Month: July 2006

Thank heavens Kevin Smith is keeping newspapers in business.
I can’t say I’ve enjoyed any of his movies — I honestly tried three times to watch Clerks and failed each time — but I have a lot of respect for Smith. His iPod director’s commentary idea is pure genius. And in the below 19-minute video, in which he discusses his abbreviated attachment to the new Superman movie, he shows what a smart, funny, and seemingly sensible guy he is:

Here’s my column from today’s paper.

When Dan Hamermesh heard that Northwest ISD was paying rookie teachers $44,159, he was thrilled. “That’s phenomenal! In Texas? I’m happy to hear it.”

But within 30 seconds, he’d switched gears: “That’s just pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. It’s exactly wrong.”

What was he talking about? Who is Dan Hamermesh? And why does he think that well-meaning North Texas school districts are making choices that will drive promising teachers out of the profession?

Here’s my story from Sunday’s front page — it’s more about cheating:

When he saw that six Richardson schools were on the state’s list of potential TAKS cheaters, Superintendent Jim Nelson wanted to investigate. But to do so, he needed to know how Caveon – the company that built the list – did its work.

He e-mailed state Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley, whose agency paid Caveon to do the analysis: “Commissioner, how do I get detailed information as to how Caveon reached their conclusions? All we got were the conclusions.”

He added, according to documents obtained by The Dallas Morning News : “Anger and frustration aimed at the agency is palpable. I want to help, but we must have access to their analysis.” Without those details, the Texas Education Agency is doing “nothing more than a hit and run,” he said.

Mr. Nelson and other Texas educators have tried to get the information they think they need to clear their schools’ names. But the TEA hasn’t been able to give it to them. That’s because agency officials never got the data themselves.

As a result, few, if any, thorough cheating investigations have begun – nearly two months after Caveon determined that 609 schools had suspicious test scores.

Benton’s First Rule of Journalism Synergy: The day you are asked to appear on a local television news program is always the day you have showed up to work dressed as a homeless person.

The two great Stevens of popular music — Sufjan and Ray — together at last.

Stupidest statement ever made in an interview of John Updike: This screamer from Nerve’s Will Doig:

One of the things that compels Ahmad to terrorism in this book is his hatred of America’s permissive attitude toward sex. And yet from where I stand, America seems more sexually repressed than ever. How is there such a disconnect between what he sees and what I see?

How thick would one’s blinders have to be to believe that America in 2006 is “more sexually repressed than ever”? Six inches? A foot? How ignorant of history would one have to be? Particularly if one is an editor for an Internet magazine devoted entirely to sex? Sheesh.

One of the glories of the explosion of video online is that it’s much easier to find all the exploitation films that, one day long ago, inspired young Quentin Tarantino to be a director.
My personal favorites, from a historian’s p.o.v., are the sexploitation films. They exist only to show naked and semi-naked women to the horny male masses. But they wrap that lurid purpose in a blanket of fake, finger-wagging moralism. As such, they prefigure nothing so much as contemporary daytime television.
Here are a few trailers from the 1950s and 1960s, all taken from the excellent Bedazzled. (NSFW — meaning you will spy a fairly steady stream of nipples and the occasional buttock):

• The Twisted Sex (“It explores the sexual deviations of our age and the people whose thirst for love brings them to the edge of madness!”)
• Some Like It Violent (“See how a shy and inhibited boy becomes a vicious sex killer!”)
• It’s a Sick, Sick, Sick World (“The things that women do…not for money, but for the enjoyment and pleasure that is derived from their actions!”)
• The Sex Cycle (“See girls caught in the vortex of vice!”)
• The Girl Smugglers (“The racket was smuggling! And the contraband was young girls, shipped to the states, where their bodies are used to bring cash into the racketeer’s treasury!”)

And finally, a later edition of the smut-wrapped-in-fake-morals genre: from 1967, The Girl, The Body, and The Pill. “Don’t let the size of that little pill fool you — it’s like a hydrogen bomb, exploding in the face of civilization!” That Miss Barrington, she’s pretty cute!

I love Uruguay.
It’s a strange country to inspire such devotion, I imagine. But it’s sort of the Zambia of South America: small and easily overlooked; dominated by its neighbors; once prosperous, now in rougher times; and friendly as all get out. I loved my couple of days there last fall and have secret plans to buy a house in Colonia del Sacramento and go write my novels.
Which explains this link to the Uruguayan Invasion. It was musical, not military, a la the British Invasion: For one shining moment in the 1960s, Uruguayan rock bands were the class of the continent, fueling Beatlemania-style mayhem among the youth of Argentina.
The key bands were Los Shakers and Los Mockers — who pinched the styles of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, respectively. (And were, naturally, great rivals.) First, Los Shakers, whom I absolutely love:

I have a great desire to track down a copy of La Conferencia Secreta del Toto’s Bar, which is supposedly their Sgt. Pepper’s, mixing psychedelia with candombe.
Now Los Mockers:

The Uruguayan Invasion, sadly, died out in 1973 with the start of Uruguay’s military dictatorship. Dictatorships have a way of doing that to pop music. All about “Ururock” here.

Bad Timing, a weblog devoted to the making of the first feature film in Zambian history. (Zambia is, of course, my favorite sub-Saharan nation.) With the obligatory companion blog on…the making of the film about the making of the first feature film in Zambian history. So, so meta.
I’d exchanged emails with Jabbes Mvula, the director, a few weeks back. He decided he wanted to get into filmmaking after the death of his three-year-old son in 2001. So I was very sad to read that another of his children died last month. That to me is the biggest gap between a place like Zambia and the developed world: the frequency with which people bury their dead. (I wrote a story about it back in 2004.)