Streaming Consciousness...

Imagine getting high quality Stream of Consciousness
wherever you go!

Inspired by Real Networks, makers of the popular RealPlayer application that streams audio and video over the internet, I am pleased to announce that Stark Raving Software, a subsidiary of Stark Raving Industries, will be offering its own internet plugin that will offer high quality streaming consciousness directly to your computer's web browser. Just download and install our forthcoming StarkRaver into your favorite browser and you can enjoy long-winded rambles, wandering subject matter, and other frivolous content MIME-types in the comfort of your own home. This new service is possible due to our breakthrough time-compression scheme. Our proprietary technology allows us to condense so much drivel into a few short paragraphs that the reader feels like it takes "forever" to get to the point.

We will soon offer similar versions of StarkRaver developed for internet equipped cell phones, wireless enabled PDAs and internet accessible refrigerators. StarkRaver is expected to be released as a free service with a pay service to follow that will offer additional features, such as random visual images, stretched analogies and jarring juxtaposition. No final pricing has been established but our marketing department says that it should be in the neighborhood of "our CEO's rent divided by the number of our subscribers."

Parts of Speech

"Can you hear me now, you %^&!?"

Swear words are like the homeless of vocabulary. Take the F*** word. Many people have referred to this naughty little mot as the universal part of speech. The thinking goes that it can replace any word in a sentence like some kind of pronoun on steroids. Witness:

Person 1: I f***ed that f***ing f***er the f*** up.

Person 2: Get the f*** out!

Of course, to flesh out this exchange into something of a conversation, while maintaining its obscenity content, we need another swear word.

Person 1: I f***ed that f***ing f***er the f *** up.

Person 2: Get the f*** out!

Person 1: No s***. I f***ing beat the living s*** outta him. That f***ing motherf***er had it f***ing coming.

Person 2: F***in' A!

Ok, I could go on, but in the interest of maintaining a family-friendly site, I won't. (I had the sheer genius to tell my Dad about this blog, and now I find myself struggling with the awkward idea that my Mom might be reading this.) The point here is that, yes, you can replace just about any word with f*** and it will grammatically make sense. But why would you? The F*** word is only universal if all you need, for the most part, are verbs that are destructive or sexual, nouns that are male and derisive, and modifiers that only exaggerate what they're applied towards.

Of course, like the homeless, these words are reviled by descent folk who feel imposed on by suddenly finding themselves in the presence of one such curse. Then you have a smaller hardcore group of open minded people that feel these epithets deserve some consideration, as they will always be with us because of the way human society works. (cough, cough)

OK, I'll switch analogies before that one get's too stretched out. I actually think swear words are like junk food. Adults use it with impunity, but kids find themselves getting scolded when their parents catch them with it. OK, OK... I think they are like junk food because they hit the spot when you get the craving for one, but they are full of empty calories. OK, that one's worth pursuing.

When you follow a fairly healthy diet that's full of a wide variety of foods, eating an occasional juicy cheeseburger or order of fries can make for a tasty, if naughty, puctuation to your sensible set of eating habits. But as much as your tastebuds are amused by a sudden infusion of salt and fatty acids, that kind of food is virtually devoid of the kind of nutrition your body needs to repair and refuel itself. You get the picture. If you've ever been forced to eat at Mickey D's for breakfast and lunch everyday, you know that you get run-down and kind of full before you can make it up at diner. You also quit tasting it after a while.


Lenny Bruce went to jail for your right to be a
foul-mouthed jerk. So try to at least have
something to say.

Similarly, if you are thoughtful and articulate, the occasional swear word will stand out and have a degree of emphasis when carefully applied to make a point. Conversely, if every other word that comes out of your mouth is s*** this or motherf***ing that, your impression on other people gets kind of blunted instead of sharpened. Oh sure, you might make a strong initial impression. But the words, when repeated often and for no apparent reason, sentence after sentence, begin to empty the paragraphs of actual content. Those still paying attention to what you're saying only hear the words occuring between the swearing, but the swear words simply become sounds, devoid of meaning.

I prefer a balanced approach, verbally speaking. l try to use whatever language expresses what I'm trying to say. If I need to say something ugly, or require a sudden burst of emphasis, then swear words are definitly on the menu. Otherwise, I try to use something else if I can. After all, there's nothing worse than a one note solo, when you came to hear a tune.

A Scott, A Mick and a Regular Midwesterner walk into a Bar...

I love double standards. They are beautiful examples of the axiom "Actions speak louder than words."

The other night, a couple of friends of mine and I went drinking at a posh little place downtown. Somehow, the subject turned to race relations and we found ourselves talking about whether African Americans are allowed to make jokes about white people. Now, personally, I have a rule about this kind of thing, namely the whole "making cracks about other people" thing, and it's that as long as it's not simply mean-spirited, contains a kernel of truth and (most importantly) it's funny, then go ahead and knock yourself out. Of course, I use humor as a sword sometimes, but I try to reserve drawing it for the times I think that someone is picking on someone else.


Why can't we be friends?

Now, I love Dave Chappelle. I think that he's funny and he has a lot of good things to say about a lot of weird things that happen to lot's of folks. However, my Scottish American friend and I found ourselves at cross-purposes on the whole "Chapelle" issue. She felt that because Dave makes the occasional joke about white people, he's fundamentally unfunny and a racist. Now, I'm going to steer clear of the whole "white people have made caricatures out of other human beings for decades while doing terrible things to them" argument because: 1) none of the people at the table were slave owners, segregationists or klansmen and 2) that tactic is reserved for arguing about history with people you don't know the personal habits of. On this particular occasion, I did know the personal habits of my esteemed friend.

First a bit of background, my family name is Irish and, trust me, unless you are an Albino, the only time I'm not whiter than you is when I sing or play the bass guitar. So when I make a crack like, "Fuck us", I'm talking about whites that can't take a joke, but more importantly, I'm talking about what society considers my own kind. Of course, I'm only speaking for myself and I have a thick skin. Make fun of the way I dance, I can take it. If you talk about racism or cops beating black folks up, I'm probably on your side, as I don't participated in either of those things. I'm sorry, but my brain doesn't shut down when I hear someone who isn't white talk about "white people". Either what they say has merit and I pay attention, or it doesn't and guess what? I still have a job, a wife, my self respect and life intact. I've never suffered for being caucasian. I can think something directed towards someone who kinda looks like me sounds stupid without getting worked up about it.

Anyway, like I've said, I know the person getting outraged about hearing jokes about white people and I have something more specific to say about her stance. We watched an episode of Star Search and she loved a joke that a white comedian said that offered, in effect, that if you see a group of people in prison, you know the white guy did it. He's not there because he was profiled or couldn't afford a lawyer. Yet when she and I watched Chappelle the other night, Dave made a joke about when you see a lone white guy hanging out in a group of black people, you know he's the most dangerous guy in the crew because he most have done something crazy to earn their respect. Plus they keep him around to talk to the cops. As far as slander goes, the white comedian said the worse thing about the hypothetical white guy in the joke, yet my friend only got offended when Chappelle did his bit.

It gets better. She and I went dancing (insert joke here) at a club a couple of years ago and she had to calm me down when I overheard a white trash barfly say following charming remark: "What are you smoking menthols for? Those are nigger smokes." Don't worry about it, that's just the way they talk in here... her outrage over the way a white person was talking about black people was virtually non-existant. It was (quite sensibly) more important to her for us to enjoy our evening than it was for me to rip into a stranger I wasn't going to change the mind or behavior of. (Insert dangling participle joke here. I think I'm up to two, so far.) Yet when Dave Chappelle makes a joke about white people, she decides she can't stand him. Interesting...

I willl go ahead and say that my point here isn't to point out an inconsistancy and shreik "AHA!" People of all stripes do this thing where they take more offense at hearing certain things from some people more than others. In high school I saw one line-backer on our football team greet the other one with "Hey fucker!" I don't think the smile he returned that remark with would have appeared for a stranger offering the same thing. I'd also like to say that this story about my friend isn't meant as character assasination, either. She's a great person with a big heart who's friends with a veritable rainbow of people in our social group. Her best friend is Korean, for chrissakes. If you knew her, you'd know she's a great person. She's got a good idea going, "Making cracks about other people isn't right." She just seems to get more worked up when she feels that it's coming at her somehow.


Rush ain't right.

There are other, much worse examples of how the knee-jerk reaction of protecting one's own translates into actual racism, instead of simple inconsistancy. When Rush Limbaugh gets rankled about the fact that the country isn't as careful about the way it talks about whites as it is about blacks, it's said on the heels of decades of public comment carefully devoid of any concern for blacks. Translation: He only cares about the way he thinks he's being treated by extension. He isn't trying to raise the bar for the way people are treated, just white people. Rhetorical gymnastics like that are devoid of empathy. But hey, years of abusing synthetic heroin will do that to a guy. (Insert self-righteous smirk at Rush's expense here) Jesus said to treat others the way that you want to be treated, and that requires being able to put yourself in the other person's shoes. Otherwise a masochist could beat a guy and say, "Jesus, told me to." If you fancy yourself a christian, empathy isn't just a good idea, it's the law. If you, like me, aren't a christian, it's still a good idea, and I think it's worth stealing.

Hmmmm... "Don't make cracks about other people." Maybe, she's onto something...

Jack Ass of The Week

This week's moron is "Reverend" Fred Phelps, the stridently anti-gay preacher who has made a career forgetting that Jesus thought love and forgiveness, but not homosexuality, were worth actually mentioning during his 33 years on the planet. This guy made national news when he had the poor taste to protest Matthew Shepard's homosexuality at the trial of the two men who beat Shepard to death for being gay.


Can you feel the love?

Now Phelps would like to use the 1st Amendment to bully Casper, Wyoming into letting him put up a "monument" on public property commemorating Shepard's "entrance into Hell" on the day Shepard died from his injuries at the hands of his assailants.

The kicker, of course, is that Phelps isn't even from Casper. Back in the south, a jerk from somewhere else that causes trouble for the locals is referred to as a "carpetbagger". I'd officially like to dust that euphemism off and tattoo it to this schmuck's forehead. That town has tried very hard to keep Shepard's murder (which horrified the majority of its residents) from being all that the rest of the world knows it for. Apparently, treating others with respect isn't part of Phelps' version of Christianity.

Some outraged residents have let it be known that if he puts this monument to his own avarice up, someone might use a sledgehammer to remove it. Now that's what I call civic pride. Phelps has said that if the monument is vandalized, he'll demand that the city of Casper provide 24 hour surveillance of it to protect his right to free speech. I'd normally say something acerbic here about the guy, but I'm dumbfounded that someone can actually not know he's making that big of a fool out of himself. Never let it be said that persistence and intelligence are the same thing. So, Fred: Jesus loves you, but the rest of us think you're a jackass.

A Short List Of Skills I'd Like to Master or Actually Learn in the First Place

01) HTML, CSS, Perl and XML
02) Cooking
03) Shooting my Longbow
04) Making my own Arrows
05) Basic First Aid
06) Speaking Fluent Spanish (and possibly French or Japanese)
07) Cunnilingus
08) Car Repair
09) Knowing all my Scales, Chords and Keys off the top of my head
10) Rolling a Cigarette with One Hand
11) Yoga
12) Tantra
13) Staying In Shape
14) Field Stripping and then Re-Assembling an AK-47 while Blindfolded
15) Knowing what to do with a Unix prompt (and possibly a DOS prompt)
16) English Grammer
17) Touch Typing
18) Writing Narrative Fiction
19) Acting
20) Being Independantly Wealthy
21) A+ Certification
22) Aikido (or possibly Brazilian Ju-Jitsu)
23) Interpersonal Skills
24) Film Making
25) Getting a Film Funded
26) Dealing with Critics
27) Speed Reading
28) Making a Living Doing What I Love
29) Making a Difference
30) Making a Really Great Cup of Coffee

Let's Fire The Boss

It’s official: I’d rather drink a tumbler full of vodka and powered glass than vote for George W. Bush to entertain us with four more years of his unique brand of physical comedy. I’m as willing as the next guy to let a joke run its course before deciding that it wasn’t funny, but enough is enough. Bush is like a Texas version of Jerry Lewis that the French actually don’t like. I really gave the guy a chance. He wasn’t my candidate in 2000, but after the inauguration I thought, “You know, how bad could it really get on the ground-level with him in the Oval Office?” The answer is much, much worse than I could have possibly imagined.


Ok, now tell me you still
don't believe in evolution.

Maybe you thought Clinton was the real Slim Shady. Maybe you think this President quoting gospel hymns during a state of the union address is the greatest thing since sliced bread. (Just what was the greatest thing before sliced bread, anyway?) All I know right now is that my income is 45% of what it was when the philandering Arkansan was in the White House. There just aren’t enough verses to Amazing Grace to make me feel good about that. What gives? I thought Republicans liked money. Get me back to $20 an hour and you can elect a Libertarian from Mississippi for all I care.

When someone gets to that level of government, their decisions were bought and paid for by a fraction of the electorate a long time ago, anyway. I just don’t cotton to having my livelihood stepped on in the process of giving the office away to the highest bidder, and this particular group of shadowy figures in the smoke-filled meeting room has now officially cost me income. So, for me, it’s time to shake the Executive branch Boggle cube and see if the new arrangement of letters has spelled “Robust Economy” from any angle.

Bush has managed to piss off the entire free world, get into an expensive war with a country that hasn’t invaded us, run up an even greater national debt than we had under Reagan and this guy’s still got more than a year left at the helm to make more sudden turns without breaking first. Aren’t the Republicans the party that preaches financial responsibility? We’ve got over a billion dollars a month to keep troops in Iraq, but we can’t afford to pay for education? The standard insult to Democrats is to call them tax and spend liberals, but cutting taxes while spending our asses off is somehow a better idea?


You might feel a slight
cramping sensation.

What do I have to show for it? The FBI can subpoena my library card activity and surfing habits. Whoopie. I feel so much safer now that John Ashcroft will know whether or not I’ve read The Bridges of Madison County or PVP. The Pentagon has proved once more that it can flatten third world countries with the efficiency of a lawn mower, but it hasn’t found Bin Laden or Hussein. We’re losing American troops at the rate of a handful per day, and that’s in a country we just conquered. We’re being told we can’t afford to take care of ourselves on the heels of being told that we have to spend $87 billion to rebuild Iraq. I wonder if seniors would have prescriptions completely covered by Medicare if Haliburton had a pharmaceutical division ready to fill a nice contract to provide the medications.

I’m less concerned with what Republicans think we should do than I am with what they’re doing. Maybe a small federal government is a good thing. Maybe we should have more of our money to spend ourselves. We can debate the abstract points of individual political philosophies until God finally tells the world’s faithful just which apocalyptic final chapter of which holy book had it right. In the meantime, the fact is: the standard of living in this country has slipped quite a bit with George’s people at the helm.

Now, as far as actually getting represented in exchange for your vote, picking a candidate has about as much of a specific effect on your personal future as your astrological sign. Maybe you voted for George, because he was Republican and that’s how you’re registered. Well, did he ever invite you to his house to talk about what you’d like him to do? Of course he didn’t. Not unless you contributed an amount of money to his party that has a single digit followed by a bunch of zeros, in which case, he did. But the regular kind of party line voting expressed by a ballot and not a checkbook actually gives you less say in how the specific administration will go, Republican or Democrat.

You, the faithful party voter, are the taken-for-granted girlfriend. Your party humors you and tells you what you want to hear from it, but not every day, anymore. Oh sure, right after the election there’s a honeymoon. They give you a little face time almost everyday and talk about how important you are. They romance you with language about the great future you’ll build together. But they’ve spent their time on the road talking to those other interests; sexy interests with bigger assets than you’ve got. Oh sure, you’re faithful and loyal, but they’ve already got you. Now, your party is setting their schedule around when those other interests they’ve been seeing need to get together and around what they’d like to do.


Of course I'll call you tommorow.

You ask them what they were doing with that political action committee or CEO the gossip section of the Wall Street Journal said they were out with the other night. Your party gives you a bunch of vague talk about how “We’re just good friends,” and then suddenly picks a fight with the country across the street before you can press them any further. Things start slipping around the House. Sure, some big show of effort is made about taking care of a couple of the things they said they’d do. But they begin to procrastinate on dealing with some of the issues and concerns they swore they’d make their top priorities. Promises made during those heady days of the campaign start to get broken. All of that money they said they’d spend on you or pay you back never quite materializes.

Maybe you feel disillusioned and start daydreaming about some independent candidate that reminds you of what your party was like when you first started voting. You start wondering about what it would be like on the other side of the fence. Who could blame you? All that time your party spent “broadening its horizons” with swing voters has left you feeling neglected and vulnerable. All that talk the Party gave you about how dedicated it was to you begins to sound hollow as you think about how your needs aren’t being met.

That is until the next election rolls around. Suddenly, there they are in the living room again every night. They throw lavish outdoor get-togethers for you and your friends. You get so many love notes in the mail you can’t even read them all. If you tell them about your problems and frustrations, they listen intently. You start to feel like the center of attention again. They talk about the things they can change or how you’ll work together to make it feel just like old times, again.


Parenting tip:
Never let your children
play with politicians,
you never know
where they've been.

Party-line Republicans and Democrats, I beseech you: snap out of it! These career politicians are worse than that jerk frat-boy your sister or cousin dated in college. They honestly need you, but only for one day every two to four years. When you give that vote away without a real commitment from your candidate, he won’t respect you for it. He’ll just move on to the next one. Campaigning politicians are like college freshmen guys trying to get laid. They think they have to work the hardest for the votes they haven’t gotten yet.

Would you sleep with someone who only called every two to four years and tried to get in bed with you using the same tired rhetoric you know they’ve already used with several thousand other people that week? Ok, maybe that analogy doesn’t work for the single young men out there, who just want to know how hot she is, before they’ll answer. But, I think you see my point. If these politicians want to spend their time chasing loose money and strange voters, make ‘em sleep in the minority seats in Congress. If your representatives aren’t representing you, dump their lame asses for someone else who will. Finally, if your president isn’t protecting your financial future or your freedoms before he does anything for anyone else, tell him the only library he needs to worry about monitoring is the one named after him that he’s about to build.

Columbus Day Revisited

"Hi. I didn't even do what I thought I did."

I saw the Sopranos rerun last night where the Italian Americans and Native Americans in New Jersey get into a literal fistfight over what kind of a guy Columbus was. We just had Columbus Day a week ago, which my federal employee wife likes to celebrate by staying home and sleeping, so I’ll weigh in:

Fuck Christopher Columbus.

I just thought I’d make my position clear on that. I don’t need to go on at length on this. Thousands of perfectly good trees have this man’s ruthlessness and incompetence written on their flattened corpses like a ruined epitaph. Each book on the man is like a mass grave.

What interests me, and by “interests me” I mean frustrates me, about dialogs like this is the utter pointlessness of them. There are plenty of great people of Italian heritage who didn’t rape and pillage their way across the West Indies. What’s the point of clinging to this one? It’s a misplaced sense of identity caused by stereotypical cultural associations. But I’m Irish and therefore a raging alcoholic; so don’t just take my word for it.

I’d submit that the point isn’t this man or that event when it comes to conversations like this. It’s what we cling to in order to differentiate ourselves from each other. Take the south, for example. I grew up in Memphis, and I’m still amazed that people actually wear rebel flags in the 21^st century. When I moved to Omaha, Nebraska, I actually had someone tell me that he and his friends “y’know, still sport the confederate flag sometimes.” I think he wanted to make me feel at home. My initial mental response was an incredulous “Thanks for picking a side in a fight that we settled 150 years ago, but I don’t think Nebraska was even a state then.” Sticking with a losing team is charming when you’re talking about Redsox fans, but these “Gray Ghost” guys just seem sad and more than a little creepy. It’s not like we’re going to replay the Civil War just to accommodate a handful of jarheads living in a past they don’t seem to fully comprehend. At least Boston gets to take another shot at the World Series every year.


"Wait, pickup trucks are the product of industrailization
and not slave-based agriculture? Well, shit!"

What sustains people through these flights of the mentally bizarre must be our enormous and only occasionally taxed capacities for denial. I’ve actually had a white coworker tell me that because some Africans participated in the slave trade, whites weren’t morally responsible for their own part in it. This is what I’m talking about, right here. He was trying so hard to come up with a rationale for something that his brain actually became incoherent. Oh sure, the sentiment is grammatically correct and formed in English, but it still makes no sense when you say it out loud. It actually breaks down when you expose it to oxygen.

It’s fairly well documented that “Ending Slavery” was the “real” reason for the Civil War the same way “Finding Weapons of Mass Destruction” was the “real” reason for Gulf War II. Now, I’m not saying that the end result of emancipation wasn’t as worthy as keeping the country from tearing in half, but what I am saying is that twisting history into something more noble doesn’t accomplish what we’d like it to. Now that the ending slavery and the Civil War are linked as primary cause and effect in so many minds, the lingering resentment over the loss of the Confederacy in some is redirected towards those that seemed to profit from it: Don’t like the way the war ended? Too bad, it was over well before you were born. However, African Americans do live here currently and they are free now at the expense of “dear ol’ Dixie”... (Cue the goddamn violins.) Or so the apparent thinking goes, anyway.

People try deconstructing unpleasant pieces of history from other angles, too. “Maybe the slaveholders treated the slaves well.” This is akin to saying that a rapist is an OK guy as long as he makes sure his victim’s head is resting on a pillow. "Maybe there’s nothing morally wrong with slavery.” Try grabbing someone off the street and forcing him to vacuum your house for three days and see how that little idea holds up in court. So instead of displacing blame, these efforts try to magically absolve it altogether. My coworker’s attempt at constructing a sentence falls under that category of nonsense. To be polite, I guess you could refer to this as a kind of rhetorical deus ex machina. Reality didn’t shape up the way some would like it to, so they’ll just refuse to process it or even pretend something else occurred instead.

I’ve even heard revisionists from the Confederate apologist camp actually claim that some black troops actually fought for the Confederates during the conflict. How would that even work? Ang Lee’s Ride With The Devil (featuring a single black raider and set in the non-state territories) aside, the established Confederacy passed laws that black troops captured in battle were to be hung as escaped slaves. Slave owners didn’t even want their blacks reading books, but I’m supposed to swallow that they were willing to give them guns? That crashing sound you hear is that notion collapsing under the weight of its own stupidity.

But as I said earlier, this pernicious nostalgia for things that never happened is as unnecessary as it is factually erroneous. I grew up in the south, and I never felt the need to apologize for the lousy parts of its history as much as I felt the need to understand them. If I want to be proud of where I’ve come from I think about our artists. We gave the world the blues and rock n’ roll. We’ve given the world Mark Twain, H.L. Menken, D.H. Lawrence and William Falkner. (Well, maybe I’ll apologize for Falkner, but I’m not going to pretend he never existed.) Some places back home are doing so well economically that some Yankees actually move south (only this time they’re not referred to as carpetbaggers). Our Democrats are some of the most battle-hardened liberals in the country, and our Republicans can kick your Republicans’ asses. Our overcooked vegetables actually taste good. Plus, we keep manners alive so the rest of the country can remember how to use them if they ever decide to, again. With all of that and more to appreciate, why in hell would I waste my time and energy trying to defend the Alabama state flag? It’s not even particularly well designed.


If we can get past this
we can get past anything.

The fact is that as a culture (and even more so as a species), we’ve made lots and lots of mistakes. I know that we’d like to pretend that Vanilla Ice never had a top ten hit, but I’ve got pictures of you from junior high dancing to Ice Ice Baby in the five minutes that it took you to realize that the sampled bass line from Queen’s Under Pressure didn’t actually make the song worth listening to. Most people don’t go around pretending that Rob Van Winkle didn’t pick an even goofier stage name and put one over on us. We certainly don’t walk around constructing elaborate reasons why that track actually rocked. We give each other shit about having liked the song and get on with our lives. If we can come to term with such trivial pop culture embarrassments, why can’t we just admit our ancestors have screwed a lot of things up and gotten a lot of things right. Especially considering the end result on our quality of life will hurt only as much as admitting a lot of us once owned copies of To The Extreme.

So southerners, be proud of who we are, and quit trying to justify every detail of what we were. Nobody else on the planet is still watching Gone With The Wind while curled up with a box of Kleenex. Italians, the rest of us do know that white guys with MBAs, not fat guys named Vito wearing tracks suits, commit most of the organized crime in this country. Give the anti-defamation league a rest; it’s turning into a bigger joke than The Godfather: Part III. As a people, Italians have given so much good to the world, I’m surprised we’re not still speaking Latin conversationally. Finally, to the two Irishmen who were offended earlier when I made that crack about alcoholism, I was drunk when I wrote it and I’m sorry.

So that's where I left that...

I’m sick to fucking death of things breaking down, but we’re not going to get into that right now.

Right now, I’m having way too much fun being distracted by the fact that I’d forgotten just how good the movie The Untouchables really is. This is the kind of pleasure one feels when finding a $20 bill in a jacket you haven’t worn since last winter. This little gem of a flick from 1987 shows you just how much fun a good movie can be to watch. The film is a dramatization of the story of Elliot Ness and his team of Chicago police that brought down Al Capone. Sure, it’s based on a true story and set in a very important period in American history (the part where Congress decided that telling everyone that they couldn’t drink anymore would somehow make them less violent), but the movie doesn’t pistol-whip you with that fact. The storytelling is great, and I mean brand-new-baby-kitten-asleep-on-your-neck great. The dialog doesn’t come across as pleased with itself when it’s clever, the sentimental parts aren’t sticky sweet and when there’s an action-hero punch line (you know- step 1) kill bad guy, step 2) say something cute about the way you did it) you feel amused instead of annoyed.

You’ve got Sean Connery playing a character appropriate to both his age and inexpugnable accent. You’ve got Kevin Costner playing Elliot Ness doing a Kevin Costner impersonation, which is how most of his good roles usually work. Come to think of it, I guess that’s one thing they both have in common. Neither Kevin nor Sean can stop playing himself, no matter how much the role demands otherwise (or as Cary Elwes put it, “Unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English Accent.”) So you’ve got a rare situation where two “name” actors are in the right parts for the right movie, then you’ve got two actual actors actually playing other people, namely Andy Garcia as an street smart Italian cop and Robert DeNiro doing an Al Capone slightly tinged with his title character at the end of Raging Bull, and something metaphorically approaching chemistry begins to happen.

I put more than a little blame for this wonderful state of things on director Brian DePalma. A lot of people have said a lot of things about him, but in brief, he’s known as a person quite taken with Alfred Hitchcock’s style of doing things. Whether or not you think that’s a good thing in general, in this case it’s beautiful to watch. The story unfolds, nay, unfurls like a gorgeous flag from America’s past, notable for its fewer stars. It twists and turns with changes in the plot or wind, yet always hangs firmly on its pole dug half its height again into a concrete premise. Characters develop. When they fail to, it’s because they’re dead. You care when the un-gratuitous violence takes its toll on the cast, but you are comforted knowing both their mission and the movie make progress as a result of their sacrifice or brutal elimination. DePalma’s, which is to say, Hitchcock’s style adds an honest tension and keeps your attention held like a breath in your chest as you wonder, I’ll repeat that for emphasis, wonder what will happen next. Hell, even the music is exceptional.

Rather than continuing to gush like a stabbed belly (which I could do for some time since I have two plus gallons of blood left in me), I’ll take the opportunity to transition into how the presence of quality in this film makes it’s absence felt in many of the other films I’ve choked down with popcorn and watery soda. Why should wondering what happens next be a novel experience when watching a film? When did having someone tell you something you didn’t already know become perceived as a bad thing for the average filmgoer? I mean, this has to be coming from somewhere and being rewarded somehow.

Remember when movie trailers weren’t Cliff’s Notes encapsulations of the films they advertise? This idea that we might resent not being able to predict every event in the movie, which we’re watching in the first place mostly because we’ve never seen it before, is incongruent on it’s smarmy little face. I’ve seen movies telegraph their punches so badly; they’ve sent me emails describing how they end before I even got in the car to go to the theater. If you dress the murderer in a mystery in a black top hat and give him a thick curly mustache to with his evil cackle, you have practically prevented me from figuring out that he did it because you’ve already told me he’s the villain. You have presented me with a clumsy set of cultural signals my simian brain is designed to interpret. How is that supposed to make me feel smart? I might as well congratulate myself for being able to read. Sure these kinds of visual shorthand are useful to establish elements quickly enough to make a larger point, but they serve piss-poorly as points in and of themselves.

David Mamet wrote in his book Three Uses of the Knife that drama is an expression of the survival mechanism in our brain that interprets sequences of things into cause and effect. I think the underlying point here is that your brain has to be under the impression that something is up for debate or worthy of investigation for your attention span to stay focused and for this pattern sorting instinct to reward you with “fun”. Once you’re aware that there’s a little man behind the curtain pushing and pulling levers, it’s pretty damn hard to take the glowing head with the booming voice seriously.

Poorly written, acted and directed films violate these expectations by calling the harsh, glaring light of attention from the illusion of a situation and put it squarely on the artifice failing to create the illusion. The landing sequence at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan may not make you feel like you’re on Omaha Beach fifty years ago, but it can fool part of your brain into thinking it’s watching an actual, meaningful situation. A direct to video porn called Saving Ryan’s Privates, on the other hand, would probably be a contrived excuse to depict an actual series of sexual acts between attractive but terrible “actors”, and as such, the lousy costumes, sets and dialog get in the way of watching the porn, and therefore call attention to themselves.

So, films like The Untouchables work because their parts all pull smoothly together in rhythm like a well-oiled machine and give the attention you put towards watching it the appearance of a complete and compelling thing. Only in retrospect do the well-designed parts come into any conspicuous focus. Films like Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace give you jarring speed bumps, gaping plot holes and bad directions, which leave you the impression you have survived a series of incidents rather than gone on a single contiguous journey punctuated with memorable events.

I’m begging you, Hollywood: There is a veritable litany of movies that do this well. Try imitating the craft of them rather than aping their specific parts.