Red Right Blog

Rants, Rates, Slags, Slates.

Manic-depressive posts from Red Wright-Hand. Because there are thousands of worthless blogs out there and who am I not to add to their number?

redrightblog@hotmail.com





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Total US troop deaths in Iraq to date (09/01/07) since 03/20/03: 3739

From 05/02/03 through 06/28/04: 718

From 06/29/04 through 01/30/05: 579

From 01/31/05 through 12/14/05: 715

From 12/15/05 through 01/31/07: 933

From 02/01/07: 653

(Sources: US Dept. of Defense, Iraq Coalition Casualty Count)

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Saturday, May 31, 2003
 
MATRIX FILMMAKER IN "SUCKS-CHANGE" SCANDAL: By now, most of you readers who pay any attention at all to Hollywood/celebrity gossip have probably heard the shocking whispers about filmmaker Larry Wachowski, writer-director (with brother Andy) of this summer's The Matrix Reloaded. I can officially confirm those eye-opening rumors, here, before the world. After a private and in-depth investigation that consumed no less than 150 minutes of my time, and at a personal expenditure of $8.50, I can now attest that The Matrix film franchise has had a sucks-change operation. That is correct. The Matrix Reloaded, the sequel to 1999's smash hit The Matrix and this year's most quiveringly anticipated film, absolutely sucks. What had promised to be a thrilling continuation of a trendsetting earlier movie, and an expansion of the characters and philosophy contained therein, has revealed itself to be a robotic clunker that even many confirmed arrested-adolescent fantasy-film nerds don't like. There are some who doubt this, who say it is unfair to pry into the privacy of artists' lives, that it is callous to snigger at private parts bared to the unblinking light of clinical inspection. They say: "Aw man, why can't you understand? It's supposed to be robotic. And, uh, boring. And repetitive. And pointless. Cause then it's like, you know, like it was generated by The Matrix itself. Why are you so blind to that? And it was like really cool when those vanilla rasta guys got all transparent and stuff! And that 10-minute dance scene at the beginning? That was so totally important to letting the audience know what life in a 23rd-century underground city would be like! I hope you get it now!" To which I say: "Boys, don't you have Bar Mitzvah lessons to attend?"

And, really, has anyone spotted anything resembling an actual essay on The Matrix Essays? Let me know if you do.


 
I've certainly been earning my paycheck this week, which is my excuse for not having posted since Monday. Ha! Like I need to make excuses for not posting. Laziness rules!


Monday, May 26, 2003
 
Now. I'm back. Then I had fun reading what students think of professors I know and/or used to study under. (Admission of vulgar gratification: a writing instructor with whom I had a bad date turns out to be not much more popular with students, either.) This weekend of traditional travel has also been a good time to read some Paul Bowles stories, and be reminded why it is often a good idea to stay home where you belong. And so far as that goes, nothing quite encapsulates Memorial Day like a batch of Coffin Joe movies, available on DVD since last October. Curl up with these on a rainy day and knock yourself out, literally.



 
PARABLE: A statue pointed to its supporting pedestal and said: "You can't argue with success!"
Discuss.

Meanwhile it appears there is at least one spot in this nation not being inundated with rain at the moment. I am going there. Now.


Wednesday, May 21, 2003
 
While I'm thinking of it, a plug for the excellent Philly Carshare organization. For $10.00 a month (and a $350.00 refundable deposit), you're allowed 24-hour use of any of several cars conveniently parked in a number of city neighborhoods, basically a collectively shared rental car system. Naturally you have to reserve a car ahead of time, but you can still do that at a moment's notice and use any car available right away. It's worth it just for the reserved parking, believe me. This system first flourished in San Francisco, I believe, and has been imported here with great results.


Monday, May 19, 2003
 
You will notice a nine-day gap between this posting and my last. We call this gap "health." I was away from home during most of that time and NOT OBSESSIVELY POSTING TO THE INTERNET WHILE ON VACATION. Once again, the word for this is "health" (with the modifier "good" being understood). Because only a hopeless screwhead would feel compelled to hunch all tappity-tappy over a keyboard and bathe in irradiated monitor light when he could be strolling the pavements of Northampton, MA, or driving leisurely to visit Herman Melville's home in the Berkshires (where Moby-Dick was written in longhand, if you know what that means), or hiking the stunning landscapes of the Quabbin Reservoir and Mount Tom. I mean, do you need to know about these things the moment they happen? Is there any reason you should care? Of course not. Only sickeningly self-involved creeps feel obliged to inform the world of every last pimple they've popped in the past half-hour, and if Claude Shannon were still alive to see the uses to which his classic theories of modern communication have been put, he would have fallen off his unicycle at the very least.


Saturday, May 10, 2003
 
It just keeps getting better: The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that The Stones of Summer will be reissued in September. So we see that justice, upon occasion, is accomplished.

Meanwhile I'll be vacationing in New England next week. There may be guest correspondents. There may not. There may not even be any corresponding from me during that time. Meanwhile, is anyone else as amused as I am by regularly contrasting this husband-and-wife pair of blogs? How much money says they both have their own customized teevees?


Thursday, May 08, 2003
 
You want confluence, I got confluence: this recent LA Weekly article tells how Don DeLillo is a fan of Stone Reader. What did we do before Google?


Wednesday, May 07, 2003
 
Thanks to everyone who's written so far. Keep those e-mails coming. Yes. Please. Thanks.


Everybody's beating up on Don DeLillo this spring. Pretty much everyone. Which is of a piece with Heidi Julavits' article in the premiere issue of The Believer, written to the effect that book reviewers are a careerist bunch more interested in making waves than reading and explicating carefully. Which is unfortunately obvious. One negative review of Cosmopolis, appearing in Newsweek (or was it Time?) states that Eric Packer, the book's protagonist, has, in the course of a day, sex with three women, none of whom are his recently-wedded wife. That is incorrect. The third and last woman he makes love to is his wife, a fact that's unmistakable to anyone who's read the book (all of 209 pages) through to the end. In fact (no snickering please), it struck me as easily the most moving and memorable interlude in a novel of deliberate abstractions. Conclusion: the jerk from Newsweek (or Time; I don't have either mag in front of me and will try later to clear up this terrible confusion) DIDN'T REALLY READ THE BOOK. None of this is to say that Cosmopolis is a masterpiece simply because critics/reviewers, sensing a shift in cultural tides, decided to fall upon DeLillo like the conspirators on Caesar. It is a minor work by his lights, not up to the magnificent standards of White Noise and Libra and large sections of Underworld; there is the too-easy feeling that, after the Herculean effort of Underworld, DeLillo is allowing himself to drift (his previous novel, The Body Artist, the first post-Underworld, is also relatively bare, if purposefully). But respect must be paid. At the very least, read him to the end before embarassing your own self in print.


Tuesday, May 06, 2003
 
This is the world's newest blog, though by the time I finish this post, the statement will likely no longer be true. But it's free, and I want to see how far I will get with this before I and any assumed readers lose interest. So yes, I am Red Wright-Hand and this is my Red Right Blog. Admirers of Nick Cave and/or John Milton (and his chief work in particular) will get the reference, I trust. I also like the name for its contradictory political implications, as though I were some Communist neo-conservative out to poison the well of the world-mind. Hysterical, ain't it?

I don't intend to speak about myself directly, but will be interested to hear from readers who may be able to detect who and where I am by references dropped from time to time. (Blue has his clues, Red has his threads.) Here is my e-mail before I forget: redrightblog@hotmail.com. (Of course, someone had already snarfed the redrighthand user ID at hotmail, so I had to settle for what I've got.)

One recommendation to start: Stone Reader, an unorthodox and extremely moving documentary about the search for Dow Mossman, the forgotten author of a long out-of-print novel (he never wrote another) titled The Stones of Summer. The director captures the lasting effect a particular book, read early in life, will have on a person's character, and along the way interviews leading (or formerly leading, which is the point) critics, editors and writers, as well as Mossman's former agent, to illuminate the grievous state of literary fiction in current America. The dreams painfully constructed stone by stone, then utterly discarded. But a celebration of those dreams too, and a recognition of those titanic books (like The Recognitions and Call it Sleep) that came finally to be acknowledged, somewhat, by good readers.