A beautiful thing

My favorite interview with any movie star in years: Mickey Rourke on Charlie Rose. Up there with Tom Hanks on In The Actor's Studio. There are so many good things going on inside Rourke's head, these days, that any interviewer who gets to him is in for a treat. The only thing Charlie didn't ask him is whether an Oscar win would really be the best thing for him. Might he not turn back into an a-hole again? It's got to be weighing on some voters minds. 

I go back and forth on Penn and Rourke almost daily but am currently thinking this: in a close two horse race, the underdog is to be favored. Supporting actress is still proving hard to call, not helped by the fact that I still haven't seen Doubt: it's feels like it's either Viola Davis or Penelope Cruz. I'm a bit bored of Cruz: she seems to have been front-runner for too long. And Davis makes sure that Doubt gets itself recognised. The other question I haven't answered is how they reward Benjamin Button: to go from a near record-breaking haul of 13 nominations to a couple of technical wins seems like too big a step-down.  I'm expecting it to sneak one surprise win, maybe for costume or best score? Desplat is certainly due.

Quote of the day

"We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy." — Judd Gregg (R) on his withdrawal from Obama's cabinet.

He just noticed?

Blanche does Katrina

My friend Mark Sam is being sued by The University of the South, which owns the rights for Tennesse Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire, to "cease and desist" with his new one-man show, in which he ventriloquises a modern-day Blanche Dubois weathering Hurricane Katrina at the the New Orleans Superdome. The Williams estate are disputing that this falls under the "fair use" part of Mark Sam's first amendment rights. I have no idea about the legals ins and outs of this. Does a parodist owe dues to the author of the work being parodied? I would have guessed not, or parody wouldn't exist as a form. The Williams lawyers are arguing that Mark Sam's parody is pointed the wrong way: “It seems at best to be a comedic political commentary directed at the events surrounding the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans,” said one of the lawyers representing the university. “As you may know, in order for a parodist to take advantage of a fair-use defense, a parodist’s criticism must target the copyrighted work at least in part.” A serious error in judgment, as anyone who has seen Mark Sam's line in platinum blonde wigs can attest.

Pet Peeve no 33: cackling anchors

One of the unintended consequences of Jon Stewart's success is the amount of fake laughter one hears on the news these days. It was the Stewart's Daily Show, I'm assuming, that prompted cable news producers to rush around looking for freelance comedians to liven up their shows. They're everywhere now, from CNN to MSNBC, from the Rachel Maddow Show to Keith Olbermann's Countdown — a little comedy 'bit' at the end where some putz you've never heard of provides his irreverent take on the day's news events. Far worse than the comic routines themselves, however, are the fake laughs that the anchor has to provide, to reassure us that what we are hearing is, indeed, comedy. It's worse than canned laughter: at least that was once fresh into the can. Someone had to find a show funny, once upon a time, even if it is not the show you happen to be watching. This something else again — lonely, pre-rehearsed cackles from a single human being at jokes they've already heard five times that day. No technician or camerman ever joins in. The laugh dies in the muffled cocoon of the studio. Even someone as naturally spontaneous and high-spirited as Rachel Maddow sounds like she's humoring her most boring uncle. Please, guys, leave that sort of thing to Larry King.

Togetherness

The recent pictures of London under snow have made me hopelessly and horribly homesick I'm not sure why. It never snows in London. I certainly don't have any memories of snow when I lived there. And it snows all the time in New York. Maybe I'm just more facile than I thought and responded, Pavlovian fashion, to the picture-book images. Actually, I know what it is. Its not the fact that it's common. Its the fact that its uncommon and I'm missing out. I remember what it was like when Thatcher resigned and when Diana died and I imagine the snowfall to have a similar effect — a sort of big civic hug. Maybe people are bonding. Maybe they are performing small and unexpected acts of kindness. Maybe they are feeling young and foolish and giggling when they look out the window. Or then again, maybe they are shovelling grey slush out of their driveways so they don't slip and fracture a toe. Either way, I'm jealous; they're doing it all together.

Inducing a cosmic eeew

So I folded and saw The Reader last night. It exceeded even my expectations of how awful it might be. Here goes: a healthy young man named Michael, friendly and engaging, with a big broad smile that suggests a trusting, loving nature, enjoys his first sexual romance with an older woman. She is beautiful, distant, a little cruel, but she teaches him the ways of female flesh. Their affair lasts for a summer, at the end of which she leaves town and Michael returns to the bosom of his family. He becomes a law student, much liked, pursued by beautiful girls his own age. Then one day he attends a war crimes trial and sees his old flame in the dock for war crimes committed while a member of Hitler's SS.

You might think his reaction to this would be one of initial shock followed by rueful reflection on the poor judgment of horny sixteen-year-old-boys. But no, what happens is this: He grows up into Ralph Fiennes. A cloud follows him wherever he goes. He marries only to see the marriage falter. He has a daughter but proves a distant father. 40 years later he is still traumatised, angry, torn apart by self loathing, seeking closure, demanding catharsis, trying and failing to find some way to put his history with this woman behind him. To which any reasonable cinema goer might be forgiven for asking: what gives?

What gives is that Bernard Schlink, the book's original author wanted to provide a probing, exhaustive disinterral of post-war German guilt. In which case, can I make a suggestion? Don't pick as your hero someone who merely shagged a war criminal, Bernard. Pick a war criminal, their butler or maid. Shagging a war criminal is unlikely to provide you with probing, exhaustive disinterral of anything much except one's poor choice of shagging partners when you are a horny sixteen year old boy. Horny sixteens year old boys will shag anything. The lesson to be drawn from such a tale are, one would have thought, negligable. 

How guilty can he a sixteen year old kid be made to feel exactly for sleeping with an attractive war criminal? I would imagine the most he would feel is a kind of momentary fate-infused grodiness — a sort of sexual-cosmic eew. But to have it blight your entire life, as if guilt were some kind of contagion, passed on through the most fleeting of contacts? What a complete crock. This story was concocted by someone who has spent almost no time observing those frail, feckless creatures we call human beings and all his time having ideas about them.

Why do embittered losers write books?

A wonderful piece in the New Yorker Observer about how emotionally misshapen losers are taking over contemporary literature:—

One strain in particular—characterized by a self-loathing impulse to confession, a kinetic demeanor and a claim to authenticity expressed through vitriolic social critique—has emerged as a dominant model. The patron saints of this mini-genre: Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and pretty much every character Chuck Palahniuk has ever written. Some of these characters are not far from monsters—not good underneath all their flaws but worth paying attention to because of them. Disfigured, pathetic, unapologetic and occasionally hopeless, they are, on the whole, contemptuous of the world around them because of what it’s turned them into and confident that the reason for their alienation is the inescapable, toxic nastiness of modern life. They are losers—spiritually dysfunctional, often ugly physically—with chips on their shoulders and resentment in their hearts that takes the form of a self-consciously unforgiving, bombastic mode of social criticism. Over the past decade or so, characters like these seem to have become the vehicle of choice for young male writers seeking to express a certain sort of disaffection.

This is a little too kind to Paluhniuk — Palunhiyuk? I can never get that guy's name right — but it holds water. Edge sells. Gritty and unflinching rule the day. I was struck reading the obituaries of Updike, how many people paid tribute to the delightedness of his descriptions. Sam Anderson, in New York magazine, noted "his almost pathological cheerful[ness]". Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, went one better than pathology:—

Updike the humorist is probably the least known or recognizable Updike of them all, but something of the White-cum-Thurber sound of the New Yorker that he joined—that bemused, ironically smiling but resolutely well-wishing, anti-malicious comic tone—lingered in his work till the very end. In the last year of his life, he wrote to an admirer that “humor is my default mode,” and that he still dreamed of being the new Benchley, the next Perelman.

I wish people wouldn't wait until you are dead to say such nice things.

This is the end

I'm currently working through the copy-editor's notes on my novel. As I am quickly finding out, copy-editors are a little harder to charm than editors. Your editor is basically already a fan; they know you; often they were the ones who bought your book. The copy-editor is just performing a job of work on a novel that has been randomly sent them. They're plucking chickens. So far I've had "very confused and contradictory and pretentious", "muddled, repetitive and crass", "cliched and dreary" "v boring" and "wet." My favorite comment so far is "we've heard him say this before and it was boring the first time." She's right, although naturally, I went back to the first time the passage appeared to see if she said anything about it then and — horror of horrors — she didn't, which makes me worry that she has been biting her tongue on other occasions. How much of this book has she been reading through gritted teeth?

I'm close to the end now, I can tell: I'm listening non-stop to Peter Gabriel on my ipod. This happened the last time I finished a book. I think it's something to do with the slow, steady rhythms, the weighty, bottom-heavy production, the momentum, the sense of big things moving slowly but surely along. It feels like swinging a sledgehammer: all the weight working for you not against you. Hopefully.

Feels a little like Christmas

Obama is due to sign his first piece of legislation tomorrow: a bill designed to make it easier for women to sue for pay discrimination. Following so quickly on his decision to end torture, close Guantanamo, restore the power of law, clip the wings of lobbyists, etc, etc it's hard the escape the Christmas-everyday! feel of living in America at the moment. It's a little bit embarrassing, to be frank. At least supporting candidate Obama had some kind of below-the-radar cool; for about a year or two youy got to root for a underdog who needed your support and cash and made you feel part of some neat underground network. Now that he is president, I am faced with the far more alarming prospect of having an outsized mancrush on the leader of the free world. It's like when a band you've been following for ages suddenly has a number one hit. Everyday I find myself resisting the temptation to go off him, if only to salvage some kind of self-respect. I'm much more comfortable with the idea that politicians are liars and crooks, that power corrupts and absolute power blah de blah. You know where you stand with them: off to one side, with a sneer on your face. But to have one that you actually like, and who reads the same books you do and listens to the same music and finds the same things funny. It's unsettling, weird and destined to end in heartache. But not now. Now it feels like Christmas, with a nice new present left for us for us under the tree every morning.

John Updike's gone. Wow. That's sad.

Perfection Wasted (1990)

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market --
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories
packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

My review of Updike's Gertrude & Claudius here.

Quote of the day

"Can I just say there is no such thing as the best actress, you know? There is no such thing as the greatest living actress" — Meryl Streep, picking up her SAG award and embarking on one self-depracation too far. Do you know how easy it is to look forbidding in a wimple?

The movie that made me a smoker

The wife and I caught Blue Velvet on TV last night. I was amazed and delighted to find it holding up so well. It's just as hypnotic as it was when I first saw it in 1989. It was the film that turned me into a smoker. Until then I'd been trying to smoke but not really enjoying it. But the moment the film ended, I staggered out into the night, feeling Dennis Hopper's viciousness like a kick to the kidneys, and without thinking, sucked down my first fully-enjoyable Marlboro red. I'm munching in Nicorette these days, but still felt the movie somewhere deep in my solar plexus. I was struck by just how quiet it all is — lots of whispered dialogue and ambient hum— and by the classicism of the story. I never really remembered it this way, but beneath all the severed ears and smeared lipstick, there's a detective story, very cleanly told, about a local drug king-pin being brought down. The scene at Pussy Heaven, with Dean Stockwell lip-synching 'The Candy-Colored Clown They Call the Sandman', remains my favorite all-time scene of cinematic debauch. Filmmakers usually get this horribly wrong, with too much going on in — too much energy, too much liveliness. Lynch catches the weird stillness of genuine depravity. It's just people in a room, checked out, swaying gently, lost to one another, waiting for someone to scream, "Let's hit. The fuck. Ing road."

Monkeys get hangovers

"A large variety of creatures consume alcohol in the wild, ranging from bumble-bees to elephants. Hooch finds its way into their diets via the fermenting fruit, sap and nectar of various plants, and many exhibit signs of inebriation after they’ve enjoyed a good feed. Their weakness for the substance au naturel is understandable: ethanol is a rich food, with 75 percent more calories than refined sugar, and its distinctive aroma makes it easy to locate. This natural thirst has been exploited by man since the dawn of history. Aristotle noted that wild monkeys were caught by setting out jars of palm wine — the creatures would drink, then pass out, leaving them easy prey. The same method of trapping was still in use in the 19th century and commented on by Darwin in the opening chapter of “The Descent of Man,” when drawing similarities between humanity and the rest of creation. Monkeys could get drunk like men. They also got hangovers: “On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons.” — NYT

Quote of the day

"Ever get the feeling everybody's having more fun than you? Well. They are." — advert for Breezes package holidays.

That's not very helpful.

When imagination roams free

There are some very entertaining reasons floating around for why Gitmo shouldn't be closed. "I think the first thing we have to remember is that we're talking about terrorists here," says House Minority Leader John Boehner "Do we bring them into our borders?", invoking the spectre of the terrorist-as-illegal-immigrant, working cash in hand as a nanny or gardener, while fiddling their green card applications. GOP House Minority Whip Eric Cantor warned: "Most families neither want nor need hundreds of terrorists seeking to kill Americans in their communities," implying a hitherto untapped ability, on the part of the terrorists, to bust out of high security prisons at will and wreak their mayhem. Lest we mock, National Review's Jim Geraghaty points out that "A detainee who escapes from any of the U.S. sites is within quick reach of terror targets, potential hostages, means of escape, etc.... It's hard to picture militia members, the Crips, Bloods, or what have you doing something as extreme as, say, crashing a plane into the prison to faciliate an escape and/or provide martyrdom to their brethren." For sheer economy, this is he winner, artfully combining the two things everyone knows about terrorists — that they crash planes into buildings and they live in Gitmo — into one phantasmagoric specter. Not even prison can hold these mighty beings.  

The New Jackie Os

The proclamations that Michelle Obama is the new Jackie O seem to have missed the mark — by a generation. A run on the jackets worn by Sasha and Malie on Inauguration Day caused J Crew's website to crash. Talent scouts are on the hunt for models who look like the two Obama children. (“People are looking for girls who resemble them,” says Charlie Winfield, the head booker at FunnyFace Today.) There's even a new line of Beanie Baby dolls named after them (“We believe it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes,” a first lady spokesman said.) But of course — we live in the age of the Olsen twins and Tweens and Miley Cyrus. Forget the parents. Prepare yourself for the onslaught.

Those Oscar nominations

The spirit of justice coursing through the land has spilled over into the Oscar nominations: the academy managed to resist the lure of Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, gave 14 nominations to Benjamin Button, decided against a best film nod for The Dark Knight, made a complete pass on Revolutionary Road and nominated actual supporting actresses in the supporting actress category. Wonder will never cease. On the other hand, Slumdog Millionaire continues its sprint, no best film nod for WALL-E and no nomination for Bruce Springsteen, which is beyond belief. That song wasn't just a nominee. It was the clear and deserved winner.

My predictions: —
Best film: Slumdog Millionaire
Best director: David Fincher
Best actress: Kate Winslet
Best actor: Sean Penn
Best supporting actor: Heath Ledger
Best supporting actress: Tariiji Henson
Best screenplay: Milk
Best adapted screenplay: Slumdog
Best effects: Button
Best Song: Slumdog
Soundtrack: Button
Foreign film: Waltz With Bashir

From a new show of Gerhard Richter paintings at the National Portrait Gallery.

Doing the right thing

It's hard to say exactly how I feel about the inauguration. Relief, mainly. The address was sombre, even severe, with very few of the rhetorical flourishes that we've come to expect of Obama. I loved "the time has come to set aside childish things". I was surprised by the boldness of this:

We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

And then, just as you were wondering if he'd noticed who was sitting right behind him, this:

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

That's when I felt most cheered. How much time I've spent over the past 8 years trying to disentangle genuine anger at what was done on 9/11 from Bush's disastrous response to it. With a single stroke, Obama sliced them apart and freed us up again. And then this:

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true.

My favorite line, possibly, in a speech that didn't seem to be angling for Bartlett's. Instead it was sturdy as an Ox leaning into its halter. The day after he issued a series of executive orders closing Guantanamo, suspending military commissions, compelling CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual, banning CIA "black sites", and restricting his own power and the power of former Presidents to withhold documents on the basis of secrecy. Heaven.

Better than the West Wing

During the confirmation hearings, Eric Holder is grilled about his basketball game.

Golden Globe reax

Very happy about Mickey Rourke winning for The Wrestler: I saw it the other night with Kate and thought it better than Raging Bull (my opinion of that movie is not as stratospheric as some). Just seeing Rourke being interviewed is enough to bring tears to my eyes. And didn't Spielberg's ouevre look spectacular in compilation like that? Not so happy about Kate Winslett winning both Actress (my heart belongs to Hathaway) and Supporting Actress. I'd understand if they gave her supporting as consolation, but to take the supporting award away from an actress who genuinely played a supporting role, like Marisa Tomei, was wasteful — more to do with Weinstein than Winslett. The biggest disappointment, though, were the awards showered on Slumdog Millionaire, the slickest little fake to come our way since Chocolat. How Fox dressed up the new Danny Boyle extravaganza as this scrappy little underdog from the Indian subcontinent is marketing savvy worthy of serious study. It's a foreign movie for those who can't be bothered with subtitles. And the love story doesn't work for a single, luscious frame.

Men buggering men

In the middle of the recent controversy over Obama's choice of Rick Warren to deliver the address at his Inaugeration, Warren said some peculiar things. He was defending himself from the accusation that he is homophobic, comparing homosexuality to his own battle with internet porn, saying that much as he'd all like to watch porn all day long, he must resists the impulse. He handed over the Internet addresses for the pornographic sites he liked so that his wife Sherry could put locks on them.

She created specific blocks for them, so I can no longer access them. Once again, this eliminated a lot of my temptation. I now feel comfortable using my own computer, but nervous when I use an unprotected computer. I’m glad my wife established these blocks.

The peculiar thing about this — the thing I find peculiar about all anti-gay Evangelicals — is their assumption that the only thing separating heterosexual men from homosexual men is resistance to temptation — that we'd all like to bugger other men, given half the chance. You know — if nobody was looking. It's kind of funny and even a little bit radical when you think about it. They basically believe that we're all gay — 'gays' are just the ones who've given up the fight not to be. I'd have that if you wanted to put some distance between yourself and an activity you found unholy, the last thing you'd want to do is paint it as different in degree, not kind, with just a slippery slope to separate you. I guess if they admit difference in kind, then they're basically agreeing with gay people that they're born that way, and then they'll end up looking intolerant. So they end up painting themselves into this strange little corner, instead:
the only thing separating an evangelical pastor from a raving sodomite, apparently, is whether your wife is watching.

A righteous wind at his back

Kate tells me I have a man crush on Daniel Craig but whatever: he's superb as a righteous Jewish warrior mowing down Nazis in Edward Zwick's Defiance. So is Liev Shrieber, as his brother, also a righteous Jewish warrior mowing down Nazis. I don't think I've enjoyed seeing more Nazis mown down more since Where Eagles Dare. Don't believe the middling reviews: some of the speeches could have used a little trimming, there's a long winter in there with lots of coughing and no nazis but boy, is it exhilarating seeing Craig wander into an informant's house and put a bullet through his head. I think I may have liked this movie as much as I liked WALL-E.

All in all, a good day

Today, Obama announced his choice of Leon Panetta to be the next CIA director. A year ago, Panetta wrote a piece called 'No Torture. No Exceptions' for The Washington Monthly, in which he argued:—

How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear. Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what's wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock? The simple answer is the rule of law. Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation.... We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.

Dawn Johnson, the woman appointed to head up the OLC is even more promising: she isn't just against torture, but advocates prosecution of torturers. Of her predecessor John Yoo's Infamous Torture Memo, she wrote:

The shockingly flawed content of this memo, the deficient processes that led to its issuance, the horrific acts it encouraged, the fact that it was kept secret for years and that the Bush administration continues to withhold other memos like it--all demand our outrage.... At the time of the Torture Opinion's issuance, violations of Common Article 3 were punishable war crimes under federal law.

Yummy. This is by far my favorite of Obama's appointments so far.

Blair defends Iraq

New York magazine asks Blair if he regrets the decision to invade Iraq.

“I don’t think the region would be more stable if Saddam and his two sons were still running around.”

Even if you grant that the Iraq war hasn't destabilised the region, strengthened Iran etc, there is also the question of the half a million who might still be alive, and the justifiable grievance their families now nurse towards the US and its allies.

“Yeah, but you’ve got to ask who killed them. There’s also a lot of people who died and who would have died under Saddam."

This is about as eloquent as any defence of the Iraq war gets: yes half a million people died but they might have died anyway. And that's Blair, too. Imagine what Bush's answers would be like.

A good year to be an American

A great piece in the NYT about the fact that Oscars don't go to the best films: they go to the most Oscar-worthy films, which is to say, the films that allow Hollywood the most pleasing reflection of itself:—

Most famously there was the banner year of 1941, for which John Ford’s magnificent “How Green Was My Valley” was named what the academy then termed “outstanding motion picture” while Orson Welles’s game-changing “Citizen Kane” went home with only the original screenplay award.... By selecting “Cavalcade” — a numbing historical pageant, derived from a Noël Coward play, about a wealthy couple (Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook) stiff-upper-lipping their way through 40 years of English history — the members of the academy distanced themselves from the racy entertainments that then dominated the box office... For most of the ’30s the academy whipsawed between popular entertainments (“It Happened One Night,” 1934) and prestigious literary adaptations (“Mutiny on the Bounty,” 1935) meant to assure would-be censors that Hollywood was a dignified, pipe-smoking kind of place, tirelessly working for the moral improvement of American audiences. During World War II priorities shifted from moral development to patriotic fervor. The “outstanding motion picture” of 1942 was determined to be William Wyler’s portrait of a middle-class British couple enduring the Blitz, “Mrs. Miniver”... By the mid -’70s, the basic elements of an Oscarizable film were fixed in place: literary value, social criticism, grand spectacle and mature content, to be mixed and matched at will.

My gut tells me that the winner this year will be something with big box office and little violence — a reaction against the last two indie-winners The Departed and No Country for Old Men. Also that it's a bad year to be a Brit and a good year to be an American: the biggest feelgood spectacle of the year was the election. On Oscar night, the confetti from the Inaugeration will be just days old. Hollywood will want to throw the after-party party. One more reason to favour Penn and Hathaway.

Make Me a Glamour Model

I just got back from the UK, where I spent half the time explaining who the celebrities were to Kate and the other half asking other people who they were. The pages of Heat magazine were particularly baffling. But the TV show that most caught our eye was Make Me A Glamour Model — a very British title, I couldn't help but feel. In America, the show would almost have been called I Want To Be A Porn Star, because aspiration and initiative is to be praised and rewarded. But in Britain, where success is unmerited, and fame is a fake, aspiration is recast as a low surly demand, implying that the only difference between me and the girls with their bits in the papers is the fact that they are in the papers, and not me. Therefore: do it. Wave you wand. Put my bits in the paper. Make me a glamour model.

Great being number two

A British writer for the LA times attempts to explain to American readers the benefits of fading power:—

The fact is that when you're No. 1, you always get blamed for everything. When you're No. 3, or No. 5 -- or No. 135 -- you can put your hands in your pockets and whistle tunelessly with a "Who, me?" look on your face, and no one ever asks any questions.... If Britain's experience is anything to go by, Americans will soon find more satisfaction by trying to break pointless world records or writing absurdist comedy, or recovering from apocalyptic, three-gin-and-tonic lunchtime hangovers.

It echoes a recurrent conversation I have with my wife, wherein I try and console her that's its okay getting knocked from the top spot. Look at the British and the Italians and the lugubrious sense of humour that comes from losing an empire, I explain, but then I dry up. I can't think of much else besides "your sense of humour gets more ironic." Public transport gets better? Not necessarily. People like you more? As she pointed out to me the other night, "if its so great being number two, why are you always on at me about how great it is."

She wishes she'd done more interviews

GIZZI: What was the biggest mistake made in the ’08 campaign?

PALIN: The biggest mistake made was that I could have called more shots on this: the opportunities that were not seized to speak to more Americans via media.

I wish she had called more shots on opportunities that were not seized to speak to more Americans via media, too. Her televised interviews are among my most vivid memories of 2008. That she wishes she had made more of them gets very close to the heart of her appeal. It seems a shame that only Alaskans get to see her on a regular basis. Maybe a live webcast would be a good idea — like those webcasts they have of Panda bears in China?

Cheney gets high

WALLACE: Highest moment the last eight years?

CHENEY: Hmmm. Highest moment in the last eight years? Well, I think the most important, the most compelling, was 9/11 itself — Fox News

Okay, so he adjusted "compelling" for "highest" but still: someone asked him for the highest moment of the last 8 years and 9/11 came to mind. What sort of person, asked to name a high point, a bright spot, a ray of light in the encroaching gloom, even thinks of the single bloodiest civilian slaughter the Unites States has yet endured? Answer: someone for whom that slaughter only confirms the Bosch-like onslaught going on inside his head. Asked, "If the president during war decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?" Cheney answered, "General proposition, I'd say yes." An astonishing admision. The "war on terror", like the "war on drugs" is, of course, a war without end. Therefore anything the president decides to do is legal, "as a general proposition."

And the winner is

“What we got was pabulum"

According to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.” Inside the C.I.A., says a retired senior officer who was privy to the agency’s internal debate, there was hardly any argument about the value of coercive methods: “Nobody in intelligence believes in the ticking bomb. It’s just a way of framing the debate for public consumption. That is not an intelligence reality."

At the F.B.I., says a seasoned counterterrorist agent, following false leads generated through torture has caused waste and exhaustion. “At least 30 percent of the F.B.I.’s time, maybe 50 percent, in counterterrorism has been spent chasing leads that were bullshit... You get burned out, you get jaded. And you think, Why am I chasing all this stuff that isn’t true? That leads to a greater problem—that you’ll miss the one that is true. The job is 24-7 anyway. It’s not like a bank job. But torture has made it harder.”

Several of those I interviewed point out the dearth of specific claims the administration has proffered. “The proponents of torture say, ‘Look at the body of information that has been obtained by these methods.’ But if K.S.M. and Abu Zubaydah did give up stuff, we would have heard the details,” says Cloonan. “What we got was pabulum.”

I ask Robert Mueller: So far as he is aware, have any attacks on America been disrupted thanks to intelligence obtained through what the administration still calls “enhanced techniques”? “I’m really reluctant to answer that,” Mueller says. He pauses, looks at an aide, and then says quietly, declining to elaborate: “I don’t believe that has been the case.” — Vanity Fair

A self-devouring flame

A fascinating new book, Gotz Al's Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, has a look at the Nazi system of governance. Basically, they didn't have one: they had a system of invading other countries and sucking the money out of them and then using that to balance the budget. One Reichsbank study estimated that the first year of occupation cost Holland 180 percent of its normal state revenues, Belgium 200 percent, France 211 percent, and Norway 242 percent.

After every military victory, no matter how quick and relatively painless for German forces, the same problems with finances and food supplies kept cropping up ... [this] meant that the Nazi leaders had to push ahead with further military expansionism. Any hesitancy would have led to the end of the regime.

This confirms what I have long suspected about Nazism: that it was suicidal. Not just that it ended in suicide, although it did for all those in the bunker, but that it was self-destructive in essence. War didn't interrupt their plans: they had no plans for what they might like to do when they weren't invading people. Invading people was what they did, all the time. As such, it was doomed to failure, from the word go. When people say: what might life for us have looked like under Nazi rule, they are posing a non-sensensical hypothesis. Nazism was a self-devouring flame.

I feel the same way about Al Qaeda. We are regularly told that they want a worldwide Celiphate, but if you look at their statements, they have no plans for what to do, were this unlikely event to occur. They have no minister of agriculture. No opinion on taxation. No preference for which day is best to collect the garbage. They have no system of governance. Their chances of implementing it are therefore, and perhaps unsurprisingly, zero.

Something wild

Every now and again I have a strange and unlikely thought: a black man is going to be president of the United States. Holy Shit. I used to get this thought a lot, and there was one night when I got it all at once. Since then it's lost some of its frequency, but none of its ability to inspire the purest marvel, if only because now it comes out of nowhere — watching the TV, or seeing a black kid on the street and wondering what he makes of it all. But I got it again today while looking through these new pictures of Obama in Time. Holy Shit.

The year of Button

It's going to be Benjamin Button's year at the Oscars. I saw the movie last night and don't want to ruin it for anyone, save to say that it is every bit and strange and beautiful as any David Fincher fan might have wished. It's an adult Gump. It deserves to win best film, best director and best special effects and maybe best adapted screenplay. Which leaves the actings gongs for Kate and Leo Revolutionary Road, unless Senn Penn causes any upsets. I'd hard to see what else Milk can get apart from best screenplay, but I feel that may got to Slumdog Millionaire. Hmm.

That covers it

I've finally got these two covers to choose between for my novel — a comedy about alcoholism. My editor and I like different ones. Does anyone have an opinion?

The line from Bush to Abu Ghraib...

... has never been clearer, according to the new Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into The Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody:

Conclusion 1: On February 7, 2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.

Conclusion 2: Members of the President’s Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed. National Security Council Principals reviewed the CIA’s interrogation program during that period.

Conclusion 13: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there. Secretary Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 approval of Mr. Haynes’s recommendation that most of the techniques contained in GTMO’s October 11, 2002 request be authorized, influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, including military working dogs, forced nudity, and stress positions, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Conclusion 19: The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.

Golden Globe nominations

The Golden Globes positively stiffed Milk, nominating only Sean Penn. (We expect this to be rectified by Oscar Time). We feel safe in ignoring most of the nominations given to Frost / Nixon The Reader or Doubt, except for Amy Adams who we think could win Best Supporting Actress. The main awards should got to Benjamin Button and Revolutionary Road (film, director, best actor, actress respectively). Best comedy should be Happy-Go-Lucky. Screenplay could go to Slumdog Millionaire, to give it something. Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger. Best comic actor: Brendan Gleeson or James Franco. Best comic actress: Rebecca Hall.

Watch out Poland

Last Thursday on “The O’Reilly Factor,” comments made by Newt Gingrich fueled a battle between host Bill O’Reilly and New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg. Ginfrich defended his comments thus:

If you go back and look at what I said, it was a very narrowly focused reference to people who were invading churches and in one case surrounding a 65-year-old person and harassing her about wearing a cross. Now, in my judgment, people who do that are fascists. And whether they are fascists on the right or fascists on the left, they’re fascists, because they believe in imposing their views on you.

I love that "narrowly focussed reference." I'd love to know what Gingrich thinks the central tens of fascism are and why Prop 8 demostrators strike him as embodying them. A preference for the petite-bourgois? The primacy placed on ties of blood and nation? A foreign policy based on radical belligerence? A totalitarian cult of personality surrounding their non-democratically appointed leader? Gingrich means none of these things, of course. He is simply using "fascist" to mean "argumentative". Sigh.

In Mickey Rourke's defence

It's not often that I feel like coming to Mickey Rourke's defence. But the snide account of his childhood in the New York Times offers an opportunity that is hard to pass up.

The piece disputes Rourke's mistreatment at the hands of his step father, Eugene Addis. “He never spoke the truth in his life,” Addis is quoted as saying, pointing out that he never abused him or his brothers “because they never needed manhandling. Mickey was the best kid I had. I had no reason to abuse him... Listen! Right now I’m in better shape than Mickey Rourke ever was. If I wanted to kick his ass I could. But I never did.”

To review. He never beat Mickey because Mickey was well behaved. And if he had chosen to beat him, he would have licked him, but he never did, because Mickey was 'the best kid I had.' Yikes.

Best TV shows 2008

Top Chef finally overtook Project Runway in our household. Tim Russert was sorely missed, although the rise of Rachel Maddow at MSNBC was splendid. The match-up between Jon Stewart's anguish and George Bush's blitheness continued to be one of the great comic marriages of our time. It will be mourned. The best performance of the year was Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock. Best Wire-replacement: The First 48.

Best Books 2008

I had a high-fibre year — not much fiction, a lot of history and politics, although Rick Perlstein's Nixonland felt like fiction, as did Nicholson Baker's pointillist-peacenik WWII history Human Smoke, both of which I loved. Thurston Clarke's The Last Campaign about Bobby Kennedy, was great election-year popcorn. I read The Dark Side, Jane Mayer's grave, humane book about Bush's torture program, in one horrified sitting, and subsequently found myself unable to recommend it to anyone. Russell Brand's My Booky Wook made me laugh and then exhausted me, much like the man. David Carr's Night of the Gun turned the addiction memoir genre on its head. The best biography I read was David Michaelis's Schulz & Peanuts closely followed by Neal Gabler's Disney. The Schulz gets my book of the year, though — a brilliant human being, brilliantly rendered. 

Waiting for the man

Between March and November, 2006, richard Howe photographed each and every one of Manhattan roughly 11,000 street corners.

The percentages of happiness

"Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself, the study found. A happy friend of a friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.8%, and even your neighbor's sister's friend can give you a 5.6% boost... A happy friend who lives within a half-mile makes you 42% more likely to be happy yourself. If that same friend lives two miles away, his impact drops to 22%... Happy spouses provide an 8% boost -- if they live under the same roof. Next-door neighbors who are happy make you 34% more likely to be happy too, but no other neighbors have an effect, even if they live on the same block."— British Medical Journal

Best films of 2008

I didn't see many movies this year, but I don't think I missed any of the good ones. (There's not much randomness to my filmgoing these days, which is micro-targeted with unnerving and slightly joyless precision). My favorite shot of the year showed Keith Richards spitting out a lit cigarette in Shine A Light. Best bad guy was Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. Best good guy was Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace. Crunchiest blockbuster was Iron Man. My favorite performances came from Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Anna Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married, and Sean Penn in Milk. My favorite films were Milk and WALL-E. Between those two movies, you've pretty much got the main food groups covered.

Who's worse: Bush or Nixon?

The other night in Washington, after a screening of Frost/Nixon, there was an impassioned debate about whether George W. Bush’s presidency was on a par with or worse than Richard Nixon’s. It prompted an angry outburst from Chris Wallace of Fox News, who scolded the panellists, "I think to compare what Nixon did, and the abuses of power for pure political self-preservation, to George W. Bush trying to protect this country – even if you disagree with rendition or water-boarding – it seems to me is both a gross misreading of history."

You could argue that Wallace has actually hit on the reason Nixon's crimes are the lesser of the two men. Bugging the 1972 Democratic party convention is nowhere near as big a deal as ordering the torture of innocent men (which is what the torture of suspects must logically entail). Yes Bush thought that in so doing he was protecting America but Nixon, too, acted to stop America from falling into the hands of commie-sympathisers during a time of war — a quite noble aim, on the face of it, and no more or less deluded than Bush's notion that torture keeps America safe. How far did Nixon really believe his own internal logic? Being the smarter of the two men, he probably didn't, which means his crimes were the more cynical. Wallace is guessing that Bush bought into his own rationale with greater gusto, which renders his acts the more wretched. He tortured by mistake.

Why Dostoevsky would have loved OJ

It's hard not to feel satisfaction over the recent sentencing of O J Simpson for armed robbery. Not because it shows us the power of the law — the whole thing has the air of getting Al Caopone in income tax evasion ‚— but because it shows us the opposite: what happens when bad deeds go unpunished. You want to know what the life of someone who gets away with double homicide looks like? It looks like Simpson's, which is to say, a slow but steady descent into bad business deals thuggery, and theft. Dostoevesky would have loved OJ for the evidence he provides of a moral law at work which surpasses our man-made legal one. Torturers suffer similar fates, although not, as far as I can see, those who perform or undergo abortions — as good an argument as any that the pro-life argument is essentially man-made. I have yet to meet anyone who has had an abortion whose life has gone off the rails in similar fashion. Sadness, grief, regret maybe, but nothing of the miserable, misbegotten quality of someone who has 'gotten away with' murder.

Nerd-Elect Obama

The blogosphere is shocked by a report that the president-elect uses the least cool MP3 player on the market. "He walked majestically across the gym floor in his track pants and sweat shirt. He hopped on the machine next to me and broke a mean sweat while reading a copy of USA Today and listening to his Zune." USA Today!? A Zune!? "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO," cried one user at the popular blog Engadget. "I want my vote back!"

When are people going to wake up to the fact that Obama is not the cool kid in class. He is the nerd who has spent so long looking at the cool kids in class that he can imitate them perfectly — but never quite join in. That is the basic story behind Dreams of My Father: Taking coke but not developing a habit. Playing basketball but too tactically to be a star. Going to Chicago because he wanted to strengthen his roots, but never quite being 'black' enough. He is the only black man I have ever seen who dances with a white man's overbite. It's one of his the most appealing qualities, in my book: the sense you get of a nerdy observer, watching and absorbing, but too ambivalent to integrate, fully.

The pain-free comedians

“I don’t enjoy any kind of danger or volatility. I don’t have that kind of ‘I love the bad guys’ thing. No, no thank you. I like nice people.” When I ask her if she ever gets the urge to straighten out Lindsay Lohan, who starred in Fey’s movie Mean Girls, or to counsel Tracy Morgan or Alec Baldwin when they hit tempestuous passages in their personal lives, she says, “I have no enabler bone in my body—not one. I’m sort of like, ‘Oh, are you going crazy? I’ll be back in an hour.’?” — Tina Fey, interviewed in Vanity Fair

Together with Jerry Seinfeld, Fey is part of a new super-breed of American entertainer: the entirely non-destructive comedian. There's pain there, but so expertly harvested, and turned into great gags so efficiently, that it takes you a while to work out what's missing, exactly. Nancy Franklin gets close when she calls Fey's style on 30 Rock "managerial" ("Fey’s intelligence comes across, of course, but it’s a kind of managerial intelligence, a high level of competence"). She indulges her female neuroses (age, kids, food) rather like the kid in class who joins in the ritualised moaning about exams only to ace every test. A fake self-depracator! With moderate to high self-esteem! Don't get me wrong. I love Fey on the show but I love her most when she's dealing with Alec Baldwin, behind whose gimlet eyes lie fathomless pools of pain.

Quote of the day

“Never forget. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The Establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times.” — Richard Nixon, in conversation with Henry Kissinger, in newly released tapes. Also gems on break-ins, blacks, Eastern elites, Ivy league presidents and jews. A perfect Christmas gift!

Obamafy yourself

Someone has devised some software which morphs you into the famous Shepard Fairey poster of Obama. Just what I wanted for Christmas. Unfortunately, it appears to have turned me into the Unabomber. Hope, it appears, cannot change everything.

In The Rooms: the CD

I'm going to be burning CDs for those that want them. Here is the track listing:—

Novel Writing — Monty Python (Matching Tie & Handkerchief)
The Slow Descent into Alcoholism — The New Pornographers (Mass Romantic: Remastered)
Just Because I Can — Prefab Sprout (B side)
The Absence of God — Rilo Riley (More Adventurous)
Blue — Cat Power Jukebox (Deluxe Edition)
The Pills Won't Help You Now — The Chemical Brothers (We Are the Night)
Too Young — Phoenix (United)
I Don't Know What It Is — Rufus Wainwright (Want One)
Crash Into Me — Dave Matthews Band (Fatboy Slim Remix)
Love Is Blindness — Cassandra Wilson (New Moon Daughter)
Trouble Man — Marvin Gaye (Anthology Series: The Best of Marvin Gaye)
I Am The Walrus — The Beatles (Love)
Useless Desires — Patty Griffin (Impossible Dream)
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free — Nina Simone (Nina Simone: Anthology)
The Things We Do for Love — 10cc (The Best of 10cc)
It Looks Like Love — Josh Rouse (Subtitulo)
Girls In Their Summer Clothes — Bruce Springsteen (Magic)
Signed, Sealed, Delivered (DJ Smash Essential Funk Mix) — Stevie Wonder (Motown Remixed)
Lola (Live) — The Kinks

The end of irony (again)

"Again and again, perfectly sentient adults cited the clinching arguments made on the candidate's behalf by their children. Again and again we were told that this was a generational thing, we couldn't understand. In a flash, we were back in high school, and we couldn't sit with the popular kids, we didn't get it. The Style section of The New York Times, on the Sunday after the election, mentioned the Obama T-shirt that "makes irony look old." Irony was now out. Naiveté, translated into "hope," was now in. Innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized."— Joan Didion NYRB

The last time America was supposed to have lost its sense of irony was 9/11. It's hard to know what people meant exactly. It's nor as if the nation's wits, so used to ironising mass slaughter, went: okay not this time. The same with elections. It's a pretty prosaic either-or kind of deal: you go into a booth and you pull a lever. Pretty hard to do that ironically. You could of course try and argue that your support for a candidiate was only ironic, but the joke would be on you, surely? I could be wrong. Maybe all the people who voted for Bush were being ironic about it, but if so then it didn't make the blind bit of difference. All of which is a round about way of saying that Didion sounds cranky as hell. Hope? Bah humbug.

Stuff I've learned

So I'm in the final furlong of my book. Since I've never written a novel before I thought it might be something to list the things I've learned.

1) I always know when I am wrong but it takes a while to admit it. That feeling — knowing-I'm-wrong-but-taking-my-time-to-admit-it — is suspiciously close to the feeling I get when I have a good idea.
2) I cannot write a character whom I don't, in some sense, love.
3) Making the reader fall in love with someone is impossible.
4) Problems that I am convinced are completely insolvable, without becoming someone else entirely — a much better writer, say — are invariably quite solvable, if only I do the thing I don't want to do.
5) Conversations can be about anything.
6) Themes are deadly. (Actually I already knew this, but not so well that I didn't have to find it out again).
7) Scenery can be a good thing but only if someone is doing something.
8) Final chapters can be a bit like parties where you drink too much and embarrass yourself.
9) Not knowing whether you've written a good book or a bad book is not just the way it works, but the way it should be.
10) Taking a walk is never a bad idea.

Solid gay, all the way through

"Sean Penn’s smile lines in Milk are a wonder. They’re not crinkles, they’re furrows; they seem to stretch all the way down to his soul. As the gay activist Harvey Milk, who was shot to death in 1978 along with the San Francisco mayor, George Moscone, the volatile Penn is unprecedentedly giddy. There’s anger in his Milk, but it never festers—it’s instantly channeled into political action... he shakes off Method self-attention the way Milk shook off the shame of being gay. As the personal becomes political, he opens all the windows and gets visibly high on the breeze." — David Edelstein, New York magazine

It's the happiest I've seen him. And certainly the best reason to see the movie: come see Sean Penn happy! There were moments in Sweet and Lowdown when he seemed blissfully transported by his guitar playing, but this is different. It's not solitary, its the infectious sort of happiness that calms everyone around him, leaving his political opponents with only sour the taste of their own unhappiness, and no option but to get unhappier still. I loved Philadelphia, too, and never quite got the charge of Uncle Tommery levelled at it. Watching Milk, I understood it a little better. There's no Denzel Washington character to hold the audience's hand: this movie is solid gay, all the way through. There's barely a straight character in the whole thing, except for a superbly played Dan White (Josh Brolin) who is drawn to Milk in ominously tighter circles, with an itch he can't quite scratch.

I'm not sure what this does to my Oscar Predictions. It's always easier not to have a horse in the race. I had Di Caprio and Winslett for Revolutionary Road, Benjamin Button for best film, director, and adapted screenplay, Milk for original screenplay, Australia for costumes and cinematography, Heath Ledger for supporting in Batman and Amy Adams for Doubt. I have a feeling Revolutionary Road is going to be a worthy bore (loved the book, hated American Beauty) but the reunion of Di Caprio and Winslettt, both overdue, both now sucking up in the right way, is going to be hard for Academy voters to resist.