Midwestern whimsy

• Yesterday I saw A Prairie Home Companion. I had never heard the radio show, though I kind of knew what the shtick is about (which is why I have never heard the radio show).
I don't particularly care for the midwest, nor for Garrison Keillor and his down home shtick. But I do care for the films of Robert Altman. The last movie of his I saw, The Company, about the Joffrey Ballet, was so godawful, that I was thinking Altman should throw in the towel already. Happily, he has returned to form with this new one. As always, it's an uneven deal.
I was entertained by several things, the incredible palette of Ed Lachman's cinematography, the stunning fluidity of Altman's amazing style (kudos to the camera operators), and some of the performers, who were extremely alive amd wonderful.
I loved seeing Woody Harrelson and the great John C. Reilly play two singing cowboys. Both sing and play the guitar beautifully, and were excellent. I enjoyed watching Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin act off each other. La Streep is the kind of monster actress who has 27 emotional reactions in the time the others have just one, and this while singing a song. She is a great comedic actress and her choices are always surprising. She's a bit over the top, but she is amazing to watch. Lily Tomlin is fantastic, landing one liners with fabulous precision. La Lohan deports herself with great professionalism, sings well and does better than anybody has a right to expect. If she is a coke whore, fine, as long as it doesn't interfere with her acting. Tommy Lee jones just has to show up to make me happy. BUT. The movie is way too long. Nothing much happens and what does is quite silly. I didn't care for Kevin Kline playing a bumbling old-fashioned detective. He's funny, but seems way too self-conscious. I also didn't care for Virginia Madsen playing an angel. I hate whimsy. I hate angels even more.
One thing I can say, is this movie is not going to travel well. I can almost guarantee that nobody outside this country is going understand drat about this movie. They are going to shake their heads in bewilderment. It will seem to them like a reenactment of the Waltons or Little House on the Prairie. They will just not get it. Whatever it is that one must get.

I am an Evangelist of the Church of Netflix

There's a cute article about Netflix in the Times today. This is what I like about Netflix:
1. I don't have to deal with smartass video store clerks any more.
2. No late fees ever.
3. No need to retrieve the movie and physically bring it back. Just put it back in its red envelope and throw it down a mail box. This is huge, because going to the videostore to return stuff is odious.
4. They have a lot of excellent foreign and hard to find movies. (This should actually be number one on the list). You can get foreign and American classics, you can get obscure little independent movies from all over the world, they have every documentary known to man and they also carry TV shows on dvd.
For a while, I kept getting all Bollywood recommendations from Netflix. Because of my weirdass name, they must have decided I was a Paratha, not an Enchilada. But now, they look at what I rent and they know better.
At the beginning their list was limited, but now it is amazing. I have almost 300 movies on my "queue". Plus it's fun to build your movie list and to rate films. Also, they have improved the site to give people more information about the films.
5. The movies arrive a day or two after the last one is returned. It works like a charm. At least where I live.
6. Blockbuster SUCKS.
7. Netflix is glorious.
I don't understand why more people don't have it. It should be sweeping the nation. And I should be getting a commission for shilling it with such selfless enthusiasm.

My letter to The New Yorker

This is a letter I emailed yesterday to The New Yorker. Which just goes to show what goes on in the idle
mind of a freelance Enchilada.

Dear Mr. Remnick:

I love The New Yorker. My life is not complete without it. But here's my beef: almost every time that words
in Spanish appear in The New Yorker, they are misspelled. This drives me crazy. I am a native Spanish
speaker and I can forgive such lapses in other publications, but not in your esteemed magazine.
This past week it was "narcotraficantes", spelled with two efs. Recently, two opening exclamation points
and a comma were missing in Martin Amis' story about Mohammed Atta. The absence of this comma
changed the meaning of the sentence from "Come on, get up" to "let's go up". Not the same thing. 
These errors break my heart. Somehow, I have a feeling that they do not happen in French, so why do they
happen in Spanish?
So I hereby volunteer, in all seriousness, to spell check for you any time there are words in Spanish
in the magazine. I feel I will be providing an invaluable service, both for the sake of the magazine's
excellence as well as for the many Spanish speakers like me, who love The New Yorker and go bonkers
every time this happens (it feels like a slap in the face).  I will be delighted to speak to your factcheckers. 

I take this opportunity to tell you that you are doing a fantastic job and that the magazine is brilliant.

Respectfully,

(Despite my copious ass-kissing, I haven't heard from him yet).

I got to love this guy

Finally, someone who hates more people than I do (many of them the same people I hate).
I think I'm in love.

Man of the hour

Stephen Colbert is fast becoming a role model for America's young. You can peruse his funny remarks at a college commencement here.

There's a sucker born every minute

But apparently not the Antichrist. Not today. I'm looking out the window and the world is still with us, so maybe we should wait until 6/6/2066 to have another collective bout of imbecility, such as today's.
Wait, maybe it's better if someone takes notes on 6/6/6666. That may be the day.

Bunch of racists

Check out this article in the NYT about the coming World Cup and what goes on at soccer matches in Europe. Imagine somebody throwing a banana peel or making a monkey noise at a black player here. It's just unthinkable.
People come up with all sorts of lame explanations to justify why Germans behave abominably towards people of color. Oh, they have unemployment in East Germany, oh, it's the alcohol. Maybe THEY ARE A BUNCH OF RACISTS. If they had a job and stopped drinking they would still be a bunch or racists.
The fact that they invented the Nazis, shouldn't that count for something? It is not a coincidence, you know.
Of course there are a lot of Germans who are not like that. We all know that everybody, including me, deep inside is a racist. There is always someone to fear, dislike, misunderstand and mistrust. In my case, if you must know, it's Arabs (and rednecks, and ultra-orthdox Jews and girls in Williamsburg who wear bangs and cowboy boots with shorts, and Germans, can't help it). In fact, I kind of hate mankind in general.
But in certain societies, like ours, the culture discourages such thinking, and as people of color are more integrated, the thinking loses power. It's not that it isn't there, but it is weaker.
Meanwhile in places like Germany and Spain, which have been mostly homogeneous for centuries, (and when they were not, they did everything in their power to remain so), they are not used to human variety, they are provincial and they are obtuse and they are unwelcoming. They are light-years away from the relative enlightenment we have in the US, but that does not prevent them from scorning the US and feeling superior to Americans.
I'll give you an example: I was in Madrid a couple of years ago. I met with some very nice friends of a friend who lives here. They were extremely charming and welcoming to me. They were all college educated, middle class, doing well. At some point we were discussing world affairs. 9/11. All of a sudden I am informed that Jews control the worldwide media. So I ask, do Jews own El Pais? No. Do they own Der Spiegel? No. Do they own Le Monde? No. Do they own the BBC? No. So? Well they still control the media. I said, "I can't believe that people like you can say such stupid things. What exactly is it that you imagine? Do you imagine a bunch of bearded Jews huddling over a table on top of the Empire State Building dictating what goes on in the newspapers?" WTF? They were rather taken aback because I guess that nobody had ever challenged their idiotic assumptions. And, this, I have to say, cannot be ascribed to ignorance, as it usually is. OK?
The following night, I get into a cab late at night and the cabbie starts, unaided:
The Chinese are pigs, they make this city filthy. Look at all the garbage they leave on the streets. It's disgusting.
(The "Chinese" sell street food to clubgoers.)
Well they come here to feed their families, I say, like most immigrants they are here to work and make a better life.
You are not from here, are you? What are you doing here?

That's how it is over there.

Oriana Fallaci

When I was a girl, we had Oriana Fallaci's book "Interview with History" at home. I remember my father admired her courage, her intelligence and her antipathy for absolute power. I think I read parts of the book when I was about 14 and, after reading this fascinating profile by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker, feel like doing so again.

Oriana Fallaci is not the first European writer that is critical about Islam and particularly about the way European nations and Western governments in general are handling the absorption, or rather lack thereof, of fundamentalist Muslims in their societies. Just last month I heard both Martin Amis and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who was born a Muslim, say intelligent, articulate and extremely critical things about Islam. I believe that American audiences were shocked at their bluntness, for we liberals are used to the language of all-appeasing political correctness. I also happen to agree with both Martin Amis and Hirsi Ali that the Western world is wrong about offering so much tolerance to the intolerant. I agree with them that it is a mistake to think of Muslim fundamentalists as sort of a crazy, tiny fringe group. It is true that most Muslims are sensible, law abiding, moderate people. But it is also true that Muslim countries encourage, and in some cases, finance fundamentalism, antisemitism and hateful anti-Western sentiment. It is also true that there is not one single Muslim country that is not an awful tyranny of some sort. Not one single Muslim country is a democracy. Martin Amis is right to be outraged at the inhumane treatment of women by fundamentalist Islam and he is right to be outraged at the West's turning a blind eye to it. He claims we are undone by our multicultural relativism, which seeks to please everybody without regard to whether two clashing sets of values can coexist in the same place.

The way I see it is, if you emigrate to a secular Western country, you have to abide by the laws of that country. That means that you cannot kill your sister because she looked at a man in the eye. If you don't like the laws of your host country you can move to Iran or Saudi Arabia (those wonderful allies of ours who finance terrorists and antisemitic textbooks and who we should actually be directing more of our wrath against). Then you can witness the stoning of adulterers and the chopping off of thieves' hands till you are sated. By the way, this little rule of thumb applies, not only to the Muslims but also to ultra-orthodox Jews and any other religious zealots. You don't like it here? Go live in a theocracy. Just don't try to impose it on us.

Oriana Fallaci, who is a woman full of rage, believes this too, but in contrast to Amis and Ali, she does not distinguish between the religion and the ruling elites that sponsor it, and the Muslim people, whom she talks about in sickening terms:

She contends that contemporary immigration from Muslim countries to Europe amounts to the same thing—invasion—only this time with “children and boats” instead of “troops and cannons.” And, as Fallaci sees it, the “art of invading and conquering and subjugating” is “the only art at which the sons of Allah have always excelled.
”The rhetoric of Fallaci’s trilogy is intentionally intemperate and frequently offensive: in the first volume, she writes that Muslims “breed like rats”; in the second, she writes that this statement was “a little brutal” but “indisputably accurate.” She ascribes behavior to bloodlines—Spain, she writes, has been overly acquiescent to Muslim immigrants because “too many Spaniards still have the Koran in the blood”—and her political views are often expressed in the language of disgust. Images of soiling recur in the books: at one point in “The Rage and the Pride” she complains about Somali Muslims leaving “yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery” in Florence. “Good Heavens!” she writes. “They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?” Six pages later, she describes urine streaks in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice, and wonders if Muslim men will one day “shit in the Sistine Chapel.”

And this is where she and I part company. Because reading her virulent, hateful descriptions immediately brought to mind the way Nazis spoke about the Jews. All you have to do is substitute the word Jew or Black or Mexican or Gay in her invective and you feel sick in the gut. It is a shame that she goes all batshit, because she actually has some very good points to make about the issue.
The other thing that floored me about the article was this:

The magnificently rebellious Oriana Fallaci now cultivates, it seems, the prejudices of the petite bourgeoisie. She is opposed to abortion, unless she “were raped and made pregnant by a bin Laden or a Zarqawi.” She is fiercely opposed to gay marriage (“In the same way that the Muslims would like us all to become Muslims, they would like us all to become homosexuals”), and suspicious of immigration in general. The demonstrations by immigrants in the United States these past few months “disgust” her, especially when protesters displayed the Mexican flag. “I don’t love the Mexicans,” Fallaci said, invoking her nasty treatment at the hands of Mexican police in 1968. “If you hold a gun and say, ‘Choose who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans,’ I have a moment of hesitation. Then I choose the Muslims, because they have broken my balls.”

At an earlier point in the article mentions that when she was left for dead, after being hit repeatedly by a Mexican firing squad, she was dumped in a room with others and a young man tried to protect her, covering her with his sweater. The doctor who took the bullets out of her body whispered to her, urging her to write everything she saw. Still, she sees fit to hate all Mexicans, and to egregiously conflate the innocent people with their torturers. She's doing the same with the Muslims.

Fallaci was rightly admired for her outspokeness. And there is still something bracing about her lack of remorse. She's old and dying of cancer and doesn't give a rat's ass, and you want to say, good for you Oriana, feisty to the end. But nothing can conceal the fact that she thinks like an angry, shrill, provincial racist. How anti-fascist is that?

That'll be the day

Be it far from me to talk finance. I have opinions about everything, including stuff I have no clue about. And finance is one of them. So when I saw the world's third richest man, a Mexican, Carlos Slim, in the front page of the NYT, I had to opine. This man is worth between 30 and 40 billion dollars. He basically owns half of Mexico. He owns the only phone company, which he got on a buddy deal from the government, and which is why Mexicans pay the most usurious telephone rates on the planet. You would think he would, like Bill and Melinda Gates and other titans of industry, have been sharing for some time some of his humongous wealth with his less fortunate countrymen, but if he has, he certainly has not done so in a significant way until now, according to this article. Now he's come up with some pretentious sounding plan to make Mexico "grow". Somehow, I don't believe him. It sounds like the demagoguery that is the mother tongue of all Mexican big shots. As the article mentions, it's all bla bla but still no talk of real competition, still no talk of increasing wages.
It's all still a big billionaire boys' club.
The very wealthy Mexicans are not as heartless as they are portrayed in the soaps, but as far as I'm concerned, they're close. Mexico, if I'm not mistaken, is not like here, where companies and individuals can get tax deductions for charitable contributions. I have never for the life of me understood why this isn't so. The government would benefit from letting corporations underwrite health, education and arts programs, to name a few possibilities. I swear, up until I read this article, it had not even occurred to me to think how indeed do the obscenely wealthy in Mexico give back to their country. They are content to provide miserable paying jobs and maybe have a little foundation here and there for handicapped children. In the meantime, the whole country is handicapped by poverty. Are they doing anything about it?
The reason that the gap between their obscene wealth and that of most of the struggling population is so huge is that labor is cheap in Mexico and the living wages are pathetic.
For years, the ruling classes have been hand in hand with the government to protect the status quo.
But maybe there is a glimmer of hope in this new public phase of Mr. Slim. Maybe after seeing so many Mexicans trying to get across the border to feed their families, and people in Mexico slowly learning to fight for their dignity, and maybe after trembling about the possibility of another Hugo Chavez in the region, something is finally snapping. It is about time.

I hear lists are popular...

So here are some stupid lists, in no particular order:

People I should like, but I don't:

Hillary Clinton
The Democrats
Williamsburg
Tina Fey
Sandra Bernhard
ACLU
Malcolm Gladwell
Amy Goodman
Paul McCartney
God

People I should hate, but I don't:

Condoleeza Rice
Jim Carrey
Keanu Reeves
Sandra Bullock
Kenneth Lay

People I really can't stand:

Celine Dion
Gael Greene
Emeril
La Lohan
James Lipton
Martha Stewart
Jennifer Jason Leigh
Tom Cruise
The Decider

People I like:

Spelling Bee contestants
Ari Gold
Tony Soprano
The Daily Show
Kate Winslet
Jiminy Glick

People I liked until they started getting on my nerves

Hugo Chavez

CCL (Could'nt Care Less):

Katie Couric
American Idol
Desperate Housewives
Lost
24

I hate lists.