October 2002 Archives
Punch-Drunk Love
If there's one thing that Paul Thomas Anderson loves, it's virtuouso camerawork. In his first film, Boogie Nights, it was generally considered to be a nod of the head to Martin Scorcese. But the impossibly long tracking shots have remained through Magnolia to his latest film, Punch-Drunk Love. When the director starts showing off his camera-slinging abilities in a romantic comedy, of all things, you know he's got it bad.
Punch-Drunk Love is no ordinary romantic comedy, however, even if you put to one side the question of the amount of time that the director evidently spent setting up shots of the interior of a 99-cent store. (Anderson's influences seem to have extended past fellow filmmakers to include Andreas Gursky.) For one thing, the girl's completely in love with the boy from the beginning. For another, it is certainly uncommon for the standard romantic comedy to start with a car suddenly flipping up into the air and tumbling down the road – especially when said car accident is never referred to for the rest of the film. It's a magical-realist touch, a bit like the frogs in Magnolia, which sets the emotional tone for the rest of the movie: edgy, with a hint of forces beyond our control.
Adam Sandler stars as Barry Egan, a man who grew up with no fewer than seven sisters, and who, as a result, is not entirely balanced. He's the sort of person who demands something verging on omniscience from customer support people, he sometimes talks to himself, and he sometimes cries a lot for no reason. Oh, and sometimes, if provoked, he can explode in a violent outburst. Again, not exactly a traditional romantic lead, and in fact it's far from clear why his sister's wide-eyed English colleague Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) is so in love with him.
Sandler himself is perfect for the role, a vulnerabile and trusting naif who has a lot of inner strength – strength which, more often than not, manifests itself in counterproductive ways. There was Oscar talk before this film came out, but he's not going to win; in fact, I predict he won't even get nominated. He suffers from the same problem as Jim Carrey, who got nominated neither for Man On The Moon nor for The Truman Show: the Academy doesn't take comic actors seriously, and certainly never gives them a Best Actor gong.
Another count against Sandler is that despite the film's critical success, audiences have hated it. The opening-night audience, when it was polled by CinemaScore, gave the film an absolutely rotten D+ rating. To give you an idea how bad that is, this is from CinemaScore's FAQ: "Where it *IS* nearly perfect, is in the negative. If a movie gets lower than a B+ (and a B+ is strictly marginal) from opening night true believers, then the chance that ANYONE is going to like it is vanishingly small."
What could these people have hated so? They weren't ignorant hicks who wandered into an Adam Sandler flick and got a nasty surprise: Punch-Drunk Love opened only in very limited release, in the major movie centers (New York, LA), and was sold out for all of its opening weekend. Maybe they wanted an earnest, overlong and operatic film along the lines of Boogie Nights (152 minutes) or Magnolia (188 minutes). Punch-Drunk Love is only 89 minutes long, and says nothing about the human condition.
I doubt they objected too much to the visuals, although maybe the Adam Sandler fans in the audience did. The film is gorgeous, shot in super-wide 2.35:1 anamorphic Panavision, and Anderson makes full use of it. Egan gets onto a plane? We get something straight out of Stanley Kubrick, with our blue-suited hero striding directly towards the camera, in front of an undifferentiated mass of grey-suited clones, and then turning to walk down the pure-white route to the aircraft, slowly dissolving into the light at the end of the tunnel until his silhouette looks like something from Close Encounters. It's fantastic, as well as being a friendly I-can-do-better-than-that response to the opening sequence of Jackie Brown.
The scene which made it onto the film's poster is even better. The foreground is dark, with out-of-focus hotel guests milling back and forth; the background, of people enjoying themselves on the beach, is in crystal-clear focus. And in between, silhouetted against the Hawaiian sun, the girl finally gets the romantic kiss with her boy for which she has been pining since the beginning of the movie.
And at various points in the movie, the screen goes completely abstract, and is covered with amorphous coloured blobs and lines. It looks fantastic, but it could definitely be considered weird by anybody expecting a conventional narrative.
Best of all is a long scene in the factory where Egan works. Already flustered from a telephone call he received that morning, Egan is confronted by his sister and his sister's friend. He likes the friend, the friend likes him, but the presence of his sister flusters Egan even more. Meanwhile, the phone calls keep on coming. The camera starts off conventionally steady, tracking Egan as he walks across the warehouse and trips over something on the floor; by the end of the scene it's hand-held, darting around frantically, in and out of focus, with the music getting faster and more nervous. The writing is fantastic, to boot.
What we're seeing is Anderson coming into his own as a filmmaker, doing his own thing as opposed to, say, Martin Scorcese's. For this scene doesn't impress the audience in the way that Scorcese might. Instead of creating a feeling of professionalism and seamlessness, the length of time without a cut serves to ratchet up the tension. And because there's no denoument, because the tension isn't dissipated by the narrative of the film, the scene works a bit like the car crash at the beginning. It creates a none-too-pleasant feeling in the audience, one which doesn't fit well for people expecting a romantic comedy.
Maybe that explains the D+ rating. Punch-Drunk Love is a difficult movie to pigeonhole, best described by what it's not (conventional romantic comedy, Adam Sandler star vehicle, PT Anderson extravaganza) than by what it is. If you go with an open mind, I think you might well like it. But you almost certainly won't get what you expected.
Posted by Felix at 0:44 EST | Comments (4)
50-50 nations
Mickey Kaus says that "a 50-50 tie may be the new equilibrium state of American politics", and helpfully provides links to other people who have said the same thing in the past. It stands to reason that in a two-party state, the parties will find themselves moving in the direction of the center. And the New York Times front an article today on how an individual – New York governor George Pataki – has moved from being essentially conservative in 1994 to being essentially liberal in 2002.
Which all set me to thining: why doesn't a similar thing happen in the UK? British elections are just as likely as not to be landslides, whether for Thatcher or for Blair. And all the opinion-polling, focus-grouping and position-tweaking in the world doesn't seem to be doing the Tories the slightest bit of good. Basically, I'm wondering why there seems to be no chance of a Tory government in the foreseeable future. The reasons I came up with:
- The UK (or Great Britain, at least) has a three-party system, not a two-party system, and therefore a vote against one party doesn't need to be a vote for the other. In the US, if one of the parties caters too much to its core constituencies (the unions, the Christian right) then alienated moderates run straight into the arms of the opposition. In the UK, they run straight into the arms of Charles Kennedy, which is a much less frightening prospect.
- Both Democrats and Republicans are more naturally universal than Labour and the Conservatives. Just look at their names – while everybody in the US is both a democrat and a republican, most Brits aren't affiliated with organised labour, and neither do they consider themselves to be particularly conservative. Even within the Tory party, the Thatcherite wing was and is far from small-c conservative.
- In the US, the executive and legislative branches are separately elected. So even when the president wins election by a comfortable margin, the electorate still constrains him through Congress. That's impossible in the UK. It's also much easier to split your vote in the US: vote Pataki for governor and Hillary Clinton for senator, say. In the UK, you can vote against your party in terms of local elections, but they have very little effect on national politics.
- The fact that there are 50 elected governors and 100 elected senators, as well as a kind-of-elected vice president, means that both parties have a relatively large pool of powerful politicians from which they can pick their presidential candidates. Once a UK party loses power, on the other hand, none of its MPs hold any kind of important office. That makes it much harder for the opposition to take back power: basically, the party in government has to lose the election, rather than the opposition winning it. Remember that the only politician in the UK who's elected by more than 80,000 people is the mayor of London.
All of which is to say that the British constitutional system would be vastly improved by having a powerful and elected second chamber. It would be a good thing for many reasons, of course, and the conclusion is far from ground-breaking. But my point is that a second chamber would do more than simply provide a legislative check on the executive. It could become a proving-ground for the opposition, giving politicians who aren't in government an opportunity to take on an important public role. I'm not sure that even a second chamber would be able to rehabilitate the Tories in their present parlous state. But it might have helped to create a stronger opposition candidate in the 1992 election than Neil Kinnock. And it could even give the Liberal Democrats the national legitimacy they need to become the official party of opposition.
Posted by Felix at 14:54 EST | Comments (2)
Krugman, Lewis and greed
The New York Times Magazine has given the cover of its last two issues to what it calls The Class Wars. The first story, by Paul Krugman, glossed the growing inequality in the US, and bemoans the fact that "income inequality in America has now returned to the levels of the 1920s." The second piece, by Michael Lewis, was headlined "In Defense of the Boom," and takes a contrarian stance with regard to the late-90s technology bubble. "If your measure of social progress is corporate profits, it is easy to take a dim view of the boom," writes Lewis. "It is more difficult to do so if you step back a bit and survey the bigger economic picture."
Adam
Moss, the editor of the magazine, decided to pair the articles off against each
other, with the successive covers of the magazine running photos from the same
shoot: first of all a robber baron kicking a working stiff out of the picture,
then the same working stiff dragging a handcuffed robber baron off to jail.
In case the pictorial rhetoric wasn't enough, the headline on the cover of the
second magazine was "The Vilification of the Money Class".
But in fact you'll look in vain for any defense by Lewis of the obscene pay packages that Krugman attacks. While Krugman hasn't drunk nearly as much of the New Economy kool-aid as Lewis has (see this 1997 Slate article for an example of his skepticism about such things), the fact is that the two writers are simply looking at two very different aspects of the 90s boom.
Krugman concentrates on the increasing inequality in individual wealth and pay, pointing out that top executives earned less than one fifth of their present salaries as recently as 1987, "the year Tom Wolfe published his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone released his movie Wall Street". Lewis, on the other hand, looks on the excesses of the 1990s with a kind of detached wryness. "It's more than a little nuts for a man who has a billion dollars to devote his life to making another billion, but that's what some of our most exalted citizens do, over and over again," he writes. "That's who we are; that's how we seem to like to spend our time. Americans are incapable of hating the rich; certainly they will always prefer them to the poor."
Lewis's main thesis is that the technology boom did wonderful things for the way companies were organised, for the way they were financed, and, not least, for the economy as a whole. If we now start looking back on those days as an evil era of stock manipulation and systematic shafting of the little guy, then we risk losing sight of all the good things we had, including "the depth, breadth and extent of wealth-sharing" in technology companies. The fact that so many employees had such great stakes in their companies, says Lewis, helped not only to spread the wealth around; it also gave companies a means to structure their payroll in such a way that employees got paid more in good times and less in bad times. In consequence, says Lewis, the number of layoffs was minimised.
Lewis even takes the argument one step further, using the example of his own purchase of Exodus shares at the height of the boom. "What happened to my money?" he asks. "It didn't simply vanish. It was pocketed by the person who sold me the shares." That person, he goes on to say, was, more likely than not, a working grunt at Exodus Communications. The foolish speculator (Lewis) got fleeced for his greed; the noble worker got the cash.
Michael Lewis is bright enough to know that he's only telling one side of the story here. For one thing, employees in the technology boom didn't hold nearly as much stock as he likes to make out. They held stock options. That's a very different thing, because options skew the incentive structure. If a manager holds stock worth $100 and considers a risky maneuvre which could send the stock to $110, he has to weigh the 10% return against the risk that the whole company could be endangered. But if the manager holds options to buy the stock at $95, then his return becomes 200%: worth a lot more risk. What's more, the interests of the manager (boost the stock as much as possible, as quickly as possible) aren't necessarily aligned with those of shareholders (make sure the upside on the stock exceeds the downside).
And yes, Michael, when people say that $7 trillion (or whatever) in stock-market value has vanished, they're right. It hasn't passed from middle-class speculators with too much cash to people who were lucky enough to sell at the top of the market. It's vanished. Yes, the money which was spent on buying shares at the top was also given to people who sold shares at the top. But the vast majority of shares were neither bought nor sold anywhere near the top. If a portfolio manager bought a million shares of Exodus at $20 and marked his position to market every day, then at the top he had made $140 million on his investment. And when Exodus went bankrupt, that $140 million was gone, along with the intial $20 million. Vanished. Into nobody's pocket at all. So when Lewis writes that "stock market losses are not losses to society. They are transfers from one person to another," he is simply wrong.
Lewis also gets things right, of course. Yes, the bubble wasn't the fault of Merrill Lynch, or even of Wall Street in general. And Lewis is a dab hand with the aphorisms: "By forcing Merrill Lynch to agree that its advice was corrupt, Eliot Spitzer helped the firm avoid saying something much more damning and much more true: that its advice on the direction of stock prices is useless. Always. By leading the firm to the conclusion that it had misled the American investor, Spitzer helped it to avoid the much more embarrassing conclusion that the American investor had misled Merrill Lynch."
What he means is that the middle-class masses looked at the vast amounts of money being made in technology stocks and got greedy. They started wanting to get in on the act too, and they forced Wall Street to play catch-up – not with the venture capitalists, so much as with the taxi-driving day-traders. Cue another Lewis aphorism: "That's the odd thing about the present moment: it is widely understood as a populist uprising against business elites. It's closer to an elitist uprising against popular capitalism."
This is the point at which we can take the Krugman and the Lewis articles and find some kind of synthesis. How can they both be right – Lewis that the boom years were mainly driven by the little people, and Krugman that the little people got very little from the boom years, and that nearly all of the benefits accrued to those at the very top?
The answer is that while Krugman is right about the what – there is, indeed, much more inequality in the US economy now than at any point in living memory – he's wrong about the why. Krugman discounts Sherwin Rosen's "superstar hypothesis" – basically, that, increasingly, we're in a winner-takes-all economy – in favour of something rather fuzzier to do with societal norms, corporate culture, and the evaporation of any guilt that executives might have once felt about paying themselves untold millions of dollars per year.
Krugman then goes on to say, basically, that the great unwashed are really stupid, and will quite happily believe whatever rich people want them to believe. "In addition to directly buying influence, money can be used to shape public perceptions," he writes. While that might be true to a certain extent, I don't think it's the main, or even a main, reason why policies which benefit mainly the top 1% of the population continue to receive such widespread public support.
Rather, it's worth recalling Lewis's comment at this point, that Americans will always prefer the rich to the poor. And also recall this month's Harper's Index, where we find this:
Percentage of U.S. college students who believe the “next Bill Gates”
is among today’s generation of college students: 50
Percentage who say they are the next Bill Gates: 24
People support policies which benefit the rich not because they are rich, but because they believe that they will be rich. Voting Republican is like buying lottery tickets: it hurts the poor, but the poor do it in much greater numbers than the rich.
It's not just that Americans are a naturally aspirational nation, although that's part of it. It's deeper than that: it goes all the way back to the American Dream. The whole point of being an American, for most of its citizens, is this: that anyone can make it. And even those who have statistically negligible chances of ever doing so not only believe that they can, but also believe that they will. And when they get there, goddamn it, they will have earned it. And there's no way that they want the government taking their hard-earned fortune away from them.
And with this in mind, we can now revisit Lewis's thesis that the 90s boom was a bottom-up affair, a grassroots movement, if you will. He's right: the day-traders who fuelled the rocket-like ascent of the stock market were not the hedge-fund elite, but rather the aspirational poor. And Krugman's right, too: those day-traders didn't make any money at all. The people who made money were people like Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg, Wall Streeters who had enough money even before they started their respective companies to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.
But the billions that Bezos and Bloomberg made shined like beacons for the population as a whole. They weren't disgusted by them, the way that Krugman is; rather, they were hypnotised by them. As the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow became bigger and bigger, the desire for it grew proportionately. There was no outrage because it wasn't theirs, it was mine, if only.
So Krugman's right: the rise in inequality was indeed fuelled by greed. But it wasn't the greed of the new plutocrats, so much as it was the greed of the whole mass of the US population. And Lewis is right too: that very greed financed technological investment and innovation which is sure to help the economy as a whole, even if it never repays the original investors. But that doesn't justify the fact that the top 1% of the population got the lion's share of the economic benefits of the boom.
Posted by Felix at 1:21 EST | Comments (1)
Frida
At the end of Frida, the new film by Julie Taymor, the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) says of his wife, the painter Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek), that "never before has a woman committed such agonised poetry to canvas". It's a fitting remark for a serial philanderer: one is reminded of Jonathan Miller's famously insulting compliment to Susan Sontag, that she was "the smartest woman in America". But it carries echoes of the filmmaker, too: Taymor's debut film, Titus, was a piece of agonised poetry which I consider to be one of the greatest films of the past 20 years, by woman or man. And, if she will excuse me for saying so, it is the best movie by a female director I've ever seen.
Frida, however, is much less successful. A lot of the blame has to be laid at the feet of the five different people responsible for writing the thing, including the author of the biography on which the film was based. The screenplay fails on every level, from wooden lines ("You were my comrade, but you were never my husband"), through characters who are introduced, never to reappear (Antonio Banderas as David Alfaro Siqueiros) and ultimately the lack of any kind of narrative structure or dramatic arc.
The two leads never transcend the writing to create vividly memorable three-dimensional characters; whether this is the fault of the actors, the director, or the script is difficult to say. When Rivera's ex-wife tells Kahlo that "it's hard to believe that he's had half the women in this room," she's right: it is hard to believe. And Salma Hayek, who produced the film as well as starring in it, seems to have spent so much energy getting the movie made that there was precious little left over for acting. Occasionally we will see a glint in her eye, a flash of strength and determination, but more often we simply don't understand what she's doing. What makes her fall in love with Rivera? Why does she tell him that she won't sleep with him as a prelude to sleeping with him? Why does she marry him, and, more puzzling still, why does she remarry him? The central problem of this film is that it is mainly a portrait of a relationship, and that relationship never really comes to life.
It would also seem that a director of Taymor's unbounded imagination is too constrained by the biopic format to do her talent justice. On the one hand, the fact that she's telling a real story prevents her from creating from whole cloth the kind of visually stunning worlds that brought her such acclaim in both Titus and The Lion King. On the other hand, her attempts to insert affective, allegorical sequences, with puppets or montage or paintings morphing into life, sit uneasily in what is otherwise a relatively straight-up chronological story.
Mundane considerations such as how to show the passage of time don't apply in a film like Titus, but here they're important: when Kahlo goes from having short hair in one scene to long hair the next, it looks like a continuity error rather than an indication that a year or more must have passed. And while Taymor has a couple of visually stunning tableaux (Kahlo, after her trolleybus accident, lying on the broken floor of the vehicle, covered in blood and gold dust; later, her plaster cast being removed from her torso, cracked open like a chrysalis to reveal her perfect, dust-covered breasts) they're occasional flashes of inspiration rather than definining every scene of the film like they did in Titus.
It's also sad that there's absolutely no indication of Kahlo's development as an artist. It's as though she received her gift from the gods at an early age: she's a fully-developed painter from the minute we see her pick up a brush. In fact, we learn more about Rivera as an artist than we do about Kahlo: the way he struggled with the contradictions of a communist painting murals for the national palace; how he sold out and crashed out in New York. When Kahlo goes to Paris, by contrast, we don't see her art once: all we see is her living the high life and seducing Josephine Baker.
Even the score, by Elliot Goldenthal (Mr Julie Taymor), shrinks like a violet exposed to the harsh Mexican sun: where Goldenthal was strong and to the fore in Titus, he's weak and backgrounded here. The one time you really notice the music is in the scene where Leon Trotsky (an utterly unconvincing Geoffrey Rush) arrives by motorcade and pulls up outside Kahlo's father's house. For some reason, Goldenthal picks this moment to unleash one of his post-minimalist Glass-Nyman pastiches: one assumes it symbolises the arrival of the European into Mexico, but it just seems out of place in practice.
Only praise, on the other hand, should go to the cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros). He slings the camera like a cowboy, but is completely in control the whole time, and gets stunning shots of both interiors and the Mexican landscape. I can't wait to see what he does with Curtis Hanson in 8 Mile.
Much as I'd love to, I can't recommend this film. There's a lot to like in it, and I know many boys and girls who are likely to go for the Frida Kahlo-Josephine Baker sex scene alone. But if it's a great biopic of a great artist you're looking for, I'd point you in the direction of Bird, instead. And if it's a great picture by a great artist you're looking for, stick to Titus.
Posted by Felix at 12:28 EST | Comments (5)
A message from my sister
I guess I should introduce myself. I am Felix’s sister, Rhian. Most of you reading this probably know me anyway cos you’re my friends and I’ve told you to read this. But it is Felix’s page and one must assume that people read his page who don’t know me and might wonder why the writing style has changed so suddenly.
Interspersed between culture and food, opera and economics, high living and humour, you may occasionally come across me. I am the opposite of Felix so whatever he is, I’m not and you can build your own impression of me from that.
Now, because of our dissimilarities, Felix is a wonderful brother to have. I can consult him on everything I don’t know and be given an opinion without having to think about it. It’s really quite useful. I am, however, slowly realising that there are more opinions out there than just his and mine so we’re opening up the Very Important Things to a wider audience. Like what books to take to Antarctica and whether flying to San Francisco for an opera is an entirely normal thing to do. Justifiable, no doubt; excessive, perhaps. I digress.
Today I’ve been Christmas shopping. Normally this is something I save until Dec 23rd at the earliest but this year (and next, and the one after that, if the boat gets in…) I will be on the southernmost continent unable to shop. How nice! So I’ve been Christmas shopping and was dismayed to find Cambridge packed with people on a similar mission. As a result, none of you are getting very much and most of you are getting nothing at all. Instead, we can meet on this web-page and have a cyber-conversation which is far cheaper and more rewarding experience for everyone anyway.
The idea is that amidst the postings of high culture Manhattan you may find a reminder that there are people far, far away where there is no organised culture, no opera, no shopping and, alas, no continual connection to the internet. Felix will send me the debate via the daily cyperpulses I will get aboard ship and on base. I will be travelling aboard the Ernest Shackleton, and hopefully going to Halley Station.
Through these websites, and the general British Antarcic Survey website, you can track where I am, read current diaries and find out if we ever make it. Unlike last year.
Anyway, I leave in three weeks, so the time has come to choose some books. Today, armed with my list from the bookclub, I gave up on Christmas and installed myself in Waterstones instead.
I am very fickle. It’s got to feel good, look good and have a great opening line. So I came home with:
The New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster (amazon.com, amazon.co.uk) recommended by Felix.
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (amazon.com; amazon.co.uk) from Terry’s hit list
Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell (amazon.com; amazon.co.uk) and Three to See the King, by Magnus Mills (amazon.com; amazon.co.uk) from Michelle’s choices
And The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (amazon.com; amazon.co.uk) from Anna’s.
Everything is Illuminated (recommended by both Felix and Michelle) was in my hands and very almost bought but it was hardback and had big writing; not good for my weight limit. I can go back though. The Master and Margarita can, likewise, still be bought if enough of you feel like reading along.
Terry, Why Call Them Back From Heaven was not in stock but I fingered Philosophy and Social Hope for a long time before the deep down knowledge that it terrified me too much to go it alone became pretty apparent. If any of you out there feel like reading along and holding my hand, I’ll go back and buy it. As a small compensation, however, I bought
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (amazon.com, amazon.co.uk), recommended by Felix . It seemed accessible but I hope deep enough that Terry will not give up on me forever.
(Andre, I’ve read Perfume... excellent choice though, thankyou.)
Now then, I also have on my bookshelf, waiting to be packed:
You Shall Know Our Velocity (Dave Eggers), Coming Through Slaughter (Michael Ondaatje), The Songlines (Bruce Chatwin), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), African Laughter (Doris Lessing), To Kill a Mocking Bird (Harper Lee), The Bridge of Saint Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder), The Poisonwood Bible (Barabara Kingsolver), The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy), One Hundred Years of Solitude (GG Marquez), Poems by Robert Frost, The Prophet (Khalil Gibran), Death in Venice (Thomas Mann) and, I’m sorry to say The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullmann. I am also yet to finish The Lord of the Rings. I started delving into Meditations by Marcus Aurelius last night (courtesy of Phil) and they’re coming too. There’s also The Coldest March (Susan Solomon) as compulsory Antarctic reading and Tamata and the Alliance (Bernard Moitessier) that Alex gave me to instil yet more adventuresomeness into my spirit.
I can’t take all of these. Really, I can’t. So, please, fill out a comment box and cast your votes. (On that note, if you can think of anything else I’ll need, add away. I have also just bought a CD player that plays mp3s and a v cheap but v cute ‘digital dream’ digital camera that I got cos Steve has one and I reckon even I can operate. And I’ll take a posh camera too but am torn between an SLR or rangefinder…)
Posted by Rhian at 12:11 EST | Comments (19)
the girl and the fig
Sonoma county, just north of San Francisco, has to be one of the most expensive places in the world. Basic B&Bs cost about $200 a night, with a 2-night minimum at weekends, while small vineyards go for millions. When I went for a wine-tasting tour last weekend, a crappy St Francis merlot was horribly metallic, the sort of thing you'd reject in a Glaswegian pub. It was also $25 a bottle. Good wines – the sort of things which cost maybe $8-$13 in your local wine shop from Australia or Argentina – cost $50 at the Sonoma wineries.
So when we needed a place to eat on Friday night, I wasn't expecting anything amazing. We cruised around the town of Sonoma, and one of the first restaurants we saw was called the girl and the fig (they want it in lower case, they can have it in lower case). "I like girls, and I like figs," I said, so we checked it out. The menu looked good, we went in and asked if they had any tables that evening, they did, and the choice was made.
the girl and the fig is cozy and comfortable: easily the most welcoming hotel restaurant I've ever been in. Maybe that's a California thing, maybe it's because it had already been going for four years in a different location before it moved in to the Sonoma Hotel about a year ago. The staff are efficient, friendly and informal; the settings are rustic in ways that make you feel at ease, without sacrificing any quality. (The wine glasses, naturally enough for Sonoma, were top-notch.)
I think I would have been happy eating at the bar, where a casually-dressed clientele paired flights of wine with delicious-looking cheese plates. When we were shown in to the dining room, I already knew one thing I was going to order: we started off with the combination platter of three cheeses and one aged sausage.
Before it arrived, we had to decide if we were going to go for flights of wine, or whether we should do the old-fashioned thing and order a bottle. I thought that flights would be too distracting, and that drinking 2oz glasses of wine with food was a bit on the impractical side, so I ordered a local cinsault off the very approachable wine list. (Castle Vineyards, the wine maker, is so small that I think the only place you can get their wine is at the winery or at the girl and the fig.) It turned out to be a great choice, although I'm sure I could have more or less thrown a dart at the reds and come up with something equally good.
The wine list is exceptional in more ways than one. While being very carefully chosen, and obviously biased towards local wines, nearly everything on it is under $50. the girl and the fig has obviously decided not to apply standard restaurant markups to the wine, which means they can offer good Sonoma wines at non-threatening prices. What's more, you'll look in vain for any chardonnay, merlot or cabernet sauvignon – this is a place to discover less well known Rhône varietals like cinsault, mourvedre and – especially – viognier.
The cheese was easily the best I've ever had in north America. Going against type, we were given a hard goat, a hard sheep, and a soft cow. The sheep, Ossau Iraty from the Pyrenees, was nutty and delicious. The goat, with the fabulously Californian name of Cypress Grove Midnight Moon, was only just hard: it held together fine, but melted in your mouth. But it was the cow which really blew us away. A triple cream cheese called Pierre Robert from Seine-et-Marne in France, it was soggily soft and bursting full of flavour. Apparently it's enriched with crème fraiche, which sounds a bit dubious to me, but boy does it work.
At about this point I wanted to order another cheese plate, with another three cheeses (they have a dozen or so on the menu at any one time), but our first courses were coming. I had the specialite de la maison, the fig salad, while Michelle had a butternut squash soup (her favourite) which she pronounced the best she'd ever had. (On the other hand, she usually says that when she has butternut squash soup.)
Good as the fig salad was, I still think that figs are a bit like oysters or lobster: the sort of thing which is best eaten pure and unadorned, on its own. Perhaps the fig salad is a year-round thing, and they have to gussy the figs up for the time when they're not fresh. But these were good figs, and good figs don't want to be covered in a port vinaigrette, no matter how light.
Then, while Michelle had the fig salad as a main course, I moved on to the duck. I'm one of those people who finds it almost impossible not to order duck when he sees it on a menu, so I've had a lot in my time, but this was definitely among the best I've ever tasted: the skin was so crispy it crunched, while the flesh melted in the mouth.
The meal was at an end, we were both very happy indeed, and the last of the cinsault had been poured. But just as we were about to make the standard no-we're-completely-stuffed noises, I spied a port and fig ice cream on the desert menu, and the friendly waitress told us about the pot de creme special. We couldn't resist.
Much as I love my local ice cream artisan, I have to say the port and fig ice cream was beyond a doubt the best ice cream I've ever had. Lusciously creamy and lip-smackingly flavourful, it was almost enough to make me think that there are good ways to cook with figs after all. And then the pot de creme – what my grandmother used to serve as her world-famous petit pots, only bigger, darker, and covered in coffee whipped cream. Michelle, the chocaholic, said it was the best chocolate desert of all time, and I was inclined to agree, yet even so it was so rich that the two of us together couldn't finish it.
All that was left was the bill, which I have to say I dreaded. When a restaurant serves food this good, with chocolate, ice cream, duck and cheese all in best-ever land, you know you're not going to get away without a painfully hit wallet. When it's in Sonoma, you know it's going to be worse. But our four courses, with a fantastic local wine and excellent coffee, came to just $112.55 (before tax and tip) for the two of us. I've had meals which cost that much per person which don't compare.
No wonder, then, that when we started telling people where we'd eaten, they all looked at us in astonishment and asked us how on earth we managed to get a reservation: apparently the girl and the fig is known throughout northern California as a gourmand's paradise. All I can do is thank my lucky stars we managed to get a table on an hour's notice, thank the girl and the fig for the best meal I've had all year, and hope that I will be able to repeat the experience some time. And encourage you all, if you find yourselves anywhere within a 50 mile radius of Sonoma (and that includes San Francisco) to get a reservation and go there.
Posted by Felix at 21:31 EST | Comments (1)
St Francis in San Francisco
I'm sure that I wasn't the only New Yorker to book a flight to the west coast when I heard that the new general director of the San Francisco opera, Pamela Rosenberg, had decided to put on a production of Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise. I doubt, however, that the opera meant quite as much to any of my fellow pilgrims as it did to me.
Saint François d'Assise – a five-hour extravaganza for a chorus of 150 and an orchestra nearly as big, including 22 woodwinds, 68 strings, and five percussionists – is almost impossible to put on: think Mahler's Eighth doubled. But in celebration of the composer's 80th birthday in 1988, Kent Nagano and the London Symphony Orchestra managed to corral the necessary forces for a concert performance at the Royal Festival Hall.
I was 16, without any discernible interest in contemporary classical music, and the plan was that my parents would go to the concert while I was left back home to watch TV or whatever it is that 16-year-olds did back then. But it didn't work out that way: my father couldn't make it, and my mother, in a flash of inspiration, asked if I might want to come along instead.
I still vividly remember that evening, right down to the exact seats we were sat in (on the aisle on the right-hand side) and even where we parked the car. I had no idea at all what I was getting myself into.
Messiaen does the audience no favours at all in the first couple of scenes. "On first hearing, the score of Saint François d'Assise may strike some as a random assemblage of notes bearing no relationship to any music encountered before," says John Palmer in San Francisco's program notes, and that was pretty much the case for me. At the beginning of the opera, there's no brass, very little woodwind: just lush orchestration and Messiaen's inimitable densely-layered textures. My mother, or the program, had told me that the piece was somewhere between an oratorio and an opera, but I'd had precious few encounters with either art form at that point, so that didn't help me too much.
The production was semi-staged, and the singers hadn't memorised five hours' worth of music for the sake of one performance, so they had to carry their parts around with them whenever they moved. And although we in the audience had a copy of the libretto along with a translation, it's hard, on first hearing, to work out exactly what's meant to be going on, plot-wise, just from reading the text. So insofar as a story was told that evening, it was told by the orchestra. And what an orchestra!
As the colours slowly started entering the music, as we started hearing snatches of birdsong or the occasional curtailed crescendo, I found myself being increasingly drawn in to Messiaen's musical world. And then, at the end, came the astonishing, incredible finale: a mind-blowingly loud and joyous starburst which, as Michelle says, clears your sinuses right out. I'd never heard anything like it in my life, and I don't think that many of the other patrons in the Festival Hall that night had, either: they ended up giving Nagano, the LSO and Messiaen the longest and most heartfelt standing ovation I've ever seen.
That evening was the beginning of my education in classical music, and from then on, with my mother's help, I went to as many performances of the likes of Bartók, Shostakovich and Britten as I could. But Messiaen always held a very special place in my heart, and although I knew that his other works would never quite achieve the heights of Saint François d'Assise, I always looked forward to them enormously.
The opera itself, of course, was never put on: far too expensive, and far too obscure. After its premiere in Paris in 1983, there was one production in Salzburg, and that was about it until this year. At one point there were hopes that the great operatic philanthropist Alberto Vilar might underwrite a production at the Met in New York, and to that end Robert Spano and the Brooklyn Philharmonic put on a concert performance of a few scenes, to bring him around. It just so happened that my mother was visiting New York at the time, and I couldn't believe my luck in being able to turn the tables and take her to the very piece that she had taken me to all those years previously. What we heard was just as good as I'd remembered.
And then came the news from San Francisco: the opera company had made the daring decision to hire Pamela Rosenberg from Stuttgart and that, to demonstrate the city's new-found seriousness about opera, she was going to put on Saint François d'Assise in her very first season, in the city named after its hero. There was no way I was missing this.
I'd never been to the San Francisco opera before. It's a beautiful building, and maybe it was just me projecting, but I could feel a buzz of anticipation before the curtain rose. This was the defining opera of the season – it is featured on the company's t-shirts – and the reviews had been terrific. For my part, I felt like a seven-year-old on Christmas Eve. I was nervous, as well, for I had dragged along four friends of mine, none of whom had much experience with opera, or any at all with Messiaen. Would they like it as much as I had, 14 years ago?
As soon as the opera started, the worrying stopped. The acoustic in the San Francisco opera is crystalline, and you could hear all the layers in the music perfectly. This production is a triumph for many people, but above all for Donald Runnicles, San Francisco Opera's long-time music director, and his orchestra. Some of the music, especially in the great sermon to the birds, is almost impossible to conduct, and Messiaen deliberately leaves a lot of its progress to the individual musicians, out of the control of the conductor. I remember back in 1988 watching with awe as Kent Nagano flipped through the enormous score of the piece at a rate of about five or six pages a minute, conducting furiously in 2-3-2/32 time or something equally complex as astonishing birdcalls came flying out of the orchestra at us. Very few conductors would dare attempt it, and it is a great testament to the rapport between Runnicles and his orchestra that he pulled it off with such aplomb.
The production design was less of a triumph, although it was perfectly good. I really didn't need to see the chorus all dressed up in trenchcoats: it's a tired trope, which has nothing to do with what the opera is about. The revolving ramp was ingenious, but it revolved far too much, and far too loudly: for an opera house, San Francisco sure has noisy machinery. (It was particularly noticeable in the final two scenes, when Saint Francis dies; for some reason the revolve just kept on creaking away throughout both of them.)
And there were some peculiar choices, too: why leave Saint Francis stranded above the orchestra pit during his transfiguration? (He's meant to disappear completely, to the point where "only a spot of light remains".) And why bring on the stage hands at the end of the sermon to the birds? But there were ingenious touches, as well, such as the one-winged Angel, whose viol was replaced by the wires holding up the ethereal platform on which (s)he was walking.
Laura Aikin, who played the Angel with a twinkle in her step, was truly magnificent. She has a central role in the production: not only is she the only female soloist, providing our sole relief from the men of the monastery, but she is also visually striking, in bright blue, in stark contrast to the browns and greys of the rest of the production. Her mischievous characterisation was a joy to watch, and, most importantly, gorgeously beautiful to listen to, with a strong, clear soprano voice which penetrated straight to the heart.
Chris Merritt, as the Leper, also has a magnificent voice, as well as the acting chops to really make us feel his suffering and consequential anger at the world. In his scenes with Saint Francis, he more than held his own against Willard White, which is not an easy thing to do.
And then there was Willard White, in the horrendously difficult title role. I saw him a few years ago as Wotan in the Ring cycle at Covent Garden, and this has got to be at least as taxing as anything which Wagner came up with. White's stamina was impressive, as was the clarity of his French, but I would have liked a little more power. (Of course, I know how much I'm asking here, seeing how much he has to sing: I'm not sure anybody would be capable of that.)
In any case, seeing the opera acted out on stage definitely helped a great deal in understanding the action and the sequence of the scenes. And the acting abilities of the cast, White foremost among them, were outstanding. His horror of lepers, his transportation when the Angel plays the music of the invisible, his suffering at the end – all were powerfully conveyed. While the concert performances of this work were primarily musical events, seeing it staged helped to emphasise the spiritual.
The one great disappointment of the San Francisco production was in the grand finale. It might have been that the chorus was slightly smaller than in the concert performances, it might have been that the orchestra was buried in a pit, it might have been the sheer size of the opera house. I think it was mostly the acoustics of the San Francisco Opera: clear, but none too reverberant. Whatever it was, the great chord at the end had neither the emotional impact nor the sheer decibel volume of the concerts I'd seen in London and New York. It ranked maybe 7 out of 10 on the goosebump-meter: impressive, but not mind-blowing.
That said, however, the production was indubitably a triumph. San Francisco has every reason to be very proud of Pamela Rosenberg, and I hope they revive this production in the next few years. (I think every night sold out: San Franciscans certainly embraced it.) Maybe next time I can take my mother, and truly repay the gift she gave me in 1988.
Posted by Felix at 2:47 EST | Comments (6)
The Trials of Henry Kissinger and Bowling for Columbine
Left-wing documentaries are popular in New York City these days. I've been to two this week: The Trials of Henry Kissinger on Thursday afternoon, and Bowling for Columbine on Sunday night. Both showings were almost sold out, and the latter film managed to gross over $200,000 in just eight theatres over the weekend: that's over three times as much, on a per-theatre basis, than any of the top Hollywood films.
It's fashionable to sneeer at Michael Moore, the Man Who Would Be Schlub who's actually an Upper East Side millionaire. But at the same time, as my friend Kieran once said of the Guardian's Matthew Norman, I think he's some kind of genius. The same can, unfortunately, not be said of Eugene Jarecki, the director of the Kissinger film.
I would highly recommend that anybody interested in Kissinger read either Christopher Hitchens' two original articles for Harper's magazine, or else the book they were turned into. The idea behind the project was not to simply rehash the same old stories about US agression that we've all heard a hundred times from Chomsky, Sontag and the lefty-peacenik-crunchy-granola crowd. Rather, Hitchens had the genius idea to take the public evidence which is currently available, and turn it into a prosecutor's brief. With forensics always uppermost in his mind, he builds a very strong case that Henry Kissinger can and should be prosecuted under international law for crimes against humanity: others have been sentenced to long jail sentences or even death for much lesser crimes.
Film, however, is not a medium naturally suited to jurisprudence or the following of paper trails. It's also especially ill-suited to the slow and painstaking way in which Hitchens shows Kissinger to be situated at the top of a pyramid which controlled all aspects of US national security, from the armed forces to the CIA.
So although the film starts off by talking about Hitchens' war-criminal thesis, in fact it never even so much as bothers to say which crimes, specifically, he's guilty of. Rather, we're given a shallow history of US involvement in Indochina, East Timor, and Chile, with an emphasis on the way in which Kissinger personally bears responsibility for countless deaths in each one.
The film is also very confused about whether it's meant to be a crusading piece of passionate partisan rhetoric, or whether it would rather be an objective judge of Hitchens' accusations. It makes noises towards the latter at its start, but there's no evidence at all that a genuinely critical eye was ever brought to bear on what Hitchens has to say. All we get in the film is Kissinger's former lieutenant Alexander Haig doing his best impression of a lunatic reds-under-the-beds type, admitting he hasn't even read the book under discussion, and calling Hitchens a "sewer pipe sucker". All most entertaining, but hardly edifying. Surely Jarecki could have found an academic somewhere who could at least attempt to place Kissinger's actions in their Cold War context.
Michael Moore, on the other hand, in Bowling for Columbine, has complete freedom to do whatever he wants, since he never even bothers with a pretense of objectivity. Sometimes he goes too far, as when he attempts to draw some kind of connection between domestic gun violence in the US, Kissinger's misadventures in Indochina (ITMA), and Osama Bin Laden's attacks on September 11. Moore also seems to have no sense of restraint or control. This can be a good thing, as when he badgers Terry Nichols' gun-nut brother James to the point where he finally admits that maybe civilians shouldn't be allowed weapons-grade plutonium on the grounds that "there are some wackos out there"; but it also means extremely graphic footage of people getting shot or the second plane flying into the World Trade Center which I, for one, could certainly have done without. (The footage was so graphic that it made it very difficult to concentrate on what was going on in the film for the next few minutes.)
What Moore lacks in understatement he more than makes up for in filmmaking ability: he keeps the movie galloping along, even when he himself has no idea where it's going. The film starts off seemingly about white kids with guns, but moves on to the broader culture of violence in the USA, gets sidetracked by tying that in to racism (via a clip from South Park) and the relationship between white suburbs and the black inner city, then decides that it's not guns which kill people, it's fear which kills people, before finally ending on a point of some confusion in the wake of an interview with Charlton Heston.
Along the way, Moore manages, with the help of a couple of kids who got shot at Columbine, to persuade Kmart to stop selling ammunition for handguns. It's a major victory, and even he is shocked that he actually managed to make something happen: when the flack from the company announces the new policy, he can barely believe what he's hearing.
Moore also scores what must be one of the biggest coups of his television interviewing career: talking to Charlton Heston in his Beverley Hills pool house, he gets Moses to blame the number of gun deaths in the USA on this country's "multiethnic" nature. It's a shocking moment: the whole cinema as one took a sharp intake of breath and turned to the person sitting next to them with a "did he really say what I think he just said?" look.
Of course, Moore also takes gratuitous potshots at George W Bush, which got the cinema hooting with laughter, as when he replays one of those press conferences where the President warns of a grave but utterly unknowable danger, and blames "evildoers" for the heinous acts which haven't actually happened yet.
It's at times like these that Moore is at his best: while Roger and Me had enough narrative drive to structure a feature-length documentary, Bowling for Columbine feels more like a concatenation of TV-sized bites.
To his credit, however, Moore does leave us with more questions than answers, and even shows two sides of himself: on the one hand the New York liberal we all know only too well, but on the other hand the lifelong member of the NRA who really believes that it's possible to have widespread gun ownership alongside nugatory gun violence. (Moore spends a lot of time developing this thread in Canada, to no obvious punchline.)
So don't see The Trials of Henry Kissinger, read the book instead. And do see Bowling for Columbine: you'll have a great time, and get to meet some very interesting Americans in the process.
Posted by Felix at 2:30 EST | Comments (1)
felixsalmon.com redesigned
Welcome to the new-look felixsalmon.com! The incomparable Stefan Geens has installed the excellent Movable Type onto my server, and what you see now is the result.
It's going to take me a little while to move all my old postings into the new template, mainly because I'm going upstate this weekend for a fundraising dinner, and I won't have internet access. I've put the last few months' worth up, though.
And in the meantime, I encourage you to make full use of the comment boxes which are now attached to each of my posts. Let the debate begin!
Posted by Felix at 12:21 EST | Comments (4)
Rosenbaum, Hitchens and the Left
Christopher Hitchens has a new book out, on George Orwell. Orwell is one of those figures who tends to mean whatever you want him to mean: he's been adopted by political partisans (and, indeed, non-partisans) from across the spectrum, each one of whom finds his views perfectly encapsulated in Orwell's body of work.
The irony, judging by the latest column from the puffed-up Ron Rosenbaum in the New York Observer, is that Hitchens himself is starting to be treated in exactly the same way – and while he's still alive, no less!
Stefan Geens seems to admire this piece to the point of saying that he regrets not having had a subscription to the New York Observer. Huh? Putting the merits or otherwise of Rosenbaum to one side, the Observer is basically an Upper East Side gossip sheet filled with dinosaurs like Hilton Kramer and pointless Democrats like Joe Conason. It's read mainly for its real-estate column, and its hilarious pieces on the difference between Chapin and Spence. Why Geens thinks he'll be "slowly easing" into this piece of vanity publishing over the next few years I have no idea.
But of all the reasons to subscribe to the New York Observer, Ron Rosenbaum's political commentary has to be the worst. He might have interesting insights on the puzzles of Pale Fire, but his views on leftism in America seem little more than a warmed-over rehash of Martin Amis's ramblings in Koba the Dread.
At the risk of sounding like Rosenbaum myself, I wrote about the Amis book on September 8, but I didn't go into too much detail about the Amis v Hitchens feud: I reckoned Hitchens was more than capable of defending himself. The difference between Rosenbaum and myself, however, is that I provide a helpful link when I refer to my past entries, while Rosenbaum doesn't. His solipsism ("I think I made that clear in a column published here on Jan. 28"; "See my Nov. 6, 2000, column") serves no purpose: after all, no one saves their back issues of the New York Observer, and no one is going to trek down to the New York Public Library in attempt to follow the references.
Rosenbaum's actually worse than Amis, at least when he gets on to the subject of the Left's response to September 11 – a subject on which he rightly admires Hitchens. For while Amis picks his fights with an articulate, named individual (Hitchens), Rosenbaum flails unimpressively against an inchoate neo-Marxism which he sees all around him but can never seem to cite.
Look at the "two idiocies" he tries to fight back against in his column. The first is a relatively benign paragraph at the end of a film review, saying that Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition is "an American everyman, a pure-hearted killer who will commit no end of mayhem to ensure a better life for his children." From this, Rosenbaum deduces, after ratcheting up the sarcasm to embarrassing levels, that
Because they [Al Qaeda] hate America, they must be for liberation, and so we can’t blame them; we must accuse ourselves of being killers. In fact, we should thank them for providing our witty writer with an occasion for reminding the world that the "American everyman" is a killer. (Rosenberg's emphases.)
This response is so wildly disproportionate to its provocation, and bears so little relation to what was actually being said, that one worries for whatever critical faculties Rosenbaum ever had. But it's actually typical of his rhetoric. Rosenbaum's second "idiocy" – the "idiocy di tutti idiocies", in his words – was a nameless college professor saying that 9/11 might prompt Americans to do what the Germans did in the 1960s, and critically examine their past.
Before 9/11, of course, even Rosenbaum would have agreed with the statement that Americans ought to critically examine their past more than they do. Now, however, saying such a thing demonstrates no less than an "inability to distinguish America’s sporadic blundering depradations from Germany’s past, Hitlerism".
One more example: a Slate Breakfast Table discussion with David Gates on the anniversary of the attacks. Gates draws a parallel between the Taliban and John Ashcroft's obsession with "the flag stuff, the United We Stand stuff, the under-God stuff, the rituals of American civil religion, the encroachments of that old-time religion." Quoting Susan Sontag, he then points out that both of them oppose "pluralism, secularism, the equality of the sexes, dancing (all kinds), skimpy clothing and, well, fun".
It's easy to disagree with this. But it's easier to simply drown the point being made, and that's what Rosenbaum does in response, this time couched in a bit more politesse, since it's a friend he's talking to:
What comes across—and again I could be wrong—is that we are just about the worst thing in the world. No diff between Ashcroft and the Taliban.
But are you saying the Bush administration or America is morally equivalent to the Taliban? Do you see any significant differences?
What kind of tone-deafness is this? Is it not possible, any more, to make the point that the things we hate about the Taliban are actually the same things that we hate about the present Administration? Or, at least, is it not possible to say that without having to be boringly explicit about the fact that yes, actually, given the choice, we'd rather be where we are than in an Islamo-fascist theocracy?
The thing which annoys me is that Rosenbaum, in the Observer column, is explicitly aligning himself with Hitchens, who's far more intelligent and nuanced, and who actually is the recipient, in Koba the Dread, of the same sort of argument that Rosenbaum then goes on to gloss in the last part of his piece.
For Rosenbaum, making much the same mistake as Amis, says that "the Left [has] failed to come to terms with its history of indifference to (at best) and support for (at worst) genocidal Marxist regimes abroad". He slams "the contemporary Left’s curious neutrality-slash-denial after the facts had come out about Marxist genocides—in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, after 20 million, 50 million, who knows how many millions had been slaughtered." The contemporary Left, he says, has a "blind spot" when it comes to Marxist genocides, and claims that America "is the worst force on the planet".
Here, Rosenbaum stops citing anybody at all, and given his demonstrated knack for hyperbole, we can hardly take it that this characterisation of the Left is in any way accurate. But even if it were, he should have read his beloved Hitchens a bit better: here's an excerpt from his reponse to Amis in the Guardian.
You demand that people - you prefer the term "intellectuals" - give an account of their attitude to the Stalin terror. Irritatingly phrased though your demand may be, I say without any reservation that you are absolutely right to make it. A huge number of liberals and conservatives and social democrats, as well as communists, made a shabby pact with "Koba", or succumbed to the fascinations of his power. Winston Churchill told Stalin's ambassador to London, before the war, that he had quite warmed to the old bastard after the Moscow Trials, which had at least put down the cosmopolitan revolutionaries who Churchill most hated. TS Eliot returned the manuscript of Animal Farm to George Orwell, well knowing that his refusal might condemn it to non-publication, because he objected to its "Trotskyite" tone. (You can read all about this illuminating episode in my little book on Orwell.) I think we can say fairly that the names of Churchill and Eliot are still highly regarded in conservative political and cultural circles. You have a certain reputation for handling irony and paradox. How could you miss an opportunity like this, and sound off like a Telegraph editorialist instead, hugging the shore and staying with the script?
However, while all of those and many other dirty compromises were being made, the Bulletin of the Left Opposition was publishing exactly the details, of famine and murder and deportation and misery, that now shock you so much. I evidently wasted my breath in telling you this, but there exists a historical tradition of Marxist writers - Victor Serge, CLR James, Boris Souvarine and others - who exposed and opposed Stalin while never ceasing to fight against empire and fascism and exploitation. If the moral and historical audit is to be properly drawn up, then I would unhesitatingly propose the members of this derided, defeated diaspora, whose closest British analogue and ally was Orwell, as the ones who come best out of the several hells of the last century. A pity that you felt them beneath your notice.
It is, surely, undeniable that the strongest criticism of Marxist genocide came from the Left, and that the Right has often made very strange bedfellows itself: note Hitchens' point that "Moscow directly ordered the French Communist party to help put down the rebellion against De Gaulle, and Brezhnev both sought and received Lyndon Johnson's advance assurance that a Red Army invasion of Prague would be considered an 'internal affair'".
Of course, there were misguided Stalinist apologists in the West. I defy, however, Rosenbaum to find any leftist who still believes, as he seems to think they all do, that McCarthy was worse than Stalin.
If this is the man who's saying goodbye to the Left with such vitriol, then I'm sure the Left, in turn, will say good riddance to him. And no, Stefan, this is not what Hitchens is saying, not by a long shot. I'm with Hitchens on the subject of whether America "deserved" 9/11. But I'm a long, long way from Rosenbaum.
Posted by Felix at 10:44 EST | Comments (4)
Secretary
Secretary is, at heart, a by-the-numbers love story. Troubled girl meets troubled boy, they fall in love, but their troubles drive them apart before they are eventually overcome and our loving couple lives happily ever after.
If the problem with this relationship were that the girl was black while the boy was white, or that the girl was a Capulet while the boy was a Montague, then the plot would be as old as the hills. But you know what's different in this film: the girl (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a masochist who likes to be dominated, while the boy (James Spader) is, well, fond of a little spanking now and then. What's more, the girl is a fragile young thing, straight out of a mental institution, while the boy is a successful lawyer, who's much older than her. Oh, and he's also her employer; she's his secretary.
Early on in their relationship, Mr Grey (Spader) manages to succeed where all manner of highly-trained mental-health professionals had failed: he persuades Lee (Gyllenhaal), through sheer force of personality, that she must no longer cut herself. Lee's mother, of course, is overjoyed, but we're not, for the very next day Grey's forceful personality starts showing itself in a rather less unambiguously positive fashion.
The first spanking scene between the two is fiery, shot through with sexual energy and confusion. But although we see the relationship develop from there, even unto the use of some rather extreme props, the movie doesn't help us to understand what's going on in either of the characters' heads. It's clear that Lee becomes enamored of her submissive role, and, by extension, her employer. What's much less clear is whether or not she has simply replaced one self-destructive mode of behaviour with another.
The replacement part is clear: Lee runs to her employer's house when her home life reaches the emotional pitch at which she would formerly have gone racing for the razor blades. It's the self-destructive part which is left ambiguous: she seems only to blossom under Grey's tutelage, while Grey himself becomes increasingly tormented and eventually breaks the whole thing off.
Through voiceover, we learn what Lee is thinking, but Grey is much harder to understand. Is he feeling guilt and remorse at abusing his position of trust with a young and impressionable girl? Is he, rather, disgusted at his own predilections, and anxious not to drag anybody else into his own perversities? Or is he simply a repressed top who isn't sexually enlightened enough to rejoice in the appearance of his perfect bottom when he finds her?
I won't spoil the film for you when I say that in the end Lee finds reserves of strength unavailable to Grey, and confronts him with a declaration of love which he could never have come out with himself. When he finally gets around to declaring the love to be requited, the story becomes a fairy-tale (albeit one where the bride wears black), and the two live happily ever after.
So what are we to make of all this? Do happy ends justify immoral means? If Lee Holloway not only forgives her boss's behaviour but finally becomes a wholesomely sexual woman because of it, are we to assume that the film is in some way excusing his inexcusable actions? And what are we to make of the fact that Lee was mentally disturbed enough to be institutionalised? That there's a connection between mental illness and masochism, even that the latter can cure the former?
I think the film would ultimately shy away from such questions: it might be an indie flick, but it's not that deep. Rather, Secretary is a gorgeously shot, beautifully-paced love story with a twist, and if you go in with an open mind, you'll laugh while watching it and come out happy. If you think that a responsible film shouldn't raise issues it isn't prepared to deal with, however, and if you think that it's wrong for Secretary to glorify workplace abuse, then you won't get any arguments from me.
Posted by Felix at 10:49 EST | Comments (1)
Barbershop
A bit later than I originally intended, I finally got around to seeing Barbershop tonight. If you haven't done so as well, I highly recommend you follow suit: it's an excellent film, which pulls off the almost-impossible feat of being popular without having to give up its intelligence.
Most of the film is set in the barbershop of the title, a barely-going concern which was inherited by its proprietor, Calvin (Ice Cube) from his father. It's been the place where colourful Chicago south siders have hung out and shot the breeze for over 40 years, and only when he sells it does Calvin finally appreciate how much it really means.
Sounds hokey? Well, it is, a little, but not uncomfortably so. And the Message is delivered with so much humour and panache that it never stirs up any resentment. There's also a broad slapstick subplot about a pair of Laurel-and-Hardy small time crooks trying to rip off an ATM machine, which not only keeps the laughs coming when the situation back in the barbershop gets too serious, but also serves to give the camera a little fresh air. Without that subplot, the film would essentially be a claustrophobic stage play.
And for all that it takes place pretty much entirely in the same location, a transferred stage play à la Six Degrees of Separation or Glengarry Glen Ross this is not. There's very little in the way of character development: the film basically takes a set of sterotypes, puts them in the barbershop, and then has each one redeem himself in turn. The oreo and the wigger start out fighting and end up as friends, the twice-convicted felon helps solve a crime, the put-upon girlfriend asserts herself and dumps her boyfriend, and the overweight African ends up getting the girl. Sophisticated character development this is not.
Another thing that Barbershop isn't: "Smoke moved to the South Side of Chicago," as I guessed it might be in my September 17 blog. Calvin is no Auggie Wren, although Eddie, the character played with relish by Cedric the Entertainer, would not be out of place in the Brooklyn tobacconist, opining in his hilariously anti-pc way on the subjects of Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, OJ Simpson, and other icons of African-American history.
It's because of those lines that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others have called for a boycott of the movie, not (thankfully) that anybody seems to be paying them the slightest bit of attention. But if anything is really offensive about the film, it's not a couple of lines put into the mouth of an eccentric old barber who never has anybody in his chair.
For it's not the treatment of African-American icons which rankles, but rather the treatment of Africans. Dinka (Dinka!), the African character played by Leonard Earl Howze, isn't even given a specific country from which he's meant to come (unlike the Punjabi convenience-store owner across the street, who corrects the misapprehension that he's Pakistani). He is a naive doofus who seeks – successfully – to learn from his American brothers, a man who finally gets what he wants not by dint of his charming love of poetry so much as through the delivery of a well-timed left hook.
Still, one can only get so offended by the portrayal of any given character in this film, given how broadly painted most of them are. And Dinka gets one of the most touching scenes in the film: when the girl he gave a card to asks him whether he wrote the poem inside himself, he breaks into a mile-wide, completely unselfconscious grin, and proudly says that no, it was actually Pablo Neruda.
It's scenes like that, or the one where Calvin is being chased through the icy streets of Chicago by a thug trying to give him $20,000, which stick with you after you've seen the film. Barbershop never takes itself too seriously, and so when, occasionally, it comes to a note of grace – when Eddie, for instance, shows how really to shave a man – we feel elevated, rather than preached at.
So go see this film. You won't learn anything about human nature, about African-American life in the inner city, or even about cutting hair. But you will have a good time, you won't feel as though your intelligence has been insulted, and you will greatly admire the central performance by Ice Cube. In a time when Hollywood films in general and African-American films in particular nearly always play for the lowest of the lowest common denominators, that's an achievement to applaud.
Posted by Felix at 10:51 EST | Comments (0)
Men in uniform
Three stories for you:
• Two air marshals panic
on a flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia, brandishing guns at terrified
passengers and arresting a blameless former Army major (of Indian descent,
natch) for "observing too closely" what was going on, according
to the newly-formed Transportation Safety Administration.
• During the IMF meetings in Washington, DC, this weekend, there's
a medium-sized anti-war demonstration outside my hotel. As it's coming
to an end, one group of protestors decides to walk (or march) in the
same general direction as I'm headed, towards the IMF. They're punk
kids like I see hanging out in the East Village the whole time, maybe
19 years old, wearing torn jeans and bandanas covering their faces.
If asked, they'd probably describe themselves as anarchists. As they
start walking and chanting down Connecticut Avenue, they're followed
by a group of policemen. There are maybe 20 kids in all; the total number
of police can't have been below 40. Half of the officers were on white
bicycles with the words "Smith & Wesson" on their sides;
the other half were on motorcycles. All of them were a lot bigger, and
a lot more threatening, than any of the demonstrators.They ride up alongside
the kids, gunning their engines, glaring at them from underneath their
helmets, and generally acting as aggressively as I've seen police act
in this country. When the kids reach an intersection, they're immediately
surrounded by police, all with their truncheons out, who get right up
next to them and start shouting at them to disperse.
• When I get back to New York, there's a lot of laundry to be done,
and I persuade the security guard in my building to let me in to the
laundry room despite the fact that it's past 10pm and the room is meant
to be locked at that hour. While I'm in there folding t-shirts, a couple
of English guys from one of the ground-floor apartments come through
to have a cigarette in the courtyard. A minute or so later, the security
guard comes barrelling through the laundry room and orders them out
of the courtyard, telling them they're not allowed there after hours.
A conversation then proceeds along the following lines:
English Guy 1: (inaudible)
Security Guard (aggressively): –I wouldn't advise that if I were
you.
English Guy 2: –Excuse me?
Security Guard: –I'd advise you not to fuck with me, because I
can break your face.
English Guy 2: –He was only saying that he wouldn't want your job.
The security guard then watches the English guys leave, tells me to
get a move on with my laundry-folding, and also volunteers that people
ought to be careful what they say in such situations, because a misunderstanding
such as this one could easily have resulted in his fucking them up.
"I'm good at that," he says.
What all of these stories have in common is the shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude of the officials entrusted with ensuring our safety. In each of the cases, the officers strutted their stuff, while the people they were ostensibly protecting got intimidated, scared, and mistrustful of their protectors' goodwill and intentions.
It's clear that in all of these cases, a less antagonistic approach would have been more fruitful. Rather than whipping out a gun and screaming at the passengers (many of whom thought they were being hijacked: the air marshals were, after all, in plain clothes), a flight attendant could simply have been asked to make an announcement over the intercom. If a policeman were to have simply approached the kid at the front of the protestors and asked him where they were headed, a relatively civilised conversation would probably have ensued. And if the security guard in my building had approached a couple of residents smoking in the courtyard with less aggression, the chances of a "misunderstanding" would have been greatly diminished.
The worst clashes at G7/IMF/WTO meetings have been in ill-prepared cities where the police overreacted: Seattle, Turin. When Davos was in New York, or the World Bank meets in Washington, the protestors invariably get heard without significantly disrupting either the city or the meetings. That was the case this year, too, despite the behaviour I witnessed: I have a feeling that if the number of protestors had been greater, the situation would have been escalated to someone with a cooler head.
In general, though, there are obvious dangers to leaving the job of protecting airline passengers to "highly trained law enforcement professionals" who have had maybe two weeks' training and who, on one occasion, managed to discharge their weapon by mistake in the middle of a flight from Washington to Las Vegas. For although even poorly-trained air marshals can help protect passengers against hijackers, hijacking an airplane is probably the last thing any potential terrorist would be planning right now.
In the meantime, overzealous marshals, policemen and security guards only serve to make us ever more conscious of the terrorist threat. The purpose of terrorism is to create widespread fear and nervousness; it seems that those who would prevent it are having much the same effect.
Posted by Felix at 10:56 EST | Comments (0)
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