Tough titties

I'm probably not the first to note that, in the wake of the news boobs at ABC's disgraceful performance in the Democratic debate the other night, all the journalistic creatures are rushing to describe Gibson and stephanopoulos's questions as "tough."

Earth to media! They weren't tough questions and neither are you. They were stooopid questions. You, media, are incompetent, if not implicated.

A tisket, a tasket, an economic basket

Although so many noted economists seem to say that the precipitous fall of the dollar in international currency markets has no downside, I'm thinking that simply cannot be. Although I admit that the last non-marxist economics class I took was in high school, I do seem to recall that there was another word associated with a decline in the value of one's money.

The word is "inflation."

And there is also a word, albeit hyphenated, for what happens when a country continues to print vast quantities of cash and spend it like an NBA star in a strip club. That word is "hyper-inflation."

Thankfully, we here in the United States are not subject to old fashioned economic theory. With our historically unique brand of take-no-prisoners get-up-and-go, we have apparently been able to run gargantuan deficits without triggering more than an acceptable smidgen of inflation. And not being an economist, I wouldn't know where to begin to look for evidence to the contrary. I guess I'll just have to trust the assurances of the experts and the government numbers.

In unrelated news, last night I discovered that in the last week that the price of a Pizza in our neighborhood went from $13 to $16 and the giant can of Asahi we get to go with it went from $3 to $4. This blow to our budget was followed closely by the landlord raising the rent by $1200 per year, a steep increase in the price of a metrocard, a significantly larger co-pay for doctors visits, and the cost of our prescriptions going from $30 to $50. Fortunately clothes pins at the dollar store are still a dollar, but the price of laundry detergent went up about 20 percent.

Oh well, all those extra dollars we waste on food, shelter, transportation, health and hygiene will just lighten the load of the suitcase full of money we'll need to go to Europe this summer.

Good ole boys gone bad

Via Atrios I came upon this post at Americablog about a southern GOP congressperson referring to Obama as "boy," as in:

"I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button."

Since I made what was perhaps a similar faux pas the other night, I'm in the mood to ponder these things. I was raised in a southernish culture and, boy I can tell ya, I've had to work really hard over the years to stop saying boy.

I'm not an apologist for the Republican congressperson and am willing to believe him a bad person. Just being a Republican congressperson means he already has 27 strikes against him, if not 27 x 162.

But where I'm from, that sentence could come out of plenty of people's mouth without any racist intent. It's often used as I did above. Something like "Sure is hot. Hoo boy." It's also used to indicate a general state akin to juvenile delinquency as in "them boys got drunk and wrapped their dang ole pickup around a dang ole tree." When it means "nigger" it has an altogether different inflection.

So I don't jump to conclusions over what could be an innocent slip of the tongue. I'm confident the ole boy's voting record is enough to indict him. I doubt if anyone seriously examines that.

The taming of obama

The New York Times reports that Senator Barak Obama has apparently given up his quest for the presidency and become a faithful Democrat.

By Saturday morning, Mr. Obama was trying to contain the political damage after a series of late-night and early-morning strategy calls in which advisers decided he had to acknowledge that he made a mistake.

What was his mistake?

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Mr. Obama responded, according to a transcript of the fund-raiser published on Friday on The Huffington Post Web site.

And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not,” Mr. Obama went on. “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Ah yes, he accurately described an important part of the culture in the United States which has played an important role in empowering the worst crimes and excesses of the Bush administration and its accomplices.

Can't have that now, can we. No way, Bub. We're number 1! We're number 1!

Anyway, his real mistake is acknowledging that he made a mistake. Although the Bush administration is far and away the worst in American history when judged by all the damage it's done to this country and the world, it has probably been the most effective political operation when judged by it's record of achieving its goals, whether unpopular, illegal or both. And the principle of never apologizing for anything, no matter how outrageous, is one of the cornerstones of that wildly successful strategy. They believe that only the weak apologize. I think if you examine the society in which you live, you'll find that a lot of people share that belief, at least unconsciously.

Me? No. I recognize that the ability to acknowledge one's mistakes and apologize is a sign of strength not weakness. And I think most people would agree with that, at least consciously.

But there is no question either way that it is weak to apologize for something you didn't do, or for doing something you know is right, simply because your rivals demand it. Might as well brand the word "Welcome" on your back an lay down on the porch.

Welcome to the Democratic party, Barak. Don't mind the boots on your back.

Bitter fruits

Today's Times reports that Hillary Clinton has openly joined John McCain and the Republicans in attacks on Democrats.

Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain separately criticized him as being out of touch with the middle class...
Mrs. Clinton issued several statements criticizing Mr. Obama, including ones that contained criticism from Republicans.

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for Mr. McCain, issued a similar response.

Do people still question my observation that she is a Republican? Yes, yes, I know they do, but you'll see that it will become increasingly more difficult to deny as the election approaches.

You know, I read Bob Somerby and Eschaton and follow the links enough to know that Chris Matthews and Tim Russert are irredeemable clowns, but until recently had never actually seen them. Since getting cable, I've done reasonably well at ignoring the bad cartoonish political coverage, but have to confess that I've paused and watched in horror on occasion.

The other night I saw what must be the most jaw droppingly stupid conversation I've ever seen in my life. Matthews and Russert were discussing when Hillary would drop out of the race. They discussed the conventional wisdom that she would drop out if she didn't win Pennsylvania by a wide margin or if she got trounced in North Carolina. Believing that she would drop out in either of those scenarios is ludicrous enough, but one of them went on to predict that she would drop out after winning Kentucky and some other state in landslides, so she could go out with some victories. I'm not joking. One of those cretins actually predicted that.

I guess it's remotely possible that she would quit the race if she started losing every state by more than 20 points, but I doubt it. If she can't win, she'll stay until the bitter end (and it will be bitter) in order to inflict as much damage on the Democrats as possible. And if the unimaginable happens and she is not allowed to play Kang to McCain's Kodor, I wouldn't put it past her to pull a Lieberman and run as an "independent."

Nice picture

This photo was taken by Phil Mansfield for The New York Times. It is an excellent example of good composition in photojournalism.

It nails pretty much every traditional rule of composition. Note how there are three sets of parallel lines going from left to right and expanding outward across the image. Following those lines from right to left leads your eye straight to the subject, which is placed in one of the prime aesthetic spots. The subject is well-lit and the reflection is a nice touch.

From a photojournalism perspective, when you look at the actual content of the picture, it does a good job of illustrating the story. That, and it tells some other stories on its own.

Personally, if I were looking at it as art rather than photojournalism, I would consider removing the car. The argument for removing it is that it is distracting. The argument for keeping it is that it points right at the subject, further helping to frame it. I'd need to actually do the work to remove it and compare before deciding.

Inklings of a glorious future

I made an unfortunate joke the other night at the dinner table. We were discussing American Idol and how bad the winners were and trying to remember their names and in what order they had won and that led to the revelation that none of us could remember the name of the big fat gospel singing black guy.

I asked if he had died? No, I was assured, he was still alive, just no longer on television. Well, I said, he’s probably reduced to singing at churches on Sunday for fried chicken.

My teenaged daughter gave me a fairly severe degree of “the look.” What? It’s just a joke. Get it? No, I don’t get it. Well hon, you’re just 16. Perhaps it was a bit too sophisticated for a young’un?

That brought about the 16-year-old drama queen stomp off to the room scene, which we see quite often. The rest of us finished dinner, retired to the living room and continuing discussing the mysteries of Paula Abdul.

A few minutes later, the teenaged one stomped into the living room with a thin sheaf of papers. Do you know what this is? she asked. Paper? Yes, obviously, but what is on these papers? Words? I’d guess. Right, she said and threw them down on my lap. This is Barak Obama’s speech on race! You should read it!

I have read it, I said, it’s a great speech. Why do you want me to read it now?

You are making fun of a black man eating fried chicken! And the obese and churchgoers, too!

Ah, of course. I realized right away what she was talking about. The racists’ fried-chicken eating nigger stereotype. I had forgotten about that.

You must understand, although I was raised in a racist environment (as are we all), I was not raised with that particular stereotype. When I was growing up, our family, and just about everyone we knew, went to church on Sunday morning and ate fried chicken at grandma's after church. If the church had some kind of event after the service, they always served fried chicken. So you see, I don’t associate eating fried chicken with any racist claptrap. I associate it with going to church.

Hon, I patiently explained, life would not be worth living if we can’t make fun of fat people and church goers. Then I told the above story of my fried chicken eating childhood and pointed out that my ability to make fun of an obese black church goer eating fried chicken without a smattering of racist intention was evidence that I was already living in a post-Obama speech world.

That led to another dramatic exit, but she left Obama’s speech. I tossed it on the coffee table and we went back to our conversation about Simon Cowell’s hand gestures.

Anyway, back to the big picture. Based on that anecdote and similar stories I’ve read about young people heckling their parents in the name of Obama, I believe I’ve seen a hint of the future. It could very well play out along the lines of what’s happened in our home.

A few days later, the family was gathered around the television watching Hell’s Kitchen, which featured a fat black guy among the contestants. That guy is a joke, said my wife. Aha! I picked up Obama’s speech and threw it at her. You should read that!

Since then the speech has been put to good use every time one of us mentions anything remotely race related. We saw a short guy on the news robbing a convenience store with a machete. Probably a Filipino, said my daughter. Whack! My wife hit her with the speech. I made a disparaging comment about McCain being a tired old white guy. Whack! My son hit me with the speech. And so on.

So you see, this is how Obama’s speech could lead to a politically correct utopia. As the years progress, more and more people will hit each other with the speech when anything that could remotely be viewed as race related is mentioned. Everyone will carry their own copies of the speech to whack people with. Marketers will produce whacking speeches for every target audience. Small children will have Nerf speeches. Teens will sport them like IPods in a veritable rainbow of colors. The intelligencia will carry theirs in pockets of suede while business people carry theirs in leather briefcases. A cult of purists will whack themselves with the speech whenever the name of a color crosses their mind. They will have special thorn laced speeches. Spies and assassins will carry razor edged speeches that they can throw at their enemies, chopping off their heads. The secret police will carry hard edged speeches to whack suspects who will later be made to confess with water soaked speeches shoved down their throats, making them feel like their drowning.

All may not be well, but at least race classification and hatred will be a thing of the past. Everyone will have to content themselves with making fun of fat people and churchgoers. Well, maybe we can include foreigners and the poor.

Photo of today

Another throwaway image from my Dark Brooklyn series.

Photo of today

Once again I find myself using words just to put distance between photos that don't work well right next to each other.

How could you possibly contemplate this triviality from the Dark Brooklyn series when Roy's metaphorical ass is right up there in your face. Perhaps you have more wherewithal than I, and more power to you, but I'm sick of looking at it.

If you keep coming back, you may be seeing a lot more of my Brooklyn portfolio in the coming weeks. I'm kind of obsessing about the Brooklym Museum's upcoming photo show which is currently open for evaluation on-line. If you like looking at photos and have any interest whatsoever in what Brooklyn looks like, it's an interesting slog. Mostly it's what Brooklyn looks like if you're a twenty something artsy person, but I guess that's to be expected. And that's not, in itself, a bad thing. Twenty-something art-respectin folk are inarguably a face of Brooklyn, there's literally hundreds of thousands of us here. It's just unfortunate that more of the other faces were under-represented or not represented at all. The multitude of other communities, for the most part, did not represent. And surprisingly, not a lot of pros did either.

The photo above, before I messed with it, was illustrative of the general tone of a good chunk of the submissions. The new contrasting with the old. Usually there's a crane in the background, but it's hard not to take a picture in Brooklyn without a crane somewhere in the frame. I work very hard to achieve that compositional non-element. You'd be surprised.

Photos of brooklyn

That photo's for Roy, if not of or by Roy. I don't know. It's not my photo. It's an entry for an upcoming show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art called "Changing Faces of Brooklyn" for which photographers were invited to submit a photo representative of that theme. It seems 389 of them accepted the offer.

I've gone through about a third of them. It's a bit generous to describe the work I've seen so far as uneven. The photos include little one hundred word essays which I don't read unless I really like the photo. Of the few gems I've seen, two were from the same middle school. Unfortunately the majority fall more into the category of artist wanna-be with a cheap digital camera. I hate to be harsh, but that's a mirror I've spent quite a bit of time looking in.

Anyway, If you're interested in Brooklyn or art theory, or possibly even photography, you might want to take a look.

Photo of today

I had meant to just post the photo of today, but when I looked at the result I realized that I needed to put some text between the photo of today and the photo that illustrated yesterday's shallow discussion of the cinema.

They just didn't look right so close together.

So I use a few words to put some space between them.

Who says words by themselves are meaningless?

Wow, on further inspection I realize that I need more words to separate photographs that inhabit such disparate color spaces.

So I might as well say a few words about Hillary Clinton. Well, I tried, but it's too difficult. I'll have to save it for a longer post. My feelings about Hillary and the whole history of the Hillary haters is too complex to deal with in a few words while killing time merely to put some space between photographs. But it is illustrative, and I will get to it, someday. No hurry is there, fuck, no hurry at all. The subject isn't going away any time soon.

Paranoid place

Filmwise, I've finally turned things around after going through a horrible stretch of seeing little but Oscar nominated dreck such as Juno, There Will be Blood, and the wretchedly banal No Country for Old Men. But this week has been different. Comparatively, how to put this with as little drama as possible? it's like the crap colored clouds parted and beams of light shone down from heaven.

First, sitting there flipping the channels, I came across an old black and white movie that was just starting. The title, Suddenly, Last Summer sounded familiar and a long forgotten eighties tune started playing in my head. Then the credits rolled. It starred Katherine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. The screenplay was by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal from a play by Tennessee Williams. Wow, the star power! I settled in and gave it a chance.

I was eager to do this because I have had great fortune watching old movies I knew nothing about on two other occasions. Those times were better because I missed the credits. I knew nothing of the backstory.

The first time I got hooked on an old black and white movie it turned out to be Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. The second film I was unexpectedly drawn into and thoroughly enjoyed was Night of the Iguana, not coincidentally, another work by Tennessee Williams.

I've never liked Katherine Hepburn as an actress and her performance in this movie is her usual shtick. Fortunately, she is absent throughout most of the movie. This was the first time I had ever seen Montgomery Clift. I've always been curious about him because of the song. Apparently, he was wasted throughout the filming and it shows, though not in a bad way.

But if you've never seen Elizabeth Taylor when she was a hot young actress, see this film. She is incredible. Even if you've seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she looks much better in black and white. Trust me on this.

The rest of Suddenly, Last Summer looks good too but it is clearly a play that has been filmed. There is very little movement and the story is told in a series of long speeches by three of the four main characters. The other main character, about whom the plot revolves, is dead and doesn't appear on screen until the very end. The drama is figuring out what happened to him. It is some very good drama. Good and twisted, in a Tennessee Williams kinda way. Seems like he might have been reading some Paul Bowles as well.

Paranoid Park, on the other hand, employs an entirely different kind of visual storytelling, almost the opposite of what we see in Suddenly, Last Summer.

The new film by Gus Van Sant would never work as a stage play. Van Sant has an amazing ability to tell a complex story with moving images. He makes you feel the characters, feel the story on such a visceral level that words are unnecessary. I think you could watch the movie without sound and come away with an equal understanding of what happened. I'm not saying that the dialogue is bad. It is well-written and enhances the film. Still, it couldn't be much further away from a Tennessee Williams kinda sensibility as you could get. It is definitely not a talkie. The fact that it would be a great film without a word of dialogue says so much about Van Sant's visual artistry.

Likewise, Paranoid Park has no Taylors, Clifts, or Hepburns. The great majority of the characters, and all of the main ones, are just kids from Portland. The movie is about story, not actors.

And it is a great story. (Spoiler Alert!!!) If I were a hack wanting a blurb, I'd call it a modern day Crime and Punishment. (note that I came up with that on my own. As regular readers know, I don't read about movies before I see them. It turns out that the crew referred to it as Crime and Punishment on Skateboards during the filming. Still, it's not that obvious and it would be very unfair to call it a rip-off.)

And I can't say enough about the cinematography. It is all great, but there is one scene, a shower scene, that must rank up there with anything ever filmed. The visual aesthetics of the drawn-out scene are fantastic beyond any words I could use to describe it and the storytelling triumph of that scene is at least as great. And not a word is spoken. If you read chuckling on-line magazine and pay any attention to the photos I post, I think you will have some understanding of how I feel about Paranoid Park. Van Sant and I, we share an aesthetic.

No golf, no trophy

Surprisingly, Obama gets some amazingly good advice from the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section:

This is why I say, play up Obama's white heritage as much as possible. He needs to start posing with his mother's family a lot more, not the United Nations crew of brothers and cousins he's normally seen running with. Staffers need to start snapping as many pictures as possible of him putting mayonnaise on his sandwiches and shaking hands straight up and down (no more low-fives that evolve into a shake with that pat on the back). He should also be banned from speaking at any kind of Baptist church (not just the United Church of Christ) and should just stick to churches that only use a pipe organ and where folks sing their songs solemnly and straight from a hymnal.

It's probably too late and I fear that advice, while good, is not enough. He needs to play golf. Golf would be the best way to highlight his whiteness and demonstrate his fitness as a chief executive. But if he even knows how to play golf, he apparently doesn't play very often and would most likely just look silly, like Dukakis in a tank. Imagine the wise cracks when he mis-hits and breaks the windows of those pricey white homes that line the fairways.

As you know, I don't see that he has any hope. Hillary's argument against voting for Obama because he is black is a powerful one that will no doubt carry the day. But if he is to have any chance, he should stop being seen altogether with black people. And if he can't play golf, maybe he should go bowling, or play some slots.

Don't get me wrong. Although I note the effectiveness of the Clinton campaign's racist tactics (if implying that we shouldn't vote for him because a black guy can't win, i.e., because he is black, is not racist, then what the hell is?), I do not agree with them. In fact it makes me hope there is a God that will damn her sorry soul to hell for taking down the one intelligent human being that could conceivably have a chance, however minuscule, of turning this sorry country around.

And minuscule is the key word. Already the Clintons arre hinting that they prefer a McCain presidency to an Obama. If by some miracle he is the nominee, chuckling confidently predicts we'll see a McCain, Clintons, Lieberman axis that will stop at nothing to maintain control.

But since I don't believe that miracle is going to happen, I'm sticking with my prediction that Hillary and McCain will be the nominees and they will both choose Lieberman as their running mate.

Photo of today

Big news day so far

The Washington Post breaks two mind-blowing stories on its front page:

Inflation Hits the Poor Hardest
No Income Group Is Untouched, but Staples Are Rising Fastest

Inflation is walloping Americans with low and moderate incomes as the prices of staples have soared far faster than those of luxuries.

Who would have thunk it? I thought only bad things happen to the rich, economically anyway.

And stranger still:

Small Dog Attacks Boy
"Pinkie-Poo" really very nice, claims owner

An out-of-control Pomeranian nipped the heels of you Billy Smith today, drawing no blood, but forcing him to hop around until the dog's owner, Mrs. Jones, could intervene.

And I always thought they were such nice dogs.

Meanwhile, in a small paragraph buried at the end of an article on page 24D we learn that the banks are failing, war is imminent, Charles Krautenhammer continues to resist treatment for the sharp stick up his ass, and a prominent Republican called for the deportation of just about everyone.

Difference in latitude

I couldn't help notice the three major newspaper's play on the content of Hillary Clinton's schedule during her years as first lady. The different approach you see between an independent foreign newspaper and its dysfunctional U.S. counterparts is illustrative of just how fucked up American journalism has become. Following are the headlines, deks, and first graphs.

The Guardian gets to the heart of the matter:

Hillary Clinton missed key presidential moments

· Papers cast doubt on claim of first-hand experience
· First lady was often far from scene of negotiations

On the day that dozens of US cruise missiles rained down on Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country's onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, first lady Hillary Clinton was far from the White House war room: she was touring ancient Egyptian ruins.

In other words, she is full of shit and now she's exposed.

The Times opts for the sleep-inducing lede:

11,000 Long-Awaited Pages of Clinton’s Schedules as First Lady Are Released

WASHINGTON — The National Archives and the William J. Clinton Presidential Library on Wednesday released more than 11,000 pages of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s public schedules for her eight years as first lady.

I'm surprised they didn't mention he was wearing a grey suit when he released the 11,000 pages of information.

In other words, nothing to see here, move along.

The Post tries to find it in its heart to say something substantive, but rambles:

In Hillary Clinton's Datebook, A Shift
Events Less Lofty After Health-Care Debacle

Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in the White House with a schedule befitting a president, packed with policy sessions, meetings with senators and trips to promote an ambitious political agenda. But after the collapse of her health-care plan in 1994, she largely retreated to a more traditional first lady's calendar of school visits, hospital tours, photo ops and speeches on a narrower set of issues.

In other words, we want her to beat Obama, but if she runs against McCain, we'll get her.

If you read beyond the first paragaraph, you can glean some useful information from each of the newspapers, but most people don't even read beyond the headline. Editors know this. By their criteria it's clear that the Guardian wants you to read the story, the Times doesn't, and the Post doesn't know what the hell it's doing.

Chuckling has a dream

I watched Obama’s speech on race relations today. It was a great speech; an unprecedented piece of artistry by a modern day American politician in a presidential race. If Hillary Clinton had an ounce of concern for the future of this country she would immediately quit the race, turn all her money over to Obama and work her ass off to get him elected president. Yea, well, I know what they say about wishes, beggars, and horses. But still, I can dream. And I do.

For many years I’ve been having a dream in which I am lost, either on my way to the airport, or in the airport, and am in a combination state of intense anxiety and crushing depression because every minute that passes, every wrong turn I make, increases the likelihood that I will miss my flight to France.

Even long after the flight is scheduled to leave, I’m still running -- or driving like a wild man in that version of the dream -- in case the flight is delayed and there's still a possibility I could board.

I feel no real hope that I can make the plane, that I can get to France. I feel gut-wrenchingly bad that I can't. Still I keep trying. No other choice occurs to me.

Do I make it? Well, the dream is never resolved, but based on the sick empty feeling I have won awakenint, I suspect not.

I used to discuss that dream, among others, with my psychoanalyst. Or more accurately, I used to discuss it with a psychoanalyst. I wasn’t paying her anything. In fact, she was paying me for some other work, but we talked a lot and I think she just liked to practice.

Anyway, according to her, the dream was my unconscious's way of telling me I was stuck and that all my efforts to move on to a better place were in vain. Frustratingly so. She said that the airport and the flight to France were metaphors for a healthy sexual relationship. Yea, well duh. I didn't need Sigmund Freud to tell me that. She knew that I wasn't getting along with my second wife any better than I did the first.

But what to do? The dream doesn’t give any clue.

When I heard Obama speak these words, I realized that we suffered from that same dream, even if his didn't take place in an airport:

I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

And nothing will change. Exactly. I’ll be running for that plane for the rest of my fucking life and he'll be running for president for the rest of his. I'll never make the plane. He'll never be president. He might as well re-name himself Williams Jenning Bryant. No, he has more sense than that. Maybe Eugene V. Debs II would be more appropriate. Our elections will always be about distractions. They will ever make a lick of sense. No one with any significant combination of brains and morals will ever be allowed to win.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

The promise of our ideals and the reality of their time? Therein, I think, likes the clue. Obama and I. We have the same dream.

What if the airport, the presidency, is not just another metaphor for sex? What if it's really telling us, in plain dreamspeak, to get out of this fucked-up country and move to France? What if that is the solution? Not just for me and mine, but for Obama as well?

The answer is, my friends, that the world would probably be a better place if he made that choice. Let's face it. Obama has already lost the election. Hillary has him branded.

But although he has lost this election, with that speech, he has set himself up to win the century.

Unfortunately, this country is fucked and we are doomed to live our lifetimes being ruled by the only kind of sociopathic morons that can navigate the media horror show in such a twisted way as to be elected president. Obama, clearly, is not cut out for the job. He is a good man with a good brain. He is too good for this country.

So chuckling's advice to Obama is to get on that plane to France. Just wash your hands of this mess. Go into exile. Speak for posterity. The long run is our only chance to win. If the best of this generation were to abandon this poor shade of democracy and spend his life speaking, writing, and acting to bring about the real thing, that would be a powerful act. Much more powerful than sliming it up with John, Hillary, and the boys on radio and teevee.

The weekend in photos

Y'all like pretty boy. Check out the rest of the show.

Oh, and by the way, if you're in the New York area and would like this kind of portrait done for yourself or someone you know, get in touch. We can probably work something out.

An oft-told tale

I saw Macbeth a few nights back in Brooklyn. I am not a Shakespeare scholar so, unlike the play, this review will be short.

Sorry, I couldn’t help the little joke. Although it came in at just under 3 hours, the production moved right along and I was never bored, at least not for long. Had I been able to understand half of what they were saying, I probably wouldn’t have been bored at all.

As long-time readers are aware, I am a shallow critic. Hell, even if you just came here and read the above paragraphs you probably figured that out. I don’t have any grand theories about the stage or screen. I’m not a member of the genius director’s school, nor the great actor’s. Mainly I am interested in story. I can appreciate good cinematography or stagecraft as well. But it usually comes down to I liked it or not.

Why or why not? The answer is almost always found in the writing. Great acting, directing and stagecraft certainly enhance a well-written work, but can rarely, if ever, save a poorly written one.

Macbeth? I thought the stagecraft great and the acting fine. As a writer, it’s difficult for me to do justice to the staging, you really have to be there and see it for yourself. I’ll just say that I liked it. A lot.

The acting? It was marvelous. Frankly, I’m impressed that anyone can memorize so many strange words, much less pronounce them coherently. The actors did both. Well done, I say.

But the writing? I’m sorry Mr. Shakespeare but that play sucked. As poetry, I grant you, it had its moments, But a play is not a poem. The plot is a tired retread of the writer’s better work. The characters are whiny and unsympathetic. Their motivations are a complete mystery. Oh, sure, plenty of people want to be king and you might say that’s an obvious motivation, but you would never get that from the words of Macbeth. More likely he was just motivated to find something else to whine about. The question that drives the plot is “when will someone shut these people up?” The answer? Not soon enough. I tell you.

A big part of what makes me such a shallow critic is that I refuse to do research or consider any kind of historical connotations around a work. I would say “it is what it is,” but then I’d have to bash my brains against a wall for using the cliché of the day, so I’ll just say that I believe that the best criticism comes from total ignorance. I don’t give a fuck who wrote the goddamned play. I don’t care what history has to say about it. If it doesn’t work from a perspective of total ignorance, it just doesn’t work. Well, maybe sometimes, but for now that’s my story.

Yea, yea, yea. I get up on my box and say all that so righteously, right, but in this case I actually did some research.

The thing that struck me most about Macbeth was that it told the exact same story as Richard III except from the perspective of a pathetic whiner rather than an unrepentant schemer. That and Macbeth wallowed in special effects and violence. My thesis was that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth when he was young and then grew as a writer and produced his masterpiece -- Richard III.

So I looked it up and, as is not unusual, got it entirely backwards. Richard III was one of his first plays, Macbeth one of his last. That makes sense as well. Apparently in his dotage, Shakespeare cribbed from his earlier, truly great work.

Like many washed up writers, he added violence and special effects to try to cover the lame-assed writing. Where Richard III was fiendishly twisted and direct, Macbeth is loaded up with witches, ghosts, silly prophesies, and sword fights. I’ll be a dollar to your dime that the next remake ends with a mushroom cloud over Dunsinane.

Anyway, although I thoroughly enjoyed the theatre-going experience, I genuinely detested the play. Unlike normal people, however, that made me want to see it again and as fate would have it, TMC had a Shakespeare night and I caught the end of Orson Welles’s Macbeth and the entirety of Olivier’s Hamlet. This was an interesting juxtaposition because just days before I had read an article in an old New Yorker (abstract here), which discussed Olivier and Welles’s claims to greatest Shakespearean actor ever and discussed those very movies.

So for good measure, I actually bought Welles’s Macbeth and watched the Richard III that features Ian McKellen for like the hundredth time. All that to get a little more context.

You must understand. Although poor chuckling is a clown as well as a shallow critic, I am aware in some deep dark corner of what passes for my mind that all serious people consider Shakespeare to be one of the greatest writers ever and Macbeth to be one of the great masterpieces ever produced by humankind. Ninety-nine out of one hundred and five historians included Macbeth as an example of what they would give superior beings from outer space to demonstrate our worthiness to life in this galaxy. So I ask, who am I, poor chuckling, to belittle the master’s masterwork and piss urine most foul on five hundred years of learned critics? And it’s not just Shakespeare upon whom I pee, but the great Lawrence Olivier as well. His Hamlet blew chunks. And Welles’s Macbeth? Let’s not even go there. The headgear was interesting. Beyond that, I shall not speak.

So to sum it all up, if you haven’t seen Richard III with Ian McKellen, go out and rent it immediately. As I said above, I am a story guy and rarely moved by great acting. Well, Richard III is one of humanity’s great stories and McKellen’s acting is possibly the best I’ve ever seen. The staging is quite good as well.

I’m sure if Macbeth were alive he’d whine about it. Richard, however, would dispatch him with a smirk and some pointed snark. Hamlet would also do well to steer clear of good Richard.

Photo of today

The subject of Barak Obama's race comes up so frequently already that if some unforeseeable miracle occurs and he is allowed to run for President as a Democrat, then questions of his "blackness" will dominate the airwaves thirty seven hours a day, eight days a week until early November.

So answer me this: What is the child in the photo above?

Click on it to see a larger image. Then take a moment. Take a breath. Give it a little thought. Try to empathize. We are not talking about a national figure. This is not a blog fight. This is a child.

A little background: both of his parents are college educated professionals. One was born American with a heavy dose of Dutch ancestry. The other is from a somewhat illustrious family in Africa that includes lawyers, professors, high government officials, even an economist. He goes to one of the better schools in the world, not primarily because of affirmative action, but by merit. His friends are a diverse group, their parents have similar bios -- educated, well-traveled professionals, often one parent from a different part of the world. His closest friends are some combination of Chinese, African, Jewish, Italian and other European mixes. In those respects, he is much like Obama. Kinda looks like him too.

So what is he? I have a little experience with this question. On more than one occasion, a small child, much like the one above only younger, has asked me "what am I?"

So what do you say? A child asks you "what am I?" After you've thought about it and decide, or more realistically, speculate, realize that your answer should apply equally to Obama.

I'll tell you how I answer.

Q: What am I?
A: American.

Q: I mean, am I black?
A: No, you are mixed.

That, followed by a little demonstration that everybody's skin is a different shade of earth tone, and that's the end of it. At least through high school. It's really not that difficult.

Or it shouldn't be. But I know it is. At least it used to be.

And that question: what am I? has played a vitally important role in Obama's life. In a fascinating article about his mother in yesterday's NYT, he is quoted as saying:

[I was] “engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.”

I find it so odd that he has that attitude. As far as I can tell he has absolutely nothing "African-American" in his background. Yet he consciously chose to become one. I always read that many kids who are labeled black but are not from an African-American background suffer identity issues and often feel pressure to "be black." What does "be black," or "be black enough" even mean? In that context those phrases seem like code for "poorly educated criminal," or "nigger."

Although reading a politician's self-serving campaign autobiography goes against my deepest moral beliefs, I guess I'm going to have to read Obama's book and find out more.

Was he a black man wannabe or a black man havetobe as he made his way through one of the better prep schools and became a superstar at Harvard? As many point out, the cop who pulls you over for driving while black doesn't know where you went to school. Society decides who we are and an individual with dark skin is black. Would people do well, as Obama has done, to embrace it rather than fight it? (In general I'd say no, but people will obviously decide for themselves)

The larger question, for the kid in the photo at least, is whether things have changed since Obama's character was formed by whatever experiences he had being labeled black by society.

What is he? Yes, he is American. Yes, he is mixed.

And yes, society categorizes him as black. At some point, will he, like Obama, feel great pressure to become so?

The question will never change but it's meanign will. For a child it's what am I (physically)? Later on it becomes what am I (culturally)?

I'd like to find a better way to put it. I am open to suggestions. Middle class educated? Maybe, but the best way I can think of to phrase it so that everyone understands is to say that culturally he is white. So is his 100 percent African parent. And so is Obama.

For the child's sake. For the world's sake, I hope times have changed and those stupid questions are moot. They haven't of course, but I am actually optimistic that they are changing and that ultimately they will change. Although there is still pre-judgement and prejudice against people perceived as black, I believe that it has become much more of a cultural thing these days. I also have quite a bit of experience being pulled over for driving while black. Although the cop doesn't know anything about the victim's education, my experience has been that once they figure it out they treat you well, even perhaps a little better to make up for their initial suspicions. I know there are still Klan types and Nazis out there, but their numbers are small. The great majority of society judges a person more by how they speak than how they look.

That's what Obama's got going for him. I'm not the first to note that he speaks very well. And I think he would actually have a chance if more people heard him speak, but as the campaign goes along, I think that will happen less and less. It's already happening less and less. Instead of hearing the guy talk, we get people talking about the black guy. Is he black enough? Is he too black? Does it help him? Does it hurt? What are the demographics? Is American ready for a black president?

I think when we phrase it like that, when it's all about blackness, we'll find that no, America is not ready. I think we are ready for an extremely talented, well-traveled and well-educated president with a strong moral center, but unfortunately we'll be stuck with one of the Republicans, Hillary or John.

The kid in the picture? Well, here's hoping things are different when his generation runs for president*.


* This wouldn't be chuckling on-line magazine if I didn't add "if we still have any kind of even barely functioning democracy at that time. More likely by that time President George Bush VII will have succeeded President George Bush VI and we'll all be living in cardboard boxes, if not concrete cells.