Showing posts with label the arts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the arts. Show all posts

Friday, November 13, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

THE YAM IS THE POWER THAT BE

•   The right-wing commentariat has gone absolutely bonkers over the college kids with their microaggressions and their safe spaces and whatnot -- especially since the Missouri crisis got a significant number of black people involved. It's like S.W.I.N.E. meets the Black Panthers! Hence, headlines like "The First Amendment is Dying" (National Review), "The Self-Destruction of the American University" (Weekly Standard), "A Generation that Hates Free Speech" (Commentary), etc. NR drama queen David French has a good one: Before inviting his fellow nuts to purge the universities of liberal taint ("Conservatives possess the power of the federal purse... It’s time for a cultural and political war against the intellectual and legal corruption of the university Left"), he tells this cautionary tale of the commie campus and what it did to a friend's kid:
Years ago, I left my law firm — where I worked as a commercial litigator — to defend free speech, religious liberty, and due process on campus, first as president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), then as director of the Center for Academic Freedom at the nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom. As I left, a friend asked why I’d give up my practice to take on higher-education reform. He was incredulous. His daughter had just been accepted to an elite college, he’d just visited, and he found the school to be everything he imagined — expensive, yes, but beautiful, prestigious, and fun.

In less than a year, he apologized. He understood my career choice. His daughter had come home for the holidays, transformed. The vibrant, joyful Christian girl who’d left for school had returned sullen and depressed. She hated her family’s values, she resented her parents, and she was obviously drinking too much. The school had stripped down her value system — all in the name of “critical thinking” — and replaced it with angry groupthink. Life and hope were replaced with fear and loathing. A social-justice warrior was born.
The kid went to college and rejected her family's values. Obviously they should have sent her to a Christian finishing school instead of an "elite college." Now it'll take a shitload of reprogramming to get her to sing hymns and hate paupers again! [shakes fist] Liberal academia, you have made a powerful enemy! We won't rest until Yale and all those radical hotbeds teach nothing but Reagan, God and Jesus!

•   I'll tell you the real problem with the kids today. Many years ago I lived at 174 Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. You'd think there'd be a plaque there, but no. Instead, according to the New Yorker, there is this:
Like its spiritual hero, Ron Burgundy, of “Anchorman,” this popular new Will Ferrell-themed bar on the Lower East Side is a loud, swinging, bad-taste good time. Fan art hangs on the walls; a nook in the back is decorated with lava lamps, cowbells, and a (jazz) flute. But, like Ferrell’s George W. Bush, the bar can be fuzzy on strategery. Where Ferrell’s characters joyfully mock obnoxiousness, Stay Classy celebrates it, serving sweet cocktails whose jokey names (Smelly Pirate Hooker, Dirty Mike and the Boys) are printed in all caps on a laminated menu...
I weep for this generation.

•   Real quick, for theater fans in New York: The Ivo van Hove production of A View from The Bridge is stateside now. I saw a simulcast of it from London some months back. I'm always nervous when a classic text gets the whoopee treatment from an ambitious director, and when the actors came out barefoot into what looked like an oversized bocce pit, I steeled for the worst. But it turns out turning the dial up one or two notches on the subtext, and even getting a little Grotowksi with it, actually helps this already-weird play a great deal, especially with brave actors like these embodying the furies. I bought it all, including the quasi-choral handling of the climax, and when it was over I felt like I'd been somewhere and I don't mean Red Hook. Recommended.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

WHAT IS IT WITH THESE P.C. COLLEGE AUDIENCES? THEY'RE P.C., YET NONE OF THEM USE P.C.s! THEY USE MACS! AND THE FOOD THEY SERVE...

I love Jerry Seinfeld, but if the kids don't dig him anymore, maybe it's political correctness, maybe it's not, so what? The hippies didn't dig Bob Hope either -- that is, as they say, show business. Bitching about it makes you sound like Lenny Bruce's Comic at the Palladium when the Brits don't laugh -- "well, Freddy boy, I see it's a little squaresville tonight, real squaresville for the first show..."

I notice Aziz Ansari isn't having trouble drawing college crowds. Maybe different audiences just like different things. They're not obligated to like you, and if they don't it's not the same thing as oppression, as conservatives seem to think. The kids have not been "unwittingly drawn into a cult they cannot escape." They are young, they like what they like, and they think old people smell.

UPDATE. Hey, remember that crazy shrink or psycho-sociomologist or whatever she is Stella Morabito from The Federalist? She has another the-PC-end-is-near rant ("Ignorance was cultivated in the schools through political correctness and squashing free debate," etc. skree), and in it she acknowledges that the peecee people do in fact laugh, but at bad things that it's bad to laugh at:
I think the reason there is so little “comedy” that’s funny today is the genre itself has been hijacked by the humorless PC crowd. Why is their humor so unamusing and so dependent upon mean-spiritedness? 
Also, the music they listen to these days, you can't even make out the lyrics, and what's with those baggy pants. Increasingly it looks like this whole P.C. boo-hoo is just a weaponized version of Those Were The Days.

UPDATE 2. Enjoy some libertarian Mad Libs from the Fonzie of Freedom at Reason:
To be sure, San Diego State student Anthony Berteaux also insists in his letter that, hey, he likes edgy and funny folks such as Amy Schumer and Louis C.K. and George Carlin and that Seinfeld should "Offend the fuck out of college students. Provoke the fuck out of me. We'll thank you for it later." 
But this doesn't just ignore the chill that is already upon campuses when lefty feminist profs like Laura Kipnis gets dragged into Title IX hearings about sex on campus in The Chronicle of Higher Education...
If you don't laugh at this AARP member's jokes, Laura Kipnis goes to the gas!
...viewings of films as mainstream and honored as American Sniper are replaced by Paddington, and students call for trigger warnings before reading The Great Gatsby.
Regular readers know how sick I am of all the culture-war bullshit, but Fonzie has it exactly backwards. College students saying they don't like your act isn't oppression. If the kids want a different leisure time activity than American Sniper, which made gazillions of dollars without their help, who gives a fuck? You don't have a Constitutional right to student activity board funds. Incursions into the curriculum and the rights of professors, on the other hand, are about the new consumerist approach to education, whereby students are regarded as customers to be satisfied rather than seekers after knowledge; "social justice" is just the MacGuffin.  The bad ideas you should worry about are the ones that created this system, not some teenager's insufficiently deep understanding of racism.

Sunday, June 07, 2015

BUT NOW HE'S PREACHIN' JUST TO BUY JELLY ROLL.

Kia and I saw the Dominique Serrand production of Tartuffe at the Harman at a preview on Saturday. The show doesn’t officially open till Monday. I am aware of and appreciate the controversy over reviewing preview performances, so I’ll forbear to judge what may be changed by the opening, and tread lightly regarding the performances, which I will say are all of high professional quality (especially in the handling of verse and comic business). I will discuss the concept, though, which was apparently settled by the time the show was mounted at Berkeley Rep.

We've all seen plenty of productions of established properties that might be deemed Dark Reimaginings. These have ranged from the brilliant, e.g. Throne of Blood, to the asinine — the worst example of which, for me, was an off-off-Broadway Midsummer Night’s Dream long ago which began with Theseus and Hippolyta simulating intercourse and had the actor playing Bottom portraying all the other Mechanicals with finger puppets. (I didn’t stick around to see what he did with Pyramus and Thisbe.)

Serrand is no tyro; he has apparently has had a long, distinguished career of squeezing extra juice of classics, and has clearly studied Tartuffe carefully, as you can tell by his sometimes laborious underlinings.

By now even people who haven’t read Tartuffe know it has something to do with religious hypocrisy and the ease with which it can upend real moral order. If you have read or seen it, you know that Moliere’s great achievement is to make the inversion as believable as it is absurd. From the outset we see that Orgon, the paterfamilias, has been not only been taken in by Tartuffe, but unhinged by him: he describes Tartuffe’s professed asceticism, and the lesson Tartuffe has apparently encouraged him to take from it: “…he weans/ My heart from every friendship, teaches me/ To have no love for anything on earth;/ And I could see my brother, children, mother,/ And wife, all die, and never care — a snap.” (This is from the old Curtis Hidden Page translation; David Ball’s adaptation, used in this show, is smoother.) Meanwhile Tartuffe is sponging off Orgon to beat the band, and has bigger game in mind.

Everyone else knows Orgon’s been had, but he never wavers in his faith until the famous scene in which Orgon’s wife Elmire conceals him so he may hear Tartuffe, who has already indirectly propositioned her, respond to her pretense of interest and fully reveal his hypocrisy (“The public scandal is what brings offense/ And secret sinning is not sin at all”). By then it’s too late, and Tartuffe has already swindled Orgon out of all his possessions. He is restored later, in a scene that Moliere added under what is generally thought to be royal compulsion, though audiences usually appreciate the relief.

This relief Serrand seems to begrudge, and in a big way. He keeps the ending, but makes it clear that Orgon’s family is dispirited and lives even after Tartuffe’s arrest in fear of him — so much so that they pile furniture against the front door of the house and slump dejectedly as the curtain falls.

In fact, though everyone besides Orgon knows Tartuffe is a fraud, throughout the play most of them seem frightened of him — even the typically sensible maid Dorine, even while she is insulting him, shivers like a menaced damsel. As for Orgon’s daughter Mariane, she’s so horrified by the prospect of the forced marriage to Tartuffe her father has arranged that she goes into a kind of Ophelia swoon — with bandaged wrists suggesting a suicide attempt, yet.

Steven Epp plays Tartuffe, rightly and very well, as someone who would give normal people the cold creeps; his blissfully bald-faced lying has an incandescence that suggests an inspired artist of deception — indeed, he really is a mystic of an evil kind, which is a great illumination of the character. But this alone can’t explain the quaking desperation he inculcates in the family.

The idea, insofar as I can guess, is to make Tartuffe represent the entire looming evil of false religion, something bigger than one man. To (I suspect) help put this over, Tartuffe is given servants who wordlessly louche about the stage like runway models on Seconal, sometimes physically accosting characters, sometimes just exuding sybaritic menace. One of them doubles as the process server Loyal, playing him like a Willem Dafoe villain. (Everyone cowers at him, too.) And though he’s doing fine just with the lines, Epp is occasionally directed to do movement-class erotic creeping along the floor, and a little door on his shirt sometimes opens to reveal his nipples. He’s not just a horny fake preacher — he’s the snake in the Garden of Eden.

Maybe I’m dense, but I think the great thing about Tartuffe is that he is a man, and that he can achieve as much mischief as he does, despite having been basically hauled in off the street, by fastening on the willful gullibility of a single bourgeois and playing it for all it's worth. We’ve all known leeches; sometimes they show unexpected resourcefulness in deception, and while it doesn't make us like them it changes our estimation of them. Tartuffe’s resourcefulness is of such a high order than when he manages to get away with his first seduction of Elmire, it’s like Richard III turning the tables at the end of Margaret’s big speech: The surprise is not completely negative. Like all the great comic villains (and some of the ones in tragedies) he’s got enough élan vital to make it interesting. We don’t necessarily have to identify completely with the dupes. In fact that may be why Moliere didn’t put Tartuffe’s comeuppance in the first version: why deprive him or Orgon of their just desserts?

Lest I make the show sound like a bore, be notified that it has great energy, some brilliant stage pictures, and lots of laughs. I wasn’t kidding when I said Serrand knows the play. The scene in which Mariane and her boyfriend Valere exchange insincere professions of unlove, and the one in which Dorine keeps coming up with ways to sass her master without getting socked, are especially successful, demonstrating that everyone involved knows what kind of human beings and human frailties they’re dealing with, at least when Tartuffe and his minions aren’t around.

Sunday, May 31, 2015

BUCKLEY AND MAILER.

Shortly before announcing his candidacy for Mayor of New York, an esteemed American author proposed a plan for the city: he would give tax breaks to “neighborhoods that developed self-financed patrols”; legalize drugs and gambling; and abolish all commercial vehicle loading between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Once declared, he advocated charging fees on drivers from out of town, building a “Disneyland East” on Queens’ old World’s Fair grounds, and “cutting down traffic by building a huge aerial bike lane, twenty feet above the ground and twenty feet wide, above Second Avenue from First Street all the way to One Hundred Twenty-Fifth.”

Four years later, another esteemed American author — one who had, out of passion for urban design, built a model city out of Lego blocks so large he couldn’t get it out the front door of his Brooklyn apartment — threw his own hat in the same ring. He ran on a platform of local control — that is, he wanted New York City to secede from the State — and like his predecessor played with ideas from all over the map, from “compulsory free love in those neighborhoods which vote for it, [to] compulsory church attendance on Sunday for those neighborhoods who vote for that…” Also, his brain trust kicked out ideas like “Make Coney Island ‘Las Vegas East.’”

Thus described by Kevin M. Schultz in his new book Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship that Shaped the Sixties, neither the 1965 candidate William F. Buckley nor the 1969 candidate Norman Mailer sounds serious. Neither worked the hustings or brokered with interest groups: both won space in the news by being famous and saying outrageous things. In the present political scene they are most closely resembled by Donald Trump, a famous crackpot on whom only the most disaffected voters could project their disgust.

But in the Sixties there was plenty of disaffection and disgust to go around. Also, each of the two men was serious about something. For all Buckley’s playfulness in this particular endeavor (best evinced by his famous quip that, should the polls return in his favor, he would “demand a recount”), he was, Schultz suggests, building political capital. As editor of conservative flagship National Review, he had not only elevated but also lightened the tone of American conservatism, replacing Bircher brooding with a confident why-not attitude. This made conservatism attractive, even fun, and in this race he vaunted his whimsically reactionary politics in the media capital of the country as a contrast to the seriousness of local social planners whose efforts were visibly failing. During his 1965 campaign, as he shook hands with working-class New Yorkers who were abandoning the major parties to support him, “Buckley,” says Schultz, “saw the future of the Republican Party.” He got 13.4% of the vote on the fringe Conservative Party ticket and may have thrown the election from Abe Beame to John Lindsay. Strengthened by Buckley’s run, the state Conservative Party got his brother Jim elected Senator six years later. Ronald Reagan, or at least his handlers, took notice.

Mailer too was serious, but not about politics as such. True, he’d covered political events in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and The Armies of the Night, and given his qualified support to the anti-war movement. But he had no sensible prescription for change and in his own campaign approached governance as an existential experiment: “I want to see where my own ideas lead,” he told followers. Having successfully changed his literary stock in trade from straight fiction to social criticism, he now took a flyer on retail politics. But though he enlisted blue-collar writers Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin to add proletarian appeal to his egghead campaign, Mailer proved less talented than Buckley at outreach, or more likely just less interested. Asked what he’d have done as Mayor about a recent snowstorm, Mailer said he’d have “pissed all over it,” and his campaign effectively ended in a speech at the Village Gate where he figuratively pissed all over his followers (“he greeted their suggestions with an angry ‘fuck you,’” reports Schultz). His 5% showing in the Democratic primary may have cost Herman Badillo the nomination, but otherwise it had no discernible further impact on city politics, and seemed to begin Mailer’s drift from political subjects in general.

Schultz’ conceit, which is intriguing if not convincing, is that mismatched as they might seem, Buckley and Mailer had something in common besides talent and mayoral campaigns. It’s not so much the subtitular “Friendship,” which mainly consists of a few social meetings and letters full of writerly banter. Their bond, per Schultz, is that they “shared a common complaint about America,” born of a “joint disgust at the central assumptions that dominated postwar America” — that is, the technocratic, welfare-statist, progressive-up-to-a-point consensus that assumed the Goldwater debacle was the end of conservatism, waded America into Vietnam, and didn’t even see the SDS coming. Mailer himself seemed to endorse this reading in his first public debate with Buckley in 1962 — befitting the calculating chutzpah of both men, a heavily-publicized affair at Chicago’s Medinah Temple promoted like a prizefight, and on which oddsmakers and intelligentsia made book — where, Schultz reports, “Mailer insisted he hated the Liberal Establishment just as much as Buckley did.”

But even then, before the heterodoxies of New Right and New Left had calcified, the two men had staked out divergent territories. At that debate Buckley denounced what he perceived as liberalism’s capitulation to communism and pleaded for submission to the guidance of “Presidents Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” That gave no wiggle room for the Left, and one gets the sense that was just how Buckley wanted it: heightening the contradictions was a big part of his act. Mailer, conversely, laid against liberalism a litany of complaints that, if they were technically as cosmic as Buckley’s, appeared to extend into a different cosmos entirely: Modern liberalism, he said, had led to “the deteriorated quality of labor, the insubstantiality of money, the ravishment of nature, the impoverishment of food, the manipulation of emotion, the emptiness of faith, the displacement of sex…” One can imagine Buckley’s supporters starting to follow this but drifting away as the vision exceeded traditional politics, not to mention propriety.

To the extent that the two men may be said to have had, even by proxy, a conversation, Mailer’s arguments were so much more capacious — if also necessarily more diffuse — than Buckley’s that nothing except their mutually glorious verbal skills really seems to unite them. On the Medinah Temple stage, for example, while Buckley was making coy references to Mailer’s personal excesses — which became his nasty habit in debates with and reference to his alleged buddy — Mailer said in apparent exasperation, “I’m trying to talk about the nature of man.” In a Firing Line session six years later, Mailer described to Buckley “greed, bigotry, insensitivity, and general stupidity” as “the disease of the Right,” and “excessive propriety in family life, excessive obedience to all the small laws of daily life, such as crossing at corners” as that of the Left. Schultz describes Buckley as dubious at this, which is understandable; Buckley and his movement saw (or at least were accustomed to profit by portraying) the Left as the home of rioting unwashed youth and blacks, whereas Mailer sincerely sought to diagnose the Left as if it were a character.

Parallels there may be, but there’s no getting around the fact that Mailer was first and last (with detours in the middle) an artist, whereas for all his authorial virtuosity Buckley was a propagandist. When Buckley dabbled in spy fiction, Schultz says, he was “rattling his saber in the most subtle of forms,” a polite way of saying that Buckley was more interested in investing his remarkable energy in a profitable line extension for his brand than in, as Mailer put it, the condition of man. For some reason Schultz seeks to portray late Buckley as a nearly spent force; after the Sixties he, like Mailer, “removed himself from the pitch of battle,” says Schultz. But that isn’t really so; though new jacks like George Will may have started to outsell him, Buckley hung in as the godfather of the scene -- even casual newspaper readers would know who he was and what he represented -- and churned out columns that served the cause. Take this bit from the start of the First Gulf War, 1991:
The anti-war people never really found a doctrine after the argument ran dry that we should continue with the sanctions. Some still hang in there with the cry, “We won’t die for oil!” but that moral-geopolitical analysis is also tending to run dry as the perception widens that “oil” is simply the convenient symbol of the kind of worldwide aggression that Saddam Hussein had in mind where he overran Kuwait and dealt with it in ways that remind old-timers of the Rape of Nanking (we hanged the Japanese general who supervised that operation).
Once a hippie-puncher, always a hippie-puncher. As for Mailer, his return to fiction and its hybrids was a return to form; his energy was as great as Buckley’s, but his skill visibly sharpened and his capacity for empathy remained and deepened and stood well his cause -- that is, his talent and literature. Along with some duds he had great artistic successes, most notably The Excecutioner’s Song. Schultz acknowledges that book’s power but, perhaps to brace up the parallel lives structure, insists that the book "was not, as Alfred Kazin had described Mailer's work a decade earlier, a mirror to the nation." Really? The story of a criminal famous for insisting on and getting the death penalty was no kind of national mirror? It might be argued that the best thing about The Excecutioner’s Song was Mailer’s evocation of the hard country that birthed and shaped Gary Gilmore and Nicole Baker.

There are other instances of Schultz trying to nudge his subjects onto convenient tracks. For example, we can see how Buckley's mischievousness fits with the rowdy Sixties, but Schultz goes so far as to insist, “he loved the constant rebukes to the status quo perpetrated by the counterculture.” Really? Like Pigasus, the Yippies’ candidate for President? “He could understand their anger and frustration,” continues Schultz, “and he, most at home as a provocateur, had never been one to toe the party line… he grew his already wavy hair even longer and could be seen darting around New York City on a Honda motorcycle, often with a passenger in tow.” This may have constituted letting one’s freak flag fly in Sharon, Connecticut, but there is nothing in Buckley’s corpus to suggest such an affinity for the Armies of the Night, or if there is Schultz does not include it.

But lily-gilding aside, Schultz does give us a fresh way to look at the two men, and if they interest you this book will, too. There are many anecdotes I hadn’t heard before — I had heard that Mailer challenged McGeorge Bundy to a fistfight, for example, but not that he was called off by Lillian Hellman, nor that Mailer was sore about it (“when the chips were down she’d always go for the guy who had the most clout”) and wouldn’t speak to her for two years. I will add that Buckley and Mailer makes very vivid a time in American letters when literary feuds were perhaps no less picayune than now but a good deal more interesting, perhaps owing to the relative quality of talents involved (I mean, who’d you rather hear bitch — Truman Capote or Jonathan Franzen?).

Monday, May 18, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 14.

Is the ending a joke?

Actually, the whole thing is. Someone on Twitter said, as if surprised, that she was laughing more at the Mad Men finale than she had at any other episode. Part of that, I assume, was the petit finales for the other principals' stories, which came off fairly breathless, not to say rushed, like the wrap-up of a Sixties sex comedy. The Peggy and Stan resolution in particular seemed like fandering (THE MOMENT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR), but sure why not, especially with Elizabeth Moss and Jay R. Ferguson so game about the funny romantic stuff. (From her phone takes especially, it would appear Moss has been studying Ross Hunter.)

Surewhynot, too, with Joan bravely going it alone with her wimmyn-owned company and Roger and Mrs. Megan in Paris Quebec. As I've said before, these characters were never going to achieve enlightenment: They were just working out career and personal issues, and though the times a-changin' made their challenges and opportunities bigger than they might have been, in the end they're no more fraught with meaning than any other TV officemates, just better written than most. (Betty and Sally are a slightly bigger deal, but that set-up came last week. Nonetheless I appreciated their Don scenes as fine examples of that other type of TV staple, the emotionally purgative phone call.)

The real story has always been Don Draper, and after all that drama, all that identity crisis, and all those harbingers of bardo, it was a shock to find, first of all, people from Don's Old Life not only talking about him ("He's not dead! At least I don't think so") but also chatting with him on the phone, and secondly, after a few rounds of Don doing Don stuff -- fucking a stranger, barking life lessons -- to come to that cynical comedy ending. But the thing that saves it is Leonard. How this Joe Average got to Thinly Disguised Esalen I can't guess, but when he started talking about his dream of being in the refrigerator and Don went to embrace him, you could be forgiven for thinking Don had learned some new kind of empathy that would help make him whole. After all, he had just cut all ties with his Old Life people; he gave Peggy the same spiel on the phone that he'd given her, basically, in "The Suitcase" (she even responded the same way: "That's not true"), and then hung up; even Stephanie, his last link to Anna Draper, took off and left him with hippies. And here he was, not working out his angst with a sexual conquest but in the embrace of Leonard, another desk guy who can't quite believe in love even when it's at the table with him.

But surprise, it's not a new empathy for a new life, it's the same empathy that made Don great at selling cigarettes to potential cancer victims and plastic wheels to sentimental families. Don has always been an empath who, because of his emotional damage, is uniquely attuned to the pain of average citizens, and when he sees a valuable crop of it he gets in there and grabs and holds it close to drain its essence. And then turns it into a commercial. He is what America has instead of artists. And that's why, despite all the historical signifiers that made the show look like the chronicle of a New Day Dawning, nothing much has really changed. Don has not rediscovered Dick Whitman -- he has, after a crisis of confidence, rediscovered Don Draper. And gone back at work.

Friday, May 15, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



•    You may remember him for his later, lush 'n' luxe blues stuff, and that's all very fine. I love B.B. King, now passed, for his slightly cheesy "B.B. 'Blues Boy' King" stompers from the 50s like the one above. Sure sounds like him and the "Orchestra" are having a good time. I expect some of my readers have their own favorites to recommend.

•    Many conservatives, even ones who are not Rod "The Get-Ready Man" Dreher, are bitching about that poll showing a slightly smaller percentage of Christians in America than once there was. At National Review David French knows why: "Why Does ‘Organized Religion’ Get a Bad Rap? Because the Elite Lies About It." Evil liberals say Jesus people are obsessed with cultural issues like gay marriage, but the truth is Christians contribute heavily to charity. Yes, it's the old "society claims I'm a pedophile, but I bought twenty tickets to the Policeman's Ball" argument. More interesting to me is this claim:
Sexual politics is simply not a dominant topic compared to scriptural study, discussions of family, or exhortations to serve the poorest and most disadvantaged members of the community. If I were to critique the church, I’d say we need to discuss the sexual revolution issues a bit more — to equip kids and families to face the cultural onslaught.
Don't talk about it enough, huh? Let's look at the past few examples of French's own writing at National Review. What picture of Christianity do you get from it? There's not a lot about charity in there -- in fact, I found no David French posts at all promoting alms to the poor. (Come on, it's National Review!) Here's what I did see:
"The Clintons, Tom Brady, and the ‘Scoreboard’ Life" (Shorter: Libtards cheat because they don't have Jesus);
"When Crusades Meet Courtrooms" and "Three Recent Lawsuits Challenge the ‘Rape Crisis’ Storyline" (Shorter: Rape is not the fault of the men lying bitches falsely accuse of raping them, it's the fault of the sexual revolution);
"Why a Huckabee Loss Would Be a Win for Religious Conservatives" (Shorter: Because all the other GOP candidates hate gays and fornication as much as Huckabee does. Eat it, libtards!);
"Obama’s Crackdown on Dissent Has Made Conservatives a Little Paranoid — and Rightly So" (Shorter: If Ted Cruz was President libtards would so be just as paranoid about Jade Helm as we are, except we aren't paranoid because Obama really is a monster);
"Comedy, Cowardice, or Both?" (Shorter: SNL libtards didn't draw Muhammed! Sure, it was funny, but what's that got to do with anything?);
"Liberals Peer into Your Heart and See the Darkness Inside" (Shorter: Libtards are mean and hateful. Not like us!)
Etc. And here are the records from the other times we've caught French's culture-war act. (This one will do if you can't read them all.) All told I'd say the biggest PR problem Christianity has isn't "Elite Lies About It" -- it's people like David French.

•    OK, here's the advertising portion of the program: A friend of mine in New York is between freelance gigs DON'T RUN AWAY SHE DOESN'T WANT A HANDOUT only another freelance gig. Métier includes branding, marketing, research, strategy, communications, social media, digital product development, content and product creation, etc. Drop me a note if you've got something for her.

•    Melissa Langsam Braunstein of The Federalist testifies to "listening to a panel at AEI on Monday night, during which several contributors to The Dadly Virtues: Adventures from the Worst Job You’ll Ever Love discussed their take on fatherhood." Sounds like a corker:
I cannot imagine a similar panel of mothers laughing as they described purposely breaking their child’s leg, as P.J. O’Rourke’s son believed he did, while regaling the audience with the saga of teaching that young son how to ski. The experience taught O’Rourke that he’s better off being the breadwinner who can afford ski lessons.
And this:
Tucker Carlson’s presentation may have been the most different from what a panel of mothers might offer. Amidst his lighthearted remarks, Carlson repeatedly mentioned that he’s not reflective about his parenting and takes no responsibility for any of his four children’s failings; he believes any mistakes his children make are strictly their own, and he does never holds his wife or himself liable.
And this:
Jonah Goldberg sounded endearingly clueless...
Stop to take a breath here.
.... – since we gather his daughter’s alright now – as he described a fall she took during toddlerhood that resulted in a sizable forehead gash. Apparently, Goldberg was still new enough to parenting that he didn’t realize his daughter’s bloody face needed to be stitched up professionally. Luckily, his sister-in-law was able to advise via telephone and pass along the good advice to wait for a plastic surgeon at the hospital.
Braunstein's conclusion:
This is all to say: fatherhood sounds rather liberating. Whatever our cultural expectations of men, it seems our standards for fathers are less exacting (and crazy-making) than those for American mothers. Having listened to the fathers on this panel, I dare say that difference is largely driven by the fact that men aren’t critical of one another’s parenting in the same way that women can be...
Either than or these guys are just a bunch of fucking idiots.

Monday, May 11, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 13.

First thought: Is Max Gail the new Brad Dourif?

I understand the necessity of the VFW scenes and even enjoyed the details, like the low-rent strip tease and the Hill's Coffee donation can (though Weiner made the room itself look Overlook Hotel bleak; if he weren't so eager to get cosmic, what would these scenes look like?). It's important for Don's journey that he tell somebody about what happened in Korea when he doesn't have to tell it (just as it was important that he spill his guts about his childhood to the guys from Hershey), and it's important for the cultural mirror people keep telling us Mad Men is that he express it, and the other vets receive it, as a fragging story of a sort that would become familiar after Vietnam. (But forgive me: I've known a few veterans; if one of them tells another vet he doesn't want to talk about the war, doesn't that normally end the conversation?)

Speaking of cosmic, Betty has revealed herself to be kind of Zen, albeit Westchester Zen: "Why was I ever doing it?" is a brilliant insight, and not accidental. (I bet she's a really good psych student.) Have I been mistaking her remoteness for severe emotional damage all along, when it was actually just a different kind of strength than what the Joans and Peggys have been trying to work their liberated selves up into? The matched shots of Betty bravely struggling up the stairs, even giving a gracious greeting through pain as she climbs, with Sally reading her letter seem to say so. I guess both things can be true. Remember all those times Joan gave Peggy frost for what she read as Peggy getting above or at least ahead of herself ("all you did was prove to them I'm a meaningless secretary and you're a humorless bitch")? Joan was insisting that, despite lacking the tools and opportunity Peggy had, she was also entitled to dignity. With these scenes the show does that on Betty's behalf. I wish there could be a Sally spin-off so I could see what she does with this knowledge.

As far as end-tying, this is by far the most elegant of the series, and what I'm guessing is the Pete Campbell resolution is the least. I'm not even a Campbell hater, but there's only one way his Trudy-in-Kansas fantasy makes sense to me: as a pale echo of Don's proposal to Megan -- an attempt to enforce normality and stave off the shadow of death. It may work out better for Pete than for Don because he has a smaller secret. Oh, yeah, that one: We have one more episode for that mantelpiece gun to go off.

I doubt that it will, though: Pete's drama can't be as big as Don's. The night this episode debuted I followed the stunned Twitter reactions to his Oklahoma adventure but when I finally watched the episode, it made perfect sense -- including Don's disposal of the Caddy. Keep in mind that so far Don hasn't really "lost it all" -- he's still very well-off and if he took a bus back to New York he could work his investments, maybe write a book, and wait out the McCann non-compete. All he's done so far is a bit of ritual self-mortification; the phonebook beatdown is a bit severe, but he seems to bounce back pretty good from it.  The weirdest part of this journey is that so far the America Don left behind so he could reinvent himself in New York still looks, upon his return, like a hell -- it's much richer than it was in Dick Whitman's childhood, but the people are still vicious and stupid. That's why Don blesses that Li'l-Abner punk. "You're lucky you feel guilty," he tells him, "that's the only difference between you and those animals right now." As far as he can see, that's the only difference between Don and the animals he grew up with, too. Giving the kid the car is a weird way to shine a light, but it was available and it cost him little. We'll see in the finale if he has to give up something that costs more.

Friday, May 08, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND THE HORN.

Friday I got Monday on my mind.

   Last summer Michael Webster took some photos at Coney Island and, as is usual with him, saw the scene differently than your average joy-popper would. The package is at Burn magazine and is called "Too Many Black People in One Place." I wrote the accompanying essay. All the work predates Ferguson and Baltimore but still holds up pretty well. Give a look when you get a chance and tell me what you think.

   As we all know, my credentials as an equal-opportunity blasphemer are impeccable. Jonah Goldberg's position is similarly consistent -- that is, he was a moron before the Pamela Geller uproar and remains one today. His latest, "Progressives Love Anti-Religious Art — as Long as It’s Anti-Christian" is just another fatty serving of the same congealed ressentiment he's been dishing for years -- it even contains references to Piss Christ and "Mapplethorpe’s hide-the-bullwhip oeuvre." (It's like his mother was scared by a Duchamp readymade while she was pregnant.) Goldberg knocks people who don't think Geller has a Constitutional right to her bullshit, but who's that?  Just a tiny sliver of idiots. Most normal people don't much care how the avatars of the world's major superstitions are portrayed (at least not the ones they don't believe in!) and, I would imagine, consider Geller an nuisance on the level of Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, looking for chances to stir the shit. (You think reactionaries like Peter King are turning on Geller because they love Mohammed?) But Goldberg portrays the real problem as snotty bohos with their so-called "art" who get fans and grants while he has to float in the oceans with nutcakes and humiliate himself with his shit writing on a regular basis.

Tuesday, May 05, 2015

FUCK YOUR BLOODTHIRSTY GODS, CONT.

I hear Pam Geller held a Draw Mohammed event in Texas which drew some unwanted attention (well, unwanted by normal people, anyway -- I'm sure Geller is delighted). I wonder why she didn't invite me -- I have after all been the internet's boldest, baddest blasphemy-be-unto-him artist since 2006:

I'm joking, of course -- the noted rageclown Geller doesn't do free-speech events, she does skree-kill-Mooslims events, in which I have no interest. Nonetheless, I defend to the death their right to harrumph harrumph harrumph. Now where's my medal?

UPDATE. Nobody likes Pammy.

Monday, May 04, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 12.


The very best thing in the entire episode, and maybe in the series, was the scene at the Wisconsin house, and the dark daughter lurking in the shadows of the home of Di the Death Waitress' ex-husband: blandly resentful, shaggy, never giving a sign of being part of these waxy, pale Christians (and vice versa), she gave me real chills.

The ex-husband was pretty good too, not ostentatiously crazy, merely vicious -- a man with a good enough explanation for his ugliness that you might not at first consider how horrible a husband he must have been, and must still be (did he really say in front of his wife that she didn't know any better?). I begin to see not only why Diana left, but also why Don is so obsessed with her -- her horrible pre-life replicates his own, except she had no magic to escape it with. Don is retracing his own steps through her.

In the home stretch Mad Men is getting stranger, and it’s easier to see why it has to in Don’s scenes than in anyone else’s because he’s the haunted one — everyone else is trying to figure out the life they’re in, and Don is trying to figure out the life he never had. Several people have speculated that Don is already dead (“and he’s finally realizing it”), and that’s getting to be a good bet, but for the moment I’m looking at it as a simpler proposition: Don knows that the life he took up is not his, that it’s unsustainable, and he’s leaving it behind.

His departure from the Miller meeting signals this by being super-weird; no one makes anything of the newly-imported hotshot leaving in the middle of a presentation except Ted, and his reaction is absurdly inappropriate — it looks like, “Oh, that son of a gun.” (I thought people would beginning clearing their throats when Don spent all that time staring out the window at the crucifix in the sky.) And Don is super-weird through most of the episode; tightly-wound in his meeting with Boss Hobart, hallucinating Bert, unconvincingly lying and apologizing at the Wisconsin house, there’s nothing comfortable about him until he decides to make that detour.

Maybe after a while the heightened scenes with Peggy and Roger will seem as necessary, but like I said, Peggy has a more real-life problem to figure out, so the roller-skating and badass slo-mo strut are jarring. Peggy’s become such a knotted-up, suffering careerist that she’s earned a more genuine nervous breakdown. Joan’s fight with the arrayed forces of sexism is more realistic, and it’s interesting in a trad TV social-commentary way. But we came here, or at least stayed here, not to see the Sixties spin out, but to see what happens to Don. It won’t be long now.

Monday, April 27, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 11.

The key moment was when Jim Hobart from McCann told the SCP partners they'd "died and gone to advertising heaven" and they all sat there looking miserable. Actually I take that back -- they looked like they didn't know how they should look. In fact I think even the actors didn't  know how they should look -- because the feeling was too ambiguous. The moment was clearly meant to show that, though advertising is what they do all day, are good at, and claim to care about, Pete, Roger, Joan, Ted and Don (well, maybe not Ted) are only now acknowledging that it's not really that important to them.

But what is, then? Joan's got the clearest gripe about the move -- McCann's a sexist shithole and she'll have trouble there. Roger -- well, his name was on the door, and so was Don's for a while. But neither of them ever showed any thirst for permanence before -- shit, they're both practically estranged from their children. And Pete's reaction looks like nothing but pique. Really, Jim's right -- this is like minor leaguers complaining they got sent up to The Show. The only reason to complain is if you're sick of baseball.

So what do they want? I fear Joan and Rich Cracker are going to be spun off into an entrepreneural love nest. Pete may devote some of his spare time to becoming a better human being, and I have to admit his tip-off to Peggy (coming after a mommy-baby flash that was very well handled) and his chivalry with Trudy make that look like an interesting project. (Question: Pete told Peggy about the McCann move but Don didn't?) Sterling can have a sitcom with Mme. Calvet, something like Green Acres in Québécois.

But what about Don? I think showing up at the Waitress of Death's apartment red- faced drunk in the wee hours was about the most human thing I've seen Don do, and the most pathetic. If it means anything, it means Don's going to have to bottom out before he can get anywhere else. But that's a big if.

I liked Peggy's truth-telling scene with Stan, and all honor to the undersung Jay R. Ferguson, who has a certain preening, thoughtless sort of art-monkey down cold, and who showed here that even a doofus can get institutional sexism if you give him absolutely no chance to evade the point -- like, have someone he loves make it. (At this point his relationship with Peggy seems more realistic to me than Don's.) I guess the only problem with it was the truth-telling; to me, it's a sign the show is ending and people are going to start spelling out what they want. And I fear it's going to be things like respect in the workplace, a financially comfortable family life, and a bunch of other dull shit that's perfectly fine in and of itself but hardly worth all that artistic effort. Shit, maybe Draper will go back to Pennsylvania and make that old whorehouse into a Hilton.

P.S. There's been a Campbell at Greenwich Country Day for generations, but suddently family history is an issue? What'd I miss? P.P.S. With Trudy's eloquent complaint, it's official: Women in 1970 are sick of this shit. Was it Virginia Slims?

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

ROOTS.

An "embarrassed" Ben Affleck admitted Tuesday that he asked producers of the PBS documentary show "Finding Your Roots" to edit out the discovery that one of his distant ancestors owned slaves... He said he spoke with show host and Harvard scholar Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, and lobbied him to take out his scandalous family history. "Skip agreed with me on the slave owner but made other choices I disagreed with," Affleck wrote. "In the end, it's his show and I knew that going in. I'm proud to be his friend and proud to have participated." -- NBC News.
"I don't know how to tell you this, but... Do you know about Nathan Bedford Forrest?"
"The founder of the Klan? Wait a minute -- are you saying one of my ancestors -- was Nathan Bedford Forrest?"
"No."
"Thank God. That would have been terrible. You have no idea how much I despise that man."
"No, I'm saying that Clayton Sykes -- who wrote a book in 1962 called Nathan Bedford Forrest: The Greatest American, and who actively petitioned to get Forrest's face on Mt. Rushmore until he died in 1975 -- was your paternal grandfather."
"This cannot possibly be made public."
"I don't know why not. It isn't your fault, after all."
"Let me put it another way: I cannot possibly allow this to be made public."
"I see."

+ + +

"But my parents were decent people from Asdofel, Missouri."
"Perhaps you've heard of the Monster of Asdofel, a deranged white supremacist who over six years raped several black women in western Missouri, leaving politically charged notes behind. One of his victims was your mother, whom he took for an African-American, probably due to his astigmatism. Though it was hushed up, documentary evidence proves that you are the child of their union."
"I'm torn here. On the one hand I'm related to a monster, on the other I'm related to his victim. Hang on, let me call my agent. [calls agent.] He says the men who are about to burst through the door should seize and destroy your notes."

+ + +

"So you're saying your have evidence that every single member of my family from 1945 onwards, including my little nieces and nephews, are neo-Nazis?"
"I'm afraid so."
"There's only one course of action left for me, Gates. Prepare to -- dammit, what's wrong with this thing? Oh, I see; it's got one of those trigger locks. Well, would you accept a bribe?"

+ + +

"Your great-grandfather, it seems, was Adolph Hitler."
"Dr. Gates, please! My fans must never know! Name your price."
"All right: No more Deuce Bigelow films."

Monday, April 20, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 10.

Mathis is now my new favorite character, too bad he’s [SPOILER] fired. First of all, his inept use of Don’s line gave me my first belly laugh of the season. (His foul mouth, which Don also mentions when he fires him, is one of the tiny cracks starting the avalanche of obscenity that would be the 70s and ever after.) Second, Mathis got to something profoundly important about Don that no other male on the show has been willing to approach. (Which reminds me: Don’s supposed to be a genius but he’s nothing but glib; Ginsburg was supposed to be a genius but he was just nuts. Mathis the hack is the only “creative” on this show with any insight on actual human beings.)

Mathis gets to Don partly because he talks back to him, which is something Don never has to take from subordinates. But the lack of respect for his talent and position is nothing compared to the slap about him being nothing but handsome, and Mathis’ relay of the story that Lucky Strike scion Garner was in love with Don and wanted to jack him off. That hits Don where he lives; earlier, when Cutler called him out for his hyper-masculinity (“a bully and drunk… a football player in a suit”) it was just ridiculous, but hearing about how Don’s sexuality affects men really pisses him off. It suddenly lights up all the gay stories in the show, and also Don’s much-discussed history as a victim of sexual abuse. For a moment we and Don have to face that his behavior is compulsive, that his fetish for objectification comes from being objectified, a reaction to the real story of his past…

…which Sally brings up, come to think of it, at dinner later as a way of peeling Don off her nubile classmate. Here too both Don and we get the benefit of the insight: Sally sees the desire to please “just comes oozing out” of Don. She’s hip enough to get that, but too young to know what it comes from. She knows about the poverty (the last time she showed any admiration for her dad was when he finally shared that with her) and she knows (or says she knows) something about sex, but she doesn’t know how deep and twisted it can get. Don’s send-off is as honest as it can be and as hopelessly square as it has to be: “You’re a very beautiful girl,” he tells her – how many other girls has he told that? – “It’s up to you to be more than that.” That’s a pretty open brief. Hey, maybe she’ll join Baader-Meinhof! Or The Runaways!

The Joan-Rich Cracker story was cute, and gives more room to Christina Hendricks’ great Season 7b performance, but it’s inconsequential except as a counterpoint to Don’s alleged big question – “What do you see for the future?” – to which everyone at SCP has transparently bad, short-sighted answers. That kind of cable-zen garbage gives me the itch, but so does the hoary story of monsters of ambition reaching beyond their busy schedules to find true love. If this season ends with Joan having a baby with Rich Cracker in his penthouse, may the shade of Douglas Sirk strangle Matt Weiner with his ectoplasm.

I have to say I approve of all the kids on Mad Men behaving sort of like they’re in a Bresson movie; it really makes them seem a different species from the grown-ups. The funny thing is, Betty has always acted a little like that too. (It’s one of the reasons why she was so fearless with the East Village hippies – she regarded them as less successful child-adults.) But Betty is not really a child, and her handling of Glenn when he spills about his enlistment looks very gentle and correct till you remember she’s been emotionally manipulating him since he was a little boy and she doesn’t even have a clue that it’s fucked up to do that to minors (though maybe the psych classes will help). “Don’t tell me that” was a great preface to “you did this for me” because the thing Betty really wants is not to be told.

Sally’s understanding of Vietnam is on a par with her understanding of her father: she doesn’t know much except it stinks. How I wish we could have a Sally spin-off and follow her through the days of Johnny Rotten and Ronald Reagan.

Monday, April 13, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 9.

Because Mad Men has such a moody house style, it was hard to recognize at first that this episode is a farce -- bitter, a little sluggish, and with some dark shadows, but with appropriately outsized comic premises. (Funnily enough I was just reading something about Kafka reading early pages of The Trial to friends and how he had trouble getting through because everyone was laughing so much.) The sad story of Diana the waitress tugs the heartstrings, but look at it from Don's perspective: He basically gives away a million dollars because he thinks this mystery woman is going to take away his pain -- and it turns out pain is what she's after. Then he discovers his furniture is missing.

Okay, so it's not A Flea in Her Ear. Maybe it's because the principals are now sufficiently comfortable (financially and dramatically) that I can't worry about them, or maybe it's the dank smell of the approaching end that's encouraging me to detach, but whatever it is I'm not inclined to take the suffering in this episode very seriously. And there is suffering, copious suffering. Even Pretty Megan, usually associated more with insufferability than suffering, has her nerves convincingly flayed; she has moved past gentle, make-believe separation into the hard reality of divorce and, worse yet, it's shoved her right back into the maw of her family, and I may be dense but I only realized when Megan's sister was blubbering about having to fly back to *Paris all by herself that she and the old lady aren't charming gallic goofs, they're horrible, self-centered monsters and it's understandable Megan would be freaked out that Don won't be around anymore to rescue her from them.

Or from scumbags like Harry Crane. It's perfect that the one thing ringing in her ears after that humiliating encounter is "I can't believe Don threw you away... you don't think he could have helped you?" -- as is made obvious by her bitterness at the lawyer's meeting (with no lawyer), and by the writers making the implicit callback to Campbell's and Sterling's bitter speeches about bitter divorced wives. It begins to seem that the writers share my feeling that no one on this show is going to learn anything.

But hey, comedy! We have Mimi Rogers as a boss dyke artiste who can also approach a problem from, as it were, the other direction, leading to some beautiful one-upgirlship between Peggy and Stan ("She tried the same thing with me -- but she didn't get as far"). That was good enough by itself, but then showing Stan at home with Elaine, showing only the tiniest glimmer of awareness that losing a power struggle wasn't the worst thing he did, was even better. Warm fandom may be a bad perspective from which to watch this show; the picture's clearer from farther away.

*UPDATE. Commenter shortstop points out that the Calvets are from Montreal. In fairness to myself, that is an easy thing to miss. sundaystyle makes a good point:
 I don't care about Diana, Waitress of Death, or Pima swanning around out-butching the guys... if Weiner's going out on a note of existential despair, I hope the remaining episodes focus more on Peggy, Don, Pete, Joan, Sally, Betty and Roger. They're the characters we've been watching since the beginning.
Yeah, the more comfortable I get with this being Just a TV Show rather than a deathless work of art, the more I want to see character payoffs, too. If you share my tedious preoccupation with Mad Men, you might enjoy Matt Zoller Seitz's recap; good catch, Jeff Strabone! (But isn't it weird that Don's record library still has Martin Denny in it?)

Monday, April 06, 2015

SEASON 7, EPISODE 8.

(Yes, we're back to Mad Men recaps. Patience, we don't have many to go.) Don Draper's arc is beginning to look like Tony Soprano's, and I don't expect a better end for him. Tony had some glimpses of a better way that he turned out unable to benefit from (I still recall him contemplating nature and being grateful for life while Paulie was breaking some guy's leg); Don gets so many messages from the great beyond that I expect William Burroughs to start talking to him, yet he doesn't seem to get anywhere either.

The flashbacks to Rachel Katz and (implicitly) Midge Daniels make sense in the same way that Don's season-6-ending whorehouse monologue made sense: Don is too intelligent not to contemplate the past (his past, anyway), but not enlightened enough to react to it in a constructive way. But that Hershey meeting flash-bang is really beginning to look like a misdirection, not to say a con. Is Don really just a charming zilch? So far in the interrupted season 7 we've seen him act slightly nicer than previously to the people he loves, but everyone else he seems puzzled by. (He reacts to Cosgrove's monologue with the same bewildered expression he gave Cosgrove's tap-dance in "The Crash.") It's getting so the sordid sequelae of his sexcapades are just another of Mad Men's guilty pleasures -- fun to see the coupling, fun also to see the regret and/or horror afterwards. As regret/horror go, Rachel's sister at shiva and the waitress really delivered. But what's any of this ever going to make Don feel except sad, and do except drink? For a guy who reads Dante at the beach, Don's not really a heavy thinker.

I realize season premieres, or half-season premieres, are mostly set-up, so there's no reason to be disappointed by the lack of significant action in this episode. The most interesting thing to me about Cosgrove is that, delicious as his vengeance is ("Shit" -- Pete Campbell), it also means he's not going to write that novel. And Peggy's drunk date is charming because she's charming, and it's nice to see this poor messed-up Draperstein's Monster relax a little, and her date isn't (or hasn't yet been revealed as) a programmatic Mad Men sexist scumbag -- unlike the McCann creeps in the Peggy-Joan meeting whose hair-raising misogyny is dialed up so high I thought it might be a dream sequence, or that Allen Funt would jump in to pull the plug. Joan's reaction to that scene -- bitterness toward Peggy, and highly unsatisfying retail therapy -- is, given what we've learned about Joan, no less depressingly expected than the Don reactions I've been complaining about. But thanks in large part to the brilliant Christina Hendricks, whose elevator scene bears watching without dialogue, I now find Joan more interesting.

Friday, April 03, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


One of the funniest things by two of the funniest people of all time.

•    It is axiomatic that Jonah Goldberg can make anything worse, and the Indiana RFRA case is no exception. Here he shows evidence of having been crammed with some libertarian revisionism: Goldberg argues that the pre-"clarification" RFRA was not like Jim Crow because Jim Crow was really about economic oppression -- because everything is! -- and had nothing to do with anything so gauche as violent prejudice against a despised minority, and still less to do with political power:
Of course, the more infamous Jim Crow laws were aimed at barring blacks from being able to vote. But there was a pernicious logic to such efforts. Denying blacks the vote, even in states where they were the majority of citizens, guaranteed that they couldn’t overturn racist state economic regulations. 
In fact, says Goldberg, Confederate businesses loved serving black people, but because a flood of emancipated black workers caused a labor shortage (forget it, he's on a roll), both blacks and black-loving shopkeepers were Jim Crowed into submission not by the Klan nor by the White Leagues, but by Big Business -- you know, the people conservatives worshiped as gods until Tim Cook said he was gay. "Ultimately," says Goldberg, "the federal government had to use just coercion to crush unjust state-government coercion," without mentioning that his own magazine was against that "just coercion" every step of the way; they affect to feel sorry about that now, and one would like to think that they'll apologize for their absurd attitude toward gays fifty years from now (if they and the nation last so long), but alas, Goldberg shows that they haven't really learned a thing:
In Indiana, the most vocal and arguably the most powerful voices against even the perception of anti-gay discrimination have come from the business community. And, one suspects, there are plenty of people in the wedding-planning industry eager for such business. 
We could impose a fine on recalcitrant religious wedding photographers. But the market already does that, every time they turn away paying customers.
They still think Title II is an injustice and don't want it applied to anyone else.

•  One Bob & Ray thing isn't enough: Enjoy this bit -- first four minutes of this clip from the Letterman show, but the rest is okay too -- in which "Barry Campbell" talks about his disastrous opening in the play "The Tender T-Bone."

•    From the Weird Reaction file: You may have seen the fascinating story of a suitcase full of photos, receipts, and diary entries chronicling a German businessman's extra-marital affair forty-five years ago that has been revived as a gallery show. Most of us find it interesting or creepy or a spur to reflection. Ole Perfesser Instapundit, however, reacts thusly:
IT WASN’T AN AFFAIR, it was performance art. Bow down and don’t criticize, philistines!
Most of the time I think Reynolds is just putting it on for the rubes, but sometimes it seems he really is that weird mix of Babbitt and Nathan Bedford Forrest he plays on the internet.

•    Speaking of the arts, I went over to Acculturated to take in the latest by Mark Judge, or Mark Gauvreau Judge or Gark Jauvreau Mudge or whatever he calls himself these days. He's sighing over a 1954 Sports Illustrated cover showing a pretty girl in a modest one-piece bathing suit largely obscured by sea spray. As you may have guessed, this inspires a meditation on how much sexier things were before sideboob.
More than fifty years later, the Pamela Nelson photo ignites my passion more than anything that is in the hyped, recently published 2015 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. The photographs in the new swimsuit issue are dull. The poses are clichéd, similar, and the models look like cyborgs. There is the arching-back pose. The bedroom-eyes-on-the-beach shot. The backside shot (or shots). Did I mention the arching-back pose?

In our culture today, pornography has excelled at titillating the masses, but is poor at capturing the soul. And no matter what our sex-drenched society tells us, sex is sexier when the soul is involved.
Every single one of the poses named above comes with a link, so Acculturated readers can decide whether they want to beat off to contemporary or vintage pin-ups -- which I guess is how some people measure cultural seriousness. Chacun à son gout is very very true...

•    Still speaking of the arts, this is from a report on wingnut intellectual George Nash's speech to the Philadelphia Society last month:
“Many conservatives, of course, including many in this room, are laboring valiantly and effectively in the realm of cultural renewal,” Nash said. “But as a historian I am constrained to note that the ‘progressives’ in this country continue to predominate in the production of culture, and in the manufacture and distribution of prestige among our cultural elites. As long as this imbalance continues, the fate of post-Reagan conservatism will be problematic.”
Do remember this, dear reader: You may think of novels, plays, ballet, music, etc. as works of art that illuminate the human condition, but to the great minds of the conservative movement they are merely widgets in "the manufacture and distribution of prestige among our cultural elites." Their policies are inhuman, that is, because they don't really relate to humanity.

Monday, February 23, 2015

AFTER-PARTY.

The Oscars should be about the simple joys of life -- gambling and vanity -- and not about politics, but I see Charlie Pierce has people expecting me to talk about those poor nuts who hate-watched Libtard Hollyweird from their survivalist treehouses. Most of the best ravings have been well picked over, but there are a few morsels left to enjoy. First, Matthew Clark, "Associate Counsel for Government Affairs and Media Advocacy with the [wingnut front group] ACLJ" and author of the dystopian epic "Hollywood’s Self-Indulgent Delusional Demagoguery." Sample:
For anyone who has an ounce of critical thinking ability (critical thinking, not PC dogmatic zombism), [the Oscars are] almost unbearable to watch (it’s like watching sausage being made, with rotten meat, and then watching someone eat it, on prime-time TV).
This guy has a future in slasher films. Oh, also:
What if an actress said this award wouldn’t have been possible if my mother chose to abort me? 
Sarah Silverman hasn't done this bit yet? Get on it, Hollywood!  Next we have Young Cons and their wonderful headline:
Sean Penn Makes “Racist” Remark At The Oscars, Everyone Forgets His Party Affiliation
Similarly, when Jane Fonda does something stupid, the media just sits back and lets everybody think she's a Republican. My favorite, though, is the line from IJReview's "5 Hollywood Actors for Conservatives To Root For At This Year’s Oscars," introducing their #3, Michael Keaton:
Michael Keaton may not be a conservative, but his speech at the Golden Globes this year espoused strong conservative principles, even if he didn’t realize it...
Also, #2 Reese Witherspoon: "While she may not be a conservative, she espouses some refreshing ideas regarding modesty..." If this kind of thinking spreads, I could wind up on this year's Best-Dressed List. Thank you, good night!

Sunday, February 15, 2015

ON TO OSCAR, 5.

(See previous reviews of American Sniper, Birdman, Boyhood, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.)

The Theory of Everything. As I've said before, the biopic is a minor form that usually tells us why some famous person was famous and doesn't spare much time for the demands of art. The Theory of Everything stretches the formula a little -- it's not just about Stephen Hawking, it's about him and his wife Jane -- but it's still an inspirational famous-person story, with both Hawking and his doting wife rising through suffering to redemption. In some ways it's just the sort of gush you'd expect: for example, Jane doesn't seem to think about cheating on her increasingly enfeebled husband (with her saintly choir director, no less) until well past the halfway point -- and at that moment, hundreds of miles away, Hawking starts spitting up blood. And every so often someone gets the opportunity to tell the world what a genius Stephen is (most melodramatically, a big-time Russian scientist who carries the crowd with him at a crucial turn). The inspira-biopic formula is faithfully followed.

And yet... the Hawkings' relationship is genuinely interesting. Their meet-cute is pro-forma -- he's gawky but obviously impassioned and fun, she's sincere and sweet and too real for those other boys, and their life at Cambridge is sunny and full of promise. But when Hawking begins to have medical problems, their relationship is stepped up -- though Stephen wants to give her an out, Jane insists she's in for the long haul and that she has the steel for it.

The haul is indeed long, far longer than the two years Stephen is originally given to live, and both parties work hard at sustaining it, and at Stephen's career. Jane's other interests are subordinated, and over time it wears on her, as Felicity Jones, who plays Jane, brilliantly shows: She doesn't become shrewish or embittered -- it turns out she does indeed have the steel -- but she does stiffen; she sees that she may break, and begins to look for ways to sustain herself.

Stephen meanwhile is both increasingly driven and dependent, and like Jane is smart enough to find out how to keep from collapsing. His academic success everyone knows about, but his way of dealing with his physical dilemma is more interesting. Eddie Redmayne is great at conveying the effects of Hawking's ALS, and at showing how Hawking uses his wit and charm, even when deprived of most conventional means of expressing them, to avoid despair in both his own life and his marriage. Still, eventually he, too, has to look outside the relationship to sustain himself. (Though putting across delicate and painful emotions while physically challenged is an Oscar-season punchline, I can tell you that in Redmayne's case, when Stephen has to have the marriage-ending discussion with Jane, it absolutely works.)

So this inspirational story is about what from some perspective might be called a failed marriage. The most obvious argument for its success is Hawking's glorious career. As for Jane's success, that's a little trickier; the film suggests that when Hawking finally acknowledges the possibility of God, which for Jane has always been a certainty, it's because she has made God real to him by her devotion. It seems a small enough victory, though you could say that any good relationship between educated people is to some extent an extended conversation, and that Hawking's admission is not so much about Jane winning a point as it is a sign that they have all along been talking the same language.

All the craft elements are very fine, but I especially liked the lushly romantic score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, which in the grand Hollywood tradition not only underlines but exalts the characters' feelings; it's up for an Oscar and I wouldn't be shocked if it won.

UPDATE. Here's an interesting Music Times column handicapping the Best Score race; it's always nice to hear from someone who knows what he or she is talking about, though the author's view that Alexandre Desplat's double nomination won't work against him is contradicted by history.

Friday, February 13, 2015

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

  I thought yesterday's First Things article -- about how, thanks to 50 Shades of Grey, BDSM will lead followers to the Church, thereby reversing the usual pattern -- would be an anomaly. But now I see it's becoming a wingnut-Christian trope, executed today by Mollie Hemingway, who I guess is the new The Anchoress. At least Hemingway starts with a perfectly entertaining review of the film; she finds the sex scenes "pretty tame" and names other BDSM-themed stories she prefers, which as a former Catholic I appreciate. But then:
Anyway — if, as a character written by G. K. Chesterton said, “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God,” let’s ponder what women who are into this awful literature are seeking.
Ugh, that quote again -- and I might have known it was Chesterton, that's how the more high-class God-botherers always announce themselves.
I want to say this before the days when such statements are branded hate-speech worthy of re-education camp...
And the same goes for ridiculous persecution fantasies.
...but a hell of a lot of women would, if forced to choose, prefer to be in a loving committed relationship with a dude than get successively better office jobs on the way to the corner office.
Also, they'd rather go to heaven and lounge on clouds all day than go to your liberal-secular schools. Thereafter Hemingway just spools out the usual bullshit: Girls who try to make something more of themselves than dutiful wifemothers end up bitter hags with frozen eggs; men are boycotting marriage because of bitter hags with frozen eggs; women don't want feminism, they "want to be lost in a relationship, completely submitting to a man who is dangerous enough to need rescue but loving enough to notice what makes them beautiful," etc. Well, one good thing may come of this; in future, Jesus-friendly films like God's Not Dead will have a lot more nudity, and missals may come with bodice-ripping illustrations and Fabio on the cover as Jesus.

•   I don't usually pimp books here, mainly because I'm sub-literate, but I can say this about Dead is Better, by my wife's friend Jo Perry: If you liked my own neo-noir Morgue for Whores (and if you haven't read that, what's stopping you), you'll probably like this. Actually, that's not a pre-condition -- Dead is less grimy and sleazy than my novel, which surprisingly does not make it less interesting. The narrator is a dead guy, murdered, and he's just getting the hang of the afterworld. He figures out how to locomote in his new "frictionless" plane of existence, and even to hitch rides in cars, pretty quickly, but he's slower to make sense of what he's learning about the people he left behind in meat world -- and of the dog, also dead, who appears to have adopted him. Murder, mystery, redemption -- all that. Oh, and very sharp writing. Have a look.

•   It's become de rigueur for conservatives to defend Scott Walker's college performance -- we Charlie Pierce fans call this "the C-plus Augustus maneuver." Jonah Goldberg ups the ante and defends Walker's punt on evolution. Goldberg calls it "Darwinism," a popular schtick among the brethren, and says no fair you're trying to make us look dumb:
To borrow a phrase from the campus left, Darwinism is used to “otherize” certain people of traditional faith — and the politicians who want their vote.
Same thing with those citizens whose Constitutional right to treat epilepsy with leeches is mocked by them there pointy-heads. Then Goldberg gives his own I-din't-come-from-no-monkey speech on grounds of moral grandeur:
Beneath the surface, the salience of evolution as a political football is ultimately about the status of man. Are humans moral creatures whose actions are judged by some external or divine standard, or are we simply accidental winners of an utterly random contest of genes?
A God that works through evolution -- why, it's too fantastic to even contemplate, just like universal health care. How I'd love to see the big courtroom scene in Inherit the Wind re-written for Goldberg -- especially if they replaced Brady's Bible citations with quotes from Animal House and "he who smelt it dealt it."

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

CULTURE WAR FOR DUMMIES: AN ONGOING SERIES.

Haven't looked in for a while on Acculturated, the culture-war jump school for would-be Douthats that has given me much pleasure in the past. There's currently a post-Grammys piece there by Mark Judge, the artist formerly known as Mark Gauvreau Judge, beginning thus:
Don’t make Sam Smith gay. 
That is to say, don’t make Sam Smith a representative of the gay community and a symbol for all things gay.
See, Judge hates it when people see sexual orientation -- that is, when gay people recognize gay people -- and also when people see color -- like when black people tell Iggy Azalea to fuck off. It all goes back to a youthful trauma:
When I was in college, the British duo the Pet Shop Boys were key contributors to the soundtrack of my young life. The Pet Shop Boys are gay.
[Blink. Blink.]
When I heard their first album Please in 1986, I felt that delirious swoon of falling in love with a piece of musical art...
I followed the Boys for years, but something started bothering me: they increasingly became known as a gay band and not just a band. Great songs like “King’s Cross,” “Liberation,” and “It Always Comes as a Surprise” were subordinated to the larger theme of homosexuality. The Pet Shop Boys were not brilliant songwriters who could touch the hearts or people all over the world—they were “queering pop.” It was like only selling Van Morrison’s music in Irish pubs...
I was a suburban kid at a Catholic university who occasionally snuck a look at Playboy. If I was to listen to the journalists, and the political club goers, and the subculture police, I would have turned myself away. Because I wasn’t the target audience.
The Gay Gay Gay took my babies away! The subculture police with their phallic nightsticks tried to drive Judge out of the disco, just as the black radicals tried to spoil his appreciation of Motown, I suppose. I'm surprised he survived with his perfectly-unexceptional tastes intact.

This is a high point of the issue, though you might also enjoy Acculturated's "Celebrities Behaving Well Award" nominations, including "Taylor Swift for reaching out to one of her adoring fans to give her real, thoughtful, honest advice about an unrequited love," "Kate Middleton for maintaining a certain level of class and decorum in the pop-culture sartorial scene," and "Justin Timberlake for his unprecedented awe and humility during his recent visit to Israel" (by which I assume they mean he didn't come onstage wearing a BDS shirt and a keffiyeh). "The winner of our contest will be announced on Monday, February 23," Acculturated says, "and we will award their charity with a $2,500 donation." $2,500! Dunno who's giving this ad-free site its wingnut welfare, but if they can come up with that kind of scratch  for a contest, I'd be happy to explain to their readers (for a reasonable fee) how my heart was broken the day Camryn Manheim became a fat activist.

UPDATE. In comments, tigrismus encapsulates Judge's problem: "He gets to decide what's universal, and quelle surprise, it's him."