Crapped the Floor

The recent Sopranos episode was the worst I've ever seen. They let some co-executive producer write it and what did he do? He invented Tony's "gambling problem" and then decided to destroy his relationship with a long-time business associate with whom he most enjoyed a glass of Scotch. So I'm thinking, "This is all just a ruse, right? The writers are fucking with us, and they're going to do something amazing that will turn it all around and make it make sense." But no. What actually happened was **SPOILER* Vito's goth son is in standing in the shower at high school, getting picked on by the jocks, and he just CRAPS on the floor, jsut like that. Standing there. Then he steps on it. The jocks yell "Ewww" and run away. The end.

I propose we use "Crapped the Floor" the way we use "Jumped the Shark."



In other news, a student cleaned the board in my classroom today. This completely cliched act almost made me burst out laughing. I didn't ask her to do it, either. All I need is an apple on the desk.

Additionally, the show Work Out completely rocked my world recently. Besides the tragic story of Doug's passing, which I rank right up there with Pedro's very famous reality TV death, a brief side storyline brought together Jesse and a gay Iraq war veteran who happend to serve on the panel who decides if your misconduct gets you kicked out of the army. He told the story of a gay man whose troop accepted him and who the panel decided was OK, but then a higher-up canned him anyway.

I have not seen a SINGLE text that has brought together the two most 2005-election-contentious issues. You have your war documentaries here and your gay stories of the street or the home threr, but they are never conjoned. Anti-war Democratic candidates do not ever make the link. They're "separate" issues, apparently, even to Barney Frank, it seems. All it took was one random gay military side character in a B-channel reality show to say, "Yeah, the morale's gone down over there" in the same conversation as, "They kicked him out anyway" and this speaks volumes and volumes more than Brokeback Mountain and the latest NPR expose about funding or hidden death-toll statistics. As long as the war is talked about in purely DC-political or economic or nationalistic terms alone, and the gender politics are bracketed out, then that Elephant in the Room is going to stamp us all out. I refuse to express more outrage at the war or at global warming than I do at lack of gay rights. This is why Marxism and feminism never really "married," pun intended. This is why I'm not going to see the fucking 60s boomer Bread and Puppet Theatre do its "zany" Bush send-ups. I'm sick of those Vermont hippies because they, too, bracket gender out. Oh, maybe they'll have some abortion skit, but that'll be it.

Finally, I want to put forth a film that I like, and I am somewhat nervous to do it. It's, er, um, United 93, the story of the plane that crasked in Penn. on 9/11. Okay, wait, wait, stop, just listen. I saw that other film, the one with Nicholas Cage. Rather, Asenath and I "saw" it in 10 minutes by scanning through it and predicting everything. United 93 is completely different. There's no orchestral melos, first of all, and there's no exaggeration of heroism in the individualistic sense. Yes, they make all those who died into heroes--that's inevitable--but it's the pacing leading up to the end, the final crash, that's so amazing and makes the falws forgivable. Time is out of joint: we see the hijackers as they board and silently prepare, glancing at eachother nervously, but then we quickly cut to workers in the control tower who are beginning to freak out about all the off-course planes. There is no overstated or overacted line in the whole movie. It's mostly quiet bafflement, Altman-like murmer and overlapping dialogue, and general de-centralized character focus. Call me crazy, but I think it's a great fuckin' film, and perfectly sensitive to the victims without sentimentalizing anyone or anything, bereft of exalting anyone to heavenly status. In fact, there's a marked absence of meaning anywhere in this film.