Her Aim Is True

Tonight marks the return of Mad Men, commencing its fourth season--Jesus, they grow up so fast these days--on AMC. When we last saw these characters back in November, Betty, the most vilified woman on network television since L.A. Law threw Rosalind Shays down that elevator shaft, had thrown Don out of the house and was heading to Reno to get on with their shocking-for-1963 D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and the gang at work had snuck out of the office in the dead of night to set up shop for themselves in new digs that probably provide terrific room service. So there's lots of reason for excitement about seeing what everybody is up to now. Have Don and his snow-capped doppelganger Roger finally decided to throw themselves into each other's arms, at the risk of dispelling a good part of the show's sexual tension? Will Bert Cooper, experiencing a delayed mid-life crisis in his 70s, get the theatrical bug and lobby the replace Rudy Vallee on Broadway in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying?, thus giving the special effects crew the chance to arrange for Robert Morse to play scenes opposite his younger self? Will Lane Pryce, an Englishman eager to convert to American at a time in history when the tide was mostly going in the other direction, adopt an LBJ accent and begin coming to the office in cowboy boots and a Stetson, greeting every new account by throwing his hat in the air with a mighty "Yee- haw!"? And what of Betty? Will she decide to kick her new single life off in style by stuffing those kids in a big sack and heading for the nearest bridge, while Bobbie Gentry lurks behind a bush, taking notes. (I actually have a soft spot for Betty, who I think inspires a degree of venomous loathing, especially on the Internet, way out of proportion to her sins. Really, I don't think she comports herself that badly for a woman who gave up several of the best years of her life to a serial liar who can't keep it in his pants and who torpedoed her career while hiring her therapist to spy on her for him.)

What I'm really curious about, though, is what's going on with Pete and Trudy, mainly Trudy. In the first season or two, Trudy was mainly a soft, moist off-screen presence, there to make you feel sorry for her, if you ever thought about her, while her new husband was cavorting with the more neurotically intriguing Peggy. That began to change in season three, when Trudy, her dreams of motherhood having been cruelly thwarted, turned her attention to her husband's career and began asserting herself as the power behind his swivel-backed chair. It meant throwing her lot in with a man who had incurred the wrath of her own daddy, who had gotten so tired of Pete's bullshit that he picked up his ball and bat and Clearasil account and went home. Being at one with her man on this scheming level seemed to bring something out of Trudy, something that the show had just hinted at with the scenes that rank among Mad Men's giddiest moments, when she and Pete hogged the spotlight at some social gathering with their spirited dance floor teamwork. My God, can that woman Charleston!




If Trudy doesn't take up a lot more space in Mad Men season four than she has in previous episodes, that may just be because the actress who plays her, Alison Brie, has been taking up more space on TV herself this past year. Community, the erratic but often brilliant comedy on which she plays a community-college student named Annie, has been renewed for a second season, and Brie has already gone a long way in using that show as the lab in which she's fulfilled, and then some, the promise of her sparkliest bits on Mad Men. Annie was introduced as a shy wallflower distracted by her crush on the high-school football star who, post-graduation, was suddenly just another loser with a winning smile to go with his pea brain and questionable job prospects. Brie brought her along slowly, dropping hints here and there that underneath that buttoned-up exterior lay the smoldering fires of a volcano waiting for its chance to erupt. (In art class, Joel McHale, watching her lovingly slide her hands over a tall, thick, cylindrical clay molding, worked up the courage to ask her what the hell she was doing. "A vase," she replied in a tiny voice, her eyes still misted over.) At the same time, Brie was making the publicity circuit and giving her fans freaky little moments to talk about, such as her co-hosting gig on Attack of the Show, where she flirted gamely with Kevin Pereira and topped things off by joining him in making egg salad sandwiches with their bare feet. ("Oooh, it's so cold!") By the time word reached my desk that she'd made Maxim's list of the world's hundred hottest women at the #99 slot, I was inclined to think that there must be at least 98 things wrong with that list.

It was at this point that, thinking back, I realized that, despite what I've believed all my life, I have a type. It's the mousy little thing who keeps signaling that, with the right helpmate, like say maybe you there by the coffee pot, mister, she could become a tigress. I guess it's a little like the classic Mary Ann vs. Ginger war, but recast for those of us who find pre-Code Hollywood movies sexy, sexier than anything dreamt of in Zalman King's imagination. I guess that, for me, the original Sophie's Choice situation for my hormones was between Loni Anderson and Jan Smithers in WKRP in Cincinnati. Anderson was the pin-up queen on that show, but I only had eyes for Smithers, who, as idealistic but shy young thing Bailey Quarters, used to sit in the background of shots, tie herself into a brunette pretzel trying to assert herself, surprise herself by flaring up when genuinely offended or angry, and, most indelibly, sweetly hinting to the fortyish, unshaven, burned-out hipster DJ, Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hessemann), that, with a little encouragement, she might find it in herself to admit that she sorta kinda like him. In one episode, she put him up in her guest room when he was homeless, and when this caused snickers among some of their more unenlightened co-workers, she succumbed to a rare attack of devilishness and started coming to work in his faded-out T-shirts, taunting the stunned prudes with the thought that they might actually be doing it. It was the possibility that they might actually start doing it for real that kept me glued to that show long after the writing had permanently gone south.

There have been some great, sexy-shy-mouse characters in movies, but most of my crushes of this kind have been on TV characters, probably because they've had more of a chance to nurse they shy-mousiness. In movies, the whole point of such characters has usually been to have them meet the hero and get over their condition. It's likely that one reason Smithers had such an impact on my own hormonal young imagination was that she was just being herself. Explaining why he cast her, WKRP producer Herb Wilson once said, "Other actresses read better for the part, but they were playing shy. Jan was shy." Many of the actresses who've gone to town with such characters on TV in recent years, such as Gillian Anderson as Scully on The X-Files, or Molly Parker in any number of roles, have played women who turned into fiery warriors, or else distinguished themselves in very different kinds of roles, which spoiled the illusion that you might be getting a glimpse at a real person. The actress who in recent years has done best, both as an artist and walking sex fantasy, at specializing in this kind of part is Amy Acker, of Angel, Alias, and Dollhouse; each of these shows gave her the chance to come on willowy and go out through a pile of charred corpses with snapped necks, and she's made the transition effective every time, because she's a chameleon who somehow manages to sell you on the idea that the appealingly vulnerable, near-fragile part of her must be the realest part of her. (By now, I'm convinced that she could sell me on that idea even while she was snapping my neck.) I don't know where her career is heading, or Brie's either, for that matter, but it's probably a safe bet that, whatever they're great at projecting as actresses, as people they must have powerful reserves of steel in their makeup. After all, the proof that Jan Smithers was really shy is that her career was really short.





[edit: Someone was good enough to send me this piece written by Brie, which was excerpted in Nerve from the book "Worst Laid Plans: When Bad Sex Happens to Good People". I somehow missed it when it first showed up online, and shame on me.]

White Noise III: Postscript

L'Affair Shirley Sherrod seems to have turned, however briefly, into the right-wing stunt propagandists' equivalent of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? The outrage generated over that show didn't put much of a dent in the steel carapace of shamelessness that reality-Tv producers have to wear at all times, and this fiasco won't send Andrew Breitbart into a monastery or a bread line, but it has inspired some of the people in his fox hole, such as Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck, to at least seem defensive, bleating about how his enemies must have conspired to send him a video that they knew he would be unable to cut up and call attention to. Breitbart, who would be incapable of experiencing embarrassment if he shit his pants while delivering the televised eulogy at the Pope's funeral, will continue to be devoted to his life's calling, which is mocking black people and those who don't swoon at the thought of black people holding powerful jobs, and trying to get them fired and their organizations shut down, which he does because he hates racism so much. (By now, Breitbart, like Beck and Rush Limbaugh, has given us enough examples of what he sees as racist for us to assume that he thinks black people commit racism pretty much every time one of them is so thoughless as to remind him that they exist.)

Last I heard, Breitbart's explanation of what he thought he was up goes something like, the NAACP is a racist organization, and to expose them, I slandered a black woman by accusing her of racism so that those black racists would show their true colors by taking the word of someone like me. In a piece in Slate, William Saletan summed up the mess--Breitbart's cruel, cynical hoax and the NAACP's hasty acceptance of his propaganda as the truth--as a reminder that both left and right are too happy reducing people to skin color, with "each side depicting the ruckus over Sherrod as proof of the other's bigotry and dishonesty. We still don't get it. This isn't about your side or mine. It's about the people we trample while fighting. It's about the common weakness that makes us susceptible not just to racism but to political polarization: our propensity to see one another as members of groups rather than as individuals."

I don't think this is quite right. The NAACP, and whoever in the White House made the call to fire Sherrod as soon as the story went into high rotation on Fox News, weren't motivated by anything to do with race but sheer terror and a desire to stub out a right-wing meme as quickly as possible. They didn't care what Sherrod had or hadn't done, they just wanted to be able to stand tall and talk about their tough zero-tolerance policy towards racism when the reporters showed up. They probably didn't give Sherrod's reputation or position enough thought for anyone to say that they sold her short. More likely they were guilty of not selling Breitbart and Fox News short enough. They probably figured that the story was bogus but took it on faith that Breitbart wasn't so dumb that he'd have gotten the ball rolling in this way if there was evidence that might be produced to show that he was a liar. Maybe they figured that even if the truth did come out, it would never be able to outshout the impact of the original allegations, which is what happened with Breitbart's previous big get, the Candid Camera stunt that brought ACORN to the bankruptcy court. (Perhaps the best of the many reasons for finding Breitbart's situation hilarious is that he earned his reputation as some kind of genius media manipulator with his slow roll-out of the ACORN tapes, allowing ACORN spokesmen to make defensive comments that would be contradicted by the next video to be released. He must think that fact-checking is some special condition that only preys on liberals.) One thing's true, though: in these post-racial times, during the administration of a president whose election was greeted by the media as beginning a new age when no one would dare use coded racist signals to appeal to voters, at the end of an economic crisis that was supposed to give us a chance to address the state of economic inequality that has driven this country batshit for some thirty years, a woman's attempt to tell people that race shouldn't matter and class does has been warped and twisted into one more opportunity to scream about race.

Back during the 1976 election, Garry Wills wrote that Jimmy Carter, running for president four years after he made the cover of Time magazine as "the face of the new south", had a potential for a national career that most Southern pols older than him, and many who were his age, didn't have because he was immune to the sickness of racism. Back then, not yet a decade after the murder of Martin Luther King, it did seem as if the South was divided between those who welcomed or were adjusted comfortably to the changes that desegregation and the death of Jim Crow had brought to the country, and those who never quite would, and that the former had a brighter future than the latter. Yes, the Republican Southern Strategy was already in place, but still, in 1976, what political analyst other than Archie Bunker would have guessed that so many people would never fully adapt to the changes that all thoughtful people agreed had been for the best, and that they would become less and less comfortable with them as they got older and their country and TV screens and neighborhoods began to seem less and less ivory white, so that almost 35 years later, politicians would still be running on what amounted to a pledge to repeal the '60s and '70s, with United States Senators using a Supreme Court nomination hearing to establish their bona fides as reasonable people by characterizing Thurgood Marshall as a scary radical?

These people are not going to win in the end. The numbers are against them. I don't just mean that this isn't going to remain the white-majority-population country of Pat Buchanan's dreams, either; most of the people who look at Obama and start thinking such deep thoughts as, "We need to take our country back!" probably have kids who grew up in the post-King era--hell, in post-Yo! MTV Raps-era--and they have no idea why Mom and Pop are so het up. That only fuels the fire, of course, and leads to insane, desperate gestures like the attempt to bring back "literacy tests" as prerequisite for voting, this time ostensibly to protect us from the evils of immigrants pulling the lever, and the recommendation from the Texas State Board of Education that textbooks include a guideline calling for students to "evaluate changes in the United States that have resulted from the civil rights movement, including participation of minorities in the political progress and unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes." But for now, it's easy to see America, weakened by the economic consequences of treating regulation and taxes as something for the kids to play with while mommy and daddy are in Vegas for the weekend, not to mention the failed shot of Viagra that the Bush administration's foreign policy was for neocons and other jingo-minded puddingheads, slipping into a state similar to Britain during the Thatcher years, with crusty old boogers sitting on their stoops on every street corner, wearing the medals they won in the invasion of Grenada and bitching under their breath at all the brown people who must be involved in some government conspiracy to keep their convenience stores open when all the nieces and nephews can't hold down a job.

That's not meant as an apocalyptic vision: there are lots of worse ways for a dying empire to wind up than with everyone playing in a crowd scene in a Hanif Kureishi movie. I actually look forward to the quieter phase of it, when everybody in the Tea Party now notices that whoever they elect this fall has turned into a [gag! choke!] "politician" and bitterly admits defeat, stops going to rallies, and starts picking up a couple of six-packs on the way home every night, so they can get plowed while blearily muttering "Ditto!" at whoever takes over Limbaugh's slot after his latest wife gets tired of him and starts leaving prescription medication invitingly strewn around the house. I've known people like this all my life, and while I guess saying this won't win me any "Friend of Democracy" plaques, the quieter they are, the better. I know that living in a world that the Fonz and Richie Cunningham never made is rough on them, but in a way, they brought their seething misery on themselves. They look at all the people who disgust and bewilder them because they're not howling in protest about the black president and the immigrants and the welfare bums whose existence they register like a fish bone in the throat, and they can find no peace, a condition made all the more unbearable by the fact that so many people who ought to be on their side find peace with it just fine. They suffer from an apparently unbeatable psychological condition, one that I think George W. Bush described best: they look at all the sane people in the world, and they hate us for our freedom.

White Noise II: The Squeakel

In a recent profile of Andrew Breitbart in The New YorkerRebecca Mead noted that Breitbart "frequently decries racism, and likes to point out that he was adopted, as was his younger sister, who is of Mexican descent. 'I hold in great disregard the idea that somehow her blood and my blood separate us,' he told me. 'I grew up resenting people who would look at us at the table and go, 'Why are those people together?'" Breitbart would like you to think that it's his abhorrence of racism that fuels his loathing of anyone--"those supposedly sacrosanct liars, like John Lewis"--who ascribe racist motives to Tea Party donkeys and Rush Limbaugh, who Breitbart has said he'd take a bullet for, and Ann Coulter ("She is the person that you want to be in a trench with.") Someone whose hatred of racism leads him to cut John Lewis less slack than Limbaugh and Coulter definitely has his own moral code, and he's welcome to it. Like a lot of Tea Party types, what Breitbart really seems to despise is any accusation of racism aimed at a white person, though black people, at least black people in a position of power, should probably be thought of as guilty until proven innocent. It's not clear how such known racists as Obama and John Lewis can repent and redeem themselves, unless it's by going away and letting some ideologically correct white person, preferably someone who's not so tight-assed that he wouldn't get a good laugh out of "Barack, the Magic Negro", take their seats.

The implosion of Shirley Sherrod's career with the United States Department of Agriculture is a testament to the warp speed of the modern scandal-fueled news cycle. Monday, around the time that Mark Williams's status as a Tea Party spokesman was being frantically whited out, Breitbart hit the Internet with a video of Sherrod delivering a speech in which she recalled that, back in the 1980s, she received a request from a white farmer who was trying to save his property from foreclosure. Sherrod, who is black, told the crowd that she wondered how much worse off he could be than all the black people she knew who were in similar straits, and she felt like doing the bare minimum that she was required to do for him, which amounted to finding him a white lawyer, on the assumption "that his own kind would take care of him." Fox News got ahold of it, and by Tuesday morning, Sherrod was not only out of a job but had been roundly denounced for her racism--and her bewildering decision to boast about it--by both her former employers and the NAACP. (Standing in her defense were Roger Spooner and his wife, the farm couple she was talking about in her story.)

In her defense, Sherrod tried to indicate that the version of the video that Breitbart and Fox News had publicized hadn't given the full picture of what she was trying to say, though she didn't do herself any favors by emphasizing that this all happened 24 years ago. It wasn't until Tuesday afternoon that the full version of the video began making the rounds. In the full speech, Sherrod went on to say that, after meeting the Spooners, she realized that she had been wrong to think of people in terms of race instead of purely thinking of them in terms of their needs and how someone in her position could serve them, and how the experience had opened her up. It was a conversion narrative, much like the Florida-born sportscaster Red Barber's story of how being part of Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson's integration of baseball helped him overcome the racist assumptions of a lifetime, or the story of how the late Robert Byrd went from being a Klansman and an opponent of segregation to having the best approval rating from the NAACP of anyone in the United States Senate. It was the stuff that afterschool specials are made of, and Breitbart turned it into a flaming image of a black racist on a rampage by the not altogether sophisticated tactic of snipping off the ending of the speech and just serving up the build-up.

Is Breitbart too stupid to recognize the difference between what Sherrod said and what he made her appear to be saying, or is he too cynical to care? Given the hard line he take with anyone who's not white compared to the generosity of spirit he extends towards anyone who isn't and is on his side, I have an awful suspicion that he may have thought that, by using selective editing to turn the point of Sherrod's speech upside down, he was trying to make it easier for people to clearly see the real truth: here was an honest-to-God black person in a position of power admitting to having experienced a racist impulse. Who cares that she conquered it; the fact that she ever thought ill of a white man was bad enough that it should disqualify her from holding government office, and probably her continued existence on planet Earth. It's not as if she was a white person calling Obama an African welfare cheat Nazi pigfucker; that would count as an excusable, perfectly understandable expression of "white frustration" in these confusing times.

The most telling thing about this may be the contrast in the way Sherrod described her path in life and the defensive ways that people like Breitbart and Williams justify their pig-headed ugliness. Sherrod admitted to having grappled with something ugly in herself so that she could rise above it. Breitbart has a Mexican sister and is "pro-miscegenation", and Williams, to hear him tell it, apparently marched, or was pushed in his stroller, in Selma, so having proven to themselves that they couldn't possibly be racists, they're safe from ever being suspected of having any ugly feelings and can give voice to ugly sentiments to their heart's content, and even assure us that their friends and allies are free of the taint as well. (Don Imus, getting his papers badly shuffled, tried to save his job in the wake of the "nappy-headed ho's" business by assuring us that, despite his stated enthusiasm for what he called "nigger jokes", he couldn't possibly be a racist because he did a lot for kids with cancer. If he'd had better advisors, he might have at least said that he did at lot for black kids with cancer, though maybe we should be grateful that he didn't boast of all the kids with cancer who he'd cheered up by telling them nigger jokes.) I don't know who besides Andrew Breitbart ever would have nominated Andrew Breitbart as the final arbiter of who is and isn't racist, but I guess it's par for the course in a world where Roger Ailes decides what's fair and balanced and a couple of draft evaders like Dick "I had other priorities" and George Bush, Jr. once got to decide which wars were worth fighting.

White Noise III

It's broken record time again at the Experience...

I've written before about growing up with my Klansman father in Jayess, Mississippi in the 1970s and how, when my uncles who worked white collar jobs in the suburbs of Louisiana used to come down for the holidays, they would sometimes huddle together over coffee and my uncles would lean in close to my dad and invite him to launch into one of his racist diatribes and entertain them with a Turner Diaries fantasy about what would someday happen to the worst of the worst--not the poor, confused "niggers" but the race traitors, the "nigger lovers" whose limp and broken bodies would be hanging from lampposts after the counterrevolution. Naive child that I was, it would be more than a decade before I discovered that there were people I was not related to who behaved this way.

My first off-campus job after I graduated high school and left Mississippi was at the New Orleans Museum of Art. I was part of a five-man crew of "preparators"; that's what they called those of us who did the manual labor that involved some kind of hands-on connection to the art, and we were all white guys. There was also a crew of guys who did the real shit work, and they were called "janitors" and were, to a man, black. My co-workers were supposedly intelligent pros who functioned in society, and the two who were within hailing distance of my age even had ambitions to carve out careers for themselves in the museum world, so I was surprised when it turned out that their second favorite worktime activity was to gather in the basement office, lock the door, and talk shit about how the janitors were all shiftless niggers who never did anything for their money. (Their favorite activity was to lock the door and talk shit about how the people we reported to, both of whom happened to be women, were nagging bitches who were so unreasonable as to expect us to do something for our money.) I actually quit that job after a few months just because I couldn't stand to listen to that shit anymore, which, as I look back on it now, makes me feel like quite the pissy little wuss. If I'd had any sense and/or gumption, I would've surreptitiously recorded a few hours worth of bull sessions and blackmailed my way into a no-show job.

It would be a mistake, I think, for anyone to think that this says anything about how people of the same race and gender "really" talk to each other when they're alone together, unless it's taken on faith that the people in question happen to be assholes. Nor do I think my co-workers should be seen as symbols of "the white power structure." Our supervisor, who had no power and the structure of three hundred pounds of sugared shit crammed into a two-hundred-pound sack and dressed in dirty overalls that he has probably long since been buried in, was a pathetic fellow, some kind of failed artist who had clearly not been counting on finding himself, on the wrong side of forty or coming up on it, taking orders from anyone, let alone anyone packing estrogen, and the rest of the guys probably saw it as their duty as good sports to sink to their lowest potential as human beings for a few hours a day so they could have enough common ground for some relaxed male bonding. They were the kind of guys who had learned that racism is the mark of a truly evil person and so could talk that shit with a clear conscience, knowing that they weren't racist because they didn't want to go back to segregated water fountains. No doubt there were many people who supported segregated water fountains back in the day who felt that they couldn't be racist because they didn't want the water in the "Coloreds Only" fountains laced with cyanide.

So when white fucktards with a chip on their shoulder think they're safely among their own, they may talk like this, figuring that it's okay because it doesn't reflect on how they think the world should be run--they don't want anybody killed or shipped to Africa--and nobody listening is getting hurt, right? (I'm sure that there are black fucktards and Asian fucktards who talk the same way, but that's another discussion.) I suspect that Mark Williams, described by Evan McMorris-Santoro at TPM as "the spokesman for one of the tea party movement's most Republican establishment-connected groups ", has a perfectly bifurcated inner life, one that allows him to rail about our "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug" President (who is, of course, a "racist" in Williams's eyes) just wants to enslave white people and tax them to give the money to shiftless black people, while boasting of his own devotion to the fight against racism--in public, where people are supposed to be paying attention. ("I was in the streets marching for civil rights while asshole southern sheriffs were swinging nail studded baseball bats at black's heads, and stood between black kids and even more fucked up northern assholes were throwing rocks and gas bombs at school buses in my hometown during forced busing for deseg. Two things you can always count on: I will defend my record on race to no one , under any circumstances." Leaving aside the neat trick of boasting about how you fought the good fight in the same breath that you claim that you'll never "defend your record on race", Williams was in high school in the early '70s. When he marched for civil rights in the early '60s, did he attack the white asshole southern sheriffs with his poopy diapers?) Williams's unmistakably racist sentiments are meant to be understand as guy talk, "letting off a little steam", as Rush Limbaugh said of the Abu Ghraib torturers. It's just the way that the spokesman for the Tea Party movement likes to talk with his political allies, and presumably the way they like to hear him talk, when there's nobody there but us chickens. But it's so unfair to act as if that said something about the way they see the world and would like to change it.

Williams is no longer an official Tea Party spokesman, having been excommunicated by the National Tea Party Federation after he published a blog post meant to convey the thinking of a black person addressing Abraham Lincoln ("The racist tea parties also demand that the government "stop the out of control spending." Again, they directly target coloreds. That means we Coloreds would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right. Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government "stop raising our taxes." That is outrageous! How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?") so utterly, openly Hustler-humor-section racist in its attitudes that the Party leaders had no choice but to call it, um, "clearly offensive", as if Williams had farted while being baptised in church and snapped at the bubbles. It says something about the surreal nature of the balancing act that the Tea Party people have to pull off, trying to retain the appearance of an uncontrollable grass roots movement long enough to tap into that energy current and get some Republicans safely elected to Congress, that they finally decided that it would do them more harm to let Williams keep posing as their public face than to risk alienating those who'd see dumping him as an egregious act of political correctness. The first line of defense was to point out that his little joke appeared on a private blog, not a press release with official Tea Party stationary, assuming there is such a thing. It's like the Mel Gibson defense: hey, he said that stuff while he was drunk, and drinking loosens your inhibitions, and doesn't that make you less likely to mean what you're saying? Though Williams is supposed to be some kind of professional gasbag, there seems to be a kind of innocence to him that links him to so many of his Tea Party brethren. They share a desire to enjoy saying the most hateful, selfish, rotten-stupid bullshit imaginable, and at the same time indignantly insist on being saluted for the innate patriotic nobility that they never manage to demonstrate when the cameras are on them.

In the '80s and '90s, the era of Tawana Brawley and jury nullification, it sometimes seemed as if the heirs to the great Civil Rights movement had decided that things were going well enough that they could afford to shuck off the moral high ground and did so with a vengeance. The white equivalent of that may be the gross reveling in self-pity that Williams and Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and all the rest of the usual suspects indulge in when they start babbling about how hard it is to be a white boy in Obama's America: did you hear the other day, some white kid got pounded on the school bus the other day, Obama will probably have his attackers over to the White House for dinner and ask them to re-enact the beating, using Joe Biden! Writing in the New York Times, Ross Douthat doesn't bring up Williams by name, but he does feint in the direction of acknowledging the excesses of Limbaugh and company before revealing that, thirty-two years after Allan Bakke, he's just found that school administrators might sometimes give "minority" students a break at the expense of whites, and he seems to think that this not only puts Pat Buchanan's racism in a better light, it justifies " the note of white grievance" that has caused some to detect racism in the Tea Party movement itself. I might not be the ideal audience for Douthat's column, since my background pretty much makes me immune to any guilty feeling he might be trying to stir up in liberal readers with his suggestion that it's "the lack of contact with rural, working-class America" that causes them to find idiots screaming at the top of their lungs that health care is Nazism kind of alarming. I really don't get the math whereby "underrepresentation [of white Christian common folk]... in the elite professional ranks" just makes it reasonable for working-class whites to believe that "Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth." I will say that, however "culturally diverse" the campuses become, there are still advantages to being a white man in America. I don't want to say that it helps minimally gifted, even sub-mediocre people with no distinguishing characteristics besides their skin color and Y chromosome land high-paying, high-profile jobs that they'll never be able to perform with distinction, but can you think of another explanation for how Ross Douthat gets paid to write for the New York Times?

The Tea Party movement and its mascots have always made a great deal for the value of how inarticulate its people are, even how baffled they themselves are about what they're so fired up over. In one of her tributes to angry conservative women, Sarah Palin puts it pretty simply: these women are running for office and shouting on street corners, not for any reason they can express in words, but "because moms kinda just know when something's wrong." Of course, when somebody's mad as hell and can't tell you why, it's often the case that they actually have a pretty good idea of why they're mad but can't think of a way to say it that won't make them sound like self-pitying bigoted jackasses who aren't getting any younger and are increasingly scared to live in a world that keeps turning. Williams, to his credit, wasn't afraid to let us in on what he thought and how he felt, which is why he's now on the ash pile, along with such refudiated one-time great conservative hopes as David Duke, George Allen, and Evan Mecham, not mention Pat Buchanan his own vile self.

(Incidentally: it would be a terrible thing if the hilarity inspired by Palin's Lewis Carroll-like wordplay were to distract from what's really disgusting in her missive about the mosque, i.e., her entreaty to "peaceful" Muslims to join her and others who would regard it as a "stab...in the heart" for their to be a place of worship for them anywhere near Ground Zero. To see the building of a mosque there in such appalling terms is to basically say that you see Islam as synonymous with murderous terrorism, and asking misguided but peaceful believers in the religion to show they're good-hearted deep down by supporting your in slandering their faith ought to be the last repellent straw. Anybody want to guess how Palin and her grizzlies would react if somebody used that kind of reasoning to protest building a Christian youth center near the site of the Oklahoma City bombing?

What Phil Heard: Sirius "Radio Classics" Channel, "Christmas in July" Week

Suspense: Two back-to-back episodes of this anthology series, introduced by an announcer who puts his all into the tag line, "Tales calculated to leave you in...suspense! This put me right in the mood for something along the lines of an audio version of an EC horror comic, but whatever these shows were like at their most red-blooded, I guess it stands to reason that things would thin out a little at Christmas time. The first episode is narrated by an old duffer sitting in his mansion, looking back on his lively childhood adventures between interruptions by his doddering butler. The story is a sort of half-assed Treasure Island rip-off, with the little-boy hero having a run-in with pirates, who make with the "Arrrr!"s before inviting him to join them for Christmas dinner. The little fella somehow ends up with the treasure and the girl, and the big twist comes when, wrapping up his story, he lets it slip that the Long John Silver figure is now his butler. I was able to keep my heart rate stable all the way through this. The second episode, which, if I heard the announcer right, starred Larry Hanes and Saddlesore Tega, gets off to a more promising start, with a tough guy snarling that "only old people and little kids believe in ghosts", in the tone that fans of the genre will immediately recognize as that of a man who only opens his mouth so that the scriptwriter can prove him wrong. It turns out that he's a crook trying to avoid arrest on Christmas Eve. He runs into a ghost, who teaches him a lesson by turning him invisible, which you'd think would not be that crushing a punishment for a sneak thief on the lam. He's devastated, though, until he meets a pretty girl who's blind, so she doesn't care that he's invisible, because she wouldn't be able to see him anyway.

The Jack Benny Show, the comedy jewel in the crown of the Radio Classics regular schedule. Out Christmas shopping, Jack runs into Mr. Kitzel, who tells him that he's gotten his mother-in-law a ticket to Florida. Why, Mr. Kitzel, says Benny, what a wonderful Christmas present for your mother-in-law, a round trip ticket to Florida. "Who said round trip?" says Mr. Kitzel.

The Shadow, episode title: "A Gift of Murder." This is not intended ironically, it turns out; a couple of people get whacked at Christmas time, and though the Shadow solves the case, the happy ending finds a couple of people agreeing that the world is better off with those two dead. It's nice to know that the Shadow, the most endearingly psychopathic of all pulp crimebusters, didn't bend over and grab his ankles just because Santa Claus was coming to town.

Gunsmoke: I'd always heard that the radio version of Gunsmoke was the big "adult western" of its day, a designation that made me wonder just how dirty it could have been. "Marshall Dillon, the Clanton brothers are headin' to town and they're ready gor trouble." "Handle it for me, will you, Chester? Miss Kitty just got herself some new lacy black underwear from Paris, France, and I'm on my way over to her place for some boinkity-boinking." I only needed to hear an episode or two to get it that what people meant was that it wasn't a smiling cowboy show along the lines of Roy Rogers; it was a mean mother, with a lot of lines along the lines of, "Drop that gun or I'll blow your guts all over the wall." This week, they play one episode that seems to devote a two-thirds of its running time to a philosophical debate between two bad guys who've captured Matt over whether they should knock him in the head and throw him out into the blizzard to freeze to death before dinner, or if they should wait and do it after they eat. I'm not sure how Christmassy this one really is, aside from the fact that it's snowing out. The yuletide theme comes through a lot louder in another episode, about a cranky old duffer who wants Matt to come out to his farm on Christmas Eve and tell the young guy with the pregnant wife who've just shown up that they can't spend the night in his barn.

The Green Hornet: The Hornet originated on radio, before branching out into movie serials and a one-season TV series from the 1960s. I think that the TV series is mostly remembered, and sometimes revived, just because the Green Hornet's sidekick was played by Bruce Lee, visibly fuming with rage that he had nothing to do but feed lines to the boring white guy and pull his punches in the fight scenes less he kill an extra. I've tried watching a few episodes over the years and found it very hard to focus on. This was the first episode of the radio version that I've ever listened to, and I was looking forward to figuring out what it had that gave the concept such staying power. Unfortunately, at some point I realized that I was intensely concentrating on doing the dishes while the announcer was reading the closing credits. They're making a Green Hornet movie now, to be directed by Michel Gondry and starring Seth Rogan, Jay Chou, and Christoph Waltz, from a script written by Rogan and Evan Goldberg. I will pray for them all.

Dragnet: "The Big Little Jesus", a title that made me wonder if maybe Dragnet, in its radio incarnation, was an unsuspected major influence on Ol' Dirty Bastard. Jack Webb's Sgt. Joe Friday and his partner have to speak to a Father Rojas, whose church has been robbed of the centerpiece of its nativity scene. "It was a $70 duplication of the scene of Bethlehem," Webb tells us in his narration."It was beautiful, except that one of the shepherds was missing an arm, the manger had a crack in it, and the baby Jesus was missing." Disgusted by the church's security system, Friday says to Father Rojas, "You leave it wide open so that any thief can walk in?" "Particularly thieves, Sergeant," Father Rojas replies. All things considered, a lot of the dialogue, which in the Webb manner isn't so much hard-boiled as over-starched, is not half bad. A garrulous dealer in religious statues who is asked if anyone has tried palming off a baby Jesus on him is incredulous: "People don't get these things so they can sell 'em, they get 'em so they can have them." The prime suspect, Claude Stroop, resident of the Golden Dream Hotel, is described as "a man who looked like he'd had his troubles at bargain rates." In the end, it turns out that a kid lifted baby Jesus so he could hit the miraculous object up for a red wagon for Christmas, and, his prayer granted, wheels the infant savior back into the church just in time for Christmas Eve.

Sherlock Holmes: Holmes is the movies' Basil Rathbone, and Dr. Watson is his usual teammate, Nigel Bruce, which means that Watson's bumbling is a key element of the plot. Hustling off on an errand to play Santa Claus, the well-meaning nitwit bumps into and inadvertently trades bags with a crook hauling around his swag, who is fit to be tied when he gets to his hideout and finds that he's been toting around an electric train and a baby doll. Meanwhile, Watson is plying a bunch of eager tots with jade earrings and Kruggerands. Holmes hoists his ass out of the comfy chair by the fire just long enough to set things right, and Watson signs off with a grateful acknowledgement that, it being 1945, the world has started getting its own problems sorted out as well, with limited assistance from the Baker Street boys.

Philco Radio Time: It's Christmas Eve, 1947, and host Bing Crosby is all over the yuletide classics, with help from Skitch Henderson and Mel Torme. Artie Shaw once called Crosby the first hip white person born in the United States; as you might expect, his hipness is doled out sparingly during the holiday season, and in fact is only barely hinted at during "a bouncy version of the perennial favorite, 'Jingle Bells'." For all I know, it sounded like "Surfin' Bird" in '47.

Der Bingle also serves as wraparound narrator for a playlet titled "The Small One." A humble farmer with money problems, who is voiced by an actor who sounds as if he's wearing spats and a monocle and gesturing with his lorgnette, tells his little son, who sounds like a member of the Lollipop Guild who plays piano in a Munchkin cathouse on weekends, to take their smallest donkey to town and sell its dilapidated carcass. No one wants the small one until an orotund-voiced stranger appears and, professing to see and admire the creature's fine inner qualities, offers to buy it to facilitate his and his wife's speedy exit from town. Somebody must have worried that the real thickies in the audience wouldn't get it, because just when you think it's over, somebody steps up to the mike to say that he's a Roman soldier, and he needs to complete some paperwork before the small one's new owner can get the hell out of Dodge. He just has a few questions: "What's your name?" "Joseph." "And your wife's name?" "Mary." "And where are you headed for?" "Bethlehem." And so, Bing says in his concluding remarks, the small one became a living legend among pack animals, and to this day, "all small donkeys" sit up expectantly on Christmas Eve, hoping that a situation might arise that will give them the chance to step up and do his memory proud. I certainly didn't enjoy it any less than I did Au hasard Balthazar.

Bing also drops in on Bob Hope's show, which Bob did from a veteran's hospital, to an appreciative crowd of men grateful for the chance to spend the holidays not getting their asses shot off. Other guests include Doris Day, singing the one about chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and a pre-taped General Omar Bradley. Hope says that there was a nurse who seemed to have disappeared from the hospital earlier, but nobody could find her until they saw "a solder chasing his duffel bag down the hall." Earlier that day, he ate with the men, "and I have the scars to prove it. It's the first time I've ever seen a diving board in a gravy bowl. They ate ten pounds of cranberries before somebody told them they were supposed to take them out the can first." Hearing Hope doing his act in his prime, without the distraction of seeing him, I can really appreciate why I grew up hearing testimonials to his well-honed chops: his delivery is so skillful that, hearing him read this stuff, you can actually tell that these sentences are meant to be jokes. You can even figure out at which points you're supposed to laugh, which for his listeners in the studio must have been a great convenience. It makes me wonder if the tragedy of his legacy was that he couldn't have been just a little less skillful. If he hadn't been able to get laughs with the kind of material he usually worked with, he might have been forced to ask more of his writers. Then he might have actually left behind a few movies or recorded bits that hold up.

Screen Directors Playhouse: A half-hour radio condensation of It's a Wonderful Life, with Frank Capra in attendance and James Stewart reprising his starring role as George Bailey, passive-aggressive small town sucker and doormat. I wouldn't watch the movie again voluntarily if it increased penis size and cured halitosis, but given how long it is--I haven't double checked this at IMDB, but I seem to recall that it's about three minutes longer than Jacques Rivette's Out 1--I was curious about how it would play tightened up. It opens with Clarence the angel setting up the scene on the bridge, after which Stewart describes his woes, from the traumatic tale of getting his sore ear whacked by the depression-addled, would-be-poisoner of a druggist, up to his flight to the river of death after mean old Mr. Potter frames his for the murder of the Lindbergh baby or whatever the hell happens in that movie after the point at which my brain always used to glaze over. Stewart gives his biggest emotional scenes, such as the one where he tells his fuckwit Uncle Billy that he's going to plant his useless corpse in a ditch before the cops show up to drag them both off the prison for the results of Billy's incompetence, the same full-throated commitment he gave them in the movie, so that when the script is all read and he slips out of character for some humorous scripted repartee with Capra, he sounds as if he's just run the four-minute mile. But the real distinction of this piece of radio art comes from Arthur Q. Bryant, who plays Clarence, and uses the voice that he made famous, in animated cartoons, as that of Elmer Fudd. Telling us at the beginning that he had to save George from committing suicide, "an act abhowwent both to his maker and the Mutual Wife Insuwance Company," he tells how he appeared on "the bwidge above the wiver" and caught George's attention "before he could fwing himself into the icy cuwwent." He loosens his grip on Elmer's lisp at the very end, dramatically calling out,"Live! Live!" instead of "Wive! Wive!', presumably because Capra was sitting right there and starting to look as if he might just thwow something at him.

Our Roving Correspondent

Sixteen years after Karl Rove used push-poll robocalls to ask Texas voters, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for Governor [Ann] Richards if you knew her staff is dominated by lesbians"; ten years after he used fliers and phone calls to spread rumors among primary voters in South Carolina that John McCain was gay ("The Fag Candidate") and that the adopted daughter that his wife had brought home from Bangladesh was actually McCain's own biological daughter after an interracial affair; after using 9/11 as a cudgel to accuse Democrats in the 2002 races of being soft on terrorism, when he wasn't using it to accuse them of treason; after engineering the attacks on Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame, Karl Rove would like to apologize for his role in "poison[ing] America's political discourse" in a way that "opened the way for politicians in both parties to move the debate from differences over issues into ad hominem attacks." Rove's apology comes in the form of a Wall Street Journal editorial in which he expresses regret for not having hit back at Democrats who accused his Pet Rock, President Bush, of having lied about Saddam Hussein having WMDs as a pretext for getting us into war with Iraq, something he calls "a shameful episode in our political life whose poisonous fruits are still with us." Not the war, you understand, or the race to get it under way come hell or high water, never mind the existence of an actual threat from Iraq or the quality of the intelligence cited to support it, but the temerity of those who doubted the President's good word.

You might think that Rove, who, since leaving the White House, has sometimes shown himself to be surprisingly prickly on the subject of Bush's own intelligence, considering the popular impression that he was responsible for doing the charismatic, thick-as-a-brick dauphin president's thinking for him, would want to be a little sly on this subject, if he ever volunteered to bring it up at all. Or maybe it's not that surprising, given where Bush's thinking, whoever was in charge of actually producing it, actually got us. The only possible verdicts on Bush, on Iraq as much as the economy and privatizing Social Security and Katrina and anything else, are either "rock stupid" or "knowingly lied and/or never gave a rat's ass." Rove claims to be affronted by any suggestion that Junior isn't a wily cuss, but by taking even greater affront at the suggestion that he knew that Saddam wasn't a threat, he's basically arguing that he thought he was a threat, which would make him one stupid fucker, like, Thomas Friedman stupid. There's no third box to check.

Because Rove is the kind of guy who sees lamenting over partisan politics as a great excuse to practice some partisan politics, his primary evidence that nobody but a hypocrite would have ever accused Bush of lying is to point out that, before the war, a lot of big-name Democrats took it on faith that Saddam had WMDs. (I think he sees it as beneath his dignity to actually offer reasons to think that Bush wasn't lying, even as he bemoans the fact that he didn't address this issue when it was his job to do so because he thought it was beneath his dignity then.) I find this part of his argument a lot less teeth-rattling than it's meant to be. For a start, the people outside the White House who, back in 2002, claimed to accept it as at least a near-certainty that Saddam had WMDs were parroting what they'd been told by the people inside the White House. Perhaps they were wrong to be so credulous, but it seems bad form to base a war on something you tell everyone that turns out to not be true and then complain that everyone believed you at the time but then got sore when they found out that you couldn't be trusted.

It's not surprising that Rove, a key player in the White House that launched a frontal assault smear campaign against a faithful Republican diplomat (and his career intelligence agency wife) as punishment for having told the truth about his findings on WMDs and that employed Donald Rumsfeld, legendary for having reacted to the pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib by saying that it was a damn shame that people had access to these little cameras, would take the position that the shaky rationale for the Iraq War, and the politicization of post-9/11 jitters than it grew out of, had less to do with our present overheated political climate than two-faced Democrats saying mean things about the Man from Crawford in the course of daring to suggest that he be held accountable. Even at that, Rove may be a little touchy on the subject. One of the instances he cites of Democrats taking this low road is a line from John Edwards, to the effect that "The administration has a problem with the truth." That's something that anyone in any election year could have gotten away with saying about any previous President going back to the ol' rail splitter himself, and they could have made a case.

Of course, people are funny about accusing politicians of flat-out lying. Somebody was accusing Bill Clinton of lying every second that he was in office, but then, every second that Bill Clinton was in office, somebody was also accusing him of controlling the Colombian drug trade and fathering Martian babies out of wedlock. President Bush the Elder was a special case, because people were so quick to tar him with the L word after he went back on his famous campaign pledge to not raise taxes, something that I am one hundred percent certain he always knew he wouldn't be able to stick to and that he was shocked to discover people not only remembered a couple of years later. Bush, the accidental heir to Reagan, was so far from beloved even by those who voted for him that I suspect that millions of Americans nailed that memory in deep just so they could someday have the thrill of calling the liver-lipped old mummy a lying turd. President Junior entered office with two, count 'em, two absolutely iron clad goals: one, to never do anything that might get him compared with the vile Slippery Bill, and two, to never do anything that might get him compared with his grotty old man. So if people want to rope him in with his two immediate predecessors as some kind of unholy triumvirate of lying-ass presidents, you have to appreciate the karmic beauty of it.


Any Iraq-related mea culpa that ever comes out of Rove, even one that takes the form of a mea culpa about how he should have been more aggressive in deflecting the attacks of his enemies, has a built-in defect, which is that Rove, like all the rest of the Bush team's key players, will never admit to thinking that the war or anything about is to be regretted. Never mind Abu Ghraib, or the abandonment of the search for Osama bin Laden and the shafting of the soldiers in Afghanistan that the move into Iraq demanded, or the failure to send enough troops or supply them with enough protective resources, or the general chaos and confusion that had many Iraqis pining for the good old days when they at least had electricity and water to go with their tyranny, or the transformation of a country that had no Al-Qaeda presence under Saddam into a terrorist safe haven, or what the mysteriously undermotivated invasion and the brutalization of Iraqi citizens did for Al_Qaeda recruiting offices. For Rove, as for Bush, it's a simple story: there was a bad man, and then there wasn't any bad man there anymore, so the war was a triumph. Anybody who sees anything else there is just trying to stir up shit.

There's never any shortage of bad people running countries at any given time, and it's always nice when one of them isn't there anymore, whether it's because his government got overthrown or his term expired and he went home to Texas to drink nonalcoholic beer and watch somebody else clear the damn brush, now that he has no need to do any more photo ops until the book hits the stores. There were lots of bad people who were running countries when Bush and Rove hit D.C., and eight years later, most of them, including several who were arguably worse and definitely less effectively declawed than Saddam was after the first Gulf War, were still in place, because they hadn't left the President of the United States feeling that they'd humiliated his daddykins and been the bug stuck up five hundred asses taking up space at neo-conservative think tanks. We went to war with Iraq because Bush and his buddies wanted to go to war with Iraq; I always thought that this was obvious at the time, which is why I think that the Downing Street memo, famous for "revealing" that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy", didn't set off the calls for impeachment and rioting in the streets that many people looked forward to at the time. It didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know in our bones, and too many people had been happy to go along with it in 2003 to get riled about it years later. Bush and Rove's great achievement wasn't the case they made for the need for war but the atmosphere they were able to whip up, in which anyone who questioned the rightness of a war of choice was immediately seen as open to denunciation and ridicule.

Does this mean that Bush lied about his reasons for launching the war? I'm going to get all Clinton on your ass and say that I'm genuinely not sure, but that the answer may depend on what exactly your definition of the word "lie" is. There was information that supported the case that Saddam was not just a bad old mean man but a threat: the neocons had been soliciting it from helpful Iraqis for a decade, and the administration ordered it up and gave it pride of place in its menu. And some of it was so obviously bogus that it stank to high heaven, such as the "yellow cake" tidbit that the administration so loved that Colin Powell gave up his only begotten reputation to read it into the record at the United Nations. There was also plenty of information to back up the distinct possibility that the weapons inspectors who were actually on the ground in Iraq and coming up with nothing did not in fact have their heads up their asses, but the administration's standard for deciding which information was solid and which didn't pass muster always came down to choosing which ones told them what they wanted to hear. Is this "lying"? Maybe, maybe not; I suspect that they believed that whatever they wanted to believe would turn out to be true, the same way that a man who takes out a loan he can't possibly repay convinces himself that he'll win the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes just in the nick of time. Of course, the real moral obscenity of Bush, Rove, the war architects, and all the boosters is that they couldn't for the life of them think of a reason why going to war might be a bad idea, so long as it was quick and easy and cathartic for their electorate slash audience. This, too, was not especially healthy for the political climate, but it will never cross the minds of any of the people responsible that they might have done anything for which they might be sorry.

The Punch Line Pretty Much Writes Itself Department

In an article in New York magazine about the ongoing disintegration of John "I never considered myself a maverick" McCain, Joe Hagan writes about Mark Salter, the hero-worshipping man-crush victim, speechwriter, and "co-writer" of McCain's books who single-handedly created McCain's image as a straight-talking, honorable man (a feat that he pulled off even though "McCain didn’t necessarily see his own life the way Salter did"):

"If the emotional fallout from the loss to Barack Obama was sublimated for McCain, it wasn’t so with Salter, who retreated to a cottage on the Maine coast and began a period of existential rumination over the direction of his life, say friends and associates. One Washington friend worried that he was falling “into this place of anger and sadness that he would not be able to get back from.”

"After the chaos and dysfunction of the campaign, Salter made an important personal decision: He would continue to write speeches for McCain, and collect a check, but he would no longer fight McCain on political matters. He wanted to try his hand at writing fiction."

The Anthony Lane Award for the Film Writer Most Devoted to Remaining Glib at All Times at the Expense of Ever Expressing an Actual Opinion Goes To...

"Here are the sum of my hopes for cinema in 2010: I want to feel something. I don't want to argue. I don't want provocation. I don't want my eyes boggled or my eardrums pummeled. I don't want to interact more with the characters or immerse myself in their world or engage in mental chess games with their director. I want to feel. Not that Barton Fink feeling, either, but the real thing.

"I realize that in saying this I lose all credibility as a serious commentator on film, given that an eighth-grade chauvinism about what counts as world cinema and what counts as sissy-stuff remains my order of the day. Serious commentators on film are all lined up like gun dogs awaiting David Fincher's movie about Facebook, The Social Network; the heady delights of Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, about a ballerina played by Natalie Portman who may or may not be imagining her rival; and Christopher Nolan's Inception, a thriller set inside the mind of Leonardo DiCaprio. "We're making a film that is a grand-scale action film about the world of dreams and the interior of the human mind," says Nolan of his forthcoming effort...

"The films I am most curious about, on the other hand, are Ed Zwick's pharmaceutical love story, Love and Other Drugs, about Pfizer salesman Jake Gyllenhaal falling for Parkinson's sufferer Anne Hathaway; The Greatest, in which Carey Mulligan, pregnant with her dead boyfriend's baby, looks up his mother, played by Susan Sarandon; and Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are Alright [sic], in which sperm donor Mark Ruffalo is tracked down by the offspring he bequeathed two lesbian mothers, played by Julianne Moore and Annette Bening. And while we're on the subject of wayward parents, put me down for Alexander Payne's The Descendents, in which George Clooney plays a recently widowed father who takes off with his two rebellious daughters to track down his wife's lover on the island of Kauai. Any or all of these movies could turn out to be pure as driven slush: That's why I'll be first in line for them."

--Tom Shone, "Please Stop Blowing My Mind", a Slate article (subhead" "Blockbusters have become way too intellectual") complaining that the problem with too many movies these days is that they're overly original and cerebral


Is Inception Hollywood's next great bomb?
"People are understandably excited about Christopher Nolan's Inception. To start with, it marks the director's first film since his 2008 mega-smash The Dark Knight, which took more than $1 billion at the box office. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a dream thief who breaks into people's minds and steals their ideas, thus suggesting not only a blockbuster requiring an intimate knowledge of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy to understand it but also a withering satire on the way Hollywood comes up with its summer movie ideas. Most importantly of all, of course, it affords audiences a peek at that most endangered of species, an original idea for a motion picture, making it the only movie this year that could reasonably fail...So yes, I will be first in line to see Inception, damp-palmed and a little nervous for Nolan, hoping he pulls magic out of the hat, grateful just for the suspense."

--Tom Shone, "A World Without Waterworlds", a Slate article complaining that they don't make high-flying, career-denting, studio-immolating box-office fiascos the way they used to (which also features the Exquisite Corpse-like sentence, "I think that Hudson Hawk is not a bad movie."

Harvey Comics

Harvey Pekar, who died yesterday at 70, fancied himself a writer, and a lot of people would have called him one. I guess he was a writer--besides the comics that finally made him famous and a cult hero, he wrote reviews of jazz records, none of which I've read, and essays sharing his views on the art of comics, at least one of which inspired a war of words in the letters section of The Comics Journal that was the death of many a tree--but what he mainly was, was a character. I don't just mean in the "What a character!" sense of the word, either. Abetted at various points in his career by the many collaborators who illustrated his comics scripts, by the adapters who, starting with Conrad Bishop's 1985 production at Lancaster, Pennsylvania's Independent Eye theater, turned his material into stage plays and, in 2003, a successful movie starring Paul Giamatti, and by the magic of television, Pekar was able to turn himself into his own literary creation, an iconic figure as unlikely in its enduring power and attraction as W. C. Fields or Norman Mailer's Aquarius. This was not a minor accomplishment, and it may have been what Pekar, who never tired of grousing about his lust for high-toned literary respectability from the hoity-toity cultural guardians, may have really wanted all along without knowing it. In one of the most memorable American Splendor stories, Harvey, who's been feeling used and unappreciated because a big write-up of his work in The Village Voice didn't get him nothing, meets Wallace Shawn, around the time that Shawn had graduated from cult playwright and son of the editor of The New Yorker to art-house movie star thanks to My Dinner with Andre, and is shocked to learn that Shawn is barely scraping by himself. He had been planning to put the bite on his new friend and had never before considered the possibility that being the toast of the New York Times Arts & Leisure section might not automatically solve all your problems.

I remember reading an article about Pekar in 1983--in The Village Voice, as it happens--and sending away for copies of all the issues of American Splendor that were still available. They came a few weeks later and I read them all in one gulp, but I know that the "story" that made the biggest impact on me was the one that began with Harvey waking up on a cold morning, alone in bed between marriages, thinking about how much his life sucked, consoling himself a little by masturbating, picking out which of his worn-out, sorry-looking duds he was going to wear, getting dressed, and going to work, his actions accompanied by one pissed-off thought balloon after another. That was Pekar making, as bluntly as possible, the point that he was put on earth to make, the same point that Arthur Miller once managed to inflate to cosmic proportions by reducing it to four simple words: attention must be paid.

One way that he got that attention was through a deliberate clash between content and the common perceptions about his medium. By the time that Pekar self-published the first issue of American Splendor in 1976 (with a banner on the cover reading "Big Bicentennial Issue", over an image of Harvey and a couple of other schlubs boring each other while sitting on a stoop), it had been well-established that comics could be used to depict things other than the activities of superheroes and talking ducks. And Harvey didn't invent autobiographical comics; in an interview in the current Paris Review, Robert Crumb, who started out disguising his own shameful confessions by casting anthropomorphic animals, albeit depraved, sex-crazed ones, in the lead roles, gives the credit for that historic achievement to Justin Green (Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary) and his own wife, Aline Kominsky. But they were grappling with powerful obsessions and neurotic issues, and Pekar was out to make you care that there was an intelligent, resilient guy holding down a civil service job in Cleveland, diligently collecting jazz records and wishing that he could get a little more personal satisfaction out of his life. Cartoonists such as Crumb and Gilbert Shelton created satirical, sometimes mock-glamorous alter egos for themselves through whom they addressed the reader directly, but with Pekar, what you saw was what you got. He wanted full credit for the insights and information you got out of his comics, and if they just bored you silly, he wanted full credit for that, too.

They say it's not what you know but who you know, and by some miraculous circumstance, Pekar happened to know the greatest cartoonist of his generation, Robert Crumb. It was Crumb's participation--he appeared on the cover of the first issue as a sort of underground seal of approval, and continued to contribute work to every issue of American Splendor until Pekar's fame was well enough secured that his services were no longer needed--that guaranteed that his friend's labor of love wasn't going to just slip completely between the cracks. Once Pekar was able to do a bit more picking and choosing, though, he seemed awfully inclined to have his work illustrated by artists such as Gary Dumm and Joe Zabel, fellow Clevelanders with naturalistic styles who could be trusted to bring nothing in the way of impressionistic or eccentric personal touches to his scripts. As a writer, Pekar was a Dreiserian son of the soil, and he may have been overly inclined to see meticulous "realism" as the key to artistic greatness. Crumb has said of his own artistic breakthrough that he experienced a kind of "explosion" fueled by LSD and personal and professional desperation. For all his ranting and bitching in print, there was never any explosive feeling about Pekar's work. He was any honorable slogger, advancing up the mountain slowing by the time-honored method of putting one foot in front of the other, then repeating.

It would have been out of character for someone who so doggedly identified himself as a prole to have done it any other way. His harping on class is a big part of what set Pekar apart from some of the best-known "minimalist" writers who started working in fiction around the same time he started publishing comics, many of whom were more obsessed with generational identity and who used the brand names of consumer goods to rope their characters off according to educational background and tax bracket. (Pekar, who was born in 1939, had too old a soul, even in his youth, to ever pass for a card-carrying member of the '60s generation.) That was an important part of his identity, and he wasn't about to betray it. The first book collection of American Splendor, a trade paperback by Doubleday, had a cover drawing by Crumb of Pekar, appearing as a guest on a TV talk show, looking as if he'd just gotten dressed to go out in search of a working toilet. (That book is probably a collector's item now, though I think the best book-length sampler of Pekar's work is The New American Splendor Anthology, originally published in 2001 by the adventurous, defunct company Four Walls Eight Windows. They also put out a handy compilation of all the comics on which Pekar and Crumb collaborated.) The joke wasn't just that Pekar might ever become even a minor TV celebrity but that he could become one on his own terms, without cleaning up and truckling to the powers that be. Ironically, Pekar's publicity tour for the book led to an attempt to draft him into David Letterman's wacky collection of recurring cranks and oddballs, which ended with Pekar, in a fit of authenticity, asserting his control over his own persona and royally pissing off his host, even committing the ultimate sacrilege by expressing doubts about whether it was worth his time to be on TV.




One reason that Pekar must seem like a survivor of a distant alien race to the reality-TV celebrities, from the cast of The Hills to Sarah Palin, who take the public's fascination as their due, is how hard he worked for his own degree of fame. The early issues of American Splendor are full of domestic scenes involving grousing about money, but unless it was absolutely central to the story, not much is said about how much it hurt a working stiff to assemble, publish and see to the distribution of his own annual publication, something that must have weighed heavily on Pekar's mind during the fifteen years it took him to put out as many issues of the comic, before actual publishers began stepping in to do the job for him.) It was just about inevitable that, when Pekar found the marriage that would last to the end of his life, it would be with someone who had read his work and was drawn to him because of, not in spite of it.

Joyce Brabner, whose marriage to Pekar enabled the makers of the American Splendor movie to shape it as a love story, complete with a late-third-act introduction of a chick into the nest, had been a community political activist who would apply her P.R. skills to promoting her husband's work, as well as helping package such radical history comics as Real War Stories and Brought to Light. (She also took a co-writing credit on Pekar's biggest original book, Our Cancer Year, illustrated by Frank Stack, which is about just what it says it's about.) Brabner has a certain amount of granola in her soul, and she may have influenced her husband in a certain reshaping of his priorities, as well as in the outlines of his public persona, which as he got older grew less threatening, more the lovably crusty old dear from the back room of Curmudgeons 'R Us. But if Pekar's sharper edges got a little soft and fuzzy, he never entirely succumbed to cultural respectability, and good for him. Beginning with the 2003 "Unsung Hero" issue of American Splendor, he spent more and more his last years writing about and adapting the work of other people, and I'd like to think there's a kind of grace note in that. It's gratifying to think that, after so many years and so many pages, Harvey Pekar finally ran out of things to tell us about himself.

Weekend Weird Sight: "Little Rosa"

This weekend's weird sight comes from a cable rerun of The Porter Wagoner Show, a syndicated series that ran from 1960 to 1981. I remember this being on in my house all the time when I was a kid, and to look at it again now is to experience that hard-to-define sensation one sometimes gets upon registering the full strangeness of what you were raised to unthinkingly accept as normal. I don't know when this episode was first broadcast, but it featured honky tonk legend Webb Pierce as the special guest and apparently dated from Porter's salad days in the late '60s and early '70s, when Dolly Parton, her hair not having yet reached its full height, was a key part of his retinue.

The show also featured his house comic, whose name escaped but whose act will likely stay imprinted on my retinas for longer than I might have liked. Wearing a green plaid jacket and funny hat, the country stand-up comedian's equivalent of a rodeo clown's finery, the fellow did his version of a Bob Newhart-Shelley Berman routine, braying corny jokes into the receiver of a prop telephone hanging on the wall: "So little Jimmy went to Sunday school, and they told him that Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt, and you know what little Jimmy said? He told 'em, that's nothing, my ma got behind the wheel of the car, and she turned into a telephone poll!" It wasn't the act that got to me so much, it was the ghoulish sound, or rather the lack of any sound, coming from the audience. Either Porter was stubbornly devoted to a faithful recording of the theatrical moment or the laugh machine was broken. In any case, not only was no attempt made to sweeten the audience's nonexistent laughter, but the cameraman kept cutting to close-ups of people in the stands who looked as if they were just killing time before going to their doctor's office to discuss the pros and cons of surgery versus radiation. I'm pretty sure that one guy whose joyless glower practically ate the camera alive later had a major Supreme Court case named after him.

It was after this experiment in alternative comedy and Brechtian alienation technique that Wagoner brought Webb Pierce on and said, "Y'know, there are clowns, you think of 'em as basically being funny, but they also have a serious side, too." That was the cue for Webb to team up with his clown, Koko, and give Koko a chance to show off his serious side. Koko's spoken-word tearjerker duet with the late, great Webb Pierce is this past weekend's official weird sight, courtesy of someone at YouTube who must have seen it just about the same time I did and was able to do the right thing with it. T'ank-a you, boss!

Methheads and Eraserfaces

Winter's Bone, which was directed by Debra Granik from a screenplay that she and Anne Rosellini adapted from Daniel Woodrell's novel, is set in a rural community in the Ozark Mountains. The central figure, a 17-year-old girl named Ree Dolly (played by the 19-year-old Jennifer Lawrence), is saddled with a near-catatonic pillhead mother and a couple of small siblings; her father, who cooks meth for a living, got himself arrested and disappeared after his bail was posted, and when the sheriff drives over to give the wary and unreceptive Ree the news that pap can't be found, he also drops it in her lap that he put up the family's property as collateral for the bond and if he isn't found, they'll all be relocating to a ditch somewhere. Ree takes all this fairly stoically. She sets about going from house to house, tracing down her relatives and asking for help in finding her errant father, but first, she gathers her siblings (one of whom has just presented her with a dog he found, as if what they most needed was another mouth to feed) and tells them she's cooking them dinner, and instructs them to watch carefully, so that they'll know how to do it.

It's implicit that she might just disappear from their lives at any minute: their father did, and one of Ree's more grounded plans for improving their lives involves enrolling herself in the military, so they can get the wad of cash promised in the recruiting poster. When the recruiter she speaks to, who must be the most honorable member of his profession ever to appear in a movie, tells her that it'll be weeks before she actually lays her hands on the money, she asks, "Why doesn't it say that in the poster?" Without a trace of sarcasm, he replies, "It must be a clerical error." He's trying to respectfully steer her away while maintaining the facade that he believes that the United States military is a straight-shooting best possible employer in the free world.

He's probably the most socially well-adjusted person in a movie full of people trying to find a language in which they can keep their dignity against all odds--"You don't ask for what ought to be offered" Ree tells her brother, who's wondering why they didn't beg their hard-shelled but not unkind neighbor for some food when they're all but starving--or may be trying to find a way to help someone out without seeming vulnerable. John Hawkes plays Ree's uncle, Teardrop, who assures her that their father really did love her and her mother and siblings, adding, "That's where he went weak." Hawkes, so intensely consumed by his role that he's near-unrecognizable at first, is terrifying early in the picture, when he all but snaps Ree's neck while hissing at her that she shouldn't be out looking for her father. It isn't immediately clear that Teardrop, whose reputation is ugly enough to precede him in a region so overpopulated by plug-uglies that Garret Dillahunt is the local sheriff, is threatening his niece because that's the only way he knows to protect her from getting into real danger. At some point, you may register, with a certain bemused horror, that the nastiest characters have been reigning themselves in a bit because of the presence of a young girl with a legitimate beef. What we've been seeing is them on their best behavior.


Granik showed her talent with actors in her first feature, the 2004 Down to the Bone, starring Vera Farmiga as a mother of two with a substance abuse problem, though that movie only held together because of Farmiga's performance, and it suffered from the "nowhere to go but down" syndrome that flattens out so many movies about self-destructive druggers and drinkers. Winter's Bone is much richer and more surprising, because, working from Woodrell's material, Granik is able to capture something complicated and unusual: a predatory, backwoods criminal milieu where hard drugs and drug money have twisted a traditionally tight-lipped, ingrown mountain community into something so cold-blooded that it's totally sociopathic. For her part, Granik brings a focus to this world that maybe only a woman could deliver. The men, surly and threatening by nature, are all so scary at first sight that it takes no small degree of concentrated observation to see which ones are harmless, which ones might be on your side, and which ones are to avoided completely. It's only when Dale Dickey, as Merab Milton, wife of white trash crime boss Thump Milton, takes center stage that you perceive how much the real life or death decisions of the clan are turned over to the matriarchy.

Winter's Bone has a superficial resemblance to such recent "neo-neorealist" wallows in economic destitution and emotional affectlessness as Wendy and Lucy and Ballast, non-dramatic movies about non-people that all but dared you not to feign interest in their pitiful characters, as if to do so would prove that you don't care about real people who slip between the cracks. But it has a poetic intensity that lifts it above that kind of thing, and its vision of a spread-out interlocking family of brutes cannibalizing each other is too weird to be reduced to a sociological case study. Lawrence makes Ree sympathetic and touching, but the whole movie is something of a sick joke at her expense, because her aims are so small. She doesn't want to bust up the crime syndicate and make the world a better place, she just wants to keep her house and be left alone to take care of her brother and sister and brush her mother's hair in peace, and yet she's still way in over her head. Her dream is to not sink below a certain level. (Showing her brother how to clean a squirrel for cooking, she answers the boy's asking, as he pulls out the intestines, "Do we eat these?" with a terse, "Not yet.")

The movie doesn't editorialize about the fact that, almost seventy years after the publication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, there are people living like this in America, and it doesn't quite howl in rage over it. It just acknowledges it and advises us to be aware of it, which may be both a more mature attitude and a more daring and challenging one. At the end, the fearsome Teardrop ("I don't want to be standing here naked when that motherfucker comes in," a guy who looks as if he'd be pretty formidable standing there wearing a pink tutu says upon hearing that Teardrop is appraching, and shuffles offscreen, presumably to fetch his bazooka) seems to be on the path to a violent revenge, but the movie isn't interested in watching it, or even in apprising of his fate. That stuff is for the movies; Winter's Bone feels that the situation of people trying to live their lives while this shit is going on is drama enough.

The oddly titled Italian movie I Am Love, directed by Luca Guadagnino, from a screenplay by Barbara Alberti, Ivan Cotroneo, Walter Fasano and the director, has swept into U.S. theaters festooned with quotes from reviewers to the effect that it will deliver something big and thrilling that movie audiences want but haven't been getting from contemporary movies. What, advanced symptoms of glaucoma? Shot in what, to judge from the detectable outlines, must be some luscious-looking parts of Milan and choice samples of the local real estate, the movie is so dimly lit that Don Corleone would tell the cinematographer, Yorick Le Saux, to turn some damn lights on before people start bumping into the furniture.

The movie stars Tilda Swinton as the Russian wife of a rich textile manufacturer, who, along with their son, Edo, inherits control of the family business after the smooth old patriarch (Gabriele Ferzetti) dies, following his big speech at the obligatory opening sequence depicting the family get-together at Christmas. But then Tilda falls in love at first sight with the new friend (Edoardo Gabbriellini) with whom Edo (Flavio Parenti) has embarked upon a homoerotically charged business partnership. Soon they're rolling around on the grass in the country, their grapplings embarrassingly intercut with shots of insects, as if the director had prepared for this challenging project by reading Lady Chatterly's Lover with one eye and watching Days of Heaven with the other. Throughout, Swinton's face is so blandly pale and ageless that she, too, is barely recognizable, which under the circumstances is a bit of a break for her. Is the dopey lighting an attempt to protect the 49-year-old Swinton? That's one hell of a misuse of an actress who's always been willing, if not eager, to look bad, and who's capable of being sexy as hell without being turned into a into a fogged-over stand-in for Grace Kelly.

Even without the clues from the movie's good notices, it's possible to make out that I Am Love means to supply the operatic pleasures of an old-style. overscaled movie-movie about people casting off societal constraints in the name of passionate but unlikely love in photogenic settings. What makes the movie dead on the screen is that Guadagnino manages to get the style he's reaching for--an academic simulation of a Douglas Sirk movie, set in Visconti territory--without supplying the narrative essentials. You never feel that you know Swinton's character--never mind your barely being able to see her--well enough to care about her, and it's neither clear what her relationship with her husband is like, nor what she and her new, younger lover see in each other, besides the trappings of her beauty and wealth and his fabulous cooking, which is highlighted in a guilty-erotic-eating scene that would have the gangster gourmet of Tampopo rolling his eyes. You can sort of fill in that the husband must be a lout--my God, he switches the TV channel when his wife is swooning over Tom Hanks's red-tinted death aria scene in Philadelphia!--and that the younger man inflames her passions anew in a way that's never happened before, but that's just because you know the cliches that Guadagnino's story draws upon well enough to fit them into his outline yourself and prop up his sketchy melodrama. I don't think this is what Jean Renoir was talking about when he said that there should be some "collaboration" between a moviemaker and his audience.