i have had a personal site that i did for fun up for a while 

i thought i'd announce it now for the myspace crowd first

its here:

http://www.rednight.net

who is gonna be Clyde the guy from Twilight?!??! maybe one of the Jonas brothers or whoever the current teeniebopper brother act is??

Barb was looking at celebrity feud.com or some such and apparently Faye Dunaway (some might recall played the Bonnie part in the 'old' version) was heard to comment that

"they should have gotten a real actress..." which prompted a tirade from Ms Duff about Faye being too old and not looking good these days etc etc

so i might suggest that Hillary show some class in the future and when someone says something bad or nasty about you, dont fire back... it would have been much more to your credit had you just said "i'll do my best" and left it at that

see its easy to sound like someone who writes for the tabs

anyone who has forgotten about our casting the taxi driver re-make here check out that older post, i think that my myspace friends and i did a great job with it 

soo... Debbie and Paul and me played our unplugged set at the Toronto film festival a while back, we actually played after Kevin Costner who (who knew?) has been playing in a band for ages apparently... he plays with his buddies from where ever he grew up... he was very nice when we talked to him and even though i was prepared to be horrified i really liked the part of his set that we saw... he does a sort of stones/country rock and the writing is actually pretty sophisticated... ok so that... we play and go back to the fancy hotel that we are in... waiting for the elevator, a whole crowd gets on so we wait for another one, doors open we jump in and there's Viggo Mortensen all by himself barefoot... he'd been seeing some guest down on the express elevator from whatever whole floor he's staying on... DAMN! we are starstruck, he looks great!... we manage to get a short conversation going about 'Apaloosa' which is playing at the festival, why he's there promoting... then a few weeks later i see that he's starring in the film version of 'The Road'... Debbie says 'oh i knew that'... Damn! i didn't, THAT would have been something i would have liked to get his take on...
who has read it? can something like that really be a movie? a friend said "that's the book that every writer has been afraid to write..." something like that certainly... 'The Road' is a very hard thing to experience... maybe it's the parenthood aspect but even without that it's rough... so far i've seen one review that says how horrendously bleak the film is... it's not really the kind of thing that one 'looks forward' to... for anyone who liked The Road i would recommend "Fires On The Plain by Shohei Ooka a Japanese classic which also has been filmed... but though 'Fires' is close it isn't the same beast as The Road which is all consuming... i hope McCarthy gets his next offering out soon

what i see little addressing of in the clamor of the election is the issue of anti-intellectualism in the US... a heated topic that is in discussion regularly, here it is on a back burner, back stage area... a lot seems to date to the end of the 19th century and the emergence of communism as part of the worlds political makeup and the association of intellectual ideals with being 'red'....later the whole 'nerd' concept... what needs to be really put forward here? everyone sees it... what perplexes me is that even though the idea of the poet warrior is looked up to when it comes to Samurai films it is not considered a 'real' option for life in America... at its most extreme the persecution of the educated has resulted in the excesses of extreme dictatorships like the Khmer Rouge which murdered those of its subjects who had even a simple education...
anyone interested just look up 'anti-inellectualism' in wikipedia and there you will find long discussions that are outlines of the current 'positions' or 'sides' of the political arena, the same stupid stances of 'conservative' vs. 'liberal' the position of the media; Gore portrayed as a boring 'brain' who 'spoke monotonously about theories and numbers no one could understand', Bill O'Reilly having a hostile attitude towards what he calls the 'ivy league' elite etc. etc.
the word 'intellectual' itself being used as an insult...
am i alone in feeling this is a crazy state of affairs... America entered the 20th century embracing the ideals of intelligence; Einstein was a popular figure and his work helped end the second world war, send men into space all of that...
is everyone out there really so far gone that they buy into all of this... the last few days have seen huge rifts in the economy that are results of the last eight years of government... the same people who picked the current government have picked the people they want to see as the next government, why are we supposed to think that there is going to be a difference

since writing the above the debate and the crash... in the debate we saw Ob address one of the issues i am always on about... the other day for the first time i was actually called by a political poll... 'what did i see as a central issue...' well the image of the US in the eyes of the world of course... as i mentioned probably several times on my blog things... once more every time we travel and talk to just average people i see that almost 100% they are confused about the situation in the US; how could we here have let this guy be our leader, twice no less...

so now with the financial crisis i see that Wm. Gibson one of our favorite writers has proved his vision for America to be even more accurate than i might have imagined; we are looking forward to an immediate future that will in all likelihood be owned and operated by a lot of international interests...
soon enough we will see the neon signs filled with Chinese characters, the cities filled with the new 'foreign' elite who own all that we can no longer maintain...
empires come and go... i recently saw it put forth that the 'swinging London' of the Beatles sixties was in fact the last gasp of the British isles rather than the beginning of anything... America leads the world in instant gratification, the Chinese as just one example have been able to put it off for years in order to create a future for their next generations...
over the last half a year or so maybe more i have seen the word "owned" enter the popular lingo to mean control, influence etc etc... lots of you tube clips titled 'so and so owned by this or that'... so in a way perfect timing here; who is gonna 'own' the US?

finally on a lighter note (maybe) i have seen commentators go on about "things in the US may soon come to resemble conditions the way they were in the seventies"... well you can all imagine how i might feel about that... my new slogan is: "DEPRESSION MEANS HAPPIER ARTISTS"