Can’t wait.
Monthly Archives: November 2011
Share A Like
This is reposted from The Specifics Hardly Matter, the movies blog I have with my friend Dave.
So as you probably know from my Facebook wall, the last few weeks I’ve been totally obsessed with this album:
Like most music I like, I’m not going to make the argument that Rye Rye’s mixtape is objectively good. It just happens to hit a lot of my personal preferences: It’s loud, fast, cacophonous and utterly unserious. I like music that sets a tone, regardless of what it is, and Rye Rye makes whatever I’m doing feel shabby and frantic.
You know I have really weird taste in music, and that I don’t really defend my favorite bands on objective grounds. Fuck Buttons and Dan Deacon, for example, which I listen to by myself more than almost anything else, are banished from my ‘houseparty’ and ‘friends for dinner’ playlists. And stuff that’s palatable for when I have people over–Crystal Castles, Rihanna, Bon Iver–are usually bands I like but don’t love.
For some reason I think of music as an almost exclusively subjective taste. I’m not going to bother defending, say, Low Limit because I basically agree with the objective criticism that it’s overlong, stressful and contains an aura of ASBO-teen violence. I sort of like my music to be all those things, so I’m not going to argue that they aren’t true.
For some reason I feel almost exactly the opposite about movies. There’s still a subjective component, but it’s vastly overshadowed by objective characteristics like story structure, ‘invisible’ acting and coherent direction. I don’t know why this is, but I feel like lots of movies are seriously hella shitty, and I’m willing to defend my opinion in a way I wouldn’t be if they were songs.
And then there’s books. I feel like literature is on the extreme ‘objective’ end of the scale, especially in the public consciousness. There are novels that you are supposed to read, no matter what your personal or aesthetic preferences. Books get described as ‘classics’—an objective, not subjective, term—much more often than music or movies. You’re sort of contractually obligated as an educated citizen of a liberal democracy to appreciate, if not love, books like Moby Dick and Catcher in the Rye. Defending your argument about those works by saying something like ‘I prefer stories where the good guys win’ or ‘I’d rather have a story in the third person’ would mark you as a philistine.
I don’t know if I’m arguing for more subjective criteria in books, or more objective criteria in music. Or anything at all, actually. I’m just increasingly aware that my mind cleaves the world into two categories: Things I like, and things that are good. And the more confident I am in the former, the less I worry about the latter.
The Selling of The President 2012
So I’m reading The Selling of the President 1968, and there’s a few fascinating chapters on Nixon’s TV ads:
According to the book, the campaign basically never used moving images in their TV spots. It was all just photo stills with Nixon’s voiceover.
It’s like seeing some paleolithic fossil of what would become PowerPoint.
The campaign staffer in charge of creating these ads is a ‘McCarthy Democrat’, whatever that is, and openly talks shit about his own work:
‘We try to create an atmosphere through our selection of pictures […] The problem we’ve had, in most cases, is Nixon himself. He says such incredible pap. In fact, the radicalness of this approach is in the fact of creating an image without actually saying anything. The worlds are given meaning by the impressions created by the stills.
Keep in mind, this quote about the commercials is by the guy who is in charge of making them. It makes them somehow even more dystopian.
‘Nixon has not only developed the use of the platitude, he’s raised it to an art form. It’s mashed potatoes. It appeals to the lowest common denominator in American taste. […] The commercials are successful because people are able to relate them to their own delightful misconceptions of themselves and their country.
‘Have you noticed? The same faces reappear in different spots. The same pictures are used again and again. They become symbols, recurring like notes in an orchestrated piece. The Alabama sharecropper with the vacant stare, the vigorious young steelworker, the grinning soldier.
‘And the rosier the sunset, the more wholesome the smiling face, the more it conforms to their false vision of what they are and what their country is.’
Forty-three years later, what’s most striking about these is that, the political cliches haven’t changed at all.
American primary political imagery is still all nuclear families and fucking amber waves of grain. American jobs are exclusively factory workers, farmers, and firemen. No one in American political discourse sits in front of a computer all day.
The images we use to demonstrate America’s greatness haven’t matured since the invention of television. Two-parent families, securely employed factory workers and family farmers make up a fraction of our population, but a majority of our political fodder.
These images were already out of date in 1968. The technologies we use to deliver them may have developed, but the Alabama sharecropper is still staring, from his unreality into ours.
The Gay Republican Tour of The German Parliament
A friend of mine works for the Liberal Party in the German Parliament, and he took me on a tour the other day
'Liberal' in Europe basically means libertarian. Personal responsibility, low taxes, etc.
According to him, the Liberal Party is both the gayest and the most man-tractive of the ruling parties. I find neither of these things surprising.
It was great to have an insider give me a tour. We were both startled at my total ignorance of the political structures of the country I live in.
This is an exhibit showing the names of all the former MPs.
The black box represents the period of 1933 - 1945. I felt weird saying the word 'Hitler' out loud in the Parliament, so we both used 'Voldemort'.
There's a system of tunnels under all the parliamentary buildings. This corridor is apparently where you're most likely to bump into Angela Merkel.
Like she's the warmech from Final Fantasy and shit.
This is where they eat lunch! I would pass hella laws if this was my cafeteria.
The parliament offices are on both sides of the river, connected by a sexy skybridge.
In the distance you can see the Chancellery, where the executive branch sits. We weren't allowed in there because separation of powers. Also, it's hella far and I was wearing dress shoes.
Conference rooms are the Starbucks of parliaments.
I AM INTEGRATING
It looks hella cold out there. I'm sure Merkel has a personal Segway for all the tunnels.
It's 5pm, and the cleaning ladies are already tidying up. I don't know what to conclude about the German work ethic from this.
The view from the skybridge! The building in the foreground is the parliament's daycare. It's only open to the children of MPs.
The whole vibe is just overwhelmingly posh. There are Mercedeses waiting everywhere to take MPs home from the office.
Even the art is cost-inefficient.
But I'm not a libertarian, so I don't really mind my tax dollars being spent on this kind of silliness.
I love how one of them just says 'Poland'. Eastern Europeans don't get names!
The Library of Congress! There's apparently a robotic book-fetching service, so there's no shelves. This was like the 30th time I resisted the urge to blurt out 'it's so fucking German!'
... This was the 31st.
So we finally made it to the Bundestag. You're not even allowed in unless you're an MP.
The doors are marked 'yes', 'no' and 'abstain'. This is apparently how they vote when they need a precise count. All the MPs leave, then re-enter through the door of their vote. It's called 'Sheep-hopping'. Seriously.
Every building in the world should have a miniature version of itself in the lobby with little movable figures.
The prayer room has removable religious symbols, so it can be Christian at 9:00, Jewish at 9:15 and Muslim at 9:30. This concept offends all religions equally.
So when they rebuild the Reichstag after being bombed and invaded, they preserved some of the walls. This graffiti, for example, reads 'we love your cafeteria'.
Wait, she's a doctor?!
My friend patiently described that, yes, Merkel was a physicist, and not involved in politics, before reunification.
I've texted her to ask for details. I'll report back.
Each of the ruling parties basically gets a tower to conduct its meetings. That dude down there is an MP cigaretting after a party meeting to decide strategy.
I feel like 'cupola' should be a more universally acknowledged synonym for breasts.
The Brandenburg Gate! Tourists looking at tourists!
This giant aluminum thing is a shade that rotates to block the sun, and keeps the cupola from getting hot flashes.
And ... we're out! After two hours, I may not know all the political clockworks of my new country, but at least I know where it orders lunch.
Cambridge
The year I lived in London, I didn't visit the rest of England once.
Bath, York, Manchester, Edinburgh, I skipped it all.
It's only since I moved on that I've visited smallertown Britain. Last weekend I checked out Cambridge because my folks are living there at the moment.
It's cute! British cities and towns make you forget that you're traveling around what was once the seat of an empire
whereas London never lets you forget.
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Reversal of ‘Bortion
So last night I watched 12th & Delaware, an HBO documentary on abortion from last year. It’s good in a predictable sort of way. I don’t think I learned anything about the principles behind the abortion debate, but I picked up a few things about the logistics.
I spent most of the movie thinking about Lake of Fire – another, slightly more interesting, abortion documentary I watched on YouTube a few months ago. The point from that movie that’s stuck with me is that the arguments for and against abortion aren’t really about abortion at all. Abortion just the vessel into which everyone – the hippies, the Christians, the women’s-libbers, the doomsdayers, whatever – put their calcified ideologies and preconceptions.
Watching 12th and Delaware it kept striking me that abortion could easily have gone to the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. I can imagine a world in which right-wingers were adamantly pro-choice. A small-government ideology is completely in sync with advocating for more access to abortion. ‘I don’t want the government telling me what to do with my body!’ is the kind of statement the Tea Party would support to the ends of the Earth–just not to the uterus.
Similarly, there’s nothing internally contradictory about left-wingers being pro-life. You can draw a straight line from supporting human rights, to banning the death penalty, to opposing abortion. If life and human dignity are worth preserving, why stop at the birth canal?
I want to watch a movie that tells me how abortion got here. Why is it one of the few social issues on which it’s impossible to be agnostic? Watching 12th and Delaware (and Lake of Fire, for that matter), I can’t help but find pro-life and pro-choice activists equally distasteful. Shining light on a shadow doesn’t make it easier to see.
I Don’t Know How I Missed This in 2008
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