Wax Banks

Michael Clayton, briefly.

[Spoilers, pal.]

I disliked Erin Brockovich; it was 'rousing' in a dull-witted way, with the outcome never in doubt and the characters warmed-over artifacts of some bygone decade (that's not a compliment). Brockovich is a 'women's picture,' all about weepy sympathy and identification with the buxom heroine, more specifically sympathy for her sympathy, and the audience is supposed to be moved by the depth of her concern - all very Christian ('He did this all for you'). I saw it on a date with a Julia Roberts lover and spent half the running time wishing we were watching something nastier, a less simplistic, Manichean film. That movie's protagonist has only a single flaw: she works so hard to save everyone, to love everyone, that she almost hurts the people around her, full stop. (Luckily they're also stalwart and true, and stick around to share her love as the credits roll.)

In short: a saccharine nightmare with decolletage. (Its strong point, Roberts's complex relationship with Aaron Eckhart, is the one reason to stick around once you've figured out what sort of movie you're watching.)

Michael Clayton is in some ways the 'men's picture' analogue of that rabble-rouser: George Clooney's titular 'fixer' takes care of his crazy buddy, looks after his son for his ex-wife, plays poker, exudes exactly zero sexual energy (maybe the beautiful man's greatest onscreen achievement), and fucks up the mostly-villain of the piece, Tilda Swinton's nervous corporate lawyer (and his buddy's doppelganger). It's good but not great, a movie in which everything is perfectly fine and all the actors do great work, and it's clearly a smart movie - but in the end it feels a lot like a genre exercise, its moral message (roughly: 'Don't sell out') clear as a bell under obfuscating layers of grime and grit. As the GF said over the very First-Time-Directorial closing shot: 'He's still going to hell, though.' And ultimately the 'complexity' of the film is just that straightforward: Clooney's character is Bad (or rather amoral and disaffected but with a heart of gold, of course), then his buddy is killed and so now he's Good, and at the end we cheer for him not because he's changed but because he's won. For a movie with so much characterological hand-wringing - really, he pulls over to look at three horses that remind him of the illustration in the novel? Really? - there isn't much complexity to it.

I know, I'm spoiled: Deadwood (which is at the interpersonal level all about 'living into' your condition of alienation/connection) and The Wire (which is so brutally frank about inescapable institutional compromise) have made it harder for me to enjoy telegraphed, foreshortened characterizations like Tony Gilroy's here. Which is too bad; it's not a bad movie at all, and it made me want to call out the writer rather than the director (they're the same guy - convenient). Actually the movie seemed to be insisting that the audience members, or at least those assholes inclined to badger their friends with movie-'critical' chatter, do just that...

Unlike Brockovich, Clayton is a very writerly film, ostentatiously so, sometimes irritatingly so: it opens with a great monologue that's nevertheless basically line-for-line Chayefsky, heads off into slow-moving family-background scenes to flesh out its Hiro Protagonist (ahem), follows a flashback/loop structure that smells a little of screenwriter Tony Gilroy's overwritten third Bourne film, and (most egregiously) works in a children's fantasy novel that echoes thematic and plot points. If you didn't know going in that it was the writer's first shot at directing, that he'd written the movie for himself and spent six years trying to sell it, you'd easily guess it from the snazzy, brisk, thuddingly 'clever' Act One.

I was totally enthralled by the sweeping gestures and dialogic oddities of Michael Clayton's first half and enjoyed its much more straightforward, procedural second half; it's a good movie all around, and Tony Gilroy seems to know what he's doing behind the camera. His choice of lead actor (he pursued Clooney for years, apparently) redounds to his credit. But I side with the critics who found it enjoyable ultimately as a genre exercise and diversion, rather than any deep inquiry into values. (Gilroy's original pitch, according to his director commentary, was 'a restaurant film about the kitchen' - a backroom-lawyering potboiler with a movie star role and no courtroom scenes. And hey, I flipped out for The Pelican Brief and The Firm same as you (in print, not onscreen, God help us all). But I'm guessing that Michael Clayton differed from John Grisham's dark devilish fantasies in its writer's intent: Gilroy didn't want to make a black-n-white parable about the costs of moral inattentiveness, he wanted to make a searching character study along those lines. If you ask me, he should've stuck to his original pitch: faster, nastier, creepier, a little more inside-baseball.

But then Gilroy's not a lawyer, and nothing about Michael Clayton suggests legal expertise or insight; if the central question, even at the mechanical level, is 'How did this man get to this point, and what does he do now that he knows what he knows?' then Clooney's character might on occasion have done even the most remotely lawyerly things, to ground his moral journey in something like a real world. The movie acts weathered and lived-in, but it's neither of those things, the actors' showy work notwithstanding. (Tom Wilkinson can do no wrong in my eyes, and those monologues are dynamite, but I got more out of his work as the creepy/loving scientist in the perfect Eternal Sunshine a few years ago.) The only demonstration of legal knowledge in the film comes when Wilkinson rattles off some bit of legalese about involuntary institutionalization deep inside Act Two; it coulda come from a test-prep book for the NYS bar exam. I'm a wannabe writer and even I know this: if you're writing a movie about shady 'legal "fixers,"' a 'backroom' look at lawyers and the law, and the only evidence of the characters' professional identities comes in the form of a fucking monologue halfway through the film, a zinger, then something is wrong with the world of your story.

Perhaps the problem is that there isn't one.

A lot of labour and even love went into Michael Clayton, and several Oscar nominations popped out. Maybe that's enough. Shit, what do I know? The scene with the horses was cool anyhow. Maybe that's enough. Well it was two hours I don't want back, and that's surely enough in this postlapsarian time of ours, Reader(s), so howdy-do to you and you.

Close reading is war!

Well look. A whole generation of kneejerk materialist lefties was brought up on/in an edifice of literary/cultural/textual theory that was quite happy to let authors cherry-pick details without context and spin 'interventions' out of them for purely political purposes, aping the manner of stylists like Derrida (one of the few critics capable, as I recall, of making Joyce seem utterly boring) and placing their own preoccupations - 'the logic of the gift' and so endlessly forth - at the center of their 'critical' practices. Much as I loved my Literary Theory class, much as it changed my own reading and writing for the better (it was a creative writing class spinning out from close, combative readings - ideal), the overall effect on the way a certain half-intellectual class speaks has been largely deleterious. We shouldn't be surprised when Our Favourite Blogger watches films or reads books and orients her/his entire 'critical' response around a single politically-disagreeable detail, ignoring context, failing to show generosity, lacking curiosity. We should be sad and disgusted and disappointed, and we should laugh at that person and refuse to take such criticism seriously, and pie-throwing or forcible application of electric shocks should be involved, yes, yes.

But not surprised.

Why oh why can't we have better pundit-prodigies?

I've long thought Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein - part of a group of mini-celeb bloggers in D.C. - were rather badly overrated, the Interpol and Vampire Weekend of blog-punditry. (Klein is closer to Interpol than Yglesias, as his irritating pomposity is always closer to the surface, while Yglesias, for all his faults, like Vampire Weekend has a self-effacing and ironic streak that makes his liteness less disappointing.) They're 'wonks,' which is to say they like to talk about specific policy and are largely 'pragmatists' (read: young, unearned cynics) where transformation and vision are concerned,; Klein is less the cynic and lets himself get swept up in windy rhetoric sometimes, never more than when John Edwards is involved, but both bloggers write about politics they way Yglesias writes about basketball: with a remarkable ability to make exciting topics seem lifeless and small. They embody unfulfilled promise: there's nothing revolutionary about Ivy-educated Jewish nerds entering the world of political punditry, and the fact that they do it online mightn't have been irrelevant, but it is in their cases (they're also magazine writers, unsurprisingly). Do they write well? Well enough - like smart undergrads, or jaded grad students. Do they write beautifully? In my years of reading them, I've never known either to write something I would consider beautiful, or even particularly elegant - in prose, in structure, or in thought.

I bring these guys up because this election cycle has utterly captivated me - it's the first election in which I've given a damn about primary results and so forth - yet it seems to have had no emotional effect on them. The bloodlessness of their campaign coverage, the nonchalance with which they talk about the ascension of two remarkable politicians (and Hillary Clinton), is unbelievable to me. Yglesias in his most common refrain talks about McCain as if he were literally nothing more than a knockoff sequel to his Boomer contemporary, George Bush, disregarding the awesome, essential differences between them - not least McCain's repeated demonstrations of iconoclasm and bravery, starting (yes, this really matters) at the Hanoi Hilton; Klein (in the above-linked post) kneels to kiss John Edwards's feet while dismissing any notion of Obama as a transformational candidate on the very grounds of his greatest promise, i.e. as a practitioner of a politics of recognition and reconciliation, particularly in outreach to marginalized Americans.

As 'wonks,' maybe Yglesias and Klein feel they need to maintain distance from the aspirational, transhistorical moral questions animating our changing culture (e.g. 'How can we be great?') and stay closer to the earth ('How can this policy be better?'). But I read their stuff, then head over to read the riskier writing of someone like Christopher Hitchens (there aren't actually that many people 'like Christopher Hitchens'), and all I can think is that these two young guys have never ever in their entire lives been told 'No,' never actually fought for anything, never risked anything in writing. The closest they've gotten to war - or even to high-stakes cultural politicking - is name-calling in the comment threads of lefty blogs.

They remind me of the worst of me, and of my generation, and when I see Klein's biography blurb on his page ('He's a frequent guest on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews' - even as he calls Matthews an empty suit on his frontpage this week) I can't help but think that an incrementally better pundit corps isn't really what the country and world need. They encounter political questions as topics for debate - as fodder for blog posts. Where's the empathy, the imaginative outreach? Where's the sense of a shared story? I won't ask 'Where's the courage' but will ask instead: Where's the reverence for courage?

It's telling that neither writer has ever (ever) displayed anything like an aesthetic sense on his blog; their discussions of movies, TV, and music are invariably as gutless as their political writing, like book reports from high-school résumé-builders. (Their knowing post-MTV hipster informality has none of the naughty jazz of their more literary peers.) It's that lack of passion, that disconnection from the emotions that fuel most people's political aspirations, that marks them as cut-rate writers. They don't capture American energy in their writing; they don't reach for it; they amble at sufficiency instead of straining for greatness.

Say what you want about the overwrought disingenuous prolonged-adolescent careerist [and frankly misandrist] Amanda Marcotte, forever rebelling against primordial wrongs - she's got stones, and gives over to the fire sometimes, and is caught up in something that's bigger than her own total monthly pageviews. Klein and Yglesias could take a note or two from her (but one or two will do).

The real legacy of George Bush?

Is it possible that the great contribution of George W. Bush to American culture will be that he's the man who got us all ready for a black president? Who else could have been so extraordinarily bad at his job, could have turned so readily from run of the mill venality to genuine evil in search of revenge (under the unfunnily ironic banner of 'freedom'), that Americans would accede to having a Negro run the Free World? Would a less grotesque president have soured the national attitude toward Washington so thoroughly that someone like Barack Obama - a sweet-talking Ivy Leaguer with a fire-breathing reactionary-lefty pastor and the middle name 'Hussein' - could run the show?

Is this George Bush's secret plan to improve race relations in the USA?

I jest.

Thursday TV: Office finale, first part of Lost finale.

As we walked over to Cyrus's house to watch Lost after a big boisterous group showing of The Office, I said to the GF [paraphrased], 'Here's what's gonna happen. Lost is gonna absolutely suck, it'll be all setup, I'll be totally unsatisfied with the cliffhanger, and I'll complain loudly about it even though I know what's gonna happen, because all I wanna do is talk about The Office and how extraordinary that episode was. I'm dying inside with how awesome that episode was.'

I was wrong. Lost was as good as it's been all year (the bar is lower for Lost, as for a mentally challenged child - any achievement seems great). In fact it was out'n'out riveting, compressing several episodes' worth of plot into 42 charged-up minutes. As usual you had your stupid bits; for once they were outweighed by concision and momentum.

All of which would be a bigger deal if The Office hadn't been a mould-breaker in its own right: an entire season's worth of plotlines closed out or dismissed entirely, a revelation every couple of minutes, a big Season Five story arc setup for all the major characters. The last few weeks have ranked up there with the best of the show's run - with the British Office in fact - and this episode paid it all off, careening between satisfying climaxes (that pre-credits tag! Damn!) and shocking anticlimaxes (Michael and the HR lady, and sweet Jesus Jim and Pam...). I was worried, at first, that Season Four would be disjointed, too random, too sentimental. In the end it was none of those things; indeed the finale was as strong a dramatic showcase (especially for Steve Carrell, maybe the best actor on TV right now) as anything Greg Daniels and company have written. The tight-lipped desperation of Season One was there, in slightly different form; the romantic sweep of Season Three was there, subverted. For my money Toby's farewell was better, all around, than 'Casino Night' (the Season Two finale, which of course ended with The Kiss).

It was - and it's been a long time since this could be said of a Thursday - just a great night of television all around. And I'm already looking forward to the next Lost, two weeks from now. What was the last time that could be said? Two years ago?

NARAL endorses Obama; various people go apeshit.

The announcement is here, and at the moment is followed by 1,984 extraordinary comments, most of the 'Shame on you, I'm no longer a NARAL supporter' variety. Near as I can tell, NARAL pissed off a nonnegligible portion of its membership/donor base with their announcement today (which was buried anyhow by the Edwards endorsement). The comments are remarkable but by no means inexplicable: they boil down to wish-fulfillment abruptly ended, and expose the nasty, often vengeful side of cultural feminist identification (vs. beliefs). It may be hard for these commenters to accept that the Hillary Clinton Self-Esteem Entitlement For All XX-Carriers will not in fact be disbursed this year, but what's even harder - what's prompting this vituperation, really - is the possibility that it was always going to be meaningless. That's the emerging media narrative, after all: Clinton's always been the cynic, the panderer, the old-fashioned politician, the relic of identitarian Boomer politics, and Obama's candidacy implicates her acolytes not only in the Clinton campaign's grotesquerie but in the state of politics these last years and decades.

NARAL's endorsement of Obama probably feels to some of these women (and men) like an assertion (a reminder?) that their mode of politicking is in the eyes of a younger generation part of the problem.

Whether or not such a charge is merited, I'm sure it hurts, and I'm sorry it's come to that. But the idea that a reproductive rights advocacy organization is obligated to support one presidential candidate because she has a vagina is as embarrassing as the notion that Group XYZ can only support a candidate who doesn't have one.

The cries of 'Judas!' are childish, shortsighted, and stupid. They reveal something ugly about us.

Asks husband's opinions regarding important decisions and purchases: 1 merit point.

Yikes.

I don't mind that the GF 'puts her cold feet on [BF] at night to warm them.' But I confess to an affinity for 'Never goes to bed angry, always makes up first,' which was a policy my mom and dad tried to enforce during my childhood. Huh: I wonder whether that plays into yesterday's post on nail-biting.

[Update: Read the Good Doc's comment. One good thing about blogging - one of few - is that I get to make manic gestures at complex topics, which occasionally prompt other people to speak from places of rather more wisdom and charity than I'm able to muster.]

Appalachia.

In the wake of the West Virginia result, this morning's must-read is Josh Marshall's dip into U.S. history here. He ought to be up on the subject; if memory serves, Revolutionary-era U.S. history was his PhD topic. From his post:

These regions were settled disproportionately by Scots-Irish immigrants who pushed into the hill country to the west in part because that's where the affordable land was but also because they wanted to get away from the more stratified and inegalitarian society of the east which was built by English settlers and their African slaves. Crucially, slavery never really took root in these areas. And this is why during the Civil War, Unionism (as in support for the federal union and opposition to the treason of secession) ran strong through the Appalachian upcountry, even into Deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi.

As I alluded to earlier, this was the origin of West Virginia, which was originally the westernmost part of Virginia. The anti-slavery, anti-slaveholding upcountry seceded from Virginia to remain in the Union after Virginia seceded from the Union. Each of these regions was fiercely anti-Slavery. And most ended up raising regiments that fought in the Union Army. But they were as anti-slave as they were anti-slavery, both of which they viewed as the lynchpins of the aristocratic and inegalitarian society they loathed. It was a society that was both more violent and more self-reliant.

This is history. But it shapes the region...

You could probably gloss this as 'Obama will have a hard time winning the white racist vote; what a surprise.' But the history is a good deal more interesting than the log line.

Nails.

As long as I can remember, I've pulled/picked/bitten my nails. Until recently my style involved picking, then biting - using the pitiful remnants of one nail (generally on a thumb or middle finger) to cut into another, then taking the now-broken sliver of dead nail and biting it off. I recognize that this is a disgusting habit from the biter's perspective as well as the observer's; what's under your fingernails is one of the vilest microbial stews on the body, and to trump nail-biting for pure grossness you'd have to go around licking the eyebrows of lepers, at the very least.

I've never used biting as a primary attack method until last week, because for the last 20 years, with only a single exception, my fingernails have never been long enough to be bitten directly. You need a lot of space to get your teeth in there and I've never allowed more than, say, a quarter-centimeter of white to remain visible at the ends of my nails.

Until last week.

A couple of weeks ago, the GF suggested a moratorium on nervous picking/biting habits. She pulls at her lower lip; I've got the same addiction, but I have an additional addiction to lip balm, apparently, so I'm unlikely to have anything to pick at on my lips. No, it's nails for me. (Note: I've never ever bitten my toenails. I find the idea vile, irrationally so. Only once in my life have I ever bitten at dead skin on my feet. Weirdly, that was last month. Is this a confession? I confess that it is.)

Well, I took her up on it, and here we are: as of this weekend my nails were longer than I can remember them being, ever. This is a big deal, emotionally and practically. I picked up a dime yesterday off a table using my nails, realizing only afterward that I'd been unable to do so for an entire generation; just now I flipped open my cell phone's power-adapter socket cover, and nearly wept: a task that literally used to take me fifteen to thirty seconds now took a fraction of a second, as it should, as it does for the average American. (Perhaps you see where this is going.) Think about that: a reasonably healthy twenty-nine-year-old fumbling at the plastic cover of his cell phone for half a minute.

* * *

One of my greatest fears is mental retardation.

Maybe that's a strange thing to say. Certainly it's a clumsy one. I don't know more polite language. It's not that I'm afraid of people with developmental disabilities; it's that I fear the idea of being trapped in a brain that doesn't fall in a normal ability range. This makes sense if you know me: I was forbidden from playing American football as a kid (a game in which I had only a passing interest, but every able-bodied kid in my middle/high school played it) because, to slightly paraphrase my parents, my brain is the only thing that's going to get me ahead in this world. A direct quote: 'You're sure not going to get by on your looks.' (I actually appreciated hearing that from my Dad, and I don't disagree, though I recognize that it's somewhat callous.) American football posed too great a danger of accident, and I was a pretty delicate kid in grade school, and the naked, simpleminded aggression of football would perhaps have altered my personality in ways my parents (and I?) might have had trouble accepting.

I was also forbidden from going to parties where drinking would go on. After a while, I had no interest in going, and if that shaded on occasion into general misanthropy, the benefits (I read, wrote, drew, sang, and played a lot back then, while gaining a pretty solid cinematic education on the side) hopefully outweighed the costs (I never learned what I had in common with the kids in my high school; I never learned how to balance social life and school). You trade one sort of growth for another - though that's also the theory behind foot-binding, isn't it? But this was nothing close to that.

In any case, I clung and continue to cling to the message that my identity is my intellect. That's maybe why I take so strongly to this medium, but don't actually enjoy commenting on blogs (and why I need/forget to apologise over and over for not responding to comments from Em and Sherv and others). And to an extent, that's why I've resisted ever smoking marijuana: by all appearances it makes people temporarily stupid, relaxed where vigilance is called for. If I get glaucoma I'll be the first to fill a prescription for weed, but in the meantime, my paranoia about limited faculties outweighs my interest in that form of externalization/relaxation. I would rather climb up to the sense that Things Are Beautiful And Everything Is Connected. (Wasn't until age 27 that I relented and took an illegal substance for the first and only time.) That's maybe not a terribly enlightened stance, nor brave, nor inquisitive, but it means standing on principle and that's one thought-shape I can hide behind.

Movies and books about the 'mentally challenged' (what a strange phrase) drive me insane with grief and fear. But it's not just disability that scares me, it's difference that I perceive (perhaps wrongly) as damaging limitation: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was a harrowing horror story to me, its charm outweighed by its desperate sadness; Forrest Gump's final scenes ('Is he...like me?') scarred me; Albert's final scene in The Corrections (as he succumbs to Parkinson's Disease) frightened and saddened me so much that I tear up just remembering it. I can't watch Rain Man again; all I can remember of it is the scene with the smoke alarm going off. It hurt me as much as it hurt the autistic character onscreen.

Part of the problem here is that a narcissistic solipsist - i.e. one who sees the inside of his skull as the scope of the world, and is convinced of his own grandness - tends to see the world as constantly crushing in on him. How could it not? If only my skull were big enough for my mind, that sort of thing. (When I was a child I read Harlan Ellison's short story 'The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore,' from which came a line I was fond of quoting to friends and strangers up through high school: 'I am an unlimited man sadly living in a limited world.' The story ran in OMNI magazine, to which I got a subscription as a gift in elementary school. Some of my fondest childhood memories involve reading weird sci-fi in those pages.) Gives you a mix of self-pity and self-hatred to go with your self-love. As a smart guy not: 'not exactly the cheery crackling hearth of psychophilosophical orientations.'

But part of the problem is that I'm often short of sympathy but I seem to be afflicted with paralyzing empathy, in short bursts perhaps but inescapable nonetheless. (I'm not trying to pay myself unearned compliments here; I know that I prize 'empathy' as an aesthetic characteristic over 'sympathy,' but that isn't meant to bear on this.) Empathy - particularly for those who are prisoner to their feelings, which seem enormous, and unable to articulate them in ways that Everybody Else will understand. That's not just the 'I'm a sucker for children' evolutionary mechanism either; for whatever reason, I watch or read stories about people with Down's Syndrome or Parkinson's Disease or Alzheimer's or (Christ almighty) quadriplegia, and I die slowly inside. I don't know why I'd know that feeling, but I vibrate to it. It tears at me.

* * *

I went twice to the National Spelling Bee in middle school - 7th and 8th grade. It's a very arbitrary thing and I take no great pride in it, but it wasn't nothing - I felt so free in Washington, even under the ridiculous pressure of the competition, and I loved being around nerdy kids. (The next thing that reminded me of it was a trip to Johns Hopkins for the summer after sophomore year in high school.) I thought of it because of my fingernails: my younger brother got angry, back then, because my mom excused my nail-pulling to my dad as 'nerves because of the Spelling Bee.' For weeks I skated by on that. Otherwise my dad would have been on my back about it; he found it an 'untidy' habit. He's always been attuned to small matters of personal grooming and presentation - but then one would expect a poor kid from the north of England, having worked in high-class service jobs for a long time before making a living (back then) cleaning the homes of nouveau riche suburban boors, to be status-conscious to a fault. And it may well have been. A fault, I mean. Maybe not just that though.

I'm pulling them now, you know. Not like I used to; it's new and scary. Too much skin, too much white at the tips, it'll break, I don't want it to break. Just a tiiiiny bit, just off the top. Just to smooth the edges. Just to even them out. Just to correct for pulling too much from one side before. Just a tiny bit more. I can get away with a tiny bit more.

* * *

My dad was so proud of my fingernails when we met in Chicago this weekend. He said so. 'That's wonderful, son. It's a hard thing to do, you know,' he said. I didn't expect him to put it in those terms and I was glad to have made him happy. I wonder if perhaps he never cared one way or the other about my nails themselves - if, maybe, he had wanted me to achieve victory over some aspect of myself. Maybe he never knew how to teach me not to damage my own body in that way; such a small thing but I can see why it would hurt him (more than me). Maybe he never figured out a way to let me know what it meant to him - never had a language in which to speak to his son about something so small.

I remember him saying to my brother and me that if he ever ended up in the hospital on life support, reliant on machines to live, that we should unplug him immediately and not dawdle or dwell. Just thinking of him in that state - trapped, mind and body unable to find one another - scares and saddens me. But if you took so much as a step toward the machine without me there I'd kill you barehanded and no mistake.

I write those words and it isn't until after I've picked at my right middle fingernail that I realize what I'm doing. I think about it in emotional shorthand, of course, rather than actual words, but what passes through my head comes down to something like this: There's plenty of nail left. A little pull won't hurt. It's not like it won't grow back.

I think of how disappointed she'd be, how proud he was. It seems not worth it to keep picking my nails, so I stop, for the moment. I'm amazed at my capacity for self-pity and hopeful about my other capacities. And scared as I am of empathy, I desperately wish to find more of it. I've unplugged the phone and plugged it back in four or five times today; that's maybe two minutes of my life I've gotten back. So simple a thing.

In two minutes I could demolish these nails. You have no idea how good it would feel. I can not even begin to communicate to you how much I would enjoy it, the depth of the disgust I would feel.

I think of all this, and write it, and every once in a while catch myself picking at a tough thumbnail, or the too-thick pinky nail, or the irritatingly rough middle nail on my right hand, which is visibly shorter now than it was when I began writing. For whatever reason my right thumbnail grows much more slowly than my left, and the difference infuriates me. I walk around with that feeling rattling inside my head. My hands always hurt. I clench my jaw, waking and sleeping. Crack my neck compulsively, my knuckles. Nostrils flared.

I am so, so very lucky to be as free as I am. Maybe I'll walk upstairs and find the nail clippers and trim them. I can't remember ever doing so. I write those sentences, look up at the window. My right hand goes to my left pinky fingernail, and I remember to stop, no harm done. As someone once said: My mind's got a mind of its own. But I'm here too, and she called a moratorium, which might in the end be enough, or at least the beginning of enough.

So I stop, for the moment.

Wish you well, Reader(s).

One sentence: 3:10 to Yuma.

I loved everything about this movie and would see it again in a heartbeat.

Yep.

Taking down Fox News? Is everyone here very stoned?

Matt Stoller:

The Fox News situation, where Obama went on Fox News and mismanaged communications, drew criticism from Moveon because taking down Fox News has been a key strategic goal of that organization; nevertheless, the group supported him because of overwhelming adulation from their membership.

If anyone at MoveOn thinks that that organization can 'take down' Fox News, they're even more fucked up than I thought. And if Stoller takes this 'strategic goal' seriously, he's an idiot. Stoller describes his political activity as 'partisan hard edged combat,' which makes me think he should (1) ask Markos what actual combat is like, and (2) grow up. 'Mismanaged communications'? By which Stoller means we're supposed to give a damn that someone in Obama's campaign said he would 'take on' Fox News, and we're supposed to be disappointed that Obama didn't pour cayenne pepper on Chris Wallace's bare scrotum. Don't know about Stoller but I, for one, have already had this monologue, thanks.

Matt Stoller is resentful, and he's not stupid. Let's not mistake his posture for wisdom.

Prog-blog.

[Aah, hell. You can get away with reading just the quote and the short second paragraph following it. The rest isn't up to snuff.]

In the 'Left' blogosphere, Ezra Klein is rated more accurately than Matthew Yglesias (neither is an intellectual heavyweight but Klein seems to be the more serious of the two). But I'm reminded periodically that one of the major weak spots in poli-blog discourse, leftish and rightesque, is the pressure against any kind of serious engagement with full-blown ideas (rather than rhetoric/talking points) from one's ideological opposites, and it affects him too. The 'wisest' liberals should have things to say to the wisest conservatives, and vice versa; it ain't necessarily so.

Klein wrote on Monday:

Clint asks, "I'd love to have a summary of who you think of as the 'Ezra Klein' of conservative bloggers. Or maybe your top 5, since conservative means many things."

This is a tricky question to get into, because folks get all sorts of pissed off when you approvingly link to writers you disagree with, and because, as Clint says, conservative means many things. In particular, I worry that I don't have any standard issue Republicans. [... my emphasis --wa.]

Predictably, Klein's commenters get their tight whites in a bunch over his mention of Megan McArdle (who, in fairness, really doesn't know her ass from her elbow, near as I can tell). A lot of that is the usual young-blogger resentment, mixed with 'conservative chicks are so horrifying' feelings, blended with the tendency to go after low-hanging fruit (she's an 'economics blogger' with an MBA). And unsurprisingly, his commenters have few alternative suggestions to make - Larison, Drezner, a couple grudging mentions of Sullivan, etc. Basically, his commenters (a small fraction of his readership) have no interest in the arguments of Klein's opposite numbers in Right Blogistan.

Must it be said? That's a problem. Even if Klein is straightforwardly describing the feedback he gets, rather than justifying his own lack of engagement, it's a scary thing he's saying. If you can't approvingly cite anyone but your ideological fellow-travelers, you're not doing serious intellectual work; you're doing PR.

Many, many, many 'Left' bloggers write as if there's no such thing as a good conservative idea (or ideal). Disgust with Republican politicians is reasonable; their organization is corrupt and, in many cases, flat-out evil, and the national GOP is complicit in various war crimes including torture, so it's sometimes OK to dismiss Republican maneuvers at first glance. And we might note that disgust with Democratic politicians is equally justified, with a minute of Bonus Hate for their absolute lack of testicular fortitude. But it astounds me that - in a year when the presumptive Dem nominee, an African-American Harvard grad, has more cross-party appeal since any politician since Reagan and is renowned for his ability to speak to conservatives - the 'thought leaders' who support him show no interest in extending the same basic courtesy, in finding common cause and joining wider discussion. No wonder our bloggers have been so obsessed with politicians who 'pander to the base': that's the basic model for blog audience-building among our young up'n'comers.

Crowded House: Somerville Theater.

Crowded House play at the Somerville Theater tonight (Tuesday)! If you're in town, c'mon down to the show - against all laws of God and man, tickets are still available. Drop a line if you go, perhaps whiskeys could be tipped at the Burren or something?

Themes, glorious themes.

'It is possible to locate certain themes in artwork XYZ' is not meaningful criticism (it's a middle school book report). Similarly, 'This art raises questions' isn't really much of a compliment; 'problematize' isn't the most ambitious thing you can do to a concept or object.

I mention this in the context of an interview with JJ Abrams, where he's complimented on Lost's way of 'tackling philosophical issues about fate and free will and science vs. religion.' For the thousandth time: Lost hasn't 'tackled' any issues of any depth at all! There's a difference between lip service - mere reference - and any kind of exploration. The Wire 'tackles issues.' Lost gussies up its pulp boilerplate (twists as ends in themselves) with superficial hand-waving at concepts like 'free will.'

So, please, if you think things like this interviewer seems to think, please please explain to me: What did Season Two of Lost, which centered around the button-pushing experiment in the hatch (the most didactic presentation of a 'moral quandary' imaginable), actually say about free will or science versus religion? If you're a TV critic, paid or otherwise, who apologizes for this show by making reference to its 'philosophical' content, can you outline even a single argument or beyond-grade-school-level evocation that the series makes? Because I don't see it. I don't see anything in there but pulp, I don't think there's ever been anything in there but pulp, I don't think the show has ever asked a serious question about anything at all, and I don't think the show's apologists can actually locate a single exchange or consideration of ideas on Lost that rises to the level of, say, the absolute worst episode of The Sopranos. (Which, for those who care, is apparently 'Columbus Day' by common consent.)

May as well say: the weakness of the show starts from the irresponsibility of the characterization: open-ended narratives and unsolved mysteries would be fine if the characters were complex enough to justify ambiguity. They're simply not; the 'complex' characters are incoherent, the 'strong' ones are thick-headed fools. (Locke is a mess, Jack is a cartoon, and so forth.)

I have yet to see a convincing argument that Lost is about anything at all beyond its own velocity and melodrama. Beyond its novel structural conceits, I think history won't have many nice things to say about it. So where's the best counterargument? Where's the best criticism of this show, seriously? Is there any consistency or integrity to it at all? And if not, can we admit that it's always been a mindless pleasure at best?