Month: January 2011

Saturday Night At The Movies

Double Feature: The weight of water

By Dennis Hartley

Undercurrent of angst: And Everything is Going Fine

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.
-Spalding Gray

Who was it who once dismissed the art of the monologist as “comedy, without punch lines”? Oh, that’s right…it was me. OK, I will confess-when I used to work as a stand-up, I always felt a bit envious of my more long-winded show-biz cousins, because generally, they got to sit down (I’ve always been a lazy bastard). Not only that, but they got to sit behind a desk, upon which they were allowed to keep notes (in case they lost their place-which probably makes actors jealous, too). They could get away with using props-without being accused of “hiding behind them”, like stand-ups are. Also, why is it that when a stand-up comic performs a long-form piece with props, it’s a “one person-show”…never a “monologue”? Do you have to be “born” a monologist? But then, as years passed and I allegedly became older and wiser, I came to admire the monologists, because I realized what it was that separates them from stand ups. Stand-ups are insecure and desperate for acceptance. That’s why we’re willing to go out there “naked” with only a mike in front of a roomful of hostile drunks, perform the same 20 minute act night after night, collect $50, and dash for the exit, before the sense of shame and humiliation over what we do for a living fully sinks in (I believe it was Jay Leno who once quite accurately likened the life of a stand up to that of a cheap hooker). A monologist, on the other hand, has to have an admirable sense of confidence in themselves. Confident enough to believe that the minutiae of their lives is so fascinating, that people will pay good money to sit in rapt attention for 90 minutes while they prattle on about themselves.

Whether or not you are going to enjoy watching And Everything is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh’s new documentary about the life of the late Spalding Gray (king of all monologists) largely hinges on how open you are to paying good money to sit in rapt attention for 90 minutes while someone prattles on about themselves. That’s because Soderbergh is shrewd enough to let a man who was nothing if not a compulsive (and gifted) storyteller tell you his own story, in his own words. For Gray’s fans, Soderbergh’s film could be what the Beatles Anthology was to Fab Four aficionados-a masterfully edited and chronologically assembled compendium of clips from TV interviews and performance excerpts spanning the breadth of his career, spiced throughout by rare and previously unseen footage. What emerges is a portrait of the artist, narrated by the artist.

Like many moviegoers, my first awareness of Gray came from watching Swimming To Cambodia, Jonathan Demme’s wonderfully realized 1987 film version of Gray’s stage show, in which Gray was able to weave a mesmerizing and vastly entertaining monologue from his experiences working on the 1984 film,The Killing Fields. He had a relatively minor acting part in the film, but the stage piece it inspired is a veritable epic; it may start off like just another backstage tale, but as diffused through the prism of a great storyteller, somehow it eventually manages to touch on life, the universe and everything. The film was a surprise hit, and although he continued to take acting roles, he was always best at just “playing” Spalding Gray, particularly in subsequent film versions of three more stage shows, (the 1988 HBO presentation Spalding Gray: Terrors of Pleasure, and two feature films-Monster in a Box from 1992 and Gray’s Anatomy, released in 1996).

There is an elephant in the room that Soderbergh largely sidesteps, and that is Gray’s tragic end. In March of 2004, after a two-month disappearance, his body was recovered from the East River, off Greenpoint in Brooklyn. It was a presumed suicide, as Gray had been suffering from severe depression (and had made several attempts to take his own life) since a 2001 car accident that left him with a fractured skull and shattered hip. There is some footage of Gray recounting the accident, and hobbling around on crutches, but no further elaboration on what it eventually led to. Maybe the director does brush against the subject in his own indirect fashion; in one interview clip Gray jokes about how Soderbergh had talked him into taking a “perfect part” in his 1993 film King of the Hill-playing a depressive character who eventually kills himself. And there are several clips (from both interviews and stage shows) where Gray refers to his mother’s suicide; perhaps the most revealing quote comes when he says “I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave.” We can never know who or what Gray thought might be waiting for him when he took that plunge into the watery depths, but if dead men really could tell tales, his would certainly be the best.

Drowning in a sea of love: Undertow

Just when you thought you’d had your fill of romantic ghost stories about closeted Peruvian fishermen, along comes writer-director Javier Fuentes-Leon with his debut film Contracorriente (“Undertow”). And yes, I am being facetious. A cross between Making Love and Truly Madly Deeply, it is a unique, compassionate, beautifully moving tale; it is the most resonant Spanish language parable I’ve seen since Like Water for Chocolate.

The story is set on the Peruvian coast. We meet an amiable, locally popular young fisherman named Miguel (Cristian Mercado) and his lovely (and very pregnant) wife Mariela (Tatiana Astengo), who live in a sleepy little village-the kind of place where everyone not only knows your name, but pretty much everything that you might be up to at any given time of the day or night. Which makes it a minor miracle that no one knows about Miguel’s amor secreto-an artist/photographer named Santiago (Manolo Cardona), an urban ex-pat who lives in an isolated beach shack, where he works on his paintings. Although he’s a low-key and gentle man, Santiago lives in literal and figurative isolation from the rest of the village; due to the fact that he is an openly gay agnostic. In a small town heavily imbued with the deeply conservative values of both traditional machismo culture and the Catholic Church, this would count for two fairly big strikes against him.

Because of his high standing with fellow fishermen and the village priest (and the fact that he is a father-to-be), Miguel is bound and determined to keep his languid, passionate trysts on the beach with Santiago compartmentalized. “I’m not that way,” he insists with a barely convincing air of macho indignation, when Santiago breaches the subject of total and open commitment (denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, as the saying goes). Mercado is a subtle actor; the look on his face as he stalks away from his lover after the spat conveys both the conflict in his heart and the inner turmoil he is suffering from due to his romantic confusion (because he does enjoy a loving relationship with his wife as well).

As the birth of his child becomes more imminent, Miguel really begins to get jumpy. After Santiago “accidently” runs into Mariela in the public market and offers to buy her a good luck candle for her baby after striking up a friendly conversation, Miguel angrily forbids him to make any more contact with his family. Santiago honors his request, and the lovers cool their heels for a while. Imagine Miguel’s surprise when, sometime after the birth of his new son, he is awakened by a noise in the middle of the night and discovers a distraught Santiago sitting on his kitchen floor. Naturally, he frantically attempts to shoo him out of his house without awakening his wife; it doesn’t work. Miguel then has an even bigger surprise when Mariela asks him who he is talking to, even though Santiago is sitting right between them in full view. “Your face is white,” his wife says with concern (as if he has seen a you-know-what). Santiago has accidently drowned while taking an ocean swim; and the only one who can “see” him now is Miguel. According to village tradition, the dead cannot truly “rest” unless they receive a public burial at sea. Santiago desperately wants Miguel to recover his body and perform this time-honored local ritual. Miguel’s new dilemma: Free Santiago’s soul (and come out of the closet in the process), or keep his secret and damn his lover to eternal torment.

The director and his cinematographer (Mauricio Vidal) utilize the inherent beauty of the tropical South American coastline to good effect (it’s interesting to note that Cabo Blanco, where the most of the principal photography was done, was also where some of the location footage for the 1958 version of The Old Man and the Sea was shot). The performances by the three leads are quite engaging. The film won the audience award at the 2010 Sundance Festival-not surprising considering the emotional wallop packed by the film’s denouement (I frankly didn’t expect the waterworks to kick in so intensely-I was blubbering like a baby, and it’s been a while since a film had that kind of effect on me). Even though it is a tale steeped in magical realism, it ultimately earns its points by shedding some light on one of life’s biggest mysteries-the complexity of the human heart.

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Good Reads

by digby

It’s very uncivil to bring this up, but what the heck. To those who say that talk of “theocracy” in our nation is silly and hyperbolic, it’s probably at least a fairly good idea to acknowledge the fact that there is some very big money behind it:

In its discussion of the now well-known ties between the Ahmansons and Christian Reconstructionist founder Rousas John Rushdoony, the article provides yet another example of the inability of the media to take seriously Rushdoony’s impact and legacy. While most mentions of Rushdoony are followed by the simplistic and inflammatory tagline “who advocated stoning of homosexuals,” in this case the Christianity Today article allows Roberta Ahmanson to paint Rushdoony as an man who spent his life struggling with his family history and whose ideas aren’t really all “that bad” but are misunderstood in contemporary culture.
[…]
The Ahmansons supplied crucial early support to Rushdoony’s writing, his early efforts in the creationist movement, and to the establishment of his Chalcedon Foundation (which Rushdoony’s son Mark now runs). In 2004 Max Blumenthal traced the Ahmansons’ contributions and argued that they were key financial backers in the effort to bring about theocracy as envisioned by Rushdoony. In the Christianity Today piece, though, Roberta Ahmanson is quoted as saying “I never was (a theocrat), and I don’t know if Howard ever was either. I’m afraid to say this, but also, what would be so bad about it?” read on

Yeah, what would be so bad about it?

And here’s a long letter to John Boehner about what’s wrong with conservatism from a man who’s been around a while. Boehner probably won’t read it but you should.

Also:

Josh Marshall on Palin

The Nation on Beck vs Frances Fox Piven

What’s behind the bizarre right wing obsession with the Gold Standard?

Niewert: violent rhetoric and the mentally ill

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They Hope There Won’t Be Blood

by digby

“Here at RedState, we too have drawn a line. We will not endorse any candidate who will not reject the judicial usurpation of Roe v. Wade and affirm that the unborn are no less entitled to a right to live simply because of their size or their physical location. Those who wish to write on the front page of RedState must make the same pledge. The reason for this is simple: once before, our nation was forced to repudiate the Supreme Court with mass bloodshed. We remain steadfast in our belief that this will not be necessary again, but only if those committed to justice do not waiver or compromise, and send a clear and
unmistakable signal to their elected officials of what must be necessary to earn our support.”

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“Less Lethal Weapons”

by digby

I think that’s a good way to think about tasers. It comes from a sharp doctor in Michigan:

Ypsilanti police said officers stopped a vehicle for excessive noise and used a Taser on the driver, who police said was trying to assault officers.

Now, the City Council and others who viewed the police surveillance video are wondering if police used improper force.

Police said the man resisted arrest and officers were forced to use the Taser on him.

Dr. Doug Smith is a retired professor of pathology. He said he requested to see the video because he is convinced there is more to the story.

“I became interested because there were two deaths last summer of people who were tasered,” Smith said.

Smith said he did not see any evidence on the video of the man trying to assault officers.

“You can see his feet in the video, and there is no evidence that he is kicking at anyone,” Smith said. “Even if you give police credit for the first tasering, but the second, the third, he has hand cuffs on the second time. He is on the ground, not struggling”

Smith said police need to realize that a Taser is not a nondeadly weapon, it is just less deadly than a gun.

“Tasers are not a non-lethal weapon, they’re a less-lethal weapon, ” Smith said. “Police have to respect them.”

You can see the video here. Like hundreds of others I’ve seen over the past few years, it’s clear to me that the tasering is excessive.

Even the police don’t like them — when it’s done to them, that is:

A Dallas police officer has filed the latest in a string of lawsuits around the country that claim jolts of electricity received during Taser training caused fractured backs and other severe injuries.

The makers of the popular stun gun, however, say that their products are safe and credit them with saving lives by providing officers with a nonlethal option to guns when confronting unruly criminals.

Dallas police Officer Andrew Butler’s lawsuit, filed Jan. 6 against Taser International, is thought to be the first of its kind in Texas. He alleges Taser did not fully disclose the risks associated with being shot with the device in the academy to his police trainers. The city of Dallas is not a defendant.

“I love my department. I love being a cop. But I dodged a bullet,” said Butler, who was able to return to patrol after he had surgery to replace a fractured vertebra. “I can’t live with having knowledge that this can harm an officer and not do something.”

The dangers of Tasers have been known for years. In Dallas, the deaths of at least two drug-addled suspects who were stunned during arrests have been connected in part to shocks from the devices.

But in recent years, police officers around the country have begun filing lawsuits claiming they were hurt when taking a Taser shot. The stun guns are regularly used on recruits in training at many police academies.

“That has been the secret injury that Taser doesn’t like to talk about,” said Robert Haslam, a Fort Worth attorney who is chairman of the American Association for Justice’s Taser Litigation Group.

Several dozen lawsuits by police officers have been filed, but only one has gone to trial. Taser prevailed in that 2005 Arizona case because the officer had a pre-existing back condition, said John Dillingham, the Phoenix attorney who represented the injured former Maricopa County sheriff’s deputy.

Dillingham said the half-dozen other cases of injured officers which he’s handled have been dismissed, but he declined to talk about settlement agreements.

“There’s no reason for an officer to take a hit in training,” Dillingham said. “The only reason to demonstrate it is that it works and it’s safe. You don’t need to get shocked to know that.”

Can everyone see the problem with that logic? I knew that you could.

One hopes that it’s only a matter of time before judges begin to see it too. Of course there’s always a chance that they will rule that it’s only “bad people” who get tasered so it’s fine to restrict their use against police in training while allowing them to be used on the public. Authoritarians R Us.

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Excite Me

by digby

The NY Times Magazine reports:

Three days before Christmas, President Obama gathered his economic team in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room to review themes for his State of the Union address. The edge-of-the-cliff crisis he inherited had passed, but with more than 14 million Americans still out of work, he was looking for bold ways to bring down unemployment. The ideas presented to him, though, seemed familiar and uninspired. “You know, guys,” he said, according to someone in the room, “I’ve told you before, I want you to come to me with ideas that excite me.” Nothing he was hearing excited him. Obama’s frustration could set the tone for the remainder of his term.

Now I don’t know about you, but I find that a little bit strange. This isn’t fashion or entertainment. It’s about creating jobs, and there just isn’t a whole lot of “exciting” innovation in that arena because the economics are what they are. I guess old dudes like Keynes just don’t rock.

But then perhaps it depends on how you define excitement. Here’s one bipartisan centrist who thinks cutting social security benefits is thrilling:

When advocates challenge the new formula though, the conservatives and pseudo-Democrats hawking this proposal are no longer even bothering to defend the “Chained” CPI on its merits. (In fact, the current CPI is, if anything, too modest.) They simply coo at how brilliant and “exciting” of a new policy tool it is. Maya MacGuineas’s cheerful performance at a Senate briefing this morning was a case in point. MacGuineas, a former Wall Street banker and current president of the Pete Peterson-funded Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, was a panelist at an Urban Institute-sponsored Senate briefing, “The $5 Trillion Question: What Do the Budget Commissions’ Social Security Proposals Mean for Retirees and Taxpayers?” When asked what she would like to see from the President in the forthcoming State of the Union address, she joked about the “Chained” CPI, but not everyone in the audience was laughing. To paraphrase her remarks:

“I kid to my family that I may be the only one in the country who is waiting to hear the President say he’ll support the ‘Chained’ CPI in his State of the Union speech! I will literally be jumping off of my couch in excitement if he does.”

I guess excitement is in the eye of the beholder.

Dots

by digby

The perverse effect of Tucson continue to amaze me. “The left” is now on the defensive and the right is empowered. Surprise. And even though the media is delicately discussing some aspects of right wing rhetoric, they aren’t connecting any dots.

Here’s a big old dot, courtesy of David Neiwert:

There’s another infamous shooting of a nine-year-old girl that is making headlines this week in Tucson. This time, we wonder if the rest of the media will bother to cover it.

The little girl’s name was Brisenia Flores. She lived near the border with her parents and sister outside the town of Arivaca, Arizona. On May 30 of 2009, a woman named Shawna Forde, who led an offshoot unit of Minutemen who ran armed border patrols for patriotic “fun”. Forde’s gang had decided to go “operational,” which meant they concocted a scheme to raid drug smugglers and take their money and drugs and use it to finance a border race war and “start a revolution against the government”. They targeted the Flores home, which had neither money nor drugs, based on dubious information. They convinced Flores to let them in by claiming to be law-enforcement officers seeking fugitives, then shot him point-blank in the head when he questioned them and wounded his wife, Gina Gonzalez. And then, while she pleaded for her life, they shot Brisenia in cold blood in the head. (Her sister, fortunately, was sleeping over at a friend’s.)

Neiwert has been following this story from the beginning and notes that the trial should reveal some very important details of the inner working of the Minutemen. Evidently, the most famous leader of the movement, Jim Gilchrist, is involved in this case — he and Shawna Forde were very close.

My friend Scott North at the Everett Herald recently published a riveting account of just how deeply Gilchrist and Forde were intertwined. Indeed, he was working to help promote her “work” on the border intensely during the two weeks between the murders and Forde’s arrest — and may have tipped her off that she was being sought by federal SWAT teams:

Jim Gilchrist counts himself among those fooled by Forde. He stuck with her when some questioned her methods. He stood by her through the blood and tumult in Everett that started last December. He remained her ally right up until the day she was arrested in connection with the two murders in Arivaca, Ariz. “If she hadn’t been able to use me she would have used somebody else,” Gilchrist said. “It is so unfortunate because I really thought this person, in spite of her checkered past had, in lieu of a better term, ‘found Jesus’ and really wanted to be a do-gooder.” Gilchrist said he was oblivious to the behind-the-scenes drama at his 2007 speech in Everett. He’d never met Forde before she e-mailed to arrange his travel. He was impressed by her and her fledgling Minutemen operation and donated the money he was paid to cover his travel expenses to Everett — cash that actually came from Parris. Gilchrist gave that money to Forde. Forde arrived in Gilchrist’s life at a time when his running feud with Simcox and other Minutemen leaders left him in need of allies. He communicated with Forde largely by e-mail, telling her he admired her dedication. Forde praised Gilchrist for being controversial. “You are a powerful man when in name only you can stir a state,” Forde wrote. “I just am amazed sometimes. I’ve never been attacked so much for a associate. But you are my friend and I’m proud to be associated with you so (expletive) ’em!!” By early 2008 Gilchrist had made Forde the Minuteman Project’s border patrol coordinator. He sent volunteers her way, telling them she “is one tough lady.” Forde’s role in bringing Gilchrist to Everett was noted in a profile of Minutemen figures around the country prepared by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a high-profile Alabama-based civil-rights watchdog group. Gilchrist now says his only concerns about Forde revolved around her claims that she was using “undercover” tactics to infiltrate border-area drug traffickers. “I really thought that she was getting into the wrong crowd and was going to end up murdered,” he said. Gilchrist stood by Forde when her ex-husband was shot, after her reported rape and after her mysterious shooting, when she was wounded in the arm. When The Herald in February revealed Forde’s history of childhood felonies and teenage prostitution, Gilchrist said what mattered more was her ability to overcome a troubled past. “She is no whiner,” he wrote at the time. “She is a stoic struggler who has chosen to put country, community and a yearning for a civilized society ahead of avarice and self-glorifying ego.” Gilchrist remained in touch with Forde after she left Everett without giving detectives a chance to question her closely about the attempted murder of her ex-husband. On the Minuteman Project Web site, Gilchrist continued to post press releases and Forde’s dispatches detailing her Arizona border exploits. One of the last arrived on May 31, just hours after the Arivaca killings. Forde reported that she and her group had been in “boots on the ground” patrols of the border for eight days and had observed thousands of pounds of dope being smuggled into the country. “A (sic) American family was murdered 2 days ago including a 9 year old girl,” Forde wrote. “Territory issue’s (sic) are now spilling over like fire on the US side and leaving Americans so afraid they will not even allow their names to be printed in any press releases.” In a few days Gilchrist began receiving e-mails from a Minuteman in Tucson who had previously let Forde’s teenage daughter live at his home. The man asked Gilchrist why a SWAT team had shown up at his door looking for Forde. “I called her,” Gilchrist said. “She was as calm as can be.” Forde told him there was no cause for worry. The man, she said, was a disgruntled former member of her group. At the same time, though, she was sending out a list of 17 people around the country she wanted contacted if she was arrested or killed. After her arrest, Gilchrist learned he was 10th on her list. He and Steve Eichler, executive director of the Minuteman Project, almost certainly were among the last people Forde e-mailed before her June 12 arrest. They talked about adding her and her officers to their Web site’s list of national Minutemen leaders. “The border is going to be HOT. Good things to come my brother,” Forde wrote Eichler that morning. She was in police handcuffs later that day. Gilchrist has since scrubbed references to Forde from his Web site. He says she appears to have cloaked her true self behind the Minutemen movement.

Far be it from me to suggest that this might make an interesting story in light of the passage of AB70 and the Tucson shooting. (I won’t even bring up the fact that the State Senate president is a neo-Nazi.)But I imagine it might make some conservatives unhappy, so I suppose we shouldn’t make trouble.

And speaking of connecting the dots, check out this map.

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The SOTU frame

by digby

According to the Politico, this is the current thinking on the president’s State of the Union address:

The president will note that the makeup of the congressional audience before him is very different from a year ago, and will be blunt about the challenges facing the nation. He will sketch a strategy for winning the future, with both short-term and long-term plans for a foundation of competitiveness and innovation — looking for growth opportunities by doing things differently and more effectively than in the past. He plans to emphasize issues where he thinks he can find COMMON GROUND with Republicans, including education, trade and fiscal responsibility — cutting spending, reexamining regulations, and working toward more efficient and effective government. All that can strengthen our economy, is a way to work with Republicans, and fits the Obama COMPETENCY MEME. A LOT OF HIS TIME WILL BE SPENT ON ISSUES WHERE HE THINKS REPUBLICANS SHOULD BE ABLE TO GO ALONG. He will embrace the spirit of the debt commission’s recommendations, but a detailed response won’t be the headline from the speech. He will call for new investments in education, and talk about trade in terms of competition with other countries, including China.

The president will aggressively defend health reform (benefits are already being enjoyed – preexisting conditions, young adults under age 26, help for seniors on affording prescription drugs) and Wall Street reform (the importance of having rules in place to protect consumers). He will point to progress in Iraq, and the coming “inflection point” in Afghanistan – July, the start for withdrawing combat troops. The president won’t announce a major tax restructuring plan, BUT WILL SAY HE VIEWS THE TAX-CUT AGREEMENT IN DECEMBER AS A MODEL for working directly with Republicans to get some things done. It means they have to take some things they don’t like, and he has to take some things he doesn’t like. But as long as it’s putting the best interests of the economy and the American people first, both sides can live with it. And he will reprise the lessons in civility to be drawn from the Tucson tragedy.

Yeah, well. It doesn’t sound like a speech I’m going to go out of my way to watch this year. But then, Obama isn’t speaking to me at the moment so I suppose it doesn’t matter.

The good news is that from this report he isn’t planning on specifically targeting Social Security. But there are plenty of hints in there that it’s still on the table. He certainly doesn’t appear to be ready to explicitly rule it out.

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Glock Politics

by tristero

It certainly won’t be Glenn Beck’s fault if something happens to Frances Piven. That’s because Beck and the rest of the lunatic right – through their lies, attacks, evasions, re-definitions, and overall propensity to bullshit a compliant media that will print anything they say (gun crosshairs are really surveyors marks – sure, why not?) – has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that in the early 21st Century, words have no meaning whatsoever.

Only guns do.

Still Loving Stephen

by digby

I’ve been critical of Jon Stewart lately, but I still don’t have enough good things to say about Stephen Colbert. Maybe it’s because his character makes it impossible to do the earnest, both-sides-do-it, lecturing that Stewart has taken to, but whatever the reason, his satire is a sharp as ever.

Last night he took on Limbaugh as only he can:

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Rush Limbaugh Speaks Chinese
www.colbertnation.com
Must be the money Published by digby on January 22, 2011 Must Be The Money by digby In case you were wondering why Obama chose Jeffrey Immelt to replace Paul Volcker, Thomas Ferguson of the Roosevelt Institute offers what I think is probably the most important reason: “Volcker out and Immelt in, because the administration now wants to emphasize ‘recovery’ and ‘jobs’ instead of ‘crisis stabilization’? Since when did any stabilization not include jobs as a top priority? What we actually have here is the disappearance from the scene of the best known and most visible critic of the excesses of the financial sector and his replacement by the sitting CEO of a company that is heavily dependent on government aid of all sorts, including diplomatic assistance to invest more in China. This is not about jobs, but political money — the White House knows that after Citizens United, it will need to raise about a billion dollars — that’s right, a billion — for its reelection campaign. That’s the context in which this and its other recent appointments need to be judged.” I think we all make the mistake of forgetting the obvious. I know I do. And it’s foolish to do so when it comes to politics. Why is Obama desperate to appease the wealthy interests right now? There are all sorts of complicated reasons. But let’s not forget that first and foremost, that’s where all the money is. . Scroll to the top