Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Gregory Stanford wrote a column the other day in which he includes part of a discussion he had with Lani Guinier. Stanford includes a paraphrase of Guinier putting down the Republican Party. Stanford writes,

The Republican vision sustains a materialistic, individualistic, consumeristic culture, Guinier said.

And that’s a problem how? If the Republicans would just ditch their “morality” issues and focus on the individualistic consumerism, they’d have my vote any day of the week. (Guinier is apparently horrified that Bush urged Americans to go shopping after 9/11 — but what is more American than shopping?)

Ditch the abortion and gay stuff and focus on cutting taxes and killing terrorists — now there’s a political party I could get behind.

Guinier, on the other hand, contrasts this with the Democrats who she thinks should stress the idea of “shared responsibility and shared sacrifice.” Ugh. Thanks, but no thanks. If your religion calls for sacrifices, who am I to object, but please do it privately amongst yourselves.

Source:

It seems Democrats must work on passion, vision. Gregory Stanford, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, November 20, 2004.

Free Fiona is a website put up by Fiona Apple fans trying to convince Sony/Epic to release Apple’s third album, “Extraodinary Machine.”

The album was finished in May 2003, but Sony/Epic won’t release it because they don’t think it will sell in the United States. A couple tracks from the album were leaked on the Internet over the summer and Epic’s probably right — the album won’t sell worth crap since it doesn’t fit into the dominant prefab modes of commercial music these days (maybe if they added a hip hop drum track over it — blah).

Can’t imagine how much it must suck to work on something like an album and then have the record company just send it to the vaults. Ugh.

One of the nicest treats this Christmas season has been watching Warner Brothers’ “Polar Express” fall on its face while Pixar’s “The Incredibles” has soared at the box office. Warner actually slotted “Polar Express” to come out the week after “The Incredibles” because they thought the Pixar film was not going to do well. And the reasoning behind that is a tale of sweet revenge.

Five years ago, Warner had an excellent animated film on its hands — “The Iron Giant.” If you haven’t seen it, you really should. No, it’s not the greatest animated movie ever made, but it’s a warm, funny, solid film. (It’s an anti-gun movie that even gun nuts like myself can love).

“The Iron Giant” received fabulous reviews, but tanked at the box office when Warner Brothers refused to promote it. The suits at Warner Brothers never believed in the film, and let it die a quick death in theaters. In typical Hollywood fashion, the blame was laid at the feed of director Brad Bird.

Fast forward to 2004, and Warner Brothers decides it absolutely must recreate a Christmas version of the $130+ million “Final Fantasy” disaster. So they take a 29 page children’s book, throw more than $150 million at it, and bring on big Hollywood star Tom Hanks.

When to release this disaster-in-the-making. Why not release it the week after “The Incredibles,” because Brad Bird is back directing that film for Pixar and the suits just know that he can’t deliver blockbuster performance.

And, of course, “The Incredibles” kicks sand in the face of the puny “Polar Express.”

It’s kind of funny because now there are the inevitable stories about Warner Brothers executives trying to figure out what went wrong. Reminds me about stories earlier this month that Creative Labs really wants to challenge the dominance of Apple’s iPod in the MP3 player market. How does Creative plan to do this? With a multi-million advertising campaign.

Well, of course, if you want to beat Apple you’d want to waste all of your money on an advertising campaign rather than trying to create a product that is as good as or better than the iPod. Focusing on turning out high quality products as Pixar and Apple do wouldn’t make much sense when you’ve got marketing and Hollywood stars in your camp!