Before I really start, I’d like to get this out of the way: You and I both know that The Two Towers is going to get next to nothing on Oscar night. The Academy is going to wait until next year, and rightly so. “TTT” isn’t a movie, it’s the middle part of a movie. And that’s all I have to say on that subject.

The meat of this particular meandering diatribe is the Animated Feature Film category, the only one to which I have any emotional attachment of any kind. Let’s just run down the list as presented on the official Nominees page, shall we?

• Ice Age: Splendid 3D animation work, not a bad little story. The technical bits that qualify as “cutting edge” nowadays are becoming more and more difficult for the average viewer to discern, but there’s just enough of that edge to make this a completely valid contender on technological merit alone. Add to that a cute, if generally bland and harmless, story with talking animals and what you get is an Oscar contender.
  
• Lilo & Stitch: Of the two (or three, depending on how you count them) Disney flicks in the running, this is the only Mouse-made production to have even a slim chance. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cute enough movie. I liked it, the family liked it, and you don’t have to twist my arm too much to get me to watch it. Like Ice Age, though, the things that are good are only barely discernable against the overall harmlessness of the film. There’s nothing that stands out from this picture, so a vote for Lilo is just a knee-jerk vote for Disney tradition.
  
• Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron: Hoo boy. I’m torn on this movie. For one thing, it has next to no story. It’s a series of vignettes and sketches loosely tied together by recurring characters. Some of the bits are truly inspired, while others inspire you to take a long bathroom break. The animation quality is similarly uneven. There are moment of unquestionable brilliance and quality, and the animators do things with computer-assisted action sequences that will be ruthlessly, shamelessly copied for years to come. There’s just not enough good material bridging those bits together to make this movie a winner.
  
• Spirited Away: I’d like to offer a reasoned, unbiased account of this film. I really would. It’s probably impossible, though, since this is undoubtedly one of the most enchanting, intriguing and marvelously beautiful animated films of all time. As for its Oscar chances, it all depends on how you look at it. I’ll get into that in a moment.
  
• Treasure Planet: As near as I can tell, it was included because there wasn’t much else in the available field. I haven’t seen this movie. I don’t know anyone who has publicly admitted to seeing this movie. In a year without any other 3D-assisted or 3D-animated fare, in a year without Miyazaki competition… maybe. But I sort of doubt it.

The competition is clearly between Ice Age and Spirited Away, with Spirit as a sort of dark horse. (Stop that groaning, I’m being serious.) Lilo & Stitch and Treasure Planet, besides being less than stellar on their own, represent too many chances for the votes to be spread thinly. A vote for Disney is a vote for… which movie?

Disney’s smartest move would be to put their public relations muscle behind Spirited Away, since any attempt to champion their own products would probably split too many votes to be effective. Miyazaki’s film is going to get some votes, no question about it and no matter what Disney’s PR people do between now and late March. If Disney only had Lilo or Planet in the running, they could get away with championing that one at the expense of Spirited Away, which admittedly they would probably love to do. Even though they’re the distributor for Spirited Away, getting the Oscar for it might be something of a Pyrrhic victory. “Yay, we won… distributing a movie that is in every way superior to the movies we made last year.”

A side bonus for Disney is the chance to rake in some cash with the mid-April release of Spirited Away on DVD. They’re also putting out Kiki’s Delivery Service and Castle In The Sky on the same date as a sort of Great Big Miyazaki DVD Fest. Given the timing, do you figure they hope to ride Oscar coattails? But of course. Hell, it works for me.

The other serious contender, of course, is the quirky and charming Ice Age. It’s certainly not a better movie than Spirited Away, but the fact that it’s 3D animation (the current hot animation “thing”) and lacks all of the disturbing strangeness and cultural subtexts of Spirited Away may count for a lot when the votes are tallied. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Blue Sky Studios take the little gold man home. Saddened a bit, but not surprised. It wouldn’t be a completely horrible thing, mind you, since Blue Sky is such a new studio and Fox (the distributor) hasn’t seen much success with animation lately, so a win would add incentive to fund more creative efforts.

And there you have it. One man’s thoughts on an Oscar race that most sane folks will generally disregard in favor of speculation on whether Jack Nicholson or Daniel Day-Lewis will win for Best Actor, or which of the actresses from The Hours will take home statuettes. *shrug* As if I cared.

Main Entry: dis…so…ci…a…tion
Pronunciation: (“)di-“sO-sE-‘A-sh&n, -shE-
Function: noun
Date: 1611
1 : the act or process of dissociating : the state of being dissociated : as (a): the process by which a chemical combination breaks up into simpler constituents; especially : one that results from the action of energy (as heat) on a gas or of a solvent on a dissolved substance (b): the separation of whole segments of the personality (as in multiple personality) or of discrete mental processes (as in the schizophrenias) from the mainstream of consciousness or of behavior. (Thank you, Merriam-Webster OnLine.)

I’ve been bummed out ever since visiting my Mom yesterday. This seems odd, really, since it was a pleasant enough visit complete with laughter and hugs. So I’ve spent the last half-day or so trying to figure out what’s wrong.

I think I’ve just about pinned it down. I’ve dissociated from the rest of the family, and now I’m feeling guilty about it. Not guilty enough to change my ways, mind you. This is my family we’re talking about. Here’s the brief run-down on what might have been my nuclear family but ended up merely atomic.

Mom – Susanne Johnson, or whatever her last name is now. She’s had a few, and I lost track a couple of husbands ago. When you get right down to it, she’s also changed the spelling of her first name on occasion. I inherited my addiction-prone personality directly from her, no doubt about it. She’s spent the past decade or so on the run from civilization and her family, preferring to live in quaint (I’m being nice, here) environs in the back of beyond. Riddle OR, Marblemount WA, Wrangel AK. You get the idea. In a weird sort of way, she’s settled down in the last few years. Her current marriage shows the distinct possibility of breaking all previous duration records, and she seems more at peace with herself and her past than ever before. Good for you, Mom.

Dad – Michael Kerezman, former promising-musician from NYC, former computer repair technician (from the days when one computer filled an entire floor in an office building), former journeyman plate stripper, dedicated hermit. It’s from him that I inherited both my urgent striving to be some kind of artist as well as the general indifference to doing much of anything about it. Oh yeah, I also got my opinionated nature from Dear Old Dad, now that I think about it. He’s a genius, probably, but he’s (dis)content to spend his remaining years in a cave in St. Johns, drinking Budweiser toasts to what might have been.

Sis – Christine Jo Anne Kerezman, a.k.a. Steeny. She’s in the Navy now, not to mention married to a fellow serviceperson. I haven’t met the guy, but I hope he’s a good person. That, and I hope he knows the secret of getting along with The World’s Most Perfect Person. Sis is one of those people who is always “more.” You know, if you complain about having a cold she’ll tell you about a worse one she had. If you made a mistake, she’ll loftily proclaim that she’d never make a similar mistake. Yes, she’s one of those. Mind you, she’s not actually a bad person. It’s just that she’s one of the most self-absorbed people I’ve ever met. (That’s saying something when you work in radio, I assure you.)

I won’t go into the roll-call of the other family members like my various grandparents, aunts and uncles. It would be tedious, depressing and unhealthy on several levels. Besides which, the perceived faults of my family members isn’t the issue.

The issue is instead my complete lack of concern, caring or any other positive human emotion when interacting with any of these people. Let’s be blunt: The only people I think of as my real family are Wendi and the kids. The others are just folks I happen to be related to and therefore must owe some sort of allegiance to.

Emotional blackmail is a phrase that leaps to mind. I don’t think I’ll pursue that thought right now, though.

Is it wrong that I just don’t care anymore? I’m serious. If I never see my parents again, I don’t think it’ll faze me one bit. I don’t cry at funerals, I don’t send birthday cards, I just don’t care.

Maybe I just reached the bottom of the box of familial concern and I’ve run out. Maybe I’m a bad person, but I really don’t think so. No matter what this little diatribe may look like, I’m not all that depressed or upset with myself. Moody I may be, but it hasn’t gotten to my old levels of despair. I generally credit my kids, my wife, my (precious few) friends and my work for getting me to a point where I can ask hard questions of myself without it spiralling down into a semi-suicidal mess.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to tidy up at the office and go home to play games with family and friends. Happy New Year, everybody. This past year hasn’t really been that bad. Let 2003 commence in the spirit of togetherness and determination.

Before I start I’d like to point out that two of the last three “Thoughts” entries are in consecutive Septembers. Gee, I don’t do a lot of thinking, do I? And I think I’ll apologize right here to any family members who find themselves offended by what I say here. Anyway, let’s get on with this.

Those few of you who are close to me may have noticed that I’m not the world’s biggest cheerleader for The Holiday Season ™. My lack of enthusiasm can be chalked up to my philosophical beliefs as well as my upbringing.

I get some amusement out of all the vitriol from Christians about how Christmas has become so commercialized. I can laugh because I’m tired not only of the rampant moneygrubbing but also the blatant religious imagery. That’s right, I’m equally offended by “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” and “O Little Town Of Bethlehem.” That’ll be my favorite part of December 26th, not having to listen to holiday carols. Bleah. I heard that abomination of a carol that Michael Bolton (himself an abomination) perpetrated upon the listening public. Right after that I was forced to listen to “Jingle Bells” as rendered (in more than one sense of the word) by synthesized barking dogs. Grr. Hulk smash.

Oh, here’s a note to store owners (as if they care what I think): If your Christmas decorations go up on or before Thanksgiving, I will most assuredly say bad things about your establishment to anyone I converse with. Putting them up before Halloween will put you on my “avoid shopping here at all costs” list.

Do you want to know what Christmas means to me? It means enforced gatherings of what we all sarcastically refer to as The Family. Hi Grandma, Hi Aunts, Hi Cousins. Hi Dad, or Mom, or Sis, but never any two or all three of you at once. Yes, let us do make tense and lifeless smalltalk until we can escape. Oh yes, we really are one happy family. And let’s do it again next year, okay? You bet your sweet bippy.

Let’s face it. The Kerezmans and Kelseys and, ah, various other last names used on account of marriage (and divorce and marriage and divorce) aren’t exactly a chummy, casually friendly family. We don’t call one another up for idle chit-chat. We don’t go out and do stuff together. Family gatherings are almost always of the “someone stops by for an hour’s visit at the end of which they’re glad to escape” variety. We’re not bad people, mind you. We’re merely a band of socially awkward iconoclasts. Makes for riveting drama, I assure you.

I’ll grant you that I’m much, much, much better about this time of year now that I have my own small family. Wendi is determined to turn me into a Christmas-loving kinda guy. I think she’s out of luck, though. I will (at best) tolerate the so-called holidays. There’s too much psychic baggage and too much disgust at all of the greedy foolishness for me to become some sort of bright-eyed happy-go-lucky sort at this stage in the game.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go watch The Muppet Christmas Carol. What a damned fine, clever, adorable movie.

No, I’m serious. It’s one of the best of the Muppet movies. I’m not a complete Scrooge, you know.

Statler: It was stupid!
Waldorf: It was pointless!
Statler: It was…short.
(They look at each other for a moment.)
Statler & Waldorf: We loved it!

Scrooge: You seem a little absentminded, spirit.
Spirit of Christmas Present: No, I’m a large absentminded spirit!

I tried typing this up on Tuesday, but Zero crashed and burned one paragraph into the entry. I’ve been meaning to type this up for almost a month now, but because it seems a bit too much like real work I’ve been putting it off.

It’s Saturday morning, 7th of September 2002 and since the cable’s out and the house is still half-asleep it’s a good time to get some of my pent-up feelings and opinions about The Anniversary out of my system. The programs and pundits and papers have been ramping up over the last couple of weeks. In a few short days we won’t be able to see or hear anything but 9-11 Anniversary programming.

As an aside, I’d like to point out that Entercom’s official stance on 9-11 is that it will be mentioned respectfully when necessary but it will not be dwelled upon and most stations will be programmed much like on any other day. Paying respect is one thing, dwelling on the past is maudlin and depressing, especially for non-talk-formatted radio stations. For some reason that makes me feel a lot better about the company I work for. Your opinion may differ, but that’s okay, because you’re not me.

Early on the morning of 11 September 2001, something awful happened. You know all about it. You can’t help it. On the morning of 11 September 2001, something else awful happened. Unless your last name is Kerezman, you probably don’t know about it.

Picture me in my office. (Some of you have seen the webcam, so it’s not much of a mental exercise for you.) I have the news up on the TV inside Zero while I surf various news websites. I’m watching large buildings billow smoke. And the phone rings. My father is on the phone. He sounds terrible, and I assume at first it’s because of the events on the screen. My father was a die-hard New Yorker for most of his adult life, so that day couldn’t have been easy on him no matter what else happened. Sadly, he has called to tell me that his mother, my dear grandma Hjordis, passed away that same morning. Granted that she had been gravely ill for some time, and in fact was pretty much comatose during her last days, but I’m still devastated.

September 11th went from being a source of horrified fascination not unlike the world’s biggest car pile-up to being a painfully personal day of tragedy.

I got through the day as many other people who don’t live in New York got through the day… dazed and hurt and questioning life, the universe and everything.

Then the fun began. Some thoughtless numbskull in our company thought it would be a great idea to send out a Powerpoint slide show to every email address in the company. (It’s easy. There’s a one-stop distribution address. No muss, no fuss, no accountability except to the people who respond to the mass-mailing with unpleasantness.) This lovely 800-kilobyte document was disturbing in a couple of ways. As a systems administrator, I take very poorly to some damned idiot clogging my email server to the tune of 160 megabytes. As a person who has just learned of the death of an adored close relative, what I do NOT need to see is slides of people leaping to their death from very tall buildings. More than just a few slides, mind you, were devoted to showing desperate and terrified people taking that last long step out of a burning building. I cannot imagine the kind of tasteless mind that would consider this suitable to distribute to every soul in a nationwide company.

In my role as email-server administrator, I replied to the person in question… and to the aforementioned distribution list. My statement was, pretty much, “It is highly inappropriate for file attachments to be distributed to the all-Entercom mailing address.” I blame my emotional turmoil for the fact that some of my phrasing was not as politic as it could have been.

Oh boy, did the fur start flying! I learned several painful things that day. One is that “Reply To All”, for many people, is a perfectly natural email tactic. I suspect it has something to do with being given an excuse to show the company “how damned clever I am.” Another is that I really, really need to learn to go through proper channels when something like this happens. Consider that lesson learned the hard way. Most disturbingly, I learned that some people really get off on watching scenes of people dying. I was accused of being an insensitive prick for objecting to the mailing of this disgusting waste of resources. I was accused of all sorts of other random human failings as well. In many cases, Reply To All was employed, so everybody in the company knew exactly how many people felt about me. I was forced to post another company-wide email restating my position but in a far more appeasing and moderate tone, and apologizing for the mess. At that point I felt it was appropriate to mention that there was another reason I objected to the mailing of the Powerpoint file, that being the death of my grandmother. Note that my original message said nothing about the CONTENT of the slideshow! I hadn’t even WATCHED the thing when I sent my original “please don’t do this” message.

That, of course, sparked off dozens more messages, Replied To All naturally. More of these were good than bad, but I still managed to singlehandedly clog the Inbox of every Entercom employee that day. And thanks to my personal website being in the “signature” of my emails, everyone in the company knew that I had a personal site hosted at a company domain. Whoops. This personal site contained an account of the events I’ve just related to you, which means I was badmouthing some of my coworkers. Extra whoops. And so Zero was shut down.

Okay. I really didn’t mean to rehash that entire episode at such length. I think I feel better having done so, though. It’s a painful catharsis or some-such gibberish. The only other personal event of note during that horrible week was the receipt of an anonymously-sent (I have hated Hotmail ever since then) message of considerable vitriol, clearly sent by someone I worked with in the Portland office. To this day I don’t know who it was or if I still have the displeasure of working with them. I still have the journal database from Zero, where the letter was reprinted. I may put it into THIS journal some day, for some absurd notion of posterity. Or maybe not. That email was the last straw for the events started on September 11. I was in tears when I left the building the day I read it.

I keep telling myself and my children that it’s all about perspective. This is just my story. There are hundreds of thousands of other stories out there, many of far worse experiences than what I endured. Okay, so there was a death in the family and a lot of bad ju-ju at the office. It hurt then, and it still aches now when I think about it, but in the Grand Scheme of Things ™ it doesn’t affect the world in any meaningful way. I have to remind myself of that every so often, you know.

So. Now that I’ve burned through all of this stuff about me, what about the world we live in? We’ve been told for a year now that America was “changed forever” by 9-11. Would it be heresy to suggest that it has not? I knew we were in trouble the instant our government urged us to get back to “business as usual.” Ah yes, business as usual. That’s a euphemism for “exploiting every single aspect of any given event to make the rich richer and the powerful even more so.” Here, little sheep. Wave a flag, it’ll make you feel better. If you do it long enough you won’t notice the fact that we’re not only manipulating you, but that we really don’t care about what happened that day except as a means to a number of ends.

Now we have airport insecurity and the memory of anthrax, dirty bombs scares, warmongering, ethnic backlash and above all we have metric buttloads of useless rhetoric. Business as usual means people (and I use the term advisedly) like Ann Coulter hawk their books on television and George W. Bush takes a vacation every month. Yes, that’s the kind of leadership I want in a Time of National Crisis ™. Don’t work too hard chasing down Osama, Gee-Dubyah.

As another aside, you’ll kindly note that I don’t get into political discourse on this website very often. The reason for it can be summed up something like this: I don’t trust any of them, not the right wing and not the left, and not half of what I see on the nightly news. Powerful people do things for their own reasons and only care about the needs of the little people in the abstract, if at all. To hell with all of them.

You may have noticed that I have strong opinions. Would you be surprised to learn that I believe in having strong opinions, even in this “changed forever” world? I don’t believe in attacking other people on account of their beliefs, but I believe in agreeing to disagree. I hate herd mentalities. I’m not exactly a textbook iconoclast, but I do choose my own peer groups and followings. I don’t take anybody’s word as gospel. Anybody whose words are taken as gospel I immediately question. I don’t believe anything I can’t wrap my brain around or that I haven’t experienced in person, and sometimes not even then.

Belief is not necessary. There’s no rule or law that says You Must Believe In Something. I choose to believe in nothing at all.

Well, I do believe I’ll have some more of that ice cream. I also believe I won’t be watching one minute of the self-obsessed syrupy trite overdone 9-11 anniversary television programming. We’re back to business as usual: corporate malfeasance and FUD and political maneuvering and media circuses and the herding of flocks of human sheep. Honor the dead, but don’t cheapen their memory by presenting this mass-market televised eulogy sponsored by Corporate America. Don’t pretend that the deceased matter to the people who control the world.

Have you ever wanted something so bad you were almost crawling out of your skin with desire?

Have you ever felt absolutely and completely alone in the world, the only person alive who thinks and feels and believes as you do?

Have you ever woken from a dream that felt like prophecy, as if the daydreams of your youth took form in the mirrorworld of nighttime fantasy, an echo from a future unknown?

Have you ever wondered what it is about yourself that attracts some people and drives others away?

Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror without any kind of self-pity or loathing?

Have you sensed that you’ve wasted a large part of your waking life, but are unsure as to which part it was?

Have you seen the sun rise over the mountains and wished you could freeze that moment for all time?

Have you loved so much that it felt like pain?

Have you felt ashamed after giving in to to an overwhelming compulsion?

Have you taken a deep breath and realized that you’re really not a bad person?

Have you wanted to share the art that you know is buried in your soul but lacked the skill and determination to do so?

Have you looked around at your life and felt a moment of pure contentment?

Have you made love under the stars and the clouds and the open sky?

Have you felt inadequate even after pouring your every last ounce of willpower and skill at a project?

Have you been embarassed by praise?

Have you run out of things to say, or not found the right words at the right time?

(Nope, neither have I.)

(Recovered from the old Zero journal, original post date 26 August 2001)

America has broken out in a severe rash of flag-waving, and her media outlets have begun shovelling rhetoric upon a situation that’s already tense and ugly. A terrible, tragic event occurred. It’s completely natural that all of America would rise up with one voice and scream for revenge against those who would do such a thing… and in such a horrible way.

So why am I left cold and uncomfortable with the sight of stars and stripes on every available surface? Maybe it’s my belief in the idea that we are all humans and should treat each other with dignity and respect, ignoring petty issues of location and costume and coloration. Maybe it’s my basic distrust of my government, especially in light of what this situation represents in terms of opportunities for those in power to grasp and wield even more power.

But that can’t really be it either. The people engaged in patriotic fervor aren’t the evil tycoons and power-players. They’re regular folks who are rightfully enraged. It could be that what really bothers me is what the flag-waving represents for the near future, the probability of armed conflict. Once we strike back, the whole country becomes a target for every nutcase on the planet with a grudge against the U.S.

We can’t sit idle and let this atrocity pass, so more pain is inevitable. I just don’t see how it’s going to get any better any time soon.