A Murder of Cows

I spend much of my childhood living in a small, rural town. Because my parents didn’t even have the good sense to live in town, where you could get cable, we got exactly three TV stations: the local PBS, ABC, and CBS affiliates. And bringing in the CBS affiliate involved using a control knob in the living room to activate a servomotor on the roof which spun our antenna southward.

At a young age, I discovered the PBS show Sneak Previews, with Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert. That was the original PBS show, running from 1977 to 1982 before the hosts made the leap to commercial television. As with much classic television, a lot of the Sneak Previews shows no longer exist on tape because somebody foolishly taped over them. Who’d ever want to see an out-of-date movie review show? So I’ve probably seen many hours of Siskel & Ebert that will never be seen again. When Siskel & Ebert left PBS, Sneak Previews limped along with Jeffrey Lyons and Neal Gabler, and later Lyons and Michael Medved, but no one cared.

Through that show, I became keenly interested in seeing grownup movies. On a visit to San Francisco, my dad wanted to see Apocalypse Now at the legendary Northpoint Theater. Mom wasn’t up for a film with lots of gunfire and no smooching, so the plan was that she’d look after me while Dad saw his manly war movie. But I begged to go along because I’d heard Siskel & Ebert talk about it, and I was a precocious kid who wanted something new and interesting from a movie. Mom was reluctant, but finally relented and allowed me to tag along with Dad.

It was great. The Northpoint was a huge theater with continental seating, a big screen, and a sound system so good that many films had their sound mixed there. I was blown away by the movie, and an interest in cinema off the beaten path was ignited.

Siskel & Ebert reviewed not only the week’s Hollywood fare, but foreign and independent film. I’m sure the first time I heard the name John Sayles, it was out of Siskel’s mouth or Ebert’s. There was nowhere near me to see that stuff, but the advent of home video made it possible to catch a few offbeat things; even our small town’s video store carried some unusual stuff. Early video stores were long tail businesses before anyone knew that that meant. Each week, as I watched Siskel & Ebert, the list of films I wanted to see someday grew in my mind. And occasionally I’d be in or near a big city where I could find a few. When I left home and moved to The Big City, I made up for lost time.

I honestly don’t remember if I agreed with Siskel or Ebert more. What was important was that each review provided just enough information about a film that I could figure out whether it was for me or not. I got to know their tastes well enough that I could calibrate them to mine. I knew their blind spots (Ebert’s weakness for films which reflected his own left-wing politics, etc.) After Gene Siskel died in 1999, it became fashionable to trash his replacement, Richard Roeper, and while Roeper wasn’t the refined cineaste Siskel was, the Ebert & Roeper review still told me everything I needed to know about a movie, and still served the function of bringing things to my attention which otherwise would have escaped it. Yeah, it wasn’t the same, but it was probably the highest-profile forum in which small independent and foreign films, including documentaries, were discussed.

Two years ago, Ebert’s failing health took him off the air, and his return seems to be far in the future at best. The show went through a series of guest co-hosts, much as it had after Siskel’s death, and the producers seemed to have settled on Michael Phillips, whose chemistry with Roeper was good: Phillips the Urban Sophisticate, Roeper the Regular Guy. I expected the inevitable announcement that Ebert would step aside and allow the show to become, logically enough, Roeper & Phillips.

But instead, Disney-ABC wanted to take it in a more Hollywood-focused direction, and Ebert and Roeper almost simultaneously announced their resignations. Roeper said a show in the spirit of the original Siskel & Ebert would be forthcoming soon, details to follow, presumably when his contract with Disney expires next month. The sooner, the better, as far as I’m concerned. And I hope even the folks who’ve never warmed to Roeper give the guy props for quitting and going elsewhere because he believed in the vision of the original show. Maybe he’ll get a little more respect now.

Amusingly, one of the hosts of the new, Hollywood-ized At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper is Ben Lyons, son of Jeffrey Lyons, one of the critics who replaced Siskel & Ebert on PBS’s Sneak Previews. The other is Ben Mankiewicz from TMZ, which tells you everything you need to know about where they’re going with the show.

Wherever Roeper & Phillips are going, I’ll be there. No, you can’t recapture the chemistry Siskel & Ebert had, but you can still do a very useful film review show that calls people’s attention to stuff off the beaten track while reviewing the latest action film with Roman numerals in the title.

Ebert wrote a fine eulogy to the show this week. While his voice is silenced for now, and maybe forever, his writing is as sharp as ever. He spoke of how he and Siskel both hated each other and loved each other, and no better insight could be gained on their relationship than by watching these two videos of Siskel & Ebert, circa 1987, joking with each other and being downright mean to each other as they shoot (or attempt to shoot) show promos. Be warned that the language they use is NSFW:

• In Slate, Christopher Hitchens writes an unsparing, unsentimental remembrance of Jesse Helms, who died earlier this month at the age of 86:
  

  It seemed somehow profane that Sen. Jesse Helms should have managed to depart this life on the 232nd anniversary of the declaration of American independence. To die on the Fourth of July, one can perhaps be forgiven for feeling, is or ought to be a privilege reserved for men of the stamp of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom expired on that day in 1826, 50 years after the promulgation of the declaration. One doesn’t want the occasion sullied by the obsequies for a senile racist buffoon.

  And it gets better from there. Read the whole thing here.
• My partner and I recently watched the seven-part HBO mini-series John Adams, which, aside from a few quibbles, like treating Adams a tad too gently for the Alien and Sedition Acts, and rushing through his legendary correspondence with Thomas Jefferson in the last seven years of his life, we liked. Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney vanished into their characters, and David Morse’s scenes as George Washington pull off the almost impossible task of communicating what it must’ve been like to set eyes on the man. The effort at historic accuracy was impressive, right down to the rotting teeth as characters age (despite a nasty little continuity error in which, in an extremely important scene, Giamatti is without his dental makeup).

  
  One episode deals with the breast cancer and eventual death of the Adams’ daughter, Abigail “Nabby” Adams Smith, which offers a cringe-inducing look at the state of medicine in 1811. The TV series, by necessity, takes an abbreviated view of her illness. Jim Olson, a history professor at Sam Houston State University, looks in more depth at the story of her illness and medical treatment. It’s interesting to see what they knew and didn’t know about breast cancer then:
  
  

  In June 1811, with the lump visible to the naked eye, a desperate Nabby returned to Massachusetts, accompanied by her husband and daughter Caroline. As soon as she arrived in Quincy, she wrote to Benjamin Rush, describing her condition and seeking his advice. When Abigail Adams first looked at her daughter’s breast, she found the condition “allarming.” [sic] The large tumor distended the breast into a misshapen mass. John and Abigail took Nabby to see several physicians in Boston, and they were cautiously reassuring, telling her that the situation and her general health were “so good as not to threaten any present danger.” They prescribed hemlock pills to “poison the disease.”

  Read the whole essay here, but be warned it’s not for the squeamish.
• Finally, how much trouble can a really disgruntled IT guy cause the government of the City & County of San Francisco? Quite a lot, actually, as we see in the case of Terry Childs:
  
  

  Prosecutors say Childs, who works in the Department of Technology at a base salary of just over $126,000, tampered with the city’s new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials’ e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates’ bookings are stored. Childs created a password that granted him exclusive access to the system, authorities said. He initially gave pass codes to police, but they didn’t work. When pressed, Childs refused to divulge the real code even when threatened with arrest, they said.

  Authorities made good on their threat of arrest, and Childs is now a guest of the city jail, but he’s still not talking. Now that’s disgruntlement. Read the stories here and here.

  How a guy with a robbery conviction got into a position of such techno-responsibility is one of many questions people will be avoiding in coming weeks.

David S. Terry was a notoriously short-tempered California politician in the 19th century, best known for having killed US Senator David Broderick in an 1859 duel. Both were Democrats, but Terry was a member of the party’s pro-slavery faction, while Broderick was a Free Soil Democrat who didn’t want slavery extended into California.

There’s something so very quintessentially mid-19th century California about the story of Terry and his wife:

Terry became entangled in a mysterious divorce case in the 1880s. A young woman named Sarah Althea Hill claimed that she was the legal wife of silver millionaire William Sharon. Sharon denied that they had ever married, but Hill wanted a divorce and a share of Sharon’s treasure. She lost her case and eventually wound up marrying Terry. The Terrys appealed, and United States Supreme Court justice Stephen J. Field, a former friend of Broderick’s, heard the case in 1888 as the senior justice of the Federal circuit court in California.

Field ruled against Mr. and Mrs. Terry in a final appeal, and jailed them both on contempt of court. The Terrys vowed vengeance.

Read the whole glorious soap opera here.

The Terry-Broderick duel took place just outside San Francisco city limits, near Lake Merced. It’s strange to think of the Westlake Shopping Center as the site of a notorious political duel. I think of it more as the site of a 24-hour Walgreens.

In another online discussion, someone said they’d like a picture of Marx Realty. Since I live nearby, and was having a late lunch right near it, I snapped a picture:

I assume the plethora of American flags (three, counting the tiny, faded sticker below the big flag) is to disclaim any connection to that Marx. In most places, that wouldn’t be necessary—they’d think Groucho, not Karl—but in San Francisco, you wouldn’t be too sure about that. A bakery a few blocks away advertises itself as a “workers’ collective,” after all. Somehow, I have a feeling a “workers’ collective” is a more oppressive place to work than a Wal-Mart in Honduras.

While my political views used to be considerably more liberal than they are today, I never succumbed to a flirtation with real leftism. For this, I think I have two things to thank. First, I traveled a lot in my youth, and saw up close that leftist regimes produced pretty miserable results. Second, while at UC Berkeley, I took a class from a political science professor named A. James Gregor.

Gregor is a Strangelovian character, and while I didn’t necessarily agree with everything he had to say, he was relentless, in that political theory class, about drawing the line between certain political theories and their catastrophic outcomes. Many of my fellow students hadn’t even heard of the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge, or that the Cultural Revolution in China had produced anything more insidious than a lot of people marching around in gray tunics. I never quite bought into his defense of right-wing dictators, but his argument about bad statist theory causing human disaster on unimaginable scales persuaded me.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of everything on Gregor’s Wikipedia page. It notes accusations that he silenced alternate views, in the class, I can tell you from firsthand experience that this was not true. Some students made contrary points and he argued back. It was the sort of exchange of ideas universities are for. He often made a point of inviting students to his office hours to continue discussing or debating a point.

I supported the anti-Apartheid movement at Berkeley, and I think history has rendered a clear verdict on who was right about that. But I couldn’t exactly join up and march, since the whole thing was led by serious Fellow Travelers, who ranged from the earnest—a woman who wanted to emigrate to Cuba—to the ridiculous—a guy who got to the front of every anti-Apartheid march through Sproul Plaza and Dwinelle Plaza chanting:

Marx and Lenin!

Mao and Trotsky!

We’ve got the team that’s really hotsky!

I am not making this up. I’m sure it got old, even for the commies. I sure did for me, as I tried to study early 19th century European history from my hard-won shady spot on the grass near the Life Sciences Building. It got especially old after the first few hundred times I heard it.

You say you want a revolution. Well, you know.

I lived pretty close to the epicenter of the Dot Com Boom™ (v. 1.0). My partner worked (as he still does) for a Major Technology Company and our neighborhood was popular among the dot-com nouveau-upper-middle-class. We saw the upscale restaurants displace the cheap dives. We ate in the cheap dives, like the splendid Pot & Pan, which offered tasty food (the Won Ton Soup was to die for) in fluorescent-lit surroundings with all the atmosphere of an airport restroom.

We ate in the upscale restaurants as our own stock market investments made possible a break from our college student-worthy diets of deli sandwiches, boxes of cheap Chinese food, and burritos. And then we saw the upscale joints close, to be replaced by cheaper fare, like the always-busy Naan ‘n’ Curry. Creative destruction in action.

My partner, for a brief time, worked in a building that had previously been occupied by Pets.com, one of the classic dot-bomb stories. It turns out that offering free shipping on 50 lb. bags of dog food is a pretty good way to send your investors’ money to the Great Beyond. “Walk toward the light! Walk toward the light!”

Perhaps the quintessential dot-bomb story was Excite.com. Few companies basked in the media attention and hype that surrounded Excite, which was a portal when it seemed obvious to everyone that portals were the future. Joe Kraus, the boyish, telegenic co-founder of the company was likely to show up in any late-90’s story about the boom. You know the story: dot com companies, wallowing in money from big IPOs, paid ridiculous prices for Super Bowl ads, billboards along US 101, blimps, and anything else they could manage. Profitability was scorned as an outdated concept, but as many young people learn, their parents were actually right about a few things, and one of those is that a company can’t lose money forever before burly dudes come to repo all your Aerons.

Excite became Excite@Home, but never quite took off, and passed through the hands of various companies which never figured out what to do with it. Their ubiquitous logo faded, and the once high-flying stock crashed to earth as the company overpaid for long-forgotten startups like iMail, Blue Mountain, and Webshots. They paid $430 million for Blue Mountain (one of those sites through which you can send greeting cards via e-mail) and soon sold it for $35 million to American Greetings. Other properties were also liquidated at a fraction of their cost to pay Excite’s crushing debts. Three weeks after 9/11 the company went bankrupt. The founders of Webshots, who sold the company to the Excite boys for $82.5 million, bought the company back for $2.4 million from the bankruptcy court.

Excite still exists, and still looks like a portal from 1997. Various owners have bought it with the intent of revitalizing the site, but no one ever quite gets around to it. Some of the links are broken; others seem to point to pages full of news stories from late June.

One of the ways dot-com companies advertised themselves in the boom of the late 90’s was to pay people to repaint their cars with the company colors and logo all over it. The owner of the car got a few hundred dollars a month, and the company got a moving billboard. Those days are mostly gone, so it was with a combination of smugness and nostalgia that I observed yesterday, on my street, a double-parked car with peeling paint, covered with Excite logos:

It reminded me of those heady days. The dot-bomb was as over-hyped as the dot-boom; plenty of companies made money and thrived, and plenty of people who rode their first company off a cliff learned from the experience and ended up making their next venture a success.

And Joe Kraus, Excite’s boy wonder? At the ripe old age of 35, he’s now a Director of Product Management at a little outfit called Google.

Since I’m new around here, I thought I’d post a little bit about myself.

I live—as I have for almost my entire adult life—in the city of San Francisco, a place as frustrating as it is beautiful. I live with my partner of 22 years; we celebrated our anniversary just a few nights ago. I’m 41 and he’s 39, so you can do the math and figure out we were young and crazy when we got together. Ours is that rare teenage romance that lasts, and I hope it does for the rest of our days.

Also, it turned out that the 1980’s were an excellent time to fall into a committed, monogamous relationship as young gay men (boys?) in an urban area. We saw people die like flies; we dodged the bullet.

I work in politics, and we’ll leave it at that; I’m having one of those midlife crises where I’m 41 and trying to decide what I want to do when I grow up, and I doubt it’ll be what I’m doing now. At some point, I promised myself I wouldn’t become that midlife crisis guy but I did. On the other hand, I promised myself I wouldn’t go bald, and that worked out fine. And my midlife crisis hasn’t resulted in the buying of a sports car with a low center of gravity that makes me look like that midlife crisis guy, so I think I’m ahead of the game.

My partner works as a senior manager for a Very High Profile Silicon Valley company. I went to college (and more college, and more college) and he didn’t. He makes a good deal more money than I do. So just in case you’re wondering if the universe is fair: no, no it’s not. I’m an active investor, and I surely make more money from that than I do from politics, so when people ask what I do for a living it’s, as they say on Facebook, complicated.

I’m fascinated by cities and towns, buildings and streetscapes, the spaces, public and private we create for ourselves. And I’m always in search of the perfect place to live.

I’m a guy of many divergent interests. This makes career planning an almost insurmountable challenge, but life an ever unfolding pleasure. Like a lot of people whose interests spread out in every direction like the roots of an old tree, busting up some sidewalk here and there, I live on the business end of an info fire-hydrant, with too many books and magazines to read, to many films to see, too many seasons of The Wire to catch up on, too many newspapers to browse, and too many blogs to check. And yet I want to add my own bit of pressure to the hydrant. I’m here because I feel like I have something to say, but I won’t know what until I write it.

A few core beliefs, to give you a sense of my overall Weltanschauung:

• The good old days weren’t. If you doubt me, read up on pre-20th century dental care.
  
  
• Market capitalism with division of labor and trade is the single best idea anyone ever had about anything.
  
  
• The internet and the accompanying Long Tail mean much more than a wider array of colored sweatshirts to buy at Wal-Mart; they profoundly empower our species.
  
  
• Manned space exploration, and eventual colonization, is important because astronomy and geology have shown clearly that catastrophic things happen to planets all the time.
  
  
• Science and reason are the only ways we have of knowing anything.
  
  
• Religion and spirituality have vastly less to tell us about our lives than literature and art.
  
  
• Wealth is not a zero-sum game. The rise of the economies China and India are unambiguously good things. Competition? Bring it on.
  
  
• Technological singularity? Maybe.
  
  
• Enjoy in moderation.

I’m sure there are more, but if I dropped all my crazy opinions into one post, what would I have to write about for the rest of my entries? Pictures of LOLcats?

You know why I’m glad I took calculus? Because now I can understand Rem Koolhaas’s formula for happiness:

And to think the other kids called me a nerd. Looks like I’m getting the last laugh.

It’s not enough to say I don’t get Barack Obama. But I don’t.

I do not believe mine is a jaundiced heart, immune to soaring rhetoric, flightless under the weight of cynicism. I do not believe I am so hidebound by my (considerable) ideological differences with Obama that I’d be deaf to the music in a good speech, unable to appreciate it for its sonority. But I don’t swoon, and I wonder why.

Living in San Francisco, in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the ur-liberal city, I’m surrounded by Obama signs, some distributed by the campaign, and others handmade and impromptu. The hand-drawn portraits of Obama always have a socialist realist quality. I don’t look at his visage and expect that, within four years, we’ll all be flipping cards in massive synchronized May Day celebrations. But I can’t help but wonder if I’m looking at the Che Guevara t-shirt of the 2030’s.

Our neighbors up the block have an Obama sign in their window and a BMW parked illegally on the sidewalk, most evenings. It’s that kind of neighborhood. When San Francisco returned to district elections for its Board of Supervisors (think city council) eight years ago, ours was the neighborhood that sent Matt Gonzalez—an unindicted vandal who’s currently Ralph Nader’s running mate—to City Hall. Sorry about that. It wasn’t my idea.

So every time I leave the house, I’m reminded that the enthusiasm for this first-term senator from Illinois is palpable. Especially as I pass this on the way to my favorite lunch spot. But why?

His speeches are full of promises to unify us, to bring us together to solve problems. How exactly? Those are the questions that serve only to divide us, silly. Even his much-vaunted speech on race only flirts with answers to hard questions; he acknowledges the contradictions inherent in affirmative action, but carefully dodges the question of what we’re supposed to do about them. He promises unity and change, and if that isn’t good enough for you, well, you just don’t get it.

There is little in his history as a legislator to justify great expectations. When pressed for his legislative accomplishments, his supporters usually sputter, and the few that don’t recite a pretty thin list. He took a trip to Russia with Richard Lugar to talk about non-proliferation. He helped veterans in Illinois get their disability checks. He co-sponsored this and that, an act that consists mainly of filing a form.

His performance in debates improved in the latter half of the campaign, but still leaves much to be desired. When Saturday Night Live called the press on their fawning, unskeptical coverage, the requisite period of self-flagellation didn’t result in tougher questions. Moderates see in him a moderate and liberals see a liberal; the latter, at least, do so with more justification in his voting record. Free-traders insist he’s really one of them; his record shrieks no. Alarming hints of a world view at odds with his cautiously hopeful rhetoric surfaced in the words of Jeremiah Wright, but the smoking gun eludes.

So are we left only with, as Obama himself posited, the “desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase race reconciliation on the cheap”? Is Geraldine Ferraro right? Or is a nation exhausted by eight years of divide-and-conquer politics just reaching out for the candidate furthest in tone from George W. Bush?

Maybe it’s all of those things. But I’m unmoved and unpersuaded. I see an adequate orator saying a lot about hope, and too little about anything else.