SHORTER JAMES LILEKS. I played "lead" guitar in a rock 'n' roll "gig." My daughter threw up. Then someone gave me a hard time about taking pictures because of 9/11. For years I was totally freaked out about 9/11 ("Make that another smoking crater in New York"), but I have just played a "gig" and so feel really "chill" about terrorism uptightness by "the Man," and will until the Cool Brother gets too damn close to the White House, whereupon I will go back to being a "racist" "asshole."

TAKE THIS SIMPLE TEST. The Charlotte Allen Washington Post article about how women are stupid has been covered to death, but I would like to make a point-by-point comparison between, on the one hand, women as viewed by Allen, and on the other, recent posts at the manliest site on the internet, Ace O. Spades.

Allen: "What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental? Take a look at the New York Times bestseller list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth Gilbert's 'Eat, Pray, Love.'"

Ace. O Spades: "I have watched this video over 1000 times and every time I do, tears well up in my eyes." [Link to Budweiser commercial where people waiting for airplanes clap for soldiers.]

Allen: "Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true... The theory that women are the dumber sex... is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence"

Ace O. Spades: Apparently finding its 372 male correspondents incompetent to operate PageMill, has new site design done by a girl. "I asked her, 'Look, if you start to play with this, you're not going to make it all girly are you? I don't want it to look like Bethany's MySpace page.' She was offended by the question."

Allen: "I swear no man watches 'Grey's Anatomy' unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of 'The Friday Night Knitting Club.' No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know."

Ace O. Spades: Post on financially-based agoraphobia ("Some telemarketing asshats have been calling me 10 times a day for over a month now... Its gotten very bad lately... I won't answer the phone unless it rings at least 8 times. Most of the dickheads give up after six, I'm only seen one that persisted to 7 rings.") Post on some book about beating off. Post on the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Post linking to clip of crook on motorcycle smashing into a police car in slow motion. (You know, I probably should have just linked to the main site and written "Scroll down.")

Conclusion: While Allen thinks women are good for "tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home," Ace O. Spades demonstrates that men can link to rad shit on the internet, and complain. This comparison, like most, is unflattering to males, but I think our larger paychecks and knowledge of sports arcana more than compensate for it.

MURDER ON THE DISORIENTED EXPRESS. When the Perfesser said "GERARD VAN DER LEUN is worried about Obama" getting shot, I knew something was off. And I was right. Guess whose fault Van Der Leun says it will be if someone shoots the Democratic candidate?

And yet it is more probable that an attempt on Obama will be made than at any time in the last few decades. The country has been infected with Bush hate for so long, and the popular culture has been so infested with dreams and threats and "works of art" imagining the death of Bush, that extending that level of political hate to Obama is trivial.

In December of 2003, I wrote this item:

Where Bush Hate is Heading which began:
A minor moron moment making its way on the talk shows today are the new lyrics by Eminem:
"F--k money. I don't rap for dead presidents.
I'd rather see the president dead. "

Even though written to be brain fade of the month, Eminem's lyrics encapsulate where Bush Hate is heading.

Bush Hate, at the rate of festering intensity currently observable, is headed towards only one singular event: An attempt on the life of George W. Bush by an American citizen.

Since 2003 the incidents that have reinforced and promulgated this cultural poison have only proliferated...

That those who hate Bush have, over the past eight years, made an attempt on the life of Barack Obama more probable is not at all ironic. It is horrifying and to their shame.

It's not remarkable that these people think liberalism is fascism; that's a simple inversion familiar to readers of Orwell. Believing that the imaginary death of Obama is caused by imaginary assassins of Bush -- that sees and raises the Vonnegut of Mother Night. But Van Der Leun's proud offering of his spectacularly wrong 2003 prediction that Bush would be shot as proof of his prescience -- I don't know if Dostoyevsky jamming with Italo Calvino and Philip K. Dick could have come up with that. It is something to consider that our greatest feats of imagination these days are mostly in the field of psychopathology.

UPDATE. Nearly all of Van Der Leun's commenters are choice, but this is my favorite:

I just thought of something that sickens me.

It's obvious that if he were assassinated, as a martyr he'd advance their cause far more than as a mediocre president. They're deliberately PLANTING the idea, hoping some nut will take them up on him, allowing them to come down hard on the entire right.

I really hope I'm developing clinical paranoia.

Like the man said, there has never been anything false about hope.

UPDATE II. In our own comments, R. Porrofatto provides some historical perspective: "Were it not for a toxic mix of GDS (Garfield Derangement Syndrome) and fanatic adoration for the messianic Chester Arthur, we wouldn't have disgruntled postal workers to this day."

FILM DORK. The culture-warriors' work of reviewing films they haven't seen is never-ending, but Dirty Harry of Libertas shows that their efforts can lead to ever greater heights of self-parody:

Frequently I’m accused of jumping the gun and judging a film before seeing it. What’s interesting about this criticism is that it only ever applies to those of us on the right who criticize based on ideology. Even though there’s an entire industry made up of people who pre-judge films and fuss over every detail from the trailer to casting to production rumors… It’s only conservatives who are ever dismissed with, “Well, did you see the movie?” What’s odd about this criticism is that given Hollywood’s decades-long war on all things American and conservative you’d think people would understand we’re on much firmer ground than all the other pre-judgers, but I’m just sounding all defensive now, so let’s get to it…

Then, having previously condemned the alleged politics of the film Iron Man based on comments by one of the actors, he praises its alleged politics based on a "script review" of a second draft.

Mr. Harry is right that I would never give so hard a time to such trailer-trawlers as Film Drunk. Film Drunk is intentionally funny and occasionally posts nude photos of Megan Gale. All of the humor of Libertas comes from imagining what kind of dork spends so much time parsing posters, interviews, trailers, and other flotsam of filmdom for evidence of treason. And Libertas has no nude photos of Megan Gale (though it will on occasion flash you some pecs). It's like comparing the films of Russ Meyer with the Army-McCarthy Hearings.

“Well, did you see the movie?” is a question a sensible person might ask any blowhard who criticizes a film based on its lobby cards or ancillary merchandise, regardless of his politics. The maudlin note of persecution just makes the KICK ME sign easier to read.

UPDATE. In comments kia of Gall and Gumption provides the best explanation I've heard yet for this phenomenon: "Seeing the actual film, knowing the history of Hollywood, knowing any facts at all, are for people who don't know what they are. Once you know what you are you know everything. In fact it's his readiness to dispense completely with his own experience that makes him such a good 'conservative' critic..." A lot of people use the phrase "identity politics" mainly to complain about black people, but I think kia's description suggests a better definition of the term.

HOW YOU GONNA KEEP 'EM DOWN ON THE FARM AFTER THEY'VE SEEN THE FARM? The Ole Perfesser is upset that some alleged New Yorker (not me!) sent him an anti-Southerner email -- upset enough to enlist in support of his native land Michael Silence, who suggests that a lot of New Yorkers move down South to... the Washington, D.C. metro area. Yee-haw!

But seriously, the article Silence links also shows a lot of growth deeper within Confederate territory: "Sixty of the fastest-growing counties were in the South..."

As a casual observer may notice from this more recent U.S. Census press release, though, many of the fastest-growing counties (such as Harris, Maricopa, and Tarrant) contain large cities (Houston, Phoenix, and Fort Worth, in the aforementioned cases), and it is not unfair to deduce -- despite the Perfesser's boundless faith in telecommuting -- that job opportunities contingent upon urban life may have motivated much of the resettlement. It's one thing to light out for the territory and another to follow a job or career path.

That many of these opportunities exist in the Southern states is indeed a remarkable phenomenon. But when people have the money to live where they please, where do they choose to go? The alarming masses of trust-funders currently occupying the choicer parts of my borough suggest that the freedom offered by wealth (according to libertarian philosophy, the highest state of man) leads to Blue State metropolitan areas.

I believe this case was most eloquently made by Paul Henning, who mapped the migratory pattern of rural sharecroppers suddenly blessed with windfall profits:

SHADOW PLAY. Michael Bloomberg announces in the Times he won't run for President; the response in published commentary is, as usual, generous. The response of a grateful nation will probably not be detectable by any but the most sensitive instruments. Bloomberg's money is important, but Bloomberg himself is not. His endorsement, when it comes, probably won't even affect votes in New York City, let alone in those wide stretches of the country in which he is perceived as Some Rich Guy.

I expect his long-range plan is to wait for America's price to come down and then buy it. In the meantime, after he tires of running New York, he may opt to run a state, or purchase a Senate seat or a small foreign country, just to keep his chops up.

SEASONS CHANGE AND SO DO I/YOU NEED NOT WONDER WHY, BABE. "People think seriously about writing their dissertations on Radiohead," says James Poulos, who has written one such for AFF Doublethink and invited me to read it. I'm flattered and abashed, not only because it gives me yet another opportunity to play the old fart.

Poulos tells the Radiohead story in epochal flashes. When the Foo Fighters' "The Colour and the Shape dropped... proto-indie emoheads of the high school thrift-store set worked up wrenching solo arrangements of big single 'Everlong.'" But wachet auf! Then came Radiohead's "Let Down," which "blew off the doors on the nostalgia for the present that had already been the soundtrack of every unrequited emo-boy’s life for what felt like one long year." Well, they all seem long at that age.

But Poulos, "a doctoral candidate at Georgetown," spares moments between orgasmic droppings to notice context. He's aware of "sensitive boys just coming of age and desperately in need of equally sensitive girlfriends... college hookups, group-sex ‘friendcest,’ university counseling, a wavelet of party drugs." In his reading these are not, as we are accustomed to think of them, new players and set-dressings for the latest version of an ever-renewing goatsong: they represent something even bigger -- "sexual and emotional corruption" that needed a cleansing fire: "But in 2001, the summer still seemed endless, and any reckoning with the full import of that line was postponed. And then the war came."

There are many reasons for which I thank God that I had no 9/11 in my younger days, and now I have to add the possibility that I might have been tempted to shake it into the kaleidoscope of cliches through which I viewed my own experience. "9/11 set in motion a long span during which neither adulthood nor The Future ever quite seemed to arrive," Poulos informs us. We got instead "a psychosexual milieu in which satisfaction seems obsolete, mutual manipulation is common currency, and fully contingent commitment defines our interrelationships." Sounds like Spring Break stretching backward and forward into infinity. Is there hope of rescue, grandson? Well of course:

Perhaps, among rock bands, only Radiohead has the credibility to do that in a way that can move people to steer away from the rocks of the age on something resembling their own terms....

For its fans, the band has provided a decade-long emotional field guide, and a ready shield against the turmoil of extended adolescence... slowly and surely it has also risen up as a sturdy cultural touchstone, an icon of an age that even those who failed to worship at its feet will remember.

But it remains an open question whether we can ever really convert the shared escape of spectators and audience members into any sort of permanent redemption. Radiohead has imparted a measure of hope even while chronicling its loss.

Boy, that takes me back. Lately I've been revisiting Pere Ubu -- like Radiohead, a technically danceable but willfully freakish band that had less resonance for the hoi polloi than for the "particularly smart and creative but somewhat adrift" back when that Poulos phrase described me.

Pere Ubu came up in a time before their kind of avant-garde twists could be widely appreciated, and we the smart, creative & drifting had no hope of seeing them into the Top Forty. We instead contented ourselves with the warm insularity of fringe fandom.

From our fringe we shouted extravagant and wounded aesthetic claims for our weirdo heroes to the unlistening world. There was no intrinsic merit in these claims -- what God cares what music you dance to? -- but the older-to-younger-brother transfer nonetheless took place. Like many another sticky social phenomenon, Pere Ubu eventually forged a path for future iterations, by adding enough clicks and grunts to the lingua franca of popular music that clubs, fans, and producers would be less confused and more accepting when they came up thereafter.

Flash forward: there are more colors in the pop paintbox than in decades past, and the eccentricities of a Radiohead more easily pass into the mainstream. Their sardonic lyrics and sonic innovations may puzzle, but they don't put off. So critically engaged supporters are relieved of the need to parlay on behalf of their heroes with the mob. What's left for them is to explain to fans, who have already been enjoying their morose sounds, what it all means.

I hate to tell Poulos, but there isn't that much to tell. Though each Radiohead joint is a lovely, grimy snowflake, in terms of content I can't see any significant difference between their glowerings and those of any avant-gardists from the late 19th Century onwards. What distinguishes them other than personality? Here's Poulos' In Rainbows rundown:

“Nude,” though edited down, still speaks for itself; “Weird Fishes” pick at the bones of an emotional captive; “All I Need” lavishes the subject of “Skip Divided” with tuneful, but no less bestial, monomania. Yorke idles in post-coital reverie (“Faust ARP”), disavows pleasure (“Reckoner”), and gives in again to begged-for adultery (“House of Cards”). “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” places Yorke and That Woman in a centrifugal club: drunk, dazzled, losing control. Eyes lock eyes; words function with all the delicacy of a “sawed-off shotgun;” a collapse into sex will finish the night, but the only path open to the future requires that you “wish away the nightmare.”

Sounds like Franz Wedekind to me. Did Bin Laden teach us nothing? In artistic terms, pretty much yes.

Which is great: if we had to define ourselves by our mortal enemies, we'd be very weak indeed. But a loyal opposition -- that's something worth rubbing up against. While I admire Poulos' spunk, I recommend he switch to the short view. Back in '77 Robert Christgau was leery of Elvis Costello, "suspecting that he is 'New Wave' for people with good taste," in the context of the taste-challenging punk rock onslaught of the time. But Christgau had the good sense, and the good taste, to also approve the critical consensus for Fleetwood Mac and Ornette Coleman. He had his political issues, but he also loved music enough to prefer cross-pollination to stasis or revolution.

Any band may find itself, by dint of talent and circumstance, in the Voice of a Generation role, but that doesn't mean it has much more to say to us than "Hey Hey We're the Monkees" (or "Nay, Nay We're the Refuseniks"), nor that it has a stronger or more long-lasting or valid claim on our attention than the next revival or New Wave. Critics, attend: Awareness of this fact may, counterintuitive as it seems, give your reviews a longer shelf-life.

UPDATE. I am pleased to see that Poulos appreciates Eyes Wide Shut more than most. But here too I would advise: it's not so much about now as ever.

UPDATE II. This post has engendered a lively comments section, much of it devoted to which bands/albums/genres suck, and which rool. The shamanistic power of Jerry Garcia is invoked, and Lester Bangs derided (to which I take exception). Fighting over the scraps of pop culture is fun for graybeards and Now People alike. Since pop can't bring us together, let us cherish that it can bring us to one another's throats in entertaining and non-lethal ways.

SUPER METATUESDAY! Cableless, I could not watch tonight's debate, so I will follow the example of conservatives who review movies they haven't seen and review the debate as it took place in the minds of National Review Online contributors.

Kathryn J. Lopez starts the evening's festivities:

I Never Thought I'd Say This, But... I may be angry on behalf of Hillary Clinton. This debate is starting out with Clinton on the defense. Obama bettter get treated like she is.

It would seem a little late for K-Lo to go feminist-deconstructionist, but apparently neither clocks nor spell-check exist in Rightwing World.

Mark Krikorian: "Maybe I'm not as smart as these two, but I have no idea what they're talking about." Why "but"? Both propositions are clearly correct.

"Could Hillary's problem be that no adviser can say 'save the b**ch for the second half hour'?" Wow, K-Lo, that didn't last long!

Stephen Spruiell tries to go substantive, but the whole thing's about what a b**ch Clinton is. Under the usual Bizarro-World formula, we might reasonably conclude from this that Clinton is winning decisively, but there is a Twilight of the Gods atmosphere about their savagery that renders the usual predictive mechanisms inoperative.

Mark Hemingway just admitted that Alan Keyes is a political tomato-can. Such is loyalty in the late conservative era.

"If Fox did this to Hil, the Left would go ballistic. But this is their hometown channel" -- Andy McCarthy. I don't see how I've remained a doctrinaire liberal so long without access to Wolf Blitzer's morning agenda.

"Without condescension, with a gentle nudge, he puts her back in the kitchen" -- Kathleen Parker. Tomorrow's talking point: Obama wants to put Hil in "kitchen"! Long discussion of Obama's sexism, probably absorbed from his hateful mother.

"I don't think Russert's doing it on purpose, but..." Were I blessed with faith in a Liberal Media, I'd believe this were the trick: to avalanche on Clinton in full view of the NatRev types so that their brains fry trying to comprehend how we, pledged in blood though we are to the evil Clinton empire, could treat her so badly. I mean, it's not as if she were Alan Keyes!

Don't Use the L-Word! [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

I wish there were a candidate delighted to be honestly and authentically called a liberal or a conservative. I like partisanship. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, "partisanship is good."

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "You're a stupid fucking load, K-Lo."

So rattled are the NatRev crew by this exercise that those members determined to comment on world affairs afterward lose their usual acuity. "The Washington Times has issued instructions that henceforth it will use illegal immigrants rather than illegal aliens," mourns Andy McCarthy. He completely missed the part about gay "marriage"! I don't really know what really happened in Cleveland tonight, but if it put these guys off their customary homophobic feed, it can't have been too bad.

UPDATE. Ann Althouse: "Obama is confronted with his 'most liberal' ranking. I find his talking tiresome and will need to check the transcript to see if he said anything interesting." I don't know what we'd do without the blogosphere -- probably go down to the tunnels of Grand Central and ask Mole People to extemporize. Meanwhile the Ole Perfesser recommends Stephen Green's "drunkblogging." Sample: "Hillary getting all sarcastic in not a pretty sight. Neither are her hips in that bright yellow jacket." Green gives drunkenness a bad name, and the Perfesser gives a bad name to everything else. Andrew Sullivan is freaked out that Obama only "denounced" Farrakhan, as opposed to -- what? Producing a Farrakhan doll and biting its throat open? Later, chided by correspondents, Sullivan says "I find Obama's calm distancing insufficient" and " I also think this will be used against him and worry that it will become a distracting issue" -- by which he means, "Here's what I'll bring up when I inevitably support McCain." Did you know The Atlantic used to publish Mark Twain? Sh, sh, don't cry -- soon the old crazy man will be President and then we will all join Daddy in heaven.

GLASS HOUSE WATCH. Larry Kudlow at National Review Online:

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed Hillary's erratic, roller-coaster, mood swings these past few weeks?

She's all over the map. Irritable and angry. Manic. Pessimistic and sad. One minute she's shedding tears, the next minute she's shouting and attacking, then she's sarcastically ripping on Obama, and on and on it goes.

So, is Hillary depressed?

Now I'm no psychiatrist, far from it, but I think a simple answer is that Senator Clinton could be depressed. She seems deflated. Down in the dumps.

Look, depression is a serious problem. It's also a multibillion-dollar business. Three of the more popular drugs in the market today to treat it are Pfizer's Zoloft, Eli Lilly's Prozac, and GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil. Maybe Hillary's taking meds, but they're just not working for her? Could that be why she's always attacking Big Pharma?

Maybe she just needs a little toot to get her over the hump. Perhaps Kudlow can pull out his old rolodex and hook her up.

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS. Megan McArdle:

Leave aside the extreme dubiousness of the proposition that Castro has, in fact, made his countrymen better off. This is like listening to those conservatives one occasionally encounters in the darker corners of the movement who drop gems such as "Well, I don't excuse Pinochet, but Chile wouldn't have a privatized social security system without him."

These "darker corners" apparently include the warrens of Mark Steyn...

But, on the passing of one of the great hate-figures of left-wing drawing-rooms, even those not quite as gung-ho for the old strongman as Peter Simple ought to acknowledge that [Pinochet] left his country much better than he found it.

...and Jonah Goldberg...

I THINK ALL intelligent, patriotic and informed people can agree: It would be great if the U.S. could find an Iraqi Augusto Pinochet... Pinochet's abuses helped create a civil society. Once the initial bloodshed subsided, Chile was no prison. Pinochet built up democratic institutions and infrastructure. And by implementing free-market reforms, he lifted the Chilean people out of poverty.

...and the Wall Street Journal...

[Pinochet] is responsible for the death and torture that occurred on his watch, but had Salvador Allende succeeded in turning Chile into another Cuba, many more might have died.

Late in life it emerged that he had probably stashed millions in personal bank accounts. But he also supported the free-market reforms that have made Chile prosperous and the envy of its neighbors.

...and... but why go on? While you have to go to history, entertainment figures, and blog commenters to find fulsome praise for Castro, you can find such praise for Pinochet right smack dab in the conservative political mainstream even after the old bastard croaked.

Is it a meaningful difference? The old commies certainly hold some romantic appeal for many liberals, and it's bleak fun to use Cuba to twit fans of American healthcare. But you'd have to dig pretty hard to find a liberal who'd really like to see more rather than fewer Communist dictatorships. As we have seen, on the right there are highly-placed commenters who don't even class the Pinochet regime as a failed experiment. They think it went just fine, and look forward to trying it again. Some kids may like to wear Che on their t-shirts, but when conservatives are opened, you shall find "authoritarian government" lying in their hearts.

UPDATE. A commenter points out that McArdle cross-posted to her own blog, where you will find a multitude of "darker corners" in comments.

BEHIND THE LAUGHTER. The Oscars were as cumbersome as usual but, bouyed by the unstoppable force of my office-pool picks (Stewart's crack about film editing was much appreciated), I didn't actually start screaming until the third song from Enchanted. It was the black guy suddenly representing Caribbean flava that did it. (I guess Mencken and Schwartz musta gone to Sandals last year.) Now, if they had also brought out a hip Latina and a kickline of differently-abled princes and princesses, I could have rolled with that, but as it was I had to scream and scream again, scream like Blacula, scream for my life like the Tingler was in the house. And it felt damn good.

Thank God we can set aside the usual bullshit for a night of Hollywood bullshit! Well, not all of us can -- like a troll sticking a headshot of Jessica Alba to the face of his love-doll, rightwing bloggers have to superimpose liberal smackdown scenarios ("And Day-Lewis wins! Clooney’s feeling the snub." Wait, what?) onto any event before they can relax and enjoy. But at least, in their emotional crippled way, they're having fun. And whatever pleasure it gives them to write stuff like "Decent people wouldn’t have even nominated these depraved films," I reap at least double that. So hooray for Hollywood! And next year, let's give the honorary award to Kitten Natividad.

OK, just fire McArdle and let her mother write the blog. It couldn't possibly be any worse.

EVERYONE'S A WINNER! I am usually very bad at picking Oscar winners, and though I've seem more entrants this year than usual, I expect to fare as poorly as ever. But talking big on subjects I don't understand is my stock in trade. So I invite you to lift your self-esteem by comparing your picks to mine.

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men. Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis. Best Actress: Ellen Page. Best Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem. Best Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton. Best Director: The Coens. Best Original Screenplay: Juno. Best Adapted Screenplay: No Country for Old Men.

(I'm all about Julie Christie, but every Oscar show needs a shocker, Juno is well-liked, and youth must be served. I still can't figure out whether Swinton was good or awful, but she sure was acting. Diablo Cody is the new Callie Khouri.)

Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille. Best Art Direction: Sweeney Todd. Best Cinematography: Atonement. Best Costume Design: Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Best Film Editing: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Best Foreign Language Film: The Counterfeiters. Best Music (Score): Ratatouille. Best Music (Song): "Raise It Up." Best Makeup: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Best Sound Mixing: The Bourne Ultimatum. Best Sound Editing: Transformers. Best Visual Effects: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Best Documentary Feature: Taxi to the Dark Side. Best Documentary Short: Freeheld. Best Animated Short: Madame Tutli-Putli. Best Live-Action Short: Tanghi Argentini.

(I'm totally groping here. I figure the big lush romance and the big summer movies require craft awards, Elizabethan clothes are wicked cool, and Michael Moore is fat. The shorts I judged, as I expect most voters do, by their synopses. Everything else is juju.)

THEN WHO ARE YOU? Despite honorable ancestors like Kiss Me Deadly, we strongly identify the paranoid thriller genre with the 1970s, when Hollywood disillusionists postulated in widescreen that everything was a fraud and anyone who got too near the truth would be killed.

When bummers went out of fashion, we still got paranoid thrillers, but they were generally more uplifting and mainstream, like the John Grisham (and Grishamesque) dramas that show up every season with horrible conspiracies, happy endings, and big stars. The hero is usually shown to be on some sort of quest for personal redemption as well as for survival, as befits the modern idea of blockbuster entertainment that makes you feel good about humanity because Tom Cruise rediscovered his sense of purpose.

Michael Clayton is of this sort, but more serious about the redemption angle. [Muted spoilers herewith.] Things still go bump in the night and the deck is still stacked until the hero pulls his ace, but we also get more than the usual amount of information about the hero's personal problems, and a stronger invitation to relate to them.

Clayton, once an assistant DA in Queens, has been for years a "fixer," "janitor," "bagman" (his words, and others') for a big law firm without making partner or even getting the kinds of cases he says he prefers. Clayton hasn't found success because he doesn't really want it: something in him is always rebelling against the amoral system in which he's enmeshed, and he screws himself with debts and bitter self-mockery.

Why not just quit? The debts provide an excuse. But as the details of his work and life mount, we get that Clayton doesn't quit for the same reason many of us don't quit. It's what he knows. He's good at it even if he isn't proud of it. Clayton has a fuckup brother whom he disdains, but with whom he nonetheless disastrously co-invested his "walk-away" money. In a simpler script the blown savings would clearly be a convenient accident that motivates the hero, but here they suggest the complicated psychology of a man for whom duty and responsibility have become means for perpetuating self-disgust.

When one of the firm's "bulls," Arthur, goes off his psych meds in the middle of a big case, Clayton is assigned to fix the situation. Arthur's madness is related to his guilt over a really loathsome case he's been working for years. The madness is his way out, and he senses that Clayton needs one, too. In their desperate conversations, Clayton keeps insisting that Arthur won't listen to him, but Arthur has something to say to Clayton, and it's only when reality begins to resemble Arthur's delusions that Clayton begins to listen.

The dread in Michael Clayton starts before any crime is done. The law offices are properly creepy, the lawyers and their big-time clients are scum. Most conversations drip with cynicism, mendacity, or both. Arthur's breakdown spurs the violence, and the violence wakes Clayton up. In old-school paranoid thrillers, the revelation of conspiracies alerts the hero, and us, to the fraudulent grounds under which we've been living. But it's a new kind of world; he, and we, already knew about the fraud before the story began. What he and we want to know is the answer to the question Arthur poses when Clayton, desperate to normalize the situation, tells him, "I'm not the enemy." "Then," responds Arthur, "who are you?"

The paranoid part of the formula is rich, but the thriller part is less so. The fulcrum of the conspiracy is Karen Crowder, newly-risen head of the odious client company whose case has deranged Arthur. In a tic-ridden performance that is either perfectly awful or awfully perfect, Tilda Swinton shows Karen to be an absolutely demolished personality who glues herself together with corporate bullshit. When the case and her career are jeopardized, she's sufficiently freaked out to go with criminal solutions (there's a lovely scene in which she haltingly matches euphemisms with a contract killer).

Karen is Clayton's opposite: if he's got too much soul to succeed in a soulless world, she's got so little that she becomes a perfect medium for the worst consequences of soullessness. But Karen's not the problem, and by having Clayton take her on, the film ties up the thriller without resolving his dilemma -- as the long, anomic coda seems to admit. Despite its "happy" ending, the film leaves us rattled. Is it because the filmmakers cleverly shifted the burden of resolution onto us, or because they couldn't craft one that suited the movie? We may be forgiven for thinking that having George Clooney take down a yuppie bitch might be a cop-out.

This is Tony Gilroy's first directing credit, and he has maximum support in every area of craft. James Newton Howard's score gently gooses the mood-shifts; as he showed with There Will Be Blood, Robert Elswit has a great eye for pockets of murk, even in sterile environments; Gilroy's brother John cuts the film to suit the patience of its style. Clooney is perfect for the movie. The script's wealth of character detail suits his easy-does-it approach. He doesn't hit the emotional cues too hard, letting the story tell him rather than vice-versa. It's odd: Michael Clayton is ambitious, maybe too ambitious for its own good, but its best features come from artistic restraint.

There, my Oscar duty's done (sorry, but even duty can't drive me to see Atonement). Predictions later.

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT.



Happy Friday!

UPDATE. Holy shit:



Crooks and Liars was just telling me how rare these Neil Young banjo numbers are. But shit, Neil on banjo and Ben Keith? And then Pancho Sampredro on mandolin for "Roll Another Number"? This is truly an age of wonders.

A SOLITARY MAN. James Lileks is outraged by an Atlantic article suggesting, with use of data, that people may now be more attracted to cities than to the burbs. Regular readers will know that I am angered by this trend myself, for rental-market reasons, and pray for urban violence to reverse the flow. But Lileks don't need no stinkin' data, nor does he share my appetite for destruction. Mr. Old Matchbook may be a "city dweller" (an odd claim, given his descriptions of Jasperwood as a wooded realm with a "water feature"), but he rebels against the citified ways of the New Urbanists:

There’s something else about the anti-burb jeremiads that’s never expressed but frequently implied: an offhand dismissal of the need for personal space. If you’re young you don’t need much. If you’re an empty-nester, a condo downtown might be just the ticket. But in the great middle expanse of your life, you not only want to spread out, you want to be left alone, and this is taking on the characteristic of an anti-social sentiment. You should be walking around the dense neighborhood window-shopping and eating at small fusion restaurants. You should be engaged. If you want to watch a quality foreign film, good, but you should not watch it home; you should walk down to the corner theater and see it in a room full of other people, and nevermind that the start time is inconvenient and you can’t pause it to go pee and the fellow in the row behind you is aerating the atmosphere with tubercular sputum. This is how they do things in New York.

This rant contains something I've noticed before about these rightwing guys: their disgust at the prospect of being around other humans. Lileks states that middle-agers "want to be left alone," and even imagines that he is somehow being coerced into watching movies "in a room full of other people" with their "tubercular sputum." No wonder he was so upset when his paper threatened to make him pound a beat! Think of the germs!

I like to consider myself eccentric, even misanthropic. But I don't mind being around people sometimes. I don't think of movie theaters as dens of contagion and forced socialization. Neither am I addicted to hand sanitizers, nor accustomed to think of the poor as disease carriers.

I used to think fear of foreign enemies was what, in this blogospheric age, defined conservatives. Now I'm thinking it's their fear of everyone.

SHORTER PEGGY NOONAN: The Obamas better show some respect or we'll cut off the Affirmative Action program that's allowing them to run for President.

(Extra credit for Noonan's foray into Ebonics:

I wonder if she knows that some people look at her and think "Man, she got it all."

Oh please, please Peggy, keep it up: "Man, that Obama bitch be straight-up wack! I be votin' for Mickey C! He got dissed by the Times, wassup with that?")

NOT ANTI-JIHAD; JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE. Haven't uncovered this particular rock in a while: Gates of Vienna explains "The Case for Temperate Speech" by citing an FBI investigation in St. Louis, prompted by blog commenters who wrote things like "Would be a shame if [a local mosque] were to be vandalized or destroyed. Just a shame I tell you….wink wink STL youth."

Maybe to you and me this seems like the sort of veiled but obvious threat of violence that might reasonably be investigated, and the affected blogs have obviously not been shut down or restricted in any way. But "Baron Bodissey" says:

So why not practice for the days of samizdat that are surely coming our way? What’s wrong with a little judicious indirection?

If the time should come when we are required to dissolve the political bands which have connected us with the existing system, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind will require us to state our case clearly.

In the glory days of the Iraq War I was called a traitor. Yet I never promised insurrection as the Baron clearly has. And Gates of Vienna is still online! Clearly Islamofascism are not as powerful as advertised.

EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL. I finally got up the nerve to read that New York Times story on McCain. And it is a story, in the old-fashioned sense. As I suspected, the Iseman angle makes it a little sexy, but its shape is practically Jamesian. McCain is portrayed as a tempermental outsider who finds himself enmeshed, against his better instincts, in the graft-heavy world of politics, and struggles against the tidal pull with limited success. The big integrity props he gets from Russ Feingold only sharpen the conflict as McCain finds himself trapped in a world he never made:

At one point, his campaign invited scores of lobbyists to a fund-raiser at the Willard Hotel in Washington. While Bush supporters stood mocking outside, the McCain team tried to defend his integrity by handing the lobbyists buttons reading “McCain voted against my bill.” Mr. McCain himself skipped the event, an act he later called “cowardly.”

The reporters, being reporters, have a bit of fun with the contradictions:

“Unless he gives you special treatment or takes legislative action against his own views, I don’t think his personal and social relationships matter,” said Charles Black, a friend and campaign adviser who has previously lobbied the senator for aviation, broadcasting and tobacco concerns.

But there is also a woman, and that makes the tsimmis and the rush of rightwing pressers to McCain's defense. Even Tucker Carlson has stepped up to say, "I instinctively jump to the defense of anyone whose private life is violated" -- an absurdity, given his Monica Lewinsky pronouncements. It doesn't matter; the blowjob defense is now universal.

People who know how to read demur. Chuckling observes:

In a stunning innovation in Newsspeak, I mean lingusitic cleansing, the New York Times redefined blatant corruption as "confidence in one's integrity" to describe their allegation that John McCain has been fucking his lobbyist and doing her political favors for sex and money.

Note that "political favors" is so ingrained as Newsspeak that it has become almost totally disassociated with its meaning. Poor "corruption's" harshly interrogated letter structure as been linguistically cleansed and now resides in a relocation camp somewhere in the Mideast.

I am in some sympathy with Chuck's take, but spare a kind thought for the Times. The currently common idea that this was a politically-motivated smear is ridiculous; McCain is in a zone where nothing can hurt him, maybe the only such zone he will enjoy this year; who would intentionally smear him now? Even some wingnuts acknowledge this, but portray it as a gaffe by the Times, not a sign of journalistic integrity. Indeed, how could they? For them, reporters not employed by Reverend Sun Myung Moon or Rupert Murdoch are demons motivated only by unthinking hate.

The Times reporters appear to have done the best they could with the facts at hand to write a publishable feature about a Presidential candidate. The stuff about the chick is highly qualified and speaks in context more to McCain's judgement than to his sexual drives. What it is, of course, is very different than what, in the current climate, it has been made for partisan purposes to seem. It's a stretch to say their editors were naive; no one naive gets to that status at the Paper of Record. Still I suspect that the newsmen, buffeted as they eternally are by highly politicized "media criticism," headed toward the only port their profession offered them, and endeavored to produce a story that conformed to what they understood to be journalism. It's just their tough luck that in these parlous times there is no such thing as journalism -- there is only propaganda, either intended or ascribed.

YOU SAY YOU'D CHANGE THE CONSTITUTION, WELL, YOU KNOW, WE'D ALL LOVE TO CHANGE YOUR HEAD. I don't have cable so I couldn't watch tonight's debate. Examining the spoor trail is interesting, though. Here's a National Review Online Corner newbie (but not unknown to aficionados of nuttage):

Both HRC and Obama say they're ready on Day One to be commander-in-chief. That's such an interesting thought. I try to picture HRC saluting the troops. I try to picture Obama doing same. And then I try to picture the troops saluting back. Will they have their fingers crossed behind their backs? I don't have this problem with McCain. Just sayin'.

Civilian control of the military is not a conservative value, I guess. I wonder what other fundamentals of republican government they don't believe in?