Ever see Magnolia? This is the original.

2. Groundhog Day
Directed by Harold Ramis
Written by Ramis and Danny Rubin

Buddha's favorite romantic comedy.

3. A Perfect World
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by John Lee Hancock

The joke goes that this is the movie that proved Eastwood's standing as a great director, because he actually managed to elicit a good performance from Kevin Costner. After The Outlaw Josey Wales, it's my favorite of Eastwood's films.

4. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
Directed by François Girard
Written by Girard, Don McKellar, and Nick McKinney

So much better than a conventional biopic.

5. Latcho Drom
Written and Directed by Tony Gatlif

A celebration of Gypsy music and culture. Frequently described as a documentary, but since the entire thing was scripted and staged it might be better to regard it as a hundred-minute music video.

6. Fearless
Directed by Peter Weir
Written by Rafael Yglesias, from his novel

Someone once told me he saw this movie on an airplane. I don't believe him.

7. Manhattan Murder Mystery
Directed by Woody Allen
Written by Allen and Marshall Brickman

Proof that Woody was capable of being laugh-out-loud funny as late as the 1990s.

8. Dottie Gets Spanked
Written and Directed by Todd Haynes

A strange and smart short about childhood, homosexuality, and television.

9. The Bed You Sleep In
Written and Directed by Jon Jost

Brings intelligence and ambiguity to a topic that rarely fares well on film. Can't tell you what that topic is, though; that would be a spoiler.

10. True Romance
Directed by Tony Scott
Written by Quentin Tarantino

Tony Scott probably wasn't the right director for this, but Tarantino's charmingly boyish script still manages to shine through.

Honorable mention:

11. Red Rock West (John Dahl)
12. Mad Dog and Glory (John McNaughton)
13. The Scent of Green Papaya (Tran Anh Hung)
14. The Wrong Trousers (Nick Park)
15. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Ray Müller)
16. Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara)
17. White (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
18. High Lonesome (Rachel Liebling)
19. The Junky's Christmas (Nick Donkin, Melodie McDaniel)
20. In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan)

posted by Jesse 12:26 AM

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COVER ME: Fellow blogger Jim Henley is collecting lists of great musical covers. I don't know if I can answer his call properly, in part because I'm not sure where the boundary lies between covering someone else's song and simply performing a standard. Still, here's a baker's dozen of my favorites -- not a top 13, but a coven of tunes that might form the core of a longer list, if I had the time and inclination to write one:

The Blind Boys of Alabama: "Amazing Grace" (they sing it to the melody of "House of the Rising Sun")

Ray Charles: "Ring of Fire" (Johnny Cash goes R&B)

Miles Davis: "Someday My Prince Will Come" (turns out there was a great jazz song in there waiting to come out)

Bob Dylan: "A Satisfied Mind" (somewhere beyond country, gospel, and rock)

Merle Haggard: "Brain Cloudy Blues" (if the Bob Wills band is playing behind you, are you covering Wills or channeling him?)

Slim Harpo: "Folsom Prison Blues" (Johnny Cash goes R&B, again)

Jason & The Scorchers: "Candy Kisses" (country crooner George Morgan learns to slamdance)

Los Lobos: "Down Where the Drunkards Roll" (the best track on the Richard Thompson tribute Beat the Retreat)

Van Morrison & The Chieftains: "Raglan Road" (Patrick Kavanagh, double the soul)

Wilson Pickett: "Sugar Sugar" (this is what the Archies would sound like if Archie weren't a virgin)

Charlie Rich: "Hey Good Lookin'" (Hank Williams gets da funk)

They Might Be Giants: "Why Does the Sun Shine?" (a faithful homage to a children's educational record)

Tom Waits: "Heigh Ho" (Snow White's little friends are in hell)

Finally, an honorable mention of sorts goes to Brave Combo for "Tubular Jugs." I don't know whether to think of this as a cover version or a full-fledged original song, but the sheer inspired madness required to combine "Tubular Bells" with "Little Brown Jug" deserves our respect, our love, and our fear.

posted by Jesse 4:28 PM

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SELF-PROMOTION: My latest column for the Reason website is an election riff.

Meanwhile, January's print edition of Reason has just been published. It includes a piece I did on some artist-pranksters who make fake postage stamps, as well as a short squib on the Boston FBI scandal.

That issue isn't online yet. But the December issue is, which means those of you who don't do paper can now read my interview with Bob Barr, my profile of Robert Anton Wilson, and a short report dubbed "A Bolshie Born Every Minute."

Finally: I know I've already mentioned the new edition of Polyphony, which includes my tale "A Short History of the Roosterville Poetry Massacre." But I just got my contributor's copies yesterday, so I figured I'd go ahead and mention it again. SF Revu describes my effort as "easily the best story in this anthology," so either I did good or everyone else did bad, or else the reviewer just has screwy taste.

posted by Jesse 6:14 PM

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ETHIOPIAN PROVERB: "When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts."

(quoted in James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, 1990)

posted by Jesse 3:02 PM

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PERSONAL NOTE: As of yesterday, I am a married man.

Do not expect more blogging from me this week.

posted by Jesse 11:36 AM

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SELF-PROMOTION: On the Reason site today, I weigh in on the alleged Osama-Saddam alliance.

Also, the rest of the November Reason is now online, which means anyone desperately interested in reading virtualized versions of my quickie squibs on libraries and the Handschu guidelines can now do so.

posted by Jesse 4:52 PM

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IMITATION FITNESS BLOG ITEM: The other day I ate at Popeye's. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, a great big buttery biscuit. Mmmmmmmmm.

(With apologies to Jim Henley.)

posted by Jesse 12:35 PM

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SUNDAY'S SET OF MOVIE REVIEWS:

Can't Stop the Music (Nancy Walker, 1980): I vividly remember the first few seconds of January 1, 1980. Just nine years old, I had stayed up to watch my first changeover of decades. There on TV, right after the big ball had dropped in Times Square, the host was exultantly proclaiming the first words of the new year: "And now here's a band I know we'll be hearing a lot from in the eighties -- the Village People!" It took me a few years to recognize this as funny.

If the numeric seventies ended with a disco song at midnight, when did "the seventies" as an era come to a close? Mostly over the course of 1979, as an Iranian revolution, a resurgent gas crisis, a couple of San Francisco assassinations, and the massacre at Jonestown forced a sharp swing in the country's mood. Or, perhaps, on Election Day 1980, as Ronald Reagan rode that new spirit into power. But the key moment arguably arrived midway through 1980, when a pseudo-biopic about the Village People -- originally to be titled Discoland, but the producers realized at the last minute that disco's day was waning -- failed spectacularly at the box office, washing away the starring band's popularity in the process. This quintessentially 1970s picture was released in the first year of the subsequent decade, and its characters periodically announce "it's the eighties" when they want to defend their behavior or criticize someone else's. But the real sign that the eighties had begun was the public's unwillingness to watch their movie.

Two decades later, one production number from Can't Stop the Music -- the "Y.M.C.A." sequence -- awaits your rediscovery. It's a deeply hilarious piece of filmmaking, something Busby Berkeley might have directed if he were under the influence of both poppers and mushrooms and was simultaneously engaged in an illicitly carnal act. The rest of the picture is mostly disposable, but there are some unexpected bright points: notably the leatherman character's audition for the group, in which he performs "Oh, Danny Boy." The lyrics seem to take on new meaning when sung by a hairy gay biker wearing S&M gear.

No, this isn't a good movie. But you haven't really lived until you've seen it. And surely it is Steve Guttenberg's finest film.

Smokey and the Bandit (Hal Needham, 1977): "Banditry is freedom, but in a peasant society few can be free. Most are shackled by the double chains of lordship and labour, the one reinforcing the other. For what makes peasants the victims of authority and coercion is not so much their economic vulnerability -- they are indeed as often as not virtually self-sufficient -- as their immobility. Their roots are in the land and the homestead, and there they must stay like trees, or rather like sea-anemones or other sessile aquatic animals which must settle down after a period of youthful mobility....

"However, there are always groups whose social position gives them the necessary freedom of action. The most important of them is the age-group of male youth between puberty and marriage, i.e. before the weight of full family responsibilities has begun to bend men's backs....Nevertheless, there is another category of potential bandits...the men who are unwilling to accept the meek and passive social role of the subject peasant; the stiff-necked and recalcitrant, the individual rebels. They are, in the classic peasant phrase, the 'men who make themselves respected.'...

"These are the men who establish their right to be respected against all comers, including other peasants, by standing up and fighting -- and in so doing automatically usurp the social role of their 'betters' who, as in the classic medieval ranking system, have the monopoly of fighting....They may also become the kind of outlaws about whom men sing ballads: champions, heroes and avengers."

(Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits, fourth edition, 2000, pp. 34–6, 39–41)

Keep your foot hard on the pedal, son, never mind them brakes
Let it all hang out 'cause we got a run to make
The boys are thirsty in Atlanta
And there's beer in Texarcana
And we'll bring it back no matter what it takes

East bound and down, loaded up and truckin'
We're gonna do what they say can't be done.
We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there.
I'm east bound, just watch ol' Bandit run.

Ol' Smokey's got them ears on, and he's hot on your trail.
He ain't gonna rest 'til you're in jail
So you got to dodge 'im and you got to duck 'im
You got to keep that diesel truckin'
Just put that hammer down and give it hell

("East Bound and Down," traditional ballad, southern U.S., late twentieth century; popularly attributed to the Bandit's legendary accomplice, known variously as "Cledus Snow," "The Snowman," and "Jerry Reed")

posted by Jesse 5:39 PM

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