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Are YOU Kevin Smith’s friend?

Jim Emerson

View image: From The Onion

New York Magazine reports on “How Kevin Smith Reinvented Movie Marketing.” By manufacturing a dust-up with a TV movie critic just before the opening of his film and getting lots of free publicity? Sure. But also, by listing 10,000 of his MySpace “friends” in his credits:

Smith’s newest addiction is MySpace: “I think it has a lot to do with growing up fat, ’cause you’re always trying to find acceptance and credibility. I’ve been on since March and I’m closing in on 50,000 friends. So I feel like, Wow, that’s kind of cool.��? The Weinstein Co. hatched a plan to promote ‘Clerks II’ by putting the names of the film’s first 10,000 MySpace friends in the credits. They thought the contest would go for weeks. They had the names in two hours.

Smith feels a compulsive need to win over an audience with the sheer tonnage of his verbiage; there were no short answers to my questions. Even though he’s now a 35-year-old father who lives in his pal Ben Affleck’s old house in L.A., Web surfers still have access to insanely intimate details of his life: One blog post this month touched upon his predilections for cunnilingus, anal sex, and picking his nose.

Meanwhile, The Onion lists Smith’s “career highlights,” including:2004: Got honey-mustard sauce all over favorite bowling shirt, but was able to learn from the experience and grow as a director.This may be the definitive test to see whether Smith has a sense of humor. About himself.

Local hero

Jim Emerson

View image The most famous phone box in the world.

After the screening of Bill Forsyth’s long-unavailable masterpiece “Housekeeping” at Ebertfest (about which more later) somebody asked him why he used the word “moving” in a key piece of dialog rather than novelist Marilynne Robinson’s word-of-choice, “drifting.” Forsyth said he didn’t remember for certain, but imagined it was because “drifting” was simply “too on-the-nose,” too “poetic” sounding. Actress Christine Lahti, who played the character speaking the line in question, and who joined Forsyth on stage (neither of them having seen the movie, or each other, for 21 years) confirmed that “drifting” works beautifully on the page of a novel, but wouldn’t have sounded right if spoken aloud on the screen. So much artistry is reflected in that simple explanation. What seemed at first like kind of a dumb, nit-picky question was justified by the answer.

Forsyth spun another tale of adaptation that mirrored the oblique and inevitable comic structure of one of his movies:

The silence of the monks

Jim Emerson

View image A theory of relativity: “Into Great Silence.”

From my review of “Into Great Silence” at RogerEbert.com:

We get a lot of movies about noise these days: gunshots, screams, explosions, fist thunks, thunderous roars, revving engines, squealing tires and those deafening sonic swooshes that accompany nearly every corporate logo before the feature even gets started. But we don’t experience many moments of silence at the movies (and I’m not just talking about the audiences). “Into Great Silence,” though devoid of narration, musical score or much at all in the way of dialogue, encourages us to listen closely: to the sound of snow falling in the mountains, a nocturnal prayer whispered in a small wooden cell with a knocking tin stove, a bell rope pulled in a chapel. Nobody yells. Nothing detonates.

The images also open up to us gradually and quietly. We’re not bombarded with fusillades of shots: “Look at this! Now this! Now this!” “Into Great Silence” unfolds with its own gentle, unforced rhythms, designed, as German filmmaker Philip Groning has said, to be less a “documentary” than a meditation.

Groning spent six months living with the monks of the eremitical Carthusian order at the Grand Chartreuse Charterhouse, or monastery, in the French Alps. He brought with him only a camera and basic sound equipment — no crew, no lights — to capture the daily lives, prayers and routines of this most ascetic of Catholic orders, which was founded by St. Bruno in 1084. The monks, who have taken a vow of poverty, subsist on very little. They pray aloud at times and sing solemn Gregorian chants, but they rarely speak, except on their Monday walks. If cinema had existed more than a thousand years ago, this is quite like what it may have recorded.

I must confess my fondness for contemplative movies of this sort. The less frenetic onscreen activity you are forced to endure, the more you’re able to notice. And the form of “Into Great Silence” is ideally suited to its subject. The monks lead a regimented existence (you can see a typical weekday schedule, and learn about their history, at their official Web site, www.chartreux.org), but time is allotted for the introspection and reflection that are essential to their devotion. You’re given the opportunity to contemplate details, including ones you may overlook in the rush and routine of your own everyday life.

Continue reading at RogerEbert.com

The Worst Movie Posters of the Decade

Jim Emerson

Jordan Gray — a graphic designer, filmmaker and scanners reader — has posted his choices for the Worst Movie Posters of the Decade. (Others’ picks for the best of the decade can be found here, here and here.)

To the right is his choice for the second-worst one-sheet design of the ’00s. JG writes:

Just try to look at this and not laugh. It’s not even remotely convincing that these 3 actors were in the same region of the world when their photos were taken. Look at the alignment of the billing block. What? Absolutely nothing about this makes any sort of design sense.

Three attractive (though not necessarily recognizable) faces and a poster that’s ugly in every way. The positioning of the names at the top is likely somebody’s awkward solution to a contractual obligation that Uma Thurman receive top billing. Relative size and arrangements of faces and names are often written into all parties’ contracts these days, presenting designers with… nightmares like this. Who could possibly have approved such flagrantly bad work?

Where does ignorance come from?

Jim Emerson

Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) posted this YouTube clip of himself asking a stupid question at a congressional hearing. How stupid? Well, just watch. And consider that Barton finds the Energy Secretary’s accurate scientific response bewildering. (Listen to Barton’s follow-up: How does he think oil “got to Alaska”?) The accompanying intro reads: “When Rep. Joe Barton asked the Nobel Prize winning Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, where oil comes from – he got a puzzling answer.” Barton surpasses Ted Stevens and his Internet “tubes” on this one. Jon Stewart, it’s all yours…

Oh, and Rep. Barton, please read this short Scientific American article. It’s only four paragraphs, but I warn you that, if you’re really interested in learning the answer to your question, it may take more than six seconds of your time: “Why is oil usually found in deserts and arctic areas?”:

An even dumberer list

Jim Emerson

That’s right — it’s on their list. So are “Amelie,” “American Pie,” “The Dresser” and “Dumb and Dumber.”

A “panel of experts” has compiled for The Guardian a list of 1000 Films To See Before You Die. Apparently, there’s no rush. I mean, it’s not films you “must see” — just films “to see.” That explains some of the choices. At least it’s not restricted to British films, or even English language films. From the introduction:

Out of these million-plus movies, our team of experts has picked what we believe is the essential 1,000 – those that best sum up the dazzling achievement and variety of the movies.Just don’t plan on dying in the next few days, because they’re publishing the list alphabetically, one day (and a few letters) at a time. Told you there was no hurry. As I write this, The Committee’s selections for A through G have appeared.

P.S. The list, so far, is partly redeemed by the presence of “Devil in a Blue Dress,” “Dazed and Confused,” “The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years,” “Dig!,” “Boogie Nights,” “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” and “Le Boucher.” And it cites the right “Crash” — the David Cronenberg one. (“Dead Ringers,” too.) On the other hand, there’s the smug, frat-boy-naughty “Clerks,” the gooey “Ghost” and “The Faculty” — which just makes me want to throw something out of something else or at something else.

Psycho: Murder in close-up (without bodies)

Jim Emerson

View image Flushing away evidence of guilt in the toilet. A big drain.

View image Shower. Head.

Imagine the “Psycho” shower scene without Marion Crane or Mrs. Bates. Alfred Hitchcock’s (and Saul Bass’s) rapid-cut sequence is renowned for its use of close-ups to suggest the slicing of flesh when, in fact, there is none on the screen. You create that illusion in the cuts.

View image The plumbing continues to function as it is designed to, without regard to Marion’s trauma.

View image The ripping of a membrane, like flesh (keeps the wet inside), as Marion (below frame) reaches out, clutches at life while it slips from her grasp.

But what really makes the sequence work, I’d argue, is the way Hitchcock uses plumbing. Back in 1998, I published an extensive web article on Plumbing in the Cinema, in which I quoted from Stephen Rebello’s book, “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho”:

“The script is shot through with obvious delight in skewering America’s sacred cows — virginity, cleanliness, privacy, masculinity, sex, mother love, marriage, the reliance on pills, the sanctity of the family… and the bathroom.” Rubello quotes screenwriter Joseph Stephano on the subject of primal-screen plumbing: “I told Hitch ‘I would like Marion to tear up a piece of paper and flush it down the toilet and SEE that toilet. Can we do that?’ A toilet had never been seen on-screen before, let alone flushing it. Hitch said, ‘I’m going to have to fight them on it.’ I thought if I could begin to unhinge audiences by showing a toilet flushing — we all suffer from peccadillos from toilet procedures — they’d be so out of it by the time of the shower murder, it would be an absolute killer. I thought [about the audience], ‘This is where you’re going to begin to know what the human race is all about. We’re going to start by showing you the toilet and it’s only going to get worse.’ We were getting into Freudian stuff and Hitchcock dug that kind of thing, so I knew we would get to see that toilet on-screen.” Just the sight of the flushing toilet was considered shocking enough to mildly unsettle and disorient audiences of the day.And the same is true today, though perhaps less noticeably so. In the same plumbing piece, here’s the way I described what happens next:Hitchcock’s guilty fugitive protagonist, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), having totaled the sum of her indebtedness, monetary and karmic, on a slip of paper, rips up the evidence of her culpability, flushes it down the water chute (although a telltale piece of it misses the bowl, as Detective Arbogast [Martin Balsalm] will later discover) and steps into the shower. Just as she’s figuratively washing her the sins of her recent past down the drain, Mrs. Bates pays her a visit with a butcher knife. Marion pays for her sins in blood. And the image of her blood swirling into the blackness of the drain dissolves into an image of her now-lifeless eye. Her head lies on the bathroom floor next to the toilet. For what is a human body itself — its arteries and intestines and organs and other viscera — but an elaborate piece of organic plumbing?

View image Following the blood and the water down the drain.

That cold, hard biological reality underscores the whole scene, from the time Marion, looking for someplace to dispose of her accounting besides the wastebasket (where that nosy Norman would undoubtedly discover it), first glances toward the bathroom, hesitates, and then decides to take a shower. The hollow sound of the tiled room echoes through the scene — and, of course, Marion’s physical vulnerability is emphasized by her nakedness and the noise of the shower drowning out the rest of the world. She’s even made a point of closing the door firmly before stepping into the shower.

View image Into the drain, and out of a lifeless eye…

You can make all the Freudian jokes you like about the phallic showerhead, but it works. Yeah, it’s sexual, and Marion seems almost orgasmic when she slides under its spray. It’s also cleansing, even cathartic after all Marion’s been through since her furtive afternoon quickie (in bra and panties) with her boyfriend in the hotel room at the start of the picture: Since leaving work the previous day, she’s made a rash and fateful decision to steal cash from her employer and skip town. She exchanged cars, had a close encounter with a cop beside the highway in the desert, drove in the dark and pouring rain, and then had that strange little talk with the young man in the back room full of stuffed and mounted birds — the boy with the mean old invalid-ed mother locked up in that spooky house looming behind the motel. Who wouldn’t like to take a nice hot shower after a day-and-a-half like that?

[images missing: insert your memory of Marion’s murder here]

What you see on this page are just the close-ups of insentient bathroom fixtures in the sequence. All images containing organic matter have been stripped out. Marion is about to become one of these inanimate objects. The image of her blood swirling in the tub, and her dead face mashed against the white tile floor, shocks us even as it prepares us for the clean-up scene, where we will shift our identification from Marion onto Norman. To Hitchcock’s perverse delight, we will soon be rooting for Norman to scrub away and dispose of the evidence of our (ex-) main character’s murder. The drain is metaphorical, but it’s also the abyss. Marion has been our surrogate; and now her pupil is as void and lifeless as that hole. We peer into it, unable to fathom where it leads, and the blackness beckons…

This is another contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon at the House Next Door.

Getting “Knocked Up”

Jim Emerson

At whom is this ad campaign aimed?

Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up” ought to be the most-discussed (and argument-generating) movie of the year so far — which means it’s uncommonly smart and subversive and disturbing (and funny), especially for a summer sex comedy. I happen to think Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, as Pete and Debbie, the bitter and resentful married couple with kids (Mann is Apatow’s wife, and the kids in the movie are theirs) are the funniest characters/actors in the picture (and Kristen Wiig: amazing), mainly because their material, and their performances, are so painfully true that it’s not funny. Which is what makes it so funny. It helps that all three are top-flight actors with a gift for uncanny understatement. Sometimes you don’t even know if the scene is funny or not (like Debbie’s suburban ambush of Pete) — and those are inevitably the most revealing and rewarding kinds of laughs, when you surprise yourself by laughing at how awful and truthful the characters are behaving.

Anyway, I’ve found that some women don’t like the movie, for sex-specific reasons I hope to discuss at length in the near future. Let me offer a few examples now from reviews that I think “get” “Knocked Up” — and not from my usual suspects, either.

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker:
One night, Ben [Seth Rogen] goes to a bar, picks up a girl, and goes to bed with her. Both are drunk at the time, and both, in consequence, throw up: Ben the next morning (“I just yakked,” he says winningly over breakfast), and the girl—who is no girl but a young woman named Alison (Katherine Heigl), with a growing career on television—some weeks later, into a trash can at work. Here comes the bit that will divide Apatow’s audience and (he hopes) get them arguing over the movie: Alison decides to inform the father and, little by little, to enfold him and his oafish, froggy grin in the gentle business of parenting. Call it the taming of the Shrek. Most women, I imagine, will scoff with incredulity: this is neither a last hurrah (Alison is still in her twenties) nor the ideal time (she has a good job), and Ben is the last slob on earth she would have chosen. Most men, meanwhile, will be too busy watching through their fingers. To them, this is “The Omen.” What’s interesting about this paragraph is that it’s slightly wrong. We go to the bar with the women, not the men. The gals are swept inside (even though Mann’s character is really too old to be there), while we catch a glimpse of Ben and his geek buddies near the front of the line. They’ve probably been standing out there for hours. (This doorman scene will pay off later — though I think it’s the weakest in the movie.)

My first reaction to the Ben-Alison match was that she would never want to see him again after their one-night stand. But, like so many women, Alison is someone who falls in love with a guy for who she wants him to be, not for who he really is. (She doesn’t even know who he is — and vice-versa.) At the point where she (improbably) lets him back into her life, it’s because she now views him as “the father of her child” (which, in her view though not our society’s, gives him some marginal rights) and as Pete and Debbie indicate cynically at the breakfast table in front of the kids, men and women who are in love get married and have babies. Or men and women who have babies get married and fall in love. Or something like that. Alison wants to be in love with the father of her child (their child, she insists), so she is determined to make herself believe that’s the case, even when it isn’t, because that’s the way it should be. And maybe she can even make him believe it.

Film Critic Keyboard Cat in the 23½ Century!(Or: “Play ’em off the bridge, KC!”)

Jim Emerson

My turn: In this episode, Keyboard Cat becomes a 23rd century film critic and must dodge deadly Romulan lens flares and Vulcan interrogation techniques on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise! Gratuitously excessive audio-visual excitement overkill galore!

UPDATE: Cameron sends this: “J.J. Abrams Admits Star Trek Lens Flares Are “Ridiculous”:

I know there are certain shots where even I watch and think, “Oh that’s ridiculous, that was too many.” But I love the idea that the future was so bright it couldn’t be contained in the frame. The flares weren’t just happening from on-camera light sources, they were happening off camera, and that was really the key to it. I want [to create] the sense that, just off camera, something spectacular is happening. […]

The conspiracy against movie critics

Jim Emerson

Look at these numbers: “Mission: Impossible III” gets a 70-percent critical approval rating on the RottenTomatoes.com TomatoMeter (fresh!), and yet takes in a devastatingly disappointing $48 million in its opening weekend at the domestic box office.

Two weeks later, “The Da Vinci Code” is destroyed by critics at Cannes and across America, ranking a lowly 21 on the TomatoMeter (rotten!) — and yet it took in $77 million opening weekend in the States and set international box-office records.

Asks The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis: “Does this mean that critics are out of touch with the public? Maybe, but really, who cares? All that box office doesn’t make [‘The Da Vinci Code’] a good movie.”

Surely the most likely explanation is that millions of people worldwide are conspiring to undermine the all-powerful hegemony of cinematic critical opinion! I mean, isn’t that what critics are supposed to do — predict box-office results? How can they wield their indomitable might (along with Hollywood and the Liberal Media) if people won’t cooperate?!?!

Or maybe I’m wrong.

Opening Shots: ‘Nights of Cabiria’

Jim Emerson

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From John Hartl, film critic for MSNBC, Seattle, WA:

“Nights of Cabiria��? (1957)

The opening scene in Federico Fellini’s greatest film presents a pattern that will be repeated in the story of Cabiria, a shrimpish streetwalker who is as feisty as she is gullible. She and her boyfriend of the moment, Giorgio, scamper across a vacant field in front of some appallingly character-less Roman apartments. She’s happy and uninhibited, but he seems impatient and calculating. As they approach a canal, he grabs her purse, shoves her in the water and runs away. A small boy hears her cries, and he and his friends rescue her just as she’s about to drown. Several adults join the rescue party, gracelessly turning her upside down as they expell the water she’s swallowed, and finally she starts breathing again. Offended and embarrassed by the kindness of strangers, she walks off in a huff.

Life rarely gets better for Cabiria, who doesn’t have much more luck in her dealings with celebrities, religion or a theatrical hypnosis session in which she bares her soul for an audience of still more strangers. Played with tremendous spirit by Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina, she has a habit of falling for traitorous losers, throwing money at them, then waking up to find herself surrounded by people she’s never met. The opening scene is almost a prophecy, yet it’s never depressing because Cabiria doesn’t know how to give in to despair. In the end, she achieves a state of grace in the midst of her most ruinous folly.

Suicide watch

Jim Emerson

Bridge into the void…

Today in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com I have a review of Eric Steel’s documentary “The Bridge,” which has haunted me for two weeks since I first saw it. A movie that takes suicide seriously, and considers the pain of the person who wishes to die as well as the anguish and guilt of the survivors, is a rarity. Over and over, survivors say they don’t understand why someone they knew and loved wanted to cease to exist; but a surprising number admit the agony that would drive someone to suicide is beyond their imagination. They have to accept, and respect, that it was real.

A father says: ““Some people say the body is a temple. He thought his body was a cage, a prison. In his mind, he knew he was loved, that he had everything and could do anything. And yet he felt trapped, and that was the only way he could get free.��? “The Bridge” makes the unthinkable, taboo subject of suicide real in honest and realistic ways that maybe even those who have never considered it can understand. The mother of a jumper recalls it took someone else to finally get her to realize: “It’s not about you. It has nothing to do with you.” That may be as hard for some to get their heads around as the suicide itself. Suicide is the ultimate solipsistic act; it’s not about anyone else.

The few, mostly superficial discussions of suicide we have in our culture (30,000+ in the U.S. in an average year; only about 25 or so off the Golden Gate, which is nevertheless the world’s leading suicide destination), tend to objectify the suicidal person and concentrate on prevention and grief and downplaying the reality out of fear that others may be encouraged to try it. Copycat incidents are real, but peer pressure is not one of the leading causes of suicide — particularly off the Golden Gate Bridge. It takes a certain kind of personality choose such a dramatic, public exit, and the bridge is already famous as a suicide spot.

“The Bridge” is being used by some to advocate a multi-million-dollar barrier to help prevent jumping off the Golden Gate. I guess one’s attitude toward this would depend on whether you see suicide as a problem of mental illness or architecture. Barriers have to be erected to keep people from accidentally falling off tall structures, and to protect those below. But I don’t know of anyone who has accidentally gone off the bridge (unless, perhaps, they foolishly decided to jump up on the railing), or anyone who has been hurt by a falling suicide jumper. “The Bridge” de-mythologizes and de-romanticizes suicide. I think that’s healthy.

From my review:

Looking this closely and intently into suicide, you almost fear too much empathy, the way you dread the vertigo that accompanies acrophobia: What you’re afraid of is not so much that you might fall, but that impulse within you that wants to eliminate the yawning tension between you and the surface below. But as several in the film acknowledge, the eternal dilemma of suicide is not something we can diminish by hushing it up or mischaracterizing what it is.

Restoring your faith in America

Jim Emerson

BAD WORD WARNING: In a world where people are stupid enough to mistake a childrens’ lightbox toy displaying the likeness of a cartoon character (which looks no more sinister than any random Pac Man-era video-game pixel blob) for a bomb — and then blame other people for their own ignorance — the only proper response to this…

… is this:

That’s right: The Aqua Teen Hunger Force marketing campaign had been under way in ten cities for ” a few weeks” by the time some non-basic-cable-subscribing Luddite in Boston freaked out the whole of Beantown by mistaking a wall-mounted LiteBrite for a bomb.

View image The Mooninite in question.

Kids: Do not take your Etch-A-Sketches out of your room, or you may be arrested as a terrorist. Or a hoaxter. Because, goodness knows, anyone in their right mind might easily mistake a plastic rectangle with a picture on it for an improvised explosive device and start a citywide panic via TV news before the authorities have the slightest idea of what’s going on. That’s called Homeland Security. Don’t mass outbreaks of unnecessary panic and fear make you feel secure? What’s the root word of “terrorism” again?

Wil Wheaton is right:

You know, if the goal of terrorists and the whole point of terrorism is to scare the sh-t out of us so badly that we leap ten feet in the air whenever someone says “boo,” then the terrorists are clearly kicking our national asses.And if “The Departed” doesn’t win an Oscar, it’s the fault of the city officials and broadcast media of Boston for perpetuating this hoax about a hoax and making everyone in the world want to avoid acknowledging that Boston exists. Again. People are too embarrassed and infuriated to even want to think about the laughingstock town of Boston now — and it’s right in the middle of Oscar voting time! (That makes about as much sense as the whole “terrorist hoax” canard, doesn’t it?)

Evidently, this is a conspiracy by Bostonians to spread fear and uncertainty — terror, if you will — that Martin Scorsese may not win his long-deserved Oscar. Why did he have to shoot — er, I’m sorry, film — the movie in Boston, for heaven’s sake?!?! All Boston politician and broadcasters who have perpetuated and promoted this hoax should be arrested, fined, and forced to watch the Cartoon Network 24/7 for 60 days, until well after the Governor’s Ball. And they should be forced to apologize — to the Mooninites, Turner Broadcasting, and to all the people of the world, for being so reckless and irresponsible.

This is just one of many, many times to come when I will dearly miss Molly Ivins. She would have had a ball with this.

Coens take Oscars for words and picture

Jim Emerson

View image Joel and Ethan Coen flank Martin Scorsese. AP photo.

Oscar deadline story:

Everybody pretty much called it in advance, but nothing was certain until the very end. Joel and Ethan Coen’s crowning achievement, “No Country For Old Men,” toted some heavy Oscars Sunday night (for Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actor), but the Academy spread the wealth.

“We, uh… thank you very much,” said Ethan, accepting the Best Screenplay Adaptation Oscar, and it was a terrific speech. Six words. Maybe five-and-a-half. Funny. Pithy. Whether it was intentional or the shorter Coen brother just went up on his lines, he demonstrated that screenwriting is not just about crafting dialog. If you set the scene properly, the words themselves don’t have to be memorable, just the moment.

It was. And, because of the sense of drama created by the structure of the show, that scene felt like the tipping point for “No Country for Old Men.” You didn’t know where the evening’s storyline was headed, but once it got there, as always, it felt as if it had been inevitable. Kind of like the ending of “No Country” itself….

Continue reading at RogerEbert.com

Family Guy Mocks Sarah Palin’s Son Trig For Having Down Syndrome

Jim Emerson

That’s not my headline up there. It’s from an unsigned entry at Huffington Post, where you’ll find a clip from this recent “Family Guy” episode (“Extra-Large Medium”). I don’t watch the show, so I may not understand the context of the scene in which the dumb 15-year-old son, Chris Griffin (voiced by Seth Green), goes on a date with Ellen, a girl with Down syndrome on whom he has a crush.

Here’s the way Huffpo describes it:

And now for a brief furlough…

Jim Emerson

I work for a newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times. As you may know, the Sun-Times recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection — mainly because of the money embezzled by its former owner, Conrad Black, who is now in prison. The Sun-Times is also contractually obligated to pay his legal bills, believe it or not. Anyway, everybody I know on the editorial side has been told to take a mandatory one-week unpaid furlough, during which time we are not allowed to work. Mine is now. I’ll be back the day after Labor Memorial Day (May 27).

In the meantime, please keep commenting. I can’t respond, but somebody will continue to approve comments in my absence. See ya soon!