Freeze or rot

Been reading so many wonderful things lately! But for now, this:

Is it not dreadful and humiliating to think that Moses went up upon Sinai, the Greeks built their lovely temples, the Romans waged their Punic Wars, Alexander, that handsome genius in a plumed helmet, fought his battles, apostles preached, martyrs suffered, poets sang, artists painted, knights shone at tournaments--only that some French, German or Russian bourgeois garbed in unsightly and absurd clothes should enjoy life "individually" or "collectively" on the ruins of all this vanished splendor?

- Konstantin Leont'ev

Of Luddites and Mammon

Here is my (1st place winning, to indulge my obsequious vanity) speech from tonight's Gardner-White Prize Debate at the Yale Political Union on the topic, Resolved: Abolish Intellectual Property. I was speaking in the affirmative, and limited to three minutes.

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Luddites, Mr Speaker! Those damnable anti-capitalists of the 19th century, those destroyers of looms, revilers of progress, reactionary troglodyte simpletons! In their confusion and rage at progress’s noble but unforgiving advance they struck back at its most pernicious manifestation: the industrialized textile mill.

Two things are curious about the modern day Luddite, Mr Speaker: first, he is now allied with the State, and not against it, with the corporations, and not in protest of them, and second, while his forbear fought to preserve a way of life in the face of economic developments he could not hope to understand, the contemporary fights merely to maintain a petty and pernicious monopoly.

This debate is not about the intricacies of patents, trademarks, and copyright, all three distinct entities that egregiously get lumped under that harmless sounding euphemism, "intellectual property". This debate is about the relationship between culture and society, between creator, and, if the body will forgive me, created for. 

To appropriate Larry Lessig’s terminology we must decide whether we want a “read-write” culture, where the audience not only “consumes” (to use a vulgar word) but interacts, integrates, and internalizes, or a “read-only” culture, where the gatekeepers of production and distribution limit access, define appropriate responses, and thus effectively neuter our culture itself. 

When I think back to the most breathtakingly beautiful thing I have ever seen, I recall the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood in St Petersburg. The beauty of this Church is not in her originality, her "attribution to an individual will"-- her architecture, iconography, and even the materials with which she was built are all, if you will, highly traditional, and certainly uncopywriteable. But do not think her a facsimile of preexisting Churches-- she is, in a sense, an emergent beauty, having arisen from centuries of liturgical art and just then imagined and constructed in a more perfect visual spectacle.

Beauty is irreducible to function, and to suggest that beauty requires licensing is to reduce it to its basest and saddest function: to garner pittances here and there largely not even for the artists themselves, who, as anyone who’s ever known an artist knows, rarely have the sense to concern themselves with money, but for those decidedly unartistic, uncultured, unmoveable companies.

To those who worry that without such licensing no art, or, at least, much less art, will be produced, I note only that Ashton Kutcher was paid $20 million dollars to replace Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men. It is the status quo that is the unsustainable absurdity, ladies and gentlemen. 

Culture has not merely existed but thrived for the majority of human existence without these obscurantist regulations. Everything from the lowly folk song to the glory of our Churches, mosques, and temples, and more importantly, our deeply felt relationship to these art forms, not only does not need such laws but recoils from them. To make of every relationship a legal relationship is to utterly dehumanize us, and to reduce our relationship to art to such a state is to bow down on our knees before Mammon himself.

Cos see when I was younger I would say

In the spirit of introspection and honest self-evaluation (and because I'm finally starting the reapplication process so I can finish my degree...), I present:

TEN JOBS I WOULD LOVE TO HAVE

(and some inspirational factors)

1. Carny maquilleuse: RuPaul's Drag Race, various Youtube makeup tutorials, Carnivàle, Waits's "Circus"

Shannel (Bryan Watkins), who was totally robbed in Season 1

2. Godbeat journalist: the complete ignorance of huge variations in structure and hierarchy of religious institutions and inability to understand the most basic relationships between religious thought and politics among the educated class,  GetReligion.org

3. Tabagisme curator: Cigarettes are Sublime, the entire Tobacciana category on eBay, The Cigarette Book, this Lynn Barber column on the symbolic nuance brought to classic cinema by cigarettes, this cigarette dispenser from Mad Men:

It is nigh impossible to find cigarette dispensers like this, anywhere, nowadays.
I shudder to think how many hours of my life I've wasted looking.

4. Bar singer: there's just too much.

5. Early Russian history professor: Paul Bushkovitch.

6. Something with the Office of External Affairs and Interchurch Relations or Pension Board (OCA): any number of posts GetReligion has had to write because the religious institution in question left entirely too much open to misinterpretation by the media.  Also, the Pension Board helps parish treasurers understand the US tax code (among other things), which is a noble endeavor if ever I've heard of one. Perhaps inexplicably various scenes in A Canticle for Leibowitz and In This House of Brede. 

7. Smoking rights activist and/or PR rep: Nick Naylor,  NYC CLASH (particularly their seeming inability either to design a proper website or understand why such a thing is necessary), Freedom2Choose, Tobacco Truth, TobaccoHarmReduction.org, Michael Siegel and his courageous battle against the overt abuse and politicization of "science", Simon Clark (of FOREST, among other praiseworthy organizations),  Dick Puddlecote, Velvet Glove, Iron Fist: A History of Anti-Smoking, the Owl Shop and Shelley's shared (and endangered) status as the only legal cigarette-friendly bars I've ever been to in the US, despite much searching.

8. Anything at the Hillwood Estate: Who wouldn't want to work at their favorite museum? I would clean its toilets-- hell, I would do worse than that-- if I could wander through those grounds every day. Marjorie Merriweather Post (Close Hutton Davies May), daughter of C.W. Post and founder of both General Foods and Hillwood Museum and Gardens, was not only a millionaire with a sense of philanthropic duty, but an heiress who grew her father's company, kept it in the family, and took seriously her role as an arbiter and patron of culture. She briefly lived in the Soviet Union with her third husband, Ambassador Davies, and while there not only grew to love Russian decorative and liturgical art, but saw it as her responsibility to salvage as much of it as possible from the brutal environs of Stalin's Russia, where all remnants of the old order, aristocratic and religious, were being melted down, ritualistically destroyed, or sold into black markets. Russianists everywhere owe her a great debt-- the Estate is also a center of scholarship and grants access to its various libraries and archives to researchers by appointment, in addition to having an online database. You can take a brief virtual tour of the museum (that in no way does it justice) here. Really, if you're around DC, whether you're a Slavophile or not, make it out to the Estate sometime-- the gardens are magnificent in the warmer months. 

9. Tom Waits roadie: Actually I think if I ever saw him in person I'd spontaneously combust, so this might not be wise.

10. Professor of Orthodox Church-State relations/ government advisor on the same: the "Conflict and Cooperation in Post-Communist Europe" seminar I took last spring. The inability of many political scientists and theorists to wrap their heads around sincere religious belief and the many troubling implications of this failure. Ivo Banac (whose course, "Eastern Europe Since 1914", I was lucky enough to take while he was still lecturing!) and much of his writing. Daniel Larison.

TEN JOBS PRE-COLLEGE ME WOULD'VE LOVED TO HAVE

(anytime prior to matriculation, not just immediately prior)

1. Political speech writer: the knowledge that I was a very good writer and a very bad communicator. My mother's obsession with the Clintons.
2. Fiction author and/or Vanity Fair contributor: latent narcissism misdiagnosed as vocation. Issues of Vanity Fair laying on the bathroom floor. Reading at "college level" by 10 or 11. Being treated like an actual prodigy, instead of a slightly advanced student, by several of my teachers, and the resulting assumption that I had interesting things to say.
3. Diplomat: peculiar fondness for airports. Faux intellectual disdain for America. Europhilia. Hans Gruber. Acceptance to the Georgetown School of Foreign Service.

4. Physics/math historian: attempt to balance my love and appreciation for the beauty of math and physics with the realization that I was probably not smart enough to pursue either field directly. The University of Pennsylvania's History and Sociology of Science Department, Mark Adams in particular. Copernicus, Brahe.

Contains neither plums nor pudding.

5. History professor: My 11th grade American history textbook. Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance. Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII. The vague notion that I wanted to be an "academic" and an "intellectual" (though I had no real idea what either of those words meant). A very eerie History Channel documentary I saw when I was 8 or 9 about some relatively early English king who had a series of unfortunate and mysterious diseases and whose death both left me profoundly unsettled and forever imbued the study of history with an air of mysticism and danger. The Cloisters.

For a long time after I visited the Cloisters (sometime in elementary school), I assumed the word had something to do with death and the dead because of how dank, tenebrous, and otherworldly it was. 

6. Lawyer: Law & Order's fixed presence on my mother's television. Winning some "debates" in summer camp in fourth grade. The assumption that lawyers are a thing smart people tend to become. My phenomenal bullshitting skills (in 7th grade I convinced my entire home ec class that I had been born and partially raised in the UK, and the teacher that my mother had gone to school with her sister in England).

7. UN translator: The Interpreter. Having a better French accent than my teacher (who I later learned spoke French so poorly that she frequently made up words and grammatical constructions. We did not have AP languages in my district). Being really good at memorizing things.

8. Mathematician: spending hours staring at my calculus textbook, finally understanding a concept, finding that more beautiful and rewarding than memorizing dates of Supreme Court cases.

9. Psychiatrist: Frasier. John Katzenbach's The Analyst. The Dali Museum. Hannibal Lecter. The first Artemis Fowl book. Dostoevsky's White Nights. Ivan Karamazov. "Antisocial" tendencies.

10. Neuroscientist/neurologist: Society for Neuroscience Brain Bee. Fondness for the orderliness of hospitals. Flowers for Algernon.

My brother and I

My younger brother, a freshman on Dartmouth's lacrosse team (go Big Green!...), has a few games in Connecticut this weekend, and today he texted me as he was traveling through New Haven:

"Psst... bring copious amounts of booze to my hotel room tonight."

"What hotel?"

"I'm unfortunately kidding, I'd be booted from the team, but wow loving the willingness, real top notch stuff."

"What are alcoholic older sisters for?"

"To easily and inconspicuously poison, thus ensuring a vast inheritance."

He knows so much, and yet, so little.

I don't know how this is related to me either.

Money never sleeps, but the audience, well...

(This is a review of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. There are no spoilers, but you shouldn't care even if there were, because no one should pay to see this movie.)

The line was long, extending through the lobby, down the stairs, out the building and along the sidewalk of what serendipitously happened to be New Haven's own Wall Street, which, in lieu of the world's largest stock exchange, is home to the Yale Law School (take from that what you will).

We arrived a half hour early and were literally the last two people to get seats in the packed auditorium. Before sitting down we were wanded by an overwhelmed-looking security guard to make sure we had no cameras or cellphones with us, which were strictly forbidden from the advanced screening somehow secured by the Yale Film Society.

Two hours later, as we emerged back onto Wall Street, bitchily dissecting the film's vapid preachy tone, inattention to character development and/or depth and/or symbolism, sloppy and inaccurate references to "moral hazard" and butchered summaries of the American financial situation, we paused, not even a block from the theater, having realized that neither of us could remember the protagonist's name.

We knew it started with a J and was probably monosyllabic. I offered to bet on the name with my friend. Though I couldn't remember a single line or scene where any character addressed our protagonist anonyme, my intuition screamed "Jake!", and I'm rarely the type to ignore my screaming inner gypsy.

My friend was leaning toward Jack, but he wouldn't take me up on the bet. Only 20 years old, he's already a tax and finance wonk, and as such (or maybe the causation flows the other way?) he's prone to bouts of "rational decision making," "cost-benefit analysis," "risk management," and other such soulless WASP affectations. Of course, he was right not to- the wailing old Slovak that is the voice of my subconscious hadn't let me down (the protagonist's name was the incomparably forgettable "Jake Moore").

See what I did there, drawing on personality and cultural archetypes to help make what is essentially a non-event into a vaguely engaging narrative whose conclusion largely allows you to draw your own?

If you are looking for anything even vaguely resembling that kind of storytelling, send me the $10 you would've wasted on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, because at best, that's what it could've been, and it failed to achieve even that.

It was 133 minutes long, roughly 120 of which felt like window dressing for what seemed to be the only two scenes Oliver Stone cared about: Moore's pseudo-scientific babble explaining the wonders of fusion energy to a Chinese investor (accompanied by CGI animations a la first season House- you know, before they realized it was a cheesy gimmick that distracted from the storytelling), and Gekko's bizarre lecture montage explaining the financial crisis, which, y'know, failed to really explain anything, but the hamfisted editing and musical score might trick someone into thinking it does if they don't bother listening.

The Whitney Humanities Center auditorium seats 242 people. Over 200 of my fellow audience goers that night were college students, so I'm not sure if WS: MNS will get quite as many laughs in future showings, but I'm also not sure that Stone didn't intend for some of the more "intense" scenes to garner outright laughter.

"Do you realize what you're asking for here?" asks some suit behind a conference table in the NY Federal Reserve. "The biggest bailout in history." Soap opera-confrontation quality line delivery. Serious Eyes! Serious Forehead! Serious Voice! The laughter begins. "Nationalization. Socialism." The audience loses it. The villainous Bretton James replies, with equal levels of 'I am being so earnest you should call me Jack', "If we don't do this, there won't be any more history."

I am not making this up.

Michael Douglas is largely a pleasure to watch, except in scenes with Carey Mulligan, who plays Gekko's spoiled brat liberal activist Elektra blah blah blah daughter Winnie. All the lines I remember because I liked them (and not because they reminded me of the self-serious bathos of Ed Wood) were his. Bud Fox briefly reappears. It wasn't particularly entertaining- all I remember is that Charlie Sheen's nose has somehow acquired a vaguely Nixoneqsue bulbousness since 1987.

The costuming was also fantastic, and I might recommend this film to aspiring sartorialists just because of the incredible attention to detail. When Jake first confronts Bretton James (played by Josh Brolin), having interrupted some kind of latter day bacchanal/fundraiser of his, Bretton is wearing a sumptuous burgundy suit jacket with a tie that matches in all the right ways, somehow faintly evoking a Doctor Faustus vibe. Gekko more than once wears an absolutely gorgeous jacket with a plaid so subtle it might be missed on the big screen- but look for it, and revel in fabrics and tailoring the likes of which you didn't know existed.

One final note, because this "review" is already too long and I don't feel like getting into the fifty other reasons why this film is vacuous at best: in the original Wall Street Gekko is never seen smoking a cigar, only cigarettes. I, being me, read a lot into this- everyone else in Wall Street who matters smokes cigars- Bud Fox, his father, and Gekko smoke cigarettes. To me this said something interesting about tobacco-as-class-marker, and about Gekko's unwillingness to let go of his lower class past in particular.

In Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I don't think I saw a single cigarette, and Gekko smoked plenty of cigars. I actually think this makes sense- destabilized, insecure, and with a fraction of the money he did prior to incarceration, he no longer has the luxury or the confidence to play himself down- there's a scene where he greets some other financial bigwig only to be awkwardly brushed aside and ignored- now, he needs every superficial wealth-and-power-signalling accessory he can find, for himself, probably, more than for anyone else.

For I am a rain dog too

A fairly arbitrarily selected list of twelve of my favorite Americans, real and fictional, whose admirable and/or compelling qualities I find distinctly American, offered in no particular order and without further commentary (for now):

1. Hunter S. Thompson
2. Ernest Hemingway
3. Tom Waits
4. Jay Gatsby
5. Denis Leary
6. Tony Stark
7. William F. Buckley, Jr
8. Richard Nixon
9. Jack Donaghy
10. Jay-Z
11. Kanye West
12. Woody Allen

Honorable mentions:
Roger Sterling
Dagny Taggart
Charlie Wilson
Nicolas Cage
Johnny Cash
Humphrey Bogart

"A rain dog is - you notice it more in lower Manhattan than anywhere else - after a rain in New York all the dogs that got caught in the rain, somehow the water washed away their whole trail and they can't get back home so about 4 in the morning you see all these stranded dogs on the street and they're looking around like - won't you help me get back home, sir, please - excuse me sir - excuse me sir - can you help me find my way back home - all makes and models, the short ones, the black ones, the tall ones, the expensive ones, the long ones, the disturbed ones, they all want to get home.

So that's a rain dog. It's like falling asleep somewhere and you thought you knew where you were and when you woke up - it's like Mission Impossible - they changed the furniture and the walls and windows and the sky turned a different color and you can never get back..." - Tom Waits

Civil Rights are Neither!

Everything old is new again?

The apparently unconquerable Civil Rights Act Question continues to rear its slippery head, this time in Nevada:

"'It’s a simple question, but it’s a ‘gotcha’ question,' [Nevada Republican candidate for Senator Sue] Lowden, a former state Republican Party chairwoman, said on the show “Face to Face.” 'Frankly, I wouldn't even know Rand Paul if I saw him on TV.'"

How the hell has this become a meme? The '64 Civil Rights Act is a thought experiment you throw at naive libertarians their freshman year of college, not a goddamn campaign issue. What's even more frustrating than the repeated asking is the complete inability of Republicans to address, brush off, and get back on message. Aren't y'all supposed to be career politicians?

Look, I'll do you a favor and tell you what to say: in an ideal world, such heavy-handed state involvement in civil society wouldn't be necessary, and given the social and economic inequalities we see between races even today it's clear that the Civil Rights Act was a less than perfect solution, but there are clear instances where imperfect state intervention is better than none. But the United States today isn't a country wanting for government intervention! In fact... [get the fuck back on message].

It's not like the Tea Party is looking for ultra-libertarian rigor and consistency, here, folks, unless there's a secret GOP Plan to finally repeal the Civil Rights Act that no one told me about (there aren't even any prominent Republicans with mustaches ornate enough to twirl evilly, so what would be the point?).

And seriously, Sue, what's with the bus hailing over Rand Paul? Touchy much?

Here's how I'd explain the fascination of the cryogenic pod people apparently running 2010 political season coverage: libertarianism, though older than the baby boomers it currently horrifies, has never gotten much attention on the national stage. Unlike Republicanism and Democratism, it's an ideological system, meaning that consistency is possible, and in consistency-friendly soil strange verdure blooms. The triple-headed dog called Bush Derangement Syndrome, the Campaign for Liberty, and the Tea Party Movement tore away enough old meat to make room for libertarian candidates, who, used to never having a snowball's chance in hell at being serious contenders for anything significant, never really learned how to talk the talk. And now we all get to relive the same old conversations libertarians have been having since way before there even was a Madonna for Gaga to imitate because apparently the Democrats can't find anything more substantive to attack the new wave GOP on?

Oh, and one more thing: isn't race like, still a huge issue, and stuff? Pray to the devil you know, I guess.