Strange Days in Oakland

MINOR SPOILER WARNING: If you haven't seen Strange Days and want to keep completely in the dark - skip this post and go rent the movie already!

I dunno if you all have been following this one, but a young man in Oakland, Oscar Grant, was shot in the back by a transit officer after being pulled off a train on New Years Eve. Captured on film, Grant was laying on his stomach and pinned by another transit officer when the shooter fires a single round into his back. This homicide has recently lead to rioting in Oakland, already an unsettled community, where relations with the black community have reached a boil.

Reading the details about this tragic and easily avoidable murder, I was immediately transported to the film Strange Days - in my opinion one of the most overlooked and best science fiction films of the 90's - which deals with an amazing similiar situation: the murder of a black man, during an arrest, on New Years Eve, in California, by white cops, which leads to race riots.

The Grant Shooting:

Compare the eyewitness description from CNN:

Burris said that the young men had been celebrating the new year at a popular waterfront tourist spot, The Embarcadero. They were heading home when police pulled them from the train car about 2 a.m.

Witness videos show Grant and two other men sitting against a wall in the Fruitvale station after being pulled off the train. BART reported that they had received a report of an altercation on the train.

Police are seen putting Grant face-down on the ground. Grant appears to struggle. One of the officers kneels on Grant as another officer stands, tugs at his gun, unholsters it and fires a shot into Grant's back.

There have been unconfirmed reports that Mehserle may have mistook his gun for a Taser, but Burris is not swayed.

Then there's a further analysis from the San Francisco Chronicle, which discusses the video and audio from that night:

The videos begin with a chaotic scene: BART officers questioning and restraining several people as a crowd of onlookers - many wielding cameras - shout in protest from a nearby train. Several videos capture, from different angles, Mehserle and another officer speaking with and eventually moving to restrain Grant.

The trainers said the scene as shown in the video moments before the shooting would be as important to understanding what happened as the shooting itself.

"The four officers have to be operating under a high level of stress given the relatively confined setting and the people on the BART train who are expressing, in a very loud vocal fashion, their displeasure with the officers' actions," said Frank Borelli, a use-of-force expert in Maryland. "Those officers, should things go bad for them, are vastly outnumbered by a group of people who have already voiced their unhappiness with the police."

Seconds before the shooting, Mehserle and another officer apparently placed Grant on his stomach to be searched or handcuffed.

"Two officers appear to be struggling with Grant prior to the shot being fired," Borelli said. "This would indicate that, at best, Grant was being uncooperative, or at worst aggressively resisting arrest. I have to emphasize that no one except those two officers knows what happened in that struggle and how the officers perceived it."

But in an indication of how the videos might move the investigation, Bedard reached a different conclusion after viewing the shooting from a different angle.

"Looking at it, I hate to say this, it looks like an execution to me," he said. "It really looks bad for the officer. ... We have to get inside his head and figure out what he was thinking when he fired the shot."

The Strange Days Script

What follows is the sequence of the Jeriko-One shooting from Strange Days:

POV SEQUENCE: We are Iris. Riding in a car. Fixing our
makeup in a mirror on the passenger side sun visor. Iris
flips the sun visor back up, revealing the moving street.
It is night.

We look down, and recognize the dress Iris was wearing
when we first saw her, two nights ago. She puts her
lipstick into a purse which is belted to her waist. Iris
turns her head and we see the driver.

It is JERIKO ONE. He is laughing, talking to someone in
the back seat. Iris looks and we see REPLAY, Jeriko's
sideman, and another woman, DIAMANDA. They are amorously
entwined. Then they are all laughing and passing around a
bottle of Jim Beam. The car stereo is thumping loudly.

Iris' POV swings around and looks down, seeing Jeriko's
hand caressing her thigh. She puts her hand on his chest
and leans close to him. Jeriko grins, then looks up and
swears at a wash of red/blue cop flash.

JERIKO
Shit. Fuckin' Five-O

Our POV swings to the rear-view mirror and we see an LAPD
car behind us, with the gumball machine on. A spotlight
hits us and we hear a single whoop on the siren. Jeriko
pulls over, but they are on an overpass... no shoulder.

COP VOICE
(on bullhorn)
Go to the bottom of the ramp.

Jeriko and Replay are both swearing. He pulls the car
down the ramp, stopping on a deserted street in a
warehouse district. Our POV looks around nervously.
Black shadows and concrete pillars. No-one around. Cars
whoosh by on the bridge above but they might as well be on
Mars. The car is stopped next to a train yard. We hear
the rumble of diesels nearby, the clank of freightcars.

We see the outlines of TWO COPS advancing through the beam
of the spotlight, their guns drawn.

JERIKO
(jumping out of the
car)
Goddamn, now what you pull me over
for? If I was going any slower I'd
be parked--

COP VOICE 1
Get down on your knees and put your
hands on your head. Now!

COP VOICE 2
Everyone else, out of the car and
down on the ground.

Our POV comes up and out of the car. Jeriko is
righteously pissed off. He's not following orders.

COP VOICE 1
Put your hands behind your head
right now!

He goes along, madder than ever. The cops get Replay down
on his knees as well, in the wet gutter next to the curb.

The cops are closer now. We see that they are SPREG and
ENGELMAN.

ENGELMAN
(to us)
Put your hands on the hood of the
car and don't move.

We exchange a look with Diamanda. Fucking cops. But
Jeriko is winding them up. Not giving them the pleasure
of the humiliation. You can see it escalating.

JERIKO
I suppose you stopped us cause you
had suspects fitting our description
in the area, what you're gonna tell
me. What was the description? Two
black males in a car? Yeah, right,
I heard that one before...

As Engelman pulls out Jeriko's wallet, looks at his ID,
Jeriko checks name tags.

JERIKO
Well you stopped the wrong black
male tonight officer... what is it?
Spreg. Officer Spreg. Cause I'm
the 800 pound gorilla in your mist,
fucker. I make more in a day than
you make in a year, and my lawyers
love to spend my money dragging
sorry-ass Aryan robocops like you
into court. Get a man down on the
ground with no probable cause. Fuck
you!

SPREG
Shut the fuck up!

He kicks Jeriko down on his face. Jeriko hits the ground
hard.

DIAMANDA
(yelling)
Leave the fuck off of us, we weren't
doing anything...

SPREG
Shut up! Don't make me walk over
there.

Engelman shows the ID to Spreg, saying something we can't
hear.

SPREG
You're that rap puke? Jeriko One?
You're the one getting all the
gangbangers to form citizens groups
and go downtown... trying to rake
the LAPD over a cheese grater?

JERIKO
That's right. And you're gonna be
in my next song, motherfucker, it's
called Robo-Spreg.

Replay starts laughing. Diamanda stifles a giggle. Spreg
is white-lipped with rage. Years of frustration coming to
a head. Too many disciplinary actions, too many
suspensions, too little appreciation of the tough job they
do.

JERIKO
It's a song about a cop who meets
his worst nightmare, a nigger with
enough political juice to crush his
ass like a stink bug. You're gonna
be famous.

Spreg looks around the empty street. Looks at Engelman.
Down at Jeriko, proned out on the pavement. Replay's
laughter in his ears.

SPREG
I don't think so.

And shoots him BLAM! BLAM! Twice in the back of the
head. Just like that.

Spooky. Hopefully, like the film, justice is done in the end for Grant and his family.

Joe the...War Correspondent?

Welcome to the twilight zone - Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher is being sent by a conservative media outlet to cover the Israeli war on Gaza.

Seriously.

The famous plumber will be focusing on the Israeli perspective on the situation. "It's tragic, I mean it really is,” Wurzelbacher told CNN affiliate WNWO “I don't say that in any little way. It's very tragic, but at the same time what are the Israeli people supposed to do.”

Seriously.

If the novel thing weren't bad enough, we'll now get his take on the whole situation as if he were a reporter. In this day and age, where people love to blame "the media" for being so bad at coverage, while at the same time elevating the "citizen reporter" blogger to new and undeserved heights, conservative zealots somehow think their token working guy can legitimately and insightfully cover this complex and tragic situation.

Cringe, journalists, cringe.

Welcome to 2009!

Hey all,

So we made it through the Year of the Gigantic Turd, and into 2009, the Year of the Terrified Citizen. Congrats! I hope your holidays have gone well - I'm deep in the midst of my move cross-country and so will still be spotty for the next few weeks while I gear up for that.

Cheers - things can only get better from here!

Memoirs of a Sound Byte

I've been a writer for 15 years - first as an aspiring comic book scribe, then short story writer, then an essayist, then a poet, then an essayist again, then game developer, tech writer and PR hack - nearly 10 of which have professional, legitimate jobs where I was hired specifically for my ability to put words to the page. Every workday, I talk about and teach people about writing better, and every night, I go home and practice my own craft in my own publishing company. Writing is my calling, and I do it every single day. But to this day, I often hestitate to classify myself as a "writer," despite over 50 published articles, 25 e-books, 18 co-authored books and reams of documentation and reports to my credit.

But as any writer who's been working a while will tell you, people who have written something are far more liberal with calling themselves "writers" than those for whom writing is a vocation. Take for instance my buddy Art, who repeatedly took upon himself the mantle of Shakespeare, Carver, and Yeats by descibing himself as "a poet" when picking up on girls because he had taken a class at a community college. The interwebz in many ways have only exacerbated the issue with blogs giving even poor writers the chance to become "authors" or "journalists." Granted, there have been some absolutely brilliant authors that have found their voices and an audience (even I have benefitted) from the new democratization of media and explosion of Web 2.0, but the ratio who legitimately deserve to be called "writers" rather than "people who write X" is abyssmally low.

So when I read this, you'd forgive me if I got a little indignant.

Typing Without a Clue
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: December 6, 2008

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

Joe, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, was no good as a citizen, having failed to pay his full share of taxes, no good as a plumber, not being fully credentialed, and not even any good as a faux American icon. Who could forget poor John McCain at his most befuddled, calling out for his working-class surrogate on a day when Joe stiffed him.

With a résumé full of failure, he now thinks he can join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell and Joan Didion.

Next up may be Sarah Palin, who is said to be worth nearly $7 million if she can place her thoughts between covers. Publishers: with all the grim news of layoffs and staff cuts at the venerable houses of American letters, can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.

Here’s Palin’s response, after Matt Lauer asked her when she knew the election was lost:

“I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.”

I have no idea what she said in that thicket of words.

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.

Writing is hard, even for the best wordsmiths. Ernest Hemingway said the most frightening thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.” And Winston Churchill called the act of writing a book “a horrible, exhaustive struggle, like a long bout of painful illness.”

When I heard J.T.P. had a book, I thought of that Chris Farley skit from “Saturday Night Live.” He’s a motivational counselor, trying to keep some slacker youths from living in a van down by the river, just like him. One kid tells him he wants to write.

“La-di-frickin’-da!” Farley says. “We got ourselves a writer here!”

If Joe really wants to write, he should keep his day job and spend his evenings reading Rick Reilly’s sports columns, Peggy Noonan’s speeches, or Jess Walter’s fiction. He should open Dostoevsky or Norman Maclean — for osmosis, if nothing else. He should study Frank McCourt on teaching or Annie Dillard on writing.

The idea that someone who stumbled into a sound bite can be published, and charge $24.95 for said words, makes so many real writers think the world is unfair.

Our next president is a writer, which may do something to elevate standards in the book industry. The last time a true writer occupied the White House was a hundred years ago, with Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote 13 books before his 40th birthday.

Barack Obama’s first book, the memoir of a mixed-race man, is terrific. Outside of a few speeches, he will probably not write anything memorable until he’s out of office, but I look forward to that presidential memoir.

For the others — you friends of celebrities penning cookbooks, you train wrecks just out of rehab, you politicians with an agent but no talent — stop soaking up precious advance money.

I know: publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print. True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage.

There was a time when I wanted to be like Sting, the singer, belting out, “Roxanne ...” I guess that’s why we have karaoke, for fantasy night. If only there was such a thing for failed plumbers, politicians or celebrities who think they can write.

Now, to be fair: one of the things that irritated the hell out of me as a writing major was english majors; the type of people who would insist that if you haven't read the "great books" of literature, which of course grow increasingly more obscure, then you don't have business to be talking about and/or writing it. Some people don't need to know what Hemingway would say about something to be able to say it themselves - some people have the experience, the depth of knowledge of a field, or just the deepness of character to write things that are valuable, useful, and/or meaningful to other human beings. It may not be "great literature" but in all seriousness, how much of what even the literary enthusiast reads is actually literature? Someone's got to write ads, newspaper articles, websites, training manuals, scripts, comedy routines, etc., etc. So the author's argument that Joe the Plumber has no right to write about his time on the national stage because he hasn't curled up with Alexis de Tocqueville rings hollow to me.

Ultimately, though, I like all writers resent things that diminish and trivialize our craft, and cynical cash grabs like a memoir for a guy who was a tool of a political campaign (who he now is trying to throw under the bus) kill a small piece of our collective bibliophilic soul. My mentor in college was an author whose agent also worked for John Grisham; the agent would work with Clint because Grisham's popular tripe kept him going and let him sell Clint's books to publishers as the "literary" part of his portfolio. This is the way of the business world. But as I watch the tremendous rise of memoirs and extended opionon essays in the market, some legitimately good (Dreams of My Father being one) but mostly drek (like this smegma from another browser tab right now), I worry about the value of the word in general. If any yahoo can get published, how will my legitimately good stuff (IMNSHO, of course) find its audience? How will it even make it through the distribution chain? I don't have a name that was thrown out 22 times in a presidential debate for no good reason - does that mean my life's work will never bear real fruit? These are the questions that haunt you.

But if you're a writer, you keep on doing what you're born to do. That's how you earn the right.

I Wish I Could Write a Bio as Well as This Guy

Found on The Register's Odds and Sods page on the death of Barney the Purple Dinosaur's lawsuit against a website hating on him:

Bonhomie Snoutintroff is a plain-spoken strong leader in cyberspace. He did poorly in school but his family is rich and well connected, so he's served as CEO of numerous, well-known Internet ventures that for various reasons unrelated to his forward-looking guidance no longer exist. He developed a cocaine and alcohol problem, although he refuses to dwell on the past: his mission is to bring honor and dignity to the IT profession. His keen insight as a global techno-visionary is matched only by his Christian humility.

This guy could make a living writing resumes. And with a name like "Bonhomie Snoutintroff," people will think you've come up with some sort of ridiculous pen name to boot.

Thought of the Day

Morrisey's "Every Day is Like Sunday" is the most catchy tune about nuclear holocaust ever written.

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