As usual, too many friggin' happenings - you blink and another two weeks have flown by. I'm gonna let Biggie Smalls help me keep up:

B-I-G, P-O-PP-A
No info, foh the, D-E-A
Federal agents mad 'cause I'm flagrant
Tapped my cell, and the phone in the basement

Not only did the Notorious B-I-G call his own death, he called the gubment monitoring our calls. He's like a Brooklyn Nostradamus - ages ahead of his time. And I fall on the West Coast side of the Rap War, so that's saying something. (Sorry Dre. Inglewood Inglewood, always up to no good.)


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So Chavez could sell U.S.-made F-16's to Iran. It's strange and sick, the things you can feel nostalgic about. Just remember: Before I was writing briefs on community theater, I broke the news on the ejector seats. I broke that shit! How bout a little goddamn respect?? Christ.

Speaking of...


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'Caught The DaVinci Code last night. A few thoughts, from a Recovering Catholic:

• The movie's longer than the book. Seriously. If I'm getting bored by the end of this story, then Ron Howard has not done his job. Coulda done a lot more things stylistically than just spit the book back at us.
  
  
• I will give props to Paul Bettany as Silas, the albino Opus Dei henchman, during the whipping scene. Now there's a guy who seriously needs to get laid. Very Passion-of-the-Christ. Bravo, sir!
  
  
• Tom Hanks played about as good a Robert Langdon as everyone expected when the studio first announced his casting. Except adding insult to injury, they gave him a mullet. ??? Who's running this movie into the ground, Isaiah Thomas?
  
  
• Audry Tautou nailed her part, too bad she and Hanks had zero chemistry, to make you believe she would also nail Robert Langdon. But that's not her fault - that's Isaiah's (allegedly).
  
  
• Others have made this point first, but I love how there was a tremor of outrage when the book took off, but now that there's a movie, you see a massive campaign against DaVinci. I guess it really is true, the Church isn't interested in independent thinkers, but the minute these ideas are exposed to the zombie mass-consumers - lookout!
  
  
• SPOILERS THE REST OF THE WAY: And what would be a blogpost without pissing off some uber-religious right-wing nuts? Look, who's to say Christ did or didn't have a wife, a bloodline? I know we have tons of ancient scrolls and texts and lost gospels to say otherwise, but are you really gonna sit there with a straight face and tell me you're 100 percent certain Jesus wasn't busy setting up the Christ franchise?
  
  Try playing a game of Telephone around the campfire. Then imagine that across 2,000 years. Really doctor? No chance whatsoever? I'm not saying I believe he did have a wife and some mini-Christs running around the house, I just think that anything's possible, and this groundswell against the movie is a fear of ideas, possibility - no more, no less.
  
  
• DaVinci paints the Church's relationship to the feminine in an awful light, and depicts it as this stubborn old dinosaur, sinking in a quagmire of pathetic, unhealthy denial.
  
  So maybe Jesus wasn't married. Accept that whole cover-up story as fiction, and Brown's account still hits at the Church's underlying flaws: a deeply rooted fear of women and sexuality (if priests could marry, guess where all the inheritance would go...); a stunted, centralized institution in Rome that's ridiculously behind the times on issues such as life-saving contraception, homosexuality, etc. Ask your local altar boy.
  
  This whole Mary Magdalene thing is just smoke-and-mirrors. Brown touched a deeper nerve - and that's good.
  
  
• If the Vatican wants my PR advice - and why wouldn't they - I'd say go stand next to Islam. Go stand next to those girls who've never felt the sun through their birkhas - who basically go through life trying not to break some dumb bullshit Koranic law, set up by some insecure socially inept imam 1,000 years ago, so a bunch of men don't throw stones at them until they die for looking at a guy who's not their husband in the wrong way. Whoops!
  
  
• The more I think about it, the more I wonder how you can be a chick and actually enjoy traditional religion. It's like marrying Billy Bob Thorton ... it's just not going to end well.
  

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go register for my local Pagan chapter.

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I'm watching Bagdhad ER on HBO right now. I think the critics are right: The documentary doesn't really take either a pro- or anti- War in Iraq slant - it just...shows.

For example, they just tossed a severed arm in the trash.

I really hope our fearless leader sees this film. Doubtful, but a man can dream. It's the sort of thing you know Kerry wouldn't have had to view - and that's why that whole Vietnam versus Texas National Guard debate was so goddamn mutherfucking important.

Oh well. And if I wasn't on a Biggie Smalls phone list before, I sure as fuck am now.