I’m an admirer of Herzog’s films (see here and here and many other posts on this blog), and his documentaries are special treats. Like the Bush administration, Herzog never allows himself to be held back by the facts:  every insight is a product of his distinct imagination, delivered in his doomy Deutschland monotone. Herzog can imagine things we can’t; in his vision, nature is chaotic and insane, and to look animals in the eye is to address our continual war with them. (He also seems to think they are winning, or will win.)

For those interested in Herzog’s dystopian view and its mordant delivery, Slate has done us all a favor. They’ve compiled some of the choicest great moments in Werner Herzog voiceovers. (Although I’m sad that they couldn’t find a place for “Lessons of Darkness,” Herzog’s extraterrestrial look at the Kuwaiti oil fires set by Saddam Hussein, a film that’s an enormous shudder-inducing accomplishment.) But if you’re looking for a primer into the Herzog documentary method, Slate’s overview fills that function nicely.

Hm. Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul. Makes it really hard to decide which one I’d most like to see them nominate.

Last week when I was reading the international response to our extermination of the dangerous pest known as Osama bin Laden, I was sadly unsurprised to see so many British editorials bemoaning U.S. action. Winston Churchill, for sure, was having a very unpleasant day in his justly commodious afterlife. Somehow or other, the civilization he had bequeathed to his people, rescued from the evil dictatorship others were hell-bent on inflicting upon it, had turned into a nation of quislings.

Imagine, then, how thrilled I was to see this yesterday:  an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from Andrew Roberts, a British historian of World War II, apologizing for his countrymen, who seem far removed from the bulldogs of past glory. Quoting Churchill, who was chary of “the long, drawling, dismal tides of drift and surrender,” Roberts wonders whether the British “can be counted upon for much longer.”

It continues to astonish me that in some circles the sentiment carries on that we somehow did wrong by Mr. bin Laden. I can’t explain it, because I can’t understand it.

Proving once again that theatre is indeed popular entertainment, just gussied up.

The western world is filled with weight-loss cures. And how fitting it was that I found a certain special one yesterday that I hadn’t heard of.

Yesterday, you see, was International Monty Python Day. I hope you didn’t miss it. The day had me reminiscing about one of Monty Python’s most iconic characters, a character who every day here in America looms even larger, Mr. Creosote, who serves as a bigger and bigger role model for many of us. Here’s the scene that launched Mr. Creosote to fame:

Now, in what I can only assume is his honor, a company has introduced WaferThin weight-loss wafers. Oh, if only the thoughtless maitre d’ in the clip above had offered one of these and not the fatal chocolate variety!

Scouring our bookshelves for a novel to read with my soon-to-be-nine-year-old son Dietrich, I landed the other night upon The Mote in God’s Eye, a first-contact science fiction novel by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle that I’d read in 1976 when I was 13. I wondered if it was too advanced for him — and his almost-13-year-old sister flat-out said it was, even though she’s never read it — but I figured that it’s got lots of space battles, and aliens, and that ultimately we’d make our way through it as successfully as his older brother and I had done with Journey to the Center of the Earth when he was the same age. So we started reading it the other night.

When you’re reading old science fiction, you’re reading what I’ll call projected alternate futures, the sort of things that make up storylines on “Fringe.” The book is set in 3017, but it’s important to remember that in a way that isn’t just over a thousand years in the future — it’s more properly one thousand forty-three years since its writing. So the authors, writing four years before the introduction of the home computer,  and 11 years before the release of the first PDA, are commendably prescient when they write, “Rod Blaine scowled at the words flowing across the screen of his pocket computer” — although one could say that if we’ve got “pocket computers” already, a millennium before the setting of their novel, it follows that we’ll have something far more advanced in the far future. (Unless, paraphrasing Einstein, we’re fighting World War IV with rocks.) At the same time, if  Niven and Pournelle are thoughtful about technology (and weaponry and the military), here’s something they weren’t thinking through in 1974:

“Blaine was rushed down the elevator to the Governor General’s floor. There wasn’t a woman in the building, although Imperial government offices usually bristled with them, and Rod missed the girls. He’d been in space a long time.”

So, somehow, in the future the military returns to all-male service, despite 4,000 years, to date, of  women serving in various military capacities; or the current military service seen in Israel, the U.S., Russia and, I believe, most industrialized or post-industrialized nations; or the projected futures depicted in artifacts of popular culture such as the Halo and Mass Effect games and seemingly every James Cameron movie.  Acceptance is often driven by pop culture (by way of example, see:  interracial relationships, homosexuality, etc.). That very anachronistic point of view seems far more 1974 than 3017.

But then, the best perspective on the skewed time-reality of the book came from  Dietrich himself, who, when I told him that I’d read this book “in the 1970’s,” tittered and said, “The 1970’s? That’s like 300 years ago!”

Courtesy of the New York Times, here’s an overview of significant offerings on stages across the U.S. this summer — including an offering from my theatre company, Moving Arts, as part of the Radar L.A. festival in June. More on that to come later.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal contains an interesting piece about how music videos are undergoing a reinvention. Here’s the story. You’ll note several videos featured that I’ve embedded into this blog in recent years, including Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice,” a superb video that famously features Christopher Walken performing a gravity-defying dance throughout a hotel, and the new interactive Devo video, which allows viewers to determine the shots and click to buy featured products, which I wrote about here. (Rebecca Black gets no mention.)

The form is evolving and so is the distribution method. Yes, almost 30 years ago, my generation was glued to MTV daily in search of the latest great new music video. They were for the most part brief and memorable. I still don’t like Van Halen, but “Hot for Teacher” remains stapled to my consciousness thanks to the video, and I just wish I could cease mentally seeing Steven Tyler opining about love in an elevator. (Shudder.) When MTV transitioned into faux-reality programming for teenagers underburdened by things to do, my generation drifted away. Smart move on MTV’s part in its search to remain relevant to a younger demographic. Forty-somethings still have music videos, but now we find them on YouTube, and we find them there via Facebook. I’m glad these sometimes brilliant little musical vignettes still get produced, and I look forward to new examples that will help pave over “Love in an Elevator.”

I read a lot:  newspapers, books, the internet, magazines, labels, you name it. As terrifying as I find, say, the chemical composition of whatever that is that Taco Bell is serving, nothing that I’ve read recently has alarmed me as much as this piece I’m going to link to in the next sentence. That’s because, if you didn’t like what you saw with the Great American Recession, hang on, ’cause here’s what happens if Congress doesn’t lift the debt ceiling. The Recession was merely the warmup; imagine the government failing to pay its vendors — i.e., U.S. businesses — and those businesses failing to pay their vendors, and those vendors and everyone above them in the food chain performing massive layoffs. How long do we have before this scenario starts to play out? About two weeks.

But wait, there’s more.

That particular problem has a solution:  a Congressional vote to increase the debt ceiling. That buys us more than two weeks. But it in no way addresses the actual problem — that most days, the U.S. Treasury takes in far less money than it needs to fund government operations. We’re all aware of this deficit, at least theoretically. But when you look at actual numbers, it gains a new cogency. Here goes:

On Monday, it took in almost $26 billion, but on Tuesday it took in less than $4 billion. Through Tuesday, the Treasury has received a little less than $1.3 trillion in taxes for fiscal year 2011, but has made payments of almost $7 trillion. The reason the payment number is so large is because it includes funds that were paid to Treasury’s lenders, whose securities matured and needed to be paid off. …

… But of course, because the federal government runs a budget deficit, the Treasury must borrow a little more on most days. On Monday, there was a net increase in Treasury borrowing of $33 billion, on Tuesday the increase was $11 billion. This is how much the national debt increased on those days. As of May 3, the total amount of debt outstanding was $14,280,140,000 and the debt limit is $14,294,000,000.

Yikes. Reading this made me want to run home to our secret hiding place and cash in every U.S. savings bond and treasury note we have. (Which, of course, would only exacerbate this problem. So please:  If you own bonds or notes, please stop reading this now and don’t do what I may well do.)  The looming debt limit is a cashflow problem that can be addressed; the deficit is the credit card that we’ve charged into oblivion and now can’t make the payments on.

Who is responsible for this? Well, all of us. We want more benefits, but we don’t want to pay for them. We want massive tax cuts and deductions, but we don’t want reduced services. It’s become the American way. If this plays out, the subprime mortgage meltdown will be just the opening act on a nightmarish drama.

Alexander Hamilton, who built history’s most stable currency, a currency that funded an ideal and an empire, is spinning in his grave.