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No one ever expects this sort of thing to happen at their post-zombie rave party.

Radiopussy

You know, I used to be a skeptic regarding global warming, but I'll admit, my little part of the earth has shown severe climate change since Radiohead's Thom Yorke contemplated meeting with Tony Blair over global warming. Of course, that was back in October. And now, halfway around the sun later, Yorke chickens out, big time:


"It was like talking to Blair's spin doctors. It was all getting weird. It was just obvious there was no point in meeting him anyway, and I didn't want to.

"That was the illest I'd ever got. I got so stressed out and so freaked out about it. Initially when it came up I tried to be pragmatic. But Blair has no environmental credentials as far as I'm concerned.

"I came out of that whole period just thinking, I don't want to get involved directly, it's poison. I'll just shout my mouth off from the sidelines. [Editor's Note: Thanks, Thom. We just don't get enough of that these days, do we now?]

"It's a nasty business. It's up to people with pure integrity who know what they're talking about, like Friends of the Earth."

The best part is, all the headlines are reading, "Radiohead Singer "Snubs" Blair"...as if the PM were waiting by the front door of 10 Downing with an autograph pen and a copy of The Bends.

Now the truth can be told: not only does Punxsutawney Phil have better environmental credentials than Thom Yorke...at least he's got the balls to stick his head out now and then.

Today's Celebrity Bus Rider

Harvey Pekar.

Imagine the blow to literature were a bus to crash with both of us on it.

No, don't.

Underexposed: An Election Day Fantasia

Are you sitting down? Preferably in a recently-deloused reclining red theater seat with dual cupholders? 'Cause get this: The Cleveland International Film Festival this year includes a documentary short about the 2004 selec... I mean, election. Ahem.

Says the [ironically named in Bush's AmeriKKKa] Free Times:

On November 2, 2004 — election day — Director [Laura] Paglin loitered inside a Ward 7 voting precinct with a digital camcorder. The result is No Umbrella.

The film opens outside a polling location in downtown Cleveland, then moves inside, where a long line of people waits to cast votes for president. Some have been there for nearly two hours. Many are angry. One woman yells loudly at the two election workers seated behind a table. Then, she begins to cry.

"We acting like niggers," shouts a tall man to the increasingly agitated crowd. "We need to be black people trying to vote."

But they can’t vote. Not if they can’t wait. Not if they have a job to get back to… There simply are not enough machines.

[Councilwoman] Fannie Lewis does her best to save the day, but bureaucracy (and possible Republican maneuvering) win out. For her efforts, though, she deserves to be canonized.

The Cleveland Scene painted a similar picture on its pages at the time. Sadly, I don't have footage of my own trip to the polls that fateful day, but let's just consider this my treatment for the certainly upcoming movie version:

Ah, Election Day 2004. My capitalist masters, tipped off by the issue of National Review on my desk, have given me the day off to vote, but I wake early out of habit and head to the polls. It's raining, but I open the oversize golf umbrella Karl Rove FedExed me and head down the street, past the library where, incidentally, having moved recently, I had to file a provisional ballot last year. "You don't really need to fill that out," said the kind Ann Coulter lookalike behind the desk. "I trust you," she said in a deep voice, winking once and pulling back her long blonde locks to reveal a diamond earring in the shape of an elephant.

This year, however, the library is under construction, so the polling place has moved down the street to a church. A white people church. Hooray! I go to church every day anyway, so twice on a Tuesday is, pardon the pun, a slice of Heaven!

I'm pointed to the end of a long hallway and down a flight of stairs to the line. Yes, it's about an hour wait from where I'm standing, but any chance to commune with my fellow man is welcome; maybe I'll meet the person who so envied my Bush 2004 yard signs so much that he just had to borrow them one night. Besides, some poor Democrat is working overtime at the office to make up for my paid absence. Ha! Maybe I'll even learn something: a lot of your typical hardcore conservative public school teachers are here during school hours, some schools having been closed because of the, um, security threat of having polling places in school buildings.

This year I tip off the election workers with my silk tie, which features little red, white, and blue elephants trampling Negro caricatures and carrying Confederate flags in their trunks. I'm led personally into a side room with a prototype voting machine-slash-massage table. What a thrill to find Michelle Malkin there giving complementary back massages. As a white male Republican, I used to think there was nothing better than a massage from a hot Asian woman, but casting multiple pre-punched ballots while sipping a protein smoothie at the same time surpassed any fantasy I ever had.

Bidding on film rights begins now. Keep in mind you'll need a decent special effects crew for the spontaneous parting of rainclouds as I leave the polling place, but a PG-13 should cover the steamy voting scenes.

I'd Like to Thank the Academy

...for not handing George Clooney a Best Director Oscar and thus another opportunity for him to open his mouth. "We are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood," he told the audience, adding that being out of touch once in a while that was "probably a good thing."

"We were the ones who talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered; we talked about civil rights when it wasn't popular," he said. "I'm proud to be part of Hollywood, proud to be part of the community and proud to be out of touch."

Well, he got the "out of touch" part right. AIDS? Civil rights? Real people living real lives addressed these topics from the beginning. Hollywood? Hollywood wrote the scripts, built the sets, fitted the wardrobe and applied the makeup well after the hard work was done and the struggle became popular. Lord knows, nobody dared talk openly about McCarthyism until Clooney broke that barrier last year with his film on the subject.

Thank God for Tom Hanks or we'd all be German-speaking AIDS patients today.

Oscar Night Predictions

Nah, I haven't seen any of the movies nominated this year either. So let's go ahead and call the Best Picture winner for 2007. And the award goes to...

No surprises here, ladies and gentlemen... The Hills Have Eyes!

Hey, wait. Isn't that some '70s-era horror movie by Wes Craven? Heck yeah, but the story of an American family ravaged by radioactive mutants in the desert is just more relevant today than ever before considering today's political climate ... and so this month we have the remake by French director Alexandre Aja.

Having every big social subject covered with this year's nominees, the Academy next year will need to tackle even more important subjects, like killer mutants. Not only that, but the Academy will want to reward Aja for his Clooney-like courage, that certain gusto it takes to stand up in Hollywood and say, "Yes, I'm a flaming liberal and I don't give a damn who knows it!"

Like Clooney, like Spielberg, Aja knows he has to fight to preserve his artistic vision against the Puritanical members of the MPAA, who threatened to slap his film with an NC-17. Powerless against the Hollywood machine, Aja was forced to cut out a couple of minutes: "a shot of the gun being pointed at the baby. They also cut half a minute of the rape scene with Brenda [and the cannibal mutant family].... It's going beyond censorship."

Aja told the U.K.'s FilmFocus that the political undertones of the feature will remain intact: "I'm French -- of course it's political!" Big Bob, retired cop and patriarch of the unmutated family, is a Republican; he also burns up. His meathead son-in-law, Doug, is a Democrat who delivers social justice with the sharp end of a pick-axe. "I was convinced [the MPAA] would cut the moment with the American flag and all of that, but everything got through." From this [gruesome] still, it appears the American flag moment involves planting of the flag pole, empire-builder style, into some poor slob's charred eye socket. I'm guessing it's Republican Bob, hence the metaphorical value and why he's an artist and you're not.

French director, political subtext (just who do you think was doing all that nuclear testing in the desert), and a struggle for freedom of expression. The Hills Have Eyes, and the ayes will have it next Oscars.

Sound farfetched? Heck, Showtime's already laying the groundwork for a new era of political horror with its tale of zombie soldiers stalking the GOP activists who rigged the vote that sent them to die in an unjust war. No, really.


UPDATE: Thanks to the Movie Spoiler, I can confirm that it is indeed Republican Bob who has the American flag driven into his charred skull, but only after he's been crucified on a cactus and immolated. Now that's symbolism.