Because, apparently, I’m a moron, I decided to start watching Battle Royale at around 1 AM tonight. So tonight I can’t blame the insomnia on anybody else. Baka!

I’d been hearing about this movie for years, and I was actually afraid to watch it. The premise — Lord of the Flies meets “Survivor,” where a class of junior high kids are sent to a deserted island to participate in a government-mandated “game” where they all kill each other — could either be brutal satire or an exploitative hyper-violent action thriller. Either way, it was likely to be gruesome. And everyone who mentioned the movie prefaced it by going on about how violent it is.
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Normally when you’re as ignorant of politics as I am, you keep your mouth shut unless absolutely necessary. But lately I can’t turn around (virtually speaking) without reading something that makes me want to put my fist through a wall. I can’t read all the news stories of people trying to capitalize on a national tragedy for political gain, without being reminded of looters trashing a flooded department store. And I can’t read all the blog blathering of people tossing blame around, without feeling as if I’m wading in feces- and corpse-filled, disease laden water.

So here’s my ignorant take on:

• Kanye West’s “Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People”
  Dude, where the hell have you been? Bush doesn’t care about people. Why you have to single out the rest of us he doesn’t care about but who aren’t black?
• The Bush Administration was quick to respond to 9/11, but slow to respond to Katrina…
  First off, screw all of you for having me to defend the Bush Administration! But back up a step: terrorists flying planes into buildings in Manhattan is thankfully still a unique occurance. People hear that and immediately realize, “Whoa, this is a big deal.” Hurricanes striking the Gulf Coast happens every year. Yes, there were predictions that this was a severe storm. But it’s reasonable to assume that people at every level thought all the bureaucracy and systems in place would be sufficient.
• …and that’s because they hate black people
  The immediate response? No. It’s more easily explained by just general incompetence and underestimation of just how severe the situation was. Setting up the conditions for the disaster, by cutting the budget for the Army Corps of Engineers? Yes, that happened, and that’s what people should be calling attention to. But it’s still not anti-black; it’s anti-poor.
  So this horrible disaster has taught us that Republicans don’t have the best interests of the poor at heart. Well, thank God we learned something from it that we couldn’t have learned from, oh I dunno, the entire history of the Republican party.

Call me a Polyanna, but my philosophy is that people suck. We’re lazy and selfish and we look for the path of least resistance. Never assume a conspiracy when simple incompetence will do. Don’t assume racism when simple laziness will explain it.

These people aren’t looking for answers, they’re looking for angles. To discredit their political opponents. While these people look at New Orleans and say, “Black people are being neglected,” anyone with a soul looks at it says, “People need help.” Just when I think that we really are gradually pulling ourselves out of the muck and advancing as a species, I see how quick everyone is to just ignore all that and forget everything we’ve learned about racism in the past 200 years.

The title is from Mike Doughty’s song “Busting Up a Starbucks”. If I’m interpreting it correctly, the song’s about impotent outrage at “corporate culture,” pop culture in particular. So at least for the rest of this post, that’s exactly what it’s about.

And what a coincidence, because that’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Granted, the whole “high art vs. low art” debate is nothing new, but either I haven’t been paying attention, or within the last decade or so it’s taken a really nasty political turn.

Used to be it was just about intelligence and coolness. So the small nugget inside me which remains in denial and full of hope that I might one day be Cool, forces me to treat everything I like as a guilty pleasure. And I play Diablo while making fun of Dungeons and Dragons. Or I obsess over “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” while mocking both the ones who write fan-fics as “losers” and the ones who write academic books in defense of the show as trying too hard to justify their obsessions. Or I get teary-eyed at the Main Street Electrical Parade while complaining about empty spectacle and meaningless entertainment. I’m not sure exactly why those of us in the nerd and geek communities are so desperate to simultaneously knock down and defend the things we love, but it probably is due to this fantasy we all have of taking off our glasses and showing up for the Big Dance as the coolest kids in the whole school.

But now, to maintain my status as a Well-Mannered, Responsible Liberal, I have to rail against all of it because it’s all the work of the Huge Soul-Crushing Media Companies. Two of which have been my employers, making it even more difficult. Has there always been this gross, simplistic, nasty political tone to it all, or is that a recent partisan development? I mean, I’ve heard simple-minded people shout “television is the opiate of the masses!” and “corporate rock sucks!” and various complaints about media conglomerates and how “indie” automatically equals “better.” And of course I’ve heard plenty of people talk about Disney as if there’s a cabal of Eisner-led liches in Burbank strangling kittens and southeast Asian factory-worker children and using their blood to make pentagrams. (Which of course there isn’t, and I haven’t seen it.)

But now the accusation is that enjoying pop culture means you’re complicit in evil — EEEEEVIL! — for giving money to these horrible companies that you’re just too stupid to see through. We’ve been so indoctrinated with the philosophy that Big Corporations are Bad that it’s gotten mixed in with the high art/low art debate and become yet another way to polarize everyone. Every company larger than 200 employees is now Standard Oil, and there’s no such thing as a good corporation. Our only recourse is to boycott the media, buy organic, and if we must watch films, they should have Parker Posey in them or be directed by Europeans or Canadians. To do otherwise is no longer just stupid, it’s wrong.

Either people are getting more stupid and simple-minded, or the stupid people are getting more vocal, or I’m getting more moderate in my advancing years. I remember back around the time of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and how self-satisfied I was for boycotting the company; it made me feel as if I were really doing something. And it pains me to realize now that in spite of all the comic books and videogames, I grew up, and realized that it’s not about me and my petty grabs at being important for making meaningful choices against a cruel world. That instead, it’s a huge number of people all trying to make meaningful choices, and frequently making mistakes.

It’s comforting to be able to pick out the villains like Kenneth Lay and put a face to the huge, nebulous injustice, but I suspect that the reality is even more depressing. I believe the reality is that there are indeed many outright self-serving bastards trying to screw everyone else, but they’re outnumbered by the people who are really trying to make a difference (in the case of entertainment, to be creative) but impeded by the sheer size of the machine and its layers of bureaucracy. And all of them are far outnumbered by the people who just really don’t give a damn, but are only trying not to get fired.

As for the song: even if I’m completely off about my interpretation, it’s still a catchy song and a great turn of phrase. You can listen to it on his official site if you’re into that sort of thing.

And while I’m writing, my favorite line from the album is “You snooze you lose, well I snost and lost.”

By the way, Doughty’s in San Francisco September 30th and October 1st, playing at The Independent which is stumbling distance from my apartment. Who wants to go with me?

The other day, I was trying to buy a pack of cigarettes from someone who just wasn’t getting the concept. Usually I say, “American Spirits mediums” and if they don’t get it, I say “the light green ones.” This was too much for the poor clerk to handle, so I was having to point vigorously while thinking up other ways to describe them. While I was explaining, “no, not the green menthol ones, the lighter green ones…” I thought, “it’s exactly the same color as the background color of my website.”

Whoa. That was completely unintentional; I just like the color green. Or do I?!?

I had another bout with insomnia last night, even after “helping” Alex move, and then drinking a whole lot of beer, the two things that should guarantee I fall asleep immediately. So what that means is that I finished another four episodes of “Alias,” and there’s just two discs left in Season 3.

At this point in the series, it’s reminding me a lot of the TV series “Angel.” Not in the content or the tone, but in how I’m responding to it. “Angel” is my quintessential love/hate TV series — there were so many characters and plotlines that I just despised, and which annoyed me enough to just give up on the show over and over again. But when they did well, it was some of the best television ever made.

They had the lame “lawyers are really evil” and “LA is really phony” gags that they just never put to rest, and they had some really loathesome characters that were supposed to be sympathetic, like Lorne the demon guy and Angel’s son. But then they’d have a killer storyline like the one where Faith came back and had more depth to her character in those two episodes than in an entire year of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Or the whole fourth season of “Angel,” where they had basically written themselves into a corner and had to cover up a pregnancy, but came out of it with a great season arc that all fit together and had episodes which were genuinely scary (and I didn’t think TV could scare me anymore).

And season three of “Alias” is kind of like that. Most of it just shatters all the “I know it’s implausible and over the top, but it’s supposed to be” good-will I’d built up. All the plot twists and change-ups and revealed secrets just seem like bored writers in afternoon meetings, moving characters around on a grid without even trying to come up with real motivations for them. The characters have gone from being two-dimensional but lovable, to one-and-a-half-dimensional and so boring that even they seem to be bored with what they’re doing. Here’s yet another scene where Jack breaks the rules to save his daughter. Here’s another scene where Dixon encounters somebody behind bars and vows vengeance. Here’s one more scene where Sydney shows teary-eyed determination. Here’s still yet another girlfight with the evil Allison Doren (who got an extraordinarily anti-climactic send-off). I’m still fine with being earnest, but that will only take you so far if you don’t have an engrossing story to back it up.

And the big villain of the season was so completely obvious from scene one, that I can’t tell whether or not the reveal was supposed to be a surprise. There are still two discs left, and I’m sure that they’ve got more plot twists to throw at the story, but so far it’s been a real yawner. (Although I will say that as soon as she started playing evil, she became 1000 times sexier. What that says about me, I don’t know and don’t want to think about.) And granted, the whole bit about Sydney’s missing two years was getting stale, but instead of throwing in some twists to make it interesting, they just blew their wad and explained the whole thing away.

So that’s the hate; where’s the love? Well, this is also the season where they really got the big budgets, it looks like, and they’d built up enough reputation to attract even bigger-name guest stars. And they had the freedom to do interesting stuff that didn’t quite fit in with the formula. Like the episode with Ricky Gervais as an IRA bomber: pretty neat. And the one with David Cronenberg as the doctor who sent Sydney on that whole dream-sequence episode: very, very neat. And Isabella Rosselini as the superspy that helps Jack: pretty lame episode overall, but she gave a great performance, even though she looks even more uncannily like David Foley in drag the older she gets.

I’m still unspoiled for the rest of this season, so I have no idea what the big cliff-hanger is going to be. And considering that the next season isn’t available on DVD until mid-October, I’m actually going to have to wait to see the resolution of this cliff-hanger. It’ll be interesting to see how long I can hold out before begging people to tell me what happens in season four.

I just went out for my 1:30 AM cigarette, and there was a guy hiding behind the stairs wearing only boxer shorts, a T-shirt, and socks, holding a baseball bat. When he heard me come out, he started giggling and gingerly skipped up the block a ways. After a minute or so, he skipped back and hid behind a different staircase next door, and then slipped around and stood behind a van.

What kept it at “what the hell?” level of interest instead of “holy shit psycho bat guy!” was that I could hear his buddies a couple doors down, out on the sidewalk drinking. But what sucks is that I stood out there to see how the whole thing played out, but one of his friends walked by with a beer can and pointed at him, and the dude just followed him back to the apartment, holding the bat. I expected a lot bigger pay-off.

Now I like to think I’m pretty open-minded, but it’s stuff like this that makes me think I’m just not cut out to live in the city. Merry Prankster Bat Guy was weird but pretty tame. More annoying is the huge lesbian with the scalp tattoo who plants herself on my steps to smoke cigarettes and talk on her cell phone. And whoever it is that leaves half-eaten sandwiches in plastic bags at the top of my stairs (that’s happened twice now). And the woman who walks by once a week at 2 AM having a long, loud, angry conversation with no one in particular. And the guy I already mentioned who always wears shorts no matter how cold it is and is always washing his car or cleaning out his garage in the wee hours of the morning. And the guy who walks by fornightly playing a digeridoo. And that weird guy who’s always out on his doorstep at 1:30 smoking a cigarette and then goes back inside to write about it on his weblog.

And this is a relatively boring neighborhood; I wonder what goes on in the rest of the city?

Still in Burbank at my comfortable media-company-catering suburban-luxury hotel, watching reports of New Orleans on the news and wondering what to do. Can’t do anything about that in particular (except donate), and considering I’ve never actually been to the city so I don’t even have anything useful to say.

I’ve still got about four hours before a meeting, and only a short while before I have to give up the room and my internet connection. Seems like it’d be a good time to get some work done, at least it would if I didn’t have a case of the stare-blankly-at-the-screen going on. I don’t get how people can get work done on planes and in hotel rooms and coffeeshops and such; I suspect they’re not really anything getting done, but just faking it. So how to kill four hours in Burbank? Based on all the signs and billboards, a lot of people around here are really, really eager for me to watch their TV channel or see their movie. Beats being outside, at least.

I keep hearing about all this great stuff you can do in LA; what’s up with that?