Weekend worrier

If anyone's noticing... I returned to the older format for this blog. It was called "The Daily Orange" for about two weeks, hence the brightly coloredmargins. I switched back for two reasons: one, I found that the Syracuse campus newspaper already goes by that name; and two, I don't particularlycare to spend more than the occasional moment decrying the conservative biasin the Orange County Register or the civic close-mindedness of local yokels, many of them as ignorant as they are wealthy. It's a waste of my time. Or rather, it's MORE a waste of my time than other wastes of my time. Toparaphrase Green Day, I don't want to be an American Idiot, but I also don'twant to be preoccupied with their redneck agenda. Or orangeneck agenda,as I think of certain Sunbelt suburbanites.

This weekend was the first I really enjoyed in a while. It didn't start smoothly - my dad and I wentto see "The Bourne Supremacy" on Friday at the bargain theater in Woodbridge. And what a bargain - something was wrong with the sound during the trailers,got better during the movie, which went completely silent after 40 minutes - loose crystals, caused by bumping into the projector, the kids at the frontcounter said. We'd get a free pass if we stayed through the movie, which I figured was just as good as getting our money back - even better, as itwas a matinee, but as I mentioned the sound went completely out, so we tookour money and left. Which was too bad, as the action was just heating up,and I was left slightly dizzy by the cuts and handheld realism. I don't mind that technique, but I minded missing the "payoff" of seeing the plot unfold. And these days, the Bourne character is one of the few mainstream creations who is not working FOR the CIA! All over the TV, you see the CIA or some cousin agency as the good guys, ala Alias or ThreatMatrix or what have you. Folks outside the US must wonder how we can do this after the revelations about the coup against Allende in Chile, Arbenz in Guatemala, and Mossadegh in Iran, plus the funding of the same Afghan groups supported by Osama bin Laden.

Ironically, the CIA's misjudgments in Afghanistan that has ultimately led to the disaster that has elevated its reputation - or maybe not its reputation, but its relative standing - among the American public. In "The Bourne Supremacy", the CIA is seen fairly close to how it really is - another self-interested bureaucracy dedicated to preserving its own standing, and its members interested in covering their hides. Yes, there's the public service/national security bit, but the Agency's overreaching as even more bad consquences than their underreaching - hence the creation of robot assassin types like Jason Bourne. It's not inherently evil. But its aims, or perhaps the aims of this country, put in, and sometimes on, the path of evil. Well, this weekend I put those thoughts largely out of my mind.

I'll probably not return to that theater - Captain Blood's, an odd name for the Irvine "family theater" - you know the kind that shows "family" fare like "The Passion of the Christ" and the above film. But I'll remember it fondly. As a kid, I went to the movies very infrequently. But most movies I saw in the 1980s were at this theater, like "Revenge of the Nerds II" and "Troop Beverly Hills". Ah, the classics! Back then it belonged to the Edwards Cinema chain, before it went bankrupt under the huge expansion spending spree of James Edwards. A pleasant byproduct of this spree is the fact that Irvine has seven movie theaters, with roughly 60 screens. Even nicer, the University 6 (near UCI) plays limited release films, some might call them "indie" films, while others call them "art" films (aren't movies supposed to be?) - and occasionally, so does the one at Irvine Spectrum 21.

After the botched film excursion, my dad and I went to Barnes and Noble. I glanced at the various current non-fiction titles, including the increasingly numerous political books that expressly or by implication favor of disfavor Bush or Kerry. The difference, if anyone takes care to notice, and not many do, is that the "pro-Kerry" or "anti-Bush" books are often written by conservatives or moderates such as Eisenhower Center head David Brinkley (Tour of Duty), Reagan adviser Kevin Phillips (American Dynasty), and Bush I's Ambassador to Kuwait Patrick Wilson (The Politics of Truth). Not to mention Rand Beers and David Brock. "Anti-Kerry" or "pro-Bush" book authors tend not to have any independent standing outside of the right-wing media, such as talk-show brother David Limbaugh, and WSJ OpinionJournal editor Tony Taranto. In other words, the blowhard candidate are being supported by blowhards. So what's new.

After glancing at the new titles, I finally found what I was looking for: In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman. Who better than this New Yorker and author of Maus to depict the tragedy and tumult of September 11th and its crazy aftermath? I found a couple good reviews at the San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times. My own observations: for a oversized (11" by 17") book, it's very hard to find. That's because the hard cover is black, like the New Yorker cover following the terrorist attacks. Inside though is an almost zany world of colors, starting with the inside cover page, which was the September 11, 1901 edition of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Front page headlines? The assassination of President McKinley, by a man with anarchist beliefs who was thought wrongly to be a foreigner. Sideline? The arrest and questioning of Emma Goldman, the famous immigrant labor activist, feminist, and revolutionary, about the assassination which of course, she had nothing to do with at all. The more things change...