Monthly Archives: September 2019

Let’s Get Ready to Ruuuuuuuumble!

The Chicago Tribune is usually a fine paper. Founded in 1847, it was once referred to as “The World’s Greatest Newspaper” (until the New York Times took that mantle in the mid 1900’s, and it remains a vigorous daily. It has a weekday circulation of 439,731 — up 6 percent over last year, a loaves-and-fishes miracle in today’s climate. It’s won a dozen Pulitzer Prizes, including in 2008 for Investigative Reporting, “for its exposure of faulty governmental regulation of toys, car seats and cribs, resulting in the extensive recall of hazardous products and congressional action to tighten supervision,” according to the Pulitzer committee.Image result for chicago tribune

Which made today’s op-ed piece baffling.  Columnist John Kass called for Elizabeth Warren to drop out of the presidential race, arguing that Bernie Sanders has a better chance to stop former vice president Joe Biden. “Sanders has the necessary authenticity,” Kass declared. Warren “turns off working-class families.”

I’m not sure what Kass is citing as evidence, but it clearly isn’t logic. After obtaining a college degree in speech pathology and audiology, but before enrolling in law school, Warren taught children with disabilities in a public school. She is Massachusetts’ first female senator. She shot to national attention at her first Banking Committee hearing in February 2013, when she pressed banking regulators to say when they had last taken a Wall Street bank to trial. “I’m really concerned that ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial’,” she famously noted. She’s married to a teacher, is the mother of two and the grandmother of two. What, my dear Mr. Kass screams working-class turnoff to you?

This is not to besmirch Bernie. He and Warren are neck and neck in Democratic polls, each without about 15%, roughly half of Biden’s poll rating. And this is before our first political primary, which often mandates the political currents in an election year. And you want her to fold? Please, John, invite me to your next poker game.Image result for biden sanders warren

No, the answer is more nuanced and, admittedly, risky. But Donald Trump has incumbency on his side, which could very well clear his path for a second term. Nineteen presidents have sought reelection since 1900: Of those, only five have lost. So brace yourselves for more weaponized ignorance. Dems will have to throw a haymaker punch, and Trump may have shown them how.

If Orange Julius has taught us anything about elected office, it’s this: Voters are as warm to traditional American politics as they are to the metric system.  He may be a pederast and ignoramus, but Trump has demonstrated that excising decades-old political norms work. No job experience? No problem. Moral and financial bankruptcy? Where do Republicans sign up? Trump is the living incarnation of H.L. Mencken’s idiom: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”Image result for h.l. mencken

So why not give Americans what they clearly want: something new. Instead of having Biden, Bernie and Warren duke it out in a traditional primary skirmish that will invariably leave all battered, why not tag team this bitch? If we’re entertaining ludicrous notions of folding up camp 20 months out, why not entertain the opposite? I’ll exclude Biden from this notion, as he is looking as gray and mumbly as Donnie Dimwit. But imagine if Warren and Sanders announced tomorrow that if one wins the presidential nomination, the other will be his/her vice-presidential pick? It would be a gambit, no doubt. But consider for a moment the potential reward:

  • It would make picking a vice president less anti-climactic. Quick, name Hillary Clinton’s choice for VP (it’s Tim Kaine). The  choice is always a dull letdown, typically made in the hopes of securing a swing state that ultimately has little effect on the overall election.
  • It would keep the base energized. Remember how angry Bernie supporters were when Clinton muscled him out of the race? Those people did not vote, opening the door for Trump and his minions. Obama rode an energized base into office; it’s time for a recharge.
  • It would demonstrate unity. This one is tougher to picture, but try: A politician makes a campaign promise — then keeps it! Dems have been deft at rallying against Trump, but not so gifted at working with one another, which is why we have no clear path from the left on gun control, a medical insurance overhaul, or even lobbying reform. It’s one thing to make a pledge, but who thus far has a reputation for keeping one?
  • It would make for a moving target. One thing the GOP does well is come up with monikers, insults and excuses to discriminate. Warren could  shake Trump’s “Pocahontas” slur with an older white male counterpart, and Bernie could loosen his rep as a “get off my lawn!” geezer.
  • It would make the primary a newsworthy event. Combining their poll numbers would immediately put Warren and Sanders into a virtual dead heat with Biden. Biden may still win out, but news coverage of a race that isn’t already decided (as the GOP now has with Trump) would keep viewers tuned in. And given our Celebrity Apprentice commander-in-chief, America has demonstrated how much it likes to tune in — particularly if it tunes them out of reality. Give them something real (and really entertaining) to watch.

This is all blue sky pipe dreaming, I know. In all likelihood, Dems will follow established protocol, and pretend to be the voice of change in a November 2020 election that will favor Trump. But if you’re really going to try to ride into office with a pledge to shake things up, why not prove you’re capable of it before you even get there?

It’s a lot bolder path than folding your cards.

‘He a Pool Shootin’ Son of a Gun’

This weekend was a busy one in the sports world. The U.S. Open wrapped up, the defending World Series champs Boston Red Sox fired their president, and the NFL kicked off its season with a full slate of games. None, however, could touch this pool shark.

Someone elect this man to office. We need at least one skilled employee.

Heeeeere’s Stanley!

Image result for stanley kubrick the shining

In 1980, while promoting his film The Shining, Stanley Kubrick gave a rare interpretation of one of his movie endings — in this case the 1921 photo at the end of the film that suggested that Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson) had been part of the Overlook Hotel for decades. “The ballroom photograph at the very end,” Kubrick said, “suggests the reincarnation of Jack.”

This year, Kubrick is experiencing a reincarnation of his own. The enigmatic director is resurfacing on big screens and small:

  • In November, the film Doctor Sleep, an adaptation of Stephen King’s sequel-novel to The Shining, hits theaters — along with some of Kubrick’s most iconic images from his controversial interpretation of King’s first book.
  • Kubrick enjoyed a resurgence on the internet this summer, as the Apollo 11 mission celebrated its 50th anniversary and conspiracy theorists resurfaced en masse to suggest that Kubrick staged a fake moon landing and admitted as much in subtle clues from The Shining.Image result for shining danny apollo 11
  • The film Ready Play One — which Indiewire called “Steven Spielberg’s Epic Tribute to Stanley Kubrick” — enjoyed a healthy run on video shelves. The film, which featured detailed Shining scene reenactments, spent two weeks  at No. 1 for video sales and collected more than $31 million.Image result for stanley kubrick the shining
  • Kubrick, Walt Disney and Stan Lee were inducted this year into Hollywood’s Visual Effects Society Hall of Fame for their “profound impact on the field of visual effects.”Image result for Kubrick, Walt Disney and Stand Lee were inducted this year into Hollywood's Visual Effects Society Hall of Fame
  • The director acts as the centerpiece for The HollywoodBowles’ latest book, The Last Novel of Jack Torrance. (In a shameless bit of self-promotion, the ghosts of the Overlook gave the book an enthusiastic severed-thumbs-up.)

Of all the reincarnations, Sleep has to be the most intriguing. While the studio and author have said that Sleep is a faithful adaption of King’s book, the movie clearly borrows from Kubrick’s masterpiece (which King famously hated, and produced a TV miniseries in response). Speaking to reporters earlier this summer, director Mike Flanagan explained the tightrope act of blending two classics, along with his nerves about bringing up the film to King.

“When it came to trying to crack the adaptation, I went back to the book first,” said Flanagan, who previously directed the well-received King adaptation Gerald’s Game. “The big conversation that we had to have was about whether or not we could still do a faithful adaptation of the novel as King had laid it out while inhabiting the universe that Kubrick had created. And that was a conversation that we had to have with Stephen King, to kick the whole thing off, and if that conversation hadn’t gone the way it went, we wouldn’t have done the film.

“Stephen King’s opinions about the Kubrick adaptation are famous, and complicated, and complicated to the point where, if you’ve read (Doctor Sleep), you know that he actively and intentionally ignored everything that Kubrick had changed about his novel, and kind of defiantly said, ‘Nope, this completely exists outside the Kubrick universe.’” Flanagan said. “We really needed to try to bring those worlds back together again. We had to go to King and explain how… and in particular how to get into the vision of the Overlook that Kubrick had created. And our pitches to Stephen went over surprisingly well, and we came out of the conversation with not only his blessing to do what we ended up doing, but his encouragement.”

But it came with an emotional cost, the director explained. “This project has had for me the two most nerve-wracking moments of my entire career,” Flanagan said. “The first was sending the first draft of the script to Stephen King, and that was utterly terrifying, but he thankfully really loved it. And the second was at the end, very recently, of this post-production process, when the film was sent to Stephen to watch and also to the Kubrick estate. Both went very well, and that was always the hope going in, was that if there was some universe in which Stephen King and the Stanley estate could both love this movie, that is the dream. Threading that needle has been the source of every ulcer we’ve had for the last two years.”Image result for stephen king hates the shining

Set 40 years after the events of The Shining, Doctor Sleep stars Ewan McGregor as the grown-up Danny Torrance who encounters a teenager named Abra (Kyliegh Curran) with her own powerful extrasensory gift, known as the “shine.” Rebecca Ferguson plays Rose the Hat, the leader of a group called The True Knot, who feed off the shine of innocents in their quest for immortality. The film opens Nov. 8.

And don’t forget about the book! Operators are standing by, and supplies are limited: As of deadline, there were only a gazillion copies remaining!