April 19

It has been 10 years since Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. I don't remember how I reacted. I don't remember hearing about it, or thinking about it - I remember the aftermath - people on the radio accusing "towelheads" - me thinking they were probably wrong - and somewhere realizing what day it was.

April 19, 1993 is much clearer, the memory. It was Patriot's Day; I had been to see the Red Sox, and then gone to Cambridge with my pals; we were eating at the Border Cafe. The TV's were on, and the news came on, the shots of tanks driving into David Koresh's compound, the news that the place was on fire - the news that there did not appear to be any survivors. I felt horrified. I felt, before that, that there was no reason on earth not to simply wait Koresh and company out, and that any overt attack would lead to something horrible. It did. And in the aftermath, I thought it would create copy cats - the paranoids would spring into action. They did.

The Oklahoma City bombings left me numb. I remember feeling confusion and denial, numb despair, but very little else. It matters that I can't find my journals from the time - if I recorded any thoughts, they are gone. I don't think I recorded many thoughts - the bombing was too stark an event. It was not something you could have an opinion about - it was just horrible.

We must acknowledge these horrors. The memory of these evils. Those who suffered and died. Take a moment and reflect.

2 Korean Films

So are Korean films going to be the next big thing? They have, I think, been the next big thing in some circles for the last few years - and recently, seem to be making inroads in American commercial theaters. Chunhyang and Chihwaseon have been released; so have Untold Scandal and The Tale of Two Sisters - and Kim Ki-duk's films are becoming regular features in the states: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring was released; 3 Iron is going to be released; Bad Guy and The Isle are shown various places.... And so, this weekend, two Korean films turned up, and I saw them both....

OLDBOY took second place at Cannes last year, the Quentin Tarantino jury, and it’s easy to see why. It’s got all the Tarantino factors - ultraviolence, metaphysics, tricks with time and sequence (though not excessive), dark humor played close to tragedy (and tragedy played as comedy) - it does it all very well. The other obvious influence is Takashi Miike - ultraviolence, comedy, taboo shattering - and it lifts a couple scenes directly from Miike. It is, however, a luded up Miike - it is telling that the moment most obviously swiped from Miike comes at the climax of Oldboy - Miike put his version about a third of the way into his film, played it a lot more graphically (and funnily), and, well, topped it a couple times before he was done. Miike consistently starts where other people end up... In any case, Oldboy is slower and more ponderous than Miike - and a bit less clear than the best Tarantino. Still, it’s quite good, if not quite great.

MEMORIES OF MURDER, meanwhile, was a huge popular and critical hit in Korea, and is now being shown in the states. It is a serial killer policier set in 1986, and apparently based on real events. Two women are found raped and murdered - the local cops start investigating, but they are hacks - a cop from Seoul shows up and tries to investigate for real. Not surprisingly, they clash: the locals manufacture evidence and kick confessions out of suspects - the big city cop preaches science and real police work and makes some progess, enough to save the poor saps the locals try to pin the crimes on, anyway. But the plot is not quite the point - they find clues, they close in on the killer, but can't quite find him - and they can't stop people from getting killed. There is a political subtext to all this - the story takes place about the time of the collapse of the military regime in South Korea, and the protests and political unrest, as well as the government's continued oppression, keep interfering with the police investigations. The political tensions build (never quite at the center of the film, but always there), and end in a brawl, where the cops' sins finally come home to roost - the fact that, by that time in the film, most of the cops have become noticeably less brutal is just an added irony... And it's that - the development of the characters of the policemen, and the depiction of their interaction - that makes the film remarkable. The cast is superb - the cops are absurd, affecting and sometimes very nastyl all at once; the filmmaking emphasizes their performances and relationships. And throughout, the film maintains a funny, off-kilter style. The opening sequence sets the tone - one of the cops turns up at the first murder scene, where a bunch of kids are playing. One of them crouches on the drain where the body is, imitating the policeman, while the rest of the kids find the murdered woman's clothes in a nearby field and start playing with them. The film maintains this tone throughout, even as events become more and more appalling, and the police grow increasingly desperate - while creating an undercurrent of tragedy, particularly through subtle use of repeated imagery objects and situations.

Of these two - Oldboy has the hype - it has the international honors, it has Tarantino, it has a better distribution deal - but Memories of Murder is one of the best films of the decade.

(Update: Some editing for wording, and a couple more links added.)

Hen Mines

I have been struggling to come up with something to blog here today - I have to blog something here today - all that work redesigning the place (well - clicking on a different template - that's work, no?) and.....

Thanks to Electrolite for this link to Defense Tech - where we learn:

Like me, you've probably stayed awake countless nights wondering, "Did the Brits ever make plans for a nuclear landmine, powered by chickens?"

Well, dear reader, I'm here to tell you that the answer is yes.

What follows is, well - well,it's worthy of the opening....

Turn and Face the Strange....

Changes!

Yes, it's redesign time. Why, you ask? To dabble with the "blogroll" a bit - though that's probably still to come. The main reason is to make it easier to read, especially if I start posting longer pieces. I've posted a couple - and hope to continue to post longer pieces every week or so. And I find them hard to read in the narrow, fixed width layout I was using. This template lets you expand the text a bit. So - that's the point. That and I was kind of tired of the green. I don't know if this orange lifesaver look is a lot better, but, it's what we're going with for a while.

It's Friday - what's on your iPod?

1 Bombastic Intro - Big Black
2 Kingdom Of Heaven - Thirteenth Floor Elevators
3 The Recluse - Cursive
4 Randy Described Eternity - Built To Spill
5 Caligari’s Mirror (Live - One Man Drives While The Other Man Screams) - Pere Ubu
6 God Only Knows - Beach Boys
7 Jet Plane In A Rocking Chair - Richard & Linda Thompson
8 Swimming Ground - Meat Puppets
9 Drunken Hearted Man - Robert Johnson
10 Araca Azul - Damon & Naomi

It was, I should add, something of a difficult commute home - usually I can get through 8-10 songs, depending on how many I skip or whether any epics come up. But today - those 10 got me one stop! Getting home took another 6, on the train alone... fun times! screaming kids, people crammed in like sardines - and a drunk on the platform as I was getting off, pushing against traffic, bouncing off people, and coming about 6 inches from going in front of an incoming train. Another day on the red line...

So here's my bonus 6. Lots of married couples in there...

Kid A - Radiohead
Back To The Base - X
Take Me Down To The Hospital - Replacements
I Can Learn - White Stripes
Miss Doris - Sonny & Linda Sharrock
Teenaged Lobotomy - Ramones

Separating the Friday Posts

This is pathetic. Here it is Thursday night, and the last post on this thing is last Friday's iPod random ten. Pathetic! I am at least glad I started posting iPod lists every Friday - it forces me, every week, to realize what a sluggard I have been. (Last week, for what it's worth, I had an excuse - the flu; irritating work developments. But this week, I have had - well, I guess I have had something like an excuse - Wong Kar-wei series at the Brattle - I went to a couple of those - makes for long nights... But should give me somethign to write about.... sad.)

Enough! The movie world is getting interesting - this weekend, Oldboy is opening - can I believe the hype? Soon we will find out. Next weekend, it's Kung Fu Hustle - Stephen Chiao is always good for a laugh, and sometimes more... Can't be bad!

Last weekend, I had to settle for Eros. Not horrible, but given the talent, you could expect a bit more. The first episode - Wong Kar-wei's - is pretty good, though a bit repetitive and formulaic. I think the handover ruined poor Wong Kar-wei’s artistic reason for living. His recent films keep going back to the 60s, but with a mournful, nostalgic tone, which is a change for the worse from the much better, much more urgent movies he made before the handover. Even the ones set in the past were made with a sense of a deadline - they were dominated by time, and the sense of time running out. That sense is gone. It is completely missing from "The Hand", and not as compelling in In the Mood For Love as it was in any of his other films. So - much rides on 2046 I guess - he needs to find something, do something to move forward. If he keeps remaking In the Mood For Love he is not going to be a great filmmaker again.

The rest of Eros is not much. The Soderburgh episode is funny, but kind of a toy, a kind of in-joke . . . and not very sexy by any standards . . . The Antonioni piece is vile - a parody of Antonioni, with bad acting, bad dubbing, bad dialogue, naked models running around in fast cars and riding horses, fucking each other in crumbling towers and dancing naked on a beach . . . atrocious! No amount of FFN can make up for the inanity of it all!

Another Friday Music Post

On goes the iPod - and what comes out?

1 For You - Big Star
2 Airbag - Radiohead
3 Ramses - Steve Coleman and 5 Elements
4 I'm the One - Van Halen
5 One Lonely Night - REO Speedwagon
6 Walk All Over You - AC/DC
7 The Green Manilishi (live) - Fleetwood Mac
8 Celebrated Summer (live) - Husker Du
9 Dead Set on Destruction - Husker Du
10 She Sells Sanctuary - The Cult

So I don't know what principals of rendomness are at work when Husker Du comes up back to back like that, but whatever they are... well, I can't complain too much. As long as it's Husker Du and not REO Speedwagon.

Friday iPod Blogging comes on Saturday this week

30 Seconds Over Tokyo - Rocket From the Tombs (live)
Can't you Hear Me Knocking - Rolling Stones
Trouble on the Line - Loretta Lynn
Randy Describes Eternity - Built to Spill
Cheating on You - Franz Ferdinand
Embraceable You - Charlie Parker
40 - U2
In D - Acid Mothers Temple
Julio Iglesias - ButtholeSurfers
Thank You - Led Zeppelin (BBC recordings)

Dead Souls

This will be more pleasant than the last post (if it ever posts.) I started this last night, it wouldn't post - I know I should try to do something Funny Here, in Honor of the Season, but I think I'm getting the flu again, so I'm going to skip the levity and stick with, well, facts.

And what are those facts? Evidence that someone has some interesting writers! I was watching Jeopardy last night, and what should come up in double jeopardy, but the following three categories - "Warsaw" - "She's Lost Control" and "'Joy' Division" - very nice.

End

Terri Schiavo is dead. I'm not going to say much about it - it's a sad, painful story, turned into a disgusting spectacle by the republican party and the media. The vultures are still circling - Tom Delay making threats: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today." And James Dobson, uttering this stunning piece of hypocrisy on CNN:

But neither of them check the courts. They're totally out of control. And there is, you know, almost a feeling of futility when it comes to the courts handing down decisions that contradict the will of the people.

You know, we saw it two weeks ago with regard to executing minors. Seventy percent of the people disagree with that. It doesn't matter what the people think and the -- neither the executive nor the legislature will step in.

Oddly, the fact that the polls on Schiavo's case were uniformly against government interference doesn't seem to register. You'd think the principal would be the same there.... Of course that assumes that the talk about activist courts and sanctity of life means something - it doesn't. It's smoke, and it's meant to cover their perfectly consistent agenda - asserting the state's control over your body. Not over their bodies - the hypocrisy of these scumbags - and that is what Dobson and Delay and everyone like them are - is that they fight tooth and nail for control over your body, but they themselves fully believe themselves immune from that control. So Delay wouldn't bat an eye at the contradiction between his own behavior when his father was on life support. The rules are for you, not for him. He's Tom Delay!

Anyway... I feel very sorry for Ms. Schiavo's family - her husband, her parents (however much they created this situation) - it was very sad to witness.

Just about Exactly My Commute

It being Friday, and me being a follower of all things fashionable a couple months ago... here, once again, the the last 10 songs my iPod offered. Not only a nice run, but all of it stuff I was in the mood to hear...

1 Stephanie Says - Velvet Underground
2 Personality Crisis - New York Dolls
3 Dirt - Mission Of Burma
4 Death or Glory - The Clash
5 Moya - Godspeed You Black Emperor
6 Apartheid - Peter Tosh
7 It’s So Easy - Buddy Holly
8 Garden was Crowded and Outside - Liars
9 Walk Awhile - Fairport Convention
10 The View - Modest Mouse

Sometimes the Jokes Aren't

We all got some amusement out of Billmon's post on David Horowitz's Cultural Revolution. But then we read this story about a new law in Florida, with this lovely quote: "While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.”"

The language there is a bit blander, but the sentiment - the sentimentality, really - the whininess, disguised as Political Correctness (don't forget where that term came from) - could have come straight from the thing itself.

It's the usual dreck, the usual Horowitz tactic of trying to destroy both liberal speech and free speech itself, wrapped in the language of political correctness itself (oh, god the irony! it burns us!), with plenty of the whiff of sulfer and hints of brickbats to follow that the Red Guards loved.

I mean, this is wicked hyperbole, calling Horowitz a Moaist - except - wasn't he basically a Maoists (or Stalinist or something) in the 60s - what sign is there that he is any less a Stalinist now? Certainly no evidence from this. Don't be fooled by the fact that then he called himself a leftist, now he says he's on the right - he's the same monster he was then isn't he? He is, in as direct a way as it is possible to be, exactly what he says he hates.

Passionless

1) I finally rented Passion of the Christ. I skipped it when it came out, for a variety of reasons. I’ve never had much interest in bloated epics - I haven’t seen any of Mel Gibson’s earlier bloated epics - so why see this one? That and the crowds - mobs of the devout... I feared I would react badly. I remember seeing Titanic - and having to control my laughter at the end, with the CGI’d people slipping off the CGI ship. Human pinball... There were a lot of places in that lousy film that demanded a laugh - or at least ironic appreciation of the melodrama. I rather liked the melodrama of Titanic - just that instead of a taut, silly picture, reveling in its genre heritage (ironically, like Almodovar or Maddin, or not), drawing the real emotion out of the conventions of its expression, it was a bloated epic, full of cheesy music, cheesy effects, cheesy, gratuitous camera work, big gaudy sets that require time, to appreciate... God! How to ruin a fun idea! Anyway, around me all the poor girls were sobbing, and I had to hold back the laughter...

2) Let’s cut to the chase: The Passion of the Christ looks cheap. The opening sequence looks as fake as anything in Guy Maddin, but it looks like Mel is trying to pass it off as a real Hollywood movie set. Once you get to the crowd scenes, you can see Mel saving money, by shooting things tight, to minimize the amount of background he needs to dress. Even longer shots are kept within fairly narrow bounds. Of course I could be wrong - it could just be that Gibson is a complete hack, who simply doesn’t know how to make a film look good. I don’t know. I think it’s the money. I think he wanted this to be a real bloated epic, but did not have a bloated budget. $25-30 million - that’s low for bloated epic, though a pretty good amount for a real movie. So I may be right. The problem is - trying to look like a bloated epic on a modest budget is a formula for making a really boring looking film. If Mel had had $100 million to throw around, he probably could have made something truly spectacular (though undoubtedly gaudy and vulgar in the worst way - but that was the point of the film - to turn the last hours of Christ’s life into thrilling spectacle, full of gore and the simulation of high emotion) - lacking the budget, he also lacked the imagination to make a film that looked like anything other than a cheap bloated epic.

3) What kills this film more than anything is the pacing. It is slow and ponderous - not because Gibson wanted to make a slow, meditative film - this is not meditative in any sense - but because it is slow and ponderous. Scenes are dragged out endlessly - with lots of pointless cutting around the room, and portentous music, the actors deliver their lines in slow monotones, as if they were reading them phonetically of cue cards (what are the odds?); scenes drag on and on, repeating their main points... This reaches a kind of nadir not so much with the flogging, though that’s pretty bad - take the structure of the flogging scene: slow start, lots of posturing and leering by various romans; some sad looking onlookers - then the beating begins; it stops - we get the same foolishness we started with, almost a reply of the beginning of the scene - then more, worse beating - and another pause, and they flip the poor SOB over and more of it.... then Jesus' followers coming out to sop up the gore and - you expect them to start writhing in the blood or something disgusting like that.... No, bad as it is, that isn't the nadir - the nadir comes later, the march through the streets of Jerusalem - slow, repetitive, clichéd - how many times can you show poor Jesus flopping to the ground in slow motion, with the cross bopping him on the head as he hits the ground? Watch and find out! Over and over - like a loop: Jesus staggers under his cross - Romans leer and flog - crowd shots - Romans growl and flog the crowd - sympathetic onlooker! - Jesus falls - Romans snarl and leer and whip the crowd - they drag Jesus to his feet and Mel replays the loop... This was when I gave up and started fast forwarding...

4) There is exactly one effective moment in the whole film: the moment of Jesus’ death. His face is shown in tight close up with a wide lens, lit/colored in blues and shadows - it flattens his face out, stretches it, so that for a second there, it looks like an ikon, and has the spiritual effect of an icon. (Evoking, we could say, the Transcendental Style of art.) For that shot, almost by accident, the film achieves something moving and beautiful. It is fleeting - it is literally one shot. It is gone.

5) There have been exactly two great Jesus movies. One is Life of Brian - it is not exactly a Jesus movie, but it is a very sharp satire on religion and politics, the JPF or PFJ and poor Reg/Loretta and the rest based, perhaps, on student politics of the 60s (if I remember the commentary tracks right), but probably as accurate a portrayal of Palestine during the life of Christ as you can find. Dozens of radical sects, political or religious, all squabbling among themselves, accusing one another of betraying whatever they were betraying... I'd bet on it.

The other - one of the greatest films ever made - is the magnificant Gospel According to Matthew. God, but this film shames Gibson's movie, on every conceivable level! But let's stick to just the one level - the tone of the film - and it's pacing. It is odd - there are those who like to say that Mel's Jesus movie is the most faithful adaptation of scripture ever - that is total nonsense. For one thing, it completely hashes the tone and pace of the scriptures. A decent adaptation has to get the strengths of the original, I would think, and that style is one of the best things about the gospels. Pasolini gets that just about right. Read the Gospel of Matthew - it buzzes along at a murderous clip. Then read the Gospel of Mark - which slims it down and speeds it up. Their style is economical, taut, spare - they are never bloated. And the dominant impression one gets from Pasolini's film is of speed - watch how Pasolini shoots Jesus. Over and over we see shots of Jesus walking away from the camera, shouting over his shoulder at a crowd of (literal) followers, who are trotting along at his heels, camera and all. Not to mention shots where Jesus turns his back on the camera (and his followers) completely - demanding we follow him. He's always running away - he's always moving into a new world, that demands that we move to follow him.

It's embarrassing and depressing to compare Pasolini's mastery to Gibson's hackery. And it is ironic that the effect of Gibson's lack of style is to stop the film completely - drain it of its violence and its energy (it's too late to be impressed by a bunch of fake blood, I'm afraid - that's not violence - that's makeup), it's sense of tumult, its radicalism. It reduces Jesus to sentimental flotsam, a cheap plastic replica of something once emotionally and spiritually powerful.

It is a bad movie. A depressing movie - the gospels tell a hell of a story - Jesus is a great character, who represents all manner of powerful things. Gibson's movie seems deliberately designed to strip the direct challenge of Jesus' message and character out - to obliterate the possibility of a real individual response, and to substitute a mass sentimentality, controlled from above, controlled and shaped by some other authority. It is a completely "priestly" movie, in Nietzsche's sense. It wants to make herds. And it succeeded marvelously, drawing in herds of viewers who responded like cattle. It's a disgrace.

Slow Down

Time to try to get back to the movie blogging. First up - Tsai Ming-Liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn. (This is somewhat obscure, but it's available on DVD and might get screeneed around the country - it is not entirely impossible to find. If it matters, I am not going to skimp on details - I could say "plot details" but as we shall see, that might not be the word. Anyway, if that sort of thing matters...)

All right then. You can check out the position of this film on my best of the 00s list. Second best Taiwanese film of the decade! It’s a good one. What makes it a good one? That is harder to answer than I wish I were. I was challenged, recently, to defend it - the usual complaints were aired: "it's so slow, there's no point, nothing happens." That provokes a small crisis. It's a problem because films like that, films paced like that, are very hard for me to defend normally. I am happiest when I can defend a film intellectually - I can't deny that I am most comfortable talking about films on rational, analytical grounds. And the truth is, I think I can defend Goodbye, Dragon Inn on those grounds - I can work out the logic of it, the themes and structural felicities and so on - it's just that with films like this, slow, minimalist films, those analytical points almost seem to be floating free in the air. Because the markers of conventional aesthetic and intellectual values are so subtle, it is easy for those who don't see them to say that they aren't there, and that the film's defenders read them into the film. And - in films like this - those doubts sometimes gain some footing.

But I see them, all the things this film does. I get it. And that creates the temptation, to fall back on some variation of the "I must be smarter than you" defense, or worse, the “I am more sensitive than you, Philistine!” defense - both vile, disgusting habits. But it's hard not to. This type of film - minimalist art in general, probably - creates this problem. It is as if you either can see what is going on in this type of art or you can't - if you don't see what is going on, without thinking about it, you won't see it when someone explains it to you. Because that kind of subtlety gets right down next to what you are - it is close enough to blankness, emptiness, that it is a real question whether there is anything there. Whether the film does show you anything, or if it simply reflects what you want to be there.

Obviously, I think it is there (the value); I think this film is as dense as any Miike or Imamura or David Lynch film. Visually, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. One reason is that I think art is fractal, like maps and Mandelbrot sets - when you move closer or further away, there is just as much information in them. A movie like this, where things don't seem to happen on the story level, contains as much information as any conventionally dense film, just placed differently. The placid surface conceals or mutes the complexity of the film - though even saying that implies something wrong, implies that the surface does not itself create specific and valuable artistic effects. But...

The film itself? I say, it is as dense as any film you are likely to see, in even the most conventional sense. It's just not all stated explicitly. What happens?

It is set in a movie theater - a huge, sprawling movie theater, with halls and attics and storage rooms surrounding the screening room. King Hu's Dragon Inn is playing to either a packed house or a handful of lonely men more interested in cruising than the swordplay on screen. A woman with a limp walks around, sweeping floors, spying on the film or the projectionist, flushing toilets. One man in the audience tries to pick up another man in the theater - then tries the men's room - then tries the storage rooms, which are full of men, silently wandering among the boxes. 40 minutes into the film, there is a line of dialogue - "this theater is haunted. There are ghosts here." "I am Japanese" replies the man we have been following - probably the only words he knows in Chinese. He goes back to the movie, and is annoyed by a woman eating nuts. The film ends and 2 men meet in the lobby - one is Miao Tien, who has been playing the father in Tsai Ming-liang's films for more than a decade. (He was a ghost in the last one.) The other is Shih Chun - one of the stars of King Hu's Dragon Gate Inn (Miao also appeared in King Hu's film.) "They have forgotten us," he says.

It fits in with Tsai's career. The long takes, of people sitting still - or walking along a corridor - climbing stairs - or standing at a urinal - watching the film playing on screen; sexual longing, the need for connection, but no connection. It has Tsai's brand of comedy - using those long takes to lull you, then slowly springing a joke on you (2 men stand beside each other in a long row of empty urinals; they stand there for several minutes. A third man comes in, and stands beside one of them. They stand there for several minutes. A man emerges from a stall behind them, washes his hands. They stand there for several minutes. Someone inside the stall reaches out and closes the door. The three men at the urinals stand there for a few more minutes. Another man comes into the room, walks up to the threesome standing together, reaches between them and takes a pack of cigarettes from the shelf above them. They keep standing there. It's in the timing. Trust me. If you've recently read some Beckett, you will understand. If you have seen enough Tsai, you will understand Beckett.) At the very end, the star of the film (of all of Tsai's films) appears for the first time, for 2 or 3 scenes. But he's playing the projectionist, so his presence has permeated the film. Outside, it rains.

That's what happens. Digging into it a bit - you have, basically, two characters, the the Japanese guy and the gir. These two move through the theater, driven by their desires, which are somewhat over-determined - she is working, but she is also looking for the projectionist, who avoids her. He is cruising, but he is also just trying to stay dry (and take a piss, maybe). These are powerful enough motivations, and interesting in their own - but Tsai skips the conventional story you might make out of these elements, and structures what is there in ways that give it its own depth. Take the patterns of presence and absence he creates - the cycling of the people in the space, the play of perception and time. Consider the role of the projectionist - framing what happens, controlling the plot, such as there is, in a way, yet absent - not seen until the end. Consider the circulation of objects - the steamed bun the woman eats, the food she offers to the projectionist then takes away. Consider the function of the film being screened, and of the actors from that film watching it. The effect is to create a series of displacements - the film, the actors, the woman and projectionist - the sense of different times occupying the same space created by the shifts from crowded areas to empty areas, or by the comparison of King Hu's film and its actors - who, again, are also Tsai Ming-liang's actors. (Miao Tien is almost as important to Tsai's work, as Lee Kang-sheng.) Miao and Lee certainly evoke Tsai's other films - in which they usually play father and son. Here, neither is on screen much - in fact, their presence (especially Lee's) is specifically withheld - and they have no interaction in the film. But that is part of the significance of the film, part of its language - to offer and deny possibilities of connections - to play off previous relationships, even if just by denying them. (Or by using the Japanese man as a kind of surrogate for Lee.)

Blogs and Deviation

On women bloggers - P. Z. Myers says something here that I completely agree with. In fact, he says it so goddamned well, I am just going to quote it:

We're all concerned about politics, so most people toss a link to the political blogs, just to keep track of what's going on in these things that affect all of our lives…but you know what that means? The political blogs are the lowest common denominator. They're like bacteria, ubiquitous, omnipresent, floating and sliming and breeding everywhere. But people don't aspire to be bacteria (not that I have anything against bacteria—wonderful critters, interesting and deserving of respect), we try to be a bit more complicated and diverse. Sure, we come up short when everyone starts bragging about their colony size or how many petri dishes they've infested or how many clonal descendants they have, but seriously, who cares? We want to be unique. We want to explore unusual experiences. We want to express ourselves in different ways. Let's agree to be different people. Flaunt your metazoan nature, rather than wishing you were more like those prolific prokaryotes.

As a reader (and I think much of the function of blogs is to indicate what you are reading, and to point to things you think other people might like to read), I know that politics is not what pulls me. It's true that the last 3-4 years have been very politically charged - so I have been reading a lot of politics - but other than the period right around the beginning of the Iraq war, and the whole election season, politics has always been a bit secondary. I get my Atrios fix, and check in on Josh Marshall and Alterman now and then, but most of my reading is elsewhere. Pharyngula; Majikthise; Long Story, Short Pier; Berube and Wolcott; Crooked Timber (currently down) and John and Belle; Pandagon. Teresa Neilson Hayden was, for a long time, at the top of the list - she has cut back on the number of posts lately, which is the only reason she isn't so high anymore...

None of these is a traditional politically oriented blog. Pandagon is closest, especially when Ezra Klein was on board - and I had slacked off reading them before Mouse Words came on board. She is not a traditional political blogger - though the problem there seems to be more with the "traditional" part than the "political" part. She writes plenty about politics - but it's not policy wonkery, it's, oh, frightening court cases or insane Christians. Which, as far as I am concerned, is what makes her worth reading. The Kevin Drum types get very boring very quickly - letting them define politics (as policy, really) is bad enough - letting them define what constitutes blogging is even worse.

So... I can see, by the way, that I listed more men than women in my list of favorites - I have also noticed that as I have tried, over the last month or so, to find more variation in the blogs I read (basically, to shift from politics to culture/academics/the arts), I have started reading more women bloggers. If that is because women don't blog on "politics" I think that might be because women who are interested in politics have a broader and more sophisticated view of what politics is.

Friday iPodding

Since I was listening to it on the train, I might as well post it...

Raw Power - Stooges
Crash the Party - Richard Thompson
On Some Faraway Beach - Brian Eno
Joe Bean - Johnny Cash
Shore Leave - Tom Waits
Return the Gift - Gang of Four
Crosseyed and Painless (live) - Talking Heads
Wear My Ring - Gene Vincent
We all Know - Devendra Banhardt
Paint it Black - Stones

Colossal Wastes of Time

I have been thinking about posting something about the Congressional investigations into steroid use - though it's hard to come up with words for such naked grand-standing by useless old men... It is not that steroids are a good thing -but they are not all that big a thing. Overall? in the long run? it will be a joke, something to snicker about, whine about, use to bash Barry Bonds and McGwire and Sosa and whoever else you don't like... that's about all, unless it makes baseball as boring as the Olympics, where it seems half the results get thrown out on appeal.

Anyway, in related news, I hear next week, Congress will be calling NBA point guards to investigate allegations of palming and double dribbling. And the week after, it's baseball again, as we get tot he bottom of the Scandal of the Phantom Tag.

She'll wave her red book...

Billmon provides context for Chairman Horowitz and his merry band of cultural revolutionaires.

We will purify. We must purify. For the sake of that security we all want. (As David Thomas put it.)

On Irish Letters

Happy St. Patrick's Day, friends! And over at Salon, Allen Barra offers excellent advice for celebrating - track down some Flann O'Brien, and wallow in his mastery! At Swim-Two-Birds in particular is a masterpiece - one of the great novels of the 20th century, a book as infinitely re-readable as they come. Cowboys, Irish mythical heroes, drunken college students, civil servants, devils and fairies, innkeepers and serving girls drink, play poker, bet on the horses, recite poetry, cadge cigarettes, stay in bed for days at a time, tell jokes, discuss politics and indulge in literature and literary theory. It is incomparable, though occasionally imitated - it is marvellous beyond words.

Halfway to 2009

This is something I have to do more of - write, and write about movies, probably more than anything else. I have, in fact, 2 or 3 posts in the pipeline, some of them with real content! But for now - best of the 00's posts have started popping up around the internet (spreading from blog to blog, more precisely) - so since I've been sitting on a list for 2 months... Time to post. I was waiting to get around to writing comments, but at my usual posting rate, that'll be done in time for the end of the decade. So enough - here it is:

1 Yi Yi - dir. Edward Yang
2 Goodbye, Dragon Inn - Tsai Ming Liang
3 Mulholland Drive - David Lynch
4 House of Flying Daggers - Zhang Yimou
5 Donnie Darko - Richard Kelly
6 Ichii the Killer - Takashi Miike
7 Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary - Guy Maddin
8 Nobody Knows - Hirokazu Kore-Eda
9 Songs from the Second Floor - Roy Anderson
10 O Brother Where Art Thou - Coens

I hope to come up with reasons for those choices: in fact, one or two of them are currently being incubated for some lengthy commentary... But for now, for the moment at least, there you go.

For Your Sunday Comics PLeasure

Found this link on Pharyngula - Something Awful offers photoshopped comic book covers. Read all about "the menace of Yao Ming, NBA Star!" Great stuff.

Friday with my iPod

I guess this is a bit of a tradition in blogland - the old, play 10 songs on the iPod/iTunes/MP3 randomizer. So - this is what came up on the train. Though I did fast forward a couple times. I won't say where...

1. Nature Boy - Nick Cave
2. Desolation Row - Bob Dylan
3. Tame - Pixies
4. Madison Blues - Fleetwood Mac
5. Soon - My Bloody Valentine
6. Sympathy for the Devil (live) - Rolling Stones
7. Higher Ground - Feelies
8. Pavement Saw - Big Black
9. Union Square - Tom Waits
10. So Stark - Pavement

Or maybe Boots 209?

This is very amusing - Attention Strippers!. (Via P. Z. Myers). Alas, coming up with a name - first pet? Street you lived on? - would require a herculean exercise of memory.... I have the horrible feeling one of the names would be "Laddie"....

Metalogic?

Yesterday on Crooked Timber, an account of an exchange between Richard Rorty and Scott Soames, with special emphasis on the topic of vagueness. This is very interesting. I suppose I notice it, and remark on it here, because of my ongoing binge of reading Samuel R. Delany - a good deal of this debate sounds like it could be taking place on Lux on Iaputus in 2112 as readily as today. This debate is full of what looks suspiciously like Modular Calculus: "whether and how language gets in touch with the world" says Rorty, not to mention the question of what is a heap? That is: say you have something that is not a heap of sand. If you add one grain of sand to it - you do not have a heap of sand. Add another grain of sand to that still-not-a-heap-of-sand, and you will still not have a heap of sand. So - if n grains of sand (goes the argument) is not a heap of sand - then n+1 grains of sand is not a heap of sand. So - when do you get a heap of sand? This question is at the core [there is some irony in saying that) of the philosophy of vagueness - and of course, Delany's "metalogics". It's all about boundaries - when does a not-heap of sand become a heap of sand? When does few become many? When does white become not-white, or the Taj Mahal not the Taj Mahal?

I wish I had a better idea what philosophers in particular Delany was drawing on in books like Trouble on Triton. He writes about these kinds of things - boundaries of concepts and correspondence between models and reality - quite a bit, both in the novels and in his nonfiction. But since he is a novelists, primarily, not a philosopher - he writes about the things from the perspective of a ficteur, and an amateur philosopher. And, in practice, one does not get the references and footnotes and the like one would get if one were reading Rorty or Soames.

I'm certainly curious to find out. It is an odd feeling - there is undoubtedly more to this than I can see, but the philosophy of vagueness really looks like what Delany was writing 25 years ago. I wish I knew more about the philosophical underpinnings of what he wrote - how his fiction corresponded to the philosophers. It's also very interesting, in itself - Trouble on Triton is an interesting book, very much about the vagueness of boundaries between concepts - a world where almost everything is turned into a set of probabilities, where almost everything is seen, somehow, as both much more quantifiable than we see things, and fuzzier - the boundaries between things (genders, races, pleasure/pain, etc - all the old hierarchies made so much of by structuralists and post-structuralists) are vague, blurry. What makes a woman becomes as vexed a question as what makes a heap. I think I can talk, fairly intelligently, about Delany - but moving past him to these similar discussions, in contemporary philosophy, drops me completely out of the conversation.

Which itself, in a sense, is related. Certainly the questions of correspondence are relevant - correspondence to reality, but also, the correspondences between a fiction, a literary (or paraliterary) text and philosophical texts... A question Delany's work (fiction and non-fiction) has explored repeatedly.... And - where does my ability to speak, with some authority, on a novel turn into an inability to speak, with authority, on philosophy?

There may be a metablogging post somewhere in the shadows around here. What am I trying to do with this blog? I know I'm doing it badly - but even if I weren't - what would I be doing? The answer, in fact, I think is this - I am trying, simply, to point to things that catch my eye. The point of this post, say, is certainly not to defend or challenge or really add anything to the Rorty/Soames debate - it might be, somehow, to comment on some of Delany's themes - and certainly, the Delany connection is what I am most interested in here. No - the point of this post is to say, goddamn - this stuff is interesting. I am going to have to look up some of this stuff and read it. This Vagueness stuff looks very interesting... So there you have it. Whatever it is.

Every Day I Learn Something New

Today, thanks to David Horowitz's Moonbat Central bog (which I am still not sure is a real Horowitz site and not a Jesus' General style comedy site), I learn that the reason Martin Scorsese has never won an Oscar is because of Kundun.

Hollywood is put off not only by the stark violence of his vision, but also because Scorsese stuck to his guns (and so, to its credit, did Disney Corp.) in making Kundun (1997). This life of the Dalai Lama showed Communist China’s brutal invasion and rape of Tibet. Beijing threatened commercial retaliation again Disney (and Hollywood) if it released this movie. Scorsese is to this day one of only 50 people officially prohibited by China from entering Tibet. Perhaps this is one factor that explains why more Hollywood figures are careful not to embrace Scorsese too warmly. Greed mixed with left ideology make a powerful cocktail.

That makes perfect sense, just like my theory that Pete Rose managed to get Paul Giamatti blacklisted by the Academy. Anyway, read and enjoy. There's some nice comedy about Roger Ebert in there too.

Pissing on the Dead

Well look who's got a blog! jimmyjeffguckertgannon - and he's trading on the late and truly lamented Hunter S. Thompson - "Fear and Loathing in the Press Room" declares the right's favorite rent boy! Meanwhile, he quotes some of his dimmer fellow travelers in their continued missing of the point:

They should propose performing the exact same investigation on all WH reporters. Send out a questionnaire that reflects the matters that find them in such breathless anxiety when it comes to Jeff Gannon/James Guckert. To wit:
1. Ask if any reporter is a homosexual.
2. Ask if any has ever exchanged sex for anything.
3. Ask them to list all web sites with which they have ever had any involvement.
4. Review all of their questions and articles for any bias, agenda, or tendentiousness.
4. Ask for a list of all political associations, involvements, activities, financial giving.
6. Once step five is completed, the same investigation must be performed on the organizations that employ them.
7. Report the results.

Now, it is very doubtful this would lead anywhere even if someone did it - the number of reporters serving or advertising themselves as prostitutes on the Internet is probably rather small - and even when something embarrassing does come up (ask Andrew Sullivan), it generally only ruins your career if you didn't really have a career.

But that aside - that isn't what happened to jjdgg. If you wanted to apply to the whole press corps the standards applied to him:
1) What kind of questions do they ask at press conferences? Do they make fools of themselves?
2) If so - where do they work? How legitimate is that organization?
3) Are they plagiarizing white house press releases?
4) How did they get their credentials, if they are plagiarists working for a news organization that appears to be a front for a partisan lobbying outfit?
5) And then - I guess the next step depends on whether they are a prostitute offering their services over the internet - but - do they have or have they recently had web sites offering their services as a prostitute on the internet? What about the nude photos?

It has to be admitted that the comedy potential of number five increases significantly if the reporter is conservative, gay, or both. Degree of closetedness is another parameter. Screaming that some bleeding heart liberal is gay is just not going to get much traction - less now, when just being a liberal is so often grounds for consignment to hell. But for right wing hacks - well! But going on the continuing efforts of righties to defend jjdgg by pretending to be outraged that liberals are mocking him for being gay - the comedy never really stops. Jimjeff is a walking ridikulus spell, that turns everyone who approaches into a figure of fun.

Gonzo

Hunter S. Thompson has left us. Majikthise offers a pessimistic reading:

Gonzo is dead because the mainstream media have abolished objectivity and subjectivity--the facts don't matter, but neither does the perspective of any individual. Like gonzo journalists, today's campaign reporters love to tell impressionistic yarns. Unlike gonzo journalists they don't want to talk about their own experiences. Enterprising reporters collect "gaffes" and "coups" and spin them into parables. The winner is the journalist whose just-so story becomes "The Defining Moment."

I am hard pressed to disagree. The Rude Pundit offers an excellent eulogy as well.

Meanwhile, hop over to Atrios and take a look at the new "Real AARP Agenda" ad he's got up - then read about it at Talking Points Memo. What the hell?

It's gotta be shit like that that drove the great man to despair - how can you make up funny shit that's weirder than that, or jimmyjeffguckertgannon?

Burning Issues of the Day

I have been slow to comment on Ward Churchill - probably because the controversy is so obviously manufactured, and because there's not much I might say that hasn't been said already. It's boring! But I do want to put something up - here's Brien Leiter commenting at some length on the case, on Churchill's actual argument and whether any of it comprises a firing offense. And the Volokh Conspiracy, not surprisingly, has a very intelligent analysis fromt he conservative side. (Here, by the way, is the thing itself - and a more recent revision.)

I can't add much. I think this is mostly about intimidation. Kevin Drum runs down the chronology - a local story, an AP story, a New York Post story, Joe Scarborough, O'Reilly, The Washington Times, " the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune Review - and then the New York Times - and then the world. Sez Drum:

It's fascinating how a trivial story like this managed to spread so far, isn't it? The right wing machine pushed, the New York Times responded, and then the rest of the press followed. Within days, the previously insignificant Ward Churchill had become a household name and a virtual poster boy for lefty nihilism based on something that no one on either the left or right had cared a whit about in the three years since he wrote it. Truly an object lesson for us all.

Or as Majikthise put it, "brutal political theater. In a dazzling display of demagoguery Bill O'Reilly, Joe Scarborough and their minions spun a hackneyed 3-year-old essay by a nonentity into a scandal that culminated in death threats and demotion." I think that is what it has all been about - smacking down someone, not so much because of what he did (however loathsome - "depraved", says Eugene Volokh - it might have been), but in order to show their power.

Meanwhile - cramming All The Great Issues of the Day into One Lazy Post - this story is just mind boggling. (Beware! naked reporter pix within!) It's one thing when the guy lobbing softball questions to Scott McClellan and President Bush is an amateur hack, writing for a fake news site run by a partisan organization. It's another when he's using a pseudonym. And another when he's plagiarizing from White House press releases. And another when he has gay-themed personal ads up on AOL. But when he registers gay porn sites? No - he registers gay escort sites? No, he is a gay escort?

What the fuck?

And this guy had access to information about Valerie Plame?

Anyway, I imagine sooner or later the right wing might have to stop missing the point - like here, trying to turn Russell Mokhiber into a left wing version of Gannon. That can't work, can it? Gannon maybe got criticized for being a hack - but he got run out of town on a rail for being a criminal. (And, of course, for the hypocrisy - you know, the Bush White House, defenders of decency and traditional values and all, using a gay prostitute as a plant in the press. Oh, the irony! Oh!) It's not about his politics (though that is where it started - but it would have stayed as ridicule and abuse if that's all there was) - it's not about his personal life, per se - it's about the fact that his personal life turned out to be so incredibly disgusting.

Anyway - the best source of information has beena nd remains, Americablog.

Speaking of DIY...

Learning to Love You More is a web site I have just found, just now, while randomly clicking around stray bookmarks and such, updating all my home page links. It has some of the tone of the kinds of communal, participatory, art popular in the 60s and 70s - and, relevant to my previous post, a major part of the early days of video art. Description?

Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher and various guests. Yuri Ono designs and manages the web site.

Just glancing at it - this could be a source of days of joy.

Video Killed the Blogging Star

Blogging? I generally ignore blogging on blogging, which explains why I am only getting to Jack Shafer's week old article now - but reading it, I see some interesting comments on the Sony Portapak Video revolution. Now that's intriguing. Did the portapak change the world? at least, the balance of power in the media world? Did it? Shafer's got some good stuff from Michael Shamberg, one of the pioneers (at Raindance) of the video revolution. Shamberg proclaiming,

With portable videotape technology, anything recorded on location is ready on location, instantly. Thus, people can control information about themselves, rather than surrender that power to outsiders. ABC, CBS, and NBC do not swim like fish among the people. They watch from the beach and thus just see the surface of the water.

Did that revolution come? That is the question, but it's not time to answer it yet...

When it comes to blogs, there's plenty of the same kind of hyperbole. Quothe Shafer:

In language only slightly less fervent than Shamberg's, conference participants declared blogs the destroyers of mainstream media. (See this page and this page for a real-time transcription of the conference.) Others prescribed blogs as the medicine the newspaper industry should take to reclaim its lost readers: Publishers should support reader blogs and encourage their reporters to blog in addition to writing stories. Podcasts would undermine the radio network empires. "Open source" journalism, in which readers and bloggers help set the news agenda for newspapers, was promoted as a tonic for what ails the press. Reporters were encouraged to regain the lost trust of readers by blogging drafts of their stories, their notes, and even their taped interviews so other bloggers could dissect and analyze them for fairness.

It's easy to mock that stuff, and all the shivery self-promotion bloggers indulge in. It's probably easier since it is, so often, a rehash of the shivery gushing advocates of portable film equipment, portable video cameras, the personal computer, the world wide web, etc. etc. have indulged in through the years. The problem with mocking it is, those things have changed the world. What is missing from the bloggers' version of the story, though Shafer has it, is that the change is usually absorbed into the existing structures of the media (since that is what we are talking about.) Electronic delivery (and creation) systems - like blogs - are absorbed by the existing media - or absorb it - or - this is not new. I have not had a newspaper subscription since, I think, 2000. I read the same papers - read more papers, actually - online. For this reader, blogs, the New York Times, online database sites (IMDB, AMG), academic journals - are part of a continuum of internet material.

Video did the same thing - changed everything, but did it without seeming to change everything. Those portapak cameras are directly responsible for huge swaths of what is on TV right now - reality shows? the way news is reported - the way movies look? the way video games look? The internet has already done much the same thing with text information - it is the delivery system of choice for quite a few people (even people who still read books and magazines). It chas changed the way information is organized, the way we conceptualize information. It has not eliminated old media, or the power structures of old media - though it undoubtedly will change them.

Finally, getting to the bloggers, getting to blog "triumphalism" as it is called: the idea that somehow blogs replace television or newspapers or magazines is somewhere between ridiculous and rather terrifying. Or let me rephrase - replacing television, as a source of news, is almost all good - blogs are deeper, more interactive than TV. Going from TV to blogs for your news is undoubtedly a step up. But newspapers, magazines are still the defininitive sources for information. Blogs don't compate, and can't compete. Blogs - at least the kinds of political blogs that political bloggers think are the only kind - are, really, not about producing content at all. They are pointers - they are records of what someone has read, and has thought other people should read. This tendency seems to get stronger the more political the blog is - the less political blogs tend to be more interestingly written. But there you go.

I'm a Day Late and a Dollar Short

...but check out Slacktivist's post on Groundhog Day. (Check out Ebert as well.) Slacktivist has the moral and philosophical musings and the broader context to put it in.... It's one of those films - and there aren't many (It's a Wonderful Life, and - ?) - that are popular, loved, and seem, if you think about them a bit, to get deeper and more interesting.

Makin' It Up

It's been a while since I've made fun of Doug Giles. It's a cottage industry in some corners of the blogosphere - god knows, the "Motel Messiah™" gives you enough material. But I'll leave the ridicule to TBogg and company, and just comment on the history.

This week's column is called Packed, Stacked and Ready to Whack - it has nothing to do with gay porn - it is another defense of the 2nd amendment. Alas, only the title is in rhyme, though Doug maintains his usual command of the English language. That aside, let's get to the history. Here's Doug, explaining the second amendment:

One of the basic human rights that constantly has to be defended is the right to keep and bear arms.  Why did the original founders of this great American experiment toss this given, no-duh, entitlement into the Constitution?  Well … it wasn’t so that we would be guaranteed that we could hunt squirrels and woodchucks without serving time, as great as that is.  It was for the purpose of defending ourselves against perps when the cops are running a little late, and for the purpose of protecting ourselves against the government should the system go south.

Alas, no, the right to keep and bear arms was not (originally) about protecting yourself from "perps" or even overthrowing the government. It is guaranteed for the fairly obvious purpose of maintaining a "well regulated militia" - so there would be no need of a standing army. Standing armies lead to tyranny, went the argument - an argument rooted in the English Civil War and the unfortunate example of Oliver Cromwell - an argument given plenty of fuel in the 1760s and 70s, as the redcoats made their presence felt in the colonies. Mr. Giles here makes a fundamental mistake - the right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed not to protect the citizens against an army out of control - but to take the place of that army.

The rest of the column is typical nonsense - claiming that if the German citizens had been armed in the 1930s they wouldn't have voted Adolf Hitler into power -ignoring the fact that most of the free world has quite restrictive gun laws - and generally showing no sign of a clue as to how politics works. If he thinks arming both sides will prevent civil wars and genocides, he hasn't been paying attention.

More on Summers

Following up on my post on the Larry Summers controversy - Ezra Klein points to this response from Zoe Vanderwolk. She defends Summers, suggesting he was "set up" - that he was invited to speak off the record, but that his remarks were reported in the Boston Globe anyway, and out of context ("he summarized the contents of a paper that was about to be presented at the conference, which had valid statistical findings with regards to women underperforming in the sciences" she says). That seems reasonable enough, I guess, though I think it's unrealistic to expect anything someone in his position says to be taken apart from his position (and thus related to tenure issues at Harvard) - and I think the broader issues still tend to make Summers' remarks wrong-headed. In fact, Vanderwolk concludes the post with an argument that gets at what I was hoping I said:

Conclusions: many girls can do maths very well. Some can't. Some boys do maths extremely well. Many don't. However, schools shunt girls out of maths to concentrate on the small percentage that do extremely well, because that's how teachers are evaluated, and also because girls are routinely pushed out of maths at all levels. I think girls need more encouragement in general to do stuff, although I don't know if this is a nature or a nurture thing. A study I read last year showed a similar imbalance in women seeking office - once women actually run for office, there's no inherent bias against them, but many fewer women even bother to run initially because they are far less likely than men to get support and endorsement from political parties. . . .

Do Conservatives Think You're Stupid?

A particularly inspiring post on democracy and conservatism at Body and Soul. Taking off from this article (by Philip Agre, a UCLA professor.) Agre takes a dim view of conservatism:

Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

Jeanne D'Arc agrees. She adds:

Traditional conservatism is the polar opposite of democracy. It assumes people can't -- or shouldn't -- think for themselves, and that they have to be lead, either by fear or p.r. (or a combination) to accept the natural order in which some people  rule and others are ruled.

What leaves most progressives, even centrists, banging our heads against the walls and mumbling about pharisees and hypocrites is that this is obviously as true of modern conservatism as it has been of conservatism for thousands of years, and yet an astonishing number of people think that the nature of conservatism has changed, and that now it is somehow all about freedom and allowing every individual to achieve everything he or she can.

This is a significant point. The right has been selling itself as the party of self-reliance - of freedom, of indepenbdence for some time now. They do this in the face of the facts - they have never been the party of self-reliance, they have always been the party of protecting the positions of those who have the power and money, now. That has not changed, and indeed, the current administration has dropped a lot of the pretense - they still use the words, but they seem barely able to contain their laughter at the rubes who still think they are a party of anything other than fuck you.

Anyway, Jeanne goes on to note - relevantly in the wake of the disatrous election last fall, with all the gnashing of teeth and searching of souls indulged in by the left, the seeking of positions to abandon and images to create - that copying the tactics of the right - "Where's the money for our p.r. machine? How do we create the mechanism to make our mindless drivel as much a part of the common wisdom as theirs? How do we learn to do this propaganda thing?" - is a losing game:

Which is not an unreasonable reaction, but it's based on the disturbing -- and conservative -- notion that most people are so deeply stupid, or at least so uninterested in the world, that they can only be reached in the dishonest and patronizing ways conservatives have been reaching them.

God help us if that's true, because if it is, we've already lost.

Conservatism thrives on ignorance (which is not, by the way, to say that all, or even most, conservatives are ignorant; if you're one of the elect, conservatism is quite rational). It's not just that conservatives are better at exploiting innate ignorance, but that conservatism itself -- the idea that if we let our superiors make the tough decisions, and generally do what they think is best and in their interest (oh, wait, we're not supposed to think about that) all will be right with the world -- depends on cultivating  lazy habits of mind and a sense of personal ineptness when it comes to understanding the world.

I can't disagree. Under all forms of conservatism, even the libertarian varieties, is that assumption - that people - the mass of people - really can't make rational decisions, so we - who can make rational decisions - must at least make sure that they can't touch us, and at most actively make those decisions for them. And given that pattern, those assumptions - she is right as well, that if we adopt their methods - simplifying the message, trying to argue with sound bites and image, then we will simply play into their hands. That approach assumes the stupidity of the people - and since conservatism shares that assumption, it will benefit from it.

The problem with what she says is that, first - the left has been (and is) perfectly capable of authoritariamism. And has been, often enough in its history, as simple minded and paternalistic as the right. It is probably begging the question to say that leftist authoritarians and paternalists are "really" conservatives - but it's not an approach I would want to abandon. But that is a topic for another day - today - I'm with Jeanne.

The most basic liberal belief is that people can and must challenge what they're told, and figure things out for themselves. And at the heart of that is a faith that ordinary human beings are capable of that action. To me, the best thing about blogs is that they feed that faith. Every day they provide proof that the country is full of people with no power, and no pretensions to expertise, who nevertheless have things to say that trump most of what you hear from those whose job it is to pretend they know what they're talking about.

Amen.

Women and Science

In my neverending quest to not blog more, I have not bothered to post anything about the Larry Summers controversy. Summers, if you recall, made a speech a couple weeks ago in which he suggested that there were innate, biological reasons why more men than women work with math. This went over badly, as one may expect. And so, a couple days later, he apologized.

So last week, in the Boston Phoenix, Harvey Silverglate responded to Summers’ apology. He was not pleased. Unfortunately, his response is not edifying. Claiming that Summers was "merely stating the obvious" - that "it is no longer acceptable to speak honestly or intelligently about gender, race, sexual identity, or any other issue that has already been "decided" by entrenched orthodoxies " just is not going to work here. Others, who know what they are talking about more than I do, have already addressed the substance of Summers’ remarks - see Majikthise and Pharyngula) in particular. I’ll have to stick to more general remarks.

First - I do not think there is anything particularly intelligent or honest about Summers' remarks. They sound to me to be aimed at irritating people - establishing an image of provocation, of being willing to challenge sacred cows - without the benefit of any thought whatsoever. They are provocative in the sense of provoking people to complain, not provoking people to think. And - perhaps a more important motivation for his remarks, in context - they are self-justifying. At some level, they seem to be aimed at denying his (or Harvard's) responsibility for fixing the gender disparity in the sciences. By suggesting that there are inherent, immutable differences between the sexes which no amount of political and social change can fix, Summers' arguments certainly suggest that at some point, there is no more good to come from social and political change. Where that point is can remain vague, but when someone in his position makes a speech like that, the implication is that the point isn't all that far away.

To defend either of those arguments in the name of academic freedom is cheap and lazy. Some of this is for essentially political reasons: Summers is not an expert on questions of gender, and as president of Harvard, what he says carries great weight - so his amateur opinions are magnified, and - again because of his position - are read as politically significant. (Some discussion of this can be found at the 800 pound gorilla of academic blogs, the Becker-Posner blog.) But beyond that, I think there are some fairly serious reasons why the whole issue is misleading.

Back in the first round of commentary on it, Matthew Yglesias posted something that, I thought, got around the obstructionism that mostly characterizes these debates. "Empirical research into genetics is only a red herring" said he - whether there are genetic differences or not, there are too many societal differences in the treatment of men and women for the genetic differences to be significant. (The Pharyngula link posted above has some similar thoughts - Myers arguing that even the differences that are detectable between men and women are too narrow to be related directly to academic positions.) Even Richard Posner, I think, falls into some of this trap, writing

It seems unlikely that all sex-related differences in occupational choice are due to discrimination; and therefore someone who explores alternative explanations should not be excoriated.

The problem, as Yglesias suggests, is that to speak of "innate" or "genetic" differences is to speak about something well beyond where we are now. That is - Posner (for instance) suggests that while discrimination declines, gender differences remain - this (he adds) suggests that there is something - else - at work. The argument presented by Summers is that the "something else" is biological - when the "something else" could be anything, from biology to social norms, role models, etc. Discrimination can't be defined as exiting only in the jopb market, or even in classrooms, in a simple way. It exists in what boys and girls are encouraged to do (for example) as much as in what they are prevented from doing. In short - I think it is unwise to talk about the genetic roots of social conditions, when you have nowhere nearly exhausted the possible social explanations.

Idealistic Hot Air

Here's David Brooks in the NY Times, talking about Bush's inauguration speech. It's a strange article. I quote, at length:

The people who detest America take a look at this odd conjunction and assume the materialistic America is the real America; the ideals are a sham. The real America, they insist, is the money-grubbing, resource-wasting, TV-drenched, unreflective bimbo of the earth. The high-toned language, the anti-Americans say, is just a cover for the quest for oil, or the desire for riches, dominion and war.

But of course they've got it exactly backward. It's the ideals that are real.

Two years from now, no one will remember the spending or the ostrich-skin cowboy boots. But Bush's speech, which is being derided for its vagueness and its supposed detachment from the concrete realities, will still be practical and present in the world, yielding consequences every day.

With that speech, President Bush's foreign policy doctrine transcended the war on terror. He laid down a standard against which everything he and his successors do will be judged.

When he goes to China, he will not be able to ignore the political prisoners there, because he called them the future leaders of their free nation. When he meets with dictators around the world, as in this flawed world he must, he will not be able to have warm relations with them, because he said no relations with tyrants can be successful.

His words will be thrown back at him and at future presidents. American diplomats have been sent a strong message. Political reform will always be on the table. Liberation and democratization will be the ghost present at every international meeting. Vladimir Putin will never again be the possessor of that fine soul; he will be the menace to democracy and rule of law.

Because of that speech, it will be harder for the U.S. government to do what we did to Latin Americans for so many decades - support strongmen to rule over them because they happened to be our strongmen. It will be harder to frustrate the dreams of a captive people, the way in the early 1990's we tried to frustrate the independence dreams of Ukraine.

It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators, the way we used to flatter Hafez al-Assad of Syria decade after decade. From now on, the borders established by any peace process will be less important than the character of the regimes in that process.

The speech does not command us to go off on a global crusade, instantaneously pushing democracy on one and all. The president vowed merely to "encourage reform." He insisted that people must choose freedom for themselves. The pace of progress will vary from nation to nation.

The speech does not mean that Bush will always live up to his standard. But the bias in American foreign policy will shift away from stability and toward reform. It will be harder to cozy up to Arab dictators because they can supposedly help us in the war on terror. It will be clearer that those dictators are not the antidotes to terror; they're the disease.

Does he believe this? (So asks Belle Waring at Crooked Timber, where I found the link.) Has Bush, in any way, done anything that might indicate this kind of a shift? He still supports strongmen if they're our strongmen - he hasn't done anythign to challenge Putin. He hasn't done much to challenge any dictators we don't like, if they have the means to defend himself. Is anything going to change?

Bush's speech is, in fact, just more of the same - repeating the words - freedom, freedom, freedom - as if they meant anything. But mostly, just making people feel good about their country so they won't think too much about what their country is actually doing. To imagine Bush suddenly adopting Jimmy Carter's foreign policy, even its underlying rhetoric (in anything approaching an honest manner) is fantastic.

And finally - the proof is in the pudding. And Bush's first term definitely supports the idea that "The real America . . . is the money-grubbing, resource-wasting, TV-drenched, unreflective bimbo of the earth. The high-toned language, the anti-Americans say, is just a cover for the quest for oil, or the desire for riches, dominion and war." One thing Brooks has right - or would have right if anyone anywhere took one word Bush says at face value - is that Bush's speeches should hold us to ahigher standard. But - unless we meet that higher standard - people will take his words as the blather they are. And - unless something very drastic has changed - there is almost no possibility at all that the policy Brooks talks about will be followed, not by this administration....

Fun with iMusic Shuffle

A fun little game - open up iTunes/iPod/whateveryouhave, turn on shuffle - list the first 10 (next 10, whatever it is) songs to come up. Well?

Things - Fannypack
One Million Kisses - Half Japanese
Hello Good Child - Acid Mothers Temple
Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for me and My Monkey - The Feelies
Treatment Bound - The Replacements
A Drop in Time - Mercury Rev
Good Fortune - PJ Harvey
Planet Claire - B-52s
The Neighborhood - Tom Waits
Run Run Run - Velvet Underground

An interesting stretch I guess.

Movies, 80s, Best

In the blogosphere, I find posts about 80s Movies. That is right up my alley, so I am going to post, and - if time permits - comment. Meanwhile, getting into the spirit of movie talk, Jim Snowden offers worst films even by great directors and best films by one-hit wonder directors. Those are interesting lists and topics themselves, and perhaps the spirit will move us to emulate.... not this post, though.

1 City of Sadness - dir. Hou Hsiao Hsien: follows a family in Taiwan from the end of WWII (it opens with Hirohito's radio speech, announcing Japan's surrender) to the arrival and takeover of Taiwan by the Guomindang. A beautiful film, with masterful articulation of space and depth of field, sophisticated use of time, flashbacks, ellipses and shifts of perspective, with a narrative and political sense that holds it together - the confusion of tongues, the ethnic and racial and political divisions, the wonderful accident of a star who couldn't speak Taiwanese, so played a deaf man, a perfect symbol for the impossibility of communication.... a film of political bitterness, and oppressive sadness.

2 Blue Velvet - David Lynch: Intense Freudian nightmare, with satiric overtones about middle America, TV, the Hardy Boy... brilliant in every possible way - gorgeous looking (the rich colors, the widescreen, wide angle cinematography, the distorted spaces, the lighting), gorgeous sounding - a funny, creepy, disturbing, moving masterpiece.

3 The Elephant Man - David Lynch: having seen this on video back in the 80s, I could like it, respect it - but until I'd seen it in a theater, in all its widescreen magnificence... when I did, I understood. The effect of the rich black and white, the odd portentious compositions, full of Lynchian spaces, with a kind of chorus of sights and sounds of machines. Men as monsters. Merrick on show, then, at the end, turned, made the looker as much as the lookee. The mirror. Dreams. Outstanding.

4 Fitzcarraldo - Werner Herzog: Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog sail a steamship up the Amazon, drag it over a mountain, and send it crashing through rapids. The story - Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, failed businessman, opera lover, hauling that steamship around - collapses into the performance of this man by Herzog and Kinski, but that doesn't matter either. Autobiographical, allegorical (isn't making any film a bit like hauling a steamship over a mountain? isn't life a bit like that? if it isn't - shouldn't it be?), absurd and wonderful all the way down.

5 Do the Right Thing - Spike Lee: A day in the life of Bed Stuy. A bad day. But Lee, here, is fair, giving everyone their reasons, and making it all make sense.

6 Peking Opera Blues - Tsui Hark: featuring an iconic performance by Bridget Lin, who is one of the great Movie Stars of all time. A thrilling, overpacked adventure involving an opera company, revolutionaries, warlords, gangsters, soldiers, petty thieves, and a good chunk of the burden of Chinese history. And the usual array of cross-dressing, derring do and bravura film-making one expects from Tsui Hark. Still a bit trapped by sound stages - lacks the production values of his Once Upon a Time in China films, but probably compensates with a tighter focus on the story and, well, Bridget Lin.

7 Black Rain - Shohei Imamura: adaptation of a book about a family living in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Imamura is an odd case - he has won the Palme D'Or twice at Cannes - for fairly unremarkable films. This one and Eijenaika are way better than Ballad of Narayama, his 80s winner. Somewhat unusual for Imamura - very restrained and dignified - the Ozu influence can be seen quite clearly.

8 Come and See - Elem Klimov: horrific story of a teenager fighting Germans in Bylorussia, 1943.

9 Full Metal Jacket - Stanley Kubrick: "I AM in a world of shit." Another of Kubrick's many fine war pictures, with the proof of the equation sex=death=shit worked out in some detail, in boot camp and Vietnam.

10 Brazil - Terry Gilliam: One of the best SF films ever. An everyman gets caught in a mistaken identity when his upstairs neighbor is mistaken for a revolutionary and taken away. He tries to help, and is himself destroyed. Brilliant evocation of a shabby future - cyberpunk almost before the word, with its low tech, grungy look and feel - a beautiful and genuinely haunting film.

Morning Despair

Fresh Horrors at Guantanamo - just great. James Woolcott comments. It's getting harder to snark. The unsettling fact that his "suggestion" that Fox hire Charles Graner is probably closer to a prediction - oh, maybe not Graner, but somebody smeared in the shit of this scandal is all too likely to turn up on TV alongside Ollie and G. Gordon Liddy (what a piker he is! all he ever tortured was himself!), probably pissing and moaning about the wickedness of Randy Moss or whichever Hilton sister is peddling smut this week.

Fucking hell.

How Low Can you go?

I know this has been discussed for a while now, but I have to say something - The Salvador Option?

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

The fact that it is being discussed at all - is surprising, how? We've already more or less adopted torture as a policy; we've got an AG nominee who (along with the torture) thinks the president is not subject to the constitution...

You get what you vote for I guess. Unfortunately, I get what they voted for too - crap.

How Low Can you go?

I know this has been discussed for a while now, but I have to say something - The Salvador Option?

Jan. 8 - What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

The fact that it is being discussed at all - is surprising, how? We've already more or less adopted torture as a policy; we've got an AG nominee who (along with the torture) thinks the president is not subject to the constitution...

You get what you vote for I guess. Unfortunately, I get what they voted for too - crap.

Some Metablogging

So here I am this Thursday night thinking about... as we move into this new year... hopes dreams plans... expectations, goals! Right! Let us ask ourselves: how can we make this blog worth reading? more frequent posts might be a start, and posts that actually say something.... it is a cruel circle, yes? why, if it were more interesting here, I would post more!

No, no, let's be serious. A new year upon us and all that. Let us imagine an influx of energy, and some focus for that energy. Let us imagine, then, the arts. Let us imagine, movie reviews, comments on books, or music, on art - the arts. The presidential elections are behind us, now maybe we can turn from politics, all the time, though it's hard with Alberto Gonzalez up for Attorney General. That's the sort of thing that will put you off your feed. Or get you reading - say, Human Rights First, which is blogging the hearings; Pandagon is also posting frequent comments; Uggabugga reminds us what the scum bags think, and James Wolcott states the matter plainly.

What the hell is wrong with us, as a country? That someone who justified the use of torture, and who claimed the president had the power to set aside the law, is being considered for the post of Attorney General? How did we get to this place? One terrorist attack? Is it possible?

You see the difficulty.... When I started playing with blogs, back - oh god - last spring (of 03!), I actually did post more about arts than politics - a bunch of stuff on comics, I remember.... well, I mentioned comics, somewhere in the post. That lasted about 2 posts, then it was monthly links to something stupid from Bush... But it is a new year! hopes, dreams, expectations abound!

So anyway, as a token of my, um, resolution to move forward in 2005, or back, or whichever direction it is, how about I offer up a list of movies? How about, Top Ten Movies Released (in my town) in 2004?

Since you asked real nice:

1) Goodbye, Dragon Inn
2) House of Flying Daggers
3) Crimson Gold
4) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
5) Millenium Mambo
6) Moolaade
7) Napoleon Dynamite
8) Zatoichi
9) I heart huckabies
10) Gozu

Evil

Did Tom Delay really say this? Did he really read from Matthew 7 - the parable of the wise and foolish builders - at a prayer breakfast this week? I guess he did. It was on C-Span.

There are two possible explanations for this. One is that Tom Delay doesn't understand the passage - "it's about a flood, and there was a big flood, so, that will be real nice, I think" went the workings of his tiny brain, if this is the case. Alas, I have known too many bible readers who have pulled pieces out of context, or quoted things they simply didn't understand, to dismiss this explanation out of hand. He very well could be simply a moron.

The other explanation is that he meant it, literally (which, of course, is more than you can say of Jesus) - that a wise man builds his house on a rock (or lives in Texas) and a foolish man builds his house on sand (or lives in southern Asia). Or even meant it figuratively - we are good and god loves us, they are bad and god hates them, and has killed 150,000 of them because they had the temerity to live in SOuthern Asia...

In which case he is an evil moron.

However you explain it, the mere fact of it will bring you up short. Delay has really gone as low as one can go. MIsapplying scriptures like this - or worse - applying that scripture to this situation - is unimaginable.

Will Eisner

I just saw this - Will Eisner is dead. (I saw the news at Abu Aardvark's site, where I was reading his Comic Book Politics blog (linked to by Matthew Yglesias - this is getting confusing - how many parentheses in am I again?) Two?)

He was a great artist. He made some of the most completely satisfying comic art - from the Spirit on, to Fagin the Jew, which I believe is the last of his works I have, innovative and graceful and beautiful, and always intelligent and humane. He will be missed.

Happy New Year!

Well, this has taken longer than I thought - here I embarked on the new year full of enthusiasm and determination to blog regularly and... here it's the 4th already. Oh well.

On the other hand, this post can stand as a public sign that I have Fulfilled one of my New Year's Resoutions! For I type these words froom the basement of the local starbyucks, courtesy of a new wifi account - yay! This, I tell myself, will inspire me to all sorts of heights of blogging creativity! for now, I can post from Anywhere!

if I have the laptop.

Anyway, this is also almost completely contentless - nothing better, on a Tuesday - what is it? afternoon already? Wow.

We can only hope for more to follow, of a more edifying sort. For now -

Welcome, baby new year!