TK

Sorry to those of you who have been dropping by. I've been working on a rather long article about Patti Smith's recent work and haven't posted anything else to help you while away the empty hours in between. Hopefully, that will give you something to look forward to. I can’t promise, but it should be a bit better than chuckling’s usual nonsense.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you about something I saw today. It’s nothing of great importance, I just thought I’d share it to pass the time until my Patti Smith article writes itself.

I often walk down Flatbush Avenue between the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Church Ave. A lot of stores along that stretch sell clothes in the style of what the local folk refer to as “ghetto fabulous.” If the words “ghetto fabulous” do not immediately bring a picture to your mind of a large black woman wearing bright pink boots, tight jeans, and a pink tank top with back-fat spilling out around the bra strap and the words “baby luv” emblazoned across massive breasts, or something along those lines, then it is safe to say that you are not a Brooklynite. You may live in Park Slope or “the heights,” but that does not necessarily count.

Of course I mean no disrespect to my sisters in the ghetto. Is there anything more non-sensical than fashion? In the near future, today’s couture, both haute and prêt-à-porter, will likely look ridiculous. Still, the mannequins in these stores are interesting on several sociological levels. Unlike the mannequins in Soho, or pretty much anywhere else I’ve ever noticed mannequins, the ones along Flatbush Avenue have what local folk refer to as “big fat asses.” Now before you think ill of poor chuckling for pointing that out, realize that my wife shot me an evil look the first time I mentioned it. What’s wrong with women with big fat asses you big fat ass? Nothing, I say. Nothing at all. It’s a good thing that mannequins in these parts represent what people really look like. The world would be a better place if the human mannequins in Cosmo would learn a thing or two about real women from the plastic mannequins in Flatbush.

But I mention it today because I noticed something else. Many of the fat-assed mannequins were wearing low cut jeans and the ass crack was showing. I had always thought that the ass crack on display was a result of poor design, or real women trying to fit into pants that only a Soho model could wear. It had never occurred to me that the ass crack was an actual fashion choice. I found that reassuring. It kind of strengthened my faith in humanity.

This all reminded me of an interesting conversation about the Trilogy of Alienation by Michelangelo Antonioni that took place a few days ago in comments over at Alicublog. For those of you not up on classic avant-garde Italian cinema, L’Aventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse are stylistically incredible, but their narrative structure is not what most people would call compelling. Many would describe them as films in which nothing happens to a bunch of bored, boring people who do pretty much nothing througout the film. Although the running time may be no more than 90 minutes in objective time, they can last for days in subjective time. Very long days.

Paul K and Grant, redoubtable commenters over at Alicublog, as well as the proprietor himself, discuss these films at a depth beyond the capabilities of poor chuckling, but something that one of them said did spark thoughts in my poor, battered brain. The idea that Antonioni’s films functioned as non-judgemental recordings of people’s lives in all their random meaninglessness rather than stories with anything remotely like a traditional narrative, and that this was a good thing, kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Don’t get me wrong. If you, or anyone else likes that kind of thing, I’m happy for you, but chuckling spends a lot of time observing the random narratives of people on many different streets and a wide variety of social situations, and I find this endlessly fascinating, but I just do not need to watch a movie to appreciate that experience. I can enjoy the cinematography, but when it comes to the mundane, the cinema is a poor facsimile of real life. It doesn’t even smell, unless you have the misfortune to sit next to someone eating “buttered” popcorn. But I don't want to smell popcorn. I want to smell flop sweat, and flowers, and vomit, and perfume, and the perfume of wet pussy. And I wouldn't mind touching some of those things, too. There is nothing tactile about images on the screen. Story can be another matter.

My little walk down Flatbush illustrated those points. I could conceivably film it in a way that captures its beauty and depth, and perhaps even communicate the perspective from which I see the fat-assed mannequins, but without some kind of story to ground the scene, I wouldn’t find it interesting. For the most part, we are a people who appreciate purposeful narrative. Some of us can appreciate the immediate meaninglessness of day-to-day life, the random snatches of conversation, the sounds and passing smells of an everyday situation from a detached, artistic perspective, but what’s the purpose of going to the cinema to see it represented when we can walk out the door and get the real thing. I agree with Paul K’s contention that a director should fucking direct, otherwise his or her title might as well be “recorder.”

All that’s not to say that I don’t like Antonioni’s Alienation Trilogy, but putting cinematography aside and focusing on the here/now, I can get the more better 3D getto fabulous version on Flatbush.

IU sucks

The other night I went to a party where pretty much everyone was very wealthy. I've been to a few over the last few years and the thing that has surprised me the most is that they are generally very decent people. But still, one can only take so much. I'm sitting there drinking their wine, a nice bottle from the cellar, and eating their cheese, a wonderfully creamy Camembert, and the conversation is all "it's so funny, like everyone I meet lately went to Wellesley, and it's such a small, exclusive school. What are the odds? I know what you mean. It seems like everyone I meet went to Harvard. Ah Harvard, those were the days." And I get a kick out of this, in a visitor-from-another-planet-kinda way, and it occurs to me to ask if I could come over and fire bomb their house, but I have matured, mellowed, and I just think the thought for old times sake. They're actually quite nice and very decent people who make the world a better place.

So the next night, it’s after dinner and I check out ESPN on-line and find that Indiana is up pretty big on Michigan State at the half. I've just finished my own wine and cheese dinner with my wife, albeit the $2.99 Trader Joe's variety, and I decide to go out to the local bar and catch the second half.

I've lived in this neighborhood for going on three years and never been to the local bar. It’s the kind of place where you see 45 year old platinum blondes smoking at the entrance and grizzly old alcoholics stumbling out into the night. I've always meant to go there but just don't get out like I used to.

So I order a bourbon on the rocks. What kind? Whatever's cheapest. We get to looking and they don't even have any Bourbon (only Jack). So I say, what about the Jameson's, how much is that? $4, I'm told, do you want the white label or the black. I'll give the black a try, I say.

Meanwhile, as I drink as much 18 year old Jameson at $4 a glass as I can afford and meet Dougie and a few of the other regulars, IU is scoring a total of like 6 points in the entire second half. The crowd is surprisingly mixed. There’s a few older white guys who seem to be limo drivers. A couple of them are with women and there’s a little drunken drama going on. Some young Latino’s are playing pool, there’s a couple black guys and, surprisingly, a few young women. The music is mid-nineties style Rap.

I’m equally comfortable, and equally out of place, in this dive as I am at the dinner party. I can’t deny that I have more to talk about with the upper classes these days, but ultimately I feel pretty much the same with the one crowd as the other. Most everyone is at least superficially nice, but I don’t see a lot of evidence that the wealthy are any happier or better adjusted in their personal lives. I agree that there is a lot to be said for knowing how to appreciate the better things in life. But is Bordeaux and Camembert ultimately any better than beer and pretzals. Is it more enjoyable to look at and discuss the fine art on the walls than the sports on the television? No, I’d say (as long as the beer is decent, unlike the Buds my new friend Dougie is guzzling, and it would help if IU could make a fucking basket). It’s better to enjoy both (and plenty of other things as well). The problem for the lower classes is that they are generally unable to enjoy both worlds. I find that the working classes harbor a lot more prejudice against the enjoyments of professionals than vice versa. Most people can enjoy beer, snacks, and TV, but a large percentage of the population is missing out on the pleasures of fine arts, wine and cheese. And it’s not just a matter of money. Dougie spent as much on his Budwiesers as my wife and I spent on our entire dinner, bottle of red from Trader Joe’s included.

Then the bartender goes out for a smoke, someone jumps behind the counter, puts on Bon Jovi’s Dead or Alive and the crowd erupts in a sing-along. I run out of money, pull out all my change and ask the bartender if he has anything for $3.50. He scratches his head and says, sorry, all we got at that price is Dewar's. I can live with that, I say. And the next one's on the house. Sometimes I just love Brooklyn. And if I were a religious nut, I'd weep and thank Jesus I didn't go to Harvard.

A complicated range of other factors

Today’s Guardian reviews Why do People get Ill, the new book by the psychoanalyst Darian Leader and philosopher of science (whatever that means) David Corfield. In it, Leader discusses the benefits and problems associated with popular mental health strategies (Parisian-style psychoanalysis, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the American-style throw-the-medicine-cabinet-and-pocket-the-loot strategy) that I discussed a couple posts down.

Listening is not a big feature of modern medicine here or anywhere in the west." Leader's book claims that, on average, a patient speaks for 23 seconds before being interrupted by their GP. The book concedes that most doctors have such staggering workloads that the average consultation with a GP in London lasts between six and eight minutes (the shortest average in Britain). But this may well make quick-fix diagnoses more likely.

...He talks about the government's preference for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) over traditional talking therapies. "The government favours this because it is about correcting surface symptoms and reintegrating people who report psychical problems back into the workplace where they can become useful again."

CBT aims at modifying everyday behaviour. Patients are often encouraged to keep a diary of significant events and associated feelings and thoughts. They are urged to question unhelpful or unrealistic assumptions and to do activities that have been avoided.

...it sounds potentially helpful for ameliorating just the kind of symptoms Leader's book spends a great deal of time discussing. Only one problem: he despises this form of therapy. "When was CBT used most widely? It was in Mao's China, when people had to be re-educated to see the world in the way that the authorities wanted." Indeed, he regards CBT as akin to drug prescription. "Some forms claim to target specific aspects of illness; they are supposed to be administered like a pill or injection, and this no doubt makes them attractive to health service providers. But I think it is horrible and fatuous."

Leader believes that unless root causes are addressed, they will simply resurface in another form, some months later.

...But surely one reason analysis is not popular, and particularly not popular with the government, is that psychoanalysis does not claim to produce results, while supporters of CBT claim that it does. "That's true. Having said that, a lot of my colleagues disagree with me and claim that studies show that, over the long term, symptoms will permanently disappear through analysis and that there will be lower rates of consulting GPs." And what is the long term? "They're talking about 20 or 30 years later." No wonder, then, that the government isn't calling on psychoanalysts such as Leader to cure Britain's depressives.

Dr. chuckling doesn’t have much to say on these issues, just finds them interesting. Viewed as a matter of simple distrust, it’s probably accurate to assume that strategies favored by government and big business are worthless at best, more likely counter-productive. Though CBT does not sound that bad to me, even though in this and the other article it is described as insidious brainwashing. But what do I know? Not much, not much.

If I must take a stand, I’ll go for psychoanalysis. It may take twenty or thirty years to produce measurable results, or not produce any results at all, but at least it has a coolness factor whereas CBT sounds like a cliff notes version of a dime-a-dozen self-help book and SSRI’s are definitely not cool (at least for the great majority of users who don’t really need them).

But psychoanalysis? With all the wacky writings of Freud, Jung, Lacan et. al.? And Woody Allen? Just about everybody likes to talk about their dreams (and what can it hurt), but who the hell wants to listen to someone else talk about theirs? Psychoanalysts deserve big money to sit through that shit for thirty years.

The more I think about it, the better it sounds. I propose that we create a huge government agency that guarantees everyone the right to 30 years of psychoanalysis. Think of how much better off people would be talking to a professional on the couch rather than ranting on blogs or sending people off to die in foreign wars. You dream you are Conan, killing hoards of brown people? God tells you what to do? But what about your mother? She laughed at your pee pee? It made you feel inadequate?

Twenty or thirty years? I see immediate results. In order to get bi-partisan support, we can cut taxes to pay for it.

(the following is just an experiment, pay no mind. Britney, shaved head, Anna Nichole, Obama Clinton feud, American Idol)

Britney, st. john, hil, and the last honest man

Matt Taibbi reports on some excellent work done by the good folk on Bernie Sanders’s staff.

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget,...

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Of course the fact that news organizations have no interest in reporting the most important news of our time is nothing new. The idealistic and just plain naive among us get confused because we continue to refer to them as “news organizations.” In easily observable reality, the real question is rather they are primarily entertainment organizations or ad delivery systems. Six of one, half dozen of the other. But news? Puh-leeze.

So it’s not their fault. They are what they are and the only question left to be answered is “how much?” Or more accurately, “how many?”

How many are watching? If more of us would watch them report on the looting of our country by the Walton’s, Cox’s, Nordstroms, Gallos and their political lackeys in all branches of government, then that’s what we’d see.

But are the lefty blogs that much better? Are they significantly less personality driven than the old-fashioned media? Is the constant hubbub about the various wankers and progressive heroes really that different than Britney and Anna Nichole?

I don’t know if Sanders’s office is trying to get the lefty blogs interested in that very well-presented research, but if they are, they’re not having much, if any, more success.

Some pundit or politician says or does something stupid or smart. That's news. If Joementum shaves his head and checks into rehab, that's big news. It doesn't have to matter a whit to those thousands whose health will suffer so the Waltons can have many more millions.

Yea, the daily adventures of Hil, the Joes, Obamas and Osamas, Britneys and Carols don't matter a whit, not much more anyway, but if their name recognition is big, they provide a spike in hits and a bump in click-through advertising.

We’re still not sure what we are, and we’re not yet asking “how much?” But “how many?” That resonates on the same frequency these days.

Thinking is the cause of your illness

Flawed plan at Writhe Safely calls attention to an article by London Communists that criticizes contemporary mental health care in Britain which consists of happy-drugging the poor sods and/or happy-talking them into mental health with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), “in which patients are told to control their thinking, block negative thoughts and to think only positive thoughts.”

Our Communist friends, it seems, believe that our ascendent Capitalism, with its wars and economic injustices, makes it only natural for people to be depressed. In these times, they say, severe depression is proof of good mental health.

This approach insists that the depression comes from inside the brain of the patient – not from the objective reality of the outside world. But in a world threatened by global warming and ecological disaster, by wars involving nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and by extremes of wealth and poverty, is it madness to be depressed? At a more personal level the working classes are now more exploited, more in debt and working longer hours while traditional community and social structures are disappearing. What is the sane response to living in a mad world?

Personally, I do not know what mental illness or depression is. Of course I sometimes feel depressed, but I don’t know how that relates to other people who say they are depressed. Are we really feeling the same thing? Is there some kind of MRI or like device that can compare the mental state of different individuals? And where is the line that separates what is a normal, albeit occasional, state for human beings? I don’t know.

I hope this does not come off as disrespectful, but I will tell you frankly that I think the great majority of treatment for normal type depression is hokum. I grew up in the seventies and have tried, recreationally, many of the common drugs that doctors prescribe for depression, and even severe mental illness, over the years. When I was in high school, just about everything could be found among the medicine cabinets of my family and friends? Not only Valium and Xanax, but strong stuff like Tuinal and Nembutal. Why were doctors prescribing that crap to normal housewives? What the fuck was the medical purpose of a Quaalude? Why did my grandmother have a prescription for Nembutal in her medicine cabinet, from which she took precisely one pill? And speed is off the subject, but back then the quacks were prescribing it to anyone with cellulite (Kurt Vonnegut writes well about this in his novel Bluebeard).

I was older when SSRI’s came along and had gone happily beyond mom’s medicine cabinet for my recreational activities, but I tried Prozac and Paxil just to see what the buzz was about. Apparently, the quacks pushed these “remedies” on any woman who walked through the door. With my experience, it was glaringly obvious that these were terribly dangerous drugs and that normal people had no business taking them. It was especially clear that Paxil would cause far worse problems than it alleviated, the comedown leaving people worse than they were before they took the shit. So my opinion of the pharmaceutical industry and the quacks that peddle their pills comes from personal experience and is significantly less than positive.

These drugs, Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), include Prozac, Serotonin, Cipramil, Fluoxetine and others. They do help some people but many patients find the side-effects cause more problems than they solve. These side effects include kidney problems and water retention and they can be addictive or they can make the depression worse. These drugs have been linked with suicides and violent outbursts.

On the other hand, I have read articles, I remember one in particular from Harper’s, that told of people for whom SSRI’s were miracle drugs that allowed them to function as they weren’t able to before. And a friend of mine, the brother of my best friend, turned schizophrenic and eventually killed himself. This was someone I knew for many years, had many deep conversations with, and deeply respected. The last time I spoke with him, he emphasized that he had a serious medical condition, that there was no way it was some kind of depression resulting from something that happened in his personal life (a devastating book on this subject is The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut).

Last year a senior executive of Glaxo-Smith-Kline admitted that most of their drugs are effective on only about a third of patients. Even when they work, the drugs do not address the root cause of the problems of depression.

So yea, I trust that there are medical conditions for which these drugs are necessary, and maybe even helpful in the long run, but I suspect that they represent a small percentage of the prescription base. For the most part it’s insane, and should be criminal, to give that crap to regular folk.

What really interested me about the article was the information about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). I had come across CBT recently in my reading and thought it sounded like a very good idea.

The National Association of Cognitive Behavioural Therapists (based in the United States) described CBT:

“It is a form of psychotherapy that emphasises the important role of thinking in how we feel and what we do. CBT therapists teach that when our brains are healthy, it is our thinking that causes us to feel and act the way we do. Therefore if we are experiencing unwanted feelings and behaviours, it is important to identify the thinking that is causing the feelings/behaviours and to learn how to replace this thinking with thoughts that lead to more desirable reactions.”

Sounds about right to me. I’ve spent most my life informally studying this type of thing. Thoughts are real. They affect the our brains and bodies. We can train our minds to control our bodies, at least to some extent. That is not some kind of new agey shit. It is scientific fact.

But can scientific fact and social services bureaucracy co-exist?

Patients (no longer called patients, that is too negative, but renamed “service-users”) who report that global warming, ecological disasters, wars, injustice, poverty and exploitation make them feel depressed are told that they are thinking too much. “Thinking is the cause of your illness. You must stop thinking your way and start thinking our way. You must think positively about the world.”

…This perpetual optimism, totally at odds with objective reality, is likely to make depressed patients feel worse, not better. They are told that the world is as it is and cannot be changed but that thinking it might be changed makes you ill and depressed.

Apparently not. The bureaucratic logic doesn’t hold water.

…Bourgeois psychologists have wrestled long and hard with the problem of optimism. Statistical analysis shows that pessimists are usually better at predicting the future than optimists. Yet they insist that optimists have better mental health. They also say that those most in touch with objective reality are the sanest. Both statements cannot be true.

Then we get the Marxist analysis:

CBT is taking the place of religion in persuading the exploited masses to resign themselves to their lot in life but it is grounded in an idealistic philosophy which ultimately claims that the material world exists as the creation of an idea (God’s) and is experienced through our ideas of it. This is the opposite of the Marxist-Leninist historical materialist view of the world which says that objective reality exists outside our own heads. And not only can it be changed but it is in a constant state of change in any case. For us, the sane method is to analyse that objective reality and the way it changes in order to be able to influence those changes – to think for ourselves and not be fooled by rosy illusions.

But what does it mean?

If we take the view of the CBT advocates, we cannot do anything to change any of this but must adjust our minds to see it all through rose tinted spectacles. This leads some people to hedonism – escapism through refusing to listen to the news, being obsessed with the celebrity culture, drinking and partying as much as possible: “if there is no hope we might as well enjoy ourselves while we can”. This is one trend that has taken a large proportion of the working class away from active participation in anything political.

That’s supposed to be a bad thing? Okay, I'll grant them celebrity culture, but partying?

The other trend is despair, which has captured many of those who cannot turn off their minds, who cannot help but see what is happening around them. But feeling isolated and helpless they become paralysed by depression and or by suppressed anger. They become unable to function as part of a society which they can see is going mad.

The only sane and rational alternative is to ignore the CBT people and the pills, take stock of objective reality and set about trying to change it.

I’m afraid that I have to disagree that political activism is the only sane and rational alternative. I would call it a courageous and noble alternative, but effective mental health therapy? I very much doubt that political activism is any better in that respect than pharmaceuticals or happy talk, could be a lot worse.

But maybe that’s just me projecting again. I know all about the sad state of world politics, far more than most people, but I neither let it get me down or try to do much of anything about it. I can tell my Communist friends from personal experience that it’s possible to know of the great and myriad crimes committed by our government abroad and be personally screwed by the current economic system and still be positive and happy in one’s personal life. Although I am not a Communist, I share their Materialist world view and believe that this life is all we’ve got. Those of us fortunate enough to have been born in relatively wealthy societies are only trapped by our desires. As noted below, I would be more than content to live in a tent in the desert. Unless you are genuinely mentally ill, otherwise sick, starving, jailed, or being tortured, happiness is all in your head. Think happy. Stop wanting all that crap. Be happy. And if that fails, eat well, get exercise, consume quality alcohol (mostly)in moderation, and maybe smoke a little weed or something on occasion. And don't forget good sex. The more, the better. Thus spake dr. chuckling.

Year of the boar

First draft of this year's Chinese New Year's photos here.

Update: A few people have questioned whether or not these pictures are "Photoshopped." No, this is actually a technique I developed specifically for Chinese New Years. Of course I do a little color balancing, but no filters or plug-ins are applied. This is an event that I go to every year, usually with the kids. I'd never seriously photographed it before, but I always took a few pictures with one of my toy cameras. The straight photos, not just mine, but others I've seen as well, fail to capture the event as I experience it. There's just too much extraneous detail in the background and a sharp photo gives little, if any, hint of the movement, which along with the cacophony and color, is what makes the event what it is. Experience is inherently subjective. A lot of people don't like this technique, but it works for me and portrays, I think, a more representative reality.

All her toys wore out

Poor chuckling is a hermit, at least a hermit wannabe. Many of my happiest times occurred when I was homeless, living in a tent or a Kombi in a desert, Sonoran or Saharan, or in the deep dark woods of Washington state. My dream for retirement is to go live in a beaten up Airstream parked in a mesquite grove somewhere in southern Arizona or northern Mexico. Unfortunately, my wife does not share that dream, but this is not about that.

It seems counterintuitive to many, but big cities can be good for the hermitic lifestyle. The ability to be alone and invisible in a crowd is one of the things I like best about New York. But as time progresses, I find myself being sucked inexorably into an ever more social world.

I am not a stay-at-home type hermit, not in the desert and certainly not in this city where home is not beautiful. The greatest thing about New York, from a hermit’s perspective, is that there is so much to do. Museums, zoos, botanic gardens, concerts, comedians, circuses, movies, dance, parades and plays. Something is always happening and a companion is rarely necessary.

Chuckling goes regularly to many of these entertainments, I am especially fond of Circus Amok and the Mermaid Day Parade, but to some, such as theater, not nearly enough. One of the advantages of my increasing entanglements with the social lives of others, in conjunction with living in New York, is that I am now regularly invited to events in which people I know are participants. More and more, I am asked to attend the concerts, art openings, seminars, sketch comedies, and plays of friends and acquaintances. For example, although I like going to the theater “in theory,” in practice I don’t go very often. So it is nice when an acquaintance, no matter how slight, suggests I attend some kind of event that I normally would not. It provides that necessary nudge.

Thus it was that I saw the off off Broadway play Los Angeles last night in a small theater in Tribeca.

The worst thing about the play was the location. Tribeca is one of wealthiest zip codes in the United States and the bars suck accordingly. The night was bitterly cold and windy, we had an hour to kill, so we went to the bar nearest the theater, which was one of the crappiest drinking establishments I’ve ever had the misfortune to visit. The decor was fine, a typical New York bar with low, interesting lighting, exposed brick walls, and street punkish art on the walls. But the crowd was the biggest bunch of dweebs you’ll ever find outside of an exclusive country club. Most guys were dressed in some variation of white pants and a pink polo shirt with blue horizontal stripes, a scene I’d thought unimaginable in New York. From the snatches of conversation I heard, I gathered that most of them worked in the television or film industries. There was one guy that I’ve seen regularly on television, but I can’t quite find the name to go with the face. But I think most of them must have worked in marketing or administration. They did not seem like a particularly creative bunch. Early nineties rap was blasting from the sound system. Periodically, a good chunk of the crowd would throw their hands up and go “woooo” when a new song came on. Guys in yellow polo shirts singing “insane in the membrane” is truly a sight to behold. It reminded me so much of Michael Bolton in Office Space. On a lot of nights I would have enjoyed the scene, from an anthropological perspective you understand, but the bartender “jiggered” me and the drinks were expensive. Mercifully, time passed and we walked back around the corner to the theater.

I enjoyed the play. We get so used to seeing two dimensional characters with perfect makeup and airbrushed bodies on a screen that its shocking to experience the presence of real humans with all of their dynamism and imperfections. We were sitting in the second row, which in this particular theater was the back row, so the physicality of the actors was immediate. I say it all the time, but I really do have to get out to more live theater. It’s an entirely different experience.

Perhaps it’s because I go so rarely that I am able, for the most part, to turn off my inner critic and just enjoy the experience. But not entirely. In this case, I recognized the story immediately and was able to predict its arc a few minutes into the first scene. A young couple wants to get out of their hometown and make it big in Los Angeles. It’s obvious that she’s a head case. Hmmmm, I wondered, what would happen? Downward spiral of sex and drugs perhaps?

Of course at this late stage in human society, every story has already been told. The question is not if it has been told, but how it’s being told. What, if anything, makes it stand out. The acting? Direction, lighting, staging? All of those were fine in Los Angeles. As an inexperienced theater-goer, I always find that the actors over-act, but I guess that’s just a part of the theater, the necessity to project emotions out into a crowd. Film permits a lot more subtlety.

The lighting and stage direction were fine. For the most part, I didn’t notice them, which I count as being well done. I was very impressed with the artistry of the final fade out, Perhaps it was a common trick that they do in all plays and I’m just a rube, but the good part of being a rube in that sense is that there is so much more in life to enjoy.

What truly separated Los Angeles from its hackneyed story, for me at least, were the musical interludes. One of the main characters is a singer who appears during scene transitions, which really helps move the play along. She has a good voice and stage presence and the music fits well with the narrative. I’d give a thought here and there to the significance of her presence, but it wasn’t until the end that I had some ideas about it. There was one point where I thought she might be the Angel of Death a la Jessica Lange in All that Jazz, which kind of bummed me out because its been done. Then there was another point where I thought she might represent a guardian angel, which bummed me out for its hokeyness. But ultimately, my inner critic stayed in the background and I was able to enjoy the show.

The last scene did leave a lot up in the air. On one level, it wrapped up the hokey writer's workshop aspect of the plot. But on several other levels it left a weird, unresolved vibe. I didn't really know what to think about it, which is something I count as a very good thing when it comes to art.

And from what I gathered milling around in the after theater crowd, everyone else enjoyed the show as well. A vague, old man smell followed us into the night, but the wind blew it away in no time.

Children of idiots

The Guardian reports on a U.N. study on the well-being of children in a study comparing 21 advanced nations.

The UK is bottom of the league of 21 economically advanced countries according to a "report card"' put together by Unicef on the wellbeing of children and adolescents, trailing the United States which comes second to last.

It’s interesting that the countries on the list that finished number 1 and number 2 in warmongering stupidity came in at the bottom for children’s well-being. Just a coincidence no doubt. Or blame it on the liberals. If we had more warmongering stupidity things could be much better. We’d be living in a fucking utopia.

Click on table to see larger image.

That vision thing

I was significantly less than enthused when I learned that José Saramago had written a sequel to Blindness. Blindness is not one of my favorite books, but it is a very powerful work of literature. It is possibly the most relentless and brutally pessimistic take on human nature of any book, or at least great book, I have read. When an entire city inexplicably goes blind, society falls apart and the ugliest brutality imaginable reigns.

Normally, if I know I am going to read a book or see a film, I go out of my way to avoid finding out what it’s about. I like to see the work presented as its creator intended, without having been filtered through the opinions of others, no matter how much I might respect them. So when I discuss a work, I usually go to great lengths to avoid giving away plot details and try to focus on the craft of how the story is conceived, structured and presented. In this case, however, I don’t think it takes away anything from the reading experience to know that Blindness is about a whole society going blind or that Seeing is about a city in which most of the citizens cast blank ballots in an election. It’s kind of like knowing that The Godfather is about organized crime. The question is “how so?” Tangentially however, there seem to be an infinite number of stories about about organized crime, but to my knowledge, Saramago is unique in imagining the worlds we find in Blindness and Seeing.

Saramago is unique in a lot of ways. The most obvious is his writing style in which sentences can go on for pages and paragraphs for chapters and, within those long expositions different characters’ dialogue is not differentiated by any punctuation or line breaks. I know that sounds like some William Burroughs-like nightmare, but it actually works quite well. Saramago’s style may take a bit of getting used to, but once you tune into the rhythm and lyricism, it works very well.

Saramago is unique, or if not unique, he is a rare master at pulling off stories that are not character driven, or those in which the characters don’t have a lot of depth. Not all of his work is like that, but a good portion is. In Blindness and Seeing, for example, the characters don’t even have names. They are referred to as the “the girl with the dark glasses,” “the doctor’s wife,” the Minister of the Interior,“ ”the old man,“ and so on. And in many cases, abstract ideas become characters. In The Double. for example, Common Sense is an oft-recurring secondary character. In Seeing, the capital city is one of the main characters. And the narrator typically moves in and out of the story, most often seamlessly and in a literarily unusual manner. For me, style is a distant second to story and I have never enjoyed books that are all style and no story or in which the style gets in the way of the story. Saramago’s style does not get in the way of the story. I’m not exactly sure that it adds to it, but it works. It may, however, take some getting used to, so if you have never read Saramago and want to give it a go, be prepared to go through a period of adjustment.

Anyway, as noted above, I was not enthusiastic about there being a sequel to Blindness, but as I began reading it, the story quickly hooked me. Seeing turned out to be perhaps the most accessible of Saramago’s novels. As the story progressed to about the halfway point, I’d forgotten all about any relation to Blindness. As the repercussions of the city’s blank ballots escalated, I became ever more interested in how the story would be resolved. The government debates polices, steps are taken, absurdities abound. It’s very good stuff. But it began to seem as if there was no way out, as if Saramago had written himself into a corner. Then I came to following lines and laughed out loud:

Obviously, any reader who has been paying close attention to the meanderings of the plot, one of those analytical readers who expects a proper explanation for everything, would be sure to ask whether the conversation between the prime minister and the president of the republic was simply added at the last moment to justify such a change of direction, or if it simply had to happen because that was its destiny, from which would spring soon-to-be-revealed consequences, forcing the narrator to set aside the story he was intending to write and to follow the new course that had suddenly appeared on the navigation chart. It is difficult to give such an either-or question an answer likely to satisfy such a reader totally. Unless, of course the narrator were to be unusually frank and confess that he had never been quite sure how to bring to a successful conclusion this extraordinary tale of a city which, en masse, decided to return blank ballot papers...

And then the characters from Blindness are reintroduced. On one level, this confirmed my worst fears about there being a sequel. Saramago was lost in the plot, so he takes the lazy way out and brings in characters from his most acclaimed and popular novel. That’s gotta suck.

Much to my relief, however, it does not suck. At this point, I have to be very careful not to give anything away, so I’ll just end this part of the discussion with the observation that I found Seeing to be a thoroughly fascinating work of literature. It is one of those rare works of art that has stayed with me for at least a week after finishing it. The denouement is powerful.

As a postscript, I’ll just mention that mainstream reviews always comment on Saramago’s politics. He is reportedly a communist and an atheist and critics typically try to tie those personal attributes to whatever of Saramago’s stories they are reviewing. Much of Seeing is about politics. The city makes political statements and the government and police react in political ways. Yet I am loathe to describe it, or anything else I’ve read by Saramago, as a political novel. He is a great artist and no matter what political motivation he may or may not start with when writing a novel, the art takes over and the finished work is impossible to classify with any kind of concrete political position. So I wouldn’t read Saramago because you like books by leftists or not read him because you don’t. Read Saramago if you like great literature. And time will tell, but I think Seeing may be great literature, perhaps his best.

Cold and grey

Here are yesterday's Inner City photos.

I haven't explained what I'm doing posting photos here, but since there are now a few people dropping by who don't know me, I'll take a moment to let you know what's going. on.

Often, I am just walking around my usual circuit, carrying a camera, and I take snapshots of anything that looks interesting. Anything that looks like it was shot in a Botanic Garden, Park, or Museum probably falls into that category. I'm not putting these out there as great work or anything, just tourist photos essentially, with the occasional inclusion of kid pics for friends and family. The big baby picture below doesn't even fall into that category. That is a straight up picture of someone else's art. Every bit of the creativity that went into it came from the sculptor. I was just using it as an illustration, not as an example of my work.

Other times I am working on photo projects. The ones I've been calling "Inner City" fall into that category. At this stage, these pictures are no where near to being finished. They are first drafts. I look at them for awhile, consider whether I will use them in a final product and if so, better ways to process them. Most of the photos I display here never make the final cut, but my hope is that you may find them interesting anyway. They are, after all, free in this medium and I imagine that these are things you've never seen before. If you have, then I hope I am framing them from a different perspective.

Although I will take a picture of anything for a variety of reasons, things like pretty flowers or beautiful sunsets, there are a few big themes that I pursue in my serious work. I am not about to tell you what they are, but there is usually something a bit deeper than what you see on the surface. For me, photography is more of a storytelling method than a presentation of the abstract or the beautiful, though not exclusively. Of course it's best when the story contains beauty and abstraction. Sometimes a picture stands on its own, but more often than not it is the series that is important. And from a decorative standpoint, I find myself more and more seeing things in pairs.

Anyway, I didn't want you to think that I am putting these things out there as finished products. In addition to the processing, if I find a scene I like there is a good chance I will go out and shoot it again in different light, or season. Yesterday, for example, the light was horrendous, barely a cloud in the sky and the sun at a harsh angle. There was a good gray scale range, however, so I converted them to black and white. This is not a black and white project though, so if I want to use any of them, I will go out on a rainy or cloudy day and reshoot them. Seems like this city just looks better under a cloud.

And I'm not hawking my work here, especially the above examples, but if you see something you might like to hang on your wall, let me know and it's something I can make a good print out of I'd be happy to sell you one at cost + a six pack, pretty much as a favor. Most of them look nice at 8 x 12 and work best in a pair.

You were wondering how stupid they could be?

Barbaro‚s Desperate Fight for Life Gripped a Nation in Anguish
By HARVEY ARATON (NY Times)

Why this national obsession with Barbaro? Maybe, as the fallen champion, the horse was reminiscent of a country that was seriously wounded on 9/11 and has been wobbly ever since.

The Wapo had similar nonsense. I can only say ummm and burn my journalism degree. Is the nation really gripped with anguish about the travails of this horse? I speak to a lot of people every day, people from all parts of the country, and I’ve never heard anyone say a word about it. And the horse is reminiscent of a country that was seriously wounded on 9/11? How out of touch can these top level journalism creatures be?

Way fucking out of touch, and that doesn’t even begin to describe them. I’d suggest that we avenge Barbaro’s death by bombing Iran, but it’s possible that a journalist might read it. We sure don’t want to put any more stupid ideas into their empty heads.

La vie en rose

The national statistics agency says that in 2006 France had the highest birthrate in Europe, according to the William Pfaff at the IHT.

Hmmm, I thought the French had quit having babies and that was a sign of the failure of their culture. Now that it’s the highest, is that evidence of the success of their culture?

Meanwhile, Frenchwomen are more likely to work than elsewhere in Europe, but even those with advanced degrees, graduates of the so-called Grandes Écoles, who go into privileged jobs, are having large families. Ségolène Royal, the Socialist presidential candidate, with four children, is exceptional only in that she and her "companion" never married.

Never married, quel horreur! Evens the front-runner for the presidency?

He goes on to inform us that she is not that much of an exception. The number of marriages fell from 416,500 in 1972 to 268,100 last year, but the number of civil partnerships — a legal alliance meant originally for homosexual couples, which has proven extremely popular among heterosexuals living in concubinage — has gone from some 6,000 to over 60,000 in six years.

Unmarried couples, homosexuals, they must all be struck by lightning, or at best die of aids before they’re forty. Ummm, no. French life expectancy in 2005 was also the highest in Europe, at 84 for women and 77 for men, and it increased last year by three and a half months for women and nearly five months for men.

Plus, their life expectancy is the highest in Europe? Here? We’re only a three to six years behind. Gotta be a lot more “divorces” by those unmarrieds, gotta be. Well, no.

A report of the National Assembly, chaired by the spokeswoman of the conservative UMP party, said that the choice between marriage and civil union seems to have no great impact on family life: which is to say that while the number of divorces is up, the civil union is not noticeably more unstable than marriage.

How to explain it?

Another possible birth incentive in France, which may not be copied elsewhere, is its 35-hour workweek. It has been suggested that the French have so much leisure now that they have found nothing more interesting to do with it than have babies, combining fun with demographic patriotism.

Are American conservatives wrong about everything?

Another wasted weekend, he cried

Click here to see photos from this weekend's walks around the neighborhood.

I've seen the future, baby

All of the big foreign policy questions of our time have been rendered irrelevant. They have all been answered. And the answer is always the same. No matter the question, the answer, it seems, is murder.

In the latest example, we learn that our government has targeted Iranians in Iraq. They are to be murdered on sight with no pretense of a trial. This is just another small detail in our strategic vision for victory in Iraq. We are not exactly sure what that strategic vision is, but we plan to achieve by murder, mass murder. The fact that our murder spree hasn’t achieved its goals, whatever they may be, is not seen as evidence that murder is not a good strategy. It is evidence that we have not murdered enough.

Dr. chuckling will now don his white lab coat and speculate that those who see murder as the answer to all of the questions are simply projecting their own fears and insecurities onto humanity in general. Many have noted that those who advocate the loudest for murder are not the ones who will go out and commit it themselves. The Bush’s, the Cheney’s, the blog nutzi’s, are all cowards in their personal lives. There is no way in hell that they will fight their own war. There is no principle for which they would fight. They kid themselves that they are brave by sending other people of to kill.

Dr. chuckling believes that because they are such craven cowards afraid of losing their own lives, they assume that everyone is just like them. In their back brains, they cannot imagine that anyone would sacrifice themselves for the sake of an idea. And they cannot imagine that anyone would fight against overwhelming odds.

It probably goes back to the playground. Because the George W. Bush’s, the Dick Cheney’s, the blog nutzi’s, the pundit class, and most of the rest of the “murder is the answer for everything crowd” did not fight back when they were bullied in their youth, they believe that others will not fight back when they are likewise bullied by the armies we command. They do not, and probably cannot understand that for many people, an idea can be more valuable than their life. The idea may be religious. It may be nationalistic. It may be simply self-respect.

Had these cowards been more observant on their playgrounds they could have learned. Many kids did not consent to being bullied. Many kids fought back. They fought back knowing they would get hurt. Knowing they would lose. And when those kids fought back, the social dynamic changed. The bully would win every fight, but he would also be hurt. And the other kids rooted for the kid that took the punishment. They respected him. And if it went on too long, they ganged up on the bully. Eventually, the bully backed off.

Unfortunately, that same playground dynamic we see in Iraq and elsewhere plays out with weapons and mass murder. The end will be the same. The bully will be hurt and withdraw. The death and destruction, however, are real.

It would be bad enough if the pathology of murder as the answer to all questions were limited to the nut cases in the White House, but it now envelopes our entire culture. Every day the news reports our intention to kill people without any kind of legal arrest or trial. It is so commonplace that no one even disputes the strategy. Not on moral grounds. Not on practical grounds. Murder, baby. The fix-it for all our problems. Never mind that it’s the cause.

An Inner City

Just walking around the neighborhood on a Saturday morning taking snapshots with my toy camera.

Dream nightmare

Toward the end of Dreamgirls, Eddie Murphy launches into a truly horrible song and I’m thinking I can’t believe I’ve actually paid good money to hear Eddie Murphy sing. But then in what is arguably the only decent musical moment in the show, Murphy’s character says enough of this shit and launches into some James Brown-style funk. Unfortunately, pretty much the rest of the music in the movie is more of that shit.

Dreamgirls is a musical that portrays the rise of a Supremes-like girl group fronted by American Idol washout Jennifer Hudson and a Motown-like record label run by Jamie Foxx. Eddie Murphy plays a Soul singer on the downward spiral and Beyoncé Knowles and Danny Glover also have bit parts as well.

Had I thought more about it, I would have questioned the idea of paying good money to see Eddie Murphy act, but he was actually pretty good as James “Thunder” Early, an R&B legend who was unable to de-saturate himself enough to make it in the white world. Or maybe his acting just looked good by comparison. Jamie Foxx was a total stiff, Danny Glover didn’t have a lot to do and Beyoncé had a small part and one big song at the end.

Jennifer Hudson, the former American Idol wannabe, is the main character. She is the leader of the girl group and far and away the best singer. But in order to make it on television, the talented but overweight Hudson is forced to sing backup to the beautiful but bland Knowles. The movie is best when Hudson is on the screen. I’ll leave it to more insightful critics to judge her acting skills, but her character’s story line, attitude and vocal skills easily dominate this lame-assed movie.

Ultimately, a musical cannot be that much better than its music and the music in Dreamgirls is mostly American Idol-style power ballads and screaming, with some Broadway show tunes and a little bit of R&B. It would have been much, much better if they could have used the actual songs of The Supremes.

The subplot outside the movie, however, is interesting in a nightmarish way. The movie’s central theme, that beauty and blandness triumphs over talent, played out in real life as well. Although Jennifer Hudson was the main character and Beyoncé Knowles played what was essentially a bit part, when it came to awards, the studio pushed Knowles for Best Actress and Hudson for Best Supporting Actress. There is no way in hell that anyone could watch that movie and think that Knowles was the lead and Hudson the supporting actress. That would be like nominating Olivia deHavilland as Best Supporting Actress in Gone with the Wind rather than Vivien Leigh. It was truly a very sad case of life imitating popular entertainment.

And unfortunately, that’s also an example of popular entertainment imitating corporate and political life. George W. Bush is by far the most obvious example of one who has done nothing to deserve a lead role, yet gets it through connections. As we know all too well, the less talented have been promoted over the more talented throughout Bush’s government. And if anecdotal evidence proves accurate, the corporate culture is at least as bad. And media? The hair is so much more important than what, if anything, is underneath it.

Still I can’t think of another situation so rife with hypocrisy. To have a film about producers screwing over Jennifer Hudson’s character because of her looks and then screwing her over for her looks in real life is just sick. The movie? Well, it sucked in the way that big Hollywood happy ending movies always suck. As far as killing time with a date before late night dinner, drinks, and the fun stuff, it had it’s moments and you could certainly do a lot worse.

More on the subject of cities

He is a man who eats and drinks too much, smokes too much, sits too much, talks too much and is always on the edge of a break-down. Often he dies of heart failure in the next few years. In a city like Cleveland this type comes to apotheosis. So do the buildings, the restaurants, the parks, the war memorials. The most typical American city I have struck thus far. Thriving, prosperous, active, clean, spacious, sanitary, vitalized by a liberal infusion of foreign blood and by the ozone from the lake, it stands out in my mind as the composite of many American cities. Possessing all the virtues, all the prerequisites for life, growth, blossoming, it remains nevertheless a thoroughly dead place--a deadly, dull, dead place.

That’s from Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. It’s been many years since I’ve read anything by Henry Miller. It's good to get back to him again. Miller was probably the biggest single outside influence on my life. I went the places he went, read the books that he read, looked at the art he looked at. Always wanted to write like he writes, but don’t seem to have it in me.

It cheered me up to find that his most notorious books are still unavailable on the shelves of the Public Library. If you wanna read The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy you have to ask the librarian. I wanted to re-read it, but was too lazy to hike up to the big library, so I had them send me Nightmare. I had forgotten what an anti-American polemic it is.

Those two girls in Youngstown coming down the slippery bluff--it was like a bad dream, I tell you. But we look at these bad dreams constantly with eyes open and when some one remarks about it we say, “Yes, that’s right, that’s how it is!” and we go on about our business or we take to dope, the dope which is worse by far than opium or hashish--I mean the newspapers, the radio, the movies. Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.

The most terrible thing about America is that there is no escape from the treadmill which we have created...

Reading Henry, it struck me that no one today is seriously railing against the consumer ethic and the virtual enslavement necessary to its maintenance. I occasionally read about a simple life movement of some sort, but as far as I can tell it is made up entirely of high income types and has nothing to do with art. And no great artist, at least none currently known, is giving voice to the idea that a life of art is better than a life of work. Instead, we are told that art is hard work. And art, for most of us, is what we see on the 60“ plasma television or what the kids do in grade school. We are so deep in corporate hell that the only the very few can even conceive of a better life. Henry Miller, it seems, is dead.

But what’s different about The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is that it contains a lot of fairly standard political commentary and it’s surprising to find that much of it is pretty much exactly the same as what we read on the lefty blogs these days, albeit more insightful and better written than most.

The flag has become a cloak to hide iniquity. We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it it means danger, revolution, anarchy. In less than two hundred years the land of liberty, home of the free, refuge of the oppressed has so altered the meaning of the Stars and Stripes that today when a man or woman succeeds in escaping from the horrors of Europe, when he finally stands before the bar under our glorious national emblem, the first question put to him is: ”How much money have you?“ If you have no money but only a love of freedom, only a prayer for mercy on your lips, you are debarred, returned to the slaughter-house, shunned as a leper. This is the bitter caricature which the descendants of our liberty-loving forefathers have made of the national emblem. Everything is a caricature here.

How's that for an insight on the use of the flag? Now, 65 years or so since that was written, no one remotely considers the Amercian flag to mean revolution or anarchy. True, it still means danger to a lot of people, but not for the wealthy and the powerful. Things are, indeed, under control. King George is alive and well.

I've always thought that protests would be more effective if everyone draped themselves in the American flag. Not only would it be a good P.R. move, it is, as Miller points out, consistent with our tradition. As a country born of revoltion with a democratic tradition that merits tremendous respect, we just need to recapture the idea that the flag stands for revolution against the looting of the many to benefit the few and against a government that exists only to protect those few. Maybe someone could dig up a design from the old days for progressives to adopt? Something that reminds us of who we are, or once were. A potent symbol of who we are supposed to be.

More invisible city

Here.

Outside

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him a s a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.

That’s from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Beyond my admiration for the writing, it’s kind of how I feel about New York.

There they go again

The Washington Post prominently displays the headline “5 Iranians Linked to Militants” on their web page, referring to the 5 people the U.S. violently kidnapped from the Iranian consulate in the Kurdish state in Iraq. Funny though, when you click on the article it’s not about the 5 being linked to militants, it’s about the Iraqis and the Kurds protesting their violent kidnapping.

Though to be fair, it is reported way down in the article that “the U.S. military had information indicating that the Iranians were "closely associated" with activities targeting U.S. and Iraqi forces.”, whatever that may mean.

Of course I don’t know whether these Iranians are funneling weapons for our Shiite allies in Iraq to kill us with or not, but the Wapo article doesn’t address the issue. And even if the article was about what its headline claimed, I don’t doubt that they, the Iranians not the Post, would confess, but what’s a confession worth when it’s obtained by torture? Nothing, that's what.

No, this is just another example of lame ass pro war propaganda from our “independent” media to justify another idiotic crime by the morons in the White House.

A little west of some place

If anyone was wondering what Jersey City looks like, I'm on the case.

Symbolism and 50 cents

The Democrats in the House have passed a bill that would require the government to negotiate lower prices with drug companies. This is opposed to the Republican plan, which is to pay the highest price possible. In an open declaration of allegiance to the principle of absolute and unapologetic corruption, 170 Republicans voted against the bill and the president has promised to veto it.

Although the Democrats had an 85 vote cushion, they concede that nothing is likely to change. “This bill has symbolic importance...” said Representative Murphy of Connecticut and the Times reporter editorializes (with no attribution whatsoever) that the measure is unlikely to become law.

So if the idea of negotiating lower prices is just symbolic and unlikely to become law, what is really going on?

According to the gist of the article, it is unlikely that the power to negotiate would by itself have much of an effect. In order to achieve the stated aim of lowering drug prices, the Democrats would need to follow the Veterans Affairs example and implement a federal price ceiling and a uniform list of covered drugs, effective measures to which the Democrats are opposed.

So it’s not really about lowering prices. It’s about symbolism and making the Republicans look bad. Tune in tomorrow as the Democrats symbolically bring the troops home from Iraq while in the material world the Republicans throw another 20,000 into the quagmire. After that, we can look forward to the Democrats symbolically restoring tax fairness for the wealthy while the Republicans have to settle for yet another tax cut for the wealthy. And so on.

Rose garden strateegery

I couldn't help notice that we just stormed an Iranian consulate and took the occupants hostage. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that considered an act of war, or at the ver least, a war crime? I guess we're accustomed to the media ignoring acts of war and war crimes, but I'm surprised no one is pointing out the very obvious fact that once upon a time it was the Iranians who stormed our embassy and took our diplomats hostage.

Is it a question of turnabout is fair play? No, unfortunately it is yet another example of how we have abandoned the rule of law for the rule of the gun. Apparently we have unofficially declared war on Somalia at about the same time with the same lack of commentary, much less outrage over our complete abandonment of interanational good citizenship.

And meanwhile we want to increase the size of the army by 100,000. Whatever for? To invade more countries perhaps?

We are just a rogue state on a crime spree. Much like Nazi Germany in the late thirties, our security is threatened by weak states and shiftless races and we must lash out with overwhelming violence to protect the glorious homeland. Never mind that only an insane megalomaniac and his mindless followers could possibly think that this is the way to safety and national security, but it's not like we have any kind of system in place that can stop them.

I'm all for national security, but squandering trillions of dollars on a murder spree does not make us more secure. Just think how truly secure we could be if those trillions were spent on healthcare, education and job creation.

No, better not to think about it.

Should christian girls wear miniskirts?

Bartholomew turns us on to the New Year's demented hopes and dreams of the retarded right. Apparently 25 percent of Americans anticipate the second coming of Christ in 2007. Yea, that could happen. I guess those are the same 25 percent who still think George W. Bush is not the pathetically malignant little idiot that he so obviously is.

Of course their leaders are more interested in the pre-second coming festivities. It's the anti-Christ that girds their loins. On that front, they hopefully scour the bureaucratic scat of the European Union for sign (again, via Bart).

EU Action Plan agreed on improving animal welfare within the European Union, for the period 2006-2010. Could the renewal of this document be the one that causes the sacrifice and oblation to cease, halfway through the Antichrist's reign? (Daniel 9:27)

What a world, what a world.

Escalation surges

I notice the Liberals are actually having some success in the propaganda war and it’s interesting to see how the major media are dealing with it. You can tell that the pro-Bush writers, who are legion, predominantly use the word “surge” whereas the liberals have taken up the “escalation” banner and use it with abandon. The poor saps who at least make a pretense of being objective are getting all mixed up, using “surge” in some graphs and “escalation” in others.

Well, that’s progress for the Libs, I guess. Even though I think, as detailed below, that using the wussy word "escalation" in place of the strong and accurate "troop increase" is a strategic mistake, at least they are actually having some success framing the debate. Hard to remebember the last time that happened.

Even though I don't agree with the strategy, I don't blame politicians for being politicians. Propaganda is a large part of what they do. S

But the media, what's their excuse? This whole semantic debacle is yet another example of how pathetic the press has become. They are not supposed to be doing propaganda, at least not in the news pages, yet it seems that they have lost the ability to use words in an independent manner. Just read the British press to see how professionals handle it. In every instance, unless they are quoting someone directly, they say “troop increase.” What has happened to us?

Yes, that’s mostly a rhetorical question. But I have an inkling, so to speak, of the answer. In short, we are living in the era of the idiots. The way George W. Bush promotes sycophants and rewards failure is reflected throughout our culture, including the media. And as the rights of corporations continue to subsume the rights of individuals and the current crop of idiots continue to weed out the more competent and replace them with like-minded losers, we can look forward to a whole lot more stupid down the road.

Update: The Daily Howler wins the prize for being the first I've noticed to say the obvious, that the press should use "troop increase" rather than the propaganda phrasings of the right or left. Why is this so difficult?

Atrios hates me

Atrios has created a list of the types of people he finds most annoying and Chuckling is #1!

The Defeatists - Doom and gloomers who know it is all hopeless, who know that we can't win elections, or that if we do win elections nothing will improve, and who think that people who bother to try are just wasting their time. Why these people spend so much time paying attention to this stuff if there's nothing to be done I do not know. If you really feel that way go do something else with your time, otherwise I expect you're just addicted to the sweet thrill of self-righteous outrage.

Yep, that’s me. And it’s unfortunate he feels that way, since I like and respect Atrios and the work that he does. Nevertheless, perhaps I can be of some help by answering the question of why we poor chuckling dead-enders spend so much time paying attention to politics when there’s nothing to be done.

It’s really not so complicated. Watching politics is like watching sports. Politics, football, basketball, lacrosse -- they are all just games and our potential for influencing the outcome is just about the same. We watch them because we find the games interesting. Plus it’s fun to root for your team, to revel in their wins, to suffer through their losses. And there is also the flip side, the schadenfreude, the relish of seeing the opposing team suffer.

So thank you very much Mr. Atrios for your advice on how I should pass the time, but if I like to watch games, and perhaps talk about them over a beer or two, well, that’s nobody’s business but my own. Certainly not yours.

And since I’m in a communicative mood, perhaps I can allay his suspicions that I am addicted to the sweet thrill of self-righteous outrage. It’s nothing so eloquently or existentially interesting as that. I can’t speak for any of my defeatist brethren, but I, at least, do not find self-righteous outrage sweet. I know that Mr. Atrios interacts with many more people than poor chuckling, but I wouldn’t classify those gloom and doomers I know as self-righteous. Realistic is the more accurate term. The sorry state of our body politic is not something to be happy about, much less self-righteous. That’s just the way it is. Sad.

Yes, it is sad. But what can we do?

Recent neurological studies, which will remain un-cited, indicate that such attributes as optimism, pessimism, or realism are hard wired into our human nature. Thus, those like Mr. Atrios who are optimistic and believe they can change things are in no way morally superior, nor are the more realistic among us. We were all just born that way.

Don’t get me wrong. I recognize that the optimists are largely responsible for the strides we humans have made from our chimpish beginnings and I respect the efforts of those who go beyond opposing the current body politic and actively try to change it for the better. Of course it would be unrealistic of me to fail to note that the conservative morons who have actively created this mess, or at least nurtured the environment in which it could develop, are optimistic go getters as well. Optimism about the possibility of changing the world for the better is not a universally positive attribute. “Better” means different things to different people.

Another study, or perhaps it is the same one since I am referencing memory, found that the best decisions were arrived at when different types of personalities were involved. As is so often the case, the aphorism “it takes all kinds...” is not far from the truth. It’s worth noting that the United States’ founding fathers, as well as the architects of the western European social democracies were more realistic, if not outright pessimistic, than optimistic. The societies they crafted were arguably designed to keep the optimists in check. So if the realists and pessimists among us took Mr. Atrios’s advice and left the optimists to their machinations, the world would not be a better place. It would likely be more of a bloody hell than it already is.

And it is not such a bad thing to recognize that on the grand scale there is little hope for the body politic or that life ultimately has no meaning. There are currently about 6.5 billion humans on earth living 50 or sixty years on average and human history goes back about 40,000 years. By contrast, the universe is 17 billion years old and there are at least 125 billion galaxies each of which contains about 200 billion stars. When you consider those numbers and their significance, it is obvious that our little lives have no greater meaning in the grand scheme of things than the lives of ants. And we’re not as different from ants as we’d like to believe. Our cities are like anthills and we spend our days building, gathering food, reproducing, and moving around with no apparent purpose. We are all just earth creatures, evolved from the same distant ancestor. I doubt an observer from a distant galaxy would see that much difference.

That’s not something we like to think about, but the realists among us cannot help but recognize the unavoidable truth of the proposition. But just because our lives have no ultimate meaning in the vastness of space and time doesn’t mean that they don’t have meaning within our limited existence. My life means something to my parents and my children and, if I live well, to a good number of other people as well. And many people’s lives have meaning for me.

And there are some people whose lives unquestionably have meaning, for good or ill, beyond their immediate circle of acquaintances, and even beyond their own time. People who get involved in politics can, obviously. change the world for millions, if not billions of people. But it’s a dangerous proposition and I think the founding father types had it right to try to hobble them.

I wish Mr. Atrios and his coterie well in their quest to better our lives, and I have even thrown a dime their way on a couple of occasions, but I am not an optimist. The fact that he is already creating an enemies list exclusively made up of people “on our side” bodes ill for the future. Power corrupts those on the left as surely it does those on the right. As the left ascends, it's likely they'll follow the same pattern as the recent right. Talking points will be distributed, the loyalists will repeat them, those who don't will be attacked, then purged.

The nonsense about surge/escalation is an early harbinger of that dynamic (it's clear that all the liberal bloggers have gotten the memo) and demonstrates how hopeless our prospects are on several levels.

First, the fact that nobody in America is capable of calling a troop increase a troop increase is distressing. As far as I can see, the entire major media has adopted the word surge for troop increase without so much as a quibble, unless you consider putting quotation marks around it a quibble. And the opposition media, the Daily Kos, other leftist blogs, Atrios, rather than call a troop increase a troop increase dig up the old propagandistic wussy-word escalation, a word designed, like surge, to avoid calling a troop increase a troop increase. What the fuck is wrong with you people?

I’m generally okay with using language intelligently to frame the debate, but using escalation instead of troop increase is not an intelligent use of language. An escalation sounds reasonable. Nearly everyone is against a troop increase. Just say the fucking words.

If, for whatever reason, the liberal bloggers can’t call a troop increase a troop increase, they should at least drop the wussy-words and come up with a good snarky substitute. Bush is reportedly going to ask for sacrifice as well as a troop increase. Perhaps we should refer to his plan as a troop sacrifice? Try it out. Bush’s plan to sacrifice more troops? Personally, I think calling a troop increase a troop increase is as effective as it’s going to get, and very effective at that.

It’s issues like these that make me doubt the literal existence of the Democratic party. So often it seems like they are the political incarnation of the Washington Generals, the faux basketball team that is paid to lose to the Harlem Globetrotters. When they can’t take something as unpopular as a troop increase and slam dunk it in the Republican’s face (give them a facial, in popular terms), you have to wonder if the game is fixed.

A surge in propaganda

I've noticed that Atrios and other liberal bloggers have been making a concerted effort to use the word "escalation" instead of surge, saying that escalation is the accurate term.

Actually, escalation is just the surge of stupid wars past, a propaganda term designed to make "increase the number of troops" sound like a good thing.

In general, I agree with this push to choose the words with which to frame the debate, but I'm uncomfortable when it turns into misleading propaganda.

In the case of escalation, however, I don't think it's misleading propaganda as much as a poor choice of words. The honest and accurate description -- "increase the number of troops" -- is a much more effective, from an anti-war perspective, than escalation, which was originally, as noted above, a pro-war propaganda term itself.

Not only that, but escalation, like surge, is a weak word, which is why they use it. Think of the words we use when we want to make the opposite argument. We do not demand that the Bush administration ebb the troops. No one at a protest rally screams de-escalate now! No, "bring home the troops" is the powerful phrase. It is powerful because it is honest and direct. It is powerful because it brings humans into equation as well as the concept of home.

By the same token, the words surge or escalate have no human connotations. But "increase the number of troops," now those are some powerful words. People know exactly what they mean.

It's green, it's green, it's tangerine

My daughter and I saw Children of Men yesterday, the new movie directed by Alfonso Cuarón that stars Clive Owen. I was interested in seeing it because I liked the look Cuarón gave Prisoner of Azkaban, the third film in the Harry Potter series -- and Owen, who gave an interesting performance in Spike Lee’s Inside Man.

The first step in my approach to critiquing a film is to determine whether it is primarily art or entertainment. Of course it could be both, or neither, and I don’t necessarily consider art “good” and entertainment “bad,” but I feel the distinction is a helpful starting point. It serves no useful purpose to judge Monsters Inc. with the same criteria as Richard the III.

I consider Children of Men to be primarily entertainment. It is a dystopian sci-fi action-adventure that follows its main characters from point A to point B, forcing them to overcome ever more formidable obstacles along the way.

The most important requirement for entertainment is that it entertain. This it does very well. The film is well paced, the slow parts are not too slow. They often contain humor and humanity and add depth to the characters. The action sequences are great, and not so sustained that the action becomes overwhelming. The acting is very good. In addition to Owen’s hang-dog performance, Claire-Hope Ashitey provides spunk and attitude, Juliette Moore does a worthy star turn and Michael Caine goofs it up, adding some much needed levity to the proceedings.

I say “much needed levity“ because Children of Men is not a light film. It is, in fact, very grim, which explains why a big budget blockbuster-type movie with an all-star crew and cast is playing in only three theaters in New York and given next to no publicity.

Much of the plot could have been stolen from Michelle Malkin’s wet dreams. As we follow the main characters from their point A’s to their point B’s, we see unremittingly bleak images of refugees/Illegal aliens in the background being brutally chased, herded, beaten, tortured, and killed with impunity.

And it is perhaps the most violent film I have ever seen. As a Natural Born Killers aficionado, I do not say that lightly. But if someone were to do a body count, like they did with NBK, I’d wager Children of Men would easily take the prize.

Yet we did not find the violence overwhelming. My daughter said it was because there was not much blood. Yea, I replied, but there were a lot of limbs.

And thinking back, I realize that there was a lot of blood as well, but it was not obvious because of the film’s palette. As he did with Azkaban, Cuarón removed nearly all of the magenta from the film, leaving it with an aquamarine cast and strong yellows. So the blood was mostly shadow with only the deepest reds showing through. You really only noticed it when it pooled. The splatter was mostly lost.

Beyond the palette, Children of Men was incredibly well filmed and edited. The action sequences are fantastic. I am not a war movie nerd, but I would guess that the final action scene is one of the best battle sequences ever filmed. It is certainly very good.

The plot is mostly coherent. It is adopted from a novel by P.D. James, the mystery writer who apparently went off the reservation in the early 90's and wrote a grim sci-fi novel that foresaw the direction of our future. There is only one scene, near the end, that intrudes on the suspension of disbelief. It’s unfortunate, and could have been easily rectified, but does not do much to mar the overall achievement of the picture.

Children of Men may be primarily entertainment, but it is not stupid entertainment, nor is it artless. If you like a very good dystopian action-adventure and can stomach a lot of very stark violence, or if you are into cinematography, I recommend it.

Update: If you want to get a taste of the look and feel, here's an interesting video montage someone made. I don't think it will spoil much of anything, but I could be wrong, so view with trepidation if you plan on seeing the movie.

Another new york moment

Perhaps my iconic New York moment took place one day on Houston street, near Katz’s deli. I was walking down the sidewalk and after a few minutes, I noticed that every car on the street was honking its horn. The “after a few minutes” is the key to that moment. A crowded city street, cars backed up, probably all the way across Manhattan, every one of them blowing its horn. It was very, very loud. Yet I am so acclimatized to the noise that 500 cars honking their horn only intrudes on my consciousness after a few minutes, and then only because of how long it’s gone on. The noise itself is unremarkable.

I was reminded of that on the bus the other day. If you’re ever in New York and are the type of person who likes to get away from the tourist traps and see the “real” city, I recommend a ride on the B35. It starts in a warehouse district well-seeded with strip clubs and porn shops, makes its way through Sunset Park, a major Hispanic neighborhood, catches the edge of Brooklyn’s Chinatown, cuts through a corner of Borough Park, an orthodox Jewish neighborhood, then all the way down Church avenue through Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Polish, Mexican, Central American, Haitian, and West Indian neighborhoods all the way out to the mean streets of the East New York ghetto. Around the world in Brooklyn or It’s a Small World in Hell?

So my wife and I are on the B35 and after a few minutes I notice that people are screaming. In retrospect, I realize that the volume has been increasing for awhile. Then the F bomb explodes through the pop pop pop cadence of the Haitian Creole and the wild tonal swings of the English West Indian dialect and the Spanish (who knew that there were Spanish speaking Muslims in Brooklyn?) on the periphery and I realize that it’s gotten pretty damn loud in here.

The primary commotion is between two large black women, each with two kids. Apparently a woman from the English speaking West Indies sent her daughter up to pay the fare and leaned a stroller up against a seat to save it for her. Then, reportedly, the woman from Haiti came along, contemptuously pushed the stroller aside and sat down in the seat. A few insults were exchanged and the confrontation escalated quickly into a devastating war of words that left both sides badly shaken.

To get the full flavor, you have to imagine it in a West Indian accent.

Insults about speaking a foreign language.
Insults about English language accents.
Accusation that people like her are why white people look down on black people.

You are uneducated.
No, I have a bachelor’s degree. I am an artist.

No, you are uneducated, and you are no artist. You are too ugly to be an artist.

No, you are uneducated, I’ll show you my card, and I am an artist. And you are the ugly one.

No, you are the ugly one, and you are uneducated. I am enrolled at the university. You are so ugly.

No, you are so ugly, and you are uneducated, you are not enrolled at the university, show me your card. You are so ugly. And you are on welfare.

I’ll show you my card, and I don’t see your card. You don’t have no card. You are too ugly to be an artist. You are uneducated. And ugly.

No, You are ugly, and you are uneducated, and you are on welfare. You look link a monkey. Why aren’t you in the zoo, you ugly welfare monkey?

And so on.

In addition to being very, very sad on so many levels, the choice of words the women employed in this war were interesting for what they illustrated about their perspectives. Pretty much every insult concerned the ability to fit into the dominant American culture. What would white people think? The importance of having a college degree. The stigma of welfare. The implied stigma of being of recent African descent. The overall importance of appearances. Ugly was the weapon employed most often. Ugly was the word that cut the deepest. Both of these women were seriously overweight. Neither was what anyone would call good looking. From an American cultural perspective, they looked exactly the same. They were ugly.

So they smack each other in the face with this word, they whack each other on the head. But ugly is more than appearances. Ugly is the lack of education. Ugly is welfare. Ugly is Foreignness. Ugly is African. Ugly is un-American.

Of course I don’t believe these things. The ugly I see in this incident is the ugly of poverty in a land of obscene wealth, which is the root cause of all the other uglies.

The ugliest thing concerning the immediate human beings was the devastated look on the women’s faces. Neither won that battle. They both lost big time and were severely hurt.

But in long view, the ugliest thing was probably that the children were there to witness it. To hear their mother called ugly and uneducated in front of a bunch of strangers. And frankly, to watch their mothers act so ugly in such a public place. The look on the children’s faces was not ugly. They looked sheepish. They looked embarrassed. But the ramifications for their psyche? That’s got to be ugly.

A Moooving Frienship

Professionalism worthy of the Post, on so many levels.

An ongoing struggle

Here are some fall photos from my Greenwood Cemetery project. I suspect I've mentioned before that I am involved in an ongoing struggle to photograph this cemetery. Although mostly forgotten by the tourist industry, Greenwood is one of the premier attractions in New York City. It is beautiful, quiet and historic. It contains a wealth of natural beauty and quite a bit of interesting art and sculpture.

Yet I have found it very difficult to photograph and have not seen particularly good work from anyone else. Its beauty is obvious to the human eye, but harder discern for the camera. Anyway, I am not there yet, but seem to be making progress.