Saturday, August 04, 2007
JUST A FLESH WOUND. The downgrading by some conservatives of the show "24" because of an environmental project its makers are conducting was previously covered here. Now someone at Ace of Spades has treated the subject, and the post is very instructive:Can a show jump the shark by virtue of something it does off screen? If so, I nominate 24…
This obviously presents a conflict for the left. Sure Jack Bauer is the pop-culture face of torture but on the other hand he’s oh so concerned about global warming. What’s a modern progressive to do? The "24" news infuriates conservatives, and the AoS author fantasizes the discomfort it will cause liberals.
This shows admirable pluck, or something.
5:39 PM by roy edroso
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SOFT BIGOTRY. At National Review Jonah Goldberg suggests "lower expectations" in Iraq:Instead, explained a former administration official, America needs to set its sights lower. We need to keep Iraq from becoming a terror sponsor or safe haven for al Qaeda. The best we can hope for, the consensus seemed to be, is a “Jordan-style” Iraq with a moderate, somewhat reliably pro-American regime that will, on occasion, vote with us in the United Nations. What we need in Iraq is a “strong state” that can assert its will domestically. A Jeffersonian democracy on the Euphrates isn’t in the cards, most agreed. Refresh my memory: why did we depose Saddam? It sounds like we could have just sent Rumsfeld over to shake his hand a few more times and achieved a similar goal.
11:43 AM by roy edroso
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SECOND (AND THIRD AND FOURTH ETC.) TIME AS FARCE. Conservative bloggers writing about the Scott Thomas Beauchamp thing have reached the Simon Says stage of analysis. From Confederate Yankee, for example, we get this:Gavin M. [of Sadly, No!] blasts Charles at LGF for using the phrase, "purported to be written by a soldier." Charles used the "P" word to describe someone hiding behind a pseudonym? Why, that's the exact same thing as directly calling him an impostor, isn't it folks? One wonders how Confederate Yankee would react if someone described him as a purported heterosexual.
11:14 AM by roy edroso
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NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD. Rod Dreher thinks the trouble with religion today is it's not masculine enough. After a quote about how there are too many women at services, Dreher preaches:I believe one reason so many male Christians responded deeply to Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was because it depicted a masculine Jesus who chose to endure excruciating pain to rescue those he loved. The Christian faith teaches that this is what Jesus did, but somehow the intense physical courage that that act of love required is easy to overlook. Gibson didn't overlook it. The Jesus Christ of his film embodied manliness par excellence: a strong, brave man who was willing to suffer and die to save others. After I saw that film in a press preview, then went to Ash Wednesday services and heard the plush priest give a homily about how Lent is really supposed to be about learning to love ourselves more, I wanted to slug the guy. This helps me understand the appeal not only of The Passion of the Christ, but also of contemporary action movies in which the hero emerges after numberless beatings and explosions to kick the ass of Evil. This certainly makes The Passion more interesting than I originally thought. Jesus got more savage treatment than even John McClane gets in the Die Hard movies, and in an age before gunpowder. But since the Biblical conventions made it impossible for Gibson's Jesus to go out and beat hell out of his persecutors, The Passion left its audiences to carry a dream of vengeance out of the theatre and into the world. One of Dreher's sources writes that a Mass "must be a certain kind of ritual. It must be majestic, soaring, even martial. It must challenge and call you on." No wonder Dreher hates the happy-clappy stuff: when one's God has been torn to bits, Christian Soldiers go not inward but Onward.
I have generally assumed that the agon of action heroes was something through which fans released the little frustrations of their lives, but I begin to see that for the devout it may actually be an animated version of the Stations of the Cross.
3:53 AM by roy edroso
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Friday, August 03, 2007
ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. Pretty much everything Peggy Noonan writes here was written better (naturally) by Gore Vidal in 1960:MRS. GAMADGE. And your two fine sons. They're very attractive and that was a nice spread of them in Life, at the barbecue. Very, very nice. We'll want more of that. But most important, your wife should be at your side at all time. (Mrs. Gamadge rises and hands the empty glass to Jensen.) She must seem to be advising you. The women must feel that there is a woman behind you (Mrs. Gamadge has maneuvered herself into position behind Russell's chair.) as there has been a woman behind every great man since the world began! (Russell, aware of Mrs. Gamadge's presence, rises and crosses to Jensen at L.)
RUSSELL. Alice plans to campaign with me, if...
MRS. GAMADGE. She's a tremendous asset. I don't need to tell you. The women like the way she doesn't wear makeup and looks like a lady, and seems shy...
RUSSELL. She is shy.
MRS. GAMADGE. She doesn't make the women feel jealous. And that's good. Keep her with you, Mr. Secretary, at all times. It did Adlai Stevenson great harm, not having a wife, and trying to be funny all the time. Great harm...
...(Somewhat nervously, Alice enters and starts to cross to Mrs. Gamadage, who to Alice's alarm, starts backing away with a speculative look, taking in everything.)
ALICE. How very nice to see you...
MRS. GAMADGE. (slowly, deliberately) You... couldn't... look... better! I mean it! I like the whole thing... especially the naturally gray hair, that is such an important point with the women. Of course Mabel Cantwell dyes her hair, but she gets away with it because she does such a bad job the women feel sorry for her... (To Alice, cozily) When you're the First Lady just remember this: Don't do too much... like Mrs. Roosevelt. The women didn't like that. On the other hand, don't do too little... like Mrs. Eisenhower. The women didn't like that either. All in all, Grace Coolidge was really the best, bless her heart. My husband had such a crush on her... Forgive my taking the Dramatists Play Service style, which includes stage directions from the original prompt book. I would so rather be seeing a good play now than paying attention to these idiots.
12:21 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, August 02, 2007
UP THE FLAGPOLE WITHOUT A SALUTE. Anyone here see the premiere episode of "Mad Men," about the bullshit kings of old Madison Avenue? I did, and though I have my objections (remarkably similar to those of James Wolcott), I'd like to see more, because the subject fascinates me. I puttered around some ad agencies in my freelance career, and took great pleasure in hearing the old bulls' recollections of the era depicted in the show. While doing newsletters for Ogilvy, I dug through some of their archives, which transmitted some of the impatient energy that "Mad Men" is going for. One finding concerned a board meeting at which a large batch of new vice-presidents had been proposed. That title is ubiquitous in advertising now (as David Ogilvy once observed, it is cheaper to give titles than raises), and one of the bulls at that particular meeting appears to have smelled an unhealthful change coming. "Seems to me," he sniffed, "that we're giving helmets to cheerleaders." If "Mad Men" can capture some of this tonal mix of patrician hauteur and homespun wisdom, I might have to get cable.
If you did see the premiere, you must recall the drama over the Lucky Strike acount, in which the client, a George Washington Hill type played by John Cullum, bitterly lamented all the foolishness about cigarettes being bad for you ("I've never been sick a day in my life"); the nervous ad guys tried to ease him into the new reality, till hero Don Draper tap-danced a new slogan based on one of the few points of difference left to discuss ad-wise: "It's Toasted." What do you think that scene was about? Draper's poise under fire? The situational ethics of mid-century advertising? The shift in the business between prose poetry and a crisper kind of nonsense? The difference between research and inspiration?
Whatever you saw, I can assure you the view of National Review's S.T. Karnick will surprise you:In responding to 1950s revelations about the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, the cigarette companies had been making claims that each one’s product was healthier than its competitors’. The federal government moved to put a stop to it.
That might seem a reasonable response at first glance, but it certainly runs afoul of the First Amendment, and it exemplifies the twentieth-century trend of government increasingly overriding people’s personal choices. This ham-fisted action by the feds resonates, of course, with the current crusade by all levels of government to eradicate cigarette smoking from the United States altogether. Something else you have to give the old Madison Avenue guys: they were much smoother than the bullshit artists of today.
10:52 PM by roy edroso
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LINDSAY LOHAN'S "COME TO JESUS" MOMENT. The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger expresses concern -- or is it contempt? It's hard to tell -- for the celebrities who take drugs, whether performance or pleasure-enhancing. At first he seems to think marketing is the culprit:I now take it as an article of faith that marketing rules the world. Marketing is an ancient business tool, but unlike some other artifacts of the past, product marketing is a perfect fit for the age of electronic mass media. The Web has been marketing's Manhattan Project, and like Iran, everyone wants access to marketing's mysterious, sometimes dark powers...
The players became platforms outside the game for selling shoes, brands "and everything." Like Nascar drivers, the shirts of the Tour de France racers are festooned with product logos. But consumers aren't going to buy stuff promoted by any palooka. Professional athletes were tutored that part of the deal was they had to pump extra hang-time into their personalities. And if they couldn't do that, the guys making the Nike commercials would do it for them. In the early days, journalists derided this as "hype," but even the press eventually signed on, and suddenly lumpen athletes and entertainers had "attitude" and "edge." This was now admirable. Henninger must have realized at some point that blaming the free market for Barry Bonds is a non-starter in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, so he comes to Jesus -- or, rather, swings Him at the heads of "the thousands of high-IQ people buying all those the God-Is-Dreadful books":The simple idea that Mr. Bonds and Ms. [Lindsay] Lohan ought to go find something resembling a church to offset the compulsions of modern life drives the no-religion people nuts. If so, they should stop making funny jokes about sprinkling holy water and start proposing an alternative way to learn integrity, self-respect and character that will have a longer shelf-life than "Don't Be Evil." Our great nation is covered with churches and filled with believers, and ruled by a fundamentalist Christian President, yet Henninger is worried about atheism's deleterious effect on Barry Bonds and Lindsay Lohan.
When I first approached his essay, I assumed that Henninger took movie stars and professional athletes as his subject because people are more inclined to read about them than Johnny Methhead or Jane Crackwhore. Now I think that if he expanded his purview to include ordinary citizens' drug habits among the horrors of atheism, it would too closely resemble a Chick Tract without the saving grace of lurid illustrations to suit the Journal's upscale clientele.
Of course, once Murdoch gets his hands on the Journal, Henninger may never need to be that cautious again.
UPDATE. Flash! Lindsay Lohan, at least, may be closer to redemption than we thought:Christian pop culture critic Mark Dice insists he knows the cure for Lindsay Lohan’s problems. Jesus.
Dice credits himself for making Paris Hilton find ‘God’ in jail, and is now focusing his prayers on Lindsay Lohan.
“What Lindsay really needs is Jesus. She needs to read the Bible and find out who she is and why she is here. There is a vast black hole in her soul which nothing else can fill. No expensive rehab facility. No jail sentence. No family or friends. Only Jesus can fix what’s wrong” Dice explains. Maybe Murdoch can just dump Henninger and hire Dice. He certainly has a livelier style.
6:58 PM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, August 01, 2007
ANOTHER "COME TO JESUS" MOMENT. I have a little cold and was not wont to post, but Kia Pienso has pointed out to me a new essay by Camille Paglia which has lifted my spirits somewhat.
The thing is hard to synopsize, but let me say that toward the beginning Paglia writes:A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. Sometime later:I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Then:Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum. The salutary effect of sacred song on the "the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism" is hinted at in this description of what to unsympathetic readers may appear an outbreak of mass hysteria:The most influential camp meeting occurred at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1804. For three days and well past midnight, a crowd estimated to be between twenty and thirty thousand sang and shouted with a great noise that was heard for miles around. Worshippers transported by extreme emotion jerked, writhed, fell to the ground in convulsions or went catatonic. This Kentucky Revival, called the Second Great Awakening, spread through the inland regions of the South and eventually reached western Pennsylvania. (I pause here to add crucial emphasis, which Paglia's famously logorrheic style denies, to the punchline:)But the movement never flourished in the North because of its harsher weather. The 6,425-word essay covers a lot of ground, but we might say the key to it is Paglia's account of the attacks on Chris Olfili's The Holy Virgin Mary when it was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Paglia blames this lunacy not on the people who made the attacks, but to the "the total failure of curatorial support" by the Brooklyn Museum, who presumably erred in failing to properly instruct a no doubt receptive Mayor Giuliani in African fertility symbology.
The whole thing pretty much goes like that. Examples of religious violence and absurdity are given, and the arts community gets the blame for being insufficiently acquainted with the Bible. While the little jihads are mostly described in coolly descriptive language, the irreligious artists and arts supporters are subjected to the kind of editorial attacks ("Supporters of the arts who gleefully cheer when a religious symbol is maltreated act as if that response authenticates their avant-garde credentials") that are sure make this essay, like many of Paglia's public explosions, a treasure trove for conservative quote trawlers, who will rejoice that somebody in the Academy is talking their language.
11:54 PM by roy edroso
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HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE. James Lileks reports from an Alaskan cruise about some damn kids who sang badly ("'Y.M.C.A' – a song about anonymous sex, incidentally") in a fucking karaoke bar. Later he goes to a tavern populated by waxwork dummies.
He leaves out the part where Rod Serling explains what happened to Lileks when he took the pig mask off.
2:47 AM by roy edroso
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GOOD OLD BOYS. The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman came to me as a double whammy from a great distance: I haven't watched their films in years, but both made a lasting impression on me. The astute Terry Teachout had a less than optimal experience revisiting Wild Strawberries in 2003, and it may be that either or both of these giants might look punier to me upon reconsideration than they did in my youth. But my memories of both director's films are clear and happy and I more or less trust them. It may be that I am less prone to disappointment than Terry, or more childish about old loves -- I enjoy Jason and the Argonauts on pretty much the same terms today as I did when I was a child; take that for what it's worth.
As for John Podhoretz' bizarre denunciation of Bergman in today's New York Post, I can only assume the 1970s were so traumatic for him that he feels it necessary to bear his grudges into the realm of excruciatingly bad taste. He certainly seems angrier at those of us who enjoyed Bergman's films than he is at the director himself, declaring that we think art "wasn't supposed to be easy to take or pleasurable to take in. It was supposed to punish you, assault you, scrub you clean of impurities." Well, The Virgin Spring ain't Star Wars, but there is more than one kind of pleasure, and Bergman's Medieval parable, rough as it may be, is well-built, stunningly photographed by Sven Nykvist, and deeply satisfying in its resolution. I don't think you have to be a snob to enjoy it, or to enjoy Max von Sydow's battle with the optical printer at the end of The Passion of Anna, or the recognizable conjugal truths of the contentious couple in Scenes from a Marriage.
For that matter, Antonioni's famous bleakness can be pretty funny, as in the first scene of The Eclipse, in which the most active member of the menage a trois is a rotating fan. I had many reservations about The Passenger when I saw it in re-release a few years ago, but I was never bored: even the misfired pairing of Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider was fascinating, and that last, long unbroken take at the end is exhilarating whether you think the film has earned it or not.
Rank them however high or low you like, but they applied themselves to their visions energetically and consistently and with undeniable craft. That's no small achievement.
12:15 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, July 30, 2007
HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 5,858,351,117. Psst -- liberals are calling themselves progressives because they want to bring back eugenics via global warming and stem cell research. Pass it on! And if anyone asks, you didn't hear it from me!
(Oops -- almost forgot the glibertarian angle.)
1:13 PM by roy edroso
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Sunday, July 29, 2007
MUST-FLEE TV. I finally watched one of those vlog things. Jesus Christ. Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart on comedy? If bongs had floated up into view, that would at least have provided an excuse.
For the record:
Goldberg acknowledged that Jon Stewart is "funny," but "what a lot of liberals are not appreciating is, come a Democratic President, Jon Stewart is going to be pretty funny about Democratic Presidents." Then who'll be laughing, traitors?
Goldberg: "On the whole humor is still much more helpful for conservatives than it is for liberals" because humorists are "equal opportunity guys and I have a couple of friends who are in the comedy business" who are of the fabled "conservative... actually libertarian" tribe, which Goldberg further qualifies as "Giuliani-type."
Goldberg: "People like Michael Moore or Al Franken don't help liberals all that much" because Franken is "dour and dark and kind of nasty," whereas Rush Limbaugh is a big ball of sunshine.
Not content to wait for Jon Stewart to make fun of future Democratic Presidents, Goldberg warns that "Jon Stewart can get into trouble... when he tries too hard to make the left-wing bloggers happy." So when I laugh at Stewart, America scowls? Thank God I don't have cable.
Goldberg says "I don't think it necessarily speaks particularly well for liberals they keep having to recruit comedians to do their arguing for them." I don't know, I thought Slappy White's keynote address at the 1992 Democratic Convention was pretty awesome.
"Humor right now still is in many respects in terms of the way we live our social lives more of an asset for conservatives," reiterates Goldberg, using as examples himself ("I win a lot of points with audiences"), Limbaugh, and noted right-wing funnyman Dave Chappelle.
On the whole Goldberg seems to think liberal humor is creaky and preachy ("going after televangelists and preachers is so old"), while attacks on "political correctness" are as fresh as springtime.
Beinart pretty much gawks at the camera and goes "muh muh muh muh" at intervals.
No wonder Republicans are crapping out of the YouTube debate.
11:01 PM by roy edroso
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