Across the Great Divide

The Angel in Sen. Clark.

According to the Associated Press, State Sen. Tarryl Clark of St. Cloud is sponsoring a bill that

could prohibit spending public dollars at in-state hotels or meeting facilities that provide their customers with pornographic materials that link sex with violence. Nonviolent adult movies would be OK.

Reader Hal Davis sees a similarity between this bill and a Minneapolis anti-pornography civil rights ordinance drafted in 1983, passed by the city council and twice vetoed by the mayor. A similar ordinance was later found unconstitutional.

Clark is aiming for Rep. Michele Bachmann's seat this fall. If she hopes to differentiate herself from Bachmann, this isn't the way to do it.

Government employees traveling on public business get discounted hotel rates. If hotels have to pick between them and other travelers, it's likely they'll go with tourists and business travelers paying  more.

This measure is a pretty ineffective stick for beating on pornography, however you look at it. If Clark doesn't want state money spent on porno movies, restrict hotel expenses to the published government rates and lower  per diems so travelers have to choose between food and a night at the movies. And if she is truly serious about eradicating violent films, good luck.

Worse, this is a poor time for political-posturing legislation that would require new enforcement efforts without saving the state any money.

I say this as someone who likes Clark, who hates to hand MDE one of those "liberal blogger" freebies, and who has managed to stay out of strip clubs and porn shops for 61 years without government encouragement.

Disclaimer: When I was an arts reviewer, with another arts reporter, I did see part of "The Devil in Miss Jones" when it first came out, under the misguided assumption it might represent some sort of advance in film making. We quickly discovered we were wrong and walked out.

I hope Sen. Clark gains a similar moment of clarity.

Drowning the Truth in the Bathtub.

Heading in from burning back some weeds, I heard the cry of a rabbit in distress. Where I live in Colorado, I can be sure it's not the Quiver Rabbit I'm hearing across the arroyo.

Coyotes lope across our land all the time. Two days ago three does trotted single file along a ridge about 60 yards from the house, as I turned to watch them, I saw a single coyote in pursuit, followed by a straggling pup. The survival parade dipped down into the wash, then back up the other side of a trail that connects to one of our regular mountain bike and hiking trails. A minute later, the deer had switched back my way and were headed around my sister's house, the coyote still about 20 yards back, the pup nowhere to be seen.

I don't have to stand in my snowless yard to know I'm in a different place. I can read the local newspaper.

Gary Harmon is the local Katherine Kersten, with a couple exceptions. He's a lot more likely to write about the Second Amendment, and his column takes more stabs at humor, though it's hard to say which columnist is funnier.

One other difference. In his day job, Harmon works as a reporter for the same newspaper, writing on a range of topics, including energy and land use.

Last week's column connecting the Tea Party movement to Dalton Trumbo was classic Harmon.

Trumbo is Grand Junction's most famous native son, which tells you quite a bit about sons from here. He gained his greatest fame as an ex-communist screenwriter who, hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, refused to answer questions or rat out other people in Hollywood, citing First Amendment rights. He was held in contempt of Congress, sentenced to 10 months in prison and then was exiled from regular film work for 13 years as one of the blacklisted Hollywood 10.

He was also the first writer to come back out.

Under the pen name “Robert Rich,” he won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for “The Brave One” in 1956, and finally was credited under his own name for "Spartacus," thanks to the advocacy of Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger, who hired Trumbo for "Exodus."

The Tea Party is doing a promotion riffing on the famous "I am Spartacus" scene, giving Harmon his opening for lefty bashing.

Harmon, who has been around for a long time, summarizes Trumbo's career this way:

The real screenwriter is something of a hero to everything the tea party types stand athwart. He was a black-listed screenwriter who had been a communist and turned on his friends when the FBI came a knocking.

Get that? Trumbo goes up against Congress, defies government suppression of First Amendment rights and risks his treasure to stand on principle — which doesn't sound all that athwart what tea party types think they are doing — and Harmon turns him into a commie snitch.

Trumbo found the Communist Party about as effective and interesting as the Knights of Pythias and he moved on. It never bothered me this writer was once a communist, but it's disturbing that this columnist is still a reporter.

2013 Calendars Half-Price While They Last.

NASA says the world is not ending any time soon.

Hollywood begs to differ.

Gail Collins says:

The film characters who are best prepared for the planetary calamity had been consulting the ancient Mayan calendar, which runs through more than five millennia and then comes screeching to a halt on Dec. 21, 2012. Some say that for the Mayans, this was just the end of a cycle, like completing a really long year, and that if they’d been able to hang around for a few more centuries they’d simply have issued a new, post-2012 calendar, this time perhaps including some nice pictures of puppies.

I checked the Daytimer advance planner people to see which calendar they offer. You can get one that starts January 2010 or July 2010, but the 2011's are "out of stock."

The back of the calendar I have with my checkbook does have a planning calendar that goes to 2013, so maybe Collins is right. The Mayans just did their product planning a little further out than Daytimer.

UPDATE: My new Visa is good through 12/12

July 4th Bike News.

The Bicycle Film Festival hits Minneapolis July 8-12, with cycling related films and events at different locations during the week.

Here's the trailer for THE THIRD WHEEL, a documentary about pedicabs in New York City, and the efforts by the taxi, hotel and theater industries to run them off the streets. (Says a guy who looks to be a big cigar in the cab license bureau: "It's not the American way. It's not the New York way.")

There are several films with local connections.

DOWN BY THE WEEP HOLE: THE STORY OF THE STUPOR BOWL is "the story of Minneapolis' Stupor Bowl, the world's coldest and most inebriated alley cat race. The movie chronicles the race's development from a twenty-person local event in 1997, through 2009 when over four-hundred national and international competitors made the harrowing journey through the Twin Cities' frozen streets."

Film maker and friend Mike Hazard has a short taken from his documentary MR. POSITIVE, called SOMETHING BRIGHT TO BE SEEN IN OUR WORLD. Carl Bentsen is a light in the neighborhood, in more ways than one.

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More Midtown Greenway mischief last week. Kids tossing rocks off one of the overpasses struck three riders (only the two without helmets were injured).

But things are dangerous for cyclists all over, including near downtown Wayzata, where a rider was struck by a four-time loser drunk driver. He was hit in a crosswalk when the driver backed over him.

That location is a dangerous spot even without drunks, where streets, train tracks and a bike path coverge where almost everyone is making a turn.

Dark blue on the left is the bike path; light blue is a downhill stretch of the popular Ferndale Road loop into town, where most bike and vehicular traffic is turning right.

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More bike trail news, the Luce Line extension through Golden Valley to Wirth Parkway has been completed. A nice paved trail winds through the south end of Wirth Park and comes out near the Par 3 golf course. I'm waiting for the first injury report of a biker hit by a duck hook.

Wear your helmet.

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Not exactly bike news, but "False Witness! The Michele Bachmann Story" is in stock at Big Brain Comics, 11th and Washington Avenue S. They have plenty of bike parking.

Things I Learned Tonight.

"Public Enemies": Waste of talent. Waste. of. Time.

There's a liquor store in Crystal that sells a no-name brand of beer for $2.99 a six pack and $4.99 a twelve, but if you're looking for Surly, you're out of luck.

The New Hope Cinema and Grill, on the other hand, has Surly on tap.

Selling Air.

Via SCSU Scholars, why popcorn costs so much at the movies.

The clip is to promote a book on microeconomics and doesn't really answer the question, though it does provide some interesting information about popcorn pricing. You knew already that popcorn has a huge mark-up, but maybe not what accounts for the price differences and margins among the various sizes.

Marginal Revolution linked to the same video and attracted revealing comments from a former theater worker:

Popcorn kernels are cheap to buy and easy to store. Unlike other food items such as soda, candy, or ice creame, where we traded in part on the name of the brand, which the firms used to increase costs and lower margins [? i.e., the candy companies raised the cost to the theaters and lowered the theaters' margins?], popcorn has no such associated costs. Towards the latter part of my work there, they added a "bulk" candy apparatus, for lack of a better term, and positioned it prominently in the lobby area, again because this candy was not sold as a brand was a far higher grossing product.

And from a popcorn marketer:

One of my first jobs out of school was running the popcorn division of a Fortune 500 food company. I attended meetings of the Popcorn Institute, followed planting patterns, inspected acreage, had meetings with our food chemists, and attended seminars on new popcorn hybrids. We had grocery, concession, and institutional buyers. What I remember most about about the concessions, primarily theaters, was they were all focused on the expansion ratio of the kernel. At that time we could deliver up to 40:1, but they wanted more. It was inventory, storage, and pricing issues. If they could have filled a 1 quart cup with 15 kernels that had an expansion ratio of 300:1, they would have bought it (selling more air). That was why we only sold them butterfly kernels instead of the superior mushroom kernels.

After the War Room.

I'm running with this because it's so brilliant — not to be anti-Clinton — but ouch!

Via A Tiny Revolution [h/t The Mississippifarian]

Has Pawlenty Seen Metropolis?

I was out in Colorado watching Metropolis screened with a new soundtrack performed live by the composers, while Gov. Pawlenty was busy in Minnesota with the bonding bill.

I was convinced I'd seen the Fritz Lange classic silent picture in college (turns out, I had no memory of the film). But the score was the attraction — plus the fact that the local supply of novel cultural experiences is still a bit lacking on a given night unless you are willing to include Texas Hold 'em.

The plot and storytelling are plodding and quaint to modern sensibilities, but visually the film is still compelling. And though the moral — heart must mediate between hands and head — is laughably didactic, the struggle between the remote masters and the  workers in the depths seems pertinent still. The "heads" would follow their pleasures down to hell rather than give them up. Meanwhile, the "hands" engage in a futile rebellion that means their own destruction.

Which brings me back to the Governor's gambit. Joh Fredersen, who runs the Metropolis, is willing to risk the city's destruction in order to defeat the workers forever. This post reminded me of the movie I'd just seen.

But it's safe to say that Pawlenty's veto of a project that has long been in the works, a project that has bi-partisan support and will be the backbone of a future transit system for the Twin Cities metro area, and a project that he previously supported is a desperate measure for a desperate man who sees his political power waning. The only lever he has left is marked "auto-destruct".

Joh Fredersen set in motion the auto-destruct and watched both the elites and the workers celebrate as their children are threatened with oblivion. But that was only a movie.

Colorado Weekend: Big Gun Coming to Town.

I'm not trying to set up Joel for our next gun discussion, really I'm not.

After all, Minneapolis has a ripe current case that provides a provocative example of the ambiguities surrounding self-defense claims.

I'm just showing that out here in Colorado, where the buffalo roam, the varieties of gun news have a different tenor right now.

(The 32 buffalo were shot near my great grandmother's former homestead, a place the columnist called "the middle of a lot of central Colorado nothingness," which must make Denver the center of everythingness.)

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Some exciting news from where I sit. Dick Cheney's coming next week to the far left part of the state — a better description might be "to the right of Utah" — for Senate fund raiser for Bob Schaffer — a good description would be to the right of Mark Kennedy... or maybe near the center of nothingness.

I'm wondering if would be worth 150 bucks to get close to Cheney and really confuse the hell out of anyone checking out my political donations.

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My brother-in-law had Tombstone on when I went over for dinner. Damn, they ran a tight ship back then. Oh, sure there were murders and all. But they kept all traces of horse manure off the main street day and night, and the dirt stayed as smooth as my living room floor. Clothes were always clean, women were hot and well kept, except for the one doing the laudanum, and the good guys were are all pretty sensitive for the 21st century, let alone the 19th.

Even when there was bloodshed and Kurt Russell had blood up to his elbows, he could caress his dying brother's forehead and never leave a print! The bar and rooms, including the jail? Immaculate. The consumptive Doc Holliday? Pale, yes, but otherwise, Paul Verlaine with six guns. Three bad cowboys went to Boot Hill in curved glass-topped coffins that looked better than any piece of furniture I've ever owned.

Doc Holliday died in Glenwood Springs, the town where I grew up, and making the little hike up the mountain to see his tombstone was like going to Mall of America. (It's what you did when you had visitors and didn't know what to do with them.)

My grandfather's ranch (not the Colorado side of the family) was near Tombstone in Cochise county. I don't recall any woods like they rode through, but maybe life was better around there in the frontier days, and we don't realize how bad we have it.

Preview of Coming Attractions.

Spending two weeks foreign tongueless and voluntarily cut off from phones, internet and news media (which include, barely, television), invites new ways of listening, seeing and experiencing.

[In any year, what returning Minnesotan could not predict the fall headlines: "Vikings need fixing" and "Gophers have second-half meltdown"?]

I expected to return from our trip to Portugal with new images and fresh thoughts about cycling, politics, culture, public investment, cities, demographics,  transportation, wealth and poverty, religion, hotels, food and drink, books,  communication, relationships,  misunderstandings and serendipitous connections. In other words, the stuff that normally fuels this blog and will, with an Iberian flavor, in the coming weeks.

But we have to start with movies.

The question, suggested by a cafe discussion with my domestic partner, concerned how we mentally edit our daily experience. Not in reflection or in preparation for public display, but in real time. Where do we point the camera? How often does it move? Who is included in the foreground or allowed to comment on the action?

Are we inevitably in a star-driven vehicle, featuring Jennifer Anniston in a stretch limo or Jack Nicholson still pretending he's just one of the Easy Rider gang? Or are we hitting the road in an Eric Bogosian-style one-man show or swimming alone to Cambodia and points beyond? Or are we more the auteur and, if so, are we Leni Riefenstahl, John Huston, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Kevin Costner or Orson Welles?

On another day, I might have a different answer, but this morning, the only proper response would be: I am Mr. Bean.

Over the two weeks, we negotiated every form of non-driving transportation available, save animal-drawn, leaping from bicycle to bus to trekking and train to metro to cab to airplane, all the while keeping track of our baggage. We almost made it home.

This morning, however, at 5:30 a.m., I awoke in my own bed to the dreaded post-vacation question: "Where's my black bag?"

As in, the black bag containing all my DP's cycling clothes and her bicycle seat. As in, the black bag I had already once retrieved from a departing train after we'd momentarily misplaced it in a distant compartment while finding our proper seats on the way to Aveiro. As in, the black bag I'd assumed responsibility for as our impedimentia increased during the trip.

As in, the black bag I'd no doubt been referring to when I said, as we left the light rail station at First Avenue, "I feel one bag lighter"

In a perfect world — maybe even in a normal one — we'd have realized that was because I was one bag lighter, and I would have turned around and retrieved the missing bag. In a Mr. Bean movie, I would have continued another block, before racing madly after a departing train, leaving a food-poisoned Susan with all the baggage, no money and surrounded by a band of gypsies.

In fact, the only difference between reality and the Mr. Bean movie — which we watched together on the return flight, and which touched on all the aforementioned themes, including alternative movie edits — was the lack of gypsies and our jet-lagged capacity for mutual self-delusion.

Now we must wait until Monday to discover what happened to all those loose plot ends involving bicycles, self-involved movie directors, lost articles, trains, food revulsion and the rest. Unlike a Mr. Bean movie, my subsequent posts will deliver just the best bits.