“Tell Me Why,” written by Taylor Swift and Liz Rose (2008)

Here’s to you and your temperYes, I remember what you said last nightAnd I know that you see what you’re doing to meTell me whyWhy, tell me why
I take a step back, let you goI told you I’m not bulletproofNow you know

“Tell Me Why,” written by Taylor Swift and Liz Rose (2008)

Here’s to you and your temper
Yes, I remember what you said last night
And I know that you see what you’re doing to me
Tell me why
Why, tell me why

I take a step back, let you go
I told you I’m not bulletproof
Now you know


Blue Lines Revisited: The Oasis Moment

And one that has nothing to do with whether Greenwald is wrong or right about PRISM (he’s wrong, by the way) and why that matters. Ultimately, in a debate like this, the best thing a politically engaged intellectual can do is write in a way that does not short-circuit thought. And my, oh, my, does Greenwald’s style of political discourse short-circuit thought—with a fierceness.

Rick Perlstein, “On Glenn Greenwald and His Fans,” The Nation, June 18, 2013

And:

The bottom line is that there’s an attitude out there that anything bad anyone says about the NSA must be a priori true, and that anything bad anyone says about the NSA must have already been said by Glenn Greenwald, and that anyone who questions Greenwald about anything must be questioning Greenwald about everything, and thus thinks the NSA (and its boss Barack Obama) is swell.

This is why I find Glenn Greenwald tiresome, even though he has done and will continue to do valuable work. I don’t doubt his honesty, but I do question his judgment. As a thinker he’s suspect. His mindset is of a man forever readying for total war.


All they needed now was a film — and Chambers had the perfect script. Months before, he had received a call from a would-be producer named Barry Geller. Geller had purchased the rights to Roger Zelazny’s science fiction novel, Lord of Light, written his own treatment, raised a few million dollars in starting capital from wealthy investors, and hired Jack Kirby, the famous comic book artist who cocreated X-Men, to do concept drawings. Along the way, Geller imagined a Colorado theme park based on Kirby’s set designs that would be called Science Fiction Land; it would include a 300-foot-tall Ferris wheel, voice-operated mag-lev cars, a “planetary control room” staffed by robots, and a heated dome almost twice as tall as the Empire State Building. Geller had announced his grand plan in November at a press conference attended by Jack Kirby, former football star and prospective cast member Rosey Grier, and several people dressed like visitors from the future. Shortly thereafter, Geller’s second-in-command was arrested for embezzling production funds, and the Lord of Light film project evaporated.

Joshuah Bearman, “How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans From Tehran,” Wired, 2007

I wonder if there were any fans of the Lord of Light novel, fans obsessive enough to have heard in the late ’70s that a Hollywood producer was interested in adapting the work for film, that Jack Kirby had been brought aboard to do artwork. I wonder if those fans heard that there might even be a theme park based on their beloved book if only the film were successful enough.

I wonder if they nervously anticipated the release of the movie, and then caught wind that it had been shelved due to legal difficulties. But then they heard new reports from Hollywood:

When the ads appeared, Hollywood Reporter and Variety writers called, generating small news articles in each magazine. “Two noted Hollywood makeup artists — one an Oscar winner — have turned producers,” read an article in the January 25, 1980, Hollywood Reporter. “Their first motion picture being Argo, a science fantasy fiction, from a story by Teresa Harris … Shooting will begin in the south of France, and then move to the Mideast … depending on the political climate.” About the cast, Bob Sidell was quoted as saying, “We will use substantial names. At the moment we are sworn to secrecy.” The coverage in turn generated further interest in this new Hollywood player soon to start filming in the Middle East.

Lord of Light will hit the big screen after all! With a new name, sure, but this is going to be great! Except, after that, those fans never heard anything more. Until 2012 when Argo was revived…

…and it turned out to be some fucking Ben Affleck vehicle about people not making Lord of Light into a movie.

OK, there are probably zero people like that. But if there are, I feel for you, Lord of Light diehards. I hope someone one day gives your favorite novel the silver screen treatment it deserves.

Anyway, the Wired article is perhaps better than Argo, which I enjoyed.

3
Jun 17

Here is a book about Detroit. I wrote a review of it for the latest issue of American Review. (Full disclosure: I am a subeditor at AR.)

I was introduced to America’s motor city in the winter of 2005, landing at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport at dawn off a red-eye flight. I was there to visit a family friend who lived, like so many other white folks in the city’s metropolitan area, not in the city itself, but in one of the less dysfunctional suburbs that ring the outskirts — in her case, a working class neighbourhood in the Westside enclave of Livonia.
It was getting ready to snow that day, and the grey skies did little to brighten the city. As my host and I drove around downtown — Detroit long ago gave itself over entirely to the automobile — the overcast conditions lent even the parts of the city yet to succumb to urban decay an air of hard scrabble gloom. The refurbished Fox Theatre, the gleaming Renaissance Center hulked over the river, the gigantic sculpted tigers prowling the outskirts of the pristine new ballpark, the uncharacteristic bustle of Greektown, and the rare neighbourhoods in which lavish mansions left over from the city’s more prosperous days were still well-kept seemed less a sign of life and more a stubborn refusal to succumb to the popular conception of Detroit as a 139 square mile urban hospice.
My host didn’t try to pretend Detroit was not disintegrating, and tolerated well my prurient fascination with its evacuated boulevards and its acres of inner-city prairie interrupted by the odd boarded-up shopfront or what locals call “party stores” — outlets catering for the ever-resilient demand for liquor, lottery tickets, and payday loans. But she insisted that I also see the parts of the city that defied the death sentence the rest of the nation had written for it. Detroiters, understandably, get prickly if you start to pretend theirs is a city that exists as a relic rather than a real place where actual people — seven hundred thousand of them, in fact — live and, in lesser numbers, work.

[and etc.]

Here is a book about Detroit. I wrote a review of it for the latest issue of American Review. (Full disclosure: I am a subeditor at AR.)

I was introduced to America’s motor city in the winter of 2005, landing at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport at dawn off a red-eye flight. I was there to visit a family friend who lived, like so many other white folks in the city’s metropolitan area, not in the city itself, but in one of the less dysfunctional suburbs that ring the outskirts — in her case, a working class neighbourhood in the Westside enclave of Livonia.

It was getting ready to snow that day, and the grey skies did little to brighten the city. As my host and I drove around downtown — Detroit long ago gave itself over entirely to the automobile — the overcast conditions lent even the parts of the city yet to succumb to urban decay an air of hard scrabble gloom. The refurbished Fox Theatre, the gleaming Renaissance Center hulked over the river, the gigantic sculpted tigers prowling the outskirts of the pristine new ballpark, the uncharacteristic bustle of Greektown, and the rare neighbourhoods in which lavish mansions left over from the city’s more prosperous days were still well-kept seemed less a sign of life and more a stubborn refusal to succumb to the popular conception of Detroit as a 139 square mile urban hospice.

My host didn’t try to pretend Detroit was not disintegrating, and tolerated well my prurient fascination with its evacuated boulevards and its acres of inner-city prairie interrupted by the odd boarded-up shopfront or what locals call “party stores” — outlets catering for the ever-resilient demand for liquor, lottery tickets, and payday loans. But she insisted that I also see the parts of the city that defied the death sentence the rest of the nation had written for it. Detroiters, understandably, get prickly if you start to pretend theirs is a city that exists as a relic rather than a real place where actual people — seven hundred thousand of them, in fact — live and, in lesser numbers, work.


[and etc.]


The “honor code” that Brooks claims was violated is perhaps nothing more than condescension mitigated by social obligation.

Amy Davidson, “David Brooks and the mind of Edward Snowden,” The New Yorker, June 11, 2013

But “condescension mitigated by social obligation” is basically David Brooks’s entire schtick right?

EDIT: Brooks, as I’ve written before, seems to have a greater horror of impoliteness than of injustice.”


Hey guys, it’s neat how ‘Ye’s all political now, right?

The fans want the feeling of A Tribe Called Quest:

I wonder if you see things in a more race-aware way now, later in your career, than you did then. The intensity of the feelings on “Watch the Throne” is much sharper.

No, it’s just being able to articulate yourself better. “All Falls Down” is the same [stuff]. I mean, I am my father’s son. I’m my mother’s child. That’s how I was raised. I am in the lineage of Gil Scott-Heron, great activist-type artists. But I’m also in the lineage of a Miles Davis — you know, that liked nice things also.

  • “You know the kids gon’ act a fool/When you stop the programs for after school”
  • “Drug dealer buy Jordans, crackhead buy crack/And the white man get paid off of all of that”
  • “They take me to the back and pat me/Asking me about some khakis/But some black people walk in, I bet you they show off their token blackie”
  • “Racism’s still alive they just be concealing it”
  • “Is it cool to rap about gold/If I told the world I copped it from Ghana and Mali?”
  • etc.

Here, by the way, is one of the many reasons why I don’t buy the idea that “conservative civil libertarians” — or libertarianism in general — are a meaningful political force. Once a politician reaches a certain point of liberalism, she’s going to be suspicious of the surveillance state. In the realm of conservatism, opposition to government intrusion on civil liberties occasionally exists, but it’s mostly just an accident. 

Here, by the way, is one of the many reasons why I don’t buy the idea that “conservative civil libertarians” — or libertarianism in general — are a meaningful political force. Once a politician reaches a certain point of liberalism, she’s going to be suspicious of the surveillance state. In the realm of conservatism, opposition to government intrusion on civil liberties occasionally exists, but it’s mostly just an accident. 


Guys, I have it confirmed straight from the source. Official canon. Nemo and his dad are immigrant fish living in some kind of Little America in the Great Barrier Reef. I had no idea Australia’s aquatic communities were so multicultural!

Guys, I have it confirmed straight from the source. Official canon. Nemo and his dad are immigrant fish living in some kind of Little America in the Great Barrier Reef. I had no idea Australia’s aquatic communities were so multicultural!


Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It’s an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s melodramatic American classic. Luhrmann, as expected, has turned “Gatsby” into a theme-park ride. But he’s done it in exactly the right way. He hasn’t tried to make the novel more respectable, intellectual, or realistic. Instead, he’s taken “The Great Gatsby” very seriously just as it is.

“Gatsby” is hard to pin down. On the one hand, it’s broadly understood as a classic American novel, which suggests that it must have important things to say about the twenties, money, love, and the American dream. On the other, it seems self-evidently to be about style over substance. It’s short (only a hundred and fifty pages); its plot is absurd; and it examines only the thinnest wedge of American life.

Joshua Rothman, “The serious superficiality of The Great Gatsby,” The New Yorker, May 13, 2013

This argument is such a boldly counter-intuitive one that I’ve seen it made in at least half-a-dozen different places around the internet since I saw the movie last night (e.g.). It doesn’t wash; Spring Breakers is a better Gatsby than Luhrmann’s if it’s dizzying crapulence you’re looking for. (As suggested here and here.)

But, yes, Fitzgerald’s story is lurid and shallow and all of those things, but it isn’t the way Luhrmann’s is; the artificiality of the novel is more like that of Mad Men, which captures the novel’s spirit better than this film. Mad Men, like Gatsby, has at its center a Midwestern Horatio Alger, one with a shady past and a false identity. It seeks to capture the entirety of an era while never shifting its gaze from the wealthiest slice of its society. And, importantly, it has that same oneiric quality, as well as a seductive elevation of style — as distinct from spectacle — over substance. (Gatsby with its language, Mad Men with its design aesthetic.) It has that same pervasive melancholy in spite of itself. Both are soapy, and sometimes preposterously so, but soapy doesn’t need to mean loud or busy. And, sorry Baz, but it should never mean boring.

Isabel is right about the shirts, though I don’t agree with her about Leo. I do about Tobey Maguire though. He wandered through this picture with that air of dimwitted amiability that seems to have become the essence of the only character he knows how to play. The performance wasn’t wrong for the part he was playing, but it felt like someone’s vision of the role was Peter Parker as Nick Carraway and so this casting choice was made.

The framing device of Carraway as author was dreadful, exactly as bad as when Life of Pi made that mistake — though at least here it didn’t seem as if it was done because the brains behind it thought they needed a white guy to act as an intermediary between the Indian main character and the audience. See here for more:

The most irritating thing about The Great Gatsby (which I mostly enjoyed) was Tobey Maguire’s voice-over. “He had the kind of smile that seemed to believe you, and understand you as you wanted to be believed and understood,” says Tobey over a shot of Leonardo DiCaprio giving us exactly that kind of smile. And then, later, “Gatsby looked in that moment as if he had killed a man,” Tobey says over an image of DiCaprio looking — yes! — exactly like someone who had killed a man.

There’s something uncomfortable about Luhrmann’s apparent fascination with the physicality of black bodies, though there’s a chance he may be channeling Fitgerald’s presentation of the same, viz, for instance:

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

EDIT:

This though, from the New Yorker piece:

Fitzgerald understood the pleasures of giving in, and he saw people as desperate to give in to nearly anything — a drink, a person, a story, a feeling, a song, a crowd, an idea. We were especially willing, he thought, to give in to ideas — to fantasies. “Gatsby” captures, with great vividness, the push and pull of illusion and self-delusion; the danger and thrill of forgetting, lying, and fantasizing; the hazards and the indispensability of dreaming and idealization.

And Luhrmann doesn’t know how to seduce; he can only aim to awe. Which, sure, might be like Gatsby the man, but not much at all like Gatsby the story.



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