postmark, needles

who's in?:

"Musical act The Cure joins Radiohead, Kraftwerk and the reunion of the Pixies at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival on May 1 and 2.

"Also in the lineup so far to appear at the Empire Polo Field in Indio, Calif., are Flaming Lips, Air, Prefuse 73, the Thrills, Electric Six and LCD Soundsystem."

two articles:

maybe elliott smith didn't committ suicide.

since the tipping point of janeane garofolo's really awful and uninformed co-hosting of crossfire, it seems like celebrities have to put up family relations as collateral before asking to be taken seriously again. madonna endorsed clark "not just as a celebrity, but also as a mother" last wk. now we have sean penn "not as an actor, but as a father, a husband and an American." so as a son, grandson, cousin, brother, i direct you to his article as San Fransisco Chronicle staff writer for a day.

i've been outside too much lately and it's taken almost this long to see mystic river twice and come back to say that it is a good movie. you should go see that movie. not sure exactly why i like it so much, but i think its partly bc most movies update some overused billy wilder movie or maybe hamlet into something starring someone like goldie hawn's awful daughter, but this thing takes a vampire story of all things and adapts it to a crime drama in catholic boston with sean penn.

you'll be happy to see on the posting to the right that slate has weighed in on an earlier comment on this page regarding schwarzenneger's good start at a triumphant defeat of casino corporations. my only point of departure with peter scheer's conclusion that such corporations are evil, however, is that i do not believe such evil played the role in voters' minds and press coverage of the campaign that he says it did. scheer optimistically presents a scenario that goes: Arianna Huffington criticized Bustamante for Indian money and his numbers went down. but i say nobody heard or cared about that Huffington charge or anything else that came out of her mouth--except her accent and jokes about Schwarzenneger's treatment of women. The reason Bustamante lost his lead is that he ran an ethnic campaign that divided voters (although, incidentally, he never legislated effectively for latinos as speaker of the house and probably would not have as governor)--and this decision for an ethnic campaign was endlessly covered in an implicit way by the press to a point where it very clearly defined his candidacy. important issues, such as evil casinos that have overtaken the state and don't pay the taxes that could help save the budget and social services, played very little role in voters' minds and very little in press coverage of the recall.

i was told to keep this a secret, so don't tell anyone, but guess who marlon brando is currently calling for drunken chats past decent calling hours.

so, yeah, problematically, my vote was in the mail before all the newspaper frisson over this schwarzenneger business broke loose and before he came up with the brilliant rebutal of lashing out at substantive complaints by people who have declined his rim jobs. i sort of expected that i might regret the vote sometime in the future, but didn't think that feeling would set in quite this fast. even still, not that i want to stake out the right wing position in our sewing circle, but if he's serious about renegotiating terms with the casinos, who have appropriated the indians to create california gambling now in excess of las vegas gambling, that's key for voters serious about choosing a candidate who balances the budget so that it doesn't endanger social services even further and is key for voters who don't want someone who has hitherto told lies about the budget figures during a campaign season, eventually costing the state billions more in interest. this gambling issue has been one of this campaign's macguffins thus far, popping up as an obstacle for Bustamante in the over-blown fund-raising story line, but not attracting any of the press pull outs that have gone to the vexing california issues of steroid use in the 1970s or the nazi party membership of schwarzenneger's late, estranged dad--even though renogiating terms with the casinos could do more to balance the budget than any other campaign promise by any candidate thus far. So, if schwarzenneger is serious about getting something like connecticut's one-third take of gambling money, maybe I won't have to be completely bothered by my pick over no-fun Davis (who, incidentally, also has his own reported history of harassment in the workplace to the point where his 60-something secretary got state promises that she would no longer have to be alone in the same room with him.) ... jesus, i'm sounding like some elks club member sitting at the red leather club bar, wanting to explain everything about the last election ...

"Mr. Penn, his eyes darting as if in anticipation of another blow, his shoulders tensed to return it, is almost beyond praise. Jimmy Markum is not only one of the best performances of the year, but also one of the definitive pieces of screen acting in the last half-century, the culmination of a realist tradition that began in the old Actor's Studio and begat Brando, Dean, Pacino and De Niro," says Tony Scott in today's NYT ... So apparently this performance by the best living actor will be different from the time Chris Hoerter and I saw him in a SF restaurant, impersonating Barbra Streisand riding James Brolin, dropping little dollars into his mouth, singing "people who need people" ...

you'll be happy to hear, brendan, that erroll morris's new movie sounded interesting when he talked yesterday, saying he hoped the "the fog of war" (mentioned at the top of this item) would amend that slogan to read "those who don't study history are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility." morris says robert mcnamara apparently agreed to participate in the project ali g style--not knowing what he was getting in to and thinking it might be a good for the book promotion. but eventually mcnamara got wise and called to say he wanted to pull out, that it would be a bad idea, he had seen morrris' other work, knew that it would end in disaster--but that he would nevertheless say aight because he had agreed to (which morris points out is a big part of mcnamara's vietnam story and surprising ability to carry out plans he knows will be bad for him) ... in any case, can't wait to see the screen version of morris' complex, pessimistic storytelling applied to an already pretty well developed character.