Halfway down the Danube

Random Friday links

A few quick links.

Here's a fun link from local blogger Christian Garbis about style in Armenia. It's funny because it's true.

Here's a thread over at Crooked Timber which sucked up way, way too much of my time in the last couple of days. Short version: the Exile is mildly amusing and occasionally interesting, but, well, not all that. I just got annoyed at... well, read it only if you're a completist. I don't know why I'm even linking to it. Come to think of it, just skip it. Moving along.

Achewood is one of the strangest things on the Internet. It's uneven, but when it's good, it's very good. Carlos enjoyed the severed head of Keith Moon, but I'm a fan of the Great Outdoor Fight.

Totally randomness: this morning I heard Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" coming out of the radio. Damn, I thought, I haven't heard that on the radio in years... but radio here is pleasantly idiosyncratic, and all sorts of odd stuff gets played.

This evening I find that Andrew Sullivan has posted the video. Go figure.

(My God, Gabriel looks so young.)

We're not finished with those chipmunks! More animated rodent madness next week.

And that's all.

Voting

Voting by absentee ballot this week.

I don't spend a lot of time on US politics here -- it's not that sort of blog -- but I guess I can make an exception every two years.

I'm still registered to vote in new Haven, Connecticut, so I actually have an interesting ballot this year. If you care how I vote, it's below the fold.

Voting -- I vote with an absentee ballot. To get it, I have to fill out a form (which I can download from the internet) and mail it in. Then they send me my ballot.

This is a simple system, and the New Haven staff were all very friendly and helpful... nice ladies who called me "honey" and were very interested in Armenia. ("Oh, that is a long way off!") It does seem a little vulnerable to cheating, but presumably someone is taking care of that. Right? So, moving along.

Senator -- If you've been following US politics, you know that the Connecticut Senate race is one of the weirdest in the nation. 18-year incumbent Joe Lieberman was defeated in the primary by novice challenger Ned Lamont. (Lieberman is a "centrist" Democrat who has been a little too friendly to President Bush.) Lieberman then turned around and ran as an independent, making this a three-way race. But the Republican candidate is pathetically weak -- he has a well-publicized gambling problem -- so it's really a two way race between Lamont (the official Democratic candidate) and Lieberman (former Democrat, now independent).

Lieberman ran a miserable primary campaign, but the loss seemed to energize him -- he's become a very aggressive campaigner, and is currently leading Lamont by about ten points in the polls.

I'm going to vote for Lamont, because I just don't like Lieberman much. There's a smug sense of entitlement about the man that really gets on my nerves. Lamont will at least be a fresh face.

But... reality check, people. Lamont is probably not going to win. And if he does win, he'll probably be a rather mediocre Senator.

Meanwhile, if Lieberman wins, he'll pretty quickly return to the Democratic fold. Oh, he's swung far right in this campaign, to pick up all those Republican votes that he needs to win. But that's simply what he has to do. Lieberman is a Democrat, albeit an annoying one. He's not going to turn Republican and he's not going to stay independent for long.

Furthermore: even if you think Joe is a dirty traitor who's a secret Republican at heart, there's still a good reason for him to rejoin the Democrats. To wit: the next election, in 2008, will probably add several more Democrats to the Senate.

See, Senators have six-year terms. Only one-third of them run for re-election in every two-cycle. So, only 33 out of 100 Senate seats are open this year. In two years, it will be a different 33. And more of the 2008 seats are Republican, meaning the Democrats have more chances to pick up seats. In fact, a lot of them are unusually weak or vulnerable Republicans. So, while two years is a long time in politics, 2008 should be a more favorable year for the Democrats than 2006.

So: right now the Democrats have 44 seats and the Republicans have 56. To gain control of the Senate this year, they need to win seven seats. I think this is unlikely. But... if they win four or five seats, then they should be in a very good position to gain control in 2008.

Lieberman, a professional politician, knows this. So although he has reason to be unhappy with the Democrats (a lot of his former friends and colleagues have been campaigning against him), simple self-interest should move him to their side of the aisle.

So, while I'm voting for Lamont, I'm not going to be too upset if Lieberman beats him.

Governor: I'm voting for the Republican, Jodi Rell.

Yeah, I know. But. I lived for two years in New Haven, Connecticut. Nice little city, great location. It's on major rail and highway lines and has three colleges, including Yale University. It should have a lot of potential. But it's never recovered from the urban blight of the 1960s and '70s. The downtown remains feeble or dead; walk off the Yale campus in most directions and you're either in a concrete mess of overpasses or a slum. Most American cities underwent a revival in the 1990s, but it passed New Haven by.

Why? Well, one major reason: crappy, corrupt city government. And the long-time Mayor of New Haven, John DiStefano, is now the Democratic candidate for Governor.

Also, Jodi has been a decent Governor. I don't say great, but okay to good. She'd have to be a real howler to make me vote for DiStefano and, well, she isn't. So.

Congressman, we have a decent, undistinguished Democrat, Rosa DeLauro. She holds such a safe seat that it's hardly worth voting. She's in her 8th term and is likely to go on as long as she cares to. Just for the hell of it, I looked up her Republican opponent, Joseph Vollano. Ouch: a complete no-hoper. 28 year old former McDonalds manager turned network administrator, running for office for the first time. Seems like a nice guy, but come on.

There was a time when I might have voted for the no-hope candidate, out of some combination of sympathy for the underdog and sheer perversity. In recent years I've swung the opposite way: I find I don't care to give my vote to candidates who aren't serious. I mean, get real, people -- if you want my vote, run someone who has a chance in hell of winning.

If any non-American readers are still with us, let me add that this is a big, big problem with the American system: roughly 90% of all districts are totally "safe" for one party or the other. So, even if De Lauro were a horrible Congresswoman, and Vollano was an excellent challenger, she'd probably still win, because her district is very, very Democratic. So the Republicans don't bother to run a serious candidate.

I don't approve of this, but there's not much I can do about it. As for DeLauro, while she has some problems -- she's a little to close to the DiStefano machine -- she's not bad. I could wish there was more of a choice, but since there isn't, she gets my vote.

(Oh, and there's also a Green candidate. But he's another no-hoper: another first-time candidate, an assistant professor of English who writes poetry. Don't think so.

(There might also be a Libertarian candidate, but brief googling didn't turn one up, and you know what? It's 2006. If I can't find your website in 30 seconds of searching online, you don't deserve my vote.)

Then there are several statewide offices: state treasurer, state comptroller, state attorney general. Because I haven't lived in Connecticut for a while, I don't think I know enough to cast a meaningful vote. So I won't vote for any of those, except one: State Attorney General. That's held by a guy named Richard Blumenthal. He's been SAG for sixteen years, which is incredible... most SAGs use it as a stepping stone, either to higher office or to a great job in the private sector. But Blumenthal seems to have no higher ambition than serving as SAG. And he's done a pretty good job. So, he gets my vote.

And that's about it. There will be many other races on the ballot, but they're all local New Haven races. Since I don't live there any more, I don't think it would be appropriate for me to vote in those races.

Prediction: Okay, I'm going to go out on a limb here and make some predictions.

House -- Dems pick up 18, giving them a razor-thin majority.

Senate -- Dems pick up 4, making the Senate 52-47 Republican with one "independent" who'll caucus with the Dems.

Governors -- Dems pick up 4.

If I'm going to be so foolish, I'd like the rest of you to join me! Readers, what think you?

Review: The Chipmunk Adventure -- Part Two

North Korea may have detonated a nuclear weapon. Russia has closed its border with Georgia. Serbia's government is in a state of slow-motion collapse. The US is a few weeks away from its most important midterm election in a decade.

Let's continue our discussion of cartoon chipmunks. "The Chipmunk Adventure" came out in 1987, thus near the end of two eras in children's animated films. It was near the end of the era of hand-painted, non-computerized animation, and it was near the end of the era of bad, crappy children's movies.

Let's take that last one first.

Co-blogger Carlos and I have occasional points of disagreement. One of them is the work of Bill Strauss and Neil Howe, pop sociologists best known as the authors of "Generations". Basically, Carlos thinks that their theory of generational change is a great pile of steaming dingo's kidneys, and their work so riddled with errors both small and large. I disagree; while I see the errors, I still think they have a piece of something interesting.

Here's an analogy: I think Strauss and Howe are sort of like those Victorian-era geologists who had a dinner in the reassembled skeleton of an iguanadon. Most of those guys weren't very good scientists even by the loose standards of the day. And they were wrong about almost everything. They reassembled the skeleton wrong, so that it looked like a giant warthog; they thought it was a giant lizard-like reptile, when in fact it was neither a reptile nor lizard-like; they guessed it might be perhaps five million years old, when it was more like 100 million).

But even if they put them together wrong, the bones were real enough. So with Strauss and Howe. I don't agree with their cyclical theory of generational change, but I do think they have some interesting and useful insights into the behavior of particular generations... especially in this century, and especially in the US.

Case in point: Strauss and Howe hold that in the 1980s, there was a sudden sharp change in societal behavior towards babies and small children. American culture as a whole became more concerned about this age group. And the American entertainment industry tracked this change (and shaped it, too, of course).

One data point in favor of this theory is that, all through the 1970s and 1980s, movies for kids came in two flavors: weird and crap.

Weird included stuff like the 1971 version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (which included a drug-trip style ride on the chocolate river, complete with psychedelic color bursts and visual distortions); "Bugsy Malone" (1976) which had grade-school kids as Depression-era gangsters, pinstripe suits and all, fighting gun battles with pies and seltzer bottles; and "The Secret of NIMH" (1982), which is a rather dark and violent film about politics among a bunch of genetically engineered rats. These are not bad movies, but if you watch them today, you may find yourself slightly unsettled: wait, this is a kid's movie?

Crap... oh, man, the list is long. Just taking Disney alone, we have stuff like "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" (1971), "Pete's Dragon" (1976) and "The Fox and the Hound" (1981). Go to Disneyland or Disneyworld and you'll search in vain for the Fox and the Hound ride. These were movies so feeble that even Disney, which is still squeezing money out of five-minute skits from the Eisenhower administration, consigned them to merciful oblivion.

And the Disney movies were the good ones. Beyond that you had stuff like "Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny" and "Return to Boggy Creek". No, I'm not providing links. Just being reminded of these movies is creeping me out a little.

Basically, if you were a parent with a four-to-eight year old kid back in the Carter administration, you either took him to movies a little too old for him and hoped he wouldn't get nightmares about Darth Vader, or you wrote off the movies altogether. It was that bad.

And then, in the late 1980s, something happened.

If there was a moment when the change became obvious, it was in 1989, when Disney released _The Little Mermaid_. TLM was revolutionary for several reasons. It marked the first, cautious use of computer animation. Disney put a huge amount of money into it -- not just into production, but aggressive marketing. Then, it MADE a huge amount of money... over $200 million, which would be nearly double that today.

And most of all, it wasn't weird and it didn't suck. Oh, there were some odd elements around the edges... the reggae crab, the seagull played by Buddy Hackett. But these were pretty minor. Overall it was a classic Disney feature film: bland and a bit boring to anyone over twelve, but gorgeous to look at, and with an attention to craftsmanship that even a six-year-old could instantly recognize.

Disney explicitly marketed TLM as a return to the good old days of non-suck Disney movies. (IMS, at one point some Disney executive pretty much came out and said, yeah, we haven't made a kid's movie worth a damn since "Robin Hood".) And that's exactly what it was. And TLM would be hugely influential. Disney would grab the ball and run, producing a steady string of good-to-excellent feature films; Pixar and other companies would arise to contest the suddenly lucrative new market; and what with one thing and another, the 1990s would open a golden age of movies for children.

Now, Strauss and Howe ask the question, why then? Why around 1989 instead of 1979 or 1999 or never at all? Why did kid's movies suck for twenty years, and then suddenly explode in a revival? (More than a revival, really. I'd argue that they've never been better than in the last 15 years.) Their answer is, because that much-cared-for generation of babies born in the early 1980s was coming of age, and suddenly there was a niche.

-- We'll bet back to this. But first: I said 1989 was the moment when the change became obvious. But it wasn't the moment when the change began. That came a few years earlier. Beginning around 1986, there were several movies that, in retrospect, were signposts on the way to the new world. I'm thinking in particular of "An American Tail" (1986) and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".

"American Tail" arguably still falls under the weird category. I mean, it's about a family of Russian Jewish mice who come to America to escape cats, only to find that there are cats in America too. But it's a good movie, well made, and it was a box-office hit. Then "Roger Rabbit", though not really a kid's movie -- Jessica Rabbit was not drawn for six-year-olds -- was a technical tour de force, and also a celebration of animation for kids; it's got Betty Boop and Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and Popeye. In retrospect, we can clearly see something building up there.

Right between them, in 1987, we have The Chipmunk Adventure.

Okay, this is going to part three. More in a bit.

A Post-Soviet Moment

Something unpleasant on the way to work today.

Driving along, we got passed by a police car running its flashers. No big deal.

A few blocks later, just as we were about to turn into the street with my office, the police car stopped a car in the street. They didn't pull it over -- they stopped it right in the lane, blocking traffic. Traffic stayed blocked for the next two or three minutes.

So the cops stop this car and start pulling people out of it. (There were three young men and one young woman.) They resist at first -- they don't want to get out of the car. One cop pulls a gun. Pretty serious stuff.

Then this other guy appears... we'll call him Thug. Because he looks like a thug: stocky guy with a pouty face, leather jacket, shaven head. Thug gets out of a white Lada Niva, which is no BMW but is a nice car by local standards.

So Thug walks over and begins beating on the guys being pulled out of the car. I mean, he just starts hitting them. Hard. While the cops are dragging them out of the car and shoving them into the cop car.

What struck me was that the cops acted as if nothing was happening. I mean, they acted as if Thug didn't exist, even as he was beating the crap out of the guys they were arresting. So, you had a cop frog-marching a guy to the cop car and shoving him into the back, and Thug walking alongside and punching the guy in the face.

This went on for... I don't know. 60 seconds, maybe?

Then Thug went back to his white Lada Niva and drove off. The cop car with the guys in the back drove off. The sobbing girl from the victims' car got back in the car, and a cop got in the car, and I guess they drove off too. Traffic started flowing again.

A minute or two later, as we were pulling into the office, I thought, "I should have gotten the license plate numbers." Of the cop car, of Thug's car. I could report them to... somebody. The local ombudsman? The anti-corruption committee? Someone.

When people are in accidents or incidents it seems they never do get the license plate numbers. I used to think that was stupid; surely /I/ would do better. But maybe not.

And that's all.

Review: The Chipmunk Adventure (1987) -- Part One

You think I'm joking?

We get one cartoon channel here. It's German, which is fine -- the boys need to keep up their German anyway.

The cartoon channel always has a big Sunday afternoon matinee movie. Since it comes in by satellite, and we're three hours ahead of Germany, for us it's a big Sunday night movie. It's always a feature-length animated film, shown intact without any commercial interruptions. Which doesn't mean it's any good, of course... in fact, the norm is some dreadful straight-to-video cartoon.

But this week it was The Chipmunk Adventure.

(Do you want to read about the Chipmunks and the Chipmunk Adventure? No? Then go away now and click on something else.)

So, the Chipmunks.

The Chipmunks started as a gag musical act back in the 1950s. An American singer named David Seville did a song with a squeaky-voiced chorus; he simply sang slowly into the recording machine, then played it back at double speed. The result was his voice at normal speed, but an octave higher. (If you've ever heard a Chipmunks song, this explanation is unneccessary.)

The Chipmunks songs were a huge hit, so the singer and some friends came up with characters -- cartoon chipmunks -- to fit the voices: Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, the Chipmunks. The Chipmunks soon had their own animated TV series, and have been a minor part of US popular culture ever since, occupying a space somewhere between Casper the Friendly Ghost and Underdog.

Digression #1: David Seville, the singer who came up with the Chipmunks? His real name was Ross Bagdasarian, and he was an Armenian-American from Fresno -- first cousin to William Saroyan, the writer. He died in 1972, but his son has continued to run Bagdasarian Productions... a firm that exists purely to make and market Chipmunks movies, cartoons, and albums.

Digression #2: There are a lot of Chipmunk albums. They did an astounding number of covers of popular songs, and then of course there was the remarkable Chipmunk Punk. Which was cited by Kurt Cobain as a creative influence on Nirvana. I am not making this up. It included covers of "Good Girls Don't", Tom Petty's "Refugee" and, of course, "My Sharona".

(Have you ever listened to the lyrics of "My Sharona"? Just trying to imagine this is making my head hurt. Please tell me they didn't cover that one straight. Please.)

Where were we... oh yes, the Chipmunks. So in 1987: the Chipmunks movie. A feature-length animated film released across the US, starring the Chipmunks and their female counterparts, the Chipettes.

Here's one of many weirdnesses about the Chipmunk world. The Chipmunks live with their adopted father, songwriter David Seville. Yah, that's right... their "father" in the movie is their creator outside the movie. I guess that's sort of neat, and we can put aside questions of how a normal human adopts three anthropoid talking animals... it's a kid's cartoon, okay.

But what blows my mind about this is that the Chipmunks "dad" looks... well... Armenian. Yes. I mean, he has thick glossy black hair, a noble blade of a nose, and eyebrows like Groucho. He's a handsome fellow, but this raises mind-twisting questions. The best interpretation I can come up with is that Bagdasarian Senior came up with the idea as a joke for the original TV cartoon -- "Ah, I'll put my alter ego into the cartoon, but he'll be a secret Armenian anyway!" -- and then Bagdasarian Junior carried it on.

Weirder still: the 1960 cartoon had a version of David Seville who looked like Bagdasarian Senior. The 1987 cartoon has a David Seville who looks very different (though still Armenian). I strongly suspect he's a cartoon version of Bagdasarian Junior. Junior's image is strangely hard to find online, so I can't prove this, but if true... that's beyond whimsical into seriously strange.

"Son, you must carry on... you must..."

"Yes, Papa! Yes!"

"But promise me, son..."

"Yes, Papa? Anything!"

"Alvin and the others... they must never know..."

Where was I... so the Chipmunks live with their adopted father, but as the movie starts, he has to go away on business. Always a promising start for a kids' movie, right?

I can't do this justice in one post. Part 2 in a day or so.