Media

Life, Satisfaction, Help, Comfort, Refuge, Healing, Redemption, Forgiveness, Atonement, Relief and Salvation

Art, Culture, Media, Movies, Religion

The mind may sort it out and give it names—
When a man dies he dies trying to say without slurring
The abruptly decaying sounds. It is true
That only flesh dies, and spirit flowers without stop
For men, cows, dung, for all dead things; and it is good, yes—

But an incarnation is in particular flesh
And the dust that is swirled into a shape
And crumbles and is swirled again had but one shape
That was this man. When he is dead the grass
Heals what he suffered, but he remains dead,
And the few who loved him know this until they die.

-Galway Kinnell, from “Freedom, New Hampshire”

The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman has been met in equal parts by deservedly effusive praise for the man’s art and the bizarre, prurient, voyeuristic, and pornographic interest in the particulars of his demise by apparent opiate overdose; heroin remains one of the few real taboos left, one of the few almost unspeakable deviancies, and, as such, some people just can’t stop talking about it. The prolific internet presence, General Gandhi, in his Twitter incarnation, noted maybe the most egregiously awful example, published in Esquire and Elle:

The sentence is pretty astonishingly tasteless on its own, but to appreciate the depth of its stupidity, you have to read it in context and realize that its author, Tom Junod, hasn’t just stumbled into a graceless or infelicitous comparison, but has deliberately and knowingly set up a pair of competing schemas: on the one hand, you have George Clooney and Matt Damon, who “have too much to lose,” and are therefore psychically and spiritually immune to the lure of addiction; on the other, you have Hoffman and Gandolfini, “whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice.” This kind of casual, causal linking of transgressive genius to substance abuse has the fetid scent of an adolescent bedroom. Put down your bongs, guys. This shit’s about to get real.

My brother died in 2009 in similar circumstances—not, as the ghoulish, now-standard description goes, “with a needle in his arm”, but alone in a cheap motel room that our parents had rented for him, because, when they’d allowed him into the house, he’d stolen, and yet by that point, he’d have otherwise been living in his car. But, you have to understand, the last six desperate months of his life were sudden and alien to him, and to us. He was far more Matt Damon than Hoffman: a handsome, athletic man with an unaffected smile and uncanny personal charm; old high-school teachers who’d given him nothing but Cs (when he probably deserved to fail) remembered him as one of their favorite students; old girlfriends never seemed to get angry with him. He bounced from job to job (a signal, in retrospect, but at the time, we saw it as an overly gregarious and under-focused twentysomething’s natural fecklessness and indecision; it would eventually correct itself). Mostly he bartended, and he was an excellent bartender. He was never much of a drinker—mostly wine and beer, and rarely in any quantity. Like a lot of bartenders and other such nocturnal creatures, he dabbled in cocaine. If you’d have asked me a year before he died what his biggest problem was, I’d have told you it was that he partied a little too often, although that, too, seemed like nothing more than the kind of mild, youthful vice that we all, mostly, grow out of.

In fact, my brother had been a daily opiate user for the better part of a decade. He never did finish college, but he spent a few years at West Virginia University, and as a freshman, he’d badly broken his leg during a game of pickup soccer. After the surgery, he’d started on pain killers, and when the prescription ran out, he got them elsewhere—codeine, oxy, and eventually, Fentanyl and heroin. I was anything but naïve about drugs myself; I’d at least tried most of them; my best friend struggled with heroin; my boyfriend at the time was a recovering alcoholic and drug addict—and for all this, I never saw it in my brother, never suspected, never knew until it was too late. He was locked in that motel room, and he was dead. Would Nathan Bacharach ever be found dead with a pile of broken pills hidden in the sock drawer?

I don’t suggest that we turn away from the circumstances of death—the opposite of pornography is a prudish sterility that’s equally awful. But if George Clooney died of prostate cancer, would we take the occasion to make it a reflection on the type of roles he chose? It is one thing to learn to gaze without flinching at the cause of a man’s death, another entirely to treat his illness as a mere foible of his eccentric genius. Hoffman had a family. They knew, or they did not know, the extent and late stage of his disease, but what consolation is it to them, or to anyone who knew him, for a stranger to offer his sickness as a slick metaphor for his professional artistry, a cheap window-dressing on his soul? An actor’s art is doubtlessly informed by his person and his inner being, and Hoffman doubtlessly drew on his own sense and memory of darkness in performing it, but he was a great actor not because of his addiction, but in spite of it, and he did not die because he was a genius, but because he was a man—all of us have our end, but none of us deserves it.

Why So Syria?

Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

My friend D. recently sent me an email asking the really critical question: why does Captain Janeway suck? Fortunately, I had recently re-watched most of Voyager, and had given the question a fair bit of cogitation prior to his asking. Viewed in relatively quick succession over the course of a month or so, what you really notice is that the Janeway character combines an immoveable moral rigidity, which manifests as a strident self-righteousness, with an extraordinary capriciousness, a mercurial ethic completely at odds with her self-presentation as a pole of right conduct.

It strikes me now that this is the perfect analog for the Obama administration’s approach to armed violence and the use of the military, stentorian correctness overlaying a feckless utilitarianism, utter conviction the costume of callous ineptitude. The last few months’ red line drawing and redrawing have been as arbitrary as any underwritten weekly serial, and the promises of punitive action suggest an adolescent aesthetic enthusiasm for some explosions right around the third commercial break. That may even be over-crediting this government; at least B-rate TV throws in the space battle because the audience demands it.

Yes, there is the irony of the government that murders 16-year-olds because it doesn’t like their dads arrogating to itself the right to punish other governments for choosing the wrong method with which to kill their own citizens, but I think the grimmer joke is the US so publicly preparing to once more wade into a civil conflict as an act of Public Relations, because if you listen to the appeals and to the rationales, what you hear, again and again, is that the US must make a tepid—albeit deadly—gesture of disapproval at the conduct of a war in order to maintain its brand as the industry leader in hasty moral arbitration. “They must not doubt our resolve.” Yes, and there’s a reason that phrase sounds like an ad for detergent.

Truly, all the agonizing—do we, or do we not light the rockets and launch the mortars—has the real moral seriousness of a generically pretty 30-something commercial actor wondering “where do all these stains come from.” Casuistry is deeply repellent as theater, and the fact that our government is willing to kill even against the better judgment of its own professional military is a sign of just how little it really values life. For all the showy agonizing, the administration has treated its decision to kill as casually as any decision to issue a press release. The thing is already written; they’re just waiting for the right moment to blast it out.

Schnell! Eeeeaaasssy. Um?

Culture, Economy, Media, Movies

I walked into Elysium a few minutes late, and Matt Damon was getting the beat-down from a robot, to whom he’d had the temerity to back talk. This robot was the only character in the film whose motivations were clear and whose actions were a function of its character. Nothing else made any sense.

In the future, an orbital post-scarcity society with the capacity to manipulate complex organic systems at the sub-molecular level maintains Fordist manufactories on Earth. Is it just to give the proles something to do? A single line of dialogue to the effect of, “We gotta keep them busy or they will revolt,” might have covered this flaw, although how an earthbound population could revolt against a well-armed space station, manifest numerical superiority or no, is quite a question, and in any case, most of the people on Earth don’t appear to have work, so there goes that theory. William Fitchner plays the vicious capitalist who runs this robot mill. He does most of his via computer terminal in a hermetically sealed office; naturally, we wonder: why is he on earth at all? Couldn’t he just Skype? Rather more to the point, in an orbital society capable of manipulating individual atoms, why is there still enterprise capitalism? Is it like contact sports, a vicious and anachronistic entertainment, practiced by only a few professionals, kept around for entertainment and kicks? Well, our industrialist suggests that it’s essential he get his company back to profitability, and he is willing to assist Jodie Foster in a coup to do so. Wait, wait, wait a minute. She offers him a 200-year contract to build Elysium’s missiles and robots. Does this not imply a competing firm, or firms? But there’s only one space station. How are these other firms in business? Who’s buying their robots and missiles? Am I going insane? What day is this?

The movie desires to be an allegory of illegal immigration, the hispanophone have-nots of a SoCal favela relentlessly throwing themselves over the Rio Grande of Near Earth Orbit in order to get to the better lives Elysium has to offer. Wait, what? Oh, no, I’m sorry. They’re going for miracle cures. Elysium doesn’t offer a better life. It just offers to fix your boo-boos. Three out of every four shiploads of immigrants gets blown to smithereens, so, like, it appears that you do not increase your chances of beating that cancer, if you consider the actual odds. Here again, the motivations are completely nonsensical, and needlessly so. We could understand people risking their lives to escape this wretched Earth in order to make a new life in space, but all evidence suggests that even those who get there and get their thyroid problems and sugar diabeetuss cleared up get deported right back to our little ball of pollution. Your cancer’s fixed, but you’re still going to starve to death. Hm.

Meanwhile, on Elysium, Jodie Foster plays a French fascist. Fascism, like capitalism, seems an odd ideology for a post-economic paradise, but I suppose assholes will always be with us. She plays some kind of secretary of defense, and she growls that the feckless leadership of Elysium is going to get them all killed, or something, despite the fact that everything on Elysium seems to be going absolutely swimmingly, and the few Earthers who do manage to crash land in this vast La Jolla in the sky appear to be swiftly rounded up and returned. Again and again and again, nothing about this world justifies her snarling aggression (nor her French, but I suppose it’s just meant to convey aristocratic awfulness, so we’ll laissez-faire).Why not make immigration a really confounding problem? The smugglers have figured out how to get hundreds, thousands of people onto Elysium. It’s upsetting the political order. They’re voting for OBAMA! The white peoples is gettin’ restless.  Jodie Foster seule pouvait eux sauver !

So Jodie Foster wants to take over Elysium for no reason, and she has William Fitchner rewrite the code for the Elysium operating system. Which he can do, because he or his company built it? Why is he in such desperate straits, then? Why is he bugging Jodie Foster for contracts? Why doesn’t he take over? I don’t know, I guess he read the script, and it says that he didn’t. He’s motivated by money in a world where money is irrelevant. Elysium has no stores, no ATMs. It’s just houses and swimming pools. Robots bring you champagne. At no point do we see any sort of transactional exchange, except of course when William begs Jodie for a contract. No one has a reason to do anything. William Fitchner goes to Earth, writes the magical spell to take over Elysium, and gets shot down by Matt Damon. Damon is dying because he got irradiated building robots in the factory that exists for no reason. Apparently this happens all the time, because they have a robot whose design features make it useful solely for the purpose of pulling irradiated humans out of a robot chamber. Yo, why didn’t you just send a robot into the radiation chamber in the first place, guys? No, Jim! You’ll flood the whole compartment! He’s dead already.

Anyway, Matt Damon and a gang of dudes who have kept Mazda 626s operational for two centuries shoot down his airplane. Matt Damon has been technologically augmented, and they download the shit into his brain. They unscramble it on the Dell desktop that I had in my office when I was an administrative assistant 10 years ago. Aw, shee-it, it’s the codes to do something. Argue argue. Run run run run run. Jodie Foster sends an augmented assassin whose motivation is that he fucking loves killing shit after Matt Damon. Eventually, everyone ends up on Elysium, because although this is the future and they are able to manipulate matter at the atomic level, if Jodie Foster is distracted for a sec, any asshole can just roll right through the gate, because Elysium’s automated systems read the script and realized that’s what they were supposed to do because of the plot. For no particular reason, the assassin stabs Jodie Foster in the neck with a piece of glass and decides that now he wants to rule Elysium. Has he ever even been to Elysium? Who cares? Jodie Foster bleeds to death on the floor in a closet with a woman who is only in this movie to prove that Matt Damon is not gay, even though Matt Damon is clearly gay; the only person with whom he has a convincing emotional connection is the sexy DL Latin thug car thief who is his best friend, who gets killed, and whose death is Damon’s one moment of actual pathos. These two obviously were boning, but don’t worry, look, there’s this woman!

So the movie kills its main villain in the middle of the last act for no reason, and then reminds you of the narrative senselessness of this act by occasionally cutting back to the room where Jodie Foster is literally lying dead under a tarp, which is the one allegory this movie gets right, except that it is an allegory for this movie. Then some shit happens, and then it turns out that there is no reason at all for the material privation and medical hopelessness on earth, and then the movie is over. I suppose there was some decent production design, in the sense that it all looked better than Star Wars Episode I. Foster does a fine villain, but her character makes so little sense that her performance was lost, and although Damon does the everyman with some skill, he gets lost as soon as the action starts. Bourne proved him a capable action hero in the hands of a capable action director. Here, alas, no.

Look, the future as an allegory for the present moment is effectively the whole point of science fiction, so the movie’s intentions were in the right place, but Blomkamp didn’t think about his concept. You don’t need a Tolkienian backstory to build a realistic fictional world, but consistency matters. If no one has any reason to do anything, or if they act constantly in contravention of their own apparent interests, then all an audience can do is be confused. The movie struggles to present its characters in the tradition of psychological realism. This may be the future, but these people are just like us, etc. etc. And yet, because everything these characters do is in the service of a story that ought not be taking place at all according to its own rules and logic, all these emotions and psychologies are rendered not more, but less real.

Brookstoßlegende

Justice, Media, War and Politics

Does anyone remember when David Brooks was a conservative? Me neither, and yet the adjective persists. He’s gotten great mileage out of the not-very-original but not-very-objectionable-either argument that a society, properly constituted, is a nested set of smaller societies, from friends and family on up through your block, your council district, your diocese, etc., all the way up to the Federal Government. He combines these with a Burkean horror at the excesses of the French Revolution; for David Brooks, it is always 1789 1968. This in turn gets folded into a frothy meringue of faddish neurobabble and pop psychology. The result is an odd chimera, a giddy atavistic technocratic utopian anachronist: a Benthamite Whig monarchist. Imagine that on your coat of arms.

Anyway, Brooks uses his column today to accuse Edward Snowden of taking the delicately wrought matryoshka doll that constitutes American civilization up to the roof and hurling it callously onto the sidewalk below. He accuses Snowden of betraying his own mother. Betrayal is one of those words that you only ever encounter in two contexts. In actual politics, betrayal is part of the lexicon of fascism. I’ll let others on the internet accuse Brooks of this. Despite his authoritarian predilections, Brooks is not a fascist, any more than Brooks is a conservative, or a liberal; Brooks is just a grumpy, entitled suburbanite on the downhill side of middle age—il est lui-même la matière de son livre. The other area in which one encounters betrayal is in the realm of romance. Ah, so that’s it. The odd tone of Brooks’ column grinds against what one expects from a polemic, but it does remind you of a breakup letter. Brooks isn’t outraged; he’s jilted.

Gore Vidal famously, or notoriously, quipped: “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” Vidal was a real aristocrat, and so he could turn his curdled humor on his own noblesse oblige; Brooks is an arriviste, lacking the confidence to giggle at his own certainty; he echoes everything in that sentence that follows positive and nothing that precedes it. Brooks views himself as essentially metonymous with the United States of America, thus the attitude toward Snowden. I can’t believe you’re breaking up with me! You can’t break up with me! I’m breaking up with you!

The column is full of peculiar, #slatepitch counterintuitions (“He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods”), which, in true Dear John fashion, simultaneously accuse Snowden of never doing the dishes and of always getting water all over the counters when he does the dishes, but there’s one fascinating and bizarre politico-historical claim that merits an additional note:

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed.

I have searched in vain, and I find no part of the Constitution, original text or amendments, that makes any provision whatsoever for the keeping of secrets, official or otherwise. In such absence, the accusation makes literally no sense at all. If you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now tell me what you know. The founders did create the United States in part to protect against the issuance of general warrants by an unanswerable government. The closest they get to mentioning 29-year-olds is in making 25 the minimum age for Representatives, 30 for the Senate. Mostly, though, both bodies are occupied by Mr. Brooks’ cohort. Boy, they’re really doing a bang-up job.

Poor? No.

Culture, Economy, Media, War and Politics

To me, the most interesting reaction to the recent Guardian/Glenn Greenwald reporting on the US Government’s vast, creepy, and stupid engagement in various programs of indiscriminate eavesdropping is the shock and disbelief evinced by, mostly, partisan defenders of the President to the effect that there is something deeply disturbing and unbelievable about the idea that a “high-school dropout” could have advanced, succeeded, and come into a six figure salary. Nevermind that the technology industries have always valorized the dropout narrative and that there are prominent tech billionaires offering substantial grants to kids who skip college in order to do something useful with their lives. I’m reminded of some educational activists who point out that in the eyes of the New York Times et al., $250,000 a year is too poor to live in Manhattan, but a teacher making fifty grand is an entitled sinecure living high on the hog. The point is . . . no, the question is: is $200,000 a lot of money to make in a year? Well, in the eyes of the professional classes and their media interlocutors, the answer is: no, if you’re the right kind of person; yes, if you’re not.

The people who express these doubts in the media, who find it so extraordinary that a guy with a mere GED could make what still passes for a decent living in this country, and indeed, find it in a sense offensive that this should be the case, as if the lack of a particular kind of credential is in fact a moral demerit that renders personal financial success not merely suspect but anathema to the proper order of an economy, are the sort of people who eagerly get on board with notions like, “every child should have the opportunity to go to college.” You can ignore the word opportunity; it is a mere formalism. They mean, everyone should go to college. (The obvious economic rejoinder is that if the thing is no longer scarce, it is no longer valuable. Witness, ladies and gentlemen, the Bachelor’s degree. But I digress.) Usually this exhortation is coupled with some vague notion that we—America, if you were wondering—are being outcompeted by China in the war to endow our children with “the skills they will need for the jobs of tomorrow.” No one ever quite gets around to mentioning what those skills are. I assume they mean computers. And it appears, InshSteveJobs, that what a guy or gal needs in order to figger out them crazy computers, is not a college degree, but access to a computer.

In fact, the universalizing of college education has completely elided the distinction between credential and skill. In the days when college was just finishing school for men of a particular class, there was a lot less confusion. I’ll confess to being a conservative sympathizer in certain domains, but I don’t pine for those days. They were shitty. Nevertheless, there was a very real recognition that reading history didn’t make a man fit to be a banker; it made a man clubbable, and then he learned to be a banker. But I propose to you that if Edward Snowden had a BA in English and Creative Writing from Oberlin College and went on to become a high-paid analyst at a defense contractor, no one would say boo about it, even though he would be in a practical sense no more qualified, and hell, probably less so, than any randomly selected dropout blogger. Guys, I know whereof I speak.

What about a degree in visual arts and documentary filmmaking—here I will reveal my conservative sympathies and laugh that such things exist—qualifies a person to judge, one way or other, the professional and vocational qualifications of a person to be a data systems/IT guy? Did you even set up your own home WiFi? Was Edward Snowden a qualified employee? I don’t know, but the dispositive evidence one way or other has nothing to do with whether or not he got into Phi Beta Kappa. The sheer ­de haut en bas snobbery of it is pretty astonishing, especially as it comes from the sort of technocratic centrists and liberals for whom class distinction is supposed to evaporate in the upward movement of social progress. Hey, I think the IT guy who fixes my copier who probably has a 2-year degree from somewhere makes more money than I do, but you know what, I’m just a manager, whereas he has skills.

Peeping Thomism

Culture, Education, Media

At some point in your youth, someone warned you that “this, young man, is going to go on your permanent record.” In my case, it was a high school vice principal. I’ve forgotten the infraction, but I remember the warning. The vice principal wasn’t a bad man, but he was a bit of martinet. That’s probably a part of the job description. I knew plenty of teachers and principals who disciplined out of impatience or because of a poorly hidden streak of petty sadism, but Mr. R. wasn’t one of them; I think he held an abiding belief that structure and direction were good—not just practically good, but universally and categorically so. Most disciplinarians just believe that children, that people, are rotten. Mr. R. believed that we were basically good, just stupid. The diagnosis was correct if the prescription was wrong, and in any event he was able to moderate his meanness, especially for the hard luck kids. That, I think, was the real mark of his moral character. He was never vindictive, and while I disagree with his code to this day, he applied it justly, which is to say, unequally, and contingent on the circumstances. American society often views harsh punishment as a virtue, and when we complain about the unequal application of the rules, we usually mean that rich guys get off too easy, but Mr. R. knew that the real problem is poor guys get it too hard. Man, did we hate that SOB, but we also thought he was kind of okay. Kids are sophisticated like that, more so than adults.

Anyway, the permanent record was one of those semi-mythical creatures that you publicly dismissed while privately fearing when you were camping in the woods and the fire had burned down. I was a rich kid in that poor town, in public school mostly because of politics related to my father’s job, and most high school discipline rolled right off me. It was a given that I’d graduate at the top of my class and decamp for some fancy college, which, indeed, I did. But I do remember the permanent record thing making me ever so slightly nervous, and if I laughed about it to my friends, then I still privately fretted that some ambitious admissions officer would haul up my file and mark me off with a red X for some past minor infraction. Now, of course, kids really do get a permanent record because schools have followed the general trend of American social hysteria and started calling the cops for the slightest infraction; detention is now a misdemeanor, and so on. That’s a shame, because the permanent record ought to be as laughable now as it ever was. Do you remember yourself when you were sixteen? Many descriptors come to mind, but fully formed isn’t one of them.

As if that weren’t bad enough, that idea that one ought to be branded with one’s own youth like a poorly considered neck tattoo, we now find not only kids, but adults (especially new adults) getting constantly dinged with the dire warning that Social Media Lasts Forever. I think this is probably patently untrue in a purely physical sense; it strikes me as probable that fifty years from now, the whole electronic record of our era will be largely lost in a sea of forgotten passwords, proprietary systems, faulty hardware, and compatibility issues. But it should also be untrue in, dare I say it, the moral sense. Educators and employers are constantly yelling that you young people have an affirmative responsibility not to post anything where a teacher or principal or, worst of all, boss or potential boss might find it, which gets the ethics of the situation precisely backwards. It isn’t your sister’s obligation to hide her diary; it’s yours not to read it. Your boyfriend shouldn’t have to close all his browser windows and hide his cell phone; you ought to refrain from checking his history and reading his texts. But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.

At some point, employers will have to face up to the unavoidability of hiring people whose first Google image is a shirtless selfie. Demographics will demand it. They’ll have to get used to it just as surely as they’ll have to get used to nose rings and, god help us, neck tattoos. It’s a shame, though, that it’ll be compulsory and reluctant. We should no more have to censor our electronic conversations than whisper in a restaurant. I suspect that as my own generation and the one after it finally manage to boot the Boomers from their tenacious hold on the steering wheel of this civilization that they’ve piloted ineluctably and inexorably toward the shoals, all the while whining about the lazy passengers, we will better understand this, and be better, and more understanding. And I hope that the kids today will refuse to heed the warnings and insist on making a world in which what is actually unacceptable is to make one’s public life little more than series of polite and carefully maintained lies.

As I Indicated, Admiral, the Thought Had Not Occurred to Me

Art, Culture, Media, Movies

This review is going to reveal Benedict Cumberbatch’s “secret identity.” The quotation marks are there to indicate that his character is neither secret, nor has an identity, unless hard puncher counts as an identity. I bet you never in your wildest imagination thought that Star Trek would end like this, with Spock karate-chopping a bad guy on top of a flying garbage truck in the middle of a bad CGI Star Wars set? I mean, sure, Star Trek had plenty of punching, but geez, man, it’s like, it’s like as if you hired, oh, I don’t know, Baz Luhrmann to make the Great Gatsby and he made it all about parties and clothes and dancing. Oh. Oh.

Like everything Damon Lindelof gets his hands on, Star Trek Subtitle Using Variation on the Word Dark begins with a MacGuffin, muddles into a non sequitur, and ends in a mess. Who hires this guy? My own editor noticed that a draft of my novel twice used fiancé instead of girlfriend, so presumably there’s someone, somewhere who could have read the script and told Lindelof and Abrams that none of this makes any sense. They could have very easily called back the original “Space Seed” episode, set it along the Klingon neutral zone at a moment of high tension when the Federation was searching for a strategic military advantage and had a fine, intelligent movie that also had punching, Klingons, and space battles. You could have had Khan as an object of fear, reverence, and intrigue. Kirk admires his prowess and poise; McCoy his immunological whatever; Spock his astonishing intellect; Uhura his, uh, substantial Cumberbatch. He would divide them and conquer them, but then, rediscovering their bonds of friendship and duty, the crew would defeat him, because there is no eugenically superior superman in TEAM. And hell, you could even throw in a necessary tactical alliance with the Klingons to set the stage for the Cold War plot that was the backbone of the Klingon storyline in TOS and the original films.

Instead. Now look, I’m going to spare you the “Where are the orbital defenses?” and “How come the Klingons didn’t detect ‘em on the long range scanners?” I’m gonna spare you the “How far away is Kronos even at high warp?” and “What’s the effective range on that communicator again?” You may, after all, think that the main storytelling conceit of Star Trek is faster-than-light travel, but really, the main conceit is that a spacefaring civilization resembles Britain, each planet an island, its Starfleet, literally, and Admiralty. Forget all that. Despite its science fiction trappings, Star Trek is really a procedural drama. Starfleet is just its convenient institution.

Yes, you heard it here first. The man who owes Gene Roddenberry the greatest debt is Dick Wolf. Star Trek is the weekly tale of people working within an institution. This, by the way, is also its principal connection to political liberalism—not its easily-dispensed-with humanism nor its integrated crew; rather, its commitment to a universe run, for the better, by enlightened bureaucrats. The prototypical Star Trek plot is a conundrum—cultural, technological, legal—that must be solved through the application of area expertise within the confines of organizational rules and the occasional call of a higher morality or duty. It’s Law and Order in space. Act 1: unexplained thing. Act 2: investigation and preliminary diagnosis. Act 3: unexpected difficulty, delay, or complication, sometimes compounded by institutional resistance. Act 4: renewed investigation, sometimes unorthodox, leading to unexpected solution. Act 5: resolution, explanation.

People and institutions exist in Abrams’ & Lindelof’s reimagined universe, but they’re just sort of there, clogging the frame until the next face punch. I don’t object to action in Star Trek; but I do object to getting rid of the old two-fister:

As with CGI, advances in fight choreography have proceeded right past the point of more gripping physical realism and into the realm of the unbelievably hyper-real. The action is so fast, the movement so “kinetic,” to borrow the Hollywood usage, that it appears faker than the stagey fisticuffs of the old TV series. These guys are naval officers, right? Not ninjas. They pilot starships; this isn’t The Matrix. Hey, remember this little rebooted show called Battlestar Galactica, how it imagined a really gripping sort of space combat—before, anyway, it got bogged down in crackpot Lindelofian metaphysics? Remember Star Trek: First Contact. Yeah, it sucked, but the opening skirmish with the Borg vessel was pretty damn cool, AMIRIGHT? Well, whatever. Let’s just have these guys run down some hallways with guns and punch each other.

So the camera certainly moves around a lot, but there’s nothing doing. Dialogue is declaimed against a clamoring background of exploding noise, and when it does rise to the level of your noticing, it’s less the sound of voices than the smell of ham. “You are my superior officer. You are also my friend. I have been and always shall be yours,” Spock tells Kirk at the beginning of The Wrath of Khan. It is a quiet moment that comes back at the very end of the movie without a flashing arrow; here, it’s all shouted above the din. “YOU ARE MY FRIEND! WE ARE FAMILY!” It’s a disco inferno. Any pathos is in any event squished beneath the steamroller of incomprehensible plot developments, as Khan is first a terrorist, then a fugitive, then a pawn, then maybe a terrorist again, then fighting Spock on a flying thingamajig. Kirk does nothing of consequence, which is just as well, because Chris Pine, while serviceable, is no match for Benedict’s genetic, uh, endowment. Zach Quinto is a better actor, but because he never convincingly fell in love with Kirk or Khan, his jilted anger is incongruous at best. And once more for the cheap seats, it appears to take place deep within the CPUs of Skywalker Ranch.

It’s all a terrible waste of good production design and some nice costume choices (love that hat, Zach; CALL ME). Meanwhile, I know we are meant to believe that the immense crap funnel of our current cinema to be an undistorted reflection of our culture’s degraded taste, and that may be so, but I yet believe that if we must have junk, it can at least taste sweeter and not smell so awfully past its expiration date.

Contre le cinéma

Culture, Media, War and Politics

By the end of the week, I found myself wondering if a better society wouldn’t have kept Boston open and shuttered CNN. Did we really shut down an entire city to catch one wounded boy? Have we overextended the First Amendment in granting the press effective immunity from responsibility even as we become a nation intent on revoking the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth? There’s a temptation to read the scenes of deserted streets and paramilitary police as teasers for the sort of incipient totalitarianism, and maybe it is, but as an aficionado of conspiracy literature, I find that this analysis tends inevitably toward the conspiracist’s biggest flaw, which is to over-read intention and to presume that history has a narrative.

If you asked me to describe in one word a culture that dispatches the black helicopters and assault vehicles in response to a dyadic pair of wayward, violent youth, I’d say, decadent. London kept the dance halls open during the Blitz, but Boston shut Fenway because of a pipe bomb. There’s some truth to the claim that Americans are uniquely deferential to authority and prone to authoritarian solutions, but we’ve also become a culture that’s largely adopted the values of an aristocracy: we want perfect safety and perfect comfort, although we’ll complain mightily about the cost of service these days. For all the John McCains looking up from their thin soup to demand that we Torquemadize the surviving brother in order to discover whether or not this was all part of Cobra Commander’s plot, the predominant sentiment behind the desire to prevent the kid from “lawyering up” and fitting him for concrete boots instead seems to me to be that putting him to trial would just be such a bother, and so expensive.

For all the praetorian hoo-hah on display all day in Boston, the thing that broke the case was some dude going outside to burn a square once the cops gave everyone the all clear. What purpose, then, did the lockdown serve? Well, yinz ever hear of a little thing called The Society of Spectacle? A culture of universal surveillance is a karaoke civilization; the lockdown of Boston was demanded by its own image; CNN’s et al.’s fake reporting wasn’t just the result of an immense, confused official response, but also in a very real sense its cause. Not for nothing does the footage resemble an action flick. The line between reality and fantasy is blurring, yes, but which is really shading into the other?

And this, too, is why the subsequent investigation and trial seem so odd to so many Americans. It reeks of anticlimax. How many more goodbyes do we have to endure before Cate Blanchett and Ian McKellan pack the Bagginses off from Middle Earth? Isn’t there something better on? One reason Brave New World holds up better than 1984 is that Huxley had the good humor to pick a winner, not a boot stomping on a human face forever, but orgy-porgy; not violence and death as a threat, but violence and death as entertainment. Hey, do you guys wonder why something as basically dull as The Hunger Games is so extraordinarily popular. It’s not because it’s fantastical. It’s because it’s recognizable.

We can no more tolerate a plodding police investigation and boring trial than we can stand a sensibly edited fight scene in a movie. It isn’t by accident that the fools on cable news say that a story is “fast moving.” Civil libertarians will argue that we turned Boston into a kind of war zone, but no, we turned it into a soundstage, and we turned the population into extras for those emotional establishing shots of regular citizens gazing through plate glass as the Avengers zoom by. So, you know, look: Lindsey Graham isn’t the villain, here. Actually, he’s the nerd telling everyone to sit down during the credits ‘cause they’re gonna miss the post-credit villain reveal!

Revolting Youth

Books and Literature, Culture, Media

When I was a teenager growing up in Uniontown, PA, a half-sinister, half-beautiful wreck of a mining town, the seat of Fayette County, which everyone called Fayette Nam, which ought to give you some idea, I had an English teacher named Ed Cupp. Mr. Cupp was a big slab of a man who kept his desk at the back of the room, something I can recall no other teacher ever doing. I always assumed it had something to do with his nocturnal activities, which we all assumed to be the cause of his frequent headaches and his occasional habit of resting his head on his crossed arms, or of keeping the lights off during class. He once wrote a poem about another teacher at our high school who’d been a great beauty when she still had her maiden name—I’m not quoting, but he put it very much like that. What I remember about the poem is that it rhymed “chimpanzees” with “phalanges.” He taught 11th-grade Honors English, which was where I read Moby Dick for the first time. The class was supposed to be difficult or whatever, but Mr. Cupp didn’t give a shit about grades, and he used to give us these hysterical fill-in-the-blanks tests. After Moby Dick the first question on the quiz was, “Call me ______.” This one kid answered “crazy,” and Mr. Cupp thought it was so funny that he shared it with the whole class the next day. He probably gave the kid an A. He loved books, and he loved literature, and even though he used to make mooing noises at us when we said something wrong or just dull and predictable, I think he loved teaching, but he also recognized the fundamental absurdity of trying to teach an art that manages to be both essential and frivolous to a bunch of egotists—because all teenagers are fundamentally egotists—who had other obsessions and preoccupations.

I’m not a teacher, but I do like to moo. In the second paragraph of his review of The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner, James Wood, who has other obsessions and preoccupations, says:

The novel’s narrator, an artist in her early twenties nicknamed Reno (it’s where she’s from), is obsessed with speed, machines, and land-speed records. (Art seems to be a subsidiary concern.)

Call me crazy. Late in the novel, Reno is at a party for an artist who appeared earlier as a pushy self-promoter trying to wrangle a show out of a prominent gallerist. Reno says:

John Dogg was not a complete idiot. He had merely seemed like one. It was wanting something a great deal that made people embarrassing—which was why I’d hidden my wants around Sandro and his friends, and Giddle, too, pretended I didn’t want an art career when I did. Pretended I wasn’t jealous of Gloria, of Helen Hellenberger, of Talia, when I was.

Kushner is a distressingly great writer. I’m jealous. And this passage makes explicit what she makes clear in every moment of the book; that Reno’s affectless affect is, duh, a put-on; that she isn’t  “wide-eyed and even dangerously porous,” a Woody description that’s supposed to be incisive but comes across as snide and a little condescending; she’s afraid. Reno does like speed, and she does like motorcycles, but they’re not her obsession. Her participation in the speed trials out on the Bonneville flats are part of a vaguely conceived art project; after she wrecks, she makes the team that’s taken her in drive her hobbled body back out to the course so she can photograph the tracks she’s made. That isn’t subsidiary. She really wants to be an artist. Even her descriptions of terrible motorcycle and automobile wrecks, in particular the crash of a driver named Flip Farmer (which Wood excerpts in his review), reveal a mind attuned to the visual, the abstract, and the geometric.

Reno considers this quality of her own character as well, later in the book, having been marooned in Italy, where she’s ostensibly gone to film (and be filmed by) the very Italian team that she encountered at Bonneville. It doesn’t work out—heartbreak, revolution, etc., and when she tries to talk to the team over the phone, they seem almost to have forgotten about her. She has a realization: that they are actually interested in speed records, whereas she is interested in the aesthetics of speed records. She isn’t a driver. Well, she is. But it’s a subsidiary concern.

It’s such a fundamental error of reading that I honestly wondered at first if Wood had just stopped reading halfway through. He wouldn’t be the first book reviewer to quit midway, and I think I’d have held it against him less. No. He definitely read the whole thing. He knows the mechanics of the plot right up to the end. Well then, what would explain it? I remembered something Edmond Caldwell wrote about Wood’s equally weird treatment of Bolaño:

We’ve seen how Wood, in his review of Death with Interruptions, turned the long-time communist Saramago into an advocate of Original Sin and ‘fallen’ human nature.  It’s in a similar spirit that Wood transforms The Savage Detectives into a story about growing into an adult ‘maturity’ after being disabused of adolescent enthusiasms such as aesthetic and political radicalism.  Bolaño in the 1970s was “an avant-garde poet bristling with mad agendas,” and so are the characters who make up the narrative’s “gang of literary guerillas,” says Wood in his summary of the novel.  Yet Savage Detectives, he goes on to affirm, “is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth.”  In other words, zany antics involving things like avant-garde agendas and guerilla gangs are fine as long as they are seen (or can be portrayed) as properly childish preoccupations; a book is “good” and merits a positive review to the extent that its pretty sentences are “about” the putting away of childish things.

Coincidentally (or no?), The Flamethrowers has a lot in common with The Savage Detectives, and Wood’s approving note on just how acutely Kushner satirizes the New York art scene in the 1970s likewise has a lot in common with his belief that Bolaño was making fun of the naïve and youthful radicalism of his “visceral realist” poets. Yes, Bolaño is making fun, but, you know, like, we kid because we love. What Wood doesn’t see, because I think he really considers artists and writers fundamentally ridiculous, however much he might try to convince us, and himself, otherwise, is the deep and true and beautiful affection and sympathy that these writers feel for their characters. Just look at what he offers as praise:

She is funny not at the expense of contemporary art but at the expense of the people who make that art, seeing with clear eyes their bluster and pantomime. She scours her chosen period for its extravagance and histrionics; the parallel with today’s ambition market is obvious. Small worlds resemble each other first.

My emphasis. This is supposed to be a compliment! Which seems extraordinary until you consider the source. He mentions, too, that she’s an art critic. Don’t worry, she’s one of us! In fact, what makes The Flamethrowers so good, what makes Kushner so impressive, is that even the most venal, grasping, ambitious, and pretentious of her imagined avant-gardists are rendered with sympathy and love. She is making fun of the scene and of the art—and yes, of the people—but not at the expense of the people. Actually, she likes her artists and revolutionaries very much, which is why we feel their failures so movingly and so viscerally when they inevitably occur.

What do you say about this kind of criticism? That it praises by mistake? That it turns everything it reads into a whetstone on which it sharpens its ideological axe? Wood would probably say he doesn’t like ideology, that it’s as juvenile and fake as art and poetry, but look at how he begins his review:

Put aside, for the moment, the long postwar argument between the rival claims of realistic and anti-realistic fiction—the seasoned triumphs of the traditional American novel on one side, and the necessary innovations of postmodern fiction on the other. It was never very edifying anyway, each camp busily caricaturing the other. And don’t bother with the newest “debate,” about the properly desirable amount of “reality” that American fiction should currently possess. (Twenty grams, twenty-five grams?) Some novelists, neither obviously traditional nor obviously experimental, neither flagrantly autobiographical nor airily fantastical, blast through such phantom barricades. Often, this is because they have a natural, vivacious talent for telling stories; and these stories—the paradox is important—seem fictively real, cunningly alive. Novelistic vivacity, the great unteachable, the unschooled enigma, has a way of making questions of form appear scholastic.

If your response is a moo, or a huh?, then have a seat, and can I offer you a drink? Who had this argument? What is “anti-realistic fiction”? What is the “traditional American novel”, and what are the “necessary innovations of postmodern fiction”? Is the former Moby Dick? Or Hawthorne? Or is he talking about Philip Roth? Is Pynchon postmodern? Personally, I can’t figure out what postmodernism added to fiction that you won’t find in Tristram Shandy. Shit, I guess Sterne and Melville just had natural, vivacious talent for telling stories. And I would like to believe that I’m cunningly alive myself, although, I don’t know . . . wouldn’t that imply that I prenatally pulled one over on my mom?

Again, this paragraph precedes a glowing review that really wants to make the case that Kushner is just some delightful raconteur spouting stories about absurd people, their stupid art and their dumb, failed revolutions. Just a storyteller! Oh, and a vivacious one, which also comes across as snide and condescending, as faint praise. The Flamethrowers is audacious not in its humor, although it’s funny, but in its seriousness. Its revolutions are doomed, but not because the revolutionaries are children or fools. Both her frauds and her real radicals are suffused with a terrible human want, and they crash against the unwillingness of the world to accommodate their desires. I suppose Wood would have them grow up and find desires that are more aligned with the will of the world. But I don’t think it’s an accident that the book ends in a question.

I don’t want to overtax the comparison of The Flamethrowers to The Savage Detectives, which was, as Caldwell put it, “nothing less than the life-cycle of a generation.” The Flamethrowers is in some ways broader than The Savage Detectives (and it actually takes place over at least three generations), but it is decidedly not epic. Of course, it isn’t “a contemporary rewriting of Flaubert’s novel of 1869, Sentimental Education” either, which is what Wood calls it before nailing (I use the term advisedly) the narrator as “like Frédéric Moreau […] a frustratingly malleable figure a hero almost vacuous except for the exactitude of her noticing.” It doesn’t help that Flaubert’s correspondence makes an appearance in the novel, which makes the comparison seem even more overdetermined—or overloaded, to use the Woodier term. If Reno has a fictional counterpart, it’s Christopher Isherwood, the guy who said that he was a camera, whom Wood would probably also call “wide-eyed and dangerously porous.” (By the way, would you call Isherwood traditional? Postmodern? Well, he wasn’t American, so whatever.) They have different locutions, but a similar eye, and they are both foreign interlopers in a world at once alluring and frightening, full of strivers, liars, men on the make, and opportunistic love affairs. Maybe that blurry margin is what makes Wood so uncomfortable that he’s got to start off with a disquisition apropos nothing else at all.

Hitler? I Coulda Killer Her!

Art, Culture, Media

A recent battle in the art world illustrates the point. The billionaire Ronald Perelman is suing the multimillionaire art dealer Larry Gagosian on the grounds, among others, that Gagosian overvalued an unfinished sculpture of Popeye (yes, the Sailor Man) by Jeff Koons. Perelman purchased this item for $4 million.

In parallel to the David of Michelangelo, I will refer to the disputed work as the Popeye. A judge will eventually decide what the Popeye is really worth. My own view is that it is worth precisely what its component materials are worth, or perhaps a bit less, due to the costs that would be incurred in hauling it away and melting it down or crushing it. If called as an expert witness, I will testify to that effect.

–Crispin Sartwell

One of my pleasures over the past couple of months has been the universe confirming my aesthetic choices as a novelist by allowing near-facsimiles of a couple of my book’s more extravagant jokes to pop up in real life. So, for instance, there’s a little bit about legalizing bigfoot hunting in Pittsburgh; lo and behold, my editor sends me a link to a real-life bigfoot season on Long Island. Elsewhere in the narrative, we briefly meet a performance artist who “reenacts the aesthetics of atrocity” by dressing up like a Leni Riefenstahl extra—basically a caricature cribbed shamelessly from the real-life Eastern European collective, NSK. Ladies and gentlemen: Charles Krafft.

If not in the top tier of international art scammers, Krafft nevertheless had a national reputation, got museum shows, sold works for tens of thousands of dollars. His work was never any good; even presumed to be commentary, it was the sort of crap that you can find in any hipster gallery on any First Friday gallery crawl in any gentrifying neighborhood from Bushwick to Bloomfield and back again. Well-regarded shit is the reserve currency of the global art market, and just about anything with a hint of ironic appropriation and meta-artistic commentary will eventually find its way into a well-regarded biennial. The art world is the Sokal Affair diluted to an eighth-grade reading level and repeated ad infinitum, except that the pranksters believe their own essays.

Krafft, it seems, never made much effort to conceal his fetish for Aryanism, but it wasn’t until earlier this month when a reporter for The Stranger published a short investigation that anyone with a well-regarded degree from a decent college bothered to notice:

When I wrote to Krafft back in May, letting him know that a reader had asked whether he was a Holocaust denier, I added, “I suppose you don’t have to answer that, but I guess I’d like to know.” This wasn’t the first time I’d heard the rumor, but I found it impossible to imagine that the swastikas on Krafft’s work might reflect genuine spite toward Jews—i.e., that there might not be so much difference between Krafft’s swastikas and Hitler’s. After all, that could mean this self-taught, former Skagit Valley hippie artist was using the guise of art and irony to smuggle far-right symbols into museums, galleries, collectors’ homes, and upscale decor shops like Far4 on First Avenue.

“I found it impossible to imagine that the swastikas on Krafft’s work might reflect genuine spite toward Jews.” I think this is the fine-arts version of that serial killer story in which the neighbors all recall what a nice boy he was, how polite, although he was, come to think of it, awfully quiet and came and went at really odd hours.

To the credit of both The Stranger’s Jen Graves and The New Yorker’s Rachel Arons, neither takes the easy route of calling Krafft a fraud as a way of exonerating themselves and their colleagues for past plaudits. Unfortunately, they can’t quite disavow any ill-considered praise for this third-rate ceramic hobbyist either. Arons:

Perhaps Krafft’s obsession with Holocaust conspiracy theory is costing him his creativity; that would be karmically interesting. But his work that contains contradictions—a “salad of symbols” too freewheeling to parse. That work is worth continuing to examine, even if we are disgusted by Krafft’s current personal beliefs and unsure exactly to what extent, or for how long, they have been informing his work. It should always be difficult to look at art about Nazis. Now that looking at Krafft’s art is even more difficult, we shouldn’t look away.

Looking at Krafft’s work was never difficult, unless, in an effort to contort your own natural aesthetic reaction (“this guy makes shitty trinkets covered in swastikas; uh, oooookay”) to the received opinions of an art establishment to which you want to belong (“ironically appropriating the symbology of fascism in a metacommentary on the nature of nostalgia in our conceptualizing of past atrocity blah blah blah”), you had to take your own brain to the bar, feed it one too many drinks, and then convince it to do something it wasn’t really comfortable with.

It’s true, we shouldn’t look away from Krafft’s art because it’s “even more difficult”. We should look away because it’s lousy art.