Message to Joe Biden: Pick Bailey Warren as VP

The topic came up in conversation with my girlfriend this weekend, but I wanted to throw out a suggestion for Joe Biden's vice-presidential pick. I know he's said he wants to pick a female running mate, but I think Elizabeth Warren's dog Bailey should be on the ticket.

Canvassing for Warren in Iowa. Source: Getty Images

I have clearly taken leave of my senses, but if you'll humor me for a second, until the orderlies drag me away, Bailey is a good dog. He marches for progressive causes, and he's in favor of redistribution of wealth, as evidenced by that time he stole a burrito from Senator Warren's staffer. The fact that he has no legislative or governing experience is a bit of a knock, but that means there are also no prior votes that would be difficult to defend.

One also presumes that, as the dog of a noted policy wonk like Warren, he'd have a better grasp of both the issues and their underlying causes than about 90% of other potential candidates.

He's also likely to have appeal across the aisle. He's a big, fuzzy, rambunctious dog, with a friendly smile and a nice golden coat. Golden retrievers originally came from Scotland, sure, but it's hard to imagine a more all-American breed, well-suited to the outdoors and to hunting. There may be some type of person who'd look at the face of a golden retriever and think, "No, I'd rather vote for the guy who doesn't even have a pet", but to be honest, I don't think the Democrats are going to get that person anyway.

The only problem I can really see is that Biden then loses the nationwide cat vote, but - without meaning to generalize here - cats aren't known for their reliable voting habits. I mean, when was the last time you saw a cat at a polling station?

Naturally, this is just a suggestion. I'm sure the Biden campaign has all kinds of lists drawn up of potential running mates. But I wanted to flag up one that they may have overlooked, who not only sat in for Warren during the impeachment trial and who the Des Moines Register called "a natural closer".

Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Well, since I can't seem to shut up about British stuff at the moment, here's a few thoughts on Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which I just rewatched on Netflix last night.

The first thing to say is that I'm not 100% sure it holds up. This is not to say it's a bad movie or anything, but it looks and sounds really raw, and the line readings and acting aren't always as great as they could be. Part of this is because a lot of the characters are played by non-actors - for a couple of them it was their first time in a movie, and others were definitely at the beginning of their careers.

Guy Ritchie also tries to be a little too clever sometimes with his cinematography. The spot where it really works is the start of the movie, where Eddy loses the card game and kicks off the chain of events that make up the plot. The camera focuses tight on his face, following him as he walks out and blurring or doubling shots of him to give that impression of drunken what-the-fuckness that I can relate to.

Not that I've ever lost £500,000 to East End gangsters in an underground poker game, but Ritchie does a good job of capturing that body-blow type of feeling.

He's a little less successful in a few other spots, like when they're celebrating having pulled off their heist, or when Big Chris (as played by Vinnie Jones) is beating Dog to death with a car door for having threatened his son. In the first case, it looks too staged, while in the second it's kind of obvious - of course Big Chris is enraged at his son being endangered, so I wonder if shooting that more matter-of-factly would have worked better than slow-motion.

Though it should be noted that I was super impressed with that scene when I was seventeen.

But about that there Vinnie Jones: was there ever a role better suited to a human being than that? Maybe I say it because I don't know Jones as a footballer, and because this film was the first I ever saw of him. But with twenty years of seeing Jones in other roles, and learning more about British gangster films, I have to appreciate how well he inhabits the role - after all, there's not many footballers I'd believe in the role of an East End enforcer.

Casting is uniformly pretty good in the movie, at least in terms of how the actors look. The main characters all look like petty criminal losers, the weed growers look like a bunch of middle-class stoners out of their element (I'm always a bit surprised to remember that Winston is not, in fact, played by Blur singer Damon Albarn, but he could have been), and the real criminals all look like real criminals.

As I said, sometimes the line readings aren't great, which might be because the actors aren't great at line readings, or because the lines aren't easy to read in the first place. But very little of it takes you out of the movie.

Two other casting choices I want to single out. First is Sting, as JD, Eddy's father. I always forget he's in this movie, and I have to say that for a tantric-sex-having, lute-playing former punk rocker he's actually fairly believable as a bar owner and basically the one honest man who's not affected by the shenanigans going on around him. The scene where Vinnie Jones comes to tell him he's going to have to give up the bar in a week, and Sting tells him to tell his boss to go fuck himself, is really fun and the two actors play off against each other really well.

The other one is Jason Statham, who like Vinnie Jones used this movie to launch his movie career. But where Jones has played essentially the same character for the past twenty years, Statham starts out here as a very different character from what he plays in the Transporter or the Fast & Furious movies. Actually, the first scene, where he's shilling stolen goods in an alley in London and giving it the wideboy patter (to use the Brits' own term of art) makes him pop like a firecracker. You can believe him in the role, even knowing what a badass he gets typecast as all these years later. Go rewatch that scene and enjoy an actor reveling in a role.

What else is there? The music, of course, though perhaps the most memorable thing is the use of Ocean Colour Scene's "100 Mile High City". Britpop was kind of over by then, but the movie still manages to catch that zeitgeist in a way that feels right. Most impressive to me was the use of "Fools Gold" by the Stone Roses as the end of the plot unfolds, with all the bad guys dead and the heroes walking away with whatever riches they've found. I love the song, and it's a nice revelation to see it crop up here.

So yeah, flawed movie and all, rough around the edges with the acting and scripting and cinematography, but you can't deny that the movie's fun and eye-catching and well-cast. Despite the presence of Jones and Statham, who went on to big success in Hollywood, it's not chock-full of other British actors that you recognize, so that you can just go on enjoying the movie without going, "What? John Simm, Doctor Who's the Master, as New Order guitarist Bernard Sumner?" To pull out an example at complete random.

Lock, Stock and its successor Snatch are the only two Guy Ritchie films I've seen. I don't know if I'm feeling the lack, but taken together they're a fun indicator of what British gangster movies were doing back then. They also got copied by a bunch of other movies, which also shows how people responded to them. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is where it started, and it's a nice way to spend a couple of hours - so go check it out on Netflix asap.

Some thoughts on the British Museum

I'm getting to the end of my time in Europe on this work contract, and with that in mind I decided to visit one of my happy places in London: the British Museum.

Now, it's slightly less of a happy place for me these days, since it started doing bag checks in its forecourt. I understand that London's a bit tense these days, thanks to various terrorist attacks in the last couple of years, and I understand that as a free museum it has to control the ever-increasing number of tourists that flock to it. But there's something about the way it's implemented the bag checks, where it causes long lines to get in on weekends, and the unfriendliness of the people doing the searches, that makes it less fun.

And the new entry requirements mean that the museum no longer does the garden exhibitions it used to do - one of my favorites was a replica Chinese garden, right there in the forecourt, with small recreations of a bunch of different Chinese ecosystems laid out next to each other. They later did one for Indian plants and one for African plants, and I remember enjoying those a whole lot too, so it's a shame that they won't be providing that anymore.

On the other hand, the inside is still great. Just today, among the temporary free exhibits, I had a look at a gallery on Toussaint Louverture, the hero of Haitian independence, and one on the friendship between artists Niko Ghika and John Craxton, and author Patrick Leigh Fermor, all centered around their time on various Greek islands in the 1950s and 1960s.

I also had a closer look at the redone Chinese gallery, which I got to check out back in January when I first arrived, having missed out on it and the adjoining Indian gallery after their refurbishments of the past year or so. Disappointingly, the Japanese gallery is closed for refurbishment until September, but at least I got to see my other happy place within the museum, which is the Korean gallery's sarangbang.

I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the place, but for the past ten or so years, I've always felt the need to stop by and have a look. I think on one hand it's because it's so cozy and perfect, with a bed and stuff for writing and stuff for reading and stuff for tea. Somehow I'm just drawn to these well-designed, self-contained little living spaces.

On the other hand, it occurred to me today that I think I'd have taken well to being a Confucian scholar-gentleman. From what I've been able to understand, they basically took their examinations, figured out what level they'd occupy and then just hung around for the rest of their lives writing poetry, painting landscapes and playing music.

None of those things is completely in my wheelhouse, but the lure of being able to sit around all day doing whatever intellectual thing takes my fancy, without worrying about, y'know, supporting myself, is pretty attractive. Though to be honest I'd probably spend a significant part of each day playing video games (I'm assuming I'd get to be a gentleman-scholar in modern times).

It's kind of too bad there's no scholar class like that anymore. The people who might be interested in writing treatises on random stuff don't really have the money to do that, while the people who have the money for it seem to be interested more in subverting democracy and corrupting political processes. Or, at the very least, in accumulating more money, which, again, leaves precious little time for important things like calligraphy or vertical landscape paintings.

My aim is to become so filthy rich that I can afford a sarangbang myself (along with a tea room like they have or had in the British Museum's Japanese gallery), and then to actually spend time in it. Probably playing video games, sure, but also likely learning languages and working on my latest disquisition on proper orchid-growing techniques.

Or this blog, who knows?

2016: The Year the Music Died

I'm clearly not the only person noticing how ridiculously many high-profile celebrity deaths there have been this year. I remember surfing to the AV Club late one night, unable to sleep, and discovering that David Bowie had died - followed by the sick feeling as Alan Rickman passed away, followed by (among others) Garry Shandling, and now Prince.


It feels like even before Prince died I was joking (somewhat darkly) to myself that every visit to the AV Club portended another celebrity death. And I haven't done any RIP posts on Shandling or Prince because, in all honesty, I wasn't that familiar with their work. Both certainly influenced a lot of artists that I like, and finding out more about their work is something I'm looking forward to (heck, I'm even considering signing up to Tidal, because Prince's music isn't on YouTube or Spotify).

But my other thought about all these deaths is, are we really seeing more deaths than usual? I'm not about to do a meta-analysis of recent years, to determine whether we've really seen the highest number - there's a line even I won't cross.

And besides, what I'm questioning is whether or not we're only noticing this now because it's a certain cohort of entertainers who are disappearing. Bowie is most associated with the 70s, Prince with the 80s, and you could map Rickman and Shandling in a similar way. None of them was ridiculously old, but neither were they kids (although I concede that Prince's death at 57 or Phife Dawg's at 45 are particularly untimely).

I guess the point I'm making is, none of us is getting any younger, and the deaths we're used to are the ones that affect our parents (or grandparents). Our cohort of musicians, actors, writers, etc is generally older than we are, and bad things can happen at any time, so I suspect that this is just going to be the new normal. I think it would be more worrying if we were seeing younger cohorts all passing away suddenly at the same time - to give a particularly nerdy example, the original cast of Babylon 5, which aired in the 1990s, has effectively been decimated, while the original Star Trek's cast is mostly still around, even if they're much older.

Maybe this is all too morbid for a Friday night, but for all the unfortunate news about all these celebrity deaths, I think we need to settle in for it to continue. Just... if whoever's in charge of this could ease off for a few months, that would be great too.

30 Years of Weird Al

Last night I caught Weird Al Yankovic's show at the Masonic Theater in San Francisco. I won't pretend it satisfied a long-standing goal of mine to see him play live, but on the other hand I'm glad I finally did - I've been listening to him off and on since I was about seven years old, with a big spike in high school, when he released Alapalooza.

To some extent I thought he'd always remain a relic of the 80s - between the silliness of that music and the rise of music videos, it seemed like the perfect time for him. I always thought he flew under the radar for much of the 90s and early 00s, but then last year he emerged with his first #1 album, Mandatory Fun, so what do I know?

My theory about him is that the kids who were listening to him in the 80s are all grown up now and in a position to buy his music for themselves and for their own kids, whereas before they had to beg their parents for the money (or, like me, had to record it onto cassette tapes). As if to prove my point, the crowd last night was all-ages - there were middle-aged people and small-ish children, and a hard-core of people in their 20s sitting down in the front row who were rocking out to the whole show.

One of the middle-aged folks was my dad, who's appreciated Weird Al about as long as I have. Oddly, we determined that this was probably his first rock concert since he took me and a friend to see REM at Shoreline Amphitheater in 1995 (my first show ever). Even though he didn't recognize a lot of the songs or the source material, I think my dad enjoyed the show - he'd have just appreciated a full rendition of Like a Surgeon, Al's parody of Like a Virgin by Madonna. What we got was a section of the song, done in a medley of other songs, in the style of a barbershop quartet.

That's Al's genius, of course - beyond the way he can change a single word or even letter to turn one song into something strange and hilarious, he also has this gift for setting one type of music to another. Admittedly this is usually polka, but he proved that he can do it more widely by singing a section of Eat It (from Michael Jackson's Beat It) to the tune of Eric Clapton's acoustic rendition of Layla from the Unplugged album. I guess Weird Al's quite rewarding to listen to if you're a music nerd, like me.

Of course, he also treated us to one of his polka medleys, of which my favorite part had to be his section of Sledgehammer by Miley Cyrus, during which he played the video on a giant screen above the stage - just imagine the video with her singing the lyrics, but his voice coming out. And you can see how he's influenced other artists - my favorite example is Chris Hardwick and Mike Phirman's band, Hard'n'Phirm, doing a bluegrass-style medley of Radiohead songs:



Anyway, last night's show was the only one he was doing in SF, so I'll just have to wait for the next tour to see him again. But someday I hope to have kids to take to see him - it'll be nice to introduce the now-bygone world of the 80s and 90s to them through him...

Not Up for Whatever: Why I'm Done Saying Yes

You know what? I'm done with "yes to life". It's time for some "no".

This was brought home to me kind of forcefully this weekend, as I ended up having a couple drinks too many after work, which led to crashing at a coworker's house (after having more drinks), sleeping on a couch impregnated with dog hairs and curled up so I wouldn't kick another coworker in the head, and listening to a third coworker, who'd drawn the short straw and ended up on the floor, alternately talking in his sleep ("That's up to you, Francesco" was uttered at one point) and snoring like a drain.

And when they finally woke up, a couple of hours after I did (I caught up on email, social media and Premier League scores, as well as listening to someone upstairs having sex), I had to get dropped off at the office so I could pick up my car and drive home. Which is when I was finally able to take a shower, brush my teeth, etc etc etc.

I'm done.

There's a lot to be said for spontaneity, and Bud Light appears to have built an entire ad campaign around the concept of "being up for whatever". Totally admirable. We're urged to say yes to everything that comes our way, because that's how we end up with stories to tell over a beer years later, or with notches on our bedpost, or whatever. If we just say yes to everything, the thinking goes, we won't die alone and unhappy in our miserable little hovels.

But this obscures the fact that, at least for me, being up for whatever has pretty much always ended up with sleeping on someone's couch (or floor), vomiting my guts out somewhere unpleasant or seeing the person I'm into go off with someone that she's into. Or some combination of the above.

On the other hand, if on Friday I'd just stopped at a beer (and a tequila, because come on, I'm not made of stone here), I could have made my way home relatively early, had ramen from the place next door to my house (instead of half a posh corndog and a couple handfuls of not particularly distinguished popcorn), done some writing, messaged someone I'm chatting to on OKCupid, and watched Netflix.

Instead I got my illusions about someone I'm kind of into at the office pretty fairly punctured, declined the offer of a line of cocaine (because even when I'm up for anything, I'm not fucking around with a drug I've never taken before just as I'm about to go to bed), and had to deal with the guilt of staking out my spot on the couch instead of the floor. As well as the concomitant paranoia throughout the night that if I got up to pee I'd lost my spot on the couch.

I guess it's good to have my illusions punctured about the person I fancied, but I'll be honest, there's really no good takeaway from that night. Except perhaps this blog.

Other times I've "just said yes" and "gone with the flow", I ended up getting swindled in Malaysia, or chatting to Colombian strippers in Austria. That may sound exotic, but at some point, like when you're ridiculously drunk, you just want it to end so you can go home and sleep in a proper bed.

So yeah, done. D-U-N. No more "crazy nights", no more going with the flow, and especially no more descending on some unsuspecting person's house and drinking all their booze. No more being paranoid that at some point I'm going to be woken up by the two people sleeping in the living room with me are going to give each other handjobs.

I'm still willing to be spontaneous (spontaneous trips to Singapore or even just down a street I've never been down have proven fun), but I just need to read situations (and people) better. And I urge you to join me in throwing off the tyranny of "yes" and "whatever". It may result in fewer crazy nights, but you'll feel a lot better for having slept well and gone to the gym.

And then I won't feel so jealous of the people whose crazy nights do turn out fun. Win-win. Fuck you, "Yes Man", the 2008 movie starring Jim Carrey.

How I Met Your Mother: The Comic Novel Comes to TV

For the last few months, I've been obsessively hoovering up episodes of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix. I was spurred by sorta-kinda-almost spoilers that I absorbed by seeing headlines about the series finale, which aired in May. I had also admired the show from afar, as it were, for a few years - when I lived in London, it was on even more frequently than the Big Bang Theory (which is saying something), and the two shows were generally paired together on the same channels (Channel Four, E4, etc). I'd even started watching it sort of regularly when Season 8 came to the UK, so I caught the broad strokes of what was happening as it led into its last season.

It's kind of an odd show. As Donna Bowman notes in her series of episode recaps for the AV Club, it's a hybrid between the traditional sitcom (like BBT) and the newer single-camera sitcom (like Community, Modern Family, etc) - likely a result of the structure, in which the main character recounts the titular story to his kids, decades later. This allows for a lot of flashbacks, flash-forwards and other time- and camera-related shenanigans.

The structure also means that spoilers are kind of irrelevant. As I said above, the headlines that came out around the time the finale aired have given me a pretty good idea of how Ted's search turns out... and, perhaps oddly, it makes me want to see how they get there. Back in 2012 I touched on the whole spoiler controversy that we're having in the culture right now, and a month or so ago, again on the AV Club, Todd VanDerWerff spoke out against what he calls "spoiler paranoia", by noting in his first sentence that Walter White dies at the end of Breaking Bad.

If that last sentence pisses you off, I'm sorry (I'm not sorry). HIMYM is another show that effectively defies spoilers, by showing you - through its title and framing sequence - that Ted will meet the love of his life and have the two kids sitting on his couch; and throughout its nine seasons, it also states pretty much outright that none of Ted's girlfriends are the mother. The best example is in the pilot, where he describes meeting the perfect girl, has an amazing date with her and tells her he loves her... only to reveal to his kids in the last frame that she's their Aunt Robin.

I'm still impressed by how well that works, especially if my suspicions about the finale are correct. I also love the more minor spoilers that crop up every now and then. In an episode positing that single people automatically have more stamina for nights out than coupled-up people, we have a flash-forward to a wedding where Lily and Marshall leave early, but Ted and Robin decide to stay later. Except this is in Season 2, when they're a couple - so the writers are effectively telling you a month or two in advance that the relationship is doomed.

That's the reason that I call the show a novel for TV. I don't know exactly how far ahead the creators, Craig Thomas and Carter Bays, plotted the show, but however they did it they managed to build a clockwork universe where, so far, pretty much everything that's been teased has paid off. It rewards close watching, for example by having Ted enter the bar wearing a dress in one episode, and not explaining what that was all about until a season or two later.

Like any good novel, the characters are also well-drawn, and generally more than one-note stereotypes. The closest to a one-note character that the show has is Barney, but in early seasons he demonstrates impressive, unhinted-at depths to his character, and then in later seasons he starts to grow out of the sleazy lothario persona we're initially introduced to. My favorite character has to be Marshall, though, because he's at once the most grown-up of the characters, by being the first to marry and have kids, and also the most child-like, with his belief in stuff like ghosts and Bigfoot. I also love his relationship with Lily, as it's pretty rare for a sitcom to show a married couple as enabling besties rather than a bored and frustrated couple (ie, "eh, the old ball-and-chain, am I right?"). That's pretty refreshing.

So I'm at Season 8 now, and coming up to the end of what's available on Netflix. Season 9 doesn't show up on DVD until 23 September, so I'm hoping the episodes will be available for streaming around that time too. All of which is a roundabout way of saying, don't tell me what happens! The show may defy spoilers, but I do want to see how we get to the end.

Toward a Unified Theory of Podcasts

I was on the phone to a friend from work recently, talking about the job I was doing now that I've moved to California. I was telling him that I kind of missed having afternoons to do data entry, and without missing a beat, he said, "Oh, because you miss listening to your podcasts!"

I hate being so transparent, sometimes. But he was right - for the past two years, whenever I had some easy, repetitive work, my coworkers were treated to the sight of me, more or less surreptitiously, slipping some earphones in and occasionally laughing quietly as I clicked away at the multitudinous spreadsheets that make up the work of a data consultancy. This friend, in particular, was prevailed upon to go see Chris Hardwick when he did a show in London, last May, so he became my official Nerdist sounding board, much to his bemusement.

But sometimes, when God closes a door, He opens a window.

Not that I really believe in God. But the point is, even though I don't have to do data entry as frequently as I used to, I do actually have another opportunity to listen to the Nerdist or any other podcast that takes my fancy: whenever I'm driving.

I realize this puts me one step closer to having NPR as my default station, and therefore to middle age and obsolescence. However, listening to the Nerdist or Marc Maron's WTF on my commute or whenever I'm driving around running errands, is actually kind of nice, especially because my CD player doesn't work anymore and the radio pretty much blows.

Of course, an interesting thing that I've noticed since I started listening more regularly to Maron or to Pete Holmes' You Made it Weird, is how well the form seems to work for comedians. Sure, there are podcasts of all kinds - I've listened to and enjoyed podcasts about travel, history and SF writing. Also, James Richardson's Football Daily podcasts for the Guardian during World Cups or European Championships are epic.

But somehow, if you look at it in evolutionary terms, comedians appear to have become the most successful animals on the digital landscape, occupying more niches than pretty much anybody else. I think it's telling that the AV Club's weekly roundup of the latest podcasts sits in the comedy section of the site, and that most are run by comedians (with the exceptions of Freakonomics and Stuff You Missed in History Class).

Maybe that's selection bias, or maybe comedy's just what rises to the top. It wouldn't be the first time a single genre comes to dominate a particular medium - superheroes are pretty much synonymous with comic books these days, but it wasn't so at the very start of the medium.

The other thing that's struck me since I started branching out from listening only to the Nerdist is how Hardwick, Maron and Holmes (btw, off topic, but doesn't that sound like an amazing legal firm?) seem to approach interacting with their guests, and navigating their own lives, in very similar ways.

It may not be that surprising, on reflection. I got into Chris Hardwick's stuff because of his book, and only started listening to his podcast after devouring the Nerdist Way and a couple of the other self-help books he referenced in it. In the book - and on the podcast - he talks about eating better, using time more productively, relating to people and dealing with addiction. These topics all crop up pretty frequently in the other podcasts I listen to - Maron, for example, is also a recovering alcoholic, while Pete Holmes spent a lot of time in his early podcasts asking his guests about their relationships and their beliefs.

I feel like it's a good bet that they've all read the same self-help books - and in any case, as I've mentioned before, a lot of self-help/productivity literature passes on the same ideas, in more or less similar forms. But because most of my podcast-listening is of the Nerdist, it feels like a strange parallel world to hear Marc Maron, who's not on the Nerdist Podcast Network, talk about similar topics and ask his guests similar questions.

And of course, they all know each other - Pete Holmes and Chris Hardwick have both appeared on Maron's TV show - so I'm sure they circulate their ideas quite easily among one another.

But it's still interesting to me, and even if they overlap quite a bit in terms of guests and subject matter, it's also interesting to see how different one person sounds on different podcasts. My favorite example is Tim Ferriss, who sounds a bit more douchey on Joe Rogan's podcast but comes off funnier when he appeared on the Nerdist, and revealed more of himself on Maron's podcast.

In any case, it'll be interesting to see how the form develops, now that these guys are seeing their profiles raised - after all, as every good biologist knows, evolution is a constant process. If this current generation looks a certain way, I'm looking forward to seeing what the smaller and nimbler ones who come up in their wake will look like.