Department of Amplification

The Day Job reports having received this message from one Ross Partridge, regarding my Tribeca review of Baghead:

wow- speaking of "generational" reporting- Phil Nugent( perhaps child to Ted which may possibly explain it) should actually read the writing on the wall(or credits)for that matter before being allowed to review a movie. Jay and Mark did not star in Baghead. Although, I can guarantee if they did, they would have been amazing, at the very least, pitch perfect accurate with their delivery... unlike your
writer.

I'm afraid that Mr. Patridge has me dead to rights on this one. In actual fact, the homely, appallingly needy, whimpering brother in the film is played by Steve Zissis, whose name would be worth many points in Scrabble, and the repellently smarmy, pretty-boy dumbass brother is played by Ross Partridge. I feel awful about the error and have no good excuse for it, except to note that Ross Patridge, the actor--he played "Milo Shaughnessy" on As the World Turns and "Curious Man" in The Lost World: Jurassic Park--really does look a lot like Mark Duplass, if you squint and turn your head funny, although it's probably true that, as Ross Patridge, the e-mail correspondent readily admits in his message, Mark Duplass probably would have done a much better job with his delivery. (Ironically, once you somehow get the mistaken impression that the film's directors are playing the lead roles, it becomes easier to believe it's so when you're watching the movie, since it would provide an explanation for why the directors didn't fire the lead actors.) Really, though, it was an unforgivable blunder on my part, and nothing, not even the fact that it was very hard to concentrate with all the snoring in the theater and the people charging over my knees and lurching in front of the screen as they made a break for the exit, can excuse it. (One poor bastard in the front row was so desperate to escape after the first fifteen minutes that, in the dark theater, he went tearing out of his seat like a rocket and literally ran--KAPOW! straight into the wall, which for a while there was on my list of the five most entertaining things I saw at Tribeca.) Mind you, as I said in my review, I thought the movie itself had a fair share of chuckles and was kind of cute up until the last twenty minutes or so--about a third of its running time--when it matched up all too well with the male leads. At first, I thought that the baffling reference to "'generational' reporting" by Mr. Patridge meant that he thinks that Baghead's meandering, half-assed quality, which pulls it into the mire in the concluding sequences, are specially pitched at a hip twenty-something sensibility and that I'd love it a lot more if I didn't have one foot in the grave, but then I looked him up at IMDB and it turns out that he's actually a few months older than me, so now I'm guessing that he meant that he'd like to take me over his knee. My loss if that never actually happens.

I've sometimes been accused to of taking criticism too much in stride by some of my more wild-eyed Internet colleagues, but my feeling is that, while we all make honest mistakes, a mistake is a mistake, and one hardly gains in stature by trying to dodge responsibility for them. I fucked up; the post in question has been corrected, and I apologize and resolve to do better in the future. The only thing that tempted me to reveal just the teeniest trace of exasperation this time is the tone adopted by Ross Partridge, the correspondent, which, while strikingly in keeping with the "I am an asshole, but enough about you" vibe that Ross Partidge the actor conveys so perfectly in the movie, did seem to me to be scaled a little out of proportion to the actual offense. But then I realized that when a scathing, lacerating wit such as that possessed by Ross Partridge, the correspondent, reveals itself, you just have to get out of the way and let it express itself. The world would be poorer by far if it had been denied the full throttle attack of an Oscar Wilde, a Jonathan Swift, a Lenny Bruce, a Ross Partidge. Think of it: this is someone who, looking to lean in for the kill, had the devastating inspiration and the ballsiness to go right for the jugular and point out that I have the same last name as a rock star and gun enthusiast who I have never met and to who I am not in fact related, though I do loves me some "Wango Tango." In playing the Nuge card, Ross Partridge the correspondent has shown himself to be every bit as much a master of creative invective as everyone I knew in fifth grade, everyone I knew in sixth grade, everyone I knew in seventh grade, everyone I knew in eight grade, everyone I knew in high school, everyone I knew in college who lived in a dorm, and three thousand of the people I identified myself to over the phone while working as a phone pollster for The New York Times, including the guy who, in response to my asking him, two months into the Iraq war, if he thought things were going better, worse, or as well as he'd expected, replied, "To be honest, a little worse. Hell, they're just sand monkeys!" It boggles the mind to imagine what kind of new-style equivalent to the Algonquin Round Table we might have if only that guy and Ross Partridge, the correspondent, could be persuaded to grab a sandwich together. Though if that had happened before Baghead was made, the sand-monkeys guy might well have been offered Ross Partridge the actor's part.

I was a little surprised to see Jack Shafer's article in Slate in which he accused obituary writers of "slobbering" over Robert Rauschenberg, and a brief notice by one of my favorite working art critics, Jed Perl, who slagged the artist's achievement. (Shafer did link to a piece by Roger Kimball belittling Rauschenberg in The New Criterion, but that doesn't surprise me at all.) I have no objection to people saying that Rauschenberg-worship is out of control or even that he wasn't all that, but Shafer, who showed more of a sense of moderation when he pissed people off a couple of years back when he complained that the obituaries for David Halberstam didn't do enough to stress that the ego that made Halberstam a maverick reporter in his youth did him fewer favors when he became a comfortable, best-selling member of the journalistic establishment, professes to be bewildered that no critic has used the occasion of Rauschenberg's death to question the value of any of his major works--"not his White Painting, not his "black painting," not his Automobile Tire Print, not his screenprints, not his Mud Muse, and not his "cardboards." Perl bores in from the opposite direction, declaring that "I cannot see that there is any poetry or power in Rauschenberg's work," period. He adds, "The merest suggestion that the juxtapositions of objects and images in Rauschenberg's paintings, sculptures, and prints are nothing more than arbitrary has left one open to the accusation of being a conservative or a reactionary. And once you have been called those names, you are out of the discussion." It's disappointing to see a published critic who's given free rein to say whatever he wants in a major magazine claiming that, because nobody recognizes how wrong they've been all these years and falls down in remorse upon learning that they disagree with him, his influential and widely disseminated opinion isn't really part of "the discussion." It underlines the real problem, which is that Perl and Shafer and company don't want a "discussion" of Rauschenberg; they want everyone to agree with them and then never mention him again.

But at least Perl--like Jim Lewis, whose measured and reasonable take on Rauschenberg, a very model of the sort of thing that Shafer complains doesn't exist, can be found in, um, Slate--is speaking straight about his thoughts and feelings. Shafer's piece has a rancid stink of willful disingenuousness to it. "You'd expect that an artist who deliberately courted controversy might rouse a little debate on the event of his death." Shafer bills himself as Slate's "media critic." His piece appeared yesterday, when Rauschenberg had been dead a day. Shafer was, I believe, alive and sentient when Nixon died; I know that he was working for Slate when they decided to put their Dubya-mocking "Bushims" feature in mothballs in the wake of 9/11, a choice that presumbaly had less to do with the editors' belief that the president's imbecility was a less important issue after the attacks had bestowed upon him the powers of a god than a feeling that if they kept making fun of him at that time, they might be beaten on the streets, or on the set of Fox talk shows, by angry mobs. If there is any part of Shafer genuinely capable of "expecting" that the very first death notices published in the wake of the passing of a legendary and celebrated figure in any field would be full of negative re-evaluations of his work, then the site ought to hire a media critic who's not from Mars.

Robert Rauschenberg

In 1988, I had a summer job working at the New Orleans Museum of Art. I was one of a group of five guys who worked out of basement office and who did all the shit work in the museum that involved handling the artwork or that might require us appearing where we might be seen by the general public; our official job title was "preparators." (We built frames for paintings and platforms for statues, set up and took down exhibits, stored and transported art works, etc. We were also all white. There was a separate group of guys with their own basement office who did all the other shit work. Their official job title was "janitors.") I worked under a guy named Tom, a huge guy in paint-spattered overalls who had a seemingly genial disposition and a scary laugh that could come out of him whenever someone--okay, mainly me--would fuck up, a laugh that got scarier and scarier as you got to know him and realized that he was sitting on more trapped, potentially explosive fury than James Cagney at the end of White Heat; a couple of young, walking smirks, one of whom wore a suit, a short haircut and a Hitler mustache, while the other had a mop of curly hair, so that they looked like British brothers band Sparks; and Fred, an older dude who I liked a lot and who reminded me of Art Carney, except that I have no reason to think that Art Carney ever spent his lunch hours advising younger men, in the manner of a paternal sage, that you could sexually enslave women by doing it to them doggy-style. (I have no idea what the "janitors" talked about on their lunch hours. Maybe cockfights and child porn, maybe chess moves and thermonuclear dynamics.) Anyway, we were sitting around the office one day, which is what we'd have done every paid second of every weekday if Tom hadn't had superiors of his own to answer to, and suddenly, after the conversation about what Julian Schnabel might be worth hit a lull, Tom piped up, "Ya wanna see the Rauschenberg?" It turned out that the museum had paid a huge sum for a Robert Rauschenberg painting, but somebody on the Board of Directors didn't care for it, so it was kept rolled up and stuck in a corner of the acquisitions room. We all trundled out and found it and took it back to a table set up near the basement office and unrolled the canvas. We unrolled it, and we all stared at it for awhile. God knows what I'd think of it today, but at the time I felt that I was falling into it eye-first. It was a big rough canvas coated in blue, with a shape of a silhouette of a diver plunging in. It felt extraordinary to be that close to such a thing. Then after a few minutes, Tom rolled it back up and stuck it back in the corner where he'd found it, and we all went back into the office and listened to the two smirks talking about how much Robert Longo must have been worth.

I'm no art expert, but I know what I like, and going back as far as I can remember, I've always liked Robert Rauschenberg. William Faulkner once gave an interview to Paris Review where he recalled the writing of his first novel Mosquitoes and said something like, "I discovered at once that writing was fun." It was easy to imagine Rauschenberg saying something similar about the process of making art. The first time I came across his name was probably through a 1976 Time magazine cover story that I picked up in the library because I was hoping to find something in the magazine about the new version of King Kong, and I mean no insult whatsoever when I say that the same qualities that, at that age, made me inclined to be interested in King Kong helped prepare me for developing an interest in Rauschenberg. His stuff may not have been the most accessible ever produced by a twentieth-century artist, but it did seem sort of friendly, to reach out to the untutored potential enthusiast. There was nothing snobbish or cliquish about it. And it was big, but with none of the egotistical swagger of the stuff that was hot in the 1980s. Rauschenberg's stuff seemed scaled big not because he was trying to impress anyone but because he couldn't contain himself.

He was a showman with a sense of play and with a desire to produce work that would, without sinking to message-mongering or propaganda, would have a role in the public discussion and begin the process of turning the newspaper stories of the day into history and legend. He was a fount of ideas and endlessly inventive, and he seemed to want to try his hand at as many different modes of expression as he could. Some of them, inevitably, turned out a little better than some others, and as with Picasso, he had his own restless creativity used against him; he got accused of being pointlessly multidimensional, of spilling his seed on the ground while others made their reputations good and firm by hitting one note so many times that nobody could fail to recognize their "signature." Last week I happened to come across an article in the New York press about some dumbass political-literary feud involving one of the vainest and most ludicrously censorious of prominent published voices, and this prick, attempting to out the knife in good and hard, said of his designated enemy that it was the fellow's tragedy that he thought he was Saul Bellow but was "only" Norman Mailer. And while it's easy to see how someone who thinks that most important thing in art is to never, ever get caught coloring outside the lines might not only prize Bellow above all others but denigrate Mailer, I'd like to think that both dead writers, if they came back tomorrow, would be able to stand united in their desire to take a blackjack to this misguided yokel for having soiled both their names by issuing them from the mouth he uses to utter such nonsense. But enough. Like Mailer, like Picasso, and for that matter like Bellow, Rauschenberg's death is an occasion only for selfish sadness on the part of those of us left behind. We've all got to go sometime, and they are heroic examples of those who had it all, in the sense that they had a lot--not enough, never enough--of time here and made the most of it. Would that any of us had enough time to do nothing on this earth but to wallow in enjoyment and appreciation of their work.

Happy Mother's Day, and Happy 99th

I'd just like to mention that my grandma's old age pension

Is the reason why I'm standing here today...

--Billy Joe Shaver, "I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train"





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Reality Checks

In documentary-film circles, Errol Morris achieved bullet-proof status with his 1988 The Thin Blue Line, one of the few nonfiction films that didn't just record or inveigh against injustice but actually had concrete results: it actually got Randall Adams, an innocent man who had been wrongly convicted of murdering a policeman in Texas released from prison, no small feat. That movie also made Morris a hero to journalists, though Morris himself is well known to blanch at the idea that he's any kind of reporter and even to reject the label "documentary" for his films, because he thinks it smacks of something dry and educational. He considers himself an artist. The Thin Blue Line dressed its story up with dramatic re-enactments and a musical score and the cute, jokey use of old film clips. For Morris, the secret to elevating documentary films to the level of art is to aestheticize the material, and he's gone further and further in that direction even as he's chosen to work with subject matter that raises big, troubling moral issues, as in Mr. Death (about Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., an expert on execution technology who was hired by a Holocaust denier to apply some singularly goofy methods to the ruins of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and obligingly concluded that they couldn't been used to execute people) and the Robert McNamara interview-profile The Fog of War. There's ample evidence by now that Morris isn't seriously interested in and maybe not especially well qualified to examine moral issues. A onetime private investigator, he stumbled across the Randall Adams story while researching another film that he had intended to make, about the psychiatrist who had testified at Adams's sentencing hearing, where he insisted that Adams was a psychopathic personality who if ever released from prison would surely kill again. (The psychiatrist, known as "Dr. Death", was a regular fixture of the sentencing hearing circuit, where he could always be counted on to testify that whoever was on trial was a psychopathic personality who, if ever released from prison, would surely kill again.) Morris may have set out to make a "Most Unforgettable Weirdass Character" movie--which is what a lot of his movies, including his early Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida, and Mr. Death, too, actually feel like--and gotten involved in Adams's story on the level of a challenging intellectual puzzle.

In The Thin Blue Line, one of the cops who railroaded Randall Adams thinks back to the sight of this man insisting, truthfully, that he hadn't had anything to do with the crime for which he'd been arrested and chortles, "He almost overacted his innocence." There's an echo of that in Morris's new movie about Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure, a man who's describing a scene where some American military and intelligence people decided to torture a prisoner and systematically beat him to death while he was hanging by his arms--whereupon, noticing that he was hanging limp and not responding anymore, they concluded that he was "playing possum" and spent quite a while marveling at how good he was at maintaining a position in which he must have been in agony. Although he now knows that the man they were teasing was dead, the interviewee still sounds pretty jolly as he recalls the scene, and you may begin to register just how far the Abu Ghraib victims were, in the minds of their tormentors, from seeming like human beings. Maybe the tormentors had to tell themselves that they weren't hurting real people in order to do what they thought was their jobs, but it's clear that whatever adjustments they had to make, once they did, they really got into it. Among the people Morris interviewed, the favored term for beating and degrading people was "messing with them." You have to look for what clues you can to guess at whether these sadists would have regarded their prisoners as animals to be prodded under the best of circumstances or whether they had to force themselves to adopt an evil simpleton's mindset so that they could follow orders and get on with their sadism. Morris, not the world's most probing interviewer, isn't out to explore that. On the simplest level, he's using his recreations (bodies twisted, attacks dogs slavering at the camera in slow motion) and his music (by Danny Elfman) and his kicky special effects to turn this story into a horror movie.

On the more cerebral, and frankly more offensive level, he's playing illusion vs. reality games with the photos from Abu Ghraib. The interviewees, who include Lynddie England and Sabrina Harman, are obsessed with pointing out that there are things people think they "know" about what's in the photographs, but they're wrong! For instance, in the infamous photo of England holding a leash that has a man on the other end, you keep reading that England was "dragging" him, but no way--they both just stood there! After the man who was beaten to death was zippered into a body bag, some of the staff tiptoed in and took a picture with him, and we see Harman, leaning her gleaming face next to his bruised, dead face, giving a thumb's up side and grinning like an evil chimpanzee. This is one of the few times Morris can be heard probing a little: why does she look so tinkled pink? "“When you get into a photo, you want to smile.” What did she mean by the thumb's up? "Whenever I get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands."

Harman is allowed to read passages from her letters home, in which she expresses concerns about the brutality and snickering cruelty she took part in, always doing so with a big toothy smile for the cameras. To my ears (and bullshit detector), the "concerns" she recorded in those letters stink of C.Y.A., and not just because she never hesitated to jump in with both feet at the torture garden. She and others at Abu Ghraib may have had enough social intelligence to get a sense that they were a part of something awful--no great insight, given that so many of the photos of what went on in the prison convey a whiff of basement-budget S & M porn. But given the chance to talk about what she really did, she reveals that she doesn't have the minimum degree of moral intelligence to even pretend to understand the specifics of why what she and her buddies did that was wrong: all the interviewees reek of naked, bleating self-pity, and none more so than Harman when she complains that she's been accusing of "mistreating" the corpse she posed with, and how the heck, she wants to know, do you mistreat 'em after they're dead? In the end, she falls back on the hoariest page in the Bush-Cheney playbook: asked if it didn't ever cross anyone's mind that what went on at Abu Ghraib was, to put it softly, "weird", she sniffles, "Not when you're told that it's to save lives." She sounds not unlike that woman on The View who sniffily said that she didn't know whether the Earth is round, because she had to choose between knowing that and making sure her children were fed.

Did the people at Abu Ghraib really think that they were working to save lives? How stupid could they have been? They knew how the people there came to be their prisoners: after the insurgency started making its presence felt, the orders came down to fill up the cells, so soldiers started going out on the streets at night and grabbing up people at random and locking them up to fill their quotas. Then, as the interviewees themselves describe it, these people who had been "arrested" for the crime of looking Arab in an Arab country expressed anger over their situation, which in turn convinced the geniuses looking over them that "they must be pretty bad guys." As Megan McArdle could have pointed out to the guards, if they weren't master terrorists, why would they object to being locked up for no reason, when the obvious normal reaction would be to salute their captors for their good intentions? I suspect that the Abu Ghraib jailers must have viewed their charges much the same way the Bush administration viewed Iraq after 9/11. Their buddies were getting killed out there, and they really were upset about it. They wanted payback. But they couldn't get their hands on the people who'd killed their buddies, any more than the Bushies could really get their hands on Osama bin Laden. But they could get their hands on people who sort of resembled the real criminals.

Standard Operating Procedure is a depressing movie, but not for the reasons you might expect. Morris doesn't have anything to say about his subject, just techniques for making it look "interesting." And he's way too taken with the idea that there's some fascinating disconnect between what happened and what the pictures show. (I wasn't dragging him! Everybody says I was dragging him, but we were both stationary!) But perhaps the most depressing thing is the sympathy he extends to the torturers. That may seem like a strange and uncharitable thing to say; it's not as if more finger-pointing is going to get us anywhere. And it would be a valuable thing if Morris could help us move closer to forgiveness of the torturers by helping ius understand them. But Morris is sympathetic to them in a way that seems to impede understanding. He shifts the blame--to the higher ups who gave the orders but evaded punishment, to Charles Graner, the alleged ringleader who he didn't get to interview. (Graner, who, with his mustache and stupid grin and the thumb's up pose everybody seems to emulate, looks so much like a geeky insurance salesman who likes to play weekend warrior with the National Guard, is described by all as a charismatic Svengali who caused everyone's cerbral cortex to shut down as they did anything to please him. They make him sound--conveniently--like a cult leader.) The interviewees are careful to make it sound as if they get it, that they know what they did was wrong, but they also make it all too clear that they think it sucks that they were held accountable for what they did and that any of them had to spend a second in jail. They're disgusting because they demand to be treated as people who've paid for their crimes even as they indicate by their faces and their words that they don't think they should have had to pay for a damn thing. The movie is disgusting because it takes all this in and greets it with an unfeeling, unthinking shrug, while expecting to be hailed for its production values and art direction.

Battle for Haditha is an acted, scripted film about an actual Iraq war atrocity, but it too was directed by a filmmaker best known for his documentaries, Nick Broomfield. In such films as Kurt and Courtney and Biggie & Tupac, Broomfield revealed himself to be a cheap, manipulative conspiracy fetishist, the kind of guy whose attitude is, Don't hold me to any of this, I'm not saying I believe it myself, but here's the really exciting thing that the guy in the tinfoil hat had to say to our camera after we bought him a beer. Haditha itself is pretty tinny as drama: when Broomfield wants to establish that an Iraqi character is mad at the U.S. but isn't to be regarded as unsympathetic, as a terrorist, he has him enter while delivering the line, "Those al-Qaeda idiots shot the schoolteacher!" The movie builds to the moment when the American troops, responding to the killing of one of their own by an I.E.D., go batshit and rampage through the town, killing everyone in sight. What makes it worth mentioning in conjunction with Standard Operating Procedure is that it, too, is intended as a brave, unflinching look at a American war crime that ends up declaring that the perpetrators of evil cannot be judged, if they happen to be ordinary American soldiers. Once again, the real bad guys are the higher-ups who escape punishment. The embodiment of evil in Haditha is a cadaverous-looking officer who seems to authorize mass murder by his troops by picking up a phone and barking that he doesn't want any more American soldiers killed. After the shit hits the fan, the soldiers who are scapegoated for Haditha are dragged before this asshole so he can cluck his tongue about what a disgrace they are to their uniforms. No argument that those who give the orders ought to be, and aren't, held accountable along with those who carry out the orders, but does that mean that those who carry out the orders should be let off the hook?

In Haditha, as in some of the Vietnam war movies such as Full Metal Jacket, war puts decent young men into situations where they're temporarily driven insane, which means they cannot be judged. Some reviewers--and, it seems, the director himself--have taken the opportunity to use Broomfield's movie as a club against Brian De Palma's Redacted, just as De Palma's Vietnam movie Casualties of War was denounced by the critics who'd hailed Full Metal Jacket and Platoon as realistic and morally tough-minded. Part of De Palma's message in both his war movies was that atrocities happen when there's an instigator there to get the ball rolling. The other Vietnam movies were part of a culture that sought to make peace with Vietnam vets who felt they'd been maligned and even demonized as part of the overall effort to criticize the war when it was going on, and they did that in part by saying that "war" is so deranging that those who'd done bad things in the field shouldn't be held responsible for anything at all, though they did have the option of feeling sorry for themselves. The ball somehow gets itself rolling. Haditha, portraying American soldiers going batshit psychotic for a brief bloody spell and then switching back to their normal selves, like the Hulk turning back into Bruce Banner, just in time to deliver a climactic soul-searching speech to the bathroom mirror, is a continuation of that trend, and it may seem a very comforting approach for people who want to express horror at what goes on in Iraq but who are terrified that if they seem to criticize any individual soldiers, they'll be accused of not "supporting the troops." What's missing from this attitude is any awareness of, let alone respect and sympathy for, the soldiers who don't go batshit and manage to hang onto their moral bearings, such as the soldier who reported the actual abduction and rape that formed the basis for the story told in Casualties of War, or the helicopter pilot who broke up the My Lai massacre, and all the numberless members of the military who go through just as much hell as anyone in war but resist the urge to run amok. One of the most resonant interviews in Standard Operating Procedure is with a guy who explains that he didn't break up the fun at Abu Ghraib and who agreed to take some pictures because, "Me being the kind of person I am, I try to be friends with everybody. I'm a nice guy, so I took [the picture]. I try not to have anybody mad at me." (This sap goes on to say that the fact that he got in trouble for his actions proves that "being a nice guy doesn't pay off," and then laments, or boasts, that since he got home, people say he's not as nice as he used to be.) The Iraq war was unnecessary, and served no good purpose, but once the president decided that he really, really wanted it, it didn't take too much work from the government to sell the media on making it seem that if you wanted to be a nice guy, if you didn't want anybody mad at you, you had to want this war too. The heroes of My Lai and the Casualties of War rape case and other nightmares were the ones who were willing to be disliked, who thought it was more important to do the obvious right thing than to be thought of as nice guys, and who, by their very existence, show the "War makes you crazy and absolves you of responsibility" school of thought for the self-protective, buck-passing line of horseshit that it is. The people at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere did unforgivable, monstrous things for the best and worst of reasons: they didn't want to be thought of as troublemakers.

Woody Peckerwood

I'm still recuperating from Tribeca, and while I'm doing that I'm chewing on the possible future of this blog, but in the meantime, while all the people I know are biting their nails to the quick over Illinois and North Carolina, I just want to get in a quick word about what a thrill it was to learn that the voters of Louisiana have once again thwarted Woody Jenkins in his quest to become a national embarrassment. I'm ashamed to say that I've gotten so cut off from my humble gravel driveway roots as I sit here in my pleasure dome in the Bronx, swilling sherry daiquiris and listening to Boston Pops records while tapping out a happy rhythm with my spats, that I had failed to notice that Woody was running for something until after the smoke had cleared, which is just as well. I didn't need the suspense.

The loss this past weekend marked Woody's first failed campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives, after three failed attempts to make it to Washington as an elected Senator and one failed bid, just to keep himself in practice, to become state elections commissioner. (I guess he figured he'd be a good fit in that post because he knew as much about elections as Zsa Zsa knows about marriage.) Besides his tenacious record of public failure, Jenkins is perhaps best known in Louisiana for his associations with the most remarkable collection of utter slimeballs: he worked with Oliver North on funding the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, recently pitched in to build the grass roots campaign to helped Bible-thumping whoremonger David Vitter ooze his way to Congress, and really distinguished himself in a 1996 election when, trying to root out the potential voters most likely to find him palatable, he bought a list of supporters' phone numbers from David Duke and then, concerned that this might not be enough to establish his total worthlessness, chose to flat-out lie about it. He lost the 1996 race to Mary Landrieu, who is what passes for a raving pinko in Louisiana. (I've heard my Yankee elitist pals condemn Mary as a Republican conservative in sane person's disguise, and all I can say is that if Louisiana didn't have people as close to the rational middle as Mary to elect, then their spots in Congress actually might get taken by people like Jenkins, and then you would be able to tell the difference.)

The 1996 race was probably the one that Woody will be best remembered for, and not just because of the David Duke gag. Jenkins went into that race armed with a lot of money and the support of several of the very worst people our American empire has managed to produce, including such paragons of soullessness as George Bush, Sr., Trent Lott, Orrin Hatch, and Bob Livingston (the Bible-thumping adulterer who pushed for Bill Clinton's impeachment on charges of getting his cock kissed and who held Newt Gingrich's seat for about fifteen minutes before receiving word that Larry Flynt was about to out him as a hypocrite), along with a well-meaning but often confused individual named John McCain. When he didn't win, he couldn't believe it, and in fact he went apeshit, screaming voter fraud and storming the halls of Congress, with Trent Lott in tow, braying about how this would not stand, it would not stand! Lott was so eager to use this occasion to embarrass and just generally mess with the party on the opposite side of the aisle that he actually held up Landrieu's swearing-in for ten months while an "investigation" was conducted to look into Woody's charges, which basically boiled down to the insinuation that, because a lot of black people had voted against him, and it struck him as unlikely that black people would be able to find the polling places on their own even in the unlikely event that they were willing to put down their watermelon and stop shucking and jiving long enough to go do their civic duty, there must have been a conspiracy by white miscreants to lure them to the voting stations with bright shiny objects. In the end, no evidence of wrongdoing on Landrieu's part was found, though it did turn out that Woody had hired a "private investigator" to suborn perjury among the "witnesses" he had found.

Thinking about Woody and Lott's behavior then is an amusing reminder that the Republican party, which seemed inclined to treat Bill Clinton's 1992 election as somehow "invalid", presumably because they had assumed there was an understanding after Ronald Reagan that the White House now belonged to them, was way into charges of voter fraud in the 1990s, before the decision, in the wake of Florida 2000, to embrace it as the cornerstone of their campaign process. What's amazing is that Jenkins still had a political career in Louisiana, albeit an unsuccessful one, after that fiasco. Because of its "colorful", as the schoolmarms say, political history, Louisiana likes to have itself associated in the national media with electoral irregularities about as much as Mississippi likes being identified as the home of the lynchin' tree, and a lot of people who didn't otherwise find Woody Jenkins crazy or scary hardly at all regarded him as a foul object after that. So it's a surprise to know that he's still out there running hard, and reassuring to know that he's still tripping over his own shoelaces in the final lap. What's dismaying is that the local Republican machine that could dig up as fresh-faced a scumbag as David Vitter to feed into the gears still has to root around and occasionally can do no better than to produce the same old gargoyles from yesteryear. Wacko mean bastard politicians don't improve with age, they just get more gnarled-looking.

Tribeca Film Festival, 2008

I'm covering the Tribeca Film Festival for the Screengrab, Nerve's movie blog, where I'm a regular poster. I don't think I've ever linked here to anything I've written for the Screengrab before, because most of what i do there is cover trivia so ephemeral that it makes the trivia I write about here look like a fit subject for Edward Gibbon, but I thought that this might be of a little more general interest. Anyway, it's probably the only way I'll have to post anything here until the press screenings die down at the end of next week. Rather than explain this seven times, I'll be updating this one post with new links every day for the next week or so.

Savage Grace

The Secret of the Grain

Simple Things

Lou Reed's Berlin

Seven Days Sunday

War, Inc.

Waiting for Hockney

Somers Town

The Objective

Chevolution

Redbelt

Trucker

Lioness

The Auteur

Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

Sita Sings the Blues

Elite Squad

Baghead

The Zen of Bobby V

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

My Winnipeg

Playing; Theater of War

Idiots & Angels

From Within

Kassim the Dream

Guest of Cindy Sherman

Boy A

Finding Amanda

Bitter & Twisted

Pray the Devil Back to Hell; Fire Under the Snow; Milosovic on Trial

Confessions of an Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha

Man on Wire

So We Had an Election, and Then Without Warning, Democracy Broke Out

That New York Times editorial lamenting the paper's failure to have recognized Hillary Clinton's full awfulness in time to keep itself from issuing the endorsement it has now sort of taken back was some kind of rich. By bowing low before the Hillary haters, the paper seemed to be pandering to its own readership, but it did so in the name of a line of thought that is 100% elitist bilge. Every four years, the media replay the same complaints about how the race is wrapped up too soon (a process that has often resulted in a rush to embrace flawed, uninspiring, wind-surfing candidates, no names please) and how this amounts to a subversion of democracy. Where are the good old shovel fights of yesteryear? So this year, democracy breaks out, and the media's response is to fan itself anxiously and reach for the smelling salts. Can we put this in a little fucking perspective? Every time some two-bit gangster or dictator manque actually subverts the Constitution or criminalizes the administrative process, whether it's Watergate or Iran-Contra or every second of our shared lives since the 2000 Supreme Court decision that gave George's little boy a job, the media can barely wait until the smoke clears and the screaming has died down before the media is assuring is that what's been proven is that the system works--we're still alive, right? Well, now we know what it takes to get them to see Armageddon in action: two people who want the same political nomination continuing to battle it out, each touting his or her virtues and attacking the other, with the less-favored candidate refusing to simply lie down and die to make Maureen Dowd happy. (I wouldn't change my socks if I thought there might be a chance that it would make Maureen Dowd happy.)

Any Obama supporters--a group that, at this point, more or less includes me, though I'd still happily vote for either one and think that anyone who would vote for one but not the other ought to be stuck in a time machine and exiled to a 2000 Nader rally for the rest of history--should take no comfort in hearing arguments made against his rival that sound so much like the arguments for why the presidency had to be pressed into George W. Bush's hands without counting the ballots first: with surprisingly little effort made to disguise it in flowery language, it all comes down to let's get this settled, it's giving me a headache! Not that there aren't other reasons for Obama to take umbrage at the Times slop: in the course of calling her a selfish, mean old thing, they felt the need to add: "Mr. Obama is not blameless when it comes to the negative and vapid nature of this campaign. He is increasingly rising to Mrs. Clinton’s bait, undercutting his own claims that he is offering a higher more inclusive form of politics." Translation: it turns out that when Obama is attacked, he doesn't just stick his nose in the air and leave the room in search of better company, like some members of the Democrats' elite clubhouse of preferred, doomed candidates. This is a good thing to know, and a good reason to vote for him, and Obama can give (and in fact, to his credit has given) much credit to Clinton for having tested his mettle. But the Times is upset that the sweet, friendly boy they find such a delight would stoop to answering back. What, is he turning into a politician or something?

People who agree that it has to stop but want to be thought of as having some reason for this view beyond a deep desire to never see or hear or think about Hillary Clinton again insist that this prolonged battle is weakening the candidates and costing the eventual nominee valuable time to start throwing brickbats at Senator McCain. I don't think this would be a good enough reason to do something as radical as demand that any part of the election be shut down even if I agreed with it. As it happens, I don't agree with it. I'm not sure which past elections these folks are pointing to as an example of the importance of spending the first two-thirds of the election year single-mindedly on message. In most of the elections I've been here for--in 2000, in 1992, in 1988, going back to the late seventies--things picked up steam and started moving in surprising directions after the conventions. And in the those cases where that didn't happen, in 1984 and 1996, a popular incumbent faced a dead man walking and nothing really changed at any point ever. The fact that we have two Democratic candidates who inspire passionate responses is seen as a terrible thing, but my God, the Republicans are currently toting around a candidate who's seen by many as anathema to their party's leaders and basic principles, and he got there not by winning over his doubters but because his competition started dropping off like flies. (Incidentally, has anybody else noticed that this makes twice in a row, starting with George W. Bush in his "compassionate conservative", GOP-controlled-Congress-bashing days, who's basic appeal to many, many voters is that they buy it that he's not really one of those crazy damn Republicans? Some people never learn.) Unless this really is an election year completely unlike any other, we've still got a while yet before this really gets down to the wire. Until then, people should chill out and enjoy the show. I'd say that it's at least forcing the reporters and pundits to work for a living, but of course they really aren't--banging your head against a wall and screaming that you can't deal with it isn't work--and the funny thing is, the lazy, pampered bastards are still cranky about it.