Wired Mesh

No, He Was More of a King Type

My old-school efforts at careful election monitoring have, so far, been a failure: I completely missed the Edwards speech last night, and the Clinton chat on Monday. No matter. Tonight I plan to settle on my couch with some Chinese takeout and watch Kerry do whatever it is he can do with that chin of his. Afterwards, I'll toss in a DVD of the original "Manchurian Candidate" to take the edge off all that hopeful-talk. Feel free to stop by the batchpad if you're hankering for some convention-watching company.

In lieu of watching any actual Boston speeches, I've been reading William Saletan's convention diary, filled with sharp observations like this one:

Sadly, the next speaker, the Rev. David Alston, put God back to, er, conventional use. Alston shared truly grave moments with Kerry on their swift boat in Vietnam. But his tribute to Skipper Kerry sounded more like a bad novel: "I can still see him now, standing in the doorway of the powder house, firing his M-16, shouting orders through the smoke and chaos." Then Alston brought the Man Upstairs into it: "I stand before you only because Almighty God saw our boat safely through those rivers of death by giving us a brave, wise, and decisive leader named John Kerry."

Hey, I don't begrudge any soldier the right to believe that God is watching over him. But in Alston's and Kerry's faith, the last person God sent to save people was already God. And he wasn't running for president.

Not the One We Thought

In the midst of an Iraq situation that only gets more muddled each day, Nicholas Kristof finds a sliver of clarity in the life -- and death -- of one soldier:

It also seems that the heroism originally attributed to Private Lynch may actually have been Sergeant Walters's. Iraqi radio intercepts had described a blond U.S. soldier fighting tenaciously, and the Army this year awarded him a posthumous Silver Star in implicit acknowledgment that he was probably that soldier.

The citation reads: "His actions and selfless courage under fire resulted in saving lives of several other members of the convoy" - perhaps including Private Lynch. His cover fire allowed fellow soldiers to escape, while he remained alone in a hostile city; when he ran out of ammunition, he ran but was captured. So it looks as if the paramount hero of that day was not the one we thought, but rather a soldier who died anonymously.

Run, Ricky, Run Away

I've gotten used to having my gut ripped out by the Miami Dolphins each December, but Christmas seems to have arrived early this year. Nothing quite like turning on the TV on a Sunday afternoon and learning that your beloved team's star running back has retired at 27. I've endured a lot as a Dolphins fan: disasterous fourth-quarter collapses, blowout playoff losses in snowstorms, Dan Marino and Don Shula (the best player-coach combo in NFL history, and nobody's going to convince me otherwise) rode out of Dade County by some balding video salesman. But Ricky Williams quitting a week before training camp? I found myself staring at ESPN yesterday, wanting to laugh: this has got to be some kind of a joke, right?

It's strange: although his retirement means the end of the season before the first kickoff, means that Jay Fiedler and A. J. Feeley (A. J. Feeley!) are now our chief offensive weapons, means that I'll need to watch games with a flask on hand, I still can't quite begrudge Ricky his decision. He wants out, feels like football keeps him from experiencing his own life. "I was never strong enough to not play football," he told the Miami Herald, "but I'm strong enough now." That makes a weird kind of sense to me. If in four years, I find that writing is keeping me from engaging the world, has become focused on the twin demons of fame and fortune, then you'd better offer me a better reason to keep going than not wanting to bum out my fans.

Betraying teammates is a bigger issue, and on that level, Ricky's choice feels really lousy, deeply selfish. But I keep coming back to the sneaking suspicion that the record of a football team is a smaller deal than the peace of a conflicted man. Not that such a suspicion will make watching this season any less painful, but hey.

I Like This Guy

Here is the thrilling terror of finding that a writer has somehow organized your last six months in three paragraphs:

"I am never satisfied with just one thing. There is one thing and then another. My life is occupied by worry after worry. The business of living complicated with projects, principles, financial matters, bills, taxes, songs to write, stories to edit, friends to call, family to consider in prayer, letters, lottery tickets, garbage days, the landlord’s voice mail, work, doctors, astrologers, bike messengers, exercise, eating, drinking, book design, indigestion, parking tickets.

"These things have set themselves on me like a big denim jacket. I am heavy with the signs of death. I am heavy with the work of the world that is death. I am not going to make it to the end. I have been put aside by the great big arm of God. He has gone somewhere else, in a different country, in a different language. I have walked all over the state, town to town, city to city, in search of meaning. The empty logging camps, the polluted rivers, the vacant parking lots, the burned out buildings, the bridges collapsed, the dysfunctional families, the potholes, the flat tires, the city taxes.

"Then there is the devil, with his convincing opinions, his euphemisms, his friendly chatter, his considerable presence. When all else has left you, he is waiting: patient, quiet, informed, good looking, articulate. I like this guy. He looks like me. He talks like me. We agree on everything. We eat the same foods. We watch the same movies. We think the same thoughts. We are exactly the same person."

-- Sufjan Stevens

The Greatest Lost Tracks of All Time

After two months of tinkering, I'm finally satisfied with my summer music mix. (It twice violates the cardinal rule of mixtapes, allowing multiple songs by Wilco and Sufjan, but I simply don't care.) And so I offer "Some Words Come Easy: Mesh's Summer Mix 2004" in hopes that you too can download these tracks, burn them to a CD, and we can sit on our respective porches, sipping bourbon, thinking of each other.

01 Sufjan Stevens – For the Widows in Paradise, For The Fatherless in Ypsilanti
02 The Shins – New Slang
03 Neutral Milk Hotel – The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1
04 John Cale – Paris 1919
05 The Magnetic Fields – I Thought You Were My Boyfriend
06 Modest Mouse – Float On
07 Franz Ferdinand – 40’
08 Santa Esmerelda – Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
09 Edwin Starr – Agent Double-O-Soul
10 The New Pornographers – The Body Says No
11 The Mountain Goats – Palmcorder Yajna
12 Wilco – The Late Greats
13 The Byrds – My Back Pages
14 Jackson Browne – Late for the Sky
15 Sufjan Stevens – Romulus
16 Wilco – Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard
17 Bonnie “Prince” Billie – Hard Life
18 Iron & Wine – The Sea and the Rhythm

I'm 35 Years Old with Jim Morrison's Beer as a Shrine

I'm finally taking a stab at a bit of screenwriting, working on two projects -- one with Chris Marr, another with Bob DeMarco -- with disparate themes but a similar naturalistic, whimsical vibe. Think Jarmusch, Wes Anderson, D. G. Green and Ashby, only, you know, not as good. I've written half a scene, which is, though unimpressive, still half a scene more than I've ever written before. So that's a start.

My biggest obstacle is that, while I have a passable understanding of cinematic language and plot structure, I haven't the first clue about script terminology. To correct this, I've been poring over some screenplays available online. I've spent a few hours looking at Cameron Crowe's shooting script for Almost Famous, trying to let the language sink in, and I've been reminded what a disarmingly emotional film it is. Even on the page, with no images or soundtrack, it's remarkably affecting -- especially scenes with Elaine Miller or Lester Bangs, two figures of wisdom who can still be wounded. Lester's last speech ("the only true currency in this bankrupt world...") made me tear up, just reading it.

And there's at least one brilliant sequence that didn't even make it into the DVD's deleted scenes, so far as I can recall; it may not have even been shot.

It happens right after William's Rolling Stone story is rejected as false by the fact checkers, and he's left alone in the boardroom. In the shooting script, however, he's not completely alone: David Felton, the comic-relief assistant editor eventually played by Rainn Wilson, stays behind with him, and delivers a pep talk:

William sits there, as only David Felton stay behind, brandishing his cigarette-holder. He sits down next to the kid.

FELTON
Powerful word. Strong. Final.

Fantastic stuff: Funny as hell, and weirdly sad. And, while I'm raving, here's a longer version of the lunch-table confrontation between lead guitarist Russell Hammond and "band-aid" Saphire:

RUSSELL
I'm not going to blame myself. I do make people happy. They just shouldn't get to know me... 'cause it appears to spoil everything.

SAPPHIRE
Let's not reminisce.

Them's Some Ugly Bootstraps, John

I think I've mentioned this on Josiah's blog, but at some point this week I shifted from being a nervous undecided voter to being a resolutely undecided voter. It feels like there's too much at stake in this election, on too many fronts, for me to make up my mind without giving George and John a chance to make their respective cases. Does Kerry have an original foreign-policy thought in his head? Has Bush realized how completely he's alienated most of the world and vast swaths of his own countrymen? I don't know, and I'd like to. So I'm going to handle this thing old school: I'll watch the conventions and debates, and see who comes across with even a whiff of statemanship.

That said, I had a conversation this morning that will factor into my decision, if only a tiny bit. I was breakfasting at 2 Squares with my boss, a perinatologist who I'll call "Dr. C," both of us dining on biscuits and some wicked Louisiana red gravy. We were plotting out advertising for a conference on premature birth and physician liability -- and that second topic reminded me of a question I'd been mulling.

"What do you think of John Edwards?" I asked. "I know he started his career as a trial lawyer, suing obstricians, and I was wonderi--"

Dr. C, as is his wont, didn't let me finish the question.

"I hate the bastard," he said, with the confident certainty of someone with a long-held dislike. He sounded like he was declaring his hatred for okra. "He makes out like he's a self-made man, a poor kid who pulled himself by his bootstraps. But he made his money suing every doctor he could get his hands on... I'm a liberal Republican, or an extremely conservative Democrat. There's not really a party for me. But when I heard Kerry picked Edwards, that was it for me."

Now, I know there are bigger issues in this election than medical malpractice. There's a war on: an ugly, misbegotten war, costing American and Iraqi lives, setting stunning precedents in our attitudes toward the world. I don't expect anybody's vote to be swayed by Dr. C's disgust toward a former lawyer -- actually, I'd be worried if it were.

But in some small way, Edwards' history sticks in my craw. Call me one of the five people in this country who really believes in the American medical establishment, at least the OB/GYNs. The docs I work for are heroes. They save lives, a lot of them. And suing obstetricians for birth defects, as Edwards has done, often, is like suing a firefighter because he was hosing down your house when it blew up. Bothers me.

The Four Horsemen's Pony Express

"If you wish to do something now that will help your unbelieving friends and family after the rapture, you need to add those persons [sic] email address to our database. Their names will be stored indefinitely and a letter will be sent out to each of them on the first Friday after the rapture."

I've been thinking about this offer for a good 10 minutes now, and what I can't figure out is how, exactly, the Rapture Letters Service is going to know that it's the first Friday after the rapture. Presumably, the person who runs the ministry is going to be sailing up into the clouds, clothes folded neatly in a pile, so human control is right out. My hope is that the guru of this service has written a program that automatically sends out these letters if he doesn't tell it not to every 24 hours, and that one of these days he's going to forget, or oversleep, and a lot of people will wonder why they hadn't seen anything on the news about this "millions and millions of people disappeared" thing.

And I haven't even started thinking about what the hundred-pound hailstones are going to do to Internet access. Encourage your loved ones to go wireless now, I say.

Link -- again -- from Long Pauses. I hope he doesn't mind.

Tracks by Delays Would Prove Especially Appropriate

I have a mounting backlog of newsletter production to address from my Coptix corner desk, a festering pile of dishes to wash, and equally unwieldly stacks of papers and clothing to rearrange before my new roommate -- Noel Weichbrodt, by the way -- moves in. In a perfect world, or at least one featuring a more productive edition of myself, I would have these projects finished by 7:00 this evening.

But of course I have managed to stumble across Fingertips Music, a web site that tracks free, legal MP3 downloads available across the Net: Wilco, Death Cab, The Innocence Mission, Joe Strummer. My day is shot.

Link from Long Pauses, another fine site.

In Fourteen Months I've Only Smiled Once and I Didn't Do It Consciously

Ron Rosenbaum offers up a column of middling Bob Dylan criticism -- and really, is there a current rock critic who isn't mediocre? Please, somebody, name me a consistently brilliant, original voice in that medium -- but he adds one fascinating idea: that "Up To Me" was written as a bittersweet farewell to Richard Fariña. Turns the whole song on its head, and has me listening to Blood on the Tracks again.

The Blessed Visions of St. Peter Parker

My Spider-Man 2 rave from this week's Pulse -- including those missing words covered up in print editions by Kirsten Dunst's elbow. I wrote this piece Monday afternoon with the Shins' sweet, miserable "New Slang" on repeat in my headphones, which may account for my extreme emphasis on Spidey's sorrows. (See, this is the kind of insider information about the Aaron Mesh writing process that you can only get from this online source! Hoo boy! Donate now!)

Spider-Man 2 is one of the finest spiritual films of the new century. And it’s the best movie of the year

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the July 7 issue of the Pulse

“The shaping of a golem,” Michael Chabon writes in his lovely, lyrical novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, “was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something – one poor, dumb, powerful thing – exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation.” But one of the many splendid joys of Spider-Man 2 is the insight (no doubt emerging in great part from Chabon’s contributions to the film’s script) that a superhero, as much as any river-creature summoned by Kabbalic intonation, must come to terms with its own feet of clay. “Hit me and I bleed,” Peter Parker earnestly informs his longtime paramour Mary Jane, and indeed he does, stretching his arms to the breaking point to stop a runaway e-train, suffering a vicious scar across his side, and collapsing into the arms of the passengers he’s saved in a pieta worthy of Michelangelo.

The messianic overtones are palpable, but what makes Spider-Man 2 one of the finest spiritual films of this young century, and the best movie of the year so far, is the flawlessly structured, devastatingly internal struggle of its hero, as he decides whether he’ll take this savior business seriously. Peter can’t escape the tension of his task: he’d rather be smooching Mary Jane than shooting webs at madmen, and by the film’s midway mark, he’s dumped his bright red tights in a back-alley trash can and is off to pursue a normal human life. This is The Last Temptation of Peter Parker, a desperate effort to reconcile an identity torn between the human and the nearly divine.

I’m afraid all of this makes Spider-Man 2 sound less like a comic-book movie than some wintry Ingmar Bergman angst-fest, but Sam Raimi has crafted a film that works on a bundle of levels, any one of which is far more entertaining than anything else at the multiplex. What’s amazing is how he’s managed to blend these layers – religious allegory, personal anxiety and kinetic action – into something compelling and wholehearted. The movie picks up two years after the first Spider-Man’s events, and Tobey Maguire’s Peter is still swinging about New York’s skyline while hiding his alter ego from those he loves. The film’s look is the same as well, still abuzz with brilliant, caricatured colors, but this time around Raimi summons a well of equally fiery emotions that the first movie only hinted at. Maguire whoops and hollers his way through skyscrapers, but he always seems on the verge of crying, pained by ugly memories of failure and the impossibility of fixing the past. And now he faces a villain with sorrow that eclipses his own: Alfred Molina’s Dr. Otto Octavius, who loses his wife and his dreams in a science experiment, then spends each minute losing his mind to the control of four robotic arms that have become fused to his body.

That the battles of these two broken men are exhilarating is, I suppose, to be expected; what’s startling is how Raimi counters the thrills with a steady flow of humor and pathos. The movie’s best sequence seamlessly merges this trio of elements: first Peter falls out the clouds, his web-shooting ability suddenly blocked by his fretfulness. Terrified by the prospect of leaping from another building, he does what anyone might: he takes the elevator down, still in his Spidey-suit, and the resultant encounter with a bewildered metrosexual stretches into side-splitting awkwardness. Before the laughter fades, Raimi cuts to a shot of the grounded hero limping home, slumping past a wall swathed with perfume posters featuring the face of Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane.

There are so many other scenes to praise in Spider-Man 2 – a horrifying surgery-gone-awry cribbed from the Evil Dead movies; a conversation between Peter and Mary Jane that’s a hilariously textbook study in miscommunication – and so many fine performances that it’s hard to single any element out. (Rosemay Harris and J. K. Simmons are again fine, and James Franco steals his scenes as Harry Osborne, the sort of ruffian that would have been described in another time as a young wastrel.) But amongst all these wonders is a perfectly integrated movie about the very idea of completeness – a simple, delightful thought about the reconciliation of Peter Parker’s dual nature. Here, masked in the disguise of a fantastical action flick, is a movie dedicated to its belief in the possibility of human integrity, a film that dares us to hope that we might someday reunite the people we long to be with the flawed creatures we actually are. Spider-Man 2 is a gesture of hope, a powerful thing that soars far above the habitual disappointments of other movies and our own lives. It beckons us to fly as well.

The Passion of the Dubya

So it seems that I will be joining local autuer Jim Burer tonight at Pisa Pizza around 6 p.m. to co-moderate a discussion of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. It's the first in a series of film forums called Analyze This.

"The discussion will be focused on analyzing Michael Moore's techniques as a filmmaker and the tools he uses to communicate his ideas," Jim writes. This can be safely interpreted as a plea from Jim and I not to show up with political pamphlets. Don't make your local alt-weekly film critic sad. We're going to talk about mise-en-scene and other cool French words. It'll be fun.

Whether you can make it or not, enjoy my Pulse review of the Bush flick.

Michael Moore’s anti-Bush protest rally will entertain many and convince no one

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the June 30 issue of the Pulse

If Michael Moore is to be believed – and if there were ever a tenuous way to begin a review, there it is – I am the ideal audience for Fahrenheit 9/11: a steadfastly undecided voter, registered for the fall elections without any party affiliation, and harboring dark thoughts about President Bush ever since his Justice Department started targeting genial old hippies. Moore has said that he hopes above all that his movie will unceremoniously usher out the Bush administration by mobilizing the politically ambivalent. So it is my sad responsibility to inform him that, while he has crafted an awfully pleasurable two hours of fear and loathing in the District, a whiz-bang Power Point alleging abuses of power in every direction, he has left this voter absolutely immobilized.

David Edelstein has called Fahrenheit 9/11 “the liberals' The Passion of the Christ,” and that’s exactly right: both movies are evangelical tracts that are destined to attract wild popularity and convert no one. Mel Gibson lost his message of grace in a mire of blood and pain, while Moore’s new movie starts out with a sharp satirical edge, only to collapse under radical conspiracy theories. And both films suffer from a more fundamental common flaw: they’re both documents of a long-dead mentality. Gibson is happily ensconced in the Middle Ages, and Moore still parties like it’s 1969, convinced that the best response to jihadism, war and political division is an old-fashioned anti-war demonstration.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is less rollicking than Moore’s Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine, and presumably more responsible in its fact-checking, but it ends up oddly less convincing. This is mainly because Moore is far too willing to engage in speculation over Bush’s personal ties to a trove of rich Saudis, particularly the bin Laden family. Note to Mike: if you’re going to mock George W. for doggedly pursuing a connection between Osama and Saddam (and there’s no shame in mocking that), it doesn’t help your case to argue for an even more unlikely connection between Osama and Bush. Moore’s obsession with a Bush-bin Laden link undermines what should be the best section of his movie, a sequence of stunning archival footage showing Bush, looking like a deer caught in some hideous headlights, reading the children’s book My Pet Goat to schoolchildren for a full seven minutes after he knows planes have crashed into the twin towers. This scene should stand on its own, portraying Bush as a lost clown of a Commander-in-Chief, but Moore has to clutter the scene with speculation that Bush was thinking of how to hide his contacts with the house of Saud. That’s not satire; it’s just silly.

Other more intentionally silly scenes work better, especially when Moore’s camera follows a pair of vapid Marine recruiters through a mall parking lot, or when he commandeers an ice cream truck to read the Patriot Act aloud to congressmen whom he suspects have overlooked its content. But toward its close, Fahrenheit 9/11 discovers real weight in the person of Lila Liscomb, a Flint, Michigan woman who travels to the White House after her soldier son is killed in Iraq. Her pain is undeniable, human, but Moore seems lost as to how he should handle something so delicate: when Liscomb wonders why her son was taken so young, all Moore can do is flash images of President Bush’s smirk, nearly shouting “ecce homo” at the audience.

And that’s where Fahrenheit 9/11 falls flat. It never failed to amuse and anger me, but in the face of real suffering, it flinches, only offering the bohemian canard that we must protest, protest, protest the bums in office. We live in ugly, complex times that impact the whole globe, bringing pain to all who seek peace, but Michael Moore still makes movies for an era when all troubles could be blamed on the thoroughgoing venality and corruption of the President. Somebody should tell him that the times, they are a-changing.

It's a Very Common Disease

Many people -- well, mostly my mother -- have voiced concern that my recent blogging silence signifies some deeper ennui. While paralyzing depression is pretty much my default predilection, my pause was sparked by more mundane reasons. I went to Pittsburgh for a Wilco show and, while there, ran into Jeff Tweedy in the Hilton hotel lobby. (He was very nice.) I was all excited about blogging this singular experience, and decided that I wouldn't post until I had time to tell the story with the requisite panache.

And then I forgot.

Once I remembered that I wanted to write about meeting Jeff Tweedy, I no longer felt much motivation to do so, but I still figured I should wait until the spirit moved me. The spirit did not move me. It still has not moved me. So I think I'm going to let that dream die. There are other things to write about, and I don't think Jeff will mind all that much.

I've been happily organizing tracks in my iTunes collection for the last few weeks, and adding new songs as I wander across them on the Net. Yesterday, Heaneyland pointed me to a fine trove of dreadful, odd and unitentionally hilarious MP3s called the 365 Days Project, and I've been downloading these in a frenzy of irony.

My favorite piece, narrowly outdistancing William Shatner's strong misreading of "Rocket Man," is a set of songs Van Morrison tossed off to escape a recording contract with Bang Records. He seems to have owed the label 31 new tracks, so he went into the studio and produced several dozen intentionally dreadful songs. You simply must hear these songs, particularly "Ring Worm," which is some kind of perverse masterpiece, a two-chord guitar tune about fungal infection. "Actually, you're very lucky to have... ring worm," Van Morrison mumbles, "cause you may have... had something else." Then he breaks into his trademark warbling. So lovely.