Category: Literature

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To Kill a Stereotype

Ebert’s Review of “To Kill a Mockingbird“.

I usually find Roger Ebert overly generous in his appraisals of new films, so I have to tip my hat to him for his brave review of “To Kill a Mockingbird”– he gives it a very modest (for him) 2.5 stars out of 4.0, after noting that it is rated as the 29th greatest film of all time by the users of the IMBD.

I’ve always liked the film, but I’ve always been conscious of the fact that I liked the film more than I admired it. I totally respected the liberal sentiment behind it. I just didn’t respect the contrived plot developments, the squeamishly overwrought emotions (of the scenes with Boo Radley at the end, for example), or the generally weak performance of Mary Badham as “Scout”.

Aside from being way too old for the part (a problem with the book is that her perceptions and actions seem beyond her age as given) her big scenes look as if they were hacked together from short snippets of adequacy, rather than from a single decent shot. This is especially evident in the scene with Walter and the molasses. But she is affected and deliberate in all of her scenes. I’ve always suspected that she did great at the auditions but once filming started– too late to try someone else–didn’t live up to expectations. I cannot believe that a director was happy with her performance.

You really can’t blame TKAMB for the “white savior” syndrome: it practically invented it. But you can blame the weak characterizations of the black characters, especially Calpurnia, on the source material and the movie.

2019-03-15

Incidentally– here’s a piece of heresy for you: “To Kill a Mockingbird” really is kind of a mediocre book, and Harper Lee never wrote another novel in her life (I don’t count the sequel as a genuine second book) because she didn’t have it in her. She knew that if she did sit down and write a completely new book that her inadequacies as a writer would be laid naked. So she never did.

This is complex because I do like the book. It is indeed likeable, and the era, and the setting are intriguing. But it’s actually quite contrived and psychologically trivial. There’s no depth to most of the major characters.

Similar contemporary film: “Blind Side”.

Hollywood does scads of deplorable remakes of films that were perfectly fine the first time out (“The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3” being the latest travesty). Why not wise up– “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a film that should be remade.

Firstly, the contrived plot twists should be improved upon– can’t there be a better way for the kids to realize that Boo Radley is a human being than to have him save their lives?– and, secondly, the tone could be changed so that, as Ebert observes, the blacks in the film don’t serve as props for the virtue of Atticus Finch. (Calpurnia could be shown to have an actual personality and life, for example.)

I didn’t know this– Jimmy Stewart apparently turned down the role because he thought the story was “too liberal”. How about that.

What is the least respected profession in the United States? Right. And who is the most admired fictional character? That’s right– Atticus Finch, a lawyer.

Best things about the film? Gregory Peck’s Hollywoodized dream dad. Scouts funky haircut. Elmer Bernstein’s exquisite theme. The lovely opening credits, with the cigar box full of collected items that breathe nostalgia. A skinny misfit named “Dill” standing in for the real Truman Capote.

Worst, most unconvincing moment in the film? Scout cozily sitting on the porch swing snuggling up to the Boogey Man himself, Boo Radley (Robert Duvall, in his debut), shortly after he saved her life from the evil Mr. Euell.

This scene reeks of the adult picturing it as it ought to have been. But Scout does not behave like a child who probably would not even have fully comprehended what happened, even with Atticus’ explanations, and certainly would not have warmed up to a creepy adult male neighbor that quickly, no matter how marvelous, as an adult, we think he really is.

In the remake, have Boo disappear as quickly as he appeared. Leave us with Scout’s face, wondering.

 

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The Third Man: How do you know a thing like that Afterwards?

It’s 1948. Postwar Vienna is suffering shortages of everything, including medicine. It is administered by a cooperative security force comprised of British, French, American, and Russian soldiers. In a unique arrangement, a representative of each country takes part in each routine patrol, even if they can’t speak each others’ language.

The city is in ruins. The people, demoralized, desperate.

Holly Martins is an American writer of pulp westerns. He gets a message from an old school chum, Harry Lime, to come visit him in Vienna. Sounds like an adventure– old times! But he arrives just ten minutes after Lime’s body has been carted away to be buried, after a car accident. Instead of a happy reunion, he attends a somber funeral, along with a very small number of Lime’s friends. And a young woman, Anna, who walks away quickly when the service is over.

Martins is clearly already infatuated with her and later catches up with her at the theatre where she performs in sad, dispirited, period comedies. Perhaps the most depressing moment of the film– the actresses, in sumptuous costumes, smiling and cavorting on stage, in some pathetic effort to recapture something magical from a hopelessly distant past– and the audience half-heartedly laughing.

After the play, she offers him a cup of tea, but it is clear that she is in no mood for sentimental reminiscences.

MARTINS
You were in love with him, weren’t you?
ANNA
I don’t know. How can you know a
thing like that afterwards? I don’t
know anything any more.

Well, damn right it’s written by Graham Greene. Martin’s line is freighted with a misguided nostalgia for Lime (we come to understand, even if Martins doesn’t, that Lime used him) and Anna’s line is freighted with bitter disillusionment.

Holly is one of the earliest incarnations of George W. Bush, blundering into complex situations which he can’t remotely understand but determined, nonetheless, to do something about them, and, in the process, causing mayhem and suffering to all those around him. He’s the ugly American, the bumbling fool who thinks his native wit will triumph over sophistication and cunning.

This is not a coincidence.  It is a known theme of Graham Greene’s: how the naïve but well-meaning Americans sew disaster around the world.

Anna wants nothing to do with him. She just wants time to go by. She’s filled with fatalism, resignation, and emotional fatigue.

You begin to understand how war saps away hope and passion. And you begin to understand the complex, disturbing attraction of Lime. And it is a wonderful tribute to Greene that he resists the temptation to imbue Anna with some kind of special nobility: it is clear she doesn’t care about the victims of Lime’s black market activities– she only wants him back. Because he was the only thing in her bleak life that made her laugh.

You don’t even get to anesthetize yourself with this illusory “true love”– she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how you would even know something like that “afterwards”

[spoiler] Then there is the astonishing last scene. The camera stands distant, at the end of a long laneway leading away from the cemetery. Martins, the fool, prevails upon Major Calloway to let him off. Calloway, reluctantly, stops the jeep and lets him out. He stands there waiting for Anna to catch up to him. The camera watches impassively as Anna slowly approaches Martins… then walks right past him as if he doesn’t even exist.

Martins doesn’t move.

We fully understand that he is being forced into a tremendously painful realization, and all he can do is stand there and watch her walk away.

Graham Greene, who was no stranger to Hollywood movies, thought the original ending of “The Third Man” was too bleak for most audiences and wanted to change it….

Well, no– it wasn’t the “original” ending: [spoiler] in the novella he wrote as a first draft, he actually had Anna walk off, after Lime’s funeral, with Martins. [end of spoiler] It was director Carol Reed and–shockingly– the producer, David O. Selznick– yes, the American Hollywood producer– who insisted there should be no compromise, because it was “right”, artistically, because it was inevitable, because the romantic ending would have been completely contrary to the spirit of the story.

It is very hard to imagine otherwise. It was an uncharacteristically cheesy idea of Greene’s, and a brilliant realization by Reed and Selznick. And I am convinced it is one of the main reasons “The Third Man” is regarded so highly more than fifty years after it was made. The romantic ending might have provided a moment of transient gratification– but it would have trivialized the rest of the film.

Considering all the indignities Hollywood has rendered upon good stories over the years, that is amazing.

I can’t stand it when a movie like “The Reader” comes along acting as if it was something like “The Third Man”. Watch the two one after the other: what’s different? The world. But mainly the writing. The difference is that there is not a single moment in “The Reader” that is even a shadow of the “how do you know a thing like that afterwards” or the cuckoo clock, or “Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. ”

If someone were to do a remake of “The Third Man”– a terrible idea, of course– you could do worse than…

Holly Martins: Steve Carell
Harry Lime: Phillip Seymour Hoffman — without a doubt.
Anna: Taryn Manning, or maybe Amy Adams, if she ever decides to take on a challenging role, instead of those lightweight confections she’s been indulging in lately.

Or how about Kelly MacDonald? I don’t know. Yes– absolutely Kelly MacDonald, with Franke Potente as a close second.

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Leadership Training

Bill’s 21 Irrefutable Rules about Leadership Trainers:

Nobody who is really busy doing real productive work has time to indulge in this kind of narcissism that they call “leadership training”.

Amazingly, the rules of leadership invariably serve the interests of the people who make the rules, and the people who sell leadership training.

Almost all people famous for leadership training never led a single real organization in their lives. All of them lead organizations dedicated to making them rich by selling “leadership” training.

If you really believe you need leadership training, you can’t be helped by leadership training.

You send your staff to take leadership training because you know that none of them will ever hold any authority over you.

There is not a single thing you would learn at a leadership training seminar that would have prevented you from investing in credit default swaps.

If you are selling leadership training to an audience of people who will never be effective leaders because they believe you can improve their leadership skills, you probably know exactly what you are doing– especially when you offer them more of your tapes, books, and CD’s. And they all automatically buy them.

Leadership training is easy because no one can ever really disprove any of the bland observations you make. For that same reason, leadership training is worthless because no one can ever prove it works.

I hear you: you are a weak leader who now believes he is a strong leader because he watched 9 hours of leadership training videos. No, you are not. You are a weak leader who will need to hire a consultant the minute you are confronted with a real problem because you still are not a real leader.

What is leadership? Sounds noble, doesn’t it? What if they called the workshop: “how to boss people around”? Not quite as glamorous, right? But at one level, leadership is all about bossing people around and the trouble with this world is too many people who love to boss people around think they are leaders.

 

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Shacked: “Sin is it’s Own Punishment”; So is “The Shack”

[If you really enjoyed “The Shack” you may want to skip this.]

I don’t believe that any of the millions of readers of “The Shack” ever really believed that God, if he appeared to them in the flesh, would take on the appearance of a mighty old man with a beard and thunderbolts and a stern visage. But they believe that’s what other Christians think, and what non-Christians think they think, and therein is the essential appeal of the book: this is so wise! God is an obese, middle-aged, singing and chortling black woman baking in the kitchen, just loving you to death, and smiling indulgently at all those misperceptions you can then pretend to be enlightened of.

“Mack” even claims to be surprised that Jesus isn’t handsome, or Caucasian. He’s “surprised” that God doesn’t enjoy punishing bad people and casting them into a pit of fire. The fact that not a single one of those misperceptions is really upsetting to a conventional, conformist view of Christianity is beside the point. It just feels wise. It feels deep. They remind you of those tedious youth ministers some churches hire specifically to minister to young people, who wear jeans and listen to DC Talk to show that they’re hip, and admit that they sometimes feel tempted to, gosh, darn it, curse right out loud. These revelations will not, as the cover claims, “astonish” you. If you like the book, they will simply confirm what you already believe, and make you feel smarter about it. The same way Morgan Freeman makes you feel like you’re not a racist.

Making God a middle-aged black woman is actually as predictable as the old man with the beard and the staff.  What would have been fresh is making God a door-to-door salesman, or a Puerto Rican bathroom attendant, or Jerry Falwell.

“The Shack” is fiction, in more ways than one. Mackenzie Phillips’ youngest daughter, Missy, is abducted and murdered while “Mack” is in the water rescuing his son from an overturned canoe. The police, who behave like New Age saints in this story (always tenderly sensitive to Mack’s feelings), can’t find Missy, but they do find a small wooden shack with her dress and blood on the floor. Later, a bitter Mack receives a note from God to come to the shack. Is it a hoax? Or will his experiences there “change his life forever”?

Yes, that does sound a bit cheesy. It is a necessary convention that Mack is reluctant to go to the shack. It is also necessary, for the conceit of this book, that Mac was not just sitting on a dock fishing, or checking out girls at the beach, or washing dishes when Missy is abducted. Or that the police never seem to hold any suspicions at all about Mack, even when he knows something that only the murderer would know. Unless you believe in miracles. Do all cops believe in miracles?

There is an explanation (but it’s a spoiler) about why the three beings sound so much like youth pastors– and it is an artistic weakness of the book that all three sound alike– but it doesn’t explain or illuminate why Mack would ever be surprised at the revelations. I mean, it would have been fun if he had found a clever way to allude to some aspect of his own personality but… well, that’s asking a lot.

I am reminded, whenever Young tries to describe a scene of overwhelming magnificence, of Mark Twain’s observation that most people would describe heaven as consisting largely of the same activities that bore them to tears in real life: singing and harp playing and floating around in gossamer chaste ecstasy. When Young describes a host of children, and Mack’s father, emanating light and song and colour– it sounds a lot to me like that kind of weird picture of the afterlife.

There’s nothing particularly awful about Young’s book. There’s just nothing particularly amazing about it either. Why is this so popular?

I’m not sure that a real victim of violent crime would find “The Shack” all that comforting. Or enlightening.

This is to music what “The Shack” is to film:
An alternative example of theological inspiration.

My comments on another contrived excursion into “authentic” faith: Donald Miller’s “Blue Like Jazz”.

My apologies for my views on “The Shack”. This is an incredibly popular book and people I love and respect do like it and claim that it has healing properties. I still like and respect those people but I also believe “The Shack” is really not as great as they think it is.

I would feel poorly served if I read a favorable review about some book or record or film and then found out the reviewer was kind to it because people he knew liked it.

The heart of this book is a relatively mundane writer speaking for God, trying to teach the reader theology by expressing it–stiffly– as dialogue between “Mack” and the Trinity, represented as a three persons living together in a shack.

That’s all. Since a real human can’t really even begin to explain, adequately, a real God, it all sounds more like a youth pastor to me than real characters. I’m not saying it couldn’t be done– a far more talented writer could do something with the idea, but that would require more poetry than William P. Young is capable of. A lot of it sounds like the villain carefully explaining all his nefarious plots to the hero who is tied to a chair and about to escape. After the explanation, of course.

I also find it really amusing that some conservative commentators, including Chuck Colson, don’t like “The Shack” and accuse the author of heresy. Wow. You would think there was something genuinely provocative in this book. Well, maybe there is. Young seems to take a fairly liberal approach to the idea of Hell, but then, so does Hollywood. He also suggests that all people, of all religions, are children of God– though it’s not very clear what the implications of that thought are, to him.

“The Shack” is essentially an attempt to explain the existence of evil in a world created and ruled by God. Is God just? It’s an old problem and I’m not particularly impressed by Young’s crack at it.

In a nutshell: “The consequences of selfishness are part of the processes that bring us to the end of our delusions, and helps us find you (God). Is that why you don’t stop every evil?” God replies, “All evil flows from independence and independence is your choice.”

No, it’s not. Either we’re independent or we aren’t. If we are independent, it’s because God planned the world that way. We didn’t choose to sign on to this arrangement. And we didn’t willingly bargain the sufferings of children for independence (see below).

And of course, if we are independent, God cannot be omnipotent.  If he is omnipotent, he can stop the Nazis, the Stalins, the bombs, the land-minds, and James Dobson.   If he can than he must, or God cannot be good.  [It would take a book to elaborate why exactly.]

There’s just not much of anything in Young’s rather lengthy and dry explanations. In fact, the more “God” goes on about how wonderful the entire scheme is, even if a few children have to suffer and die, the more unconvincing he is. And this makes it doubly insufferable when Mack professes such astonishment at the “wisdom” he puts into God’s mouth. He sounds like a bad TV ad: and you mean I get all this for only $19.95— why that sounds too good to be true. “It does– but wait– there’s more…”

From the time I was in high school, I have heard this argument and I’ve never accepted it.

Dostoevsky’s twist on the idea was this: what if I refuse the bargain? What if I say, you can keep your “independence” or freedom. I refuse any deal that assumes, as a precondition, the suffering of innocent children. I refuse my ticket. God’s reply, in “The Grand Inquisitor” is that Jesus, because he was innocent, had a right to accept the bargain.

The flaw in Dostoevsky’s argument is that this does’t change the objection:  it doesn’t matter if Jesus accepts the bargain: Jesus is not me.  I still do not.

February 12, 2009

A lot of “The Shack” consists of a very orthodox Christian theology rendered in insipid dialogue, with the distressing frequency of self-satisfied chuckles or laughter from the three persons representing God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. What is the purpose of “Jesus chuckled in the dark. ‘Since I am human, we have much in common…’ ” Does theology presented with chuckling seem more folksy and down-to-earth, and not at all some pie-in-sky abstraction?

Good and evil? Simple. Humans should never rely on their own judgment– God is truth. Why didn’t I think of that? Maybe because the real problem is that humans tend to spend a lot of time and energy telling us that they know what God thinks and it happens to coincide with their own personal beliefs. The real problem which “The Shack” neatly sidesteps, is how do you know what the will of God really is? Isn’t there always some interpretation going on? How do you know it’s even God’s voice you hear when you claim He is telling you, clearly, to do this or that?

Is it supposed to be delightful to think that God might want to lie on a dock at night and look at his own stars? It would have been more amusing if he would have a special fondness for “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Friends”, or fresh cut fries. I checked to see if Young’s God is a vegetarian. Don’t know.

We do know, thanks to Young, that God likes Bruce Cockburn’s “Lord of the Starfields”. Well, that beats “Just as I Am”, I guess.

Alternatives: without question, the most accomplished version of this approach to theodicy is “The Grand Inquisitor” from “The Brothers Karamazov by Fydor Dostoevsky. If you have never read the whole book, you should– it’s one of the two or three greatest novels ever written.

 

 

[If you really enjoyed “The Shack” you may want to skip this.]

I don’t believe that any of the millions of readers of “The Shack” ever really believed that God, if he appeared to them in the flesh, would take on the appearance of a mighty old man with a beard and thunderbolts and a stern visage. But they believe that’s what other Christians think, and what non-Christians think they think, and therein is the essential appeal of the book: this is so wise! God is an obese, middle-aged, singing and chortling black woman baking in the kitchen, just loving you to death, and smiling indulgently at all those misperceptions you can then pretend to be enlightened of. “Mack” even claims to be surprised that Jesus isn’t handsome, or Caucasian. He’s “surprised” that God doesn’t enjoy punishing bad people and casting them into a pit of fire. The fact that not a single one of those misperceptions is really upsetting to a conventional, conformist view of Christianity is beside the point. It just feels wise. It feels deep. They remind you of those tedious youth ministers some churches hire specifically to minister to young people, who wear jeans and listen to DC Talk to show that they’re hip, and admit that they sometimes feel tempted to, gosh, darn it, curse right out loud. These revelations will not, as the cover claims, “astonish” you. If you like the book, they will simply confirm what you already believe, and make you feel smarter about it. The same way Morgan Freeman makes you feel like you’re not a racist.

“The Shack” is fiction, in more ways than one. Mackenzie Phillips’ youngest daughter, Missy, is abducted and murdered while “Mack” is in the water rescuing his son from an overturned canoe. The police, who behave like New Age saints in this story (always tenderly sensitive to Mack’s feelings), can’t find Missy, but they do find a small wooden shack with her dress and blood on the floor. Later, a bitter Mack receives a note from God to come to the shack. Is it a hoax? Or will his experiences there “change his life forever”?

Yes, that does sound a bit cheesy. It is a necessary convention that Mack is reluctant to go to the shack. It is also necessary, for the conceit of this book, that Mac was not just sitting on a dock fishing, or checking out girls at the beach, or washing dishes when Missy is abducted. Or that the police never seem to hold any suspicions at all about Mack, even when he knows something that only the murderer would know. Unless you believe in miracles. Do all cops believe in miracles?

There is an explanation (but it’s a spoiler) about why the three beings sound so much like youth pastors– and it is an artistic weakness of the book that all three sound alike– but it doesn’t explain or illuminate why Mack would ever be surprised at the revelations. I mean, it would have been fun if he had found a clever way to allude to some aspect of his own personality but… well, that’s asking a lot.

I am reminded, whenever Young tries to describe a scene of overwhelming magnificence, of Mark Twain’s observation that most people would describe heaven as consisting largely of the same activities that bore them to tears in real life: singing and harp playing and floating around in gossamer chaste ecstasy. When Young describes a host of children, and Mack’s father, emanating light and song and colour– it sounds a lot to me like that kind of weird picture of the afterlife.

There’s nothing particularly awful about Young’s book. There’s just nothing particularly amazing about it either. Why is this so popular?

I’m not sure that a real victim of violent crime would find “The Shack” all that comforting. Or enlightening.

Here’s an alternative example of theological inspiration.

 

All Contents Copyright © Bill Van Dyk
2009 All Rights Reserved

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Information Highway Robbery

Apparently there a lot of orphaned books out there. These poor little documents have no mothers or fathers or other living relatives. They reside in research facilities and libraries. But fear not little books– Google wants you.

Google has cut a deal with an association of publishers and an association of authors: we will take all those books. Thanks. Goodbye.

Google wants to scan in all these books. I don’t think they plan to sell access to them directly– they will profit by having you end up at their websites whenever you do an online search for any text in any of these books.

This is not all bad. In fact, this could be wonderfully useful. What has some people upset is that Google, in order to protect their investment, is demanding exclusive rights to this material. And they must have paid some money to the people in charge at the publishers and authors associations– people in charge– for these rights. Will any individual publishers and authors ever benefit? Almost certainly not as much as the people who negotiated the deal will benefit. This is the same principle behind the government giving away oil and gas and water: we citizens get nothing. They get lavish campaign contributions and parties.

Google would probably argue that if they don’t get exclusive rights, it won’t be in their interests to scan all these books in, so they won’t do it, and nobody else will either.

You also have to understand that this agreement is not the same as legislation. Google has simply paid off the only groups likely to be able to muster a legal battle against them. If you were to start scanning in all these books yourself and then offer them online on your own web page, Google would likely resort to the standard corporate practice of threatening you with their lawyers with no intention of ever actually allowing the case to go to court.

The article in the New York Times.

Need some therapy? Apparently those librarians do. They are angry about this deal. They think it stinks. And they are “mad”, “angry”, “upset”.

A good therapist could provide an effective solution to this problem: they just need to get some therapy. They aren’t “angry”– they have “anger issues” that need to be addressed.

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Open Source Books

I do not know what to do with my books. I don’t even know how many I have. Probably over a thousand. They sit on their prefab bookshelves, two layers deep, along my basement wall. They look fine. They testify to my learning and erudition. They show that I am not one of the thoughtless mob who spend hours and hours watching television.

Books have become very, very expensive. I know of a student at the University of Waterloo who recently spent over $900 for her course books. Is there some kind of scam going on with the universities and book publishers? Students are always told they need the latest, newest, revised edition. No effort is made to make new editions compatible with old editions, by retaining a consistent paging sequence, or by publishing addendums, or online updates.

How on earth can a laptop computer cost less than your course books? The computer requires thousands of manufactured parts from all over the globe, carefully assembled and tested, and shipped thousands of miles. Yet you can buy a new laptop for $500 or $600 nowadays. You can buy a lawnmower for $240. You can’t buy five books for less than that?

I think we need a movement. We need a group of intellectual hackers to devise an alternative to the established publishers, to write new text books and publish them on electronic readers like the Kindle. We need students to organize themselves and demand that professors adopt these new electronic books for their courses.

Their objection, of course, will be that they only want this particular book, a printed, published one, for the course. Only this book will do. Just as, in the computer world, first it was “only IBM will do” and then “only Microsoft will do”. Finally today, more and more users, including governments and corporations have discovered Linux.

What would happen if Universities supported this movement and began to require that all books be supplied in digital format and that they cost less than $20 each? Well, what would happen if they told the publishers they were no longer going to buy their inefficient, over-priced, tree-slaying compendiums? The publishers would have no choice. First, they would claim that they would be driven out of business. Then some smaller, more nimble publishers would start filling the gap. Then the big companies would buy them out and double their prices.

If there are enough hackers out there to support Linux– very efficiently, I might add– then there must be enough intellectuals, scientists, and others who would support a new “open source” text book system. In fact, isn’t Wikipedia a demonstration of this exact idea?

The Amazon electronic book reader.

It connects to Amazon through a wireless network– that is not compatible with European standards. Has the publishing industry learned anything from the music industry? Indeed they have: they appear to be just as stupid. A monthly subscription to the New York Times on Kindle– which is free, online– is $13.99. All right, so you buy a Kindle, and you decide to read five or six online news magazines or news papers, a few books, a few reference works… how long before you arrive at over $100.00 a month? And you are paying this for a technology that eliminates the publisher’s need to actually print something, on paper, and transport it to your eager little hands.

Add that to your cable bill, your phone bill, your cell bill, your iTunes bill, your movie rentals, and your CD collection… I think they’ve lost their minds. Why not do what Google, and most online newspapers have learned to do? Discretely sell some advertising in a non-intrusive way and hope to earn back the revenue through volume of hits?

[2009-11]

Apparently the State of California is now trying to do just what I describe here: it is creating digital versions of text books for high school and making them available online for free.  Story here.

[2010-08-01 ]

I just read that there is a website devoted to this cause.

“The drive-through, which accounts for 60 percent of the chain’s business in the United States, was reconfigured to become more efficient….” The New York Times in an article on the resurgence of the McDonald’s Restaurant chain, January 11, 2009.

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Leonard Cohen Live in Kitchener

I remember fondly an era in which I was the only person I knew who was a fan of Leonard Cohen. When I was in college, I personally introduced many of my friends to the dark, brooding pleasures of “Suzanne”, “The Stranger Song”, “Famous Blue Raincoat”, and “Take This Longing”.

Most, quite sensibly, rejected him: “music to slit your wrists by”.

On June 2, 2008, I joined more than 2000 people paying over $100 a seat in Centre in the Square in Kitchener to see “the grocer of despair” on his latest (and last, perhaps) tour. With the exception of “Suzanne”, he didn’t do any of my six or seven favorite songs, which are, without exception, products of his early career, before he became the bard of rueful despair, rather than the bard of exquisite, flaming rage and desire… and despair.

Nothing in this concert suggested the searing heat and mystical vulgarity of his brilliant novel “Beautiful Losers” or the searing heat and mystical vulgarity of “Songs of Love and Hate”.

I have a couple of favorites from his later albums– “First We Take Manhattan” and “Hallelujah” of course. His backup singers, the Webb Sisters, performed a marvelous version of “If it be Your Will”. The band was smoking on “Who By Fire”, the best performance of the night. “I’m Your Man” was fine. But I longed to hear the Cohen I first came to love, and his explorations of the dark links between sensuality and mysticism and despair and grace.

Well, what kind of a sick person “enjoys” listening to this:

There is no comfort in the covens of the witch
Some very clever doctor went and sterilized the bitch
And the only man of energy, yes the revolution’s pride
He trained a hundred women just to kill an unborn child

(Leonard Cohen, “Diamonds in the Mine” from “Songs of Love and Hate”)

Or

And when we fell together all our flesh was like a veil
that I had to draw aside to see
the serpent eat its tail.

And the answer is:  me.

(Leonard Cohen, “Last Year’s Man” from “Songs of Love and Hate”)

Would Mr. Cohen be embarrassed to sing those lines today?

He now sings “give crack and careless sex” instead of “give me crack and anal sex”, so, yes, I think he is.  And to sing them with passion?

It is more embarrassing to hear him wail, unconvincingly, “there is a crack in everything/ that’s how the light gets in”.

Songs I wish he had skipped:

  • Democracy
  • I Tried to Leave You (the joke, of performing this as an encore, is worn out)
  • Anthem (Cohen’s Hallmark Card song; yes, there is a crack in everything, but sometimes there is a light in everything and a crack gets in.)
  • A Thousand Kisses Deep
  • Bird on the Wire (I know this is a fan favorite but even Joe Cocker can’t make it interesting musically).

Songs I wish he had performed

Famous Blue Raincoat
Take This Longing
Chelsea Hotel
Last Year’s Man
Stranger Song
Memories

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Hallelujah

I learned that love was desperation and cunning, flagellation and mysticism, grunting and grasping and kissing and licking and scratching for the tiniest fragment of grace in a world of obscene emotional brutality.

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Bullfights

I’ve always been an admirer of Earnest Hemingway’s prose style: lean and clear, elegant, and yet compelling. Hemingway eschewed flowery description and florid imagery for the real thing, the actions, the words that defined character. The more pitiable that he saw something grand and noble in bullfighting. Why oh why oh why?

I’ll begin with a caveat: I would find bullfighting more appealing if a few more people died doing it. I know that sounds bizarre, since I object to bullfighting on the grounds of it’s barbarism, but to me it’s like those endlessly recycled American and British tv shows that titillate by constantly suggesting something sexual might be afoot without ever giving anyone the gratification of actually seeing anything remotely sexual. This is the fig leaf of respectable bourgeois morality: I didn’t actually see a nipple so I am still a morally upright person. No you’re not, because you enjoyed the titillation. You might as well have seen the real thing so we could all be honest about ourselves here. You are actually worse than a man who goes to a strip club because the man in the strip club, at least, doesn’t deceive himself about what he is doing there.

For the same general reasons, I believe executions should be public. Let’s get it out in the open: our society kills people in cold blood. We have him locked up. He’s going no where. He has no chance. Find the idea revolting? Yes, it is revolting. Yes, capital punishment is revolting, no less so because he we hide it away in shame.

So when the brave, brave matador and the picadors enter the ring and the bull unexpectedly gives one of them a toss and then pummels and stomps him into the ground, let’s quietly acknowledge that without the occasional death, there is no genuine risk, and without genuine risk, the matadors and picadors are really no more brave or graceful than any other two-bit punk car racer or skate-boarder or gang member. They are cruel thugs absurdly in love with trivial barbarisms. They should stay in their trailers and open a six-pack and watch American football instead.

 

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Allan Bloom & Leo Strauss and Real Political Correctness

The 20th was a century unlike any other.

I am this moment interested in one particular difference– the democratization of knowledge– the massive influx of middle-class and poor students into post-secondary institutions of higher learning that occurred in the 1960’s, and our ever-so-sweet, controversial, apocalyptic moral decline. Here we are. We’ve declined. We have the morality of alley cats. How did we get here?

For all the white noise and rhetorical flashes over the issue, it’s really not all that complicated. Until the 20th century, only the children of very rich, very privileged people could receive a higher education. These were children of people who benefited from the status quo. They were the status quo, either the church or the aristocracy. And all intellectual conversation took place on their terms, in their language, in a manner congenial to their ultimate self-interests, especially when it concerned noblesse oblige.

And then suddenly you have democracy and a prosperous middle class and suddenly children of hard-working middle-class parents get to go to college, and buy records, and go to movies, and read books, and suddenly Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom are whining about the tragic loss of culture and learning when what they really mean is that their privileged little ivory towers no longer command the landscape, and those suckers, those helplessly inane but physically peerless farmer’s boys, were no longer mindlessly willing to go immolate themselves on spears and in trenches in order to preserve Allan Bloom’s right to buy $4,000 dinner jackets, smoke Cuban cigars, and troll the streets of Paris looking for rough trade.

The same elitist attitudes certainly exist today. There has been no decline. If anything, there is probably more elitist achievement and behavior today than there ever was before. But the elitists are outnumbered. And they hate it. They just can’t stand the fact that Bruce Springsteen sells more copies of his songs about seducing New Jersey girls named Sandy with tight unzipped jeans, than the Chicago symphony will ever sell of any work by Beethoven. More people have seen “Blade Runner” than will ever see “Hamlet”. Besides, I’m not all that sure that “Hamlet” really is more important, or more of an indication of sophisticated and developed taste than “Blade Runner” is.

The bottom line is never surprising. Neo-cons like Bloom and Strauss and their disciples (who don’t occupy quite as many positions within the Bush administration as they used to) want to build a world in which their social and political class get to dictate culture to the masses. For all their bitter complaining about the “nanny state”, they are far more authoritarian, and far more willing to over-rule popular taste.

They are and always have been the real advocates of “political correctness”: patriotism, chastity, prurience, and consumerism.