Miscellaneous Debris
Friday, June 27, 2003 | 0 Comments
Propaganda Remix Project. I've been meaning to share this link for some time now. Artist Micah Ian Wright has made creative use of WWII era propaganda posters, updating them for our domestic war on terrorism. Each is a "Message from the Ministry of Homeland Security." Along with his book (featuring a forward by Kurt Vonnegut), Wright's posters are also available as T-Shirts, mugs, stickers, etc. For those of you who missed my birthday last month, I kind of like this Woody Guthrie inspired design. (I take an X-Large.)
Assorted Goodies. Some fun and/or interesting links, many of which I'm posting so that I can delete them from my computer at work. Only one more day until I move into my new job!
- Catoptric on Lawrence vs. Texas. See also the drunken, bar-talk version of same. (Warning: the second link is not for the faint of heart.)
- Karen at Beyond asked me about blogging and writing, in general. This is what I came up with.
- Mark Fiore's animation gallery. So much fun. Hip, efficient vector animation in the service of satirical jabs at Bush and Company. What could be better?
- Ask Raymond Carver.
- Jurgen Habermas on the fall of Baghdad and the Bush Doctrine.
- David Hare on Tony Blair.
- Baudrillard on The Matrix. (Yeah, my french sucks, too.)
- Tom Tykwer on Punch-Drunk Love. (GreenCine is quickly becoming the best film site we've got.)
And Just Because. It's been at least a month since I last quoted Robert Byrd (who really needs to collect these speeches in a little commemorative edition):
Although some timorous steps have been taken in the past few days to begin a review of this intelligence – I must watch my terms carefully, for I may be tempted to use the words "investigation" or "inquiry" to describe this review, and those are terms which I am told are not supposed to be used – the proposed measures appear to fall short of what the situation requires. We are already shading our terms about how to describe the proposed review of intelligence: cherry-picking words to give the American people the impression that the government is fully in control of the situation, and that there is no reason to ask tough questions. This is the same problem that got us into this controversy about slanted intelligence reports. Word games. Lots and lots of word games.
Well, Mr. President, this is no game. For the first time in our history, the United States has gone to war because of intelligence reports claiming that a country posed a threat to our nation. Congress should not be content to use standard operating procedures to look into this extraordinary matter. We should accept no substitute for a full, bipartisan investigation by Congress into the issue of our pre-war intelligence on the threat from Iraq and its use.
The purpose of such an investigation is not to play pre-election year politics, nor is it to engage in what some might call "revisionist history." Rather it is to get at the truth. The longer questions are allowed to fester about what our intelligence knew about Iraq, and when they knew it, the greater the risk that the people – the American people whom we are elected to serve – will lose confidence in our government.
Byrd delivered his speech to the Senate on Tuesday. Yesterday, the House rejected two calls for deeper probes into the issue. Nice.
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Song of the Moment
Friday, June 27, 2003 | 0 Comments
Brad Mehldau is such a ridiculously talented pianist, composer, and arranger. His cover of Radiohead's "Exit Music (For a Film)" isn't particularly representative of his work, which is often more improvisatory and freeform (check out his Elegiac Cycle album), but it seemed a timely choice. Mehldau's also been known to cover Neil Young, Nick Drake, Van Morrison, and The Beatles. The liner notes of his album, Progressions, features an original essay on music and the discourse of democracy that floats fluently through Foucault and Faust, Kant and Kubrick. It's well worth a read.
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Happy Anniversary
Thursday, June 19, 2003 | 0 Comments
While sweating my way through a section of my dissertation (in which I'm attempting to say something intelligent about Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg and failing utterly), I got an e-mail from my dad, who passed along this article:
Today, or, more precisely, a few minutes past 8 p.m. tonight, marks the 50th anniversary of the deaths of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the electric chair at Sing Sing. The Rosenbergs, who maintained their innocence to the end, were convicted of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, a crime the judge declared "worse than murder." It now seems clear the Rosenbergs were neither as innocent as they claimed nor as guilty as the government alleged.
I had to read the article twice before I noticed that throwaway phrase in the first sentence —"a few minutes past 8 p.m. tonight." I'd forgotten that the execution was delayed by several hours because Eisenhower and his cronies thought it unseemly to execute Jews on the Sabbath. Apparently they weren't as troubled by the other quirky problem posed by the date: Julius and Ethel died on their fourteenth wedding anniversary.
If you're looking for a fun summer read — something equal parts spy thriller, courtroom drama, and political history — check out The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton. I'm hoping that they will publish a revised version soon, incorporating the newly available KGB documents. It really is a fascinating story.
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Take Me With You, Alec
Tuesday, June 17, 2003 | 0 Comments
I'm not even sure how to wrap my ahead around stuff like this. According to a recent poll, a third of the American public believes that we have already discovered WMD in Iraq. And nearly a fourth believes that Iraq actually used chemical and biological weapons during the war. As the article mentions, this is the same American public who believed — or, at least half of them believed, and half is way too many — that Iraqis were flying the planes on 9/11. Read this next line in that David Letterman dumb guy voice, the one he makes while curling up his top lip: "Saudi Arabia, huh? Never heard of it."
Several analysts said they were troubled by the lack of knowledge about the Sept. 11 hijackers, shown in the January survey conducted for Knight Ridder newspapers. Only 17 percent correctly said that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.
"That really bothers me, because it shows a lack of understanding about other countries - that maybe many Americans don't know one Arab from another," said Sam Popkin, a polling expert at the University of California-San Diego who has advised Democratic candidates. "Maybe because Saudis are seen as rich and friendly, people have a hard time dealing with them as hijackers."
No wonder Toby Keith and that "Have You Forgotten" guy are still leading us all to war. If I lived in terrified ignorance, I'd probably want to drop some bombs, too. (By the way, the AP has now officially put the estimated civilian death toll in Iraq at over 3,240, which means, of course, that our Christian democracy is now responsible for nearly 500 more civilian deaths than the 9/11 hijackers.)
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From the Journals of Jean Seberg
Monday, June 16, 2003 | 0 Comments
Inspired by my recent wanderings through Ray Carney's Website, I rented Mark Rappaport's From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996) and watched it twice this weekend. Here, Rappaport — who Carney calls "a geographer of our fantasies, dreams, and obsessions" — splices together news footage, film clips, and original video, creating a documentary-ish collage that transforms Seberg's life into a meditation on misogyny, the Hollywood star machine, and the morality of spectatorship. He also manages to chart America's journey from Eisenhower-era consensus through the rise and fall of the New Left, and does it all with wit and authority and insight. Quite a feat for a 95 minute film.
Journals is built around the performance of Mary Beth Hurt, who plays Seberg from beyond the grave. The actress stares directly into the camera — which is only appropriate for someone standing in for the star of Godard's Breathless — and recounts her life in the first person: born in 1938 in America's heartland, discovered in Otto Preminger's nationwide talent search for his adaptation of Shaw's Saint Joan, launched to international stardom by Godard, abused by a trio of husbands, excoriated for her involvement with the Black Panthers, ignored in a series of forgettable roles, dead from suicide at the age of 40.
Rappaport follows this line in mostly chronological order, using Seberg's major film roles as jumping off points. For instance, when discussing the artistic and commercial failings of Saint Joan, he wanders off through the lives of Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, and Alida Valli — all leading ladies who carried the "curse" of playing Joan of Arc. It's a fascinating conceit — a kind of associative editing that, in a sense, hyperlinks the various threads of film history and, in the process, forces us to acknowledge the strangeness of narrative and symbolic archetypes. Why do we take such pleasure from watching a noble young woman burned before us? Or, as Rappaport asks when discussing Seberg's most interesting role — her lead in Robert Rossen's Lilith (1964) — why must men (the writers, producers, and directors) always equate female madness with aberrant sexuality?
Journals is at its best, I think, when Rappaport intertwines the lives and loves of Seberg, Jane Fonda, and Vanessa Redgrave. All are of the same age, all made films directed by their husbands (another of the film's more interesting concerns), and all participated actively in radical political movements. Their stories ended quite differently, though. Redgrave retreated to the stage and to small, innocuous film roles. The public, Hurt's Seberg tells us, doesn't care to watch its young beauties grow old on screen. Fonda exploited her sexualized Barbarella persona by stretching and gyrating her way through a series of popular workout videos that earned her millions. My favorite of Hurt's lines is when she mentions that in 1988, in order to stave off bad publicity, Fonda apologized to veterans groups for her Vietnam-era activities, but never, as far as Hurt could remember, apologized to feminists for being a bimbo.
Seberg's life ended in 1978, when she finally succeeded after a series of failed suicide attempts. The reasons for her depression are complicated, the film shows us — her lopsided marriage to Romain Gary, a lifetime spent "doing what she was told," the death of her daughter, and the hounding pressures exerted on her by both Hoover's F.B.I. and the popular press. But, ultimately, we're left to wonder about the destructive effects of a life lived on screen. A life of being looked at. At one point, Rappaport draws a line from the Kuleshov effect to Breathless to Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name — or, from Russian Formalism to the first Modern cinema to Reagan-era machismo. Seberg is stuck there in the middle. Her blind stare into the camera is "enigmatic" and "sphinx-like," or so the male reviewers have said, and all I can do is project my own desires onto her beautiful, beautiful face. The story of her life.
I look forward to sharing Rappaport's film with students who bristle at the word "feminism," because Journals is not the least bit preachy — in fact, it offers few pat answers at all — but it makes feminist concerns immediate and (I hesitate to use the word) entertaining. Quite a feat.
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Song of the Moment
Monday, June 16, 2003 | 0 Comments
Yeah, so like everyone else of my general demographic, I'm listening to the new Radiohead. I mean, it's, like, required, right? So far, "There There" is my favorite track. Especially at high volumes.
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Give 'Em Hell, Bill
Wednesday, June 11, 2003 | 0 Comments
A few days ago I read John Nichols's report from the Take Back America conference, where Bill Moyers delivered a rousing speech "that legal scholar Jamie Raskin described as one of the most 'amazing and spellbinding' addresses he had ever heard." Naturally I was anxious to read it for myself, and now a full transcript is finally available online. In just under 6,000 words, Moyers outlines the history of America's Populist and Progressive movements, unearths the historical precedents for the Grover Norquist / Karl Rove School of Realpolitik, and issues a challenge to left-leaning politicians and voters alike: "This is your story – the progressive story of America," he concludes. "Pass it on."
It really is a fantastic speech — much too long for me to adequately comment on it here. I do want to snip this one paragraph, though, which reminded me of something I had written just a few days ago.
In "Sin and Society," written in 1907, [Edward A. Ross] told readers that the sins "blackening the face of our time" were of a new variety, and not yet recognized as such. "The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate, murders with an adulterant instead of a bludgeon, burglarizes with a 'rake-off' instead of a jimmy, cheats with a company instead of a deck of cards, or scuttles his town instead of his ship, does not feel on his brow the brand of a malefactor." In other words upstanding individuals could plot corporate crimes and sleep the sleep of the just without the sting of social stigma or the pangs of conscience. Like Kenneth Lay, they could even be invited into the White House to write their own regulations.
And a not-so-random snippet from "The Trouble with 'Being Left in This Country': Tony Kushner’s Progressive Theology" (a work in progress, all rights reserved):
In A Bright Room Called Day, Kushner’s first major play, he dissects one of those “moments,” revisiting the final days of the Weimar Republic, when, with its competing factions divided by petty politics and by interference from the Cominterm in Moscow, the German Left stood idly by as the National Socialist Workers’ Party swept to power. In case the parallels between Weimar Berlin and Reagan-era Washington, D.C. were too obscure for that first audience who saw Bright Room in 1985 — or for any audience since, for that matter — Kushner also places on stage with his German characters a contemporary American Jewish woman. Zillah Katz — “BoHo/East Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies” — is like a living embodiment of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. A polemicist and provocateur, she repeatedly interrupts the relatively naturalistic drama in order to comment on the action, and she does so in an explicitly didactic fashion. At her most outrageous, Zillah screams at the audience: “REAGAN EQUALS HITLER! RESIST! DON’T FORGET, WEIMAR HAD A CONSTITUTION TOO!” And in an image that could serve as an epigraph for Kushner’s next play, Angels in America, she adds: “Don’t put too much stock in a good night’s sleep. During times of reactionary backlash, the only people sleeping soundly are the guys who’re giving the rest of us bad dreams."
"Sleep the sleep of the just" is my favorite line from Moyers's speech. That strange metaphor — the idea that sleeping soundly somehow demonstrates moral rightness — has shown up in a few odd places lately, most notably in the frequent reports that President Bush is sleeping well despite (or, perhaps, because of) the war. Well thank God for small blessings, eh?
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Few and Far Between
Tuesday, June 10, 2003 | 0 Comments
If blog updates are coming at a slower pace, it's because my life has become a bit hectic again. Last week I accepted a job offer over in another department, which is exciting. I needed a change. I'm also dissertatin' away (2,614 words at last count), and yesterday my designated blog time was spent putting together an online portfolio for my wife. (Not that anyone cares.) A few interesting blips in the blogosphere:
- Dooce is pregnant! Congratulations all around.
- GreenCine now features a film blog. It looks like it could become quite a resource. And the blogger obviously has good taste, as he or she has already linked to Long Pauses.
- And my friend Doug recently launched Film Journey, a film blog and discussion forum. I haven't posted yet, but I look forward to participating there.
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Honesty Matters (Still)
Monday, June 09, 2003 | 0 Comments
Today on Morning Edition, Noah Adams began a new series in which he will "travel throughout the country to profile the low-income workforce, talking with people about their jobs, their families and their hopes for the future." His first stop was about 100 yards from my office.
Honesty Matters, Part 3. I don't have time to write up a full response to this, but "Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction" by John W. Dean is an interesting analysis of the legal grounds for a potential Bush impeachment. If lying about getting a blowjob is cause for both impeachment and moral outrage (particularly from America's churches), then certainly lying in order to justify a war that led to several thousand deaths should generate some noise too.
Honesty Matters, Part 4. The Whiskey Bar is at it again. This time, Billmon has compiled a chronological collection of quotations that illustrate the Bush administration's changing attitude toward the democratization of Iraq. Here it is in a nutshell:
They told us, "Liberation now," and then they made it occupation. Bush said he was a liberator, not an occupier, and we supported the United States on this basis.
— Ahmed Chalabi, Chairman of the Iraqi National Congress (May 29, 2003)
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A Woman Under the Influence
Monday, June 09, 2003 | 0 Comments
It took me three tries to make it through John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence (1974). I wasn't bored by the film; I was in agony. Gena Rowlands's performance as Mabel Longhetti, a blue collar housewife collapsing under the weight of mental illness, is the single most painful experience of my film-watching life. Cassavetes doesn't make it easy for us. His brand of cinema verite forces us to look on helplessly, passively, as if we were just a few more strangers in Mabel's life, a few more strangers who refuse to stand up for her. He uses static medium shots to sit us down at the Longhetti's large, loud dinner table, then denies us an escape route when the tension builds. These moments are balanced with equally painful close-ups that bring us into intimate contact with Mabel, someone with whom such intimacy is a constant threat and danger.
Peter Falk plays Mabel's husband, Nick, an abusive bastard who, though occasionally capable of stealing our sympathy, is one of the screen's most loathsome villains. In the final act of the film — an hour-long scene that takes place on the evening of Mabel's return from a six-month stay in a sanitarium — the depths of Nick's depravity and the extent to which he has contributed to Mabel's instability are revealed in a series of devastating sequences that play out in real time. I found myself literally squirming in my seat, gasping aloud and wiping away tears. Because of that I just can't accept Roger Ebert's take on the final image: "Only by the end of the film is it quietly made clear that Nick is about as crazy as his wife is, and that in a desperate way their two madnesses make a nice fit." Calling that fit "nice" is a disgrace. I don't get it.
As he would be the first to point out, Ray Carney is the authority on and champion of John Cassavetes's films. A professor of film and American studies at Boston University and director of the film studies program there, Carney is best known for being something of a polemicist and provocateur (and a damn fine film critic, to boot). I like to browse through his impressive Website when I'm feeling pessimistic about the current state of academia. Doing so certainly doesn't cure me of my condition, but I find it strangely comforting to read such articulate and well-informed rants on the subject. It also helps that the guy seems to lack any kind of internal censor. Carney doesn't pull punches, and it's damn refreshing.
In "'A herd of Independent Minds': Or, Intellectuals Are the Last to Know," Carney sits down with an unnamed interviewer and skewers contemporary film criticism, Hollywood, the intellectual influence of the New York Times, academic biases against film art, and Citizen Kane. God bless him. The whole piece is worth a read (as is much of the other writing collected at his site), but I think Carney is at his best when he talks about the incestuous relationship between art, academia, and the cultural forces that shape critical opinion.
Journalists and the things they write about have become part of the celebrity culture, which means that once someone or something appears in The New York Times or The New Yorker, he, she, or it is taken seriously. If someone's name appears in the New York Times or The New Yorker a certain number of times, that's all that it takes to constitute importance. And the people who appear in The New York Times or The New Yorker the most are journalists. So they are taken the most seriously. They become the cultural definition of what it is to be a thinker. If a journalist is merely a bit clever verbally and shows up on the breakfast table long enough, most academics and intellectuals mistake him or her for a thinker. No one ever asks if you are really important. Are you really smart? . . .
My understanding of being an intellectual is that it is to be given a unique opportunity to stand just a little outside our culture's system of hype and publicity. It is to be someone who refuses to be pulled into the muddy undertow of advertising, journalistic sensationalism and celebrity worship. While more or less everyone else is paid to sell something, the academic is paid to be independent. Or not paid. But is independent anyway. But what has happened in our culture is the opposite. At least in film, the intellectuals line up to sell out to the culture's values. And for the people giving out the grants and prizes, the celebrity tail wags the intellectual dog. Our universities are no different.
But academics, obviously, aren't the only people getting wagged by that celebrity tail.
This applies to every group. What is it Joyce says in Finnegan's Wake? “We wipe our glosses with what we know.” For literary critics, a movie is good if it has clever dialogue or is a faithful adaptation. It's no different from why multiculturalists judge a film in terms of how many minority characters are in it or what their income level is, why Jewish viewers like Schindler's List, World War II vets like Saving Private Ryan, teenage girls like Titanic, and teenage boys like The Matrix. It's identity politics. People enjoy seeing themselves and their own views represented — not their real selves and views of course, but a flattering, idealized version of them. It's not a terribly sophisticated view of what makes great art. Yet how many times do you hear something like “Holocaust survivors said that Spielberg's movie was accurate” invoked as proof that Schindler's List is a great movie?
Carney offers some advice for film-viewers — tips and tricks that he's learned over the years as he's tried to empower young film students and complacent professors alike:
I do a lot of things to lever them out of their old ways of knowing — including deliberately destroying a lot of the pleasure of the screening, by calling things out during it, or stopping the film at a climactic moment and asking questions about it—so that they can't just sit back and relax and watch the movie. I am reprogramming their brains, teaching them new sets of responses, new things to look and listen for. Sometimes I talk all the way through a film to prevent them from “dropping into it” even for a minute. I have to play a lot of mind games and sprinkle a lot of fairy dust to keep them motivated. Students really have to put themselves in my hands, and there may be a certain amount of resistance for the first couple months, but that too becomes part of the learning process—a lesson in how we resist change and hold onto past viewing habits. But the best ones stay with it because as the challenges get greater, the trust and personal bond grows. I can't do any of that when I am showing the film to a professor. The relationship is entirely different. With twenty-year-olds who are malleable and open to new experiences it's not that hard to orchestrate the changes, but for someone older and more set in their ways it's much less likely to happen.
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Song of the Moment
Monday, June 09, 2003 | 0 Comments
"Cupid's Trick" is my favorite Elliot Smith song, and I've been listening to a good bit of Elliot Smith lately, for what it's worth.
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Welcome, June
Tuesday, June 03, 2003 | 0 Comments
I had planned to post most of this yesterday, but, well, I didn't. So today it's two for the price of one, and a more random assortment of half-chewed thoughts you'll never find.
And so it begins. After four years of coursework, two years of studying for and taking comprehensive exams, and one year of planning and proposing, I just wrote the first 150 words of my dissertation, with the goal of completing this section — my discussion of Tony Kushner — by June 20. Today I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by the immensity of the project, which, over the next two years, will likely swell from 150 words to well over 100,000. But I've started. I'm now officially "writing" my dissertation. Lord help me.
The Prison Industry. I begin most mornings by skimming through some favorite news sites, most of which are linked over there to the right. While clicking headlines at Common Dreams, I stumbled into this article, which is just head-shaking. Latest statistics reveal that 2,019,234 Americans now live behind bars. I've come to expect figures like this — America has, after all, been battling for some time now with Russia for the honor of locking up the largest percentage of its population — but this article digs a bit deeper. Some random samples:
On a per capita basis, according to the best available figures, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland, five times more than Tanzania and seven times more than Germany. Maryland has more citizens in prison and jail (an estimated 35,200) than all of Canada (31,600), though Canada's population is six times greater.
The Justice Department reports that one in eight black men in their 20s and early 30s were behind bars last year, compared with one in 63 white men. A black man has a one-in-three chance of going to prison, the department says. For black male high school dropouts, Western says, the numbers are higher: 41 percent of black dropouts between ages 22 and 30 were locked up in 1999.
In 1980, says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project in Washington, about 40,000 Americans were locked up solely for drug offenses. Now the number is 450,000, three-fourths of them black or Hispanic, although drug use is no higher in those groups than among whites.
Honesty Matters. This blog at The Whiskey Bar compiles an interesting collection of quotations (all carefully cited) that illustrate nicely the administration's changing attitudes toward Iraq's WMD.
Honesty Matters, Part 2.
- "Bush Shines in the Time of the Lie" by Gordon Livingston
- "Standard Operating Procedure" by Paul Krugman
- "Credibility Gap, Anyone?" by Jim Lobe
- "US Senate Inquiry Into How Case for War was Made" by Suzanne Goldenberg
- "Does the Pentagon Have Amnesia on Lynch?" by Rep. Dennis Kucinich
- "Pentagon Aims Guns at Lynch Reports" by Robert Scheer
And Violence Matters, Too. "The Messenger Kills" from Mike Ward of PopMatters is the best piece I've read in weeks. Unfortunately, it's nearly 3,000 words, which means that it likely won't be read in full by even the most dedicated and responsible of Web and blog browsers. Which is a shame because it pulls together so many of the seemingly random thoughts that have been bouncing around in my brain for the last few months. Drawing on the writings of Gore Vidal and the examples of 9/11, Oklahoma City, and Iraq, Ward argues (and quite convincingly for only 3,000 words) that violence has become a de facto method of global communication for "good" Americans and "evil" terrorists alike and that it not only leads inevitably to senseless death and more violence, but it also fails to achieve its stated goal: communication. Most damning of all, Ward writes, is that we've come to accept this as our only option — as if violence were the "inevitable" product of modern politics or human nature or "Man's fallen condition" or predestination or (choose your own word for "fate").
Absent any sense of clarity regarding who constitutes "good" and who constitutes "evil" in the Great Game of war and terrorism, violence now registers as an act of nature — state-sponsored violence much more apocalyptically so. It swoops over, down, and upon the unsuspecting, it wipes out the lives and livelihoods of those who wish nothing more than a sustainable existence for themselves and their families. Because it is prohibited to ask why this must be so, state-sponsored violence comes to seem as arbitrary as the downhill flow of magma from an exploding volcano, and leaves similarly blighted wastelands in its wake.
Read the whole article. It's worth your time.
On the Lighter Side. And because I'm not nearly so cynical or dour as this blog might lead you to believe:
Answer: "I jacked some guy for his bling."
Question: What did my wife say when I asked her where she got that 75 cents?
(And I laughed and I laughed and I laughed. Right there in the entrance to Wal-Mart, smack dab in front of the Dr. Thunder machine.)