It Is Snowing, Cretins

Yeah, it just snowed. Incredible.

I dragged Tom to a reading of a really awful play last night. The play was called "Clouds Hill," and was a production of the Manhattan Theater Club, sponsored in part by the Sloan Foundation, who, for some reason, want to promote depictions of science in the arts. It was about two professors and a Middle Eastern visiting student at a small liberal arts college. One professor, a square-jawed ex-Navy chemist, thinks the student might be a terrorist in training; the other, a hysterical and hopelessly naive sociology professor won't believe him. Guess which is right. Well, the play is a mess and really doesn't have anything to do with chemistry, or any kind of science for that matter. However, you will learn that American men are pathetic because they're afraid to oppress women; that the desire to oppress women is something that we share with Middle Easterners, but we have to kill them because we have some tangential assets to protect; and that the United States Navy is MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU CAN COMPREHEND, MOTHERFUCKER. At best, "Clouds Hill" is a poorly written "very special" episode of a sitcom; at worst, it's an inflammatory piece of jingoist bullshit.

However, I did recognize this guy in the audience who was in Hal Hartley's movie, Amateur. He played the wild-haired CPA who bites all the cops after he gets electrocuted by the porn-magnate's gangsters. He's merely an okay actor, but he is weird looking. It was almost as cool as when I saw Liev Schreiber at Han's Deli licking all the cinnamon off the rice pudding. That man is an animal.

Speaking of oppressing women, NPR was talking about Afghan women being prevented from voting in the upcoming democratic elections by their husbands / imams / whatever. I've said it before -- that whole country ought to be be razed and replaced by a Planned Parenthood or maybe a Doctors Without Borders clinic the size of a Wal-Mart -- but maybe we can start by summarily executing men who try to stifle the female vote. That probably means all of them. And that goes for the U.S., too: Those administrators in Florida who mislabeled all those black people as felons in the last election to keep the minority vote low should get the gun-clap, too, but maybe they should be put in a zoo first. Think about it -- it's pretty treasonous. It makes me as mad as the new Spy Kids / Silmarillion cross-over (forthcoming from New Line Cinema) makes Tom.

Flatliners is actually a pretty good movie.

***ITEM***: David Rees apparently does the lecture circuit, and he's gonna be in B-town next Sunday. Peep from his site:

Sunday, December 7
Brooklyn, NY
Sunny's Bar
253 Conover Street
(718) 625-8211
3:00 PM

Get your questions ready! ("What was in the briefcase? Was it Marcellus Wallace's soul?")