A Reasonable Man

Barack Obama’s favorite TV show is, apparently, The Wire. It’s a new day!

June.  June?!?!  I will fucking kill you, Steve.

David Sedaris delivers a pizza.

(via kottke)

I am not a political heavy, but it seems to me that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have pretty much the same plan to turn America into a godless wasteland shorn of freedom, where the terrorist masses will kill us all to death. During the last several debates, Senator Clinton has tried very hard to make the case that this is not true - that there are substantive policy differences between herself and and Senator Obama. The best I can tell, this has something to do with healthcare and mandates and something something something. If it sounds like I don’t really sound convinced, it’s because I’m not. I have not gone out of my way to actively wrap my head around her argument, nor have I attempted to actively ignore it. I have approached it with a spirit of passive indifference. I have tried to let her words settle on my brain like snow on the curb and penetrate my (admittedly dense) skull. They have not, and as a result I can say that as the every man, as the political layman, I have concluded that the difference, if it exists, is most likely of such nuance that it does not matter to me. Both candidates seem committed to providing universal healthcare (and destroying America), and in the broad brushstrokes with which I engage politics, I am satiated.

The question (in my mind) then becomes, if both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama are, for all intents and purposes, peddling the same prescription to cure the ills of the body politik, for whom should I cast my treasonous, freedom-hating vote?

Senator Clinton, after months of being the presumptive nominee, has not had a good time of it lately. Although she managed to squeak out wins in both Ohio and Texas yesterday, the insane calculus of delegate math does not paint a rosy picture of her chances for winning the nomination. As I said earlier, she has strived vigorously to create - not highlight - but create, as in, to conjure from the ether - genuine policy differences between herself and Senator Obama, because I believe that she knows that if it’s a choice between two candidates with the same roadmap for America, she’s in real trouble. And she’s in real trouble because, simply enough, Senator Obama elicits more enthusiasm from everyday people than she does.

How much more enthusiasm? Consider this.

Barack Hussein Obama is estimated to have raised $50 million dollars in the month of February. He had, at the time I wrote this, won 11 primaries in a row. Over a million people have donated to his campaign, which is something that has never, ever happened in a political primary. His rallies are more like rock concerts than political events; women swoon and faint, and attendance regularly balloons to over 20,000 people, another figure that is an astonishing milestone in a primary campaign. It is truly a phenomenon. He has reached this envious position with a positive, upbeat message of change. Even his critics concede that he’s a powerful orator, and although his stump speeches may sometimes lack the concrete policy that is the gristle of his competitor, it seems obvious that his message and his rhetoric have tapped into something fundamental in the psyche of a nation.

Clinton, on the other hand, is a self-professed policy wonk. She’s studious. She’s someone who can cite legislation chapter and verse. Her stump speeches are full of the the nut and bolt underpinnings of her political aspirations. She talks about a 5-point plan for health care, a 3-point plan for immigration, a 6-point plan for national security. I confess that this is half invention. I don’t know how many points are in her plan for immigration, and that’s the whole point - I don’t really care. It may be good policy, but if I need the nitty-gritty I can visit her website. Reciting a list of legislative requirements doesn’t get people fired up the way that Obama can when he declares to a cheering throng, “Yes, we can!”

I don’t think it’s bad that Senator Clinton is so well-versed in political policy. I think, in fact, that it’s a necessity for getting things done. I also think, however, that it’s a skill that Barack Obama has shown throughout the campaign (especially in the debates) that he has too. He simply (and wisely) chooses not to make the guts of his legislative proposals the centerpiece for his campaign.

When it comes down to it, I believe that a candidate like Barack Obama, who can excite and inspire so many people to get involved in the political process is a candidate who, in time, has the best chance to dispel the cloud of apathy that seems to have settled like a permanent fixture on the landscape of America, and that is an X-Factor that no policy or plan can equal.

I believe that a candidate like Barack Obama, who worked in the slums and ghettos of Chicago, motivating the disenfranchised to make change in their own backyards as a community organizer, is someone who can take the excitement and the enthusiasm that his campaign has generated and funnel that energy into a real resurgence in political activism.

Because, ultimately, I believe that our national epidemic of apathy has robbed us of a rich history of political activism. We exist now as a people who rely on government to cure our ills. We are at our best when we work with government - at all levels - to achive bold progress.

Senator Obama rallying cry is Yes We Can, and for once in my life, when a politican says that change is a thing within our grasp, I believe him. And, what’s more, I want to help make it happen.

Ben and I spend a lot of time trying to come up with schemes to get rich.  The problem - or, rather, the chief problem - is that we tend to approach these ventures like a troop of monkeys with ADD.  We’ll spend an evening or afternoon brainstorming a given idea, working ourselves up into a healthy lather of enthusiasm, and then when we encounter an obstacle, we quickly abandon our plans and begin hunting anew for an idea that will bring us unimaginable wealth - one that is, we hope, much, much easier.  For example, if someone were to just give us millions of dollars for free because we seem like nice guys.  That’s a plan we could get behind.

Not surprisingly, this methodology has yet to net us much in the way of financial reward.  Or, really, any reward.  Not even cookies.  Or one cookie we could split.

I was reminded of all this because I saw this post over on Metafilter about the Netflix Prize.   And what is the Netflix Prize you might ask, if you were too lazy to follow the link I provided?  Well, I’ll tell you.  Netflix uses a fancy algorithm called Cinematch to recommend movies to its subscribers based on how those subscribers have rated films they’ve already seen.  In October of 2006, Netflix released a whole mess of sample data to the public at large and issued the following challenge:  You come up with an algorithm that improves on the predictions of Cinematch by 10%, we’ll give you a million dollars.

It just so happens that this was one of the projects that Ben and I decided to tackle in early 2007.  Because, after all, we’ve both seen movies, and, what’s more, we’ve both used Netflix, so really, how could we not win?  We got as far as registering a team name, printing out a 300 page PDF on machine learning that we never even looked at, and, our coup de grâce, developing the first sparse stages of a ridiculously obtuse and impossible to implement algorithm before we hit our first snag - a library that wasn’t properly installed on the Linux machine we had commandeered for “project development”.

I wish I was joking (I am not) when I say that thus ended our campaign to cash in on a million dollars.  The only remnants of another dead dream is that, occasionally, Ben will look over at me and say, “Hey, do you think anyone has won that Netflix Prize yet?”

It turns out that the answer that question is a resounding no, but there are a few people who’ve managed to do a little bit better than me and Ben.  The Wired article linked in the Metafilter post above highlights in fascinating detail the efforts of one such champion - an unemployed psychologist who lives in London named Gavin Potter.  He’s not in the lead, but he’s close, having improved on the Cinematch system by 8.07%.  There’s a lot that makes his story compelling - that might, one day, make good fodder for a sappy Hollywood movie.  Like, for example, the idea that a guy pushing 50 with no formal training in computer science (much less machine learning) - a guy who has his high school aged daughter work out the calculus and other math bits of his alogirithms - is giving brainy teams of engineers and scientists from Princeton and AT&T a run for their money.

What I find most compelling, however, is how Potter has made such significant progress by employing a rather novel concept.  His idea, put simply, is that people can’t always be reliably reduced to a string of numbers pushed through an equation.  Where computer scientists and computer theorists have failed to make inroads, he hopes to succeed, because he has incorporated innovative elements of psychology into his approach at prediction.  It’s a blend of art and science that, as someone who came out of the University of Michigan with a degree in both Computer Science and English, gives me fits of  glee.

Not as much glee as if, say, I had won the Netflix Prize, but I think it’ll have to do.

And who did the Detroit Red Wings take before the end of the trade deadline?  Did they welcome Sergei Fedorov back into the fold?  Woo stellar right winger Marian Hossa?  Get to Mats Sundin and convince him to reconsider his no-trade clause with Montreal?

Even better!

They got..   defenseman Brad Stuart.  From the Kings.

I don’t even know who that is.  And I don’t care to know.

In which I, Kyle Joseph Banas, review the five films nominated this year for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  Of course, in a perfect world this would have been finished before the actual airing of the Academy Awards, but, you know, what are you going to do?

Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton was pretty good.  Here’s my thing, though, because, obviously, I have to have a thing.  Michael Clayton was good, but it was also a hour and a half of George Clooney parading around as a helpless, broken down, morally ambiguous mope.  This is not a judgement on Mr. Clooney, or his performance, even - it was really good.  It’s just that this character, this Mr. Clayton with his sad sack self, doesn’t fit into the mold I have created for George Clooney.  If I want that, I can look in a mirror.  I like my Clooney bone-headed and egomaniacal.  I like my Clooney oozing charisma.  I like my Clooney full of righteous indignation.  I do not, it turns out, particularly care for moping, repressed Clooney.

Thankfully, in the film’s final turn he magnificently transforms into a nice smooth drinking blend of chiseled charm and righteous fury (see:  Do I look like I’m negotiating?) and I was satiated.

There Will Be Blood

You’ve probably read the stories about Daniel Day-Lewis.  I’m not talking about the time he saw the dead visage of his father while on stage or the time he went into quasi-retirement so he could learn how to make shoes.  I’m talking about the whole method actor thing.  Because Daniel Day-Lewis gets seriously into his roles.  In My Left Foot, the character he played, Christy Brown, was wheelchair bound, and Daniel took this to heart and refused to get out of his, you know, prop wheelchair.  At all.  Ever.  Grips and assistants had to pick him up in his chair and carry him over cables and props and other production adornment so he could appear on set.  For The Last of the Mohicans, I am only slightly exaggerating when I say he striped naked and ventured into the woods with a bowie knife so he could kill a grizzly bear and commune with the land.  There was a time when filming Gangs of New York when, though he was basically dying of pneumonia, he refused to seek medical treatment because…  wait for it..   the miracle of modern medicine didn’t exist in turn of the century New York.

I read all this stuff early last week, being previously oblivious, and it really kind of pissed me off.  I was reminded of that scene from A Knight’s Tale when Chaucer declares of the titular knight, “In Greece he spent a year in silence just to better understand the sound of a whisper.”  I guess I have a natural tendency to be wary of pretension, and this reeked to me.  I mean, come on.  I can just imagine being the sorry son of a bitch tasked with carting Daniel Day-Lewis through a maze of production equipment because he was too in the zone to get out of his fucking chair and walk twenty feet.  As an outsider looking in it’s like - Seriously?  You’re not gaining some kind of supernatural insight into your dramatic and wrought performance by sitting in a fucking wheelchair all the time.  You’re being a dick.  Get up, walk across the room, plop back down in your chair and just fucking do the thing you do.  Having never won an Academy Award, much less acted in anything save my forth grade talent show, it’s easy to make these kind of assertions.

Then I saw There Will Be Blood, and I have to say, man, I’m sorry.  Whatever works for you, it works.

The score, by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, is also a stellar achievement.  The only bad thing I can say about it is that it’s only a hair over 30 minutes long.

Atonement

I thought it was kind of funny that two of the other films nominated - both There Will Be Blood and Michael Clayton - feature scenes where characters use really evocative, visceral language to talk about childbirth.  One word in particular is used in both scenes in both films, and that word is afterbirth.  This is funny to me because Atonement is, essentially, afterbirth.  It’s the slimy, steaming stuff left after every other good film was birthed into being by Hollywood this year.  And if that makes you throw up a little, well, it should.

Atonement is not good.  It is confused and contrived and cliched and, with the single exception of a sex scene involving Kiera Knightley, it is without merit.  Next time guys, just make that sex scene two hours long.  That I will watch.  A bunch of times.

Juno

Juno was funny and warm and completely harmless.  Michael Cera might want to consider, at some point, playing against type.  I don’t think it’s a big secret that he’s George-Michael Bluth all the time.  I think, however, that at this point in his physical development, that may actually be a physical impossibility.  I mean, what’s he going to do?  Play the brooding hero?  He emotes awkward but sweet with every bone in his string bean body, and you can’t fight the tide.  And you probably shouldn’t fight the tide when it’s putting you in movies and making you millions and millions of dollars.  I mean, aside from the one time he played a Russian commanding a nuclear submarine in K-19, Harrison Ford hasn’t exactly stretched his acting chops, and I heard from Barbara Walters that he owns six planes, so he’s probably not hurting.

Also, I can go for the rest of my life without ever hearing anyone ever say Swear to Blog again.  Diablo Cody may be hot, but she is not infallible.  Let’s just put that one out of its misery right now.

No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy is great.  The Coen Brothers are great.  Tommy Lee Jones is great.  Josh Brolin is great.  Javair Bardem is great.  This movie is great.  The ending - of both the film and the book - is a little abrupt.  It lacks the closure - the neat little bundle, the complete trajectory - of a lot of stories, and some people find that unsatisfying.  Us intellectual types, though, we can get behind that, because we’re sophisticated and you’re an idiot.

And no, to answer the question the people behind me were pondering as we exited the theater, they were not setting it up for a fucking sequel.

I will say one other thing, which is that Javair Bardem has been complaining to anyone who will listen for the past however many months about what an awful Auschwitz like experience it was that he had to wear his hair like that.  Oh, I know, what an ordeal.  But look, it got you an Academy Award, so please take my advice and stop being such a whiney little bitch about it.

Although I live in Michigan, I am incredibly bad at driving in winter weather.

This fact is plainly foreshadowed by my first experience with driving in snow. I turned 16 in the August of 1996, and as cold and miserable as it can be in Michigan, the first snowfall usually holds off until at least October. By that I mean to indicate that although I took driver’s training and practiced parallel parking and watched the video where the kids drink too much at the prom and end up wrapped around a pole, I never had any experience learning to drive on the white stuff. After the first particularly heavy snowstorm of 1996, my dad sought to rectify this oversight. He grabbed the keys to his car - a big, black Bonneville that I would eventually inherit - and told me to put my boots on.

Although Bridge Lake Road is now paved and lined by rows of expensive condominiums, back then it was a nowhere dirt road surrounded by empty fields. Speed limit 25 Miles Per Hour. I eased the car out of our half-circle drive and out onto Bridge Lake, and at Dad’s direction, headed toward town. At the big red farm house (I remember a sign out front advertised that it was a centennial farm, no less) he instructed me to turn right onto Davisburg Road. Davisburg was the real deal - a paved road that traversed a series of steadily increasing hills until it hit the closest thing we had to civilization, which was Dixie Highway. Dixie Highway led up past the Bordine’s to I-75. I-75 went straight on ’till Flordia.

“Ok,” he said. “Now, I want you to work up a head of steam and then step on the brakes. I want you to see how it’s different in the snow.”

I obliged, but without understanding, which is often a dangerous thing. I stepped on the gas as we motored down Davisburg, and when I deemed that I had built up an appropriate head of steam, I slammed on the brakes. Slammed.

Of course, I can’t really remember, but in the fantasy I have concocted of this moment it is at this point that my dad yells, “Jesus Christ!”

The car fishtailed wildly, and I had absolutely no idea what to do about it. I thought, That’s odd. Then I thought, Oh my sweet fucking Christ, we’re going to die. The big Bonneville continued to fishtail, then went into a horrible skid. We careened off of the road and into a snowbank, narrowly avoiding a mailbox in the process.

For a minute, we were both silent, and I think it’s in that moment of silence that this first formative experience became permanently tattooed on my consciousness. So that’s how it is, driving on snow, I thought. If you try to do anything other than go straight, you die.

“I didn’t say slam on the brakes,” my dad said, through gritted teeth. “I said step on the brakes. Don’t ever slam on the brakes like that when you’re driving in snow.”

“Ok,” I said, numbly. “I think I get it.”

I think he could tell from my ashen face and from the way my hands were wrapped in a death grip around the steering wheel that I was petrified.

“It’s about slow moves,” he said in a patient voice, the voice of parental tutelage. “Everything goes haywire in snow, Kyle. Do anything erratic or abrupt, and you’re bound for trouble.”

He motioned out the front window at the snowy landscape, which had taken on a sickening list. It effectively emphasized his point. “Don’t slam on the brakes and don’t jerk the wheel. Be slow and deliberate,” he said. “In weather like this, you have to be slow and deliberate.”

I nodded my head, but I was not fine. It’s a startling experience when, for the first time, the 3,000 pounds of steel you’re plowing through space doesn’t respond to - in fact, counteracts - in fact, actively undermines - your intent. It teaches one humility, and vulnerability. You are, at once, completely at the mercy of fate. People will talk about pumping the brakes, or turning into the slide, or some other way to get yourself out of a jam, but in the few seconds after your car starts to spin and slide, unless it’s second nature, all that survivability goes out the window.

Heavy stuff.

I nodded my head at what he was saying, and I wanted to believe him, but all I could think was, If you try to do anything other than go straight, you die.

“That’s enough for today, I think” he said. “Now let’s see if you can work us out of our present predicament and get us home in one piece.”

And I did just that. After a protracted battle with the snowbank in which I had deposited us, I managed to - slowly and deliberately - ease the car back up onto Davisburg Road and inch home, my hands clenching the wheel, my gut just clenched, and silence permeating the cavernous inside of the Bonneville.

In the years since, not a lot has changed for me when it comes to driving in the snow and ice. I still sit hunched and tense, my hands so tightly embracing the wheel that my knuckles soon turn white from exertion. I am still certain that at any moment I am going to die, and I still repeat the mantra my father taught me as I putter through the white - slow and deliberate slow and deliberate slow and deliberate. In essence, my every experience out on the roads in the middle of winter’s fury has been not unlike that first awful time.

I remember something else about my dad and driving. It’s something else he said to me. The date is earlier - this time we go back to when I was 15, before (but just before) I entered driver’s education. Because I was as neurotic then as I am now, I was worried about driving. I was worried that I would not be able to do it. I was worried that the rules and pedals and knobs and levers would all be too much.

“Look around,” my dad said, when I expressed my concern. “Look at all the people out on the road, driving along. Millions and millions of people do it every day. Do you honestly think they’re all capable of doing something that’s just too difficult for you to wrap your head around? I don’t.”

Sometimes, when I’m crawling along in the right lane going 35 miles an hour down US-23 in the middle of a blizzard, and cars are shooting past me in the left lane like I’m standing still, I think about that, and a small confidence begins to blossom in my chest, and I think, I don’t have to be so afraid. I can do that too.

I even, sometimes, relax my hold on the steering wheel.

But then, as I make a turn or change lanes, the tires underneath me start their rebellion and the car starts to disobey and that small confidence wither and dies. I grip the wheel and step on the brake and I think, If you try to do anything other than go straight, you die.

I just got back from South Africa.  Here are a bunch of pictures that I took while I was there.

Christopher Nolan on Heath Ledger.  “That’s real charisma—as invisible and natural as gravity. That’s what Heath had.”