Nursing a Habit

I DVR and regularly watch both Pinkett-Smith's Hawthorne and
Nurse Jackie with former Soprano Edie Falco, and Nurse Jackie
is clearly the superior of the two nurse shows. Which is not to say
Hawthorne is bad, "Nurse Jackie" is just better. Anna Deavere
Smith, Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-nominated American actress,
playwright, and professor, plays Gloria Akalitis, a wobbly, over-
officious, fleshy and clearly menopausal hospital administrator on
Nurse Jackie and her performance teeters on the precipice of
caricature. For me, it is a fascinating tight-rope act.

Digitally Converted

I finally got around to purchasing a digital converter box
for the ancient twelve inch color television in my kitchen
and it has been great! First of all, even before the conver-
sion to all digital broadcasting, I had only been able to get
VHF channels - which was fine because I rarely spent much
more time in the kitchen than it took to prepare or to con-
sume a meal, and I usually listened to sports radio or NPR
when I did that. So I get my brand new digital converter
home and hook it up to my television. As I said, my tele-
vision is old, so the cute little color-coordinated jacks that
plug into the cute color-coordinated holes were of no use
to me. I am strictly coaxial cable, baby! Still, I muddle
through, with no help from the instruction manual I might
add, finally realizing I need to slide the switch on the back
of the television from channel 4 to channel 3 in order to get
some reception.

My old television has no control buttons - they have all
broken off - so I need to use my universal remote to turn
the television on, then the digital converter box's remote
to turn on the digital converter box. I press MENU on the
remote control to display the Main Menu and select Auto
Program to begin scanning and searching for all the digital
channels in my area. It takes a few minutes but, man, is it
worth it. Instead of four fuzzy VHF channels, I now have
upwards of thirty over the air digital channels, including all
the UHF channels I had been previously missing. The digital
clarity of the picture is a joy to behold. I actually found my-
self sitting in a hard kitchen chair watching a 25 year-old
episode of Knight Rider on the ME channel (why does KITT
need Michael Knight, anyway?).

The downside is I am listening to less NPR and spending more
time in my kitchen watching The View and Kathy Lee and
Hoda. I am watching the local morning shows and the news
at noon. The upside is I am spending more time in my kitchen
chopping up onions, garlic and mushrooms and frying up fresh
garnishes for my burgers.

How to Lose $60 Million Without Really Trying

I am watching something called In the Name of the King: A
Dungeon Siege Tale on Showtime. The movie stars Jason
Statham and the cast includes such stellar actors as Ron
(Hellboy) Perlman, Ray (Goodfellas) Liotta - shamelessly
chewing up scenery as Gallion, the prolific John Rhys-Davies,
Burt (Smokey and the Bandit) Reynolds, Claire (Meet Joe Black)
Forlani, Leelee (Deep Impact) Sobieski and Brian J. White
(The Shield, Moonlight) wearing a nasty looking scar as
the nubian warrior, Commander Tarish.

The movie is directed by German born schlockmiester Uwe Boll,
best known for his BloodRayne movies.

I had never heard of this movie so I went to IMDB, Box Office
Mojo and Wikipedia and discovered In the Name of the King
cost $60 million and grossed a robust $13 million worldwide.
Then I discoverd the first BloodRayne cost $25 million and
grossed a whopping $2.42 million. WTF!!!!!

Then I discovered that Boll is very successfully manipulating a
lucrative loophole in German tax laws. Boll is able to acquire
funding thanks to German tax laws that reward investments in
film. The law allows investors in German-owned films to write
off 100% of their investment as a tax deduction; it also allows
them to invest borrowed money and write off any fees associated
with the loan. The investor is then only required to pay taxes on
the profits made by the movie; if the movie loses money, the
investor gets a tax writeoff.

Imagine, thought I, if black filmmakers were able to exploit such
a loophole? Everybody KNOWS black films don't make money.
What an excellent opportunity to make all the black epics everyone
dreams of but nobody dares risk the money to make.

What a bonanza! You could hire all the known but under utilized
black actors and actresses - pay them top dollar - WTF? We are
TRYING to lose money after all!

Let Vin Diesel make his "Hannibal." Let Spike Lee make his
"Tuskegee Airmen." Let the Hughes Brothers make whatever
they want. Hell, let me film The World Ebon. Shoot, I could burn
through a coupla hundred million dollars real quick!

Imagine the mishmash of casts you could come up with! What
would be your dream project?

Don't Want Nobody To Give Me Nothin'

In a predictable 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the
firefighters who were denied promotions because several lower
courts viewed the uniformity of their complexion as proof that the
New Haven promotion process was potentially flawed. This is not a
litmus test on Judge Sotomayor’s fitness for the High Court; it is
really a refutation of the long-held and wrong-headed notion that
minorities can’t achieve unless they are given special dispensations.
Almost from the beginning, the implementers of affirmative action
got it wrong. They looked at the evidence, coupled it with their bias,
and presumed that minorities had not achieved at the rate of their
white counterparts because they were under-qualified while
conveniently ignoring that most of the original complainants had
filed because they were denied advancement while less qualified
white applicants leapfrogged over them. What minorities require,
and what has long been lacking, is an level playing field. Don’t
change anything. Just open up the door, we’ll get it ourselves.

Gorillas in the Mist and the Negro Migration North

As I listened to the most recent edition of NPR's SaturdayEdition,
I was regaled with misty water-colored memories of Bushman,
the legendary and allegedly beloved lowland gorilla who lived and
died at the Lincoln Park Zoo. I have long been fascinated by white
people's fascination with massive gorillas in cages and how neatly
this attraction dovetails with the growing migration of poor blacks
from the rural south to the industrialized north.

It is said 120,000 people flocked to the Lincoln Park Zoo on

a single June day in 1950 to see Bushman, who was presumed
to be dying. The Chicago Tribune notes "No other animal in a
Chicago-area zoo has ever drawn the crowds as Bushman did
in his stark steel cage." http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/
politics/chi-chicagodays-bushman-story,0,1541189.story.

"In his stark steel cage."

From a June 1950 TIME magazine article titled "The Jovial Gorilla"
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,857782,00.html

I quote the following passage "Bushman, even as a grey-thatched
elder gorilla, is one of the most fearsome-looking monsters ever put
behind bars. On seeing him for the first time, zoo visitors read a
promise of unspeakable ferocity in his black little eyes, his brutal,
purplish-black countenance, and his gleaming white incisors. Unlike
some older gorillas, he never developed a paunch; and his hairy
547 lbs. are all muscle."

"one of the most fearsome-looking monsters ever put
behind bars."

The Tribune article goes on to describe Bushman thusly:

"like a nightmare that escaped from darkness into daylight
and has exchanged its insubstantial form for 550 pounds of
solid flesh. His face is one that might be expected to gloat
through the troubled dreams that follow overindulgence. His
hand is the kind of thing a sleeper sees reaching for him
just before he wakes up screaming."

Yet, the various articles I Googled on Bushmen have titles like
"The Jovial Gorilla (Time)" and "Beloved Gorilla Still Charms
(NPR)," NPR's Daniel Pinkwater in his build up to a review of the
children's book Little Beauty tells us how he considered the 550
pound Gorilla his friend and suggests he and gorilla shared a tender
moment at the juncture of the stark steel cage where Bushman
resided.

Yet, in the Tribune article Bushman is described thusly:
Photographed often, the solitary animal was a temperamental
subject, often hurling food and his dung at photographers. Those
who had been pelted claimed the gorilla's aim was more accurate
than that of any Cubs or White Sox pitcher.

Things that make you go "hmmmm."

The great state of Wisconsin, where I reside, also had a superstar
gorilla, Sampson, who reigned at the Milwaukee County Zoo.
Sampson was a 650 pound behemoth whose cult of personality
grew in direct proportion to the ascendency of Milwaukee's growing
black community. It is a little known fact that at one time, due to the
proliferation of factories clustered in and around Milwaukee,

that Wisconsin blacks once had the distinction of earning the
highest per capital income of any blacks in America.

Yet, that story, like Sampson's, was not warm and cuddly.
Sampson did not take to his captivity kindly. Full of menace, he
would run and hurl his 650 pounds at the glass of his enclosure,

causing spectators to shriek in horror.

I think of that and the fact that blacks in Wisconsin, while
making up a scant 4 percent of the population, constitute

a full 50 percent of the state's prison population, making
them, for those of you counting at home, sixteen hundred

percent more unlawful than their white counterparts (and,
as I like to say, I went to school with white people, I work
with white people, I live next white people and I KNOW that
ain't true!).

I recall when the new 100 million dollar Milwaukee

County Jail was built (approved by ballot even as a
proposal for a 100 million dollar technical high school
was rejected), and the throngs of white people who came
and oohed and aahed as they toured the shiny new facility
before thousands of modern bushmen were incarcerated
there.

Today in Sound-Off Theater (Sunday)

For those of you scoring at home, I am once again engaging in my Sunday ritual of listening to NPR while reading two sunday newpapers, surfing the web and watching a movie with the sound off. Today's movie is 2007's Invasion. I am a big fan of Phillip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so I had a hard time warming up to this remake of a remake. BUT, like The Golden Compass, it looks great in HD. The golden hues make many scenes look like renaissance paintings. And, also as in The Golden Compass, Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, two of the palest white folks working, look fabulous in high def. German Director Oliver Hirschbiegel helms the film and is responsible to the many evocative close-ups but everything gorgeous I adore about this particular Sound-Off viewing was probably provided by German cinematographer Rainer Klausmann. Another thing I like about Invasion is that there are black people in this universe, including Jeffrey Wright a score of extras. Invasion is a lovely moving picture.

Today in Sound-Off Theater (Saturday)

Because I was on vacation Friday, I am engaging in my Sunday ritual 
of listening to NPR while surfing the web, reading two newspapers
and watching a movie with the sound off, today.

I have found another excellent candidate for soundless movie viewing: Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico.  This fantasmagoric extravaganza is almost unintelligible but my is it a feast for the eyes!  All those angles! All those close-ups!  All that blood!

What great faces:

Antonio Banderas
Salma Hayek
Johnny Depp
Mickey Rourke
Eva Mendez
Danny Trejo
Cheech Marin
Ruben Blades
Willem Dafoe

It is all so technicolorful!

Other great sound-off movies:
Catwoman
The Golden Compass

Titan A. E.

~rave!