From a new Flickr photostream marking the president's first 100 days. Slate (below) marks the occasion on Facebook. 
Barack Obama is taking the oath of office. Barack Obama is taking the oath of office. Barack Obama deleted the group I'm a Lobbyist AND I Work at the White House! Barack Obama deleted the group Guantanamo Bay Detainees 4EVA. 
Reggie Love wrote on Beyonce Knowles' Wall. 
When I first saw the trailer for Anvil! The Story of Anvil, I thought it was a put-on — a Spinal Tap reheat. Indeed, it features a drummer called Robb Reiner, a volume dial that really does go to eleven, and a hilarious disquisition on the origins of a song called Thumb-Hang ("its from the Spanish Inquisition"). But Anvil are real alright and the film is a joy — funny and touching and rousing, in large part because of the lead singer Lips, a wide-eyed, big-hearted overflowing spillage of a man who exhorts his band through thick and thin with speeches that veer between indefatigable optimism and outright delusion. After everything on their tour goes wrong, he points out, “at least there was a tour for it to go wrong on.” Look on the bright side, he says, as he drives back to his job at a children's catering company in frozen Ontario. "It could never be worse than it already is." By the end of the movie I was tapping my foot to their awful, earsplitting songs, like the proudest of mothers, and I left the theatre with tears streaking my face. Just glorious.
“The Zen experience of forgetting the self was very natural to me. I had already been engaged in forgetting and abandoning the self in my childhood, which was filled with the fear of how unreal things seemed. But that forgetting was pathological. I always had some deeper sense that I wasn’t really there, that my life and my marriages didn’t seem real. In therapy with Jeffrey I began to realize this feeling of invisibility wasn’t just a peculiar experience but was maybe the central theme of my life." — A Zen Master who entered a course of psychotherapy to deal with the loss of self he attained through meditating.
"Yes it's against the law but there's a higher moral law at work here. That's what Dr King was all about" — Pat Buchanan, defending torture on Hardball
The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.In other words, what led them to ramp up the interrogation on KSM and Zubaydah, waterboarding them 266 times in a single month was no 'ticking time bomb' scenario, but their desire to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections — an act of such heartbreakingly wicked it's difficult to know what to say except: time to prosecute.
"The importance of the Chavez hand shake is the report you did just now, on the jump in book sales from #54,000 to number 2. Everywhere in Latin America, enemies of America are going to use the picture of Chavez smiling and being with the President as proof that Chavez is now legitimate, that he's acceptable. He's a dictatorial figure, he's an anti American figure."
Newt Gingrich on Fox News, reacting to the calamity that was Obama's handshake with Hugo Chavez. Numerous bloggers have already pointed out the number of former presidents who have indulged in this nefarious activity — Kennedy/Khrushchev, Nixon/Brezhnev, Reagan/Gorbachev — but at least grant that Gingrich is consistent. It was he who, in 1985, predicted the sky would fall following Reagan's rapprochement with Gorbachev, calling it "the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Chamberlain in 1938 at Munich." Thank goodness we have Newt around to protect us.
"We have laid it all out for our enemies. Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again" — Anonymous Bush administration official, protesting Obama's release of the torture memos.
“I don't believe Obama would intentionally endanger the nation, so it must be that he thinks either 1. the previous administration, including the CIA professionals who have defended this program, is lying about its importance and effectiveness, or 2. he believes we are no longer really at war and no longer face the kind of grave threat to our national security this program has protected against.”The former. To date, the Bush administration have not been able to name a single piece of actionable intelligence that came from torturing suspects, although in the WSJ today Mukasey and Hadley trot out the usual claims about Abu Zubaydah:
The terrorist Abu Zubaydah... disclosed some information voluntarily. But he was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S.Zubaydah is the suspect they waterboarded 83 times, and whose coerced testimony triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantom plots — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty — none of which turned out to have any basis in reality. “What we got was pabulum,” said FBI agent Jack Cloonan. "We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms," said one intelligence official.
Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said. Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”
I have to say: I'm excited. I am far from being a Trekkie, or even on the footslopes of Trekkiedom, but I always loved the Starship Enterprise itself.* No space ship design has come close for distinctiveness, although I certainly was a big fan of the x-wing and the Nostromo. Above all I love the delicateness of the stems on which the cabin-saucer and side rockets sit — exactly the sort of ergonomic elegance that zero-air resistance might allow. In the new posters (left), it looks like the sort of shape that might form when molten glass is dropped into water.
A new Rasmussen poll finds that while 53 per cent of Americans think “capitalism” is better than “socialism,” 20 per cent think socialism is better and 27 per cent aren’t sure which of the two is better. Few can fail to be delighted by this ascent of American politics into the realms of higher nonsense. It's not too hard to see what's happened here: the right have called Obama's programs socialist enough times that the word has come to mean "whatever it is Obama is doing"; and enough people like whatever it is Obama is doing, that socialism has been reclaimed to mean "the thing that 53% of the country voted for." Heaven.
I've been thinking long and hard about what might motivate former vice-president Cheney to say that Obama's repeal of the Bush torture program has made America "less safe." It seems politically unwise: Obama is the only thing standing between the vice-president and prosecution. It also seems to kick up another unforseen consequence: if he re-arms the issue and pushes anough people to wonder whether Obama has indeed made them less safe, Obama will be forced to prove him wrong. That will mean an investigation into what intelligence, exactly, the torture program gave us. How is Cheney served by this? The last thing he wants is an investigation of any sort. It's very puzzling. Is it rage?
It's official: I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I didn't love Duplicity, you see. I really tried to pay attention, too. Sat there with my head in my hand, eyes narrowed, brow furrowing, determined to get the most out of it. "This is as good as it gets," said Variety. "However you describe it, Duplicity is superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time," said A O Scott. " If what thrills you is the swift-moving, unrelenting contest between equal and opposing forces, then the movies you seek out are surely the great romantic comedies of the studio era, verbal boxing matches that draw blood and end in kisses."
Obama's bowling gaffe just goes to prove a theory of mine: mistakes comes in twos. Trying to correct gaffe number one (the public's perception of his bowling skills) he commits another (he compares it to the special olympics). It's always the way. Its just when you've successfully avoided stepping in a puddle that you walk into a lamp-post. I don't think it has to do with karma, or an ironic God or anything like that. I think there is a direct causal relationship behind Sod's law. It is precisely because you have negotiated threat A that you relax your guard sufficiently to succumb to threat B. Joking about his bowling score, Obama probably felt exhilaration (finally, that alabatross put to bed) and the exhilaration opened him up.
Confronted with a ladder across the sidewalk, you have two choices. Either you walk under it, or you walk around it. But it's not as simple as that is it? If you walk around it, you are announcing to the world "I am a superstitious sort and prefer not to talk under ladders in the street." If you walk under it, you are defiantly thumbing your nose at such nonsense. But what if you have no position on the matter and simply want to walk along the street, uninterrupted by demands to declare your position on the matter?
From my column for The Daily Beast.The camera draws near.
MICHAEL (comforting): Don’t take it too personally.
JASON: It's hard not to. I mean I can’t believe I fell for that. A wood chipper. Jesus. That is worse than anything I ever did.
MICHAEL: Way worse.
JASON: It’s these new kids. They’re not playing the game the way it should be played. It’s all cellphones and pagers one minute and then they’re coming at you with baseball bats and knives and God knows what else. Whatever happened to taking a shower? Running in high heels? Losing the car keys?
MICHAEL (wistfully): Taking a walk in the forest.
JASON: Yeah right. ”Is anybody there?”
MICHAEL (girlishly): “I won’t be long.....”
Jason mimes bringing a machete down through the air, but cricks his neck and winces. Carefully, he massages his shoulder.
MICHAEL: It’s Scream. That film screwed everything up for us. Now everyone knows our shit.”
JASON: Bunch of artsy-fartsys Scooby-Doo crap is what it was. Putting ideas in their heads. They would never have thought of a wood chipper before. No way.
MICHAEL: If anyone’s feeding someone into a wood chipper it's you, Jay.
JASON: It’s fucked up.
MICHAEL: It's disrespectful is what it is.
They both shake their heads....
EASTON, Pa. - A man accused of driving drunk said Pennsylvania courts have no jurisdiction over him because he's his own country. Scott Alan Witmer, who represented himself, said he believes police lack jurisdiction to pull him over. "I live inside myself, not in Pennsylvania," he claimed Tuesday, prompting Northampton County Judge Leonard Zito to reset Witmer's bail. Witmer said he was challenging the traffic stop that led to his arrest and said he believes in certain laws, not all of them. "Don't all our souls live within ourselves?" he asked, pointing to his body. "Isn't this where you really live?"
In the summer of 1978, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan met to hash out their ideas for Raiders of the Last Ark. They met on 5 consecutive 9-hour days at the L.A. home of Lucas's assistant Jane Bay. "We had a tape recorder going and George essentially guided the story process," said Spielberg. "And that's where the fantasy of all our pent-up, wet-movie dreams coalesced. Most of the time we were on our feet, trying to out-shout each other with ideas." For the first time, those conversations have been published. They make for fascinating reading. 
The London press are outraged over Obama's recent gift to Gordon Brown — 25 DVDs including Star Wars, The Godfather and Citizen Kane. “Barack Obama, the leader of the world's richest country,” huffed the Daily Mail, “gave the Prime Minister a box set of 25 classic American films - a gift about as exciting as a pair of socks.” Brown on the other hand gave Brown a pen holder carved from the timbers of the sister ship of the one the White House desk is made from and a first edition of a seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill. I have to say that of those two gifts, I know which one I'd prefer. Surely there's one movie in those 25 that he hasn't watched?"The main objections to the truth commission Sen. Leahy has been trying to organize are that it will be... nothing more than a witch hunt. Of course, the use of the phrase “witch hunt” today implies a hunt in pursuit of something that does not exist, while we are fairly certain that there were criminals in the outgoing administration who have thus far escaped the appropriate sanctions of the law." — Daniel Larison, The American Conservative
John Cole has some good graphs about the "socialism" ruckus, from which he deduces the following:—The 2010 proposed rate of 39.60% = socialism.I don't remember America being a particularly communist country back in the nineties. Of course I only moved here in 1999, so what do I know. but I visited many times and I didn't really get that vibe off the place. You'd think news would have leaked out somehow. They have newspapers here, and TV. Wouldn't some brave American have got the news out that his country, so implacably opposed to socialism a few years earlier — they had a cold war for crissakes! for several decades! — had, in fact, succumbed to the cold clutches of Marxist-Leninism? Evidently not. The government crackdown on such dissidents must indeed have been savage and intense.
The 2002-2008 rates of 35.00% = capitalist nirvana.
The 39.6% rate of the 1990’s = socialism.
Everything else = down the memory hole.
The latest hour-long Rush Limbaugh extravaganza is pure bliss. Not since Sarah Palin popped her head into our airspace has political theatre acquired such bouyancy — as light as farce. As with all the best farces, the engine of this one is powered along by a neat conundrum: someone who believes himself to be the solution to the problem is in fact its source. 
From my review of Watchmen, which loosed a tidal wave of fanboy snark in Slate a few years back:Whether you take this self-reflexivity as evidence of a newfound sophistication on behalf of the comic book, or as self-consciousness tricked out as superiority—that old adolescent standby—is up to you. Watchmen was unquestionably a landmark work, a masterpiece, even. Before Moore came along, comic books were not generally in the habit of quoting Nietzsche, or scrambling their time schemes, or berating their heroes for their crypto-fascist politics, or their readers for reading them. It was Moore's slightly self-negating triumph to have allowed it to do so... The last time I looked, the only ones reading Ulysses and quoting Nietzsche were teenagers. No adult has time for aesthetic "difficulty" or "self-consciousness." Life is too short. Frankly, we'd much rather be watching The Incredibles.Thinking about it further, I'd hone my objections a little further: too much backstory and not enough story. Moore is a dead-end for movie-makers. The same thing happened with V For Vendetta, which spent its entire time taking us on a guided tour of the fascistic future it inhabited, and left approximately five minutes for an actual plot to get underway. Moore is way too fond of the world he envisions — or to be accurate, the political points scored by that vision — to ever let his plots run away with him. The clock ticks backward.
In no order, here are the films that I'm most looking forward to this year.
"In 1919, Charlie Chaplin had an idea for some fleas. Wouldn't it be good, he thought, if a man accidentally opened his matchbox of performing fleas in a dosshouse? But he could find no place for the scene in the film he was shooting. He tinkered with the idea for almost a decade - wouldn't it be good if he inspected one of the fleas from a hobo's beard, only to throw it away because it wasn't one of his? - and almost got it into The Circus in 1928, and then The Great Dictator in 1940, but still it wouldn't fit. Finally, in 1952, with the communist witch-hunt closing in on him, the press baying for his blood, Chaplin made his last film on American soil, Limelight, about a washed-up clown called Calvero plying himself with greasepaint for one final hurrah. In a flashback sequence, we see Calvero finally lose those performing fleas, but not the whole box: just two of them now, hopping invisibly from fist to fist."
— From my review of Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey in tomorrow's Sunday Times
The best case for Slumdig Millionaire I have heard, from my friend Nick Hornby:It’s perfectly possible not to enjoy Slumdog Millionaire, of course – nothing appeals to everybody, and I didn’t have enough invested in the love story for the film to lift me as much as it seems to have lifted others. But typically, when the success of a book or a film or a piece of music baffles the liberal intelligentsia, then that success will usually be put down to the cynicism of the makers, or the depressing ignorance of the consumers... It would be nice to think that our artier film-makers and more literary novelists could look at ‘Slumdog’ and steal a few of its underpinnings. Is energy, for example, as vulgar an attribute as many of them seem to believe? And is coherent structure really such an awful thing? On the evidence of the LRB letter, though, our intellectuals are more likely to sneer. I’m sure they’re all very clever people, but they can be terribly dim sometimes.
Many movies and novels could do with a little more vulgar energy — The Reader springs to mind. And the structure of Slumdog was the only time I can remember enjoying, rather than enduring, flashbacks in a movie. I was happy when it came out. I could see the point of it. A stalwart addition to a decent year at the movies, I thought — a good midfielder, a dependable mid-range success story. I just never for a second imagined it would clean up at every awards ceremony western civilization has to offer. 7 Baftas and 8 Oscars, including Best Picture, depresses me for some reason. It's not a bias against popular movies: I didn't feel this way when Titanic won, or Lord of the Rings. For all its flaws I think The Dark Knight should have got a best picture nod. And it is nothing short of painful to me that movies like Knocked Up never stand a chance. But Slumdog has an offputting cunning to it, I think: come see this small, scruffy, underdog movie from the Indian subcontinent, complete with Hindi subtitles, and — guess what — it slips down as easily as the latest Janet Jackson video. There's no earthly reason why movies set in other countries have to be dour and grainy and foreign-filmish — sitting through Gomorrah is not mandatory — but I like a little bit of foreignness, some detail that makes you sit up. There was some shots of India in The Darjeeling Limited (an otherwise bad movie) that looked as strange and stunning as a lunar landscape. I never got anything like that in Slumdog. Foreigners aren't so foreign after all, it said. They watch the same junk, they dream the same dreams. Do they? One thing Danny Boyle said in interview stuck with me, about how unexpectedly non-aspirational the slum dwellers all were, despite their crushing poverty. The westerner expected revolution, revolt; what he found was good-humored acceptance. Something to do with Hinduism? The caste system? Who knows, but that was interesting to me. I wish he'd made a movie about that — or which at least included that. It would have made his hero's arc all the more startling.
The Millionsblogs parses an Obama sentence:—Obama has a good memory for where he's been, grammatically, and a strong sense of where he's going. His tripartite analysis of the problem is clearly reflected in the structure of the sentence, and thus in the three main branches of the diagram. (Turn it on its side and it could be a mobile.) Obama's confidence in the basic architecture of his sentences allows him to throw in some syntactically varied riffs and qualifiers: an absolute phrase here, a correlative conjunction or comparative adjective there.By contrast with the syntax, the diction is quite straightforward, which may account for why the majority of Americans, unlike their pundit overlords, don't seem to feel that Obama is talking down to them. The verbs here are all "to be" verbs, given weight by participles like "prosecuted" and "interested," and by the muscular commonplaces, "above the law," "looking forward" and "looking back." The only superfluous adjective is "clear," which sounds positively Bush-like, even as it serves to qualify the clause it's attached to. Even more remarkable: by virtue of the third "that," this is a complex sentence, but not a compound one. Like "I'm the decider," it has a single, copulative predicate. This may be the essential Obama gift: making complexity and caution sound bold and active, even masculine.
It is possible - mistaken, I think, but certainly possible - to dismiss this sentence as a platitudinous non-answer, and if comedians ever overcome their Obama anxiety, this may be his Achilles heel: "The beef, assuming it's in a port wine reduction, sounds, uh, amazing, but on the other hand, given that the chicken is, ah, locally grown, I'd be eager to try it."
The Guardian has some excellent statistics about the Oscars, including:— 43% of best actresses winners have been brunette, only 14% blondes. Playing someone with a mental illness gives you 23% chance of winning, physical illness 10%, an inspirational teacher 5%, Holocaust victim 4%, victim of homophobia 3%, nun 3%, monk, genius + victim of racism all 2%.
The Carpetbagger asks: what would you do if you handed out the Oscars? In his case:Anne Hathaway would be more than an also-ran in lead actress. “Rachel Getting Married” might have snuck in to the best picture picture. Kate Winslet would have been nominated for “Revolutionary Road” instead of “The Reader.” And “Gomorrah” would not only be up for best foreign-language film, it would threaten in the best picture category.Agreed. Plus: WALL-E would get a best picture nod, as would the Wrestler. Russell Brand would get a best supporting actor nomination for Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Marisa Tomei would be the hands-down, no-questions take-all-contenders BSA winner. Bruce Springsteen would be nominated and win. Slumdog Millionaire would be nominated and not win anything besides best editing. But here's the thing: I'm not sure I'd want to live in a universe in which the right films won the Oscars. 1) We would have nothing left to complain about; 2) Indie filmmakers would have no clue what it is they're supposed to be independent from; 3) The suits would all start smoking roll ups and block-booking Fassbinder retrospectives. 4) The word "meretricious" would lose 90% of its meaning, and probably collapse, causing untold knock-on effects in other areas of the dictionary. What makes disliking a movie like Slumdog Millionaire or The Reader such a life-sustaining experience is the sure knowledge that other people think it a work of genius. Disliking a bad movie is not enough: a bad movie must be overrated by others to instill the pain necessary for all meaningful action. What the Carpetbagger is proposing is pure through-a-wormhole-backwards chaos. It is to be resisted.
A bizarre debate has erupted over whether Joaquin Phoenix's display of truculence on the David Letterman Show was a 'hoax' or not:Last month Entertainment Weekly quoted a friend of the actor who confirmed that Phoenix was playing a joke at the public's expense, claiming he told him 'It's a put-on. I'm going to pretend to have a meltdown and change careers, and Casey is going to film it.' Journalist Devin Faraci, who recently attended the press junket for Phoenix's new movie Two Lovers, says having witnessed the actor's behaviour first hand — he is convinced that it isn't all a prank.It's a nonsensical question. Pretending to be an antisocial jerk is surely the same thing as being an antisocial jerk. There is no question of sincerity or intention. That's what makes it antisocial.
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. 
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
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? 
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.
Perfection Wasted (1990)
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."
"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
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