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March 31, 2008
The toilet flushes clockwise in these parts
"You can climb a mountain
You can swim a sea
You can jump into the fire
But you will never be free"
- Harry Nillson
I've left paradise and after many hours of airport and airplane delays (only on the LAX to ORD flight - how could that have possibly happened?), I'm back to the gray of Chicago and the drama and soul-killing grind of law school. New Zealand doesn't believe in free wi-fi, so I haven't been able to blog or post photos, so I'm pretending I'm still free of responsibilities by hitting the Flickr for the next couple of days. Pictures and stories to follow.
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March 23, 2008
We are pleased to be able to fullfill your stereotypes
Greetings from Christchurch, New Zealand.
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March 18, 2008
Kia Ora!
That's how they say hello in Maori. "Ayyyyyyyyyy! Come in here!" is how you say hello if you're a drunk girl alone in a bar and a dozen Yanks walk by on St. Patrick's Day, as we found out last night.
Auckland is nice, but very close to an American city in style and attitude - others I'm travelling with have compared it to Seattle, but I've never been, so I'll just say that it's a little like Boston, but with more hills.
Tomorrow, it's off to Wellington, which I've been told is even nicer. Hopefully the hotel will have WiFi so I can share some pictures.
Trip so far:
Legal Research content: 0
Wineries Visited: 4
Beer Brands Sampled: 3
Cell Phones Working: 0
Delicious Meals: 2 (N.Z. scallops... wow.)
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March 15, 2008
At least it isn't Houston
I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.
- Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in Annie Hall
Due to "mechanical difficulties," i.e. they had to take an engine off of the plane we were supposed to fly and replace it with a new one, I have a day to spend in sunny Los Angeles, California. However, years of anti-LA sentiment and no car mean that it's going to be hard to venture far from the airport hotel our gracious airline provided for us. After 15 minutes of searching the MTA's awful website (why must everything be in PDF?) I discovered a light rail station about a mile from here, but I'm not sure where to go once I get there. I'm a little embarrassed that I consider myself worldly, yet I don't have any interest in exploring America's second largest city.
Now I must excuse myself from the computer to gorge myself at the complimentary buffet...
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March 14, 2008
Travel daze
I leave the house in three hours. I arrive in New Zealand on Sunday morning. Blogging will be light, which is to say that I won't be doing it for the next few days.
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March 11, 2008
It's spinoff time
After a crabcake and beer sendoff party for the best show nobody watches, I'm finally at peace with the end of The Wire. The conclusion, while bittersweet, tied up the plotlines with a pretty pink bow and left a whole new world of criminals, cops and pols in Baltimore to speculate about. Will the new collective spring forth a conciliatory figure like Prop Joe, or will the next Marlo (maybe even Marlo himself) run a top-down citywide operation? Is Dukie the next Bubbles, or is his time with the Araber a short stop on the way to respectability? There's simply no way they will ever make a movie since it will have to be longer than Lord of the Rings and would lack any starpower, absent the addition of some ill-fitting celebs to the cast. But what if the DVDs build the show's cult following and grows the audience to the point at which a spinoff seems like a good idea? I have some pitches:
Bigger Fish to Fry: Michael looks like he's on the way to being the next Omar, but it's hard to imagine anyone as stone-cold and clever as the Man With the Code. After a few close calls robbing stash houses, Michael realizes that Snoop was right and he wasn't cut out for the game. Since his friends have all gone their separate ways, there is nothing left for him in Baltimore except for certain early death. He packs up his trunk with cash and heads down to an unfamiliar town he knows only from rap videos: Miami. Paying for an off-the-books sublet with a stack of crumpled $10s and $20s, Michael gets his GED and becomes mildly successful after introducing the Lake Trout sandwich to South Florida. A few years hence, a Baltimore TV station does a story on this local boy done good, drawing the attention of Randy and that little kid who shot Omar, both of whom have become serious gangsters. They load up the Navigator and head down for the beach to kill our protagonist, who still has a bounty on his head. Can Michael simultaneously avoid death, run a small business and hide his murderous past from his naive Jewish girlfriend?
Everybody Loves Naimond: Saved from a life on the streets by Bunny Colvin, Wee-Bay's son gets his bachelor's from UMBC and lands a decent job writing copy for direct-mail solicitations. Soon, life in his milquetoast Baltimore County apartment becomes unbearable and the streets beckon. His old crew is long gone and he now considers a life of crime below him. Soon, he enrolls in the Police Academy and hits the streets as a newly-minted officer in the Western District. At first, being a hated authority figure to boys he identifies with wears him down - not to mention the occasional domestic disturbance involving his mom and new half-brother Taimond. Soon, he gets the hang of it and offers life lessons to a new generation of corner boys. Yes, this show features Cutty a lot.
Calvert Street: With his knowledge of how police investigations work, Cedric Daniels rises up the ranks to become one of Baltimore's top criminal defense attorneys. Rigid in his adherence to the rules, he takes his duty of zealous representation seriously and springs the worst of the worst, including Slim Charles and a parade of former Wire cast members. His wife, Judge Pearlman, doesn't like what he's doing, so each episode of this procedural courtroom drama ends with a long argument over the dinner table and an uncomfortable sex scene.
Annapolis: Think West Wing but with Governor Carcetti. There's a lot of walking quickly down hallways, but with a different set of issues. How much snowfall do you need to call a state of emergency? Which of the three possible alignments of the Intercounty Connector best addresses environmental, congestion and development concerns? Sometimes a friend, sometimes an enemy, always a barrel of laughs, state Sen. Clay Davis has a recurring role as the voice of logrolling and drawn-out cussing.
Welcome Back, Prezbo: Self-explanatory.
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March 10, 2008
What I take away from The Wire
At some point in their lives, everybody has a day when they figure out why their superiors were so much worse at their job than they mistakenly thought they'd be.
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Mixed feelings
On the one hand, this is good for Obama. On the other hand, he's the governor of New York, a Democrat and was a great prosecutor.
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March 9, 2008
The other election season
The walls, doors and structural pillars of this law school are covered with multicolored posters put up by people running for positions in student government. Like every other student group, getting mixed up with SBA means endless meetings, a couple of logistical challenges each semester and absolutely nothing else in terms of prestige or job opportunities.
That doesn't seem to matter for these would be 1L Lincolns and 2L Trumans. The signs promise that they will "listen," that they will "speak for you" and that they're attractive and smart (hint: if you have to write it out, you aren't either). Pictures of puppies, smiling faces, even crayon drawings all cover the walls of this supposedly serious institution. I shudder to think what a foreign visiting scholar would think about a campaign based around the slogan, "I can eat whatever I want and I never gain weight." Really, WTF?
It's all very Tracy Flick.
Yes, for the twenty-seventh time, law school is an awful lot like middle school: there are no platforms because there's no power and no issues the voters care about other than who is friends with who.
Okay, so that wasn't exactly biting, original social commentary. I think I said the same thing before every student group election since the one I lost in 10th grade.
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March 7, 2008
The devil is out of the hole
Matthew Yglesias says goodbye to The Wire. Most of this fond farewell consists of ragging on the final season. It's de rigeur for "serious" Wire fans to tee off on the new episodes. Yes, the newspaper plot sucks and reeks of score-settling. The school is out of the plot without showing Prezbo's inevitable decline into cynicism. Marlo's rise to power was the inevitable next step in the plotline. Omar fails. The McNulty plot is ridiculous. Accepted.
But...
Maybe the melodrama and cheap suspense of the Marlo investigation follows through with existing themes and makes for a better show.
We've been convinced of the futility of change, the self-reinforcing spiral of personal and societal decline. What more could be said that isn't either redundant or repellently fatalistic? Just like when Bunny broke the rules, the outside-the-box thinkers in drugs and policework are winning because they refuse to abide by the strict hierarchies we've seen in detail since Season One. They're sometimes on top, but the system works against new power centers.
Think about it. For four seasons, it was a slow grind, drawing its power by digging deeper and deeper into small sections of a big, interconnected city. Each season, the plot takes on a new aspect of Baltimore and keeps it in the mix to greater or lesser degrees. The direction was outward and in a rush to put all the pieces together, tossing in the media doesn't seem like such a bad idea, whether or not you agree with the execution. All told, the mission is accomplished, with McNulty pushing around the politicians, media, cops and drug kingpins. Not even the mayor has that much pull.
In addition, if your point has been made, why not blow it all up? Elements of fantasy, tales of suspense and bizarre plots are all literary tools used with great effect throughout history. Since we have the "Dickensian aspect," perhaps it's time for a pivot towards drawing the viewer in at the very end.
I'll be sad to see the show end, but this season shows that it's time. I'm enjoying the last act.
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Twelve hours over the Pacific
I leave for spring break a week from today, yet my most recent musical discovery was Architecture in Helsinki's Places Like This, which was months ago - at this point, I'm already tired of "Hold Music," as the shuffle feature on my iPod seems to simply adore it.
Any good recommendations for the long flight to New Zealand?
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March 6, 2008
Testy, testy
Is it possible that the few weeks before spring break brings out the worst in people? All at once, 1Ls are finishing memos, some 3Ls are suffering through the MPRE, spring breakers are shopping and packing, folks are doing taxes (many for two states) and clinic types are as harried as usual. The common areas around the school are littered with far more sleeping students than usual.
I've noticed a marked increase in the number of testy exchanges around school. The whole law school seems close to snapping. I for one will be weathering the storm locked in my bedroom as much as practicable.
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March 5, 2008
The Day After
I find myself watching a lot more ESPN and a lot less CNN.
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March 3, 2008
Walking the Walk (where nobody walks)
After months of online shilling for a certain Democratic presidential candidate, I decided to put my money where my keyboard is and go out to Ohio to canvass with a group of law students. We were assigned to meet at a union hall in a suburb of a mid-sized city, where we found a parking lot full of Illinois plates outside and a bunch of latte-sippers sorting through canvassing maps inside. If the stereotype of Obama supporters as upwardly mobile yuppies will ever be refuted, it didn't happen on Saturday.
We in the law school posse were assigned to a fairly new subdivision just outside of town. Full of cul-de-sacs and lacking in street parking, I ditched the car behind one of the few other cars not in a driveway in the hopes that I wouldn't get towed.
Our canvassing sheets included nearly every house on the blocks to which we were assigned. After watching the veteran volunteer in our group knock on a couple of doors, I set out on my own.
First house: the sheet says it's a fifty-something woman. It didn't look like fertile ground and I was relieved when nobody was home.
Second house: the golden retriever came to the door and immediately started barking. Feet pitter-pattered upstairs but nobody came to the door. I hung our literature on the doorknob and moved on.
It went like that for the next few houses until I someone finally answered the door. Since his two golden retrievers pawed at the screen, he spoke to me through the grass. An undecided voter uninterested in talking about healthcare mandates, NAFTA or anything else, he took my literature and looked relieved when I gave up and told him to visit the website if he had any questions.
There was a large-ish house at the end of the block that didn't have the driveway plowed (there were many un-shoveled walkways because most people only leave home by car) and every single blind closed. No for sale sign stood in the front yard. A foreclosure?
On the next block, a few more people were home. The first was a Republican who wished me good luck "but not too much." The second was a Republican who told me I woke her baby. The third was undecided in a filthy sweatshirt. Her issues: "everything." Her frontrunner: "I don't like any of them." It turns out that isolated subdivisions aren't exactly hotbeds of activism.
On the third block, nobody was home. Does this neighborhood go to the supermarket in shifts?
After a few more blocks of empty homes and frazzled mothers with hyper kids tired of staying inside on yet another cold Midwestern day, I started to get dispirited for lack of Obama compatriots living in this red section of this red town in this red part of Ohio.
My last two houses before packing it in and returning to Chicago were on a cul-de-sac. It didn't look good: one house had a lawn jockey out front. Not a repainted lawn jockey like the kind you'll find outside of 21, but a lawn jockey with a pitch-black face and gigantic bright red lips. Too bad Wallace isn't running this year.
Next to the lawn jockey house was the final address on my list. A Virgin Mary statuette marked the front door. Needless to say, I was quite surprised to find my first Obama supporter, a thirty-something mom who let me inside to make my non-pitch and dump my literature. Behind her, two kids played some sort of ad hoc Harry Potter game.
"You're looking for Obama supporters in ______?" she said.
"Yes, and you might guess how thats' going. By the way, are you interested in volunteering for the campaign?"
As children screamed about quiddich or spells or some such, she shook her head no. "I had to ask." She understood.
They gave us a haystack and I found a needle. Upon return to the union hall, we were rewarded with apple pie and sympathy by a woman in her fifties who had come here all the way from Baltimore.
Apple pie, civic engagement and a mom-like figure, the heartland. Only fireworks would have made the moment more American.
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