Showing posts sorted by relevance for query mark judge. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query mark judge. Sort by date Show all posts

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

LOOKING IN ON OLD FRIENDS.

We've had a lot of fun with Mark "Gavreau" Judge here in recent weeks, so on a whim I dropped by the rightwing culture mag that employs him to see how he was passing his days. Behold:
Can the Hollywood reboot of The Fantastic Four, now in the works, succeed where the original movies failed? It all depends on whether producer Matthew Vaughn and director Josh Trank have the guts to do one thing: To make The Fantastic Four about the family versus communism.
Don't ever change, fella.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

HO-HUM, ANOTHER AMATEUR BLASPHEMER (PLUS: A BULLSHIT LIBERTARIAN ANGLE!) Guess who's back? Mark Goldblatt! Longtime National Review readers may recall Goldblatt as the author of Africa Speaks, a book with which he hoped to show that
If not for the French — who've retired all such trophies — African Americans would currently rank as the most hypocritical, most paranoid, most pretentious group of people on the planet.
You'd think the world, or at least the rural Deep South, had been waiting years for such a book, but alas, it o'ertopped no bestseller lists; Goldblatt attributed this to booksellers' prejudice against white people ("Whiteballing"). Yes, really.

I haven't read Africa Speaks, and so cannot judge it. I can report he has a new book out called Sloth which sounds pretty interesting. And he hasn't given up offering his usual brave opinions of dark people.

His new bit, to nutshell, is that because Allen Ginsburg once yelled blasphemies (or so Goldblatt heard) at a Muslim cabdriver who approved of Salman Rushdie's fatwa, Goldblatt may refer to the attempted Times Square bomber as a "Muslim dirtbag." And, like the great Ginsberg, he too will "shit on Islam."

There are many levels of So What to this assertion (though I imagine if someone called Goldblatt a Jewish douchebag a lot of people would flip their lids). Yet these are mere words -- certainly nothing like my brave Muhammed cartoon, which I reproduce here:

Did that in 2006, Goldblatt! Now leave this religion-bashing stuff to the pros, and go back to making fun of black people. You're good at it, and your conservative friends will approve just as heartily.

Added punchline: Goldblatt's rant appears in Reason, the libertarian magazine. If Goldblatt can call Islam shit, I guess I can call libertarianism bullshit. Or "conservatism." But I repeat myself.

Thursday, October 21, 2021

A NEW DISCOVERY.

Some of you may remember what fun I used to have with a little number called Acculturated, a rightwing ladymag apparently created to propagandize readers of the Seven Sisters and fashion books. They delivered some lulus, including columns by Boof Kavanaugh buddy Mark Gauvreau Judge and the deathless coochphrase “skin bus to Tuna Town,” before giving up the ghost at the end of 2017.

But wait! There is another, apparently: Something called Evie, which has apparently been operating under the radar since last year. It offers a premium print version, the covers of which appear to emulate the design of Elle, but mostly it’s online. 

I’m probably going to more fully scan the rack, as it were, for Roy Edroso Breaks It Down tomorrow, but for now I want to call your attention to this honey from August, “Man-Hating Feminism Is Turning Us Into Narcissists,” by staff writer Meghan Dillon. It’s all about how, while the good feminists of yore were about “equality and suffrage,” the kind you whores practice is about “sexual empowerment, man-hating, and bashing women who disagree with them.” Dillon also tells us that though stupid feminists think “there would be no more wars if women ruled the world” (“I even heard this sentiment echoed from history professors when I was in college”), she counters that “women can be just as cruel as men” and cites Margaret Thatcher as an example. (I’m not sure she thought that one through.) 

In defense of her thesis Dillon cites authorities like “podcast host Suzanne Venker” and Jessa Crispin, which brings me to my favorite part:

Crispin argues that this attitude leads to a sense of grandiose self-importance, making some modern feminists think they’re more important simply because they’re women. This sense of self-importance (and lack of empathy for others) leads to narcissism, as Crispin writes, “It is a failure of empathy to identify yourself only with those who resemble you. That is as narcissistic as working exclusively in your own self-interest.”

I can’t think of a more relevant example for this phenomenon than what Bachelorette fans witnessed during the season 17 finale.

Very promising! More tomorrow at REBID

UPDATE. My fuller consideration of Evie is up now

Thursday, August 30, 2007

ART TRIALS. Well, I did my best with Clive James' Cultural Amnesia, but after 500 pages I had to set it aside, not out of fatigue but out of irritation. The writing's not the problem. In and among the dozens of essays, each dedicated to (but not necessarily about) a major figure of the 20th Century (and sometimes others), James reliably produces insights that have both force and delicacy, as with this bit on Pound:
Pound vaunted his ability to form explanatory relationships, but it was the very thing he could never truly do, even though, like any other paranoid psychotic, he tried to all the time. Nevertheless he had the talent to demonstrate that to go mad for detail might yield something, whereas to go mad for generalization leads nowhere... he thought that he could judge an empire by the metallic composition of its small change, just as he thought he could extract the meaning of a Chinese ideogram by the way it looked. In both cases he was too far from the mark for sanity. But if he didn't get the picture, he could at least see it...
When he likes his subjects James is even better: "Montesquieu can delay his judgement on Tiberius: a forebearance that not even Tacitus can show... Tacitus, as much fascinated as repelled, had his sense of irony exhausted by a satanically gifted individual. Montesquieu, less emotionally involved, saw a point about Tiberius that extended to all mankind." If you can't get with this sort of material, he also writes elegantly about Dick Cavett and Tony Curtis.

The book isn't all about art, though. James' 20th Century is a slaughterhouse, so by his lights Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Mao, Pinochet and other such like must be considered, as well as artists who either opposed or collabrated with them, or were their victims. On these subjects, too, James can be forceful and even subtle: Goebbels, for example, "was the preeminent Nazi advocate of Total War... but he was also a realist in a surreal world, the madhouse he had helped create." On Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband was executed by Stalin, James is even poetic:
Akhmatova encapsulated the anguish of millions of devastated women when she wrote: "Husband dead, son in jail: pray for me." But a romantic she remained, still believing in the imaginative validity of a love affair beyond time. In Hope Abandoned, Nadezhda was able to say firmly that her friend was mistaken. Love affairs beyond time were impossible to take seriously when violent separations are the stuff of reality. With real life so disturbed, the nature of romanticism had been changed. In the new reality, all love affairs were beyond time.
James is so good at finding such aesthetic kernels in the tragedies that came with totalitarianism that I was prepared and even eager to hear a lot more of them. Alas, I did, and the kernels lost their savor soon enough. Part of it perhaps could not be helped; the horrors of the century may have been unprecedented, but they certainly begin to resemble one another over long stretches of description, and after the thirtieth or fortieth outrage I wished an editor had gently told James that we get it already. When Dante went to Hell he took Virgil, and you need a guide at that level to keep the infernal circles from closing into a blind spiral on you.

James' solution is to place the artists -- or, when they won't serve, polemicists -- in the context of relevant totalitarianisms. Did they perform admirably? Ernst Junger, despite being "incomparably the most gifted writer to remain on the scene" -- that is, in the Reich, though never quite a collaborator -- "no amount of horrifying truth could induce him fully to admit that he made a mistake. His way out of such an admission was to blame the style of the times; i.e., to console himself that everyone was at it..." If you think that's harsh, see what European Reds like Saramago get:
When Democracy finally arrived in 1974, Saramago didn't trust it. Saramago had good reason to suspect that justice would never come by reasonable means. But when it showed signs of doing so, he did nothing in his discursive writings to justify his position the only way it could have been justified... but it was wholly untrue to go on claiming that the far left offered an alternative in itself. The price of sticking to such a proposition was to restrict his own frame of reference to the size of his study. There was a world elsewhere in which the common people, all over the planet, had been massacred by the millions...
You soon see there is no Third Way with James. Authors who don't get the message are failures on that basis, despite the merit of their prose. James does not quite descend to the sort of Konservetkult nonsense we regularly lampoon here because he is a true critic with a rigorous standard: as with Pound, the ability to see the object is some recompense, but to get the picture is what art should be doing, particularly when the picture is of an oncoming holocaust. This is an arguable point, and certainly not the same thing as the blind weighing and sorting of the propagandist, but weighing and sorting is done and sometimes to an absurd degree:
In the long view of history, Brecht's fame as a creep will prevail, as it ought to. An unblushing apologist for organized frightfulness against the common people whose welfare he claimed to prize above his own, he was really no better than Oswald Mosley and a lot more dangerous. Brecht's fame as a poet will depend upon a wide appreciation of what he could do with language, and there lies the drawback: because the more you appreciate what he could do with language, the more you realize how clearly he could see, and so the more you are faced with how he left things out. You are faced, that is, with what he did not do with language.
What Brecht did do with language James never addresses, but you can pick up his plays and poems and enjoy them, I would say, even if you are not an apologist for Stalin.

This sort of hectoring eventually wore me down, but I am still getting some pleasure out of riffling it, because now I can desultorily enjoy James' lovely anecdotes, textual analyses, appreciations, and even some history lessons, without having to fidget in anticipation of another session of his grim tribunal.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

THINK OF YOURSELVES AS INTERNS AT THE PRESTIGIOUS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

When a Texas judge stops an executive order granting overtime rights to millions of workers, you expect the usual suspects to rush to yell hooray; though I see Megan McArdle is a little slow off the mark this morning, National Review got Carrie Lukas on the case pronto. Unfortunately, Lukas' bullshit dispenser wasn't warmed up. After announcing the injunction is "good news for workers," she falters in the crucial "make it look good" part of the routine. After trying the old employers-will-just-reclassify-those-workers bit -- at least that's what I think she's trying to convey with that Tammy McCutchen quote -- she gives us this:
Moreover, many workers simply don’t want to have to track their time and inform their bosses exactly when they are leaving early and when they are working late. Moving to an hourly position entails a loss of prestige for some workers, who prefer to feel as though their contributions to the company are bigger than just their time logged.
Sure, you would have gotten a higher rate after 40 hours, but you'd have had to record your hours! And if you're like me -- a rightwing factotum -- you hate bureaucracy more than you need to feed a family! Also, think of the loss of prestige -- imagine your "walk of shame" from the paymaster's office as your coworkers glare at you; you can even hear some of them saying, "yeah, looks like old Smith's only slaughtering pigs for the money!"

Well, there's one real upside: We should stop hearing about economic anxiety any day now.

UPDATE. Hi, guys, Disqus seems to have deleted a bunch of comments I did not ask to be deleted, and I cannot yet figure out how to get them back up. Working on resolution now. New comments seem to work, so feel free to blow off steam here.

Monday, March 04, 2013

WHEN SLAVE GIRL PRINCESS LEIA ISN'T ENOUGH.

Mark "Gavreau" Judge apparently felt the need to be humiliated, and went about it the way conservatives often do these days, by writing about Lena Dunham and Girls:
Girls creator Lena Dunham is very talented, and she’s only twenty-six, but it has to be said: like so many liberal Hollywood and New York artists, she has a powerful streak of cowardice... The girls in Girls are frustrated because the guys they date are either passive, psychotic, pretentious, degrading, or plain old losers. But what if Dunham had written in a male character who is strong, caring, attractive, highly intelligent, sexually unambiguous, great in bed, and a conservative?... 
How about this: a handsome grad student from Fordham who is Catholic, articulate, a college football star, compassionate, manly, and can debate any liberal to a standstill. Maybe his flaw is that he drinks too much, or that he once bullied a gay kid.
He could be called Gark "Javreau" Mudge! And the dark secret that drives him is that a black kid may have stolen his bicycle.

I understand the celebrity fantasy but, guy, this thing about trying to dare Lena Dunham into fucking your avatar (or at least wearing its promise ring) is just creepy. Also, did it never occur to you to make Gark Javreau Mudge's hamartia two wetsuits and a dildo?

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

MLK DAY WRAPUP. Aged recluse Jeff Goldstein bestirs himself to perform -- in poor voice, but with maximum attitude -- some Jeff Goldstein Greatest Hits, challenging black folk who think they deserve some sort of a holiday -- which they don't because there is no such thing as race, you see. Goldstein's boys love it, until a person claiming to be black shows up in comments, whereupon they immediately forget that there's no such thing as blackness and start attacking black people ("And what do you say about a 70% out of wedlock black birth rate? Is that unmentionable? Whitey’s fault?"). Even on MLK Day, apparently, there are some neighborhoods people of color ought to avoid.

More surprising is the National Review tribute, where some of the brethren actually admit that American conservatives were once hostile toward MLK:
Aside from the general dislike that conservatives held (and hold) toward civil disobedience under most circumstances, there are a number of other reasons left unaddressed by [Rick] Perlstein for why conservatives cannot embrace King without reservation....
If Perlstein left those reasons unaddressed -- I'm thinking of one in particular -- I'm sure he was just being polite.

They'll Do It Every Time -- celebrating the King holiday by explaning why he shouldn't have a holiday and so forth. If I wish they could just stop pretending and say what they really feel, it isn't entirely because I would like to see their electoral disasters increase -- it is also out of fellow-feeling, because the strain of trying to seem respectful appears to be wearing on them something awful.

UPDATE. Mark Krikorian says the best thing about the recent Mike Judge movie Idiocracy is that it makes fun of black people. Every day is MLK Day for some people!

Thursday, December 08, 2005

SORRY, OLD CHAP. I really hate to say this, but Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech was not well played.

In a way I admire it. He had a world stage, and gave from it (or from a TV set perched on it) the explicitly political lecture he wished to give. There is a touch in this of Brando sending out Sacheen Littlefeather, which I also admire. Fuck 'em if they can't take a rant. What makes their party more sacrosanct than the Oscars? It's his party this year, after all.

My quarrel is that he did not explicitly tie his gift to literature -- the occasion for the speech -- to his political argument. This judgement may be based on ignorance of his more recent work, which I have seen mostly on right-wing websites, by which torn pieces covered in wolves' spittle no sensible person could judge it.

That notwithstanding, I do see a break in Pinter's speech that cut his authority as a great writer away from his reasoning as a world citizen. And without that authority his argument, again given the occasion, loses the force it might have had.

All the early stuff about his working method is, or should be, nectar to writers:
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
This is excellent, largely because it approaches the universal by way of the particular. Not everyone starts as Pinter does, but the conclusion at which he arrives is both philosophically astute and common knowledge – it’s also funny, which demonstrates that the mystery Pinter pursued is one we all can acknowledge, and gives evidence of his lasting gift.

Pinter remains on the right track with his first relating of language to politics:
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.
This is inarguable. Shortly thereafter:
Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
Well... okay... but...
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.
Here you get the feeling that only the thinnest reed connects Pinter’s argument with its target: he has begun to compare the quest of earnest travellers toward truth, such as himself, with that of professional liars. It isn’t that the argument is too big for the target – though I think it is – but that one has nothing really to do with the other.

By the time we get to the painful descriptions of Reagan’s Nicaragua policy, Pinter’s argument is as far off the mark as a bird’s argument with a cat. It is beyond the province of literature, and, I fear, there is nothing in it that can wrest the argument back toward terms more favorable to literature. That may be Pinter’s assessment, too, and while I appreciate his dire conclusion –
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.
-- the speech, meant to accent the "crucial obligation," because it plays on the enemy's field is forced to leave its weight on the "enormous odds."

It may be that Toni Morrison’s Nobel Speech has as little relevance to the real, bleeding, scheming world as Pinter’s, and Lord knows I prefer his work to hers. But her Speech hinged on a metaphor – a blind woman trying to discern the fate of a bird in hand – and tightly connected her gift, such as it is, to the enemy it faced in the State:
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed.
I would be remiss not to mention the Speech by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky:
"How can one write music after Auschwitz?" inquired Adorno; and one familiar with Russian history can repeat the same question by merely changing the name of the camp - and repeat it perhaps with even greater justification, since the number of people who perished in Stalin's camps far surpasses the number of German prisoncamp victims. "And how can you eat lunch?" the American poet Mark Strand once retorted. In any case, the generation to which I belong has proven capable of writing that music.
This is not to play Dueling Oppressions, but to recognize that oppression remains what it has always been, as art has, and though the former tries like hell it has not in all these centuries been able to eradicate the latter. Pinter might have spoken of the particularly seductive language oppression, Western-style, has learned to deceive its subjects; what a speech that might have been!

But we already ask too much of our artists when we ask them to tell us how they do what they do. And I note with displeasure that the Nobel Speeches get longer each decade – look at Knut Hamsen’s! If Pinter’s speech disappoints you, read the plays. They contain everything you need to know.

Friday, September 30, 2005

THE FUDGE NEVER STOPS WITH THE FUDGE FACTORY. As previously observed here, conservative writers are going mad, and the newer ones lack basic compositional skills. Todd Buchholz seems to have been knocking around for some time ("an economic adviser in the White House of George H.W. Bush"); maybe he was working mostly in a language other than English. Get a load of this:
We are in a global race for IQ points. Not useless Mensa meeting points but applied IQ points. Brains put to work. Those countries that best harness IQ will prosper most. The U.S. produces about half the annual patent filings in the world. That's an outstanding number. But new ideas are not enough if we do not have a motivated, educated work force to exploit them. Despite improved high-school graduation rates, our kids are the Jamaican bobsled team of education, to judge by international test scores. They lose to the Slovenians. If we don't buck up our schools, the next generation could end up with white collars and pink slips.
This is a clumsily padded non-idea -- Chamber of Commerce rah-rah blather about how ideas and education will win the race for fill-in-the-blank. That's why it stinks so bad. Take somebody with a strong motivation to obfuscate rather than illuminate a subject, feed him on cliches and Mark Steyn, and this is this sort of thing he squeezes out.

Buchholz does have one idea -- that because white collar and blue collar workers are equally at risk of losing their jobs, the line between these old employment categories is blurred (or, in his odd usage, "fuzzed up"). But this idea might lead a more assiduous author in a direction not likely to win a hearing at OpinionJournal.

Fortunately for his career, Buchholz comes up with plenty of sunny images to make the shared doom of suits 'n' brutes look like something fun and futuristic. "How many executives still dictate to a secretary?" he demands, and while you are too stunned to ask what the hell that has to do with anything, he informs us that "my local UPS guy is carrying not just my cardboard box but a sophisticated inventory control device," and that today Archie Bunker could buy a really big Philippe Starck bathtub if he had the money (which, given Archie's age and skillset, he almost certainly would not). So you see, the future is an exciting challenge (rather than a desperate, exhausting race to the bottom) filled with lots of glossy images from a corporate training video, of which Buchholz's article is the journalistic equivalent.

Friday, May 28, 2004

YOU'S A EDUCATED FOOL. Culture scold James Bowman writes yet another long sneer at pop-culture studies, treating dismissively a host of comically-named tomes treating the deeper meanings of The Sopranos, Sex & The City, etc. Though Bowman does express some admiration for one such work that suggests The Simpsons is pro-family, on the rest he employs eye-rolling phrases ("purports to give a philosophical analysis," "unadulterated jargon of real-life scholars," "the more feminist the analysis, the less lighthearted -- and readable") to communicate his customary message: that professors, like artists, are fools to look for deeper meaning in absurdities.

Meanwhile over at NRO, we get not one but two articles about how the Kate Hudson vehicle Raising Hell represents an overdue reinterpretation of eccleasiastics in modern society. They don't use that kind of language, of course (consider their audience) -- theirs goes more like this: "...audiences will fall for Pastor Dan specifically because he is just like a typical pastor -- likeable. Likeable, and strong, and funny, and, yes, sexy."

Pastor Dan is played by the guy who did the radio show on Northern Exposure, and here's Megan Basham, the author quoted above, describing his courtship of the Kate Hudson character:
In one scene, shortly after they meet, Dan asks Helen if she'd like to go out sometime. When she shakes her head no, he starts to leave. But then, realizing how blind she is, he turns back and glowers, "It's because I'm not one of those model, club-hoppin' guys right? So you don't think I'm sexy?" Embarrassed and not knowing how to respond, Helen stands frozen until Dan marches back toward her, leans in, and growls, "Let me tell you something little lady, I am sexy. I'm a sexy man of God, and I know it."
If you think that's sexy, you'll cream your jeans over Tony Perkins in Crimes of Passion.

This sort of thing happens anytime something pops up in a book or movie or trend that could be interpreted, by minds obsessed with such things, as an endorsement of conservative politics or mores. (See Mark Gauvreau Judge on Swing Dancing for a particularly lurid example.) I don't see how this is any sillier than monographs about TV shows. Maybe James Bowman can explain it sometime.

Friday, October 31, 2003

WHILE YOU COMMIE-PAGAN BASTARDS ARE GOING TO COSTUME PARTIES, rightwing Christer sourball Mark Gavreau Judge commemorates Halloween by writing with an apparent lack of skepticism about a Catholic exorcism.

Wonder if he still thinks swing dancing will "contribute to the winning of the culture war"?