Artistic charisma

Whenever I start watching a Bollywood film, I'm always astounded at how clumsy it is. There's a lot of overacting; cuts are abrupt; outfits are ridiculous; plots are preposterous and take off without much development.

Yet at a certain point I always wind up being sucked in by the sheer spectacle of it all, and by the end of the film always feel that things have smoothed out and-- although I can recall the blemishes--am much more likely to remember how good the overall film was.

By contrast, Hollywood films are usually 'well-made', but I'm rarely left thinking wow, that was good.

Good art is hard. It's not just about craftsmanship; otherwise, Albrecht Dürer would be as widely acclaimed as Leonardo da Vinci. To a certain extent, too much meticulousness can detract--especially in forms like film and books and music, we want there to be some sense of growth, some building. We don't want the beginning, middle and end to be flat, even if at a high level of excellence; it somehow feels less good that way.

Here, for example, is Joan Didion's notes while developing the play version of her Year of Magical Thinking:

On Oct. 16, back from Boston that morning, leaving for Dallas and Minneapolis the next, I again met with Scott. “SR sees the form as six or eight ‘sections,’ or ‘chunks’ — call them movements,” my notes read that day. “The movements should build sequentially, repeated refrains taking on new meaning as they build. The speaker is urgent, driven to tell us something we don’t want to know. She is reporting, bringing us a dispatch from a far country.”

More notes: “At some point we notice a slippage in this. We begin to suspect that the delivery of this report is all that holds the speaker together. We begin to sense a tension between what we are being told and what we are not being told — What’s going on here? Is she crazy? Or is she aware that we think she’s crazy and doesn’t care?

“Is that the risk she is taking? Why is she taking it?

“Think of the Greeks, how ragged they are, how apparently careless of logical transition. Is there a deeper logic?”

And that's exactly it--apparently careless. Because it's one thing to do things sloppily out of ignorance or neglect; another thing altogether when such 'defects' wind up serving a greater purpose.

Logic is not the be-all and end-all in life, and especially in the realm of art. I often thing the great directors purposely put in illogical and even 'un-understandable' scenes to remind us of that. They don't want us so hung up on everything making sense that we miss the gestalt of the film.

It's so tricky to say what's good art, but one thing for sure--good art, like good speech, is never too smooth, too pat, too apt. It's always slightly ragged and usually rough; because we're never quite ready for it.

Maybe the 30th time through it smooths out, we get it; but never the first. When experiencing great art we're always overloaded, not sure what to pay attention to, a little confused--so we take refuge in logic, in noticing when things don't process according to our expectations; we're really all control freaks when it comes to encounters with something we fear as larger than ourselves.

The trick is to acknowledge your brain noticing, but not judge, and to let it go; and definitely not get annoyed. Otherwise, you miss taking away what's valuable or interesting out of the work.

I think it's clearest in music--you just go along for the ride, even if you don't like all the stops along the way. Maybe part of it is because nobody expects music to be logical; it's a priori an emotional experience, so when some guy's up there prancing around on stage and screaming random things during a song it doesn't faze us, any more than all the bad dancing going on around us does.

It's a defining part of what we call charisma--the ability to get others to come along with you, to not process every step and agree yes/no to continue like in a flow chart, but rather--to let it flow.

It's what Ben Yagoda touches on in his review, Song of Myself, of The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music:

Another problem is the book's insularity. Barker, a former musician and songwriter, and Taylor, the author of ''The Future of Jazz,'' show no awareness that for a century or so, authenticity has been a crucial and highly charged word and concept in philosophy, psychology and aesthetics. If they had made use of Lionel Trilling's classic 1972 book, ''Sincerity and Authenticity,'' for example, they would have been able to trace the lineage of such tortured neo-Romantics as Neil Young, Kurt Cobain and John Lydon back to Edmund Burke's denigration of ''beauty'' in favor of the energy and power of the sublime. In this conception, Trilling wrote, ''the artist ... ceases to be the craftsman or the performer, dependent upon the approval of the audience. His reference is to himself only, or to some transcendent power which -- or who -- has decreed his enterprise and alone is worthy to judge it.''

Or, as Lydon (better known as Johnny Rotten) put it: ''No gimmicks, no theater, just us. Take it or leave it.''

Of course, gimmickry is in the eye of the beholder--as in everything else, we may have to change our traditional definitions once the Chinese show up. As the Times noted in a recent piece profiling the Chinese artists who are taking the modern art world where concept is everything by storm:

Ai Weiwei was both the driving force behind the revolutionary Stars Group of artists in the late 1970s and the idea man behind Herzog & de Meuron’s bird’s-nest design for the 2008 Olympic stadium. His bad-boy stance can seem like shtick. Take, for example, his iconic photo series ‘‘Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,’’ in which he does exactly that, or the groundbreaking if not defamatory exhibition he curated alongside the Shanghai Biennale in 2000. But he is anything but disingenuous. His blog, read by some 10,000 people a day, mixes astute political and social commentary with unflagging daily photographic journal entries. His architecture firm, Fake Design, has 50 projects under way. And his artistic career is only just taking off. An almost $4 million project, set to highlight the opening of Documenta XII in June, will encamp 1,001 Chinese citizens in the center of Kassel, Germany. Their clothing and furnishings, like so much in the Chinese art world, will be of Ai’s design. ...

The merry prankster of Shanghai, Xu Zhen makes slyly provocative art out of the foibles of the party state. When a team of Chinese mountaineers revised the official height of Mount Everest in 2005, lowering it by four meters, he produced an elaborate ‘‘documentary’’ of himself scaling the summit with a group of friends and then displayed the mountaineering paraphernalia from this Photoshopped expedition — along with a papier-mâché pyramid purported to be Everest’s missing peak. For the Shanghai Biennale in 2004, he sped up the clock atop the British Racing Club building (which now houses the Shanghai Art Museum) so that during the exhibition the hours passed in mere seconds. His piece ‘‘OKmyclub’’ (shown here) took the form of a widely forwarded e-mail message that solicited funding for him and a gang of thugs to travel around the world ‘‘beating up’’ celebrities and politicians. He now oversees a curatorial space in Shanghai’s Moganshan gallery district as well as an online community populated by young Chinese hipsters.

This sort of jokey art that hints at something more profound has been around forever, of course. David Kirby makes it explicit in his Times review of Brad Leithauser's Curves and Angles:

Nor does the natural world have a sense of humor. For that, fully evolved bipeds are needed. The last part of this book is cold, and one must scamper to the first section of ''Curves and Angles'' for the warmth of human company. Thoreau's more gregarious friend Emerson once said, ''I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim,'' a reminder that humans are the joke-making species. Whim is the flashlight, the can opener, the universal solvent that allows the observant to see beneath the monotony of the day-to-day: to take notice of a boy using his finger to print ''OTTO'' on a steamed-up train window, for example, and wonder whether the little fellow is writing his own name or just a word that can be read both by those within and outside the car. And whim is the tool Leithauser uses to paint the spread of television's blue light throughout a Detroit neighborhood in 1948, first bathing the Nutleys in its innocent-seeming glow and then engulfing the Daleys, the Floods, the Markses. But he relies on music as well as visuals in his poetry, both in his overt tributes to the lyricist Lorenz Hart and in the characteristic postponed rhymes he sets up and then completes lines later.

Is that a halo?

Jon Gertner's look at Toyota in the Times magazine, From 0 to 60 to World Domination, is one of the best business stories I've read in years.

It makes you wonder if American companies copied more of Toyota's management and philosophical style, we'd stop associating corporations with evil.

It's a long piece; some of its most interesting sections:

It can be simplistic, and often a distortion, to accept a corporate executive as the personification of a corporation, especially one as large and varied as Toyota. Yet [Jim] Press serves as an apt representative, and not merely because his career arc mirrors the company’s ascendancy. Like Toyota, he expresses himself in private with modesty and care, yet in public his speeches are bold, declarative and effervescent. In his office, he has an informal, relaxed presence and exhibits just a hint of an avuncular stoop; yet he loves to race cars and sometimes swims 5,000 meters a day. Press also has a fluency in the company’s arcane systems and history. Toyota is as much a philosophy as a business, a patchwork of traditions, apothegms and precepts that don’t translate easily into the American vernacular. Some have proved incisive (“Build quality into processes”) and some opaque (“Open the window. It’s a big world out there!”). Toyota’s overarching principle, Press told me, is “to enrich society through the building of cars and trucks.” This phrase should be cause for skepticism, especially coming from a company so adept at marketing and public relations. I lost count of how many times Toyota executives, during the course of my reporting, repeated it and how often I had to keep from recoiling at its hollow peculiarity. And yet, the catch phrase — to enrich and serve society — was not intended, at least originally, to function as a P.R. motto. Historically the idea has meant offering car customers reliability and mobility while investing profits in new plants, technologies and employees. It has also captured an obsessive obligation to build better cars, which reflects the Toyota belief in kaizen, or continuous improvement. Finally, the phrase carries with it the responsibility to plan for the long term — financially, technically, imaginatively. “The company thinks in years and decades,” Michael Robinet, a vice president at CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that focuses on the global auto industry, told me. “They don’t think in months or quarters.” ...

Toyota itself keeps pushing ahead. Under its system, an engineer appointed to lead a new project has a huge budget and near absolute authority over the project. Toyota’s chief engineers consider it their responsibility to begin a design (or a redesign) by going out and seeing for themselves — the term within Toyota is genchi genbutsu — what customers want in a car or a truck and how any current versions come up short. This quest can sometimes seem Arthurian, with chief engineers leading lonely and gallant expeditions in an attempt to figure out how to beat the competition. Most extreme, perhaps, was the task Yuji Yokoya set for himself when he was asked to redesign the Sienna minivan. He decided he would drive the Sienna (and other minivans) in every American state, every Canadian province and most of Mexico. Yokoya at one point decided to visit a tiny and remote Canadian town, Rankin Inlet, in Nunavut, near the Arctic Circle. He flew there in a small plane, borrowed a minivan from a Rankin Inlet taxi driver and drove around for a few minutes (there were very few roads). The point of all this to and fro, Jeff Liker says, was to test different vans — on ice, in wind, on highways and city streets — and make Toyota’s superior. Curiously, even when his three-year, 53,000-mile journey was finished, Yokoya could not stop. One person at Toyota told me he bumped into him at a hotel in the middle of Death Valley, Calif., after the new Sienna came out in 2004. Apparently, Yokoya wanted to see how his redesigned van was handling in the desert. ...

Toyota grew out of an entrepreneurial foray by the Toyoda family — which made a fortune building textile looms early in the last century — in the 1930s under the leadership of Kiichiro Toyoda. (That’s also when it was decided that the car company would be better served by replacing the family’s “d” with a “t,” in part because it was deemed easier to write and pronounce. The Toyoda loom works did not change its name.) Toyota’s success has often been attributed to a Japanese quality of persistence and ingenuity. One of the first Western academics to look deep inside the company, Michael Cusumano, now a professor of management at M.I.T., debunked that notion when he compared Toyota and Nissan in the early 1980s. “The founders and the managers created and refined Toyota company culture, which is far more powerful than Japanese culture,” he says. “It does build on many things that are Japanese — precision, quality, loyalty. But the Toyota culture dominates.” ...

The idea of actually situating a parts supplier inside an assembly plant is wholly novel. But the methods of low inventory — or what’s known as “just in time” production — are hardly unique to Toyota; these have been emulated with great success by other automakers. The same goes for other processes at the San Antonio plant: the line stoppages and quality checks, the time spent by workers discussing hand and body movements in the hope of shaving a crucial half-second from their work. Over the years, Toyota has assisted competitors, especially G.M., in helping to adopt its system, believing it to be in its interest to share practices, especially in exchange for insights into a rival’s methods. ...

You might figure that Toyota is elated at the way things have gone lately: its market share in the U.S. has risen in the past couple of years while American automakers like Ford (and to a lesser degree, G.M.) have been in a tailspin. But this assumption is probably only partly correct. “We want them to be strong,” Jim Press says, referring to Ford and G.M. “When you play a ball game, you don’t want to win by errors.” Jim Womack puts it more bluntly: “The last thing Toyota wants is for any of those guys to collapse.” For one thing, it could be politically disastrous for the Japanese company if it were considered responsible for the death of a grand American institution. “But it’s also completely worthless to Toyota in the market,” Womack adds. “They’re selling all the vehicles they can make already. What they actually want is just continuous, slow decline — decline at the same rate that they have the ability to organically expand. That’s the ideal world for them.” ...

Toyota’s president, Katsuaki Watanabe, who like all of the company’s top executives is based in Japan, recently declared that his dream for Toyota is to build a car that does not hurt anyone and cleans the air when it’s running. This is not quite as fantastical as it sounds. Several automakers are developing cars with sensors that literally prevent them from crashing (though not from being crashed into). And in the heavy intersections in Tokyo where air quality is poor, Takahiro Fujimoto told me, part of Watanabe’s vision is already real: “The emission gas of some advanced cars is in fact cleaner than the intake air.”

Toyota logo found in various places online.

Trespassing against God and country

Reading Dobson Offers Insight on 2008 Republican Hopefuls in U.S. News & World Report made me smile--for the insight Dobson offered wasn't what he intended:

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson appeared to throw cold water on a possible presidential bid by former Sen. Fred Thompson while praising former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also weighing a presidential run, in a phone interview Tuesday.

"Everyone knows he's conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for," Dobson said of Thompson. "[But] I don't think he's a Christian; at least that's my impression," Dobson added, saying that such an impression would make it difficult for Thompson to connect with the Republican Party's conservative Christian base and win the GOP nomination.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Thompson, took issue with Dobson's characterization of the former Tennessee senator. "Thompson is indeed a Christian," he said. "He was baptized into the Church of Christ."

In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."

"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added.

Dobson's use of the word brings to my mind the old saw about the Holy Roman Empire being neither Holy nor Roman nor and Empire.

It's interesting to me that lost in the discussion after Dobson's remark was the inherently discriminatory nature of his comments against all non-Christians; and even, apparently, against some Christians.

He does realize, doesn't he, that his type of thinking was sufficiently repugnant to the Founders that Article VI of the Constitution reads: The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Uncredited photo of Dobson found in various places online.

Majority indictment

There's a fascinating Times magazine article, The Brain on the Stand, that looks at medical research into the physical traces of our thoughts. Essentially, whether someday jurors will routinely review brain scans in trying to determine such things as motivation and intent.

This being the Times, of course, the article doesn't make mention of Minority Report; or, for that matter, the works of science fiction's revered Philip K. Dick, who made a career out of exploring these issues and wrote the novelette the film's based on.

Most of the article explores what happens when what's going on in someone's mind becomes open to parsing in a courtroom.

[Hank Greely, a law professor and head of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences] acknowledges that lie-detection and memory-retrieval technologies like this could pose a serious challenge to our freedom of thought, which is now defended largely by the First Amendment protections for freedom of expression. “Freedom of thought has always been buttressed by the reality that you could only tell what someone thought based on their behavior,” he told me. “This technology holds out the possibility of looking through the skull and seeing what’s really happening, seeing the thoughts themselves.” According to Greely, this may challenge the principle that we should be held accountable for what we do, not what we think. “It opens up for the first time the possibility of punishing people for their thoughts rather than their actions,” he says. “One reason thought has been free in the harshest dictatorships is that dictators haven’t been able to detect it.” He adds, “Now they may be able to, putting greater pressure on legal constraints against government interference with freedom of thought.”

If technology ever allows us to judge people for what they think in addition to what they do, I'd strongly suggest we all read Gandhi.

The Mahatma laid out, in detail, his belief that there is no difference between committing violence in the heart--i.e. thinking it--and committing it in the physical world.

And oftentimes, Gandhi noted, the only thing keeping the latter from flowing into the former was the cowardice of the non-actor; why should someone get credit for being afraid?

For him, someone who found himself on the path of non-violence because of weakness or fear was no better than those who reacted to the same spurs by lashing out violently.

Contray to pop culture's portrayal, Gandhi was actually a remarkable militant. He had unreal expectations for people's courage, expecting them to follow him open-eyed straight into the cudgels and if necessary bullets of the British. He was a moral absolutist, although he himself also confessed to numerous failings in that area (he had a particularly hard time coming to grips with his lust).

An Indian thinker, Sri Chinmoy, had this to say about Gandhi's thoughts on sin:

The world, especially the Christian world, is afraid of the consequences of sin. A Christian is more concerned about his sin than is any other man on earth. The Indian heart in Gandhi speaks about sin: "I do not seek redemption from the consequences of sin, I seek to be redeemed from sin itself."

I'd contend, then, that a system of justice based on thought isn't one that would prove alien to many Hindus, Buddhists and actually even many Christians, Muslims and Jews.

What is religion, after all, but a justice system for the mind; with its universal message that the world of our senses is ultimately immaterial, and what matters isn't just how we act but also how we conduct ourselves in our ongoing dialogue with God.

Things like praying five times a day or going to church are understood to be frail man's attempt to set up a structure within which we can strive toward being one with God.

It's not for nothing that in traditional societies, there was and is no concept of 'religion' as a separate part of life--it was life, everything was tied up in it and inseprable from it It's one reason why the missionary process involves so much death and rarely takes hold until the second generation; in trying to separate someone from his or her beliefs you wind up having to sever them from so much more than what in the West would be simply where they go on Sunday.

Religion in traditional societies is always present, in such everyday activities as throwing a piece of pottery or weaving a cloth; you're always honoring and reflecting God, even without the use of any overt symbols of your 'faith' in your 'work'.

The Times piece, of course, reflects none of this. Instead, it throws in this tidbit, in passing:

The experiments, conducted by Elizabeth Phelps, who teaches psychology at New York University, combine brain scans with a behavioral test known as the Implicit Association Test, or I.A.T., as well as physiological tests of the startle reflex. The I.A.T. flashes pictures of black and white faces at you and asks you to associate various adjectives with the faces. Repeated tests have shown that white subjects take longer to respond when they’re asked to associate black faces with positive adjectives and white faces with negative adjectives than vice versa, and this is said to be an implicit measure of unconscious racism. Phelps and her colleagues added neurological evidence to this insight by scanning the brains and testing the startle reflexes of white undergraduates at Yale before they took the I.A.T. She found that the subjects who showed the most unconscious bias on the I.A.T. also had the highest activation in their amygdalas — a center of threat perception — when unfamiliar black faces were flashed at them in the scanner. By contrast, when subjects were shown pictures of familiar black and white figures — like Denzel Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. and Conan O’Brien — there was no jump in amygdala activity.

The legal implications of the new experiments involving bias and neuroscience are hotly disputed. Mahzarin R. Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard who helped to pioneer the I.A.T., has argued that there may be a big gap between the concept of intentional bias embedded in law and the reality of unconscious racism revealed by science. When the gap is “substantial,” she and the U.C.L.A. law professor Jerry Kang have argued, “the law should be changed to comport with science” — relaxing, for example, the current focus on intentional discrimination and trying to root out unconscious bias in the workplace with “structural interventions,” which critics say may be tantamount to racial quotas. One legal scholar has cited Phelps’s work to argue for the elimination of peremptory challenges to prospective jurors — if most whites are unconsciously racist, the argument goes, then any decision to strike a black juror must be infected with racism. Much to her displeasure, Phelps’s work has been cited by a journalist to suggest that a white cop who accidentally shot a black teenager on a Brooklyn rooftop in 2004 must have been responding to a hard-wired fear of unfamiliar black faces — a version of the amygdala made me do it.

Phelps herself says it’s “crazy” to link her work to cops who shoot on the job and insists that it is too early to use her research in the courtroom. “Part of my discomfort is that we haven’t linked what we see in the amygdala or any other region of the brain with an activity outside the magnet that we would call racism,” she told me. “We have no evidence whatsoever that activity in the brain is more predictive of things we care about in the courtroom than the behaviors themselves that we correlate with brain function.” In other words, just because you have a biased reaction to a photograph doesn’t mean you’ll act on those biases in the workplace.

I have, of course, written about the IAT before.

And of course the Times soft-pedals the research ('this is said to be'), and tags it controversial--it indicts a majority of our society. And of course Phelps is going to be very careful about what conclusions she draws--that, after all, isn't what she's trained for, as a scientist she presents findings and leaves it to society to decide what to do about it.

As I've said before, the test doesn't show we're all racist; rather, that in our society we are all predisposed to a certain type of repeated racism, and unless we're aware of that and counteract it, we will wind up acting in racist ways. (This, incidentally, is one reason why I really question people whose response to murder and other man-made tragedies is that it's God's will, we should all forbear. Maybe God's will is being perveted time and time again, forcing the same group to always bear the cross, by man's bias).

There's no such thing as a level playing field, according to the IAT, and the sooner we realize that and take active--and it's always going to have to be active, remember this takes place on the subconscious level but is significantly augmented by conscious racism--measures, the less abrupt the redress when non-whites become the new majority in America.

Justice, after all, is a dish never better served cold.

Hitler's she-wolf

The novelist Clives James purportedly reviews two new Leni Riefenstahl biographies in an essay, Reich Star, in the Times Book Review last Sunday.

The piece is really just James going off on the Nazi Reifenstahl, who apparently is given more sympathetic treatment by her biographers (whom he mentions just a few times).

Owen does a thorough job recounting Riefenstahl's brazen lies in her chilling attempt to rewrite her history, closing with this punch:

She lied about everything. She just went on lying until people got tired, or old, or died. One of her most telling lies was the one she told about Streicher. She said that she had loathed him. But there is preserved correspondence to prove that she invited his company and treated him as a close friend until quite late in the war. The idea that Streicher would never mention to her what was happening to the Jews is preposterous. He was proud of it, and was eventually hanged for it.

Leni, although she never managed regret, had enough sense to feign ignorance. But one of her closer questioners got the admission out of her that really mattered. He was Budd Schulberg. His famous days as a screenwriter were still ahead of him, but he would never dream up a neater scene than the one he played out with Leni when he interviewed her in 1945, shortly after her arrest by American soldiers. After unrolling her usual impatient rigmarole about having known nothing about any Nazi atrocities, Leni made the mistake of saying that she sometimes, against her will, had to do what Goebbels wanted, because she was afraid of being sent to a concentration camp. Schulberg asked why she should have been afraid of that, if she didn’t know that concentration camps existed.

So there was the whole story. For anyone with a memory for recent events, the question of Leni’s moral status was settled. What came next, stretching on to the end of the millennium and now beyond, was the question of her artistic stature, supposedly a different thing. She built another career photographing tribesmen in Africa, and then another one, filming life below the waves in yet another new role as the oldest diver in the world. And as the people with a memory for the real world grew fewer, those who knew about nothing except the movies gradually redefined the issue.

At the end of the first “Star Wars” movie, George Lucas copied the ambience of “Triumph of the Will” with no apparent sense of how he was really proving that the cause in which Luke Skywalker and his friends had just triumphed could not have been worth fighting for. Lucas wasn’t alone: Trimborn does a useful job of rounding up the unusual suspects. Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Madonna all enrolled themselves on the growing list of Leni’s fans. So did Siegfried and Roy. Francis Ford Coppola said he admired her. Steven Spielberg said he wanted to meet her. If he had made “Schindler’s List” 10 times, he could not have undone the portent of such a wish, because he was really saying that there can be art without a human framework, and that a movie can be made out of nothing but impressive images. Some of Leni’s images were indeed impressive. But the question is never about whether or not you are impressed. The question is about whether you can keep your head when you are. Leni Riefenstahl was impressed by the Nazis, and look what happened.

I'd be surprised if any of the stars mentioned above, except for Spielberg, ever pick/picked up the Sunday Times Book Review; even so, my hope is someone in their life--an agent or family member or friend--forces them to read James' piece. It's too bad the studio bosses of old aren't still around to chastise and educate these children when they stray off the backlots and open their mouths.

Even though they're mostly idiots, what Hollywood thinks does matter, if only because of inconvenient truths like most Americans would rather watch movies than read the Times (if I had to give up one for a year, it'd be movies, but I suspect I'd be one of the few).

James' piece goes astray though when he argues:

Susan Sontag later made a serious mistake in arguing that “Olympia” was entirely steeped in fascist worship of the beautiful body. But it’s nature that worships the beautiful body. Fascism is natural. That’s what’s wrong with it: it’s nothing else. Despite the too often prevailing calisthenic mass maneuvers, as if Busby Berkeley had met Praxiteles, much of the reputation “Olympia” has for beauty can thus safely be endorsed, but always with the proviso that a lot of the athletic events were beautiful anyway, and that her technical inventions for capturing them would eventually suffer the fate of all technical inventions and be superseded: everything she did in Berlin in 1936 was topped by what Kon Ichikawa did in Tokyo in 1964. Nevertheless, Leni, with her raw material handed to her on a plate, and unhampered by those requirements of invented narrative that she could never manage, had made quite a movie for its time.

I do agree with what James writes about Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Orimpikku, which sticks in my mind as one of the most surprisingly affecting movies I've ever seen.

But, even though I've only read Sontag's Fascinating Fascism essay once, I don't think she made any serious mistakes in it.

Along with essays by George Orwell, E.M. Forster, Joan Didion and E.B. White, it's one of the most organically true things I've ever read and will absolutely give you an understanding of how seductive fascism's allure can be, and how it must always be quarantined.

Everything it touches, even if it's something 'natural', is by definition perverted and can no longer be seen in its original context, regardless of its inherent qualities.

Just look at the swastika, which some scholars believe to be among the oldest symbols known to man in its original, Indian form. The Nazis reversed it and tilted it; and in doing so have ruined it for most of the world forever.

Sontag isn't arguing that Olympia is just about worshipping the beautiful body; she's saying it's about a particular type of worship, which isn't frank and admiring and innocent, but purposeful and directed and corrupting.

James compounds his misreading when he writes:

Not many Jewish athletes were there to be filmed anyway, but there were black athletes present, and one of them was Jesse Owens, whom Leni didn’t hesitate to caress with her lenses as if he were a godlike figure.

She wasn’t having a thing with Owens. She was having that with another American, the decathlete Glenn Morris, whom she obliged to add an 11th discipline to his event. But she filmed Owens with loving appreciation. It’s a shameful consideration that no Hollywood director would have been encouraged to do the same, at the time. Owens in repose looked lovely anyway, and on the move he was poetic, but it took a fine eye and a lot of knowledge to get the poetry on film, and Leni knew how to do that with him and with many another athlete.

I've seen Olympia, both the first and second part; the way Owens is portrayed isn't anything to be commended--again, it's the 'loving appreciation' the slaveowner has for a particularly fine physical specimen.

It's not surprising to me that as a white male James misses the corruption inherent in Riefenstahl's version of the male gaze.

Further, Owens, like a racehorse, is only extolled by Riefenstahl for his animal strength and force (I can imagine her asking him to open his mouth so she can get a shot of his teeth), fascism's building base.

Much as Riefenstahl later, in the words of Sontag, commandeered the Nuba tribe in Africa:

What is distinctive about the fascist version of the old idea of the Noble Savage is its contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic. In Riefenstahl's casebook of primitive virtue, it is hardly—as in Lévi-Strauss—the intricacy and subtlety of primitive myth, social organization, or thinking that is being extolled. Riefenstahl strongly recalls fascist rhetoric when she celebrates the ways the Nuba are exalted and unified by the physical ordeals of their wrestling matches, in which the "heaving and straining" Nuba men, "huge muscles bulging," throw one another to the ground—fighting not for material prizes but "for the renewal of the sacred vitality of the tribe."

Really, I think what's happening with James' essay, which only mentions Sontag once, dismissingly and at the end, is what Harold Bloom terms the anxiety of influence.

The Times really should've just reprinted her essay; and James knows that. Post-Sontag, there's nothing more to be said about Riefenstahl and fascism, any more than post-Arendt there's anything left to be said about Adolph Eichmann and bureaucracy. (It's fascinating to me that Sontag apparently had a crush on Arendt; my gosh, for a seat at their dinner table!)

So James writes what he does about Sontag while essentially regurgitating her thoughts, poorly at that. It's all understandable, I guess, he had to write something; just ironic given how he takes Riefenstahl to task for glossing over truth.

Uncredit photo of Riefenstahl from an incredibly-confused UCLA student project website.

The Times published an interesting letter on 4/8 that made a good related point about James' bias:

To the Editor:

I admired Clive James’s review (March 25) of the new Leni Riefenstahl biographies very much, but I wondered why James, almost throughout the essay, referred to Riefenstahl by her first name. The men he discusses — Hitler, Goebbels, Julius Streicher, Jesse Owens — are all called by their last names, but Riefenstahl is “Leni.” This often happens with female artists, and it always carries a note of condescension. (Would I, in this letter, speak of James as “Clive”?) The curious thing is that in his recent book, “Cultural Amnesia,” James nowhere places himself on a first-name basis with his female subjects. Why the reversion to the double standard with Riefenstahl? And do the editors of the Book Review think it’s O.K. to treat men and women differently in this regard?

Joan Acocella, New York

Liesl Schillinger in the Times Book Review, incidentally, reviewed James' latest bad boy tome a couple of weeks after the Riefenstahl piece; mostly forgettable review, except for this part:

A conversation with Martin Amis, about how, “no matter how much you admire a novel, after about a year you forget everything in it,” confirmed him in his practice of rereading much of what he’d already consumed. “If we can’t remember it all, we should at least have some idea of what we have forgotten,” he writes; that is the intention of this book. “The writer represents all the expressive people to whom he has ever paid attention, even if he disapproved of what they expressed,” James explains.

Tidbits from the Times

See the ball, hit the ball
Your Brain on Baseball, David Brooks, The Times: But baseball has accomplished another, more important feat. It has developed a series of habits and standards of behavior to keep the conscious mind from interfering with the automatic mind.

Baseball is one of those activities in which the harder you try, the worse you do. The more a pitcher aims the ball, the wilder he becomes. The more a batter tenses, the slower and more tentative his muscles become.

Over the generations, baseball people have developed an infinity of tics and habits to distract and sedate the conscious mind. Managers encourage a preternaturally calm way of being — especially after failure. In the game I happened to see here on Tuesday, Detroit Tigers pitcher Nate Robertson threw poorly, but strutted off the mound as if he’d just slain Achilles. Second baseman Kevin Hooper waved pathetically at a third struck fastball, but walked back to the dugout wearing an expression of utter nonchalance.

This sort of body language helps players remain steady amid humiliation, so they’ll do better next time.

Believe me, the people involved in the sport have no theory of the human mind, but under the pressure of competition, they’ve come up with a set of practices that embody a few key truths.

First, habits and etiquette shape the brain. Or as Timothy Wilson puts it, “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitudes and feelings."

Cutting words
Inside the Book Review, Dwight Garner, The Times Book Review: When Robert Stone’s third novel, “A Flag for Sunrise,” was published in the fall of 1981, he made a $5 bet with his publicist that the book would not make the Times best-seller list. But lo, it came to pass. On Nov. 22, 1981, “A Flag for Sunrise” stood at No. 9 on the hardcover fiction list — the first time one of Stone’s books had appeared here. (It was sandwiched between Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park” and Paul Erdman’s “Last Days of America.”) Stone never had to cough up the $5, however. In the next issue of the Book Review, the following note ran under the best-seller rankings: “Last week Robert Stone’s ‘A Flag for Sunrise’ was reported in ninth place on the hardcover fiction list. This was the result of a computer error. The actual sales of the novel placed it quite far off the list.” Quite far off the list — did they have to rub it in? “Well,” Stone told me earlier this month, “I got to be on top of the world for a week.”

White's the default?
Guns and Yoga, Patton Oswalt in the Times Magazine: The people I took the introductory gun course with were an interesting bunch: two guys hoping to become armed security guards, an indie-music-store-looking black guy, a dad and his two teenage sons and a guy who claimed to be an actor researching a role.

Such matters as--religion?
For Yale’s Money Man, a Higher Calling , Geraldine Fabrikant in the Times: Other investors describe [David] Swensen as an “extremely rational” contrarian. “He tries to think through what is the best opportunity,” Mr. Greenberg says. “He doesn’t care about being popular. And he is not afraid to go where other people don’t.”

Mr. Swensen considers trying to time the market a “fool’s errand.” Other managers say that his primary expertise involves spotting growth sectors in the economy and finding the best people to manage Yale’s investment in those sectors.

It is work that he loves. “You get to choose those investments that are the right fit,” he says. “I think Warren Buffett said it: It is like playing baseball when they don’t call the balls and strikes. You can wait and wait until it is a pitch you want to hit.”

Like Mr. Buffett, Mr. Swensen has developed a following. “In the endowment world, going to see David for advice is like going to the pope,” says a board member of an Ivy League university who insisted on anonymity because his board does not want him to comment on such matters publicly.

Not by your grace

It's hard for many to understand black slaves weren't freed. Rather, whites stopped-- or were forced to stop, in the singular case of Haiti--enslaving them.

It's a pretty important distinction, as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah makes reference to in his Times magazine article
A Slow Emancipation:

When I think about how the world of the Ashanti remains etched and scored by slavery, an odd question arises: What is it about slavery that makes it morally objectionable? European and American abolitionists in the 19th century tended to focus, reasonably enough, on its cruelty: on the horrors that began with capture and separation from one’s family, continued in the cramped and putrid quarters below the decks of the middle passage and went on in plantations ruled by the lash. William Wilberforce, the evangelist and Tory member of Parliament who was as responsible as anyone for the passage of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, was not an enthusiast for democracy when it came to expanding the franchise, and he railed against the “mad-headed professors of liberty and equality.” It was the torments of slavery’s victims that moved him so. (He was also a founding member of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.) Once freed slaves had been properly Christianized, he believed, “they will sustain with patience the sufferings of their actual lot.” In the United States, abolitionists mainly shared his perspective, naturally emphasizing the abundant horrors of plantation slavery.

Slavery’s more sophisticated defenders had a response. They agreed that cruelty was wrong, but, they maintained, these horrors were abuses of the slavery system, not inherent features of it.

A cynic would argue what's the difference if Wilberforce and his ilk argued on the basis of cruelty rather than equality for the abolition of the slave trade, as long as the slave winds up free.

I think it's crucial whether someone is free on the basis of who they are (equality) versus who we are (not wanting to be cruel). The latter society is rife with talk of tolerance and forebearance and charity and salvation, but is laced with inherent racism and always oppression.

The former is a true democracy, where everyone is equal without depending on the majority's better angels.

I'm pretty sure come Judgment Day Hollywood is going to have to answer for why it's always portraying situations where whites stop sinning, as heroic whites saving others.

Really, charity begins at home.

Uncaptioned photo by John Stanmeyer in the Times.

Who is the real Joe Jamail?

Joe Jamail takes a deposition defended by Edward Carstarphen

It's hard to believe, but the lawyer off-camera doing the questioning in this crazy deposition video is Joe Jumail, Texas superlawyer. Here are some other aspects of the man; they really need to make a movie about him.

It's Good to Be the King, Texas Superlawyers:

He may be the richest lawyer in America, but even at 78 Joe Jamail shows no signs of slowing down.

The King is 45 minutes late when he walks out of the elevator and into his penthouse office, high atop 500 Dallas Street in Houston. His pace is slow and regal through the lobby, as he is being politely acknowledged by his staff. He doesn't need to explain where he's been. After all, he is a man who claims more trial victories than anyone else, ever. A man who forced the withdrawal of three products from the marketplace because he deemed them dangerous. A man who won the largest civil damage award in history. A man whose legal victories are so astounding and groundbreaking that he was acknowledged in the Guinness Book of World Records. But this is no mere man. This is Joe Jamail — King of Torts

-Oh, yes, the King likes to imbibe on occasion. In fact, a morning's worth of Jamail's stories tends to start out the same way: "I was drinking with a couple of my buddies when ...”

For instance, where was he when he was first inspired to become a lawyer? In a saloon in Lafayette, Louisiana, trying to score with the barmaid when an attorney named Kaliste Soloom intervened to spark Jamail's curiosity about the law.

Where was he when he decided to take the bar exam on a dare -- with only three days to prepare? Drinking off-campus with some law school buddies. He passed by one point -- and boisterously claimed that he had overtrained for the test — then headed right back out to celebrate.

Where was he the night before he was to deliver his closing arguments in the historic Pennzoil versus Texaco trial? Drinking with Willie Nelson and former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal. "Willie and Darrell showed up in a white stretch limousine and started pounding on the front door They kept me up drinking and bullshitting past midnight," says Jamail.

-Despite that highly unusual all-night liquid strategy session, Jamail still nailed the summation and cemented his footprints into the legal walk of fame with the verdict that followed.

By now, a trainload of ink has been spilled over that trial, and Jamail still considers it the shining jewel in his crown. It took place in the mid-1980s, a period often perceived as a decade of greed. Getting a jury to care about two big oil companies fighting over more money seemed a daunting task. What's more, there would be substantial testimony of Wall Street dealings and business acquisitions and a whole mess of other financial stuff that might confuse or bore a jury.

Jamail was representing Pennzoil, who claimed that Texaco knowingly savaged its deal to take over Getty Oil. He agonized for weeks over how to argue it. Finally, he found the clarity he was seeking and saw the situation as a matter of honor, and that's the foundation with which he chose his picks for the jury "[Pennzoil] didn't have a signed contract, but we had a word. We had a handshake. So I was looking for people with long marriages, long church affiliations ... people whose word meant something," says Jamail. "I had to try to make them understand that they didn't give up their common sense when they got to court. And it worked for me."

Oh, it worked all right. Jamail compelled the jury to get excited enough to send a warning shot across the bow of every company in America that morality and ethics have a place in business just as they have in life's other arenas. And it was a big shot. The largest legal shot in history, in fact. It was an $11 billion shot, and, of course, Jamail got a lawyer-sized cut of the award. (And even though the case was ultimately settled for $3 billion, that's still a lot more money than most attorneys will rack up in a lifetime of litigating.)

-He's charming and talented, but Jamail is also a warrior. He’s extremely hard-working and thorough when preparing for a case. "When you really prepare — and that's one of the things that I'm noted for: I really get ready — then it looks like it's all coming right off the top of your head. But look, the only thing that comes off the top of your head is dandruff. So I drive everybody around here nuts picking apart every little thing,” says Jamail. "Anybody who thinks they're smart enough to go to court and the Holy Ghost is going to descend upon them with all the knowledge they need to win is ... goofy. It just doesn't happen like that. If you're not prepared, you're just not gonna win." ...

The discussion swings toward the current political climate — which he is none too happy with and what he perceives as an erosion of civil liberties. He then leans in to make his last point crystal clear and the soon-to-be octogenarian assumes the role of warrior king again. "There's never been a bigger assault on people's privacy and their liberties and on the Constitution itself ... because of some hocus-pocus cry of `war-time president!' thereby revoking all our constitutional guarantees. Give me a break. I don't believe that. I don't like that and I'm not going to put up with that. I'm going to fight that."

High profile: Joe Jamail, Dallas Morning News:

-A grocer's son and of Lebanese descent, Mr. Jamail grew up in Houston in the "Jamail Compound," where aunts, uncles, and cousins also lived.

As a neighborhood runt and facing pressure of being as good as his older brother, George, he quickly grew to resent authority.

But the chip on his shoulder "the size of a manhole cover" taught him to fight back, long before he started taking on big corporations.

Once, sick of being a bully's punching bag, young Joe kept a sock loaded with marbles handy.

"I just got tired of it, so when he got close, I nailed him," Mr. Jamail recalls. "It taught me something. If you don't stand up for something, then what are you going to do?"

-"He almost always uses very traditional theories of liability," says Bill Powers, who is the dean for UT's School of Law and still teaches tort-law classes.

"His forte has always been his technique. He takes the core legal principles and tells a great story to the jury under those traditional principles: If they are violated, then someone ought to pay."

Mr. Jamail will stun juries with blunt deliveries, just as he did one afternoon when admitting that his client, paralyzed in an accident, registered a .31 blood alcohol content – more than three times the legal limit.

He went on to convince the jury that his client, despite being drunk, was not weaving or causing his own peril but was forced off the road by a commercial truck. The jury returned with a $6 million award.

"Any attorney who goes into court thinking he's going to flim-flam a jury is nuts," he says.

"That's why I told the jury during voir dire: 'I want you to know right off my client was drunk. I don't care what you've seen, you've never seen anybody as drunk as he was the night this happened, so if anyone who feels it's open season on drunks and they are not entitled to protections of the law, I need to know.' Half wouldn't give a drunk a fair trial."

From his own, idiosyncratic website:

"As for doctors, I was in this debate once with the head of the Harris County Medical Society, and it was being televised. He went off on lawyers; it was terrible. And the last couple or three minutes the moderator looked at me and said, 'Mr. Jamail, I'm sorry he's taken most of the time but you have thirty seconds if you'd like to respond.' I said, 'That's more than enough time. I would like for you to remind the doctor, and I hope he doesn't mind if I call him a doctor. I would like for you to remind him that when his professional ancestors were putting leeches on George Washington to bleed him, mine were writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.' That ended that shit."

A blog entry entitled Lawyerin’ Ain’t Easy has the following:

Jamail didn’t get to where he is now by being a softy, though. In Paramount Communications Inc. v. QVC Network Inc., Jamail represented one of the Paramount directors. During the course of the case, Jamail was defending a deposition when the following exchange took place:

Q. . . . Do you have any idea why Mr. Oresman was calling that material to your attention?

MR. JAMAIL: Don’t answer that. How would he know what was going on in Mr. Oresman’s mind? Don’t answer it. Go on to your next question.

MR. JOHNSTON: No, Joe –

MR. JAMAIL: He’s not going to answer that. Certify it. I’m going to shut it down if you don’t go to your next question.

MR. JOHNSTON: No. Joe, Joe –

MR. JAMAIL: Don’t “Joe” me, asshole. You can ask some questions, but get off that. You could gag a maggot off a meat wagon. . . . .

This exchange was apparently only one example of a number of similar exchanges. The Delaware Supreme Court actually added an addendum to its decision, noting “an astonishing lack of professionalism and civility that is worthy of special note.”

Fear of a dark snack

In general, reporters try to leave their readers or viewers with an interesting or funny tidbit at the end of their articles or reports, known as a 'kicker'. (Bloggers generally don't do this, since our entire post is often a kicker).

The Associated Press moved this story yesterday:

Catholic group: Chocolate Christ no Easter treat: The Easter season unveiling of a milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ, dubbed "My Sweet Lord" by its creator, left a sour taste Thursday in the mouths of a Catholic group infuriated by the anatomically correct confection.

"This is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever," said Bill Donohue, head of the watchdog Catholic League. "It's not just the ugliness of the portrayal, but the timing _ to choose Holy Week is astounding."

The 6-foot sculpture by artist Cosimo Cavallaro was to debut Monday evening, the day after Palm Sunday and just four days before Roman Catholics mark the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Good Friday. The final day of the exhibit at the Lab Gallery inside midtown Manhattan's Roger Smith Hotel was planned for Easter Sunday.

"The fact that they chose Holy Week shows this is calculated, and the timing is deliberate," said Donohue, whose group represents 350,000 Catholics nationwide.

He called for an economic boycott of the hotel, which he described as "already morally bankrupt."

The gallery's creative director, Matt Semler, said the Lab and the hotel were overrun with angry telephone calls and e-mails about the exhibit. Although he described Donohue's response as "a Catholic fatwa," Semler said the gallery was considering its options amid the criticism. ...

It's one those stories where the good work done on quotes and wording by the usually little-noticed AP reporter, Larry McShane in this case, has much to do with why it resonates so and is in the process of snowballing into one of those stories.

Here in New York, Archbishop John Joseph Cardinal O'Connor issued this ominous statement:

"The media have reported that a so-called "work of art," manifestly intended to offend the Christians of our community, will be displayed during Holy Week in the Roger Smith Hotel in Manhattan. It is a scandalous carving of Jesus Christ allegedly made out of chocolate. What the Roger Smith Hotel would hope to achieve by this sickening display, no one seems to know. The Catholic community is alerted to this offense of our faith and sensitivities. This is something we will not forget."

O'Connor must be more of a modern art connoisseur then I know, since his statement that the work was intended to offend belies a familiarity with the artist.

NY1News just gave an update, feeding in more reaction; at the end of his story, the reporter said not only is Cavallaro inviting the public to see his statue, he's also inviting the public to taste it--the chocolate will be made available to eat when the exhibit ends.

That literally made me laugh out loud. I mean, what better way to make evident the artist's perhaps-trite but interestingly embodied (and anatomically correct!) meditation, that chocolate is to Easter what Santa is to Christmas. Especially, of course, since Catholics believe it's the body of Christ they're ingesting each time they take a communion wafer.

Christians really should be applauding his work, in my opinion; Cavallaro is illuminating commercialization and its attendant dogma of ignorant consumption. But then again, the long tradition of religious outrage at artistic expression is often ironic, sometimes opportunistic and many times borne of ignorance, willful or otherwise.

I have no issue, obviously, with sincere people of faith not liking the sculpture--I would urge them to take a closer look (if not bite), but when initially hearing of this or seeing the photo some will genuinely cross themselves and gasp.

But with the usual suspects out there already loudly professing their offended nature, I wonder whether this case isn't being fed by more than just the usual talk radio nonsense or fat idleness.

Whether there's a feeling among some Christians as they almost gleefully forward this around that they can turn 'My Sweet Lord' into a flexing-of-the-muscles fight that 'proves' their festering contention that their faith is under siege in America.

Yeah, under attack right here in the good ole USA, home--to paraphrase Jon Stewart--to 42 straight Christian presidents.

I wonder if another factor flowing into what soon will be a tempest is a sense--overtly stated in the NY1 report by the Catholic League spokeswoman--that those Muslims would be upset by a chocolate Mohammed, so watch us let loose our righteous anger, too; this is our country.

As if Muslims in America share the luxury of a statue being their worst fear. Indeed, were some sculptor out there to seize on this to 'test' Muslims with a chocolate Mohammed, the reaction may well be more intense. In Islam there's a strong prohibition on depictions of likenesses of the prophet that Christianity doesn't share. Also, unlike Christians, Muslims never portray Mohammed in anything near a nude state.

Theology aside, there is also a difference, I'd submit, between Christians in a country like America responding to what they see as an affront--particularly one from an artist from that same culture--and Muslims in a country like America responding to what may seem a similar affront.

It's like the distinction between when the poor take to the streets, and when the elites stage their own march. One is understandable, often the straw-too-far result of years of previous outrages and systematic injustice.

The other is notable; either as offensive play-acting (the elites don't need to march to get things done) or the sign of a society on the verge of revolution, where the usual levers of power suddenly prove unresponsive or even absent. (Recent examples of the elites truly marching, even if incongruously, with the poor: Iran in 1979; the Phillipines' People Power revolution in 1986; Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe's Velvet Revolution in 1989).

The fact that I don't see the Shah, Marcos or Stalin's heirs around anywhere makes me wonder about motivations, at least in the case of the largest squawkers so far.

None of whom have used this as a chance to say you know what, this offends me as a Christian--and now I understand a little bit better how my Muslim brothers felt about the Danish cartoons. Now I know what my Jewish brethren mean when they talk about Shylock.

And next time, now that I find myself in the same parade--albeit carried in a sedan chair with a retinue of bodyguards--I won't be so quick to paint my fellow Abrahamic faiths as hotheads or complainers.

But really, who can know the heart of their fellow man. Maybe it's all not a misguided siege mentality or any of the above that's driving the controversy. Not even nostalgia for another Easter week cause celebre, two years after the Terri Schiavo offering.

Some Christians may just be mad because it wasn't white chocolate.

Image of 'My Sweet Lord' via Cavallaro's website.

Practice makes entertainment

So Rasheed Wallace hit a crazy last-second shot from beyond halfcourt against the Nuggets the other night, to send the game to OT in a game the Pistons wound up winning.

Turns out--in contrast to Nuggets coach George Karl's calling it a "lucky shot"--that Rasheed practices this kind of thing all the time.

We forget sometimes just how good NBA players, for all their zaniness, are; the best make it look effortless, and playing against each other in gametime situations can negate their amazing skills.

But videos like this, where they're just messing around in the gym, make it easier to relate--and see how these guys are on a different planet.

Here's Gilbert Arenas, who made a $20,000 bet with DeShawn Stevenson over who could make more 3-pointers from the college line. Agent Zero won, making 73 out of 100.

One-handed.

Thinned out

American Idol results night; Ryan comes out with a Sanjaya-ish mohawk, which prompts him to crack up, along with the judges. The commercial's got a Western theme; Chris on a horse vs. Jordin in a gunfight, I guess some Mustangs come to her rescue. Not a very good one.

Blake first, and he's safe; LaKisha next, she too; Phil's in the bottom three, probably to his surprise--he had a big grin on his face, wasn't nervous at all. Melinda is safe, Chris Richardson's troops rallied and he's safe, Sanjaya next, and he's safe; yaaaay. Haley has this nervous look, and she's in the bottom three; Jordin is hopefully safe--and she is, based on seating; indeed. So either Chris Sligh or Gina; probably Sligh. They break, leaving both of them hanging.

Hmm, I guess Ryan called Haley Stacey; as Simon said, nobody even knows her name. Another Idol trivia challenge, all of which like most fans I've known so far. Apparently Exxon Mobil gave money last week to Idol Cares, but nobody else, or at least nobody else worth talking about.

Gwen Stefani performs, with a full ensemble, which I've never seen for any other performer. It's the first good performance we've had on the show this year; not suprisingly, since she's the first real star they've had. She's entertaining to watch, kindof like Madonna-lite. Her hype man is funny, should be on the show himself. Most of the Idols aren't really watching, chatting with each other; I like Stefani, strikes me as someone who's doing her own thing and is sweet, actually.

Rotund Sligh and Rocker Gina; and it's chubby in the bottom three. This is like my dream bottom three--the remaining contestants who I most think should go home. Ryan fakes out Haley, sends Phil back. All as it should be, so far.

Randy has no idea who's going home, Paula says you both deserve to stay; Simon says he thinks it's bye-bye Curly. I picked Haley; and America sends Chris home. Ugh, now Haley will get the almost-bump in votes.

If chubby tries to say something nuts, I'm gonna yell; and he doesn't, just performs. And they show some of it.

Eyes open

Between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War, Americans got most of their information about the rest of the world via a handful of macro media sources--dominated by Walter Cronkite, Time magazine, and the Seven Sisters movie studios--and the micro personal experiences of servicemen returning from wars abroad.

And that was pretty much it. Which meant that while on the one hand people didn't know nearly a fraction about the rest of the world that we did today, on the other hand what Americans did know was really known.

The day in 1968 when Walter Cronkite, reporting on his recent trip to Vietnam, said the war was likely to end in a stalemate, prompted LBJ to famously say 'If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America.'

It's a statement that was both figuratively and literally true--not just because Cronkite was influential in a way no journalist today will ever be, but because for lack of options everyone watched and trusted his newscast, so whatever conclusions he drew and communicated instantly became the gospel of the land. Not just because he was a great journalist who reported his findings honestly; but also because there wasn't much static--his voice was pretty much the only thing out there that night.

There are some virtues to this closed system, just as there are some virtues to a benevolent dictatorship when compared with messy democracy. Things are so much more efficient; and if the absolute ruler is or becomes enlightened--as some would say famously occurred with Constantine's conversion to Christianity--the 'good' that can result is just as swift and lasting as the bad that despots like Hitler and Stalin imprinted on history.

It is, of course, a classic debate--is it better to have change, even if it for the better, to be 'artificially' imposed upon a society; or is meaningful change on any sufficiently divisive and thus important issue only the result of societal evolution. We face it in this country all the time; if we go by the quintessential recent example of the civil rights struggle, very few people would argue they'd rather the famously liberal Warren court have taken its time desegregating schools and buses and lunch counters, waiting for the mood of the South to more 'naturally' evolve.

Thinking people don't say things like that because there are too many african americans alive today who'd respond, with unanswerable equanamity, so--you'd prolong my hell under Jim Crow so whites would have more time to become comfortable with ending their sinning?

Having said all that, if I could play king for a day and get all Americans to watch some specific television programming at some point this week, I'd surprisingly not pick American Idol (heck, no need to, everyone watches it anyway). I'd pick:

-Wide Angle's Pilgrimage to Karbalal: WIDE ANGLE travels with a busload of Shia pilgrims as they make their way from Iran to Iraq to visit Karbala, among the holiest sites in Shia Islam. Pilgrims travel to Karbala year-round to honor Hussein, the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, whose murder, in part, caused the schism between the Sunni and Shia. In the time of Saddam such observances were banned, but in wartime Iraq, marked by vicious sectarian violence, the pilgrimage is more dangerous than it has ever been. In PILGRIMAGE TO KARBALA we examine the roots of the Islamic schism, and see how an ancient murder affects the people of the Persian Gulf to this day.

-Frontline's War of Ideas: "In the fourth hour of News War, FRONTLINE/World reporter Greg Barker travels to the Middle East to examine the rise of Arab satellite TV channels and their impact on the "war of ideas" at a time of convulsive change and conflict in the region. His report focuses on the growing influence of Al Jazeera, and the controversy around the recent launch of Al Jazeera English, which U.S. satellite and cable companies have declined to carry. Barker also visits the "war room" of the State Department's Rapid Response Unit, which monitors Arab media 24 hours a day, and meets with U.S. military officers whose mission is to engage the Arab news channels in debate."

The two programs provide a good micro/macro balance, with Wide Angle's almost-cinematic look at a pilgrimage humanizing a country and religion that in the eyes of many Americans is all dark and bloody.

And Frontline's analytical examination of al-Jazeera and its censorship in the U.S. raising some uncomfortable questions about the closed mindset that George Bush has supposedly forced upon an otherwise liberal country.

In the end, if we indeed are to get the government we deserve, it's up to us to watch not just the programs of FOX but those on PBS as well. Now if only there were a way to combine the best attributes of both....

Uncredited photo of Karbala from Trekearth. Image of al-Jazeera logo found in various places online.

Stripped down

Watching American Idol live, for once. Cutting to 9; also down to an hour and change, so should be a breathless show. Ugh, music from No Doubt and stuff Gewn Stefani likes. Okay....

Not much padding not even the walkout; LaKisha Jones first--in brief vid Stefani says she should be asking her for advice. In stripey number, with crazy print dress, singing Donna Summers' Let's Dance. Eh, it's okay--not a great fan of the song, so I think it's okay. Actually a little bored by it; she's definitely not winning this thing, may not even make top three. Randy says nice up-tempo, good boots; Paula says a hard song but good job; Simon luvs the boots, much younger than last week; good classic LaKisha with great vocal. Hmm, her numbers must be slipping. Fast and almost rudimentary tonight.

Chris Sligh on the hot seat, puts on a whole little routine in a faux-gay voice. In ugly brown jacket and jeans. Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, Gwen says he's off-tempo. That's about it for her comments; he clears his throats before singing, and my gosh, it's not very good. So B-karaoke. Swallows words, is breathless, and trying too hard. I don't know what it is about tonight--performance times may be a bit shorter too, just boring. Randy says good choice but band and your tempo didn't match; asks Chris to respond, he does, says he's never sang it before. Paula says yeah, big beat problems; Simon says it was a mess--all over the place, bad song, didn't feel right. Wants to go on, music cuts him off--he says, Not finished yet!, then very funnily--not the Oscars. Chris just says my bad to Ryan, it's pathetic.

Gina Glockson, who loves Gwen; I'm liking Gina more week after week, Gwen says perfect song choice for her voice, I'll Stand By You. Wow, she's good--in metallic tiny outfit, it really is a great song choice. Lyrics sound heartfelt, waves of cheering during it; they've definitly got shorter song slots this week, I wanted this one to go on. Big applause; Randy says great boots, one of best performances ever. I'll tell you right now she may be a darkhorse candidate. Paula likes it too, Simon's beaming--not one of your best, everyone boos; it was your best performance--everyone cheers. Knowing who you are, choosing the right song, what a transformation (chalk and cheese), best performance so far tonight.

Wow, Sanjaya Malakar next--with crazy mohawkish hair! I'm telling you, no matter what he is, the kid's not boring and definitely isn't just playing it safe. Unlike with Chris, who if he could would probably convene a focus group before doing anything. It'd be interesting if some rich kid got on the show one year and his parents paid for exactly that. So he's doing Bathwater, Stefani says he was a bit nervous, feels for him--will be difficult for him, a hard song, good luck. Man, his hair is totally crazy; cool leather outfit. Voice is a bit small, but melodic. Rushing it a bit; he's a bit diffident when he sings. But nods his head in time well; and as the song goes on, pushes it out a bit more. It's always half-cringe time when I watch him, but half smile when he nails it; I think he does pretty well tonight, actually. Randy is just cracking up, says he's speechless every time, hairdo was interesting; you actually can sing, just go put it out there; Paula is like if you had the ability to just go for it, then it would all fit, but when you don't go for it we're all like come on. Simon says I presume there was no mirror in your dressing room; and it doesn't matter anymore what we say, you're in your own universe, if people like you good luck. Wow, his hair is cool, it's like 7 ponytails instead of a true mohawk. Man, I hope he sticks around long enough to let loose.

Ugh, Haley Scarnato, who I didn't think I could like any less, doing True Colors--Gwen is like she's throwing in some unnecessary stuff, just tone it down. In black dress; I mean, I love this song, but to sing it on Idol is such a cop-out. It's like doing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Essentially you're saying I bring nothing, let a great, simply melodic song carry me. I can't see anyone being inspired to vote for her. Ending is like dogs howling; ugh. Randy is like just allright, didn't grab me; pitchy; Paula is like just sing the melody and be vulnerable, it wasn't quite right; Simon asks her how she thinks she did; sweet but forgettable, thousands can sing just like that. Too safe, you'll have to do better than that.

Phil 'weirdo' Stacey says in response to a question they're too busy to notice how much of an impact they're having on the country. Every Breath You Take, Gwen is surprised at how good it is; she's apparently counseling all of them to do nothing extra and just sing the melody well. Can't wait for her/Blake. He actually is good; believable singing this, wearing his little knit beret. A bit of Chris Daughtry in him, not as rich but he's improving. There's definitely a vacuum on the guys side, he's trying to step into it. Some pitch problems, but not bad. Randy says I actually kindof liked that, a solid performance; Paula says good choice, personality and color coming out in your voice when you get to chorus, verses are safe so work on that; Simon says I thought that was very good, good song choice, only time in the past few weeks I felt you were taking this seriously and trying to do well. Yeah, he's realizing he's got a shot at sticking around.

Melinda Doolittle, who Gwen says blew her away, you don't really need luck. In weird paisley blue outfit. Don't Take Your Love Away, effortless--I'm telling you, she's great, but she's waaaay too professional for this show, it's no fun when people who have already found their voice are week in and week out showing that they can sing. It's like Vegas, big show and everything. Randy says great, you're living the words not just singing; Paula says tons of charisma, good story-telling; Simon says not the greatest ever, but as usual vocally outstanding, hate the outfit.

Blake Lewis, in odd sweater; doing the Cure's Love Song. Think the song's only okay, his voice is per usual smooth and he's probably doing interesting things, but I just find it okay, low-energy and a bit odd. Randy not wild about song, but tender; Paula loved what he did with the song, he's looking at her stone faced, she gushes about him, says she'd love to see him in the finale; Simon says definitely the strongest guy--but you're in this Chris Daughtry zone where you have to be sure not to be too indulgent, and don't be boring.

Now my fave, Jordin Sparks. Gwen says she was shocked when she heard she was singing Hey Baby, but she's refreshing and brought a lot of energy. In chekered shirt; and tripey skirt. Wow, a total different side from her, like she's got some ghetto in her--and it's really good, actually; she's got enough attitude, with a good voice; and total stage presence. I'm telling you, she's got amazing range; song's a bit unmelodic, but totally fun. Audience loves her, Randy says risky, hard to do something stylized, but you can sing anything and that was brilliant; he's exactly right, hard to do stylized without sounding cliched; Paula loves her; Simon says you're the most improved contestant, another side to you, but a bit copycatish; she butts in, she really is growing. Wow, already through 9.

Chris Richardson closes the show, which has totally flown by. Doing Don't Speak, Gwen funnily says she knows he likes to do this verbal Olympics things, but that she doesn't think the song needs it. She's pretty smart, actually. Voice is off from the get-go; in dark jacketish and jeans; I feel like vocally he's really off. No real energy, almost like he's going mellow; or like he's too cool. Then energy comes, but in weird parts; I find the whole thing boring. Randy is like interesting thing, liked the R&B flavor, but not best vocal, good twist; Paula just says you're good, Chris, you're good, just good; Simon says better song choice, but vocal was just okay, struggled in the middle, need to pay a lot more attention to your vocals right now.

Overall, just an okay show tonight; no real surprises, except maybe that Gina's really grown on me. I still think FOX needs to do something to prevent the show from degenerating into a everyone-playing-it-safe, boring vocals adult fest--if we want that, we'll turn on the radio. Thank god for Sanjaya and Jordin.

Gina Glockson
Jordin Sparks
Phil Stacey
Melinda Doolittle
Sanjaya Malakar
Blake Lewis
LaKisha Jones
Chris Richardson
Haley Scarnato
Chris Sligh

Watching Hou

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is one of my favorite directors, along with Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Abbas Kirosatmi, John Ford, and his fellow Taiwanese Edward Yang.

He's very deliberate--and usually quite political--in his films. Things happen slowly, if at all; and key details slip in and out of frame. Quite different from most filmmakers working today. (This is what I wrote about Millennium Mambo).

I finally got around to seeing Cafe Lumiere, which has been on my list ever since it came out in 2003. It has an interesting back story; it was produced specifically in homage to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, on the centenary of his birth. Which is somehow fitting--other directors might pay tribute to a predecessor with a scene here or a line of dialogue there; very few would dedicate an entire film to the proposition.

I've never seen any Ozu films, specifically Tokyo Story, which Cafe Lumiere is most directly linked to. Having said that, Cafe Lumiere strikes me as a purposefully small-scale look at some big issues.

The story centers around Yoko, a young woman living alone in Tokyo who's recently returned from one of multiple trips to Taiwan. She's leading the typical life of a modern unattached urbanite--a small place of her own, much time going around the city and in cafes, friends of the opposite sex, days spent vaguely following what catches her fancy (in this case the study of a Taiwanese-born composer who'd spent time in Tokyo 60 years ago).

While she's on a visit home (for the annual grave sweeping day that is prevalent across Asia but unknown in the West) she tells her mom she's pregnant by her Taiwanese boyfriend. She doesn't want to marry him, planning to raise the baby on her own. Of course her mom--who turns out not to be her birth mom (in typical Hou fashion he subtly conveys that early on by letting the mother's greeting of her daughter contrast with the father's)--worries about this.

As does her father; but he shows this, as men tend to do, not by saying anything or even seemingly doing anything, but just by being tender toward her. In one scene, while they're eating her favorite dish, which her mom made at home and they brought in on a visit to the city, he pushes toward her some potatoes, saying they're always been your favorite, telling her simply, 'eat.'

It's one of three exquisite, quiet domestic scenes in the film. The first happens when Yoko goes home to her parents' home outside Tokyo--all that really happens is she lays on the floor while her mom makes food, then she goes to sleep in her room while her dad and then her mom eat, and then she gets up hungry after they've gone to bed and while she's looking for food her mom wakes up and makes her some. It's so simply shot, with great lighting and perfect pace, that along with a few lines of dialogue it conveys exactly the different lives two generations have.

The second scene, which I suspect is in direct homage to an Ozu scene, has the three of them lined up eating at a noodle bar with their backs to the camera; Yoko in black, her parents in white, after cleaning their relatives' graves. That's literally all that happens--the camera just watches them eat while seated closely together for a few minutes.

It points up a stylistic hallmark of Hou--he likes to let scenes unfold from non-standard angles. Throughout Cafe Lumiere, he'll shoot a location like most directors would, where you see everyone's faces; and then come back to that location later and shoot it from the reverse angle, often just showing the backs of the characters.

The film opens, actually, with a long scene where Yoko has just returned from Taiwan and is hanging up laundry and talking on the phone to her friend Hajime, who owns a used bookstore she frequents--all you see the first time you're introduced to the film's centeral figure is her back, with sunlight streaming in past her body.

I think it's all to point up how difficult it is to know what's going on, let alone to know each other; it all depends on what you see, what you're able to perceive. Hou deliberately, I think, allows his films to be hard to understand--you can often be left after a scene wondering whether anything happened. Either because you missed what was important, or else what's important is the feeling of the scene rather than anything more conventionally understood as action. Like in life, in Hou's films it's important to soak up things, without letting processing get in the way.

The film's full of little scenes that really don't sound like much and don't advance the plot in any conventional sense, yet stick with you. My favorite for some reason is a scene where Yoko walks in Tokyo along a bridge past a weeping willow tree.

That's it, nothing else happens--but the balance, the colors, the pace, are all so right, and convey an exact feeling of how Japan is this juxtaposition of the man-made and nature, melded into one, actually, more carefully than maybe any other country.

In some ways, Cafe Lumiere is just a cinematic capturing of a particular time in Tokyo's history. Preserving for posterity Ozu's city, just as in the film Yoko spirals in and learns about the Taiwanese pianist first via his music, then books, then visiting his Tokyo haunts, then talking to his widow and looking at her photos.

Even if you've never gone to Japan you can get a feel for what it's like--and if you have gone, you're reminded all over again of the cleanliness, the exactness of verbal and non-verbal communications, the clear line between stranger and non-stranger, the willingness to leave even important things unspoken, the idiosyncratic interest in the West, the central role food plays.

Building on the specificity with which Cafe Lumiere conveys Tokyo is the theme of trains. Hajime, who has quiet feelings for Yoko that he never directly expreses, really likes trains, memorizing all the train stations and creating a work of art centering on them (in which quite literally he's cradled by trains), and going around Tokyo recording the train system's natural sounds. It's only fitting that a film set entirely in and about Tokyo has one of the city's distinctive and almost organice features at its heart, with the sense of purposeful motion and getting somewhere that goes along with it, in contrast to the meandering of Yoko and to a lesser degree Hajime.

Toward the end of the film, you see Yoko's train being overtaken by another train, in which you can see Hajime standing, recording; she doesn't see him until they both get off at the next stop, and as the movie closes she waits while he spends many minutes recording the departure of her train and the arrival of another one.

Hou shoots them with the arriving train in the foreground--which can be read as how modern life, for better or for worse, is all about things like train timetables (time is a key theme for Hou), trying to bridge distance (there's a subtheme in this film of people living away), and an attempt to make art or beauty or meaning out of it all.

You can also see it as the two of them looking up from everyday life and discovering they've arrived at the same destination. Yoko's pregnancy is always in the background--she's only about 3 months in so it's not there visually, but you worry for her, wonder what she's going to do to support her baby. You hope she winds up with her kindred artistic soul Hajime rather than the Taiwanese scion of umbrella makers.

Because this film was made by a Taiwanese director about Japanese characters, you can't discount the political angle. There's an overt reference early, when Yoko brings back from Taiwan for Hajime an old-style pocket watch that was issued as part of the 116th anniversary of the founding of the Taiwanese railroad. Left unsaid is that the railroad was built by the Japanese, during the years in which Taiwan was their colony.

Like all colonized nations, the Taiwanese make use of and in some ways appreciate the public works projects their colonial overseers put up, but it's hard to forget the cost of the projects was always borne by the natives, both financially as well as often in blood, and that the projects weren't intended to benefit the people but to make ruling them easier.

I wonder if Hou is in some sly way saying not only did you Japanese bring the railroad and all that it made possible to Taiwan, but also filmmaking--and watch while I show you the heights to which us Taiwanese have brought it.

Hou also touches upon the well-known racism of the Japanese, with the hanging silence after Yoko tells her mom she's pregnant--by her Taiwanese boyfriend. You flash forward and wonder what'll be worse for the kid to come in Japan--an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, no father, or the Chinese blood.

There is, though, a sense with this scene and the plot that for the younger generation these things don't matter as much--Yoko, after all, is not only sleeping with the Taiwanese but also studying one of their musicians. It doesn't matter not because they've thought about it and rejected old-fashioned hang-ups like racism, but because they're drifting, within a self-created world and thus tend not to inherit things like racism (or family life).

As always with Hou, I look to the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum for his take. He starts his review quoting Hou,

“It's very difficult to cross national borders and shoot a film about a different culture. How many films have you seen that do that successfully? There are very few. The reason is very simple. When we look at films [about our own country] made by foreign companies, they're not accurate. . . . But it's an interesting challenge."

Rosenbaum really is our finest living critic; I always read his reviews, and think, of course..... He writes of Cafe Lumiere:

Cafe Lumiere is a look at everyday Japanese life and how it's changed since Ozu's heyday. It uses some of Ozu's visual motifs -- trains, clotheslines -- and it beautifully reflects what English critic Tony Rayns has called the "persuasive" unassertiveness that characterizes much of Ozu's late work. It's an outsider's view of Japan that's really a two-way mirror, because the obsessive preoccupation of its 23-year-old Japanese heroine, Yoko (Yo Hitoto), a freelance writer based in Tokyo, is investigating the life of Taiwanese classical composer Jiang Wenye. Roughly a contemporary of Ozu, Jiang was born in Taiwan and educated in Japan, then spent most of the remainder of his life in mainland China. The only music heard in the film, besides a pop song over the final credits, is a selection of piano pieces he composed in Japan during the 1920s and '30s; they provide a historical and cultural filter through which we perceive the present. Yoko has just returned from Taiwan, where she's been researching Jiang's roots while teaching Japanese. She's pregnant with the child of one of her students, and she tells her elderly parents that she intends to raise the child alone -- a clear sign of the differences between Japanese life today and the life chronicled by Ozu.

Taiwan was a Japanese colony for 50 years, until 1945, only two years before Hou was born, and Japanese culture undoubtedly had a lingering effect on many aspects of Taiwanese life. Hou, who's long had an interest in Ozu, shares the older director's fascination with trains, and in Cafe Lumiere one of Yoko's friends, Hajime (Tadanobu Asano), who runs a used-book store, is obsessed with recording the sounds of trains.

Like Ozu, Hou is mainly nonjudgmental about his characters, though he does manage to suggest over the course of his almost plotless narrative that Yoko and Hajime are somewhat indiscriminate collectors whose preoccupation with music and trains shows more compulsiveness than passion. This may be a critique of contemporary life -- something also hinted at in the film's Japanese title, Coffee Jikou, which means "coffee, time, light" -- but if so, it's a judicious one that only adds to the sense of serene clarity.

That sense of doubleness is a Hou trademark; literally, with the liberal use of mirrors and windows and reflections, and of course metaphorically, with the twinning of characters and situations.

He's also good at featuring strong amateur performances--a lot of the side roles in his early films especially were played by friends or strangers he met in the shooting of his films. In Cafe Lumiere, Yo Hitoto plays Yoko; a half-Japanese half-Taiwanese singer who's in her first film, she also sings Hitoshian over the closing credits. Hitoto has a typically cute website, and her songs are all over YouTube, including the one below.



In addition to YouTube this also being the age of the DVD extra, there's a French documentary on it about Hou. He's fascinating to listen to--the specificity with which he thinks, the purposefulness, the way his crew works to make every aspect of his imagination real. His brilliance and committment to his artistic integrity are present when he speaks just as it his films, which often isn't the case.

It's somehow fitting that the French have a deep appreciation for Taiwanese and Japanese (and increasingly Chinese) films.

In many ways it's the passing of the torch; or more precisely acknowledgement first of the intermingling between the great French New Wave directors and the classic Japanese directors, culminating in a bitterseet Gallic nod as France now looks East for the vibrancy and inventiveness she once had.

Were the Lumière brothers around today, they'd probably be working in Asia.

Image from Café Lumière in various places online.