Month: May 2004

Last night, I started reading Underground, Haruki Murakami’s collection of interviews of survivors of the sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995.

Today, we find out that there was sarin nerve gas in an roadside bomb/unexploded shell in Iraq.

Just plain weird, is what I’m saying.

It was the best of Jones, it was the worst of Jones.

(Okay, it was a dumb headline. I’m tired; sue me. And I’m heading up to Boston for a biopharma conference for a couple of days. Au revoir!)

A few months ago, I wrote, “[Las Vegas] is actually an alien theme park of planet Earth. Which helps explain both the laser beam [from the top of the Luxor] AND the proximity to Area 51.”

In The Nation, Marc Cooper writes about Vegas as the new capital of America (figuratively speaking, of course: y’know, the way various cities have been emblematic of various stages of our history). He writes:

What a turnaround it has been for once lowly Las Vegas–and for the nation around it. Barely fifteen years ago, the august Citicorp was queasy about publicly admitting that its major credit-card processing center had been relocated to an unincorporated suburb of Las Vegas. A deal with state authorities allowed the banking corporation to postmark and camouflage its mail as coming from “The Lakes, Nevada” instead of from sinful Vegas. Today, that same neighborhood sports several high-end casinos and luxury hotels. And Citicorp’s own credibility, in the aftermath of the great Wall Street accounting scandals, ranks somewhere below that of a midtown three-card-monte hustler.

The Germans and the Iranians are getting feisty over commemorating murdered dissidents and the sale of chemical weapons.

. . . when Hezbollah sez you’ve gone too far.

It seems pretty clear by now that there�s a sizeable audience for the books and movies of Michael Moore. I haven�t read or watched any of these, so I�m not gong to cast any aspersions on them or their audience. I�m simply stating that a lot of people are interested in Moore�s work.

That said, it seems like there�s a logic short-circuit in the recent criticisms of Disney�s refusal to distribute Moore�s latest flick, which explores the relationship between the Bush family and Saudi Arabian oil interests.

Miramax, a subsidiary of Disney, has already paid millions to finance the film, after the company that produced The Passion of The Christ withdrew funding. As part of its buy-in, Miramax had an option to distribute the film, but chose to pass on the option. This doesn’t mean that the movie will be kept in a locked vault for no one to see; it simply means that another distributor will have to buy the rights, promote the movie (in conjunction with Mr. Moore’s publicity efforts), and get theaters to carry it.

Moore, on his website, has contended that Disney made this decision because it didn’t want to jeopardize tax breaks that the state of Florida (the governor of which, of course, is the brother of President Bush) provides for Disney’s theme parks.

Now, this gets back to my initial sentence: There’s a sizeable audience for Mr. Moore’s work. In a highly-polarized election year, that audience will probably turn out in huge numbers to see this movie. However, Disney has elected to forego the large box-office return it would receive from this movie (one report puts production costs at $6 million, which means profit margins could be pretty impressive).

The NYTimes op-ed page, however, eschews this logic, contending, “[I]t is clear that Disney loves its bottom line more than the freedom of political discourse.” Are movie studios being ridiculed for turning down The Passion of The Christ, after that flick made more than $400 million at the box office? No. Despite the massive profits to be made, the media regards them as having principles for not helping produce it, because it was “controversial.”

However, now that a studio in dire need of some hits passes on a no-brainer money-maker, it’s vilified as “repressive.”

Because global capitalism is all about the mindless pursuit of money, except when it isn’t.

Damn. I gotta get back to writing about wacky cultural issues and the arts sometime. Maybe there’s something good on VH1 Classic.

For the first time, my publishing persona and my sports persona have come together. No, I’m not publishing a Paul West book on cricket (not a bad idea . . .). Rather, the spring-training pre-game practice of Yankee catcher Jorge Posada feels like something straight out of The Mad Man.

Money quote? “I wish I could wear gloves, honestly,” Posada said. “I’ve tried it. It just doesn’t feel right.”