#1) How exactly does Obama win?

I’m not saying he doesn’t, his debate win last night hopefully cemented his national lead, but if you were running his campaign what would you do to make sure we pull off a victory? Simply continue to give McCain/Palin enough rope? Go (more) negative? Push a sound bite friendly populist economic message? Policy wonks: please feel free to offer up detailed electoral map projections and strategies.

#2) Who gets the blame if he doesn’t?

It may not be altogether healthy but maybe if we start pointing fingers now we can get the bad karma out of the way and pretend we never had this discussion while we celebrate as one come November 5^th. Anyone else worried about the Bradley effect?

#3) What is the inevitable October surprise going to be?

What will the party of Atwater and Rove grace us with this time? Will it be more Ayers/Wright, a pale ex-girlfriend, a smear of Michelle, or another Bin Laden tape?

How about town mottoes? Do you know yours? I live in The International City. I imagine that giving such an ostentatiously worldly title to what was nicknamed Iowa by the Sea was mostly based on our appropriating a large English ocean liner and docking it in our harbor, but it seems to have been a happily self-fulfilling prophecy considering how impressively diverse Long Beach has since become. I remember the occasional shield shaped metal signs with the title and a picture of The Queen Mary as a kid but I haven’t seen one in years and the title is used unofficially these days if at all.

Not so my motto obsessed neighbors to the north. I speak, of course, of Lakewood, CA. Lakewood’s motto when I was a child was Tomorrow’s City Today. This seemed positively Disneyesque, if not a bit silly even at the time, but that’s what the sign said so I believed it and moved on. Joan Didion (see Trouble in Lakewood from the July 26, 1993 New Yorker) and D.J. Waldie (Holy Land) have written with more insight about the place than I could ever hope so I’ll merely offer that my own biased opinions are not the subject here and give the standard disclaimers that I have many friends who have lived or currently reside in the fine city of Lakewood.

The idea for this post came to me when I saw the new flags hanging from the lampposts and then the huge concrete signs on the street dividers containing not one motto but a whole collection of information about Lakewood. Tomorrow’s City Today was suddenly nowhere to be found (but forever implied?) but there were claims to the effect that I was now in Tree City USA as well as Sportstown USA. These seemed harmless enough though I couldn’t help but wonder how a city designated itself something like that or how many tree friendly places or enthusiastic sports towns must dot our entire nation. Above these relatively innocuous statements, however, was the new motto of Lakewood spelled out loudly and proudly for all to contemplate:

Times Change. Values Don’t.

Reader, I did a double take and then a triple. I looked in the rearview mirror for the burning cross and then for the candid camera that was trying to record how they freaked out the token liberal driving through town. I saw neither, just the smug insanity that would cause a city to invest so heavily in publicizing its own, well, what exactly? Fear? Oh yeah. Racism? Don’t see the senator from Illinois doing well here, no. But plenty of communities are characterized by this and more but they don’t scream the repeated embarrassment down every street that is Times Change Values Don’t. I could be wrong though. Why do I automatically assume these values to be scary or in opposition to my own? Maybe the city burghers are huge proponents of the Enlightenment? The poetry of Percy Shelley? The Grundrisse? The films of Bob Fosse? Nah, I don’t think so either.

And what happened to Tomorrow’s City Today? How did these two mottoes pass each other on the mobius strip of time/space continuum? Here is where multiple viewings of all five Planet of the Apes films really pay off. On the one hand you’ve got a city existing somehow slightly in the future and on the other you’re acknowledging chronological time while at the same time disputing it in favor of some apparently immutable principles. But which values are hurtling toward the future to be lost forever and which exist unthreatened in the protected space between the green parks and baseball diamonds? No wonder these people are confused.

But don’t despair, the other night I was watching Over the Edge, the Matt Dillon debut about disaffected teens with the killer Cheap Trick soundtrack, and the fictional town of New Granada has a very familiar motto. The film is set outside Denver and the actual events are supposedly inspired by an early 70’s crime spree in Foster City, California, but devotees of the Spur Posse and their once and future city won’t be fooled: Tomorrow’s City Today lives on.

I’m asking for your nominations for an artist who achieves the highest levels of mainstream success in two different fields. For as much as I’m cheating with the qualifiers I’m interested in the names you come up with. I excluded writers who merely mastered different genres and dismissed most musicians who dabbled, however successfully, in acting. Artists like Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives, or William Carlos Williams may be notable for being able to maintain a conventional career in conjunction with their writing or composing but they excelled in only one artistic medium. Warhol was tempting but I didn’t see his films as mainstream enough and other visual artists who could write well enough rarely produced enough to warrant inclusion. I was left with Sam Shepherd, he’s one of our best playwrights and he did get an Academy Award nomination for his acting but, let’s face it, he pretty much plays variations on the same role every time. Stretching further, I’ll throw Pasolini’s name into the ring but don’t feel qualified enough to really judge as I’ve only seen a handful of his films and a poem or two in translation.

One of the many things that intrigue me about Fosse, clearly my vote for this list, is that he continued working on Broadway even after winning the Academy Award as a film director in 1972. I can understand the narrative where the choreographer suddenly makes it to the big time and thereafter only chooses to work in film but to not only return to the stage but work on Hollywood and Broadway projects concurrently is surprising to me in the extreme. I know next to nothing about dance and loathe most musicals. This too is a huge hook to me, how can a man whose life work up to that point is centered on dance create such an utterly personal body of work in film that can speak so directly to someone with so little appreciation for his best known skill?

It’s difficult for me to realize how popular Cabaret (1972) must have been considering how disturbing it is watching it now. The film won eight Oscars, including Fosse winning over Coppola’s work on The Godfather for best director. I’ve complained before about the Academy Awards being overvalued and bewildering (see Joel Grey besting Al Pacino for best supporting actor) but they are representative of the zeitgeist and I still wonder at how this film played back then. Was the audience so in thrall to Minnelli’s car crash of a performance to not be completely creeped out by the young blond boy singing in the beer garden or were we in fact close enough to World War II to accept this look back at the darkness that was to come? That Fosse doesn’t overplay the Nazi material makes it all the more chilling, he’s filtering Isherwood of course but the idea that a song and dance man in only his second film can somehow perfectly create an atmosphere of decadence that works for both Weimar Germany and Nixon America is an achievement that deserves another viewing. Tell me if you too caught your breath when that slow pan over the brass reflects the SS officers in the audience right before the credits crawl. Completely brilliant…and the happiest ending of the three films to follow!

Lenny (1974) is interesting to me primarily as an antecedent to Star 80 (1983) and as a comment on how Fosse works with actors vs. stars. That this depressing failure of a film got nominated for another batch of awards must have been the glow from two years previous but some kind of justice prevailed and Coppola won for The Godfather Part II. All of the good luck Fosse had with Minnelli on Cabaret inexplicably disappeared when working with a far better (and saner) actor in Dustin Hoffman. I don’t know why exactly, other than that the script leaves Hoffman little to do but chew scenery which he does too willingly and that Liza’s compulsive and compelling need to be stared at took our mind off of the bleak political subtexts of that film. Two of the greatest performances Fosse elicited, from Roy Scheider and Eric Roberts, were by actors who were not necessarily stars and I think this is one of Fosse’s signal strengths as a director. The emphasis on performance, particularly the realities of life backstage, on the road, or during the creative process, is consistent in all of Fosse’s work and the talking heads interviewed to tell the retrospective tale will be used to similar but improved effect in the Stratten film nine years later. Final shot alert: a slow pull back to reveal a grainy black and white still of Lenny Bruce’s nude overdosed corpse.

Fosse didn’t make another film until 1979’s All That Jazz but he choreographed and directed a number of Broadway shows during this time, including 1975’s Chicago which he helped write the book for as well. It was during the editing of Lenny and the rehearsals for Chicago that Fosse suffered a near fatal heart attack. But don’t trust me; see the actual open heart surgery for yourself as Fosse has a never better Scheider portray himself in the painfully autobiographical and self indulgent All That Jazz. I wonder why Fosse even bothered to call the character Joe Gideon; he could have been ahead of his time and sponsored an entire academic industry of postmodern studies by just having Bob Fosse direct a film about Bob Fosse. I urge you to wade past the occasionally wince inducing megalomania, you will be greatly rewarded. You want to see a 1979 pretty Jessica Lange play the angel of death? You’ve got it. How about a fifteen minute long fantasy sequence featuring a live band that looks like it just got off of Carousel from Logan’s Run? Look no further. And what exactly is Ben Vereen wearing? I’ll call it a grey spandex unitard worn under that tuxedo, how about you? This film tied with Kurosawa’s Kagemusha for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Must have been that last shot of Scheider being zipped into a body bag as Ethel Merman warbles “There’s No Business Like Show Business” that sealed the deal.

Two years ago I tore my ACL and was laid up for a solid week after the surgery. I could do little but grow whatever facial hair I can muster and at the end of that week I hobbled on my crutches to the bathroom mirror to see what I could make of this new canvas. I shaved myself a pencil thin mustache and started smiling into the mirror as I intoned variations of “Hi, I’m Paul Snider”, “How you doing, Paul, Paul Snider” or “Snider, Paul.” I’m not necessarily proud of this and there’s no way I’m telling you if I rocked the black bikini briefs too but simply warning you as to the effect Star 80 can have on people.

I wonder what people said to Fosse after they saw All That Jazz? “Hey, I never thought of lovingly filming my own death like that, nicely done. And how are you feeling, anyway?” It’s my favorite Fosse film and the one I would recommend most from this list. It also shows him actually choreographing a show and the insight it gave this dance neophyte into that art form was instructive in its own right as well as a literal mirror of what makes Fosse tick. But how could one possibly raise the stakes and better intertwine his three obsessions of sex, death, and performance? Star 80 is that attempt. It reprises many of Lenny’s formal devices to better effect but the enormity of the true life crime and the complicity of most of the people involved make it almost unwatchable outside of an unbelievably good performance from Eric Roberts (which may form the basis of another list of nominations-best performance by an actor who never got close to being this good ever again) and an underrated job by Mariel Hemingway. Despite my love for The Last Picture Show, and an appreciation for his interviews with Orson Welles I promise that you’ll never look at Dr. Melfi’s shrink the same way again. That Bogdanovich actually marries Dorothy Stratten’s little sister after the events depicted in the film may make him, thinly disguised as a director named Aram Nicolas, the most disturbing character in the entire piece. Hard to believe but, again, the logic of Star 80 is that dark and twisted. The first time I saw it I could only see the brilliance of Roberts as he somehow elicits sympathy in his desperation as Snider but in watching it again for this post I’ll rank it above Lenny and leave it to your own discretion and capacity for well constructed but bleak narratives. The end doesn’t shock the way the others do but seeing a clip of a live Dorothy being interviewed makes it perhaps the saddest of them all.

So get your nominations in and hurry to adjust your queue. It’s Showtime!

–Herman Melville

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.

–Dave Hickey

We liked the same music, we liked the same bands, we liked the same clothes…

–Bruce Springsteen

I asked MoveOn to send me a free Obama sticker. I’ll try and convince the few friends I have who may not vote for him that they should. Here’s a sampling of reasons why: He is a Democrat and I tend to vote for anyone with a (D) by his or her name. Policy-wise, he hasn’t said enough innovative things to really catch my attention yet, but he seems as liberal as can likely be elected and a talented enough campaigner to get the win we so desperately need. I admire the fact that he doesn’t come from a wealthy family and owes much of his success to his own abilities. He’s well spoken and a very good writer for a politician.

I have been surprised to hear many discussions fearing for his assassination and, worse, what would tragically become of us were this sad event to take place. I fervently hope Senator Obama is our next President, but he is not a savior or messiah, and I don’t think he pretends to be. All successful politicians are able to have people project their hopes and dreams onto them, and if Obama can articulate the desires of a great many people, then this should help him get the votes I need him to get, but let’s worry more about sending him money or, better, volunteering for the guy before we spend too many sleepless nights worrying for his safety. I don’t want to see him hurt, but too much of this kind of talk almost seems a creepily self-fulfilling prophecy of martyrdom that ties to a bunch of Kennedy worship and liberal guilt that I think we’d do better to try and leave behind this election.

My wife offers that I’m getting older and perhaps disillusioned by the stolen election of 2000 and, to me, the even more incomprehensible “re”election of 2004. She’s (always) right to a point; Obama isn’t “my guy” like Bill Clinton and even Al Gore were, and though I would have been happy with literally any one of the Democrats who participated in the primaries, I voted for Senator Clinton in the primary and wish I had the opportunity to do so again. But my reticence is based mostly on concerns that I don’t see or read about often enough…which then causes me to doubt myself even more and just want to wake up on November 5^th (notice that I’m so scarred that I can’t even visualize a clean win called by the networks that same evening) with the good guys finally winning again. You see, Obama needs a whole lot more than our positive energy or our prayers; he needs our votes, 270 electoral ones to be exact, and I’m not sure how he’s going to get them.

I won’t spend too much time going over what you can find elsewhere, but let’s direct our attention away from the charisma of our candidate or the perfidy of the old bad man and look again and again at that daunting map. We’ve got 157 safe votes in 11 states and the District of Columbia. Then you’ve got six “swing” states that in reality are must wins unless he can pull off some huge upsets somewhere else. This means that Michigan (17 votes and a disputed primary which leaves polling even more up in the air than usual), Minnesota (10 votes), New Jersey (15 votes), Oregon (7 votes), Pennsylvania (21 votes), and Washington (11 votes) can get him to 238. Where do we get the next 32? North Carolina (15 votes), Virginia (13 votes), Colorado (9 votes), Nevada (5 votes), New Mexico (5 votes), Iowa (7 votes), Missouri (11 votes), Florida (27 votes), Ohio (20 votes), New Hampshire (4 votes), and Wisconsin (10 votes)? Which do you feel overly confident about? I’ll crunch some numbers and with some degree of audacity say that Obama wins Iowa, and Wisconsin–now he’s at 255, only 15 more to go. But I see Florida and North Carolina as a loss so we have to peel some more off elsewhere. How about Nevada, New Hampshire, and New Mexico? Brace yourself, that only leaves him with 269. Of course, winning Ohio alone wins it, as would picking up a bigger state or two that currently leans Republican such as Colorado, Missouri, or Virginia. I don’t know much else about Ted Strickland other than that he’s a popular Democratic governor from Ohio, but based on hard numbers alone, he may suddenly be my new favorite Vice Presidential candidate. I realize that Obama has a bunch of money and says he intends on running a 50-state campaign but, given how low the current administration’s approval ratings are and the weakness of our challenger, I still see a disturbingly tight race.

The 800 lb. Yeti in the room, of course, is that I don’t even trust any of the polling that I pore over to make my hoped for projections and vote totals. It’s June and while Obama doesn’t have too much of a voting record to attack, he will be subjected to the standard right wing smears and mischaracterizations. He’s a liberal, after all; oh yeah, and he’s black. I’ve lived in Southern California my whole life and still remember what happened to the popular mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, when he consistently polled well but suddenly lost the governorship in 1982. Will the fine people in enough of the states listed above go into the privacy of their voting booth and elect the first person of color President in our history? I hope so but am already agonizing about the better angels in the nature of many of my fellow citizens.

I’ve been reading Bishop’s The Big Sort, and he points out that in the 1976 Presidential election just over 26 percent of the nation’s voters lived in landslide counties, landslide counties being defined as one where one party won by 20 percentage points or more. In 2004, 48.3 % of voters lived in communities where the election wasn’t close at all. Living in a solid blue state is one thing but to realize that it’s not even entire states in the Rust Belt and South that determine my family’s fate but a handful of potentially swing counties that are legitimately in play makes me worry even more about the disconnect that characterizes much of our current political discourse. In the coming months try and remember to not be either frightened or triumphal; we’ve got a long way to go and should be able to pull this thing off, but it will be better for us all if we remain clear eyed and perhaps add a bit of caution to our optimism instead of congratulate ourselves on preaching to the already converted. It’s not us we have to convince, it’s them, and I’m not always sure how we’re supposed to do that when we spend a great deal of our time in comforting echo chambers of our own making.

But enough of my doom and gloom; listen to my secret weapon. I’m not cutting my hair until we have a Democratic President. Shhh, don’t tell my lovely wife, who, inexplicably, doesn’t care for the flowing locks. She thinks it has to do with an upcoming birthday, but my Samson-like mojo is wholly directed at earning votes for the cause of social justice. America, I’m putting my suburban shoulder to the wheel.

“It’s hard to choose a favorite among so many great tracks, but “The Greatest Love of All” is one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation, dignity. Its universal message crosses all boundaries and instills one with the hope that it’s not too late to better ourselves.” –Patrick Bateman

I’d never “camped out” for anything before. I had waited in a long line outside of Music Plus for Stones tickets once a long time ago, but the communal bonding and shared mania of waiting for days to purchase an iPhone, get student tickets to a NCAA game, or be one of the very first to be massively disappointed by The Phantom Menace had been denied to me.

All that changed about a month ago. I took the day off of work and set the alarm for just after 3:00 a.m. My buddy Charlie was going to pick me up at 3:20 so we could get a prime spot in line. I had considered making it an all-nighter, maybe closing the Bayshore Saloon after a night of NTN and just taking a cab to get an even better position but wanted to be lucid if the need arrived. I dressed for the cold and packed a portable DVD player along with the following films: Apocalypse Now Redux, Blade Runner, and True Romance. Charlie brought these fantastic reclining chairs; actually, the term lawn chair doesn’t begin to do them justice, since they allowed you to stretch out and feel as if you were floating (if you were able to maintain your balance just right and could manage to remain perfectly still).

There were four people ahead of us. We greeted our fellow waiters, aware that we likely knew some of them but were unable to see anything in the dark of the early morning. The conversation among our then-anonymous selves centered on what time the first guy had got there and how many times various people had gone through this process. The “winning time” for those keeping track for next year was 2:30 a.m. It turned out that the woman in the fourth spot was a high school classmate of mine. We squinted at each other in the dark and said hello, she being a pro at this, having done it twice before with this being her last time.

Did we then gather stones and draw slips of paper from a wooden box?

No, I was there to register my kids for kindergarten. Our neighborhood (I shy away from wanting to claim it as my neighborhood, but read on in case you have any doubts as to the depths of my delusion) has enacted this bizarre ritual for years. There are two different time slots at our kindergarten, and registration is on a first-come, first-served basis. So as to ensure that your child is placed into the correct class, you will rise before dawn and do your part to prove that your children are indeed our future. My kids needed to be in the first session. The morning session is the only one that would do. If I didn’t get my kids into that session, if I didn’t do what it took, no matter the cost, well, there’s no telling what could happen to them, right? That’s why we were all there. We would even snicker about the idea of someone bothering to wait for the afternoon session. It just wasn’t done. Oh sure, we knew of parents who enrolled their kids in the late classes; it was fine to do so, since the teachers were the same after all, but the implied stigma could be spelled out to me by the line of lawn chairs that spread out beside me as those parents who just didn’t care enough finally arrived to take their spot in this most precious queue.

Let me add two things: I went to this very elementary school and am now a public school teacher myself. We didn’t have to do this when I was five years old (I laughed to think of my Dad out here, but then I worried that I may have been consigned to those late classes after all. It all makes sense now!), and I have few illusions as to the ratio of importance between the particular teacher a student has versus the entire support system they have outside of the classroom, but here I was anyway, gloating inwardly that I had a lock on three of those first thirty spots by showing up when I did. Note the significance there–I was the sixth person waiting in line, after my neighbor Charlie, but was taking up slots #7-9 with my oversized brood. The guy who was second in line has twins, very sweet girls who go to our preschool, but here I was taking up a sizable percentage all on my own. When parents arrived, they would do a head count down the line and grunt in satisfaction only to have the true numbers read out to them. “Twins, huh? Triplets? That guy has triplets?” I’m used to being “the triplet guy.” It has and will continue to define who I am to a large extent. But this time it seemed less an amusing oddity and more of a freakish irritant. Grim faces under baseball caps moved toward the back of the line as they pulled out their cell phones to tell their wives that this sudden and unexpected onslaught of multiples could put a crimp in their kid’s college plans.

My immediate line-mates were nice. We could afford to be–we were all in. I decided against my films because it was more of a mixed crowd than I had anticipated and my kids will have enough problems with labels without dealing with their dad being the guy who listens to the Dennis Hopper monologue on the genealogy of the Sicilian people. The sun finally rose, which was nice because it was freezing. Now the regular school staff arrived to work. I can guess what they made of us, but they had seen it every year, so they gave us a tight smile and went about their business. Then the students began to be dropped off. They looked much less sure and who can blame them? Some neighborhood parents arrived too, pushing their strollers with their toddlers and laughing with us that they had been in our shoes once before and would be again next year or the year after. Once again, my special circumstances were noted. This would be my only appearance at this event, as I was always one and done.

The woman from the PTA, very friendly and professional, set up a table with doughnuts and coffee and took our immunization cards to be copied. It was around then that my wife, Adriean, arrived to take my spot in line. She had taken the kids to preschool and the proud papa, the great hunter, could now go and enjoy his much deserved sleep. I was glad to help my children pass this crucial test and, for as much as I want to mock myself, did feel a sense of accomplishment when I looked at the long line stretching down to the building where I had gone to sixth grade knowing that I had delivered for the family.

What exactly it was that I gave them I’m still trying to piece together. I know it’s silly, but so many of the choices that we make for our kids are similarly insignificant until they somehow mean everything. I hope they like the morning class. It’s very likely that I did it more for my self-concept of what a parent should do or be than for any value that they’ll get out of it. But I would and will do it again if it offers even the slightest chance at their potential happiness. I’m the triplet guy. It’s what I do.