What the hell? In what kind of world does a person who essentially tortured people get better treatment than the person who exposed the abuse? What twists and distortions lead you to such a conclusion?Also: a San Francisco art gallery closes after the owner is assaulted for displaying a depiction of Iraqi prisoners being tortured. I railed against Follow Me Here for crossing the line seperating criticism of the Bush administration from outright hatred; maybe I was wrong. The people in these articles, to me, are like distorted caricatures and stereotypes of a U.S. I once thought existed. As articles like these begin to make clear, perhaps it’s the prim and proper U.S., the one that respected other viewpoints and didn’t torture people using the excuse of “they do it, too,” that’s the distortion now.

Frontal offset collision tests by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety yielded some interesting results. The pictures seem to tell all: even putting aside the tendency towards more aggressive driving because of the perception of safety, a larger vehicle does not always afford more safety. This makes a fair amount of sense, given the test used: a collision with a (presumably) immovable and inelastic object. Heavier vehicles require more energy to get up to speed; in a collision, that means there’s more energy to absorb. Apparently the Ford F-150’s safety cage wasn’t up to the task.To be fair, Ford has taken the IIHS’s findings to heart, and the 2004 edition of the Ford F-150 has jumped to the head of the class where the frontal offset test is concerned. Also, the pickup will probably still fare better in a two-car crash for the same reason it didn’t do so well in the test: all that kinetic energy has to go somewhere, and in a multiple-vehicle crash, most likely it won’t be absorbed by the pickup. However, again small cars win in most cases because the first rule of surviving a collision is to avoid it in the first place—something that’s far easier to do in a nimble compact than in an ungainly full-size truck.

Between unfortunate network-funded catastrophes like NBC’s 10.5 miniseries and the uproar over ABC’s Nightline deigning to do the unthinkable—if you call reading the names of the American soldiers lost in Iraq “unthinkable”—it’s important to remember that not so long ago, television was indeed capable of more than just entertainment.Threads and The Day After were products of a very specific time and place. The English and American television productions, airing within a year of each other, had very similar tales to tell: what would happen if the Cold War came to a sudden and catastrophic end? What would happen if the threat of nuclear war was realized? Since 1984, of course, the political climate has changed drastically. The Soviet Union is no longer the threat it once was, and the western world seems to stand in solidarity, the United States the lone superpower.Thus, both movies are not so much cautionary tales as they are historical documents, evidence of a time when our station in the universe was far more precarious. (This is, of course, arguable—certainly there are any number of current threats to humanity even today.) Despite the distance of time, however, The Day After and especially Threads are chilling portrayals of humanity after a nuclear war.The Day After was produced and aired by ABC slightly earlier than Threads, a BBC production. Partially because of its American backing, and partially because of its earlier release, The Day After doesn’t quite ring as true. Nevertheless, the movie was a television success, often said to be the most-watched made-for-television movie ever. The depiction of a post-nuclear strike Kansas is horrifying, with little hope evident amidst the gymnasiums full of patients with radiation sickness, the city blocks reduced to rubble, the living reduced to refugees in their own nation.And for all the bleakness of its American counterpart, Threads outdoes it by a mile. Focusing on the (now-former) industrial centre of Sheffield, the BBC production unflinchingly examines the build-up to the catastrophic nuclear exchange that decimates much of the United Kingdom. The elements of hope in The Day After are completely missing here.The U.S. President sends out an ineffectual radio message in The Day After in an attempt to reassure the population that everything will return to normal, even as everyone realizes the lie to his words. The ceasefire with Russia is pointless and besides the point. In Threads, there’s little indication that a central government even exists, let alone a Prime Minister; no one knows or cares about the outcome of the war, much less the crisis in Iran that set everything alight. As the movie extends to a full 13 years after the attack (far beyond the scope of The Day After, incidentally) it is plainly obvious that a return to pre-war conditions is not a matter of years, but possibly centuries.With its relentless images of human suffering and desperation, Threads is not an easy movie to watch, even with the distance of time. Both The Day After and Threads, upon their initial airings, were followed by special network programmes discussing the threat of nuclear attack and what could be done about it; ABC aired a special edition of Nightline, with then-Secretary of State Dwight Schultz one of those on the discussion panel. All of this was done in an effort to remember the extremely high cost of a nuclear war, and to avoid it at all costs.I’ve read stories from people in the British school system who watched the film as part of their schooling. I can think of no better accomplishment for a work of fiction like Threads, and despite its flaws, I now think of it as required viewing. Never should we wish upon our children a future so bleak.A National Public Radio report on the effect of The Day After, 20 years on. BBC4 re-aired Threads last year; a review of Threads written after the Cold War ended.

I Am The World Trade Center’s Amy Dykes was diagnosed with cancer while on tour. Daily updates on the I Am The World Trade Center site. New album The Cover-Up is set for a May 18 release, but all tour dates have been cancelled.

A brief history of Microsoft Word as told by one of the managers heading up Word development. Interesting article, with a lot of insight into the days of Microsoft as a competitor, rather than the near-monopoly it is today. The bulk of the page is given over to comments, which predictably turns quickly into round 207,019 of Palestine vs. Israel Microsoft vs. Linux. Yes, the page is hosted by Microsoft, but the conspiracy theories about Microsoft eliminating unsympathetic comments and the like are ludicrous. The sooner people stop treating Microsoft like a vast technocratic conspiracy, the sooner people can start figuring out exactly what Microsoft gets right, and what it does wrong.Interestingly, there were several follow-ups to the original post. There are also some interesting comments, notably one that makes a lot of references to breathing drugged air that gets a little annoying, but succintly makes the same point I’m trying to make, only backed up with more info: Microsoft is not evil, but rather a company that was once crafty, now content to rest on its laurels technologically and rely on market inertia and the innovation of smaller companies.
Some of the best movies are the ones that don’t really end when the lights go up. They’re movies that manage the greatest of feats: convincing the audience that there is a future, beyond the credits, for characters that never existed. There’s no neat wrap-up of storylines, no end of a chapter, only an acknowledgent that for most people, life doesn’t happen in fits and starts. That’s why the noncommittal ending of As Good As It Gets works so well; that’s why everyone wants to know what Bill Murray says to Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation.It’s this very quality of realism that is the success—and perhaps failure—of Dirty Pretty Things, Stephen Frears’ 2002 film about illegal immigrants caught in a web of especially unfortunate circumstances while living in London. The whole film seems to fall into place quite neatly, from the fairly invisible mixing of the two main storylines to the cast of characters so familiar by the end of the film. The two leads, Chiwetel Ejifor and Amelie’s Audrey Tautou, are especially good; Ejifor does a tremendous job of carrying most of the picture with his quiet, detached approach.Despite the occasional bit of humour here and there, though, Dirty Pretty Things is not an upbeat film, nor does it end on a cleanly upbeat note. Throughout the film there is a sense of hopelessness that never really dissipates, especially as the situation worsens for the characters. Okwe (Ejifor) tells Senay (Tautou) at one point that all there is, for them, is survival.Really, though, most everyone in the film is barely clinging to whatever life they’ve been given, acutely aware that the slightest mishap or misfortune could see them penniless or deported. And yet, this point isn’t harped upon as much as it could have been; this is not a social realist tale about the victims of England’s immigration policy. While Frears obviously wants you to think about problems facing British immigration, ultimately these concerns are secondary to the matter of how—or if—Okwe and Senay will make it across the breach intact.Fitting, then, that for the characters who have to live day to day, constantly looking over their shoulder, there is no easy solution at the end of the film. The last scene of Dirty Pretty Things could have been a lifting of the fog; instead, right up to the very end, we’re left with an uneasy feeling that everything will take a turn for the worse, as it has for these people so many times already. As the picture closes, we’re left to look over Okwe and Senay’s shoulders ourselves, wondering what future lies ahead while thinking, surely this isn’t the end of their troubles?

“It’s hard to go shopping for groceries,” Thedos argues. “It’s hard to have friends visit and park their cars. You make a lot of trade-offs. Why can’t we evolve this into a form that’s more accessible? Let’s morph it into something that anybody who wants to can live in and not have to trade off their garage and fenceable yard in a location where shopping is proximate and there are multiple bedrooms for children.”In an attempt to capture an audience that arguably does not exist, Cornerstone Homes has created the first loft subdivision, housed in new brick buildings designed to look like repurposed old warehouses. This seems to be the latest in the trend of taking urban styles and applying them to suburban living. What the perpetrators don’t understand (or don’t care to understand; whatever makes money may be the modus operandum) is that the advent of lifestyles like work/live lofts and the reclaiming of industrial buildings represents the antithesis of a subdivision.Subdivisions increasingly adhere to a set of principles attractive to some and blasphemous to others: consistent and regular zoning, geared towards middle-class living (SUVs, a bucketload of kids and plenty of space for all your crap) and built with several layers of isolation, from the neighbourhood level right down to the house level. You don’t have to ever talk to your neighbours in a subdivision, and the people a block away may as well be a country away.Somehow, the idea of urban living has become “inhospitable except to a small segment of the population,” according to people like Dean Thedos. Shopping for groceries is hard in the city. (Presumably you can only buy groceries at large supermarkets with parking lots.) Friends can’t park anywhere. (Presumably the only friends you have abhor the idea of public transit.) The city is no place to raise kids. (The jury’s out on that, as usual; personally, I can’t imagine a more isolating childhood than the one I had in the suburbs, where I barely knew anyone on my street.)The whole point of urban living is that you don’t need the garage because you try not to drive in the city. You don’t need the fenceable yard because you don’t need the distance from your neighbours and neighbourhood. You don’t think of the city as a place where shopping is distant; you can walk to the corner grocer faster than most people take to drive to the suburban supermarket.What Thedos is selling is purely the ability to say, “I live in a warehouse.” You can’t even say abandoned, because the warehouse was built specifically for the purpose of housing five or ten middle-class families. Whatever perks you might enjoy from living in that cosmopolitian loft in the old shipping district, they’re gone once you move the loft out to the highway turnpike.

Usually I’m pretty impressed by Follow Me Here; some of the most interesting articles I’ve read have come from there, and certainly Eliot Gelwan’s commentary on many subjects, notably the realm of abnormal psychology, where he makes his living, is thoughtful and intelligent.This, however, worries me. The article Gelwan links to, a thinly-veiled personal attack on Bush, is not debate or discussion. I was mortified by the piece, and I’m apparently part of the target audience, as someone who doesn’t trust Bush any further than I can throw him. But this sort of clap-trap, which calls Bush’s policies “aggro-American” and talks about Bush’s “cute monkey ears” and his unbounded stupidity, is par for the course—if, you know, we were talking about the editorial pages of a bad Indymedia outlet or some small-press alternative weekly.Morford’s piece is a classic example of leftist bluster, assuming that just because the Democrats need more anger in their diet to reflect the severity of Bush’s liberties with foreign policy, the economy and the many other things his administration has screwed up, we can make stupid personal attacks and act like the straw man “liberals” that many Bush supporters love to spit on. It’s exactly what’s wrong with the anti-Bush movement these days, and it’s exactly why radical anti-globalization protesters (who use similarly self-defeating tactics) and people like Morford will never succeed: because people will concentrate on the histrionics and ignore the facts. In fact, people like Morford hinder the cause more than they help it; not everyone on our side of the fence is in the habit of throwing rocks through windows or screaming repeatedly at anti-war demonstrations that Bush just wants more oil.Instead of ripping Morford a new one and providing a blistering yet thought-provoking critique of what Bush is really doing wrong and why 2004 should be his final year in office, Gelwan basically pats Morford on the back for his purpled prose. Morford’s piece goes beyond “good derision directed in Dubya’s direction.” It’s essentially building a straw man out of Bush, using loaded terms like “oily corporate stratagems” and “cute monkey ears” to turn the Bush administration into a caricature. This is “he did it for his daddy” liberalism, and it sickens me to think this sort of debate is acceptable to anyone when all pieces like Morford’s column do is play right into the hands of the people who hate you.Maybe it’s naive or old-fashioned for me to think that the people of the United States can come to a compromise that doesn’t involve Bush or his dangerous and potentially disastrous policies. I didn’t think we’d come to the point where all we can do is scream at the other side until we feel better.

Neko Case, Carolyn Mark and Kelly Hogan w/ Ancient Chinese Secret
Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto—April 28, 2004You almost wished they’d stop singing so they could crack wise more often. But every time they started up again, you wished they’d stop making jokes and just belt out the tunes.It’s fitting that the three women on stage had on stage the subjects and the filmmaker behind Lipstick and Dynamite, Piss and Vinegar: The First Ladies Of Wrestling, because right now, Neko Case, Carolyn Mark and Kelly Hogan are the first ladies of alt-country. Somewhat unfairly billed as a Neko Case show, the three singers shared headlining duties, trading off and harmonizing on a mix of old standards and covers.With just two guitarists as backup, the focus was obviously on the trio up front, and rightfully so—if you’ve only seen Case as part of the New Pornographers, you’re missing out on something fierce. And as powerful as Case is on stage, Carolyn Mark and Kelly Hogan did more than just hold their own, cultivating their own stage personas and wowing the crowd with their own solo renditions.Mark was her usual wisecracking self, and her selection of songs reflected her sense of humour. “Don’t Come Over, Baby,” from Party Girl, was one of the highlights of the evening, and definitely one of the most playful tunes in the setlist. Kelly’s originals, written for the soundtrack to Lipstick and Dynamite, were masterful showcases for her voice, one she once described as the luxury liner to Neko’s sports car. If anything, Kelly didn’t get enough time in the limelight, often relegated to backup.At one point, Neko mentioned that she had apparently picked out a bunch of depressing songs about animals for her songs; that should give you an idea of what kind of show it was for her. Far more torch singer than barnburner, Neko gave a great performance nonetheless. It just wasn’t what you might’ve been led to expect when you walked in the door: a crazy hootenanny of epic proportions.What the crowd got, though, was still a great performance; with a laidback feel to the evening and great stage rapport, as well as one outstanding vocal performance after another, it felt like the end of the night came far too quickly. Was it too much to ask for a second encore? But then, it’s always a good sign when you leave them wanting more. Hopefully Carolyn Mark still plays Victoria whenever she’s back home—I’ll be paying her many a visit if so.