Dicks and Smoking

It’s 2011, and for fuck’s sake, we all know that smoking cigarettes, and chewing tobacco, are at the very least unhealthy. Given what the Big Tobacco Co.’s stuff in to make it more addicting, it’s downright toxic. And deadly. And the deaths are ugly. And that ugly looks like this:

Lung cancer: (which I typooed as “lunch cancer” while writing this, but that’s another story)

Mouth cancer:

Birth defects:

Whoops, that’s not a birth defect, that’s a congenital heart-can’t-fucking-be-found defect. Here’s the birth defect:

Yeah, I totally could have warned you that the pictures were graphic, but let’s face it: until you fucking see what it does, you don’t know, can’t imagine, and not one of you could have drawn what these pictures show even if I described it to you in gory detail. The pictures are, especially of that child, horrible.

So in 2009 the FDA started up a new plan to make the Big Tobacco companies show their customers what could happen to them if they keep smoking. This is the equivalent of the “Blood on the Highway” movies we all had to watch before getting our drivers licenses. In some ways, it’s also the equivalent of the “Duck and Cover” movies about nuclear war in the 1950s.

Apparently, tho, forcing the evil cunts at Big Tobacco to put these pics on the side of pack of cigs is somehow “forced speech” and now violates their rights? According to U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon.

The Court concludes that plaintiffs have demonstrated a substantial likelihood that they will prevail on the merits of their position that these mandatory graphic images unconstitutionally compel speech, and that they will suffer irreparable harm absent injunctive relief pending a judicial review of the constitutionality of the FDA’s rule…

It’s not like we require the cigarette companies to include a little voice player like the Hallmark cards with Alec Mapa saying “Yep, you can still have this, but it could fuck up your baby. Go for it, girl!” it’s just a fucking picture of actual results, and your results may vary.

I’ve worked with the Montana Tobacco Use Prevention Program for years, and I personally HATE cigarettes, and thinking chewing tobacco is one step off shooting meth. To say I’m not a fan is understatement.

I have friends who think that cigarettes and other tobacco products should be banned outright, but I don’t think that’s the way to go either. If you want to smoke, fine, that’s your choice. Don’t do it by me, thank you, and know what you’re getting into. These pictures would help in that education. The idea is to stop people before they start, because once hooked, you’re fucked for a good long time.

Ask anyone who has managed to quit smoking how hard it was.

And since we can’t force people to see these images when they buy cigarettes, because it would hurt the tobacco companies (who deserve to be hurt, but that’s another rant as well) I suggest you bookmark this post and tweet it to your friends who smoke. They’ll see that baby. And they’ll see Dick Cheney. Both should be more than enough to scare them into calling 1-800-QUIT-NOW immediately.

Ok, so we’ve all heard the complaints about the double-standard that’s been in evidence in recent years regarding how the football players can get away with murder while the regular students get sacked for basic pranking. If you want a primer on this, I recommend my good friend’s at 4 & 20 Blackbirds post “More Griz Thuggery“ on this exact subject.

In fact, I had been chatting with the masterful writers over at the birds’ nest, and we both agree that this situation appears to be out of hand.

I, however, took what I’d heard from them to my sources, and heard something very different, and it’s not something that seems out of sorts at all, so now I’m torn.

The current two stories are thus;

1) The students were at a party, far too loud, and when the police arrived, they pulled the “do you know who I am” crap that all d-list stars try at some point, which got them no where, then they resisted arrest, pushed a cop, and had to be tased. This story falls under the “football players are coddled twats who spend more time making trouble than actually proving their worth on the field” which is a popular story, and one that’s actually based on some truth.

2) The students were at a party, far too loud, and when the police arrived, instead of asking that the noise be kept down, one of the cops, who apparently is right about 5-foot-nothing and has a staggering case of “small man syndrome” started in about “you niggers need to go back where you came from” yelling at the players that they were useless and had been taking scholarships from the locals who were deployed to Iraq to protect our freedoms. This falls under the “Missoula police have been out of hand and have some bad apples who are reflecting poorly on the overall force with their inability to actually police without being bullies or instigating situations that then require some sort of weaponry, usually a taser.” This is also a popular story, one that, again, is based on some truth.

So what actually happened? If this were any time before 2010 we’d have to answer “We may never know.” but it’s not, and apparently there are videos on cell phones, multiple videos, that show this cop losing his shit and doing the wrong thing, inciting and attacking instead of protecting and serving.

This is also why one of the most expensive lawyers in the state, one with whom no one really likes to tangle, has agreed to handle this case. The cops are in a world of trouble if this plays out with these videos.

Mind you, I’ve seen nothing, and my information is second-hand, but it’s from people I trust and who would actually know. If I were a betting man, I’d not put money down because it’d be like insider-trading at this point, but you should totally put money on the cop getting busted down to cross-walk guard in the very near future.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem with the football players being treated as the Favored Sons of Powerful Lords, it, in fact, re-enforces the idea that this is a problem. If a cop, admittedly an unbalanced one in this case, but not so unbalanced he could be removed from the force before this, obviously, realized he was dealing with the players, and that they’d probably get off scot-free regardless of what they did, that could easily be enough to push him over whatever edge he was walking when it comes to dealing with law breakers.

Missoula PD might also want to do some more rigorous personality/stress testing to see what’s going on with their officers and perhaps mitigate events like this in the future.

Regardless, there does need to more upstanding, ethical behavior on all sides. The student athletes need to remember that they are privileged to be in the roles they have, and nothing is owed them, while quite a bit is given, willingly. Show some respect, and be adults. If you need help figuring out how to do that, find Miss Manners and or just ask a drama student to help you. The cops need to remember that kids do stupid things, and dealing with drunks takes patience and skill, and that training cannot be skipped or avoided, because tasers are deadly far more often than they should be, and it’s usually because someone lost their temper instead of using their head.

I’m sure there will be more to come on this whole story, but for right now, both sides are in the wrong and nothing good has come of it.

On Saturday I was kindly given tickets to the Helena Symphony’s performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, a piece that I 1) love, 2) have performed several times in my life, and 3) laugh every time my mother calls it “Carmen Bulimia” because she’s clever like that.

This piece is one of those works that really makes you love music. It takes some of the raciest concepts and puts them to sweeping music and makes you work while you enjoy it. It’s fantastic.

Or, well, it should be.

I’ve kind of agonized over this because I really do like the people I know in the Symphony, and I know several members of the Symphony Chorale and truly like and admire them. And they did good. Not great, but good.

I wouldn’t cross the street to piss on Allan Scott, the conductor, if he was on fire. I can’t stand the man, and the way he’s treated people in this town has, for years, been a standing insult to the arts. He’s a insufferable dick, and he’s getting worse. So while I did want to see the show, it would have been immeasurably better if Scott had been stricken with a cold, or perhaps a minivan.

But again, the musicians, both in the orchestra and the chorale, did good. Which is only depressing because I know their talent and drive and for them to have done anything less than spectacular is a shame.

Overall, the night wasn’t the best entertainment, but not the worst either.

First off, the concert was billed as Carmina Burana, but when we got to the Civic Center, we find out that the concert will start with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op36. Not a bad piece, but not the same sort of vitality of Carmina, so it’s a bit of an odd choice. Not horrible, just odd. I can imagine this was ostensibly done for the “blue-haired ladies” that fund the bulk of the arts in small towns, but I know most of those ladies and they love Carmina Burana all on it’s own, so it’s still strikes me as a weird choice.

After the orchestra has tuned up, in the traditional manner, Alan Scott, née “Maestro Scott” enters wearing his pajamas. I’m not one to call someone out for wearing whatever the hell he wants, but he looked like he didn’t care about the performance. I wear a tux when I sing with the Helena Chamber Singers, which goes against my “always shorts, always” rule, so I feel I get to call him out on his sartorial cockup. He looked like an idiot, which he isn’t, but maybe he was confused about how to show his true colors. (In case you’re wondering, Allan, megalomaniacs wear epaulettes, eg. Qaddafi.)

Anyway, back to the concert. Scott preened a bit, then turned to the orchestra and waggled his baton to start the performance. Go listen to how No. 2 starts. It has two hits. They aren’t that hard, nor are they uncommon at this point in western musical history, but the Helena Symphony missed it, and given the off-hand, seizure-like flailing of the baton that Scott subjected them to, I don’t see any way they could have gotten it right. He was a mess, and he fucked up the most basic part of a great piece – the first note!

I was not impressed, and at this point, I started to wonder if seeing his interpretation of Carmina Burana was a good idea. As we slogged through the Beethoven, I really become despondent. What happened to our symphony? Why is this being allowed? The piece drags a bit, but, played well, Beethoven is always a treat. It just wasn’t played all that well. And again, knowing the talent seated on that stage, this was a tad crushing.

I actually thought, and asked a friend seated next to me, “Were they sight-reading this for the first time?” because that’s where this performance was. They musicians are that talented, so why was the performance not at their level.

One would think the pajama’d stick-waver would have rehearsed them a bit better. Apparently, one would be wrong.

But whatever, I wasn’t at the performance for the Beethoven, I was there for the Orff. We all were.

I checked the program and was heartened to see the final paragraph, which I will quote in it’s entirety, because it’s awesome.

It must be remembered that Carmina Burana was designed to be seen as well as heard. Either mimed and choreographed as a ballet or performed in concert, Carmina continues to maintain its chilling and hypnotic effect on admirers of all generations (even when they are not familiar with the work itself), proving that besides the ear of the “civilized” man there exists another ear—a greedy, barbaric one that cries for its food, drink, desire, lust, risks, and fate.

I was looking forward to that “seen as well as heard” bit because when I last performed this, with the Helena Chamber Singers, we had the Premier Dance Company do some spectacular performances as we sang. (This qualifies as my disclaimer as I’m hardly an uninterested by-stander, but I did come to this performance with an open mind, hoping for the best.)

I was destined to be disappointed. Instead of having dancers, they had a projector with English supertitles floating 25 feet above the symphony, and the supertitles were useless. The font was small, the color dark blue, and the words were close, but not right and quite frankly, useless. We’d have all been better off without them.

For those of you unfamiliar with Carmina Burana get a copy of it from iTunes. It’s brilliant, and I can guarantee that you’ve heard at least O! Fortuna! as it’s been used over and over again in ad campaigns for decades.

Again, Scott returns to the stage in his silken nightshirt, ready to start the big piece.

He then strikes out with his baton as if fending off a charging grizzly in a vain attempt to save a family of four from being devoured in the wilds of Montana during a particularly harsh winter. The symphony and the chorale are forced to interpret this manic dance, and attempt, only to ultimately fail, to come in together, as the composer intended.

Not a good start.

This went on. There were fantastic moments, truly brilliant times when the instruments were perfect, the chorus was magical and the moment just raised chills for me. There were two of them. In Carmina there are at least 20 places where this should happen, and perhaps 40 more where, under the guidance of true talent, it could happen. Twice was not enough.

The baritone, Evan Thomas Jones, was great. I felt he started off a tad overwrought vocally, but by his second solo he was awesome, and then he added just the right touch of actual acting to make his performance brilliant. Bravo to him.

The tenor, Jeffrey G. Kitto, has only one solo, and it’s a bitch. I know, I’ve sung it. Kitto did great with it, and was hysterical in his acting as well. Bravo to him as well.

Kristine Biller Mattson, the soprano, was the only one of the three soloists that didn’t have her music memorized. I would fault her for this, but given the spastic conducting of Scott’s, combined with the runs and tempo changes in her solos, it’s not that big of a deal. Her voice is rich and warm, and powerful, and while she could have done more acting, she sang beautifully. Brava to her.

The Caspar Children’s Chorale was fine. I don’t know why they were there, nor why the childrens’ choirs from our own city weren’t used, but in the end, the only problems that happened with the choir can’t be laid at the feet of these kids. They sang well, they just looked terrified or bored, depending on where in the piece they were.

The Symphony Chorale was under-utilized, and almost felt under-rehearsed. The dynamic range they showed wasn’t anything near their ability, and the random flapping displayed by Scott was impossible to decypher, so entrances were flubbed and hits were missed.

At the end of O! Fortuna the tempo changes, and with uncoordinated flailing it’s no wonder that instead of the powerful, dramatic, majestic ending that Orff composed, the symphony was left to deliver an end that missed a hit.

I hate criticizing the symphony because it’s such a great institution – or, at least, it was. What Scott has done with is inability to lead, his manic style combined with his overbearing ego and lack of humanity is to destroy this once-great symphony and make it a shell of what it once was. It used to be a regional, if not national, caliber symphony. Now, it’s this:

Which is sad. It was more, and should be again, but at least we can all agree on why it’s a problem, as this tweet shows:

For those of you who don’t know, “ictus” means “hit”, and so, it’s apparently a common problem.

It appears that not only can’t Scott conduct himself as a decent human being, he can’t conduct the symphony orchestra either. He needs to go.

Fixing the TV.

You know, the worst part about watching the TV is that the whole mess that used to be solved by TV Guide has gotten way the hell out of hand. Have you fired up your average Cable TV Guidance System lately? I bet you have. I also bet you’re just as overwhelmed by it as you’d be if you were asked to man the missile control guidance system used by our military drones.

Pardon my language, but what a fucking mess. On my system, Bresnan Cablevision Optimum, you’ll find that the regular channels start at 2, the random “Who the hell watches this? Oh, it’s Lifetime” channels are in the high 100s and into the 200s, there’s a block of NHL channels on the 400s, the 500s used to be HD, but now their movie channels, but not the HD movie channels, unless you’re going into the OnDemand Movie channels and then yes, they are HD, sometimes, and then the 600s have baseball or basketball or hackey-sack or something else that no one really watches anyway, and then the 700s have the regular channels that were back at 2 but they are now in HD and mostly you can find channel 2 in HD on 702, but sometimes that doesn’t work either, and not all the channels have HD yet, but then…

You know what? It’s just dumb. Stop it.

Last year, HBO released an app. (Stick with me, this is related, and I promise this will all circle around and only make one eye twitch.) HBO Go is a brilliant app, you can, if your cable company isn’t a douche, sign in with your cable company login credentials and watch every HBO original series, right on your iPad. Absolutely brilliant!

Of course, Optimum appears to be powered by a super-secret water-and-vinegar concoction so I haven’t been able to use it, but there it is, tantalizingly beckoning me into the future of 2010. Wooohoo.

If you really think about what this is, tho, it’s a chance for the cable companies to get out of the headaches they currently have and instead to offer up just bandwidth and be free of negotiating contracts with content producers, because let’s face it, if you want Disney (and every cable company wants Disney, they practically have to have it) you’re going to have to negotiate with Disney, and while the Mouse is cute, the lawyers he employs are wicked evil. You want Disney, you’re going to have to pay for EPSN2 through EPSN28 as well. Which no one will watch. Ever. Those are the 400s and 600s of the guide, apparently.

Why would you want to bust your balls with that? You don’t. So be smart, Cable Company, and ditch that shit.

Get with Apple or Motorola and make a new kind of cable box that just has a purchasing interface, and then blocks of channels. You want the locals as a given, great, put them in. You want Disney, it’s $4 a month. ESPN is $4 as well. HBO is $6. Showtime is $5.50 and Cinemax comes in a bundle with HBO and just bumps it up to $6.50 for both channels.

And other than the local channels, you know what you get to watch? Whatever you want, if it’s on the channel, you can watch it as you want. That’s the beauty. It’s TV that makes sense, and the cable company just bills for it, and takes their cut of what you’ve chosen to get.

And that would be awesome.

Which means we’ll never see it.