Eric The Blue

Lane Pryce rebounds; others moving in a different direction

I like to write about "Mad Men" from time to time, but Salon's Nelle Engoran is on the beat, and who wants to invite invidious comparisons?  Her commentary on last night's episode is a tour de force.  Might she, however, have made mention of Lane's Macomber-like rally?  Remember when--I think a couple seasons ago--one show ended with his old father caning him into submission, then standing over his crumpled body in the manner of Clay over Liston?  There's something pathetic about a grown man being dominated and beaten by dad, but now Lane is the one to cold-cock Pete.  Everyone's been waiting for someone to replace that signature simper with a big red welt, and if Lane beds Joan, a teasing possibility, he will have a reward beyond any I can bestow.

On Saturday night, we watched Young Adult, a Netflix rental.  The screenplay is by Diablo Cody (Juno), it's directed by Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air), and stars Charlize Theron. I'm now at an end of nice things to say about it.  

Bad girl goes back to Lake Wobegon, has outlandish misadventures: just terrible.  

Mad Men, Season 5, Episode 1

I'm listening to Terry Gross interview Matthew Weiner about--what else?--last night's two-hour season premier of "Mad Men." It ends with SCDP's reception area full of African-American job applicants.  They're there because, in the first scene, some yahoos at a rival agency had dropped paper bags full of water on civil rights protesters marching on the sidewalk below their office windows in a Manhattan skyscraper.  This had resulted in some bad publicity, and SCDP, to pile on, had placed a fake ad in the Times that  dropped the phrase "equal opportunity employer."  The applicants are nicely dressed, polite, dignified, and, of course, not in on the joke.  Do they appear a little too decent, like the Drapers' maid, whom I wrote about here?  I'm addicted, but the rather too obvious contrast between upright African-Americans and the cavorting ad men is one item for the debit column.  Remember Lane's girlfriend at the Playboy club?  When the topic of race comes up, the show emits a faint but distinct whiff of falsity.

The interview with Weiner, in which Terry does not take up the bookends to last night's premier, is here.

Netflix: 50/50

A funny movie about cancer, which necessarily involves giving short shrift to some of the details.  I hope it requires no spoiler alert to note that, in the end, the very likable main character, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, undergoes a successful surgery and gets the girl you'd been hoping he would.  As the patient's best friend, Seth Rogen is as ever hilarious.  Incorporating his friend's illness into his pick-up procedures, he explains to a girl at a club that his mostly silent sidekick suffers from "type 4 back cancer."  It works like the ace of trumps, and two pairs end up back at the patient's house, where there is a large stash of medicinal marijuana.  For some reason, it's more enjoyable than I'm making it sound: maybe a spoonful of irreverence makes the schlock go down.

Netflix: True Grit

You won't go wrong with the Coen brothers, and this is another good one.  It's been a frequent subject of redaction criticism, since it's based on a novel (by Charles Portis, published in 1968, bearing the same title) that was in 1969 made into a film of the same name, starring none other than John Wayne.  I know nothing of the novel or the earlier movie but am going to guess that the Coens' version is bleaker and more desolating.  It features Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Jeff Bridges, who was nominated for an Oscar, but the movie really belongs to Hailee Steinfeld, a teen-ager who plays the teen-aged Mattie Ross, who's determined to avenge the murder of her father.  The movie plays up her intelligence, her linguistic prowess (in general, the characters in this movie never have to punish themselves with the thought, I wish I had said that, because they did), her precocious negotiating skills, her ability to climb trees and cut down corpses hanging from high branches, her devotion to her cause, her. . . grit. 

In the end, though, what does it get her?  Before she was fifteen, she tracked down her father's murderer in Indian country and shot him in the chest.  Twenty-five years later, in the closing frame, she's a grave spinster with an amputated arm who's three days late to a Wild West show.  Suddenly it makes more sense that in this movie it seems always to be night and you have to squint in the darkness to try and tell what unpleasant events are occurring.

Poor, White, Republican, and overwrought

This--"Poor, White, and Republican," a New Yorker "Daily Comment" by George Packer--had elicited precisely 100 comments last time I visited.  One of them was by yours truly, who detected a geographical lapse: Chisago is the name of a Minnesota county, not a "small Minnesota town." But that is not my only reaction.  For example, the line about the "bad teeth" of the demographic group he's describing is not, as some may suppose, a gratuitous sneer by a New Yorker staff writer, aka, Platonic form of The Cultural Elite.  One of Amanda's best friends lives somewhere in northern Anoka County, which abuts Chisago County.  She drove up there one day a couple years ago to go garage-saling, and, arriving back home here in Starbucks land, announced that she had never seen so many people who could benefit from some dental work.  This reminded me of my own observations during time spent in small-town bars in central Minnesota during weekend softball tournaments.  Packer is probably familiar with the article by his colleague, Malcolm Gladwell, wherein one reads, at the outset:

Several years ago, two Harvard researchers, Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, set out to interview people without health-care coverage for a book they were writing, "Uninsured in America." They talked to as many kinds of people as they could find, collecting stories of untreated depression and struggling single mothers and chronically injured laborers—and the most common complaint they heard was about teeth.

My other reaction concerns the movies Packer references.  He's a reader, too, so he might have referenced novels, but for some reason it's the movies, not fiction, in which the decline of the American working class has been chronicled.  Is Rabbit Angstrom an exception?  Golfing with fellow retirees, Jews, in Florida, Rabbit doesn't let on when they run down Reagan that he'd voted for him.  But, then, Rabbit had graduated from the print shop to the Toyota dealership, inherited from his wife's side of the family.  He doesn't really qualify. 

What a lot of vitriol in the other 99 comments!  I wouldn't have guessed that the group Packer is discussing includes so many inclined to surf to the New Yorker site and take a crap in the Comments.  I think both he and they could benefit from a little sense of humor.  Whenever the local news reports about some knucklehead who has, say, fallen through the ice on his snowmobile and drowned, Amanda can be counted upon to ask whether he was my year or the one just ahead of me at Columbia Heights Senior High.

Netflix and Newt

While Newt Gingrich trod upon John King with cold feigned fury, we were enjoying "Moneyball," concerning Billy Beane's effort to make the Oakland A's champions on a dime after they lost Johnny Damon, Jason Isringhausen, and Jason Giambi to free agency in 2001.  You are carried away by the best theme ever invented--the poor plucky underdog waging battle against the New York Yankees and other overlords.  Beane's no-names with high on-base percentages won 20 games in a row in 2002 before bowing to my Twins in the first round of the playoffs.  In the cold light of day it seems crazy that a movie about the 2002 Oakland A's makes hardly a mention of Miguel Tejada (the league MVP) or of Barry Zito (winner of the Cy Young award).  It wan't only the no-names, and the Twins aren't exactly overlords.  I'm just saying.

You don't have to wait till morning for Newt's case to look a little thin.  When he said that his friends of the time would all attest that he never asked his second wife to make room for more, John King should have asked how his friends could know.  Were they spending as much time at his house as he was?  Also, it's more than a little rich that one of Clinton's impeachers should appear outraged over being asked about his marital strayings.  He's a fat little wanker, but I hope he wins South Carolina, so that the internecine games can continue.

Bridesmaids; and other mediocrities

"Bridesmaids," the Judd Apatow-produced box-office hit, was our most recent Netflix rental.  We all know that grossout scenes of overfed, overdrunk young men vomiting in slo-mo are hilarious.  How about when nubile young women who've had a bad meal are similarly afflicted?  Only to a degree.  I think the movie overstays its welcome, and the ending, in which the main character gets together with the likable fellow she's been pushing away, screams: Focus-group tested!

Speaking of mediocrity, what about the arguments against gay marriage?  Yesterday's Star Tribune treated us to "Why should I accept same-sex couples," by Dan  Nye, of Edina.  He has six questions he wants people like me to answer, forthrightly and civilly.  Here's no. 1:

Were our ancestors all dumb and bigoted because they thought homosexuality was wrong?  Some may think that accepting homosexuality is innovative and progressive, but others say abandoning our previous norm may be presumptuous on our part.  In other words, our ancestors might have been right, and we might be wrong.

Our ancestors weren't right about everything, Dan.  The earth isn't at the center of the universe, chattel slavery is a moral abomination, ditto for laws banning interracial marriage, and the Clinton tax hike was not a jobs killer.  Is it too much to ask for a logical argument?

Here's no. 2:

Don't our sexual organs exist for reproduction?  How does homosexuality square with that?

And our eyes exist for vision.  I'm not sure why it follows that homosexuals must not be permitted to marry.  Men who "shoot blanks" are allowed to marry.  Couples who meet at Sun City mixers can marry.  Still waiting for a coherent argument, Dan.

No. 3 has a lot of words.  Here they come:

It is no secret that the human sex drive is a lot stronger than is needed for reproduction.  Do we just give in to those desires, or do we try to control them?  The ancients told us that controlling our physical desires is one of the things that distinguish us from the beasts.  Sexual desires, if not controlled, easily lead us into trouble.

Completely off point.  Suppose I were to acknowledge that all this tic-tac-toe stuff is true.  Why would it follow that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry?  Still waiting for a coherent argument, Dan. 

It's soon time for me to start watching televised football, so here's a quick run-down on the second half of Dan's case.  No. 4 says that, as pederasty is bad, so is homosexuality.  No. 5 introduces the term "prevalent homosexuality," which "will not work in society."  No. 6 says that homosexuals will likely all go to hell, so those who would coddle them "may be doing indescribable harm."  He concludes with a portentous challenge:

If all you have is name-calling, you have no valid position.  If truth is on your side, answer these questions in a civil manner.

Poor Dan.  He seems to think that his being a moron and a bigot requires everyone to take him seriously. 

Netflix: "Please Give"

This one made it into our queue because several years ago, when we still were "going out to the movies," we saw "Friends With Money," directed by Nicole Holofcener and starring Catherine Keener as one-half of an affluent married couple ruining the views of their neighbors, and the character of the subdivision, by putting a vertical addition on their house.  "Please Give" is also directed by Holofcener and features Keener, who is now one-half of an affluent married couple who have bought the neighbor's Manhattan apartment so that they can knock down the dividing wall and make their own living quarters roomier soon as the ninety-something inhabitant dies.  In both movies, the Keener character is afflicted with guilt--to the extent that, in "Please Give," she reads the ads for volunteers, and even goes to a couple of interviews.  But assisted living centers and schools for mentally handicapped children are not for her.  She has no talent for good works. When she offers cash to a slightly scruffy black man standing on a sidewalk, he explains that he's just waiting for a table.

It's not only the neighbor whose death will help her prosper.  She and her husband, played by Oliver Platt, have a used furniture store full of pieces purchased from estates being administered by harried survivors too eager to get on with their lives to make counter offers.  The least she can do is grocery shop for the nonagenarian, which brings her into contact with the old lady's granddaughters, one of whom is nice and one of whom isn't.  Her husband sleeps with the bad one.  The nice one has a notably flattened affect, like the house-cleaning maid played by Jennifer Anniston whose friends had money in the earlier film. Toward the end, the good one gets a nice boyfriend, Platt and the bad one break it off, and everyone comes together for the funeral of the old lady.  As if that may not be enough to cheer you up, in the very last scene Keener reconciles with her troubled teen-aged daughter by buying her a very expensive pair of blue jeans.  

"Thank you," says the girl.  "You're welcome," Keener replies.  Then dark screen, roll credits.

The movie has its moments, like when the good granddaughter, an x-ray technician specializing in mammograms, tells her nice boyfriend that to her breasts are just "tubes of potential trouble."  I think Amanda liked the movie more than I did, and I'd recommend it. 

Fine man

I reviewed James Gleick's biography of the physicist Richard Feynman here.  He (Feynman) is the subject of a television biography, "No Ordinary Genius," which is available online--I found it at 3 Quarks Daily.  Takes about ninety minutes.  There is a lot to like, even if you are not in the cult, but I was struck by Feynman's self-criticism for having participated in the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.  He had thought it was vital to get it before the Germans did, but then Germany was defeated, and he was too busy to notice that his reason for participating was gone.   In his imagination, he juxtaposed the drunk, celebrating scientists with the suffering Japanese.  Everyone talks about Truman and "the decision to drop" but I think it was more like bureaucratic momentum arising from the same force that worked on Feynman.  It was a train you couldn't get off.

 

Netflix: The Special Relationship

Dennis Quaid's bluff, voluble Bill Clinton schools Michael Sheen's Tony Blair, who could barely be heard above the shoosh of our dishwasher in the next room, on winning elections and governing from "the center left."  Sheen's undertones signal Blair's moral seriousness: he knows you have to invade Kosovo, and not permit interns to suck you off. If only he could figure out that W. is a chump.

Quaid shows that he has studied his subject by the way he sets his chin in the crotch between thumb and pointing finger, so lost in thought that he momentarily forgets to feed himself.  The thin overlay of historicity, including news footage, suggests that the prime minister and his aides really did bat back and forth the question of whether "it has to be in to be a sin."

Not a significant contribution to the made-for-TV genre.

Netflix: Love Actually

Of King Lear, Lionel Trilling said it is not enough that there is one broken man wandering the earth in despondency and madness; there must be two.  For Richard Curtis, director of Love Actually, it is not enough that there is one absurd love story tugging at the heart strings of good-hearted holiday moviegoers; there must be seventeen. 

It's like splenda on frosted flakes. 

With Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Keira Knightley, Laura Linney, Colin Firth. . . . many others: 17 x 2 = 34, and some of the stories involve, you know, triangles.  Terrible, just terrible. 

Netflix: The Thin Blue Line

Sometimes (like in its Wikipedia article) called a "documentary," the film features reenactments of a Texas murder in which the wrong man, Randall Dale Adams, was convicted and sentenced to death.  These reenactments are based on the false testimony of various witnesses.  The only version never reenacted is the one the film proves to be true--namely, that the murder, of a police officer, was done by David Harris, a juvenile with whom Adams had drunk beer at a drive-in movie earlier in the evening of the shooting.

How did the investigation go awry?  Pretty clearly the problem was that a police officer had been shot, and the law enforcement establishment--the police and the county attorney of Harris County, Texas--wanted an execution.  Harris, however, was a juvenile.  Adams was prosecuted because he was an adult and could be executed.  Were it not for this strange and wonderful movie, he probably would have been.  Directed by Errol Morris, the film's total effect is augmented considerably by the Philip Glass score.  The Thin Blue Line is a significant contribution to the cinematic arts which has not, however, diminished the enthusiasm for capital punishment among the part of the population that just might vote for Rick Perry for president.

Netflix: Heartburn

Stars Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, which, together with the fact that neither Amanda nor I had seen it, is what made it attractive in the menu of Netflix selections available for streaming on our TV.

It begins with the two principals, a political columnist (Nicholson) and a food writer (Streep), neither one of whom ever seems to have to go to work, meeting at a wedding.  At the end, they're married, he's been cheating, and she puts a pie in his face at a dinner party, then gets on a plane with their little kids.  She is woman, hear her roar.

You might be wondering about the scene in which she discovers he's having an affair.  It's at the hair dresser's.  The beautician is complaining about her fellow's sorry subterfuges and it all falls into place for the Streep character.  She races home, her hair undone, and quickly uncovers irrefutable proof in the center drawer of his desk.  What a scoundrel!  And she's so likable!  Well, of course, the script is by Nora Ephron, and it's based on her autobiographical novel of the same title.

The most interesting thing about the movie is the cultural artifacts.  I'd almost forgotten how large phones were in 1986.

Watching movies while the country burns

Here in Minnesota, where Governor Dayton has capitulated to Republicans, accepting their plan to balance the budget without raising any new revenue (by delaying already-delayed payments to public schools and by selling bonds to get money today for money to be received in the future from a tobacco suit settlement), the wingnuts are so crazy that they haven't the sense to declare victory.  Oh, it's a hard deal!  No one likes it!  They have had to give up the dream of passing a budget that restricts access to abortion, shuts down stem cell research, and prevents four felons from voting in one election after another.  Everything related to the budget, they got.

Dayton says that, bad as the deal is, the state government shutdown was worse, and, since Republicans just weren't going to meet him at any middle point, he had to take their offer.  In the realm of theory, it is conceivable that the Republicans would have had to concede that "Governor Dayton just wasn't going to meet us in the middle," and that "we therefore had no choice but to take his offer."  But in the real world, as distinguished from some conceptual one, it helps to be crazy.

Pro-business Republicans are naturally opposed to suing Big Tobacco, but they aren't against using the money from the settlement to run state government, especially if the alternative is a tax hike on people with seven-figure incomes.   

Meanwhile, the national Republicans are showing signs that they are not so crazy as to be blind to their own craziness.  I have in mind Sen. Mitch McConnell's plan to avoid a catastophic default by permitting Obama unilaterally to raise the debt ceiling, then objecting, then permitting Democrats to overcome those objections, then campaigning against Obama and the Democrats for having raised the debt ceiling.  Ingenious! They know what needs to be done.  They just won't do it. 

They're interested in winning elections but not in governing.

It's all sufficiently dreary to cause me to resort to unnatural tactics in the pursuit of relief.  Last night, during negotiations conducted before the menu of Netflix selections eligible for streaming to our TV, I allowed Amanda to think that I'd never seen "The Big Lebowski," and was as a result treated, once again, to the sight of The Dude, interrupted by burgling nihilists while smoking dope in his bathtub, calling out, without changing comfortable position, the following complaint: "Hey, this is a private residence, man."  May he always abide.

 

Netflix: No Reservations

By the time the kids are in bed we don't have two hours for a movie, so have taken to watching, in unsystematic fashion, episodes of "No Reservations," Anthony Bourdain's travel-adventure-culinary TV show.  Part of the appeal is seeing new places without paying airfare or being revealed as a tourist by the knowing locals.  We're with Tony and he knows the places to go.

We choose episodes based mostly on the title, which doesn't explain why we haven't yet seen "Food Porn" and "Food Porn 2."  We have seen the episodes concerning Tony's visits to Hawaii, Laos, Saudi Arabia, London and Edinburgh, Cleveland, Vancouver, and the one in which he eats raw seal with the Inuit: they kill the creature, haul home the carcass, drop it on a tarp on the kitchen floor, have at it with sharp knives and fingers. You might be wincing but Tony, who obliged his courteous hosts by sucking the juices out of an eyeball, says the worst thing he's eaten is a Chicken McNugget.

Another part of the appeal is Bourdain's personality, described by himself as "snarky."  He doesn't think much of the Food Network, Rachel Ray, or ABBA, but he loves the Ramones, swears a lot, and used to be an addict.  Cool, huh?

Speaking of "snarky," why do you suppose so many words starting sn- have unfavorable connotations?--snake, snag, snarl, sneer, snicker, snide, snigger, snit, snivel, snob, snort, snot, snub.  Snack and snooze are the exceptions that prove the rule. Faulkner knew what he was doing when he christened Flem Snopes.

Date night

Amanda and I saw The King's Speech at the Parkway Theatre, a few blocks from our house, on Saturday night.  Possibly my judgment was impaired by the enjoyable beverages I enjoyed before the show at the nearby Town Hall Tap, but was this really the best movie of the year?  You feel bad for a stutterer, want him to get through, feel relief when he does, and in this case it's the King of England.  Still, so what?  He has to give a speech, a big problem for him.  But it's not like he's going to have to fight in the war himself.  I also found myself objecting:  It's radio!  Just let someone else read the damn speech.

Possibly it's the "interplay" between the uptight Royal and his relaxed, Australian speech therapist that is supposed to be Oscar-worthy.  Evidently something was.  I was more favorably impressed by the "Hot Damn" burger at the Town Hall Tap.  Don't put ketchup on it.

Netflix: The Social Network

Mark Zuckerberg, age about 20, suffers rejection at the mouth of a fair-faced but sharp-tongued coed and, just to show her, invents Facebook and becomes a gazillionaire.  He has some adventures along the way, many of which involve scenes of young people behaving badly.  It's as if the boys of Animal House were all programming geniuses.

Speaking of which: did you know that geniuses are not like you and me?  When thinking outside in the winter, they do not get cold, so warm are their thoughts.

At the end Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, friends (thanks to him, it's a verb) the fair-faced girl from his laptop in the deserted conference room of a high-powered law firm that's either defending him or suing his ass.  Then he keeps depressing the F5 key.  Refresh, nothing; refresh, nothing; refresh, nothing; refresh, nothing.  Either she is unplugged for twenty seconds or else it's lonely at the top.

We're supposed to think it's lonely at the top.  The inventor of Facebook is socially unconnected.  The title is ironic.  Get it?

Nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, which makes me feel better about having young children and never being able to go out.

Netflix: The Kids Are All Right

An unmarried heterosexual man invades a household headed by two moms.  Well, it's actually headed by one mom, the one who is an OB-GYN, played by Annette Benning.  The other mom, played by Julianne Moore, is a little more of a hippie and vocational drifter.  In an early scene, she goes down on Benning while gay porn--male stars--plays on the bedroom TV.  As a character in a Woody Allen movie remarks, when it comes to human sexuality, normal is not a useful concept. 

Anyway, the teen-aged children, a boy and a girl, make contact with the sperm donor who got them both off to a start.  You'd think that lesbians might be immune to his charms, but no!  The mom-mom has grown weary of Dr Mom, the workaday success, whom she stilll loves, sort of, but not so much to keep her out of the old sperm donor's bed.  He is more understanding, you see.  The whole situation is a well-worn path but now it is being trod by lesbians.  OMG!

With Mark Ruffalo as the donor.  For some reason, he talks like Marlon Brando's godfather.  Written by Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg and directed by Cholodenko.

President Obama, who self-reports that he "struggles with this issue," might be made uncomfortable by the presentation of a de facto gay marriage.  The movie reminded me of a quip by Minnesota's junior senator, Al Franken, who, expressing his support for gay marriage, said there was no reason for straights to monopolize the misery.  That the principals in The Kids Are All Right are less wholesome than the stars of gay marriage posters is a considerable relief.  The movie is pretty good, especially considering how terrible it could have been. 

 

Netflix: Pulp Fiction

Not less enjoyable the fourth or fifth time.  If enough time has elapsed since the last viewing, each new scene elicits: Oh, yeah, this is a kick!  The violence is more shocking than in violent movies that aren't poking fun at violent movies.   

I love the way the humdrum intermingles with the criminal pyrotechnics.  The gangsters postpone a hit for a few minutes in order to pursue their discussion of whether an extra-marital foot massage crosses the line.  A drug dealer, wearing only his bath robe, lies in bed watching TV and eating breakfast cereal about 16 hours after the time for breakfast. The mess of an accidental homicide has to be hidden from the police, of course--but a wife due home from the nightshift is a more immediate concern.  She will be really pissed to discover a car full of blood and brain bits parked in her garage!

Tarrantino's next movie, Jackie Brown, is an interracial love story in which the topic of race barely comes up.  There is enough going on in Pulp Fiction that I did not notice, until after seeing Jackie Brown, that the prior movie is among many other things an interracial buddy story in which the topic of race barely comes up.  Probably one of the ten best American films of the 1990s.

Netflix: Sunshine Cleaning

Thirtyish sisters, down but not entirely out in Albuquerque, New Mexico, go into business cleaning up hazardous waste after suicides and more accidental messes.  The plot is thin and the dialogue sometimes embarrassingly bad, as when one sister, having suffered a humiliation at the home of a more "successful" high-school classmate, is told by the other: "You're better than them."  There's more not to like:

• Supporting characters, such as a one-armed shopkeeper and the sisters' gruffly likable father, who are too plainly intended as "lovable eccentrics."
• Throwaway emotion elicited by the plight and wonderings of a boy, the son of one of the sisters, who turns eight just before the touching resolution of the implausible plot.
• A sort of pat psychological undertone when it develops that the young businesswomen, who clean up the physical messes made by suicides, are themselves messes on account of the suicide of their own mother while they were still young enough to frolic, in slow-motion flashbacks, in a lawn sprinkler.

And yet: I liked it, quite a lot.  There is a scene wherein the young entrepreneurs buy a (very) used van from a paunchy, pasty car salesman who with friendly nonchalance declines to budge on the price.  He doesn't look like his customers, except inasmuch as he qualifies as another unexceptional American struggling to earn a living--a rare sight at the movies.

Directed by Christine Jeffs (Sylvia) and featuring Amy Adams (Doubt) and Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada), as the sisters.

Netflix: Brothers

Stars Tobey Maguire, sufferer of post-traumatic stress disorder after an ordeal in an Afghan prison camp; Natalie Portman, his adorable wife; Jake Gyllenhaal, his ex-con brother; and Sam Shepard, his father, who prefers the soldier to the retired armed robber.  With all that star power it would seem unnecessary to lean on the young daughters of the troubled couple to tug at our heart strings. 

According to Roger Ebert, the film "avoids temptations toward melodrama," which makes it sound as though it isn't even in melodrama's zip code.  But I remember a scene in which the damaged soldier tosses some dishes around the kitchen before holding a gun to his own head in the presence of his brother, wife, and the police.  Special effects slow down time, and it appears he may very well shoot himself, but then, through the oozy sounds and stretchy photography, he hears his brother's calls, and the vertiginous effects subside as he puts down his gun.  In a phrase favored by the demurrers of my household:

I'm just sayin'.

Mad Men, Season 4

Thanks to Netflix, we've zoomed into 1965, present time on Mad Men, and the result is that our Netflix moments have been pooled and then leased to AMC on Sunday evenings.  It's better than thinking about going to work on Monday.  On the other hand, when you're a couple seasons behind with a DVD in hand you can put off thinking about going to work in the morning till it's almost time to go.

Having insides made of tissue, I thought the volume of alcohol consumed by Don Draper in Seasons 1, 2 and 3 was enough to render implausible his satisfactory work-a-day functioning, not to mention the after-hours meandering and philandering.  But what do I know?  In Season 4, he picks up the pace before, in the last episode, climbing out of the bottle to get engaged to his secretary, who is hot and half his age.  Does that sound familiar?  His partner Roger Sterling pulled the same stunt, and now, a couple seasons later, the mist is out of Roger's eyes and he finds himself married to a woman who's been written out of the script.

Betty, Don's ex, is missing from whole episodes as well.  She's going down, down, down.  Personally, I think it is condign punishment for marrying a Republican operative.  She lies in bed, unhappy and alone, in a scene "balanced" by one in which Don and his secretary gaze deep, deep into the eyes of the other.  No wonder Betty looks so sad!  Meanwhile, Peggy and Joan and Dr. Faye Miller, the spurned psychologist, are not amused by Don's triumph.  I say: "Hang in there, ladies." Don, too, is apt to be de-misted.  "It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."

Lydia Davis, Glenn Gould & Mary Tyler Moore

Having finished Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, my haphazard reading habits have caused me to pick up The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which more than caffeine has aroused my nervous system during midmorning, work-day coffee breaks.  Davis's "fictions" have been called crosses between stories, prose poems, and philosophic aphorisms.  In an interview, she has said that she likes Beckett for   "the plain, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; the intelligence; the challenge to my intelligence; the humor that undercut what might have been a heavy message; and the self-consciousness about language."  These are characteristics that one recognizes in Davis's work, too.  And another one that she did not mention, the bleak outlook. 

In a story called "Glenn Gould," the narrator, a stay-at-home mother, makes a point of watching "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" whenever possible.  It seems odd that one of my favorite TV shows plays a part in the last two books I've read.  Franzen's teen-aged Patty Emerson, watching at her home in Westchester County, New York, is by way of this show introduced to my hometown of Minneapolis, and to escape her affluent but damaged family of origin she accepts an athletic scholarship to the University of Minnesota.  Davis's character, describing the attractions of the show, says: "I want to stay in that other place, that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited."

One feels that the language, here and almost everywhere in Davis's work, is charged and allusive.  The "other place," "that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited," is not really or just Minneapolis, Minnesota.  It's where sane, grounded, decent, intelligent, mostly contented Mary Richards, the character played by Mary Tyler Moore, makes her home.  That's the place the narrator hasn't been.  She gives the impression that she regards "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" as a guilty pleasure and is therefore pleased to learn, in a letter from her friend Mitch, that Glenn Gould, the great pianist she admires, is also a fan.  In the course of the brief story (though, at nine pages, it's one of Davis's longer ones), some of the pianist's characteristics are mentioned, and the movement is from the elevated ("intelligent," "high standards," "articulate") to the ominous ("hypochondriac," "excessively careful of his hands," "was fond of a certain rather ugly female pop singer").  Also, there is this:

Glenn Gould did not have children.  He was not married.

The narrator is married and has a child.  There is nothing in the story to indicate that either is a source of much satisfaction.  The husband is barely in the story.  When they eat dinner, they sometimes have little to talk about, so she will tell him about something funny from the last episode.  Then, "I can see that he is ready to laugh even before I tell it, though so often, in the case of other subjects, he is not terribly interested in what I say to him, especially when he sees that I am becoming enthusiastic."

The sentence proceeds, clause by clause, to that final one: especially when he sees that I am becoming enthusiastic.  That is all there is about the husband.  Her friend who tells her that Glenn Gould watches "Mary Tyler Moore" is Mitch but the husband is not named.  One of the things the narrator mentions about Glenn Gould is that he "was able to be selfish without hurting anyone."  To the narrator, it seems like a trait worth mentioning.

Freedom: a short review

Finished Franzen's Freedom.  Didn't want it to end, but it did, and I feel now like I thought I would--not like there's been a death in the family but tending in that direction.  Some people consider themselves too smart to fall for it but not me.

More than one reviewer has taken note of the part played in the novel by Tolstoy's War and Peace.  Patty reads it, partly to impress Walter but also because she enjoys it, especially the way in which the narrative seems to reflect aspects of her own life:  she's Natasha to Richard Katz's Anatol while Walter is Prince Andrei.  By these allusions Franzen I think calls attention to his high ambition, the effort to compose a sweeping chronicle of the United States in the years, roughly, 1978 to 2008, by telling the stories of two families, the Emersons and the Berglunds.  One aspect of this ambition is the geographic sprawl, from Minnesota's Twin Cities and the Iron Range towns to points distant and eastward: New York City, Westchester County, Georgetown, West Virginia, and Charlottesville, Virginia, home of the University of Virginia.  Franzen, master of the American scene, provides rich renderings of all these locales, their flora and fauna, from which locales (except for West Virginia and Hibbing, Minnesota) you might surmise that none of the principal characters is in foreclosure--and you'd be right.  In that way it might be argued that Freedom is not true to the American scene, but something similar could be said against War and Peace, and, anyway, toward the end of the novel, when Walter is living by a lake in a mostly hardscrabble region of northern Minnesota, his solitude is encroached upon by a new upscale subdivision whose residents, it is revealed, are not all paying their bills.

About those neighbors: they are studying Walter and Patty just as, at the very beginning, Walter-and-Patty were the objects of their neighbors' attention in their gentrified St. Paul neighborhood.  So we see the two of them first through other eyes, darkly, and then in the long and mostly satisfying middle sections, directly, before at the end they blur out in the eye of a different set of neighbors.  The desired effect, I believe, is to give the impression that one has come finally to the apt and necessary conclusion of a bulging epic.  Perhaps by the end, however, the memory of the parallel beginning is not distant enough for this effect to be fully realized.  I will finish where I began by saying that--excepting the sequences concerning Walter's work with the Cerulean Mountain Trust, which he finally renounces in a somewhat corny scene involving a speech he ad-libs before the right-wingers with whom he had made implausible (considering his intelligence) common cause--I wished the novel longer.

More Freedom

In Freedom, I've advanced to the section, about half-way through the novel, concerning Joey Berglund's freshman year at the University of Virginia.  I hope it doesn't seem perverse if I persist in my quirky attention to the novel's chronology and the fact-checking of small details, such as whether it is indeed possible that Joey's mother's college basketball games were played before the alternate possession rule eliminated almost all jump balls.

On page 251, Joey and his roommate are watching a World Series game on television.  We know that it is a few weeks past the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which occurred just as Joey was starting college.  The game, we are told, is between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees--check, those two teams were indeed the 2001 contestants.  The Diamondbacks, behind Randy Johnson's pitching, win the game 4-0--check, that was indeed the final score of Game 2, played on Sunday, October 28, in Phoenix, with Johnson the winning pitcher.  At the bottom of the  page, our omniscient narrator reports that "On Jonathan's TV, Derek Jeter lined out to second base, and the game was over"--check, that is how  the game ended, according to the batter-by-batter summary supplied at the above "Game 2" link. 

Even Homer nodded but it's hard to catch Franzen.  Maybe the characterization of Patty Berglund,  nee Emerson, is not all of a piece.  Here she is speaking with Joey on the telephone, Thanksgiving 2001:

"But you don't have any religion."

"Exactly my point.  That was one of the few things that my parents and I agreed on, bless their hearts.  That religion is stoopid.  Although apparently my sister now disagrees with me, which means that our record of disagreeing about absolutely everything is still unblemished."

"Which sister?"

"Your aunt Abigail.  She's apparently deep into the Kabbalah and rediscovering her Jewish roots, such as they are.  How do I know this, you ask?  Because we got a chain letter, or e-mail actually, from her, about the Kabbalah.  I thought it was pretty bad form, and so I actually e-mailed her back, to ask her please not to send me any more chain letters, and she e-mailed me back about her Journey."

"I don't even know what the Kabbalah is," Joey said.

"Oh, I'm sure she'd be happy to tell you all about it, if you ever want to be in touch with her.  It's very Important and Mystical--I think Madonna's into it, which tells you pretty much all you need to know right there."

"Madonna's Jewish?"

"Yah, Joey, hence her name."  His mother laughed at him.

All very enjoyable, like so much else in this long book, but, by this point in the narrative, the reader has gotten to know Patty pretty well, her flattened affect, for example, and how she is supposedly the stupidest person in her eccentric, flawed family of origin, and it therefore seems that some of the intelligence and wit displayed in the above conversation is on loan from Jonathan Franzen himself. 

Carping complaint, not even really a complaint, just something that occurred to me while I was reading along with great pleasure.  There are two Pattys.  One can't figure out that her drug-addled college friend does not really have leukemia and the other is the sophisticated author of the "autobiography," written at the suggestion of her therapist, which is included in the novel and displays throughout Franzen's own effortlessly elegant, but still conversational, prose style.

Netflix: Nurse Jackie

Edie Falco plays a tough, able, partly jaded emergency room nurse with a taste for Percocet, which she conceals by performing delicate operations on packets of artificial sweetener.  I think the show is supposed to be "realistic" but it really works, if it works, by taking everyone's conception of "emergency room nurse" and multiplying by 3.  Among the incongruities: How is it that the Falco character ever hooked up with the large hunk of milquetoast who is her husband?  She has one cell phone for him and another for her boyfriend, the hospital pharmacist, and I've said enough for you to guess what she sees in him. 

Our disc from Netflix for the second set of episodes was defective and I think we've decided just to skip ahead in our queue.  Still, almost everything else on TV is worse.  I love watching Falco, and Merritt Wever, as a nursing student, is a revelation, a word all professional reviewers work into their favorable reviews, along with luminous.

Kai Erikson and accidental slaughters

It's now been 65 years since the United States, on two out of four consecutive August mornings in 1945, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan, achieving in two instants a six-figure civilian body count and bringing World War II to an end.  I join Amy Davidson in linking to an op-ed, published August 5 in The New York Times, by the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe. He recalls how his mother, hearing of the hospitalization of a friend in Hiroshima, traveled there from their home on the island of Shikoku with a small care package.  On her return, she described for her son, the future novelist, what the friend had seen on the morning of August 6:

Moments before the atomic bomb was dropped, my mother’s friend happened to seek shelter from the bright summer sunlight in the shadow of a sturdy brick wall, and she watched from there as two children who had been playing out in the open were vaporized in the blink of an eye. “I just felt outraged,” she told my mother, weeping.

That the atomic bombings are still broadly supported by Americans is not a good advertisement for us.  But whom to blame for these horrific events?  I think the best analysis of the decision to use the atomic bomb is the essay, by the Yale social scientist Kai Erikson (who is the son of psychologist Erik Erikson), "Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters."  Erikson's view is that the "decision to drop" was not the result of rational analysis or moral choice but, rather, of bureaucratic momentum.  It was not possible, given all the small decisions already made along the way of developoment, that war-weary leaders would in the end decline to use this awesome new weapon.  The question of whether it is wise to take the last few steps cannot arise if the road already travelled is very far. 

Truman and his war council appear in this light not as monsters but as ordinary blokes.  It is I think a strong argument for disarmament.  We should be very afraid of what we might do without even really thinking about it, if we have the means.  (Alcoholics, if they are really recovering, do not keep liquor in the garage.)  Erikson took the title for his essay from a speech of Horatio's as Hamlet draws to its close:

And let me speak to th' yet unknowing world
How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook. . . .

Something like 200,000 people, hardly any of them soldiers, were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

Netflix: New in Town

Renee Zellweger, playing an ambitious corporate type, accepts a temporary assignment in small-town Minnesota, where she colors every polygon in a paint-by-number "romantic comedy."  This movie is woefully bad.  You long for the end of each scene, but when it arrives, the anticipated relief is soon drowned beneath a new stack of stale stupidities.

 

Netflix: "Food, Inc."

The forces of evil are arrayed unambiguously on one side, as in a Hollywood thriller, but now it's plausible, because the movie is a documentary and verisimilitude applies only to made-up stuff.  Moreoever, the villains are multinationals and anyone who goes to the grocery store is a victim.  The only sin is to bore and you aren't bored when contemplating depravity.

The food giants all turned down opportunities to make their case before filmmaker Robert Kenner's camera.  I have to admit, they're in a bad spot despite all the money.  When you take the Fifth, everyone naturally assumes you're guilty; but if you talk, Kenner might juxtapose your speech acts with footage from the killing floor at a big slaughterhouse, or the scene inside a corporate "chicken coop," and it's not exactly clear that you would not deserve it.

I eat meat and have always told myself that the animals do not have the kind of consciousness that permits knowledge of what's happening to them.  And is the food safety record of Goliath really as bad as the film suggests?  Nevertheless, many of the practices of the food giants are deplorable, it should not be against the law to criticize them, public policy should not help to make high fructose corn syrup more prevalent and affordable than fresh produce, and all of us need to be wiser consumers.  Shop around the periphery of the grocery store.  Read labels.  If the ingredients list is long and polysyllabic, don't buy the item.  Eat less but eat more fruits and vegetables.  Think about planting a vegetable garden or joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).  Overcome inertia by watching "Food, Inc."

Netflix: "Crazy Heart"

Exploits some tried-and-true crowd-pleasers: the suffering artist, the recovery movement, the plucky single mom with a very cute 4-year-old, the potential couple you want together but it might not happen--a pail full of schlock with a country-western sound track.  In one particularly absurd sequence, we are asked to put out of our minds the fact that you need not be a sodden country singer at the bottom of the well to lose track of a kid at the mall.

Jeff Bridges stumbles and mumbles his way to the Academy Award.  People of a certain age might say, Whatever.  I'm just saying it's not any good.

Netflix: "The Last Seduction"

Superman in reverse, it's the Bad Girl whose wiles and puissance are destined to prevail in the end. How bad is she?  Slow service in a saloon elicits her question, "Whose a girl gotta suck around here to get a drink?"  I'm glad I was watching with my wife, not my mom.

Linda Fiorentino is the femme fatale and she would have benefited from worthier competition.  The outcome is not in doubt.  Implausible as Superman, it's a confection for those who say they hate confections.  Halliwell's Film Guide gives it three stars, and I loved it, too.

Netflix: "Word Wars"

The subtitle of this documentary is "Tiles and Tribulations on the Scrabble Circuit."  Would you have guessed that the greatest Scrabble players in the world are a little off?  This movie will persuade you that it's so.  I remember, when young, being perhaps too impressed by televised feats of incredible athleticism and then feeling let down when the hero, interviewed after the game, revealed himself to be weird and dopey.  For some reason, I thought the grace and prowess would extend into other areas, but of course the opposite is true: those who are the best at something tend to have ignored everything else.  These scrabblers reminded me of Grigory Perelman, the famously prickly and antisocial mathematician who solved the Poincare Conjecture.  His biographer has conjectured that he suffers from Asperger's syndrome, sometimes called "autism lite," and that the condition is associated with unusual mathematical ability.  If you read this review, by John Allen Paulos, and then watch the movie, I think you too will detect a certain family resemblance. 

Netflix: The Atheism Tapes

"The Screwtape Letters"; "The Atheism Tapes": a sly dig, maybe.  The presence in the title of the A-word is also significant, as the film is made of "extra material" collected by Jonathan Miller, the British polymath, while making the BBC program "Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief," which in America was renamed "A Brief History of Disbelief" in order to be less offensive to potential corporate underwriters.

The title is almost the only playful thing about it.  Jesus, though truly human, is never in the Gospels reported to have laughed, and neither it seems do his contemporary critics.  Perhaps this God-business is only for the serious.  Once or twice I smiled, as when Colin McGinn, discussing the so-called ontological proof of God's existence, said something like: "It is easier to be unpersuaded than to say exactly what is wrong."  I think he was paraphrasing Bertrand Russell.

There are six parts, one each for Miller's interviewees, who for the record are, besides philosopher McGinn, the physicist Steven Weinberg, playwright Arthur Miller, biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and, presumably for "balance," the British theologian Denys Turner, who called Dawkins a fundamentalist.  I'd say what else he said but none of it made enough sense to remember.  Jonathan Miller has some very colorful socks and an odd way of stretching his arms and playing with his fingers.

Here's a joke. A small town in a very remote location is populated by fundamentalist Christians who are afraid that, at the Second Coming, Jesus will not find them and they'll be left behind in the rapture.  So they build towers on the edges of town and hire some of the local beggars to sit atop them in shifts looking for Jesus to come again in all his glory, in which case they are to signal him to the town.  One day a traveller is passing by and sees a man sitting in the tower.  "What are you doing up there?" he calls.  The former beggar explains the whole thing.  "Well," says the traveller, "that's a helluva job.  How's the pay?"

"The work doesn't pay much," the beggar answers.  "But it's steady."

Netflix: Madmen, season 3

Though I don't necessarily hear from my legions of devoted readers, they must all be wondering about the recent absence of my inimitable reviews of the Netflix rentals screened at our house after the kids are in bed.  The explanation is that we have ceased watching movies so that we can watch episode after episode of Mad Men.  I gave my initial imprimatur here.  We are now well into season 3--in a recent episode Pete Campbell, after taking a sabbatical from bad behavior, performed a favor for the nanny in a neighboring apartment and then demanded repayment in sexual currency.  In the same episode, Betty Draper, having accompanied her husband on a business trip to Rome, rebuffed a young Italian at an outdoor bar with the line, "You are not a gentleman."  But he was only making inquiries, and the viewer is supposed to notice that, compared to Pete, he's a knight.  I think this is maybe what more fawning critics call "layered storytelling."

I love Mad Men but not unreservedly.  For example, the Draper's colored maid: I hate it when the camera lingers on her silently thinking decent, knowing thoughts while surrounded by the joyless philandering of the affluent white characters.  Faulkner pulled it off with Dilsey but the successors are all false and call to mind this word: patronizing.  One way to make a hit series is to be abundantly clear about who the good people are, so that, after some close calls, they can satisfyingly prevail at the end of every episode.  One thing I love about Mad Men is that it does not do this, there are no pure-good characters--except this damn maid.  I wish she'd break into the liquor cabinet.  Something! 

An eventful Sunday evening

On the night the House passed the healthcare reform bill, Amanda and I dropped the kids at gramma and grampa's and went to the show--The Blind Side, at the Riverview in south Minneapolis, where a ticket for a 7:00 show on Sunday evening is still $3.00.  If you stayed home and force fed yourself corn syrup for the show's running time, you'd be well past three bucks of corn syrup, so it is really quite a good deal.

What did I miss?  I don't doubt George Packer, who called the Democrats' speeches uninspiring and the Republicans'--paraphrasing lightly--rabid, fanatical, crazed, foamy.  What has become of my parents' G.O.P.?  Newt Gingrich tweets that healthcare reform will ruin the Dems for the next forty years, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Yes, what a shameful disaster that was!  No one has ever understood what President Johnson could have been thinking.  Do the Republicans have an argument that does not amount to offering political advice to the other party--the advice being, essentially, not to repeat their finest achievements?   I pick on Gingrich because he has a reputation for being a big thinker of deep thoughts, don't ask me why.  It would hardly be more ridiculous if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner were put forward as the Big Brains of the Republican party. 

Here is a question: who, from the front ranks of the Republican party, deserves to be taken seriously?  John McCain, on the morning after the vote, said that Democrats have "poisoned the well" and will get no cooperation from the Republicans.  What does that even mean?   They got no cooperation on healthcare, passed it anyway.  How's the strategy working, Senator?

These guys seem eager to sweep to power on the shirttails of the Democrats' achievement.  Why?  So that they can invade Iran and rerun the economy into the ground?  The Democrats' occasional victories have the effect of dividing the Republicans' failure into periods.

Over at Power Line, John Hinderaker directs readers to a site where they can pledge to support only candidates who will vote to repeal "Obamacare."  But Obama will still be president, and Republicans will not have 67 senators even if they win every single senate race, which they won't.  Being completely divorced from reality is what makes him such an apt spokesman for conservatism, American-style. 

Netflix: A Serious Man

The Book of Job translated to the suburbs of the Twin Cities in the Age of Eisenhower.  It's written and directed by the Coen brothers, and one of the adoring professionals has said that "A Serious Man" is the kind of movie you make after winning an Academy Award.  It was meant as a compliment,  but dropping the obligation to entertain is not in my view something to be celebrated.

I would probably agree with all the professional critics if only it were possible to get past how boring it is. 

Netflix: Into Temptation

It was the local angle that landed this independent film in our Netflix queue: it's set and filmed in Minneapolis, and the writer and director, Patrick Coyle, is a neighbor whose kids catch the school bus at the same corner as ours.  I've never met him, but he and Amanda have exchanged pleasantries, and she popped out of her seat on the sofa when, in one scene, she saw his girls in the background.

The story concerns a young priest who works crossword puzzles while hearing confessions.  You know he's cool because, in addition to being bored by the sins of his congregants, he rides a bicycle, drinks beer, is sympathetic toward homosexuals, and not real sure of his vocation.  When a hooker confesses that she is going to kill herself on her birthday, he puts down the puzzle and sets out to find her outside the booth--an exercise that involves, for example, a night-time bike ride to Minneapolis's famous red-light district.  (There isn't one, but Mr. Coyle does his best to make Our Fair City look sinister.)  If I told you the priest has a love interest, a former girlfriend who's back in town after a divorce, you'd probably underestimate this movie, which seems (if an outsider may claim to detect it) suffused with religious feeling.  Recommended.

Netflix: Funny People

Funny and sweet, some will say, and I will not contradict them, although those of a certain sensibility might say that all the penis jokes detract somewhat from the sweetness.  It's sort of long (almost 2.5 hours), and on some occasions, like the scenes involving speech acts by young children--the actual daughters of writer and director Judd Apatow and his wife, Leslie Mann, who plays Adam Sandler's love interest--you might feel a little too aware of the sweetness.  As long as I'm finding fault, let me add that, notwithstanding considerable raunchiness, the movie suffers from a conventional and sentimental conception of what makes a good life: it holds out as an ideal something more like a dyspeptic Hollywood billionaire's daydream of what he should have tried for than what he actually should have tried for. 

Nevertheless, nevertheless: highly recommended.

Netflix: The Verdict

A redemption story concerning an alcholic, ambulance-chasing lawyer, played by Paul Newman, who, just when it looks as if he's mucked up his last chance, gets to the bottom of a medical malpractice case and produces a surprise witness whose testimony exposes the evil doctor.  The witness's testimony is thrown out, but the jury heard it, and returns the verdict the audience wants.  Wouldn't it be pretty if life were like that?

There are layers of implausibility.  For example, a doctor who will testify for Newman's side goes missing on the eve of the trial.  He had waxed eloquent on the incompetence of his colleagues before the defense paid him off.  That he is venal apparently is supposed to obscure the hole in David Mamet's script.  It's not till the end of the show, when Newman's witness gives dramatic testimony, that the truth comes out.  The disappearing expert witness is supposed to be a crushing blow to Newman's chances but there really was nothing for him to testify about.  The only person who could help Newman is the one he manages to turn out at the end.  Excepting the worldliness of Archdiocesan officials--it's a Catholic hospital that bungled the surgery--nothing about the movie makes much sense.  Sidney Lumet directs.

Netflix: Mad Men

We're in the middle of season two.  I don't doubt that those were the styles and decors, but could people really drink that much and remain standing?  Be that promiscuous and remain married?  That pregnant and not know it?

Maybe the critical term is "magical realism."

Oh, that Don Draper, he doesn't say much, so you know he is deep, always staring out at nothing as the camera studies him from behind.  So many thoughts, so few words.  If I were him, pensively surveying the scene through a haze of alcohol and cigarette smoke, the words in my thought bubble would be: "My wife is really hot!"  But, no, he is thinking of calling Kodak's circular picture holder "the carousel." 

What a genius!  And a fine series, too.  Don't watch if you recently quit smoking.

Right again, mother

My mother told me as a boy,

If you'd think about other people once in awhile, maybe your own problems wouldn't seem so bad. 

Yes.

The New Yorker, Dec. 21 & 28, 2009

The current New Yorker is one that the circulation deparment should wish into your mailbox right before your subscription runs out--George Packer on Obama's Oslo speech, a story by Helen Simpson, Louis Menand on Arthur Koestler, and Joan Acocella on Chaucer.  Something quick about each.

I have not read the speech Obama delivered that day.  I expect Packer quotes the parts he found particularly strong but here is one sentence that makes it into his column that I wish had not made it into the speech: "For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world."  Does the president imagine that some of his auditors disagree?  Is it his view that critics of his Afghanistan policy think evil does not exist in the world?  His conception of ambiguity may be over-simple.

The story by Helen Simpson, called "Diary of an Interesting Year," is hard to read.  There has been a global disaster and the diary entries mercilessly describe a descent into a hell where life is nasty, brutish, solitary, and, the female diarist must think, not short enough.  It isn't the worst, so long as the she can say, "This is the worst."

Koestler was the reason Cyril Connolly told Edmund Wilson, "Like everyone who talks of ethics all day long, one could not trust him half an hour with one's wife."  Also, he (Koestler) believed in paranormal phenomena and bequeathed 400,000 pounds to the University of Edinburgh that it might establish in its psychology department the Koestler Parapsychological Unit, which, Menand reports, is currently studying "alleged poltergeist experiences."  I'm with Menand about the title--Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic--of the new biography, by Michael Scammell, that is the subject of his article: the word "skeptic" does not belong.  The peculiar enthusiasms and blind spots of geniuses must be an interesting topic.

I studied Chaucer at the University of Minnesota with Andrew MacLeish.  We had to learn by heart passages from The Canterbury Tales and then, at an interview, recite for him in Middle English one of the assigned passages, we knew not which till he told us at the interview.  It happened that my interview was in the afternoon of the morning on which we had all had to turn in a final paper that was to be a big part of our course grade.  MacLeish gave it back to me at the interview.  It looked just as it had when I turned it in a few hours earlier except now, at the end, was written: "Your paper is sensible though not particularly profound. B."  I always wondered how many profound papers he read that day.  Anyway, Acocella will make you want to read The Canterbury Tales.  She suggests the interlinear translation of Vincent Hopper but the Middle English is really not that incomprehensible, honest.  MacLeish required us to buy Robert Pratt's edition, which glosses in the right-hand margin the least familiar looking words.  The tale of the Pardoner is really one of the best things in English literature.

Sunday morning politicking

In my bachelor days, I always watched the Sunday morning news talk shows.  This morning, scanning the newspaper over the blare of Sponge Bob Square Pants, I saw a short item, "TV News Shows," detailing which guests would be on what shows, and thought: Boy, am I glad those days are gone.  What was I thinking?  I can hear them without hearing them, their lines so palpably memorized.  Holy Joe Lieberman was on "Face the Nation," no doubt pronouncing platitudes inflected with piety and self-importance.  Not that he's that much worse than most of the rest of them.  The day's other guests on "Face the Nation" were Sens. Rockefeller, Nelson, and McConnell.  McConnell, in particular, is nauseating--though the formerly unknown Nelson, who seems to be enjoying all the attention lavished on him as a "swing vote" on health care, isn't far behind. 

Netflix: Chinatown

Last night's home entertainment was not actually a Netflix rental.  That would have have been the third episode in the first season of Mad Men, but we couldn't play the disc, so we substituted my personally owned videocassette of Chinatown: Los Angeles in the 1930s, not Madison Avenue in the 1960s.  I'd forgotten Gittes's putdown of the crooked cop Mulvihill, who has had his water service cut off.

How did you know?  You don't drink it.  You don't bathe in it.  Did they send you a letter?  Oh, but then you'd have to know how to read.

You have to supply the Nicholsonian inflection, the way he hangs on to the vowel sound in "read," drawing it out.

The ending is not focus-group tested.  "He owns the police!"  Then some shots and the long blare of the horn.  So it's not "just Chinatown"; the corruption is pervasive.  Roman Polanski has a cameo and directs.  You don't have to be a nice man to make a great movie.

Obama at West Point

Being married with children, I was not in front of the tv last night watching the president.  But I agree with Amy Davidson:  if the purpose of the policy is to have fewer of our soldiers in Afghanistan by 2011,  wouldn't it be simpler to reduce troop levels rather than first sending 30,000 more so that you can then throw the ball over the garage, bounce it off the roof and through the basket in the back yard?  Q: What are we doing there?  A: Beating a cat because we don't know what to do about the tiger in the next room.

(The cat is the Taliban in Afghanistan; the tiger, al-Qaeda in Pakistan.)

Let's pile on by calling attention to one of the president's goofiest supporters.  I don't mean Senator Imhofe, a convert as of last night, but Cornel West, the subject of this exercise in expert vituperation.  Satire: the pleasure is in watching a ripe target taking a hit.  Via Michael Tomasky. 

Netflix: John Adams, the conclusion

Arriving home last night from our Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Amanda's aunt and uncle, in picturesque rural Cologne, Minnesota, we got the kids into bed and then watched in our own bed the last installment in the seven-part HBO miniseries on John Adams.  My reaction to the first four parts is here.  The last episode, concerning Adams's life in retirement after Jefferson's victory in the presidential election of 1800, is death-suffused: first his daughter, Nabby, of metastatic breast cancer; then his wife, Abigail, of typhoid fever (though I gleaned the cause of death from Wikipedia, not the show); and, finally, Jefferson, more friendly correspondent than political rival in these last years, and Adams himself, both on the Fourth of July of 1826, the fiftieth anniversay of the Declaration of Independence.  Adams was 90; Jefferson, 83.  I think the longest-lived people of the period died at around the same age they do today, but we lose fewer along the way.

Amanda commented that back then everyone seems to have died so peacefully.  I reminded her of the scene, from one of the early episodes, wherein a naval patriot dies below deck during, or immediately after, a limb amputation performed without anesthetic.  The preparations for the mastectomy performed upon the Adams' daughter, also without anesthetic, are likewise shown to viewers--the straps to hold her in place and the brutishly common looking tools with which the procedure was to be performed.  The medical history is apparently accurate as it conforms with this grim report by Jim Olson, author of Bathsheba's Breast: Women, Cancer & History.  Nabby recovered from the surgery, but the cancer had not all been excised, and her painful death, about ten months after the operation, occurs off camera.  Abigail took to her bed with depression and it was the ex-president who cared for his dying daughter in her last days.  None of that is any part of the show, either.  On the other hand, Jefferson on his last day is shown lying propped up in bed while being fanned by a slave.  Sally Hemings is the third person in the room and it looks as if something could have happened were it not for the presence of the fellow with the fan. 

As biography and political history there are innumerable inaccuracies, but the series is interesting in ways I hadn't anticipated.  I've come to the end of this post without mentioning the Alien and Sedition Acts, which do not grab my attention in the same way as a woman having a diseased breast lopped off in an upstairs bedroom while biting down on a stick wrapped with cloth.

Netflix: John Adams

The HBO miniseries, based on David McCulluogh's 2001 biography, stars Paul Giamatti, as John Adams, and Laura Linney as his wife, Abigail.  Amanda and I have now watched the first four (of seven) episodes and that means we have absorbed somewhere around 300 minutes of unrelieved solemnity.  No doubt lightheartedness will not accomplish a revolution but you might have thought that Abigail at least would take a day off from the heavy lifting.  In episode three Adams, in Paris to solicit French assistance, is appalled when, barging into Benjamin Franklin's quarters on some elevated matter, he discovers that electricity experiments are not the old man's lone avocation.  A little more of that, please.

The incident reminded me of the letter in which Franklin, in the course of advising a young friend to marry, sees fit also to lay out a Plan B involving older amours, who are to be preferred to their younger, fresher counterparts.  He enumerates the reasons; for example: 

5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part. The Face first grows lank and Wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower parts continuing to the last as plump as ever; so that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old one from a young one. And as in the Dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of Corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal and frequently superior; every Knack being by Practice capable by improvement.

The eighth, and last, is: "They are so grateful!"  Abigail would not approve.

 

Netflix: Taxi to the Dark Side

Filmmaker Alex Gibney seems to have taken something from Errol Morris--the montage of historical footage and interviews of people who aren't used to being on camera, the opium-den music--and used it to convict the Bush administration of lawlessness.  The most stunning effect of cinematic art occurs when, the "dark side" of the title having been exposed, two of our finest, dressed all in crisp whites, are shown raising the flag with all requisite precision and ritual.  It might put you in mind of "whitewash," a necessary concept to explain how MPs could go to jail while Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, et al, give speeches, write memoirs, teach law students, etc.

It might also put you in mind of the chapter on the whiteness of the whale.  Probably deserves its Oscar for best documentary.

Netflix: "Slumdog Millionaire"

A boy from the slums of Mumbai, India goes on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and wins the big prize.  Between successive correct answers, the movie shows, in a series of flashbacks that tell the story of his life, how exactly he came to know the answer to that particular question.  Clever, but the reason it won an Oscar for Best Picture is that all the suffering and brutality cannot defeat an indomitable spirit, et cetera. 

There is one sense in which the plot seems realistic.  He gets the girl only after he gets the big money.

Netflix: "Five Easy Pieces"

The title character, played by Jack Nicholson, is named Robert Eroica Dupea.  The five easy pieces of the title refer to piano compositions he played as a boy.  Music lessons together with a middle name that refers to Beethoven's Third Symphony might make you wonder about the household of origin.  But Dupea has left it behind.  He has a dirty job in an oil field and lives with his girlfriend.  He drinks, bowls, cheats on the girlfriend, and watches television in the trailer home of his friend.  The camera does not deprive you of views of freeways, landscapes of parking lots and roadside motels, and the insides of cheap diners.  That is pretty much the first half.

The second half starts when Dupea learns that his father is very ill.  He travels back to the household of origin and finds that his mute dying father is attended to by a laconic weightlifter who is bedding his rather homely sister.  Meanwhile a brother, a violinist, has "sprained his neck" and wears a goofy-looking brace that nevertheless has not prevented him from becoming the lover of an attractive hippie who has settled into the household, appropriately located on an island.  They all work on their music and occasionally an intellectual drops by to hold forth on some topic.  Dupea tries to persuade the hippie girl to switch brothers, succeeds a little, then fails.  He tries to talk with his mute father but the old man is too far gone.  Dupea had picked up some hitchhiking gargoyles along the way but were they any crazier than these characters?

The organization of the movie invites you to compare the world Dupea rejected to the one he found with the motels and parking lots and freeways and oil fields.  His own vote seems to be thumbs down on both.  On the way back home, he stops for gas, and the girlfriend walks off to the diner next to the station for a coffee.  Dupea studies himself in the mirror of the station's men's room.  When he comes out, a truck hauling timber has pulled in.  The camera only shows, and from a distance, the conversation in which the necessary agreements are made, then, as Dupea takes his seat beside the  driver, pulls away even farther as the truck moves out into the highway and turns the opposite direction from which Dupea had been going in the car with his girlfriend.  The camera continues to dwell on the crumby little gas station after the truck has disappeared and you can only hear the sound of its changing gears.  The end.

With Karen Black, as Dupea's girlfriend, and everyone will recognize Sally Struthers.  Bob Rafelson directs.  The scene in the diner is so famous that it seems to have stopped people from realizing that "Five Easy Pieces" is one of the very best American pictures.