This is Orson Welles's masterpiece, a virtuoso performance of sound and video editing that co-opts the documentary but is not one. It is the rare postmodern text that's laugh out loud funny, steeped in the relativism of the post war period but not held hostage by it. He appears as himself, sheared of doubts and humanity, in full possession and knowledge of his genius, but he is not the subject (excuse my language) of the film. It's a "film about trickery, fraud and lies," and about two great exponents of those arts, Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. The film is not much watched by people from any generation, met with cold critical reception on release, how can it be Welles's masterpiece? But it is, and is neglected due to its translation from the dross and palaver of our late capitalist society in which relativism extends mainly to the comparison of ledgers, a number of hard, unpleasant truths about meaning, about value, and about our modern oracles, the experts. Or as Welles says of art (or anything): "How is it valued? The value depends on opinion. Opinion depends on the expert. A faker like Elmyr makes fools of the experts, so who's the expert? Who's the faker?"
The ferret goes in your pants. Your pants are cinched to prevent its escape. Then you stand there while a scared rodent scratches, bites, and generally freaks the fuck out in the vicinity of your manly-bits. He who endures the longest wins. There you have the “sport” of ferret-legging, a Yorkshire coalminer practice now revived at the Richmond, VA Celtic Festival. While I cannot speak for the rest of the Plasma Pool team, I have not personally experienced the joy of ferret legging – nor do I have any desire to do so in the future. But what should be Liked about this particular Stuff is not corporeal, but rather its statement about the competitive nature of man such that he would trap a ferret in his pants for over five hours for no reward but the knowledge that he did what no other man could do. There exists in each of us a compulsion to strive for greatness, and in the course of this pursuit we are capable of unimaginable sacrifice in the name of achievement. Today humanity faces new and difficult challenges, but what drives these semi-sane “athletes” is the same that drives those in more noble fields to cure diseases, create art, and improve humanity in countless other ways. So, thank you ferret-leggers. Just keep that animal away from my junk. -- Donny Bridges
Without getting into any kind of commentary about the trial itself or its place in pop culture memory, this video of the OJ Simpson verdict is stunning. Pay attention to 1:24, 2:10, 3:30, 3:59. The camera pans over a near-complete spectrum of emotions, almost oblivious to the murmur of the verdict while the faces hang on to every word. The calm voice at the end advises to "expect the worst." For me, the bizarre essence of the clip is that some idea of "justice" is located somewhere in the physical and conceptual space between the rows of silent faces and the implied source of the unseen voices. The mass of bodies tenses and contorts as an articulation of the disembodied speech of the justice system. I am reluctant to give a reading of all this beyond this cursory description, but one final thing to consider is that our detached gaze is nearly embedded in the perspective of the invisible jury, who sits at the center of the verdict. -- Scott Coomes
Apr 29, 2009 1
Behold, the Lord’s Prayer in Old English:
Fæder úre, ðú ðe eart on heofonum,
Sí ðín nama ġehálgod.
Tó becume ðín riċe.
Ġewurþe ðín willa
On eorþan swá swá on heofonum.
Urne ġedæghwamlíċan hlaf syle ús tódæġ.
And forgyf ús úre gyltas,
Swá swá wé forgyfaþ úrum gyltendum.
And ne ġelæd ðú ús on costnunge,
Ac álýs ús of yfele. Sóþliċe.
You may call me a [...]
Apr 26, 2009 1
Pages upon pages of John Galt self-righteously sneering at all the ‘looters’ (socialists, vegetarians, Christians, liberals, Buddhists, academics, environmentalists, Mexicans, etc.) seem not only like a pathetic attempt to overwhelm a reader who would be impressed by the volume of pages, but also like the product of a small mind. John Galt’s cheery speech was more than my well meaning young-Republican-lite ideology could take. Rand helpfully packaged this ideology in weapons-grade concentration and laid it all out for easy scrutiny and swift rejection.
Apr 24, 2009 0
In response to the essay The Virtues of Rational Religious Belief, by Jason Finley and Kevin Hilke.
I’d like to thank Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke for their willingness to have this exchange. As much as our opinions may differ, I believe it’s important that we keep them open to discussion; I have encountered far too [...]
Apr 19, 2009 0
In January, The Nation published a discursive but fruitful memoiristic essay by Ted Solotaroff, who spent a career in political and literary editing beginning at Commentary in the ideologically tumultuous 1960s. It is illuminating for anyone interested in this period, when the nation’s intellectual heft began to swing decidedly to the right, a swing that determined the political and social structures of our own period, and so one instructive to those who wish to map, influence, or create the political and social structures of the future. Solotaroff gets us inside the heads of some of the people whose contingent decisions and actions set that formation in motion. While the first half of Solotaroff’s piece treats the politics of internecine midcentury literary-political editing, the second traces his relationships with his later writers—after his estrangement from the supercilious Podhoretz and much of the intelligensia that gathered around him—notably Cynthia Ozick and, hugely, the subjectively-unhinged critic, fiction writer, and jetsetting homosexual intellectual Alfred Chester, whose peripatetic life as a self-declared immoralist, vexed by poverty, alienation, and aberrant desire, ultimately made him into a searing and prescient queer moralist.
Apr 12, 2009 1
There is an old joke about easing yourself into a conversation in a party: all you have to do is walk up and say “Yes, but where do you draw the line?” and you will immediately find yourself right at the heart of the discussion. The reason this is funny, and the reason it works, is that most everything worth discussing is a continuum phenomenon. Issues are rarely a matter of ‘black and white,’ yet everyone seems to have an opinion about where one thing ends and another begins. Yet in today’s politics, we are quick to throw out a final answer and call it a day. Issues like gay marriage and abortion pose difficult questions characteristically because there is no simple answer. We should approach these dilemmas with sensitivity befitting of their difficulty.
