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Athens, Jerusalem and Gillette

I’m here in the Real O.C.! I haven’t seen Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows anywhere, nor Kristin Cavallari’s roots, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

During the flight, I watched No Maps for These Territories, a documentary about William Gibson. I’m ruminating on that one, and might write a lengthy, rambling take on it next weekend. Harass me about it, so I can formulate some more.

Also, I read a pair of short columns that I think you might like, and that seem somehow intertwined. I haven’t gone to Arts & Letters much lately; not sure why. But Amy hit it this weekend and came across both of these pieces, so all credit goes to the official VM wife.

The first is a review of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, which explores Bloom’s visions and revisions on the relationship between the Old and New Testaments:

Bloom interprets the trinity as an essentially polytheistic “structure of anxiety” in which God the Father—whom Bloom finds “lacking in personality”—is a mere shade of Yahweh. Yahweh, “the West’s major literary, spiritual, and ideological character,” has not, according to Bloom, “survived in Christianity.” In J’s portrait—the earliest biblical layer—Yahweh is “anxious, pugnacious, aggressive, ambivalent,” not to mention all too often absent. But unlike Jesus Christ and God the Father, he is emphatically not a theological God. Indeed, Bloom asserts that “no God has been more human.”

The other piece is about wet shaving, Homer, and the possibility of redemption. I can’t begin to do it justice.

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Absentia

Sorry to be posting so infrequently, dear reader. This headcold’s been whomping me, and I’ve been on a rough production schedule for the magazine. On top of that, I have to head out to Anaheim on Sunday for another conference. I’m guessing that the architecture won’t quite match up to Chicago’s.

We’ll catch up next week, sometime.

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Someday, only meth users won’t be congested

The true cost of the War on Drugs was the 3 minutes of my life that were wasted in CVS on my lunch break when I bought some decongestant.

I had to bring a product-card to the front checkout so they could give me the decongestant. Then was told I had to sign a registry book with my name, address, time of purchase, and quantity of pseudoephedrine.

So I’m afraid that “Ambulatory P. Groin” of “1313 Mockingbird Ln.” might find himself getting a visit from the DEA sometime soon. He probably shouldn’t have bought “one pound” of the product, but hey.

(I wonder what expression the clerk would have had if I walked up with 200 product-cards and dumped them on the counter. I swear: when I get over this headcold, I oughtta start a meth lab. This is worse than those Truth commericals.)

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Bald Win!

I follow Page 6 in the New York Post pretty devotedly. I’ve never been one for the supermarket tabloids & gossip mags, with their overriding fixation with pregnancy, but Page 6 usually gets is just right, with embarrassing celebrity stories, blind items that Amy & I occasionally suss out, and a seeming moratorium on Paris Hilton items.

I don’t link to the items because they go dead within a week, and it always makes me sad to look over blog-archives and find dead links. I’ve got issues.

Anyway, in the past week, Page 6 raised an interesting question in the VM household. See, a few months ago, there was an item about Stephen Baldwin’s residence in near(ish)by Nyack, NY. Baldwin, a born-again Christian, so objected to a local porno store, he began writing down the license plates of cars in its parking lot, for publication in the local paper.

Last week, the column reported that Baldwin’s moving out of Nyack for another town in Westchester. The thing is, the item referred to him as “the least-famous Baldwin.”

Well, we thought, it’s pretty easy to say that Alec‘s the best known, but what about the rest? I know Daniel Baldwin best from his crack-binge blowout a few years ago, but Amy sez he’s pretty well known from being on Homicide.

But Billy? More famous than Stephen? Sure, he’s married to Chynna Phillips, but could we really say that Billy’s Dagwood Bumstead haircut in Sliver outranked the “Oswald was a pussy” line from The Usual Suspects?

Fortunately, a week later, they followed up with an item referring to Stephen as “[t]he third-most famous of the acting Baldwin brothers,” which sounds better. Unfortunately, the item was about how Baldwin’s actually moving because he’s stuck for cash.

All of which gets me to this weekend’s movie revelation: The Cooler. Sure, William H. Macy was great as a down-on-everybody’s-luck casino jinx, and Maria Bello was flat-out great to look at, but Alec Baldwin was absolutely fantastic as the casino owner. I was amazed at how he devoured the role without playing up the “Look at me! I’m Alec Baldwin!” face. He seemed to revel in the past-his-prime-ness of the character.

He’ll always be the most famous of the Baldwins to me. Even if Page 6 reports more terrible details of his custody fights with Kim Basinger.

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The L word

George Will blasts the GOP (collaterally damaging the Dems) with his apolcalyptic column about the move to restrict “527” political donations:

David Dreier (R-Calif.) explained, sort of. He said he voted against McCain-Feingold because “dictating who could give how much to whom” violated the First Amendment, but now he favors dictating to 527 contributors because McCain-Feingold is not violating the First Amendment enough: It is not “working as it was intended.” That is, it is not sufficiently restricting the money financing political advocacy.

[. . .] Oh, so that is what the First Amendment means: Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech unless speech annoys politicians.

That “L word” I mentioned? It comes up in the conclusion of Will’s column.