Dave Friedman's Soul of Wit

Sentimentalists and Naifs Take Cover

The fourth season of The Wire is about to start, and, for those of us hip enough to have HBO On Demand, the premier episode is available for your viewing exercise.

I say exercise, not pleasure, because watching the Wire is like reading good literature. (Interesting discussion here about narratively complex TV shows, such as The Wire and, natch, Battlestar Galactica, two very different shows that nevertheless share the same narrative complexity that demands a lot of its viewers.) It's a safe bet that the viewers of either show tend to be more intelligent than the population at large, much the same way that a person who reads novels for exercise (not pleasure!) is more intelligent than the population at large. (Logic test for my readers: This shouldn't be construed to mean that those who don't read novels aren't more intelligent than the population at large.)

But, as always, I digress. This season's The Wire promises to be a meditation on the failed promise of public education, especially as it relates to the inner city poor. Witness the sullen, shell-shocked teachers forced to sit in front of an old, clueless lady, who claims that the secret to educating black America is IALAC--I Am Lovable And Contemptible. (OK, I made the "C" up. I forget what it stands for.)

You get the idea: (1) The Wire is a brutal, gruesome show that displays life in a manner which defines verisimilitude; (2) public education, especially in the inner city, is a complete and utter failure; (3) the tragedy to be explored in the show is that, given the poverty of their educational environment, the school kids would do better to sell drugs on the street, and have an income thereby, than to idle away their years sitting in ineffectual government-funded schools.

As to point 3: Never mind that one of the risks attendant with selling drugs on the street is that you will be laid low by an errant (or inerrant) bullet; the street gives you an income where the classroom does not.

Nativists Apoplectic

Well, it had to happen. Salma Hayek, more appropriately referred to as "the body" than Elle MacPherson, is bringning a telenovela (Spanish-language soap opera) to ABC.

Oh, and for the immigrant-bashers out there, the star of the show is someone named America Ferrara. Not too American, I am sure.

Nativists everywhere are said to be having fits of apoplexy over such apostasy.

A New Yorker on the Material Girl on Bush

Want to leave the "quasi-fundamentalist Christian[s] with socially conservative views" of Plano, TX scratching their heads?

Show them this, in which a motley crew of New Yorkers opines on the Material Girl.

Most surprising statement of all:

She put a bad taste in everyone’s mouths when she insulted George Bush. I want her to realize that people are out there fighting for democracy!

My blog post regarding New Yorkers' reaction to Charlie Daniels' patriotism here.

The Friedman Theorem, Or, I Do Tendentiousness

There is a general theorem of cultural relativity by which we can all set our clocks: if it is popular there is a greater than average chance that David Friedman will not like it because popularity is generally inversely proportional to quality. (I.e. the masses wouldn't know aesthetic pleasure if Matisse tripped them in the street.)

To wit, Lisa Nova, enfant terrible of YouTube.

Sure she's easy on the eyes. Sure, some see in her success the destruction of Hollywood (no bad thing in my estimation).

But it's such trite shit, so poorly done.

That said, Lynne & Tessa are pretty cool. Their stuff is trite, as well, but they don't have any pretension about what they are doing--they're just two kids having fun with a web cam and karoake.

Charlie Daniels

Saw the Charlie Daniels Band tonight at B.B King's in Times Square, and during his performance, he commented on his support of the troops in Iraq.

And I'm happy to say, even in New York City, Daniels was applauded for his comments.

Those who would impugn the efforts of Americans who risk life and limb would do well to consider how they would react were they placed in the same situation as our soldiers. No matter what we think of the Bush Administration's policies in Iraq (and it is not clear that those policies have yielded much benefit) it is nonetheless imperative that we support those who risk their lives to serve our country.

The Da Vinci Code

Apparently, the book the Da Vinci Code has been made into a movie starring Forrest Gump...and, well, that has the Catholics all up in a lather because, apparently, said book is not only anti-Catholic, but also presents a mortal danger to these Catholics. (Never mind that pedophilia seems a more persistent thorn in the side of the Church than does fiction. After all, the Bible is fiction, right?)

But I digress.

While some Catholics have an intelligent reaction to this book and movie ("it's fiction; get over it") others seem to think the end of the world is nigh:

If "such lies and errors had been directed at the Quran or the Holocaust," said Archbishop Angelo Amato, the Vatican's secretary for the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, "they would have justly provoked a world uprising."

The archbishop was speaking of "The Da Vinci Code," the Ron Howard film that debuts at Cannes and opens worldwide this week, and is expected to gross $500 million by summer's end.

The archbishop's point is undeniable. Blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban, published a few months ago in a Danish newspaper and reprinted on the front pages of Europe's major papers, ignited demonstrations in Muslim communities across Europe and violent and deadly riots across the Islamic world.

Is Pat Buchanan really drawing an equivalence between his fellow Catholics and wanton Islamic rioters? In any event, Dispatches From the Culture Wars dispatches with this kind of argument quite well:

Pat, take my advice. If you don't like the content of this movie, by all means don't go see it. I have zero interest in seeing the movie myself, so I'm not going to go see it (ain't that great? Freedom allows you to avoid seeing things you think are satanic, which is why I've never been to a John Tesh concert). I got about one chapter into the book and found it boring as hell. Umberto Eco covered much of the same territory 25 years ago and did it much, much better.

The Da Vinci Code, plainly, is fiction, and, as such, is speculative at best and harmless at worst. But when religious people use a work of fiction to claim blasphemy they imply that theirs is a religion beyond ridicule or reproach.

But that's not the way the free flow of ideas works in this country. Surely, Catholics (and all Christians) have better things to worry about than the fidelity of the Da Vinci Code's representation of their religion.

There are some interesting comments on this whole issue at a post written by Professor Bainbridge. Some of the more cogent arguments made about the deleterious effect of this book on the Catholic Church state that, despite author Dan Brown's protestations to the contrary, the book is not based on accepted historical knowledge, and Brown's continued claim that his work is based on historical fact, has led people to believe that the Catholic Church is an insidious, demonic organization out to ruin the world, etc. (That such would likely be the reaction of a boy raped by a priest is left unsaid in these arguments.) But in any event, it is hardly Dan Brown's fault that people believe what he says or writes, any more than it is the fault of Bush I when people believed him when he said "read my lips: no new taxes." What people are really complaining about here is not Dan Brown's lies about the historical record but rather that people read without inquiry and accept as fact that which is written because, well, it is written.

Never mind that that is rather tautological and abusrdly insubstantial.

Two plus two is three. Michael Jordan is five feet tall. I'm a billionaire.

Now, do you believe any of that?

No?

Then why the hell would you believe anything anyone writes without independent verification?

Titanic Stupidity

I finally watched the movie Titanic the other night, and it is a marvelously stupid movie, exceeded in stupidity only by the arrogance with which its Victorian-era passengers went about their business.

But Rogert Ebert's review of the movie makes little sense:

She was ``the largest moving work of man in all history,'' a character boasts, neatly dismissing the Pyramids and the Great Wall. There is a shot of her, early in the film, sweeping majestically beneath the camera from bow to stern, nearly 900 feet long and ``unsinkable,'' it was claimed, until an iceberg made an irrefutable reply.

Neither the Great Wall nor the Pyramids move, unless by "move" one means move through empty space, carried on the back of the Earth. Surely that is not what Ebert means, and surely the Titanic was one of the largest vessels ever built, at its time.

In Which I Demonstrate That Respect for My Fellow Man is a Folly

Apparently, the fad du jour is claiming that one's dog provides "emotional support," and, as a consequence, a person can't be expected to eat in a restaurant without said dog:

ON a sun-drenched weekend last month, cafes from TriBeCa to the Upper West Side were swelling with diners, many of whom left dogs tied to parking meters in deference to Health Department rules that prohibit pets in restaurants. At French Roast on upper Broadway, however, two women sat down to brunch with dogs in tow: a golden retriever and a Yorkie toted in a bag.

"They both said that their animals were emotional service dogs," said Gil Ohana, the manager, explaining why he let them in. "One of them actually carried a doctor's letter."

Health care professionals have recommended animals for psychological or emotional support for more than two decades, based on research showing many benefits, including longer lives and less stress for pet owners.

But recently a number of New York restaurateurs have noticed a surge in the number of diners seeking to bring dogs inside for emotional support, where previously restaurants had accommodated only dogs for the blind.

This is all rather disgusting and European. How pathetic are people that they need dogs in their presence for emotional support during that most vital of human activities, the consumption of caloric energy?

Methinks man has become child.

Incoherent Professors

Interesting article in Variety about the TV show American Idol and all the cash the show generates. (I'm more interested in the cash than the show itself.)

Apparently, AI is one of the few TV shows that can now command a sizeable audience, and, as a result, it commands very high prices for advertisers that want to peddle their goods on the show:

Experts say this series, like a dwindling number of programs, may be one of the few massively popular shows to thrive on ad dollars alone, which may a reason why the piggybackers are less of a concern.

After all, the Super Bowl also has thousands of very profitable piggybackers, but it's still the network that rakes it in by earning millions on every commercial. As Syracuse U. prof Bob Thompson says, " 'Idol' proves that all this 21st century stuff depends on the cultural equity of a good old-fashioned network success."

Ignore for a moment the fallacious appeal to "experts" (professors are "expert" in nothing other than giving platitudinous quotes to gullible journalists). What the hell is "cultural equity" and what does it have to do with American Idol's capacity for lulling middle America into a collective stupor?

Via Hit & Run.

"You are representing your race when you speak."

I meant to blog about this story, but A Constrained Vision, among others, beat me to it. The story is about a group of black professionals who founded a group which tries to instill in mainly black children the need to speak correctly. The theory behind this radical thinking is that to those people who are well spoken life's rewards accrue. Essentially: barring the occasional celebrity or professional athlete, high incomes correlate highly to eloquence and education. (Sidenote: those professional athletes who are also well-spoken find success in other, non-athletic pursuits. See: Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, David Robinson, etc. Those professional athletes who fail to get an education seem to have a rather marginal post-career life. See: Pete Rose, etc.)

One question: Would it have been considered racist for a white to say of black children: "you represent your race when you speak, so speak well"? It is refreshing to hear such words from a black person; too bad America is so fraught with political correctness that those simple, and true, words, if spoken by a white person, would be seen as racist.

Demographic Presumption

Toyota and Fox are partnering to bring a TV show called "Prison Break" to mobile phones. Allegedly, I am in the "target demo" of the show, being male and 30 years old. Never mind that I never heard of the show until I read about it in the Wall St. Journal:

In a first-of-its-kind agreement, Toyota Motor and News Corp.'s Fox network plan to announce today that they have cut an extensive deal for the auto company to sponsor -- and be featured in -- a spinoff series for mobile phones of the hit drama "Prison Break." Toyota, as part of the cross-platform deal, also will sponsor exclusive content for a Web site dedicated to the program and get ad exclusivity in several episodes in May as the series nears its season finale.

I don't understand the appeal of watching a TV show on a small cell phone screen. Perhaps this will take off, and it will be one more instance in which (most) TV bores me. But if the problem really is that people my age are too busy for advertisers to reach in the conventional way (i.e., through TV) then perhaps that means that TV needs to change its shows, in order to attract more viewers. The only shows that interest me at this point either feature sophisticated plot development, such as The Sopranos and Huff, or else are relatively free of the strictures of George Carlin's "seven dirty words", such as Nip/Tuck and Entourage.

When Capitalism Sucks

Budweiser, which is to beer as McDonald's is to cuisine, which is to say, Budweiser is not so much beer as it is a pale imitation, is one of the worst examples of the mediocre quality to which mass-produced items sink.

Budweiser also has rights to sell its beer at soccer's World Cup, which is in Germany this year.

Germans, being perceptive about such things, realize that Budweiser is not beer, and are none too happy:

Being the official beer sponsor of the world's most-watched sporting event should give the company an ideal chance to promote its brand and to associate itself with the one thing Germans love almost as much as beer, soccer.

But the King of Beers has a king-size problem: Germans hate the beer and Anheuser-Busch can't even use the Budweiser name in Germany. In a country where brews are hand-crafted and richly flavored, many drinkers dismiss Bud as light, mass-produced and weak.

"We don't want Bud at our World Cup," says Johannes Schnitter, a 25-year-old student at the Freie Universität in Berlin, who has set up an anti-Bud Web site, BudOut.de. "I'm not anti-American. This is just the worst beer you could imagine."

A long-running legal dispute with a Czech brewer prevents Anheuser from using the name Budweiser in Germany. Anheuser-Busch introduced Budweiser in 1876. In 1895 a group of Czech brewers in the town of Ceske Budejovice (Budweis in German) launched a beer called Budweiser too. The Czech company says it was upholding the tradition of beer brewed in the town since the 13th century. The two companies have been fighting over use of the name almost ever since.

Middle America doesn't know good beer, just as it does not know good cars. Budweiser, and its food equivelent, McDonald's, is perhaps the worst manifestation of Middle American flavorlessness and ennui.

The Great American Idiocy That is the Love Affair With Cars

One of the more idiotic phenomenons of American culture is Americans' love affairs with their cars. Never in history has there been a more inefficient way to get around town than via car. Now, Chicagoans, who have one of the most extensive public transportation systems in the country, are bitching about having to ditch their cars and, well, using the public transportation system for which they paid:

Ann Schue used to cherish the time she spent alone in her 2003 Ford Expedition during her 90-minute morning commute to her job at the University of Chicago. Nestled in heated leather seats, she planned her day while listening to the news.

Not anymore. Massive construction work on one of Chicago's main highways has forced her to trade the peace of her sport-utility vehicle for the clatter and crowds of a double-decker commuter train.

"This was a very, very big step for me," says Ms. Schue, 42 years old, who had never been on a train in her life before she recently started taking the Metra rail service. "I'm still very...," she says, choking up, then pausing to compose herself. "I miss my car."

Chicago is the rare Midwestern city with pervasive mass transit, including buses, elevated trains and regional commuter rail. But it's also typically Midwestern in that many residents so love their vehicles that they'd rather sit in traffic burning up $2.99-a-gallon gasoline than go near a bus stop or train platform.

Look: people who live in suburbs, and who rely on cars to get them from point A to point B are idiots and lead unnecessarily inefficient lives. (I don't care much about the alleged environmental effects of driving; the world is a far cleaner place than it was even twenty years ago.)

Quit your bitching, move out of the suburbs and embrace efficiency.

For those inclined to argue that the suburbs are more environmentally friendly than cities, interesting article here. Explanation of the economics of urban and suburban housing prices here.

That people continue to live in suburbs despite all of the evidence of their drawbacks shows only the inability of man to think rationally about his circumstance. Kill your television and kill your car, and emancipate yourself.

July 27th, 2007

The Simpsons comes to the big screen.

A Brit Takes on the French

Via Arts & Letters Daily:

I’m not being hasty. Like all English women (probably women everywhere) I was raised with the certainty that French women were the most stylish, and that if I could only get them to stop scowling at me, they would share the secret. At 16 I fell madly in love with Paris, and on the basis that even the concièrges would look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade went to live there three years later. Big mistake. The concièrges did not look like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. In fact, no one looked like Audrey Hepburn in Charade. This is probably because Hepburn was a woman of Dutch/Anglo-Irish heritage working in America. The real French looked like Japanese tourists with bad Burberry habits. I realise now, of course, that upping sticks to Paris at 19 was as misconceived a plan as entering Celebrity Big Brother to disseminate one’s political beliefs about Saddam Hussein. No one should take up residence in Paris before the age of 40 — it is such an innately bourgeois city that you cannot truly appreciate it (nor it you) until you are sufficiently established and well heeled to acquire your own Burberry habit, plus an Hermès Birkin, after which le snottiness extraordinaire, which all the best Parisian sales assistants go to sales-assistant school to master, becomes easier to quell.

From The London Times.

Give me Shakespeare and beer and brie and wine. I don't care about the rest of either Britian or France.

Multi-Culturalism in the UK

One Brit is upset at his nation's museums:

Why is it that so often when I visit a museum these days, I leave feeling ever so slightly cross? I’m thinking, say, of those wretched animatronic dinosaurs we parents have to queue for at the Natural History Museum, completely ignoring the genuine prehistoric skeletons either side. And of that display cabinet at the National Maritime Museum where nautical objects have been plonked apparently at random in the same glass case in order to illustrate a curator’s trendy post-modern point about the hopelessness of trying to extract meaning from artefacts so far removed from our own time and place.

But, hey, why pick on those two? Pretty much everyone in the museum world is at it these days and has been for some time: the exhibition at the Horniman, which proudly claimed - though with no supporting evidence, that voodoo was one of Africa's "great contributions to world culture"; the Gainsborough exhibition whose curator presumed to judge the mores of 18th century society by the PC standards of modern Britain; the decision by Manchester City Art Gallery to hang its paintings lower, the better that they might be enjoyed by children and the disabled; Palmer Majority Report (of which more later); the National Gallery's campaign to the keep Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks apparently less on the grounds of its artistic or historical merit than on its subject's status as a single mother; almost anything containing the words "access", "relevance" or "inclusivity."

What all these diverse irritants have in common is that they are part of the same worrying, hidden debate. "Hidden" because its arguments, though familiar to the point of cliche to anyone who works in the museum industry, are pretty much unknown to the people outside it. "Worrying" because the conclusions reached by these self-serving guardians of our national heritage are so often dangerously at odds with the needs of the public they claim to serve.

Someone in the audience of scholars, curators, directors and other museum professionals made this point rather well at an Institute of Ideas debate at the Wallace Collection last year on the subject Should We Junk Collections? "Most of us here are quite used to this sort of talk," she said, "But if it were to be overheard by the people who actually visit our museums a lot of them would be quite horrified."

Via Arts & Letters Daily.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is, Or, Conservative Don't Want to Risk Their Capital

Conservatives, never known for cogency, bitch and moan about Hollywood and its liberal values till they're blue in the face. And yet, a tried and true conservative, and possible anti-Semite, Mel Gibson, has proven there is a market for movies palatable to conservatives' wordlview, namely, the Passion of the Christ.

Althouse comments on a Time article about Gibson's newest project. This prompted me to comment on her site:

Here's what I don't understand.

Gibson has proven that there is a market for religious movies that attract conservatives. And of course Hollywood doesn't seem interested in these types of movies. So why don't the conservatives who are interested in these movies put their money where their mouths are and finance more of these movies?

Clearly, there are a number of very wealthy people sympathetic to conservative views (Philip Anschutz comes to mind, but I know there are others).

Seems it's time for the conservatives to quit complaining about Hollywood, step up to the plate, and lay their own money on the line. Or is risking one's own money too conservative a notion?

Random Observation on the State of Motherhood

I need your expert opinion here.

I was on the subway yesterday, waiting for the train, and I saw a mom drag her kid down the stairs, in a stroller, as one would drag a piece of luggage. In other words, rather than picking the stroller up she just bounced it down the stairs on the back wheels.

This kid was an infant. Cranial damage? I see this kid in special ed in a few years if that's how the mother treats the kid. It goes without saying the mother did not seem to be well heeled.

I Do Pretension

Dan Drezner brings us the very important international relations news that Sarah Jessica Parker, of Sex and the City Fame, is planning to do a show on HBO about the Washingtonienne.

To which news I commented:

It is a fact universally acknowledged among men that New York has an elan and sophistication utterly absent in D.C.

(Inspiration for the pretention and elan of this comment comes from Jane Austen: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.")

Proulx Apoplectic

Annie Proulx, from whose short story the Oscar contender Brokeback Mountain came, is apoplectic that it was not awarded Best Picture at this year's Oscars:

Academy members who vote for the year's best film are "out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city," Proulx writes.

Yes, you read that right: the alleged shifting culture in America is properly compared to a loaf of bread rising.

And to think that some consider her writing the apotheosis of literary aesthetics.

"Buck Fush" or "Art"

"Art".

Gallery run by Ivan Boesky's daughter.

Take Some Ambien and Call Me in the Morning

So I just watched the first ten minutes of the movie Sleepless in Seattle.

What a trite piece of shit.

Please Hammer, Don't Blog 'Em

One hit eighties wonder MC Hammer has a blog.

Via Shanti's Dispatches.

To borrow a phrase from one of MC Hammer's songs, please Hammer, don't blog 'em. We already have too many voices in the blogosphere. What's next, a Flock of Seagulls blog?

Culturally Tone Deaf

If a politician is invited to go on the Daily Show, don't you think his media handlers would have clued him into its comedic nature? Not so if you're a third-rate political hack from Illinois:

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich wasn't in on the joke.

Blagojevich says he didn't realize "The Daily Show" was a comedy spoof of the news when he sat down for an interview that ended up poking fun at the sometimes-puzzled governor.

"It was going to be an interview on contraceptives ... that's all I knew about it," Blagojevich laughingly told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a story for Thursday's editions. "I had no idea I was going to be asked if I was 'the gay governor.' "

This guy is a certifiable idiot.

Europe: Cradle of Civilization

If you want to sexually abuse women, there apparently are worse places to go than Italy.

See, if the woman (or girl) you are molesting is not a virgin, then it's a less serious offense:

Sexually abusing a teenager is less serious a crime if the girl is not a virgin, Italy's higher court said on Friday in a controversial ruling that immediately drew a barrage of criticism.

The court ruled in favor of a man in his forties, identified only as Marco T., who forced his 14-year old stepdaughter to have oral sex with him after she refused intercourse.

The man, who has been sentenced to three years and four months in jail, lodged an appeal arguing that the fact that his stepdaughter had had sex with men before should have been taken into consideration during his trial as a mitigating factor.

The supreme court agreed, saying that because of her previous sexual experiences, the victim's "personality, from a sexual point of view, is much more developed than what would be normally expected of a girl of her age".

What's the about fiddling while Rome burned?

Air Marshals

Oliver Stone is somewhere kicking himself because he didn't get to this concept first: some Air Marshals have been arrested for smuggling coke:

Shawn Ray Nguyen, 38, and Burlie Sholar, 32, were arrested Thursday after allegedly receiving 15 kilograms of cocaine and $15,000 cash delivered to Nguyen's home and agreeing to take the drugs on a plane, prosecutors said in court papers.

The U.S. attorney's office accused the two men of agreeing to use their official positions as federal air marshals to bypass airport security and smuggle the cocaine on board a flight from Houston to Las Vegas, Nevada, in exchange for the money.

Contradiction

Wikipedia's entry on Queen Latifah explains her unusual surname:

Her stage name, Latifah, means "delicate" and "sensitive" in Arabic. It was given to her when she was eight by her cousin. While in high school, she was a power forward on her basketball team. Her father also gave her lessons in karate and firearms use.

Right. Power forwards are "delicate" and "sensitive".

Someone forgot to tell that to Dennis Rodman.

What I'll Be Buying Soon

Vanity Fair.

Not the Thackeray novel.

The magazine.

Why?

Cause Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley will be naked. On the cover.

If ever there was a reason to buy Vanity Fair, that would be it.

Unrelated trivia question: How do we know that Thackeray is not Muslim? Because his middle name is Makepeace.

Turkish Anti-Americanism

The most expensive Turkish movie ever made is a piece of anti-American agitprop:

American soldiers in Iraq crash a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.

They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine-gun fire, shoot the groom in the head, and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison -- where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

"Valley of the Wolves Iraq" -- set to open in Turkey on Friday -- feeds off the increasingly negative feelings many Turks harbor toward their longtime NATO allies: Americans.

I'm not sure how pervasive this anti-American feeling is. There are some Turks in government who have made public statements condemning the United States, but I suspect that among Turkey's informed citizenry, the United States' military presence in Turkey and its political and economic influence over Israel is seen as a rather good thing. Nothing stabilizes a volatile region like a trillion-dollar superpower with nculear weapons. Turkey's business community and its government are well aware of their proximity to both Saudia Arabia and Iran; neither of these countries has given secular Turkey (or Israel) much of a problem because both countries know they could not win a war in which the United States would participate. Turkey is too critical to America's strategic interests in the region. I suspect that informed Turks understand this and value their historic friendship with America and Israel.

Turkey, as with all Muslim countries with moderately developed economies, has major issues involving tensions between secularists and traditionalists. The secularists are generally wealthier, better educated, and have firm ties with both America and cosmopolitan Europe. The traditionalists do not.

Observation

Xeni Jardin and Cathy Seipp look like they're the same person.

Italy, Antiquities, and the use of Scarce Resources

Speaking of bad demographic trends (see post below), Italy faces two major problems: its economy, heavily dependent on labor-intensive industries such as textiles, is under siege from Mexico, China, and eastern Europe, and its population is slowly aging and shrinking.

Time and money being the scarcest resources, one must ask: Is it really an effective use of Italians' time and money to pursue claims that the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a piece of Italy's ancient history illegally?

The rational among us would say that Italy would do better to focus on modernizing its economy and making it more welcome to immigrants, but the prideful nationalists who make such decisions would rather pursue claims that Italy has to archeological treasures.

I'm not sure that's a long-term prescription for success.

Britney Spears: Conservative Christian

Apparently, even the slatternly have found God.

Up next: kids wearing What Would Britney Do? bracelets. (Which would replace their Who Would Britney Do? bracelets.)

On Working in the Wrong Field

A friend of mine manages an Off Off Broadway Theater.

Occasionally she sends out emails letting her friends know what's going on at the theater.

Curiously, she also included this note in a missive sent out this morning:

On Sunday, January 15, 2006, members of the cast and produc­tion team ventured to Scores: West Side on a working field trip to explore the world of strip clubs.

To which I responded that I must be working in the wrong profession.

One Doesn't Know Where to Begin

(Note: some of the links on this post are decidedly not safe for work. Forewarned is forearmed.)

Althouse blogs about a guy who wants to wear skirts (kilts) but whose high school forbids males from wearing such clothes. This being America, the kid sues, and Althouse laments his atrocious fashion sense. All well and good.

But then a lovely lass named Sonia comments on Althouse's blog about how she doesn't like clothes at all, but if you're going to wear clothes it may as well be a skirt.

Turns out Sonia is a nudist. A rather good looking nudist but a nudist nonetheless. Oh, and she's married, but she's never cheated on her husband because she only has affairs with women. (That this is starting to read like a blog-version of Emmannuelle should not go unmentioned.)

What's disturbing about this "woman" is that, in addition to bearing all, she also apparently does not think rape is a big deal. Some explanation is in order. The French, being the French, made two movies in the past several years which featured brutal scenes of rape, namely, Baise-Moi (Fuck Me) and Irreversible. I had chance to see both of these movies while they were briefly shown in movie theaters here in New York City, and, well, let's say they are rather disturbing depictions of brutal violence toward women.

So, back to Sonia. On Irreversible:

So when the rape comes and the camera is actually still (for once), it feels strangely peaceful and calm. We feel sorry for Monica [Bellucci] to have her ass violated that way...

On Baise-Moi:

She didn't mind being gang raped because there was nothing precious inside her cunt. After that opening scene, the film becomes progressively more violent, while the sex scene, ironically, become more consensual. And while those are still very explicit, there is actually less and less nudity - a bit of a breast here, some pubic hairs there, but very little full frontals. Too bad!

By the way, this woman has kids.

UPDATE: This woman claims to have rape fantasies.

The Strokes: "Gay Music"

Apparently, the band that any self-respecting hipster loves, the Strokes, is a "gay" band.

I have no idea what makes them a "gay" band, but of one thing I am sure: look for your friendly neighborhood homophobes to call for a boycott of Time Warner.

Music You Should Listen To

Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

Blues guitarist from Shreveport.

His album Trouble Is is a classic.

Check out the track "Blue on Black."

Finally, it's been fifteen years since Eddie Vedder came out with Ten.

If my parents had had the foresight to have named me Jeremy, I would end this blog post, pithily, with the words "Jeremy's spoken."

Alas, my name is not Jeremy, and writing "Dave's spoken" would just seem pompous, not ironic or clever.

Alas.

Satire

Just saw an interesting piece of satire called Saved! which follows the travails of a bunch of kids at a Christian high school. The plot is rather predictable: girl's boyfriend says he thinks he's gay, girl has sex with him to prove that he's not gay, boyfriend gets sent to be "cured", girl gets pregnant, and the in crowd rejects both of them.

Come to think of it that likely is not satire but rather life for many teenage kids of religious parents. No matter. An interesting attempt by Hollywood to look, satirically, at least, at many of the problems posed by religion.

Another interesting movie along the same lines is But I'm a Cheerleader, starring the intriguing Natasha Lyonne. In this instance Lyonne plays a naive cheerleader whose quarterback boyfriend suspects she's a lesbian because she's more interested in cheerleading practice than sucking face, he and her parents stage an intervention, and she is sent to be "cured" at a home run by a crazed woman played by Cathy Moriarty.

The irony there is especially poignant because, of course, Moriarty played a 15 year old girl in Raging Bull whom Bobby DeNiro's character seduced and eventually married. Moriarty's best known role is not known for being a paragon of sexual rectitude.

Wilson Pickett Dead

Wilson Picket has died of a heart attack.

Wikipedia has good background information on him, here. Oddly they refer to him as a soul singer, when he should more appropriately be called a blues singer. He was a soulful singer, but his singing is too good to be soul.

Battlestar Galactica

So I started watching the first season of Battlestar Galactica on DVD. I'm usually not much of a sci-fi fan, as it is often redolent of '70s era kitsch. But this version-- "reimagining" seems the argot du jour--actually has interesting characters, good writing, and phenomenal camera work (the tracking shot in the pilot episode calls to mind Scorsese's famous tracking shots in Raging Bull and Goodfellas.)

Huh?

A review of the first season of the Sopranos at Amazon.com makes no sense:

Anyone who dislikes this show but then publicly proclaims their love for is abusing the freedoms that our forefathers lost their lives to defend. You are un-patriotic and not a true American.

So, dishonest people abuse the freedoms created by the nation's founders? Further, dishonest Americans are not really American? Huh?

First, what the hell does dishonesty have to do with freedoms enshrined in the Constitution? Second, Richard Nixon is as American as they come, and patently dishonest to boot.

The Latin phrases non sequitur and ad hominem come to mind. Those are never good when someone uses them to analyze your argument.

"vulva fashions", or, Feminists Are Morons

Not only do women have to make sure that they are not doing something so gauche as wearing last year's shoes, they also have to make sure that their vulva are fashionable. Writes* one Betty Dodson in a letter published in the New York Times magazine, in response to a vulva-awareness column by Daphne Merkin:

While I agree that more women could value their unique genital forms, we must also support women's freedom to choose. As they do with hair, makeup and clothes, many stay abreast of the latest vulva fashions.

There you have it, women: your genitals have been compared to your hair, makeup and clothes. Just remember that the next time you shopping with the girls. You are nothing but a vulva.

*Link not available on line at time of posting.

On Geographic Proximity

Italians, a Mediterranean people if ever there was one, have developed a reputation for being pushy and impatient.

Therefore, Muslims must be pushy and impatient, and that pushiness and impatience explains the recent trampling to death of hundreds of pilgrims at Mecca.

Right?

I mean, that makes perfect sense? No?

Well, actually it doesn't. Some idiot commented at on an Alarming News post:

Cultures that border the Mediterranean have big problems standing in line. When skiers come from France or Italy to ski in the US, they always remark on how nice it is to wait in a lift line with no pushing and shoving.

All these countries were conquered by the Moors so the pushing-and shoving-gene was spread far and wide.

Ignore the irrelevant comment about the Moors: they apply only to Morocco, Algeria, and Spain and Portugal. The key implications here are that (1) Saudia Arabia is a Mediterranean country, and (2) most Muslims live in Mediterranean countries. Neither is true. Saudia Arabia emphatically does not border the Mediterranean, and, even if it did, its culture has as much in common with cosmopolitan Beirut or Athens as the Arcitc National Wildlife Refuge has with midtown Manhattan. The vast majority of Muslims live in Asia, decidedly not Mediterranean in culture.

The Italians may be pushy, and Muslims may live in a fictional world in which they think theirs is a "religion of peace" but one has nothing to do with the other.

Ignorance has no place in commenting upon the atrocities visited upon man by Islam.

Losers

If ever you should find me on a "party bus" please put me out of my misery:

Despite their better instincts, the stalled drivers on Second Avenue could not bring themselves to honk at the big blue bus double-parked at 52nd Street, with its disco lights and gut-shaking bass. Sure, a few passers-by snickered at the sight of grown men staggering from the bus, the coffin-size beer cooler that blocked the center aisle and the idea that anyone would hire a 35-foot whale christened the Princess Shannon to bar hop around the city on a Saturday night.

Revelers drink up on the Party Ride, a luxury bus service that features strobe lights, leather couches and lots of liquor.

"What is this thing?" asked a young woman, tentatively climbing the stairs until she noticed the carpet of crushed Doritos on the floor.

"It's a party on wheels, come on up," responded the choir, most of them married men in the midst of an alcohol-splashed bachelor party.

The woman quickly retreated, the door closed and the bus rumbled on toward a strip club in Queens named Wiggles.

New Yorkers love a good party. They also have a certain fondness for public transportation, even more so when it functions. Imagine, if you will, a leather-upholstered boxcar that allows all manner of pleasure seeking, including smoking and go-go girls, a flat-screen TV and a bathroom, and you will understand why John Grando and his business partner, Hesie Elias, have invested millions of dollars in a tricked-out collection of diesel monsters that are revolutionizing the rent-a-limousine business in New York.

Exactly the type of thing sophisticated New Yorkers are supposed to avoid.

Olympics

An interesting, and acerbic, perspective on the winter Olympics:

Life, already full of irritants, is about to acquire two more. Their names are Neve and Gliz, official mascots for the XXth Winter Olympiad. The work of an obscure Portuguese artist, Neve is a snowball (with badly drawn limbs) while Gliz is a little ice cube. Chirpy. Irksome.

Yes, it's Winter Olympics time again. Every four years, chiefly for the commercial benefit of Madison Avenue, global broadcasting schedules are interrupted by strange activities involving snow, ice and frostbitten sports reporters. Please do not thump your TV set. That fuzzy picture on the screen really is a blizzard -- obscuring yet another heat of the men's downhill skiing competition.

There's the luge, which involves helmeted figures in tight-crotch bodysuits hurtling down an ice tunnel on something resembling a cocktail tray. There's curling, in which Scottish women with brooms frantically rub an ice rink to make a land-mine shaped object roll toward a tiny puck. And there's ski jumping, surely sponsored by the plaster cast industry, in which goggled creatures whoosh off a high ramp, to hang momentarily in the air, bracing their horizontal spines for the possibility of a crash landing.

These aren't sports! They're psychological infirmities.

Personally, I can understand the appeal of skiing and luging, though not curling. However, neither skiing nor luging are things I want to do all the time. I've skiied two or three times, and enjoyed it at least once, and I've done the summer version of luging, wherein you go down a concrete half-pipe on a luge-like board. A thrilling experience. But I view these experiences like I view sky-diving or climbing vertical rockfaces: fun to do, and I'm glad to have done them, so as to check them off my list of things to do before I die, but I don't feel any compulsion to do them again.

Of two things I am certain: one, I won't watch the winter Olympics, and two, they will lose money.

Toilet Desecrated

One of Marcel Duchamp's pieces of "art" was defaced: its porcelain has been chipped by some disgruntled museum-goer.

My question: If one were to take a leak in the urinal, would that constitute defacement, or utilitarian appreciation of Duchamp's aesthetic?

I vote for the latter, but then I'm a wry ironist.

Overheard in New York

Teenager to mother: "You haven't heard of Alicia Keys?! She's got more pipes than a plumbing supply company!"

There's a brilliant and poetic description of Keys.

Briefing for a Descent Into Pandora's Box

Pandora's Box: Enter a favorite musician, or style of music, and it creates a streaming radio station full of that band's music, as well as musically similar bands.

Jimmy Page being God, I of course entered Led Zeppelin into the little window, Heartbreaker started playing, and well, hence, my descent into Pandora's Box. Subsequent music includes Cream, Robert Johnson, Traffic, Yes, and, oddly, Wings.

Pretty rad.

Via Althouse.

(Title for this blog post cribbed from Doris Lessing's Briefing For a Descent Into Hell.)

NOTE: The service is woefully short on jazz and classical music, but that is to be expected as too many people are wholly ignorant of such music. (Enter Coltrane, and the computer may very well explode before your eyes in a fit of digital apoplexy.) Unfortunate, to be sure, but that's them apples, as they say.

NOTE 2: And now they're playing a live version of Jimi's Love or Confusion, from the Monterey Pop Festival, which I had not heard previously.

NOTE 3: I've forgotten what a great band the Black Crowes is. Goldie Hawn's daughter has good taste in music. Better, at least, that Gwyneth.

Name Dropping

What's the legal equivalent of name-dropping the celebrity you banged last week?

This:

While other law firms have built substantial hedge-fund practices -- notably Seward & Kissel LLP of New York and Sidley Austin LLP of Chicago -- Schulte is the industry's "iconic brand," says Michael Ryan, a corporate partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP of New York.

Name partner Paul Roth "is to the hedge-fund industry what Martin Lipton is to the M&A business," says Theodore V. Wells Jr., partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, referring to the renowned merger-and-acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, which is based in New York.

For those not privy to the world of corporate law firms in New York City, these sentences translate into, approximately, "Last night, Gwyneth and I had dinner with Hugh and Jude, and then we went partying with Master P at Jay Z's place in the Hamptons."

Corny, to be sure, but that's how the lawyers try to stay hip and edgy.

On That Which Is Incoherent

Did you know liberals have a secret agenda when they push for their set of beliefs?

See, it's all about sex. So says guest blogger Julia at Alarming News:

Seriously, sex is usually the driving force at the bottom of any liberal policy position. You can trace almost any of their positions back to sex. For example, why do you think they don’t want the Ten Commandments hanging in the classrooms? Because one of those commandments says thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, and liberals are like, “We think the kids should make their own decisions about that.” And why do you think a liberal doesn’t want you to own a gun? Because he doesn’t want to get shot in case he sleeps with your wife.

An analogy: Julia is to conservative thought what Barbra Streisand is to liberal thought. Strident, incoherent, and replete with enough non sequiturs to make a logician puke.

The "Christian" Spirit

You know that Christian spirit of good will toward your fellow man we're always hearing about?

Well, a Lutheran school in California has booted two girls on suspicion of being lesbians. Mind you, this is not a story about two girls having sex in violation of a student code of conduct. Rather, it is a story about two (apparent) lesbians professing that they love each other.

The best part? The girls, accused of not being "Christian" are apparently not the only non-Christians in the school. The girls' lawyer explains:

"There's a lot of hypocrisy going on here," Hanson said. "The school is claiming the girls were expelled because their conduct wasn't within the Christian code. But at the same time, (the school) has students who aren't Christians and are even Jewish."

So, these two girls are expelled from school for having an "un-Christian" relationship (that pesky lesbianism), yet the school has students who are not even nominally Christian!

Never has man seemed so incoherent than when it comes to religion. I say we jettison the whole thing and start over.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

On the Jewish Question

Despite their reputation for intelligence and entrepreneurship, many American Jews nonetheless decide to ally themselves with liberals.

It is rather questionable if there are many intelligent liberals, and it is almost certain that most entrepreneurs are decidedly not liberal, so, the question remains: why do intelligent and entrepreneurial Jews remain liberal in their politics?

This (nominal) Jew can attest that many of the Jews here in New York City parrot the liberal creed with all the critical thought of a robot running through its algorithms. (Not for nothing does Jane Galt refer to Manhattan's Upper West Side as "Moscow on the Hudson.")

In any event, the Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein attempts to explain.

"Sean Penn is a shallow, pretentious poser"

Dispatches From the Culture Wars:

Sean Penn is a shallow, pretentious poser; he's also a hell of an actor who tends to do very good work on film. And since his ability as an actor is the only reason I am even aware of his existence, it's the only thing I care about in that context. I don't care if he hates President Bush or loves him any more than I care whether he wears boxers or briefs or what basketball team he roots for.

Mel Gibson seems to me to be a bit of a nut and, on the whole, not very bright. He says lots of stupid things. If he tried to write a book about his views, I likely wouldn't read it because I think he's an ignoramus. But that has nothing to do with his acting or the quality of his movies. In that department, he's a mixed bag. He's done some good work and some bad work. But if I see a film he's made that looks interesting, hell yes I'm gonna see it and his stupidity when it comes to evolution or politics won't even enter into the decision.

The post's larger point is that, in consideration of Mel Gibson's religious and political beliefs, it makes no sense to boycott his movies. This is a trope often pulled by conservatives--"Barbra Streisand is a Clinton lackey, and therefore I won't patronize her work"--that is illogical and incoherent. Streisand (or Penn or Gibson) do not succeed on the basis of their political, religious, or moral framework: they succeed because people believe them to be talented at what they do, and people enjoy seeing them perform. Whether you agree with Gibson or Streisand or Penn on matters politcial, religious, or moral is irrelevant to the calculus of: do I enjoy their work?

As for Sean Penn's acting, well, see Mystic River. Though the movie itself is a success on the basis of Clint Eastwood having directed it, Penn's acting in the movie is nonetheless superb. (Observation: Neither Eastwood nor Gibson are members of the "liberal left" so derogated by conservatives, yet both Eastwood and Gibson fall squarely into the group of Hollywood "power players" so hated by conservative activists. Neither the "liberal left" nor their antagonists on the right are very coherent.)

(For a critical look at the practices of Opus Dei and its impact on its adherents, see this. For an example of the abject and utter idiocy of Streisand's brand of political "commentary" see her blog.)

Brian Wilson

Saw a fascinating documentary on the Beach Boys and the making of the legendary album "Smile."

The Christmas Spirit

Christopher Hitchens, who is smarter and more acerbic than you or I, writes:

The Fox News campaign against Wal-Mart and other outlets—whose observance of the official feast-day is otherwise fanatical and punctilious to a degree, but a degree that falls short of unswerving orthodoxy—is one of the most sinister as well as one of the most laughable campaigns on record. If these dolts knew anything about the real Protestant tradition, they would know that it was exactly this paganism and corruption that led Oliver Cromwell—my own favorite Protestant fundamentalist—to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.

No believer in the First Amendment could go that far. But there are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as "churches," and they can also force passersby to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them everyone.

Via Althouse.

For the unthinking religious person on your gift list, I highly recommend Hitchens' critical inquiry of Mother Teresa.

UPDATE: One of the commenters at Althouse's post makes an excellent point about the assumptions underlying the "War on Christmas" meme promulgated by the half-wits at FoxNews:

I think this whole crazy debate would take on a different flavor if the focus weren't on the "minority" as constituted by the PC-obsessed-atheist-ACLU crowd (however one might wish to characterize them) or whatever, and instead on the minority whose cultural or religious traditions differ from (and don't include) majority Christian tradition.

One of the most poisonous things that has come out of this whole War on Christmas debate is the increasing indignation and resentment expressed by some at the idea of accommodating (or even recognizing) minority cultures. "Who the hell cares about them" has been a subtext that seems to have gained urgency and traction. What used to be a defining feature of America has, in my opinion, begun to notably recede and with great acceleration during this otherwise festive season.

When you wish someone "Merry Christmas" without any knowledge of their relgious or cultural practice, you're saying "it is my assumption that you are just like me." Now, in many small towns (like the small town where I grew up in Wisconsin), this assumption is largely justified, at least statistically. But that doesn't mean your assumption is correct. Just try to think to yourself: What if the person is Jewish?

Now, tihs commenter contemplates the celebration of Christmas in a nuanced and sophisticated way wholly unfamiliar to the reactionary theory perpetuated by FoxNews and its conservative acolytes that there exists in American society a "war" on Christmas or Christians, or, even more broadly, religion.

I will repeat what I have said before: it is crucial that we engage religion critically; that is, blind adherence to faith is insidious. Whether that blind adherence is to the religion itself or to perceived attacks on the religion, nothing is more pernicious to modern society than the notion that merely because one says to you "Happy Holidays" in place of your favored "Merry Christmas", you are somehow being oppressed.

This type of rhetoric sounds awfully similar to the liberal creed that no person should ever be offended anywhere by anyone at any time, lest that person suffer the indignity of knowing that he is different from the masses. There is another phrase for this type of thinking, and it is "political correctness." Those who engage in supporting political correctness, either from the right or the left, engage only in intellectual laxity and ignorance.

Oy Vey

(For the non-New Yorkers in the audience the title to this blog post is Yiddish. Google the phrase and educate yourself.)

In any event, this week's New York magazine devotes its cover article to "reasons to love New York." The number one reason? Bush is not our fault.

Displaying a degree of smug existentialist angst impossible anywhere else outside of Los Angeles, our dutiful reporter explains:

After every malapropism, every inadvertent display of incuriosity, every heartbreaking show of incompetence, we can remind ourselves we had nothing to do with Bush’s reelection. It’s some consolation, small though it is.

In fact, the city actively tried to prevent his election. In 2004, one-third of John Kerry’s campaign funds came from New York, and in the end, nearly three-quarters of the city, or 74.3 percent, voted for him. (In Manhattan, this number was a staggering 81.7 percent; only in Staten Island did a majority break Bush’s way.) New Yorkers who hadn’t attended a protest since college got on buses to Pennsylvania and Ohio, knocked on doors, tried to swing things our way to nudge the country into a bluer state of mind. We fantasized about secession. “New York to country: Drop dead.”

The war? We decided we wanted someone else in charge of it, if not to end it, even if we bore the brunt of September 11’s casualties. The tax cuts? No thanks, even if New Yorkers are among the wealthiest citizens on planet Earth. Privatizing Social Security? Please. Even New Yorkers, whose very fortunes rise and fall with those of Wall Street’s, aren’t that evangelical about or trusting of the market.

Our rejection turned out to be prescient, but the sense of validation that our predictions have come true is cold comfort. Soldiers are still coming home in coffins; the Treasury is bare; a hurricane destroyed New Orleans and Bush could barely be made to notice. Of course