Enterprise? More like Voyager.

So Berk and I are spending the holidays with the family in Norfolk, VA, and all is well. But the trip down here…that’s a different story. I’d be remiss if I didn’t warn you all never, ever to rent a car from Enterprise Rent A Car. My Monday morning went something like this:

THE PLAN: Pick up car from Newark International Airport and get on road by 9:30am.


7:30am: Leave apt., Get on A train to Penn Station.

8:00am: Pay $30. Get on Amtrak to Newark Airport.

8:25am: Train stops in Downtown Newark

8:30am: Train arrives at airport. Get on Newark monorail.

8:55am: Arrive at rental car stop. Wait for Enterprise off-site bus.

9:15am: Bus arrives. I find out from bus driver that, despite my twice-confirmed reservation, I’m not allowed to rent a car from this Enterprise because I didn’t just get off a plane. No boarding pass, no car. But I’m told that the Enterprise in Downtown Newark (where I’d been an hour earlier) will honor the reservation.

9:25am: Get back on Newark monorail.

9:55am: Get back on Amtrak.

10:00am: Arrive in Downtown Newark.

10:10am: Arrive at Downtown Newark Enterprise. I wait while they give the suit in front of me the full customer service treatment (“You want to upgrade? Sure! We’ll just drive an Altima right over.“), etc. etc. When my turn comes, they look at my reservation printout like it’s a dead animal. They tell me they have no cars to give (despite upgrade of aforementioned suit) and that they can’t honor the reservation. I call the Airport Enterprise back to see if the car in my name is still there. They tell me they gave it away and that the only thing to do is try to make a new (read: much-higher-priced) reservation with an Enterprise somewhere else in the Tri-state area.

10:15am: I get very irate.

10:20am: The Kraken is released.

11:00am: To get me out of their hair, they finally ship me to a third Enterprise, in the Newark environs.

11:40am: The third Enterprise honors the first reservation at the first price, and I leave Newark in a Ford Focus, headed back for NYC (to pick up Berk and my friend/co-rider Amanda.)

Of course, getting back into the city is no picnic then, but you get the idea. Suffice to say, I’m never doing business with Enterprise again, despite the friendlier folk at the third franchise.

Play it Again, Samwise.

THRILL to the adventure. MARVEL at the journey. EXPLORE worlds of wonder in (drumroll) Howard Hawks’ Lord of the Rings. Starring Humphrey Bogart as Frodo, the courageous hobbit. Marlene Dietrich as the alluring elf queen. Orson Welles as the wise wizard horribly corrupted. And Peter Lorre as the sinister guide with a secret to tell. (Spoilers for those who haven’t read the trilogy.)

Byrd-Hunting.

Drudge is trying his damnedest today to get a Lott-size stink brewing around Robert Byrd for his Confederate cameo in Gods and Generals. As I mentioned a few months ago, I do think this is a bit strange, but hardly in the league of Lott openly advocating segregation in his capacity as majority leader.

Warriors…come out and play!

Update 12/4/07: If you’re here from The Carpetbagger today, welcome, and have a look around. The front page of GitM is this way, and the movie review archive is over there.

Caught the Weinstein edit of Gangs of New York this afternoon, and still not sure how I feel about it. A beautifully shot and often entrancing film, but sadly there’s not much there there. Once you get past Daniel Day-Lewis and Jim Broadbent chewing the scenery (Day-Lewis pretty much has to win Best Actor for this – he almost singlehandedly carries the film), you’re basically left with a rather perfunctory revenge thriller that, despite the carnival of Five Points, drags on in the third act. Plus, not to get all history geek about it, but this take on the Civil War draft riots seems a bit dubious. Scorsese doesn’t flinch in depicting the atrocities committed against African-Americans during the riots, but you still get the sense that (a) the Irish are too busy rising up against Bill the Butcher’s hordes to be involved and (b) the Union troops are firing on innocent civilians in order to protect the Schermerhorns of New York. In fact, despite whatever friendship Leo struck up with Jimmy Spoils, his black companion in the Dead Rabbits, the Irish — much as it pains me to say it — were the prime instigators of both the riots and the grotesque racial violence that accompanied it. And regarding the federal troops, they arrived weary from Gettysburg on Day 4 of the riots, long after this “innocent” crowd had been engaged in an ethnic murder spree. And these soldiers were attacked by the rioters before they fired on anybody. Most annoying, US Navy ships never fired on the city, as they do during the critical mano a mano moment in the film.

Scorsese’s thesis is interesting – that the Draft Riots represent a turning point in American history when the Federal Government proves itself more powerful than the tribal warlords of the city. But I take issue with the idea, made explicit by Scorsese’s intercutting at the climax of the film, that the Union army is just a bigger, badder gang out solely to protect the parochial interests of the wealthy elite. Obviously, America’s military power has been used to serve narrow economic ends, as attested by our imperial engagements at the turn of the century (and note I didn’t specify which century.) But making that argument in this instance severely downplays the racial element of the riots…In sum, Federal troops weren’t slaughtering an innocent coalition of multi-ethnic immigrants in the name of the almighty buck. They were putting an end to a four-day nightmare of racist terror perpetuated primarily by the Irish, the heroes of Scorsese’s film.

All that being said, Gangs is definitely worth seeing, for Daniel Day-Lewis as much as the exotic flavor of Gotham throughout. And I’m curious to see if the longer cut gives a fuller picture of the riots, which seem almost superfluous in this edit.

The Doctor is In.

With a little push out the door from George Allen, Lott goes down, to be replaced by Bill Frist of Tennessee. Smart move by the GOP, even if their Contract on America is temporarily hampered…Frist is a much more congenial and Daschle-esque character than Lott, and it’ll be harder for the Dems to paint him as a right-wing ideologue. (Fortunately, there’s always Tom DeLay.)

Elrod’s (Sour) Grapes of Wrath


In the same vein as the Brin piece linked to the other day, Tomb of Horrors and Lake Effect (he’s back!) have pointed to Epic Pooh, another Tolkien-bashing article, this time by Michael Moorcock. Obviously, I disagree with a lot of what Moorcock has to say here, although I did find the Pratchett quote a bit eerie. (“Terry Pratchett once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin.“) It’s irrefutable that much of Tolkien‘s writing is infused by a near-Luddite paranoia about the industrial order and a backwards-looking regret for a lost Golden Age. And yes, our beloved Oxford don is a bit of a snob – both the Cockney speech of the orcs and the often-limited imagination of Samwise attest to that. But it’s fatuous to compare Tolkien’s pre-industrial nostalgia to that of bored Bournemouth vacationers (and a bit hypocritical to accuse Tolkien of fostering anti-humanist Thatcherism while continually bagging on commuters who enjoy reading “addictive cabbage”…who’s the elitist here?) Considering both his youth in Birmingham and his experience in WWI, Tolkien’s loathing of modernity was to my mind hard-earned and deeply felt.

As for evil being “never really defined” in Tolkien’s book, I emphatically disagree. It seems clear that evil is defined by the will to, and temptation of, power. Both Brin and Moorcock argue that Tolkien never gives Sauron’s POV about matters, that evil is one-dimensional. That’s garbage. Evil is manifested throughout the trilogy not as a state of being but as a choice made, by Saruman deciding the world would be better if he were in charge, by Boromir attempting to harness the power of the ring as a weapon, by Frodo learning the seduction of domination through the taming of Smeagol. As such, in Tolkien’s trilogy, all good characters are capable of evil…Frodo, Galadriel, Gandalf (yes, even the “white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what’s best for us,”), and most evil characters (Sauron, Saruman, the Nazgul) were once good. (This duality is most obviously and explicitly represented by the tortured Smeagol/Gollum.) Thus, Tolkien’s representation of evil in the Lord of the Rings is much more nuanced and complex than either Brin or Moorcock suggest. It is a complexity that belies Moorcock’s charge of “infantilism.”

Also, it should be noted that Tolkien’s backward-looking elitism is tempered somewhat by a forward-looking faith in pluralism. As emphasized in the films, multilateralism becomes a necessity in Middle Earth. Men, elves, dwarves, hobbits, ents…all have to come together and work together to have any chance of countering the threat of Mordor. Indeed, as Brin noted, Tolkien himself declared the aristocratic Elves’ fleeing to the West to be “selfish.” Southrons and Easterlings notwithstanding, Tolkien’s writings argue passionately for a pluralism more at home in the modern age than any previous.

I’m not going to deal with Moorcock’s attempted dismantling of other authors here…of his other targets I’ll confess a fondness for Richard Adams Watership Down, but I was never much into the Narnia books. That being said, I quite liked David Brin’s Uplift War series, and people I trust tell me that the film version of The Postman was a horrible translation of a quite-good novel. So when Brin has something to say about Tolkien’s writing, I’ll give him his due. But Michael Moorcock?! Are you kidding me? As a teenager, when I would devour all the science-fiction and fantasy books I could get my hands on (“addictive cabbage” and otherwise), I read the first couple of Elric books…not to put too fine a point on it, I thought they were pretty lousy. (And even then, it was clear Moorcock had an axe to grind with Tolkien.) I’ll get my brooding and platitudinous Goth melodrama from Anne Rice, thank you very much. I say, I say, give me Elrod the Albino over the “Stormbringer” any day. Update: Perhaps Moorcock would prefer a different author for the Rings trilogy? (Some of these are hilarious.)