The Dawn of the Dead/Passion of the Christ Joke. I predicted here that Jon Stewart would go for the ready-made joke about Dawn of the Dead getting the better of The Passion of the Christ at the box office over the weekend. And that it would be "carefully crafted." That is, he wouldn't pass up the material, but he also wouldn't be offensive. The Daily Show writers would wield their great writing skills to surgically extract the usable joke. Here it is:

The Passion of the Christ, after three weekends, got knocked out of the number one movie in America slot. The honor now belongs to: Dawn of the Dead. What it says is this. While Americans enjoy a good resurrection movie, a good movie about one man who rises from the grave, what America has said is: the more people rising from the grave, the better. So that’s really the issue here. It wasn’t the story about religion and its glory. It’s really just dead people coming to life—whether they heal the sick … or eat brains.

Well done! The key was to make it into a joke about how crass our interests are, which really could even have worked as an idea for a sermon.

Madison, weekend. I don't understand sports enough to explain the presence of greenness in redville this weekend. I don't think it was leftover St. Patrick's day, but something about basketball ... or hula.

It got cold again, all blustery, but there was this lovely sign of spring, the first food cart on Library Mall.

And State Street Brats was just waiting for the sports fans to arrive and engage in revelry presided over by those kindred spirits, Bucky Badger and Miss Liberty.

Boo to American Airlines for demanding that one of my sons get off the plane going from O'Hare to Madison at 9 o'clock at night because the plane was overweight. I know there are real safety concerns about weight and removing one person may make a difference and a little weight really does matter on those small planes, but at 9 o'clock at night, with no later flight to take, couldn't you offer more freebies until you get a volunteer? Two people did volunteer, but American only needed to kick off one person and so it would only offer one of these two the measly $200 travel certificate, and the two volunteers didn't want to split up. So one of my sons had to leave, to get the next bus to Madison, at 11 pm, and arrive at the Memorial Union at 2 am--on a cold night, with no shelter open, and nothing warm to wear, because he hadn't worn a coat in Austin, and his luggage had traveled on the plane.

Many passengers on the plane witnessed how rudely my sons were treated and at least one came up afterwards to say how offended he was and how he was going to write a letter to the airline about it. What I simply cannot understand is: 1. If you are going to do something like this at least be scrupulously polite while you're doing it (instead, the method used was: if you don't leave right now, we'll still make you leave and you won't even get the $200 certificate!) and 2. Try much harder to get volunteers (for a second $200 travel certificate, the two volunteers would have left willingly, and everyone else on the plane would have kept a positive opinion about the airline; instead, many people felt really bad about the airline). By the way, I think I would have volunteered in that situation, because the idea of a small plane at its weight limit scares me. That's another reason why they should go for volunteers: pressuring someone makes everyone feel anxious and subject of the dangerous weight of the plane has got to make for some exquisitely bad feeling aboard!

It's interesting that there were seats for everyone on the plane, but the weight didn't add up right. Do you think in that situation the airline ought to pick on the heaviest passengers? Actually, I don't. Yet if I were in that situation, seeing someone being pressured off the plane because of the weight of the plane--especially someone obviously under the 185 weight airlines assume people weigh--I'd be glancing around at passengers to see who was bringing the most weight on the plane and thinking uncharitable thoughts. But that's one more reason why the airline should escalate the inducements until they get a volunteer.

UPDATE: The certificate was for $250, not $200.

AND JUST TO BE CLEAR: The airline was not singling out the heaviest passengers--my sons are way under 185. My point is that if the plane is overweight and that someone is going to have to leave, a certain common sense suggests asking the heaviest person to leave. One person is inconvenienced, either way, but the maximum weight is removed. If you see them trying to oust a thin person, don't you tend to think they ought to be going after somebody big? But they don't, for whatever reason. Fear of lawsuits? Desire not to seem mean? But they were mean!

CHRIS ADDS:

A couple points you missed on the blog about the American Airlines thing:

1) Three or four women working the gate inside the airport knew, and told John and me, that the airplane was overloaded, and even while it was being delayed never made a single announcement that it was overloaded. They knowingly overloaded the plane because they were too lazy to make an announcement over the loadspeaker that they needed a volunteer.

2) What they should do, if they're going to FORCE someone off the plane, is single out the person who checked the heaviest bag. They have that information--they weigh every single checked bag--and they could easily do it that way, something based on weight, without insulting people for being fat. Instead, they got rid of a thin guy, left all the [heaviest people] on the plane, and even left his bag on the plane.

Also, people inside the plane yelled at the guy for not allowing the couple that volunteered to leave the plane. Plus, they were completely unapologetic and even threatening towards us from beginning to end!

Overblogging. Clearly, I was overblogging on Saturday and Sunday, fueled by the return of my iBook and the fun of figuring out my new camera. The wireless café access and accompanying coffee was part of the phenomenon. And the end of Spring Break ... and my sons being away in Austin.

"Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, thank you so much--you've been just lovely--a real knock out." That's Prince, at the Hall of Fame show. He gives a great performance--and changes the words to Kiss:

"You don't have to watch Sex and the City to have an attitude."

Oh, but good Lord, the intro is stilted and prolonged. Alicia Keys seems to be auditioning for a movie role, so earnestly emoting her way through the teleprompter script.

"He's the inspiration that generations will return to until the end of time."

I love Prince, but that's just stupid. Keys should have refused to say those idiotic lines. Ah, what the hell. There's always been something incoherent about the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame. And good old Prince is still raving about freedom and spirituality, God bless him.

I hope Tonya TiVoed the adorable Dave Matthews intro for Traffic. ... There really is something wondrous about Mr. Fantasy. And Steve Winwood's voice is wondrously intact.

The politics of your zip code. Go ahead, just type your zip code here and find out who in the area gave money to which presidential candidates--and how much they gave! (Via Metafilter--where they've got some good comments.) You can get the street addresses and names of all the donors, so if you're thinking of buying a house, you can find, say, the place in Madison where you'll be snuggled up next to the kind of people who gave $200 to Kucinich, or alternatively, the folks who forked over the whole $2000 to Bush. Students can find out who their professors gave money to (and how much). Hmmpf! A new excuse not to give ...

Blogspot ads. I suppose I'd like to be able to get rid of the Blogspot ads, but at the same time, I find it interesting to see what their machine matches up to my writing. I see they've got City Lights Bookstore, which is apt, because I've been blogging about beat poets a fair amount. Then there's "Progressive Politics," which takes you a blogspot blog on that topic. Hmmm... And Nina's blog has ads for the Republican Party! Tonya's blog aptly points you toward buying tickets for the Dave Matthews Band. There's a simple explanation: the not very subtle machine just matches up ads they have with words you have written, with no ability to discern whether you said nice things or not. Not very effective as a way to sell ads, but a bit of a source of humor anyway.

What plays did William Faulkner see? What did he read? I hadn't exactly been wondering, but this article by Javier Marías in Threepenny Review (linked by A&L Daily) has some answers:

Faulkner was a taciturn man who loved silence, and he had only been to the theater five times in his entire life: he had seen Hamlet three times, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Ben Hur, and that was all. He had not read Freud, either, at least so he said on one occasion: "I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't." He read Don Quixote every year.

Ah! I love silence too. And I've been meaning to read Don Quixote ... there's that new translation ...

I liked this part of the article too, about how he lost his job as a post office clerk at the University of Mississippi:

Apparently one of the lecturers there, quite reasonably, complained: the only way he could get his mail was by rummaging around in the rubbish bin at the back door, where the unopened bags of post all too often ended up. Faulkner did not like having his reading interrupted, and the sale of stamps fell alarmingly; by way of explanation, Faulkner told his family that he was not prepared to keep getting up to wait on people at the window and having to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had the two cents to buy a stamp.

Sounds like Newman on Seinfeld ("The Andrea Doria"). I'd watch a sitcom about this Faulkner character. And don't just tell me to watch Barton Fink--Joel Coel is on record saying the John Mahoney character isn't much like Faulkner.

Are you done talking about the New York Times yet? Well, I wanted to talk about the philosophy therapist and Al Franken and Spalding Gray, but I've been sitting in the café too long, the cappucino is severely frazzling my nerves and I'm getting hungry... And yikes, someone just knocked over a chair and I completely overreacted. So it's time for me to go. Let me leave you with a Madison picture, as I disengage from the newspaper from New York and return to my real environs:

Xiaoze Xie. Here's another artist. (Cool name, too.) More images here.

This is a good insight:

"When I was in China, my fellow students and I felt that art should be for art's sake," Mr. Xie said. "We'd seen a lot of bad critical art for so long. Now I've changed my theory on that. Art should carry some message. But, of course, it has to be beautiful, too."

"The Weather Project" I like this Olafur Eliasson installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. The NYT writes:

An instant cult site of mood-altering atmospherics, both gloomy and eye-popping, "The Weather Project" consists of a fake sun (yellow lights behind a huge semicircular screen, below a mirrored ceiling) and pumped-in mist. ...

Thrilled but circumspect about the reaction, he is by temperament a skeptical Scandinavian type. Half Danish, half Icelandic, he is not given to expressions of simple contentment, not with a stranger anyway. "I am trying to maintain in my mind an open discourse about its qualities of consumerism and spectacle," he says. "I would like to think that the spectator became the center of this piece, that the project twisted the Tate so the people who came to visit were what the art was about." ...

Previously, he has erected a fake sun, about 41 yards in diameter, like a billboard, on the skyline in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He designed a waterfall that flowed upward. He dyed various rivers in Europe and America green (eco-friendly dye, naturally)....

Hey, wait a minute. I think Chicago got there first.

A side note: why does the Times deal enthusiastically in ethnic stereotypes when the group in question is Nordic? (Like this one, about the "famously silent, stoic Finns.")

An easy to laugh at correction. The NYT has to correct two things about its review of Jayson Blair's book. Here's a more significant mistake:

An article last Sunday about China's energy needs misidentified the main greenhouse gas emitted by burning coal. It is carbon dioxide, not carbon monoxide.

Well, that makes a bit of a difference!

The Plot Skeleton. I wanted to include some discussion of the Scott Meredith "plot skeleton" in that last post, and did some Googling. I'm quite surprised that nothing comes up for "scott meredith 'fee client' plot skeleton," because I would have thought somebody would have told that story by now! So maybe someone will Google here now that I've written that. I'm sure a fair number of writers have posted letters like this one, but did they know they were "fee clients"? They could not have thought the famous literary agent himself wrote the long letter personally. You had to be a pretty good and prolific writer to churn out such letters, so why didn't my Googling turn up some fee department employee's description?

Art formulas. Should we shake our heads at the production of formulas for art, like "Hit Song Science"?

PolyphonicHMI says the software uses a proprietary algorithm to weigh and analyze more than 20 components of a recording (tempo, rhythm, cadence, etc.) and assign each song a value. The company used that algorithm to analyze 50 years of music released in the United States - album tracks and singles, pop, jazz and classical, totaling 3.5 million tracks - and graphed each song in multiple dimensions to create "the music universe." Plotted, it resembles a picture of a far-away galaxy, millions of song-specks floating in cosmic precision, presenting the illusion of randomness.

Some people do object, thinking art is all about individual imagination, but music is already based on some pretty constraining patterns. Artistic creativity always occurs within some kind of structure, and there is reason to think that a constricting structure enhances artistic creation. Think of the sonnet form or Dogme95. These limitations could be based on philosophical principles or scientific analysis of existing works, like Polti's Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, or it could be a game of limiting oneself, like the surrealist games. Obviously, these devices can produce bad art too, but so can a blank sheet of paper or an empty canvas. I love these efforts at constraint and limitation. Some of them are good and some aren't. Devising them is itself creative, even if it is also analytical and scientific. Art is not anarchy.

Punks for Bush. The Times notes a trend:

"Punks will tell me, `Punk and capitalism don't go together,' " [22-year-old Nick] Rizzuto said. "I don't understand where they're coming from. The biggest punk scenes are in capitalist countries like the U.S., Canada and Japan. I haven't heard of any new North Korean punk bands coming out. There's no scene in Iran."

That photograph by Richard Perry is the photo of the year for me. I don't even know how to say how much I love that photograph!

The article notes:

Johnny Ramone, the guitarist for the Ramones, has been an outspoken Republican for years, and some skinhead bands have blended the punk aesthetic with their extreme right-wing views.

(Just go ahead and lump Republicans and skinheads together!)

I like this quote from Ian MacKaye (of Fugazi) who "likened the punk aesthetic to furniture":

"Once it's built you can put it into any house," he said. "You can be a lefty and go to Ikea or you can be a right-winger and go to Ikea." Punk, he said, "is a free space where anything can go — a series of actions and reactions, and people rebelling and then rebelling against rebelling."

He's a smart guy.

Too much ready-made humor. Dawn of the Dead has defeated The Passion of The Christ at the boxoffice this weekend. The potential for jokes in bad taste about rising from the dead is disturbing. Would Letterman or Leno go for the ready-made joke here? There's a line in comedy here: some comics would cross it and some wouldn't. Will Jon Stewart? My guess is that he'll have a carefully crafted witticism on tomorrow's Daily Show.

Another source of ready-made humor this week is Justice Scalia's memo declining to recuse himself after duck-hunting with VP Cheney. There has always been something funny about ducks: the way they look, the way they sound, the word their name rhymes with. The Marx Brothers knew it: Why a Duck? Duck Soup. But Scalia's memo also has the line: ""I never hunted in the same blind as the vice president." So duck blind ... justice is blind ... the Justice is blind ... C'mon! There's a joke here. Here's Maureen Dowd's attempt to pull the seemingly ready-made joke out of that:

No need for justice to be blind when the blinds are just.

Huh? Here's Art Buchwald pointlessly flailing at the material. Enough!