2010 Interview With U.S. Navy Commander William Mayes

After two years I no longer get free web hosting with MSU so my resume/writing sample website is down. I thought it might be a good idea to put some of the more interesting stuff from it here so here is an email interview I did while working with DTE Energy.

Southfield City Council July 29, 2013 City Council Meeting

Regular Meeting of the Southfield City Council held July 29, 2013

Topics Include

• Bootcamp Michigan's application for special use
• An ordinance that would make the city's laws regarding cell towers more compliant with the State's.
• The Community Development Block Grant (CDGB) Budget 

An agenda and related documents can be found here.

July 29, 2013 Southfield Committee of the Whole

This July 29, 2013 Committee of Whole Southfield City Council meeting was held primarily to discuss the appointment of Sue Ward-Witkowski, current City Deputy Attorney, to the position of City Attorney.

Not A Review of Weeds

Note: I've only seen the first season.


I'm watching Weeds and man is that show bumming me out. Why? Because if I were watching this show when it first came out in 2005 I would love it. But through a wacky twist of fate I saw a show with roughly the same premise that came out later  and has a better execution first.



Watching this show in my head I keep saying "I would absolutely love it... if Walt hadn't killed Krazy 8." That's a shame because this show did almost all of it first. Not necessarily the long drawnout dude in a basehead's basement being suffocated with a bike lock thing, but the, "breaking bad" thing, and the cancer thing and the "relationship" with a fed thing.

I'm trying to pin point why it's not as good and I think I figured it out. The Wire, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy,  and The Sopranos, established early on that their worlds were filled with death and destruction. Or to put it bluntly no matter what happens things will not go well. Murphy's Law is God.

I just don't feel that, in this show. Without that element why should I care? What are the stakes? There is a moment early on in the show where the protagonist, Nancy has a meet with a competitor who has been trying to intimidate her.  In those other shows that confrontation would have involved serious violence the likes of which at best would have caused a severe permanent limp and at worse... death.

In Weeds it leads to.




And that's the moment the show lost me.  It's not about the show being unrealistic. Honestly have have no clue how the drug trade works and I don't want to know. But like I said I have no clue what the stakes are. Okay what happens if Nancy fails in her endeavors?

I'm running through all the hypotheticals in my head. She's caught. Well that is a risk, but other than general witticisms the threat of the cops feels weak. In The Wire there was a constant paranoia, same with those other shows accept maybe Breaking Bad and the show always treated Walt's hubris on the subject of his DEA brother-in-law as an idiotic liability. W.W.

Okay how about this? A competitor "fucks her up". One word, pennies. Can't take that seriously anymore.

What if she loses business due to "normal" market forces like the better quality at the  marijuana dispensary.


I would be worried about that if the struggle for money was a consistent element in the show. We get one episode where that's really an issue. Even then it's mostly used for stuff that seems out there. Karate classes and maid service? How about mortgages, groceries, car payments. Again Breaking Bad did it better showing a constricted food budget. The show doesn't really explain why she's turned to drugs rather than anything else. With Walt the "I'm dying so I'm out of fucks to give" works until it's clear that pride has a role to play but with Nancy I don't know.

I Know Every Generation Shakes Their Fist At The Last But...

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

Okay the last couple of posts have been about things that bug me and people seem to like that, but I'm feeling sort of emotionally burnt-out after talking about racial disenfranchisement and the slow decline of Detroit so how about pet peeves, things that get an emotional reaction out of me but don't require the same amount of thought as active investing, bankruptcy and the prison-industrial complex.

Hey you know what I hate? These kind of articles, the Generation Y consists of a bunch a do-nothing slackers articles.  I'm tired of this kind of thing and want to nip it in the bud, and seeing as this humble blog post is probably not going to do it ... eghhhh.

I hate them for all sorts of reasons lets start with the obvious. They're insulting.  And they are so for absolutely no reason. I'll get to that in a sec. Anyway they're the same sort of mean girl talk you see in high school except they're from "media professionals" who by all accounts have better things to write about, again more on that in a sec.

Now for the record I've seen a lot of these done well... when they have something to say about about how aggregate trends and the youth demographic can have concrete consequences. For instance every now and again The New York Times will run an article about how my generation drives less and how it is having or will have an impact on the automotive industry and how roads are funded.

Most of these aren't that though. They're cathartic fist waving at the intern who decides to text you rather than pick up the phone. Or self-righteous aggrandizing image perpetuation about how boomers have their shit together and millennials don't.  And I wouldn't have a problem with that if they were a little self aware about it, but they aren't.

They do it because they feel they can get a way with. Let's face it for most of the magazine/websites that pull this crap, their lead demographic are the middle aged office crowd for whom old man fist waving strikes a chord. It's cheap pablum that its audience will eat up.

Which is what I have more of a problem with than it perpetuating stereotypes about the young.  Half of these have the gall to call my generation lazy and unmotivated in articles that are being kicked out solely because they're easier than going out and doing real reporting.

Hey look, I get it. Sometimes a slow newsday is a slow newsday, and budget and staff reductions are budget and staff reductions, but every now and again could you just write about a skateboarding dog or something?

Bankruptcy Sucks

Alright, you know what? I need to get this out of my system.

The current situation with Detroit sucks. Okay Captain Obvious do go on. Detroit is right now ground zero for just about every kind of political, social, and economic type of dysfunction you can have short of going to a war zone. But you know what, it's not a war zone, it's part of the good old U. S. of A.

Okay let me back up. I love South Park, but I hate this joke.

My point is that everybody kind of sort of knew Detroit had problems but nobody cared enough to try to fix them. Why because everybody was just glad that the problems of Detroit weren't in their backyard.

My understanding and I could be wrong here is even if the city goes through bankruptcy the most that will probably do is reduce or eliminate it's debts. But to truly reform the city and improve civil services would require capital that even then probably won't be around, especially if the federal and state government don't decide to get off their asses. Not to mention the likelihood of retirement promises being broken.

And all of that pisses me off mainly for three reasons.

1. While the residents do share some of the blame for the decade long slow decline of the city a lot of it was caused by either A. crocked politicians. i.e. Kwame Killpatrick, and Monica Conyers or B. exterior aggregate trends and forces that they had no control over, i.e. white flight, urban sprawl, the economy, and declining property values. So it seems sort of like a dick move for everybody to be saying, "Oh Detroit you made your bed now lie in it."

And for the rest of the country, but especially the Michigan suburbs, who I might add actually use utility and court services based in Detroit, that kind of pisses me off.

2. Look if you want me to go into more detail about this I already did, but Detroit is a mostly Black city.  Especially when you consider that a lot of the aforementioned problems can be charted back to the 1967 riot, letting the city go to pot has racial implications.

3. Look if you don't like giving foreign aid, fine. I disagree with you but fine. But you know what Detroit is a part of the country, and as a country we should have standards, bare minimums of what a citizen should expect of the state and we haven't been meeting them. I mean that's why we are a country in the first place right.

P.S.
You know that scene in Dark Knight Rises where Robin and Gordon are watching a White House press conference and realize the city is on its own...yeah. That's the kind of day I'm having.

General Misanthropic Posturing About the Downfall of Detroit

Facebook rantings of the last eh hour or so. 

Well it's official my opinion of Congress could not get any lower. [ After indidividually saying more or less they wouldn't try to help the city.]

By the way since Congress is freely elected I should add my opinion of humanity in general couldn't get any lower.

Which, sums up how we got here in the first place, a cesspool of crocked politicians, racist opportunists, corporate greed, and incompetent administration that is almost unimaginable. I hate humanity.

Then again all of that crap is the cost of free will. At the end of the day yes we will be cruel, stupid, violent, greedy, arrogant, vengeful and petty. Because we can be. And being able to be those things is better than the alternative. 

... So am I saying the collapse of Detroit is the price of freewill? Dear god. Send me to the re-education camp.

Southfield Police Citizen Observer Crime Bulletin July 15-21, 2013

Yes You Can Make Wonder Woman Work

Alright let's talk about this.


Eh screw that.


Wired ran a piece decrying how during the announcement everybody was excited about seeing seeing Batman and Supes together,but there was nary a word about Wonder Woman, further theorizing that chances are even if they did manage to give her a big role in the JL movie said role would probably suck because people have a hard time writing her right. And also pointed to the fact that W.W's early comic appearances were... weird.



And you know what yes there were, and so were Superman's and Ironman's, and the X-men's and you get the point. The Big Blue Boy Scout started off as more like The Punisher than most people are willing to admit.

That said I am only tangentially antiquated with the character and mostly know about her from adaptations, yet I feel that's exactly why I would like to see a Wonder Woman movie. Sure there are lots of Wonder Woman comics on my list but there are lots of comics on my list. At the end they are a luxury item and as far as luxury items go, right now it's cheaper and easier for me to rent movies, watch Netflix, or catch comic movies on TV. I'm not saying I don't want to her read comics I'm saying right now I can't really read comics period.

Which is why I really want to see her on the big screen. So here is my list with the very limited knowledge of the character I have of how not to make her suck.

1. Consult Gail Simone


Again I have very limited knowledge about Wonder Woman comics, but there is a general consensus that she is probably the best contemporary writer to tackle her character in a long while. Again most of this is second hand, but when it comes to Wonder Woman she is one of the few people who gets her.


2.  Yes She Is An Amazonian Princess Damn It
Okay for better or worse most adaptions of Wonder Woman outside of comics or cartoons try to soft peddle the fact that she's an amazon.  And no. That is a huge part of her character and identity. I'm not saying do the origin story necessarily, but her being an Amazon is kind of what makes her her.

Furthermore the thing that she generally contributes an the J.L. is that she is a warrior, i.e. soldier. Superman being the general pacifist he is normally is a little antagonistic towards the military, and Batman, well let's just say getting him to trust any large organization with the type of power the USMC. can muster is out of character. You need someone to talk to the highly trained, highly armed, highly disciplined, highly regimented organization, you go to the person raised to command XX chromosome Sparta.

Hell she's probably the only J.L. headliner who is sort of iffy on the thou shalt not kill thing. Yes if it's a numbers game of death she will make the call the others can't.

3. Feminism is Complicated
Okay, being a guy I'm not really going to go on about feminism, but what we call feminism is wide birth of issues and ideas some of which contradict each other. Being as steeped in feminism as she is it's almost impossible to talk about Wonder Woman without talking about woman's issues so I'm just going to say be smart.  Whoever does the next Wonder Woman TV show, movie, whatever, really has to think about the message and implications there in.

4. Lead Role
Alright some when it come to comics Wonder Woman is probably the third best known member of the Justice League as has been constantly one of it's lead members, yet in mainstream media, not so much. We've had like 8 batman movies, like 6 superman movies, yet I can't even think of a Wonderwoman movie. Again she's generally considered the third piller of the J.L. being even more important than Green Lantern and Super Girl who both have their own movies, bad movies albeit but movies.

Even without the sexism, there's a joke out there that the only superhero Warner Brothers really knows how to do right is Batman and if they're going to get serious about making a big competitor to Marvel's Avengers, that's going to have to change.

See what made the Avengers work as a movie was that it was able to marry all of the different settings and tones of all the Marvel movies, which were diverse enough to make such a marriage kind of interesting. You've got a millionaire playboy hanging out with a military experiment gone wrong, hanging out with a military experiment gone right,  hanging out with a Norse god hanging out with two super spies. All while keeping their strong individual persona's in the fore.

I think this why any J.L./Wonder movie is likely to fail more so than sexism. They're going to bend over backwards to try to ground all of this stuff in reality and for Batman's Gotham or even maybe, I said maybe, Superman's Metropolis that might work but for Wonderwoman, Martian Manhunter, The Flash, and Green Lantern, what makes them them are supernatural fanciful elements. You have basically  Hector with boobs, normal sized green man from Mars, human Sonic the Hedgehog (Damn you Movie Bob), and space cop.

You are not going to make that seem normal.

Why Scott Pilgrim Is Important (Yeah I'm Assuming You've Seen The Movie)

You know what? When I do that big post about why I like Kevin Smith a big chunk of it is going to based around young adult slice of life realism in movies. This is what he makes his bread and butter out of, but what got me thinking about all of that in the first place was me continually thinking that I should eventually get around to explaining and defending Scott Pilgrim vs the World.  Why?


Because once you scrap away all the shine and especially if you take all that shine as visual metaphor Scott Pilgrim is basically one of the best young adult coming to grips with life movies I've seen in years, with the possible exception of Adventureland. See in a big way I always thought that Scott Pilgrim was Clerks, but for Gen Y instead of X and with a budget and better actors, and camera movement. Keep in mind I do really like Clerks.

For a better version of what I'm about to say see Spoony's review.

Alright so lets get started. Scott Pilgrim along with Titan A.E. and Death to Smoochy is on my list of good movies that broke the studio.  A lot of people said that the movie was all style and no substance, but I say it was more of a case of the style overshadowing the substance.  There is a lot of visual comedy, even 4th wall visual comedy. The movie very often uses a lot of screen, composition, and sound effects to communicate contextually. And whether you loved it or loathed it, it was the most defining thing about the film.

Metatext

Regardless of everything else I am about to say, on an academic cinematic level this is why you should watch this movie. See film is a medium. And a lot of the execution of the narrative deals with the form of the medium. No matter what movie you're watching it is a movie and has to deal with the form of its medium.

Think about it like this. The cut. Almost every feature film you've seen features the cut because it's a specific tool of the medium. This movie uses cuts or even the noticeable lack a cuts not just as an accepted part of the medium, but as a communication or even narrative tool in and of themselves. Most  movies do this kind of thing, but Scott Pilgrim is one of the most blatant movies I've seen in this regard.

Conventional wisdom is that you want the audience to be aware of the medium as little as possible. You don't want people thinking metatextually, i.e. this happens because this is a movie. Or I feel this way because x was written or shot y way.

This movie says screw all that and in doing so those medium tools take on a life of their own. They can be used to make a joke, reference, or visual metaphor, and while the tool becomes obvious the joke, reference and metaphor becomes subtle, Causing the audience to ask why? Why is this shot this way? Why is there a cut here? Why is there not a cut here?  And because of the sheer craftsmanship of the movie you know there is an answer. Without that craftsmanship rather than ask why the audience would just assume accident and laze. Hell, some did that anyway.

A great meta-meta textual example of this is the song in the "So Sad, So Very Very Sad" it clocks in at about 3 seconds short for song, it's medium, making the audience go why?



The Soundtrack...Visualtrack... Narrative Thingy of Our Lives
Apart from the language of film the movie also seeks to take advantage of the fact that my generation has been inundated with multimedia;  music, comics, video games, TV, anime even text messaging and twitter.  I feel that this is one of the defining traits of my generation.

All of these other mediums have their own media tools and the film attempts to adapt them all to be usable in the medium of film. This inter-texuality at least for me, makes the film incredibly relatable.  I experience life through media. If you want to know what's running through my head any given day, check out my recently watched queue, or Rhapsody mixer

The movie seems to be ... aware of this and uses these tools accordingly.

Anyway, as evidenced by the last 10  paragraphs that's what people focus on when talking about the movie. But it has a lot of other stuff going on.

The Heart
As state previously all of that stuff is kind of academic. As I sort of started saying Pilgrim is my generations' Clerks.  Let me qualify that.

Clerks is ultimately about a Dante Hicks coming to grips with and dealing with his own laze, narcissism and indecisiveness, as manifested by his inability to break up with his current girlfriend when he realizes he still has feelings for his ex.

See Dante views himself as the put upon only sane man, so when his much more self aware best friend calls him on his bullshit he denies how unfair the situation is to both his respective beaus. Not only that but again his best friends tells him that despite everything Dante's beleaguered lot in life is more or less  his own fault for being so wishy-washy.

The point of Scott Pilgrim is more or less the same, and yet I feel it's the more emotionally complex movie, especially if you take the plot as a metaphor for relationships.

I like to think of the evil ex's, the guys Scott has to fight for Ramona's affections, as metaphors for her emotional baggage. Not unlike Clerks the movie is about Scott's journey to self-awareness, a realization that he is not as awesome as he thinks he is.

The biggest example of Scott pre-revelation, is when just after the fourth fight he decides he doesn't want to deal with Romona's past anymore, not realizing that he's got his own emotional baggage that Ramona has to deal with, i.e. Knives, Envy and his own kind of douchey personality.

After burning with jealousy, literally becoming a green-eyed monster when he sees her with the last boyfriend, Gideon, he mulls things over with cocoa.

Eventually he finally decides he loves Ramona not to give up on the relationship and with the visual metaphor of a kickass katana called, "The Power of Love" he goes to take on her last evil ex who "controls her mind".
... And he loses.

He dies and gets sent to the, "Desert of Loneliness" where he finally realizes he's not the hot shit he thinks he is. After that he gets a do-over and a new sword, "The Power of Self-Respect," with which he is finally able to get past all the crap and beat Gideon.

The ultimate resolution is him finally coming to grips negative aspects of his personality, "Nega-Scott" and going out for coffee with him.

How the hell can you say it has no substance.

My Thoughts on Red State

I love Kevin Smith. I suppose in another post I'll get to why but this isn't that post.

What is the point of this post. Red State.



I really really really like Red State. But it's also a somewhat polarizing movie. The same reasons why I like it are the same reasons why other people hate it and I think that merits discussion, so let's discuss. See the big criticism is with the movie is that it's all over the place and oddly enough yeah it is.

But it is for a reason.

Meta.

See in one of his Q and A sessions Smith said that he designed to the movie to take a right turn everytime the audience saw where it was going and it does.

The movie starts out as a teen road trip comedy, then turns into a torture porn horror, then turns into a police stand off movie.

In theory, every time the audience is starting to guess the genre and by extension the tropes of the movie they change.  Creating a scenario where in watching the audience never really knows what's going to happen. And my opinion is, judged solely on that criteria the movie works. It does what it is supposed to do, but it also becomes three separate and incomplete movies.

And I can see how that could get on people's nerves. See the movie primarally accomplishes this by shifting the focus to other characters once the fate of the character you're looking at starts becoming apparent. Once it's clear someone's going to die there is no point in following them anymore. But, even if it's a movie you've seen before you want to see the end. Even then you could also argue that that makes Red State a lesser movie than the standard bearers of the genres it's imitating.

I argue however that on a metatexual level this makes the Red State really really interesting, especially upon a first viewing and as an exersise in story telling.

Going back to that Q and A session, Smith said the reason why he designed the movie the way he did was because my generation's audiences are really genre savvy. Most movies are based off of established archetypes and tropes. I'm not saying it's bad but well with not only the thousands of movies out there, we've also been exposed to comics, books, and music videos. We've been inundated with narrative.

The movie tries to use the audiences experience with narrative against them saying, "Stop trying to guess what's going to happen. No. Stop it. Damn it. Now I have to do something else." And even if you get annoyed by it I kind of dig a movie having the balls to do it.

Until the last scene where he cops out.

Useful Terms for Understanding the Finance Stuff

Okay after some reflection I realize I am not qualified to actually analyze the financial document in the previous post. I have been frantically trying to acclimate myself to some of the terminology and this website is the closest I got to defining the nomenclature tripping me up.

Particularly the parts I think I should be paying attention to are the rate of return and the policy index.

Finances of Southfield Police and Fire Retirement Fund

At the May 20, 2013 Southfield City Council meeting the Council expressed concerns about the financial investment losses in the city's fire and police retirement fund. Councilman Fracassi in particular stating that making up the difference in the system comes from tax payer dollars.





Correction: An earlier version of this post cited a number and upon reflection I think I might be confused about said number but I thought the information I had was still worth posting.

If This Were A Real Paper

• Cameras and Lenses
• Video Camera
• External Microphone and Audio Equipment
• New Printer and Scanner
• Podcast/Webcast Studio Area
• Updated Office, Graphics, Web Design, Audio Editing,Video Editing, Screen Capture and GIS Software
• Live Feed Switcher With Overlay Capability
• Monitor, HDMI Cable and Switcher
• New Web Host
• Dedicated Laptop/Tablet
• Media Storage
• Organizational External PVR, Media Storage and categorization software (Who said what where)
• Digital Security
• PACER Account
• Lexis Nexis Account
• Police Scanner
• Premium Ustream/Livestream Account
• Travel Expense Account
• Skype Handset
• Skype Phone Number
• A.P. Wire Service
• Staff (Copy Editor, Proofreader, Artist, Photographer, Videographers, Reporters, Section Editor, Literary Writers, Columnists)
• Lansing, Washington, New York, and L.A.  Bureaus
• Event (Conference, Panel, Fundraiser) Budget
• FOIA and External Printing Budget
• Legal Counsel (What can I record? What can I print? Am I in danger of libel?)
• Accountant
• Marketing Budget
• Advertising Sales Staff
• Media (Movies, Concerts, Albums) Review Budget
• Printing Press
• Reference Books
• General Office Supplies
• White Board/Bulletin Board

-----------------------------

• New Chair
• Brief Case 
• Trench Coat
• Lifetime supply of Coke Cola, (I think better when I'm on the stuff. Perfect combo of caffeine and sugar, to keep me going 'till 4 in the morning.)

And while I'm at it how about a fedora.

Councilman Jeremy Moss Running For The Michigan House

Southfield City Councilman Jeremy Moss in an email press release announced his candidacy in the 2014 35th District Michigan House of Representatives election. The current holder of the district's seat, Ruddy Hobbs, will be for running for the 14th Michigan U.S. Congressional District seat currently held by democratic congressman, Gary Peters who is making a U.S. Senate bid.

Moss is currently the youngest councilman in the history of Southfield, and graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in journalism and political science. He has worked in the offices of former State Rep. Paul Condino and State Rep. Rudy Hobbs.

Peters, who has raised more than $1,000,000, and is considered the front-runner  for the Senate race, will be running against Michigan's former secretary of state, Republican Terri Lynn Land.

Also of note is Mark Schauer who will be running in the Michigan gubernatorial race as a democrat.

And now you know as much as I do. I need some Republican contacts.