Look at this awesome Nalgene bottle that my coworker got me a few weeks ago. It is a special philosophy bottle. You can get your own from Powell’s (a huge bookstore in Oregon).
The philosophers listed are: Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault. We joked that I should etch Zizek on the very top — maybe I will someday.
I now know of at least two instances when songs appear in films by Wong Kar-Wai and Pedro Almodóvar. It seems that Almodóvar is borrowing from WKW, but I can’t say for sure. All I know is that “Cucurrucucú Paloma” showed up in both Happy Together (WKW) and Talk To Her (Almodóvar) and that WKW used Nat King Cole’s version of “Quizà s, Quizà s, Quizà s” in In The Mood For Love and Almodóvar had a drag queen mimicking Sara Montiel perform it in Almodóvar’s latest, Bad Education (Spanish title: La mala educación).
I really am not sure what is going on with this back-and-forth, and I somehow doubt that Almodóvar and WKW know each other, but I love the fact that these two “difficult” and visually stunning directors are similarly inspired by the same music.
I hate to admit that I wasn’t very impressed with Talk To Her — generally considered to be Almodóvar’s masterpiece and one of the best films of the decade (according to Time magazine). Honestly, I think the movie was too hyped up for me and I plan to revisit it in the future.
Prior to Talk To Her, Almodóvar created All About My Mother, a movie I do genuinely love. It takes a lot for a movie to make me cry, but I vaguely recall crying when main character’s son is killed within the first fifteen minutes of the movie. That says something, if you ask me.
I’m not quite sure whether I like Bad Education more than All About My Mother, but I will say (immediately after watching it) that I do like it more than Talk To Her. Like Talk To Her it has a story-within-a-story thing going on, though I think what was toyed with in Talk To Her was more fully realized and better executed in Bad Education.
Another thing I love (in case you cannot tell by the title of my blog) is the idea of doubles. Sometimes I think my desire to “double” everything makes movies seem unnecessarily complicated to me (i.e. 2046), but overall I think it makes movies much more enjoyable for me. I loved that in Bad Education there were doubles and doubles of doubles and sometimes the person you though someone was a double of was in fact the double of someone else. Although it sounds confusing, Almodóvar knows what he’s doing and the movie is shockingly easy to follow.
Seeing Bad Education inspires me to check out some of Almodóvar’s earlier films and to re-watch All About My Mother. It also makes me want to give Talk To Her another chance — maybe in a couple of months or so. I’m not yet ready to call him one of my favorite directors, but I think the possibility is there.
I was very sad to find out yesterday that MSNBC‘s television show Connected Coast to Coast with Ron Reagan (and this annoying conservative named Monica Crowley) is being canceled. The network is adding Rita Cosby (who used to have a show on FOX News of all places) to the lineup and Reagan is getting bumped. (Personally, I was hoping The Abrams Report would get booted — all the show does is sensationalize court cases.)
In my anger and sadness, I sent off an email to the Connected producers. You can too at connected@msnbc.com.
Here is my email:
Subject: where is connected going?
i just saw that there is a new lineup starting on monday and was sad to see that connected coast to coast is no longer scheduled for the afternoons.
is the show totally going away? what will happen to ron reagan? it was nice to have a liberal commentator for a change (matthews isn’t much of a liberal anymore, and olberman is more straight-news than commentary).
also, being from seattle it was cool to see someone from the pacific northwest with a show (since it seems everyone else is from the east coast or los angeles).
is there any chance getting connected back?
I’m not sure that my email was effective as it could have been, or that I necessarily contacted the appropriate people — maybe this is something I can investigate more, later. All I know is that I truly and sad that Reagan is being “disconnected.”
Is anyone else as annoyed/surprised as me about the fact that my blog has basically been taken over by a discussion (if you could call it that?) of this 206-415-xxxx thing?
The main post about me being annoyed/confused by the phone call currently has over 45 comments! What sucks, though, is that most of these comments are of little help. Mostly it’s just some random person from Anywhere, U.S.A. throwing in a “me too!” And really, nobody cares, right?
For the record, I have taken no action. I haven’t gotten one of those calls for quite a few weeks now, so I’ve basically given up. I’ll leave it to all of these other people to contact the FCC and whatnot. Plus, the calls I am getting are different than the calls they are. The people posting comments are the dumbasses who call me back saying, “I’m calling you because your number showed up on my caller ID.”
Anyway, these comments have been discouraged me and sorta suppressed my desire to post anything more meaningful. I know it’s stupid, but it’s discouraging when the most popular post on your blog is about something so inane.
I’ll work on getting over this ego-blow, though. I promise. In the meantime, go ahead and reflect on the 206-415 nightmare that seems to be afflicting people coast-to-coast.
Within the next few months there are going to be a lot of exciting things for me to buy. I keep forgetting what comes out when, so in an effort to remind myself, I am posting the dates that these exciting things are being released to I can head over to Best Buy (or wherever else) and get them hot off the shelves.
| Month | Day | Exciting Thing |
| August | 9 | Dallas season 3 |
| August | 16 | Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis |
| August | 30 | Plans by Death Cab For Cutie |
| August | 30 | Nip/Tuck season 2 |
| September | 6 | Millennium season 3 |
| September | 13 | Goo deluxe reissue by Sonic Youth |
| September | 13 | Takk by Sigur Rós |
| October | 11 | Arrested Development season 2 |
Well duh! But at least Entertainment Weekly finally figured it out!! In the August 5, 2005 issue they have a “Summer’s Must-See Movies” feature which included a blurb about 2046.
I love that they commended Zhang Ziyi on her acting ability and noted made a connection between the film’s title and Hong Kong history.
Yesterday my coworker asked me what I thought about the idea that Jesus was a time traveler. Being a fan of Coast to Coast, ideas like this don’t really strike me as extremely odd or absurd.
Then I started to really contemplate the implications of Jesus Christ being from the future. The whole thing made my head spin and I was rather shaken by the idea.
Just image: Jesus is pretty much without a doubt one of the most influential people in the history of human beings on Earth (I really would struggle to think of anyone more influential). Christianity has so utterly shaped and influenced the world, I cannot imagine how the world would be without it (and I say this as an atheist).
If Jesus were indeed from the future, then the future he came from would be a future without Christianity since without Jesus there wouldn’t be a Christian religion. Wow!
So many inventions and philosophies nowadays are a result of Christianity — where would we be without them? The printing press, for example, was in large part created so that Protestants could spread the religion, largely inspired by Jesus’s desire to bring the gospel to the people, etc. You could also argue that the ideas of capitalism and the protestant work ethic and all of that are also directly influenced by the teachings of Jesus (or, more accurately, people’s interpretations of his teachings).
Conversely, however, one could argue that in the grand cosmic scheme, there was a void that needed to be filled at the time and place that Jesus lived, so had Jesus not come from the future, another person — say, David or Diane or Brandon or Mary or Michael or whoever — could have been the one to form the religion now known as Christianity because there was some great cosmic need for such a religion.
I don’t know. Like I said, just contemplating the idea made my head spin — in a good way, of course.
The story about the guy from Brazil who was shot (8 times!!) and killed in London on Friday is probably one of the most upsetting pieces of news I’ve read in a long time… probably more upsetting than this whole Karl Rove scandal.
Thank god we have The Huffington Post‘s “A Death in London” to really put things in perspective and actually report the story. (I swear, it took me a long time to even find this story on U.S. media sources this morning — the fact that an innocent man has been killed has been trumped by the release of the “names” of more suspects is rather disturbing).
I quote from the “Death in London” piece:
So let us consider two truths about this incident. Jean Charles de Menezes would never have been shot if he didn’t have dark skin, because if he didn’t have dark skin, he wouldn’t have been a suspect. (This despite the fact that Brazilians look nothing like Pakistanis.)
What this basically says, and which I think is true, is that anyone who doesn’t have white skin is now considered a potential terrorist — not just middle eastern people anymore.
And people who might defend this by saying that it was done in the name of safety and all that… well, it’s bullshit. After the Oklahoma City bombing here in the U.S. we never would’ve buried a story involving police killing “innocent” white redneck skinheads.
I just don’t get how this isn’t upsetting more people. The ends (stopping terrorists) do not justify the means (killing non-white people who might be terrorists). I understand that they police were doing their job and whatnot, but it seem as if the U.K. isn’t even apologizing for this — they are trying to justify/rationalize rather than say they are sorry.
What I find most ironic about all this “they hate our freedom” rationale for the combating these people who “hate our freedom” is by limiting our freedom (“shoot to kill” and The Patriot Act and whatnot), there is far less freedom for these terrorists to “hate” us for.
I’m not sure what the solution is, but I honestly don’t think that killing people without certainty and saying that it was the right thing to do is going to make things better.
The night of Sept. 11 I went for a run for whatever reason (during college I often went on late night runs). I remember being afraid that night, but not because I was worried about terrorists or anything like that, but because I thought the police or military or who knows what would stop me and interrogate me about why I was running at night and whether I was connected to terrorists or whatever. Is that freedom worth hating?
On Sunday afternoon, when it was sunny and in the 80s in Seattle (during a relatively cold and rainy summer), I went to a lecture by Robert Horton, the curator of The Frye Art Gallery‘s The Magic Lantern “talks on film and art” series. I mentioned the talk the other day and gave some excerpts from programs I found online.
Overall, the talk was mediocre. I guess I’m more used to very academic talks at colleges, whereas this one was, I felt, geared more toward a general audience… which makes sense and, if nothing else, just shows how elitist I am. Oh well.
The Frye’s Oliver Herring: Taking and Making exhibit inspired Horton to do a talk about Wong Kar-Wai. In particular, Herring had a series of photographs arranged in the shape of an X (over about 20 feet or so) that told two stories. In the middle the stories intersected.
Horton compared this arrangement of photographs to motion pictures — since a film is, at its most basic level — a series of still photographs arranged horizontally in order to produce the “illusion of movement.” Horton also likened the X pattern to the multiple intersecting storylines often found in WKW’s movies (especially Chungking Express and As Tears Go By).
He also noted that WKW and Herring shared what, I believe, is a fairly common trait among artists: The act of creating the art is more important than the final product. Horton said that for Herring the objects (i.e. the art) was less interesting than the time he spent creating it. Likewise, Horton gave some history about WKW’s reluctance to finish pieces of work (he was shooting and editing parts of In the Mood for Love days before it preimierd at the Cannes Film Festival and actually changed 2046 a bit after it debuted at the Hong Kong Film Festival). Horton concluded that WKW loves the process of making the film, probably more than finishing the film.
The method of emphasizing the creation of the piece rather than the final product is, I would argue, a common theme in postmodern art. I think of things like Warhol’s studio or David Lynch using dead animals and insects to create pieces of art as being other examples of artists who value the process of making art more than the final piece.
Horton also gave some biographical information about WKW (born in Shanghai, moved to Hong Kong at age 5 during the early ’60s — no wonder he keeps returning to the ’60s in films like In the Mood for Love, The Hand (from Eros, and 2046), most importantly noting that WKW almost always collaborates with production designer/editor William Chang and cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Horton believes, as I’m sure many critics would agree, that Chang and Doyle add a great deal to the look and feel of WKW’s movies.
(As a side note, I am guessing that Horton has met Doyle at some point — Doyle was in Seattle for 2004 the Seattle International Film Festival — because he kept talking about how much Doyle partied and was a womanizer and whatnot. It was amusing.)
Horton then showed clips from four of WKW’s movies and discussed how these clips related to time and WKW’s non-straightforward method of producing films and storylines:
Scene: Yuddy and Su Lizhen meet for the first time. The scene starts with a clock — Yuddy tells Su Lizhen to watch the clock for a minute. Then he tells that for despite what happens in the future, they will always have this one minute in which they were friends. An unknown amount of time passes. Yuddy and Su Lizhen are in bed. She asks him to marry her, he rejects. She leaves him.
Given that time was a central component of the lecture, Horton noted that a scene starting with a clock was perfect for the lecture. He noted that we don’t see their relationship progress and that the time between their first encounter and the demise of the relationship is ambiguous.
He explained that many of WKW’s films are “memory films,” and that chronology isn’t always important — the essence of the film and the events is more important than anything else.
Apparently WKW wanted his films to look like the work of Edward Hopper because of the way Hopper’s work captures alienation and loneliness — a look which WKW developed in Days and has carried through in his films sense. The production design (color palette, architecture, etc.) is very deliberate and somewhat nostalgic. Horton kept using the term brick-a-brack (another postmodern artistic technique) to describe it.
Scene: The cop and Faye meet for the first time. The owner of Chungking Express gives the cop food/dating advice, encouraging the cop to bring two things from the Express back to her and give her a choice. Ultimately giving his girlfriend choices in food causes her to leave the cop. (~35 min. into the film)
“California Dreamin'” by The Mamas & The Papas blasts from Faye’s radio as the cop tries to order food from Faye. All of the characters sort of randomly appear and disappear (not in a bizarre way — they are in one scene, and not in the other — presumably off doing something else) in the scene. The only way we know that time has passed is by the changing of Faye’s outfit — there is no traditional fading in or out. Horton calls this syncopation.
Faye, especially, is a syncopated character. She randomly appears in people’s lives then disappears — especially when least expected. Horton notes that this reflects the nature of her character, as evidenced by her trespassing into the cop’s apartment.
With Chungking Express, Horton also notes that WKW rewards viewers for multiple viewings. The film is basically broken into two pieces: The first half dealing with the woman in the blonde wig and He, the cop; the second half dealing with the other cop and Faye. Bits and pieces from each half appear in the other, though in ways that are not obvious upon first viewing.
Horton also noted that Chungking Express was initially intended to be three parts, rather than two. The last part ultimately became Fallen Angels which, like Chungking Express then became a concatenation of two stories.
Scene: The Killer, one on of his assignments, goes into a restaurant or something to kill a group of people playing mahjong. After fleeing the scene he boards a bus where he runs into an old friend from school who tries to sell him insurance. He shows his “friend” a picture of his “wife” (a black woman he paid money to pose with him) and his “son” (a kid he bought ice cream for). He then contemplates the idea of an assassin having insurance benefits.
While the killer is killing a remix (or a remake??) of Massive Attack‘s “Karmacoma” is playing… I’m not familiar with the version of the song, though it sounds somewhat like the “Bumper Ball Dub” remix). I mention this because I love the song and loved that it was included in the movie and because Horton mentioned the song, as well.
Horton noted that throughout Fallen Angels, especially, WKW used wide angle lenses. They add a sort of distortion to the film, he argues. The wide angle lenses also made the scenes feel less claustrophobic (despite the fact they were since WKW shot on-location) and caused the people on the screen to look distanced, which captured the emotional feelings of many characters in the film.
From a technical standpoint, Horton also pointed out WKW’s use of step printing after the Killer leaves the restaurant and how it, also, distorts the scene. Step printing is a type of slow-motion filming that looks more like stop-animation. It’s hard to explain, unfortunately, but feels very disorienting.
The violence of the Killer’s assassination was nontraditional, Horton suggested, because of the quick cuts from different angles. Rather than helping the audience make sense of the moment, WKW made everything chaotic and appearing as a blur of color and movement. Horton went so far as to say that the frantic editing was like music.
Fallen Angels also makes use of narration (which becomes a WKW trademark in subsequent WKW movies — I don’t recall it in Chungking Express as much). Horton described the narration as “taking us out of the scene while we are still in it.” The narration also gave the main characters a chance to be more whimsical and ironic than the normal events of the film would let them be.
Finally, in regard to genre, Horton noted that WKW started off as a screenwriter mostly doing Hong Kong kung-fu and action-type movies. Fallen Angels, Horton explained, may have had the motif of a gangster movie, but that the film was really about other things (WKW favorites like loneliness, relationships, etc.) though it was “hung on the hanger of a gangster movie.”
This part killed me. The thing I hate the most about lectures are the audience questions and comments. It seems people ask two types of questions: either they ask an inane question they could find the answer to (“what year did xxx come out?”) or a question that shows off their knowledge. I hate both types. Sometimes there is a good question, but mostly Q&As are lame.
Sample questions:
Doyle once told a story about Happy Together that Horton feels captures the chaotic style of WKW’s filmmaking process: Some of the supporting actors arrived in Argentina but WKW had no idea exactly who their characters were or how they were going to fit into the movie or anything. WKW starts without a script and then lets the characters find themselves (much to the annoyance of many actors). Doyle’s remark on this was something like: “The actors were waiting for their characters to come and WKW was hoping for the same thing at a coffee shop down the street.”
Scene: Chow and Su Lizhen are in the alley acting out how they think their cheating significant others first met and started messing around. Some indefinite time passes and they are eating at a restaurant.
Some background Horton gave about In the Mood For Love: the shoot took 15 months (which is long), WKW was shooting the epilogue days before the Cannes premier, the actors didn’t have much direction and were told to “search for the material,” WKW wanted to shoot the entire thing on location — not on sets or soundstages, and the original title was Summer in Beijing.
The style of In the Mood is more like that of Days of Being Wild (not as jittery or random as Chungking or Fallen Angels), though with a more grown-up feel.
Originally, apparently, WKW wanted to do a 3-part film about food (?!?). Horton suggests that that is why there are so many scenes of people eating or at restaurants and why the food is almost fetishized.
Horton’s main discussion about In the Mood, however, focused on the deleted scenes and the Criterion Collection edition of In the Mood For Love.
Some of the most important deleted scenes make the relationship between Chow and Su Lizhen much more explicit. They make love (which is only vaguely alluded to — and never confirmed — in the “theatrical” version of the film), the cook together, they dance together, etc.
Horton argues that the existence and relative accessibility of these scenes (i.e. they aren’t locked away in a vault or anything — the Criterion Collection is, as far as I know, the only U.S. release of the film) alters the film in a sort of metaphysical way. The overall story is drastically changed in our heads forever now. Even though the scenes were “deleted,” they live in our head and change our understanding of the events in the movie.
DVDs can change the way films are understood and turn them into a constant work of art. The DVD is a new form of art with a new film on it. In order to really understand In the Mood For Love are we better off watching the DVD and seeing the “true” story, or should we ignore the deleted scenes and take the “theatrical” version as the definitive version.
What is interesting about this whole idea is that other directors, most notably George Lucas and Peter Jackson, have also embraced the DVD and/or re-releases of films in order to constantly work on their previous projects. Whereas Jackson has been commended for his DVDs, Lucas has mostly been criticized.
It’s a fine line, and I’m not sure where I fall when it comes to In the Mood — the unspoken and unseen love between Chow and Su Lizhen is one of the most beautiful aspects of the movie… but at the same time, I love existing in their world and seeing as much as possible. It’s hard.
And then, of course, how does 2046 fit into everything. It’s been described as a “loose sequel.” It definitely stands alone, but should it? Is 2046 just another permutation of the same project that In the Mood For Love is? And is In the Mood For Love just a sequel to Days of Being Wild anyway?
Horton then moved the conversation toward WKW’s fetishization of objects. He mentioned the food in the restaurant scene that started the In the Mood discussion and also remarked that WKW also fetishized music, people’s faces through extreme close-ups. intense colors and textures, jukeboxes, hair, and costumes (especially Su Lizhen’s in In the Mood). Again, he referred to this as brick-a-brack and theorized that it made everything more precious and important.
Only the good ones:
Horton made two comments about 2046: First, Chow’s character is more like Yuddy from Days than Chow from In the Mood; second, if 2046 is just an extension/exploration continuing In the Mood For Love and In the Mood For Love is an “adult” version of Days of Being Wild… so that basically all of WKW’s movies are different perspectives on the same theme, he doesn’t need to choose a “favorite,” per say — he loves them all.
Finally, I have to comment on how annoying some of the audience members were.
First, there were some old women toward the back of the auditorium who were talking throughout the lecture. Because they were old, I am guessing, they had to speak louder because they had lost their hearing or something. It was totally rude and they were ignorant about what they were doing.
Second, in a similar vein, there was another old woman who had a plastic bag that she sat and ruffled for quite a long time toward the end of the lecture. Nearly everyone in the auditorium looked back to give her “the evil eye” but, again, she was ignorant to how rude she was. It was very annoying.
Finally, there was an audience member who was trying to be all know-it-all and suggested that the title 2046 was a reference to the fact that it would be the 50th anniversary of Britain returning Hong Kong to China… well, as I noted in a previous review, the year is actually 2047. I am guessing that the guy read the same review I did and just got the dates confused. This is an example of someone asking a question only to show off.
… the lecture was interesting, probably more due to the fact that it was about a director I love than the content of the lecture. As I said before, I’m not entirely sure what the guy’s thesis was — if there was one at all. It started out with some interesting ideas on time in WKW films, then into WKW’s haphazard method of developing his storylines, and finally into the new continually evolving type of film that WKW has created with the deleted scenes on the Criterion DVD. I wish he would’ve included some discussion of Happy Together (the film that got me hooked on WKW), or As Tears Go By (WKW’s first, apparently more conventional film) or Ashes of Time (which, along with Tears, I have yet to watch). Nonetheless, it great to see someone else intellectually engaged with WKW’s work and maybe it will inspire me in some way that I have yet to realize.
It’s been over a week since I last got my West Wing fix, so I’m feeling the need to do something West Wing related until my friend returns from vacation and I can resume season two (so far we’re about eight episodes into that season). As promised, here are some of my thoughts about things that have happened so far:
Don’t worry, I already know that he’s going to be gone sometime soon so if you mention it I won’t be shocked. I just get bad vibes from him. Maybe it’s the southern Texas thing? I don’t know. He just seems slimy. Oh, and I hated it when he yelled at CJ in season one. Don’t mess with her!
At the end of the episode about capital punishment, Bartlet’s priest tells him the story about the man who lived by a flooding river and that man’s belief in God. Thanks to the episode summary for “Take This Sabbath Day” on TV.com:
You know, you remind me of the man that lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the river was going to rush up and flood the town. And that all the residents should evacuate their homes. But the man said, ‘I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.’ The waters rose up. A guy in a row boat came along and he shouted, ‘Hey, hey you! You in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety.’ But the man shouted back, ‘I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.’ A helicopter was hovering overhead. And a guy with a megaphone shouted, ‘Hey you, you down there. The town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I’ll take you to safety.’ But the man shouted back that he was religious, that he prayed, that God loved him and that God will take him to safety. Well… the man drowned. And standing at the gates of St. Peter, he demanded an audience with God. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘I’m a religious man, I pray. I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?’ God said, ‘I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?’
The priest says it reminds him of Bartlet because Bartlet mentions that he “prayed for wisdom,” to which the father seems rather annoyed because “God” had sent Barlet a priest, a rabbi (from Toby’s synagogue), and a Quaker (Joey Lucas), yet in the end Barlet decided not to step in and save the man’s life. As an atheist, it really struck me because it proved to me how Christians (among others) are always praying for signs and whatnot even though the answer is right in front of them — they just don’t want to accept it or want something more glorious and foreboding.
I could tell that they were gonna get together during the episode in which Bartlet was cooking chili and Zoe had Charlie taste it. I think watching soap operas makes me either really good at knowing when writers are trying to get people together, or (and maybe more likely), they make me assume that everyone is going to hookup.
I loved how during the season premier of season two (“In the Shadow of Two Gunmen”) the National Security Advisor (played by Anna Deavere Smith, who spoke/performed at my college a few years back) was more worried about Osama bin Laden in October 2000 than the real National Security Advisor (Condoleezza Rice) until Sept. 11. Actually, I don’t “love” that fact — it freaks me out that writers and people making a fictional television show might’ve been more alert and aware of the real dangers facing the U.S. than the Bush administration.
Even though I feel like I should support Moira Kelly since she was in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (playing Donna after Lara Flynn Boyle decided not to do the movie — what’s with lame actresses playing Donna???), I just hated her character… and I loved the fact that she was a regular cast member in season one and then just sorta disappeared when season two came along. I have tons of theories on what happened to her (amnesia, drugged and abducted, she was really a spy, etc. — see, soap opera influence here!!), and since we never find out, I’ll let my imagination run wild.
It was funny to see people’s hair change overnight when I watched the first season’s finale followed immediately by the second season’s premier. Rob Lowe‘s hair change was especially noticeable.
In “The Midterms” there is a “doctor” named Dr. Jenna Jacobs who has a Ph.D. in English Literature (which is a very nice degree, I might add), but passes herself off as a psychologist or something a la “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger who passes herself off as a psychologist/therapist/etc. despite the fact her degree is in physiology. Both of the women (in the show and the real Dr. Laura) have conservative call-in radio shows. It was cool to see that real-world tie-in.
I assumed that the Ainsley Hayes character (especially based on her appearance — tall, blonde, leggy, etc. — and her opinions) would parallel the evil right-wing conservative author Ann Coulter. Turns out I was wrong and Ainsley is a cool person, after all.