Everyone knows film festivals ought to be lawless temporary autonomous zones, because if a guy can get get arrested at one for raping a child and then skipping bail to avoid prosecution for it, that’s obviously a slippery slope leading toward very bad things like unfriendliness between Americans and the French.
If you love film, don’t look at the list of signatories, as it will only depress you. (Speaking of which: Tilda? You signed this f%&#ing thing? You are no longer my Imaginary Girlfriend.)
About a month after 9/11, there was a benefit concert in Madison Square Garden to raise money for recovery efforts et cetera. It was full of celebs marching onto the stage to pitch for the fundraising. I watched some of it, and there are two things that stand out in my memory.
One was Steve Buschemi, who it turns out had served with FDNY when he was younger, and had been volunteering. He showed up with the crew he'd been working with, looking haggard—uh, more haggard than usual, that is—and embarrassed by the applause.
The other was Richard Gere, who you may know is a Buddhist. I just found a transcript of what he said.
I think in this situation right now, when, when we have
the possibility of taking this energy, this horrendous energy that
we're all feeling—and the possibility of turning it into more violence and
revenge—we can stop that. We can take that energy and turn it into
something else. We can turn it into compassion, into love, into
understanding.
the crowd boos loudly
That's apparently unpopular right now, but that's all right.
My friends right now are the cops, the firemen, the emergency workers.
Those are the ones who don't ask if you're a good guy or a bad guy if
they're going to save you. They don't ask what your religion is when
they save you. They just do it because it need to be done.
the crowd cheers
That's the heart that I'm talking about, that's compassion, that's
the real thing. That's what we all need to aspire to.
I remember the look on his face when the booing happened. He obviously knew it would be coming. That's walking the walk of fierce compassion.
I used to work with Nanci Houlgate, and in addition to her other skills she turned out to be a very accomplished baker of elaborate and delicious cakes and cookies. She just opened her Etsy store Baked, and I'm already trying to think of an excuse to buy something.
After the party, Harry is surprised to learn that Tony is a preacher.
“What kind of church do you belong to?”
“I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning.”
Worth clicking through to read the whole thing, including the comments, which feature this gem:
I heard Tony Campolo tell that story a few years ago. And the crowd erupted into applause at that point — but we were checked by Tony holding up his hand. Then he kept talking:
I will never forget his reply. He said ‘No you don't. I'd go to a church that did that.’
It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled “The State of Macro” (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that “the state of macro is good.” The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making.
Will Wilkinson, in the course of a right-on blog post talking about how our current era of tricky mixed expectations about how a gent behaves toward women is a good thing, makes an astonishing assertion.
I think part of the fascination for many white guys with the show Mad Men is that it is a window into an attractive (to them) world of white male dominance and privilege that has largely disappeared.
Seriously?
I'm six episodes into the show and all I can think is how fascinatingly awful those people are, and how happy I am that I live now and not then.
He was as good at being a United States Senator as anyone ever has been. And by my lights, he was not only good at it—smart, skilled, and crafty—but also good: a liberal with a proudly bleeding heart, leading one fight after another for the needs of the disenfranchised. In a long, fascinating 2003 profile in the Boston Globe, Charles P. Pierce quotes Kennedy's former chief of staff Bancroft Littlefield, Jr.
This is a guy who, the first thing he did in the Senate was take on the poll tax
Yeah.
I've read a few profiles like that one over the years, and two things strike me.
First, it's impossible to resist the idea that he worked hard because the shades of the dead were watching, both the brothers he had to measure up to and the woman to whom he owed a debt.
Second, there's a fascination to his tirelessness at the sheer mechanics of playing a role like his: endless little bits of Taking Care of Business, like this moving story:
On the morning of the day before the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, Senator Ted Kennedy called the White House to inquire if it was appropriate to bring to the burial some earth from Arlington National Cemetery. The answer was essentially a shrug: Who knows? Unadvised, the senator carried a shopping bag onto the plane, filled with earth he had himself dug the afternoon before from the graves of his two murdered brothers. And at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, after waiting for the crowd and the cameras to disperse, he dropped to his hands and knees, and gently placed that earth on the grave of the murdered prime minister.
In that spirit, how about we set aside our conventional eulogies and instead offer the memorial Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice proposes?
The glee of Senator Kennedy’s enemies and ours will be unbounded over the next few days. I’m sure the birfers, astroturfers, industry shills, talibangelicals, Blue Dog DINOs, glibertarians, neocons, and general malefactors of great wealth will weep crocodile tears as they lament that Teddy’s death should not be used as an opportunity by crass liberals to pass the kind of serious health care reform he spent the last thirty years championing. And that, my friends and President Obama, is why it’s time to come back after Labor Day with a single coherent Senator Edward M. Kennedy Health Care Reform Bill, and to twist whatever arms, ears, or other parts are necessary to get a good strong comprehensive bill passed and signed, NOW. We owe the memory of a great man no less.
Via Hal O'Brien, from Stephen Minkin's obscure novel A No Doubt Mad Idea:
On to the library. And all through his time at the card catalog, combing the shelves, filling out the request cards, he danced a silent, flirtatious minuet of the eyes with a rosy-cheeked redhead in the biology section, pages of notes spread before her. All his life, he had had a yen for women in libraries. In a cerebral setting, the physical becomes irresistible. Also, he figured he was really more likely to meet a better or at least more compatible woman in a library than in a saloon. Ought to have singles libraries, with soups and salads, Bach and Mozart, Montaignes bound in morocco; place to sip, smoke, and seduce in a classical setting, noon to midnight. Chaucer's Salons, call them, franchise chain.
I should have suspected as much. Dig the crazy trailer for Legion, the forthcoming Killer Angel Action Movie.
By owning a copy of The Prophecy on DVD, featuring Christopher Walken as the archangel Gabriel and Elias Koteas as a priest turned cop, I feel I'm ahead of the curve on this one.
I'm pretty much the exact right age to mourn the passing of Mr Hughes: I was a teenager when he was making movies for teenagers, and I still feel a great affection for his work. (Though sitting down with a friend recently to watch my personal favorite of his films, Some Kind of Wonderful, we agreed that it was a very good thing that we were no longer teenagers and so emotionally raw.)
I remember some critics at the time dismissing Hughes as just telling teenagers what they wanted to hear: you're smart and adults are stupid. Those critics are half-right: Hughes did tell teenagers what they wanted to hear, but he had a much less cynical, and more correct, understanding of what that was. Reviewing Hughes' career, Roger Ebert quotes him:
Kids are smart enough to know that most teenage movies are just exploiting them .... People forget that when you’re 16, you’re probably more serious than you’ll ever be again.
Hughes says yeah, parents and schoolteachers and other adults are usually foolish and always uncool, but most of them actually love their teenage charges and are trying to do right by them. Sex is a powerful force, but love is more important. Not everyone you love will return your love, but love is still worth pursuing because if you seek it out you will find it ... most importantly with your friends. And the English language is the greatest toy in the world.
It turns out that these things are not only what I wanted to hear when I was a teenager, they're what I've found to be true as an adult. Nice work.
Neil Gaiman, saying “it's either beautiful or the stupidest thing I've read today” points us to a UK Telegraph story about a yellow marriage between a woman and an amusement park ride.
“I love him as much as women love their husbands and know we’ll be together forever,” she said.
Miss Wolfe first fell for the ride when she was 13: “I was instantly attracted to him sexually and mentally.
“I wasn’t freaked out, as it just felt so natural, but I didn’t tell anyone about it because I knew it wasn’t ‘normal’ to have feelings for a fairground ride.”
Ten years later, she decided to go back to Knoebels Amusement Park to declare her love. She now sleeps with a picture of the ride on her ceiling and carries its spare nuts and bolts around to feel closer to it.
She claims to believe they share a fulfilling physical and spiritual relationship and does not get jealous when other people ride it.
Indeed, the meaning of love comes into question. However, there is no single definition because this feeling has many levels and crosses every part of the spectrum. Virtually every one and every thing can be loved. Love does not have any rules that requisite to whom or to what we express this multifaceted emotion, as long as it causes no violation or harm to the subjected.
Maybe I'm just in a romantic mood today but reading that, to Mr Gaiman's point, makes me go with “beautiful.”
The Hawthorn Group is an international public affairs company of senior political communications specialists. Hawthorn helps solve business and policy problems—crisis, legislative, media, customer, financial and employee—for corporations, governments, associations and non-profit organizations.
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Specializing in complex policy issues and heavily regulated industries—beverage, banking, energy, gaming, healthcare, insurance, natural resources, security, trade and utilities—Hawthorn currently represents a diverse group of industry-leading clients.
Got that? They're PR guys for corporations. To translate some of those terms, we're talking about corporations that do stuff like drill for oil, operate casinos, deny people's health insurance claims, blow up mountains to get the minerals, and send guys with guns to solve clients' problems. In short: evil corporations.
We thought the most fixated of the political and communications “junkies” might find interesting some highlights of a recent grassroots campaign Hawthorn created and managed for the American Coalition of Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE).
“Grassroots campaign.” I do not think that word means what they think it means.
John Lennon famously said, “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry,’ ” and “Come Together” owes so much to Berry's song “You Can't Catch Me” that Lennon was sued by Chuck Berry's publisher.
Here's another song that owes a big debt to “You Can't Catch Me,” James McMurtry's “Chocktaw Bingo,” our “new national anthem.”
Update: When I saw Julie Taymor's Across The Universe, I laughed out loud at this scene, because I recognized why the character of JoJo is introduced dressed like Chuck Berry ... as the soundtrack gives us “Come Together:”
Update: Just for fun: a cover of “Come Together” from Pomplamoose.
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.
Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
I'd add a couple of observations from my experience as an interaction designer.
When I was a consultant, I worked in a very small team that got to set its own rhythm of work internally, which meant that we could take the right sized chunks of time to do things most of the time. This had huge benefits for our productivity, both in the volume of work we could do and its quality.
Plus, I have to observe that the calendaring tools that we use — I'm talking, of course, about MS Outlook primarily — are designed (if badly) around the manager's style of schedule, with a simpleminded conception of fixed blocks of time. But almost everyone needs the ability to tell their calendar “every day between 12:00 and 2:00 I need at least half an hour free in which to eat lunch.” And many people need the ability to tell their calendar things like “each week I need 15 hours outside of meetings, including at least two uninterrupted three-hour blocks of time”. This is the kind of stuff top executives have personal assistants to do, but well designed software could do many of the same things. I have a good job, but if someone wants to pay me to design that system, I'm up for talking about it ....
I've been holding my breath, hoping that the moves the Obama administration has made to justify detention without trial as policy, á la Guantànamo, have been a head fake intended to create the political opportunity to do the opposite. I'm turning blue, here: it's looking more and more like the Obama administration is entirely serious about giving the US government institutional mechanisms for locking people up without a trial. Glenn Greenwald has the latest.
A task force appointed by President Obama to issue recommendations on how to close Guantanamo announced yesterday it will miss its deadline and instead needs a six-month extension, potentially jeopardizing Obama's promise to close Guantanamo within a year. The announcement was made in a briefing given by four leading Obama officials, where the condition of the briefing was that none of the officials could be named (why not?) and allmediaoutlets agreed to this condition (why?).
Though the Task Force's final recommendations were delayed, it did release an interim report (.pdf) which — true to Obama's prior pledges — envisions an optional, three-tiered “system of justice” for imprisoning accused Terrorists, to be determined by the Obama administration in each case: (1) real trials in real courts for some; (2) military commissions for others; and (3) indefinite detention with no charges for the rest. This memo is the first step towards institutionalizing both a new scheme of preventive detention and Obama's version of military commissions.
From this interim report, it's more apparent than ever that the central excuse made by Obama defenders to justify preventive detention and military commissions — there are dangerous Terrorists who cannot be released but also cannot be tried because Bush obtained the evidence against them via torture — is an absolute myth.
I am very displeased to be using my “the horror” label on a post about the President of the United States again.
Today I find myself thinking of how as the year 2000 approached there was lots of talk of the Greatest X of the 20th Century or the Most Important Y of the Millenium.
When talk came around to the Greatest Artwork of the 20th Century, I certainly had to respect folks who went with Guernica or Le Sacre du Printemps or Seven Samurai. But for me, it's no contest.
For what, other than art, can you call a human being standing on the surface of the Moon? Whatever other explanations one might offer, we went to the Moon not because it was useful, but for the same reason we do all art. We felt at some deep human level that it was simply too compelling an idea not to take the effort to make it happen.
What could be more human? We are curious monkeys. We will risk our lives to know something more about the world. Then, unsatisfied, we will risk our lives again to see it for ourselves. Then, unsatisfied, we will risk our lives again to touch it.
What could be more emblematic of the 20th Century? It would have been impossible before: the integral role of technology, that great force of the century, is obvious. And with that there is also the role of technological hubris. The 20th Century political order gave us governments able to gather the resources ... and driven enough by rivalry to invest those resources into it. Global communications meant that half a billion people could participate in it as it happened.
And to that last point, when we talk about it, we ordinarily say that “we went to the Moon.” Not those three astronauts, not NASA, not the United States of America. We went, all of us. In part as witnesses, yes, but also truly as participants, because doing it took just about everything we had. Everything we knew about nature, and technology, and the human frame ... the wealth of the world providing the resources to build the machines, and to support and train the people who did the work ... the wit and skill of people from around the world ... and everything our ancestors did to bring us to the place where we had enough to work with. All of us, even people like me who were not yet born, as the future witnesses who would make the act immortal.
What will be the greatest artwork of the 21st Century? It's easy to say the next step, but that seems wrong to me. I like the idea of the Clock of the Long Now. But the century is young; it's more likely something I cannot imagine. Whatever it will be, it has a tough act to follow.
Update:@vruba at Tupperwolf has a similar thought about Apollo and the Space Shuttle.
Space exploration is art, but we have to keep this secret. We must not say in public that it’s how humanity in a technological age reaches outside itself, how we find a mirror distant enough to see to our edges, how we face the void. Shhh.So people see space exploration as part of the military-industrial complex. And it is. Kind of.
Power wants what it doesn’t have, and it can’t have art. Art needs power’s materials and protection, but fears its responsibilities. Even when they come to terms, power never owns art, only a contract, and art is never safe, only sheltered. High on the cathedrals, the stonecarvers make satirical gargoyles. Space exploration is art, but we have to keep this secret. We must not say in public that it’s how humanity in a technological age reaches outside itself, how we find a mirror distant enough to see to our edges, how we face the void. Shhh.
We have grown some of the great monumental art of our time right on the institutions of fear and violence, like a bromeliad on the saggital crest of a rogue ape. We made a lot of awful compromises to do it. But we did it.
And @vruba also has some words about Earthrise and other things which I think you really out to check out.
Update: As one would expect, on this subject Carl Sagan brings it.
I have been a practising Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief — confirmed in the holy scriptures — that we are all equal in the eyes of God.
The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.
There have been many things where I've given the Obama administration a little slack, with the hope — often rewarded — that it's doing some subtle Barack-Rahm rope-a-dope. This is not one of those times. There is no justification for this.
I usually try to stay away from the forces of darkness, but last week I killed a famous vampire — and let me tell you, it was fun! Actually, I didn’t stake him myself — I used new media tools to allow one of the strongest female television characters of our generation to do it. OK, let me back up a minute. Last week, at the Open Video Conference at NYU Law School, I debuted my feminist mash-up video, Buffy v. Edward. It’s an example of transformative storytelling which reinterprets the movie Twilight by re-cutting and combining it with the TV series Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.
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More than just a showdown between The Slayer and the Sparkly Vampire, it’s also a humorous visualization of the metaphorical battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21ist century.
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Joe Bob says check it out: it's not only an incisive critique, it's fun and clever.
If you're not real familiar with Twilight, I can say that I did see the film and Mr McIntosh is not, by my lights, misrepresenting it.
“San Francisco” — song by Jill Sobule, directed by Margaret Cho. If you want to see that, you probably know who you are.
Now why do I recognize the young lady with the straight black hair who crops up at 1:00 and several other parts of the video? Have we met? Or is that just wishful thinking?
Across the street from the Stonewall, a crowd of maybe 100 was watching the police march out a dozen or so bar patrons and employees into a paddy wagon. The young arrestees paused at the back of the waiting paddy wagon and struck vampy poses, smiling and waving to the crowd.
This was not the way gays were supposed to behave when they were arrested, and the officers started shoving them with their nightsticks. People in the crowd yelled at the police to stop. The officers responded by telling them to get off the street. Someone started throwing pocket change at the officers, and others began rocking the paddy wagon. Then, from the back of the crowd, beer cans and bottles flew through the air. In a hail of coins and street debris, the paddy wagon drove away with two patrol cars, and the remaining officers retreated inside the Stonewall, locking the doors behind them.
Soon enough, loose cobblestones from a nearby repaving site rained down on the bar’s windows. An uprooted parking meter was used to ram the club’s doors. Someone lighted a wad of newspaper and threw it through the bar’s broken window, starting a small fire. The policemen inside the Stonewall put it out with a fire hose, which they then turned on the crowd.
Instead of dispersing, the people in the street cavorted sarcastically in the spray, teasing the officers with suggestive come-ons. A few moments later, patrol cars came screaming down Christopher Street from Sixth Avenue. And at approximately 2 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, the gay men decided they weren’t going to take it anymore. The clash outside the Stonewall went on for 48 more hours and become famous as the riots that started the gay-rights movement.
Amazingly, there was no TV coverage and only a few paragraphs in the city’s daily papers.
Not so any more. On the editorial page of the New York Times, Frank Rich criticizes the President for failing to step up on gay rights.
On Monday, President Obama will commemorate Stonewall with an East Room reception for gay leaders. Some of the invitees have been fiercely critical of what they see as his failure, thus far, to redeem his promise to be a “fierce advocate” for their still unfulfilled cause. The rancor increased this month, after the Department of Justice filed a brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the most ignominious civil rights betrayal under the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
The Obama White House has said that the Justice Department action was merely a bureaucratic speed bump on the way to repealing DOMA — which hardly mitigates the brief’s denigration of same-sex marriage, now legal in six states after many hard-fought battles. The White House has also asserted that its Stonewall ceremony was “long planned” — even though it sure looks like damage control. News of the event trickled out publicly only last Monday, after dozens of aggrieved, heavy-hitting gay donors dropped out of a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser with a top ticket of $30,400.
In conversations with gay activists on both coasts last week, I heard several theories as to why Obama has seemed alternately clumsy and foot-dragging in honoring his campaign commitments to dismantle DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The most charitable take had it that he was following a deliberate strategy, given his habit of pursuing his goals through long-term game plans. After all, he’s only five months into his term and must first juggle two wars, the cratered economy, health care and Iran. Some speculated that the president is fearful of crossing preachers, especially black preachers, who are adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage. Still others said that the president was tone-deaf on the issue because his inner White House circle lacks any known gay people.
It's odd to be old enough to remember history. The Stonewall Riot always makes me feel like a citizen of Concord awakened by musket fire on that crisp April morning and wondering what the commotion was.
It seems I'm not alone in being surprised to find myself affected by his passing. The night before last, when the news was fresh, a friendly madman asked me for change and expressed his mourning. The following day, as I walked to work, I passed a dozen boxes offering me the San Francisco Chronicle with an enormous picture of Jackson on the front page: a concert photograph of him in motion, exuberant and gorgeous at the height of his powers, before everything we think of now when we hear his name.
He's black yet also white. He's adult yet also a child. He's male yet also female. He's gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he's also never fucked their mothers. He's wearing a mask, yet he's also showing his real self. He's walking yet also sliding. He's guilty yet also innocent. He's American yet also global. He's sexual yet also sexless. He's immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He's Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He's real yet also synthetic. He's crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He's the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He's bad, yet also good. He's blessed yet also cursed. He's alive, but only in theory.
Seeing the picture of the Michael Jackson whom I had forgotten, I had a daydream yesterday morning.
On the night of Elvis' death Michael Jackson is nineteen years old.
The King's shade comes to Michael in a dream. The world is going to need a King of Pop, Elvis tells him. He plays a single note on his guitar and for just the length of a single heartbeat the note hangs in the air and Michael can feel what it will be like, to hold perfect poise in front of an audience of a hundred thousand, their voices raised with his in joy.
The shade of Robert Johnson is there too. The Grandfather offers a secret and a warning.
I can tell you how it can be you. My legend is true, and I can teach you how I did it. But the legend is also right that there's a price. You will be mocked. You will go mad. You will hack at your own flesh. You will commit the worst crime you can imagine. You will burn.
Michael is heedless of the warning. The moment of stardom which Elvis showed him is singing in his heart.
Michael wakes at midnight. He rises, donning shoes, a coat, and gloves against the night air. He steps outside and walks down the street to the crossroads, where the Devil is waiting. The Devil offers his hand, and its grip burns away Michael's glove. Though Michael's flesh remains unharmed, the pain is real and excruciating.
Michael smiles his best on-stage smile and does not let go until the Devil confirms that the deal is done.
Malcolm Gladwell, writing for The New Yorker about caffeine makes one of the kind of facile, reductive cause-and-effect observations that I enjoy but try not to take too seriously.
It is worth noting, as well, that in the original coffeehouses nearly everyone smoked, and nicotine also has a distinctive physiological effect. It moderates mood and extends attention, and, more important, it doubles the rate of caffeine metabolism: it allows you to drink twice as much coffee as you could otherwise. In other words, the original coffeehouse was a place where men of all types could sit all day; the tobacco they smoked made it possible to drink coffee all day; and the coffee they drank inspired them to talk all day. Out of this came the Enlightenment.
Not sure I'd go that far, but caffeine certainly does count as one of the key technologies of modernity.
