The Wright Stuff: Clinton '08

Make no mistake: there is still a clear road ahead for Hillary Clinton to take the Democratic Party's nomination. In fact, there is only one identical road for either Senator Clinton or Sen. Obama-- the superdelegates. Have a problem with this arguably "undemocratic" aspect of the nomination process? Well, chart it up with the Electoral College, US Senate apportionment of seats by states, the Supreme Court, the non-seating of the Michigan and Florida delegates, and other violations of the Periclean Age democratic "ideal" we all supposedly aspire to.

But we don't. And the Democrats' bevy of superdelegates, created in the wake of primaries that ended in the nominations of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter-- weak candidates and, in the latter case, a fascinating but ultimately unsuccessful President (who suffered an earlier "Civil War" within the ranks of the Democratic Party in 1980 between himself and Senator Ted Kennedy) are ideally positioned to finally assert themselves in history by fulfilling the function they were dreamed up to do: prevent fickle and misguided voters from anointing an unelectable and unfit contender.

The Jeremiah Wright scandal has revealed Barack Obama's bona fides, both as a character and a phenomenon. Despite the fact that his address on the controversy was roundly (and predictably) praised by mainstream, center-left and hard-left pundits and bloggers, it has revealed deficits of judgment and candor not to be overlooked in a contender for the nation's highest office. Obama still wields his silky oratory and commands high marks from his acolytes, but the rest of the country is still reeling (as poll numbers strongly indicate) with difficult and rather angry questions.

Obama's speech, though seemingly a nuanced and moderate take on America's contemporary race issues, didn't serve to answer the questions that forced him to deliver the speech in the first place. What exactly have been Obama's reactions to his long-time pastor and spiritual mentor's remarks from the pulpit? Does a would-be President and "uniter" flinch at sermons crying out "God damn America?" Does the mixed-race multiculturalist have quibbles with a message of black victimhood and liberation theology out of the pages of Sixties radicalism-- the same sort of kneejerk agitprop which Obama has repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail has a pernicious hold (in his analysis) upon the minds of Newt Gingrich and the Clintons? How does one claim to be a sort of new New Democrat, moving beyond competing radicalism of the Left and Right, while attending a church so ostentatiously committed to a gospel of Black Power? And what about Rev. Wright's brazen claims as to questions of fact: that the United States government is responsible for the narcotics trade, or that it invented AIDS as a weapon of genocide against black people?

Perhaps Obama sincerely shrugged off these and other statements as rhetorical excesses, or perhaps he didn't see it as his place to castigate his pastor, the man who led him to Christ. Granted, many other churchgoers across the country might similarly have refrained from approaching their minister. But then, in the man who would lead us, hold Cabinet meetings and conduct negotiations with foreign leaders, surely we can ask for more backbone. I have long been skeptical about Obama's fitness to lead precisely because of his endless boilerplate about 'unity' and 'change', coupled with his alarming suggestions that his foreign policy would lead with apologies and no-conditions-attached summits with noxious dictators. Obama's conduct via-a-vis Wright underlines this point. That he not only held his tongue then, but, his speech notwithstanding, is STILL holding his tongue on these specifics, tells us that Obama is either a calculator or a coward-- in either event, hardly "transformational" and clearly not "leader"--like.

The Rev. Wright's "U.S. of KKK A." and "God damn America" comments might be perfectly allowable protest in a slam poetry event or on a blog. I by no means wish to suggest that these bare words themselves, or others like them, constitute traitorous conduct. But Obama is not running to be Poet Laureate or Activist-in-Chief, dream jobs where spontaneous effusions can always be chalked up as "moral challenges" (yes, I've indulged a few myself!), and during his Presidential campaign he has rather ostentatiously sought to distance himself from Wright, ever since the infamous invite/non-invite that kicked off the campaign-- in fact, Obama has shunned being the candidate of "protest". Yet his background as a "community activist" (one of these nauseating descriptions, like 'barrista', so tragically beloved of the hip Left) and, as is now glaringly obvious, as a state Senator representing the Chicago South Side, home of campus academics and black liberationists, has left him with a woefully one-sided take on the nation's politics, one rooted deeply in Sixties agitprop and soft-focus utopian attitudinizing. What has he done to demonstrate a grasp of practical politics, aside from grabbing up a score of caucuses in this competition?

Given the similarities in stated positions between Obama and Clinton, it has always been an open question, why one would pick the unseasoned newbie over the veteran infighter? Well, the Democratic faithful (God love 'em) are forever dreaming of the Messiah, and the Messiah cannot appear on Capitol Hill except to be crucified. Do we really want four years of Obama getting mangled before Congress and on the world stage, just to satisfy an emotional itch for some vague 'inspiration'? Are the threats posed by multiple wars and recession really relegatable to the back seat thanks to an "historic opportunity" to affirm the laying-to-rest of the legacy of racism, in large measure a symbolic gesture, perhaps of little real help for the immediate needs of black communities reeling under the pressures of crime, poverty, and failing schools? Would it not be better done to tackle our real-world problems first, elect a leader with demonstrable committments to make life better for impoverished and middle class Americans?-- one who, by-the-by, also embodies the wish for an "historic opportunity"?

Hillary Clinton's experience and competence have been treated with a counterfactual nay-saying difficult to be believed, culminating in one of the most bizarre non sequiturs to ever cross my ears: when pundits were granting us their comments on Hillary's newly-released White House schedules on NBC's "Today Show", one offered this odd verdict on her overseas visits: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." To which my internal "Terminator" response-selection screen can only blink out the odious text-speak: WFT?!? Has the sexism of the Chirping Class reached such nauseating lows that we must deny the possibility that a First Lady who visited eighty countries and who once had six Cabinet Secretaries answering to her on Healthcare policy never ventured no further into our nation's global affairs than to swap Pillsbury recipes with Cherie Blair? Or can we not even be bothered to recall that Hillary sits on an obscure Senate committee that has to do with Armed Services? No-- for these are mere technicalities compared with the awesome charm of the fact that our multiethnic skywalker once lived on a distant desert planet known as "Indonesia" when he was (oh, can I be forgiven for not memorizing the particulars of the messiah's childhood?) eight or something.

Which brings me abruptly back to the superdelegates. Hillary's route to the nomination is not a jot more "mathematically impossible" than Barack Obama's-- they are both quite entirely dependent upon superdelegates for the nomination! And so we have the endless sophistries about how they should decide their votes-- none in the least binding, or indeed other than completely arbitrary. There is only one basis upon which they are compelled to decide: their own judgment. And they are transparently free to base that judgment upon whatever factors they wish to calculate upon. And it is likewise transparently clear that they were created to be free-- free of the democratic majority, free of the states, free of the "delegate count" going before them. What they SHOULD decide upon are two exclusive factors: first, who would make the best President?; and second, who is more electable?

Obama's political inexperience and naivete are, respectively, so narrow and so expansive, I don't think there can be any question about the first. Hillary Clinton is no saint and, Heaven be thanked, she isn't running as one. Lord knows she's made mistakes-- but she knows it too. Every American has long since had seared into their consciousness how tough, how unembarrassable this woman is. New Hampshire, Super Tuesday, Ohio and Texas-- all the comebacks urge us just how strong she can be. And this personal strength is being matched to demonstrable (and growing) electoral clout. With her current lead in the Pennsylvania polls yawning open to 16% over Obama, she appears set to racket up some very strong wins in the final months of the nominating campaign. Indeed, a majority in the popular primary vote may finally be hers. Yet Obamamaniac pundits still parse every news flash for a 'Hillary withdrawal'-- see the latest with Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama (and oh, what calculations were going on there?)-- as if a Hillary withdrawal somehow could make even a sliver of sense now. After Texas and Ohio, with momentous winds at her back and the potentially ruinous Wright flap, Hillary would be insane to throw in the towel, and the vast majority of Americans would be left with jaws gaping, mouthing only (what else is new?) "WTF?!?"

Indeed, let us venture now that if Obama still takes the Democratic nomination, he will give the Democrats a perceived Patriotism Gap far in excess of that suffered by the likes of Carter or Kerry (both, like McGovern, with distinguished records of military service, as if that ever helps a Democrat!). Will you blame the Republicans?: what, YOU wouldn't go after a Republican with a minister who cried out "God damn Muslims" or "God damn homosexuals" or-- for whatever reason-- "God damn America"? [and remember: Hagee is not McCain's personal pastor!] George W. Bush was castigated for speaking at Bob Jones University: can Barack Obama not be castigated for his choice of church? Yet Democrats, for the moment, seem to be basking in an idiotic insularity. When Obama wins a state like Wyoming, the cry is "See, he can make us competitive in red states again!!" Good people, take a deep breath and listen to me: It's a Democratic Party caucus. They're going to give it to a DEMOCRAT. Bush carried Wyoming in 2004 with SEVENTY PERCENT of the vote. You are NOT going to carry Wyoming!!!

Hillary's negatives are all long since "known knowns"; Obama's are fresh, raw as a wound. Hippie idealism will not stand for long in the bracing air of reality in any event; and in Obama's case, naysayers don't have to drag out those recruiters with the Che Guevera poster any more. Clinton's direct speech contrasts more and more favorably against Barack's vague wordings and questionable juxtapositions (did his grandmother's fear of black youth-- a streetwise norm, however regretted-- really demand comparison with Wright's public effusions?)-- while her vastly greater experience, however ludicrously underplayed in the media today, offers a rational rebuttal to Obama's claims to office that is well-nigh decisive by itself. That Richardson, a long-time Clinton crony, would throw in his hand to the Obama camp is mystifying, but it hardly troubles Clinton's ever-stronger showing [perhaps it was his only shot at outreaching Holbrook for Secretary of State?]. No matter. It ain't over till the superdelegates sing, and they damn well know they'd better sit still for the fifth act. Hillary's under the spotlight, standing center-stage.

Godspeed, William F. Buckley

The contemplation of an enduring consciousness is a noble thing. For one mind to continuously survey the scene, week after week, year after year, age upon age, is a state of affairs both rare and admirable. That few would find in William F. Buckley's opinions and observations an unmitigated source of pleasure and agreement goes without saying. But his humour was sharp, his prose fluid, and his arguments, if not always so perfectly logical as he might urge us all to be, were well-considered and worthy of our consideration.

In his long-ago obituary for Ayn Rand, he pressed his hope that her Apollonian intellect might now be experiencing a sort of ravishment (he spoke of Heaven in almost Dionysian tones) such as her rationality might never (by his reckoning) have considered. If I had ever met Buckley, I might have asked him under what auspices in the Christian dispensation he justified the hope that Rand might be admitted to Paradise. Is libertarianism a workable substitute for Grace when caught in a divine pinch? Be that as it may, I salute the graciousness of Buckley's well-wishes to a philosophical adversary and extend to him the same.

It is said that Buckley was found dead at his desk at home; I cannot imagine but that he was either busily at work upon another column or lost in the magnificent strains of Johann Sebastian Bach. I admit to a kind of noble elation, and an envy, as I consider this passing of his, so in character with the man and the life he lived. I haven't picked up a "National Review" since October, but I assume he had continued at his work right to the very end. There are many sad and undeserving fates in this world; but to pass at age 82, in possession of one's faculties and still busy upon one's life-work, and at one's very desk to boot, is as desirable a means to embrace mortal necessity as we might imagine. He has gone to it in brave style. Godspeed, William F. Buckley

"Cannibal" weekend, CBS Monday

I didn't catch all of the season premiere of "How I Met Your Mother"-- I walked into it pretty late-- but I'll offer a few takes on the CBS Monday night sitcoms, the apparent heir to the mantle of dominance once maintained by NBC's Thursday nights from Cosby through Seinfeld to "Friends". I don't think Robin will be terribly missed, at least not for sentimental reasons. Her presumptive role as the gentle mocking Voice of Reason (a sometimes unreasonable sort of 'reason') may be harder to fill though. Marshall and Lily may be the cutest couple in the world, but they need another couple to achieve comedic balance, and if this season is going to be about building a new central relationship, then it will be a challenge to make it funny.

I'll pass on offering judgment about "The Big Bang Theory", though I quite enjoyed it. Will the taller, geekier one mellow into a loveable sort or is he a misanthropic Squidward? I had pegged him from the trailers as the heartfelt one, but I see now that the shorter one is definitely meant to be genial and endearing. Oh well, I'll adjust accordingly. But is our heroine supposed to be a foxy minx, jolly wench or Everyday Girl? I need clarification.

The less said about "Two and a Half Men", well . . . --Of course I ENJOY the show; who wouldn't be delighted really? Who would have imagined that Charlie babyface Sheen would have evolved into something whose chin is a veritable comic strip come to life? Even without the potty humor, the deadpans would be hysterical. But I have nothing to 'analyze', at least not in my present state, and so--

Man, that Audrey is a bitch! "Rules of Engagement" has generally charmed, thanks to the comedic camaraderie of the males, what with chiselled Jeff as a more affable and affectless version of the male solipsism of Charlie Sheen's "Charlie" and David Spade as a peroxided metrosexual Genie-in-a-Bottle take on "How I Met Your Mother"s Barney, and then--er--that other dude as a less fey variation on Marshall. But "Rules", for all of its comedy-of-recognition in the relationships department (yes, if you're heterosexual, definitely watch it with your partner), presses hotly on the perils of the Whipped Man. From what frame of reference is this show being written, that a wife can blithely insist upon her husband getting surgery for his snoring? Would unpretentious sorts like Audrey and Jeff really consider a surgical procedure for such a trifling complaint [oh, but I don't live in the Real America, DO I?!?! . . . ] Well, I don't think Jeff would consent, nor should he, either as a person or as a believable character. If "Rules of Engagement" is going to submit Jeff to this kind of treatment, they might as well write him into the basement in "Pulp Fiction." And Audrey really needs to mellow, fast-- far from being a character women can relate to (I hope, at any rate, they feel restrained from doing so!), Audrey has always come across as a perpetually irritated scowl whose permanent state of unhappiness is very thinly veiled, and not by charm; that unhappiness, by the way, can hardly be attributed to the alleged thickheadedness of Jeff, whose self-deprecating manner of deadpanning his way through life is borderline Buddhistic, which is why, despite the affectations of masculine stereotype imposed upon the character, I regard Jeff as Marshall's near kin. Too bad he doesn't have himself a Lilly.


In other thoughts: Ruggero Deodato's splatterhouse exploitation 'classic' "Cannibal Holocaust" is neither the decathlon of gore-hounds nor the grindhouse "Straw Dogs" it is often made out to be. Putting aside Deodato's lamentable decision to kill real living animals on screen, the film is an ambitious but failed attempt to make terrifying moralistic hay out of crude Sadean pseudo-anthropology and edgy shifting of perspective. The opening scene, a brilliantly scripted and shot faux-news broadcast brimming with conceited smuggery about the "omnipotence" of man is so good I've watched it again and again. Our story will concern four "brave" young Americans, "children of the Space Age armed"--significant word--"with cameras" who plunged into deepest Amazonia never to be seen again. The first half of the film concerns the effort to retrieve what, it turns out, is all that is left of their intrepid adventure--their cannisters of film; the second "half" rolls that film, with appropriate interruptions, and significantly upends any idealistic or hopeful notions we may have begun this film with.

That the four documentarians turned out to be nihilistic punks comes as no surprise-- their cocky swagger when we first meet them is enough to prove that they will come to a poor end, and probably deserve it in some respect. It is a truism, good enough as far as it goes, that these four got exactly what they deserved. Except I feel that the film fails to give us quite enough-- not grisliness or wrongdoing, for there's plenty of that, but-- explication. The intention of Alan Yates in torching the hut was not, apparently, to kill everyone inside but to film the desperate escape. Of course he was horrifically exploiting and endangering these people-- moveover, it seems evident that at least someone died in this atrocity. Yet when we cut back to the present for the Professor's commentary, it lingers upon the slain pig (how prophetic of "Cannibal Holocaust"s own fate, it's animal atrocities having upstaged its many displays of man's inhumanity to man), and if there was a charred body in the wreckage, it is not commented upon. Of course, even if all the tribesmen made it out alive, the torching of their hut would be enough for us to despise the filmmakers and grimly but eagerly await their terrible comeuppance. But why the dissonance here about the consequences of their act? Has Professor Monroe made a moralizing mental slip, failing to see the charred remains because he is not yet equipped to ask "Who are the real cannibals?" Or has Deodato actually conceptualized his audience's (justifiable) reactions into the film's design, taunting us for our experience of entertainment in watching humans sadistically abused while fretting over the depiction of animals killed (or so he insists) for food?

"Cannibal Holocaust" is full of undigested dissonances of this sort, which unfortunately swell over and drown the less comprehensive displays of knowing dissonance incorporated into the film's design. The earliest scenes of "The Green Inferno" footage we see are persuasive bits of camera testing and tomfoolery. There's the disturbing trick of showing us "The Long Road to Hell", passed off here as 'fake' (or was that simply "staged"?-- a significant difference!) though this documentary footage is (supposedly) real-world atrocity footage from Africa. All of this primes us to be unsettled further by what is to come, but its bearing on subsequent events is a little hard to pin down. Doubtless being warned of Yates' duplicitous ways allows us a sense of outraged discovery when the hut is torched-- we realize just what kind of "documentary" these folks have in mind. Up until this point we have sympathized with the missing documentarians; now we learn to loathe them. But, as the ultimate victims of the titular "Holocaust", is it important for the film's total effect that we should still identify with them?

This, I think, is the larger cognitive game that Deodato loses at. Through swatches of "The Green Inferno" we can wonder at what the filmmakers' precise attitude to events is. Do they exculpate themselves, in their minds, of their behavior because they see the cannibals as subhuman, or simply because there is no civilized court of law to impose any standard of behavior upon them? Were they born sociopathic, or were they desensitived by previous exposure to horrors in Southeast Asia, or by reading Deconstructionists at NYU? It would be nice to get a little something of this sort to chew on [oh, the unintended pun!], but we receive no sense of incipient madness, or even of events pushing people with few moral defenses towards even more despicable behavior. No doubt we readily believe that Yates and crew came prepared to do exactly the terrible things they do in pursuit of their "documentary", but that doesn't explain their subsequent, even more willfully evil conduct. Nor can the film overcome the dissonance between the grave and disturbed faces of the actors during the disemboweling of the turtle (apparently unscripted and genuine displays of torment and disgust) with the nonchalance they put on for the gang-rape scene. If "Cannibal Holocaust" wanted to insinuate growing moral disease within the confusing and chaotic confines of the Green Inferno, even simply by providing thoughtful interstices in the surviving footage, then that would be an achievement. As it is, we feel that we are simply exploited, as viewers, with one nasty scene piled atop another willy-nilly.

It is a kind of agonized triumph in moral insight, by way of indicting media detachment from human misery and its failures of conscience, that "Cannibal Holocaust" places Faye during the gang-rape of the stray cannibal girl as a hectoring mommy, chiding her boys for wasting film! Though some commentators have apparently misread compassion into Faye's reaction, it is clear that she evinces no concern for the girl as a human being or, specifically, as a female victim of rape. Faye's cri de coeur is "We're not making a porno!"-- as if, in fact, the filmed rape of a tribal girl would constitute an exercise in porn as opposed to the "snuff film" genre. But yet Faye has the good sense to recognize that a filmed rape cannot make their final cut, and thus she protests vociferously-- at the waste of precious film!! Of course, once Yates joins in she becomes physically involved in trying to pull him off--either out of jealousy or concern that he might contract some social disease and pass it on to her. I take these motives as implied since, again, it is utterly clear from the rest of her outcries that her motivation is neither concern for the victim nor shock that her lover and pals have descended to this outrage.

Thus "Cannibal Holocaust" is capable of being as grim in its moral outlook as in its strict articulation of all the horrors that can be inflicted upon the human body. But these harsh imaginings of human moral failure, vivid as they are, don't amount to much if the viewer isn't given the tools to try and add up how these people came to be the way they are. Of course where the cannibals are concerned that's a question for anthropology. Not that I take anything in "Cannibal Holocaust" as a testiment to actual cannibal practice, but then cannibalism is not strictly an imaginary phenomenon, any more than snuff films, since the online murders by Al Qaeda and their colleagues have certainly literalized that urban legend. It's unavoidable that the cannibal tribes come off as frightening agents of destruction, nor can it be said that they act simply in defense of their own, since we have the gratuitous barbarities of the "social surgery" sequence, to say nothing of the ritual murder on the hellish riverbank that kicks off the film's roster of sickening slayings. But Deodato is not making "Cannibal Holocaust" to take the moral temperature of the Amazonians. It's uncomfortable to ask how well he's taking the audience's or his own. But what about that damned crew of filmmakers, how are we to explain their fever of cruelty?

Yates' joining-in during the rape is, from a narrative perspective, hard to fathom. His fiancee is witnessing this. We know, from prior events, that he is not lacking for sexual release thanks to her, just in case anyone wants to try that horrible old defense (and by "defense" we mean explanation, which is what we still seek in the face of the actual deed). For the purpose of shocking the viewer with the sting of outrage simply filming this would be enough to include Yates with his fellows as a scumbag-- does Deodato think Yates has to join in so that we get it that he's not just an enabler of evil, but an active participant? Well, it's his status as enabler that makes Yates terrifying, and it'd be more than enough for us to root for him to meet his grisly end.

The Grisly End that now descends very quickly upon them-- only allowing time for the poor victim to meet her even more hellish end first and for our merry crew to document it-- poses its own representational dilemmas. When Yates looks upon the impaled girl with that smug look of admiring titillation (does he wish he thought of doing it himself?: admittedly, I've toyed with the idea that the documentarians did this to her, but aside from the straight juxtaposition of rape and her death there's nothing to demonstrate this, though perhaps it is still a legitimate interpretational possibility) before snapping into the all-aghast bewilderment of the humane Westerner for the benefit of his camera, Deodato is cleverly, I feel, underlining the toxic amorality of Yates' filmmaker's gaze before we dive into the final orgy of mayhem, in which we must remain conscious of Yates' proximity to the murders of his pals (which adds the horror of suspense and "identification" to that of witnessing the carnage already underway) and also remain reproachfully aware of his demented, appalling and even self-destructive dedication to his "film" at all costs. We are thus voyeurs who are at the same time invited, prodded to reflect upon the voyeurism of the camera's lens and of the man wielding it. Should we imagine Yates with that same amazed grin on his face as Faye is gang-raped, beaten and beheaded? We must, at any rate, recognize that Faye's indictment during the rape of the young cannibal has come full circle: Yates is assuredly wasting film, because he should be running for his life, and he'll never get to use it in his film. Small consolation for Faye, whose terror, violation and death have become just another slice of entertainment. We should remember, lest we fall to meditating on the question of how this woman could have ever entertained setting up home with a man who would film her being raped and eaten, rather than make any chivalrous effort to save her or at any rate sensibly run for his own life, that to Faye another woman's rape was cause for complaint only as it wasted film.

Except I wish Deodato had set things up a tad more clearly at the end. Not cinematographically-- the footage is horrifically believable as something filmed under the circumstances assumed by the story. But the weight of events is not entirely clear: when Mark (?) yells at Yates to think of the film, is he telling him to give up and run away today to screen tomorrow, or is he telling him that Faye's capture means he should go and catch another scintillating reel of mutilation and torture? Does Yates shoot the blond guy to make sure he falls into the cannibals' clutches (as some have read this), thus assuring him something new and exciting to photograph, or is he putting him out of his misery (which, even allowing a mixture of these motives, is hard not to take gratefully, since with that spear in him he wasn't really going anywhere, and I think the niceties of the Terri Schiavo lobby would quickly fall mute in the fact of the treatment his body receives here)? It's possible to imagine, if one is so inclined, some tremors of emotion in the act of filming Faye's demise-- some desperate desire to simply record, in the face of his own inevitable death, or to understand what is happening to her or will happen to him. And this, of course, is actually a central motive on the part of the viewers of horror films. Terrible as the prospect is, noone will watch this without trying to grapple, albeit impossibly, with the infernal torments that the victims are subjected to. And with Faye, coldblooded hussy that she assuredly is, it's impossible not to identify with her, since she is the most "humanized" victim in the film. Yates, by contrast, goes out in a bloody close-up that tells us nothing about the state of his own internal organs, whether already 'tenderized' or indeed gone upon their route through the bowels of a politic convocation of cannibals. It's his masochistic narcissism, the almost tender look he bestows upon his camera, like some male starlet ready for his close-up, that gives "Cannibal Holocaust" its most penetrating moment of insight into media narcissism. Faye's operatic death-agonies (note the way Deodato taunts the viewer with the cut to the 'uplifting', and here almost sadistically schmaltzy, title music, before cutting back again to the Atrocity Theme) punch the gut and perhaps even pull at the weary heartstrings, but Yates' death-portrait stings the intellect.

Back to the bus: Crouse revisited

Reading journalistic reveal-it-alls can be draining, as most youthful vices are. One furtive weekend at the public library you pick up, say, David Halberstam's "War in a Time of Peace" and proceed to knock off a couple'o'hundred pages while trying not to elbow your latest empty can of ginger ale off that natty old sofa's armrest. What a wealth of information! What dazzling portraits!-- What ACCESS the man has! --Now flash forward a few years: Halberstam bites the empty ginger ale can, you hear him honored with a rebroadcast of an old Terry Gross interview on Radio IQ. You notice how Halberstam starts rolling into his answer before Terry ever gets to finish a single damn question. You pick up his book from the discount bin at Barnes & Noble (ok, you picked it up several months before he died, but we want to hone a dramatic anecdote here, right?) and reread it. You notice how suspiciously admirable so many public servants are-- are these his sources? How does he know Bush wanted Powell to be his running-mate in '92-- did Colin write this stupid book? Who is he to play Proust with a cast of 200 real people, and who could ever figure out Yugoslavia's mess or give a hoot about it? I read this book twice, plus Warren Christopher's memoirs, and I couldn't explain Yugoslavia if you put a gun to my head.

Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus" can be excused on several of the above counts. Its prose-style far excels that found in Halberstam. It's protagonists are not Eagleburgers and Sandy Bergers weary of carrying the world's weight on their shoulders (or their undisclosed documents disguised under clothes) but journalists, many of whom still ply their weary trade. You may not come away from Crouse with a clear idea of how the 1972 Presidential election was so monumentally lop-sided, but you may score some insight into why David Broder is so anxious to salvage the honor of Karl Rove. And finally Crouse (dare I tip my hat to wikipedia?) apparently never struck any Faustian bargain to become the next Bob Woodward, contenting himself instead with the humble anonymity of success on Broadway. The only thing left to complain of is the suspicion that some anecdotes may have received the tightening that felicitous forgetfulnes, or judicious editing, might impose; but then, when did journalism ever sound at all like real life?

The first anecdote in "The Boys on the Bus" to make me grit my teeth comes when Broder and Marty Nolan rake Ed Muskie over an unreasonable set of coals after his underwhelming (only 46$ of the vote!) returns in the New Hampshire primary. Muskie lashes out with his famous temper, but that's hardly what's interesting here. Even Crouse seems careful not to show indignation over what, to me at least, seems a revealing display of unreasonable expectations on the part of the press. Here they want to know what his returns mean for the forthcoming primaries. Well, what kind of a question is that? And what kind of answer could satisfy it? Muskie's snappy reply sounds to me quite satisfactory: "I can't tell you that"; "You'll tell me and you'll tell the rest of the country because you interpret this victory . . . " (45). At which point Nolan loses it, shortly afterwards berating the Muskie crew with "I've taken three and a half years of this kind of shit from Nixon and those people, and I'm not gonna take it from you pricks" (46).

This saucily moralistic outburst vividly illustrates one of Crouse's key insights in his book: with friends like these, liberals don't need enemies. Though Crouse lays out the case on his own later, this vivid anecdote clearly shows how a press, raging impotently against its servile condition under a conservative administration, can then lash out with undue vehemence against 'friendly' liberals. That Nolan "takes" crap from the Nixon people shows that, in three and a half-years he hasn't found a way to roughen them up-- a dispiriting show from the supposedly free press. By what right can he demand something different from Muskie, especially since the entire question he insists upon receiving a satisfactory answer to is essentially vague and undefinable, only an invitation for the candidate to draw rope with which to hang himself? Whyever should Muskie take the bait?

This rancor against the Nixon administration lies at the heart of one of Crouse's most relevant ideas-- an idea upon which the media has since pivoted. He clearly is steamed at the Nixon White House for what he views, with his peers, as stonewalling with regard to campaign information. But the, what exactly is the 'information' they're looking for? While Watergate and Vietnam steadily churn somewhwere in the backwaters of public awareness, the White House press corps wants to know: is Richard Nixon a candidate in 1972?!? Now, one might think the question utterly scholastic, but the press seems hell-bent on forcing Ron Ziegler to admit that the President is also such an unpresidential thing as a candidate. Disturbingly, I couldn't help but admire the skill of Nixon and his people in keeping the message focused and framed according to their desires. More disturbingly, the press today feels so too-- for what constitutes the vaunted "discipline" and "professionalism" of Hillary's campaign if not the very same skills for which the Nixon team is here condemned? In '72 the assumed liberalism of the press made them privately steam over their servility to Nixon; today, any leader who can't instill in them that same servility is thereby, in their own reckoning, not fit for high command! Indeed, instilling servility must be the ONLY requisite today, since George W.'s administration has shown facility in no other department, and Hillary has been unforthcoming with any concrete agenda besides Framing the Message.

But frankly, Nixon's '72 campaign appeals to me: the brooding RN, snug within the walls of his Forbidden City in an august display of composure and authority, hand-outs and Danishes meticulously bestowed upon the waiting press. I laughed with glee over his little New York rally, the token war-protestors stealthily admitted so he could wheel the cameras away from them to the thronging masses of children cheering. And why not?: grimace however we may, his Middle America was real; and if the hippies themselves debarred Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey from office (for godssakes, LBJ wasn't "toppled"! [88]), it was Middle America that asserted its control with Nixon's victories, especially in '72. The one thing I really miss in Crouse's account is any real acknowledgment of the madness and folly of the McGovern campaign; yes, it's there briefly at the Convention, but then Crouse considers Miami well-behaved. Well, if the standard is set by the riots of Chicago in '68, then sure; but can a convention be considered a success that pushes the acceptance speech "out of the prime-time hours" (164)? If I remember correctly from VH-1, McGovern aired during prime time IN HAWAII . . . .

A Novel is a Novel ain't a Novel

When is a novel not a novel? There must be a reason, after all, why booksites feature mature adults boasting of their preference for YA books over regular new novels. And oh yes, it does have something to do with the beaming and boisterous self-conscious "youthfulness" of us all in this shiny dreary new millennium. And yes, it also has to do with the fact that Education Factories produce public schoolteachers who think YA comprises a "literature" all on its own (a literature of the oppressed!!). And yes, damnit, it has a little to do with the sneaky way YA rocks . . . But this is not my point.

No, the question of when a novel is not a novel has been forcibly sprung upon me by my late reading of Iris Murdoch. The acclaimed Platonistic philosopher and notorious bisexual gaddabout was a dim presence in the back of my mind thanks to various "New Yorker" profiles before she sank into Alzheimer's and death, as subsequently "documented" in "Iris" which, I say thankfully, I have not seen.
But lately I turned to the fiction aisles at my local public library-- a zone I generally miss altogether, too absorbed in checking out the entire philosophy shelf again or trolling about for forgotten tell-all memoirs of the Carter administration. But lo and behold, we are generously stocked with Murdoch, damn near the entire canon, and I was stunned into indecision by the extent of the riches on display. I finally settled on "An Accidental Man".

The bookjacket publisher's copy asserts this to be "iris Murdoch's longest and most brilliant novel, very serious, very funny." Okay, we know we're in trouble, right? Already the experienced reader, otherwise oblivious of Murdoch's work, will say "Ah, yes, it must be Murdoch's "It"-- the once-great novelist bites off too much and unloads a great amorphous blob of a novel, pretentious and straining for 'significance'--right?" After all, it takes place during Vietnam-- or was that simply "the war" because, I'll be damned, I'm not sure that the book ever mentions it by name.

Now, I don't know how Harold Bloom rates "An Accidental Man", though he rates Murdoch rather highly, albeit as an author of "romances", in the Shakespearean/Hawthornian/cyberpunk sense of the word. And yes, suffice it to say we're not exactly in the realm of normative realism. But "An Accidental Man" is a hell of a book, full of matter to chew on, bulging with memorable dialogue, shifty situations, characters both endearing and hateful. Thank god I didn't actually READ it though!!

--Now, if I HAD read it through I don't think I could tell you if Vietnam were in fact ever referenced by name. I'm that kind of reader, for all my word-for-word religiosity, but also, it's that kind of book. Murdoch is seductive, and as choking as a bog. Like many a library book opened at 1:00am, "An Accidental Man" became a skim-through, a four-hour breakdown scannathon, eagerly surfing straight ahead to see just what fates would unfold for these strange people. And with all the guilt, I thought to myself too, "Oh thank god I didn't give three weeks to this book!!! It would have KILLED me!!!"
Because if Francesca Lia Block doesn't exactly tighten the rusty screws on her leaky plots, Murdoch doesn't either. And if Block laddles whimsy on top of myth, Murdoch laddles myth on top of whimsy which, she being a great thinker and probably a better writer, means that her books are still more imposing creations, but they don't register so well as "books". For readers like me, for whom a novel means Jane Austen or Choderlos de Laclos, reading a volume by Roth, Bellow or Murdoch can feel like an act of mental masturbation, like reading Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoirs or Thomas Friedman. Who are these people? What are these lives? And what are these arbitrary collections of authorially-imposed happenstance, all as inscrutable and thoroughly acausal-sounding as the dumping I received from my solipsistic Albertine who reads her Proust upstairs?

Lest I seem reactionary, let's recall the mistress of compact witty surreality, Muriel Spark. In her fiction, the Author, the Characters, and God all seem to be schemily competing for precedence as the authors of all-encompassing plots. Cruel chance-- or is that the "providence" of her detached deity?-- can govern all. Yet her characters register on the mind's eye with dazzling sharpness of outline, even those who are mysterious or unknowable. Nicholas in "The Girls of Slender Means" and Sandy in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" are especially mysterious in their 'state of grace'-- if they're hard to fathom within their novels' main stories, it's even more of a challenge to grasp how they've become the people they became-- but we know that we're grasping something real, tangibly in our hands, when we consider them. But what do you hold when you scrutinize Matthew or Dorina? These characters may have their rewards, but their arbitrary construction brings this reader at least a lot of pain-- in part, the suffering born of empty calories. Their bizarre antics set my teeth on edge even as I'm forced to chew down on them-- and my digestion! . . . --Of course there are other sorts of rewards, entirely less ambivalent:

She had loved him always, thought of him always. Love is not time's fool and rejects notions of exact measurement. How many hours per day of thinking about the beloved counts as being in love? Such ideas are absurd. Love laughs at locksmiths and also at Locke. Love belongs to the ideal.
(pg 388)




But when I think of Mitzi and Mavis (oh, bother these names!) the solipsistic sisters of Block and Cohn and their acolytes seem less offensive. Are Violet and Claire, Echo and Barbie less real than these fanciful ideograms? Is effusive self-pity more charming in the thrice-married and middle-aged than in chain-smoking teenage outcasts? Oh forbid! Thus does Block advance one step closer to canonicity.

Brave New Gilmore Girls

I've spent too much time and energy belaboring this in other forums today, but let's briefly note the situation from Montreal. God bless reproductive rights, but it's time for a little more engagement on the question of whether it's ethically acceptable, or legally tolerable, for people to jostle about eggs and sperm with limitless abandon. I speak not of actual sex: the Thomists among us, alas, have hardly secured my endorsement. Nor do we need undercut the self-determination of identity that is a necessary and beneficent element of any adoptive family by challenging whether the capabilities of reproductive science should be unleashed so as to shove eggs and sperm under the proverbial nose of any prospective parent, least of all if the prospect in question is your own child being granted the dubious privilege of carrying her mother's own egg. People have the right to follow their hearts-- an adoptive child is not mandated to go seeking for biological parents, let alone to accept them when they are found to be inadequate and, more fundamentally, superfluous compared to the loving parents they already have. But, as those who remember the rather chilling conclusion of Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers" will recall, parenthood of any stripe is a double-edged sword when expectation and reality are at oods.

Which is, vide Aeschylus and Woody Allen, always true. I make no pretense that "conventional" or "unconventional" families, the later here including everything that doesn't fall under the rubric of fertile nuclear heterosexuality, are at an imbalance in regards to this question. One of the gravest errors of the species has been the inclination to suppose that anyone must "apologize" for the circumstances of their existence. But, sometimes, an apology may be owed on account of the circumstances one has been dealt due to the choices of others. And in this regard I am inclined to be very indulgent indeed to the acting-up and "acting-out" of the potential offspring of the Montreal woman who has bequeathed her frozen eggs to her little daughter, in the hope ("It'll be her own decision"!) that this child, infertile due to a genetic condition, will have the happy option of carrying to term her half-sibling some day, conceived perhaps with the aid of a beaming suitor's sperm. Whether such a child would refuse to embrace "grandma" as parent, even for a few punishing adolescent years, might be doubted; I have no doubt that "grandma" however would be all too happily obliging. Perhaps the best that could be hoped for is that the two put-upon half-siblings would join together in forceful choruses of "Mo-oommm!!!" to all further demonstrations of her imperial "altruism" . . .

Really, my present vein of flippancy hardly does justice to the moral problems presented by this case; just as it stands, I think the woman has done a rather horrible thing. Rather incredibly, a number of comments I've seen posted have doted upon the fact that "Flavie" (the seven-year old prospective surrogate) would have the consolation of bearing a child that has the family resemblance! Really, decent manners for families that employ donors and surrogacy is one thing, but it shouldn't blind us to the obvious human truth that everyone WANTS to bear a child that resembles them-- this is the ordinary course of nature, after all, and the fact that science has introduced other outcomes as potentialities for the birthmother beholding the baby that has come from her does nothing to change the fact of this desire, for male and female parents alike. In this hypothetical case, Flavie is left contemplating something a bit like the monstrous image in Shelley's "The Cenci", where the heroine's father, who has raped her, gloats in the thought of her forced to behold his hated countenance in their imagined offspring. A birth mother should have something, either more or less, than siblinghood as her prize when she is given the baby from her womb. To carry another woman's egg is one thing, perhaps more questionable than has been allowed of late. But the only blood-relation's reproductive cell that should be involved is her own.

Fleeting thoughts . . . .

Fleeting impressions by the flickering light of the telly:

I. Gods, why was "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" ever made? . . . as NBC trundles out the last leftovers of the already-cancelled program, I can see why Entertainment Weekly blasted it as the worst show on tv-- though sourgrapes probably has something to do with that judgment! (How the entertainment press hates beging caught backing the failures they help launch with fanfare!) The show is portentous and impenetrable, settling humorlessly over an inert sinkhole of a story, with its depressing and depressive characters stuck there like so many gooed-up wads of hair. What was the motivation behind a single scene in that whole ruckus? Why did Sorkin write it? Why did NBC want it?

II. Tina Fey, I still don't know what makes you tick. I distrust you for the way you treat Lorne Michaels, a patently disgusting man, as some sort of benevolent father. But I love Liz Lemon, I love Jack and Jenna, I hopelessly love "30 Rock". I hate the title, but I quite adore the show . . . .

III. Old Navy's "Summerland" commercial is the hottest approximation yet to Antonioni-in-a-30-sec-boob-tube dose. I'm sure there are a lot of film school retards eager to whore themselves out to retailers looking for stylish, sexed-up adverts that would make David Fincher drool. Those zooms, those lovely geometries of lounging bodies, abstract as landscapes; those undulating bums and Frenchiefied, affectless glances into the distance-- oh, Ridley Scott eat your heart out! Or was that you . . . ?

IV. The Republicans will win in '08. How can they not? The Democrats are atrophied by their inability to think about what they want. An end to the war? Ah, and just who will do that for them?: does Hillary want an end to the war? Could Obama or Edwards actually manage it? Will Americans really be willing to withdraw, considering the scale of the sacrifice and committment in Iraq?
The current Democratic lineup, topheavy with affirmative action candidates, has rendered the Democratic flock undersceptical and prone to dodge real debate. What's the conversation? For godssakes, Dems, talk about resumes, talk about records. Should Hillary pass for progressive on account of her womanhood? Does Barack Obama have a record at all? What does Edwards really believe?-- and how can we know? Why must Richardson be kicked into the gutter of anonymity-- with his record, including his incumbancy in the governor's mansion in a valued Western state. Goodness grief, the Republican voters get all the choices! Giuliani and McCain are allowed to slug it out charismatically, with the competent but slippery Romney a surprising addition. The vitality of the Republican candidates, along with the unpredictability in that camp, lends them a juice-factor sadly lacking in the Democratic fold. Just compare Hillary's promise of "retaliation" in the event of a nuclear strike against America versus McCain's promise to chase bin Laden "to the gates of hell". Forget geopolitics even: do you want a President who thinks about retaliation, or one who promises to chase people to the gates of hell. Give me a Dem who'll chase corporate ne'er-do-wells, porkbarreling politicos, AND Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell! Lyndon Johnson, where are you?!?

Obsolescent Memorial Day

"I wonder," said the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, "what damn silly fool invented Sunday afternoon."
--Dorothy L. Sayers, "Clouds of Witness",58

And what damned fool invented Memorial Day? Was Armistice Day too Eurocentric? Really, I must not only oppose any and all future federal holidays, but ask for the rollback of some of those we already have. Labor Day, I grant, is even more expendable-- what intestinal fit of Progressivism convinced us to adopt "Labor Day"? If it served any use at all, it hasn't been put to it in living memory. Still, there is that matter of wearing whites-- curious, how this Edith Wharton's world detail is the only damn thing any American knows about this holiday-- and Memorial Day serves no comparable function except to remind us that Gas Prices Are Up, thanks of course to our own valiant efforts to Head Off For Memorial Day . . .
Veterans, to be chicly blase about it, are a prickly bunch. Since this is Sunday afternoon, a damn silly fool's time of it, I shall part ways with all my Stoic notions of high valor and put it thusly-- why are veterans so damned hermeneutical? In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, the Roanoke Star has turned white with mournful remembrance, but a few weeks ago the veterans began to grumble-- turn it back to red, white, and blue. Now, I'm sure all American citizens have as much right to lay claim to the symbolism of red, white, and blue, and for this reason I balk at the veterans' community's appropriation, which amounts in effect to: "Red, white, and blue means US, and you'd better get back to remembering US." Now, the present war will have to drag on a while yet (assuredly, it will) before there's any chance of the Roanoke region's being as starkly defined by the incremental casualties from Iraq as it has been by the nation's greatest lone-nut gun-massacre on record. And, since "Hokie Nation" (dismal phrase) commands quite a good deal of patriotism on its own count, it stands to reason that mournful white currently trounces the Red, White, and Blue.
Besides, who says white can't stand in for an army bled dry? I'm always pained by conservative protestations that those serving abroad are so sensitively attuned to the politics of war back home. Don't they really have quite enough on their minds? It's predictably easy to get caught up in the maudlin grip of sentimental symbolism once you're back home-- time enough for that if you make it out. Surely it's ill-advised, froma military standpoint, for soldiers in the field to take very much thought of these things at all. And I don't believe, in fact, that they do. The unsentimental (really TOO unsentimental) truth, acknowledged by so many, is that in combat one thinks of oneself and one's immediate comrades-- not of country, or idealistic international goals. My hope is that, for the exceptional soldiers, this is not in fact true. Animalistic demands for survival aside, the maudlin love of comrades, one's "band of brothers", is far ickier, morally trickier, and yes, nauseatingly homosocial. Kneejerk patriotism is far cleanier in fact-- mock patriotism if you will, but at least it is the loyal defense of the comparably Big Boat of Nationhood, and in a nation as diverse and expansive as the United States of America, we can still be forgiven for sometimes feeling that Our Interests are also Their's. Unlike, say, nationalistic Chechnyans, or even nationalistic Scots for that matter, our "nationalism" is not quite severable from our Jeffersonian committments, perverted as they sometimes are by smug overreach, personal grandiosity, or the malevolent misguiding hand of corporate interests; and being a nation very much at large upon the world, a rational consideration of our interests is never far asunder from consideration of the global picture.

But back to being a meanspirited ass. Just as our cup of federal agencies continuously runneth over, so too do our holidays and memorials. The World War II monument in Washington is the most notorious recent example. To the veterans who hankered in front of the Senate, saying quite brazenly that they wanted to see the memorial before they died, I answer quite boldly: you've waited this long, now do you want to ruin the Mall forever for future generations because you want to see some Mussoliniesque monstrosity before you go? Hell, didn't these guys see enough of these things when they liberated Germany? Alas, I fear Tom Brokaw and Steven Spielberg became history teachers to those who lived it. Having silently reintegrated themselves into society (concealing howsoever many psychical scars in the process, to whatever ruinous effect) and having watched with some indifference the revelations of Vietnam-era traumas, the elderly WWII vets found, at last, that their sufferings should be told. What was once public history-- the murderous march of Blitzkrieg, the invincible counterthrusts of Zhukov and Patton, Nimitz and MacArthur-- became "tell us your story, grandpa." The crusty dads who smacked their sensitive hippie offspring about finally came into their own in the Age of Oprah, an army of Anne Franks, the blighted youth of a sacrificial noble cause. --To be sure, this is not an opportunity all have availed themselves of (can one imagine George H. W. Bush even making a serious attempt at such?), but sufficient numbers came forward to bask in the belated attention, never mind they reserved a seat for Tom Hanks too at the Battle of the Bulge's reunion party (it's like he was practically THERE!). In short, World War II became big infotainment, and a rather greedy relationship was sprung between the media and the vets, diluting the credibility of both. The dizzy zenith was already reached when the Department of Veterans Affairs put out a William Castle-style warning for "Saving Private Ryan", to the effect that vets might have a heart attack!!! Needless to say, Terence Malick's artier, and truly artistic, and very violent "The Thin Red Line" received no similar, sensationalistic thumbs up, way up from the concerned Feds. It's taken for granted here, as Godard has bitterly and correctly diagnosed, that Spielberg can own anything-- our anointed Capra's take on History must always be True, and Conclusive. In collusion with Tom Brokaw, our modern Thucydides, it's World War II Inc. No wonder every Veteran of Foreign Wars is an armchair hermeneuticist.

But why can't Veterans Day suffice? Perhaps semantics is another fashionable skill of those who have had military service: we memorialize the fallen, and vet the Veterans. Take to the graves in May, and do an oral history project in November. Pale November is surely the hour for all these onerous duties: cannot soldiers appreciate the superiority of poetry over hermeneutics? Is it not better these things be done appropriately, with a sound sense of remembrance in its proper season? These fools on the highways are heading for the beach, not Arlington! So here then, is a sober, serious thought: November 11th, dyed in the false hopes of a War to End All Wars, is the most appropriate single date for modern peoples to commemorate the service of the living and the fallen. Soldiers, don't segregate yourselves. Let all nations do their work of mourning and remembrance for all who have borne arms and bled for their country on one cold November day.

Rock Me, "Amadeus Director's Cut" (Part II)

Two more viewings, the latter in company of the helpmeet, assure me that I will become no stranger to this film. In terms of visual and narrative exuberance it smashes such would-be-frothy concoctions as "Marie Antoinette" against the hearth. It comes at the viewer with all the unbridled over-the-topness of the greatest cinematic extravaganzas-- "Ivan the Terrible", "One from the heart", "Heaven's Gate". Add to that its outpourings of music-- by definition incomparable-- and its definite, though majestic, storytelling gusto, and it's impossible to miss why David Thomson saluted Forman on the occasion of "Amadeus"s 1984 release as the new Vincent Minnelli.

Two sequences may illuminate this particular aspect of the film. The costume ball, with its giddy game of musical chairs and the bearing-in of a roasted ox, winged cherub mounted athwart it, is as unabashed in its visual indulgence as the great opera sequences staged in the Tyl Theatre. Its dramatic content is to detail Leopold's real mission in visiting his son, and to germinate in Salieri's mind part of his later program for destroying Mozart. It also gives us a supreme example of Salieri's unnerving masochism, as he offers his own name for Mozart's forthcoming ridicule. "That was God laughing, Father" he tells the priest to whom he recounts his tale, ultimately not in quest of absolution but in the pride of discovery. "Someday I will laugh at you." With the blowing out of his candle, the original release cut to the beginning of the Figaro saga that occupies the film's middle section and represents Mozart's halcyon phase, as all worldly obstacles seem to dissipate until the Emperor's miraculous yawn topples his every chance of success.
Now, in the new version the composition of "The Marriage of Figaro" and its attendant difficulties occupies quite a larger chunk of the story, and we know throughout that Mozart's fortunes are very far from secure. Originally, we might have taken issue with Leopold's accusation "they say that you have debts" (though we know it would be foolish to doubt the pragmatic Leopold on this); but now we see Mozart hitting up Salieri himself for a loan. This thread is interwoven with the quest for pupils, a theme introduced right after the successful premiere of "The Abduction from the Seraglio", one which previously was but a footnote. In the Director's Cut the battle for pupils grows from a tertiary friction with the Court into a full-blooded contest, pitting Constanze against Mozart (and driving her to throw her body at Salieri), giving Salieri occasion for a dark machination worthy of his diabolical declaration of war with God (his molestation charges against Mozart before the Emperor, which immediately follow it), and allowing one of the film's most riotous exercises in comedy, as Mozart attempts to give a music lesson to a nervous nubile jungfrau while her philistine papa (Kenneth Macmillan, always a riot), her maman who cuts the air with bent arms to Mozart's music in a pattern familiar enough to those who have seen old ladies attempting to accomodate themselves to a hip-hop rhythm at a wedding (or to those familiar with my helpmeet!), and a gaggle of noisome mutts all look on while making as few concessions to pedagogical decorum as could be imagined.
Now, in the midst of this "Figaro" Act of the film, the party sequence acts as a sort of-- well, not idyll, since the most idyllic scene in the film must be the outdoor performance of the Piano Concerto No. 22, whose finale seems to delight Constanze and Joseph II in equal measure and which may be regarded as the height of Mozart's professional career in terms of the film-- but perhaps a kind of jubilee or Roman triumph, as even Leopold must bear witness to the dear Viennese' love for his wastral boy, and Salieri feels himself at his lowest ebb. After all, those are HIS Viennese who whoop it up riotously over Wolfie's grimacing, grunting, fart-blowing parody of the Court Composer. The bewigged beauties who patently dote on Mozart, the little boy who seems to stand in for the child Beethoven who would draw sustenance from his interview with the maestro-- they prefigure the women of "The Magic Flute" who carouse with Mozart in the cabin, and the children who step up behind him as he conducts the Queen of the Night to get a closer view, as our closest proxies within the film, who give Mozart the absolute and unconditional adulation posterity owes him as his due. Even as Salieri feeds his wicked designs, therefore, this sequence is celebratory, and its extreme extravagance, mingling as it does all the riches of Rococo with perhaps some gestures towards native Czech rusticity (the grotto-like setting, that roasted ox which Forman tells us in his commentary was looked forward-to with great appetite by the extras, except it got past three days before they were done with the sequence and the carcase reeked!) delights the viewer, as so much in this extraordinary film does, with its willingness to place us firmly in the midst of its unstintingly lavish vision-- to encourage us to LIVE inside the film, inside its luminous interpretation of that magically bejewelled place and time-- even as it serves to advance the drama's tensions, to push us into the enveloping tragedy that unfolds.

The second sequence I wish to ponder is the one which certainly does the least to advance anything like "story" in the film-- the parody/pastiche of Mozart operas staged by Schikaneder in his People's Theatre. I've always felt there was something meant to be "political" about this sequence-- that it was Forman's own special gift to the people of Prague, to give the extras (in the guise of poor plebeians rather than bewigged aristocrats) a good show, and to prove that Mozart is "for the masses." On a related note, I find something displeasingly Kundera-like in this scene: Forman's jovial vulgarity seems close to Kundera's spirit here, what in Kundera's very odd scheme would be anti-vulgarity, since "vulgarity" for Kundera means false high sentiment (thus, Beethoven's music is vulgar, orgies are not). Kundera himself introduced Forman to Laclos' "Les Liaisons Dangereuses", which Forman would eventually film as "Valmont", so we may assume that Forman's ideas about the 18th Century were formed in part by Kundera. Likewise, any political message Forman might wish to consider in a 1984 Prague would be invested with Kundera's concerns. The transposition of Mozart's music into a vaudevillean lexicon results in something that might be playfully considered as "silly" but, in brutal honesty, is stupid. Does Forman wish to tell us that Mozart's tunes work in any context, even when removed from the fabric of his own music? Hopefully he does not wish to push this remix-mentality very far; Mozart himself seems to take it in stride as a brash theatre piece, while Constanze stands bravely upon High Art principle ("I didn't like what he did to your opera; it was comic") while insisting simultaneously upon the rules of High Finance ("Half the house? You'll never see a penny!"). Since "Amadeus" is blithely indifferent to the role of Freemasonry in the life of Mozart, the unwary viewer has nothing to guide them into the mystical and late-Shakespearean motifs of "The Magic Flute", but at least they can see that it is all opera and no parody. But the shots of the audience during the parody's performance are a bit of a sore spot for the movie-- one has to accept, with Mozartean graciousness and egalitarianism, that Forman looked for some Real Czechs off the street and put them before the cameras in an "unwashed" state, as if to say-- See that old lady looking for the sausages to be thrown her way? That old lady lives under Communism. Those sausages would feed her for a week. Thus, strangely, the parody sequence may be the populist mirror of the scene at court where Mozart must sruggle to lift the Emperor's ban on "Figaro". In these scenes Forman wrestles again with the spirit of his Iron Curtain censors, under their supposedly obliging noses.

Rock Me, "Amadeus Director's Cut" (Part I)

Once you've grown past the naive assumption that more is always better, you become, not wary merely, but afraid, very very afraid, of "Director's Cut"s. Once upon a time, of course, you thought of them as a Holy Grail, like letterboxed VHS-- better still, often they actually came together, since either was rare. Think "Blade Runner". Or that restored 311 min. "1900" on Bravo, letterboxed and then censored of all the explicit sexual bits-- the violence, of course, could be safely retained, in all its grisly head-smashing expliciteness; the sexuality too, naughty stuff that it is, was more or less left untouched, but Dominique Sanda's nudity, which I can only assume was in radiant evidence somewhere or other, was gone. Well, it was an experience nonetheless and hey, where else were you going to see any of it?
All of that has changed. Perhaps it came with that "Basic Instinct" director's cut with, what, 23 seconds? of additional footage. Or was it the opposite extreme that would define the self-indulgence of the director's cut?: Oliver Stone packing entire new over-the-top studies in satiric grisliness into his already bursting-at-the-seams-grisly "Natural Born Killers"? Time was, Ridley Scott could rescue a masterpiece from the ashbin of travesty-- "Blade Runner: The Director's Cut." Now he's working on the director's cut of the director's cut, having in the meantime taken his original director's cut of "Alien" and turned it into something of a travesty, in between breaks in retooling "Gladiator", "Kingdom of Heaven"-- who's keeping count, actually? Has he decided who gets to do the soundtrack for "Legend"? Will there be a subtler, boarless "Hannibal"? Will he decide to let Thelma and Louise make it to the bottom of the canyon, or will he stake out his claim to the Pantheon on a three-hour "Someone to Watch Over Me"? --All, more or less, fine films; Scott's a major director, a visual maestro with a definite auteurist streak in terms of theme and story, but should he play Henry James with his entire canon? With the films he had control over the first time around? . . .

The Director's Cut that has loomed largest with me is Milos Forman's new millennium "Amadeus." We can take the 5-hour "Fanny and Alexander" out of the running, since that actually WAS the original conception of the film, with the theatrical version as Bergman's willing response to the logistics of the theatre and the requirements of an international release. But Milos Forman's case is different. A true auteur with a proven record of bending the most disparate literary sources to his will, producing a set of films as conspicuously of-a-piece as any body of work in the cinema, Forman, teamed once again with Saul Zaentz, the producer he propelled to Oscar glory with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", gave the world his entirely original and personal re-vision of Peter Shaffer's stagework in 1984, fighting perhaps a rather stern battle-of-wills with the nominally compliant Czech authorities, but assuredly not one in the editing room. The 1984 director's cut laid claim to eight Oscars (though cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek and editors Nena Danevic and Michael Chandler would have to content themselves with the British Academy's prizes), and had a good eighteen years to settle in the minds of an international audience. Though some journalist or other scoffed at comparisons with "Apocalypse Now Redux" when "Amadeus Director's Cut" came out, in fact Forman's revision of his own original vision is a more radical departure, not least because the public had a general idea at least of the sorts of things Coppola had left on the cutting-room floor. The new Forman cut returns the film somewhat to the scabrous spirit of Shaffer's play (which itself exists in at least two distinct versions, losing "Cosi fan Tutte" among other things along the way), in the process threatening its own, quite superior dramatic integrity, and dampening its incomparable joie-de-vivre.

Having anticipated this, I put myself in no hurry to view it. But life is cruelly defined by limitations, and whether Heaven or Hell awaits, it cannot be put off forever. Especially since, whether by Forman's own intention or as another clever DVD marketing scheme to force the devoted viewer to purchase ever-new "Special Editions", the theatrical "Amadeus" (I remind you, the ORIGINAL director's cut) is quite unavailable today. Its only dvd release was on an early, "flipper" disc compelling the viewer to turn it over halfway through the film. On the "Amadeus Director's Cut" release, disc two is full of bonus extras. As the endtitles have been expanded, not only to make the usual allowances for the limited number of hands doing digital remastering and the restored cameo performers (hello Kenneth Macmillan!!), but to credit bits of music that have mysteriously insinuated themselves into prominence, whether they were already there or not ("Caro Mio Ben" by Giuseppe Giordani, Michele Esposito, soprano?), I would hardly wish to trust "seamless" same-disc viewing options anyway-- nevermind the horrific object-lesson posed by the fate of Forman's "Valmont" on its MGM dvd, where an ENTIRE SEQUENCE has disappared, with no corrected re-release in sight! For me, even the original endcredits are a part of my film history, and with the zeal with which Forman has reinserted bits great and small, only a separately issued disc could reassure me that the original version is safely preserved for posterity.

It behooves me to consider how drastically the new material changes the entire spirit of the film, in addition to its dramatic cohesion; but I must first note, as the matter has been neglected by every commentator I've encountered, the parts that are MISSING from this new version. Thankfully I have the vhs widescreen release of old "Amadeus", as well as the rather poorly transfered pan-and-scan from "Republic Pictures" (this released somewhere between the much more pristine HBO home video on which I experienced the film the first sixty-odd times, and the later Warner Bros. release); but these will not avail me here, as I admit I haven't consulted them lately. But I have quite clear enough a memory to assure me of two particular points concerning the soundtrack, and another, almost as certain, about a precious slice of film I miss in the "Director's Cut."
Inscrutably altered is the voice of the operatic party-girl during the bacchic costume ball, who once offered the pleasing suggestion (to the audience at least, though Mozart, against his real taste, demurs) "Play Handel!" In deference to the thrilling uninhibitedness of the original voice, we should write this: PLAY HANDEL!!! It's a trilling, greedy songbird sort of voice, utterly appropriate and for me, utterly beloved. Shockingly, there is now a different voice altogether, and all it has to offer is, "Pl'handl". --I can only imagine that Forman had once re-dubbed a poor bit player's wilty voice and now, perhaps out of patriotic deference to a native Czech, has restored her own utterly banal voice to her mouth. But this new voice clearly does not belong to that delightful orifice, and I am outraged. Did someone in the Zaentz compound have a Nixon-secretary moment with the original track? Has 1984 "Amadeus" been consumed by flames?
Equally certainly gone is Roy Dotrice's unforgettable offscreen barking at Constanze and his overburdened son as Mozart returns to work on "Figaro". We are now allowed to see that Constanze opens the door to accept Lorl's services (well, obviously!) but we are denied, in the interest of hearing more clearly Mozart's music (never mind that it is, for dramatic purposes, interrupted and interfered with on innumberable occasions), the pleasure of "Parties all night! parties every night! . . . dinner at eight, dinner at ten, dinner when anybody FEELS like it: IF anybody FEELS LIKE IT!!!" How the devil are we to appreciate the full weight of Leopold's impossible disapproval without this, its single most magnificent outburst, all the more effective as it shows Leopold always hovering over his son's consciousness even when he isn't in the room, impossible to escape even from the sublime heights of musical inspiration.

For in place of the diffident hero-villain of the original film, who wars early with God but only becomes earnest in his war with Mozart once Leopold is dead and he conceives his diabolical way through the storms and stress of "Don Giovanni" which split his mind apart, we now have a Salieri whose madness gathers so early and so heavily that the entire film threatens to careen into the abyss opened by the first Act. Now we have a Salieri so malign, so vicious that it becomes implausible that he won't wring Mozart's neck before he can cough out a minor-key Concerto, let alone the Requiem. Before, it was as if Salieri allowed his murderous intentions to follow through a door seemingly (to him) opened by God Himself: after all, it was a "miracle" that the Emperor yawned during "Figaro". In the end, Salieri insists it was God who murdered Mozart; implicitely, it is God's own diffident cruelty with his musical Incarnation that emboldens Salieri to take matters into his own hands. Not so with the "Director's Cut". Here, Salieri tries to force God's hands, and with a homoerotic fervor that was only dimly implicit before in his Chillingworth-like attachment to Mozart. "Enter me!" he cries in prayer, bent over, furious with need, attempting to blackmail the Almighty with the threat of immediate sins he himself can hardly contemplate. This is Salieri on the threshold of his sexual humiliation of Constanze, a sequence matched in its operatic fury only by the original version's staging of "Don Giovanni". Forman rarely cuts in an overt, "cinematic" way, but here he is operatic, cueing a later passage of the C-minor Great Mass as counterpoint for Constanze's undressing as she forces a guileless smile upon herself while she whores for her unheeding husband's career. We are swept up in unaccustomed suspense, the music soars, Constanze's clothes fall, we are upon the brink of we-know-not-what abyss, we plunge into it. Adultery is denied, but the shock is almost as bitter as the threatened reality. We know better than Salieri did, I think, that he wasn't going to follow through, but it is a small and unknown recompense for the blighted Constanze that, had she submitted herself to a willing Salieri, it would have been all for naught. But then, she came there, she was used, and she understands well enough that she lost in a terrible, rigged game she should never have entered into.

All well and good, so far as dramatic fireworks go-- except, first of all, the sneaking suspicion that this scene, though it may be the locus classicus of its type, is of a type nonetheless. A Calvin Klein tv ad of the late 80s or early 90s featured a waif doing laundry (bringing it up on the elevator?) with the "Rex Tremendae" of the Requiem as accompaniment. Innumerable shlock Showtime sleazefests have used classical music to score scenes of arch, goofish debauchery. This suppressed scene may be original in its time, but, for all that it delivers "Amadeus" into R-rated territory, does it succeed in raising the dramatic stakes in the film or only in crusting the palate?
This is the second, and more essential consideration-- the scene damages "Amadeus"s 'sense-of-life'. For all of Salieri's Miltonic soliloquies against the Almighty, the first film was essentially as joyous and spontaneous as all the happier parts of "Fanny and Alexander". Mozart would begin to suffer sad reversals, of course, but they were constantly dispelled by the eruptions of his music. By the end, paradoxically, poverty and even death could hardly maintain a grim spirit against the exuberance of "The Magic Flute"s constant interruptions and the joy of creating the "Requiem". Alone with his nemesis and in his power, Mozart is conscious only of dictating thrilling passages of music to a helpful friend with a big paycheck on the way--pulling an all-nighter to get the latest masterpiece in on time. And wonderfully, paradoxically, Salieri's murderous intentions recede away completely. Never has he been more solicitous; clearly, here in his terrible moment of victory, victory itself seems to be the last thing on his mind. Perhaps this is an awesome misreading on my part-- Salieri wants to get "his" masterpiece finished of course, and he wants to work Mozart to death; but everyone besides the musical illiterate know the damn thing is nowhere near completion (indeed, Mozart's real hand in the "Confutatis" and the "Lachrimosa", which mysteriously gets wrapped somehow in the early moments of dawn, is probably rather less assured than even the film's dictation scenario implies), and Salieri seems utterly subsumed in his role as faithful amanuensis. For once, he is absolutely humble, and it is here, if at all, that the terrible paradox of the "patron saint of mediocrities" achieves a kind of uncanny realization. It is this terrible joy in Mozart's divine music, a joy that can make him forget his own awful self-- the burden of being that terrible selfish man-- that is perhaps what is most lost in the swirl of the "Director's Cut." Thanks to the many new scenes of vehement conniving on Salieri's part, it becomes harder to believe that this man would really come to "Don Giovanni" five times, strangely aghast that he alone has ears to hear a music he has swatted out of public earshot. He is even more of an Iago than ever, but his own malevolent designs, begot of sexual torment, professional arrogance, and a brutal sense of divine entitlement, seem too deafening to allow him much space to wonder, Caliban-like, at the unearthly beauty born of his better. This Calibanesque childishness, if you will, is what made the original film's Salieri so strangely sympathetic (much more so than Shaffer's incarnations); now, the Italianate stage-villain is back and, even without sexual dominion (here too, at least, we may credit Forman with a greater psychological sense than Shaffer, who perhaps missed the "Othello"-borne implications of his own design) is, front and center, an aesthete not of music but of malice.

[On this day, in 1626, that great man Francis Bacon, to whom all but everything is owed by each one of us today, passed away of a fever born of his extempore experiment in the preservation of a fowl by stuffing it with snow. He fell into the Immortal in the noble pursuit of immortality, and there, we may solemnly hope, he is treasured to the full measure of his desserts as he is honored here for his many monuments of wisdom. Godspeed, Francis Bacon.]

Frank, you're lawyered

There is much waiting to be said: Ferrero on history and the art of statesmanship; why David West's blowhard translation of the "Aeneid" is no match for W. F. Jackson Knight-- and, most of all----------; but that will be seen shortly.

But for now, hats off to "The Apprentice:LA"s Frank.

Donald Trump told him he may not have the polish, but by the time he was through with Heidi, he and "Don Jr." (as if we care about him!) had to concur: he's a fighter.
But Frank showed more than his old fighting spirit. He offered Heidi a cross-examination, and his insistent, levelheaded forcefulness in honing in on the essential points in order to save his skin and compel Heidi to impale herself upon the stake of her own responsibilities was positively dazzling. The Trumps may think he's the boy for the construction sight, but if he's not the apprentice, a law degree may not be far behind.
The man has polish. Frank, I'm rootin' for you . . . .

The 5 Greatest Geniuses Ever (for Yahoos)

In feeble response to some mindless, inscrutable and (for my purposes) unsearchable askyahoo featurette, in which the popularly approved response consisted of: Stephen Hawkings, Einstein, Bill Gates, Marie Curie, and Louis Pasteur, I offer in brazen contempt the following:

1. Leibniz
2. Mozart
3. Francis Bacon
4. Alfred North Whitehead
5. Alexander the Great

Well, I AM being facetious; though, in terms of raw mental power alone, or in sheer fecundity of intellectual ideas, I can only fail to imagine which human being of history could possibly match Leibniz. Artistic production is a different kind of fecundity altogether, and in that we may well place Mozart ahead of all, ahead of Leibniz too; but as Mozart did not turn himself in the direction of the polymath I feel it only fair to let Leibniz carry off the laurels. If Bacon was no mathematician, he was a philosopher of the highest magnitude, as all the most sensitive souls of Romanticism appreciated (and that despite his obvious place as the progenitor of the Anglo-Empirical and Pragmatic traditions in philosophy, to say nothing of modern science and the Enlightenment itself); and, though I am aware that some, including such disparate souls as Julian Marias and Bertrand Russell seek to minimize his achievements, far the greater number of serious students of his work come away convinced of the awesome fecundity of his mind-- besides his efforts to promulgate the cultivation of material explanations and the discovery of efficient causes, which were fruitful even for Leibniz himself, and his articulation both of modern skepticism (in this the "Novum Organon" is still, I argue, unsurpassed) and of the scientific method (about which much can still be learned-- and perhaps, some things corrected!--by the careful examination of the same work), he is as much a visionary in the realm of the human sciences as Newton or Leibniz in the realms of physical science and mathematics. "The Advancement of Learning" is a still-unexhausted blueprint for the conquest of all knowledge: one may find all of the Enlightenment within it, the birth of sociology and anthropology, a system of aesthetics, a theory of rhetoric, of leadership, of history-- riches everywhere, penetrative discourse flowing outward in all directions, sweeping everything before it. A mere sampling of the "Essays" proves unassailably how nothing could escape this invincible man of thought. Bacon builds his science of the human upon sturdier foundations than any other science devised, and it still soars, Babel-like, above all other works of man. To heap upon him the labors of Shakespeare is equal parts redundancy and blasphemy. Such idle, unfounded speculations are merely intergalactic, for we know of no such species as could maintain such effort.

To Whitehead belongs the mantle of the Modern Leibniz. I can only consider, based upon his seniority and the obvious fecundity of his widespread speculations, that his was the greater part of the "Principia Mathematica." Famous as this work is, admittedly neither Russell nor Whitehead is ever quite accorded the name-dropping relish of a Frege, a Godel, or a Tarski. Perhaps the professional logicians are embarassed at the thought of a fellow logician descending to such a mere activity as building a philosophy (as even Russell, let it be admitted, fell to doing). To this we may add the astonishing, only possibly superseded, and hardly ever attended to, labor of his alternative Theory of Relativity. Then the mass of his processivist philosophy, touching as it does upon many questions of modern physics in a pertinent and unrelentingly probing way, and then his "humanistic" labors, concerning education and the popularization of the fruits of his mathematical, logical and scientific labors, which never blinded him (not, at least, from the moment he turned to metaphysics proper) to the awesome and indisputable role of philosophy itself. Compared to him, Russell is a bugbear and Wittgenstein a decadent Viennese gadfly.

I turn finally to Alexander the Great as a proper corrective to the obvious middle-school edification of reciting such triflers as Curie and Pasteur as world-historical geniuses, to say nothing of the Champion of Men, Gates. It is not to isotopes, or antibodies, but to empires that we should look for inspiration. To me, the regular laudations fed to the young (albeit in the completely vague terms that are endemic to American public education) of such people as Edison, Franklin, Jefferson and Da Vinci are almost as bad as those assignments where I and my fellow pupils had to crib the life of Cortez-- and Pizarro, and De Soto, and the whole lot of them-- out of the World Book Encyclopedia. Doubtless the litany of Conquistadors (at least a dozen of whom we had to know, I swear) has seen the axe of political correctness, but must we flatter the innate geekiness of children by telling them that the schmuck who invented the lightbulb is somehow the superior of such voiceless, unnamed and unknown ghosts as Bach, Plato, Virgil, Raphael? Or that a hundred-year patent is better cause than to build a nation? God knows someone else would've come along and invented the lightbulb in Edison's place-- think of the wireless, or the cinematograph. Hell, even CALCULUS happened simultaneously to fall within the ken of two brilliant minds. And Persia would have fallen too-- but in so visionary a fashion? To begin the dangerous, and certainly violent, work of building a multicultural empire, the astounding work of a youth who lived and died in his charismatic prime-- is this not more wholesome food for the imagination? Wholesome, because such a god will not come again, and because the violent parts add color and fire, the seasoning of the tragic and the extreme, to this exalted chimera, built on the very real sand of a couple of million square miles of territory and stamped indelibly upon not only the imaginations, but the very institutions, of a couple of ensuing millenia, the product of this young man's sweat and vision. Compared to this, all Bill Gates' largesse, flowing as smoothly and slowly as toothpaste worked back into the tube, is as inspiring as Nero opening up the granaries after the torching of Rome. That Gates never dissipated with any Poppaeas or debauched an Octavia (at least, Melinda ain't saying) counts for little in the light of his vapid neo-liberal imperialism, the necessary and expected concommitant of his rise to fortune as the blandest of microbarons. Neither industry nor philanthropy can build lasting institutions-- for these, a polis and a leader are required. Even Seleucus and Ptolemy, in truth, built more lasting and admirable works than the curent Bill-and-the-Billionaires Boy Club of capitalist charity will accomplish.

--And, to carry the day further against our historic techno-geeks: who would say that Petrarch could have written the "Paradiso" in Dante's place, or Beethoven have composed the Symphony in G-minor? Could "Paradise Lost" have waited for Dryden, or the "Phedre" for Voltaire? Yet astoundingly, the "research" tells us that women are more liable to name Einstein as a genius than Shakespeare! Women!! --Let this be a warning, O Educators, of the damned fruits ye sow. Worship your false gizmos, your digital timber and stone, your disinfectant Baals and radioactive Ashtoreths, and profanate your offspring to follow you in your knee-bending abominations! Your sons shall mate with cybergeeks, your swains shall draw manga books beneath their Juliets' balconies; instead of sonnets, ad copy shall flow off their spf 30-gleaming lips. Engineers shall couple while troubadours waste away under a forlorn dormroom's shade. The myrtle shall wilt while the lava-lamp glows. Jesus, and you wonder why every college kid wears sweatpants all the time? As in "Brave New World", when poetry is dead, even science lies unknown.

Postscript: I must refer the curious to an essay in the much-defunct magazine "Talk", concerning the non-world-historical stature of Stephen Hawkings, Physicist. The Oxbridge rumor has it (and Oxbridge rumor, O Gaudy Night!, is that very beast Virgil told you about) that his actual achievements add up to a couple of elegant mathematical theorems, unconfirmed by experimental science. His propaganda achievement, on the contrary, is astounding. He has stepped on, or rather, run over, some toes in his ascent to notoriety. Apparently though he contemplates the law of the heavens while listening to his Wagner, this immobile Siegfried has never really slain any dragons. In the enterprise of multidimensional chess, he has nor Einstein nor Newton in checkmate.

The Top Twenty Today

In the absence of ymdb.com, here's a sample of the films most prominent in my aesthetic database currently:

1. Fanny and Alexander (Bergman)
2. Sacrifice (Tarkovsky)
3. Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock)
4. Manhattan (Allen)
5. La Collectionneuse (Rohmer)
6. Cries and Whispers (Bergman)
7. Ludwig (Visconti)
8. Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (Truffaut)
9. Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)
10. Prenom: Carmen (Godard)
11. Marnie (Hitchcock)
12. Heaven's Gate (Cimino)
13. Notorious (Hitchcock)
14. Dangerous Liaisons (Frears/Hampton)
15. They Live by Night (Ray)
16. Napoleon (Gance)
17. North by Northwest (Hitchcock)
18. Persona (Bergman)
19. Swimming Pool (Ozon)
20. Laura (Preminger)

I hope Cecile Gaudechaux, Aurora and the other fine interlocutors of our favorite Franco-Anglaise film-fan website will be together again soon! . . .

Campaign '07

Conventional wisdom insists that governors make the best Presidents. How little such pundits must have mused on the careers of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton may be doubted, but the passing of Gerald Ford and the eulogies bestowed upon him should give occasion to point this up. Of course all we have heard about is Ford's character-- decent, modest-- and his pardoning of Nixon, along with a predictable offering of fresh hooey from Bob Woodward as to the deep "friendship" between Ford and Nixon, thus at once personalizing and debasing Ford's pardon of Nixon. This is perhaps Woodward's way of having his cake and eating it too-- positioning himself as an official spokesman of Washington's wisdom, the oracle granting the funeral libation, while reminding us all that he is the Oedipus who slew the Watergate Sphinx. But anyone with a passing knowledge of Richard Nixon, that great and greatly flawed enigmatical man, knows right well that Nixon's view of friendship was almost to the right of Napoleon's. Whatever kind sentiments Ford may have harbored for Nixon, RN can hardly have given a genuine fig for Ford-- at least not as a rival president, for all his contemporaries were such deadly rivals, and for Nixon, with perhaps even a modicum of justice, they all failed to measure up to himself.
But Ford, though of humble House stock, managed to hit the White House running in a way that eluded the much more clever Carter and Clinton. It serves as a healthy vindication of the Washington Insider, who knows much more about how Washington itself-- to say nothing of the world beyond, whose violent affairs so little impinge upon the state capitols, least of all in Little Rock!-- runs. Nominators of presidential candidates would be well to remember this, and thus, Tom Vilsack, I'm afraid I won't be taking your number . . .
More offensive, however, are Barack Obama's insinuations of an incipient campaign. That he offers a rather vitriolic explanation of Washington malaise in terms of post-60s babyboomer powerhogging-- something about college bull sessions unleashed upon the corridors of power, if you can swallow that-- leaves nothing to vindicate his own navel-gazing generation's pretensions to run things better, if it actually has any real pretensions of running things at all. After all, politics is an old man's game. It is, however, the perpetual disease of rank-and-file Democrats to lust after a Jack'n'Bob figure who can embody all that "youthful vitality"-- never mind that Kennedy's political virility, and perhaps the other brand too, was readily outstripped by that of the indefatiguable Lyndon Johnson. For god's sake, can we agree the Kennedys are unmasked already, and move on! I imagine Obama devouring "The Gospel of RFK" and writing his playbook accordingly. That Kennedy's response to the crisis of '68 wasn't exciting I won't try to prove, but his specifics were probably patchy enough then-- in today's unthorough times, I expect much less from Obama, and I expect I won't be surprised. Howard Dean, now's your hour!

An Unbreakable Webb

The presumptive elevation of Jim Webb to the Senate seat in Virginia is perhaps the most gratifying thing, for this Virginia Democrat, to happen yet, during the unfolding elevation of this red state to Another Shade of Purple. The laconic, cheerily gruff Webb, for all his Reaganite background, is a radical centrist's dream: campaigning in all-out, hit-the-rural-counties Mark Warner fashion, Webb comes across like a butcher Bill Clinton: with an adorably slight pudge about the face, Webb exudes the positive energy that beaming crowds trust and adore, yet has a mental wireiness that made him the easy champ in his "Meet the Press" debate with Allen. That energy has been crucial to his campaign style, but more fundamentally, it informs his political vision, and will almost certainly make him a maverick Senator, and perhaps a highly visible one too, nationally. Certainly the Democrats owe him enormously. Toppling George Allen, a not-so-long-ago Presidential-hopeful frontrunner, spells the almost-certain doom of any repeat of the Bush presidency in the near future. The silky-rough contours of Allen's faux-populist persona, with its endless repetitions, both in person and in his ads, of moronic ad hominems about his "opponent's Washington allies" (before this election, where were allies to be found on Capitol Hill for a Democrat?) and about "how we do things in Virginia", had been carefully cultivated through a long political career to maximize his star-wattage with Red State voters. A governor and then senator, Allen was a bona fide star in Virginia, and the GOP groomed him vociferously for national leadership. Like Santorum, Allen is a cold customer, a well-oiled political machine fueled by expert and energetic fundraising, and, though perhaps more grinning a creature than Santorum (who, like Frist, comes across as an overzealous undertaker who has proceeded to embalm himself), may have been even more empty as a politician. Both have been dismissed, and the result is that the Republican Party is going to have to seriously shrift about for new leadership; and, though not a foregone conclusion, it makes sense that this should include new ideas as well.

As for new ideas for the Democrats, I don't necessarily feel we're bound for a more "conservative" party. The kneejerk brohaha about 'bipartisanship' and 'moderates' from the stuffed-shirts of broadcasting (yes, I mean you Tom Brokaw!) notwithstanding, these are not Reagan Democrats eager to bolt over to the GOP side. They're new Democrats by choice-- some of them, like Webb, Republicans who became eager to bolt over to the Democrats' side. Many of them have spoken against this war in terms that would make the McGovern campaign proud; almost all are signed on for the increase in the minimum wage. It stands to reason that a version of the McCain compromise on immigration can now move forward. Calculations will be made as to whether a Presidential veto (number two!) of a stem-cell provision can be overwhelmed. None of this means revolutionary change, so there is certainly promise of moderation, if you will. But our tv pundits are not helping us to figure out what 'left' and 'right' mean today, in an America with few committed leftists or overt Fascists. The Democrats seem, as a rule, willing to forgive gun-ownership as a matter of choice, and the fortunate outcome in South Dakota means that Western voters may be willing to begin to consider abortion as a matter of choice too. Perhaps the Democrats are heading for a reappraisal of the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt (not one of their actual ranks, I understand, but obviously a spiritual predecessor!) if not of FDR. David Brooks at least seems to sense that the electorate is craving another Carter '76 sort of figure. Perhaps the Dems can find executive material more suitable. As things stand, Howard Dean's strategy of full competition in all 50 states has paid off, even if many of the gains were won by solidifying the blue blocks of the Northeastern Congressional map. The "liberal" Pelosi will make compromises to keep her new flock faithful to a common agenda, certainly, but lets not forget that the "liberal" Dean-and-Pelosi team (the new Kennedys and Clintons of the Republicans smear-lexicon) won this thing, big, by their own smarts and toughs. They are (in the President's faintly underpraising rebuttals to John Kerry) "plenty smart and plenty brave" to have succeeded in this. And though Mark Warner-- perhaps the most likely, and most exciting, Jimmy Carter redux figure on the horizon-- has announced his certain abstention from '08, Jim Webb carries the Warner-Kaine revolution from the governor's mansion in Virginia up to Capitol Hill. Likely to get along with the silver fox John Warner (a fellow navy secretary of yore), Webb will give his homestate a genuinely centrist, forward-thinking direction from the Senate floor. Undoubtedly the most interesting of the new crop of Senators, Webb has a guaranteed six-year career ahead of him as one of Washington's most exciting and articulate voices.