Take a moment.

It’s always hard to remember, amid the breathless blatherings from local news reporters about the weather and the state of the beaches on the “unofficial start of Summer” that Memorial Day is basically funereal in nature. As the national memories of wars of mass involvement (WW2, Vietnam) fade, it becomes harder to relate to the tragedy of the professional armed forces who are sent into harms way to execute presidential policies. Without the threat of a draft, wars become something other people do — we may feel empathy for their suffering, but not the visceral sense of personal threat that could pressure policy makers to change their plans. And that, of course, is why we don’t have a draft in the “War on Terror”. But it bears remembering that, to date, 4,589 Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and perhaps 30,000 wounded.

Here are a couple of links to worthwhile places you can explore after you get your fill of burgers and the beach:

• [Carrier] — a great PBS multi-part documentary about the lives of sailors on the USS Nimitz.
• [The Wounded Warrior Project] — a great service for returning veterans who have been maimed in the current war. Send them a few bucks.

One of These Things is Not Like the Others My mom (3rd from the right) as a teenager. Maude was pretty as a picture, with the voice of an angel and the mouth of a sailor. A very bawdy sailor.

My co-workers frequently comment on the burdens of raising children and the consultations they regularly have with their kids’ teachers which, in these over-cautious times, often take on the gravity of papal audiences. As the resident childless drone in the office I have nothing to reference during these conversations except my own history of parent-teacher interactions. Such as the time my older sister was in fourth grade and came home crying because she had received a rap on the head from her teacher, who wore a heavy costume jewelry ring for just that purpose. The next morning my mother walked her to school, then continued into the building and into my sister’s classroom. “Listen, tramp,” she said to the hapless teacher, “if you ever touch my child again I will come up here and pull your blond hair out by its black roots!” In a class of 30 students picture 29 small mouths agape and a teacher in tears. I’m sure my sister wanted to crawl off the planet at that moment, but years later we would regale each other with re-tellings of a story that so perfectly summed up the exasperating extent of our mother’s loyalty.

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The Medium is the Message Rosario Dawson in a viral YouTube video for Gemini Division, Bravo’s Top Chef prominently featuring Glad products, and Microsoft Photosynth starring in a recent episode of CSI.

Once upon a time, back in television’s Stone Age, a juvey medium that wasn’t quite sure how to make money from new technology decided to continue an approach that had been in use since Lever Brothers underwrote silent films that featured its Sunlight Soap — put products the sponsors were trying to sell right into the shows being sponsored and even have the actors in the programs occasionally step out of character for a pitch directly to the audience. We’ve all seen corny examples of this and it was broadly satirized in the media-bashing Truman Show a few years back.

As the effectiveness of 30 and 60 second commercial breaks became clear, product placement faded and in fact was avoided — so that television shows could be re-run and re-syndicated without worrying about conflicts with unknown future sponsors.

Then along came remote channel changers and Tivo…

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Five minutes of excruciating cultural perfection. A brief appearance by Karen Black just adds to the exquisite horror.

New Year’s Parade down Mott Street in Chinatown, February 10 2008.

How could I not be on hand to celebrate the Year of the Rat? Saw lots of dragons but no rats of the decorative or (mercifully) authentic type. Besides me, that is. Gong Xi Fa Cai!

So sad. So awfully sad.

UPDATE 1/26: It’s been a few days since hearing the news about Ledger’s death. The day after he died a colleague and I went by his building to place a couple of flowers at the ad hoc memorial that fans had created. Looked up at the large dark windows of his apartment and commented on the strange irony that — if it’s true that his overdose was not accidental — someone who had touched so many and who was the target of such affection could feel so bereft and desperate. Seeing his body in that large wooden crate being loaded into a hearse for the trip back to Australia was jarring. I walked past him on 8th Avenue a few months ago. He was hard to miss — very tall and lanky, his gaze cast down toward the street as he walked with a woman. He didn’t see me recognize him but she did and her look at me suggested wariness that I’d interrupt them with some gushing fan tribute. I never would. The joy came in simply knowing that I could walk past him. We were both New Yorkers.

Alien + Predator + Cloverfield
A friend and I spent our day off doing a double-feature of Alien vs. Predator and Cloverfield. Fun. I’ve avoided the AVP franchise in the past because I loved the original Alien movies so much — I practically grew up with them and, by the early-nineties, facing the onslaught of AIDS, the [theme] of an alien invader and the heroic warrior who faced it down made the series almost sacred. The AVP movie is a decent B-movie thriller, happily repurposing the tried and true tropes of the earlier Alien and Predator films (warrior woman and little girl take on the now long-in-the-tooth monsters) and just goes to show that, in Hollywood, nothing is allowed to die until the last penny has been wrung from it. In the same derivative vein, Cloverfield is nowhere near original — Godzilla meets Blair Witch Project — but the execution is clever and the idea of an honest-to-gosh monster rampaging through the streets of Manhattan is kind of audacious in its simplicity. Some people are up in arms about the parallels to 9/11 — but it’s no different from Godzilla rising out of post-war Tokyo and probably serves the same purpose.

Suzanne Pleshette (1937 - 2008)
Most people think of Suzanne Pleshette from her role in the 70’s Bob Newhart Show. I could never watch that show because, though I liked her and Newhart, the supporting cast made my skin crawl (Peter Bonerz… *shudder*). But I will always think of her as the only interesting character in The Birds. In a movie that was camp the second it hit the can, her portrayal of husky-voiced booze swilling Annie Hayworth provided an authenticity otherwise lacking in the film and made her co-star, the definitively inauthentic “Tippi” Hedren, look even more artificial than she was. Mo Rocca, channeling his inner girl, goes into more depth on this [here].

The Organist Entertains
For the life of me I don’t know why I don’t live in Britain. English culture seems still, after all this time, to be a culture not just tolerant of eccentricity but fully committed to it. A perfect example is the weekly BBC radio show [The Organist Entertains], where, according to the website, “Nigel Ogden presents a programme of popular organ recordings”. Not just organ recordings mind you… popular organ recordings. If you have a yen to hear the Wurlitzer put through its paces, this is the show for you. It has been broadcast without interruption for almost 40 years and — perhaps most eccentric of all — originally went on the air in 1969, amid the mod psychedelia of swinging 60’s London. God knows how I came across it, but I’ll sometimes put it on while I’m making dinner and it instantly dispels a bad day. It’s hilarious.