Also: Because I was off in Los Angeles covering the film fest, I never got around to linking to my last Reason column, a memoir of my days as a teenaged zinester. And it isn't online, but the new No Depression, dated November-December 2005, includes my review of a reissued Pogues CD.
Finally, lookit this: The AP asks me to talk about the state of Doonesbury. I should mention, before you rush off to read it, that I'm not comfortable with the claim that I "disagree" with Trudeau's recent work -- the verb implies that I have sympathy for his targets, and that usually isn't the case. I just don't think his satire is as sharp as it used to be.
The first involves Saturday's selection of Kurdish films. Most of these were more interesting as artifacts than as art, but one short -- Ednan Osman's Garbage Dump -- was exceptional. A group of children is playing on pile of refuge, picking up remnants of the war; a wonderful series of surreal images and inspired lines ensues. At one point, a kid straps on an Osama mask, declares a "republic of garbage," and tells the others that he'll be following their progress from his hiding place on the moon. It was one of the better films of the festival, and I wish I'd had room to praise it in my piece.
The second observation involves some curious parallels. No matter what the Culture Warriors say, you can't sort all of the country into neat piles of red and blue. Last year Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Passion of the Christ were supposed to represent opposite poles of a deeply divided nation. But Michael Moore is a Catholic and Mel Gibson has criticized the war, and both have spoken kindly of each other's movies.
So for all the Republican partisanship on display last weekend, it wasn't always easy to distinguish these conservatives' critique of Hollywood from the criticisms you'll hear from the left. When festival co-founder Govindini Murty complained to me about the state of the cineplex, she told me that movies today feature "out of control violence" and a "fetish of the gun"; she pointed out that there has been "a real decrease in the number of roles for women"; and she argued, hyperbolically, that Hollywood has adopted the aesthetic values of the Nazis. If all that sounds familiar, it may be because liberals and feminists regularly make the exact same complaints.
I should also mention that November's print edition of Reason has been out for a couple of weeks. My sole bylined contribution is a tiny little article about the abolition of Ukraine's traffic patrols.
Finally: I'm going to be away when it goes up, so I might not get a chance to link to it at the time, but I should have another piece on Reason Online on Thursday, this one about the persistance of zines. It accidentally appeared on the site today for about five or ten minutes before the Web team realized they'd posted the wrong column, so some of you may have had a sneak preview.