Posts by matt

Forget the hype. The movie is just annoying.

It’s one of those movies that makes you resent art-house cinema. It should have had a honking red “For Your Consideration” subtitle superimposed onto every other frame in loopy script. It had a predictable yet nonexistent plot. It featured a cast of 1-ply characters, played by actors who masterfully conveyed suggestions of intense inner lives that unfortunately did not exist. It was pretty. It was empty. It was boring. It was an art appreciation lesson thinly disguised as a film.

There were some great ideas in it. I believe Peter Webber, the director, really was fascinated by the painting, the period, Vermeer’s technique, etc. And if you’re going to steal from anyone, why not rip off Ingmar Bergman, as Webber does — a lot?

Still. Want my money back.

Minorities in the U.S. have been pitted against each other for ever since this place was colonized. Read Howard Zinn, he’ll preach it to you. Talk about how the Irish became white. Or how Jewish folks became white. There’s just a long tradition of one minority group, usually blacks, being set against another minority group, with the victor winning higher social regard, more rights, etc.

It’s happening again, and this time, it’s gays and blacks.

Read Franklin Foer’s article in The Atlantic Monthly about one of the chief architects of the anti-gay-marriage movement, an Irish-American who grew up in black churches and realizes the value of not allowing this fight to be painted as a simple oppressor-oppressed divide.

Key graf:

Daniels’s savvy was also evident in his launching of the FMA. He had made the case for his amendment to leading social conservatives, but he hadn’t tried to enlist them as his main allies, because of their polarizing language and stance. (“The traditional social-conservative movement harkens back to an era of white Protestant cultural hegemony,” he told me.) And because he knew that gay-rights activists would cast marriage as a civil right and evoke the African-American struggle, he had devised a strategy to pre-empt this line of argument: he chose African-Americans, including the Boston minister Ray Hammond and the civil-rights veteran Walter Fauntroy, to be his spokesmen.

It’s remarkable how brazen this guy is about it, though. Take a look at his Alliance for Marriage home page, a.k.a. “Happy Black Heterosexuals for Christ.” Click around for a while. Or, if you’re lazy, I’ll just link to every image besides the logo I can find on the website in the extended entry.

Read more…

I like what I’ve read of Dan Okrent, public editor of The New York Times.

I don’t like his picture.

I can’t really tell you why, he just looks worn-down, vaguely unhappy, insincere, trying too hard to look like a man of the people. I wonder if this is how everyone else sees Howard Dean?

Anyway, I know Robin disagrees with me, and I understand this post is worth nothing at all, but I’d felt I’d raise the point regardless, because the picture’s all up on the front page of NYT.c, harshing my buzz.

And while I’m bashing Dan Okrent (what else are ombudspeople for?), is it just me, or is he way self-obsessed and tortured about Dan Okrent and his role and his place in the universe? Every column’s filled with these asides, “Gentle reader, your concerns are half-right and half-wrong. It’s like this lesson I’ve learned from my mother, which I always kept in my head as I was editor of Time, ‘Dan,’ she once intoned, ‘you’re half-right and half-wrong.’ Do you see, Gentle Reader, how I am just like you? I am, in fact, one of you.” (Take this one, for example.) His latest column was an interview with himself. Dude, if you’re that hard up for the opportunity to navel-gaze, get a blog.

Oh, wait.

Heartbreaking Washington Post Magazine story about a South Asian-American poet who killed her 2-year-old son and herself.

AND: OK, I won’t just leave it at that. Why is it heartbreaking?

It’s steeped in her poetry. Paula Span, the author, pulls in these opaque fragments of poems, and they’re excellent. Early on, Span cites this devastating piece by the woman, called “Lullaby”:

I would not sing you to sleep.

I would press my lips to your ear

and hope the terror in my heart stirs you.

And you can’t help but see her writing that poem to her murdered son.

You can’t read a good poem by a dead author without missing what’s been lost, wondering what they were thinking, and lamenting that you can’t know. It’s just the same reading this. As with any article about a suicide, this one spends the whole time probing the question of why she did it, while always being upfront about the fact that we can never know. Reetika Varzani was foreign-born, and wrote between these two worlds — India and America. America, where her own father disappeared one day, and she later found he’d taken his own life.

But that’s just one seemingly significant piece in this huge puzzle portrait of a mind that you can almost feel beneath the text, as her words weave in and out. It’s not at all like reading “The Bell Jar,” I promise.

Yesterday, as San Francisco gay couples received marriage licenses from the city, Judge James Warren of the county Superior Court said something. That’s about all the newspaper headlines about the story can agree on.

What actually happened, as far as I can tell: Judge Warren was responding to a request from an anti-gay-marriage group asking him to make San Francisco “cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court.” He interpreted the semicolon in that sentence as an “or.” So he told the city either to cease and desist, or to defend its actions on March 29. He also said that the anti-marriage group will probably win its stay when that hearing is held. In other words, the city’s actions might eventually be determined to be illegal.

Depending on which headline you believe, the judge said the marriages were illegal, he said they were ok, he urged a halt on the marriages, he won’t halt the marriages, etc.

I think The Washington Post hits closest to the truth with their headline, “Judges Postpone Action on Same-Sex Marriage.” And I think SFGate.com carried the best story about the matter; theirs actually quoted the judge.

OK, this should be filed under something that’s more like Election 3028, but whatever. Inspired by this asstastic idea, Robin and I were discussing our own pie-in-the-sky visions of electoral utopia tonight.

We agree that our current political system, in practice, does not reflect America at all. Our politicians are, for the most part, rich and homogenous. We’ve been debating strategies on how best to turn the country into a truly excellent representative democracy.

Here’s one idea we had:

First off, Election Day should be a holiday. I could stop right there. Why isn’t it a holiday? Really, we take days off for some of the most arbitrary things. The single calendar day arguably most rationally suited to being a holiday is not. What gives with that? I’m making it part of my Personal Life Crusade to get at least this plank of our plan enacted.

[/digression]

On Election Day, everyone eligible to vote gathers in geographically divided groups of 20. They spend all day trading words, talking ideas, deliberative polling, all the good civic stuff. Then, they elect a representative for the group, ostensibly the smartest and savviest member.

Then those representatives gather in groups of 20, and do the same.

Now it’s Wednesday, and we’ve got 500,000 representatives, who gather in groups of 20, and pick 25,000 representatives, who gather on Thursday in groups of 20 and pick 1,250 representatives. Who gather on Friday and choose a legislature.

That’s the gist of it. Thoughts?

This is serious gleeful miscellany. CraigsList rocks the party that rocks the body.

A few researchers at the U. Washington have announced that they can predict if a marriage is going to fail or succeed.

I wonder if they’ve re-jiggered their algorithm to take into account the recent gay marriages in San Francisco. According to information from Focus on the Family and the Campaign for California Families, these developments will destroy an estimated 5.3 percent of all marriages.

We can all relate to this month’s Esquire Complaint — people who sit through the credits. I’m not sure why I’m linking to it, because I’m an Esquire subscriber, and unless you are, you probably can’t read it. And in any case, it’s good enough and short enough that I’m going to reproduce it here in toto. Sorry, Esquire:

You are fooling no one.

You know who you are. You are impressing no one, and it is time you learned the truth: Nobody thinks you’re smart because you sit through the closing credits at the end of movies.

You do this all the time (and particularly at the end of Miramax films). The movie concludes, the houselights come up, and you silently pretend to be fascinated by the cast listing. Somehow, this is supposed to indicate that you are a serious person. What this actually proves is that you are an inefficient person, because all the information you are pretending to ascertain is already on the Internet (and most of that information doesn’t matter to anyone who doesn’t actively work in the film industry). You do not have a favorite gaffer. You do not care what record label released the soundtrack. You do not know the difference between the motion caption coordinator and the environmental technical director, so why would you care who these people are (or who their first assistants are)?

Now, I realize you do this because you think your date will think you’re intellectual. She does not. She either thinks you’re a pretentious fraud (which you are), or she suddenly feels insecure (because she can’t figure out why she’s supposed to care who the secondary location scout was). The movie is over. Leave the theater. Go to the bathroom.

Being one who sits through the credits, I take umbrage, even as I appreciate Chuck Klosterman’s sneering. But I’d like to answer on behalf of the Credits-Watchers. (Others who watch the credits, feel free to chime in.)

Read more…

This thread about the pronunciation of the word “forte” turns out to be excellent. As does this one, about popular songs of misunderstood intent.

These two posts, in conjunction, raise an interesting issue (if you’re me) that I’d like to call out here.

People always snark out Alanis Morissette for misusing the term “Ironic.” But it seems to me she clearly didn’t do so. Her usages of the term are all “poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended.” And it seems like all the protestations amount to, “That definition doesn’t count.”