Sometimes you just want the TV on for background noise. Volume at a low murmur, a moving painting pushed up against the wall. It’s not too distracting that way. I’ve also found it’s pretty much the perfect way to appreciate “Scarface.”
It was on AMC last night. I never watch movies on AMC — there are commercials, and the profanity is scrubbed, but last night I was paying 98 percent of my attention to something else, and besides, it’s “Scarface.” The worst movie ever made. You think losing a few f-bombs is going to hurt the experience?
But actually, I came away from this multitask-aided viewing sort of liking it. How the hell could that happen? I dunno; maybe because I paid attention to the women this time. I liked seeing scrawny, slight-breasted women like Michelle Pfeiffer and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in plunging necklines. (Nowadays Posh Spice is the model.) I liked Mastrantonio’s ridiculous Afro, and the scene where Pfeiffer listens to her husband crab about everything while he takes a bath. (She sits at her vanity, polishing her nails and tooting cocaine, which seems the right strategy.) Of course, I loved the stupid accents: Toe-nee, we jost got mah-reed yesterday! We were goin’ to soo-prize you!
And, of course, I liked how Miami seems to be entirely populated by young blondes walking down the street in string bikinis. Oliver Stone and Brian DePalma at their best.
It was a short, intense week, but now all my work is done, and it’s Friday! And it’s beautiful! And it’s warm, but not so hot. So I’m giving you this lame-ass entry and a few links:
Lance Mannion speaks for me and many others when he takes note of the tut-tutting over the tone of the Lieberman race — something I’ve paid less than close attention to, although I know it’s pretty ugly — with this cri de blog:
And everybody on down the food chain to the lowliest of the low—I mean me—has again and again expressed their frustration, dismay, and anger at the way insider pundits, politicians, and analysts insist on covering politics as if they live in a universe where Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Roger Ailes of Fox News (not the good Roger Ailes) and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and before them Lee Atwater, Morton Downey Jr, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Joe McCarthy, and Father Coughlin, had all never been born and as if the poisoned state of political debate was the Democrats’ doing, a bug they keep catching because they refuse to wear their galoshes in the rain and then pass along by not covering their mouths when they cough.
Uh-huh.
The proprietor of Detroitblog is a secretive fellow (he obscured his WHOIS entry), and I suspect for good reason: Evidence suggests he’s a journalist in the employ of one of the dailies, and if word leaked to his bosses that he was blogging on the side, they’d perform their usual First Amendment-inspired clampdown on his right to free expression. Because everyone knows that once you go to work for the princely salary a newspaper pays, they OWN you, brother, you and EVERY WORD YOU WRITE.
Oh, I digress. Anyway, he has a lovely post up, with pictures, on the encroachment of the urban prairie in inner-city Detroit. He had permalinks for a while, but no more, but he doesn’t update often, so if you just go here, I’m sure the post will be at the top for at least a few days.