G. Wesley Houp: "Speedballer"

(A message from one of my favorite singer-songwriters. He is also a published poet and a master of multiple blues guitar styles.)

Dear friends, acquaintances and strangers all,

You're cordially invited to check out the latest musical offering, "Speedballer," by Murfreeboro's most revered compiler of American Tragi-musical crots! The one in question is yet another installment of the Jeannie serial about that bad-eyed, loveless, and karmically depleted composite-girl, who parts the world before her like a Titanic and leaves a tragic wake of chewed-up iceberg innards behind her but miraculously manages to keep on plowing forward, seemingly oblivious but intrinsically aware of the mess (and at times using feigned ignorance as a tool--don't we all?). I haven't let you down. This one has a helping of pot-smoking no-good-doers, a tender touch of sex-for-drugs miscreants, and an ever-so-light basting of honey-smoked regrets. For those of you unfamiliar with the nuances of narco-semiology, "speedballing" refers to a lethal combination of oxycotin (or methadone) and xanax. Not at all a good way to "get your buzz-coat on." I recommend forgoing the narcs and reposing with a Pinot Noir, preferably on your backporch in the spring while your rosy-faced, toe-headed children dig for tiny treasures with tiny spades in your herb garden. Ahh...humans are tragic, but life is good.

Yours truly,

G. Wesley Houp

On the 6th Anniversary of The Iraq War

(Courtesy of Free Speech Radio and their report Winter Soldier Europe brings vets together to discuss PTSD and more)

In commemoration of the 6th Anniversary of the start of the Bush Administration's Iraq War, I would like to recommend that you, no matter your perspective, take the time to listen to the reasons why soldiers are speaking out against the ongoing war:

Iraq Veterans Against the War: Why We're Against the War

Michael Benton's Peace/Conflict Studies Archive (2009) designed for teaching a course on the subject.

More from Free Speech Radio:

Army Dealing with Rising Soldier Suicides

Two Million Iraqi Refugees Struggle to Survive

and from Bill Moyers Journal:

Buying the War: How Did the Mainstream Press Get it So Wrong?

A Question About the (Non)Politics of Teaching

My question: is it possible to teach history, art, literature, philosophy, science, business, economics, etc... without a political agenda? Is pretending that you have no political position and teaching the materials as the dominant society constructs a subject a political agenda? Is it possible to "profess" or hold an "opinion" or construct a history or create art that is free of "bias" or "political agendas"?

Just curious ... ;)

Double-Tongued Dictionary; Dean Wright: Watching our language -- Writing about the financial crisis

I really enjoy the proliferation of websites helping us to make sense of the proliferation of buzzwords:

Double-Tongued Dictionary

I found this website in Dean Wright's fascinating article on Reuters Blogs:

Watching our language: Writing about the financial crisis

Response to a Critique of My Dismissal of the Movie Version of Watchmen

(Charles lengthy critique of my dismissal of Watchmen is in the comment section of this post)

Charles,

First off, lets agree that responses to films are subjective in the sense that we filter the film through our own experiences and ideologies.

Thus we have different reactions to the film. I read the graphic novel when it first came out and was powerfully moved by its critique of fetishized super hero worship (and its subtextual relation to the unreflective real-world worship of powerful "leaders" who are going to save the day and their destructive controlling ideologies) during Reagan's second term in which the dominant narrative was of the holy super America versus the evil destructive Soviet forces (Reagan's "evil empire"). The controlling American narrative at that time was that whatever we did in the interest of our holy mission against the evil empire was acceptable and just. This, for me, is what made Moore's/Gibbons' graphic novel so powerful (much like the graphic novel V)

The current movie (term used purposely) version is facile in the sense that it relies more on the spectacle of action super hero tropes as opposed to the deconstructive critique of the comic book super hero genre.

You state:

"This should be the main focus of a criticism of a film."

Is there only one way to read a film? Could you outline in more detail what that one way should be?

You cite Alan Moore's comments about his graphic novel to support your celebration of the film, while ignoring that he has disowned the film as a superficial exercise. He even refused any money from the film and gave all proceeds to the illustrator Dave Gibbons. How does that reverse/divert your application of Moore's critique to the film version?

Thus, it seems problematic that you seek to conflate the graphic novel and film versions as if they were one text. Is it not obvious that they are separate texts and that they should be treated/critiqued as such?

While you still are conflating the two texts you mention:

"From this in my opinion these superheroes of Watchmen are reactionary victims to the society they live in, and therefore exhibit the ability to inspire some sort of sympathy even in their most hellish and barbaric moments."

I never stated that I felt no sympathy for the characters, but I find it hard to reconcile anyone's empathy with the psychopathic Comedian. This is a man who murders on command, slaughters those who depend on him, and rapes at will (in all of its implications). Can you identify for me when and where you feel sympathy for this character? Is it because in his final moments he is horrified by the onrushing apocalyptic events he has helped to usher in? Does his drunken tears move you? What do we see as his ultimate response to this threat to the world of the movie's narrative? Is it worthy of our sympathy/empathy/respect?

Rorshach, on the other hand, deserves our pity, for he is the product of a horrible upbringing and it has made him into a psychopathic super hero. He is not commendable though, unless you celebrate vigilantes' hunting down people in the streets. Was Moore critiquing the Dark Knight mythos before he did it proper? Rorshach's death at the end of both versions is tragic and wrong, but it does not remove the fact that he is a psychopath with a mask (clearly outlined in the graphic novel, defused in the film).

You state:

"They each therefore exhibit extreme views and reflect certain unsavory ideologies that reflect the human condition .This translates verbatim into the film. I would go as far as to say that 90% of the dialogue present in the film is from the comic directly albeit with lines switched for different characters at many times."

What ideologies do these characters represent for you and how do these ideologies represent for you the human condition? Could you explain? Is nihilism an acceptable response even from those who suffer from tragic circumstances and/or "unsavory ideologies?" I would reject nihilism as a valid response, but then perhaps I am idealistic in my humanistic outlook?

I never said the movie did not try to "imitate" the comic, in fact, it seems the filmmakers try to do this as much as possible. Instead, the problem is while imitating the book they switch the emphasis to sensationalized visual spectacles over the more multitextual technique of the graphic novel. This, for me, robs the movie of the graphic novel's critical power.

I disagree that any of the Watchmen should be considered victims, except perhaps a bit of empathy for Rorshach, considering his background.

You state:

"Further there are many things in the aesthetics and style that are meant to be subversive I think. One of these would be how the characters enjoy the violence they are committing. Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II both get aroused from brutally assaulting a gang of knot heads, as they do in the comic. Only in the film they go as far as to kill them. In the comic they merely brutally beat the men, but they do not murder them. In the film as well, two of Rorschach’s extreme acts of violence are altered as well. These alterations change the character quite a bit. In the comic when Rorschach comes upon the child killer, he does not murder him. He handcuffs him to the oven and set the place on fire and leaves a handsaw for him to cut through his arm should he want to live. This reflects Rorschach’s view that the man is an animal and as such can escape if he desires like an animal would gnaw its paw off to escape a trap. In the film, Rorschach comes face to face with the man and can’t conceive of how to simply punish the man in a world that is completely and utterly cold and hopeless. As such he butchers the man .The second is burning the man with grease in the prison. In the comic Rorschach reaches for the closest thing and burns the man with the shiv with the grease, out of self defense and to make appoint. In the film, Rorschach defends himself with his metal tray and knocks the man down defenseless. He then reaches over to grab the grease and burns the man, only this time not out of self defense, but merely an act of subversive spectacle. These two acts in my opinion alter the character and make him possibly more psychopathic in the film version. Another subversive moment in the film for me would be the sex scene with Dan and Laurie. In this scene there is focus on the costumes being torn away, and even more focus on the leather boots she is wearing. This coupled with the absurd use of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah , seems to turn what would have been a simple love scene , into a ironic and laughable marathon exercise into the sexual fetishism of their superhero identities."

I agree with your analysis of the changes, but I am completely befuddled by your claim that these are subversive moves? These two scenes, for me, are symptomatic of the movie's defusion of the deconstructive power of the original graphic novel ... people were loudly cheering Rorshach's violence as if he was a simplistic action hero and the Nite Owl II/Silk Spectre II violence/sex scene was beyond ridiculous (although I did enjoy my girlfriend's howl of mocking laughter when they acted out the fanboy fantasy scene). Once again though the scenes lack a clear sense of critiquing the dramas being laid out for consumption as if the filmmakers were hoping that they might be able to appease both the critical fans and the straight-forward action audience. I disagree finally with your insistence that the film presents the super heroes in an unsympathetic light as the audience I watched the film with cheered many scenes like they would a typical action film.

I do agree that the film is a technical wonder, much like 300, which I also had problems with ... I find aesthetics to be political in the sense that the aesthetics of Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation or Maid in Manhattan and Pretty Woman cannot be separated from their political messages. I am not associating Watchmen with the first pair of films, instead, I am critiquing the aesthetic spectacle of Watchmen as a distraction from serious consideration of the political message of the film. I would make the same claim for the latest Dark Knight film in which, surprisingly, I found myself at one point cheering on the chaos of the Joker, because the Dark Knight becomes a symbol of unchecked (super) power in the service of a (supposed) noble cause--it would seem obvious who we are suppose to identify with in the film (much as Bush's administration thought it was obvious we should always cheer their means in the service of their self-proclaimed noble ends) but anyone vaguely aware of the cultural/political context of the film could not but help to reject the ultimate message of the Dark Knight.

Last, as this is running long, I find nothing admirable about "moral ambiguity" in films or people. Are you celebrating it? Can you explain why?

I appreciate your lengthy, thoughtful critique. I hope you take my words in the spirit of dialogue. If the movie version of Watchmen inspires people this much, perhaps it has more value than I originally thought. I still stand by my critique of the movie version.

Sarah DiGregorio: Is Foie Gras Torture?

Is Foie Gras Torture?
By Sarah DiGregorio
Village Voice

It's very hard to watch the video about foie gras from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and not conclude that you should lay off fatty liver.

You're shown a disheveled duck squeezed into a cage so small that the bird can't open its wings. Disturbingly, it rocks back and forth. You then see an enormous barn full of birds, all of them immobilized in tiny cages. There are graphic shots of birds' festering open sores with rats nibbling at them, some that are dying slowly, and some with holes punched through their necks. We learn that foie gras production has been banned in the United Kingdom, Israel, and Switzerland.

The Humane Society and the ASPCA have also joined PETA to oppose foie gras. They object to the force-feeding process, called "gavage," which entails putting a metal tube down a duck's throat to deliver a large amount of corn-based food that causes the liver to enlarge. The process, animal rights groups say, causes trauma to the duck's esophagus and beak. Also, they say, the enlargement of the liver—from six to 10 times the normal size—causes the ducks to become deathly ill, struggle to walk and breathe, and vomit up undigested food. At the website of the humane group Farm Sanctuary, a photograph of a healthy, fluffy white duck rescued from a foie gras farm is contrasted with a shot of two ducks in tiny cages, both covered with their own yellow vomit.

To Read the Rest of the Report and To Watch a Slideshow

J. Hoberman: Zack Snyder Didn't Ruin Watchmen -- He just sapped it of its superpower

Zack Snyder Didn't Ruin Watchmen: He just sapped it of its superpower.
By J. Hoberman
Village Voice



The most eagerly anticipated (as well as the most beleaguered) movie of the year (if not the century), Watchmen is neither desecratory disaster nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse's adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address the cult while pandering to the masses.

Warner Bros., which battled Fox for possession of the property—from which author Alan Moore has, typically, removed his name—is marketing Snyder, who remade George Romero's Dawn of the Dead in 2004 and had a surprise mega-hit two years later with his adaptation of Frank Miller's comic book Thermopylae, 300, as a "visionary." That's a grateful studio's code word for "competent hack." The master of the vid-game aesthetic has successfully streamlined Moore's 12-part graphic novel and, even at a running time that tops two hours and 40 minutes, made it commercially viable.

...

Although the ending has been somewhat modified from the novel's, let it be said that Watchmen doesn't lack for self-confidence or even entertainment value. Its failure is one of imagination—although faithfully approximating Dave Gibbons's original drawings, the filmmakers are unable to teleport themselves to the level of the original concept. Perhaps no one could have, but it would have been fun to see what sort of mess Terry Gilliam (who hoped to make a movie version back in the '80s) or Richard Kelly (who surely took inspiration from Watchmen in conceptualizing his no less convoluted comic book saga Southland Tales) would have made of Moore's magnum opus. Snyder's movie is too literal and too linear. Social satire is pummeled into submission by the amplified pow-kick-thud of the sub-Matrix action sequences; not just metaphysics and narrative are simplified, but even character is ultimately eclipsed by the presumed need for violent spectacle.

The philosopher Iain Thomson (who valiantly brought Heidegger's Being and Time to bear on his reading of Watchmen) maintained that Moore not only deconstructed the idea of comic book super-heroism but pulverized the very notion of the hero—and the hero-worship that comics traditionally sell. For all its superficial fidelity, Snyder's movie stands Moore's novel on its head, trying to reconstruct a conventional blockbuster out of those empty capes and scattered shards.

To Read the Entire Review

J. Hoberman: The Excruciating Details of Death-by-Starvation in Hunger

The Excruciating Details of Death-by-Starvation in Hunger
By J. Hoberman
Village Voice



Hunger, too, is essentially contemplative. (It can be bracketed with such other "experiential," post-Gibson passions as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, United 93, and Day Night Day Night.) The takes are long; the camera is mainly static, moving only to map out some confined space. The emphasis is on the individual setup. The piss-drenched corridor is scrubbed in real-time, with a guard working his way toward the viewer. The mode is materially Christian. The prisoners may use their Bibles for stationery or cigarette paper and exploit mass as a meeting place, but Sands (Michael Fassbender), who only appears midway through the movie, is an explicitly religious martyr. Even the Brits are into self-mortification—one cop compulsively washes his hands in scalding water. One of the few scenes outside the Maze is a cold-blooded execution, resulting in a savage pietà, the victim face-down in his mother's blood-spattered lap.

The heart of the movie is an extraordinary 20-minute conversation between Sands and a tough, far from unsympathetic parish priest (Liam Cunningham), much of it shot in a single take. Sands has requested a meeting to inform the priest of his planned hunger strike. The hardboiled banter (playwright Enda Walsh's main chance to riff out) is suffused in bleak Irish humor. All argument is stymied, however, by the prisoner's stubborn determination to fast unto death; the priest's irate "then fookin' life must mean nothin' to you" cues a close-up in which Sands answers with a story—or rather a long story within the story. It's not quite "The Grand Inquisitor," but I can't recall a movie with a more powerful priest-prisoner dialogue.

Hunger's harrowing final movement is informed not only by scripture, but by a thousand years of religious art—with Thatcher, or at least her voice, brought back to play Pontius Pilate. The subject is now exclusively Sands—or rather the physical state of his emaciated body—as he lies on a prison-hospital cot covered with running sores and stigmata lesions. One can barely watch this living cadaver or the bedside food tray that is his constant temptation. I've seen Hunger three times, and with each screening, the spectacle of violence, suffering, and pain becomes more awful and more awe-inspiring.

To Read the Entire Review

Jacob Needleman: The American Soul -- Founding Ideals and the American Dream

The American Soul: Founding Ideals and the American Dream
Jacob Needleman
Live at Stanford University’s Aurora Forum
January 26, 2004 Stanford University’s Aurora Forum



Jacob Needleman joined Reverend Scotty McLennan in conversation about the visions and values which gave birth to the American dream.

To Listen to the Conversation

Philosophy Bites: Keith Ward on Idealism in Eastern and Western Philosophy

Keith Ward on Idealism in Eastern and Western Philosophy
Philosophy Bites
Hosts: David Edmunds and Nigel Warburton

Is the ultimate nature of reality non-physical? Keith Ward, who believes that it is, discusses the idealist traditions in Eastern and Western philosophy... .

To Listen to the Conversation

Philosophy Bites: Sebastian Gardner on Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith

Sebastian Gardner on Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith
Philosophy Bites
Hosts: David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton



Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness is sometimes described as the bible of existentialism. At its core is the notion of Bad Faith. Sebastian Gardner, author of a recent book about Being and Nothingness, explains what Sartre meant by Bad Faith.

To Listen to the Conversation

Tyler E. Boudreau: To Kill or Not to Kill

To Kill or Not to Kill
By Tyler E. Boudreau
The Progressive



U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl was an unlikely guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. One of the authors of the 2006 Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, Nagl said: “If I could sum up the book in just a few words, it would be: Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill.” In that single sentence, he put his finger on a crucial discrepancy. In Iraq, I witnessed this discrepancy. I felt it. I knew from the moment I picked up the Counterinsurgency Field Manual what was missing.

On April 11, 2004, I did something that I’d never before done. I shot a man . . . at least, I shot at him. (Amidst the chaos of the moment, it was difficult to say whether or not he was hit.) It was Iraq. I was a Marine. And we were under heavy attack. It seemed like the thing to do.

Though I’d been in the infantry for more than a decade, I would not exactly describe the moment as perfunctory—automatic perhaps, but not quite perfunctory. Exactly what does it take to level the sights of a weapon and fire it at another human being? Under the circumstances, you wouldn’t think it would take much. And honestly, for me it didn’t.

But it would be precarious to assume that it didn’t take much because of circumstances alone. For some people, circumstances weigh very little in the decision to shoot or not to shoot. In a counterinsurgency operation, military doctrine not only demands of its soldiers a willingness to kill, but a willingness not to kill as well. Training for the Iraq War has slighted the second part. So today, we have a different kind of force, a different kind of warrior. I know. I was one of them.

There was a well-known study—well known within the military, anyway—done directly after World War II by retired Colonel S. L. A. Marshall, author of Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War. He discovered that even in the thickest of fire fights, the vast majority of soldiers did not fire their weapons. (Based on interviews with the soldiers themselves, Marshall estimated that within the average unit under fire, only 15 percent of men actually pulled their triggers. Even within the most disciplined units, he found that average rose to not more than 25 percent.) Marshall discovered that it was not fear that prevented these men from engaging their enemies, but humanity. All of them reported a keen reluctance to kill.

You can just imagine the military’s dismay upon getting this news. Beneath all the rigid tomes on military tactics lies the fundamental principle of conventional battle: Those who fire the most bullets win. In the military, this principle is referred to as fire superiority. It’s not which side has more guns. Fire superiority is when one unit is discharging a heavier volume of fire than the other, keeping more of the latter’s heads down, thereby allowing the former to maneuver. That’s the key right there—maneuver. That’s how an infantry unit gains forward momentum and how it seizes the initiative. That’s how you win the battle. And that is precisely why Marshall’s findings were so disconcerting, and how a new emphasis on killing entered the military culture, where it has thrived ever since.

The killing culture prevails not simply by indoctrination. With soldiers, the effort is mutual. The military, no doubt, provides an environment in which violence can be looked upon with nonchalance. But that can only take a man so far. A soldier must engage this environment willingly. He must embrace it for it to have any meaningful effect. To be truly desensitized, he must desensitize himself.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Howard Zinn: Lessons of Iraq War Start With US History

(Published in 2006, even more important to consider on the 6th anniversary of the Iraq War)

Lessons of Iraq War Start With US History
By Howard Zinn
The Progressive

Tuesday 14 March 2006

On the third anniversary of President Bush's Iraq debacle, it's important to consider why the administration so easily fooled so many people into supporting the war.

I believe there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture.

One is an absence of historical perspective. The other is an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism.

If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. But if we know some history, if we know how many times presidents have lied to us, we will not be fooled again.

President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil" but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that he really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Wilson lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the rising American power.

President Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."

And everyone lied about Vietnam - President Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, President Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin and President Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia. They all claimed the war was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanted to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

President Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country. And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 - hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait, rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

There is an even bigger lie: the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If our starting point for evaluating the world around us is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then we are not likely to question the president when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values - democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise - to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.

But we must face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.

We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.

And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted the belief in the minds of many people that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have embraced this notion.

But what is the idea of our moral superiority based on?

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world.

It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join people around the world in the common cause of peace and justice.

--------

Howard Zinn, who served as a bombardier in the Air Force in World War II, is the author of "A People's History of the United States" (HarperCollins, 1995). He is also the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a People's History of the United States" (Seven Stories Press, 2004).

Out of the Past: Episode 10# The Killers

Episode 10: The Killers
Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir
Hosts: Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards



While Robert Siodmak's noir triumph "Ernest Hemingway's 'The Killers'" flaunts its literary bloodlines, Hemingway's 1927 short story is little more than a pretext. The film actually investigates the fundamental post-WWII question: in a world where every man bears scars from the fight, how and why does he keep fighting? Siodmak's answer seems to be the very one given by Albert Camus in his famous essay "The Myth of Sisyphus." At the moment a man accepts the burden of his existence, bends to shoulder the stone of his being, he is greater than his destiny. Siodmak adds a caveat: if a man knowingly wrongs another he seals his own doom, and the killers descend on him like Fate itself.

To Listen to the Conversation

Democracy Now: Mark Danner -- Bush Lied About Torture of Prisoners

Mark Danner: Bush Lied About Torture of Prisoners
Democracy Now
Host: Amy Goodman

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report two years ago that the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners “constituted torture” in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The findings were based on interviews with prisoners once held in the CIA’s secret black sites. Author and journalist Mark Danner broke the story when he published extensive excerpts of the report in the New York Review of Books. The Red Cross said the fourteen prisoners held in the CIA prisons gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding.

To Listen to the Conversation

Democracy Now: Public Outcry Forces Lawmakers to Say They’ll Recoup Millions in AIG Bonuses, But Why Not the Billions in Taxpayer Bailout Funds?

Public Outcry Forces Lawmakers to Say They’ll Recoup Millions in AIG Bonuses, But Why Not the Billions in Taxpayer Bailout Funds?
Host: Amy Goodman
Democracy Now

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have responded to growing public outrage with a pledge to recoup million-dollar bonuses paid out by the bailed-out insurance giant AIG. But the hundreds of millions of dollars in bonus money pales to the billions used to bail out AIG a second time. We speak to consumer advocate Ralph Nader and economist Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect. Kuttner says, “I think [Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner is probably gone within sixty days, because he has become a liability to the administration.”

To Listen to the Conversation

John Hartl: The Robe introduced a new Scope

“The Robe” introduced a new Scope
by John Hartl
Parallax View



Whatever you think of the biblical blockbuster, The Robe, there’s no question that its phenomenal popularity marked a turning point in movie history.

Twentieth Century-Fox, which previously treated it rather shabbily on DVD, tape and laser disc, is finally recognizing its significance with a Blu-ray Special Edition that’s loaded with extra features. Among them: a featurette about the history of CinemaScope, a discussion of the script’s political implications, and an enthusiastic introduction by Martin Scorsese, who vividly remembers the impact it had at the time.

Just weeks after The Robe’s much-ballyhooed debut as the first Scope release in the fall of 1953, the movie was challenging Gone With the Wind by setting new box-office records, and theater managers were widening their screens and beefing up their sound systems.

Before the year was over, Scope had won the battle over screen shape and size, and even movies designed to be “square,” like Shane, were stretched and distorted to suggest a panoramic effect. A few major-studio films, including the Judy Garland remake of A Star Is Born, were partially reshot to take advantage of the new process.

The Robe led the way in replacing small screens and transforming monophonic sound systems. Although some critics suggested that wide screens were suitable only for photographing snakes and funerals, and Charlie Chaplin and Frank Tashlin made fun of Scope in their late-1950s films, the system eventually had an artistic impact. Hollywood’s famous 1950s spectacles and musicals were affected, and so were such meticulously designed wide-screen classics as La Dolce Vita, The Innocents, Jules and Jim and most of Robert Altman’s movies.

But it wasn’t a first. Abel Gance had experimented with a Cinerama-like sequence in 1927’s Napoleon, and Raoul Walsh used an early 70mm process called “Grandeur” when he cast John Wayne in 1930’s The Big Trail. Disney had made imaginative use of stereo in 1940’s Fantasia. Box-office disappointments all, they failed to capture the public’s interest.

To Read the Rest of the Review

Watchmen (United States of Amnesia: Zach Snyder, 2009)

Watchmen, so far, is the worst film I have seen in the theaters this year. A huge disappointment. Nothing like turning a critique of the false worship of heroes (the original graphic novel obviously meant for us to link it to a critique of media/historic construction of real world leaders as super heroic, thus the graphic novels constant deconstruction of this process across many narrative forms) into a fetishized worship of super heroes as mindless entertainment. Even the psychopathic Rorshach and Comedian in the final scenes are designed to evoke sympathy. Simple movies for simple minds (yeah, I went to see it, I engaged in a nostalgic hope, yes, sometimes I fall for the hype).

Open Source: Errol Morris’ “Feel-Bad” Masterpiece -- Standard Operating Procedure

(Last semester only 2 out of over a hundred students knew what Abu Ghraib was until I showed them pictures. United States of Amnesia -- USA. In Kentucky the state leaders are currently debating whether to remove from all state testing the humanities/social sciences components and end the portfolio process/essay tests, effectively making all regulatory/assessment tests multiple choice. Even worse was my students' classroom discussions this semester of how ridiculously easy it was for them to use the Plato Testing system, not in the sense of ease of test-taking, but in the sense of passing the multiple choice questions. Probably why it is so popular? I had a handful of students discuss how their entire last two years of high school where completed through Plato Testing? The conversation between Errol Morris, Chris Lydon and the students is amazing and Morris' film is essential viewing. The documentary is, for me, a masterpiece because it does not "tell" us what happened, instead, for one of the few times, we are encouraged to listen, to watch, and to assess for ourselves, to use our brains, to figure out may or may not have happened. It is a powerful film that encourages active thinking/meaning-making rather than passive consumption.)

Errol Morris’ “Feel-Bad” Masterpiece
Open Source (Watson Institute for International Studies -- Brown University)
Host: Chris Lydon



Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure is a shocking, depressing work of art that might tell you almost nothing you didn’t know in your bones: that the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib were a perfect kernel of the war on Iraq. See the movie anyway, for confirmation or as penance. It is a blood sample of a gross policy of humiliation, emasculation, sophisticated mental cruelty and pitiless domination in the Arab Middle East. Errol Morris makes no bones about it. He says: we are looking at icons of American foreign policy.

To Listen to the Conversation

On the Media: Word Watch -- Bipartisan

Word Watch: Bipartisan
On the Media (NPR/WNYC)

Obama promised to bring a bipartisan spirit to Washington. But ... he signed the 787 billion dollar stimulus package with basically no Republican support and the media declared it a failure of bipartisanship. What's bipartisan really mean anyway? James Morone, a professor from Brown University, says the media might have a warped sense of the word.

To Listen to the Episode

On the Media: The Growing Cable Monopoly -- Comcast

The Die is Cast
On the Media (NPR: WNYC)
Host: Brooke Gladstone

Comcast is now the cable monopoly in 40 of the top 50 markets. It’s the third largest phone company in the US, and the largest provider of broadband internet to homes, with nearly 15 million customers, many of whom apparently hate Comcast. Wired Magazine senior writer Daniel Roth parses the troubled reputation of a media giant.

To Listen to the Episode

Live in Concert from All Songs Considered: Sleater-Kinney in Concert at Washington, D.C.'s 9:30 Club (2006)

Sleater-Kinney in Concert at Washington, D.C.'s 9:30 Club (2006)
Live in Concert from All Songs Considered (NPR)



More than a decade after the band first formed in Olympia, Wash., Sleater-Kinney continues to make passionate, punk-inspired rock with the release of its seventh CD, The Woods. But it may be the trio's last album, at least for some time: The group recently announced plans to go on indefinite hiatus after its current tour ends later this year. It performed an epic concert at Washington, D.C.'s 9:30 Club August 3.

Sleater-Linney's current lineup features guitarists and singers Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker, with drummer Janet Weiss. The band emerged from the so-called "riot grrl" movement in the early 1990s — a subculture of young feminist musicians who sought to change perceptions of women in rock. It played traditionally male-dominated instruments like guitars and drums, screamed vocals and thrashed on stage. Though Sleater-Kinney has since distanced itself from that movement, the band still identifies with the fierce drive for independence.

"I was definitely a part of riot grrl when it happened way, way back in the early '90s," Tucker says. "But that all kind of took place and came and went really before Sleater-Kinney started. But I think that our presentation probably carries over a lot of feminist notions about wanting to be seen as multidimensional humans and as musicians first and foremost, and not wanting to be sort of seen as these objectified ladies."

To Read the Rest of the Profile and to Listen to the Concert

Michael Benton: The Politics of Meat 3.0

But the hands of one of the partners were already at K.’s throat,
while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice.
With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them immediately before him, cheek leaning against cheek, watching the final act. "Like a dog!" he said: it was as if the shame of it would outlive him.

—Franz Kafka, The Trial

I believe that eating meat in itself is not immoral; at least that is what I have told myself as I continue to eat it (although, in the interest of environment, I try to limit my consumption). For me, the issue is the "way" in which we currently raise animals and slaughter them--factory style, injecting drugs, inhumane (kind of a stupid word, but at least it communicates a sense) conditions, environmental pollution, issues of sustainability...

Has anyone read Michel Faber's brilliant novel Under the Skin that acts as a parable about factory style slaughter of animals (in the dystopian tradition of 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Lord of Flies, We)--allowing us to see it from the animal's viewpoint (in this case, particularly vivid for a male perspective).

Carol Adams' The Sexual Politics of Meat first chapter "The Patriarchal Texts of Meat" has very vivid examples of how we raise our food and how what we eat plays a strong role in our attitude toward our fellow humans (in Adam's case of men toward women--which she demonstrates with visual advertisements that sexualize meat eating).

Many Holocaust survivors made strong connections between their experiences and the factory style breeding and slaughtering of animals, becoming vegetarian/vegan as a result. Richard Rubenstein in his brilliant book The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the the American Future makes the same point in the development of a ruthlessly efficient technocratic-bureaucratic order that understands only the bottom-line of efficiency--the most bang for your buck. As a reader of Rubenstein's book states:

Modernity laid the foundation, and bureaucracy provided the means. Bureaucracy's roots are deep in military organization. Both require a hierarchical structure with decisions made only at the top. Both require layers of non-individuals who follow orders without thought or input, even if the end of the process is massive death. We were (are) just following orders. Just let me do my job. Don't bother me. Bombing cities, manufacturing cigarettes, dealing drugs, killing the earth become matters not of choice but of necessity. To make a moral judgment - any moral judgment - is to set oneself outside society.

Can we make the same assumption along the lines of those who engage in the abuse of animals (either by choice or necessity)? Anyone who has chosen the vegetarian/vegan lifestyle understands very vividly how our society treats anyone who chooses to step outside its dominant order of treating animals as products to be consumed (as food or pets or entertainments).

If we can understand the setting up of camps for the apatrides (this history being repeated in the "War on Terror") as leading to the atrocities of the concentration camps of WWII, could we also make the argument for the development of factory style slaughtering of animals as a step in the same direction?

For a discussion of this consult Richard Rubenstein's Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the
American Future

Giorgio Agamben in The Open: Man and Animal, Means Without Ends, and State of Exception has been wrestling with these philosophical issues. Danesh Wadiwel, in a review of Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal and Charles Patterson's Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust states:

There is a certain humanist line of thinking that suggests that violence is invariably accompanied by what can be described as ‘dehumanisation.’ According to this standpoint, the instigator of violence suspends the humanity of his or her victim, in order to circumvent the ethical deterrents that would normally prevent the use of violence. In many respects this strikes us as true: the human subject of violence is frequently ‘objectified,’ they are treated as ‘pigs,’ ‘vermin,’ ‘dogs,’ as sub-human. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the greatest acts of violence against humans appear to be accompanied by a dehumanisation that is of commensurate intensity. The Holocaust was no exception to this. Dehumanisation was found in the Nazi labour and extermination camps, not only in the forms of violence and death prevalent there (for example cattle cars and mass exterminations), but in the plight of those in the camps, who as a result of starvation, brutal working conditions, indignity and violence, are said to have lost touch with their ‘humanity.’ A survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau recalls: "You could watch human beings turning into animals" (Volkel in Steinhoff, Pechel and Showalter, 1991: 236).

The humanist will say "Stop treating humans like animals: respect the human and violence will not be possible." But there is alternative line of thinking that responds in an apparently oblique way to the humanist: "Stop treating animals like we treat animals; then it will not be possible to treat humans like animals." Understood in this fashion, human violence represents not only a capacity for dehumanisation alone, but is tied closely to the justification of violence against the non-human. This reflects not only the capacity for humans to harm each other, but draws attention to the sustained incarceration, torture and violence that is directed towards animals in slaughterhouses, experimental laboratories and factory farms. It was perhaps this line of thinking that prompted novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer to observe "In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

Should we introduce the concerns of animals into the "political sphere"? How disconnected must we be from the environment to think that they do not deserve the same considerations that humans do... is our domination, exploitation and mistreatment a sign of our collective (in)sanity. If we can make a designation of the slippery slope of the "state of exception" leading to the destructive depersonalization of humans, can we not delineate that same process in our treatment of animals?

Giorgio Agamben: Means Without Ends

PBS Frontline: Modern Meat

MICHAEL POLLAN: AMERICANS' UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD

Ruth Ozeki: Creating Novel Life Forms

With all of this in mind, with my politics, in the reality of contemporary food production, I believe I should become at least a vegetarian?

Pamela Grace: Review of Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, The Religious Right, and the Culture Wars

(Courtesy of David Hudson)

Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, The Religious Right, and the Culture Wars
by Pamela Grace
Cineaste



For those of us who thought we were relatively familiar with the brouhaha over the production and 1988 release of The Last Temptation of Christ, Thomas R. Lindlof’s Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars is a revelation. Lindlof’s meticulously researched page-turner, which draws from interviews with nearly eighty significant figures involved in the controversy, provides a wealth of detail about Universal’s massive effort to bring the film to the screen without bloodshed and the Christian right’s highly organized attempts to suppress, or even burn, the picture.

Lindlof takes us all the way from the conception of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1951 eponymous novel written as a devotional exploration of Christ’s possible hesitation on his way to the cross and then placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books to the film’s domestic and international release. Although Sidney Lumet (The Pawnbroker, 12 Angry Men) attempted to adapt the novel for the screen in 1971, this accomplished director could not pull together a screenplay or find a studio willing to take on the project. Later the same year, actress Barbara Hershey gave the novel to Martin Scorsese, who had once planned to become a priest and still had a strong interest in religious themes. The young director was interested in pursuing more straightforwardly the religious ideas that pervaded his other films sin, forgiveness, and redemption and was eager to make Jesus accessible to modern film viewers. Scorsese’s collaboration with Paramount in the early 1980s was famously disastrous. The project quickly ran into budgetary problems, but it was the protests of the recently organized religious right that ultimately killed the film before it was even made.

Donald Wildmon, founder of the National Federation of Decency (NFD), which had formed alliances with several large conservative religious groups, launched his campaign against Last Temptation in 1983 with an article in his journal the NFD Informer: “Film to Have Jesus Fighting against Being Accepted as the Messiah.” The article ended with a list of the products made by Paramount’s parent company, Gulf & Western, and provided the address of the company’s president, for those who “care to write.” At about the same time, independent of Wildmon, several evangelical nuns with large mailing lists also began organizing protests. Soon churches were circulating petitions, and the mail reached over five thousand pieces a day. The highly publicized protests led United Artists, which owned 3,200 screens, to reject the film and raised the possibility that the studio could be left with an expensive picture that virtually no one would screen. Concerned and conflicted, Paramount’s Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg soldiered on until Gulf & Western chairman Martin Davis abruptly cancelled the project just as principal photography was about to begin. Scorsese was devastated; Diller, Eisner and Katzenberg left Paramount a few months later; and Wildmon boasted that the NFD had brought down the film. The Paramount-Last Temptation ordeal ended with a newly confident, highly activist Christian right, a more cautious Hollywood, and a culture war that had become more structured, focused, and intense.

Scorsese never gave up on the idea of making Last Temptation, even when his future as a filmmaker was in question. Finally, in 1987, in his words, “everything changed.” This time a confluence of events worked in Scorsese’s favor. The innovative agent Michael Ovitz, founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and a specialist in “packaging” deals for leading authors and actors, had become one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. In October 1986, Ovitz’s long-time colleague, Tom Pollock, a leading Hollywood lawyer, who had developed new financing strategies for the film industry, became the chair of MCA Motion Picture Group, whose flagship label was Universal. (The parent company was MCA, chaired by Lew Wasserman.) Ovitz won Scorsese as a client and then went to Pollock and worked out a contract for Last Temptation. A fortunate coincidence made it possible for Universal to take on a project that exhibitors had once shunned. The previous year, taking advantage of the Reagan Justice Department’s loosening of the laws against vertical integration of movie producers and exhibitors, MCA had bought close to fifty percent of Cineplex Odeon Corporation, a theater chain that owned forty to sixty percent of the exhibition space in several major cities. Pollock pushed this advantage even further. He convinced Cineplex Odeon to become a fifty percent equity partner in Last Temptation.

Scorsese went through a grueling shoot in Morocco, and then came back to face an even greater challenge. By the late 1980s, the Christian right had developed a huge constituency and over a thousand radio stations. It had also been burned by recent sex scandals and was eager to take on a unifying cause. Last Temptation seemed to invite opposition from evangelicals; and their massive campaign required an unprecedented studio response. Lindlof’s description of Universal’s “dual-track public relations strategy” is one of the most interesting elements of the book.

To Read the Rest of the Book Review



Criterion Collection: The Last Temptation of Christ

New York Review of Books: J. Michael Lennon on Norman Mailer's Letters

J. Michael Lennon on Norman Mailer's Letters
New York Review of Books

J. Michael Lennon, who is at work on an authorized biography of Norman Mailer, speaks with Sasha Weiss about Mailer's letters and what they reveal about his ambitions, his relationships with other writers, and his enduring obsessions.

To Listen to the Episode (MP3)

Left Field Cinema: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Left Field Cinema



To Listen to the Episode

Wesley Morris: Agnes Varda, A Humanist Filmmaker with a Collector's Eye

A humanist filmmaker with a collector's eye
by Wesley Morris
The Boston Globe



...

"Cléo from 5 to 7" was released in 1962 near the height of the New Wave and is fondly regarded as part of the movement. Essentially a day in the life of a successful singer nicknamed Cléo (Corrine Marchard) who thinks she is dying of cancer, the film is full of play - jump cuts, musical interludes, roving handheld camerawork - but it feels studied, like work.

Varda had just married Jacques Demy, whose left-of- New Wave musicals "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "The Young Girls of Rochefort" were on their way. And in "Cléo," you can feel in all the formal dissonance a pleasant experiment. Varda was close to the New Wave, yet she never got wet.

The best moments in "Cléo" are the quiet ones - a montage of faces looking at the camera, an actual silent movie that shows up in the last third. They say everything. So does the silence at the end of "Le Bonheur" ("Happiness") from 1965. It was Varda's first completely color feature. It was heavy on the Mozart, heavier on the idea that bliss is ignorance.

The movie is about a married man who decides to take a mistress. Its blasé attitude toward infidelity was something of a shock at the time, but that attitude is nothing more than an attitude. Man and wife are working-class folks, but class concerns are neutralized by the Eden-like paradise the film makes of a Paris suburb. Varda, nonetheless, is up to something from the first shot, which cuts between a healthy single sunflower and wilting family of them. What still feels right about the film is how modern it is. Add a third woman and cut back on the artistic sensibility, and this could be a series on HBO.

That modernity is what makes Varda so exciting as a filmmaker. Even when her engagement with her times doesn't entirely succeed - the ambitious feminist drama, "One Sings, the Other Doesn't" (1977) does not; the surreal older woman-loves-little boy romance, "A Little Love" a.k.a. "Kung Fu Master," (1987) does - that engagement never flags. Varda never went in for costume dramas or empty nostalgia pieces. Were she to make one, you sense that she might come back with Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette," a movie that can't help but see the past through the prism of today.

In 1985, Varda's evolution culminated with "Vagabond," the best movie I've seen about the pros and cons of being alive. It opens with a girl frozen in a ditch in a rural town then backs up to explain how she ended up there. The girl calls herself Mona, and Varda cast a teenage Sandrine Bonnaire in the part. Mona is a street-smart drifter, a gleaner of sorts, too - clever, horny, scrappy, uncouth, vividly unwashed. Bonnaire gives us all that, and the humor and contradictions in between - a punk-rock naïf.

On screen, the folks who meet Mona testify how the experience affected them. Women - an intellectual environmental activist; a dowdy young maid; a decrepit spinster - find themselves especially touched by what they see in her: a passionate soul, a free spirit. Even in her dirty, coarse state, Mona is the woman she wants to be, no longer chained to society's grind, without portfolio but not lost, either. Of course, Varda is asking what freedom means anymore. What, consequently, does feminism?

The film anticipates everything from "Thelma & Louise" to "Wendy and Lucy." It's the movie that "The Piano" director Jane Campion seems to have devoted her career, in vain, to top - and Campion has had a great career. But only Mike Leigh's grimmer "Naked," from 1993, comes as close to Varda's forlorn bulletin on the human condition. Mona stands in for ideas of liberty and incivility, but Varda never loses sight of Mona as a person. She's always somebody's daughter, friend, former co-worker - a symbol maybe, a cipher never.

That is essentially what separates Agnès Varda from the intellectuals and stylists who have come up with and around her. She's a people person. And, naturally, no matter how many movies we see in the dark, Varda knows how much truer people are in the light.

To read the rest of the retrospective review

Concrete Blonde: Bloodletting; Montage of Vampire Film Clips

I was talking vampire films with Gerry Adair and I mentioned this song and we looked it up on Youtube and we found this montage of vampire film clips compiled by Simplytheanthropic set to the song. Great fun :) Thanks!



Movie Listing:
Constantine
Legend
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Dracula 2000
Underworld (I and II)
John Carpenter's Vampires
Skinwalkers
Van Helsing
The Covenent
Queen of the Damned
Interview with the Vampire

Jonathan M. Hansen: Cosmopolitan Patriots and Cosmic Patriotism

An excerpt from The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890-1920
by Jonathan M. Hansen
University of Chicago Press



Cosmopolitan Patriots and Cosmic Patriotism

On September 9, 1918, the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs appeared in Cleveland Federal Court to answer charges that he had violated the Espionage Act in a speech at Canton, Ohio, the previous June. According to the district attorney, Debs had impugned the U.S. government, derided the federal courts, praised the Russian Bolsheviks, and mocked the idea of a war fought to make the world safe for democracy. Worse, from the district attorney's perspective, was Debs's "sneering attitude towards patriotism and his attempt to make patriotism as we commonly understand it, ridiculous and absurd by his biting sarcasm." Noting that Debs had discharged these remarks "in the open air" and in the presence of "women and young men," and taking into account his "forceful and earnest delivery," the district attorney concluded that Debs was a threat to "the morale of the people."

After three days of testimony the government rested its case, whereupon Debs's counsel, Seymour Stedman, prepared to call his first witness. At Debs's insistence, Stedman informed the court that the defendant would plead his own cause. There was no point refuting the prosecution's report, Debs declared; it was entirely accurate. At issue, rather, was whether his Socialist critique was really un-American, as the prosecutor charged, or the very embodiment of patriotism, as he himself had been arguing for twenty-five years. Resolved that it was not Eugene Debs but American institutions on trial in Cleveland federal court, Debs believed that no one was more qualified to rise to their defense than he.

Debs began his plea to the jury by accepting full responsibility for his acts and utterances, assuring his peers that he harbored no guilt in his conscience. He then responded to the government's charges one by one: he had impugned the U.S. government for thwarting the advance of industrial democracy; he had derided the federal courts for persecuting the defenders of beleaguered workers; he had praised the Russian Bolsheviks for overthrowing the tyranny of the czar; and he had mocked the idea of a war fought to make the world safe for democracy because the people themselves had never yet declared a war. Renouncing the district attorney's patriotism, Debs invoked another model. Patriotism, he argued, meant more than shedding blood and upholding law. As manifested in American history, patriotism meant defending sacred principles and resisting tyranny and oppression, often in defiance of the law. The court of King George III had branded America's Founding Fathers criminals and traitors, Debs reminded the jury. "Isn't it strange," he remarked, "that we Socialists stand almost alone today in upholding and defending the Constitution of the United States."

•
This book poses the problem of U.S. civic identity at the turn of the twentieth century: how does a country founded on liberal principles and composed of diverse cultures secure the solidarity required to safeguard individuality and promote social justice? The problem of American civic identity has received considerable attention of late from scholars and cultural critics concerned about the current state of liberalism and democratic participation. Rampant individualism, economic disparity, and the impression of a government for sale on the open market induce political cynicism and a consequent retreat from public life that transforms citizens into spectators. Local political passivity coincides with the rise of religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism around the world, lending this problem urgency. As the United States confronts vexing social and political challenges at home and abroad, more and more Americans may be heard to wonder, in the words of historian David A. Hollinger, "How Wide the Circle of the 'We'?"

Mine is the story of a group of American intellectuals who believed that the solution to the problem of American civic identity lay in rethinking the meaning of liberalism. Between 1890 and 1920, William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, W. E. B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Louis Brandeis, and Horace Kallen, among others, repudiated liberalism's association with acquisitive individualism and laissez-faire economics, delineating a model of liberal citizenship whose virtues and commitments amount to what I have labeled "cosmopolitan patriotism." While celebrating individual autonomy and cultural diversity, the cosmopolitan patriots exhorted Americans to embrace a social-democratic ethic that reflected the interconnected and mutually dependent nature of life in the modern world. From their perspectives, Americans could best secure the blessings of liberty and property by ensuring their universal distribution.

Read the Rest of the Excerpt and an Interview with the Author

William Gillespie: Generation Exxay

(courtesy of Jonathan Vincent)

Generation Exxay
by William Gillespie
Smile Politely

Though I was too young to understand and articulate my objections, I was annoyed to discover at age 20 that everyone in my age range had been declared “slackers” by the ruling generation, the Baby Boomers. I hadn’t even been given a chance to excel in life, and already I was indicted by a blanket statement that declared me apathetic and unambitious. “Generation X” was not exactly flattering either — the seldom-used twenty-fourth letter, the algebraic variable X, implied alienation and emptiness.

By calling us slackers, was the preceding generation trying to falsely claim as tenacity or integrity the coincidence of their good fortune as people who rode the roller coaster of postwar American prosperity from the bottom, where they were born, to the top, where they would be the last people to cash in on a soon-to-be-dismantled private and state retirement apparatus? (And, incidentally, which generation fucked that up? I’m pissed.)

What I am discovering is that “slacker” means “principled.“ We witnessed our elders’ arc from unrestrained idealism (1967) to burnout (1969) to grotesque self-indulgence (1976) to unapologetic materialism (1980); from cannabis to LSD to cocaine to imported wine; from psychedelic pop to mustache jam-band rock to disco to new age; from “Don’t trust anybody over thirty” to “Fifty is the new thirty.“ Against the backdrop of this circus, X inherited those progressive ideals (and great songs) from 1967, and the stewardship and advancement of the environmental, civil rights, and feminist ideologies. And so we found ourselves all but paralyzed with the Boomers’ cast-off responsibilities: the fear of becoming self-centered, obnoxious materialists, or just totally lame; and the imperative to find meaningful work in an economic system driven by greed, waste, and consumerism.

To Read the Rest of the Essay

Stephen Colbert Challenges Republican GOP Chairman Michael Steele to a Rap Battle

(My favorite part of this clip is Steele's attempt to placate Chuck D and Chuck D's direct rejection of the idiocy of Steele's faux hip hop politics. Courtesy of Sean Morris)



Unfortunately Steele may be delayed by the idiotic mouthpieces of his political party that wish to first have a pissing contest of their own:

GOP Chairman Michael Steele and Pundit Rush Limbaugh in War of Words

Salman Rushdie: On Celluloid Adaptation of Novels

A Fine Pickle
by Salman Rushdie
Guardian UK
...



I'm currently teaching a course that highlights some of the instances in which fine books have been adapted into fine films - Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence mutated into Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence; Giuseppe di Lampedusa's portrait of Sicily in 1860, The Leopard, turned into Luchino Visconti's greatest film; Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood became a wonderful John Huston movie; and, in his film of Great Expectations, Lean produced a classic that can stand alongside the Dickens novel without any sense of inferiority, a film that allows this film-goer, at least, to forgive him for the later blunders of A Passage to India.

There are many other examples of successful adaptation. Few people these days read Jan Potocki's 19th-century Franco-Polish masterpiece The Manuscript Found at Saragossa, but I urge you to discover it for its playfulness and bizarrerie, its surreal, supernatural, gothic, picaresque world of Gypsies, thieves, hallucinations, inquisitions and a pair of unbelievably beautiful sisters who are, unfortunately for the men they seduce, only ghosts. Its qualities are perfectly captured by the Polish film director Wojciech Has in his 1965 film The Saragossa Manuscript, which you should seek out at once. Satyajit Ray's 1955 film Pather Panchali ("The Song of the Little Road") not only equalled but bettered the 1929 Bengali classic by Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadyahya from which it was adapted. Huston seems to have been a particularly gifted adapter of good literature, and his film of Joyce's "The Dead", perhaps the greatest short story in the English language, brings it vividly, passionately to life; although right at the end, when the camera moves out through a window to watch the falling snow, and Joyce's famous words take over from Huston's images, speaking of the snow that was falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead, we are reminded of the difference between excellence and genius. The Dead is an excellent film, but the last lines of Joyce's story surpass it effortlessly.

The question raised by the adaptive excesses of Adaptation is the question at the heart of the entire subject of adaptation - that is to say, the question of essence. "Poetry is what gets lost in translation," said Robert Frost, but Joseph Brodsky retorted: "Poetry is what is gained in translation," and the battle-lines could not be more clearly drawn. My own view has always been that whether we are talking about a poem moving across a language border to become another poem in another tongue, a book crossing the frontier between the world of print and celluloid, or human beings migrating from one world to another, both Frost and Brodsky are right. Something is always lost in translation; and yet something can also be gained. I am defining adaptation very broadly, to include translation, migration and metamorphosis, all the means by which one thing becomes another. In my novel Midnight's Children the narrator Saleem discusses the making of pickles as this sort of adaptive process: "I reconcile myself," he says, "to the inevitable distortions of the pickling process. To pickle is to give immortality, after all: fish, vegetables, fruit hang embalmed in spice-and-vinegar; a certain alteration, a slight intensification of taste, is a small matter, surely? The art is to change the flavour in degree, but not in kind; and above all (in my thirty jars and a jar) to give it shape and form - that is to say, meaning."

The question of essences remains at the heart of the adaptive act: how to make a second version of a first thing, of a book or film or poem or vegetable, or of yourself, that is successfully its own, new thing and yet carries with it the essence, the spirit, the soul of the first thing, the thing that you yourself, or your book or poem or film or your pre-pickle mango or lime, originally were.

Is it impossible? Is the intangible in our arts and our natures, the space between our words, the things seen in between the things shown, inevitably discarded in the remaking process, and if so can it be filled up with other spaces, other visions, that satisfy or even enrich us enough so that we do not mind the loss? To look at adaptation in this broad-spectrum way, to take it beyond the realm of art into the rest of life, is to see that all the meanings of the word deal with the question of what is essential - in a work adapted to another form, in an individual adapting to a new home, in a society adapting to a new age. What do you preserve? What do you jettison? What is changeable, and where must you draw the line? The questions are always the same, and the way we answer them determines the quality of the adaptation, of the book, the poem, or of our own lives.

...

To Read the Entire Essay

Lee Hill: Doing the Right Thing -- Naomi Wolf's The End of America (2007)

Doing The Right Thing
By Lee Hill
Vertigo Magazine



Published in 2007, Naomi Wolf’s book, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to A Young Patriot is, unsurprisingly given the author’s previous work, both polemic and investigation. Since the publication of the bestselling The Beauty Myth in 1991, Wolf has done a great deal to reinvigorate the discussion of women’s issues in the mainstream culture. Her subsequent books, Fire With Fire (1994) and Promiscuities (1998), deepened her unique take on the challenges facing American women in a seemingly post-feminist culture where choice now seemed infinite and yet in many ways, illusory. Wolf’s approach moved back and forth between the personal and the political combining both the best and sometimes the worst aspects of social criticism, the personal essay, and cultural history. Not since the days when Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer were media stars in the late 60s and early 70s had the mainstream found a commentator on women’s issues so passionate, charismatic and articulate.

...

[The] End of America [is a] brave, well-researched and sometimes unwieldy book about the near collapse of the verities of democracy many American took for granted before Bush came to power and that quickly got pushed aside in a never ending fight against an ill defined enemy called “terrorism”. The book is now a brash, somewhat overstuffed documentary by Annie Sundberg and Rikki Stern in collaboration with Wolf. It is not a great documentary like Marcel Ophuls’ Memory of A Justice that tells us something revelatory about the hidden psyche of a nation, or a Swiftian roar of disgust like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, but it is probably doing a lot more to galvanise people to action than either film. Instead of creating an easy visual companion to the book, Wolf and her collaborators have made a film that has generated not just an impassioned audience response, but actual grassroots activism.

Shot and produced during a brief funding window over the summer and autumn of 2008, The End of America began screening in various forms to audiences in community centres, universities, schools and the proverbial church basement across the US during the same period. These work-in-progress screenings, usually introduced by Wolf, help to centre the growing restlessness and dissent among ordinary American citizens towards the worst excesses of George Bush Jr. and Co. The screenings also became convenient ways to raise additional funding to complete this independent film and also gather contributions from citizen journalists (in one memorable instance, footage of one peaceful demonstration disrupted by a violent riot squad intervention was only captured by a camera hidden in the grass). As documented in both book and film, the Administration’s steady and calculated erosion of civil liberties had disturbing echoes of rise of Nazism in Germany. It takes a brave writer to make such a connection given the way such a comparison has in recent years become devalued and trivialised, but the film’s biggest strength (as well as its flashpoint) is how well it made this point. For those readers who are uncomfortable with such comparisons, I suggest they run not walk to a good bookshop and order The Nazi Seizure of Power by William Allen, a seminal study of how easy it is easy to kneecap a liberal democracy.

Like An Inconvenient Truth, there are times when The End of America resembles the world’s most expensive powerpoint presentation. Yet for all its superficial earnestness and lack of polish, The End of America, like An Inconvenient Truth, represents a new kind of documentary. It is a form that is unabashedly polemical, but also rooted in vigorous research (albeit research skewed to a view of a new American Reich that may not seem as ominous to every viewer out there). Yet it is a form that despite its bias does not see the audience as a passive receiver of information.

...

To Read the Entire Review

To View the Film and Learn More About it

Gareth Evans: Franny Armstrong's The Age of Stupid

(Courtesy of David Hudson)

The Age of Stupid: The huge implications of climate change are given dynamic form in Franny Armstrong’s essential new feature
By Gareth Evans
Vertigo Magazine (United Kingdom)



Following on from her remarkable campaigning documentaries McLibel and Drowned Out, film-maker Franny Armstrong has spent the last few years making her most important film yet. The Age of Stupid is a docu-drama about climate change, ecological collapse and the end of human civilisation. Starring Pete Postlethwaite and produced by John Battsek (One Day in September) via a participatory funding structure and with a huge cadre of supporters and volunteers, it seeks to transform cinematic representation of the greatest threat facing human society.

As George Monbiot has observed, the film “promises to make a big impact. It follows the lives of six people - from the head of a new Indian airline to a Nigerian fisherwoman who has to use Omo to scrub the oil off her catch - caught up in the politics of climate breakdown. It is a captivating and constantly surprising film: the first successful dramatisation of climate change to reach the big screen.”

Armstrong and her team are extraordinarily dedicated image activists, taking their crucial films to huge numbers of people with an energy and determination that is hard to match. For The Age of Stupid, they are developing educational and outreach strategies on a scale as yet unseen.

To Read the Interview

Vittorio Giacci: Cinema, Responsibility and Formation

(Thinking about cinema as a social force--I recommend the entire essay)

Cinema, Responsibility and Formation
by Vittorio Giacci
Cinemascope

...

Cinema is the most suitable form of art and communication to represent the society we live in, and hence it is fully affected by the argumentations ... of freedom and responsibility.

But there is a warning: when we enter the area of communication, things become even more tricky as it is evident that one of the hard-won principles, is exactly the one that concerns the value of the freedom of expression, which, in order to be effective must be free of any conditions.

Any restriction of this freedom would in fact evoke the ghosts of censorship which has caused much suffering to the arts in general and cinema in particular. I am thinking of the films made by Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Pasolini (to name but a few) whose works, today considered authentic masterpieces, have had a lot of problems with the censorship system.

Nevertheless, we must make some cinema-specific reflections even on this non-negotiable principle.

Unlike other forms of artistic expression, cinema is an "industrial form of art": in order to express itself fully, it needs ever-greater financial investments. This means that the author's artistic expression is conditioned right from the start--and it would be hypocritical not to admit this--by the capital invested. These capital sources can be motivated not just by the simple and legitimate desire for expression, but also by power groups, concentrations and lobbies of all sorts and backgrounds, who can use cinematographic media in instrumental way to advance particular interests that that have little or nothing to do with the noble--and general--principle of the freedom of expression.

To Read the Rest of This Essay

8 1/2 (Italy/France: Federico Fellini, 1963)

(Archive for my ENG 282: International Film Studies course)

8 1/2 (Italy/France: Federico Fellini, 1963)

“Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.”
--Federico Fellini







Criterion Collection: 8 1/2

Tullio Kezich: 8 1/2--When? (Criterion)

Alexander Sesonske: 8 1/2--A film With Itself as Its Subject

Derek Malcolm: Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (UK Guardian)

Roger Ebert: 8 1/2 (Chicago Sun-Times)

Trailers/Clips/Mashups (Google Video)

Terry Gilliam on his Favorite Cinematic Moment (8 1/2) (Close-Up/BBC2)

Guide to 8 1/2 (edited by Charles Affron) (Google Books)

Peter Wuss: Dreamlike Images in Fellini's 8 1/2 and Tarkovsky's Mirror--A Cognitive Approach (PDF File) (The Journal of Moving Image Studies)

Antonio Shanahan: Great Directors Profile of Federico Fellini (Senses of Cinema)

George Porcari: Fellini Goes to the Beach (Cineaction)

An Interview with Federico Fellini: The Master Speaks on Life, Art and Carlos Castaneda (Bright Lights Film Journal)

Videos by and about Fellini (Google Videos)

Books by and about Fellini (Google books)

Gerry Manacas: Images and Archetypes... A Personal Perspective on the Films of Fellini: Man/Whore/Wife (Out of Balance)

"Everyone lives in his own fantasy world, but most people don't understand that. No one perceives the real world. Each person simply call his private, personal fantasies the Truth. The difference is that I know I live in a fantasy world. I prefer it that way and resent anything that disturbs my vision." (Fellini in I, Fellini, ed. by Charlotte Chandler, 1995 source link)

Peter Bondanella: The Films of Federico Fellini (Google Books)

Tulio Kezich: Federico Fellini--His Life an Times (Google Books)

Federice Fellini--Contemporary Perspectives (ed. Frank Burke/Marguerite Waller) (Google Books)

The Criterion Collection: Fellini's Films

American Soldier Berating Iraqis Police

An American soldier berating Iraqis police... disturbing, in tone and content...

Mark Slouka: A Quibble

A Quibble
by Mark Slouka
Harper's Magazine

...

What we need to talk about, what someone needs to talk about, particularly now, is our ever-deepening ignorance (of politics, of foreign languages, of history, of science, of current affairs, of pretty much everything) and not just our ignorance but our complacency in the face of it, our growing fondness for it. A generation ago the proof of our foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some redeeming twinge of shame—no longer. Today, across vast swaths of the republic, it amuses and comforts us. We're deeply loyal to it. Ignorance gives us a sense of community; it confers citizenship; our representatives either share it or bow down to it or risk our wrath.

Seen from a sufficient distance (a decade abroad, for example), or viewed through a protective filter, like film, or alcohol, there can be something almost endearing about it. It can appear quaint, part of our foolish-but authentic, naive-yet-sincere, roughhewn spirit. Up close and personal, unromanticized and unfiltered, it's another thing entirely. In the flesh, barking from the electronic pulpit or braying back from the audience, our ignorance can be sobering. We don't know. Or much care. Or care to know.

What do we care about? We care about auto racing and Jessica. We care about food, oh yes, please, very much. And money. (Did you catch the last episode of I Love Money?) We care about Jesus, though we're a bit vague on his teachings. And America. We care about America. And the flag. And the troops, though we're untroubled by the fact that the Bush Administration lied us into the conflict, then spent years figuring out that armor in war might be a good idea. Did I mention money?

Here's the mirror—look and wince. One out of every four of us believes we've been reincarnated; 44 percent of us believe in ghosts; 71 percent, in angels. Forty percent of us believe God created all things in their present form sometime during the last 10,000 years. Nearly the same number—not coincidentally, perhaps—are functionally illiterate. Twenty percent think the sun might revolve around the earth. When one of us writes a book explaining that our offspring are bored and disruptive in class because they have an indigo "vibrational aura" that means they are a gifted race sent to this planet to change our consciousness with the help of guides from a higher world, half a million of us rush to the bookstores to lay our money down.

Wherever it may have resided before, the brain in America has migrated to the region of the belt—not below it, which might at least be diverting, but only as far as the gut—where it has come to a stop. The gut tells us things. It tells us what's right and what's wrong, who to hate and what to believe and who to vote for. Increasingly, it's where American politics is done. All we have to do is listen to it and the answer appears in the little window of the eight ball: "Don't trust him. Don't know. Undecided. Just because, that's why." We know because we feel, as if truth were a matter of personal taste, or something to be divined in the human heart, like love.

I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden to this day, and have successfully passed it on to my children. I don't believe I have the right to an opinion about something I know nothing about—constitutional law, for example, or sailing—a notion that puts me sadly out of step with a growing majority of my countrymen, many of whom may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism, or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don't believe in it. Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who can tell you, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing rant, and bloggers' speculation that's so divorced from actual, demonstrable fact, that's so not true, as the kids would say, that the mind goes numb with wonder. "Way I see it is," a man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool told me last summer, "if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us."

Quite possibly, this belief in our own opinion, regardless of the facts, may be what separates us from the nations of the world, what makes us unique in God's eyes. The average German or Czech, though possibly no less ignorant than his American counterpart, will probably consider the possibility that someone who has spent his life studying something may have an opinion worth considering. Not the American. Although perfectly willing to recognize expertise in basketball, for example, or refrigerator repair, when it comes to the realm of ideas, all folks (and their opinions) are suddenly equal. Thus evolution is a damned lie, global warming a liberal hoax, and Republicans care about people like you.

But there's more. Not only do we believe that opinion (our own) trumps expertise; we then go further and demand that expertise assume the position—demand, that is, that those with actual knowledge supplicate themselves to the Believers, who don't need to know. The logic here, if that's the term, seems to rest on the a priori conviction that belief and knowledge are separate and unequal. Belief is higher, nobler; it comes from the heart; it feels like truth. There's a kind of Biblical grandeur to it, and as God's chosen, we have an inherent right to it. Knowledge, on the other hand, is impersonal, easily manipulated, inherently suspect. Like the facts it's based on, it's slippery, insubstantial—not solid like the things you believe.

The corollary to the axiom that belief beats knowledge, of course, is that ordinary folks shouldn't value the latter too highly, and should be suspicious of those who do. Which may explain our inherent discomfort with argument. We may not know much, but at least we know what we believe. Tricky elitists, on the other hand, are always going on. Confusing things. We don't trust them. So what if Sarah Palin couldn't answer Charlie Gibson's sneaky question about the Bush Doctrine? We didn't know what it was either.

...

To read the entire commentary

Left Field Cinema: Errol Morris' The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)

Errol Morris' The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
Left Field Cinema



The first in the Left Field Cinema Documentary Milestone series. Up for examination is Errol Morris' extended interview with the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Strange McNamara.

To Listen to the Episode

Left Field Cinema: Aku Louhimies' Frozen Land

Aku Louhimies' Frozen Land
Left Field Cinema



Aku Louhimies excellent hidden masterpiece, this Finnish film is based on Leo Tolstoy's short story The Forged Coupon.

To Listen to the Episode

Examined Life (Canada: Astra Taylor, 2008)

(The trailer is very good and I look forward to seeing the entire film. Courtesy of Art Forum.)

Examined Life (Canada: Astra Taylor, 2008) trailer
National Film Board (Canada)

"The unexamined life is not worth living." — Socrates

Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets.

Philosophers have long done their best thinking when directly engaging with the outside world, not in isolation from it. Socrates roved the Athenian agora, courting trouble with the authorities. Rousseau immortalized his rambles through nature on the printed page. Nietzsche once said that only ideas conceived while walking have any value.

In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.

Peter Singer's thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue's posh boutiques. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture's fixation on individualism.

And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West - perhaps America's best-known public intellectual - compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be.

Offering privileged moments with great thinkers from fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy's power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it.

Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

To watch the Trailer