How the '08 election changed the Emmy smacktalk in our house

The 08 election has changed things in our house. Specifically it has changed the smacktalk between my wife and I during awards season. The way it used to go was this.

Me: "So are you ready for the beating you're going to recieve at the Emmy's tomorrow?"
My wife: "That is some fighting talk, my friend."
Me: "Not necessarily. Just the talk of someone who knows his strengths with awards shows. Remember the beating you took last year at the Spirit awards?"
My wife: "The Spirit Awards? Indie awards shows are for losers. You always flunk it with the Grand Slams...."
Me: "Don't be sore."
My wife: "The only thing sore is your backside after the hiding you took at the Oscars..."

And so on and so forth, in ever higher spirals of braggadoccio. The chit-chat of mere amateurs, I now recognise, having seen the way Obama and Clinton faced off in the rustbelt primaries — in particular the way they managed expectations, in a constant attempt to cast themselves as the plucky underdog coming from behind. Obama was the underdog for a while, but then he beat Clinton in Iowa. Clinton saw an opportunity to portray herself as the underdog, and won New Hampshire. But she succeeded too much, found herself in the sniper-friendly front-runner position again — drat — and Obama won south Carolina. Etc etc. Having observed these political maestros in action our smack-talk now goes something like this.

Me: "Boy are you going to take a beating tomorrow night at the Emmy's."
My wife: "Them's fighting words."
Me: "No, merely the words of someone who won handily last year."
My wife [a glint in her eye]: "Hmmm. You're right. You do do pretty well at the Emmy's."
Me [realising too late the trap I have set for myself']: "Nyah, I got lucky is all."
My wife: "No you're good. You do your homework."
Me: "That's why I'm worried. I haven't done any this year. Remember how bad I am on American television? I just don't know the history. I'm playing an away game."
My wife [a maniacal look stealing over her]: "You know what? You are! Sucker! You're going down so fast you're going to take all the branches off the tree...!!!"

Actually I don't remember that double-switchback maneuvre being used by Clinton last year but she's welcome to it, should she chose to run again.

Life is a pre-existing condition

Among the things counted as "pre-existing conditions" by American insurance companies:

Health insurers have issued guidelines saying they could deny coverage to people suffering from such conditions as acne, hemorrhoids and bunions. One big insurer refused to issue individual policies to police officers and firefighters, along with people in other hazardous occupations. Some treated pregnancy or the intention to adopt as a reason for rejection.

Others routinely refuse the victims of domestic violence. Having experienced the bureaucratic delights of the American health system first hand, I sense a great absurdist play in there somewhere — something to do with life being a deadly disease and/or a pre-existing condition / bowl of minestroni, we are born astride the grave, etc, etc.

The eyes have it

It's obviously poetry week for me. After Bright Star, we have the new Nicholson Baker novel, The Anthologist, which is about this poet named Paul Choder who is attempting, and failing, to write a new introduction for an anthology of poems. I am a huge Baker fan, and am only half way through it but I haven't been enjoying his disquisitions on iambic pentameter nearly as much as I enjoyed his thoughts on corrugated straws in The Mezzanine. That's always been Baker's genius, it seems to me: to bend that considerable vocabulary of his to things that don't usually get described. There's a delightful, democratic, due-rectifying justice to it all. It's like Pop Art. Even his book about Updike was less about Updike's writing than it was about the assorted paraphenalia of literary fame — an unusual subject. Not so poetry, which seems pretty well covered from where I'm standing. Baker's written a literary book about a literary subject. Where's the fun in that, as Tom Hanks might say. That said, it's not all about iambic pentameter. there are still some great passages in the book, such as this one, where Chowder talks about how difficult it is to "meeting someone's eyes":—

Meet them how? They have two eyes. You have to choose one. I start by looking at the person's right eye, intently, and then I begin to feel that I'm hurting the feelings of the person's left eye. As she's telling her story, she thinks, Why is he concentrating his attentions so fixedly on my right eye? Is he deliberately looking away from my left eye? Is there something wrong with my left eye? So then I shift over, and I stare into her left eye, till it's as if I'm falling down an optical pipe.

U.S. Condemned For Pre-Emptive Use Of Hillary Clinton Against Pakistan

Help! Approaching Obama overload!

On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan is advancing his talking point du jour: that Obama's appearance on five news shows this weekend constitutes "overload." Politico and Drudge seem similarly excited. In my experience, this is one of those worries that is confined almost exclusively to those who keep track of weekend news-program scheduling, which is to say those who work in the media. But people can only watch one program at at a time, and most of them watch one news channel. The vast majority of people who catch Obama on TV this weekend will not be following him around the TV schedules, like presidential newshounds. They will watch the same program they always watch and if Obama happen to be on it, they will watch him. Quelle overload.

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Stars

Jane Campion's Bright Star arrived just in time for me and my wife's first wedding anniversary. How could I resist taking Kate to see a film offering "Hot English Chastity", according to the New York Times? The only question was when.
"Its on at 7.50."
"Its Friday night. We should get there early. 7.20."
"Its about Keats."
"7.30 then."
In fact the cinema was well packed, for a movie about a long-dead English poet. The film was beautiful and passionate and sad. What more could you ask from a movie about a poet? It may even be the best movie about a poet I have ever seen although I can't remember ever having see a good one. Tom and Viv was diabolical. Three weeks after Dead Poet's Society I was back on solids but only just. Even walk on parts for poetry give me the willies. Otherwise good movies, like the Bridges of Madison county, are marred by a single incursion into verse ("great stuff Yeats"). But somehow Campion brings it off. There are no cries of "very witty Wilde!", such as usually mar biopics. Her leads, Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish are both terrific. Cornish looks like a Vermeer, and acts the way Kate Winslet used to, right down to her toes; Campion films that beautiful dome of a forehead like it was the Cistine Chapel. Whishaw is a tender, watchful ink-stained boy, with just the right air of specialness — the kind of kid people make exceptions for. For every scene Campion finds some playful, teasing bit of business for her actors that brings them to life while staying in period. I was about to say "totally in period" but what do I know. It's not a question of accuracy versus anachronism: all is guesswork, really. The question is whether your guesswork has color in its cheeks and I haven't seen a filmmaker come up with a historical style that works so fluidly since Michael Mann's The Last of The Mohicans. There's geese and mud, bonnets and bees and summer light that looks very different from the winter light. Even the poetry sounded good, which really is something, the scene where Keats and Fanny speak lines of verse to one another ruined only by a long and protracted rumble from my stomach, which brought on a fit of church giggles from Kate. It wasn't entirely my fault: the movie is pin-drop quiet. I feel like I held my breath for two hours. The stars were in alignment on this one.

Oprah gets bamboozled by an addict (again)

"Did you go to rehab?"
"I did my stint. I did my 30 days, you know..."
"Does that mean you're drug free?"
"Yes, ma'am. I mean, you know, don't think I don't have desires for it. It takes a minute to cleanse, get off. Get off me. I have to pray it away."
"Absolutely."
"I have a drink every night. Dont get me wrong. If you see me out in a bar, having a drink, don't think—"
"Don't think she's gone back."
"No. Please don't do that to me."
"Because drinking wasn't an issue for you."
"No. It was never an issue for me. No. No."
— Whitney Houston, being interviewed by Oprah

What was the name of that rehab she went to, the one where they let you drink? It sounds terrific. The news that they have to get off all mood-altering substances is often bitterly resented by most addicts. Heroin addicts see no reason why they should come off alcohol. Alcoholics see no reason to steer clear of crack. Crack addicts see nothing wrong with a little weed every now and again. The news — drummed into everybody who enters rehab — that all mind-altering substances are equally dangerous, and all lead to one another, if not already then eventually, comes as a shock. They try to find ways around it. Maybe if I smoked but didn't inhale. Maybe if I drank but didn't inject. They all eventually relapse.

So it's quite something for Whitney Houston to have tracked down the one rehab in America that allows drinking. Presumably she must also have found her own special brand of CA/AA meetings, too, where they don't get too hung up about this whole alcohol thing. How tediously they insist on abstinence! Even more amazing is that Oprah bought it. I know she's not an addict herself, but this is supposed to be her territory. She's supposed to know her stuff when it comes to recovery. "The best interview I've ever done," she said, meaning: I got her talking about drugs. That doesn't necessarily mean she got her talking truthfully about drugs. It reminds me of the time she got bamboozled by James Frey, and for much the same reasons. There is something about addiction Oprah just doesn't get, because, in her head, she is comparing it to domestic abuse all the time.

This is a subject Oprah gets because she has lived it. She was on home turf when talking about Whitney's marriage to Bobby Brown — the way Houston had to muzzle her own career, for instance, so as not to upset the less than luminous Bobby. But when she asked her "Were you weak for him or were you weak for the drugs?" she is offering a get-out-of-gaol-free card which any addict would leap at. "He was my drug," replied Houston, predictably enough.

"I understand," said Oprah.

No, not really. She doesn't. There are similarities and crossovers between domestic abuse and addiction, obviously. Both require recovery, and the recovery for both largely consists of sharing your experience with others who have been through the same thing. But the very same sympathy you offer a victim of domestic abuse is going to be ruthlessly exploited by an active drug addict. You offer the abuse victim a shoulder to cry on and a sofa to sleep on, and you are being a good friend. You do the same to a crackhead and you will wake up to find your TV gone.

And when a recovering drug addict tells you they are still drinking, every day, and not to even think of approaching them about it, the interview heralding their comeback needs to come with a huge asterisk attached.

Teaching helplessness to a Democrat

"Psychologist Martin Seligman discovered that if you administer enough random shocks to a dog, the dog will eventually get so demoralized that it won't even try to avoid them when can easily do so. He called the phenomenon learned helplessness. Helpless dogs were paralyzed in situations they were capable of handling with aplomb. Inducing learned helplessness seems to be the GOP strategy for the Obama age. Their M.O.? Freak out randomly: The president telling kids to stay in school?!!! Counseling seniors about living wills!?! Czars?!! That these spasms make no sense is a feature, not a bug. The key is that there be absolutely no way to predict what will set off the GOP. At this rate, the Democrats will be reduced to a whimpering puddle on the lab floor in no time" — Lindsay Beyerstein, Obsidian Wings

A wicked funnel of transference and spite

Okay, that is it. I'm done. I'm finished. I know you've heard me say this before but this time it's for real: I am not watching America's Next Top Model ever again.*

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my complete inability to pick the winners on this show. They will have heard my suspicions that Tyra actually boots girls off for the very same reasons that I like them — that in some ways this might be construed as a compliment, given how capricious Tyra's judgment is; and that the show's real purposes is to reproduce the sense of visceral injustice that Tyra experienced as a young model. So the better ones are eliminated early, and the undeserving kept in, solely for the intra-model static it induces in the surivivors. There is a wicked funnel of transference and spite gusting through that woman. The girls that really need to look out are the ones she identifies with: they really get it in the neck.

But nothing quite beats last night's episode, which was like a conversation with Charles Manson in its approximation to pure, head-banging chaos. It was the first one of this season I have tuned into, number three, so I worked fast to catch up and pick the girl I thought would win, followed by the runner up. I'm used to seeing my favorites weeded out over a course of a season, by which time the program has got its hooks into me again. This time, I had to wait a sum total of 5 minutes to see one booted off and 50 minutes to see the other follow her. It was pure, unadulterated craziness. Up was down, left was right, and Courtney and Rachel were out on their tushes.

Tyra's blown it this time: she's presented me with a clear opportunity to bail, early on. I'm taking it.

*This season.

An Ode For Levi by Ben Folds and Nick Hornby

A couple more potential best actor nominees

"The theme of the search for meaning after a great loss is developed with great sensitivity thanks to Colin Firth's moving performance in the main role -- for which he won the best actor prize [In Venice]... Firth's measured performance, delivered in a clipped British accent, has just the right restraint, and the intelligent dialogue is a pleasure" — Hollywood Reporter

Plus, in the women's race, Annette Bening in Mother & Daughter:

"This is a great woman's film except it isn't, not really, because it got to me big-time and I generally don't fall for films aimed at the opposite genre market so go figure. It's so good and so exactingly and humanistically right... on top of this Annette Bening, who gives what I feel is possibly the best performance of her life in this film."

The Classics, if they were written today

Courtesy of Your Monkey Called

Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

Then: Walden
Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany

Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now: Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

Then: The Prince
Now: The Prince (Foreword by Oprah Winfrey)

Courtesy of Kottke

Then: Romeo and Juliet
Now: The Teen Sex and Suicide Epidemic: What You Need to Know to Protect Yourself and Your Family

Then: Book of Genesis
Now: FLOOD! A True Story of Heartbreak, Heroism, and the Will to Survive

Then: The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Now: Shed Your Skin!: How I Gave up Junk Food and Released the Butterfly Within

Then: Frankenstein
Now: Mad Science: How Stem Cell Research is Endangering Your Village

Then: The Oxford English Dictionary
Now: Word Up! 300,000 Proven Ways to Express Yourself in Speech and Writing

Then: The New Testament
Now: Getting into Heaven for Dummies

Then: Dante's Inferno
Now: Chicken Soup for the Damned

Then: Gone With The Wind
Now: Extreme Home Makeover: Confederate Edition

Why I'm screwed

"If you want to be happy, what’s most important is to have lots of friends. Historically, we have often thought that having a small cluster of tight, long-term friends is crucial to being happy. But Christakis and Fowler found that the happiest people in Framingham were those who had the most connections, even if the relationships weren’t necessarily deep ones." — From Clive Thompson's assessment of their research into happiness in the Times Magazine

I just saw Obama's limo

I just saw Obama's limo. I was in the deli when the guy ahead of me in the queue telling a story about someone driving past him with his windows down. "He just saw Obama," explained the cashier when I reached her.
"Really."
"He's in town to speak to Wall Street."
"Wow."
I got out my ipohone, found out that he was due to have lunch with Bill Clinton at Il Mulino, and headed down there. I joined a large crowd on the corner West 3rd and La Guardia place, held back by metal barricades. About three blocks had been closed off. We couldn't see much, just a mass of police cars about a block away, their lights flashing, but the crowd seemed happy to collect, everyone taking turns to tell newcomers what was going on.
"Obama's having lunch."
"Really? Wow."
One woman asks me what was going on.
"Obama's having lunch with Bill Clinton," I tell her.
"Huh. And they didn't ask me," she says and wanders off.
Another guy deadpans, "boring," to laughter, then takes out his camera like everyone else.
Finally there is movement: a helicopter overhead and a phalanx of bodygaurds walking down the street towards us, waving people back from their fire-escapes. The crowd push forward against the barricade. The police cars whoop. There is a flash of sunlight in a window, and a big black limo swings into view... then disappears down Thompson street, a block away. He's not coming out way, after all.
"Oh Obama," said one girl, before walking off.

My first gay wedding

My friends Doug and Michael got married yesterday on Long Island. No, New York has not legalised gay marriage just yet: they got formally hitched in Masachussetts and held another ceremony at a friends house just outside Southampton. It was a big farm house, with a swimming pool, barns and stables, and some bemused-looking horses just next to the field where the ceremony took place. Hmm, I could see them thinking. Two grooms. Never seen that before. Needless to say, there were tears and laughter and kids and speeches and proud parents and bad dancing and great music and drinking and apple pie and some fire-eaters which you don't see every day. Did I feel like the institution of marriage was weakened, or my own marriage in any way threatened? Of course not; it felt strengthened, as it always is when friends of yours go through the same experience as you. If anything, I made me realise how completely stuck for an answer I would be if Doug or Michael or any other of my gay friends asked me the reason that I could get married and they couldn't. I mean honestly. What could I possibly say to them? How would that sentence begin? I'm better than you? Better at sex? Opposite attract? Finders keepers? Really. My head is as empty as a beach-ball. I'm curious: what arguments have people been using?

Americans Observing 9/11 By Trying Not To Masturbate

Cheer up, luv, it might never happen!

"When he picked up a pair of hitchhikers and allowed one of them to drive, the sideways image that he took shows the driver—a dead-eyed ringer for Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”—in determined profile. Check the contact sheet at the back of the catalogue, and you come across the succeeding frame: same angle, same guy, but now with a definite grin—closer in mood, instantly, to the Dreyfuss who gunned his truck in pursuit of the alien craft, his face lit with chirpy wonder. Then there is the heroine of “The Americans,” an elevator girl from Miami Beach, of whom Jack Kerouac asked, in concluding his introduction to the U.S. edition: "And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what’s her name & address?" Again, it is worth consulting the relevant contact strip: fourteen shots of the same woman, at least half of them catching her in the act of a smile—a polite gesture adopted for those riding beside her, you might say, but then professional courtesy is no less a national trait than the ruefulness on which Frank preferred to focus" — Anthony Lane, reviewing the Robert Frank exhibition in The New Yorker

I've often wondered whether people in photographs are as miserable as they look. Proper photographs, that is, by proper photographers: the kind who threw a camera in the back of a truck during the great depression and drove down to the dustbowl to take stark black and white pictures of people living stark black-and-white lives. Not your mum's holiday snaps. A few years ago, I was in an airport and there was this guy sitting opposite me in the terminal. He looked sunk in despair, sat there, being ignored by everyone around him, his face wan with the bad lighting. I thought to myself: If I was a photographer, that would make a great image of modern-day alienation and anomie. Then I caught myself, backed up a little, and thought: hang on, how do I really know that guy is miserable. I looked at him again. This time, I tried to imagine him thinking about the nice Turkey dinner that was waiting for him when he got home, his wife, his kids. He might not be showing it on the outside, but it was warming him from the inside. Before I knew it, I couldn't look at him without being convinced he was sitting on the most extraordinary secret. A photograph would never be able to capture it. In fact, a photograph would do the exact opposite: it would suggest he was locked in existential torpor when he wasn't.

And then I thought of all the photographs I've seen — in exhibitions, in books — where I assumed something similar. A sullen young mother during the Great Depression who can only be thinking about what a lousy time it was to have kids. A drag queen in New York during the fifties who just has to be thinking about the difficulties of being a drag queen in fifties New York. A corporate worker on the subway home, staring into his own personal abyss. How do I know they weren't thinking about a turkey dinner, too? Or maybe they were just thinking about the fact that some stranger they didn't know was pointing a camera at them. It doesn't happen every day. The act of being ambushed by a photographer doesn't exactly bring out the best in people. Who pulls on their game face for a stranger? You look back defiantly, sullenly. And as for being photographed on the sly, on the subway home, say, well forget it: who wouldn't look like a corporate worker ant crushed by the wheels of industry?

Ode to joy: The return of Paddy McAloon

“Have you ever seen those documentaries about people who stockpile newspapers and bread and bicycles? I’m a bit like that. I have this massive creative urge, which I struggle with. The desire to write is much stronger than the desire to turn any of them into records. At a certain point it went from being a sort of sensible strategy of laying things away for a long winter and now I’ve got a mountain of junk and music. I feel like someone in an Edgar Allan Poe story, buried under my boxes of albums.

“I have a good family life, I do the school pick up, I have friends. But I am reclusive in a lot of things. I don’t really care for the brave new world. You’re talking to a guy who doesn’t drive. I’m not on the internet. But I don’t think it’s as mad as it looks. If you decide to devote your life to something as an artistic endeavour, you’re doing it cause you think it’s worth doing. Its not some act of grandeur for myself, its more that I can get away with it, and concentrate on the exciting bit, the flowery bit. I feel like when I talk about it, I’m coming from a sensible place. But I know how it makes me sound. Maybe it’s the beard.” — The Daily Telegraph

I've always thought Paddy McAloon had a little Brian Wilson in him. Green Gartside certainly does. I do love my eighties pop perfectionists turned bearded recluses. I tried being a recluse once, living in the middle of the forest outside Woodstock, while I finished a book. But I couldn't hack it. I finished the book, and came to find my trash overflowing with empties. Where was everybody? You can't be a recluse if you're asking yourself that kind of question. So I moved back to the city. It was fun while it lasted.

So. A new Prefab Sprout album. The US open on the TV. A new novel from Lorrie Moore on my bedside table, and new books from Nicholson Baker and Nick Hornby on the way. The memory godawful Norwegian receding in the summer haze. Things are looking up. More than looking up. If one godawful Norwegian trilogy is all I have to pay for a Prefab/Hornby/Nadal happiness trifecta then count me one of God's contented customers.

How To tips on heckling

So Joe Wilson has decided to introduce British style heckling into the house of congress. There's just one small detail he didn't get right: when you heckle the prime minister in the UK, it is because you have caught him out in a bit of flannel so obvious, so self-evident, that it is all you can do to register your beggared credulity.

Language and expressions used in the Chamber must conform to a number of rules. Erskine May states "good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language". Objection has been taken both to individual words and to sentences and constructions in the case of the former, to insulting, coarse, or abusive language (particularly as applied to other Members); and of the latter, to charges of lying or being drunk and misrepresentation of the words of another. Among the words to which Speakers have objected over the years have been blackguard, coward, git, guttersnipe, hooligan, rat, swine, stoolpigeon and traitor. Members sometimes use considerable ingenuity to circumvent these rules (as when, for instance, Winston Churchill substituted the phrase "terminological inexactitude" for "lie") but they must be careful to obey the Speaker's directions, as a Member who refuses to retract an offending expression may be named or required to withdraw from the Chamber.

You do not, as Wilson did, heckle the speaker because he has blown your cover with your constituents. This morning, predictably enough, the media looked into who was right and found — doh! — that it was Obama. Factcheck.org:

H.R. 3200: Sec 246 — NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

What a tool.

Marxist slur of the month*

The Republicans spout such freeform nonsense these days, that's it a shame to single out anyone of them for praise. But this week's belly laugh came courtesy of Republican Party chairman Jim Greer who last week accused the president of seeking to use his speech to the nation's school children as an opportunity to brainwash them with “socialist ideology”. Having read the text and found that all Obama did was tell them to stay in school and wash their hands, Greer graciously conceded, "In its current form, it’s fine. But it remains to be seen if it’s the speech he’s going to give.” Best be safe than sorry. Obama might momentarily break cover and start reciting Das Capital in a scary Exorcist voice which, run backwards, tells the little chilluns to kill grandma.

*In a fruitless effort to limit use of the terms Marxist, Communist, Socialist, and Nazi by politicians who haven't the foggiest what they mean.

It could all be so much simpler

"British terrorists planned to blow up at least seven transatlantic flights from London, murdering more than 1,500 people in a plot on a scale to rival the September 11 attacks, a jury found today... three men now face life sentences after being found guilty of conspiring to explode liquid bombs on airliners flying from Britain to North America." — The Guardian

There. What's so difficult about that? Terrorists are found guilty in a court of law on the basis of evidence, and sentenced to life in prison.* It sounds so breathtakingly simple compared to the snarl-up Bush has landed on Obama's desk. The US government, by contrast, can't prosecute because the only terrorists they've been able to lay their hands on are in permanent legal limbo. They can't present evidence because the evidence is tainted by torture. And nor can they sentence them to life in prison because the Republicans are busy spreading the belief that no prison is strong enough to hold them — that the terrorists will burn through any wall using their evil death rays, like the X-Men.

* Extra bonus: the eavesdropping that caught them was legal. Greenwald:

So here -- with this British Terrorist conviction -- we have the perfect template for how Terrorism can be effectively combated within the rule of law. Authorities learned of the plot through legal investigations involving warrants and FISA court supervision. The Terrorist suspects were not disappeared to a secret prison, nor held without charges, nor did they have confessions tortured out of them, and were not given some sham military commission; instead, they were charged with a crime, given a trial in a real court with due process, convicted by a citizen jury and then sentenced to long prison terms. It was all effectuated in accordance with legal means and basic precepts of justice.

Cinderella by Kurt Vonnegut

Silvers.org posts an account of a lecture given by Kurt Vonnegut on the need people have for drama in their lives.

“People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories. Let's look at a few examples. Let's look at a very common story arc. The story of Cinderella. People love that story! This story arc has been written a thousand times in a thousand tales. And because of it, people think their lives are supposed to be like this."

Real life, he said, goes more like this:

"But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”

What might have been

Debris from the World Trade Center is stored in an 80,000-square-foot hangar at Kennedy International Airport. The humidity is regulated so the steel does not rust. The FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who extracted page after page of actionable intelligence from Abu Zubaydah using nothing more than a plateful of Oreos (and whom the 9/11 commission deemed "one of the more impressive intelligence agents -- from any agency -- that we encountered in our work"), recently broke his silence:-

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out. Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

Quote of the day

"I complete me. I'm just lucky that after I completed myself, I met someone who could tolerate me" —Sandra Bullock

Nothing beats the wit of Rafael Nadal

I just saw Rafael Nadal play his fellow Spaniard Nicolas Almagro in the third round of the US open. There was one rally in particular that reminded me who I love tennis. I won't try and blind you with science, but basically Nadal hit it over the net. You thought to yourself: there is no way Almagro is getting to that. But somehow got it back over the net. He hit it back in such a way as to make you think: Nadal's toast. Then, incredibly, Nadal got his racket to the ball, and hit it back in such a way as to make you think: game over. But Almagro got to it and..... you get the picture. (I told you this wasn't going to be Phd level commentary). I know of no other sport that provokes such regular spirals of delight. Football is a long agonising struggle punctuated by ecstatic release. Basketball come close, with its end-to-end switcheroos, but the team nature of the sport can't deliver the personal battle to wits that tennis delivers— the giddy brinkmanship, the vertiginous delight, the air of high-octane flabberghast. Only great farce comes close — Noel Coward, or a Preston Sturges comedy, or Spielberg. Tennis makes me laugh the same way an Indiana Jones chase sequence makes me laugh.

Judd Apatow, king of pain

No 6 in Time magazine's list of tips for filmmakers is "Out Apatow Apatow. Raunchy comedy The Hangover was a surprise hit: cost 35 million, grossed 270 million." I'm always amazed by critics and journalists who characterise Apatow's movies as "raunchy" or "grossout". The New York Times calls him "the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies." Really? That's what you remember? What distinguishes Apatow is the painful honesty of the writing — the line in Knocked Up when Leslie Mann says“You think because you don’t yell that you’re not mean. This is mean.” The chest-waxing and the gyneocologist jokes, you can get anywhere. I guess it doesn't sound as good: Judd Apatow, king of pain.

The personal style of Steven Spielberg

There aren't that many good pictures of Spielberg these days. He looked cool shooting Jaws (so seventies), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (so sand-blasted), but the mid-eighties saw the end of anything resembling personal style for him; more recently he has sported the placid, fashionable look of a man happy to let his wife dress him. So I was pleased to see this picture of him with Peter Jackson on the set of The Adventures of Tin Tin: the Secret of the Unicorn in Empire magazine. The look of nerdish preoccupation on his face, plus the look of second-fiddle awe on Jackson's, plus the hats. Very cool.

Has Michael Cimino turned into Barry Manilow?

A friend of mine writes to ask if I knew that Michael Cimino, director of The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate, has had a sex change operation. I tell him no, I didn't know that and look up some recent pictures of the director. Woman or not, he bears a startling resemblance to Barry Manilow. No film director who reshoots so much footage as to bankrupt an entire studio should ever be let within a 20-mile radius of a plastic surgeon.

Democracy: this is the way it works

“I never dreamed I would see an administration try to disavow all the things that have made this country different from all others... Every institution that has made this country the greatest nation in the world is under attack. Those of you who think like I do, hope this country can hang on another 16 months.” — Sen Jim Inhofe

One of the more puzzling strains of Republican thinking in the last six months has been something to this effect. Normally, in a two party democracy, the losing side gets to gripe about the winners undoing all their good work. But that's not what the Republicans are saying. They're not saying "A Democrat is undoing Republican policies" but "A Democrat is undermining America." They speak as if they've been invaded, or the subject of a coup. As if they've never been through one of these election things before and don't understand that the other guys get to be in power for a bit. That's the way it works. It's a bit like the fear Freud describes children as having when their mother leaves the room and they imagine her to be gone forever.

Isn't this something?

It's an advert for the World Wildlife Foundation. Everyone's all over it here — its distasteful, a disgrace, etc etc — but I find it mesmerising.

My favorite Ted Kennedy remembrance

"His ability to overcome adversity was stunning to me. I mean, I just--what he went through, and to come back day after day, time after time. He used to say, by the way, you know, with all of our difficulties, he'd say, "Whatever you're worried about today, I promise you, a year from today you won't remember what it is. You'll worry about something else a year from now, but you won't worry about this." And he brought that kind of vitality to his life that I think is critical for every human being, I don't care what you're doing." — Sen Chris Dodd, Meet The Press

A few people have said this to me over the years. It always irritates the hell out of me. Afterwards I always find myself muttering something to the effect that it's easy to deprecate the worries of others — easier to say "our problems don't amount to a hill of beans in this world" when the problems are not yours. It's one of those irritating but true things. I don't know why I picked it really, but I've been looking for a way to pay my respects; maybe realising that he could have been one of those people in my life who say irritating but true things is as good a way as any.

Full steam ahead on the ego express

It's not often that literary criticism feels like work. Not real work. Not the kind of work that gets you up at dawn or gives you calloses or makes you join a union. But when a literary editor asks you if you want to review a new Norwegian novel called The Discoverer, which turns out not only to be five hundred pages long and largely set in a Fjord, but also part three of a trilogy, parts one and two of which also run to 500 pages each, many of them set on a glacier, then you begin to feel like you have a real job of work ahead of you. I'm about halfway through the whole lot right now. The guy at the centre of the trilogy makes TV programs about Ibsen, can conduct four streams of thought at any one time and has a magic penis that can automatically fit to the shape of his lover's vagina. I'm not joking. When he's not bringing women to the brink of cyclonic orgasms he's diving into whirlpools and waterfalls to save the lives of random strangers. And when he's not telling us how great he is, the narration changes hands and someone else does it for him. That's modesty for you. For 1,500 pages. Did no-one think to say, hey Jan I think your hero might need a fault or two? This stuff about having a magic penis is great and all, but I think you may lose some people here? I mean seriously. When you think about the effort that other writers go to to smuggle their idealised selves into their books. The amount of disguise they have to don, the amount of self-deprecation they have to pull off, the extra jokes they have to put in so we won't notice, or mind. Not this guy! He doesn't give a monkeys! It's full steam ahead on the ego express. His hero is a stud, a paragon, an intellectual giant, a lion amongst men. He is also, by a long shot the biggest bore I have come across in a work of fiction since that guy in The Runaway Soul.

How the Oscars look from here

The Vulture lays down its Oscar cards. They're quite big on Jane Campion's Bright Star and the Jason Reitman-George Clooney comedy, Up In the Air. Hmm. Nobody seems to be agreeing with me that Stanley Tucci should win Best Supporting actor, but I'm keeping the faith. I also just had a shiver up my leg telling me that Katherine Bigelow as going to win Best Director, making her the first woman ever to win. Never one to be beaten in the premature speculation game, here's how it looks to me, as of Aug 1, having seen precisely two of the movies concerned.

Best Film: The Lovely Bones, An Education, Up, Invictus, The Hurt Locker, Nine, Precious, Bright Star, Avatar, Up In The Air
Director: Katherine Bigelow, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Clint Eastwood, Rob Marshall
Actor: Morgan Freeman, Daniel Day Lewis, Jeremy Renner, Sam Rockwell, George Clooney
Actress: Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep, Michelle Monaghan, Abbie Cornish, Hillary Swank
Supporting Actor: Stanley Tucci, Christoph Waltz, Matt Damon, Alfred Molina, Liev Schreiber
Supporting Actress: Monique, Penelope Cruz, Susan Sarandon, Judi Dench, Saorise Ronan

May the counter-insurgency be with you

A marine corps officer serving in Iraq watches Return of the Jedi and finds himself wondering:

Why didn't the Rebel Alliance pursue a strategy of insurgency in their rebellion against the Galactic Empire? I would argue that they pursued a strategy of conventional war against the Empire and forwent every aspect of insurgent strategy and tactics. They finally came around a bit in the end by co-opting the Ewoks onto their side. Why hadn't they pursued that strategy on a larger scale? Instead, they simply staged two conventional assualts on the Empire's center of gravity: the Death Star. Although both attempts were successful, I think they got lucky. I think they would have been better served had read their Mao and followed his maxims.

Why didn't the Empire follow counterinsurgency doctrine? Destroying Alderan was probably the dumbest move ever, one that the Alliance could have exploited to their advantage with the proper IO campaign. What do you think the similarities are between destroying Alderan and 4ID tactics circa 2004-5 or liberal ordnance drop policies in Afghanistan? And neither side seemed to subordinate their tactics and strategy to political goals? Clausewitz would have been appalled. Jomini and Summers, on the other hand, would have been most proud.

"Verschaerfte Vernehmung": a capital crime in 1945, 61% in favor in 2009

"Unlike those subjected to Cheney's torture techniques, none of those tortured by the Gestapo died in the process. In fact, the Gestapo's defense at trial was John Yoo's: "Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement." The Gestapo did not use waterboarding - so their methods of interrogation in this case were not as extreme as Cheney's. Nonetheless, the US-run court ruled that Cheney-style EITs, deployed by the Gestapo with the same justification as Cheney, constituted prosecutable torture. And they were executed." — Andrew Sullivan

Towards a general theory of movie suckitude

The Daily Beast (for which I occasionally blog) goes the love-him-or-hate-him-at-least-we're-talking-about-him route, in order to quell the debate over Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. I have a question: how come, when people always make this argument, they're always talking about bad movies, never good ones? This is not to say that controversies don't sometimes erupt over good movies, particularly if the subject matter or theme is charged, but when the controversy centres over the quality of the movie, the movie generally sucks. JFK, Basic Instinct, Natural Born Killers, Crash, Inglorious Basterds. I cannot think of a single example that defies this rule.

Cheney's offer to America: drill, baby, drill

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?

CHENEY: I am.

In the wake of recent revelations about the CIA murdering, choking and threatening its detainees with power drills, Dick Cheney popped up on Fox yesterday to explain why such actions were essential to the security interests of the United States. To both him and his defenders I want to say the following: okay, have your way. Sign out of the Geneva Conventions. Strike out Reagan's signature on the 1984 Convention against torture. Legalise it. Don't beat around the bush with mealy-mouthed legal memos. Say it loud and proud. "The United States tortures its prisoner." Drown, choke and beat every prisoner to within an inch of his life. Then watch what happens next. See Great Britain pull all of its troops out of Afghanistan. See alliances with every civilized nation in the developed world crumble and fall, starting with Germany and France and Australia and finally including even China and Russia. See every country in the Western hemisphere change its extradition laws. See The US lectured on human rights by Yugoslavia and Columbia. See international trade dwindle and sanctions put in place. See Mi5 and Scotland Yard and Interpol refuse to cough up intelligence. See the United State unable to draw on a single military partner in the so-called 'war on terror'. Then we can talk about how important it is to you to go waving power drills in people's faces. But only then. Go on. Do it.

Nor is this a fanciful projection: it was beginning to happen. I like Obama's word for the Cheney experiment: unsustainable. Like the career of a kamikaze pilot, or, for that matter, suicide bomber. That's what Cheney was offering the American people — a dark, glamorous form of national suicide, as bewitching as only suicide can be.

Punch drunk love

"If Alexander Portnoy had had a younger brother, he might have sounded a lot like Jonathan Ames... For all the bodily fluids and rampaging hormones on display, The Double Life Is Twice As Good possesses a winning vulnerability, a sweet ache. Ames is the guy at the orgy who just likes the company."

From my review of Jonathan Ames's The Double Life Is Twice As Good, for this week's Book Forum, here

Gored by a minotaur: pros and cons

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

Confessions of a Streep Agnostic

Those vaunted gaurdians of the aesthetic high ground, The Onion, have an interesting piece maintaining that Meryl Streep has never starred in any truly great movies. A long-term Streep agnostic, I was all ears.

Kramer Versus Kramer? "It's more Dustin Hoffman's movie than Meryl Streep's movie." Sophie's Choice? "A fairly routine melodrama, with a Holocaust backstory thrown in to make the love triangle seem less banal." The Deer Hunter? She was only in it for "three. maybe four minutes." Out Of Africa? "Come on." They're a little unfair to The Bridges of Madison County and The Devil Wears Prada but then they also forget to mention The French Lieutenant's Woman, which proves their point exactly. There's a lot of high-toned crap in there.

I wonder, though, if what this actually illuminates is a difference between actors' and actresses' careers. Look at their examples they give by way of comparison: Al Pacino in The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon, Robert De Niro in Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy. That's one big helping of dirty realist machismo. You can practically smell the hangover. The only woman who gets her own "classic" is Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. There's a big boy;s club in effect. Actor's careers are more auteur-driven. They make hard, gritty movies of the kind that get called "classics" by critics who like hard, gritty movies. De Niro hooks up with Scorsese and the result is a small library of classic movies. Same with Hanks and Spielberg. Where, in short, is Meryl Streep's Tarantino?

It's all about the women

So we're about halfway through our Mad Men marathon and my main feeling is this: the title is wrong. Its not about the men. Its all about the women. Forgive me if everyone already knows this. Maybe every single reviewer out there has said this until its a cliche — everyone knows Mad Men is about the women — duh — but here are my thoughts.

Partly its to do with period. We are back in the era when men bestrode Madison Avenue like colossi, while the women plot and plan their way through the maze. This makes the female characters, at a rough estimate, about ten times more interesting than the male ones. It's a man's world — they're the fish out of water. Then men are all boorish cardboard cutouts whose sexist zingers fizzle upon launch. They never quite seem to fill the space marked out for them. I was reminded of Phillip Semour Hoffman's saying that the hardest thing about playing a male priest in the fifties was getting the entitlement right: the fact that he could walk into a room and if Meryl Streep was sitting in his chair, she would eject herself from it immediately. He remembered thinking: holy heck, Meryl Streep! and wanted to apologise.

Most of the male acting is a bit like that: they haven't really inhabited the bullish body spaces of these men. They don't fill their suits. (Only John Ham does that.) But the women are all great, from the conniving Christina Hendricks, whose sails through each scene, bosom thrust forward like a ship's prow, to the the mousy secretary with a trick up her sleeve, played by Elizabeth Moss, to the peppermint-voiced January Jones, who delivers a fascinating study of a woman locked into her beauty — both bored and a little puzzled by the power she has been arbitrarily ceded. I've rarely seen someone play a beautiful woman so well, which is to say, not a woman who is beautiful because she happens to be played by a movie star, but a woman whose beauty is a stubborn actual fact, out there in the world, like a third thumb.

Craig Brown: Obama chooses icecream

"I stand before this ice-cream truck today humbled by the task before me, grateful for the trust my wife and my daughters have bestowed upon me, mindful of the great and inspiring choice of popsicles and ice-creams and other light refreshments both borne and consumed by our ancestors before us. We should rejoice in this choice and this variety. It is the differences between iced comestibles that make them so attractive. So let us celebrate these differences.

"Daddy," says Malia Ann. "May I please have a Tutti Frutti?"

I look at her through these eyes, the eyes of a father both loving and dutiful.

"I say to you this, Malia Ann," I say. "And this I say to you. The Tutti Frutti is a fine ice cream. Of that there is no doubt. But let us go further than that. Yes, the Tutti Frutti has all the truly outstanding qualities of a great ice cream. It is cold. It is colorful. And it is good to the taste. It remains firm upon the stick, and is able within its noble resilience to endure the harsh heat of sunlight.

"But I tell you this, Malia Ann. Once an ice cream is eaten, it is eaten. And that ice cream remains eaten. For all its worth, that ice cream once swallowed does not have it within its power to reappear on that stick. That is our one true sorrow. But it avails us nothing to pretend that is any other way. So now, Malia Ann, is the time for realism. Now is the time for tough choices--choices that is in the heart of each one of us to address. Now, Malia Ann, is the time to confront the popsicle."— Craig Raine, Private Eye

Power drills to the head: pros and cons

Publius summarises the IG report:—

The highlights include: (1) mock executions; (2) threatened rape of family members; (3) threatened murder of children; (4) kicking and beating a detainee with a metal flashlight to death; (5) threatening naked hooded detainees with power drills; (6) blowing cigar smoke in detainees' faces until they got sick; (7) waterboarding with massive volumes of water far beyond what OLC authorized (to make it "poignant"); (8) stress positions that nearly caused shoulder dislocations; (9) scraping detainees with stiff brushes; (10) choking a detainee with one's bare hands until they nearly pass out; (11) subjecting detainees to extremely cold temperatures and water dousing; (12) "hard takedowns" (sometimes in diapers); and (13) beating detainees with butts of rifles (followed by kicking them).

Cheney, needless to say, claims vindication. The power-drills worked. But remember, these methods were used on suspects, not members of Al Qaeda, but people the administration suspected of being members of Al Qaeda. Many of the detainees were tortured due to "assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence". Translation: they were innocent. I'm tried of keeping track of this stuff, tired of rehearsing arguments about why power drills to the head of innocent people is not an efficacious idea; tired of hearing news anchors weighing the pros and cons of torturing people; tired of people talk about "enhanced" interrogations and "poignant" waterboarding; when all I really want to say is: stop it. Stop defending the people who did it. Stop protecting the people who ordered it. Just stop.

Inglorious Basterds: Pros and Cons

Since Tarantino is very much a filmmaker of bits — good bits, bad bits, cool bits, indifferent bits — I've decided to chop up Inglorious Basterds into its constituent parts. Beware: spoilers ahead.

Some things I liked about the film:—
1. The scar on Brad Pitt's neck. Intriguing.
2. The entire first scene, including the cows.
3. Christoph Waltz's performance, until the point where he decides to throw in the towel.
4. Melanie Laurent. The red dress. The lipstick. Everything.
5. The shot of the strudel. Funny, for reasons I can't put my finger on.
6. The baseball bat to the head. Shocking.
7. The dialogue in French and German.
8. The freeze frames.
9. The use of David Bowie's Putting Out Fires. Cool.
10. Brad Pitt's line about how much he doesn't like fighting in basements.

Some things I didn't like about the film:—
1. The rest of Brad Pitt's performance.
2. The speeches giving us a potted history of German cinema.
3. The misspelt (borrowed) title. Never fails to irritate.
4. Eli Roth, but particularly the shot of him mowing down unarmed Germans.
5. Christopher Waltz' performance after the point when, just seconds away from total crushing victory over his enemies, he decides to jack in this whole Nazi thing and join the allies. Somebody explain to me why.
6. The plot. I thought Tarantino was going to make a "ten men died getting us this information" kind of a movie, in which the Basterds attempt to ascend the Matterhorn of impossible missions: taking out Hitler. Instead Hitler just walks into a trap that wasn't even set for him. Huh.
7. The dialogue in English. First draft stuff. I loved Tarantino's riffs on the differences between a Royale with Cheese and a Big Mac. Riffs on the differences between rats and squirrels didn't do it for me.
8. The fact that torture always ellicited accurate information.
9. We only get to know two of the basterds.
10. The guy two rows in front of me laughing at every damn thing.

Those death panellists in full

John McCain joins Texas Governor Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Senator Chuck Grassley, Senator Orrin Hatch, Betsy McCaughey, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, The Washington Times, The American Spectator, Senator Tom Coburn and RNC chair Michael Steele in their belief that the government is planning to euthanise the elderly, or see advantage in being perceived to hold such a belief. McCain argues that the bill is "ambiguous" which is true up to a point. It if you are one of those people who see the phrase "end-of-life care" as potentially meaning the kind of care which brings about the end of your life, the yes, the bill is indeed ambiguous.

Where are the women?

"Does this mean that the novelist-as-rock-star is a mostly male phenomenon? Or that women stayed sloshed for longer? It could be that there are many sober women writers out there, but they’re better at maintaining their anonymity than men."

A response to readers who commented on the lack of women writers in my article about novelists and sobriety for Intelligent Life.