Hail Caesar!

Rarely has a hero's journey been as finely delineated as it is in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Caesar, as essayed by Andy Serkis, is a great cinematic creation. From his birth as the only spawn of a genetically re-engineered mother to his grabbing the mantle of a full-scale primate rebellion, the digitally rendered chimpanzee is as full blooded as Kenneth Branaugh's Hamlet and as fully realized as Paul Robeson's Emperor Jones - yet there is nothing tragic about this hero.

~rave!

Wisonsin State Fair?

This is an open letter to Jim Stingl of the Milwaukee Journal regarding his Sunday, August 7th opinion column: http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/127077078.html

Mr. Stingl,

The recent events at Mayfair, Riverwest and State Fair can be construed as a cry for help or a call to arms, but it should not be dismissed as "wilding" youths who should be put down with extreme prejudice.

Ignore the root cause of these escalating public eruptions at your own risk.

I have heard so many funny, contradictory and simply wrong-headed things in the aftermath of this incident. To those people who pronounced they would not be attending the State Fair - now is the safest time to go. To Police Chief Flynn who "beefed" up police presence at African World Festival, thank you but it was not necessary - for the second year in a row, African World Festival was the chillest location in Milwaukee - although all the officers I encountered seemed to be having a good time.

Take Knuckle-headed Alds. Bob Donovon and Joe Dudzik (please!) - Tweedledum and Tweedledummer - who had the unmitigated gall to opine in a joint statement "Let's face it, it also has much to do with a deteriorating African-American culture in our city. Are large groups of Hispanics or Hmong going out in large mobs and viciously attacking whites? No."

To which I respond, give Hispanics and Hmongs fifty years of the treatment African-Americans have suffered in this city and they will be "wilding," too. (Funny thing: whites don't tend to flee when Hispanics and Hmongs move into their neighborhoods. Could it be the hair?)

I challenge any race to endure generations of poverty and lack of job opportunity - and by that I mean constant rejection for any the most menial of positions and not be just a little bit perturbed. During the Reagan Depression, I was unemployed for two-and-a-half years and - despite being a high school honors student with five years of work experience - I could not find a job at a car wash. So, imagine, if you will, what is a high school drop-out with no work experience is up against.

What are we, as a people, to make of studies done all over the country where blind tests prove employers are more likely to hire a white ex-con than a black college graduate http://millionsforreparations.org/wessel.html? Where does that put your prospects if you are a black high school drop-out or a black ex-con? How do you pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don't have any boots?

I constantly tell my children - both on academic scholarship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and both graduates of Milwaukee Public High Schools - that the only difference between poor, uneducated black people and poor, uneducated white people, is that poor, uneducated white people have jobs (the same apparently applies to Hispanics and Hmongs).

We are currently being governed by the evil spawn of those who fled, politicians inbred in Waukesha and Washington Counties. These elected officials, who have only second-hand - and tainted - knowledge of Wisconsin's inner cities, believe in a "get tough" stance that not only hasn't solved the problem, it hasn't contained it. And, mark my words, it will spread further.

If those marauding youths did nothing else on a steamy Thursday night in West Allis, Wisconsin, they made you look. Unfortunately, they could not make you see.

~(no)rave!

Real Men Don't Equal Ratings

TNT has decided to cancel Men of a Certain Age, the wonderfully evocative slice of life series created by Ray Romano and his creative partner, Mike Royce. I am sorry to hear this. Being a man of a certain age, I really enjoyed the show. But, I am well aware that although I continue to consume a lot of television, mostly non-network, I am no longer part of commercial television's coveted 18-49 year-old demographic. So fuck me and anybody like me and anybody who likes anything somebody like me likes.

But I digress.

This was a particularly good season for actor Andre Braugher. His character, a soft, brow-beaten man who suffers from diabetes and sleep apnea, magnificently rises to the challenge of saving his debt-ridden family business. He is something you rarely see on television, an ordinary black man who loves his wife, is loved by her in return, takes care of his children and slogs off to work every day - even though he doesn't particularly like his job or his boss - kinda like all the rest of us men of a certain age.

The show will be missed.

~rave!

Men in Hats

The Adjustment Bureau may be the best "men in hats" movie since Rusty Cundieff's Fear of a Black Hat. And this is not my left-handed attempt to praise the movie with faint damns. There is real appeal in first time director George Nolfi's grim fairy-tale about the path of true love. The two leads, Matt Damon and Emily Blunt have a lot to do with this. Improbably there is real chemistry between them. I say "improbably" because this is a role that should be essayed by a young John Edwards and would have better suited Damon's brother-from-another-mother, Ben Affleck, or Blunt's real-life husband, John Krasinski (The Office), to name two. Matt Damon is miscast as David Norris, the charismatic political wunderkind at the core of the Bureau in much the same way he was miscast as Jason Bourne and the talented Mr. Ripley. Which is to say, he is terrific.

When The Adjustment Bureau was released three short months ago, it seemed a little improbable that the political freight train that was the senate campaign of Congressman Norris could be derailed by the inopportune release of college pictures showing him mooning his frat brothers but, of course, this was before Weinergate and the circus of the absurd that dominated the news cycle for nearly two weeks. Norris goes down in inglorious defeat but all is not lost as he and Blunt meet "cute."

Then boy-loses-girl and they meet cute again when angel-cum-organization-man Anthony Mackie literally misses the bus. This is noteworthy because it quickly becomes apparent that it is imperative to the Men-in-Hats aggregation that is the Adjustment Bureau to keep Damon and Blunt separated at all costs. Why? Who knows. Suffice it to say that the Big Boss Man has a plan and it is verboten to deviate from that plan. When you do veer off course, as Damon repeatedly does, the Men-in-Hats must make adjustments to get you back on the straight and narrow. Damon is such a tough nut to crack that the Men-in-Hats must do something they have only done once before - they tell Damon everything and then attempt to coerce him into compliant complicity.

When senior Man-in-Hat John Slattery, who wears his fedora as nattily as he does on Mad Men, fails to talk sense to Damon, the even more senior Terence Stamp is brought in to "hammer" Damon into commission.

On the whole, The Adjustment Bureau is a little pokey and the business with the hats is a little hokey (as a unrepentant hat wearer I cannot condone the profiling - "never trust a man in a hat") but, as mentioned before, the chemistry between Damon and Blunt is appealing and the last act all-or-nothing flight from downtown Manhattan to Liberty Island in New York Harbor is quite rousing.

~rave!

First We Pray

Nate Dogg is dead. It don't even seem right to be writing that shit. How the fuck Nate Dogg gone be dead? I'm about to hit a double-nickle and Nate couldn't have been no more than - dayum - 41 years old. Fourteen years my junior - but Nate Dogg weren't never no junior. He was always a grown ass man. And maybe that was the fuckin' problem. Nate always seem too grown for this silly ass rap game - which has always been a province of little boy posers. But as I said, Nate was always a grown ass man with a grown ass man's voice and a grown ass man's soul.

I stumbled across his great album, G-Funk Classics, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, by accident. It literally fell off the roof of a moving car. Possession being nine-tenths of the law, I loaded it into my CD player and there it stayed for the better parts of the next six months as I played the hell out of it.

The two disk G-Funk Classics, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 is a ghetto elegy delivered in Nate Dogg's inimitable buffed-up baritone - which could have been described as silky-smooth if it hadn't been so rough-edged. Nate Dogg's voice told you he had been places and seen things - hell, done things - and that he had had a few drinks and a lot of smokes while he did so. If Luther Vandross and Tone Loc had had a bastard child, Nate Dogg is what he would have sounded like.

That voice infuses and informs everything on G-Funk Classics, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I call Classics an elegy but while it is melancholic and plaintive, it is a lament for the living, not the dead.

Black people dont have no, no where to go
you know, all we got to do is kick it
we gonna kick it in our hood, you know
what we gonna do, we might
we might go kill a couple of niggaz mane
you know, go in they hood and do a drive-by
then come back in the hood and laugh about that stuff
you know, its just a thing
("First We Pray," G-Funk Classics, Vol.1&2)

Now the above lyrics are (or were) standard ghetto poetry. What elevates the song to greatness is the chorus:

First we pray, then we ride

First we pray, then we ride

The first time you hear Nate Dogg croon those first three plaintive words: First we pray, you'll never get them out of your head. The way he stretches and caresses the word "pray" and makes it soar will borrow into your consciousness like some insidious viral worm and your brain will never be the same again.

Rest in peace, Nathaniel Dwayne Hale.

~rave!

Cuts Like a Machete

Grindhouse was the ode to 70's era exploitation movies Robert Rodriguez co-directed with Quentin Tarantino. Machete is the grindhouse movie Rodriquez promised but failed to deliver in his half of the twin-bill extravaganza. Machete which appeared in Grindhouse as a cheeky one-off trailer for a movie never made, is everything Rodriques' bloody but aimless Planet Terror is not. It is forward-paced kinetic thriller and classic 70's grindhouse actioner with plenty of bad(ass) dialogue and gratuitous nudity glommed on like so much icing on a cake.

Hatchet-faced Danny Trejo was born for this role as "one mad Mexican" who has a literal axe to grind with evil political operative Michael Booth (Jeff Fahey) who double-crosses him while in the employ of evil Senator John McLaughlin (a thinly veiled John McCain), played with giddy, greasy slipperiness by Robert DeNiro, and under the thumb of the even more evil Steven Segal, who essays the paunchy but serenely venal power broker, Torrez.

Add to this savory stew a estrogen heavy dose of Michele Rodriguez as a tough mama amalgram of Cesar Chavez and Che Guevara and Jessica Alba as a sweet-faced Federal Agent who plays "beauty" to Trejo's machete wielding "beast."

The gratuitous nudity is delivered in a small but bracing dose by actress Mayra Leal as a naked chica who gives new meaning to "reaching out to touch someone" in the opening sequence. It is delivered in large, loopy, (hopefully) drug-induced gallops by former A-list actress Lindsay Lohan, who plays Jeff Fahey's wild-child daughter, and Alicia Rachel Marek, who plays Lohan's alcoholic mother. Lohan looks great naked but you can't help but wonder "WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?" when she agreed to take this role.

In one great set-piece, a character explains how the human body has twenty feet of small intestines right before Machete puts the knowledge to bloody and effective use. You'll never think of seven yards of guts in the same way again.

Machete the movie holds together better than most Robert Rodriquez movies, which often come off as half-baked despite great cinematic ingredients. One wonders whether to ascribe this Rodriguez or his credited co-director, Ethan Maniquis or, perhaps, even his co-writer, Alvaro Rodriguez. In any event, rarely has ten million dollars been better employed on the big screen.

~rave!

Wi-fi and other revelations

I have been busy as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest.
Just completed a major move and moving is always been an
ordeal for me because I always try to drag fifty-four years of my
life with me. In fact, for eight years I lived in an undesirable sit-

uation (two break-ins in the last three years; horrible landlord;
worse neighbors) because I absolutely abhor moving.

This time I did a major purge, throwing away stuff I had been
toting around for thirty years. Still, there were hundreds of books
to move and scores of boxes to lug them in.

I threw away hundreds of video tapes. Turns out my late brother
and I were delusional, self-appointed archivists: we recorded
every episode of The Cosby Show and A Different World and
every movie we loved because we could not foresee a world where
Netflix would put anything we could possibly want to see at our
fingertips with a wi-fi connection.

I had boxes of old Jet magazines - all of which are available on-
line in their entirety.

Ditto for boxes of skin slick magazines collected during my sane
and sober youth - all content available on-line for a monthly fee
(although, there's nothing like the real thing, baby).

I did tote my hundreds of vinyl records and my thousands of CDs.
I did not tote my hundreds of cassette tapes and scores of 8-tracks
(although I did preserve a few).

It was a blast rediscovering books, magazines and photographs
that I had forgot I had (even though trips down memory lane
slowed down the moving process quite a bit - it took me three
weeks to move a three-story townhouse - if I ever ask you to help
me move - RUN!)

Lastly, I have been without a home wi-fi connection from
November 17th until yesterday (worse than Chinese water torture).

~(no)rave!