Thursday, June 23, 2005
QUOTE OF THE DAY -- PERHAPS EVEN QUOTE OF THE WEEK! The newly invigorated Poor Man points us to a blog maintained by the President of GoDaddy. I liked GoDaddy's Super Bowl ad, but this guy's posting on Guantanamo Bay contains another sort of outrage entirely -- an unexpected gloss on the "Gitmo is not as bad as [insert atrocity here]" gambit:Compared to those Americans and others who were forced to jump to their death on 9-11, the detainees at Gitmo really don't have it so bad... But maybe those detainees should be forced to jump from a tall building, because they might have had something to do with the WTC attacks -- or they might not; maybe they're in there for parking tickets; we'll probably never know, but hey, how about that 9-11? Coming soon: Gitmo compared favorably to Hiroshima!
2:43 PM by roy edroso
|
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
FUTURISM IS EASY....no one can really stop the perfect storm. That's why it's important for mid-career journalists to get their hands dirty in using the technology of the personal media revolution instead of thinking about how and where to learn about it. Become a 'doer' of the word instead of a 'hearer' only. Learning is always accelerated by experience, so those who feel their careers slipping away need to get involved. Start a blog. Build a Web page. Pick up a camera. Play a video game. Get close to young people who are comfortable using technology, and ask questions. Read a book, or better yet, go online and look around for tutorials. They're everywhere. Most of all, don't let fear get in the way. It's only technology. DO something!
-- Some Guy at some website. BROWN: What up, G. I'm Brown from the Sun. Are you Winslow Cosloy?
THE HAMMER: (offering awkward soul shake) What it is. Yeah, I'm Winslow, but call me The Hammer.
BROWN: Hammer, my editor says you can hook me up, so to speak, with the New Journalism.
THE HAMMER: That's THEE Hammer, dude. And it's Citizen Journalism. (busts out Playstation 2) Let's play The Simpsons: Road Rage 2.
BROWN: What, may I ask, will that achieve?
THE HAMMER: That's what's wack about you MSM types. You're all about, like, what comes next, or why somebody did something! Don't stress it. Just read the board.
(THE HAMMER points out bulletin board which reads:
DEMOCRACY IS WINNING
AGAINST WAR=AGAINST AMERICA
DEMOCRATS=AGAINST WAR
THE SIMPSONS IS RAD
FREE MARKET RULEZ
GITMO IS NICE
Next to this is tacked up a picture of Andrew Sullivan with horns drawn onto his forehead and the words BYE QUEER scrawled underneath.)
BROWN: Are we supposed to work these angles into our stories?
THE HAMMER: I dunno. I just like stare at them every morning and then everything just flows. But gaming builds up your journalism muscles! Good eye-hand coordination, son. Like, if I was on the street, and news came around the corner? I would be so on it.
BROWN: So where do we get our information?
THE HAMMER: Check my bookmarks. Dude, sure you don't want to play? When Homer goes "D'oh" it's rilly funny.
(BROWN checks computer)
BROWN: This "Butt Trumpet" guy just seems to link to other bloggers and call people traitors.
THE HAMMER: He's rilly funny. Score! I runned over Moe.
BROWN: Do any of these people do any actual reporting?
THE HAMMER: Butt Trumpet interviewed me once! It was awesome. We talked about Star Wars and what a dick Lucas is. Do you like Jar Jar Binks? I hate him.
BROWN: But I don't understand. If they don't report, and they apparently can't write, then what's the point?
THE HAMMER: (clicking off the game)The point is it's distributed journalism! 'Cause like if you have just one or two old dudes like you, with your lame clothes and no iPod, saying "Blah blah, this is the news," then it's like propaganda. But if you got a thousand dudes like me, totally pimped out with camcorders and digital cameras and Rios, and we're all linking to Glenn Reynolds, that's, like, a revolution.
BROWN: Sounds like a flash mob to me.
THE HAMMER: Flash mob? Oh yeah, my older brother was into that. He's so old. You're, like, even older. You better get out of here, you're getting old-man smell in my house.
(The Hammer later writes about the incident with MUCH INAPPROPRIATE CAPITALIZATION, a picture of Nosferatu with stink lines radiating from his armpits and captioned "Brown from the Sun," and pictures of pretty girls in Eastern European peasant costumes, holding up signs saying BROWN MUST GO! Brown is later replaced at the Sun by JimZ of the Ass Farts blog, who draws salary for weeks without submitting any work, though he writes every day in his blog about what a bunch of assholes he works with at the Sun.)
5:03 PM by roy edroso
|
UNHAPPY IS THE LAND THAT NEEDS A HERO. I see Senator Durbin has finally bowed to political necessity and retracted his perfectly sensible comments of last week.
Some chest-beating types are calling Durbin's retraction a defeat for "the leftie blogosphere," as it has "cut them off at the knees." Because I am a grown man, the forced recantation of a professional vote-grubber does not cut me, particularly, at the knees or anywhere else.
I still assert that Durbin's original remarks are unobjectionable to people who do not misread them, willfully or otherwise. That a sufficient number of people pretended to be offended, and stirred the ill-informed to actual offense, to score a political hit doesn't change that.
Common sense is its own reward.
10:20 AM by roy edroso
|
TRUE DAT: A SUMMER HOLIDAY. I'm watching this AFI "100 Years of Movie Quotes" thing. It's pretty cute, in the usual AFI see-how-fun-we-are-bite-me-Henry-Langlois way, and fifty seconds of White Heat is better than no White Heat at all. But though a few of the stories and a very few of the commentators are interesting (who knew Chris Sarandon was so well-spoken?), it's faintly disgusting to see so many great movies ground down into sound bites, however potent. And of course Top Tennitis is a disease of our age that may not be as harmful as increasingly bold governmental lying, but is all the more distressing to sensitive temperments such as mine for its very puerility, because we imagine that when future generations (if there are any) look back at us, they will be appalled by our great crimes, but they will be contemptuous of our peccadilloes, and it is the contempt that stings. Atrocity, statistic, etc; the oceans of blood spilled in the Terror of the French Revolution are literally awesome, and supercede our capacity for revulsion, but the Carmagnole and the Marriage Federal finger the pit of the stomach.
My natural reaction, of course, is to replicate this nightmare on my own arty-farty terms. Yes, I'm throwing a meme, boys and girls. Head for the hills! Or descend with me into the warm, soothing muck.
The theme is quotes. We all have favorites, but I'm going to pitch this high and inside. I would like to know what your truest quotes are. Let me explain. Some quotes you like because they're poetic or amusing or charming. They sound good to you. Some, though, stick with you because they really reflect your beliefs, and have done so through whatever life experiences you've had.
The true-quotes become obvious when you think about them in that light. You realize that these little scraps of mental paper have become your watchwords, the identifying labels on your ego. To name them is not always a pleasing thing, I have found, because those labels usually floated onto your ego long ago and only stuck because you never cared to brush them off. They have the persistence of habits, and most habits are bad. So they sting to note. But that sting is what makes this such an elevating enterprise! Let me open:
'Tis a terrible thing to be lonesome, but it's far worse to go mixing with the fools of the earth.
-- J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World
A writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.
-- Thomas Mann
For even honest folk may act like sinners
Unless they've had their customary dinners
-- Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (as translated by Marc Blitzstein)
GREAT POETS DIE IN STEAMING POTS OF SHIT
-- Charles Bukowski, story title
And if you're lonesome, ah-ha... Listen to a friend's Judy Garland album at Carnegie Hall... Big nelly-queen audience, lotta tsuris, lotta dues... her dues, their dues, tell us about the dues... 'Don't worry, we'll sing 'em all and we're gonna stay here all night...' Then came the line that really did me in... "'Cause I never want to go home!" Whew, and they don't wanna go home either... because nobody wants to go back to their room alone... "Ma, gimme a glass of water, 'cause I don't want the water, all I want is the water with your hand attached to glass with your arm attached to the hand and stay there... and don't sneak out, 'cause when you wake up I wanna see you there, and if you stay there I'll drink as much water as you want me to drink." Later.
-- Lenny Bruce, Live at the Curran
Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this end she must come. Make her laugh at that.
-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
You know talent is an aphrodisiac
They don't stock it on the shelves
Some people say opposites attract
And some people just love themselves
-- Loudon Wainwright III, "Aphrodisiac"
We are living in the future
I'll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper
Fifteen years ago
We're all riding rocket ships
And talking with our minds
We're wearing turquoise jewelry
And standing in soup lines
-- John Prine, "Living In The Future"
If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.
-- Henry Ford (almost certainly apocryphal)
It's no longer a world of men, Machine.
-- David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross
I play it the company way
Executive policy is by me O.K.
(How can you get anywhere?) Junior, have no fear,
Whoever the company fires, I will still be here
-- Frank Loesser, "The Company Way" (from How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying)
Man hands misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself.
-- Philip Larkin, "This Be The Verse"
I don’t wanna have to shout it out
I don’t want my hair to fall out
I don’t wanna be filled with doubt
I don’t wanna be a good boy scout
I don’t wanna have to learn to count
I don’t wanna have the biggest amount
I don’t wanna grow up
-- Tom Waits and K. Brennan, "I Don't Want to Grow Up"
You can't take life too seriously. Otherwise it doesn't pay to live.
-- Joey Ramone, New York Times interview, 1978
The whole world's a circus if you know how to look at it.
-- Charles Beaumont and Ben Hecht, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao Excuse me now while I throw myself upon the couch to re-read Reader's Block.
(PS: No invites. All are welcome, in comments or in their own blogs.)
12:38 AM by roy edroso
|
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
CULTURE CLOWNS: A PROGRESS REPORT. Roger L. Simon -- perhaps dreaming of the day when Victor Davis Hanson and his troops will march boldly into the Ministry of Culture, kick Michael Eisner off his throne, and install Simon as Commissar -- is trying to pump up a new book about how the Hollywood Ten had it coming. Movie attendance is down, gloats Simon; the beast is weak, der Tag is at hand! His readers agree that the "Hwood Communist Party" is headed for the ash-heap of history except for Team Incredibles of the Christ, Batman Begins (with reservations: "Since it's contemporary Hollywood, though, there's nary a kaffiyah, an 'Allah Akbar' nor a fifth-column media figure to be had"), and, oddly, the Coen Brothers -- though this last seems a case of some softhearted comrade trying to sneak personal favorites out of the camps, despite the Coens' lack of Party bona-fides. Is exceptionalism, Comrade!
In idle moments I like to imagine Simon attending a barbecue with his readership. "Waaaaiitt a minute... yew done wrote a movie fer Woody Allen and Bette Midler???" (Grill-tipping, fire-spreading, rebel yells as the Boys light out for Warren Bell's place.)
The McCarthy book itself gets a fuller treatment at "libertarian" (excuse me, I can't say that word without laughing anymore) magazine Reason, where Cathy Young explains that while McCarthyism was a bad thing -- though, perhaps to protect herself from Durbinization, she adds that "it's absurd to treat the blacklist as somehow equivalent to the Soviet purges" -- blacklisting was kinda sorta not so bad because the Communists that got blacklisted (along with a lot of other guys, too, but let's not nitpick) were worse: though they committed no crimes but thought crimes, they said good things about bad people, and their tragic legacy is "today's celebrity radicals" who "blast American policies while ignoring the evil of a Saddam Hussein."
I have addressed this imbecilic point of view back in the old Alicubi days, when Jonah Goldberg and, sadly, Kevin Drum fell (well, Kevin fell, Goldberg just grabbed his knees and cannonballed) into the same fallacy:Goldberg says that McCarthy was a "lout" but essentially justified because Communist agents were afoot in America. He brushes off the prosecutions, official or otherwise, that disemployed many citizens who had committed no crimes. "When they denounce McCarythism," he writes, "they are working on the clear assumption that McCarthyism victimized only innocent people. That is a lie. And it also a lie that the USA Patriot Act is being used solely to punish innocent people."
This is a breathtaking switcheroo: a complaint against the prosecution of innocents is answered by the fact that some people are not innocent...
...it is interesting that no one much questions another large, unspoken idea here --that being a Communist made one fair game even if no espionage or other crime had taken place. McCarthy's whole schtick was enabled by the notion that there could be such a thing as a thought crime -- that if you thought Marx was right, you could be taken down, whether you collaborated in espionage or merely believed in the widespread redistribution of wealth. Even [Drum], in his generally thoughtful consideration of Goldberg, says, "It is not McCarthyism to accuse a communist of being a communist." It's actually something much worse, because our freedoms aren't worth much if we do not have the right to be wrong. Hey, that wasn't bad. Maybe I should take a month off and just recycle my greatest hits. But that's hardly a testimony to my own skills; American Constitutional values age very well -- though their enemies, as we have seen, work very hard to sell us on an alternative philosophy.
UPDATE. Comments are, as usual, very interesting (Simon may have the numbers, but alicublog has the guns!), but FMGuru drops some especially sharp science: "[The decline in opening grosses] has everything to do with plasma screens and dumbasses talking on cell phones, and nothing to do with The People rising up against the corrupt Quisling coastal elites... H'wood is one of the most brutally capitalist places in America..." The correct response to this home truth would be "D'uh!" if so many flattery-driven numbskulls were not impervious to common sense. Well, we few remaining thinking people (yes, but I need a majority!) can enjoy it, at least.
11:39 AM by roy edroso
|
Sunday, June 19, 2005
BUILDING A MYSTERY. Reader Chris V pointed out to me this article at the Liberty Film Festival site Libertas , and it's a pleasant surprise. I've had fun with these guys before, but fair is fair and I have to commend Jason Apuzzo for chiding fellow-travellers for "evaluating films exclusively on the basis of their ideological content, or ideological implications." Hear, hear, buy that man a beer!
In fact Apuzzo goes further than I would:So when my conservative friends know or care to know more about film, or when they know more about the arts in general, then I’ll accept their opining about Star Wars more than I do now. When my conservative friends can tell me who Tyrone Power is, or something about Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, or Wagner’s Ring-cycle, or maybe what the difference is between motion-control and motion-capture … then maybe I’ll be more patient when they fulminate about Jar Jar Binks... Now I think this is in the right direction but a little too narrow. More knowledge of whatever one is talking about is always a good thing. But do you really have to know Final Cut Pro to judge films?
Well, like the guy in the old joke said, it couldn't hoit. Some critics have learned enough about the process to go out and make their own movies, and the criticism of Fielding and Nabokov is at least as much fun to read as their novels.
But a lot of very fine critics never played the game at all, and have still had useful things to say. So what do they have in common with the critic/creators?
This reminds me of the bit in The Bad and the Beautiful where Kirk Douglas' mogul decides to take over as director of a film from a difficult old von Sternberg type. The old director wonders: does the mogul have the humility to make a film?
That's an interesting word: what kind of humility? The easiest call would be a simple lack of hubris, which the Douglas character has in spades, but given that a lot of fine artists are monsters of ego themselves (so was von Sternberg, come to think of it), I believe the writers might have been thinking of something else. Or maybe only I'm thinking it. Well, here goes in any case:
Anything worth looking at or listening to carries some sort of mystery. Skills get that mystery from a creator's brain to the audience, ideally in decent enough shape to be recognized. But ten tons of skill and a platoon of genii may be employed in a waste of time -- that happens a lot. When Martin Scorsese and the cream of Hollywood make a crap film, what was missing or betrayed? The obscure object, to borrow a phrase.
The thing that makes a piece of work worthwhile is the mystery, but that's doesn't mean an inspired fauve who doesn't know what he's doing can put it over without skills. (Usually.) The talented, trained people who get that thing on the stage or the page or the screen must be good with their tools, but they must also be working to realize the mystery, whether they would think to say so or, as with some hard-bitten old magicians, would rather portray themselves as clock-punchers trying to keep up their pay grade. You see the total absorption of great craftsmen at work: is it all for the money, do you think? Anyone who has worked on a production of any kind knows what it feels like when magic is being made -- or failing to be made. Audiences know it too.
And so do critics. The best of these try to trace the evidence of what is put before them back to the places where it went right, or wrong. To do this, they have to learn about what they're watching or listening to. Some of them get very technical about it -- others, less so. But they all know what they're looking for and will dig through a ton of information to get as close as they can to it, and try like hell to do it justice in the review.
So it's kind of a self-sharpening process. You try to get better at whatever technique you've got in order to give shape to something that is otherwise insubstantial.
This is where humility comes in. When I look at a work of art, I am always hoping for something more than a pleasing agglomeration of whatever materials were used. A pleasing agglomeration would be nice, of course, and often I consider myself lucky to get even that -- and wander the gallery or squint balefully at the screen, grumbling to myself about the decline of standards and so forth.
But sometimes I get much more, enough to lift me out of myself. Whatever garbage I brought with me into the experience gets pushed aside. Suddenly I'm not looking at paint or film or words -- though I might go back later and try to figure out how the hell the guy did it. The mystery has been realized. Whether it was Michael Moore or Jason Apuzzo who had made it, I would happily -- and, I would hope, eloquently if I chose to do it in writing -- doff my hat to him. And if you know me, you know that's humility, baby.
This is where ideologically-minded critics go wrong. They aren't at all interested in the mystery. When I read their poli-sci reviews, I can see that they're trying to assess the impact of the work in question -- as if it were a social program or an economic stimulus package -- on something they are pleased to call The Culture. In that sense, their work is indeed technical, and they often know their own grim metrics very well. But it has nothing to do with humility, or mystery, or art.
11:37 PM by roy edroso
|
|
