Tonight when Al Gore went up to the podium with Davis Guggenheim and company to accept the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, it must've been sweet for the former veep and presidential candidate who won the popular and probably the electoral vote in 2000, but conceded the election and failed to become President, something he has the unimaginable composure to joke about.

He's been riding a formidable wave with An Inconvenient Truth, not having to measure up to campaign expectations, not answerable to any party, poll or caucus, making a difference outside the Beltway that probably eclipses the effectiveness he could have had within it. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are also making enormous humanitarian and geo-political strides as freelance social crusaders. But Gore, he became an issue icon, a movie star, an environmental champion, a vindicated gladiator in the case against a global warming that the powers that be heretofore denied or trivialized.

This film is an outstanding tribute to redemption in the realm of social activism and the world of movies and in the story of a great, politically pedigreed and well-positioned American who just wasn't destined to become President of the United States when he ran.

"He is more popular now than he ever was in office, and he knows it," says Laurie David, one of the producers of Inconvenient Truth and a Hollywood environmental activist (and wife of "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David) who has traveled around the world promoting the film with Gore. "He's a superhero now."

[...snip]

An Inconvenient Truth was not on anybody's short list for theatrical release, let alone an Oscar. "I think I was the only person crazy enough to want it," says John Lesher, president of Paramount Vantage, which purchased the film at Sundance. "Everybody else had already passed on it..."

from Al Gore International Rock Star (WaPo via MSNBC)

An Inconvenient Truth was the first movie I saw when I returned permanently to American soil in July after living abroad for almost 4 years. I saw it in a small theatre in Greenwich Village with my sister during Independence Day week. I wasn't at all surprised at how well done and well intentioned it was, but I was amazed at how really good it was. And how impressive Gore, who was one of the most boring and fumble-mouthed campaigners ever to run for office, performed. He knew who he was up there and for any of us who ever wondered, we now know who he is, too. This documentary is no ordinary little indie movie. It has earned $45 million worldwide and sold a million DVDs. It doesn't just have legs. It has clout.

So all the A-list and wing-wag buzz these past few days, besides Maureen Dowd's devastating piece on that rascal David Geffen, who's fete-ing a Barak Obama multi-million dollar fundraiser, irresponsibly and gratuitiously mouthing off on his former cronies the Clintons, is: if Gore's movie wins the Oscar (director Guggenheim is the winner of record, not Gore himself) should he go for the Democratic nomination to run again for President? In fact, Leonardo diCaprio fed Gore a straight line, asking him if he had anything to announce. Obviously scripted, the music drowned out Gore's answer. Frankly, it fell flat. I think it was a sign. But Gore's addendum to Guggenheim's acceptance speech, imploring involvement and action, was brilliant.

I personally doubt Gore would or should seek the nomination. I think it would be a step down for him. Hillary Clinton represents one generation, Barak Obama appeals to another, but Gore, he's got it all. I hope he campaigns for whomever the Democratc nominee turns out to be and I hope he has significant impact on the environmental policy of the next administration. He's already won a more important race.

An Inconvenient Truth
Featuring: Al Gore
DIRECTOR: Davis Guggenheim
EDITOR: Jay Lash Cassidy and Dan Swietlik
DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount Vantage

Congratulations, all. And no small measure of sincere thanks.

Today is Andy Warhol's birthday as well as George Washington's birthday, and the coincidental natalities bookend the father of a revolutionary country and the father of the country's revolutionary post-modern Pop art.

George Washington inspired a lot of paintings, most famously George Washington Crossing the Delaware, one of the most recognizable paintings in the world, as well as one of the largest, at 12 by 21 feet. It is on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This link is a treasure, if you've got a moment and a decent internet connection, go explore one of my favorite haunts.

The Met is where I spent many hours moping and musing as a teenager and young adult--hours that shaped and changed me as well as inspired and comforted a troubled youth. It was there that I learned to savor and cherish art and learned to value and serve the creativity in myself.

My art is in words and ideas, I have little visual art skill to speak of, but artists, much to my enrichment, have always constellated around my life. I've been fascinated and informed by them, the master mime and line-drawing guy in New York, the painter in Prague,the jewelry designer studying painting in Amsterdam, the man who carves dragons in Bolinas and countless others.


Art is a nourishing and transcendent pastime, and I am recommending to you today, to take a moment anywhere you are, to look around and let your eyes rest on a piece of art, let it occupy and transport you and stimulate you to see something, anything, anywhere--even your own face--in a way you've not seen it before. Which is part of the appeal of Andy Warhol, who fomented as much controversy as product, but in the end left us all looking at things differently.

Perspective is everything.

RE-UPDATE
China Digital Times now runs a correction saying this video is from 2002 and Danwei has a post on how not only CC, but the Washington Post--apparently-- propagated CTD's chronological error regarding this video. Jeremy, whom I know personally, usually makes more sense than anyone, and he offers a fine and elegantly measured argument against sourcing blogs without citing the source, and the perplexities of Chinese translations. CDT is indeed a blog, out of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

UPDATE: I learned from China Herald, who caught the item a day before we did, that this is an old video, posted in May of last year, not from this year's party, regardless of what CDT announced. One of his readers recognized it. So my bad, my point, somewhat obsolete, stands and I apologize for propagating some old news as if it were new.
===========================xxx========================

In the U.S., CCTV means closed-circuit TV. In China, it means China Central TV. Not as big a disparity as language might indicate.

I stole this from China Digital Times, but it's too good not to pass on. I took part in several CCTV shows, staff on one show, guest several times on another, while I was in Beijing, and experienced firsthand the secret frustration of some of the most talented and conscientious of their young on-camera and production people. I was the confidante of one of their most popular talents when that major personality quit in disgust to take a high-paying job in the private sector.

Here's a satire that pretty much where's the beefs of all journalists who truly want to be journalists in China's state-overseen news media, which is a bit slow on the uptake in the reform department, that is, moving from propaganda to creative, accurate and critical reportage. As we can see, it's not for a lack of talent.

According to CDT, this was recorded at an in-house celebration for Spring Festival (the holiday period over the Chinese New Year) but I am willing to bet the farm that the "big potatoes" at CCTV won't like this being broadcast worldwide. One of the pleasures of sharing it. I'm sure I won't be the only blogger to do so. (But by dint of the fact that most of my blogging colleagues in China are sleeping right now, I might be one of the first.)

Video below.
The following are excerpts from the CCTV performers' lyrics, translated by CDT:

No news shows are not truthful
No information is not timely
No programs are not excellent
No audiences are not loyal
No interviews are not comprehensive
No recordings are not lively
No perspectives are not brand new
No live broadcasts are not done perfectly.

All these years we could only do what we've been told
Tonight let's be the master for once.

No national conferences are not successful
No sports games are not intensive
No official speeches are not important
No applause is not a thunderstorm
No festivals are not celebratory
No diplomatic meetings are not friendly
No participation is not enthusiastic
No performances are not award-winning

Oh go to hell, let's quit
Many thousands time we ask ourselves, is this the kind of life any human being can stand?

If you can't see it here, go directly to YouTube to view

I know a lot of writers and aspiring writers come here, so I thought you might like to look over the shoulder of my morning coffee and me pondering some of the lessons from the writers' book of life.

Readers of [Tom] Bissell's new book will find themselves in another foreign place--Vietnam. Like "Chasing the Sea", "The Father of all Things" began as an article. In 2003, Bissell was sitting down for dinner with Devin Friedman--an editor at GQ who wanted him to write for the magazine--wracking his brain for story ideas. [snip] Then he started telling Friedman about his father and Vietnam, how it shaped him and affected his life and how he thought of going back there.

That, Friedman said, is what he should write about. So, on assignment from the magazine, Bissel and his dad returned to Vietnam later that year, where the two of them traveled from place to place. [snip] Along the way, Bissell tried to make sense of the time and place that made his dad who he is. It was a long, moving piece of literary journalism.

GQ killed it.

"When they killed it," Bissell remembers, "I was in total despair about the piece. I thought I had totally whiffed. So I sent it to Harper's really sheepishly. I sent them the third draft. I'd gotten up to eight drafts with GQ and it kept getting worse and worse. I just hated the whole process. It was awful. So I sent Harper's the third draft, which was the only draft I really liked and they said they'd run it as is."

"War Wounds" was published in the December 2004 issue of Harpers and Bissell says it generated a bigger response than anything he's ever written. It was chosen for The Best American Travel Writing 2005 and became one of the few nonfiction pieces ever read on NPR's Selected Shorts.

Funny how something you don't even intend to read turns out to be so en-pointe.

I read that in Poets & Writers Magazine, March/Arpil 2007, "All the Things he did Not Know" by Frank Bures. (not in the online ed.)

I'm in the library, reading an intervew in the paper edition (remember those?) learning that Larry Ferlinghetti came to San Francisco from Paris where he was getting his doctorate at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill (do I hear the clinking of irony maidens?). He's talking about how he considers himself the last of the Bohemians, not really a Beat poet. So much for those who say he's the last of the Beats.

I arrived in San Francisco four years before Allen Ginsberg and the Beats did. I was still wearing my French beret.

Two for the notes-book. Thanks for joining me.

Or why I only upgrade if I have to.

So last week when I logged into Blogger, which is changing it's operation over to a new format upon being sold to Google, I got a message that I had to migrate to the new format. I'd been invited to do so for weeks, but declined. But they were pre-emptively moving users over in batches and my number was up. I didn't really have a choice. So I configured my new login information, posted my last post and was done with it.

Done is the operative word. Done for might be a better choice. For the last three days I've been trying to log back in to Blogger and was greeted by terminally slow and partial loading--which completely prevented access to updating and maintaining Crackpot Chronicles. Today, using tricks I learned as a self-styled geek, I back-doored my way in and finally got the Blogger interface to work. If this post publishes, that is.

I had some jaunty posts in mind during that dead time. A letter-perfect graf by MoDo (Maureen Dowd) skewering Bush's Iraq policies that practically smoked. Some comments on how anti-war demonstrations have recently taken on a revived fervor and credibility. Some quirky Maine anecdotes. I've lost my zest for these--blogging being the of-the-moment phenomenon that it is. All because Blogger was terminally balky due to unresolved and probably unforeseen problems in ramping up the new version.

I've worked in the software biz and I know how product is rolled out without as thorough a testing as might be necessary and how goofy surprises often accompany even a robustly tested update. My brother is a reporter on the consumer electronics beat. When I griped to him about some of what seemed to me stupid design flaws in a recent gadget acquisition, he shrugged and replied "rush to market." He's a much better sport about it than I am.

Which brings me to Windoze Vista, the latest incarnation of Microsoft Windows. I've seen the TV spots, read the reviews and articles and it sure looks nifty. But me, I won't touch it with a fork until I have to and under no circumstances would I ever "upgrade" to a 1.0 version of anything I care about. Unless it was your machine and you paid me to.

How do you like this story about an entire country that's about to get nailed by Vista?

Earlier this week Slashdot linked to a lengthy post by Gen Kenai detailing the sorry saga of a country completely in thrall to the Microsoft monoculture -- South Korea. Due to a series of decisions made way back in the late 1990s, Korean computer users managed to lock themselves into a situation where today, if they want to complete an online transaction, they are entirely dependent on Microsoft. It's bad enough that this means Apple and Linux users are a minuscule minority. But what's even worse is that Microsoft Vista, set to launch within days in Korea, doesn't work well with the old Active X technology that is ubiquitous in Korea.

So suppose you decide to buy Microsoft Vista, perhaps in conjunction with a new computer that is powerful enough to run Vista, but then you suddenly discover that you cannot bank or purchase online or do anything else that requires secure encryption. It's kooky, a huge number of people in Korea are justifiably outraged, and lawsuits are beginning to fly.

From How The World Works on Salon.com, which you'll need a subscription for to read more than one article on a day-pass.

I don't patch my Windows, having been burned once by incompatibilities. I don't upgrade my browser, relying, successfully, I might add--knock wood--on my antivirus and personal firewall software, which I do update. I've only been burned once. I am the only person I know to have suffered a Y2K crash--on an old Windows 95 laptop, which was well backed up and successfully restored. But I can wait for Windows Vista and it can wait for me.