So Guv’nah Brownback (R-Koch) has floated the idea of restoring some funding to the state arts commission. Naturally there are strings: the restored budget is less than a third of what was cut last year, and the proposal makes no attempt to approach the money needed to qualify for NEA grants. It also combines the arts agency with the film commission, an agency whose work is by nature temporary and project-based.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too, at least not without baking the cake first. Like, with heat, man. You know? Okay, my point is this: is it so implausible that a flat $200,000 budget was the plan all along? Here’s an idea that seems like a reasonable compromise, and the man who floated it, a shrewd negotiator. The effect, though, is that not only is the bar for measuring compromise now lower, but as a bonus, the public discourse about the virtues of public arts support has shifted rightward. Rather than celebrating the obvious economic, educational and long-term benefits of a functional arts life on a state level, supporters have to use the words “essential” and “non-essential.” If you’re a person who nickels-and-dimes all public expenditures, this is a juicy plum indeed: long after you’ve replaced one fool with another, you can still ask people which they’d prefer: a jarful of piss, or a jarful of peanut butter. As if the person holding the position of politician — or artist — were more important than the institution. (This point is articulated beautifully here.)

Unsure which side of the line dividing advocacy from paranoia this lands me.

Kudos too to the Examiner for choosing sides in so many of the important issues in our community. After braving the great Utopia-vs.-Groupon battle, it’s a wonder they have any energy left. As their fig-leaf disclaimer indicates, they reserve the right to decline to publish abusive articles. But if you’re not going to exercise that right, you could at least do your readers the favor of reading up on both sides of an issue before handing the mic to just one of them. That’s how a newspaper would do it. Those folks have really taken to heart their mission of out-Weeklying the Weekly.

Max doesn’t like lima beans. But Max lives in Limabean County, where the lima bean farmers, the menu at the local diner, and the annual Lima Days festival make it hard for him to express his true nature. So, to fit in, he chokes down the mealy little booger-beans as best he can. This doesn’t make Max a lima bean lover. It makes him a guy who alters his behavior to gain acceptance. His behavior doesn’t change his basic orientation as someone who doesn’t like lima beans.

All this pretending depresses Max. So he seeks out a man named Marcus, who runs an operation that promises to help people learn to love lima beans. (The farmers love his work; also, he accepts Medicaid.) They school Max in plant biology, and in the glory of the Green Giant’s wondrous bounty, and tell him that while savoring a delectable (yet imaginary) pinto bean is tempting, it is sinful and wrong. They feed him pinto and ipecac salad. Lo and behold, Max feels even worse than he did before he came to see Marcus. And he never does learn to like lima beans. But because he continues to eat them, especially in Marcus’ presence, Marcus claims Max as a convert and crows about his success.

Max feels defeated and continues to live his life miserably as a grimly self-identifying lima bean eater, forgoing the pleasures of his beloved pinto bean. He dies withered and alone — and canonized.

The moral of the story: Don’t pray away what’s okay.

Hat tips to mi hermano David Virden, and to Edward Everett Horton for narrating the original Rocky and Bullwinkle FFT.

Here in Blogtopia, there’s nothing wrong with writing something just to pay off a nice alliterative headline. It should be different in the majors though. I’m not expecting a missionary discussion in Newsweek, but I do expect them to distinguish slippery parody from actual doctrine. We’ve survived a number of Mormon Moments already; by now we should be well inured to any predicted glory that might come from this one — or the next.

Formal complaints aside, there is a moment to savor here, though not the one Newsweek is talking about: Mitt Romney is at a point when past screwups are temporarily forgotten, and he has yet to re-yoke himself to the plow. Until the capitulation begins, he’s the most principled national figure the Republicans have right now — a bar set so low I guaran-goddam-tee you Obama loses no sleep at all. All it takes to appear rational among Republican presidential aspirants is to tell the camera that Sharia law will not be applied by U.S. courts. As Chris Rock says: what do you want, a cookie?

Also, sir, the devil is in the details. At Mormon.org, this tax-exempt group articulates its core values, many of which are hard to not share: strong families across past, present and future generations, education, freedom of choice and good citizenship. Setting aside the elevation of proselytism, you have to wonder about the fine print, though — that is, how you get from the glory of the immortal spirit to Bruce McConkie and his unique brand of self-esteem, or from “unselfishness, honesty and loyalty” to a concerted effort to deny millions of people their civil rights. In the nineteenth century, it took that tribe twenty years, give or take, to go from one end of the rifle to the other. If they had an Internet, they’d have been on both ends simultaneously.

Among religions, doctrinal nuttiness only differs in the language and the iconography, which makes Romney’s private practices and rituals irrelevant. He might as well identify himself as model minority and accuse Pawlenty of exercising white privilege. But honestly, even the Mormons’ ethnic cleansing at the hands of the very gangsters who ultimately started the Civil War* matters far less than the actual executive decisions of an actual 21st-century governor. As a citizen, what moves me is the extent to which an individual adheres to or diverges from political party doctrine. Measured thusly, Romney deserves credit for drawing the ire of those who would keep everyone on the same script, and taking mavericky stances on human-generated climate change or building a functioning statewide healthcare system.

* The Wiki does an excellent job of recreating Missouri’s 1830s political climate, and provides a lesson in how to breed a generation of thugs and victims: The governor, Lilburn Boggs, “passively saw community leaders and officials sign demands for Mormon withdrawal, and next force a gunbarrel contract to abandon the county before spring planting…anti-Mormon goals were reached in a few simple stages. Executive paralysis permitted terrorism, which forced Mormons to self-defense, which was immediately labeled as an “insurrection,” and was put down by the activated militia of the county. Once Latter-day Saints were disarmed, mounted squads visited Mormon settlements with threats and enough beatings and destruction of homes to force flight.”

Matt Wilkins makes movies the way a cheironomer makes music, or the way Kennedy plots against Castro: He assembles assemblies, describes contours and nurtures key plot points, but the title of director is ill-fitting and plausibly deniable. You could almost say his film company doesn’t even make movies — they make processes, one of which will have its Seattle premiere during SIFF this year.

Believe me, it’s not half as precious as it sounds. Marrow is dark and tough as nails. It’s about the all-too-familiar family conflicts and the backhanded way legacies are sometimes passed down.

Previous Sisyphus projects had smaller budgets and lesser visions. How small? Small enough to draw the titles for one in ketchup on a bathroom floor. That’s one reason why I’m encouraging you to see Marrow: Matt’s maturation as a filmmaker might have been inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less delightful to witness. Mainly, though, it’s a good movie, plain and simple.

Wednesday, June 1
7:00 pm
Harvard Exit, Capitol Hill

Saturday, June 4
3:30 pm
Admiral Theater, West Seattle

BUY TICKETS

For all the lip service I pay to letting people make up their own minds, I can’t deny thinking it would be great if the Internet came with its own bullshit filter. The Chinese government would probably agree, asterisk. But holy cow, people believe a lot of weird things, all of which have an online bulk way beyond what their shaky legs can support. These are articles you read through rather than read over. A Facebook friend, for example, thinks Obama has signed into law a UN provision that bans nutritional supplements. A guy I work with thinks cell phones cause cancer, and the decrease in the world’s bee population proves it. Another guy believes the Windsors — every last one — should be carted off to Bannockburn and shot with heirloom pistols. Sheesh, what a mormon, that guy! Oh, wait a sec…

Earlier I was slumming at a site about this stupid rapture campaign, which led me to Psalm 60:4: “But for those who fear you, you have raised a banner to be unfurled against the bow.” Downblog G*d brags: ”Ephraim is my helmet, Judah is my scepter. Moab is my washbasin, on Edom I toss my sandal.” Which led me to Stephen Fry’s autobiography. Which in turn led me to the Wiki article on the kingdom of Moab, east of the Dead Sea, whose origin story is that Lot’s oldest daughter got Lot drunk and lay with him in order to continue the line, having lost her fiancé in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. His daughter. Because every child deserves a mother and a grandfather.

Reading a bible is a pure act. Reading an annotated bible is tainted by knowledge, the thirst for which drove Adam & Eve out of paradise — and not a moment too soon. Reading a hotlinked bible online is just plain wicked, and not in the Bostonian sense.

The damage here is not limited to the trustworthiness of the district or contractors and subcontractors like the Urban League, Elaine Ko, and Velma Veloria. The damage is to public education and to nonprofits in general, which will have to contend with a perceptual as well as a financial hit when appeal season comes around. So thanks, Silas Potter, for making the world a little crappier and the climb a little steeper for people you were supposed to help.

With Karyn out of town on exciting business this week, I’ve been hoisting the freak flag to a reasonable height like only a middle-aged white guy can: staying up ’til nearly eleven, cooking unlikely food, leaving the seat up. I know, whoa there cowboy, right? Chauncey doesn’t know what to think, but I rely on her willingness to roll with it much more than her Mama does. Wednesday night, frex, the two of us went out for photos and pho — the real stuff in Little Saigon, not that faux pho from Than Brothers. I had in mind a certain majestic low angle on Charlie Dang’s accountancy office that included the Deco wonder of Pac Med at night behind it. Dang flies a ragged banner of his own; it reads something like “File with us and you could be a millionaire!”

On Boren just short of Stewart, though, we had to detour. Ahead I could see a regular waltz of red moonbeams, right there on the corner where John T. Williams was shot last summer. Swinging over to 9th and up to Olive, I successfully diverted us from real poignancy for the sake of some cheap rice noodles. Wednesday, of course, was when it all came down for Officer Birk: unprosecuted in the morning, slammed by his superiors and off the force by day’s end. And here we were at ground zero in golden-hour light with a fully charged camera and a tripod right there in the car.

So, what did I do? Whiffed it, that’s what. I held back. It’s not that I didn’t consider stopping, if a parking spot opened up and it wasn’t too far away…. That ellipsis is my mind going blurry and disengaging, attendant only to its own echoes: Chauncey in the car all by herself. Warm pho. You could be a millionaire. All while putting ever more distance between me and this one-of-a-kind moment of Seattle history.

You can’t command a moment to be decisive. That’s why I’m disinclined to work in a photo studio. You can, however, learn to spot when conditions might be favorable for letting your heart take the wheel. Because when people say of a photographer, “she has a good eye,” what they really mean is “she has a good heart,” the care and feeding of which is a sure way to improve yourself. The hard part is recognizing what’s food and what’s, you know, just there.

So, to recap:
• Cops protect and serve, but don’t look at them sideways even if your knife is closed.
• “f/8 and be there”
• Focus is good, but not if it blinds you.

Captain Wade Wilkenson of the Navy’s 28th Squadron has died. Parsed in the news accounts, the captain’s resumé traces a remarkable 25-year trajectory of success. Before all that, I went to high school with Wade, and while we weren’t friends, this week I’ve been trying to make sense of his death — his suicide — with a combination of online research and suitably shabby stereotyping based on his youthful discretions. You could say he was always a straight arrow, but so what? People always say that. My hunch is that the thoughtful kid who grew to be Captain Wilkenson was incapable of being ordinary. Combine that with the Navy’s pyramid structure, with the behavior expected of its most elite, and you have to wonder at his sad end.

Wilkenson commanded seven destroyers and one frigate. Can you imagine? He lived at the front line of the Global War on Terror, wherever that is. Actually, with his Southern Command experience, he lived where the GWOT and the War on Drugs meet. He pushed for a law, which was passed in 2008, to make it easier to prosecute a newer kind of international drug traffic vehicle: the self-propelled semisubmersible (SPSS), a kind of Prius of mules. Made of fiberglass or wood, impervious to radar with a tiny thermal footprint, the SPSS has edged out faster surface boats as the preferred transport of FARC’s more discerning cocaine traffickers. It’s also designed with a series of valves to open should the need arise, scuttling vessel and payload in a minute or less: No evidence, no case. The ability to prosecute without evidence, entirely plausible in this day and age, is the most flexible (though the most constitutionally vague) part of the law Captain Wilkenson advocated for. A close second might be the provision for applying the law in international waters.

Befitting a Southern Command captain, Wilkenson offered a doomsday scenario in his advocacy for this new law: what if the Columbians loaded an SPSS with a bomb, and sent it on its merry GPS-guided way to Tampa or Galveston?

Like Dexter Morgan, Wilkenson was a warrior with a wife, some children, and ties to Miami, and yet in Norfolk he lived in bachelor’s quarters. A more salacious speculation might make much of this, but I see no need to go there. Additionally, a few of the local stories mention that he was ‘under investigation’ by whatever Naval bodies do so, but this being the military, nobody is saying why; normally, I’d count on this information being scuttled soon, but at the Norfolk newspaper, the writer covering the military beat tells me the dead can’t legally claim a right to privacy, so her FOIA request for the investigation’s report should yield something in due time.

Oh, and Westboro Baptist has announced they would picket his funeral, which I guess brings us full fucking circle. Fair winds and following seas, Captain.