"Fahrenheit 9/11" is well received in Madison.

Highlights from the article in the Capital Times:

Tickets to the 7 p.m. show at Westgate Art Cinemas went on sale Tuesday and, according to the box office, had sold out by Wednesday. By Friday afternoon, the 1:30, 4:15 and 9:45 shows were sold out, and the theater had added midnight screenings for Friday night and tonight. ...

[A local resident] described herself as a "violent Democrat" and said everyone should watch the movie - including the president. ... "I personally feel very sad about the Iraq war," [she] said. "Every time they bring a body bag home I cry. This war needs to be talked about all the time." ...

[Another resident] waited with her 11-year-old daughter and said she was not worried about the film's R rating. "From everything I've heard, the violence isn't gratuitous," [she] said. "Kids are so exposed to war rhetoric, it's important for them to see what it's really like." ...

When U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, appeared in the film, the theater burst into applause ....

[A]n 82-year-old Madison woman, who asked not to be named because she was speaking "for more than just myself," wore a "God Bless Michael Moore" button on her right lapel and a John Kerry button on the other. The feisty activist said she promised her kids she wouldn't die until there was a good president in the White House.

This is all very Madison.

Larry McMurtry raves (literally) about Clinton's book.

Here's a typical passage (appearing in this Sunday's NYT Book Review):

The very press that wanted to discredit him and perhaps even run him out of town instead made him a celebrity, a far more expensive thing than a mere president. Clinton's now up there with Madonna, in the highlands that are even above talent. In fact, he and Madonna may, just at the moment, be the only ones way up there, problems having arisen with so many lesser reputations.

And somehow, vaguely, it all has to do with sex - not necessarily sex performed, just sex in the world's head. I doubt myself that Bill Clinton's sex life has been all that different from anybody else's: pastures of plenty, pastures of less than plenty, pastures he should get out of immediately, and not a few acres of scorched earth.

What??

A Saturday walk.

This mysterious graffiti appears with the saying "Don't stop dreaming."



Grace Church on Capitol Square has a bubble machine going, and a little boy is inspired.



The Rainbow Bookstore is promoting peace, rebellion, and a parade:



Half of Madison is at the Farmers' Market, including this man with a marvelous shirt:



And this man with marvelous hair:



There are beautiful things everywhere.

The Presidential face.

John Kerry was in attendance at the event discussed in the previous post, and I want to give him credit for not drinking in the adulation and the glamour--or so I infer from this Billy Crystal wisecrack:

"You're the front-runner, you've raised $200 million — if you're having a good time, tell your face."

That's a pretty funny joke too. And it was smart of Kerry to say, later, "I just want you to know, I'm having a ball — I'm having fun and my face got told."

Democrats may want another Clinton, and Clinton's re-emergence this week has reminded us again of the strength of his charm. You can easily picture how Clinton's face would beam if he had been sitting at that Hollywood fundraiser. But pleasure-loving and a fondness for celebrities is not a requirement for the Presidency.

9/11 is not a punchline.

For a long time after the events of September 11, 2001, I avoided using the shorthand "9/11" to refer to what had happened. Recently, someone close to me heard me use the term 9/11 and said, "I thought you didn't say that." I admitted that over time, I'd gone to the shorthand. Didn't he use the shorthand? No, in fact, he never did. The profundity of what had happened was still present enough in his mind that he continued to say "September Eleventh."

This conversation came to mind when I read an article in the NYT this morning about a fundraiser that took place this past Thursday, in which "an A-list of Hollywood celebrities shared the stage in the architectural splendor of Disney Hall to raise a show-stopping $5 million for Senator John Kerry and the Democratic National Committee." It looked like Oscar night, the Times writes, with Billy Crystal "cracking wise about movies and politics, money and baseball." But a joke about Bill Clinton "fell flat." The audience, as the Times put it, "had paid too much ($2,000 to $25,000)... to laugh at itself."

Fun was to be had, sure, but at the Republicans' expense.

So Mr. Crystal fared much better when he recalled having met President Bush at Yankee Stadium during the third game of the World Series in 2001 and realizing, "911 is also his SAT scores."

I know brilliant comedians need some leeway as they search for new ways to share the important political insight that Bush is stupid, but 9/11 is not a punchline.

(If you can't remember how that night in Yankee Stadium felt at the time, and perhaps the image that comes to mind is the oft-shown clip from "Fahrenheit 9/11" in which Bush makes a comment about fighting terrorism and then returns to his golf game, read this.)

Slacker!

If there is one movie I have been hoping will be released on DVD, it's Slacker. Finally, it's coming out--in August--and, making it worth the wait, it will be a Criterion Collection DVD. This is cause for celebration at my house. Slacker is the movie that is most like my favorite movie, My Dinner With André. Both films are nonstop talk fests, but instead of two old guys sitting in a fancy restaurant talking about art and life through the entire film, Slacker takes us all around Austin, Texas, moving from character to character, mostly but not all young people, talking about art and life and conspiracy and politics.

Around the fishbowl.

I decide to walk back from the café to my parking garage a different way, not down State Street, but around past Riley's Wines of the World, which has a surprising number of youngish men crisscrossing its small parking lot. It is Friday afternoon at about 3, and serious drinking is in the offing. I notice a yellow electrical box with a washed out "Buscemi" sticker on it, so I get out my camera.



With the camera in my hand, I find this neon sign photographable. Apparently a large alcohol-filled vessel is available here.



Some guys inside the bar see me taking the picture and yell at me to take their picture. As I aim the camera at them, one calls out to the other "Say sex!" If you're not from Wisconsin, and when you think about Wisconsin you think of cheese, just remember when drinking guys are getting their picture taken on University Avenue in Madison, they don't call out "Say cheese!"



They seem pretty happy to get their picture taken, and I say, anticipating an artistic composition: "Thanks, I really like that Cheney's in the picture." They respond enthusiastically, but without acknowledging the artistic potential of having Dick Cheney in the picture. I move on and decide to photograph the Black Cat tattoo and piercing parlor, which I think has chosen its location well along this bar-studded strip of University Avenue.



The cat tries to hypnotize you into making a decision you may some day regret.



Think about the young person who looks in this window and decides yes, I want to be pierced and tattooed. Is a ceramic gnome reassuring? And how about that photograph? What is it? A leg? And who could you possibly impress with that ghastly image? Some of the other photos in the window show piercings surrounded by worrisome redness.



As I near the parking garage, I see another yellow electric box with another faded sticker. The advice is to "curb your consumption," but it's not meant to chide the alcohol consumers who frequent this part of town. (It's a "Buy Nothing Day" sticker.)

What we might find funny.

The Black Table (via Throwing Things) has a nice "entirely subjective list of major influences to what We Find Funny." The first thing on the list is "Bill Cosby, Himself" and the description was enough to make me go over to Amazon and pre-order the DVD (to be released in August). Amazon tells me "Customers who shopped for Bill Cosby, Himself also shopped for": The Passion of the Christ, Kill Bill Volume 2, and Hellboy ("a moodily effective, consistently entertaining action-packed fantasy, beginning in 1944 when the mad monk Rasputin--in cahoots with occult-buff Hitler and his Nazi thugs--opens a transdimensional portal through which a baby demon emerges, capable of destroying the world with his powers"). Who are these customers?

UPDATE: When I wrote this originally, I thought it was absurd that anyone could be interested in all four of these DVDs. (Of course, I knew Amazon wasn't claiming the same person was interested in all four.) The weird thing is, now that I've written that, I realize that I am interested in all four movies. Regular readers may attempt to guess which of the four movies I went to see as soon as it came out. The other three, I've never seen. Answer: here.

Speaking of synonyms ...

the official term for Clinton's 957-page autobiography is "tome." Oh, and I like the way Google helpfully asks me "Did you mean: clinton 'my life' time," because it reminds me I don't have time for a tome.

Gore and "brownshirts."

As discussed by James Lileks (via Instapundit), Al Gore is calling his internet critics "brownshirts." Quite aside from the general inadvisability of calling your political opponents fascists, you'd think that if Al Gore wanted to call someone a fascist, the last synonym he'd pick from the thesaurus would be "brownshirt," considering that he was famous for literally wearing a brown shirt. I'm just distracted into thinking about that whole Naomi Wolf/alpha male business again. He's lost control of his imagery in more ways than one.

Blogger spellcheck humor.

The Blogger spellcheck suggests changing Instapundit to "Instability." Oh well, it doesn't recognize "Blogger" or "spellcheck" either. I'm a fan of spellcheck humor, because the suggestion for Althouse--in Microsoft Word, anyway--is "Alehouse," and that seems like fun. Blogger's spellcheck, on the other hand, goes for "Although," which is apt enough, I suppose, for a hairsplitting lawyer and political fencestraddler like me.

The Calabresi apology.

I see that Judge Calabresi "apologized 'profusely' yesterday for remarks he made last weekend at a lawyers convention comparing President Bush's election in 2000 to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini":

Judge Calabresi said that in his off-the-cuff remarks he was trying to make "a rather complicated academic argument," but he understood that they had been taken as an attack on President Bush. In a letter that contained no less than four apologies, he said he was "truly sorry" for "any embarrassment" he might have caused the appeals court. He did not, however, renounce the views he expressed.

Instapundit and How Appealing have noted the apology.

I would like to stress that the judge is only apologizing for giving the appearance of likening Bush to Hitler and Mussolini and that the apology contains the suggestion that people failed to grasp his "complicated academic argument." I summarized the supposedly complicated argument in my post on Tuesday, and his apology does nothing to change my opinion that it is a bad argument. Moreover, the judge made a high profile public speech that took a strong position that ordinary people should vote against Bush to restore democracy. The position purported to rest on legal not political grounds. If you're going to make a legal argument for a political choice and you're ethically bound as a judge not to make a partisan argument, shouldn't you make the legal argument clear? I think I made the legal argument reasonably clear in my Tuesday post. I also think when you make it clear, you can see that it doesn't make much sense.

I'd like to see the judge or his supporters restate the legal argument in a form that allows the people he's trying to persuade to vote against Bush to understand what the purportedly nonpartisan reason for doing so is and to argue about whether it is a sound reason. You'd think someone who makes principles of democracy central to his legal argument wouldn't stop at saying his argument is complicated and academic.

[CORRECTION: The last paragraph incorrectly said "vote for Bush" and has been corrected. And yes, I was simultaneously asking for clarity and being confusing. Sorry. That was lame.]

Tornadoes in Madison.

It's official. We had tornadoes here in Madison on Wednesday night. They were just F0 tornadoes, but "[i]n the University Research Park, sheets of siding were strewn throughout the area like discarded chewing-gum wrappers." There was a touch down near Park Street just three miles south of campus. One resident said:

she heard the sirens go off and was heading for the basement of her Berwyn Street home when the storm hit, knocking down all three pine trees in her back yard, including one that hit the roof, and left her home without electricity.

"We never made it to the basement," she said. "I just heard a big crack, which was probably the tree" hitting the house. "We're still here and we can be thankful for that."

Hmmm.... I heard the siren and didn't bother to go in the basement. I used my usual approach of hanging out near the basement door, waiting to see if there is any big change in the wind. Maybe not such a great approach. I've heard that tornadoes avoid the lakes, so if you're living on the isthmus (as I am) you are safe. Don't take my word for it. It sounds like a ridiculous idea to me, but I've heard it. Even if a tornado had the sense to avoid lakes, wouldn't that make the isthmus its preferred path?

The fifteen minute eternity.

The AP reports (via Kausfiles) that Clinton interviewed that "he still feels sorry for Lewinsky and hopes she 'won't be trapped in what Andy Warhol called everybody's 15 minutes of fame.'" Well, that's nice of him, but I just wanted to point out that he's mangling Warhol's notion here. If you're famous for 15 minutes, after the 15 minutes, you're not famous anymore. It seems Lewinsky has the opposite problem: the inability to get unfamous.

Oh, okay, I'll take the inner child test.

Because everybody else is doing it. (Profs. Yin and Bainbridge.)

My inner child is ten years old!

The adult world is pretty irrelevant to me. Whether I'm off on my bicycle (or pony) exploring, lost in a good book, or giggling with my best friend, I live in a world apart, one full of adventure and wonder and other stuff adults don't understand.

Take the Quizilla here.

How Reagan and Clinton learned to think.

Edmund Morris spins a theory in this week's New Yorker about how Ronald Reagan came to think the way he did. It all started with nearsightedness:

As a boy, “Dutch” Reagan assumed that nature was a blur. Not until he put on his mother’s spectacles, around the age of thirteen, did he perceive the world in all its sharp-edged intricacy. He did not find it disorienting, as somebody who had been blind from birth might. Perhaps his later, Rothko-like preference for large, luminous policy blocks (as opposed to, say, Bill Clinton’s fly’s-eye view of government as a multifacetted montage, endlessly adjustable) derived from his unfocussed childhood.

Clinton didn't somehow have fly eyes to correspond to Reagan's myopia, and both men are described as suffering from a lack of focus as a child, but somehow their ways of thinking came out completely different because of something having to do with their eyesight. I don't even get it as a silly, fake theory. I note that Reagan solved his eyesight problem by putting on his mother's glasses. You'd think the boy would from that develop a belief in taking steps to improve vision and see intricacy, not prefer the fuzziness. Or are we not to think of Rothko's paintings as fuzzy-edged? (But they completely are.)

Speaking of Presidents learning thinking patterns from their mothers, I was struck by this passage in historian Paul Johnson's essay about Bill Clinton on Best of the Web today:

Clinton's family background was unfortunate, to put it mildly, and there is no more to be said about it other than to applaud his strength in rising above it. His mother, Virginia Kelley, provided a clue in explaining how she survived her rackety life: "I construct an airtight box. I keep inside it what I want to think about, and everything else stays beyond the walls. Inside is white, outside is black. . . . Inside is love and friends and optimism. Outside is negativity, can't-doism, and any criticism of me and mine." Bill Clinton would not have been able to describe his defensive technique so clearly. But that is what he did, with great success. As a result, while never arrogant, he was always secure.

At least there, I can understand the theory. Whether any of this historian psychoanalyzing is true, I'm in no position to say. It can be pretty amusing to read.