a set of sharp and cogent notes
Nov 28, 2009
“Is this how openly gay appointees must operate within the Obama administration—not as advocates on behalf of civil rights but rather as lackeys charged with blocking equal rights for their own kind?” So asks Michael Signorile after learning that the White House has chosen to defy a federal court by denying health benefits to the spouse of a lesbian employee—and forced a gay man to issue the edict. Deplorable.
Category: The Plasma Spring
Tagged:
Christopher Hitchens is dead.
Several members of the NYPD are under investigation for racist Facebook messages pertaining to working the city's West Indian American Day Parade in over Labor Day. Great job, guys!
Glenn Kenny on Edward Yang's amazing, just-now-getting-a-proper-release 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day and the critical compulsion to stump for the underseen.
Like something out of Breaking Bad, a math professor in Boston has been arrested for running a meth lab with her son. Hopefully she doesn't also own a car wash.
With OWS wearily dwindling and the American administration unable to so much as slow the immolation of the middle class, Malcolm Harris and Ezra Klein offer assessments of the waning power of social democracy and the illusory promise of change a second time around.
Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, and Richard Linklater are working on a third movie in their series that includes Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Given the strength of the first two, this news qualifies as something of a blockbuster for fans of small movies with little more than two people conversing the whole time.
Noel Murray thinks there should be a TCM for TV. He is extremely correct.
David Gordon Green is returning to dramas with the new film Q, which also happens to be the title of a long-gestating project by Terence Malick. Apparently DGG's going to force those Malick comparisons that met his first few films, no matter what it takes.
Rather than end things, has Michael Bloomberg's disgusting, shameful, and police-state decision to evict Occupy Wall Street in the middle of the night actually given the movement a second and more effective life?
"When," asks Randy Lewis, "was the last time you saw an act of charity on TV? In the strictly for-profit world of corporate media that dominates our nightly viewing, caring for strangers has lost out to macho indifference, consumerist narcissism, and paranoid stranger-danger. Except in rare circumstances, we are not permitted to witness ongoing suffering nor those who tend to it. This omission is one of the defining facts of our contemporary mediascape."
Occupy Wall Street has been a surprising success. But Hendrik Hertzberg thinks it's time for the occupation to transition to something new and no less creative.
The vastly underrated series Treme will end after two more seasons. Which frankly seems like as good a plan as any for a show that's at it best when it doesn't even have much in the way of plot.
Axe Body Spray decided to market aggressively to guys who needed the most help getting girls. Then it worked too well, and their brand suffered because of it.
Independent film icon Hal Hartley has started a Kickstarter drive to raise the money to finish his new movie. We are truly in a new world when it comes to funding for creative projects.
Lynne Ramsay, the always-interesting director of Morvern Callar and the forthcoming We Need to Talk About Kevin, is planning a sci-fi adaptation of Moby-Dick. This news is exciting primarily because Ramsay is one of the few filmmakers who may choose to adapt the entire novel, not just the first and last 100 pages.
Nitsuh Abebe explains the modern state of adult contemporary music, in which genuine artists like Wilco and Feist put out songs that are just good enough but lacking an extra kick of inspiration.
"No writer owned the arena of toilet reading more than Henry Miller. He read truly great books on the lavatory, and maintained that some, Ulysses for instance, could not be fully appreciated elsewhere." But is it safe and sanitary? Probably.
"But really, to me," George Saunders tells The New Yorker's Deborah Treisman, "the writer’s main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared—she’s right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves."
"In a dispiriting time," writes Todd Gitlin, Occupy Wall Street has "put some new facts on the ground. This is no small thing, especially when initiatives come so substantially from the right. It’s a huge thing, in fact, in a twisted political system busy debating the shape of the earth."
"Rather than the constant state of hyper-vigilance that comes from the Tea Party’s psychology of exclusion, OWS inclusion carries with it a sadness that no repair is ever perfect, that even the most exceptional America possible will still and always fall short of our aspirational ideals," writes Todd Essig for Forbes.
There used to be a thing called a public intellectual, Lewis Beale reminds us, and Paul Goodman, a queer leftist polymath who died in 1972, "was practically its template." Miller-McCune reports on a new film by Jonathan Lee that aims to revive him.
David Milch and Stephen Bochco are working together again for the first time since NYPD Blue. Looks like NBC will have at least one pilot worth checking out next fall.
Some insightful comments made on this item posted elsewhere prompts me to clarify my use of the word “bigotry,” which was chosen deliberately.
Bigotry enshrined in law is no less bigotry. Its enforcers as individuals are not thereby made bigots; but without a doubt, our country’s prevailing laws are the product of an age when bigotry was not just the norm, but a powerful and utilizable political force. Most laws on our books descend from British and colonial statutes about intercourse with sheep and the like–which was initially the deliberately imprecise equivalent of same-sex intercourse, an act so horrible not even the law could name it–and prohibitions against pretending to be the opposite gender, mostly in the east, mostly in the 1800s. Which meant, of course, that “sodomy” could mean anything it needed to mean to accomplish a political purpose, from putting on a summer dress and walking down the avenue to fucking a goat in the livery. That–with considerable detail omitted–is the lineage of these laws.
The problem with charges like bigotry against abstractions is that absent a space to locate a bigoted motive–active a discrete subject we can accuse of being a bigot–it’s hard to make the charge stick. This is, of course, a strategy we recognize, as it was devised in our cultural context by corporations intent on taking for themselves the rights of individuals. Abstract entities can act with the force and horror of individuals–with more force and horror–but individuals themselves whose actions, collectively or singularly, harm others are always excused on the principle that guilt can only be abstracted so far. Thus the moral difficulty we see (and must see) today in holding one person responsible for the failure of, say, the global economy. A designed, intentional, contrived diffusion of responsibility shields abstractions from answering for the horrors they set in motion.
Does that mean that the subjects harmed, those subjects not under the umbrella of the specious individuality of the corporation or in this case the government itself, are any less harmed? What action does the contemporary law surrounding corporations take toward activating in the world the ideals it claims to espouse in the abstract toward each human individual? None. There is no action here; there is acquiescence and rhetoric.
So in using the word bigotry (I seriously using considered “regression” instead), I want to call attention to the fact that bigotry does exist here despite its lack of a tether to a particular subject. I do not mean to say that Obama is a bigot; I have no good reason to think he is and many reasons to believe he is not. His complacency, though–his reluctance to exercise his voice to fight for the goals he pledged unambiguously to fight for–in allowing a bigoted law to be enforced even after a court ruling gave him cover to cease enforcing it is unacceptable. He not only falls to bigotry, this president; he becomes its agent. We can’t fault him for not being able to deliver on his promises. His will does not undo contingency. We must, however, fault him for failing to try. And on the two most salient homo issues on his desk at the moment (or rather, pushed off to the side of the desk, about to teeter into the trashbin), DADT and DOMA, he stands resolutely pat.