A Blog of My Own

The wife and I found ourselves today in Park Ridge, IL–a near NW suburb of Chicago, a well-planned middle- and upper-middle class community, and the town Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton grew up in from the age of 3. Equipped only with the cameras in our cell phones, we decided to find her house and document our quest. I’ll tell you a secret. If you click that link above, the arrow on the map doesn’t point to her childhood home. But her home’s location is contained on that map.

Here’s a great old movie theater in the center of town.

The next picture is not Hillary’s house! It’s the Park Ridge Public Library, directly across from the Pickwick. It’s where we found some helpful librarians in the reference department who supplied the address of the Rodham house, and directions how to get there.

Below, eureka, The House. Modest (looks bigger from the front than it is). But nice. A corner house. A little bit “Prairie School” in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, although obviously not a Wright house per se. There are many such houses in the Chicago area, especially in Wright’s home town of Oak Park, a suburb that Park Ridge shares some characteristics with.

Here’s your intrepid reporter in front of the house. Proof I was there! (You’ll have to take my word that that’s me.)

Although no neon signs point the way, you can see that the community feels a quiet pride in the house from this sign high on the lamppost that stands in front.

I’ll tell you…Though I’m ambivalent about Hillary (I think she’s capable of being a good, even great President, and may just be the better of the Clintons, but I voted for Obama in the Illinois primary), being in front of her house made me like her more. I felt, as we approached her beginnings and then stood before them, that I was learning something about her I liked. In this campaign, we’ve seen Good Hillary and Bad Hillary, and maybe looking at her old house I felt the spirit of Good Hillary again. Is that any way to choose a President? I don’t know; there are probably worse ways.

Every Oscars contains at least one terrible mistake, and this year it was Jon Stewart’s inviting back to the stage Marketa Irglova, co-writer of the winning song from Once, to give the acceptance speech she’d been prevented from making because her partner, Glen Hansard, used up all the team’s alloted time making his. (His speech had seemed to speak for both of them, but I guess not.)

I think the young lady deserved her moment in the sun, but she and her partner should have worked out a way to share between them the time they knew they’d be alloted.

To set things right, the Oscars now need to air a make-good show to allow every costume designer, sound mixer, makeup person, film editor, production designer, and director of an animated short subject they’ve ever cut short to come back and finish. It could take nine hours, but since Oscar is now in the “nice” business, fair is fair.

I’m a fan of In Treatment, and was gratified to read yesterday that the TV critic of The Chicago Tribune is also.

The central figure is shrink Paul Weston. (No, not this Paul Weston.) A fresh half-hour episode every weeknight at 8:30 Central on HBO shows us that day’s appointment with a different one of Paul’s patients. Monday night lets us in on the weekly session of Laura, seriously effed up, promiscuous, and in love with Paul. Tuesdays are for Alex, Navy bomber pilot carrying a payload of guilt for killing a schoolful of innocent Iraqi children by mistake. If it’s Wednesday it must be Sophie, teen Olympic gymnastics hopeful who’s been sexually abused by her coach (and maybe others). On Thursday we get couples counseling, as Paul referees Jake and Amy going for each other’s thoats. Friday is for Paul’s appointments with senior shrink Gina, because after that week, Paul needs to talk to someone, too.

You have to be able to tolerate a show that’s all talk, no action. But it’s good talk. The patients draw you in, just as they draw Paul in. And if they draw Paul in a little too much for his own good (and theirs), they may be drawing us in a little too much for our own good, too; the show’s addictive.

When I started watching, I didn’t think I could or would commit to it every single night. And after the first few, I still thought that. I thought, “Hmm, that was pretty good—not great, but pretty good—I could live with catching it when it’s convenient.” But each night, 8:30 would roll around (as it is wont to do), and I had to tune it in. Here it is Week Four, and I haven’t missed a single episode.

I had wondered whether anyone was watching this show other than me and the few other devotees who are discussing it over at Television Without Pity. And I still don’t know what the ratings are like. But at least the Tribune critic is into it. Maybe it’ll catch on.

Obama used to knock me out because, unlike every other politician, he didn’t give the same speech every time. His victory and concession speeches seemed freshly conceived for the occasion; they had ideas.

But I caught his act last night, after he won in Wisconsin. He’s now giving the same speech every time.

And it’s too long. It rambles themelessly, idea-free, with ten laundrylists-worth of promises.

Someone should tell him to cut it out already with the anecdote in which he tells of taking his “cars with better gas mileage” demand to the auto executives in Detroit instead of the Sierra Club, because he’s so brave, and not afraid to speak truth to power, and says what people need to hear instead of what they want to hear. Yadda yadda yadda. It impressed the first few times. Not so much anymore.

I know why his acceptance speeches have become so flabby, though. Before, he was giving them in hotel ballrooms to groups of core supporters. You could give a good, concise speech in that situation. Now he’s doing them in basketball arenas to crowds of 20,000. You can’t come out and talk to a crowd that size, a crowd including voters who are auditioning you in the hope of being turned on, and do twelve minutes. You’ve got to do the whole act.

But the act needs new material.

Back in April, I presciently predicted that due to online commerce the streets of our cities would soon be ghost towns–that the only businesses left standing as the sagebrush blows through would be those that do what your computer can’t, like give you a haircut. (Let’s add the word “yet” to that “can’t,” since, as my friend Ellis Weiner responded, it’s only a matter of time.)

Now an article in Slate by business writer Daniel Gross makes the same suggestion, and adds the current state of the economy to the mix for good measure. Stores are disappearing by the acreful. Apparently not shopping has become a trend. There’s even a whole book about it.

Is integrity taking care of your responsibilities to your family? Sure it is. Is integrity staying true to your dream? Heck, yeah. But what about when you can’t do both at the same time?

Ay, there’s the rub with which The TV Set massages us, and it’s got great hands. When the movie came out a year or so ago, most reviews said it was “interesting, but…” For me, there’s no but. This deft, subtle, and superbly-acted satire is five stars on a scale of four.

A view of the royally effed-up system that gives us our TV programming, seen through the struggles of show-runner Mike Klein (David Duchovny) to get a pilot produced and picked up by the Panda Network (think “pander network”) run by Lenny (Sigourney Weaver), The TV Set was damned with faint praise upon its release. It garnered only a 65% “fresh” rating among the top newspaper and magazine critics compiled on rottentomatoes.com. Among those who liked it, some couldn’t resist noting an over-preciousness or staleness about it. Comparisons to Paddy Chayevsky’s Network and Robert Altman’s The Player floated through the reviews. Around the same time, the now-defunct cable network Trio aired a good serial half-hour sitcom called Pilot Season (Sam Seder, Sarah Silverman, Isla Fisher) that covered some of the same ground as The TV Set. But The TV Set is its own thing—a meticulously-detailed satire that deserves comparison not with Network, The Player, or Pilot Season, but with the best film comedies ever made.

The DVD contains two commentary tracks. The first, with writer-director Jake Kasdan, Duchovny, and actress Lindsay Sloane, is amusing and worth sitting through. The second is indispensible. It features Kasdan and the film’s producer Judd Apatow. Both came up in the world The TV Set depicts (they collaborated on the series Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared). I wouldn’t say their commentary takes us deeper into the comedic hell The TV Set displays (the movie really can’t be beat at this), but it adds detail around the edges. If the movie is sharp-eyed satire, the movie-plus-commentary shows us the world behind the screen in 1080p, super High-Def vision.

It would be easier to list the movies and TV shows Stephen Tobolowsky hasn’t been in than the ones he has. You know the guy: Ned Ryerson the insurance agent in Groundhog Day, Commissioner Jarry in Deadwood…yeah, him. In 2005, he got top billing at last, not just name above the title but hell, name in the title, in Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party. (Has any other actor achieved that besides John Malkovich?)

ST’sBP finds the actor preparing his home for the arrival of guests to celebrate his birthday, and then invites us to the party. It is a framework for him to tell stories about things that have happened to him in his life. In the first portion of the film the camera is the only audience; in the second, once the guests have arrived, he addresses himself to them. (Amy Adams is there.) The film has the aura of a “documentary,” but it can’t be one, unless it’s the truth that at Stephen Tobolowsky’s house no one else ever gets to talk.

Tobolowsky’s stories seem to reside somewhere between fact and fiction. Think a Jewish Spalding Gray. I am sure every tale Tobolowsky tells is based in truth, but they are shaped like short stories, and they have the aura of performance art. He is very good at telling them. If you’re looking for something a little different to rent one night, I recommend the film, which is available from Netflix.

Unnoticed by me at the time was that about a week and half ago this blog crossed the threshold of 10,000 views since its inception less than a year ago.

Thanks, readers.

Why do I feel this unsuper-Wednesday morning like I don’t give a rat’s ass who wins the nomination? This isn’t at all how I expected to feel. Maybe it’s Hillbama burn-out. Maybe I cared so much going into my state’s primary that my care-tank is empty. Or maybe it’s winter.

If millions of illegal aliens get legalized—meaning, given a path to citizenship, given the right to vote, therefore given a say over who gets elected in our future and what laws get passed—and millions more illegals enter the U.S. as a result of these new laws, who then get legalized, given the right to vote, and given a say over who gets elected and what laws get passed—aren’t we in fairly serious danger of seeing domestic and foreign policy changed in ways antithetical to the national interest? In ways we can now only dimly anticipate?

Mickey Kaus of Slate has a point of view about which Presidential candidate is least likely to make this happen.