I had no idea. The world of pro wrestling was closed to me and I to it; as far as I was concerned, it was a redneck pastime of rural America not worth a second thought. My infrequent intersections with wrestling had ranged from the boring to the utterly bizarre.

It was Michael Thomas who opened my eyes. Every couple of weeks I pester Michael to start his own blog, because he’s the kind of guy who’s always forwarding links to his friends and chatting about pop culture. He knows enough about comics to fit very well into that segment of the blogosphere, and he has the requisite Quirky Area of Expertise: he’s a devotee of pro wrestling, and is even writing a master’s thesis on its history and importance to American culture. Last Sunday, in the spirit of broadening my horizons, I headed over to his house for an evening of pay-per-view excitement.

Michael is a “smart.” Until I met him I didn’t realize that smarts existed, though if I had taken a moment to think I might have guessed it. To understand what a smart is you first have to get your mind around this stunning secret: pro wrestling is fake. It’s staged. The outcomes of the matches are determined in advance by the bookers, and, depending on the skill of the wrestlers, the exact details of the match are either scripted in advance or improvised through subtle communication in the ring. The relationships and rivalries between wrestlers on television comprise a storyline of soap-operatic proportions, all completely made up.

Still with me? Take deep breaths. I realize it was a bit of a shock. Now then: if you’re someone who’s a fan of pro wrestling and believes wholeheartedly that it’s real, that makes you a “mark.” If, on the other hand, you’re clued in to the artifice, and still a fan, you’re a smart. Smarts revel in technical knowledge of the hidden workings of the wrestling world, while at the same time appreciating the matches themselves with no small measure of ironic detachment. They take take pride in noticing when a wrestler uses the hidden razor blade to slice his forehead and make himself bleed, or catching it when one whispers to another to negotiate the next “spot.” They especially admire a good “worker”—a wrestler who can pull off a difficult maneuver and make it look real. All smarts live for the instant when they are transported despite themselves, when that ineluctable moment arrives in a match and they believe it to be real in their heart of hearts, when they are taken up as completely and naively as any mark. Such a moment is known as “marking out.” (There’s also such a thing as a “smark,” which is a smart who admits to being somewhat of a mark at times, perhaps because they’re a big fan of a particular wrestler.)

Sunday night, I was surrounded by Michael and his friends, most of them smarts, but I was doubly removed from the action, watching both the wrestling and the wrestling-watchers with wry detachment. (A “snark,” if you will; credit for that coinage belongs to a smart named Hal all-around cool guy Steve Conley. [Hal remains cool himself, but was not the guy who coined the term.]) There wasn’t a redneck in the bunch, though Michael is from Louisiana. Heck, one guy even had a British accent. At first I thought that at the very least it was a guy thing, but when Michael’s mild-mannered, elegant wife Megan started getting into the action, I realized that all bets were off when it came to stereotyping smarts. They could be anyone; they could be anywhere. You may know a smart and not even know it.

They were a little disappointed that night, because as it turned out, Michael’s cable box was out. This worked out just fine for me, though, since this meant that he dipped into his prodigious collection of wrestling DVDs and showed an assortment of classic matches from the past twenty years. Thus began my education in wrestling; thus was the veil torn from mine eyes. I’ll run down the six matches I saw that day and in the process try to shed a little light for the uninitiated on the world of wrestling.

Magnum TA vs. Tully Blanchard—1985

An old-school cage fight was a good start, though it was probably my least favorite of the matches. It was an “I Quit” match, which meant that the winner was the guy who got the other one to cry uncle. Spandex shorts and bad hair were the order of the day. There was little to distinguish the good guy from the bad guy here, except maybe the fact that Magnum TA was blonde. He was the “face”—short for babyface—the one the marks are supposed to like. Tully, by contrast, was the “heel,” the villain, the one the marks are supposed to hate (and love to hate). Wrestling storylines are unrelentingly formulaic and always come back to the struggle between good and evil. This is not to say that the face always wins the match, but if he doesn’t, you can be sure there’ll be an opportunity down the road for the heel to get his comeuppance. Heels are the ones who break the rules and fight dirty, though there’s some leeway if a heel has done so for the face to respond in kind.

“What’s the cage for?” I asked as it started.

“To keep them in,” somebody replied.

The fight was your standard grab-the-guy-and-roll-around-on-the-floor style of wrestling; what distinguished it from the other matches was the amount of blood, which you don’t often see anymore. Some of the blood is real, but most of it is generated with hidden razors. The ol’ slash across the forehead is relatively safe but makes for a great spectacle. Smarts call this a “blade job,” and rate blade jobs on the “Muta Scale,” named after the Great Muta, a Japanese wrestler who “could pull off a sick blade job in his day,” according to Michael. The critical thing to understand, though, is that smarts are in for appreciation of the technique and not the gory violence—those who are into the blood for its own sake are disparagingly called “vampires.”

The high point of the match was when Tully had Magnum in a submission hold and stole the ref’s microphone. He stuffed it into Magnum’s mouth and shouted “Say it! Say it!” Later on Magnum was doing the same thing to Tully, and somewhere in there one of them was banging the other one on the head with it. When it was all over one of the smarts commented that that match hadn’t help up over the years as well as he thought it would. This led to a brief conversation comparing a number of matches from the Eighties, in which the participants displayed as much erudition and mastery of trivial knowledge as baseball fans comparing World Series pitchers or Phisheads debating which was the best Gamehenge.

Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart—1994

Family is important in wrestling, with storylines often involving brother warriors, black sheep, in-laws and the like. Owen Hart here played the jealous younger brother, always outshone by his elder, and willing to do anything to gain the upper hand—hence, the heel. This was also a cage match, with the added wrinkle that you won if you managed to climb over the top of the cage or escaped through the door, which a referee with a truly outrageous mullet would open when the struggle moved in his direction. During the opening wide shot, Hal smiled. “I always liked this cage,” he said.

Watching wrestling involves a certain amount of suspension of disbelief—above and beyond the obvious suspension of disblelief, I mean. I had a hard time at first going along with the fact that, after being bludgeoned repeatedly, one of the brothers would be forced back into the cage before escaping because of a particularly nasty grip on his hair. But wrestling logic is different from that of the real world, and some conventions you just have to go along with, or you’ll be lost before you’ve really begun.

The Hart brothers wore more spandex and more pink than their 1985 forebears. The match didn’t get really interesting until Bret actually won it, but instead of relenting, Owen called on Jim Neidherdt, Bret’s former tag team partner, who leapt from the stands, turned on Bret (gasp!), and tossed him back in the ring. Bret was aided by his brother-in-law, the British Bulldog (another convenient spectator), and for a while there was some two-on-two post-match chaos in which Owen actually locked the cage while shouting “You’re not my brother! You’re not my family!” The scene ended with the camera following Owen and Jim leaving the arena as if victorious to the frantic boos of the crowd.

When Worlds Collide—November 6, 1994

I wanted a group fight, and Michael obliged me. This three-on-three tag-team struggle featured five Mexican wrestlers and one American; it was a joint venture of WCW and AAA, a Mexican wrestling federation. Up until this point I think it’s safe to say I hadn’t marked out, or even come close. But this was a very different style of wrestling. Instead of big lugs lurching around the ring, many of these guys were lighter, faster, and acrobatic. Jumps, flips, and tumbles prevailed. One of the Mexicans, Psychosis, wore a gaudy orange costume featuring a bison mask. How cool is that?

“Psychosis sells really well,” one of the smarts commented. “Selling” is very important to smarts: it is the ability to act well, especially when it comes to providing continuity through the match. In other words, if someone pulls an Atomic Drop on you early in the match, totally screwing up your lower back, then twenty minutes later you ought to be moving in a way that shows that your lower back still hurts. That seems pretty basic, but the performative element of wrestling is something that only the best can pull off well; there are debased wrestlers (like Hulk Hogan) who hardly bother with it at all. (Smarts tend to think very highly of the Japanese pro wrestling circuit, which features more actual physical contact and places a higher emphasis on in-ring performance.)

The commentators hadn’t really grabbed my interest until one of them blurted enthusiastically: “Everything is so unpredictable!” I had a good laugh at that, and also when another one said (of Psychosis) “He thinks not on his feet, but in the air!” Those commentators have a peculiar and fascinating role in all of this. On the one hand, they are providing real and accurate commentary on the match—the moves, the rules, the ongoing development—in a way that has all the trappings of sportscasters everywhere. But they are also in on the story and know the outcome, so of course they are performing every bit as much as the wrestlers. What’s trippy is that they’re not performing instead of commentating—the one is layered on top of the other.

I can now add “wrestling commentator” to the list of wacky occupations I might like to try someday, right alongside “infomercial host,” and for many of the same reasons.

Eddie Guerrero vs. Rey Mysterio Jr.—October 26, 1997

Mysterio was in the last match as well—he’s a wrestler who made his name in Mexico and then made the transition to the American circuit. He’s 5’3” and agile as heck; it’s like having Spider-Man in the ring. He is a “luchadore,” one who fights in the acrobatic “Lucha Libres” style, sometimes wearing a mask. For this match Mysterio wore a purple bodysuit that made him look like The Phantom. Rending or stealing a luchadore’s mask is a grave insult, so it goes without saying that at some point Eddie tore a gaping hole in Mysterio’s mask, after which point things started really heating up.

I don’t know if I had never happened to watch this sort of high-flying wrestling before, or if being around aficianados was affecting my perspective, but I was definitely surprised by how much I was enjoying myself. Still not marking out, mind, but having a good enough time.

Wrestlemania TLC Match—April 9, 2001

“What does TLC stand for?” I asked.

“Tables, ladders, and chairs,” Megan replied with smile I can only describe as “hungry.”

Oh yes. This was the match with props. A prize belt was suspended 20 feet above the middle of the ring, and the object was for the winning team to get it down. There were three teams, each specializing in fighting with a different type of furniture. It was also another one of those family dramas, where the Dudleys (the table specialists) squared off against the Hardy Boyz (ladders) and the chair guys, whoever they were. Extra family members joined in from the stands, including the diminutive Spike Dudley (Michael: “The runt of the Dudley litter”) and Lita Hardy, a female wrestler who tore off her shirt once in the ring, revealing her ample (and amply-supported) bosom.

Female Smart Whose Name I Forget: You know, Lita busted an implant in the ring one time.
Megan: Wait—do you mean in the storyline, or in real life?
Female: (frowns in thought) I think it was for real.
Me: I don’t know what’s real any more . . .
Hal: . . . And that’s wrestling.

At one point, Jeff Hardy managed to grab the belt, only to have his ladder fall out from under him. As he was swinging in midair, The Edge leapt from another nearby ladder and grabbed him around the waist, pulling them both down—a twenty foot fall, mind you—and crashing to the ground.

“Holy crap!” I cried. There it was. I had marked out. Well, maybe not exactly. It wasn’t so much that I believed it as that I realized that even if both of those guys knew exactly what was going to happen, it was still bloody impressive. The same thing held true a few moments later when a couple guys went flying out of the ring and crashed through two tables that were stacked on top of each other. You can’t pull off a spot like that without extreme bodily injury unless you’re an athlete—a bizarre, twisted, sideshow-spectacle sort of athlete, but an athlete nonetheless.

Shawn Michaels vs. Triple H—August 25, 2002

There was a history to this match. That’s true for most of them, and if you’re not clued in to the story you have little hope of gaining a full appreciation for what’s going on. Back in the day, Michaels and Triple H were both heels and part of the same faction: Degeneration X. These guys were evil not just because of their dirty tricks in the ring, but because they’d hold up signs reading “Who Wrote This Crap?” And that’s breaking kayfabe.

“Kayfabe” is a sort of wrestling code of secrecy—“breaking kayfabe” is pulling back the curtain and exposing the artifice behind a wrestling match. It’s an old carnie term; in that context, keeping kayfabe meant not revealing the tricks of your fellow three-card monte dealers, cureall peddlers, magicians, and other scam artists. It’s entirely appropriate for wrestling to have taken up the term, since the practice has its roots in the carnivals.

Anyway, once you understand kayfabe you can see why a “Who Wrote This Crap?” sign is a rather heinous breach of it, designed to infuriate and/or confuse the marks and infuriate and/or delight the smarts. These guys were bad. But as is wont to happen in wrestling storylines, Shawn Michaels came to see the light and became a face—his change of heart was conveniently coupled with a religious conversion.

So in this match, he strode into the ring wearing a t-shirt that read “Phillipians 4:13.” (I’ll save you the trouble: “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.”)

Now a seasoned observer of wrestling, I was able to appreciate how good a wrestler Shawn Michaels was—especially in how he sold his back injury so well at every step in the match. I could also appreciate how devastatingly cool it was that the combatants happened to find under the ring the following: a trash can lid, a trash can, a chair, a sledgehammer (Triple H’s weapon of choice), a ladder, a table, and a fire extinguisher. One or the other of them managed to get swatted by each of these in turn. At the end, Triple H had Michaels in a Pedigree—a sort of Piledriver from hell—but Michaels managed to reverse it at the last second for a fluke pin and a pretty thrilling finish.

Now, at last, I understand wrestling—or rather, I am beginning to understand how much I do not yet understand. I’m no smart, but I can no longer really call myself a snark, either. As long as the drinks are cold and the fried chicken is hot, I’d be happy to kick back at Michael’s again for another bit of the old ultraviolence. Michael has done his best to inundate me with resources to read and links to websites—it goes without saying that smart culture grew and thrived with the coming of the Internet. I’m stopping short of delving into all of that, though. I’ll let him take up the task of bringing wrestling to the rest of the world when he starts his own darn blog. Look for it soon.

I’d like to add a “Best of Polytropos” section to the sidebar, linking to the handful of entries that are, well, _best_. It occurs to me that what I think of as best and what others think of as best may not be the same thing. I’ve certainly had occasion to be surprised over the past six months at which entries end up being linked and widely read. So I’m asking for your suggestions: which entries from 2003 struck you as the most memorable/interesting/well-written/whatever? Let me know in the comments or via email, and I’ll take it all into account as I compile the list.

UPDATE: This entry just got nailed with100+ pieces of comment spam, all due to something called “Flood MT.” Clearly, the next volley in the blog spam war has begun. I’ve turned off comments on this entry; hopefully I won’t need to turn off comments altogether. In the meantime, please send your Best of Polytropos suggestions to me via email.

UPDATE: The behavior of FloodMT is known as “crapflooding.” The urls in this spam are nonsense letters; the spam serves no purpose other than to annoy Movable Type users. Some people are such jerks. Thankfully, “Jay Allen”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ is on it.

The Democratic candidates were at their silliest a few weeks ago at that one debate when everyone was asked if they thought Dean could beat Bush, and (Dean excepted) they all said “No.” What poppycock. None of them will have an easy time of it, but _any_ of the major contenders has a real chance at victory. The main reason for this — and this is by no means an observation that originates with me — is that we’re a nation divided. Four years ago the popular vote was split right down the middle, and Bush’s policies have only served to cement the convictions of his supporters and detractors.

I thought about all of this as I looked over “my notes on Bush’s inauguration”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000272.html. If I was annoyed then at the fact that Bush was behaving as if he had a popular mandate when he clearly did not, and troubled by the sense of entitlement displayed by many of his supporters, I don’t have a word for how I feel about it now. A couple things I said back then are particularly interesting in retrospect:

On the other hand, the protestors’ fundamental right to do what they were doing was challenged and belittled at every turn. The media coverage I saw didn’t reflect the extent or the passion or the sheer presence of the protests.

This is a dynamic that was repeated during the run-up to the war.

For those who do object not only to Bush’s politics but to his very legitimacy, it’s going to be hard to stay present in the public eye for two or four years. But I think it’s important that they do. This inauguration was not ritual-as-usual. Its circumstances were unique in American history. I am eager — and very curious — to see how the American people will comment on it all the next time we all head for the polls.

That ‘next’ time was the midterm election, and as far as the American people commenting on the previous election: they didn’t. It didn’t help that the DNC had its head up its tuckus, to boot.

The hope for a Democratic victory in November lies less with swaying swing voters and more with getting out the vote. I get the sense that many more people than usual have already made up their minds, and the important question is how many of them will actually get to the polls. Kerry, Dean, Edwards — whoever wins should remind America of the last presidential election. He must drive to the polls everyone who _didn’t_ vote in 2000 and said to themselves afterward, when they saw how close it was, “Man — I guess I should’ve voted.”

Inspiring the populace to action isn’t easy, and whoever wins the Democratic nomination had better be good at it. This is my biggest reservation about Kerry, and a strength for Dean and especially Edwards (who Bush is “clearly afraid of”:http://www.sunspot.net/news/health/bal-bz.malpractice27jan27,0,4324470.story?coll=bal-health-headlines). But again — any of them _could_ pull it off.

And please, oh please, let Ralph Nader keep to himself this time around. “There’s no real difference between Gore and Bush” — remember _that_ poisonous bit of nonsense?

I’ve said it before when talking about Alias: the way to watch good TV shows is to rent them on DVD. You have to wait a couple years, but in that time you can usually get a sense, through your friends or through the grapevine, of which shows start good and stay good. The latest proof positive of this technique is Smallville, which we’re renting through Netflix interspersed with Alias and The Sopranos. (It’s been a while since we’ve rented an actual movie—with Ella around, we’re far more likely to have forty-five minutes to spare than a couple of hours.)

Those of you who are already Smallville fans will have to pardon the enthusiasm of somebody who’s only four episodes in. But for those who have no clue: the show airs on the WB, and traces the life of Clark Kent as a high school student, as he’s gradually discovering his powers and before he’s decided upon life as superhero. Practically speaking, of course, he is the hero of the show, but has to wrestle with fitting that role into the rest of his life in a way that fits very well with Jim’s idea that “the superhero story is the literature of ethics.”

The show is obviously and, at times, derivatively post-Buffy. It runs the same “supernatural metaphors mapped onto adolescent experience” schtick, replacing the Hellmouth with kryptonite meteors as an explanation for the strange goings-on. But what really puts the show on a rung below Buffy is the fact that neither its characters nor its actors are anywhere in the league of folks like Willow, Xander, and Giles.

Except Lex. Lex Luthor in Smallville is a striking, sad, and intricate character, brilliantly played by Michael Rosenbaum. We know the villain he’ll become, but it’s clear that that path will be a tragic arc—right now he’s the spoiled rich kid just trying, like Clark, to find his own sense of self, in his case out from under the thumb of his father, the Bad Businessman. He alone makes the show worthwhile at some points, rather like how scenes with Londo Mollari would redeem an otherwise mediocre Babylon 5 episode.

Smallville doesn’t have dialogue that’s as clever as Buffy (though it’s very good), or that show’s wonderful fantasy setting, but its plots are tighter and (comparing season 1 to season 1 so far) more elegant. The pilot is masterful, and the following three episodes are solid fun. Having Clark only gradually discover his powers is a great narrative device, because the audience knows all the things he’ll eventually be able to do and can’t wait to see exactly how it all plays out. I can already see the stuff that threatens to get old about the show, though. Having kryptonite scattered everywhere thanks to the meteor shower is both a brilliant idea for balancing out Clark’s powers as well as a plot crutch waiting to be overused. But the thing that will make the show hardest to stick with is not even a weakness: I’m not the target audience. Buffy was a high school show written for adults thinking back on their rotten high school experiences; if actual adolescents loved it was a happy accident, they were unusually sophisticated, or they were just swooning over David Boreanaz and/or Sarah Michelle Gellar. Smallville, by contrast, is very much geared toward the teenybopper set. There are plenty of emotional moments that don’t click at all now, but that I know would have just killed me when I was fifteen. And I’m a little old at this point to get excited about a wall-sized poster of young Lana Lang. Still, such is the fate of those who favor the groundbreaking, imaginative, quirky sorts of shows that network TV would never touch. (Babylon 5, Buffy, Firefly, Smallville—insert your own favorites.) Loving them is always a little bit of a labor of love, but always worth it.

Ah! So this is the plan, then. I’ll unveil Smallville for Ella when she’s fourteen, and save Buffy for when she’s eighteen. It goes without saying that whatever’s airing on TV at that time will be unwatchable crap . . .

If I haven’t piped up with much backgammon news lately, it’s not because I haven’t been playing — just not playing very often. But the relative decline in mindshare taken by the game of kings increased again with my Christmas present from Suanna: “Backgammon”:http://www.gammoned.com/books/magriel.html by Paul Magriel. This book is rightly referred to as the Backgammon Bible, and while certain later texts (like Robertie’s) are generally understood to improve on Magriel in certain aspects of advanced play, _Backgammon_ is unmatched as a comprehensive and well-written survey of the game’s strategy.

Getting the opportunity to read the book had started to become an obsession for me. It’s out of print, so you have to get it used or direct from the author. French, a good friend and frequent backgammon opponent whom I’ve “mentioned before”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000075.html, got a copy of Magriel a while back but has been judiciously keeping it to himself. After losing badly at “the club”:http://www.polytropos.org/web/backgammon.html on occasional Mondays, I would often say to myself “Man. I have _got_ to read Magriel.”

In Michigan I only read the first half, which is a survey of basic strategy that for me was pretty much review. Even so, having read it a part of me felt somehow enlightened — empowered, even. This feeling lasted only until I actually got to play the game again back at “The Grounds”:http://www.commongroundsarlington.com/ against Steve, who decimated me ruthlessly. Turns out — surprise! — that as with any game, playing a lot and staying in practice is far more important than anything you can learn from a book.

My New Year slump ended Sunday afternoon — sort of. French, Steve, and I headed up to Bethesda to compete in the bi-monthly tournament of the “Beltway Backgammon Club”:http://www.beltwaybg.org/. The matches were longer and the play more intense than at the Virginia Club, our usual haunt, so I was very pleased to go two and two. Steve even won the loser’s bracket and took home a bit of money. Far more satisfying than that, though, were the money games I played on the side, where I netted a total of twenty, ah, “points” against French. Both experiences reinforced what I’ve known for a while: my checker play is pretty solid, but I’m still a rank novice when it comes to understanding the subtleties of the cube. The big mistakes I made in the tournament — at least, the ones I was aware of — all involved mishandling of the doubling cube.

I still have that second half of Magriel to plow through — that must be where all the truly powerful backgammon lore is hid. If I can just finish the book, _then_ I’ll be unstoppable. Yeah. That’s it.

I’m a sucker for the Oscars. It’s a form of masochism. The movies I want to win never seem to win, and even the nominations never quite get it right. But I still tune in faithfully every year, even an hour early to watch the stars strut down the carpet. It’s my one capitulation to the American cult of celebrity.

Nominations are out today, and while there are many nominated films I haven’t seen, I won’t let that stop me from nattering. This year, it’s all about _The Return of the King_, both for its intrinsic merits and because _The Lord of the Rings_ has yet to be recognized by the Academy in a meaningful way. I thought that each of the previous films deserved the Oscar for Best Picture, especially _Fellowship_, making the past two Oscar nights particularly painful. This time, finally, hoping for a LOTR win isn’t entirely unreasonable.

On to the categories!

*Actor in a Leading Role*

Johnny Depp — _Pirates of the Caribbean_
Ben Kingsley — _House of Sand and Fog_
Jude Law — _Cold Mountain_
Bill Murray — _Lost in Translation_
Sean Penn — _Mystic River_

I’m only 2 for 5 in this category, and I’d be happy with either Murray or Penn winning. Slight edge to Murray. Baseless prediction: Sean Penn. I do plan to see both _Pirates_ and _Cold Mountain_, so all this may change.

*Actor in a Supporting Role*

Alec Baldwin — _The Cooler_
Benicio Del Toro — _21 Grams_
Djimon Hounsou — _In America_
Tim Robbins — _Mystic River_
Ken Watanabe — _The Last Samurai_

Where the deuce is Sean Astin? Samwise Gamgee is the very definition of a “supporting role.” He deserves the win here and he doesn’t even get nominated. I hereby boycott the category.

*Actress in a Leading Role*

Keisha Castle-Hughes — _Whale Rider_
Diane Keaton — _Something’s Gotta Give_
Samantha Morton — _In America_
Charlize Theron — _Monster_
Naomi Watts — _21 Grams_

Yikes! 0 for 5! I’ll keep my mouth shut, except to say that I know a lot of people who were big fans of _Whale Rider_ and will be delighted that that actress got a nod.

*Actress in a Supporting Role*

Shohreh Aghdashloo — _House of Sand and Fog_
Patricia Clarkson — _Pieces of April_
Marcia Gay Harden — _Mystic River_
Holly Hunter — _Thirteen_
Renee Zellweger — _Cold Mountain_

1 out of 5. Prediction: Renee Zellweger, based on _Cold Mountain_ trailers.

*Cinematography*

_City of God_
_Cold Mountain_
_Girl with a Pearl Earring_
_Master and Commander_
_Seabiscuit_

_Excuse_ me?! Where the heck is _Return of the King_? The cinematography was one of the best things about the film. Another boycott. Humph.

*Directing*

_City of God_
_The Return of the King_
_Lost in Translation_
_Master and Commander_
_Mystic River_

At last, we get to the categories I really care about. It is more important to me that Peter Jackson win this award than that _Return of the King_ win Best Picture — but it’s also less likely to happen. Haven’t seen _City_. _Master_ was fun but has no business in this category. Clint probably has another Oscar-worthy movie in him, but _Mystic_ isn’t quite it. I wouldn’t whine if Sophia won for _Lost in Translation_, though.

*Writing (Adapted Screenplay)*

_American Splendor_
_City of God_
_The Return of the King_
_Mystic River_
_Seabiscuit_

Given its “glaring omissions and bad cuts”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/000222.html, I’m not convinced that _King_ should win this one. I think perhaps I’ll have to watch this _City of God_ flick and find out what the big deal is before deciding/predicting.

*Writing (Original Screenplay)*

_The Barbarian Invasions_
_Dirty Pretty Things_
_Finding Nemo_
_In America_
_Lost in Translation_

Go _Translation_! I’ll stick with that even though I haven’t yet seen three of the others. Nice to see an animated picture get some attention here.

*Best Picture*

_The Return of the King_
_Lost in Translation_
_Master and Commander_
_Mystic River_
_Seabiscuit_

Obviously, if _King_ doesn’t win here I’m swearing off the Oscars forever. It’s both my pick and my prediction. The only one in the same league is _Lost in Translation_, which is what I’d probably be gunning for in a Tolkien-less world. What’s most alarming about this category is what’s missing — I thought _Cold Mountain_ was supposed to be all that? _Master_ and _Seabiscuit_ both strike me as “Pick me! Pick me!” movies that don’t really have any business being nominated here.

Updates to follow as I get a chance to see the movies I haven’t seen yet. Then again, in past years I’ve always seen fewer of those than I mean to, and that was pre-parenthood. Time will tell.

Thinking about the upcoming primary and election put me in mind of the last presidential election. I went back to reread something I had written the day George W. was inaugurated, when I had gone into DC to wander around and take notes on what I saw. (Pity I didn’t have a digital camera back then.) It’s amazing to think of all that’s changed in the intervening years. I plan to make some more comments eventually that springboard off of my observations from back then, so I’m including the old essay below. I’m being just a little self-indulgent in doing so, since it’s only the last two paragraphs that I’m really going to be using; you can safely skip past all the descriptive stuff to those if you like.

Inauguration Day

George W. Bush got himself inaugurated last Saturday, at the end of an all-too-ordinary campaign and an all-too-unusual post-campaign struggle. Given the prospect of celebration happening alongside protest, the fundamental grinding of conflicting ideologies at the epicenter of world politics, I wanted to be there. It was just across the river, after all.

I had an opportunity to get an actual ticket to the Inauguration Ceremony itself, but passed that up. I was more interested in what would be going on at the periphery, among the protest and boundary lines. But I wasn’t going as a protester myself, either. As nervous as I am about Bush being President, I didn’t share either the visceral emotion or the perspective of those who, for example, were holding up signs that simply said “COUP.”

I went to watch, to see what I might see, and in wandering around the Mall area (in an extraordinarily wide arc, given the barriers) I saw a lot. Here are some highlights.

The Metro ride there, in a way, said it all best. The city was filled with partisans of both stripes and precious few people in between. The car I rode in was two-thirds filled with Bush supporters. The rest were bound for the protests. I was amazed at the degree to which they were readily identifiable by clothing and appearance.

The Bushies: Short hair, clean-cut, often with primary-color windbreakers. Walking advertisements for L.L. Bean. One guy was showing his “Luana Hills Golf Course” cap to his friends, talking about how cool it was to be golfing in Hawaii. A significant Bushie subset were the Texas Aristos: generally older, with guys in suits and ladies in fur, fur, and more fur. A smaller subset were the Russ’ Restaurant crowd: the Midwesterners in dowdier clothing, often carrying pro-Bush signs and wearing t-shirts with slogans.

The Antibushies: Long hair, scruffy, granola. Many woolen sweaters and sandals. Lots of pierced skin. Mostly college-age or in their 20’s. The main subset: African-American protestors, mostly middle-aged women. Nearly everyone with a sign of one kind or another.

I’m stereotyping here, but only a little. Both on the Metro and wandering around the Mall, I’d say the above descriptions, taken together, accounted for 80% of the crowd. One exception was two grey-haired women not far from me who ended up sitting across from each other. They could have been sisters, but one of them was clearly with some Bushies and the other had a “Hail to the Thief” t-shirt on. There was an awkward silence in that part of the train at that moment. The Bushie lady broke it.

“Is that about Jack Kennedy in 1960?” she asked.

“No, it’s for Bush—you know, the one who didn’t get the popular vote?” the other replied.

The Bushie lady nodded. “Well, maybe we can work on changing the system now. But what’s done is done.” She smiled in an awkward way, clearly trying to avoid a sense of tension. They looked at each other for a moment, each of them perhaps reaching for some common ground. But there was nothing. They probably led hauntingly parallel lives back home, but that day the gulf between them was immense, insurmountable. They both looked away.

Just outside the Metro, a throng of African-American and Latino teenagers were loudly peddling “W Stands for Winner” t-shirts.

Not far from there was a Bushie counter-protestor, of a sort. He was taking great pleasure in standing on the counter and periodically shouting, victoriously, “Al Who?”

A brief rant: It’s the attitude symbolized in that statement that irks me the most. Even though Bush was elected under dubious circumstances without the majority of the country behind him, many of his supporters are proceeding with a disturbing degree of smugness—indeed, a tangible sense of entitlement. Worse, “Al Who?” carries some weight of truth—the media has for the most part left Gore behind, and the coverage of the protests that I saw treated it more as an occasionally-disruptive curiosity than one of the vital poles of a nationwide debate.

I came across the second most profound juxtaposition of the day on Independence Avenue across from the Botanical Gardens. A bunch of protestors clustered there, and a charasmatic young guy with a goatee paced back and forth with a loudspeaker, reciting a litany of grievances against Bush, the Supreme Court, Republicans, and John Ashcroft. He was building to a climax as deftly as any pulpit-pounding preacher, with the words “I love my country! I love democracy! But today that democracy has been stolen from us! I cannot accept this man as my President! And I will not rest and I will not be silent!” At that exact moment, the loudspeakers from the Inauguration Ceremony a hundred yards away were blaring the National Anthem. Behind him, a small cluster of Bushies who must not have had tickets to the ceremony put their hands over their hearts and glared at loudspeaker guy. Right in front of him, half a dozen tourists captured every word and gesture with handheld video cameras.

The plaza in front of the Supreme Court was jam-packed with protesters, mostly African-Americans. A few nervous policemen tried to keep the sidewalk open for those just passing by. But the whole scene was eerily muffled by the presence of a dozen huge tourist buses idling loudly on the street. I’m sure it was just an unfortunate coincidence, but if I was into conspiracy theories, I’d theorize that the buses had deliberately been parked there in order to drown out the protests.

Here and elsewhere, I was mistaken for a reporter while standing to the side and scribbling observations into my notebook.

“Are you with the Washington Times?” one guy asked.

“No.”

“The Post?”

“No, I’m not a reporter.”

He looked skeptically at my notebook. Then he asked ominously, “Are you an agent?”

“Nope, not that either,” I replied, though I should have said “Agent of what?” For his part he must have concluded that I was a reporter, because he gave me his card and started talking about who he was with and the nature of their protest (“The Texas Racist”), filling in for me the questions I wasn’t asking him.

The periphery of the Mall was filled with innumerable anti-Bush slogans and logos. “Hail to the Thief” was the most common, though “Selection Not Election” was also very popular. The endless variations on the same core puns got old rather quickly. Consequently, when I passed by some guys in scarlet shirts that simply read “FUCK BUSH” in black letters, it was refreshing.

By the Capitol, a Texas Aristo lady in fur and heels was trying to cross a street crowded with protestors. After unsuccessfully trying to make headway through the throng, she took a step back and bellowed: “Would you PLEASE get out of my WAY!” Every fiber of her being quivered with annoyance.

Problems like that were rampant along the parade route on Pennsylvania Avenue. I got down there well before the parade to look around, but after a short time things started getting very, very crowded. The cops had blocked off streets so that there were only certain access points to the route, plus the bleachers created a lot of bottlenecks on the sidewalk. Even before the parade attendees started streaming in en masse, it was sardine-crowded. The weather up until that point had been wet and miserable, but a full drizzle kicked in to make it even worse.

Which brings me to the most profound juxtaposition of the day: on the sidewalk, protestors, dripping, huddled, halfheartedly belting out their slogans in the face of the weather. Occasionally, cops jogging by in formation (wearing “soft” riot gear) to attend to a particular hotspot. But above it all, on the second and third and fourth floors of the office buildings and hotels, Bushies in suits stood watching through big bay windows in one of dozens of private viewing areas rented out for the occasion. Sipping wine. Peering bemusedly at the chaos below.

I had to clear out of there before the parade got started. Claustrophobia. But when I finally got free of the crowd, I was consumed with a desire to beat the system—to get into one of those tall buildings and find some un-rented window view of the parade. In short, I wanted to infiltrate.

Main entrances were out of the question – there were security guards at the doors and people taking tickets or invitations to whatever exclusive gathering was going on in the upper stories. But buildings have many entrances. I slipped into the parking garage of the Marriott and from there through an inconspicuous double door leading to a maintenance tunnel of some kind. From there I tried—oh, I tried—to find something that would get me up and into the building past the security checkpoints. And I almost succeeded. I found a service elevator that fit the bill perfectly, but the hotel had covered their bases—it was locked down. I also found a fire escape stairwell that wound all the way to the top, but each and every door leading out was locked. No exceptions.

By that time, back outside, it was raining even more and the parade still hadn’t started. I decided to call it a day, and headed home.

I don’t know what conclusions to draw from all these impressions. On the one hand, I don’t agree with the protestors about a lot. I’m not happy that Bush is President, but I don’t see it as a failure of democracy. A failure of supposedly-impartial judicial institutions, yes. A failure of Gore’s political campaign, sure. And Bush has certainly angered me since, nominating a depressingly partisan and old-school batch of Cabinet members in the face of his pledges for unity and non-divisiveness. But the system worked. Messily, lurchingly, sometimes unsatisfactorily, but it worked.

On the other hand, the protestors’ fundamental right to do what they were doing was challenged and belittled at every turn. The media coverage I saw didn’t reflect the extent or the passion or the sheer presence of the protests. And I heard and saw far too many Bushies, awash in their sense of entitlement, angry at the very presence of the protests, refusing to acknowledge their right to be there or the profound issues that they represent, however extremely.

For those who do object not only to Bush’s politics but to his very legitimacy, it’s going to be hard to stay present in the public eye for two or four years. But I think it’s important that they do. This inauguration was not ritual-as-usual. Its circumstances were unique in American history. I am eager—and very curious—to see how the American people will comment on it all the next time we all head for the polls.

* Josh Marshall has a good “New Yorker article”:http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?040202crat_atlarge on the American empire.
* “Eve Tushnet”:http://eve-tushnet.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_eve-tushnet_archive.html#107484497646215295 ruminates after a long-overdue first reading of _Watchmen_, and “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2004_01_25.html#004983 has an excellent response that drifts into a broader consideration of the role of superhero fiction:

And of course the core question, “what could possibly make [volunteer firemen] think that it was worthwhile to risk their own lives to save others,” can be spun and flipped in a number of important ways. From _Why do firemen do what they do?_ to _Why don’t the rest of us do what they do?_ to _Why shouldn’t the rest of us do what they do?_ and even _What right do we have_ not _to do what they do?_ To me, superheroes become an interesting way of addressing these questions. I would argue that, if science fiction is the literature of ideas, the superhero story is the literature of ethics. Or say, rather, _it should be_.

* “Ed Hand”:http://homepage.mac.com/edahand/iblog/B1323778479/C1181413705/E1681227363/index.html comments on the new “Firefly”:http://www2.foxhome.com/firefly/ DVD. This prompted me to wonder why I hadn’t received my copy yet, which I ordered from Amazon a while ago. This in turn led to the discovery that I _hadn’t_ actually ordered it, but only marked it to buy later. Now it _is_ ordered — look for mucho Firely talk in a couple weeks.
* Via “Ed Heil”:http://ed.puddingbowl.org/archives/001821.html via “Beth Wheeler”:http://soli.inav.net/~penfold/, this gem: “The Lord of the Rings: A Source-Criticism Analysis”:http://www.mark-shea.com/LOTR.html. Priceless.
* Hearty congratulations to Michael Hall of “Puddingtime!”:http://www.puddingbowl.org/archives/stork/001816.php on the birth of a healthy baby boy, Benjamin Arthur Dunfree Hall. (I’ll be sure to steal that name the next time I’m in a Call of Cthulu game.) 10 lbs., 4 oz., 22″, to which I can only say: holy crap!
* UPDATE: Everyone will be happy to learn “the real story behind the Blizzard of ’96”:http://www.biblenews1.com/history3/20030216.htm. Hat tip to alert reader Bryan, who stumbled on the info while searching for ‘washing dc snowstorms.’

I’ve been puzzled by the large uptick in hits that Polytropos has been getting from Google the past couple of weeks; only today did I examine the logs in enough detail to figure out what was going on. Hundreds and hundreds of people have found my Gencon entry by doing a Google “image search”:http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q= on the word “bikini.” This is because one of the pictures I posted was the requisite shot of a woman in a chainmail bikini, which I named “bikini.jpg”. That picture made it up to page two of the search results.

Something tells me that people who find the site via a bikini search aren’t likely to stick around for the articles, as it were. So I took the picture off, though I can’t quite believe I’m doing something in order to _reduce_ traffic to this site.

If you’re reading _this_ entry because of a search for bikini pictures on the Internet: get a life! Well, maybe not a _life_ exactly, but: read blogs! Start “here”:http://www.polytropos.org, or, if you’re put off by my shameless self-promotion, “here”:http://slacktivist.typepad.com/ or “here”:http://www.highclearing.com/.

I was watching CSPAN while giving Ella a bottle just now; they were showing John Kerry mingling with supporters somewhere in New Hampshire. He was clearly feeling under the weather, but nevertheless talked one on one with dozens of people, each with their own individual problems or comments. He posed for pictures. He answered questions. And it struck me: what’s this nonsense about him being “wooden?” Here he is, obviously exhausted, and he can still work a crowd with the best of them. Of _course_ he can: he wouldn’t have made it this far if he couldn’t.

This goes for everybody else, too. Kerry isn’t wooden. Gore wasn’t a robot. Dean isn’t angry, either, and Bush isn’t stupid. Heck, I saw Lieberman on CSPAN a few months ago doing the same sort of thing as Kerry, and even _he_ was impressive. They all do have their individual tics, their strengths and weaknesses, but if they didn’t have that weird ability to _connect_ to perfect strangers, they wouldn’t be in this business in the first place. We do all candidates a disservice by judging them by their performances in front of the bright lights, and by going along with the shorthand evaluations that a culture of sound bites inevitably creates. In a perfect world each citizen would be able to look each candidate in the eye; as it is, everyone should watch them mingle with the crowds on CSPAN. You’ll learn a lot.