Saturday, October 24, 2009
NOTES FROM AROUND HERE. New Geography tells us all those "progressive cities" you liberals love so much are very white. Of course you have to grade on the curve to get this result: If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles... Also, apparently, Philadelphia and D.C. That's like saying that if you got George Will and Laura Ingraham off This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the roundtables would be pretty reasonable.
Meanwhile it seems the NYC tea party movement has scaled back with a modest display at news org buildings. Jamie Wearing Fool complains that the MSM didn't cover them and their comrades elsewhere. I'm sorry I didn't get the memo, or I would have happily covered; but it seems to me the mainstream outlets were doing the patriots a favor. "We want our country back," says one of minions, "and we're gonna take it if you don't give it to us." Seldom has such a revolutionary threat seemed less credible.
6:06 PM by roy edroso
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Thursday, October 22, 2009
A SERIOUS MAN. I see that my Voice colleagueElla Taylor* finds in this movie "an avalanche of Ugly Jew iconography." As a goy semitophile raised on Mad magazine, I see it as an overdeveloped Dave Berg cartoon.
I assume the Coens, whom I have always suspected of being heavy stoners and ultracosmopolitan Jews, made a conscious decision to people their latest morality play with 60s-vintage intraJewish stereotypes -- like the hero of Frank Gallop's "Irving" parody of "Ringo", like characters in late Molly Picon vehicles such as Paris Is Out, and on the trailing edge of early Woody Allen routines, like Russo ("they wanted all his cash, and Russo like a jerk tried to sign for it for tax purposes").
In other words, the Coens picked 60s suburban American Jews because they are easy and harmless figures of fun that automatically provide some comic distance to the general audience -- like the Minnesotans of Fargo (Joel Coen called Minnesota, recall, "Siberia with family restaurants"), the white trash of Raising Arizona, the sorta-50s, sorta-40s city slickers of The Hudsucker Proxy, etc.
We may have been un-reminded by the serious cred afforded to No Country for Old Men that this has always been their schtick: to pick a stereotype and, while staying conscious of the reality behind it, fuck around with it. No one bitches about The Big Lebowski (still my favorite Coen joint) because no one feels the need to defend Cali stoner culture, but in A Serious Man the Coens have done no more to, or with, American Jews than they did with Lebowksi to a different, Anti-Defamation League-deprived constituency.
Setting the self-hating Jew nonsense aside, what do we have? In a way, a twist on Barton Fink. The humorously Semitic caricature-hero Michael Stuhlbarg in this case -- bespectacled, hair only slightly less unruly than Fink's, academic, and passive -- is more schlimazel than schlemiel; that is, the one on whom the hapless schlemiel spills his soup.
Where Fink in his Hollywood quest ran a gauntlet mostly of equally-alienated strangers, Stuhlbarg is persecuted by local fellow Semites -- the nightmarishly insensitive family, the paranoiac and physically challenged brother, his wife's vaguely bohemian and thoroughly ruthless lover, and a variety of Jewish professionals (lawyers, rabbis) who defend their own position against his interest. While Fink found himself in a foreign, sun-drenched goyische paradise/hell, Stuhlbarg is comfortable and happy in his 60s-suburban development until everything and everyone he's been accustomed to trust turns against him.
Big difference there: Fink went looking for the promised land, whereas Stuhlbarg merely wants to stay on the tenure track. Fink finds his new environment disastrously unaccommodating; stay-at-home Stuhlbarg is genuinely betrayed. In short, Fink went looking for trouble, and trouble went looking for Stuhlbarg.
This might promote the notion that the Coens' lead Jew here is a total victim, but for the complementary story arc of his son, a weed-smoking rock-loving Yeshiva boy who not only enlists the support of the top rabbi -- with whom his hapless father can't even get an appointment -- but manages, despite seemingly incapacitating stonage, to read the Torah aloud at his Bar Mitzvah.
Stuhlbarg fils is the counterweight to Stuhlbarg pere's agony. Confronted by his own, junior-grade authority figures (teachers, dealer, sister), he is perfectly and by brute instinct able to handle them. His self-preserving instinct -- untroubled by the moral querulousness that has his dad running among authority figures, seeking existential answers -- lifts him above all the conventions that make his dad a schlimazel. He's nowhere near as smart or conscientious as his father, but is clearly destined to work through the maze of life more successfully. And for his father he shows nothing but contempt.
This -- as does much of A Serious Man -- seems a first merely a cruel Oedipal joke. Dad's search for truth leads only to suffering; Son's search for good dope and better reception of F Troop leads to comfort and a promising future.
The punchline, though, is a little more interesting. Without spoiling too much, I'll say that the father finally agonizes out of the weeds only to find an unexpected new obstacle; the son, meanwhile, appears to have his ducks very comfortably in a row when a natural disaster -- looming over the shoulder of one of his former antagonists -- seems to threaten his future.
I'm not sure that this isn't just a Dave Berg punchline: the smartass kid getting his comeuppance in the final frame. It might be my own lack of depth is assessing it, but I think the Coens rolled too much on instinct here. They clearly wanted the morally-concerned nebbish-patriarch to fail -- and heaped externalities on him to make sure of it -- while they wanted the morally-neutral son to succeed. That reflects a sour home-truth that fits with most of their movies. (Fargo is a big, and popular, exception.) But it seems they wanted a cop-out, too, in the form of a climactic tornado, and in the post-9/11 era that's about as cheap a dodge as you can get. What if the boy simply outstripped his dad?
Maybe the Coens felt the stereotypes they were playing with hit too close to home, and summoned a disaster to rescue them. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened in the movies. But it's a shame to see a few of our best filmmakers fudging like that.
(* Fixed attribution)
10:49 PM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, October 21, 2009
JUST IN CASE YOU HADN'T NOTICED. Moe Lane in July:To put it bluntly: there was no point to this editorial, which uses Governor Palin and former Senator/current SecState Clinton as examples of how badly the media treats inconvenient women in politics. It was pointless because conservatives already knew and liberals don’t particularly care, which means that the people who would most take this editorial to heart are the least likely to have needed it, and vice versa.
I had a few paragraphs more, but it can be summed up as such: the larger problem will persist until feminists get sick of being the aphids in the Democrats’ anthill. Moe Lane today, on a Dede Scozzafava campaign appearance:From our super-secret hidden peanut gallery (names left in because they said to):streiff: I was an evaluator on a live fire exercise back in 84 when a herd of free range cattle moped into the impact area and about 200 troops decided they were much more fun to shoot at than 55-gal drums filled with dirt. I wish I had pictures of the outcome of that because that is what her photo op is like
Neil Stevens: Streiff: You aren’t comparing Dede with a cow are you? Because that wouldn’t be right.
streiff: actually, I was thinking of one particular cow that had a rear leg chopped off by an M-60 machinegun …no, that image wasn’t pretty: then again, neither was this Most people realize that everything these guys say about feminism is bullshit, but it never hurts to be reminded.
9:56 PM by roy edroso
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Monday, October 19, 2009
THE FUTURE OF CONSERVATISM. While the joy-poppers are boycotting the NFL, Victor Davis Hanson is boycotting everything:...I think some of you are in the same boat: Have you stopped reading, listening, watching, and paying attention to most of what now passes for establishment public or popular culture?...
Take Hollywood protocol -- make a big movie, hype it, show it at the mall multiplex. But I went to one movie the last year. Maybe three in the last four years. There is not much choice here -- car crashes, evil white men killing the innocent, some gay or feminist heroes fending off club-bearing white homophobic Mississippians in pick-ups... I think he's talking about Transporter 2. Ditto music. I don’t know the name of a single rapper. Don’t follow rock anymore. Don’t want to. I like a Mark Knopfler or Coldplay...
Add in television. I haven’t watched a network newscast in 10 years...
I used to be a big fan of PBS and PR, but no more. The laudable shows are far outweighed by the race/class/gender agendas...
Next confession: I have not watched a single NFL game–including the Super bowl–for more than 10 minutes during the last decade... Ditto the NBA. I have not watched a complete game in 15 years... I watched 2 baseball games on television the last 3 years... Just a dozen selfless players, who keep quiet when they score, give credit to others when they pitch a shut-out, or pass rather than shoot could help things... Baseball, ruined by hotshot pitchers! Vanitas! Christy Mathewson used to insist the scorers add a run for the opposing team, so people wouldn't think he'd gotten a swelled head.
Being a bit of a crank myself, I generally applaud non-joiners, holdouts, and antiquarians. But to go on for over 2,200 words about all the things he hasn't seen and won't see suggests, despite his insistence to the contrary, that Hanson is proud of it. He's proud as an observantly religious man might be that he scrupulously avoids the near occasion of sin, and has done so long and faithfully enough that he can truly say he's untempted.
The religious guy has a God to which his abstinence brings him closer. What has Hanson? The old things, which are lovely, and this:...I have tried to remain more engaged than ever in the country’s political and military crises, which are acute and growing. One’s distancing from the popular culture of movies, TV, newspapers, and establishment culture makes one perhaps wish to overcompensate in other directions, from the trivial to the important. Bear in mind that Hanson also eschews major news media, so we may assume he gets such political information for his "engagement" as he has from his colleagues at Pajamas Media and like-minded souls. Now it's clearer that he's not just avoiding things in which he has no interest, but also things in which he professes a keen interest but finds unaccommodating. He's bragging on the selectivity of the sources from which he draws his conclusions and writes his columns.
And why shouldn't he? When you know, ahead of time and for a fact, what's crap and what isn't, why waste time with the former? All new movies are PC, all new music is noise, all the athletes are thugs, all the prizes go to undeserving minorities, and the MSM lies. Go with what you know: Suetonius and Fox News.
Homer nods but the Ole Perfesser links, and commenters rush to assure Hanson that they, too, have taken leave of the hurly-burly: When I read reviews of movies, I have no desire to see them. They sound so superficial, politically correct, and narcissistic...
My psychological withdrawal is being matched now by a material need to go Galt...
Just last night I was watching “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” with my grandson, a movie advertised as a “family-friendly laffer (sic).” And even in this moronic 90 minute bore the Hollywood liberal bias was evident...
The American who loves his country is, must be, alienated from American popular culture in the Obama era...
My sentiments exactly. The only exception was the TV show Battlestar Galactica until its third season began when it went off the rails....
I also used to love listening to “Prairie Home Companion”, but not in the last two years, ever since Garrison Keillor became so bitter and deranged...
With my Study of Sparta and the real meaning of a republic, I have since gotten rid of anything dealing with America since it is all a Masonic Kabbalistic lie... Bonus: A comment by Frank Miller, for those of you so steeped in loathsome pop culture that you know who he is.
This suggests an interesting vision of a future for conservatism. I wonder if David Frum has looked into it?
8:30 PM by roy edroso
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NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Rush/Rams deal and the hilarious conservative boycott of that notorious left-wing activist organization, the National Football League. The column hasn't been up long, but already one of the patriots quoted therein has emerged in comments to accuse the NFL of "a DOUBLE standard." Another citizen gobsmacked by capitalism! You'd think one of them would have learned something by now.
The brighter bulbs among them certainly have. "I'm not talking about trying to boycott the NFL," says Deacon Paul of Power Line, " I'm talking about directing our efforts at more vulnerable enterprises. In a sense, this is already happening. Many conservatives have deserted the mainstream media..."
Smartly done -- sensing the planned takedown of America's Sunday-Monday beer-and-wings ritual may not be the great success its promoters have promised, they can always retreat to past glories, specifically the lingering death of the MSM, which they may again attribute to real Americans who couldn't be bothered to show up at the last election but are sufficiently motivated to not buy newspapers. Actual football fans are indeed calling for boycotts -- of their lousy home teams. Surely this can be summoned as proof of a groundswell for Rush and the new American Revolution.
Can't wait to hear Megan McArdle on the subject.
3:28 AM by roy edroso
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