THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

I haven't read the book, but from what i've read about it, the movie seems to have the same qualities, i.e. not the greatest writing, but a solid enough mystery story that transcends some of the cliched aspects of the plot and its evil characters by the uniqueness of the good guys and their relationship—a troubled young female hacker and a middle-aged crusading magazine reporter.

The story is scheduled for an "American" version, but the Swedish original I saw the other night to get out of the heat and the power outages again, will be hard to beat. The lead actors are terrific, even in the most operatic moments of melodrama or emotional and plot manipulation.

I'm always grateful when watching a European movie because the leads are almost always willing to expose themselves physically as mortals with the usual human flaws, especially physically, that no Hollywood movie seems capable of matching (except for the overgrown-boy comedy male leads where the women are still usually pretty perfect, in fact usually too perfect to believe they're with the lead, but that's usually the point as they're won over by his humor and sincerity etc.).

Anyway I'm distracted as I write this that the airport connection seems to have broken in one of my nieces' house down the Jersey shore on Long Beach Island. I've been here with my twelve-year-old for two days, an invitation that got us out of my neighborhood's continued power outages and into a rough but warmly inviting ocean and the love of family.

So I'll cut this short and hopefully catch up over the weekend. But my final verdict on THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is that though some of the violence is gratuitous—even if for a good cause, and unfortunately realistic and believable in this world—it's a pretty compelling story about anti-fascism metaphorically and literally, but more specifically anti-evil. A little too broadly done, but always moving the narrative along, keeping it full of suspense and unexpected shifts in tone and rhythm. I loved it.

THE KARATE KID

The power has been going on and off all day, a day when temperatures were over 100 degrees and the heat index made it feel even hotter.

I found ways to cool off, including the gym, and then this evening my twelve-year-old decided we should go see the new remake of THE KARATE KID—in China it's known as THE KUNG FU KID which makes more sense.

I went because he wanted to, but had little interest, even though I knew Jackie Chan was in it and who can resist Jackie Chan? Most reviews I'd read were critical. But after seeing it I wonder how those critics' hearts work.

I found it engaging and thoroughly entertaining, but also moving. Of course it's a formulaic plot, most are, and it's a remake which many critics say is not as good as the original. I think it's easily as good and probably better, or at least more universal.

And it's kind of cool to be present at the dawn of a dynasty, because as much as Jaden Smith looks and even acts like his famous father Will, he definitely more than holds his own in this flick. A star is definitely born here.

As much as I would have loved to not have liked him or this movie and seen it as nepotism and privilege and elitism at work etc. Jaden won me over pretty quickly and by the end I was a fan. And the complaints that Jackie Chan doesn't have enough action scenes are silly. It's not a Jackie Chan movie.

I noticed Jaden got top billing over Chan in the opening credits, which initially got my back up, but again, I was won over not just by Jaden's cinematic appeal but by his achievement. He obviously worked almost as hard or maybe more so than the character he plays has to in the movie. And Chan brings so much to the character of the disenchanted disillusioned brokenhearted teacher—or "master—it elevated that cliched role to unforgettable.

I left the theater more than satisfied, I left it happy, even despite the overwhelming heat that hit us when we exited back into the night air, arriving home just in time for the power to go out totally. No more on and off, just off.

But it's a few hours later, past midnight, and the power just came back on and we got to spend some quality time with our new upstairs neighbors getting to now each other while sitting on the front steps because it was too hot in our apartments. Just like neighbors on my street when I was growing up would spend the night on steps and stoops during a heat wave because back then we didn't have air conditioners and we all suffered together. As a kid I found it exciting and festive, everyone seeming more friendly and more candid in the dark of the middle of the night.

But, I'm grateful the one little air conditioner we have is on again and the fan blowing the cool air from my little guy's room down the hall in the direction of mine is spinning again and , knock on wood, hopefully they will continue to through the night.

WHY KEROUAC MATTERS

If your a fan of ON THE ROAD or of Jack Kerouac's in general, you'll probably dig this book. Even if you disagree with the author, John Leland, about what Kerouac was doing and trying to do in ON THE ROAD, or about who Kerouac really was, as oposed to the author that critics and academics still can't seem to entirely embrace, or even consider as important as he obviously is.

Few books, let alone novels, have had the impact ON THE ROAD had and continues to have. And though the media image of Kerouac created almost immediately upon publication in 1957—"King of The Beats" bad boy drug using free loving out-for-kicks pied piper of his and following generations—was distorted, and either untrue or only a tiny part of the truth, there have been readers, myself included, who have seen through that and been sympathetic to a committed artist who was deliberately trying to change the way stories are told. And did.

Though I don't concur with a lot of what Leland has to say about Kerouac's accomplishment(s) and what ON THE ROAD specifically means and what Leland thinks Kerouac was tyring to achieve, I still really enjoyed reading WHY KEROUAC MATTERS. Some of Leland's points are entirely well taken and as someone who has read everything I could fine that's out there about Kerouac, a lot of Leland's points either haven't been made before or not as effectively.

One of the best things about WHY KEROUAC MATTERS is that Leland doesn't get bogged down in the academic and critical jargon that has dominated literary criticism for too long. His takes are personal and expressed with energy and a lot of appropriately hip idioms as well as lines and titles that resonate with musical and other cultural references without being "hipper-or-cleverer-than-thou" self-satisfied.

I think he's wrong, for instance when he says you could read the interviews Kerouac gave throughout his life from first to last "without encountering much sign of a noteworthy intellect." He goes on to say "Like Bob Dylan, who has talked twaddle in public for four-plus decades, the real Kerouac is best encountered through the artifice of his fiction."

Even in some of his most drunken interviews Kerouac was capable of gems of wisdom and insight as well as critical acumen. Dylan too. Leland makes other judgments I don't agree with (he seems to think BIG SUR is Kerouac's best book, seemingly because Leland sees it as Kerouac's most honest in delineating his deterioration from the effects of fame and alcoholism). But, he's entiteld to them, and he articulates them engagingly and often originally.

His big original point—though I've read less specific versions of it—is that Rick Warren and the "Jesus movement" that arose from the same generation that produced the flower children, come more out of ON THE ROAD and its influence than the hippies did. And there's a kernel of truth to that. Kerouac was a spiritual seeker and ON THE ROAD does encompass and incorporate a spiritual quest.

But the greatness of Jack Kerouac and his writing, is that he got down his own unique personal vision and struggle and expreince—intellectual as well as sensual and spiritual—not a generation's or movement's or even literary coterie's. There's never been anyone like him before, or since. That's a hell of an achievement, even if you don't dig the results. I happen to.

HAPPY FOURTH

There's been a reappearance of rightwing trolls, or maybe it's all the same one since they leave their comments anonymously (or maybe it's my old nemesis Jim just writing under the "anonymous" moniker—it's impossible to know because they all parrot the exact same rightwing propoganda of the day, week, month, etc.).

But on this day of all days, it's time "to take OUR country back"—a slogan associated too much with right, especially the so-called "tea-partyers" these days.

The campaign to paint any disagreement with rightwing positions as somehow "unAmerican" and "socialist"—or in Glenn Beck's terms socialist/facist/progressive/liberal/communist as in his ill-reasoned and ill-informed diatribes they somehow are all equated—has been going on almost since the founding fathers and mothers.

But just to clarify, even if reason and logic and facts have no sway with the right, but as an exercise for my own peace of mind, the choices in our politics have been relatively limited to right and center for a number of years now.

The claims of the rightwingers in comments on this blog and throughout the web and the media that Obama and Demcorats in the House and Senate somehow represent leftist or even "liberal" or "progressive" positions are false.

There are liberal Democrats, but their political positions are still almost exclusively centrist, not leftist. While there are almost no centrist Republicans left, and even the right wing of the Republican party—which IS the Republican party—isn't right enough for many of the most influential rightwingers: Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, et. al.

On the political spectrum of right to left, here's the right's position on healthcare: it should be entirely private, with little or no government regulation at all.

The left's position is: healthcare is a fundamental right and government should make it available to everyone through a single payer system.

There is room for nuance in these positions, but these are the basic perspectives. So Obama's healthcare plan is obviously a compromise between these two positions, thus centrist (the right will say it's leftist because there is an insurance mandate, the left will say it's rightist because of the concessions to the insurance and drug corporations).

On corporate power, the right's position is simple, little or no regulation, ala the oil companies which leads to BP's gulf catastrophe, whereas the left's is government regulation of corporations as in the elimintation of any energy processing that isn't "clean" or as clean as possible. On this Obama and the Dems for the most part are right of center.

But let's do a quick and condensed roll call of the right's and the left's positions historically:

The most liberal or leftist of the Founding Fathers wanted to eliminate slavery arguing that no citizen of this new country could be considered free if some weren't. The right argued for the continuation of slavery. The compromise unfortunately was to the right. In order to have a unified front against the British and enough unity for a central government. The right won out here.

But coninued pressure from the left over the next almost century led to more and more erosion of slavery as an institution and the "rights" of slaveholders until the defeat of slavery all together as a result of the Civil War, etc.

The right's position then became segregation and "states rights" and unfortunately for a number of decades, in order to win national elections the Dems compromised to placate the Southern right wing of their party, but saw the light and under LBJ finally passed a Civil Rights act that led to the end of the most egregious of instituional segregation laws, etc.

We could repeat this history for womens rights, workers' rights, etc. etc. etc.

The only consistent psotion the right has maintained in its history is resistance to progress and support of corporate interests over individuals (it's ironic I guess that Teddy Roosevelt had to fight the right wing of the Republican Party to "bust the trusts" i.e. corporate powers of his day).

We could do this straight down the line, but it's too tedious and most who read this blog I'm sure are aware of all this anyway.

But when I watched the fireworks tonight with my twelve-year-old in the Jersey town I live in I thought of all the struggles people had to go through to extend rights and protections to citizens previously left out and it made me proud to be a part of that history of struggling for more freedoms, more equality of opportunity, and more protections and guarantees for "the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness" as Jefferson so aptly put it in the declaration this day celebrates.

[PS: This article has links to many sad examples of the right's anti-reasoned vitriolic destructive propaganda.]

LUCKY DAY

This is the way I felt after my brain operation when they said it wasn't cancer. Thanks to Tom G. for hipping me to it. And hey, watch it to the end.

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY

That U2 refrain has been going through my head for the past two days. After another mini=heat wave (and another on the way) the past few days and today have been extraordinarily beautiful. Perfectly warm but breezy, blues skies but with those puffy whites ones that don't auger storms but instead seem there just to enjoy and watch float slowly by.

It's made me think about yesterday's post and the negative feelings I was projecting about the seeming ability of the rightwing propaganda machine to hypnotize people into believing what's worst for them is what they need and vice versa.

But the fact is, until Rupert Murdoch gets replaced by a "liberal" nemesis (too bad George Sporos doesn't use his fortune to buy up the media as Murdoch has done), it looks like there's not much we can do about the influence of FAUX NEWS et. al.

But fortunately, there's also a lot of good news that doesn't get much attention but is pretty interesting and comforting. Like the fact that a lot of what we used to call "third world countries" and now call "developing countries" are actually doing better by many measurements, including economic growth and recovery from the Great recession, than the USA and other so-called "advanced" countries.

Not that I don't want my country to do well. But I do want us to stop using up a majority of the world's resources so we can get fatter and consume more junk etc.

The Great Recession has impacted countries all over the world, but most South American countries are doing better than us and most of Europe interestingly, as are some Asian and African and even "Mideastern" countries, like Turkey. I think that all bodes well for an evening out of the playing field and the rewards of play.

And within our own country many things are improving. Some of the fastest growing businesses are about the movement to eat locally and leave less of a carbon footprint. The raising-your-own-chickens biz being one of them. And one dear to my heart as my father once bought a bunch of little chicks to sell to families for Easter (over half a century ago this is) only got them too early and they were too ugly by the time Easter arrived so I grew up with a chicken coop in the back yard and our own chickens for dinner. (check out backyardchickens.com).

And there was an article in last Sunday's NY Times about how even though the spotted owl is disappearing in the Northwest, the battle to save it led to Clinton's setting aside a lot of federal land for old growth forests and ended up creating a growing ecology and tourist business as well as preserving a lot of the ecosystem.

So, all in all, as throughout history or in any given moment, there is what someone will see as "bad" and "good" but in the end is just reality, for which I try to be grateful—and then go ahead and work to change what I think needs to be changed.

THE TRIUMPH OF HYPOCRISY AND/OR MASS HYPNOSIS

How well the "conservatives" have manipulated the media and sold their "big lies" like:

The problem with the economy is the deficit. We must make cuts to save the economy! [When economists whose track record of being correct I respect (like Paul Krugman) present solid evidence arguing it is too soon to start cutting and if we do the rescue of the economy that the stimulus package helped generate will be for naught, but government will be slashed until it is even weaker and less regulatory and supportive, which is the conservative agenda in the first place, so it's win/win for them and lose/lose for the rest of us.]

Or:

We care about small businesses and working people and those being impacted by the "oil spill" and/or the recession! [But not enough to extend unemployment benefits, which the Republicans voted solidly against, using the deficit as their excuse and a distraction for the media, while people without jobs or help from the government can't buy things which means less economic activity and therefore more job loss etc.!]

Or:

The "oil spill" is Clinton's fault, or Obama's! [And not the last administration's which gutted the agency that regulates drilling in the gulf and was in the breast pocket of the oil corporations! et-endlessly-cetera!]

But the one that always riles me the most is their flip flopping on "states rights" and any kind of "local rights" depending on whether or not it lines the pockets of corporations or their own. Like the rightwing dominated Supreme Court's decisions in case after case in favor of states against anything the federal government tried to do in terms of regulations and practices etc. until the 2000 election when Florida's Supreme Court ruled to continue counting votes and was overruled because suddenly the federal position trumped states rights.

Or too many other cases to list here, so I'll end with one of the latest, that local municipalities and states have no right to limit access to firearms or write laws limiting them because the NRA trumps elected officials and common sense.

Et-incredibly-cetera.