Evolution
Thursday, November 27, 2003 | 0 Comments
Long Pauses just swam on shore and sprouted legs. The revisions aren't too dramatic this time, but you will notice a new option at the top of the page. I wanted to go with smaller text for the main content, but I'm also trying to be as sensitive as possible to accessibility issues. You can now toggle between two style sheets, which will give you the option of switching to larger fonts and standard links.
If you're interested in adding multiple style sheets to your site, do what I did: read Paul Sowden's excellent tutorial, then rip off his script.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Finally!
Wednesday, November 26, 2003 | 0 Comments
Looks like Criterion will finally be releasing Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest in February 2004, some two years after rumors of the disc first began floating. It will feature:
- New high-definition digital transfer, with restored image and sound
- Audio commentary by film historian Peter Cowie
- 11-minutes of deleted scenes
- New and improved English subtitle translation
- New essay by film critic Frédéric Bonnaud
- Optimal image quality: RSDL dual-layer edition
It will also feature one of Criterion's uglier works of cover art (a minor complaint). Finally some Bresson on DVD. Hopefully Au Hasard Balthazar will follow soon. [link via Robert-Bresson.com]
Song of the Moment
Wednesday, November 26, 2003 | 0 Comments
"Big Dipper" is one more track from a mix CD that I received recently. I've never been a big fan of Cracker, but this song really works for me. I love the spare arrangement, especially the acoustic piano and steel guitar, but mostly I like this song because of the lyrics and because of David Lowery's delivery of them.
Cigarette and carrot juice
And get yourself a new tattoo
for those sleeveless days of June
I'm sitting on the Cafe Xeno's steps
with a book I haven't started yet
watching all the girls walk by
Could I take you out
I'll be yours without a doubt
on that big dipper
And if the sound of this it frightens you
we could play it real cool
and act somewhat indifferent
And hey June why did you have to come,
why did you have to come around so soon
I wasn't ready for all this nature
The terrible green green grass,
and violent blooms of flowered dresses
and afternoons that make me sleepy
But we could wait awhile
before we push that dull turnstile
into the passage
The thousands they had tread
and others sometimes fled
before the turn came
And we could wait our lives
before a chance arrives
before the passage
From the top you can see Monterey
or think about San Jose
though I know it's not that pleasant
And hey Jim Kerouac
brother of the famous Jack
or so he likes to say "lucky bastard"
He's sitting on the cafe Xeno's steps
with a girl I'm not over yet
watching all the world go by
Boy you are looking bad
Did I make you feel that sad
I'm honestly flattered
But if she asks me out
I'll be hers without a doubt
on that big dipper
Cigarettes and carrot juice
and get yourself a new tattoo
for those sleeveless days of June
I'm sitting on the cafe Xeno's steps
I haven't got the courage yet,
I haven't got the courage yet,
I haven't got the courage yet
Speaking of Gobbledygook
Wednesday, November 26, 2003 | 0 Comments
I have this habit of browsing through the "New Arrivals" shelves on my way out of the university library. I go straight to the PNs (film) and the PSs (American Lit) and grab whatever titles catch my eye. It's a bad habit, actually, because these are the books that inevitably get filed away on some bookshelf at home, never to be opened.
Today, after tracking down the last of those elusive Philip Roth essays, I gave into my craving and checked out Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, a new collection of essays edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. According to the jacket copy:
The essays are less about proving the innocence of those accused of bad writing than about critically interrogating the terms and assumptions of the allegations. The contributors attempt to inform and deepen the debate by asking what values, history, politics, and stylistics are implicated, on both sides, in the controversy.
The book seems to have been inspired, in part, by the journal Philosophy and Literature's year-end awards for "bad" academic writing and by the debate (and hard feelings) they have provoked. I found one brief review that summarizes the collection's argument as such: "by calling attention to their own unconventional writing style, theorists emphasize theory’s calling to investigate language." I certainly hope that they offer a more convincing justification than that. Should be a fun read.
More Angels
Tuesday, November 25, 2003 | 0 Comments
Richard Goldstein offers the best one-paragraph synapsis of Angels in America that you'll ever read. (He also talks to Kushner about Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, the problems of liberalism, and his new musical, Caroline, or Change.)
In Angels, every character you expect to be good is capable of evil, and everyone who ought to be evil can love. Never have there been so many caring, sexy Mormons in a work by a card-carrying lefty. As for the Angel, she has eight vaginas and the means to use them—even on the dying faggot she transforms into a prophet through an orgasmic act. He ascends to heaven on a golden ladder, and just when you think you're in a Christian potboiler about the rapture, it turns out that God has disappeared and the bureaucrats who run paradise want this prophet to end the human quest for change. But he rejects this temptation and demands "life . . . more life" instead: life as rebellion against celestial stasis; change as ecstatic, unmanageable pain. This is what the pioneer woman in Angels says when she pops out of a diorama at the Mormon Visitors Center: People change when God rips out their intestines, stuffs them back in a different way, and "it's up to you to sew yourself up." Benjamin tried to describe that ineffable process, and Kushner admits, "I'm indebted to Benjamin to the point of larceny."
Radical Pragmatism
Tuesday, November 25, 2003 | 0 Comments
In this new interview, Mother Jones calls Tony Kushner a "Radical Pragmatist," a moniker I wouldn't mind carrying myself. (It will take some effort on my part, though. I can't imagine any aspect of my life or politics being described as "radical" right now. Baby steps.) He talks a bit about his and Robert Altman's* failed attempt to film Angels a few years ago — nothing new if you've read their interview in either Tony Kushner in Conversation or Approaching the Millennium. The meat of the interview, though, is a discussion of the current political climate. I especially like this bit. Kushner is sounding more and more like John Rawls:
There are a lot of politically active young people, but I feel that we've misled them. I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left decided at some point that government couldn't get it what it wanted. As a result, it's a movement of endless complaint and of a one-sided reading of American history, which misses the important point: Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.
On a related note, here's a link to an editorial at GOPUSA.com that was inspired by Frank Rich's piece from a week ago. It takes pot-shots at likely targets: Barbra Streisand and "the tinsel town left," George Soros and Howard Dean (who is once again saddled with the now-mandatory modifier "McGovern-like"). Oh yeah, and you can also buy your copy of Treason there, so you know the site's a bastion of fair and balanced journalistic integrity.
* Fun Fact: When I spell-checked this post, Dreamweaver suggested I replace "Altman's" with "Batman's"
A Note from Knoxville
Tuesday, November 25, 2003 | 0 Comments
Newsday posted a fun article yesterday about the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility. Of course, the word "fun" is totally relative when you're talking about something like the "Body Farm" — a two-acre plot of land just across the river from UT's main campus, where donated bodies decompose under the close scrutiny of forensic anthropologists.
Some of the 30 to 50 cadavers arriving at the Body Farm each year come courtesy of local medical examiners donating unclaimed bodies. But much more frequently, the arrivals are pre-arranged by consenting donors who have expressed an active interest in the facility's research and who have completed a biological questionnaire detailing their medical histories. The facility has amassed hundreds of these completed questionnaires by its future donors.
During their talks at a conference held by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, [Dr. Richard] Jantz and fellow researcher Arpad Vass detailed the clues to be gleaned from nature's disposal process -- a process that begins about four minutes after death. Each stage includes its own march of the macabre. Flies begin laying their eggs in available crevices during the fresh stage, said Vass, a forensic scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The gaseous by-products of bacteria lead to bloating during the second stage. In the third, called active decay, the body's soft tissue liquefies and insect holes proliferate. And in the fourth, or dry, stage, the body becomes little more than bones.
Nice, eh?
In a roundabout way, the Body Farm is the reason that I live in Knoxville. When I was researching doctoral programs, my wife's ears perked up at the mention of UT. She had been interested for some time in forensic anthropology and forensic art and was well-acquainted with the program here. She's since taken a bachelor's degree from them and has developed into something of an asset for the department as well. She's over there right now, in fact, reconstructing the face of a young girl who has gone unidentified since the early-1980s.
That type of work makes me glad for two things: that there are people out there willing to do it, and that they ain't me.
Gobbledygook
Monday, November 24, 2003 | 0 Comments
The argument of my dissertation, informed by current thinking in feminist theory, queer theory, cultural materialism, eco-criticism, and postcolonial studies, centers on the paradoxes of representation involving masculine authority and feminine desire in eighteenth-century pirate literature, and especially on sentimentalism as a response to the en(gender)ing of the patriarchal body -- which I see as epistemologically equivalent to the "body politic" in eighteenth-century political discourse -- in the figure of the (male) sailor in British oceanic commerce during the first age of imperial expansion.
Sometimes satire hits a bit too close to home. This mock-application letter by Manfred Mickleson would be even funnier if it weren't so damn depressing. [via Invisible Adjunct]
In the Works
Monday, November 24, 2003 | 0 Comments
I made the mistake of experimenting with Long Pauses this weekend. Nothing too dramatic this time, but a minor redesign is on the way.
Exploding Dog
Friday, November 21, 2003 | 0 Comments
It's been too long since I last visited Exploding Dog. I'll never stop being amazed by how much emotion is contained within Sam's simple line drawings. I image him knocking these things out in a mad flurry of half-thought and creativity, but who knows.
Heavy Industries
Thursday, November 20, 2003 | 0 Comments
Y0ung-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents is just about the coolest damn Website I've found in months. Finally, someone is doing something original with Flash — and by "original" I mean a backward glance to early-Godard all jumbled together with politics and sex and Blue Note jazz. Great stuff. You might want to start with ARTIST'S STATEMENT N0. 45,730,944: THE PERFECT ARTISTIC WEB SITE.
The Great Work Begins
Wednesday, November 19, 2003 | 0 Comments
I can’t seem to muster enough energy to even care about the Reagan mini-series hubbub; carving out a nuanced position is completely beyond me. For largely economic reasons, CBS seems to have caved to partisan political pressure, which is lame and disheartening but neither illegal nor censorship. It's not even particularly surprising. Come to think of it, I might actually be more offended by the idea of there being a Reagan biopic starring James Brolin than by the fact that I won’t get to see it. I mean, who would want to?
I am intrigued, though, by the rising tide of commentary that links the mini-series with Angels in America. Frank Rich got the ball rolling with his piece in the Sunday Times. Then, yesterday, Andrew Sullivan posted a response at The New Republic. And now there’s word that Showtime will bump up its broadcast of the Reagan movie to November 30, exactly one week before HBO’s big premiere. In the Post article, Lisa de Moraes explains that Showtime President Robert Greenblatt “denied speculation that [his network] moved up the airdate to Nov. 30 because The Reagans, with all its juicy, audience-attracting controversy, was in grave danger of becoming roadkill when HBO debuted its adaptation of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play.” Greenblatt's motivations are actually irrelevant to me; I'm more interested in the fact that the media has made that leap on its own, connecting the two films in a hotly politicized context.
All three links are worth a read — I'm especially excited by Rich's claim that "Angels is the most powerful screen adaptation of a major American play since Elia Kazan's Streetcar Named Desire more than a half-century ago" — but I'm going to limit my comments to Sullivan's piece, and, more specifically, to one aspect of it: his strangely ambivalent dismissal of Kushner's play as "good Stalinist agitprop." (I'm tempted also to take on his equally bizarre claim that "networks aren't supposed to be" biased, but I'll leave that argument to others better equipped and motivated to do so.)
It is perhaps worth mentioning here at the start that Sullivan and Kushner have, as they say, "a history." I haven't followed it all too closely, but it's been public at least since June '94, when they appeared together, along with Donna Minkowitz and Bruce Bawer, on the Charlie Rose show to discuss the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. I haven't seen the episode, but based on the transcript (available in Tony Kushner in Conversation) it appears that they spent a good portion of the evening throwing jabs at one another — Kushner accusing Sullivan of knocking down paper tigers, "one of them is the politics of the Left, as though there's one politics of the Left"; Sullivan accusing Kushner of being "stuck in the McCarthy period....stuck in the late 1960s." There was also Kushner's commencement speech at Vassar, in which he took a none-too-subtle jab at "those newfangled neo-con gay people with their own website and no day job." I don't read Sullivan often enough to know if he responded in kind.
But back to the piece in The New Republic. Sullivan writes:
Exhibit A in the attempt to turn the human tragedy of AIDS into political agitprop was Tony Kushner's Angels in America. As such, it appealed and still appeals to the hard left, which is partly why it won a Pulitzer and entirely why Frank Rich of The New York Times single-handedly championed it in the 1990s.
That Angels is a fiercely political play goes without saying. And, yes, I imagine that its particular politics would be more appealing to those of a leftist bent. But to reduce the play to agitprop — a rhetorical ploy of the laziest variety — demands a grossly simplistic reading of a work that delights in ambiguity. Later, Sullivan seems to acknowledge as much in a back-handed compliment, calling Kushner's play "a magical realist fantasy — where dreams become enacted, angels appear, and all sorts of metaphors are turned into dramatic imagery." Even Roy Cohn, who Sullivan (accurately) describes as "an emblem of all the hard left despises," is treated by Kushner with tremendous grace. Sure, the character Louis describes Cohn as "the pollstar of human evil," but anyone who has seen or read the play with at least a modicum of maturity and human understanding will surely remember Roy's death scene — a moment of suffering and humor and mourning and, perhaps most surprising of all, forgiveness. (I can't wait to see Pacino and Streep together.)
To be fair, Sullivan's biggest beef here seems to be with Rich, who I would agree makes some questionable argumentative leaps. But Sullivan makes too many of his own. The historical record, he writes, "is complicated, hemmed in by political and scientific realities that neither Kushner nor Rich want to explore. Why? Because such nuance would get in the way of their anti-Republican hysteria." He also compares Angels unfavorably to Randy Shilts's As The Band Played On:
Shilts's sin — and the reason that he was vilified as viciously as Kushner was celebrated — is that he actually criticized some gay activists, as well as the Reagan administration, for resisting efforts to counteract the plague early enough. But in the polarized politics of AIDS, such complexities are generally unrewarded.
Again, Sullivan's reduction of Angels to simplistic, partisan politicking reveals his embarrassingly simplistic reading of the play and, I might add, some blatant partisanship (and personal anger?) of his own. Like Shilts's book, Kushner's play is actually quite critical of the American left, which is precisely why it's a great play and not just one more Waiting for Lefty. The following paragraphs are the opening of a larger piece that might or might not end up in my dissertation.
- - -
Near the end of Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Louis Ironson asks, “Why has democracy succeeded in America?” then proceeds to answer his own question — sort of — rambling for several pages through a breathless and often hilarious (in a flummoxed, Woody Allen kind of way) litany of stereotypically liberal “fetishes” including, but not limited to: freedom, homophobia, human rights, race, anti-Semitism, and “the inescapable battle of politics” (1:89, 92). When his companion, an African-American ex-ex-drag queen named Belize, accuses Louis of spouting “racist bullshit,” Louis wilts, acknowledging that he probably is. “Oh I really hate that!” Belize sighs. “It’s no fun picking on you Louis; you’re so guilty, it’s like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there’s no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish” (1:93).
It’s a telling moment for Kushner, perhaps the most explicitly political of America’s top-tier playwrights. Set mostly in the mid-1980s, Angels in America is very much concerned with a particular moment in history when, as Louis’s debilitating ambivalence demonstrates, “being Left in this country” was more transgressive and exasperating than it had been since the consensus days of the Eisenhower administration. Reagan’s landslide victory over Mondale; the ideological partnering of the Republican party with the “Moral Majority”; the wholesale cutting of budgets to domestic social programs; the intensification of Cold War rhetoric and foreign policies of containment; and the ineffectiveness of key left-leaning organizations to stem this tide — all contributed to a crisis point in the history of the American Left. Kushner has said of the era:
the play is set — and I think this is very important — at a time when there’s no such thing [as mass-movement politics] in the United States for generally progressive people. For someone like Belize, there isn’t anything: The Rainbow Coalition has started to waffle and fall apart. And there is nothing in the gay community — there’s the Gay Pride parade, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis getting humiliated at the City Council in Newark every year — 1984-1985 was a horrible, horrible time. It really seemed as if the maniacs had won for good. (Savran 27)
Throughout Angels and much of his other early work, Kushner responds directly to this crisis with equal parts vitriol and, perhaps more surprisingly, a tempered optimism. In that same interview he asks a critical question of the Left, one that guides his plays and that should likewise guide the formation of any contemporary progressive politics, or so he implies. “So none of these people had anything they could hook into, which is the history of the Left,” Kushner says. “When the moment comes, when the break happens and history can be made, do we step in and make it or do we flub and fail?” (Savran 27).
- - -
Ultimately, Angels in America is unable to offer a single, simple answer to Kushner's own question — or, at least, a single, simple, political answer. Hell, as the curtain closes, Louis and Belize are still arguing, now about Israel and Palestine. But there's something in the play itself — in its humanism and poetry, its theology and ambiguity, its campy theatricality and epic reach — that does inspire a strange longing (in me, at least) for progress (whatever that means) and for something like collective action, though not of the variety that would likely send Sullivan's knee-a-jerkin'. Prior's closing lines are a benediction, with all of the stickiness that word implies:
You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
And I bless you: More Life.
The Great Work Begins.
If Sullivan reads Angels in America as a Stalinist tract, then I pity his ideological blindness. He's missing a hell of a play.
New and Improved
Wednesday, November 19, 2003 | 0 Comments
I've decided to give this comments thing a try. Be the first on your block to leave a note at Long Pauses! Or don't. Whatever.
Song of the Moment
Monday, November 17, 2003 | 0 Comments
16 Horsepower is a Gothic country-rock quartet from Denver, but their version of "Wayfaring Stranger" feels so fated, so instinctual, it spreads the South all over the American map, a dusting of damnation on wherever you might be as you listen. Edwards is a brilliant banjo player: His sense of rhythm is as irresistible as it is elusive. On "Wayfaring Stranger," brilliance means the ability to play as if the player is learning the strings as he makes the notes. You can imagine the singer as the hero of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, the soldier on his trek back to his North Carolina home as the Confederate Army falls apart at the end of the Civil War, stumbling over an abandoned, half-busted banjo on the road, picking it up and discovering it comes with a song, this one.
Though nothing could be more prosaically American -- a believer who has wandered through this land as a witness is ready to "cross over Jordan" -- the uncertainty of the player's touch makes you feel the man isn't telling all he knows. Singing from inside the folk character, Edwards doesn't tell you what he's seen, but you can guess: "I'll drop this cross of self-denial," he says, and suddenly a mystical groaning, now pressed by guitar as well as banjo, comes out of the ground. . . . But after only one verse, in less than a minute, the old song stops. It seems to break down into a modern void, into abstract, disembodied sounds that don't connect to each other; you wonder what happened. Then out of that suspension, the man returns, his scratchy, everyday voice insistent that death is the last promise he will keep: He will die with this song on his lips. He'll sing it over and over for as long as it takes.
— Greil Marcus, Interview magazine
Roth, on Film
Monday, November 17, 2003 | 0 Comments
We all know that Stanley Kauffman, that grand icon of American film-reviewing, has been with The New Republic since 1958. But did you know that he was preceded immediately by a young punk of a wannabe novelist named Philip Roth? In June 1957, Roth — then a 24-year-old instructor at the University of Chicago — began his nine-month stint with the magazine, where he reported on the latest Hollywood and television offerings. I read through all of his reviews this morning and stumbled upon a few nuggets.
First, Roth the critic. Despite a general antipathy toward "ideology" that has characterized so much of his work over the years, Roth gets surprisingly political in his critique of Studio "message" films, particularly those that treat America's race problems with, in his words, "Mother Goose simplicity." His reviews of Island in the Sun and Something of Value — the former a Harry Belafonte vehicle, the latter a Sidney Poitier picture — chastise the filmmakers for surrendering to empty sentimentality and senseless moralizing. Referring to the climax of Something of Value, in which Poitier dies tragically, leaving his child to be carried off by Rock Hudson, Roth writes:
The next generation, the picture seems to cry, for them it will be better! But I keep wanting to know about this generation. . . . [I]sn't it possible to live with a man when he is not like your brother? What I want to know is when we're going to be ready to make that picture.
Roth's finest moment as a film critic, though, comes in his assessment of A Bridge on the River Kwai. I say "finest," perhaps, because his ambivalence toward Lean's "masterpiece" mirrors my own:
The Colonel, then, does not appear to have actually chosen to blow up his bridge, nor does he live to see it destroyed. And thus he is robbed of that final agony and awakening that might have made of him a tragic figure. He does, of course, have an awakening: "What have I done?" he finally asks. But what kind of question is that? What must I do now? — that is what the tragic hero asks, that is the painful question. He must do something. To have the hero fall across the dynamite switch because he is wounded permits the final destruction to arise not out of the agony of choice but out of mere physical circumstance. What had begun as a drama of character ends unsatisfactorily with some misty melodramatic statement about Chance and the Ironies of Life.
Of course, in 1957 Roth was also busy writing fiction, including the stories that would be collected in Goodbye, Columbus and that would make of him a National Book Award winner at 26. That brash young talent is on display in a few of his reviews. In his coverage of the televised Miss America pageant, for instance, he wanders off into a remembrance of his boyhood barber, a "sixty-year-old Turkish Jew who had preached hedonism to me long before he'd begun to shave my sideburns; his admiration for his adopted country was limited for the most part to its long-legged women." The old barber would be right at home in Roth's early stories — a friend of "Epstein," maybe, or Ozzie's neighbor in "The Conversion of the Jews."
Special mention also goes to Roth's review of 20th Century-Fox's The Sun Also Rises, which he delivers in the style of Hemingway and in the form of a conversation between himself and a "street-walker" who he meets outside the theater. It ends:
We left it at that.
Finally she looked up. "I hear they are filming A Farewell to Arms," she said.
"I know."
"It will have Rock Hudson," she looked up hopefully; it was a drunk's kind of hope. "Maybe it will be better?"
Someone came into the bar and from across the street I could hear silver clinking on the box office window.
"Yes," I said, "isn't it pretty to think so."
As far as I know, Roth's reviews have never been collected. I had to scour through a few rolls of microfilm to find them all. They're well worth the effort, I'd say. Kauffman, by the way, posted his review of The Human Stain a few days ago and concludes:
Thus The Human Stain, for all its page-by-page rewards, is a smaller book internally than most of Roth's work. It is no compliment to the art of film to say that the book's quasi-mechanical structure, plus that social issue, recommended it for adaptation, but I'd guess that this was what happened. These facts also explain why the film's shortcomings are not all Meyer's: most of them are in the novel.
We Care!
Sunday, November 16, 2003 | 0 Comments
Look at what the United States Postal Service left on my doorstep Friday. (Warning: cinephiles should perhaps not look.) Yes, that is a dent near the top, and yes that is an official USPS plastic baggy. Poor Rainer must be spinning in his grave.
Cringe
Tuesday, November 11, 2003 | 0 Comments
So, today at lunch a co-worker was getting us all up to speed on the latest episode of Average Joe, and our conversation turned — inevitably, perhaps — to the sick pleasure we humans seem to take from experiencing others' discomfort. "The Cringe Factor," you might call it. I shared a story from my undergrad days, when I found myself trapped in my dorm room as my socially-awkward roommate repeatedly asked out one of his classmates.
"So, I was wondering if you might want to go get something to eat on Friday . . . Oh, really? Okay, well, how 'bout Saturday? . . . Studying, huh. Well, are you busy next weekend? Maybe we could catch a movie Friday night. . . . . Saturday? . . . Oh, okay. . . ."
And on and on it went until he finally hung up, looked over at me (I was trying desperately to hide behind a book), and said, "It's okay, though. I know she likes me because she smiled at me once." Had there been a hole deep enough up there on the second floor of Cawthon Hall, I would have leapt in head first. Anything to make myself disappear.
Someone else told a story he had heard on the radio once — a story involving misplaced eyeglasses and a horrible case of mistaken identity. It sounded like an episode of This American Life to me, so I Googled the title of the show and the word "cringe," and just look at what I found. Bingo. The opening story is classic, but the one that made me want to take off my headphones and run far, far away is Ira Glass's tale of visiting the set of M*A*S*H as an NPR intern in 1979. Talk about cringe-inducing. Listening to the earnest, 20-year-old Glass ask Harry Morgan why he didn't take more leading roles reminded me instantly of every stupid word that has ever come out of my stupid mouth. Which is probably the very source of cringe pleasure to begin with.
Ira Glass, by the way, was also interviewed by the Onion A.V. Club last week, where, among many other interesting comments, he admits to being a fan of Gilmore Girls. So you know it's worth a read.
Going Digital
Monday, November 10, 2003 | 0 Comments
Mike, do you feel that these days you can actually do bolder things on television than you can in film?
Nichols: I do, yes. It has to do with HBO, it’s as simple as that. We love HBO and we love the freedom that there is on HBO, and the power. And what is that power? It’s economic. You know, we’re run by market forces—the fact that an outfit can make a billion dollars a year just sitting there collecting its subscriptions. It’s an economic basis that affords us this freedom.
HBO's economic freedom is just one of the many topics of discussion over at Newsweek, where Mike Nichols, Tony Kushner, and their cast are talking up Angels in America. In preparation for the big premiere, I called my cable provider last week to find out how much it would cost to add just HBO to my basic service package. "You're new monthly bill will be $61.50," the surprisingly helpful saleswoman told me. "Or," she paused, tying her carrot to the stick, "for just a few dollars more, we can upgrade you to digital cable and throw in the full compliment of HBO/Showtime channels, plus an additional tier of your choice."
So, of course, I now have digital cable.
Friday Colloquy
Sunday, November 09, 2003 | 0 Comments
On Friday afternoon I subjected myself to ninety minutes of critical scrutiny by a group of professional historians. And it ended up being a damn good time.
My article, "The American Left and the Problems of History in Philip Roth's 'American Trilogy,'" was the subject of this month's Friday Colloquy, sponsored by UT's Center for the Study of War and Society. Unlike most academic conferences — wherein, in my experience at least, you read a paper to a small and largely disinterested audience who then ask one or two questions while staring at their watches — the colloquy provides participants with copies of the article weeks in advance. The monthly meetings, then, become sites of informed discussion and constructive criticism. Who knew such a thing could still be found in academia?
After spending the last three weeks writing and deleting and rewriting and deleting again the opening twelve pages of my first chapter, my confidence was shaky, at best. Sitting face-to-face with a group of critical readers was, surprisingly, exactly what I needed. The best compliment I received was that my writing was "refreshingly free of jargon," and more than one member of UT's history faculty told me that when my dissertation is published it will be a welcomed addition to the required readings of many undergraduate American history courses.
Someone might actually read this thing after all. Go figure.
Song of the Moment
Thursday, November 06, 2003 | 0 Comments
A friend and I exchanged mix CDs this week, and apparently I now have to go buy PJ Harvey's Is This Desire? You know you're dangerously obsessed with a song when WinAmp is set to repeat and the playlist includes only one track. "The Wind" is totally that song.
Wingnut Debate Dictionary
Thursday, November 06, 2003 | 0 Comments
False DickChenomy (n.) — The arguer offers only two options in a situation, one of which is objectively pro-Saddam.
I don't claim to get all of the references to specific blogs, but what I do get, I like.
Counting the Days
Wednesday, November 05, 2003 | 0 Comments
I haven't spent this much time analyzing a film trailer since Kubrick released his teaser for Eyes Wide Shut.
Stuck in the Long, Hard Slog
Tuesday, November 04, 2003 | 0 Comments
How many thousands of hours will future historians devote to parsing through the events of this week? Yesterday, barely 48 hours after the downing of an American helicopter in Fallujah, six — and only six — members of the Senate showed up to approve the White House's request for $87.5 billion, thus guaranteeing our long-term commitment of lives and resources to the future occupation of Iraq. The other 94 Senators, an homogeneous mix of Republicans and Democrats, skipped the vote so as to avoid putting their names in the official record. It's an interesting strategy. Now they can't be accused of abandoning our troops or of pouring billions into a useless cause.
And you know what? I can't say that I blame them.
I've made a deliberate choice in recent weeks to keep quiet on these issues, partly because I'm tired, but mostly because I just don't know where to stand. I protested the war last winter because, like so many by my side, I could see this coming. Hell, even Bush, Sr. saw it coming. From his memoirs:
Trying to eliminate Saddam... would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible... we would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq... there was no viable 'exit strategy' we could see, violating another of our principles... Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.
But then we started dropping bombs and killing thousands of people and dismantling what remained of Iraq's infrastructure, and everything changed. Regardless of his political motives, I gained some respect for President Bush in recent weeks when he threatened to veto any changes to the appropriations bill that would turn our $20 billion "gift" into a "loan." We owe the people of Iraq at least that much. But, of course, then I wonder how much of our gift will actually make it to the people of Iraq, and how much will simply be funneled into the pockets of American contractors (who might or might not have direct, personal connections to the administration). But, then again, even if the money does go to those contractors, who's to say that they aren't, in fact, the most qualified people to do the job and that the Iraqi people won't benefit in the long run?
And now you see why I've been so quiet.
I wish I could join the knee-jerkers on my end of the spectrum who are turning up the "bring our boys home" rhetoric. Ray McGovern makes the most convincing argument that I've read yet. "Whether or not U.S. policymakers can admit at this point that they were 'terribly wrong,'" he writes, "they need to transfer real authority to the United Nations without delay and support the U.N. in overseeing a rapid return to Iraqi sovereignty."
But, many protest, we can't just withdraw! Sure we can, and better now than ten years from now, as in the case of Vietnam. If it is true that we are not in Iraq to control the oil or to establish military bases with which to dominate that strategic area, we can certainly withdraw. As in Vietnam, the war is unwinnable... hear that? Unwinnable!
If the U.S. withdraws, would there be civil war in Iraq? One cannot dismiss this possibility lightly given the history of Iraq. But it is at least as likely that a regional-federal model of government that would include substantial autonomy for the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the center, and the Shiites in the south (something foreshadowed by the composition of the existing Council) could begin to function in relatively short order with help from the U.N. While some degree of inter-ethnic violence could be expected, chances are good that this model would still allow a representative national government to function.
We won't know if we don't try. Besides, there is no viable alternative.
McGovern, the 27-year CIA veteran and advisor to Bush, Sr., certainly understands the issue better than I. (That he directs the Servant Leadership School is another reason that I'm heeding his warning.) And with each day, as the death toll grows (23 already in November), I grow increasingly disheartened. When I heard of the helicopter tragedy on Sunday, my first thoughts were of my own family, who just last week marked the twenty year anniversary of the death of my cousin, who piloted a Black Hawk into (but not out of) Grenada. On November 2, 2023, sixteen other families will mark similar anniversaries and will still be mourning, as ours is.
But wish as I might, I can't yet join the knee-jerkers, and I'm not sure why, exactly. Except that I don't want it all to have been for nothing.
Miscellaneous Debris
Monday, November 03, 2003 | 0 Comments
- Joe Pernice talks about Meat is Murder on Fresh Air
- Armond White offers a strangely positive review of The Human Stain
- A really good strip from Non-Sequitor
- James Tata's film and arts blog (thanks for the link)
- Russell Mokhiber and Scott McClellan discuss General Boykin
- Jim Wallis addresses Boykin directly
Ghosts, Goblins, etc.
Monday, November 03, 2003 | 0 Comments
Halloween is the highest of the holy days in Long Pauses land. My wife spends months planning her costume — this year she was Galadriel, I was Harold (from Harold and Maude). Our best friends hosted the party this year, which was attended by folks from the English department and . . . I swear this isn't a setup for a punchline . . . a group of future reference librarians. Sounds wild and crazy, doesn't it? Actually, there are great perks to attending such a party, like getting to have this conversation*:
Post-Attack Roy Horn: Darren, did you catch Philip Roth on Fresh Air today?
Harold: Oh yeah. It was a rerun from 2000. I'm always surprised by how personable he comes off in that interview. I expect him to be more defensive and bitter.
Post-Attack Roy Horn: You had to love that question about his influences. Like, was there any chance that he would name someone other than Bellow?
Harold: Hopeless nostalgic, that one. Whatcha drinkin'?
Post-Attack Roy Horn: Miller tall boy.
Harold: Sweet.
Or this one:
Andy Warhol: I saw Paris, Texas last week.
Harold: Wim Wenders, right? I haven't seen it yet.
Andy Warhol: Sam Shepard is great in it.
Harold: Speaking of, what did you think of the CBT's Buried Child?
Andy Warhol: I enjoyed it, except for the last twenty minutes. And I didn't like the way that they turned Dodge into comic relief.
Harold: Exactly! He should be more cynical and threatening. . . . Does your wig itch as much as mine does?
Andy Warhol: Totally.
Or my favorite:
Collared Green: Dude, please tell me that you're Harold! I love that costume!
* Poetic liberties have been taken in the reconstruction of these conversations.
Survival Saturday
Sunday, November 02, 2003 | 0 Comments
College football is the only sport capable of raising my heart rate these days. I gave up on the NFL when Joe Gibbs left the Redskins, and the last time I watched a complete baseball game Brady Anderson struck out in the bottom of the ninth, ending his and Cal Ripken Jr.'s careers. I haven't cared about the NBA since the Bird and Magic days, and I'll continue to not care about the NBA until the Bullets make their next championship run (somewhere in my parents' house I have a banner from the last one).
But Saturdays in the fall are my high holy days. The obsession came fairly late to me — 1987, the year my sister moved to Clemson and the year I got to see Danny Ford's Tigers play in Death Valley. Although my official justification for going to Florida State was its fine music school, I mainly went to watch big time college football up close and personal. I got to Tallahassee just in time to see their ACC debut, their first national championship, and way too many missed field goals. Which is why yesterday was such a good day.
Many people still put a small asterisk next to FSU's first championship banner because, late in the season, we got beat pretty good up in South Bend. We only made it to the title game, in fact, because the Irish somehow managed to lose at Boston College the next week. Notre Dame beat us again last year — a season in which they played beyond their talent and we were mediocre, at best. Yesterday, finally, the tables turned. 37-0. Good times. Good times.
And then it got better. Virginia Tech horse-whipped Miami — beat them so badly, in fact, that by the end of the game the 'Canes were picking fights and getting ejected from the game. Ah, the crooks and criminals who we had all come to hate during the mid-90s, finally revealing themselves once more.
And then there's the Tennessee Volunteers, the least impressive two loss team in the country. A team that needed five overtimes to beat the horrible Crimson Tide last week. A team that needed a fourth quarter rally yesterday to beat Duke. Duke! The Vols are just horrible, and the funny thing is that they might just win the SEC East. John Adams has a great piece about them in today's Knox New-Sentinel:
Moments later, linebacker Kevin Burnett used the same phrase, "We just have to keep playing Tennessee football."
Tennessee football: What is it? It's counting on the other guys to make more mistakes than you do. It's relying on somebody else to take care of your business. And guess what? It's working. . . .
UT's offensive braintrust is more creative with excuses than plays. "We won without our starting tailback (Cedric Houston) and safety (Rashad Baker)," Fulmer pointed out. "Mark Jones (wide receiver/safety) was limited." Wow! And it still beat Duke 23-6.
If the East championship came down to a vote, I can imagine an athletic director making a case for the Vols by saying: "Don't forget, they beat Duke by 17 points without two starters. And Mark Jones was limited." UT doesn't want or need a vote. It just needs to muddle through against the three worst teams in the SEC - Mississippi State, Vanderbilt and Kentucky - and for Auburn to beat Georgia in two weeks.
It just needs to keep playing Tennessee football.
We now return to regular Long Pauses programming . . .
Darren Hughes is a web designer and freelance writer in Knoxville, Tennessee.