Dig for Fire

Because blogging is the art of turning trivialities into news.

There are certain things about the original Japanese cooking show “Iron Chef” and its lame American counterpart that we can never really know. For example, we know that ICA host Mark Dacascos is being ironic when he asks the challenger “which chef will cower at the sight of your massive pepper mill?” But is Chairman Kaga, the host of Iron Chef Classic, being ironic when he bites lustily into a bell pepper in the introductory sequence? Do the iron chefs really not know which one of them will be challenged before the show is filmed? And just how secret is the secret ingredient, be it geoduck, eggplant, noodles, or umeboshi plum?

One thing is certain: last night, at the second annual Inter-coöpular Iron Chef, an intense one-hour cooking competition that brought together six university-owned coöps plus renegade outsider Cayuga Lodge, none of the contestants knew that the secret ingredient would be marshmallows.

 Lookin’ good, Chef

Prior to the competition rumors had circulated that, owing to the recession, this year’s Iron Chef would feature a significantly cheaper secret ingredient than last year’s ginger-themed bout. Reigning champions Prospect of Whitby entered the competition with confidence, having won last year with a delicious peanut-ginger noodle salad, grilled tofu, and plum dumplings. Triphammer Coop placed third at the first Inter-coöpular Iron Chef, though the judges agreed that their gingered carrot soup was well-balanced, the whitefish in blackberry-vodka-ginger sauce innovative, the chocolate-chai soufflé ballsy.

Last night, the enterprising young chefs scrambled to react to this culinary curve ball. The event was hosted by Von Cramm coöp, the only coöp with a kitchen large enough to accommodate the competition. Each team was comprised of one head-chef and two sous-chefs, which meant that at any given time, 21 people might be jostling over two ovens and a twelve-burner range. With all the hot oil spitting, sharp knives flying, water boiling and tempers simmering, it’s only by the sheer, random intercession of fate that no one was killed.

The chefs’ offerings included marshmallow fried rice and a tofu-based vegan marshmallow ice cream. Onlooker Dean Fogarsi, a resident of Triphammer Coop, said: “When I saw that I was like ‘ewww’…out loud….” But in the end, only one cuisine could reign supreme. Triphammer insiders explain that it was particularly important to rank higher than Whitby, as the two coops have been engaged in an emotionally-charged prank war for years. Most recently, in response to the kidnapping of Fred Whitby, a carved wooden bear representing the spirit of the house, Prospect deposited a dirty mattress on Triphammer’s kitchen table and, maddeningly, stole the 7 ball from the billiard set. Triphammer’s team, headed by chef-exec Sadie Smith (pictured above), beat out the competition with an appetizer of butter-sautéed carrot slices served with mint on a bed of marshmallows—“sugar pillows,” as Smith called them—followed by a spicy marshmallow curry with potatoes and fruit. Dessert? Fried banana-marshmallow kebabs accompanied by a peanut-ginger dipping sauce. Team Trip defeated champions Prospect of Whitby, who came in 3^rd, to take home the golden marshmallow trophy. Rumor has it that Fred Whitby shed runny, s’mores flavored tears.

(Scroll down to skip my summary and go straight to the interview)

On February 19, a group of students calling themselves Take Back NYU!* occupied the Kimmel Center Marketplace, a dining hall inside a student union building at 60 Washington Square Park South. The 70 initial occupiers (18 by the time university police stormed the cafeteria and handed out suspension letters reading “You are suspended from, and classified as a persona non grata at New York University”) barricaded the dining room doors, hung banners from the balcony, and refused to leave until the university agreed to negotiate with them over the group’s demands. The 40-hour occupation is already two weeks old; the suspended students un-suspended; the debate rages on.

TBNYU!’s list of demands focuses on budget transparency, tuition stabilization, and justice for NYU workers, but includes public access to NYU’s library and, most controversially, “Annual scholarships be provided for thirteen Palestinian students” and “That the university donates all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza.” Some have criticized the demands as scattered and pointedly anti-Israel. Clara Green responds in a New York City IndyMedia article that “it is crucial to recognize that all progressive social movements are inextricably linked together. As Martin Luther King made clear towards the end of his life, it was impossible to struggle within the civil rights movement without simultaneously struggling against the Vietnam War and all forms of American imperialism.”

The tone of Green’s article is reflected in TBNYU!’s website; though I was surprised by some of the passionate rhetoric, I couldn’t help but admire how well-thought out it all was, how measured and conscientious the responses to comments and questions. However, the student response to TBNYU! has been mixed at best. Some students created Facebook groups calling for the end of the occupation; many were just peeved to be missing out on the yo-lat-o (that’s right—yogurt gelato) peddled at Kimmel Marketplace. Editorials and letters continue to fly back and forth in NYU’s student paper, Washington Square News, in a battle royale that makes the venomous Gaza-sniping in the Cornell Daily Sun seem fit for a finishing school tea-party. Even the Sun weighed in; Eric Finklestein in his column of February 23^rd compared the “Kimmel 18” to the “Redbud 8.” This week in dig for fire we reprint (with apologies for the long preamble) an email interview with Clara Green, Take Back NYU!’s informal spokesperson. For more information, read Green’s article at New York City Indymedia (link above), or visit takebacknyu.com.

Dig for Fire: How did Take Back NYU! get started? How did you progress from being a group of students who all happened to share the same frustrations to an organization? What’s the structure of your organization like, and how do you make decisions?

Green: TBNYU started two years ago as a coalition of students interested in disclosure of the budget. We felt we were incapable of exerting a say in how our university was run if we didn’t know how our money was being spent. We are nonhierarchical and we make consensus-based decisions so that every person’s voice has just as much power as those beside them.

Dff: In Fall 2008, TBNYU! Hosted “Have your school and eat it too,” “an edible exploration to imagine an ideal university.” Sounds pretty awesome. Describe it? How did it work out? Highlights?

Green: We attempted to build versions of the university we desired through food. The point was to get people thinking about what our school currently is and what it could one day be. We wanted people to engage in critical dialogue and start thinking about their role in the university – what does a student mean? Are we here just for the classes? Are we consumers? That sort of thing.

Dff: How did the occupation end? Did the same group of students stay for the entire 40 hours?

Green: Students came and went during the occupation. Ultimately it ended when the NYU guards busted in and took out the remaining 18 students. Throughout the occupation, I would say around 100 people came and went.

Dff: Was anyone hurt? Any particularly scary moments?

Green: People were roughed around some by cops but no one inside was seriously hurt. Outside during the protests, countless individuals were massed, pushed, and hit by cops.

Dff: What is the most positive thing to come out of the Kimmel takeover? The most negative?

Green: Most positive is that we students asserted our voices and projected meaningful and necessary dissent. We didn’t allow the university to silence us and we stood up for what we believed.

Most negative was definitely the administration’s failure to negotiate with us.

Dff: What was your relationship with the University like before the occupation? Now?

Green: I’m more frustrated and angry with the university, but I also realize now just how necessary the occupation was, and how events like those are exactly what we need to force the administration to change their ways. It’s important to note that I love NYU – the education I have received is absolutely phenomenal and I’ve met some incredible students and professors. That’s why the suggestion that protestors leave NYU is invalid – we love this school and want to make it better.

Dff: We understand that the University administration sent out some pretty biased emails to the student body. Here at IC & Cornell, we obviously didn’t get a chance to see them. Any choice language you’d like to reprint here?

Green: Here’s what they wrote -

From: Lynne Brown- Office of the Senior Vice President
Subject: NYU STATEMENT ON EVENTS AT UNIVERSITY’S KIMMEL CENTER
Sent: Feb 20, 2009 3:42 PM

New York University is pleased to report that the students who sat in the Kimmel
Center’s cafeteria and disrupted services have peacefully exited the building.

Robust dialogue is a customary, normal, and expected part of the interaction
between students, faculty, and administration at NYU. But it is not appropriate
for it to take place while there is an ongoing violation of university rules.

Despite the protesters’ stated principles that the protest was to be
non-destructive and non-violent, the protesters, despite specific warnings to
stay off the Kimmel Center balcony, broke the lock to gain access to the
balcony. The protesters also injured an NYU security officer during a scuffle.
These actions dishonor NYU’s commitment to free exchange of ideas, reasoned
debate, and legitimate forms of protest.

From the outset, the University made clear to the protesters that they were
violating the University rules and engaging in improper activity. Nonetheless,
the University offered to sit down and have a dialogue with the students if they
left the cafeteria early the night of February 19.

The 18 students who stayed through the night of February 19–after rejecting the
University’s offer to leave the building–have been suspended pending the
outcome of the university’s disciplinary process.

No students who were participating in the demonstration in the Kimmel Center
cafeteria were arrested by the New York Police Department.

None of the students’ demands was met. [sic]

Dff: How has the student body at large reacted to TBNYU!? Apathy, hostility, support?

Green: I think all of the above. A lot of people don’t understand what we’re doing, a lot of people don’t know, and a lot of people are sticking by us. It’s complicated and difficult to see students standing against us, but we must always remember that it is our duty to show them what we’re fighting for and why it’s absolutely essential.

Dff: Here at Cornell, we’re in the midst of a very visible, very heated debate over the war in Gaza. In your demands, you ask “That the university donates all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza.” In the website’s FAQ, the reason given is that “our school very likely helped destroy it” and “The chairman of the investment committee on NYU’s board of trustees, Michael Steinhardt, is an avid supporter of pro-zionist causes that condone and perpetuate Israeli violence and oppression.” Does it concern you that TBNYU! might alienate students who are pro-Israel, but who also want budget transparency?

Green: A lot of people disliked this demand, but TBNYU students cannot be silenced about the Israel/Palestine conflict just because it’s a contentious issue. We stand against the actions of the Israeli state because we believe they are an apartheid state. It would be incredibly inconsistent to fight other injustices across the globe and not stand up for the rights of Palestinians.

Dff: When will TBNYU! consider that it’s achieved its aims? Are there goals which are more important than others? Do you see progress being made?

Green: We were massively successful in the occupation for many reasons, but of course we still want our demands met. The central goal of the TBNYU campaign is and always has been full disclosure of the budget, and we won’t stop until we get our demands met.

*Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title; read about it here. Fascinatingly, this little typographical quirk makes it impossible to write about the group without seeming to advocate for it, as the title may catch they eye and be read as a complete sentence. Punctuation: ain’t it neat?

So I’ve become obsessed with the website This is Why You’re Fat. Every day, the creators of the site (who are they? My heart cries out for an ‘about us’ page!) post pornographically glistening pictures of unbelievable foods—foods that will make you gasp aloud in a mixture of horror and admiration. It is a website dedicated to the daring spirit of such monuments to grotesque over-consumption as the 36-layer “double-stuff” oreo, the gravy pizza, the bacon-wrapped meatloaf stuffed with mac & cheese (recipe here—one has to wonder, given that you’re just going to sandwich the mac & cheese between two layers of sizzling ground chuck, why bother with the saffron and truffles?). I contend that the website hasn’t taken it far enough. So far, they’ve only shown us foods that contain a staggering amount of fat or sugar.

I give you Lardo. It is exactly what it sounds like. It is pig-fat—and that’s all. Harvested from the back of a pig (which must, by government decree, weigh at least 380 pounds), it’s then laid in marble troughs with layers of salt and herbs and cured in a cool cellar for at least six months. The result is a pale, cool, veined, delicate salumi that you slice thinly and eat in a sandwich with tomato (yum), or put on pizza or crostini so that it melts (gross). Think of it as bacon without all that pink stuff.

Though it sounds like the kind of thing Louis XIV might have had naked women drop into his mouth, Lardo was originally a poor man’s food. It was considered ideal fuel for marble-quarry workers in the town of Colonnata. In 1996, the Italian government raided Colonnata and seized hundreds of marble casks, claiming (despite literally 1000 years of local experience to the contrary) that uncooked pig fat couldn’t possibly be sterile.

Lardo has since come under the dubious protection of the Slow Food movement (“we’re coming to help you. Right away. Just as soon as we fix lunch. Three, maybe four hours”), which has declared it an “endangered food.” Now, the salumi is celebrated in a Lardo festival at the end of August, a heady four-day fat-binge that draws tourists from all over Europe. And you’ll have to go straight there to get it—the US won’t import raw pork from Italy, ever since one asshole once threw a half-eaten pork sandwich into a pigsty (seriously, dude? That didn’t strike as just a tiny bit wrong?) and a bunch of people got African swine fever. Whatever, whiners. Speaking of tourists, if you’re ever in Italy and you’re offered something called “white prosciutto,” it’s Lardo—a euphemism for pure, unrepentant fat, designed to spare Americans’ delicate sensibilities.

It’s kind of funny that the world’s fattest citizens think that all fat is poison. Or maybe this is too broad a generalization—maybe it’s only fat-obsessed skinny rich people (the kind who can get to Italy) who’d be likely to turn up their surgically-enhanced noses if they knew what white prosciutto really was. I guess what’s really funny is that having tons of money breeds, not culture and breadth of taste, but philistinism and finickiness. I take comfort in one thing: at the coffee shop where I work, the half-n-half always runs out the quickest.

The opinion page of the Cornell Daily Sun has lately been a more exciting place than usual, what with Kitsch editor-in-chief Peter Fritch’s open letter to the SAFC, John David-Brown’s long overdue parody of the irritatingly confessive “25 Things” phenom, and columnists taking sides in the war in Gaza—sometimes in a cogent and engaging way, sometimes not so much. With all the barbed words flying back and forth, it would be easy to ignore a more pointed threat that lurks under our very noses.

Last week, the Islamic Alliance for Justice placed 1,300 small black flags along pathways on central campus, one for each Palestinian death since the conflict began. The flags made a striking visual statement that resonated powerfully—from far away, it looked like a thousand somber crows. The signs explaining the exhibit were apparently stolen and vandalized by someone who disagreed with what they said (real mature, people). While I wish the IAJ—and all the student groups struggling with this issue—all the best, my first thought (after the crow thing) was that the flags are packed together pretty densely, and the tips are rather…pointy. I had to ask myself whether a student suffering a painful, but undeniably comic, injury in full public view wouldn’t damage the impact of the exhibit.

I’m all in favor of President Skorton’s plan to end the war in Gaza by having college students argue with each other. I’m also a great believer in the power of drunken carousing to bring people together. And I don’t know about you, but when I’m stumbling loaded around the arts quad at 3 am, I’m not really on the lookout for a thousand pointy black flags. I swear it’s just a matter of time before we hear of some horribly ironic accident involving an ill-timed stumble and a perfectly positioned flagpole, and then no one will think I’m insensitive for joking about this—they’ll think the pricks who strewed a bunch of sharp shit right where people walk were the insensitive ones. More dangerous than the flags themselves, which, at least, have relatively dull looking plastic tips (not that my delicate eyeballs could withstand them), is what happens when they break, leaving jagged, splintery wooden stakes sticking out of the ground, business end up.

I have this theory that God is a bored, mean-spirited old man who makes people die ironic deaths just for shits and giggles, so I feel that the surest way to live a long life is to avoid situations where I might die in a way that God would find amusing. For that reason, I never joke about planes crashing, and I stay the hell away from golf courses during thunderstorms. But now, just because I brought it up, I’m probably going to impale my crooked, black little heart on one of those flags, and it’ll serve me right, and God will laugh till it hurts. As the Oracle says in The Matrix: “what’s really going to bake your noodle later on is: would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything.” Indeed.

Amendment: props to the IAJ for recovering the vandalized signs, repairing them, and then placing them alongside the flags in this semi-tattered state; it was an elegant protest. Vandals, be ashamed.

The consensus out there in opinion-land is that Bush’s farewell address was the usual stuff of his speeches—little substance, watery clichéd appeals to sentiment and so forth. Michael Crowley of The New Republic’s “The Plank” called it “pretty weak tea” and suggested that Bush’s body language conveyed shame and contrition. Eve Fairbanks, also of The New Republic, complained about the disconnect between the ideals Bush expressed and what his administration actually accomplished, citing his “cuddly relationship” with Putin and his failure to do much of anything for the people of Georgia.

Does anyone else think that Bush’s last address was anything but anemic? That he defended what has become known variously as “The Freedom Agenda” and “The Bush Doctrine” with quiet intensity, making a case for nation-building and pre-emptive war? The most successful moments of Bush’s speech last night weren’t the ones looking backwards, but the ones where he outlined his hopes for the future. Bush really does want to go down in history as the man who boldly invaded Iraq without an exit strategy: “In the long run, advancing [democracy] is the only practical way to protect our citizens. When people live in freedom, they do not willingly choose leaders who pursue campaigns of terror. When people have hope in the future, they will not cede their lives to violence and extremism.”

This disturbs me on two levels. One, that the man will never, ever have to admit that he was wrong, because he’s now placed the Iraq war, almost uniformly seen as the United States’ worst foreign policy misstep since the Bay of Pigs, in the context of a larger struggle to “lead the cause of freedom.” He’s always maintained that history would vindicate him, and now he’s shown us specifically how. He seems to think that historians will link any support the United States lends to troubled revolutions in the future to Iraq, his project, the first bold attempt, and that, when it is seen in the context of all these struggles, less emphasis will be placed on the fact that it was an unforgivable waste of money and lives.

Also, I think he’s become convinced that his decision to invade Iraq, which seemed to many of us at the time to be prompted by greed, hubris, the Oedipus complex, anything but “leading the cause of freedom,” is part of a larger, coherent philosophy, that “The Bush Doctrine” is something Bush invented consciously, instead of a name applied in hindsight to his disastrous mistakes. Forgive my cynicism, but I just don’t believe that Bush had anything so concrete in mind when he made the decision to compromise our country’s alliances and integrity and send our young people off to die: I think he was pretty much making it up as he went along.

What we need now is our own David Frost—someone to wring a verbal capitulation out of Bush, since the president-elect is, at most, agnostic on the subject of whether or not he will pursue legal action against the administration. At the moment, it seems most likely that Bush will disappear back into the anonymity of Crawford, Texas; doubtful for him the Clinton “retirement” of stumping, speechmaking, and fundraising. And most people will be content, I think, to let him go.

The main argument of the movie Frost/Nixon is that at the end of the Nixon presidency, the people badly needed the Frost interviews—they were really, really angry and they needed some kind of restitution.But most people seem to feel sorry for Bush, whose bloody crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo qualify him for the Nixon section in my personal wax museum of nasty, nasty buggers. Every time I start feeling sorry for Bush, I just think of the way he rode out the last nine months of his presidency—content to let the wars continue, determined to leave wrapping up Iraq and Afghanistan to his successor. So he wanted “The Freedom Agenda” to be his legacy—so why didn’t he do something about it? It’s at this point that Bush apologists inevitably cry surge. Sorry, but we’ve been at war since I was a junior in high school. I wanted normalcy, I wanted an uncorrupt Iraqi administration, I wanted clean running water, like yesterday, like a couple thousand American bodies ago. While we were risking our lives, what did Bush risk? Who will call Bush to account? Who will send him to his reckoning?

You say “paranoid technophobic Luddite” like it’s a bad thing…

The other day I went into a Blockbuster with only one intention: to rent and enjoy the timeless satire Soapdish. When I couldn’t find it in the “alphabetized” comedy section, I went to consult the clerk, mistress of all blockbusting, keeper of the almighty computerized inventory. She rapidly typed in the title, and her mouth screwed up in chagrin as she shook her head from side to side. They didn’t have it.

How serious is this? A DVD-rental-establishment not carrying Soapdish is a little bit like a bookstore not carrying King Lear. Okay, so maybe it’s more like a bookstore not carrying Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s still bad. We’re talking about the comedy that brought together Sally Field, Kevin Kline, and pre-rehab Robert Downey Jr. If the owner of this particular Blockbuster franchise had a personal problem with the movie (Who do these people think they are? I love soap operas! And Sally Field was never attractive!) and yanked it from the shelves, that would be one thing. But I’m betting that’s not what happened. I’m betting it went something like this: a computer program keeps track of all the titles in the Blockbuster inventory, and how often they get rented and therefore how much revenue the company takes in from each one. At some point, Soapdish dropped below a certain mathematically derived threshold of profitability, and this mindless piece of software flagged it for removal, so that the few inches of space it was taking up in each fine Blockbuster outlet could be reallocated to a slightly more popular film. There was no check in place, no manual override, no reasonable human being, you know, with a soul, to step in and say “hey, you know what? It might not get rented that often, but this is a really great film. We should keep it around.” It annoys me for the same reason I get angry every time I encounter one of those cars that beeps at you when you don’t put your seatbelt on. It’s like, I’m the human, you’re the machine, I have a sense of right and wrong, you don’t, I tell you what to do, not the other way around. I can almost hear the eerily smooth robotic voice intoning: that movie’s not very popular, Dave. Wouldn’t you rather watch Space Chimps? Put your seatbelt on, watch this big budget piece of shit, and shut the fuck up.

Increasingly it seems that one can only express one’s individuality in ways that are ratified by computers. I love the internet, and I obviously use it as a soapbox, but I’m not interested in doing but everything over the internet. I actually enjoy the experience of going to pick out a movie, instead of just adding it to my online queue, or going to pick out a book and then—stay with me, people—buying it in the store. “Without ever leaving home!” is a phrase that’s beginning to sound a decidedly morbid note. Why leave home at all? For that matter, why live, when I can order books and movies from the comfort of my grave?

Maybe I was so frustrated by the Blockbuster incident because that very same day I had gone into a Barnes & Noble and asked the information desk attendant to look me up a shilling shocker (witches! poison! lies!) called The Burning Court, after a short and disappointing waltz through the ever-shrinking fiction section. Eventually, the saleswoman found a record on her computer. “That’s book’s out of print,” she told me, a note of dismay in her voice. Why would anyone want to read a book that was—gasp—between editions? And what kind of insane bookstore would carry such an article? With a sinking feeling of dread and distaste, I allowed her to order the book for me over the internet from a third party, but it’s not the same. The tactile pleasure of browsing is, perhaps, all but forgotten in this convenience-driven culture. You run your finger along a row of spines, slip one out, read the back, hmmmm, no, that’s not the one you want, put it back, you can spend half an hour this way. Now it’s all simplified for you—movies are recommended by software that selects them based on other things you’ve already seen and liked, so there’s absolutely no chance you might ever see something that would actually blow your mind.

I know my complaint isn’t new, and I found in editing this that I had to work hard to avoid sounding crotchety, even senile. I’ve never been that big on technology—at least not in all its bizarre and marvelous new manifestations. While I do my best thinking at a keyboard and lovingly embrace the internet as a medium of information exchange, I will never own an ipod, or a cell phone that’s anything but just that. I guess the Soapdish incident brought home something that’s been bothering me for years. You walk down the street, and there are fewer and fewer independent bookstores left, fewer and fewer neighborhood video-emporia (nostalgia for the local video palace is the theme of Michel Gondry’s film Be Kind Rewind, skewered with pitiless skill by our own Elliott Feedore). So you walk into a Borders or a Blockbuster, and what you see depresses you even more: fewer and fewer choices—fewer real books, fewer movies that aren’t new releases. I don’t know what to do about it except wish—that our economy was a little more forgiving, so that small businesses that provided a valuable community service (like stocking outré and relatively unpopular media) could afford to keep their doors open. And of course, when I can, continue to patronize places like the Video Room, the corner movie Mecca in my home zip code, where the chief clerk is a cranky balding dude with a massive dent in his forehead, who will nakedly despise you if you rent movies he doesn’t like.

The startling bareness of bookstore shelves is a small piece of a huge, indeterminate, and by no means recent, cultural shift. It triggers the paranoiac in me, the part that’s watched Bladerunner and The Matrix and Terminator a few too many times. Of course I don’t actually think that machines will become self-aware, raise armies and take over the world—but it bothers me that we’ve come so close to living as if they already had, almost without noticing. How much of our choice, our free will—which is the only thing we have—we’ve cheerfully turned over to Deep Thought and Hal. For fun, let’s make a list of things human beings can do that robots can’t:

1)      Be ironic. Machines are always in deadly earnest—they never have a sense of humor about themselves

2)      Make improbable chess moves…oh, wait…

3)      Drop acid (but it’s only a matter of time)

4)      Tell that Soapdish is a good movie.

‘nuff said. Oh, that’s number five—adorably shorten words.

This came to my attention today by way of The Daily Beast, my favorite news-digest site since Chris Buckley (that’s William F. Buckley’s son, by the way) used it as a forum to endorse Barack Obama. Johnathan Martin of politico writes that conservative leaders are planning a top-secret evil genius meeting in Virginia for the day after the election. The topic of discussion? Not how to jettison their rigid, backwoods, xenophobic “base” like ballast from a sinking ship, but rather how to groom Sarah Palin* for leadership in 2012. Conservative think tank president Brent Bozell was quoted yesterday in the New York Times saying that Palin “has proven that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years.” But hasn’t Palin, in fact, been surprisingly ineffective at doing the one thing she was brought in to do–solidify hardcore social conservatives behind John McCain? Despite Palin’s sincere efforts to appeal to the worst instincts of the voting public–insinuating, or saying outright, that Obama is a dangerous radical, a foreigner, and an anti-American terrorist sympathizer–McCain is losing in swing states like Pennsylvania and Virginia, where race and social conservatism should have given him an edge. Sean Quinn of fivethirtyeight.com, a polling analysis site, related a story shared with him by a door-to-door canvasser:

“So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, ‘We’re votin’ for the n***er!’
Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: ‘We’re voting for the n***er.’”

Maybe this recession is good for us after all–apparently economics now trump race. Not only does Palin represent a Republican party that intellectually serious conservatives (a string of whom have appeared recently on  “The Daily Show”)  no longer recognize, she’s doing it badly. As America pirhouettes on the brink of a recession, Pain (of the $150,000 shopping spree) is out of touch with the “Real Americans” she purports to represent. Her line doesn’t work anymore. The fact that some conservative leaders see her as the party’s future shows just how deep the GOP’s schizophrenic cracks run. The old-style prosperity republicans, the ones who just want to make a lot of money without the government interfering, are increasingly alienated by a party that seems more interested in telling everybody who to sleep with and how to pray. Funny how the likes of Sarah Palin can make simple greed seem so innocent.

*with this post, dig for fire firmly pledges not to target Sarah Palin again until after election day, no matter how tempting, fun, or downright easy it might be.

Sarah Palin tried to ban books because she is the Chupacabra.

In the acclaimed documentary 30 Days of Night, vampires cross the Bering Strait into Alaska to take advantage of the polar winter’s month of darkness. Some claim that this stirring portrayal of Josh Hartnett’s struggle to save his tiny town from blood-sucking bare-breasted cannibal women leaves key questions unanswered. Why wouldn’t the vampires just settle in Siberia, which is also dark during the winter months, and is much closer to whichever Slavic or Central Asian country they originated in, judging by their epicanthic folds and Klingon-like language of grunts? In fact, they would have had to pass through Siberia to get to Alaska…you’d think at least one of them would have said (lisping through his prominent teeth): “Let’th thtay here! Thereth plenty of fat Northernerth for uth to feed on!”

The answer, of course, is that Russia isn’t ruled by vampires. It’s ruled by werewolves. And, as everyone who saw the brilliant 2003 documentary Underworld knows, vampires and werewolves have been at war for millennia. So the vampires fled to Alaska, where Sarah Palin (or Mallorc LaBotnik, as she is known in the Old Language) had insinuated herself into the Mayoral office of a small town full of redneck drug addicts. She kept an eye on Russia from her house, sustaining herself on goats and chickens to avoid arousing suspicion, all while doing everything in her power to prepare Wasilla (thinly disguised as “Barrow” in the film, no doubt to protect the innocent) for the coming tide of loathsome reanimated corpses. Thus, the “rhetorical” book-banning conversation between Palin and the Wasilla Public Librarian:

Sarah Palin: Hey, Marian Librarian, nice frock. Can I ask you a completely hypothetical question? Suppose that a goat-killing vampire became the mayor of a small Alaskan town. Could that person then ban books relating to vampirism and witchcraft, in order to render the town defenseless when the undead invaded from Russia?

Marian Librarian: Well, no. That would be a gross abuse of power, and would violate the first amendment, and I would use all of my resources to resist any attempt at book banning.

SP: Resources? You mean like silver bullets and garlic?

ML: I mean like an injunction from the city council.

SP: Oh, right. Well, it’s been nice having this 100 % rhetorical conversation with you. By the way you’re fired.

ML: Why are you making gurgling noises in the back of your throat?

SP: It’s nothing.

Once the vampires had safely made away with Wasilla (now nothing more than the smoking, charred, blood-spattered shell of a town, as 30 Days of Night so powerfully illustrates), Palin moved on to bigger things—the governorship, the republican nomination. We’ve seen this pattern before: I’m sure I don’t have to remind you which influential republican was governor of Texas when Quentin Tarantino filmed the tour-de-force documentary From Dusk Till Dawn. Why does Bush fake a Texan accent? Because his real voice sounds like Bela Lugosi.

Last night I went to a special live broadcast of Rachel Maddow’s Air America show at the State Theater, and it was grand. It was relaxing, just like listening to the radio, except we were treated to all the artless and fascinating gestures one never gets to see, like Maddow slipping her giant headphones on and off, or dancing to the cheesy interval music, or leaning back in her chair and clasping her hands behind her head as she listened to a radio host from Alaska reminisce about Sarah Palin’s days as his intern (when Maddow asked, with tension in her voice, if he thought she was smart, the answer was “I would say she was nice.”)

Of course, it was the liberal love-fest you might expect. She was just reading the news, but with people shouting responses and bursting into cacophonous applause every thirty seconds, it felt more like a rally. Maddow, a native of my own dear Gay Area, recently became the first out lesbian to host a primetime news show. According to the San Francisco Chronicle (local girl makes good!), Maddow treats her guests, even those with whom she disagrees, with respect, a refreshing break from typical talk show fare, where an opponent is brought on to demonstrate the host’s “open-mindedness” and then abused without relief until “that’s all we have time for.” Maddow is everything a pundit should be—saucy, well-informed, smart-as-a-whip. I used to catch her regular appearances on Keith Olbermann’s “The Countdown.” Olbermann’s Special Comments (direct, searing indictments of the administration and its media lackeys) have sustained me in this dark political winter, and I was saddened and amused to learn that MSNBC has replaced him as the host of this year’s election night coverage. According to the New York Times, the decision came down after a comment Olbermann made when the network aired the 9-11 tribute video shown at the Republican National Convention, calling it exploitation and apologizing to viewers for the content.

Maddow focused on the debate over Senator Obama’s campaign strategy—should he break out the trebuchet and start slinging mud or stay true to his message?—bringing up a rather sensitive point. While apparently 47 percent (as Gallup has it) of Americans are okay with Senator McCain’s notorious rage-aholism, they might not be able to handle an aggressive, outraged Obama. As reluctant as white America might be to vote for a black candidate, they’re really not gonna vote for an “angry black man,” and the last thing we need is McCain trying to paint Obama as some kind of embittered, fist-pumping reactionary, especially as the campaign wanes and the consequences lessen.

Maddow also touched on Governor Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson. I think that at this point I would vote for anyone who couldn’t possibly die and leave that politically naïve, fanatically religious, backwards, book-banning hausfrau in charge. It was enough for me that she fired the Wasilla public librarian after a “rhetorical” conversation about book-banning, but it’s obvious that Palin has zero grasp of international relations. Every answer was an evasion. Gibson caught her out in total ignorance of NATO’s workings when she suggested that Ukraine and Georgia be allowed to join the organization. When Gibson pointed out that, under the terms of the treaty, we might be forced to go to war with Russia should it invade either country, she answered perkily, “perhaps so!”

I found myself cramming my knuckles into my mouth as I listened to some of the quotes Maddow played—Palin in her nice, hockey mom voice, admitting she’s hardly been out of the country and never met a foreign head of state, or trying to bullshit her way past the fact that she doesn’t know what the Bush doctrine is. I thought I could detect a vaguely embarrassed, patronizing note in Gibson’s voice as he tried to lead Palin through the question, like a math tutor in an after-school program with a kid who just doesn’t get it. It hurt way more than Misty-Eyed-Gate, or any of the political cartoons depicting Hillary with a big ass. If the McCain/Palin ticket wins this election, could it damage every future female candidate for the office? Perhaps so.

The Internet is amazing. I have discovered astonishing things. Were you aware that, in thirty-one films over the past twenty-five years, Tom Cruise has died only twice? Unless you count Interview with the Vampire, where he plays the living dead. And it’s not as if his characters take no physical risks. In Top Gun he’s a fighter pilot, in Days of Thunder a race-car driver. Sometimes, when I watch a Tom Cruise movie, I whisper to the screen: die, Tom Cruise. You have the power; you are most likely the producer of this film. It would be so easy: a fiery high-speed crash, a blackout at five Gs. But I (almost) never get my wish. This man—this super man—is invulnerable to alien invasion, pelting frog-rain, and murderous sex-cults. Has Scientology made him immortal? Do bullets practically bounce off him because his thetan levels are so low, or high, or whatever the fuck it is they believe?

People hate on T-Cruise for the wrong reasons. Instead of ridiculing his “religion,” or his insanity, or his asinine grin, shouldn’t we be holding him accountable for what he’s done to cinema? Let me explain: I love going to the movies. Movies seen in the theater have a raw edge of unpredictability and excitement. I first saw The Ring by myself at midnight in an empty theater. The closet shot nearly killed me. In a theater, the experience is bigger than the movie alone. Watching it with a bunch of strangers in a big public space enhances it; the nature of the event is that things can go wrong, or wrongly right. When I saw Be Kind, Rewind at Triphammer Mall, the film actually melted in the projector and burned out right at the moment in the movie when Jack Black’s magnetized head makes the TV screen go all wonky. The lights came up; many people left. It took a full ten minutes to get the thing synced back up again, and we were treated to the spectacle of the sweating, frantic projectionist running back and forth in the booth while we munched our popcorn and swilled rum from empty coca cola cups.

It’s just not the same when you pop in a rented DVD. Seeing the whole thing contained in its little plastic box brings home the fact that all of the “events” in the movie have already happened. Everything is decided. The packaging reminds you that it’s already been seen by a small army of marketers and manufacturers, not to mention the viewing public. Neatly sealed up and attractively, comfortingly varnished, it’s not alive or changeable anymore—it’s a corpse in a coffin. Movies seen in the theaters aren’t fully sanitized yet. Before the reviews and box office numbers start rolling in, you can’t be certain that the film you’re seeing isn’t the year’s filthiest, most unpalatable movie. There are still little wrinkles to iron out, things subject to change. For example, though I have absolutely no proof, I’m convinced that the cut of Disney’s Aladdin shown in theaters contained the lyric (in reference to Saudi Arabia), “where they chop off your ears if they do not like your face.” Either Disney was forced to change the song in the VHS version in reaction to a public outcry,* or I was a pretty disturbed little seven-year-old.

That sense of wild possibility is really dampened when the star has accumulated so much power and prestige that he literally can’t be killed. In the dark, between mouthfuls of raisinettes, you turn to your neighbor and whisper, “what do you think will happen?” And she whispers back, “well obviously he wins—it’s Tom Cruise!” It renders the supposedly “thrilling” action movies he makes totally boring and predictable. You already know how they’re going to end.

As a counter-example, take Leonardo DiCaprio, whose career, while much shorter than Tom Cruise’s, is relatively fraught with mortality. Out of nineteen films, DiCaprio buys the farm in five, a whopping twenty-five percent. When a director needs to cast someone who freezes to death in the middle of the North Atlantic, or gets shot in an abandoned tenement in Boston, or slowly bleeds out in the hills of South Africa, what makes him snap his fingers and say, “DiCaprio! DiCaprio’s the one!” I guess something about Leo just screams fallible human being.

I can’t help but think that Cruise’s inability to die is connected to the kind of roles that he plays—none of DiCaprio’s junkies and gay bohemian poets and tortured madmen. T-Cruise couldn’t play those roles, because the audience would see him and think of couches and Katie Holmes and black turtlenecks—not Howard Hughes or Arthur Rimbaud. Because he is so much in the public eye he naturally upstages his characters and can’t convincingly portray anything other than a well-intentioned, superficially-flawed generic protagonist. How boring! How sad! God shield our better actors from such fame.

*What—no Arabs in your focus groups, you racist sons of bitches?