A new voice has entered the blogosphere that I think you’re going to enjoy. Her name is Kathy G and she’s writing at her blog The G-Spot. It’s scary smart (in that University of Chicago awesome-smart kind of way) and also very funny and iconoclastic. In just a couple of weeks, she’s done a fascinating study of inequality in a series of of posts on the subject, a take down of Emily Yoffe over “slut-shaming” and a tribute to Joan Crawford, here. But my favorite so far is this thoroughly original observation of Hillary Clinton’s Nixonian qualities, which those of you on both sides of the Great Dividewill find of interest.
Enjoy.
And if you’re a mind to support women in the blogosphere generally, go here and vote for one of us…
It’s a classic American story: In the prime of his life, a man who parties too much and lives in the shadow of his esteemed father turns his life around. He gives up alcohol, embraces religion and finds a new purpose in life. But will his desire to impress his dad and purge his personal demons put the world in danger? Coming soon to a movie theater near you: controversial director Oliver Stone’s “W,” the life story of President George W. Bush, a warts-and-all portrayal. […] The film’s script captures purported notorious moments in Bush’s life: Rumors that his father pulled strings to get him into Harvard Business School. His arrest during college for tearing down the goalposts at a football game. Almost getting into a fistfight with his father when he comes home drunk one night in the 1970s. His vow to quit drinking when he wakes up with a wicked hangover soon after his 40th birthday. It also covers plenty of his administration’s lowlights — from Bush’s reported obsession with invading Iraq, which Stone will portray as a desire to avenge Saddam Hussein’s assassination attempt on Bush’s father and his frustration with the failed search for WMDs to his penchant for malapropisms and cheery optimism about the chances for civil war in Iraq. […] Stone, who mined psychological motives in his previous presidential movies, from the conspiratorial “JFK” to the dark character study of “Nixon,” makes much of Bush’s competitive relationship with his father and how it fueled his desire to invade Iraq. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld purportedly confronts Bush in 2002 about his obsession with Saddam: “What’s the big deal about Saddam? Bin Laden’s the trained ape that wrought this hell on us,” Dubya’s response sounds like a line out of “The Godfather”: “You don’t go after the Bushes and get to talk about it. You got me?” After his born-again experience, Bush says that he doesn’t ask his dad for advice because “there’s a higher Father I appeal to.” When his father cries after losing to Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush sticks it to his dad by telling him that he would have won if he’d ousted Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War. When Bush’s parents tell him to hold off running for governor of Texas until after younger brother Jeb Bush has a chance to wins Florida’s top spot, Barbara tells him that he can’t win because “you’re loud and you have a short fuse.” Stone also portrays the president as stubborn and aggressive when it came to prosecuting the war in Iraq. Before the invasion, he tells a shocked British Prime Minister Tony Blair about alternative plans such as baiting Saddam by painting a U.S. spy plane in U.N. colors and assassinating the Iraqi leader. When he hears about French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac’s desire to give weapons inspectors 30 more days to work in Iraq, Bush explodes: “Thirty days! I’d like to stuff a plate of freedom fries down that slick piece of s–‘s throat!”
This is not an April Fool’s joke.
I don’t know about the freedom fries line, but I’ve heard all the rest. And say what you will about Stone (and Jane Hamsher has said plenty) he is one of the most cinematically gifted directors around, always creating an odd sense of “memory” about events you already know about. This should be quite interesting if only because we are all so familiar with this territoryand it’s so recent.
Ari Fleischer says the script is wrong because Bush didn’t cuss as president. Right, Mr towel slapper suddenly stopped using salty language when he became the most powerful man in the world. We know his VP swears like a sailor, on the floor of the senate, no less. And there is at least one report that I’ve never heard refuted: “Fuck Saddam, we’re takin’ him out,” which could be the tagline for the film.
They may move move up the release date to before the election. Let’s hope he includes the scene of John McCain on his knees in the oval office, kissing Bush’s ring, begging for forgiveness and promising to do everything he could to ensure his reelection in 2004. I can see Bush, sitting on the edge of the desk, looking down on the supplicant, saying, “will you even promise to help the Senate pass legislation enabling your president to torture at will, in much the same way you were tortured in North Vietnam while I was snorting lines in Alabama?”
I saw footage of Barack Obama’s trip to Altoona, PA the other day, bowling a gutterball and scoring a paltry 37 (for 7 frames, not a full game, by the way) about 10 times on cable news. I mentally checked off the points that could be made in an attack ad using that footage (“Obama’s plan for socialized medicine will throw your money right in the gutter”) but quickly realized that they would be superfluous when the media is already so conditioned to view political fights as personal battles among who is more manly, that they’re ready to do all the work for the Republicans:
SCARBOROUGH: You know, Willie, the thing is, Americans want their president, if it’s a man, to be a real man. They — 1984, I remember Ronald Reagan goes to South Boston. He holds up that beer mug —
BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.
SCARBOROUGH: — in that South Boston pub, and everybody’s like, “He’s a real man,” and I guess Barack Obama’s trying to do the same thing, too.
BRZEZINSKI: Stop it. Oh, come on.
SCARBOROUGH: Awful. Good Lord.
GEIST: He’s going to have to try a little harder than he did in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night —
SCARBOROUGH: Oh my God —
BRZEZINSKI: Really?
SCARBOROUGH: Oh, this is awful.
GEIST: — at the Pleasant Valley Rec Center. He went bowling, and let’s just take a quick look at it here. I guess I’ll just give you the final numbers. Started out nicely, got the Velcro shoes.
BRZEZINSKI: Looking good, looking good.
GEIST: But then he started bowling. The score you’re really after in bowling is 300; that’s a perfect score.
BRZEZINSKI: Oh, OK.
SCARBOROUGH: That’s perfect score.
BRZEZINSKI: Good, good, good.
SCARBOROUGH: But, you know, if you get 200, you’re a good bowler.
GEIST: Sure. You know what?
BRZEZINSKI: Yeah. Two-fifty —
SCARBOROUGH: You get 150, you’re a man —
BRZEZINSKI: OK.
SCARBOROUGH: — or a good woman.
BRZEZINSKI: Stop it.
GEIST: Out of my president, I want a 150, at least. Barack Obama bowled — well, you can see his form here —
SCARBOROUGH: Hee!
BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.
GEIST: A 37.
BRZEZINSKI: Oh.
GEIST: That’s a three, next to a seven.
SCARBOROUGH: Baby, if you go to Altoona, Pennsylvania, on a Saturday night and you’re going to try to bowl —
SCARBOROUGH: Oh, that’s so dainty. Ugh.
Chris Matthews (of course) joined in on this yesterday, and added a racial twist:
MATTHEWS: You know, Michelle — and this gets very ethnic, but the fact that he’s good at basketball doesn’t surprise anybody, but the fact that he’s that terrible at bowling does make you wonder —
FINEMAN: That doesn’t surprise anybody either.
BERNARD: Well, it certainly doesn’t surprise anybody black, I can tell you that.
MATTHEWS: Is black a bowling —
FINEMAN: This is just killing him.
MATTHEWS: I don’t know, I guess everybody bowls.
FINEMAN: This is just killing him.
MATTHEWS: I know.
FINEMAN: This is just killing him, Chris. Don’t show this over and over again.
MATTHEWS: No, no, we’re doing it again. This is a killer. Look at this killer. Because it isn’t the most macho form there, I must say, but who knows?
The fact that Republicans distinctly try to feminize Democratic Presidential candidates is nothing new. Neither is the fact that the media has internalized this narrative so completely that Republican feminization efforts become redundant. If Clinton somehow takes the nomination, Republicans will have to recalibrate, but I’m sure we’ll hear more “she’s a castrating rhymes-with-witch” in the media.
This isn’t about gender, of course, it’s about weakness, it’s about a B.S. macho worldview that you have to be tough and rugged to lead, that Democrats can never be tough or rugged, that Republicans are tough and rugged by default. The question is whether or not that works anymore, post-Bush. But it hasn’t exactly been disproven in Presidential politics, and the media is so lazy (and of course, heavily invested in this worldview) that they’ll continue to frame everything in this way. I’ll bet Tweety and Scarborough couldn’t stop giggling when they got that bowling footage. After all, it’s easier than looking at a health care white paper.
Apparently Jay Rosen was intrigued (and concerned) by Will Bunch’s characterization of the liberal bloggers at Eschacon “declaring war” on the press. I find that interesting since, as far as I’m concerned, liberal bloggers declared war on the press many years ago. I’m not sure that this is even controversial. Pushing back on biased, anti-Democrat and pro-Republican lies and editorial judgment is supposed to be one of our primary raison d’etres.
Jay seems to think this discussion was unusually provocative, but it actually wasn’t. What we said was that the press is in love with McCain, that it is very dangerous for Democrats and that we needed to work hard to combat that, starting now while the Democrats are still settling their primary. (As Bunch wrote in his piece, October is way too late to do it.) When I said that bloggers could get “personal and ugly” in ways that institutions like Media Matters couldn’t, I wasn’t suggesting that we “take the culture war to the next level and de-legitimate the media for as many people as we can reach.” That’s hyperbole that nobody even came close to saying.
By going personal and ugly, I meant that we could write about the press the way I did in the excerpt from this post which Jay positively quotes at length. In other words, we can write like bloggers, laying out the critique in edgy, irreverent, aggressive terms that an organization like Media Matters would not want to do. (And our new organizing tools may make it possible to drill our national critique down to the state and local level and mobilize readers to take it to the writers themselves.) The informality and shoot-from-the-hip style, along with our outsider status and freedom, is the essence of blogging.
A better case than my post, would be the ridicule the blogosphere as a whole dished out when the video of the McCain press bar-b-que in Sedona found its way on to Youtube. That was “personal and ugly” simply by showing the fawning media schmoozing with their favorite flyboy (and garnering two glowing accounts in the Washington Post on the same day.) After the 2000 campaign, when Bush bought off the press corps with Dove bars and Animal House nicknames, it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical of the media when they get friendly with their favored candidates like this. The history of the love affair between the McCain campaign and the press is legendary and there has been nothing so far in this campaign to reassure me that it has changed.
Jay wonders if by “declaring war on the media” we mean we will declare war on Bill Keller for either being a “loser” and not making the McCain/Iseman story stick or having the bad judgment to publish it in the first place. Neither actually. The derision emanating from blogosphere about the Iseman story was mostly about the run on smelling salts down at the Village drug store — The New York Times unethically published a front page story about McCain’s private life based on rumor and innuendo! The humanity!
After years of trivial tabloid coverage of Democrats, from discussions of Kerry’s “butler” to Edwards’ haircuts, you’ll have to excuse us cynical bloggers for finding that reaction absurd, particularly in light of the lengthy, anonymously sourced front page story just six months earlier cataloging the number of nights the Clintons spent together. That story was relentlessly flogged by the cable gasbags, who justified their heavy breathing with the rationale that Bill had a habit of catting around, so his marital bed was newsworthy since his wife was running for president. Indeed, not only was it responsible to speculate how often the Clinton’s have sex, it would be irresponsible not to.
Unlike the Clinton Rules which say that if one tiny detail of the story is proven factual then the entire story is taken as gospel, the McCain Rules say the opposite. The fact that the alleged affair with Vicki Iseman was not proven means that his rank hypocrisy on campaign finance and ties to lobbyists can never be mentioned again. The Village hissy fit (and McCains own self-righteous performance) was sufficient to cow any news organization from going there again.
Jay brings up the fact that my colleague on the panel in question, NTodd, said that if people are asking Chelsea Clinton about Monica Lewinsky we should have people asking McCain about the circumstances of his marriage. Jay speculates that it would be risky because McCain’s response might be able to turn that into a positive viral Youtube ( that old McCain magic, I guess.) But even if that were so, according to Cokie’s Law, once it’s “out there,” it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not — people would be talking about it.
This is how the right wing gets these things into the ether. It would be nice if they didn’t, but they do and it does no good to stand on the sidelines clucking about how unfair it all is. Ironically, Jay reports that the person asking Chelsea that question was actually a Clinton supporter, but today it’s become a topic of conversation on the Chris Matthews show because she’s now being asked the question by others on college campuses. Howard Fineman sniffed that she was going to have to come up with a better answer than she has, spiritedly seconded by undercover right wing operative Michele Bernard. Only the reporter from Congressional Quarterly suggested that there might be some political coordination going on among these college students who are suddenly popping up and asking Chelsea Clinton how she feels about her father’s infidelity. Everybody else on the show played dumb. (In case anyone’s forgotten, College Republicans pretty much require ratfucking beatdowns as an initiation ritual.)
Most people don’t know about McCain’s marital history because the press has been hands off. It is why the gasbags and the village pearl clutchers were able to claim the Iseman story wasn’t newsworthy and chastise Bill Keller for doing to McCain what the New York Times does to Democrats with impunity and Chris Matthews and his ilk do every day on their repulsive sideshows. I don’t have any particular desire to know who politicians are sleeping with and the idea that this information is some sort of great window into the character or qualifications for the job (particularly when the criticism is coming from promiscuous celebrity playboys) is laughable. But if they are going to do it (and there is no sign that they aren’t) the least we can expect is that they will be equal opportunity busybodies and show the same hypocrisy toward politicians they personally like as well as the ones they loathe. “Fair and balanced” scandalmongering isn’t particularly edifying, but it’s better than yet another decade of open season on Democratic presidential candidates.
Jay believes there is a chance that the press has been chastened by their behavior in 2000 but I see absolutely no evidence that they have ever looked at the fundamental issues underlying their attachment to McCain — their simple-minded attraction to his macho warrior bonafides, the assumptions of political courage based upon his record of physical bravery 40 years ago and his famously bad tempered iconoclasm, his phony clubbiness. They give him a pass because they like him. And they like him because he pretends to like them. The fact that McCain’s “openness” results in the boys on the bus protecting him is not an improvement over Tim Russert’s mindless gotcha questions or the blatant hostility to politicians they find “boring” or “cold.”
Jay brings up one episode I find very revealing, from Howard Kurtz:
McCain said he couldn’t stop[talking to reporters], because “that destroys credibility.” And besides, he said, “I enjoy it a lot. It keeps me intellectually stimulated, it keeps me thinking about issues, and it keeps me associated with a lower level of human being than I otherwise would be.”
Can’t stop. Destroys credibility if I change now. Keeps me thinking. Reporters: lower level of human being. Kurtz was supposed to chuckle at the insult, which is the towel-snapping part of the affair
Is it really too much to ask that the relationship between the press and the powerful be based upon healthy mutual skepticism and (even begrudging) respect for each others’ jobs rather than boys locker room experiences? It seems to me we should have worked that through after this last round, but apparently the “Bush III” campaign (talk about dynasties) is going to reported in much the same way as Bush II — hijinx and bar-b-q and assorted useless stupidities substituting for journalism.
Jay thinks all that is possibly about to change because Obama may match McCain in “radical openness” with the press. It’s possible, of course, but Obama’s been more closed to the press than any of the other candidates of both parties (and considering his success so far, I would suggest that it’s worked.) But as stories like this ,this and this begin to surface, you can see a critical narrative building up around his failure to do it.
There are a number of reasons as to why he’s escaped the normal Democratic coverage so far, not the least of which is that the media have been obsessively diverted by their complicated, long standing relationships to the Clintons and John McCain, which play out as the soap opera or stirring warrior tales that were written long ago. That doesn’t take anything away from Senator Obama, who until FoxNews decided they needed to get in the game, had managed to finesse them quite successfully. (Managing the press corps is a skill that I wouldn’t ever take for granted. It’s a big selling point for Obama in my book.)
But history shows that these love affairs with Dems tend only to last as long as the press corps isn’t getting fed the kind of juicy, tabloid style GOP spin points they find irresistible, while at the same time being slammed mercilessly by the same operatives for being in the tank. The Reverend Wright brouhaha was an example of what we can expect — at some point Obama will start receiving an onslaught of tough press. But it will be much worse for him if John McCain is allowed to continue to get away with allowing the professional character assassins to get it “out there” while righteously declaring his moral superiority and opposition to such tactics.
Jay quotes Paul Waldman, one of the co-authors of “Free Ride” about McCain’s relationship with the media, saying that he’s hopeful the book will help persuade reporters to take a step back and ask themselves whether their coverage of McCain has been what it should be. The book is impressive and perhaps there will be some in the press who read it and have that epiphany. But as Jay points out, the rightwing babblers all hate McCain too. Under those circumstances, the press conventions dictate that because McCain is hated by both the too hot right and too cold left — he’s just right. McCain becomes the man in the middle, that most precious of political commodities. (And he loves them, he really loves them!)
Judging by what I’m seeing in the campaign so far, the press hasn’t spent even one minute reassessing their campaign coverage of the past couple of decades and are mindlessly running repetitious (and long ago discredited) plot lines. The younger ones don’t even know how much right wing cant they’ve internalized and the older ones are still trying to justify their previous bad behavior. When you look at the press coverage of Bill Clinton, Gore and Kerry, it’s more than obvious that Republican narratives dominate once they get going. (It’s why I have been of the opinion that having the primary go on for a while was actually a good thing — the Republicans can’t settle on a single story line.) We can assume that this time is different or we can try to get out in front and attack this stuff head on, right now.
Jay wants us to not declare war, but rather try to persuade. That seems a matter of semantics and tactics to me. I desperately want to persuade them to stop being ninnies and jackasses but the only way I’ve seen to do that is by relentlessly pointing out their foibles and mobilizing the public to hold them accountable for it. If they all wake up tomorrow and begin reporting the race in a way that doesn’t seem to come out of junior high slumber parties and boy scout camp, I couldn’t be happier. But I think it would be foolish to count on it.
Jay has some interesting ideas about how to go about making the coverage of McCain better at the end of the article that are worth considering. (But I would be very surprised if McCain would allow liberal bloggers on the back of the bus and I suspect the press corps wouldn’t like it much either. After all, we would very likely spoil the party.)
Update: I should make clear that I’m not criticizing Jay for his observations. I disagree with some of his assumptions about the possibility of change in the press corps’ behavior in this election, but he’s not wrong to ask these questions. I just believe that bloggers pointing out incorrect reporting isn’t enough. Media Matters does that better than any of us. the independent bloggers connect the dots with aggression and attitude. It’s what it takes to engage the public and break through.
So the Treasury Secretary called for a “sweeping overhaul” of financial rules, and the cheerleaders on the business channels are predictably calling this some kind of radical change, whereas Paul Krugman rightly explains this as rearranging deck chairs.
Anyone who has worked in a large organization — or, for that matter, reads the comic strip “Dilbert” — is familiar with the “org chart” strategy. To hide their lack of any actual ideas about what to do, managers sometimes make a big show of rearranging the boxes and lines that say who reports to whom.
You now understand the principle behind the Bush administration’s new proposal for financial reform, which will be formally announced today: it’s all about creating the appearance of responding to the current crisis, without actually doing anything substantive.
I think what we’ve seen is the belief in deregulation of financial markets and massive corporate consolidation in general working in tandem. This created huge financial institutions of the likes of Bear Stearns, which then became too big to allow to fail no matter how speculative they became. And so they could engage in whatever risky operations they wished, full with the knowledge that they would never experience a full washout of their assets. The result is a safety net for massive corporations only at the expense of the social safety net for individuals.
Without a vote of the Congress or a public debate, the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve have made government the guarantor of the shadow banking system – the unregulated, unhinged hedge funds and investment houses whose compulsive excesses now threaten the global economy. They say necessity is the mother of invention, but we seen only a part of the new machine, not surprisingly, the part that buttresses Wall Street. They have scrambled to put this together in an emergency, behind closed doors, without a hint of the necessary regulatory changes that must rationally accompany such guarantees. That is what the fight in the coming months will surely be about […] The shadow banking system now must be brought out of the shadows. After all we are constantly told that finance serves the economy, and the market system is the best means to solve our social goals. It feels very uncomfortable when our servant’s servant becomes our master’s master as Wall Street has been permitted to become in America in recent years by contribution- hungry elected officials.
Barack Obama explicitly connected the current crisis to the bipartisan practice of deregulation. This is part of a culture of laissez-faire economics that has shifted risk to individuals and removed risk from corporations, and Obama’s speech talked about the need to radically change that midset with actual regulation instead of putting new names on the same old ineffective regulatory agencies. Corporations for too long have, as Bob Borosage said, been given “the freedom to gamble with other peoples’ money … protected by lavish campaign contributions and powerful lobbies.”
One thing we all know is that John “Let’s Schedule A Meeting Sometime” McCain would offer the same Hoover-like do-nothing approach. But it’s striking how many connections there are between McCain allies and surrogates and every aspect of the financial crisis. After all, some top campaign advisors of his lobbied for the shady lender Ameriquest, one of his top surrogates Carly Fiorina is a welfare queen whose company paid off her mortgage between 1999 and 2003, the most recent RNC chair is saying that his non-plan to deal with the mortgage crisis is incomplete, and his top economic advisor is perhaps most responsible for the crisis itself:
The general co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a Depression-era banking regulation law that Democrat Barack Obama claimed on Thursday contributed significantly to today’s economic turmoil.
“A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business had changed,” the Illinois senator running for president said in a New York economic speech. “But by the time [it] was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.”
Gramm’s role in the swift and dramatic recent restructuring of the nation’s investment houses and practices didn’t stop there.
A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm. http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif Later, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.
During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.
For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written down more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs.
The regulation referred to here is the Glass-Steagall Act, and after its demise investment banks grew larger and larger, essentially becoming invulnerable. It’s so clear that lack of regulation gave the investment banks a license to steal, and that Phil Gramm and his puppet Presidential candidate, who doesn’t know or care about the economy, want the theft to continue.
UPDATE: See also emptywheel deconstructing the Treasury Department’s fallacious rhetoric.
Juan Cole analyzes the latest cease-fire in the multi-front Iraqi civil war:
The entire episode underlines how powerful Iran has become in Iraq. The Iranian government had called on Saturday for the fighting to stop. And by Sunday evening it had negotiated at least a similar call from Sadr (whether the fighting actually stops remains to be seen and depends on local commanders and on whether al-Maliki meets Sadr’s conditions).
Cole also notes in his headline that Bush has been reduced to sheer irrelevancy: al-Sadr and Iran clearly are in control of the situation.
Think about that. Four thousand plus American lives have been sacrificed, countless Iraqis have also died, at a financial cost in the multiple trillions and the upshot is not democracy but the spread of radical Shiite islamism. There aren’t words in the English language ominous enough to describe how profound a catastrophe this is.
Note to United States: Bush/Iraq is why you should never, ever, elect a president with a C+ average.
Note to United States II: Bush/Iraq is also why you should never, ever elect a president who has “senior moments” and scrambles the differences between Shiite and Sunni.
Divine Trash, Hidden Jewels, Part 6: Short Attention Span Theater
by Dennis Hartley
One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together. -Jean Luc Goddard
A mixed-up mix Mix up your journey to the next journey Mixers rock -DJ Takefumi, from the film Funky Forest: The First Contact
So, do you think you’ve seen it all? I would venture to say that you haven’t- until you’ve sat through a screening of Funky Forest: The First Contact, originally released in 2005 as Naisu no mori in Japan but now available for the first time on Region 1 DVD.
The film is a collaborative effort by three Japanese directors, most notably Katsuhito Ishii (The Taste of Tea). Ishii, along with Hajime Ishimine and Shunichiro Miki, has concocted a heady “mixed-up-mix”, indeed. There is really no logical way to describe this blend of dancing, slapstick, surrealism, sci-fi, animation, absurdist humor, and experimental filmmaking, married to a hip soundtrack of jazz, dub and house music without sounding like I’m high (perhaps I already sound that way in a lot of my posts-n’est-ce pas?), but I will do my best. There is no real central “story” in the traditional sense; the film is more or less an anthology of several dozen vignettes, featuring recurring characters a la late night TV sketch comedy. Some of these disparate stories and characters do eventually intersect (although usually in a somewhat oblique fashion). The film is a throwback in some ways to “channel surfing” anthology films from the 1970s like The Groove Tube, Tunnel Vision and The Kentucky Fried Movie; although it is important to note that the referential comic sensibilities are very Japanese. If a Western replica of this project were produced, it would require collaboration between Jim Jarmusch, Terry Gilliam and David Cronenberg (and a script from Charlie Kaufman).
Although there are ostensibly no “stars” of the film, there are quite a few memorable vignettes featuring three oddball siblings, introduced as “The Unpopular With Women Brothers”. The barbed yet affectionate bickering between the hopelessly geeky Katsuichi, the tone-deaf, guitar strumming Masuru (aka “Guitar Brother”) and the pre-pubescent Masao, as they struggle with dissecting the mystery of how to get “chicks” to dig them is reminiscent of the dynamic between the uncle and the two brothers in Napoleon Dynamite and often quite funny. It is never explained why the obese, Snickers-addicted Masao happens to be a Caucasian; but then, the whole concept wouldn’t be so absurdly funny, would it? The scenes centering around the relationship between Notti and Takefumi, a platonic couple, probably come closest to displaying any kind of conventional narrative structure (well, at least up to the point where they start telling each other about their dreams). Then there are the 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights-influenced trio of giggly “Babbling Hot Springs Vixens”, who tell each other tall stories in three segments entitled “Alien Piko Rico”, “The Big Ginko Tree” and my personal favorite, “Buck Naked and the Panda”. I could tell you more (I haven’t even scratched the surface on the really bizarre stuff) but I’ll let you discover all that on your own-if you dare.
You will need to clear some time-Funky Forest runs 2½ hours long, in all its challengingly non-linear glory. So is it worth your time? Well, it probably depends on your answer to this age-old question: Does a movie necessarily have to be “about” something to be enjoyable? At one point in the film, Takefumi goes into a soliloquy:
The turntable is the cosmos A universe in each album A journey, an adventure A journey, a true adventure Journey, adventure Journey Needles rock. Needles rock. Music mixer and the mix
There is also another significant clue on the film’s intermission card, which reads: “End of Side A”. I think that this may be the key to unlocking the “meaning” of this film, which is, there is no meaning; perhaps life, like the structure of the movie, is best represented by a series of random needle drops, no? It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey (OK, now I’m stoned.) With an underlying spirit of winking goofiness running all throughout this unconventional weirdness, perhaps the filmmakers are just paraphrasing something that Mork from Ork once said about always retaining “a bit of mondo bozo”. God knows, it’s helped me get through 52 years on this silly planet.
I’m sad to note the passing of actor Richard Widmark, he of the patented “stare”- who died at the age of 93 earlier this week. He appeared in over 70 films from 1947 to 1991. Widmark specialized in tough guy roles; he certainly played his share of killers, cops, rugged cowboys, and steely-eyed military men.
Few actors have ever made a screen debut as audacious or memorable as Widmark’s psychopathic killer, Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death. One particular scene, wherein Udo shoves an elderly crippled woman down a flight of stairs, was shocking enough for 1947, but I’m sure audiences never expected Widmark’s character to then laugh manically at the sight of his hapless victim as she tumbled ass over wheelchair to her grisly demise.
Nearly all the films noir that Widmark starred in early in his career are now considered genre classics; in particular I would recommend Night and the City (1950) and Pickup on South Street (1953), which have both been given the deluxe DVD treatment (including luminous transfers) by Criterion. Another recommendation from this period would be No Way Out (1950), a hybrid noir/social issue drama with Widmark and co-star Sidney Poitier both in top form.
Widmark teamed up again with Poitier in 1965, giving a great performance as the captain of a naval destroyer in one of my favorite nuclear paranoia thrillers, The Bedford Incident (1965). A few other mid-career highlights include one of the seminal “cop on the edge” dramas, Madigan (1968) and the epic Cinerama spectacle, How the West Was Won (which will be airing on Turner Classic Movies April 3; check your local listings!)
Widmark’s career came full circle in 1984, when director Taylor Hackford cast him in Against All Odds , which was a loose remake of the 1947 film noir Out of the Past.
Definitely one of the last of a certain breed of Hollywood icons.
I wrote about this before, but I think it’s worth reiterating. The “special relationship” between John McCain and the press is particularly dangerous in one respect: he is not held accountable for his words on the stump, (while Democrats’ are used against them as if they’d carved them in stone from Mt Rushmore) and he’s not held liable for his gross and obvious panders and policy shifts. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a politician have this kind of industrial strength teflon before.
Dave Neiwert addressed this the other night over on FDL:
A lot of wags have been chortling about “the McCain Moment,” myself included, because it encapsulates so neatly much of what’s wrong with John McCain. But not everything. We also need to deal with the McCain Of The Moment. The guy who said one thing six months ago and says nearly its opposite now. Who knows what he’ll say in another six months? As disturbing as his obvious mental lapses might be, McCain’s bizarre policy flip-flops make Daffy Duck look positively stolid in comparison, especially because they have come in many cases in which he has made himself a national reputation. Things like torture and campaign finance ethics. And this is especially the case with immigration. The co-author of the Kennedy-McCain Immigration Act — which, comparatively speaking, took a moderate approach to immigration reform — McCain is now saying that he wouldn’t even vote for it today, let alone co-author it.
I think we all remember a fellow who was relentlessly called a “flip-flopper” for much less egregious and far more ancient policy shifts than that. Indeed, one of the truisms about presidential politics until now has been that Senators, particularly those with long legislative records, could not be elected because of votes they’ve taken in the past which were done for horse trading or positioning or some other reflection of sausage making that isn’t easily explained. (You see it in the current Democratic race.)
St. McCain is different. When he makes a policy shift or takes a U-Turn in his rhetoric, or misrepresents his own record, it’s excused by his fanboys in the media as something he “had to do.” Here’s Nick Kristoff on the subject:
… his pride in “straight talk” may arise partly because he is an execrable actor. When he does try double-talk, he looks so guilty and uncomfortable that he convinces nobody. It’s also striking that Barack Obama is leading a Democratic field in which he has been the candidate who is least-scripted and most willing to annoy primary voters, whether in speaking about Reagan’s impact on history or on the suffering of Palestinians. All of this is puzzlingly mature on the part of the electorate. A common complaint about President Bush is that he walls himself off from alternative points of view, but the American public has the same management flaw: it normally fires politicians who tell them bad news. It is true that Mr. McCain sometimes weaves and bobs. With the arrival of the primaries, he has moved to the right on social issues and pretended to be more conservative than he is. On Wednesday, for example, he retreated on his brave stand on torture by voting against a bill that would block the C.I.A. from using physical force in interrogations. His most famous pander came in 2000, when, after earlier denouncing the Confederate flag as a “symbol of racism,” he embraced it as “a symbol of heritage.” To his credit, Mr. McCain later acknowledged, “I feared that if I answered honestly I could not win the South Carolina primary, so I chose to compromise my principles.” In short, Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste. That’s preferable to politicians who are congenital invertebrates.
That sentiment is quite common among the punditocrisy and the media fanboys. They have talked themselves into believing that McCain’s flip-flops and panders are actually a sign of his integrity and strength because he does them so blatantly. Now that’s teflon.
The main thing at play here is a pernicious, primal narrative that’s been out there for decades in which liberals are tarred as being sissies who can’t stand up for the country. Therefore, when they “flipflop” they do it out of weakness of will and unformed identity. They are always trying to “find themselves.” Conservatives have no such issues. They are always on the side of God, Mother, Country (and Wall Street) and don’t care who knows it. Unlike those nancy boys on the left, they aren’t small, flaccid and flip-flopping — they are large, hard and straight-up. That’s the long standing (ahem) narrative of liberal and conservative politics in the modern era and McCain is the perfect hero of the tale.
This is where all that bonhomie on the old Straight Talk Express really pays off. He can literally say anything and the press will excuse it because they think he’s their cynical, postmodern pal — a Rorschach test for their own beliefs. When he gets “angry” at lobbyists or rightwing ministers he’s telling the truth. When he cozies up to lobbyists and seeks the endorsement of rightwing ministers, it’s because he *has* to, (and he really, really hates doing it.) John McCain’s heart, you see, is always in the right place, and oddly enough, everyone believes it’s in the same place as is their own.
I can’t conceive of a greater advantage for a politician. He’s almost a magical figure. He’s an editorial from The Advocate, from just last week:
McCain’s opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment is emblematic of his tempestuous relationship with the religious right. After the bruising 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, McCain labeled the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “agents of intolerance” and “corrupting influences on religion and politics.” Sure, McCain spoke at Falwell’s Liberty University in 2006, but he didn’t pander. At the end of the day, McCain loathes the religious right, and the feeling is mutual. A notoriously stubborn man, he will probably not feel the need to appease the anti-gay wing of his party, especially considering how outspoken its members have been in their denunciation of him. Evangelical leader James Dobson has already said he will not support McCain.
His allegedly stubborn belief in gay rights, you’ll notice, is assumed. Sure, he went down to Liberty University and kissed Jerry Falwell’s ring. But that wasn’t a pander. And all the other anti-gay legislation he’s supported he just did because he *had to.* He won’t feel the need to appease the right wing of his party by throwing gays to the wolves. He said he’d take money from the Log Cabin Republicans and everything!
This is a serious danger for the Democrats. Everyone thinks this guy is secretly on their side. Jonathan Chait, one of the original McCain fanboys, wrote this recently:
Determining how McCain would act as president has thus become a highly sophisticated exercise in figuring out whom he’s misleading and why. Nearly everyone can find something to like in McCain. Liberals can admire his progressive instincts and hope that he is dishonestly pandering to the right in order to get through the primary. Conservatives can believe he will follow whatever course his conservative advisers set out for him and will feel bound by whatever promises he has made to them…
The amazing thing about McCain is that his reputation for principled consistency has remained completely intact. It is his strongest cudgel against opponents. Wall Street Journal editorial page columnist Kimberley Strassel recently gushed that McCain is “no flip-flopper.” “Like or dislike Mr. McCain’s views,” she added, “Americans know what they are.” Then, in the very next paragraph, she wrote that McCain will now be “as pure as the New Hampshire snow on the two core issues of taxes and judges” and that “[t]he key difference between Mr. McCain in 2000 and 2008 is that he…appears intent on making amends” to conservatives.It is a truly impressive skill McCain has–the ability to adopt new beliefs and convince his new allies that his conversion is genuine (or, at least, irreversible) while simultaneously strengthening their belief in the immutability of his principles.
It isn’t a skill, it’s a gift, bestowed upon McCain by a press corps which can’t ever seem to do its job properly. Because of his POW history and his savvy manipulation of their hero worship, they have imputed the character of the young man of integrity who stood steadfastly by his fellow prisoners forty years ago to the older sleazy, self-serving, intellectually lazy politician he became.
He’s the perfect man for the Republicans right now, a party which has devalued its brand in the service of neocon crazies and corrupt incompetents. He’s one of them to the core, but because of his stirring life story, the media present him as sui generis, a different kind ‘o Republican, their kind ‘o Republican, a man who shares everyone’s principles, even when they are diametrically opposed.
We’d better hope he dodders around so much that people think he’s sick or something because that is a formidable advantage for any candidate. It means there’s nothing he can say or do that disqualifies him on the merits.
Even on Iraq, you say? Well get this, from Chait again, in the same article from which I quoted above:
Even the ideological tendency McCain is most strongly identified with–neoconservative foreign policy–is, as John B. Judis explained in The New Republic, a relatively recent development: McCain originally opposed intervention in Bosnia and worried about a bloody ground campaign before the first Gulf war (see “Neo-McCain,” October 16, 2006). McCain’s advisers include not only neoconservatives but also the likes of Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. It would hardly be unimaginable for McCain to revert to his old realism, especially if Iraq continues to fail at political reconciliation. He could easily be the president who ends the war.
See, he’s just saying we might have to stay in Iraq for a thousand years because he *has* to. He factually finds the idea quite distasteful (just like me!) and because he’s a stubborn man of principle he will end the war much sooner than anyone else.
Don’t underestimate him. I know true blue liberals who really like this guy. Why wouldn’t they? They read the liberal media.
Does the press corps fawn to McCain? It’s a very important question. But if you watched this seven-minute segment, you saw very little real discussion of that critical question. The scribes’ minds wandered all about, as is the rule when such questions are asked. Until the very end of the segment, when Matthews explained the whole syndrome:
MATTHEWS: Let me explain why a lot of guys like McCain. He served his country in ways that none us cannot imagine serving this country. I think that gives him a moral edge over a lot of us and we show it. Anyway, Jennifer Donahue, thank you very much for being on. Ryan Lizza, as always.
It’s all about Nam, Matthews said. McCain served there, and we multimillionaires didn’t. “That gives him a moral edge over of us,” Matthews said. And then, the key part of his statement: That gives him a moral edge—and we show it. Shorter Matthews: We refused to serve during Vietnam. And because we feel so guilty about it, we refuse to serve today too.
Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on Arab leaders meeting in Syria to voice their support for Iraq’s “resistance” to what he calls foreign occupation.
Al-Jazeera television has shown a brief clip of an interview with the Mahdi Army militia leader. It says the full interview will be shown later Saturday.
The broadcast is the first word from the reclusive cleric since the Iraqi government launched a crackdown against militia violence in the southern oil port of Basra earlier this week.
Al-Sadr is believed to be in Iran, but Al-Jazeera doesn’t say where or when the interview took place. The portly al-Sadr, who is in his mid-30s, appears to have lost a great deal of weight in the clip.
From word one, “Anti-American,” the article is designed to create an irrational animosity against al-Sadr.He could just as accurately, and with less volatility, be described as “Shiite cleric,” “Radical Shiite cleric,” “The popular radical Shiite cleric Muktada al-Sadr” but no. The only salient feauture, as far as AP is concerned is his anti-Americanism. Then we get scare quotes around “resistance” and a careful hedge “from what he calls foreign occupation,” as if that is somehow an inaccurate description of the American – I’m so sorry, I meant coalition – troops stationed in Iraq behind heavily protected walls.
Then we learn that al-Sadr is “reclusive.” Oh, really? For all I know he really may be another Unabomber, choosing to live alone in some shack out in the desert, but somehow I suspect he doesn’t go for a nice stroll in public because he’s shy but because the United States military once had a contract out on his life (and probably still does). I may be a nervous Nellie but I, too, would probably become pretty reclusive if I knew the most powerful military organization on earth was trying to kill me. But “reclusive” really does imply someone mysterious, vaguely malign, and maladjusted. In short, an evil “anti-American.”
Next we are told what al-Sadr’s resistance to the occupation really should be called – “militia violence.” In this context, “militia” implies illegitimate paramilitary organizations, quite a contrast to describing the beyond-any-law mercenary killers of Blackwater as “contractors.” Yet there is a bit of truth to AP’s description. This is no longer about “insurgents” – shadowy guerrilas and the like. The civil war in Iraq goes far, far beyond IED’s and surreptitious assaults. Heckuva job, General Petraeus!
Finally, AP pulls out all the stops to portray al-Sadr in the most unpleasant light to a famously obese America. “The portly al-Sadr” – I honestly can’t believe I read that – lost a “great deal of weight”! That evil, anti-American, militia-wielding bastard! How did he do it? I guess we’ll have to tune in to our local al-Jazeera broadcast later today to get his diet tips.
All joking aside, this kind of blatantly propagandistic reporting (how, by the way, do we know he may be in Iran?) serves no useful purpose whatsoever. It merely makes it more difficult to understand what is going on and provides nothing of importance about what is clearly a very ominous move on al Sadr’s part – an overt appeal to make the Bush/Iraq war a regional conflict. But to write an article about that requires research and interviews and a lot of icky work with translators – it’s too much to ask that American reporters speak Arabic. It’s far easier to notice that al-Sadr has slimmed down and “report” that.
Rumors that his father pulled strings to get him into Harvard Business School. 
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