I stupidly watched a Soviet science-fiction movie from the mid 80s this morning. We don’t get to see very many in-depth expressions of such a vastly different political reality.
Will Chinese movies ever shock American sensibilities?
My guess is that the American point-of-view is now so universal that no mass-market film can escape it.
A few times now, on television mostly but once on the local NPR station, KPCC, I’ve caught breathless promos for “special reports” on race, gender and the Democratic presidential hopefuls.
Forty-three percent of all public school students are Hispanic and/or Black. Fifty-seven percent of college students are not men.
When will we discuss race, gender and the Republican presidential hopefuls?
Far From Heaven is the best Todd Haynes movie? I loved it. Beautiful, complicated and simple. Emotionally stirring and intellectually expansive. A Living Imitation of an Imitation of Life.
The Science of Sleep may be Michel Gondry’s best attempt at a movie, yet. For all of its trickery, it’s very honest.
I wonder if the protagonist is a stand-in for the director? And if so, is Gondry conceding some vulnerability, suggesting his motives for constantly showing off – changing the subject.
Bloomberg, via The San Jose Mercury News, has the tidiest summary of the subprime lending fiasco I’ve read yet.
It’s full of great quotes.
On the ripple effect: “The magnified losses caused by derivatives made it possible for a small number of defaulting subprime borrowers to freeze world credit markets.”
On the basic miscalculation, part one: “From 2001 to 2006, as U.S. home prices rose 50 percent nationally, owning the debt and guessing that borrowers would keep current paid off. Since July 2006, however, when housing supply began to outstrip demand…”
On the basic miscalculation, part two: “‘These are loans based on the borrowers’ ability to refinance rather than the borrowers’ ability to repay,’ Einhorn said.”
On the banks’ incentive to make bad loans: “If the borrowers defaulted, the bankers still got their fees.”
On the subprime derivatives market: “Investors didn’t know what they were buying.”
Anthony Lewis, reviewing The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin:
George W. Bush fit the conservative judicial campaign perfectly. As governor of Texas he indicated that judicial niceties were not at the top of his concerns. A study by the Chicago Tribune, published in June 2000, showed that he had refused clemency in all 131 death cases that had reached him. (Alberto Gonzales was legal counsel to Governor Bush and provided memoranda on clemency petitions.) Bush explained that the defendants had had “full access to a fair trial.” In a third of those cases the lawyer who represented the defendant at trial or on appeal had been or was later disbarred or otherwise sanctioned.
Trying to do a piece of extended drama that embodied the values of pragmatic progressive reformism would be impossible. The results, if serious and true to the spirit, would be deadly dull. Moderate optimism about human nature and the possibility for change is, if done in an entertaining way, the stuff of light romantic comedies, not big-time drama…
In political terms [The Wire is] a dark vision that, like Dostoevsky’s, veers wildly between radical and reactionary and that exists, fundamentally, outside the lines of “normal” arguments about policy. Simon believes that we are doomed, and political progress requires us to believe that we are not. But aesthetically it’s an extremely powerful conceit. And at the end of the day, it’s a television show not a treatise on urban policy.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: politics and good intentions have ruined more filmmakers than drugs and money combined. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That goes double if the knowledge involved is political in nature.
Lejos de mi tierra, by Vicente Fernandez, may be the best song written about contemporary Mexican immigration to the United States.
Two unrelated quotes. Both are interesting.
One:
When a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain.
“In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories,” Eagleman explained. “And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took.”
Eagleman added this illusion “is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you’re a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you’re older, you’ve seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by.”
Two:
To a Democrat, if you get a blurb in the Washington Post, one day, that’s a public relations victory. To a Republican, once that blurb is repeated every day for 30 years then they declare victory.
No End In Sight. Were it broadcast at prime time during the Summer of 2008…
A taste of the future: U.S. aircraft carrier denied access to Hong Kong
Update: By the time the Chinese changed their minds, the U.S. aircraft carrier had already reversed course.
WNYC’s Radio Lab is my favorite radio program and a gold standard for pop intellectualism.
Here are links to mp3 files of each episode, should you be able to DownThemAll:
Season One
Who Am I?
Stress
Emergence
Time
Season Two
Detective Stories
Musical Language (really fun!)
Morality
Where Am I?
Space
Season Three
Placebo
Sleep
Zoos
Memory and Forgetting
Mortality
Fourteen brilliant episodes are easily worth $28 to WNYC online.
Keen observation: “I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but George W. Bush is being disappeared from the presidential campaign and everyone’s running against incumbent Hillary Clinton.”
What’s the opposite of schadenfreude? I feel that right now for Gordon Ramsay. His show, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, is like a television Tampopo: brilliantly concocted, edifying, romantic.
The American version of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on the Fox Network is like a blackened hamburger made out of AAA filet mignon. The footage is ugly, the exposition clumsy and obvious – like a drunk repeating himself.
The opening sequence mars the entire operation: where the British series used the motif of a single knife cutting through the air of a kitchen, the American series uses a dozen knives – and throws them, inexplicably, at the star of the show.
Deadwood, which turns out to be about America and Shakespeare, ends badly. It’s as if the producers found out the show had been canceled with two episodes left in the third season and then devoted those remaining episodes to killing the show slowly so the audience wouldn’t miss it when it was gone. What a tremendously great show, otherwise.
Short-term fluctuations, often driven by events beyond the control of the party in power, are inevitable. So the way to win is not to win every election but to control the terms of the debate. The conservative movement’s signal triumph is to have done just this, reshaping what is possible in American politics over the long term.
Politics is a test of imagination.