What would rock and roll be without drugs?  Tomorrow is the first anniversary of  the death of Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD-25.  Hoffman’s tale is one of the most celebrated stories of chemical discovery; he discovered the compound in 1938 but shelved it after preliminary tests on animals showed no particular pharmacological benefits (aside from “restlessness”).  A “peculiar presentiment” prompted Hoffman to revisit the substance five years later, and during the synthesis process he found himself sufficiently disoriented to discontinue work.  Three days later, on April 29, 1943, he intentionally subjected himself to what he thought would be a threshold dose of 250 µg (which is actually from two to five times the typical recreational dose), and the well-chronicled adventures that followed have been subsequently celebrated as  “Bicycle Day” amongst the psychonaut community.

The Film: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The Song: “Jumping Jack Flash”

The Artist: The Rolling Stones

While Albert Hoffman has been thought of as a benevolent father to LSD (implicitly accepting his paternity by bestowing the title “LSD – My Problem Child” upon his memoir), Timothy Leary has been much more of a polarizing figure within the substance’s lore.   The same year that Hoffman was careening through the streets of Basel on his bicycle, Leary was dropping out of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  In the late fifties and early sixties, Leary’s experiments with (and enthusiastic distribution of) hallucinogenics got him bounced from the faculty at Harvard University.  Leary’s considerable charisma enabled him to find patrons who supported his continued research at an estate outside the town of Millbrook in upstate New York, but he developed a few enemies as well, amongst them G. Gordon Liddy, a local district attorney during those years.

Tim Leary’s attitude towards the use of LSD – as he carelessly championed the catchphrase “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out” – was summarized in a scathing critique towards the end of Hunter S. Thompson’s semi-autobiographical tale Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as Hunter explained:

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60′s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously.  All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create.  A generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

The multitalented Owsley Stanley (who awesomely believes in a completely carnivorous diet and has eaten little other than meat, eggs, butter and cheese since 1959), a chemist who synthesized and distributed massive quantities of LSD in the Haight-Ashbury scene in the late sixties and an acoustical engineer who created the “Wall of Sound” for the Grateful Dead and provided the inspiration for their iconic “dancing bear” logo shared a similarly contemptuous opinion of the media-friendly Leary:

Leary was a fool. Drunk with ‘celebrity-hood’ and his own ego, he became a media clown – and was arguably the single most damaging actor involved in the destruction of the evanescent social movement of the ’60′s. Tim, with his very public exhortations to the kids to ‘tune in, turn on and drop out,’ is the inspiration for all the current draconian U.S. drug laws against psychedelics. He would not listen to any of us when we asked him to please cool it, he loved the limelight and relished his notoriety.  I was not a fan of his.

Even before I read Fear and Loathing, it seemed to me that Leary’s philosophy (and the basic foundation of the hippie movement) was destined to fail because it wasn’t grounded in the real world – the “grim meat-hook realities” that Thompson warns of.   Love isn’t all you need.  You need food and water and shelter too.  Humans have successfully manipulated our world such that these come at an astonishingly low price today compared to other points in our evolution – but they still come at a price.  To me, Leary’s greatest contribution to the psychedelic movement was the concept of “set and setting,” the idea that an LSD trip isn’t something to take lightly, that proper preparations should be made, both internally and externally, to ensure that the experience is as stress-free as possible.

My own adventures under the influence of LSD, which I approached with as much care as a teenager can be expected to produce, were very memorable, and quite wonderful.  The first time was during the summer after my senior year of high school.  I hosted a small gathering with a few trusted friends at my house (yes, my parents were away) that featured the sense of being the director of a film about my own life, “meaningful” conversations atop the rooftoop about colors, a makeout session with our school’s drama princess on the bathroom floor, and a magnificent sense of renewal and rebirth the following morning as I danced around the garage clad in an aquamarine blanket tied like a cape around my shoulders to the Beatles song “Ob La Di” while preparing the inserts for my Sunday papers.  For my second trip I went on a tour of the Wadsworth Atheneum art museum in Hartford.  On my third, in what has been immortalized in my memory as The Ice Cream Trip (even though I didn’t actually eat any ice cream) or “Tomorrow Never Knows” during Spring Break of my sophomore year in college, I took a walking tour of the Claremont Colleges campus, listening to classical compositions like Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turka,” and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.  A friend of mine desperately wanted to drop acid at Disneyland (much like Lisa Simpson’s trip to Duff Gardens) but the idea never materialized (which is just as well, considering some of the images contained within Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride).  I’m too spooked by the idea of a bad trip to get anywhere near LSD today, and while I can’t say it provided me with any remarkable insights, it definitely left me with a few spectacular memories.

Next week the Kentucky Derby takes place, which is the first example of the “gonzo journalism” style that Thompson created with his article “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.”  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is of course the most famous – and lengthy – example of Thompson’s gonzo style.  The film version of the story, which was capably adapted by Terry Gilliam and well-received by Thompson himself, was actually a critical dud and a financial failure.  The end credits feature the Rolling Stones song “Jumping Jack Flash” as Thompson drives down U.S. Interstate 15 back to anonymity in Los Angeles.  There’s nothing groundbreaking about the effect of the credits sliding along the road behind the departing vehicle, but it’s a fitting way to bookend the story and the hand-painted sign is a nice touch.

A few clues exist in the gospels that suggest Jesus’ sexual preferences might have made it a little easier to ignore the charms of the prostitutes he was willing to defend.  Mentions of the “disciple who Jesus loved,” and “the kiss of Judas” provide fodder for interpretation, but in a larger sense, I think Jesus’ sexuality is entirely irrelevant with regards to the core message of his teachings.  Whether Jesus had any sexual nature at all affects his legacy no more than Morrisey’s sexuality affects his lyrics or whether Kevin Spacey’s sexual preference influences the roles he inhabits.

The Film: The Last Temptation of Christ

The Song: “It Is Accomplished”

The Artist: Peter Gabriel

When Martin Scorsese produced The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), he faced similar (though less vitriolic) criticism for depicting sex as one of the tools the devil attempted to tempt Jesus with.  But sex is one of the most basic human drives, taking its place amongst oxygen, food, water, and sleep at the base of Maslow’s pyramid.  So if Jesus truly was the Son of Man, simultaneously both divine and human, unless the devil somehow managed to get Jesus hooked on China White, sex (in whatever form Jesus might have preferred) was probably one of Old Scratch’s most potent weapons.  The hierarchy of the Catholic Church certainly wasn’t immune to such temptations, and many Protestant branches have been wise enough to recognize the futility of denying oneself such an irrepressible need.

Even when I was in Catholic elementary school (Corpus Christi, in Wethersfield, CT) the Western conception of Jesus as a light-haired, light-skinned Caucasian struck me as ridiculous.  The British science fiction writer Parke Godwin included Jesus as a minor character in his clever novel Waiting for the Galactic Bus, a short, swarthy Jew who opined that “sometimes I wish I hadn’t bothered.”  Godwin also included St. Augustine of Hippo as a character, a narrow-viewed man who was never able to recognize Jesus because he expected the Messiah to be “beautiful as a child, beautiful on earth, beautiful in heaven.”

During the Presidential campaign of 2008, opponents used Barack Obama’s rhetorical abilities to demonize him, sarcastically referring to him as a “Messiah” and his supporters as blind adherents to his gospel of change.  But it seems indisputable that Jesus himself must have been a masterful orator, commanding the attention of immense crowds in a time before microphones or visual aids.  It seems certain that distractions were a bit less prevalent than they are in our time, but even so, maintaining the attention of a large crowd for hours at a time is a pretty tall order.

Was Jesus gay?  Was he straight?  Shrug.  I don’t care.  It’s not important.  What is important, and lends relevance to his message, is that he was human.  Films like The Last Temptation of Christ are important because they acknowledge that humans are sexual creatures – regardless of how exactly this sexuality happens to be expressed.

Although the bright colors used in the end credit sequence of Scorsese’s film are garish and jarring (and are actually the product of overexposed film), Peter Gabriel’s composition is appropriately triumphant for the penultimate moment in the movie (Jesus’ acceptance of his destiny and his sacrifice providing for the forgiveness of the sins of mankind).  The music from the film was released separately as a standalone album using the working title of the film, “Passion.”  It is arguably Peter Gabriel’s most abstract production and easily one of his finest, weaving a tapestry of Middle Eastern instruments along with Gabriel’s own voice and pet sounds.  The closing reprise “Bread and Wine” is one of the most touching melodies I know of, and the lilting tin whistle (blown by Richard Evans) makes my eyes misty every time I hear it.  I’ve become quite cynical about how Christianity has been perverted into a negative force influencing the world I live in, but works such as this serve as a pleasant reminder that Jesus Christ’s legacy left behind a great deal of beauty as well.
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On the technical side, the hardest part of counting cards exists in playing with perfect strategy.  There are essentially 250 situations that can occur while playing blackjack, and you need to know how to play your cards in each of them.  Memorizing 250 different responses might sound intimidating, but it’s no harder than memorizing the multiplication tables, and you managed to accomplish that before you were nine years old.

Put these two basic techniques together, and you’ve got an edge on the casino.  All you need to do is increase the amount of your bet when the count is positive, and over the long haul you’ll win money.  Of course, any dealer worth the meager wages the casinos begrudge them can count cards as easily as you – so with a basic high-low system, what you’re doing is completely transparent.

The Film: Ocean’s Eleven

The Song: “69 Police”

The Artist: David Holmes

I saw Ocean’s Eleven (2001) at a special screening in Mission Valley for Qualcomm employees and their friends.  I had a roommate who was working on their digital cinema collaboration with Texas Instruments.  The film was a fun bit of fluff, obviously as enjoyable for the actors to produce as it was for us to watch.  The engineers at Qualcomm were deservedly proud of their work, which was absent of lint, spots, jitter or cigarette burns.  It was a fun evening – the Qualcomm folks were still enjoying the tail end of the giddy stock price heights of the 2000 dot-com bubble, and I was on the tail end of my own experience at pilfering money from a Las Vegas casino.

I had learned how to count cards with the help of my aforementioned ex-friend F****, who had mastered the single level high-low counting system and progressed onto more complex ways of modifying bets and strategy to maximize player advantage.  I was still living in San Diego, and for some reason I decided it was imperative that I head up to Las Vegas for the weekend.  I couldn’t convince anyone to come along.  F**** theorized that he might be able to fly out and join me, but it never materialized.  Which is unfortunate, because if he had made the trip, he and I probably would have ended up as co-owners of the El Cortez hotel.

At the time of my trip, Digital 21 had just been released for beta-testing in the casinos.  It was a version of blackjack where the only difference was that there were no physical cards.  Everything else was exactly the same.  Everything.  The table was the same size and shape, with six station, the familiar green felt and traditional betting circles. There were fifty-two cards in each virtual deck.  There was a dealer who “shuffled” and “dealt” the virtual cards and took your very real money.  The only real difference was that your cards existed only as a series of pixels on a little video screen on the table in front of you.

In an effort to drum up some interest in the new feature, casinos had set up most of the table with single decks and favorable rules, like having the dealer stand on soft seventeen, allowing surrender, or allowing the player to double down after splitting a pair.  My own initiation came at the El Cortez, one of the largest downtown casinos away from Fremont Street.  I sat down by myself at the table and watched as my strategy – successful thus far – failed to yield results against what should have been a great opportunity.

I could tell that something was off, because certain hands kept reappearing, and playing out the same exact way each time.  The third time I split a pair of sixes to the same eventual result (breaking even as one hand won and the other lost) I complained to the dealer, who gave me a sour look.  I picked up what was left of my chips and started walking back towards the more friendly tables at Binion’s Horseshoe and the Four Queens.  Halfway back I took pause and reconsidered the situation.  Something in the machine was malfunctioning; that much was clear, and it was making my counting strategy useless.  But it wasn’t like I was losing every hand.  I was still winning a few.  And I realized that if I could figure out which hands I was going to win, ahead of the fact, that the only limit to how much money I could win would be when the casino recognized the problem and shut me down.

After a few more shuffles at the table, I figured out exactly what was happening: the sequence of cards in the deck never changed.  Although the start point would vary, depending on where the cards were cut, the cards would eventually start falling into the same pattern (especially considering how mechanically I was playing; always making the same choices).  All I needed to do was learn the location of the winning hands – and learn the patterns of cards that preceded them.

I went through three dealers, and eventually accumulated just short of $2500 before the El Cortez finally caught on and shut the table down.  After I’d gone from an initial stake of $50 to about $1000 the pit boss started paying attention to me, and spent dozens of hands hovering over my shoulder, trying to figure out what was happening.  It was clear that he thought I was running a basic card counting system – a strategy that I’d completely abandoned – and my chaotic bet structure had him completely flummoxed.  I shudder to think of how much money I threw away on losing hands just trying to divert his attention.  Things finally fell apart for me after one of the dealers, a shrewd asshole that apparently I wasn’t tipping enough, finally called what card he was about to get while the boss was watching.

I managed to sneak in one last $700 hand (even when you can predict the future, having $700 riding on a single hand will set your heart pounding) before abandoning the table.  As I waited at the cashier, I watched several men in suits gathering around the table, a bovine herd trying to puzzle out the mystery of the table, dealing out hand after hand, reshuffling, and doing it all over again.  They never bothered me – but I’d imagine someone at the casino got into quite a bit of trouble for letting my run last as long as it did.

I ended up spending the majority of the money paying down my student loans.

I can still think of plenty of mistakes I made; of how I could have exploited the situation better.  All of them revolve around extending my run.  I could have deliberately made bad plays to give the dealer different hands.  I could have played two hands at times.  If F**** had showed up, the two of us could have played that table at the maximum all night long.

In the end, I was very happy to emerge as victorious as I was.  But there’s a bittersweet edge to it.  Blackjack is no longer exciting for me – no matter how great of a run of luck I put together, it will never come anywhere close to that magnificent evening when I knew the lay of the cards in advance.  These days, the only gambling I do is occasional craps, when I can find a low-limit table, or sports gambling.  Stay tuned this fall for my football picks column – I’ve got a new system to beat the house.  It’s a lock, I swear.

Steven Soderbergh has commissioned David Holmes – a DJ from Northern Ireland – to produce the music for two of his films.  The first, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Out of Sight (1998) featured a series of upbeat jazzy interludes that framed the scenes perfectly.  The second was Ocean’s Eleven, which relied heavily on the use of a reimagined version of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation” as a leitmotif, but also managed to sprinkle in various other compositions by David Holmes, including the particularly memorable “69 Police” along with the end credits of the film.

F**** and I didn’t have a great track record of traveling together.  During our senior year in college, we’d embarked on a cross-country journey from Virginia to California in an aging Ford Taurus that my parents had given to me.  After a single day of being on the road together, we came to an unspoken agreement that if we didn’t make it across the country as quickly as possible, our journey might outlast our friendship.  We ended up driving in shifts for 34 straight hours, from Asheville, North Carolina to Las Vegas, stopping only for food and gas.  We survived, and our friendship survived (that particular trip, at least – we’re no longer friends today), and it didn’t seem like a bad idea to try it again four years later.

The Film: Easy Rider

The Song: “Ballad of Easy Rider”

The Artist: Roger McGuinn

The most important accesory for the trip was a cooler full of beer we put into the trunk.  The second-most accessory for the trip was the full-coverage insurance we took out on the rental car.  I can’t even begin to explain the peace of mind that came with coughing up the extra money and signing off on every single type of coverage that was available.  Neither of us was dumb enough to bring along any nice clothing; by the end of the trip both pairs of pants I brought had two inches worth of stains from the cuff upwards from wading through streets full of litter.

Most of the four days we spent there is pretty much of a blur.  We had a basic system of rotating drunkenness; one of us was allowed to really cut loose while the other effectively chaperoned and made sure we made it back to our hotel (a half-hour drive outside of town) intact.  I remember drinking a lot of hurricanes.  I remember that the food was fantastic – even the alligator that I tasted.  I remember seeing a lot of boobs.  I remember ducking into the service hallway of a bar to make out with a prosecutor from somewhere in Colorado, though I can’t for the life of me remember her name.

The most vivid memory I have is of almost getting arrested. I was mooning some folks up on a balcony who were cheering and throwing cards and beads back down at me, and suddenly I was essentially picked up and hustled across the sidewalk and found myself with my back against a wall facing a phalanx of New Orleans policemen.  The lead cop, who was a good bit shorter than me, was shouting about how they would drag me downtown and how I wouldn’t be so cavalier about flashing my ass in a cell.  I swear to god it’s true, and it’s one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever done, but somehow, despite having my windpipe trapped between his forearm and a brick wall, despite having my pants around my ankles, despite the half dozen cops behind him, I simply couldn’t stop myself and literally started laughing in his face.

They let me walk away.  I still can’t believe it.

I have some memories of our final night as well. F**** and I got separated, which in and of itself wasn’t that big of a deal (we’d navigated those waters just fine on previous nights).  It was F****’s night to go big, and my night to stay safe, so I wandered around the bars for an hour in search of a reunion, and then went back to the car to wait.  There was some other guy hanging around waiting for his friends so I offered him a beer, which he drank no more than five sips of, and we waited together for a while to help keep each other awake.  After his friends returned, he departed and I was alone again.  I started to get very sleepy and began to sense that I was in the middle of carjack central, so I pulled anchor and drove back to the hotel, crossing my fingers that F**** had gotten lucky.  If not, I figured he’s have the presence of mind to call the hotel and I’d come back pick him up.  I woke up the next morning, still flying solo, hoping that maybe F**** had gotten lucky.  I headed back downtown – it was finally Fat Tuesday – and wandered around, knowing that my chances of finding him were slim.  In the afternoon, exhausted, I went back to the hotel again to find him back in the room, asleep.  He’d been sleeping since 10 a.m.

Poor F**** had wandered the streets of New Orleans all night.  I’m not sure he remembers much of what happened during that time.  It didn’t occur to him to come looking for me at the car until 4 a.m.  It never occurred to him to call our hotel.  After daylight had broken, he ended up catching a very expensive cab ride back.

Our trip back to Austin was quiet and uneventful.  I saw F**** twice more in my life; once was when I stopped by while I was driving cross-country before leaving for South Africa, and the last time was in Virginia where some things happened that made it such that that we’ll never speak again.  Was our journey to New Orleans anything like the long strange trip that Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) took in Easy Rider?  It’s a stretch.  In the end, our trip was no more of a spiritual success than theirs: they failed in their quest to experience the real America; F**** and I were never really searching for anything other than a memorable experience.  Ours certainly had a happier ending – but at least Wyatt and Billy were still friends when they parted ways.

The song that accompanies the end credits of the film is “Ballad of Easy Rider,” a song partially written by Bob Dylan and then turned over to Roger McGuinn for completion.  It’s an uncomplicated song, but it matches nicely with the feel of the final scene and the river that comes into view as the camera draws away from the symbolically burning American flag of Wyatt’s wrecked motorcycle.

As it turns out, Buddy is more like the monster in a horror movie.  He seemingly has the ability to be everywhere at once.  Traditional authority figures are incapable of stopping him.  And except for a moment of greed at the very end of the film, he seems to be motivated by nothing more than pure malice.  He’s more of a caricature of a bully than an actual bully, which is absolutely necessary for the story to unfold as it does.

The Film: Three O’Clock High

The Song: “Something to Remember Me By”

The Artist: Jim Walker

Roger Ebert wrote a scathing review of Three O’Clock High because he felt that the movie failed to contain the worthwhile lesson that brains trump brawn (as is the case in the similarly-themed 1980 film My Bodyguard).  It’s true that director Phil Joanou never makes an effort to explore why Buddy is a “touch freak” or what motivates his single-minded determination to fight Jerry in the parking lot at three o’clock.  And it’s true that all of Jerry’s various efforts to avoid, outwit, or otherwise defuse his antagonist are completely thwarted.  But one of the final scenes underscores an important point, a sad fact of life that Ebert might be in denial of, but happens to be true nonetheless.

In eighth period, Jerry discovers himself sitting next to Buddy for an algebra quiz.  After gazing dully at his exam paper for the first half of the period, Buddy stares down Jerry and intimidates him into letting him copy Jerry’s answers.  The pair are caught, and sent to Principal O’Rourke (John P. Ryan) for punishment.  Jerry attempts to shoulder the blame, claiming to be the one who was cheating, but the principal is skeptical, and says he’ll believe them if Buddy can correctly solve a pair of problems.  Buddy promptly succeeds, and it’s clear to Jerry (and the audience) that Buddy knew the answers all along – he just held Jerry in such low regard that he decided to torment him even further.  In other words, he didn’t need the answers – he just wanted to take them.  And the central point of this exchange, which Ebert willfully ignored, is that some people are just assholes.  They can’t be reasoned with, or made friends with, or understood.  They’re just fucking assholes, and the only way to confront them is to take them on head on.  It might not bring victory, but at least it will bring respect.

Conservative Republicans understood this lesson in the wake of September 11th.  They were fully willing to recognize that there existed, within the world at large, a number of organizations whose sole purpose was the destruction of the United States of America.  And many of these actors had, if any, only very dim visions of a future beyond that immediate objective.  Fortunately, enemies like this are rare.  But a great failure of American hawks was that they were so enthusiastic about a scorched-earth response, they ended up dehumanizing their enemies with too broad of a brush.  Eventually everyone who disagreed with them – even their liberal countrymen – were viewed as dangerous and completely incapable of reason.  Anyone who expressed – or was even willing to concede the reasonable existence of – an opposing viewpoint was guilty of hating America.

Ebert’s attitude – of avoiding confrontation under any circumstances whatsoever – reminds me a lot of the spineless Harry Reid and the Democratic majority from 2006 to 2008.  On bill after bill, the Democrats were reported as “caving” to the demands of President Bush and the Republican minority.  It’s a bit simplistic to explain that it’s because they were just plain soft, but I guarantee that Republican Senators saw them that way.   They cynically trotted out the same tired memes about supporting the troops, and letting the terrorists win, and on decision after decision, Democrats were cowed.  Not once did Reid force Senate Republicans to engage in a real filibuster – making them speak until their legs gave out and their vocal chords bled.  All the Republicans ever had to do was threaten. Bush administration officials callously ignored Congressional subpoenas, because they knew that the Democrats weren’t willing to go to the mat to enforce them.  If Democrats had threatened to impeach President Bush if he commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence, would he have done it anyways?  Of course he would have, because he would have known damn well that they wouldn’t have followed through.  I could go on and on, but one of the most poignant examples of Ebert’s “avoid confrontation at all costs” mentality was when Democratic leadership let Joe Lieberman retain his committee chairmanships even after he gleefully bitch-slapped them throughout election season.

Three O’Clock high is a pretty fun movie, in my opinion, when viewed with an understanding that it’s a simple, surreal tale that’s meant to end happily.  The cinematography – done by Barry Sonnenfeld – is simply brilliant.  Yeardley Smith, Jeffrey Tambor, Mitch Pileggi, and Philip Baker Hall all turn up in minor roles (which is amusing because none of the principals in the film have had memorable careers).  I’m not entirely sure I’d advice you to actually listen to Jim Walker’s song “Something to Remember Me By,” which frames both the beginning and the end of the film (it’s been infuriatingly stuck in my head since I watched the movie last week).  However, the sound production (including harmonized vocals, treble-heavy drumming, and a guitar solo that sounds like it’s been stolen from the 90210 theme), would fit perfectly into a time capsule of the most ridiculous trends of the eighties along with ripped jeans and feathered hair.

Actually, what really makes gold so great is its resistance to corrosion. It’s virtually impossible to dissolve, and doesn’t oxidize easily – meaning that it won’t rust, tarnish, or become discolored under normal circumstances. Remember the old redox potential tables from your high school chemistry? Gold is right up there near the top. Gold doesn’t get old. Sunken treasure can languish at the bottom of the ocean for centuries without losing its luster. Platinum has the same characteristics – except it’s more rare, and hence more valuable.

The Film: Fight Club

The Song: “Where is My Mind”

The Artist: The Pixies

Throughout the middle ages, gold (along with silver) was a primary medium of exchange. In more recent history (17th – 19th century), a gold standard was adopted by most countries, which means that certificates or coins were issued by the government and backed by a fixed amount of gold held in reserve. Theoretically, these monetary notes could be exchanged for the specified amount of gold – or silver. From 1944 to 1971, the international economies functioned according to the Bretton Woods system, which required the participating countries to maintain the value of their currencies (through monetary policy) within a fixed value relative to gold. This system collapsed in 1971 when the United States, in response to accelerating inflation caused by the Vietnam War, abandoned the system and all the world’s currencies were no longer fixed but instead floated against each other at variable rates.

The end result of all this is that modern currencies are fiat currencies, which means that they have no intrinsic value whatsoever. Their only value derives from the specific dictation of the government (fiat) that the currency must be accepted as a means of exchange. Essentially, money is one large consensual hallucination – it’s something we’ve all agreed upon in advance. The only reason it’s worth anything at all is because we all agree that it is.

At the end of David Fincher’s brilliant visualization of the Chuck Pahahniuk novel Fight Club (1999), Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the alter ego of the protagonist (Edward Norton), declares that he plans to destroy the debt record – and set the balance of society back to zero. While in practical terms, it would be impossible to make billions of dollars worth of wealth disappear just by knocking down a few buildings (or would it?), the ending of the film provided a bit of a prelude to the global financial crisis that the world is currently embroiled in. Although the collapse of property values and the subsequent default of massive amounts of debt that was previously considered infallible didn’t happen overnight, it did happen very quickly from a macroeconomical perspective. As the housing bubble burst and financial firms that had made highly leveraged investments discovered that their prized assets – mountainous piles of mortgage debt – were worthless, insurance floors pancaked out and investment house after investment house began to collapse.

The Pixies song “Where is My Mind” blends perfectly with the final scene of Fight Club, as the homemade explosives detonate and the buildings of the financial district begin crashing to the ground. It’s the only song in the film (with the exception of Tom Waits’ “Goin’ Out West”) that wasn’t written and produced specifically for the film by the Dust Brothers. The score for the film is entirely appropriate, but nothing much could top the combination of power chords and lyrics in “Where is My Mind” that accompany the image of the narrator and Marla watching the financial buildings disintegrate and contemplating the future – both public and private – that awaits them.

Stacey Peralta’s documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) contains a few very important pieces of information that help explain the evolution of modern skateboarding. Chief among these is the illustration of the relationship between skateboarding and surfing, and how early skateboarders were attempting to imitate maneuvers that were performed in the water (something that is fascinating to me personally is how a reverse has taken place and now surfers often try to emulate maneuvers that were originally invented on skateboards). Equally important is the documentation of how a severe drought in the mid-seventies in Southern California led to the evolution of vertical skateboarding. And of course, the film pays a great deal of attention to the lifestyle that was associated with the early days of skateboarding, particularly amongst the original members of the Zephyr skateboarding team from Santa Monica. But something that the film isn’t quite bold enough to assert, but I think can be fairly argued, is that the physical orientation of a person riding a board – the very stance itself – served as a line of demarcation between generations.

Imagine an airplane. The direction of travel is the primary axis, and we can consider the wings of the plane to act as a horizontal plane. Imagine the airplane climbing or descending. “Pitch” is position of the nose – it’s the rotation of this plane along a horizontal axis perpendicular to the direction of travel. Now imagine the airplane performing a barrel roll. “Roll” is the rotation of the horizontal plane along the axis of travel. Finally, imagine the plane turning left of right, without banking. “Yaw” is the rotation of this plane in its own axis.

Previous generations tended to react from a straightforward position. The feet are even with one another; perpendicular to the direction one was facing. This means that pitch, forward balance, is controlled by the ankles, knees and lower back. Yaw is controlled by the hips. And roll, which is controlled by the relatively weak obliques, is essentially left to trust – as Larry Craig taught us, the best way to avoid losing control of roll, from a straightforward position, is to use a wide stance. In a boardriding stance, some of this is all shifted. Roll is controlled by the ankles, back and knees. Yaw is still controlled by the hips. And pitch is controlled primarily through the obliques.

Is either better? Not necessarily, no. But they certainly are different.

The difference between stances is most easily seen in the difference between skiing and snowboarding. As wakeboarding is to waterskiing, snowboarding is part of the revolution in riding position that skateboarding helped inspire. Skiing, with its straightforward stance, is better suited to maneuvers where pitch is important – negotiating moguls, or doing backflips. Snowboarding, with its sideways stance, allows for deeper carves – harder, tighter turns (I haven’t been able to determine how the slalom times match up against skiing times, though I’m certainly curious) , and the tricks tend to be focused around horizontal rotation – spins.

In the early days of surfing, the penultimate maneuver was to “hang ten” – to trim the board along the wave properly and walk far enough out onto the nose that all ten toes could hang over the leading edge of the board. The competition sequence of Dogtown and Z-Boys, when the team makes its first appearance in front of the skateboarding world in Del Mar, California, showed that early skateboarding prized the same type of tricks – feats of forward balance that relied on a straightforward stance, like balancing on the nose of the board. As surfing evolved, the tricks tended to be focused more around the “bert” turns pioneered by the surfer Larry Bertleman – and these were the tricks that the Zephyr team brought to Del Mar with them. And these tricks were entirely reliant on this sideways stance.

There’s about forty different songs that get used in Dogtown and Z-Boys. And I’m not even sure what the song is used here with the end credits. But it’s a fascinating film – and a brilliant rumination on a movement that changed the way youths faced the world.

One of the most sickening episodes during the Bush administration, one that betrayed so many members of the Washington press as nothing more than sycophantic lapdogs for the establishment power structure, was the conviction of Scooter Libby and the commutation of his sentence by President Bush. Among the litany of abuses of the basic principles of both democracy and constitutional government, this was the one example that stood out to me as an unmistakable signal that our system of representational government, as articulated in the Constitution, was in dire jeopardy.

I’ve seen a number of lists of questions that the press should theoretically be asking Sarah Palin, if they ever get a chance to query her outside of a very strictly controlled setting (such as Charles Gibson’s interview, which was surprisingly adversarial). But I’ve got one question that’s been bugging me that I’d really like to see someone ask John McCain: “Did you think it was appropriate for the President to commute the sentence of convicted perjurer Scooter Libby, and would you have done the same thing?”

The Film: The Bourne Ultimatum

The Song: “Extreme Ways”

The Artist: Moby

The facts of the Scooter Libby conviction were relatively simple. During the investigation of the exposure of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame (and yes, she was fucking covert), Libby had told FBI investigators that he learned of Plame’s status from Tim Russert (who, in a shocking inversion of standard journalistic practices, acknowledged that all his conversations with potential sources were presumptively “off the record”), and not from Dick Cheney. He repeated these claims before a grand jury, thus impeding Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into to the ultimate source of the leak. Libby was convicted on four of five counts (making false statements to federal investigators, perjury, perjury again, and obstruction of justice) by a jury. Once Judge Reggie Walton (one of my judicial heroes, second only to Judge Michael T. Sauer, who once pulled a great white shark from the ocean with his bare hands and used it beat a grizzly bear to death) began deliberating Libby’s sentence, he was inundated with letters from Libby’s friends and colleagues, most of whom implored the judge to show leniency towards the convicted felon.

Shortly after Judge Walton discounted all the letters of support, caustically questioning the motives of many of the authors, and sentenced Libby to a comparatively lenient sentence of 30 months in prison, President Bush declared that, “I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.” In my opinion, any Congress, when faced with the proposition of the President commuting the sentence of a convicted felon who may possibly have committed his crime at the president’s bidding, should have impeached the President on the spot, without hesitation. Here’s why: when Congress fails to do so, they open the door for any President to order any crime committed on his behalf, with the prospect of zero consequences to whomever carries out the prescribed action. All the perpetrator has to do is maintain silence, suffer a conviction, and then waltz free as soon as the President declares the sentence “excessive.” Even Nixon didn’t have the balls to attempt something so brazen, but President Bush showed no hesitation to spare Libby the prospect of imprisonment and Congress (controlled by the Democratic party) meekly submitted to the President’s will.

What would Jason Bourne, or Michael Westen of Burn Notice, have done if their cover had been blown for nakedly political purposes? I’m certain that retribution would be swift, harsh, and appropriately brutal. And what was Richard Cohen’s reaction to all this fuss? He declared, “this is not an entirely trivial matter since government officials should not lie to grand juries, but neither should they be called to account for practicing the dark art of politics. As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off.” I find that for a political commentator to make such a statement makes about as much sense as a San Fernando Valley pornography director shooting his films in pitch darkness.

The Bourne films have been a fun series. Moby’s song “Extreme Ways” has been used at the end of all three films, and this is my favorite closing of the three. The Bourne Ultimatum ends the same way that The Bourne Identity began; with Jason Bourne floating motionlessly underwater. It’s a nice circular way to bring the trilogy to a close, and although there has been some talk of making additional films, I’d prefer that they leave this series well enough alone.

BONUS:
Jason Bourne’s thoughts on Palin.

Satire is Mike Judge’s strongest suit, and the disintegration of American society into various facets of stupidity is a topic he confronted more broadly in his following film, Idiocracy (2006). But the focus in Office Space was much sharper, where work life in general was the target, but the workplace managers came under the heaviest fire. Playing a cameo as the manager of Chotchkie’s, Mike Judge himself is willing to step in as the target of ridicule, repeatedly castigating Peter’s girlfriend Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) for her insistence on wearing the minimum number of pieces of flair. It’s meaningless minutiae such as this that are clearly a source of such exasperation for Judge; cover sheets on TPS reports and pieces of flair are not important to how a business functions, and are a waste of time for management to concern themselves with.

The Film: Office Space

The Song: “Shove this Jay-Oh-Bee”

The Artist: Canibus (feat. Biz Markie)

Ultimately, management is the science of making decisions. In order to make intelligent decisions, it’s essential to gather as much information as possible prior to each decision point. And where possible, these decisions can be reevaluated to include new information. It’s this aspect of George W. Bush’s performance as President that has been so frustrating for many Americans – once he’s made up his mind, generally based on a “gut” feeling, he digs in his heels, puts his hands over his ears, and shakes his head, chanting “nyah, nyah, nyah” any time someone tries to provide him with new information that contradicts a decision he’s already made.

Serving as President of the United States of America is basically the biggest management job that exists, and John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate has called into question how he makes decisions. Few details have emerged as to how the rumors of Lieberman, Pawlenty, and Romney as vice-presidential picks were all shattered by the selection of a VPILF from the most sparsely populated state in the union. My own viewpoint is that McCain had anticipated a successful convention for the Democrats and had planned to announce his vice-presidential pick on Friday to blunt the impact of Obama’s speech and dampen the typical post-convention bounce. But I think McCain was overwhelmed by just how powerful Obama’s performance was (let’s remember that Pat Buchanan referred to it as the greatest convention speech in history) and his reaction was driven by a sense of panic.

Good managers gather as much information as possible and consider it carefully before making decisions. The emergence of information about Sarah Palin over the weekend makes it clear that McCain had done very little consideration of Palin as a candidate before choosing her. I’ve seen a lot of speculation that his decision was driven by a desire to motivate the fundamentalist wing of the Republican party, and I don’t think that this is too far from the mark. I suspect that Lieberman (as a Connecticut native, I loathe Lieberman more than I can possibly describe) was McCain’s preferred choice for vice-president, but when he witnessed the spectacle of Obama’s magnificently delivered speech in front of 84,000 people at Invesco Field, McCain realized that a Lieberman candidacy would whip the already-enthusiastic Democratic party loyalists into an absolute frenzy, and that he simply could not compete with this sort of ground game. His reaction was to roll the dice on a vice-presidential candidate that would not only provide adequate diversion for the media herd, but on paper also provided the fundamentalist credentials he would need to help build a GOTV machine. I don’t believe that he thought he could trick disgruntled Hillary voters into supporting him simply to see a woman in the vice-presidency; they’re not that stupid, and neither is he (though Geraldine Ferraro might be).

A lot of hand-wringers in the left wing fear that that too many body shots against Palin will backfire, that overly aggressive attacks will generate sympathy votes for her, but it’s an argument that’s easily countered – should she assume the presidency, will Putin treat her gently? Or Ahmadinejad? Obama’s campaign has been wise enough to essentially ignore her altogether and take the high road with regards to the gossip about her newborn infant’s delivery. My prediction (caveat: it’s easy money to lay bets down against Zack’s predictions) is that Palin will withdraw herself from consideration within two weeks, citing family and privacy concerns. McCain, after being told to shove the Jay-Oh-Bee, will select a new vice-president, and he’ll be given a massive do-over on one of the most important decisions a presidential candidate makes.

I won’t be surprised. But the problem here is that as an American president, John McCain would face many decisions where he wouldn’t be given the opportunity of a do-over. And as president, there are lots of situations where he wouldn’t have the luxury of taking six goddamned months before fucking it up on his first try.

Since Youtube and Dailymotion won’t let me post end credits anymore, I’ll post one of my favorite bits from the film instead. Enjoy.

While occasional films will address the tense high-school relationships between children and their parents or other authority figures (Rebel Without a Cause, The Breakfast Club, Dead Poets Society) most teen films conveniently relegate adult characters to the periphery, only letting them occasionally affect the events of the film. A variety of techniques can be used to ensure that adults stay out of the picture; they can be on vacation (Risky Business), absent (Napoleon Dynamite), dead (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire*), or simply invisible (Lucas). In Brick, the only adult figure (aside from a brief glimpse of the Pin’s mom) who becomes involved in the narrative in any way is the Assistant Vice Principal Gary Trueman (Richard Roundtree). And even AVP Trueman doesn’t really affect how the story plays out; he inhabits the hard-boiled detective novel equivalent of the local police chief who reluctantly agrees to allow the private detective the freedom of movement he needs to solve his case. And despite a number of scenes taking place during the school day, the high school campus is virtually deserted.** It’s these aspects of Brick that are the most challenging to an audience in terms of willingly suspending their disbelief.

The Film: Brick

The Song: “Sister Ray”

The Artist: The Velvet Underground

Willing suspension of disbelief is essential for any piece of artwork to succeed. In Brick, accepting the complete independence of the teenage characters is not difficult as long as you’re willing to accept the movie as a metaphor for hard-boiled detective novels and noir films of the forties and fifties. As one of the last commenters in the glowing Pajiba review makes clear, it’s not possible for everyone to swallow this premise. And, in the words of the movie’s muscle-bound heavy, Tug (Noah Fleiss), “that’s understandable.”

Personally, I had the same problem with Be Kind, Rewind (2008). I would have avoided it, due to my perennial distaste for Jack Black’s antics, but a few weeks ago I was trapped on an Ontario-bound flight with a dying iPod, so I gave it a chance. After twenty minutes of shaking my head at the implausible actions of the characters, and the surreal nature of the story, I turned it off and stared out the window for the next two hours. I understand that the movie is about the joys of filmmaking, and friendship, and community, but I just couldn’t get past the idea that a series of amateurish videotapes would generate legions of faithful and supportive fans.

Unfortunately, a film’s failure to close the deal in the disbelief department doesn’t always occur in the first few minutes, when it’s easy for a viewer to bail out. The crime thriller Heat (1995), which is one of my favorite movies, imposed a disastrous plot turn near the very end. Val Kilmer’s character, Chris Shiherlis, stops off at a safe house to retrieve his wife, only to be warned away from a police setup by a surreptitious signal that she gives him while standing on the balcony. Mistrusting her, the cops pull him over. Despite the fact that they’ve had him under surveillance for weeks, know his name and exactly what he looks like, and have shot him in the shoulder only hours before, he’s able to give them the slip by presenting them with a phony ID. It’s that simple! That’s the kind of incident that makes you sit up in your seat and gasp “Oh my god, what a load of horseshit!”

It was the same for the Ocean’s Eleven movies. I didn’t mind accepting they myriad of confidence games it took to pull off the original heist, and in the second film I was able to tolerate the idea of raising a house’s foundations by several inches with relatively good humor. But as soon as Julia Roberts’ character Tess began masquerading as Julia Roberts in Ocean’s Twelve (2004), my willingness to believe completely switched off. The movie abruptly changed from a fun bit of fluff to an assault on my sense of reason. Huge inconsistencies in character behavior, such as when all the characters in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’ Chest (2006) were willing to lay their lives on the line for Captain Jack Sparrow, who had repeatedly lied to, betrayed, and in the case of some, attempted to kill them, are inexcusable.

As far as science is concerned, it’s interesting to consider what a viewer will find perfectly plausible within the context of the story, and that which suddenly becomes preposterous and ruins the film. In the X-Men series of films, I had no trouble accepting the premise that genetic mutations could be responsible for any number of fantastical abilities, like regeneration, telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and lasers that shoot out of a guy’s eyes that can only be constrained through a ruby crystal. And in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), I didn’t have a problem with the concept of a serum that could rearrange a mutant’s genetic code to render them “normal.” But the idea that the serum could penetrate throughout an entire network of cells and render its effects within a matter of seconds? Hogwash.

Brick, as few films do, does an excellent job of chronicling the physical deterioration of its main character as it barrels towards its denouement. We see Brendon suffer from exhaustion and the effects of repeated beatings, eventually culminating with him coughing up blood, collapsing, and relying on a timely rescue and interlude with the film’s femme fatale Laura (Nora Zehetner). Few films that treat their characters as fully invincible can succeed – there’s no point in worrying about what is happening to them if you know they won’t come to any harm. The Star Wars prequels suffered from this malaise. The catchphrase “nuking the fridge” was born from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) based on Indy’s survival of a nuclear blast by ducking inside a refrigerator, and has come to represent the moment when a film is “deemed to have passed its peak, changing the tone of the series so far that viewers see it as having fundamentally and permanently strayed from its original premise.”

In order to fairly play the game of disbelief, filmmakers must adhere to a consistent set of internal rules. They themselves have the opportunity to establish their own rules, but it must be done quickly. In The Sixth Sense (1999), M. Night Shyamalan did a superb job of establishing what actions could, and couldn’t be performed by a ghost. The Matrix (1999) also did a good job of laying out which actions of the characters could be considered fair, and which couldn’t. While it’s not imperative for every movie to say out loud what the rules are, there is an implicit contract with the audience that once these ground rules are established, they will not be violated. Abandoning them, which often occurs in films with multiple twists at the end, is a first class ticket to an unforgivable disappointment.

I suppose that the studio engineer who was hired to record “Sister Ray” was also confronted with a strong sense of disbelief. The band planned to record the story/song in a single long take, accepting whatever mistakes occurred during this process. Lou Reed recounted the engineer’s words as “I don’t have to listen to this. I’ll put it in Record, and then I’m leaving. When you’re done, come get me.”

*I don’t care what you say, that was totally a high school movie.

** This was an unavoidable aspect of the film’s shoestring production process. It was shot at San Clemente High School on weekends to avoid disrupting classes. And director Rian Johnson actually uses this to his advantage during a splendid cross-campus chase scene.