Quote of the Day posts

“I understand there’s a common fraternity creed here at Morehouse: 'Excuses are tools of the incompetent used to build bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness.' Well, we’ve got no time for excuses. Not because the bitter legacy of slavery and segregation have vanished entirely; they have not. Not because racism and discrimination no longer exist; we know those are still out there. It’s just that in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil — many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did — all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything that you have not earned. (Applause.)

”Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination. And moreover, you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and they overcame them. And if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too."

-- Pres. Barack Obama in his commencement speech to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., yesterday.

“When Mary Lucia played The Suburbs' 'Love Is The Law' just after 5 p.m. yesterday, historic yesterday, I was on the freeway driving home from the Minnesota State Capitol, ears still ringing from the cheers and cries of thousands of happy lovers, law-makers, and families. It was beyond poignant, and for me, one of the greatest moments ever heard on The Current; a perfect, yes, marriage of civic pride, music, roots, community, love. Over the last month or so, this is the (30-year-old) tune that's been running through my head — 'kewpie dolls and urine stalls will be laughed at the way you're laughed at now' — and today I'm proud to be from the state that gave us such a timeless anthem and message. Long may it play...

-- Minneapolis writer and singer Jim Walsh, author of ”The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting,“ on Minnesota becoming the 12th state to legalize same-sex marriage.

”Love is the Law" was the big song from my first, confused, awful steps away from high school and into college.

Marriage equality passes the Minnesota Senate, 36-30, May 13, 2013. Gov. Mark Dayton will sign it into law today.

“... the truth is I carry a 'faulty' gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer. My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman ...

”Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex ...

“But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.”

-- Angelina Jolie, “My Medical Choice,” in a New York Times Op-Ed, May 14, 2013.

“A man's got to keep playing if he's fit. Don't quit until every base is uphill.”

-- Babe Ruth, recovering from cancer surgery, to Hank Greenberg, who was visiting him in his hospital room before reporting to spring training, Feb. 1946. As recounted in John Rosengren's book, “Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes,” pg. 305.

Babe Ruth on Babe Ruth Day, 1947. It would be his last visit to Yankee Stadium.

“[A]s Ronald Reagan made his plea for unity, he spoke with a mildness, a lack of charisma, even a simplicity, which was reminiscent of a good middle-aged stock actor's simplicity—well, you know, fellows, the man I'm playing is an intellectual, and of course I have the kind of mind which eve gets confused by a finesse in bridge.

”They cheered him wildly, and he looked happy, as if something had gone his way ...

“Still, unlike Nixon, Reagan was altogether at ease with the Press. They had been good to him, they would be good again—he had the confidence of the elected governor of a big state, precisely what Nixon had always lacked; besides, Reagan had long ago incorporated the confidence of an actor who knows he is popular with interviewers. In fact, he had a public manner which was so natural that his discrepancies appeared only slightly surrealistic: at the age of fifty-seven, he had the presence of a man of thirty, the deferential enthusiasm, the bright but dependably unoriginal mind, of a sales manager promoted for his ability over men older than himself. ... Besides, darkening shades of the surreal, he had a second personality which was younger than the first, very young, boyish, maybe thirteen or fourteen, freckles, cowlick, I-tripped-on-my-sneaker-lace aw shucks variety of confusion. For back on Tuesday afternoon they had been firing questions at him on the order of how well he was doing at prying delegates loose from Nixon, and he could only say over and over, 'I don't know. I just don't know. I've been moving around so quickly talking to so many delegations in caucus that I haven't had time to read a paper.'

”'Well, what do the delegations say, Governor?'

“'Well, I don't know. They listen to me very pleasantly and politely, and then I leave and they discuss what I've said. But I can't tell you if we're gaining. I think we are, but I don't know, I don't know. I honestly don't know gentlemen,' and he broken into a grin, 'I just don't know,' exactly like a thirteen year old, as if indeed gentlemen he really didn't know, and the Press and the delegates listening laughed with him as if there were no harm in Ronald Reagan, unless the lightning struck.”

--Norman Mailer, “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” pp. 70-72.

From Amy Davidson's post, “What Charles Ramsey and Amanda Berry Knew,” on the New Yorker site, about the rescue of three women from a home in Cleveland. I have no words; these are good ones:

“So, you know, I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute,” Charles Ramsey told a reporter for the ABC affiliate in Cleveland, explaining what happened after, as he put it, he “heard screaming. I’m eating McDonald’s. I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of the house.” Ramsey, and others who gathered, helped her break open the door, kicking it from the bottom. She told them her name, Amanda Berry. She had been kidnapped at the age of seventeen, ten years ago. There were two other women in the house, Gina Dejesus, who is now twenty-three, and Michelle Knight, now thirty, who had also been held for a decade. There was at least one small child.

Ramsey’s 911 call is transfixing. “Yeah hey bro,” it begins, “you check this out.” His intensity, the McDonald’s shout-out, his undoubtedly loose paraphrase of Berry’s account (“This motherfucker done kidnapped me and my daughter”), and also his competence (he does a better job with the essentials like the address than the 911 operator) make him one of those instantly compelling figures who, in the middle of an American tragedy, just start talking—and then we can’t stop listening. (See Ruslan Tsarni, Ashley Smith.) But one phrase in particular, from the interview, is worth dwelling on: “I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute.” In many times and places, a line like that has been offered as an excuse for walking away, not for helping a woman break down your neighbor’s door. How many women have died as a result? They didn’t yesterday.

“Obviously, there has been no shortage of news to cover over these past few weeks.  ... But even when the days seemed darkest, we have seen humanity shine at its brightest. We’ve seen first responders and National Guardsmen who have dashed into danger, law enforcement officers who lived their oath to serve and to protect, and everyday Americans who are opening their homes and their hearts to perfect strangers.

”And we also saw journalists at their best — especially those who took the time to wade upstream through the torrent of digital rumors to chase down leads and verify facts and painstakingly put the pieces together to inform, and to educate, and to tell stories that demanded to be told.

“If anyone wonders, for example, whether newspapers are a thing of the past, all you needed to do was to pick up or log on to papers like the Boston Globe.  When their communities and the wider world needed them most, they were there making sense of events that might at first blush seem beyond our comprehension.  And that’s what great journalism is, and that¹s what great journalists do. ...

”And in these past few weeks, as I’ve gotten a chance to meet many of the first responders and the police officers and volunteers who raced to help when hardship hits, I was reminded, as I’m always reminded when I meet our men and women in uniform, whether they’re in war theater, or here back home, or at Walter Reed in Bethesda — I’m reminded that all these folks, they don’t do it to be honored, they don’t do it to be celebrated.  They do it because they love their families and they love their neighborhoods and they love their country.

And so these men and women should inspire all of us in this room to live up to those same standards; to be worthy of their trust; to do our jobs with the same fidelity, and the same integrity, and the same sense of purpose, and the same love of country.  Because if we’re only focused on profits or ratings or polls, then we’re contributing to the cynicism that so many people feel right now."

-- Pres. Barack Obama striking a serious note at the end of his speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Sat. April 27, 2013. Particularly like the last line.

“What is it with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]? Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern, studies unjust deportations and detentions. She has concluded that, on any given day, roughly one percent of ICE's tens of thousands of prisoners are U.S. citizens. Stevens has documented more than forty U.S. citizens who have been deported. The true number of cases, even recent ones, is unknown. ...

”[T]he FBI's vast database ... produced many records of Mark Daniel Lyttle as a U.S. citizen with a valid Social Security number. There was no record of a Jose Thomas being connected to Lyttle or to his prints. Why were the biometrics ignored? Evidently, the goal of these searches was not to discover who the detainee was but to deport Jose Thomas. Information that was consistent with deportation was treated as accurate. Information was that inconsistent was treated as false.“

-- William Finnegan, ”The Deportation Machine: A citizen trapped in the system," in the April 29, 2013 issue of The New Yorker.

See also: The War in Iraq.

“Writing is of use to the psyche only if the writer discovers something he did not know he knew in the act itself of writing.”

-- Norman Mailer, “Death, the 11th Presidential Paper,” in his book, “The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer,” 1963, pg. 219

“Anybody who wants a quick solution for a permanent problem is a lowgrade totalitarian.”

-- Norman Mailer, “An Impolite Interview,” in “The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer.”

Jonathan Eig, author of “Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season,” was nice enough to read my review of “42” and tweet the following:

@eriklundegaard You nailed it. Couldn't have said it better myself. I'll probably write a short column next day or two. But this is perfect.

— Jonathan Eig (@jonathaneig) April 14, 2013

The short column is his “Nine-inning Review of '42'” for Chicago Sports Side. He liked the movie more than I did, left the theater happier than I did, but we're not far off. I agree in particular with his 8th and 9th points:

8. “42” tries too hard to please. It wants the endorsement of the Robinson family, Major League Baseball, historians, and fans young and old. It wants to educate and entertain. It wants black fans to feel pride and white fans to appreciate how far we’ve come. It succeeds in almost every one of those ways. It makes for a good movie, but not a great one. “42” plays it safe, something Jackie Robinson never did. Robinson was a complicated man, full of fear and fury. I wish more of his complexity made it to the screen.

9. I left the theater smiling. I enjoyed the movie, and so did my kids. But I found myself wondering how it would have turned out if Spike Lee had directed. He might not have done better, but I don’t think he would have played it safe.

Safe. The right kind.

“The [Hengdian World Studios] lot is 27 times larger than Universal and Paramount combined, but it's still not enough: on average, there are 20 movies or television dramas being filmed simultaneously, and many more directors are waiting to begin shooting. Filmmakers are eager to to tap into China's box office, which last year totalled $2.7 billion, surpassing Japan to become the world's second largest. Others come to supply China's gargantuan television industry: the country has more than 2500 stations.”

From Ian Johnson's article, “Studio City: In a remote spot in China, the world's biggest movie lost is getting even bigger,” in the April 22 New Yorker. It's a fascinating bit of contemporary history even if the article itself is so-so.

One of the many sets, expertly built, on the Hengdian World Studios lot, which makes it feel like one of the Hollywood studios during its glory days.

“Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets.”

-- former U.S. Representative and gun victim Gabrielle Giffords in the NY Times Op-Ed, “A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip,” April 17, 2013, after a group of senators (below: 41 Republicans, four Democrats, one procedural) blocked passage of mild gun-control reforms including background checks.

“A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in 'a startling show of force,' as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a 'phalanx' of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours ('I was scared') before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone who’d plant a bomb—that he was a nice guy who liked sports. 'Let me go to school, dude,' the roommate said later in the day, covering his face with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living with a killer.”

-- Amy Davidson, in the New Yorker piece, “The Saudi Marathon Man,” on the Saudi national who, this Monday, went from bombing victim, to bombing suspect, to person of interest, to double victim.

“I had a late hockey game last night, which means about an hour in the car listening to late-night talk radio call-in shows. There's nothing like late-night talk radio call-in shows to restore your confidence in the portions of the media that are NOT late-night talk radio call-in shows.”

-- my friend Dave during a Facebook discussion of my previous post on the Boston Marathon bombings.

“When Jackie Robinson went to the Major Leagues, that was the beginning of the modern-day civil rights movement. That was before Rosa Parks said, ‘I don’t feel like going to the back of the damn bus today.’ That was before Brown vs. Board of Education. Martin Luther King was a sophomore at Morehouse College at the time. Jackie Robinson went to the Major Leagues and that’s what started the ball rolling. That was the start, man! Are you listening?”

-- Buck O'Neill to two ignorant NY shock jocks in the 1990s, as recounted in Joe Posnanski's book, “The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America,“ and on his blog today. It takes place just before the incident with the woman in the red dress, which is one of my favorite stories. I also like this bit Joe adds: ”I once asked Buck if he could have been the first black man play in the Major Leagues. He said no. He said that task needed someone extraordinary, someone fierce, someone who would not stand for injustice, someone who would not bend to ease of inaction or the force of hatred. I said, 'You could have done it.' He said, “No, that was for Jackie. I had a different role.'”

“All of life is futile and pointless. I'm so unhappy.”

-- Dave White at the end of his scathing review of “Scary Movie 5” on Movies.com.

I've been there, dude. Off the top of my head, here are the movies that made me feel that way:

• National Lampoon's Gold Diggers (2004)
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
• Sucker Punch (2011)

“The myth — and it is a myth — that the 1970s were Britain’s lowest point persists mainly because 'winners' of Thatcher’s upward wealth redistribution are more likely to write books and newspapers columns and host television shows than former miners are.”

-- Alex Pareene, “The Woman Who Wrecked Great Britain: Margaret Thatcher earned every single cheer that greeted her death,” on Salon.com

So how did Woody Allen approach you [about being in his movie]?
It just came out of nowhere. I got this e-mail: Woody Allen wants you to come in for something. I’ve been waiting for that e-mail my whole life.

-- Louis C.K., in the David Itzkoff Q&A, “For Louis C.K., the Joke's on Him,” in The New York Times.

“When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.”

-- Roger Ebert, after cancer took away his lower jaw and his ability to speak, in Chris Jones' 2010 Esquire piece, “Roger Ebert: The Essential Man.”  Roger died yesterday at the age of 70.

“Ebbets Field was a whole different thing. It took a lot of character to be a Dodger fan and none to be a Yankees fan.”

--Robert L. Ostertag, lawyer and Mets fan, in Ken Belson's piece, ”A Fan’s Ballpark Routine Outlasting the Park" in The New York Times, April 2, 2013. Ostertag has been going to Mets' home openers for 50 years now. He's 81.

“[In 'Olympus Has Fallen'], the Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman) takes command, but the only one who can save the President—not to mention the world—is a disgraced former Secret Service agent, Mike Banning. He’s played by Gerard Butler, a second-tier star from Scotland whose lack of humor may remind you why Bruce Willis has lasted so long as an action hero.”

-- David Denby, “The Current Cinema: Rough Rides,” March 2013. Here's my review of “Olympus Has Fallen.”

Butler: happy times.

One of the disadvantages of Google, or search engines in general, is that you miss all the stuff you'd find on the way to finding what you're looking for.

For my review of “On the Road,” for example, I couldn't find, online, James Baldwin's criticism of Jack Kerouac, so I began to go through my books. Those things on the shelves back there. I thought it was in an early essay but “Notes of a Native Son” seemed too early. So maybe “Nobody Knows My Name”? And there it was. The last essay: “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.” The white boy in this case being Norman Mailer, not Kerouac.

But on the way to that discovery I re-read a few of the other essays, including the first, “The Discovery of What It Means to be an American,” and came across the line below. He's talking about the various differences between America, where he was born, and Europe, where he became an artist:

On the contrary, [Americans] have a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately).

It's been a while since I've come across a sentence that so succinctly defines the message of the GOP generally and FOX-News specifically: distrust the intellects (elites) and cling to the myth (tall in the saddle). Most real intellectual effort destroys absolutism, which is what myths are about. Intellectual effort is hard, wish fulfillment is fun. Why we're where we are.

It's a shame, by the way, that James Baldwin wasn't around to see the election of Barack Obama and the shift in American attitudes toward homosexuality and same-sex marriage, the latter of which is being played out before the U.S. Supreme Court this week. Baldwin would have been 89 this year.

“Filming Superman was sometimes tedious and exasperating. I spent months hanging on wires for brief moments in the movie that would then have to be reshot. But ultimately it was a wonderful experience. One of my favorite memories is of running into John Gielgud in a hallway at Pinewood Studios. We had met before at a social occasion; now I was dressed in full Superman regalia. As he shook my hand he said, 'So delightful to see you. What are you doing now?'”

-- Christopher Reeve, “Still Me,” pp. 193-94

“We're all heading to the same station [death]. There's a great line by T.S. Eliot: 'There's only the trying. The rest is not our business.' Just keep trying. Do what you can, but don't stop, and particularly don't stop at that sign that says success. Run that light. Run that light.”

-- Robert Redford, in Scott Raab's great profile, “Free at Last: The Robert Redford Story,” in the April issue of Esquire. I'm like Raab, coming of age when Redford was ascendant, and have my own Redford stories. (I wrote a small piece on Redford's political movies in 2007.) I might get to the others one day.

“Mr. Dahlberg? Mr. Ken Dahlberg?” Bob Woodward, trying.

“These leftist stooges for anti-American causes are always given a free pass. Isn’t it time to make them stand up and be counted for their views?”

-- Joe Scarborough, talking about Iraq War protesters in April 2003. In his piece, “MSNBC selectively remembers the Iraq War,” Alex Pareene makes sure Scarborough stands up and is counted for his views.

Further reading about the Iraq War on this site:

• Miss Me Yet? Part I
• Miss Me Yet? Part II
• Where are Iraq War movies popular?
• Tom Waits' “Day After Tomorrow”
• 'Fuck it, we're going in.'
• Movie Review: The Hurt Locker (2009)
• Movie Review: Green Zone (2010)
• Movie Review: Fair Game (2010)
• Movie Review: The Tillman Story (2010)
• Movie Review: Restrepo (2010)

“MAD [magazine] has never been successfully sued, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. The magazine once received a letter from Lucasfilm’s legal department after their Empire Strikes Back parody, demanding that they recall all printed copies of the issue and destroy them. MAD replied by sending a copy of another letter they had received the previous month—from George Lucas, offering to buy the original artwork for the Empire parody and comparing Mort Drucker to Leonardo Da Vinci and the parody’s writer, Dick De Bartolo, to Mark Twain. They never heard from Lucasfilm’s legal department again.”

-- Grady Hendrix in his article, “Cahiers du CinéMAD,” about the history of MAD magazine's movie parodies, in Film Comment. Here's a Wiki list of MAD's film spoofs. The first I remember is “A Crockwork Lemon.”

Two panels from MAD's 1977 parody of “Star Wars.”

“Louie Gohmert is not just a nutjob — he is a singularly useless and unaccomplished nutjob. The man has been in the House of Representatives since 2005 and in all that time all he’s done is generate hundreds of outraged blog posts.

”Gohmert is the perfect spokesperson for the modern conservative movement, because his Congressional record is made up of an endless series of inflammatory, stupid and outrageous public statements, instead of any legislative accomplishments whatsoever. He has done nothing at all since he arrived in Washington besides repeatedly say degrading and insulting things about gay people and Muslims and immigrants. He doesn’t really seem to take any issue remotely seriously and has no apparent interest in actually advancing conservative policy goals. He’s done nothing for conservative causes beyond rile up liberals and repel sensible people.

“At CPAC he is Elvis.”

-- Alex Pareene, in the article, “Louie Gohmert treated like rock star at CPAC.” The piece also has maybe the best subhed ever written: “Longtime crank with no actual accomplishments very beloved at conservative conference.”

“So it turns out that the thesis here is 'Washington is obsessed with the deficit debate but we need to focus on the jobs crisis,' which is basically a Paul Krugman column, except [Peggy Noonan's version is] the insane version where the reason we are having a tax showdown is because Barack Obama is obsessed with inflicting misery on Pittsburgh because he hates Republicans. Got it. Thanks, Peggy.”

-- Alex Pareene, “Celebrated author, speechwriter and columnist Peggy Noonan: Obama made Pittsburgh depressing because he did not pass a stimulus bill,” on Salon.com. It's pretty funny and awful. But Peggy Noonan is pretty funny and awful.

“This is the biggest sin. This is the best kid that ever lived. Without him, there would've been no Superman.”

-- Director Richard Donner in the DVD commentary for “Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut.” He's initially talking about what a sin it is that the producers, Alexander and Ilya Salkind, cheapened their product, his “Superman” movies; but then the film's dedication to Christopher Reeve comes up and he alludes to the real sin of Christopher Reeve having lost his life. He goes on to talk about Reeve for another five minutes. It's quite touching.

“Like so many other parents of children with special needs, I’m leading a life of many decibels of desperation. Those pictures of my son, recklessly plastered all over the social network? I’m desperate for you – for the world, really – to fall in love with him, or, at the very least, respect him, maybe even develop a sense of responsibility for all kids like him. And by kids, I mean human beings, so please don’t get wrapped up in ageism. We’re all kids, and I want the world to love mine, because someday I won’t be around to take care of him.

”Love may endure, but I don’t think my enduring love can ensure clean clothing, good food, superhero stories, and a warm, safe bed for him when I’m not around, or when my wife isn’t. We know our daughter is the best big sister he could possibly have, and she’ll step up when and if the time comes, but you know, this is a marathon that requires many people to help one person run a good race, and that’s why I post the photos. Big love is way better than no love, and too many caring hands are better than two or too little.“

-- Jerry Grillo, father and writer, in his must-read post, ”Loud, Graphic, Measured Desperation."

“I found the film, which doesn’t have narration, to be exhaustively researched and arrestingly powerful. Most importantly, it answers a lot of questions I and everyone have had about the author. There is previously unseen footage and photos, and a rich depiction of that unfathomable period in Salinger’s career when The New Yorker magazine was able to publish a new J.D. Salinger story fairly regularly.

“There also are details of: his WWII soldiering in Normandy and interrogation of Nazi prisoners; his love affair with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter Oona, and the crushing disappointment of losing her to Charlie Chaplin while Salinger fought in Europe; Salinger’s habit of locking himself away in his New Hampshire cinder block bunker for weeks at a time to write; his penchant for taking a week to craft a single sentence; the damage his silences caused his family; the futile efforts of friends to reintroduce him to the world ...

”Even more intriguing, Salerno’s documentary also reports on what J.D. Salinger literary works might be in the famed secret vault, where 45 years of unpublished writings are rumored to be kept.“

-- Mike Fleming, Jr. on Shane Salerno's documentary, ”Salinger," which was recently purchased by the Weinstein Co. for distribution later this year. For me, though, the unfathomable period in Salinger's life isn't his New Yorker days (roughly 1947 to 1956); it's 1965 on. But I'm excited for the doc. My own life with J.D. Salinger here.

“The broadcast. I’d almost forgotten that’s what it was: an event in which the intended audience was elsewhere, in anonymous living rooms stocked with chips and wine. You knew this because of the time-outs for commercials that broke the show’s momentum every few minutes, reducing it to a series of short, lame bits that forced us—the supposed chosen ones, who were really just extras brought in to fill the shots—to cravenly, insincerely applaud a show that sucked even worse in real life than on television ...

”That night confirmed my suspicions: The heart of the matter with the Oscars, and with Hollywood generally, is that there is none. Just when you think you’ve reached the epicenter, the VIP room within the VIP room, a shift occurs, a reversal of perspective, and you find that you’re on the inside looking out with much the same sense of longing and displacement you felt when you were looking in.“

-- Walter Kirn in his New Republic piece, ”Oscar Grouch: I'd like to thank the Academy for nothing,“ about attending the Oscars in 2010 when his novel, ”Up in the Air,“ was turned into a film starring George Clooney and nominated for six Oscars. It won none.

Kirn: ”I did feel bad for Clooney, though. The junkets had endeared the guy to me. He’d hit on my girlfriend, which I took as a compliment. He’d refrained from sleeping with my girlfriend, which I counted as a favor."

“I am so afraid that my life is living me, and soon will be over, and not a moment of it will have been my own.”

-- Alma Garret (Molly Parker) in the final episode of the second season of “Deadwood,” “Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To,” written by Ted Mann. Yeah, I know, we're late to the party.

“You remember the war in Afghanistan, right? The one the U.S. military has fought since 2001 in a country far from our Homeland­-obsessed shores? The grinding, mystifying conflict in which more than 2,000 American soldiers have died? Anybody?”

--former Stars and Stripes reporter Martin Kuz in his review of Jake Tapper's book “The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor.”

“First off, there's probably not a damned thing the Yankees can do about A-Rod's contract. It was always a foolish deal, unless they had an unlimited budget and were willing to cut him when he stopped hitting. It seems that neither of those conditions apply. Not yet, anyway. Fortunately, the contract is good for Baseball, as it's ridiculous profligacy like this that keeps the haves from completely dominating the have-nots. So thank you, Steinbrothers, for paying your dreary third baseman a king's ransom. Now live with it.”

-- Rob Neyer, “Is it time for the 'A-Rod Rule'?” on mlb.sbnation.

Joe Posnanski, as always, has a nice, measured piece on the affair.

Encore.

“It occurred to me — it was an actor that murdered Abraham Lincoln. And therefore, somehow, it is only so fitting that every now and then an actor tries to bring him back to life again.”

--Daniel Day-Lewis, upon accepting the SAG award for his performance in “Lincoln.”

“There’s no perfect measure of how frequently filibusters occur. The closest thing we have to a count is the number of cloture votes the majority mounts. From 1917 to 1970, the majority sought cloture 58 times. Since the start of President Obama’s first term, it has sought cloture more than 250 times.”

-- Ezra Klein in his New Yorker article, “Let's Talk: The move to reform the filibuster.” The full article is only available to subscribers so get with it already, people.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, providing no peace, has actually filibustered himself.

“The United States spends more on defense than all the other nations of the world combined.”

-- Jill Lepore in her article “The Force: How much military is enough?” about the history of the Department of Defense and its budgets. Must-read.

“I'm hoping for a flurry of retractions. A Marine spokesperson said yesterday that she couldn't confirm or deny that Beyoncé wasn't lip-syncing, and pretty much every media outlet assumed that was an admission. ... It's bunk. That lady was singing live. ... I've done a bunch of lip-syncing, in music videos, and it's very easy to spot. Anyone who performs in, shoots, or edits music videos can see the tiny, observable latency endemic to lip-syncing. Beyoncé either sang live, or she's the most gifted lip-syncer in the history of humanity. ...

”For me, the most compelling evidence that Beyoncé was doing it for real is the HELL YES smile on Joe Biden's face. Now, that is, clearly, a dude standing two feet from an electrifying lady singing like a motherfucker.“

-- Musician Mike Doughty, ”Beyoncé Wasn’t Lip-Syncing: A professional musician goes deep on the inaugural non-scandal,“ on Slate. Read the whole thing. He makes it all fascinating and understandable. Even a music doofus like me gets it.

”Now, that is, clearly, a dude standing two feet from an electrifying lady singing like a motherfucker." — Mike Doughty

“Fifty? Good god, Lundegaard! Earl Weaver, Stan the man — and now this!”

--Josh Karp in his Facebook birthday message this afternoon.

“This could have been an interview with Condoleezza Rice. ... [Kathryn Bigelow's] basic argument: 'People tortured people. After that torture took place, we got Bin Laden. Please reach your own conclusion.' That's like if someone were to say, I dunno, 'Islamic terrorists perpetrated 9/11. In Iraq, the government is Islamic and has done some terrorist-like activities. 'Nuff said.'”

-- Andrew Reed, on yesterday's blog post, “The Annotated Kathryn Bigelow Editorial,” in which she defends, kind of, her film “Zero Dark Thirty.” Reed's synopsis of Bigelow's basic argument is the best I've read anywhere: New Yorker, Salon, Daily Dish.

“[Kenny] Lofton is one of the better examples of what I have come to think of as the Tummy Delusion. There are plenty of people who have told me that Kenny Lofton is not a Hall of Famer, essentially, because HE IS NOT A HALL OF FAMER. Right? He just doesn't feel like a Hall of Famer. He never felt like a Hall of Famer. This idea of going back and breaking down his career and reevaluating his career is all well and good, but it doesn't replace that gut feeling ... Good player. Sure. Hall of Famer? No. OK. Move on. Places to go. People to see.

”I obviously feel differently about it. For one thing, I think the first gut is usually off. Someone just emailed me to say that  if Steve Garvey is not a Hall of Famer, Edgar Martinez certainly cannot be a Hall of Famer. And that's fine except Edgar Martinez was a much, much, much, much better hitter than Steve Garvey. I keep hearing about Garvey as a Hall of Famer … the guy's career on-base percentage was .329. Edgar Martinez's was .418.

“I mean, I don't really think anything else needs to be said. What could Steve Garvey possibly do to make up for 90 points in on-base percentage? Garvey got 792 more plate appearances than Martinez — a bit more than a season's worth — but made 1,400 more outs. That Martinez hit with considerably more power as well doesn't even need to be said.”

-- Joe Posnanski, “The BBWAA Project: Center Field.” My thoughts on Edgar.

“I recently read that the co-creator/artist of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, is a big-time Objectivist and Ayn Rand fan. How much must he hate it that his most famous creation's most famous quote is 'with great power comes great responsibility'?”

--friend and colleague Ross Pfund.

The opening panel to “Amazing Fantasy #15.” It may be the first time I ever read the word “wallflower.” Even though I was one.

“Not teasing—flirting. Does anyone know the difference? A tease is a con. You press a spot because you know that it can be pressed, and while the sucker is feeling the pleasure or the pain resulting from the pressure, you take something from him. 'Do you have the money? Good. Good. She'll be right down. Wait here; she'll be right here.' And then nothing. A flirt doesn't do that. A flirt does a dance within the context of giving pleasure. Referring to this, referring to that. And suddenly, following the references, you find a little surprise. Nothing enormous. Nothing like 'Feed on me.' Nothing like that. Something small with a bow on it. It's a pleasure. A surprise, and a gift.”

-- George W.S. Trow, “Within the Context of No Context,” pp. 94-95

Erik

I really enjoyed your review of “Lincoln”—you brilliantly put words to the sentiments I felt about Daniel Day-Lewis' performance (and to what I felt about the 'Abe' of the movie generally).
 
I agree with your criticism of Downton Abbey, but I have to say that Maggie Smith doesn't even have to say anything to be worth watching. She has had some of the most classic facial expressions in that show—it's fantastic! It's too bad the show does not seem to want to be its better self. That said, I believe you misspelled the actress Michelle Dockery's name. You might wish to correct it.
 
Sincerely,
Daniel

Daniel isn't kidding. I left off the “D” in Dockery for a “C.” That's not a good mistake—since corrected. Thanks, Daniel, and the army of copy editors I have out there.

“He spelled it with a what?”

Nate Silver, who kept me sane in October, answered questions on Reddit today. When he mentioned that politics is more delusional than sports, he was asked which of the two is more frustrating to analyze. His answer:

Politics. I don’t think it's close. Between the pundits and the partisans, you’re dealing with a lot of very delusional people. And sports provides for much more frequent reality checks. In politics, you can go on being delusional for years at a time.

That last line is killer.

“The first time I watched Daniel [Day-Lewis], in the first shot on the first day of shooting, was the first shot of the movie. He comes into the room and his son is asleep by the fireplace, and he lays down next to his son. That was the first time he actually performed Lincoln, and I cried when I saw that. And on the last shot of the last day, with Lincoln on his death bed at the Petersen House — and only minutes later the film was done, we wrapped the company and all got together. And Daniel embraced me, and then he spoke to me for the first time in four months with his English accent, and made me cry even harder. And it made me cry because I wasn't ready to say goodbye to this warm and generous President who I had gotten to know better than all the history books I've ever read, and all the research I ever did. And perhaps the surprising financial success that our picture's enjoying right now is in no small measure due to the people not wanting to say goodbye to Lincoln either.”

-- Steven Spielberg at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, honoring his and their best actor. My take on Day-Lewis' performance was similar. Third paragraph. Currently, “Lincoln” has grossed $144 million at the box office, the 17th highest-grossing film of the year.

“Another point is that the 'invaders' [in Peter Berg's 'Battleship'] only brought 5 ships, don't fire unless fired upon, go to extremes to avoid killing anyone (they don't even have guns) and when one of the aliens corners the scientist dude, does he kill him? No, he freaking tries to comfort and calm him down.

”There is a tragedy to be found in this movie and I would have loved to see the same events from the aliens' point of view...“

-- a reader named ”Mavado“ in the comments field under my scathing review of ”Battleship.“ I didn't think anyone could say anything that would make me want to watch ”Battleship“ again, but this comes close. Is ”Battleship“ like ”Starship Troopers“? Is it a send-up of alien invasion movies? Are we the villains in it, recognizably so by the movie's creators? Holy shit, if so.

Do Rihanna, the USN, and paranoid world governments kill peace-loving aliens in ”Battleship"?

“He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.”

--Tobias Wolff on his former student, the novelist George Saunders, as quoted by Joel Lovell in his New York Times Magazine piece, “Stay Open, Forever, So Open It Hurts.” Online, the piece is known as, “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year.” That book is called “Tenth of December,” in case you're interested.

“People didn't like the [1964 World's] Fair. People tried to like it, though. They agreed to like it. The Fair was hard to like, but they agreed to like it. Not to like it was the same thing as to break the agreement that was all that stood between them and being alone.”

-- George W.S. Trow, “Within the Context of No Context,” pg. 113

“We’re craving the nondigital even more these days, the authentically human interaction. We need to see some schmuck sweat.”

-- Jerry Seinfeld on the necessity of live stand-up comedy in an age when almost everything can be seen online. From the article, “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up,” in The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 20, 2012.

“This is the guy I relate to more than any athlete. His precision, incredible precision. Look at his body type — he’s made the most of what he has. He’s the hardest guy to get out. He’s fast. And he’s old.”

-- Jerry Seinfeld on Ichiro Suzuki in the article, “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up,” in The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 20, 2012

“In a new bit, [Jerry] Seinfeld likens a man to a balloon. At the outset of a romantic relationship, the balloon is buoyant and beautiful and 'the woman holds on tight' for fear he’ll fly away. Flash forward, and the balloon’s doddering around, off in a corner somewhere, low to the floor, pathetically unable to 'even lift up its own string.'”

-- from Jonah Weiner's New York Times Magazine piece, “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up,” from Dec. 20, 2012. I just got around to reading it. It's worth it. The above joke is a good harbinger of both the end of the year, which is upon us, and next month, during which I'll turn 50.

Jerry Seinfeld explains the Pop Tart joke on the New York Times site.

I don't agree with all of Nathaniel Rogers' annual lumps of coal in this post from a few days ago. He has five items listed on his “Most Overrated Anything” list, and I'd  argue that Amy Adams was hardly what was wrong with “The Master,” while “Life of Pi” was a more fascinating movie than he lets on. But yes to “Silver Linings Playbook.” At one point during that movie I did something I've never done at the theater before: I got out my iPhone and checked my email. Don't worry, I was in the last row! No one around me! Even so. Takes a lot for me to do that. Although my threshold keeps getting lower.

The quote of the day, though, is for No. 4 on Nat's list: film critics. We actually kind of disagree on this, too, since he thinks they're shirking their advocacy duties while I think the biggest way they fucked up was allowing others, namely pundits, to point out the main moral issues, or shortcomings, with “Zero Dark Thirty,” after a month of nothing but adulation from critics. That still pisses me off. If, in fact, the pundits are correct. I'll finally get to see the movie next week. 

But we agree here:

It's not helping, I don't think, that the online conversation is increasingly oroborus-insular and consensus-premature since movies are withheld from public view too long and by the time the conversation has opened up critics have tired of playing with them, like cats who've grown bored with their own tails or a dead mouse.

My real complaint, of course, is with the studios and distributors, who hold the best movies until the end of the year, then force-feed them to us at Christmastime.

“I will almost never like a movie about a road trip, about some sick or suffering family member or emotionally stressful family situation, about a boy/girl’s troubled relationship with his/her mother/father, about a childhood that’s unhappy, about self-discovery in high school, about mothers who are crazy, fathers who are unloving. These types of films, however, dominate American independent filmmaking and are the sole reason why, during the Seattle International Film Festival, I do everything in my power to avoid watching and reviewing movies made by unknown or emerging American directors. Give me French, Chinese, Mexican, Iranian—anything but indie American filmmakers and all of their road trips and family issues.”

--Charles Mudede, in the Northwest Film Forum article, “A Vivat Mudede Top 10 List,” compiled by Liz Sheppard. The above comes in at No. 6. I love it. And I disagree completely, vehemently, with No. 5.

“In his remarks, Senator Kennedy had much the better argument [than the NRA], which is not surprising since his case is irrefutable. He pointed out that in this decade the number of civilians killed by firearms at home is many times the number of soldiers killed in Vietnam. In 1965 alone, 5,600 murders, 36,000 assaults and most of the 68,000 armed robberies were committed with guns.

”It is easy to argue that these crimes could have been carried out by other means. But advocates of gun-control legislation are making an effort to reduce the toll of death and suffering; they are not offering a panacea. Because a gun is easily concealed, readily available, and achieves its purpose immediately, it is the favorite weapons of the jealous lover, the excitable adolescent and the demented crank. No other weapon can make that claim.“

-- New York Times editorial on a meeting between Senator Ted Kennedy and the NRA on April 5, 1967 vis a vis upcoming gun control legislation. The Times editorial advocated banning ”the sale of firearms through the mail“ and ”the registration of guns with the police.“ A year later, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed by Congress and signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. It mostly prohibited the interstate transfer of firearms except by licensed dealers, since this was the method Lee Harvey Oswald purchased the rifle that killed Pres. Kennedy in Nov. 1963. The Times editorial, quoted above and below, is the second mention of ”gun control" in the New York Times archives. The first occurred in 1965.

Who are your heroes in real life?
I really love Barack Obama. Sorry if that’s like “Ew. The president. That’s lame.” I love Barack Obama. What a great man. I’m so lucky to have voted for that guy.

--Louis C.K., in the Proust Questionnaire in the latest Vanity Fair. His answers are so good they put to shame almost everybody else's, including mine from a few years back, since most of us play along with VF and Proust. Louie doesn't.

Oh, and it's another connection, as if we need it, between Louis C.K. and Marcel Proust. 

Together again. Proust, I'm sure, never envisioned some of Louie's answers.

“The only thing more beautiful than a baseball park full of screaming fans is an empty park with not a fan in sight. I mention this because it's a sentiment I feel every time I go to work.”

-- Bob Lundegaard in an email to his ne'er-do-well son, Erik, about the film “Moneyball.” His job, referenced above, is tour guide at Target Field in beautiful downtown Minneapolis. if you go, be sure to ask for him by name.

An empty ballpark of the beautiful kind, not the Safeco Field kind.

“By the time I reached the coffee-shop door … my self-confidence had collapsed. Panic had taken its place. I believed I was the ugliest, dirtiest little old bum in Manhattan. If I went into the coffee shop, everybody would be nauseated. They would throw me out and tell me to go to the Bowery where I belonged.

“But I somehow found the courage to go in anyway—and imagine my surprise! It was as though I had died and gone to heaven! A waitress said to me, 'Honeybunch, you sit right down, and I’ll bring you your coffee right away.' I hadn’t said anything to her.

”So I sit down, and everywhere I looked I saw customers of every description being received with love. To the waitresses everybody was 'honeybunch' and 'darling' and 'dear.' It was like an emergency ward after a great catastrophe. It did not matter what race or class the victims belonged to. They were all given the same miracle drug, which was coffee. The catastrophe in this case, of course, was that the sun had come up again.“

--Walter F. Starbuck in Kurt Vonnegut's 1979 novel, ”Jailbird"; pp. 165-66

My morning. Book by Kurt Vonnegut, pottery by Ingrid Sundstrom, keyboard by Apple.

“No one is a bigger admirer of The Hurt Locker than myself (I was one of the first fans out of the gate,) but Zero Dark Thirty delivers on a more precise, exacting and muscular level — it's dry and fierce and austere and Day of the Jackal-ish (minus the sex) and much more exacting and verite than even I expected. And yet it builds and delivers like a great melodrama, or a great melodrama according to Biggy-Boal's new rules.”

--Jeffrey Wells in his post, “ZDT, Django Double Bill,” in which he lauds the former movie (Katherine Bigelow's “Zero Dark Thirty”) and disparages the latter (Quentin Tarantino's “Djano Unchained”). I'm looking forward to both, but mostly to “Zero Dark Thirty.” Every time I see the trailer (below) I lose interest in the movie I'm about to see.

“The notion of a pervasive constructed world of falsehood and illusion built on the fabrications of the press and the liberal establishment has long been central to the American far right. And since Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater before him, the knowledge that its supporters have their own truth, that they are forced to battle continually against an intensively propagandized false reality, has been a vital energizing trump of “movement” Republicans. It means that Republicans, whether in power or not, are always in opposition. Even when they hold the White House and Congress, still the great bulk of the news media in New York and Washington with its vaunted “objectivity”; the culture industry in New York and California with its Hollywood vulgarity and easy virtues; the permanent bureaucracy of unionized government employees and teachers with their sinecures and perks—all remain immovably liberal. Republicans, “in power” or not, are forced to struggle always to conquer false truth, and that constant struggle has been a source of great motivating mobilizing power ...

”Of course occasionally into these great self-sustaining master narratives comes a rude interruption from something…real.“

-- Mark Danner, ”How, and What, Obama Won," in The New York Review of Books, which is a delicious, delicious read.

“The players must understand the owners aren't against them. But the owners are fed up with Miller. They simply aren't going to let Marvin Miller run over them anymore.”

--Paul Richards, vice-president of the Atlanta Braves, in 1972, just before Marvin Miller and the MLBPA ran over the owners big time. In the process, of course, the owners became richer than ever.

The quote comes from Red Smith's article, “Owners' Armor Has Its Chinks,” in the April 9, 1972, New York Times. Miller died yesterday at the age of 95.

It's an intersting article--available as .pdf on the NY Times site. Basically Smith lets the owners hoist themselves.  August A. Busch, Jr. (St. Louis Cardinals) talks about baseball being not a game but a business, and they need to treat it like a business. Then Bob Howsam, GM of the Cincinnati Reds, complains that to Miller “money seems to be his only concern,” as if that's not a business concern as well. In his autobiography, “A Whole Different Ball Game,” Miller cites Smith as one of the few scribes who didn't take cheap shots at the union, and who asked probing questions to get at the facts.

Here's the Times' obit.

MLBPA rep Marvin Miller, and player rep (and 1971 NL MVP) Joe Torre, at the end of the April 1972 players strike.

“I’ve got a mandate to help middle-class families and families that are working hard to try to get into the middle class. That’s my mandate.”

--Pres. Barack Obama, last week in his first press conference since winning re-election.

Pres. Obama talks to the press, Nov. 14, 2012 (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson).

“Dec. 27: In an attempt to score more runs, the Mariners announce they are moving third base closer to home plate.”

--Jim Caple, “Off Base Predictions for the Rest of the Year,” on ESPN.com. I'm also a fan of Nov. 16, Nov. 17, Thanksgiving Day, and the various ways the Yankees try to get rid of A-Rod.

Safeco Field, with its unfair location of third base.

“Here is the real world in proportion:

”David Petraeus has had sex outside his marriage, as have many men and many women. Human sexuality and compulsion are not in any way related to intelligence.  It’s not that the dumb or powerful are more prone to fucking around, or that the intelligent and powerless do it to any greater degree.  It’s that men in general are hopelessly and permanently prone to contemplate sex and furtive romance and, sometimes, to act on it.   The reasons they do so are crude, ordinary and inevitable.   Women are also hopelessly and permanently prone to contemplate furtive romance and sex — and yes, I changed the order, I know — and the reasons they do so are only marginally less crude, ordinary and inevitable.

“Professionally, David Petraeus understood a helluva lot more than John McCain conveyed to Roger Simon in two minutes of conversation.  For one thing, if Mr. Simon wanted to be honest, he might acknowledge that it was Petraeus who saw the morass that was Iraq even as it began, who famously turned to a journalist on the march into Baghdad with the 101st Airborne and declared openly:  I know how this begins, but explain to me how this ends?  That alone makes the man more astute and more valuable than an entire White House, most of the Pentagon, and much of the American press corps, which itself failed to raise so much worry when war in Iraq was being debated, or rather, not seriously debated at all.  It certainly makes Petraeus smarter than most of America, which largely supported that disastrous intervention.”

--David Simon, “Stray Penises and Politicos,” from his own website, The Audacity of Despair. It describes my feeling about all of this better than anything I've read or even thought.

“At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said, ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ It’s exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.”

--Novelist Philip Roth, annoucing his retirement from writing at the age of 79.

My recommendations from the Roth oeuvre: ”Goodbye, Columbus,“ ”Portnoy's Complaint,“ ”Reading Myself and Others,“ ”The Ghost Writer,“ ”Zuckerman Unbound,“ ”The Anatomy Lesson,“ ”Patrimony.“ I think his best is ”The Ghost Writer." His novels in the '90s won numerous awards but I was not a fan. All the same, he was the right fielder of my starting nine of the literary world. 

Philip Roth Unbound

“I think of this as an election where we stuck to our values: Make sure Social Security and Medicare benefits are protected, and millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share. To me, that’s the heart of it. That’s really where the basic social contract is reaffirmed.”

--Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator-elect (D-MA), in the article, “Is Elizabeth Warren's Victory the End of the Tea Party?,” on AlterNet

“The president's oration was almost a summation of his core belief: that against the odds, human beings can actually better ourselves, morally, ethically, materially, and we can do so more powerfully together than alone, and that nowhere exemplifies that endeavor more than America. It was Lincolnian in its cadences, and in some ways, was the final, impassioned, heart-felt rebuke to all those, including his opponent, who tried to portray him as somehow un-American. How deeply that must have cut. How emphatically did he rebut the charge.

”What he reminded me of was how deeply American he actually is - how this country's experiment truly is in diversity as well as democracy. And his diversity is not some cringe-worthy 1990s variety. It is about being both white and black, both mid-Western and Hawaiian, both proudly American and yet also attuned to the opinion of mankind.

“As for the next four years, there is time enough for that. But I stand by these words. And one felt something tectonic shift tonight. America crossed the Rubicon of every citizen's access to healthcare, and re-elected a black president in a truly tough economic climate. The shift toward gay equality is now irreversible. The end of prohibition of marijuana is in sight. Women, in particular, moved this nation forward - pragmatically, provisionally, sensibly. They did so alongside the young whose dedication to voting was actually greater this time than in 2008, the Latino voters who have made the current GOP irrelevant, and African-Americans, who turned up in vast numbers, as in 2008, to put a period at the end of an important sentence.

”That sentence will never now be unwritten. By anyone.“

--Andrew Sullivan, ”The American President," on The Dish

“I know that political campaigns can sometimes seem small, even silly. And that provides plenty of fodder for the cynics who tell us that politics is nothing more than a contest of egos or the domain of special interests. But if you ever get the chance to talk to folks who turned out at our rallies and crowded along a rope line in a high school gym or — or saw folks working late at a campaign office in some tiny county far away from home, you’ll discover something else.

”You’ll hear the deep patriotism in the voice of a military spouse who’s working the phones late at night to make sure that no one who fights for this country ever has to fight for a job or a roof over their head when they come home. You’ll hear the determination in the voice of a young field organizer who’s working his way through college and wants to make sure every child has that same opportunity. You’ll hear the pride in the voice of a volunteer who’s going door to door because her brother was finally hired when the local auto plant added another shift.

“That’s why we do this. That’s what politics can be. That’s why elections matter. It’s not small, it’s big. It’s important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won’t change after tonight. And it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty, and we can never forget that as we speak, people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter — the chance to cast their ballots like we did today.”

-- Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States (and still heavyweight champion of the world), in his victory speech last night in Chicago.

This was my favorite part of a very good speech. It encourages us not to give in to cynicism, which is the easiest thing to do. So why do it? Why not try to do the hard thing? He seems like the adult in the room. Again.

There was also this moment at the end, when he redefined the word by which he is most known, and which, to many, has become a cynical punchline since 2009:

“I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the road blocks that stand in our path. I’m not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.”

Four more years. Thank God.

“That’s why elections matter. It’s not small, it’s big. It’s important.”

“Every now and then, I run across the stray Romney supporter. I’ve been instructed to wish them a nice day and move on. 

”I’m not good at following instructions.“

--my friend Ben Stocking, ”The Obamanator,“ helping to get out the vote for Pres. Obama in the projects of Newton, Florida, as recounted in his post, ”Greetings from the Campaign Trail."

“I confess that as a liberal Democrat I'm amazed that Obama isn't 20 points ahead in the race. Yes, he had that one lousy debate, but what a truly vapid, uninspired candidate Mitt Romney is, standing for nothing, a glistening shrine to hackitude. Romney's been compared to Nixon in his mendacious duplicitous insincerity but Romney's actually worse: Nixon knew stuff, he did his homework, not like Romney, who has a vacancy sign on his brow whenever he's forced to discuss an issue--usually foreign-policy related--that he's had six or seven years to study up on if he hadn't been such a complacent, incurious sumbitch too busy admiring his fucking hair and winning smile in the mirror. I really thought he'd be smart enough not to glue himself to Tea Party positions that become a mite uncomfortable in the general election, such as hey let's send disaster relief back to the states or better yet privatize it, but no, he pandered like a fan dancer. His shape-shifting about the Detroit bailout couldn't be more spazzy. And he's the best the Republicans had!”

--James Wolcott, “The Good, the Bad, and the Soggy” on the Vanity Fair site.

With apologies to Jason Robards and William Goldman, actor and screenwriter of “All the President's Men,” from which this quote was taken (slightly out of context):

You know the results of the latest Gallup Poll? ... We're under a lot of pressure, you know, and you put us there. Nothing's riding on this except the first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters. But if you fuck up again, I'm gonna get mad.

Here's the scene:

“In the nineteen-seventies, the balance of power began to shift from production to capital, and corporate America started to seem lumbering and inefficient. This shift was the business world’s version of the sixties—one (younger and impatient) group of politically conservative businesspeople challenging another (older and more traditional) group. The field of battle was not politics, culture, dress, or taste in music. It was the American corporation, and the consequences for the whole society were profound. The business sixties wound up rearranging most of the American economy. General Motors has fewer than half as many employees today as it did in 1955, and, among the American corporations that were great at mid-century, it’s hardly alone. George Romney was an organization man. Mitt Romney became a transaction man: someone who moves assets around with a speed and force that leaves many of the rest of us bewildered. The insurrection in business has profoundly affected the lives of most people who work, pay taxes, and get government benefits. It is the backdrop to this Presidential election.”

--Nicholas Lemann in his Oct. 1 New Yorker article “Transaction Man: Mormonism, private equity, and the making of a candidate.”

“If you believe in the value of every human life, if you believe that lives that aren’t filmed have meaning, then you have to believe in theater.”

--Craig Wright, playwright, in the New York Times.

“When [Coco] Crisp squeezed the baseball, the Oakland Athletics completed one of the more amazing and unlikely seasons in the sport's long and storied history. The Texas Rangers, of course, are still alive. But as Wild Cards, not champions. The A's are the champions. And nobody in the whole world saw it coming.”

--Rob Neyer, “Athletics Blow Out Rangers, Win American League West.”

CF Josh Hamilton commits rare error that allows 2 runs to score, as Oakland beats Texas 12-5.

(BTW: These moveable gif files like the U2 song “Stuck in a Moment,” aren't they? They're like bad memories, played over and over again in your mind. And each time, it plays the same. I find them a bit disconcerting.)

• “On any subject other than their own work, [actors] should keep quiet.” --1952
• “Moderates don't make themselves heard on public issues. It's too bad because moderates make democracy work. --1968
• ”My living depends on people not getting mad at me. No matter what, I've never felt a significant part of the audience was mad at me. ... The trick is to state your views as moderately as you can.“ --1984
• ”Moses was a conservative. You don't mess around with Moses. He was an angry, harsh leader, not a friendly fellow.“ --1998
• ”[Regular people] have precious little time or resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it's a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand, while they seek preference with the other.“ --1998
• ”The last two generations have abandoned even the idea of greatness. The media, academe, the creative community, now extol the ordinary, enshrine the victim.“ --2000
• ”Vote freedom first. Vote George W. Bush. Everything else is a distant and forgettable second place. This is the most important election since the Civil War. Al Gore, if elected, would have the power to hammer your gun rights right into oblivion. Instead of fighting redcoats, we are now fighting blue blood elitists.“ --2000
• ”My Dear Friends, Colleagues and Fans: My physicians have recently told me I may have a neurological disorder whose symptoms are consistent with Alzheimer's disease...“ --2002

Most of the above quotes are from Chapter 7 of ”Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics," by Steven J. Ross.

c

This isn't a quote so much as a summation and a warning. Jill Lepore's New Yorker article, “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,” on the rise and ascendancy of Clem Whitaker, Leone Baxter and Campaigns, Inc., the first political consulting firm in the world, which mostly handled right-wing candidates and issues in the 1930s, '40s and ''50s, includes this line: “Whitaker and Baxter weren’t just inventing new techniques [to win political campaigns]; they were writing a rule book.”

This is the rule book. See if you can spot familiar political techniques:

1. Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues.
2. If your position doesn’t have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one.
3. Pretend that you are the Voice of the People.
4. Attack, attack, attack. (Whitaker: “You can’t wage a defensive campaign and win.”)
5. Never explain anything. (Whitaker: “The more you have to explain, the more difficult it is to win support.”)
6. Say the same thing over and over again. (Whitaker: “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale.”)
7. Subtlety is your enemy. (Baxter: “Words that lean on the mind are no good. They must dent it.)
8. Simplify, simplify, simplify. (Whitaker: “A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.“)
9. Fan flames. (Whitaker: “We need more partisanship in this country.”)
10. Never shy from controversy; instead, win the controversy. (Whitaker: “The average American doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen. But there are two ways you can interest him in a campaign, and only two that we have ever found successful.“ You can put on a fight (“he likes a good hot battle, with no punches pulled”), or you can put on a show (“he likes the movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades”). “So if you can’t fight, PUT ON A SHOW! And if you put on a good show, Mr. and Mrs. America will turn out to see it.”)
11. Winner takes all.

It's like finally finding the Covenant of the GOP.

Baxter and Whitaker helped elect conservative candidates and defeat progressive legislation for decades. “A wall goes up when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think," Whitaker said.

“In this profession of leading men’s minds, this is the reason I feel it must be in the hands of the most ethical, principled people—people with real concern for the world around them, for people around them—or else it will erode into the hands of people who have no regard for the world around them. It could be a very, very destructive thing.” 

-- Leone Baxter quoted at the end of Jill Lepore's New Yorker article, “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,” She and her husband, Clem Whitaker, were the biggest and most inovative political consultants in the middle of the 20th century. Among other things, they helped: defeat Upton Sinclair in his bid to become governor of California in 1934; defeat Gov. Earl Warren's California health care proposal; defeat Harry S. Truman's health care proposal; usher in the era of dirty, media-driven, money-driven politics.

“'Government by Whitaker and Baxter' appeared in The Nation in three parts, in April and May of 1951. ...[The author], as Whitaker and Baxter must have very well understood, had played by different rules from theirs. He hadn’t been simple. He hadn’t attacked them. He had taken time to explain. He hadn’t invented an enemy. He hadn’t taken remarks out of context. He hadn’t made anything up. He hadn’t lied.”

“Whitaker and Baxter went to Washington and persuaded a hundred congressmen to let them read their constituent mail. At the start of the campaign, Whitaker reported, mail from voters 'was running four and half to one in favor' of Truman’s plan [about national health care]. Whitaker and Baxter went to work. 'Nine months later it was running four to one against.'

-- from Jill Lepore's New Yorker article, ”The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,“ on the rise and ascendancy of Clem Whitaker, Leone Baxter, Campaigns, Inc. and politcal consulting. Among the charges against Truman's plan was the notion that it was ”socialized medicine."

“The scuttling of his health insurance plan was a confirmation for [Gov. Earl] Warren of the nature of the political process, in which advocates of programs based on humanity and common sense were pitted against selfish, vindictive special interests.”

-- Earl Warren’s biographer, G. Edmund White, on the defeat of the California governor's proposed 1945 health care legislation, which was demonized by the political consulting firm, Campaigns, Inc. Previously, in 1942, Campaigns, Inc. had helped elect Warren. The quotes above and below appear in Jill Lepore's excellent New Yorker article, “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business.”

“In 1942, the problem with Earl Warren was that he was grim. Baxter said that, to get women to vote for him, he and his wife had to agree to have a picture of their family taken, and publicized. Warren’s wife, Nina, objected. 'She didn’t want to exploit her family,' Baxter said. 'But we knew that he had to get that family.' They took a picture—Earl, Nina, and their six children. They look like the Von Trapp Family Singers. Campaigns, Inc., distributed three million copies.”

“Upton [Sinclair] was beaten ... because he had written books.”

--Clem Whitaker, one of the first political consultants, in Jill Lepore's New Yorker article, “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,” on the rise and ascendancy of Whitaker, Leone Baxter and Campaigns, Inc., the first political consulting firm in the world. Among other things, Campaigns, Inc. placed out-of-context quotes from Sinclair's books and novels every day on the front page of The Los Angeles Times.

From the Los Angeles Examiner, 1934.

“[W]hen modern advertising began, the big clients were just as interested in advancing a political agenda as a commercial one. Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentally, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that [Upton] Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, 'So far,' he wrote, 'Big Business has won every skirmish.'”

--Jill Lepore in her New Yorker article, “The Lie Factory: How politics became a business,” on the rise and ascendancy of Clem Whitaker, Leone Baxter and Campaigns, Inc. Much, much recommended.

Leone Baxter and Clem Whitaker of Campaigns, Inc., the first big political consulting firm.

He: There's a lot of trouble behind a bar.
Me: How do you mean?
He: The drinking. Plus everyone wants to fuck the bartender. It's a good job to have in your 20s, but once you hit 35...

--Conversation at the Hilton Garden Inn Hotel bar, in Eagan, Minn., while watching “Monday Night Football.” The guy I was talking to, another guest at the hotel, looked a bit like Lawrence Tierney in “Reservoir Dogs,” but with black-framed glasses. He was the father of at least two, and was talking about his daughter, who had recently graduated from college with a dual degree, neither of which she was using. Instead, she was bartending and teaching snowboarding in Colorado. At one point, despite his words, I said, “You seem proud of her,” and he shrugged without shrugging. “The world was made for people like her,” he said. “Now my son. He studies, plays by the rules. He'll struggle his whole life.”

Could've talked to the dude all night.

Lawrence Tierney in “Reservoir Dogs.”

Q: How did you and Gene Wilder become friends?

A: These things are gradual. We played tennis together, then he met Gilda Radner, I became friends of both of them, and I arranged for their wedding here, their engagement dinner; and then, you know, it just got solidified. Some lawyers feel it’s important to keep the desk between themselves and the client--so that they have respect from the client. And I feel that to know me is not necessarily to disrespect me.

--Eric Weissmann, entertainment attorney, during my Q&A in the Feb. 2011 issue of Southern California Super Lawyers magazine, “Take Your Violin and Go Back to Vienna!” Mr. Weissmann, a gracious interviewee, also has great stories on Burt Lancaster, Mel Brooks, the making of “Jaws,” and escaping Nazi-occupied Europe as a child.

I thought of Lundin's tweet about the deaths at the American embassy in Libya yesterday while driving home from work. The deaths occurred to protest Sam Becile's anti-Islam movie, “The Innocence of Muslims,” which Jeffrey Welles calls a ridiculous, “grade-z” movie. Some wonder whether Sam Becile is a real person. (Sam Becile? Imbecile?) Some wonder whether the movie is a real movie.

What made me think of Lundin's tweet again was the song that played on the car stereo: Steve Earle's “Little Emperor,” written for George W. Bush. In particular, these lines:

Hey Little Hypocrite
What you gonna say
When you wind up standin' naked
On the final Judgement Day
How you gonna justify it
Who you gonna call
What if it turns out that
God don't look like you at all

For all the above idiots.

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real.

--from “Deafness Before the Storm,” by Kurt Eichenwald, author of “500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars," in the New York Times Op-Ed.

“So did you see the AP fact-check of Bill Clinton’s long speech last night? It’s sort of amazing. Like, for example, while Bill Clinton claimed that the Romney/Ryan campaign is dishonest, the reality is ... MONICA LEWINSKY.

”CLINTON: 'Their campaign pollster said, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” Now that is true. I couldn’t have said it better myself — I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad.'

“THE FACTS: Clinton, who famously finger-wagged a denial on national television about his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky and was subsequently impeached in the House on a perjury charge, has had his own uncomfortable moments over telling the truth. 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,' Clinton told television viewers. Later, after he was forced to testify to a grand jury, Clinton said his statements were 'legally accurate' but also allowed that he 'misled people, including even my wife.'

”How is this a checking of a fact?“

--Alex Pareene, ”The AP's Amazing Clinton 'Fact Check,'" Salon.com

*  *  *

Not sure what's with AP these days. They often run extremely conservative and/or opinionated stuff under the guise of objectivity. I first noticed it--but have noticed it many times since--while working on a profile of Robert Rubin, litigation director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area:

Rubin, of course, is aware of the more famous Robert Rubin, the former treasury secretary, but there was a day last November when, if you were online, “You didn’t have to go through Robert E. Rubin to get to me,” he says.

It was the day an AP story came out critical of the fact that the only two lawyers to sue under a provision of the 2002 California Voting Rights Act were the two lawyers who helped write the provision: Joaquin Avila and Rubin. The law, according to the article, “makes it easier for lawyers to sue and win financial judgments in cases arising from claims that minorities effectively were shut out of local [at-large] elections.” The story, despite a passing reference to Rubin’s salaried position, also implied that the two lawyers were getting rich from it. Headlined “Jackpot: Lawyers earn fees from law they wrote,” it spread quickly on anti-lawyer blogs.

“It was very biased and one-sided,” Brown says of the article. “They didn’t ask for competing points of views, they didn’t discuss the purpose of public-interest impact litigation. It suggested that these lawyers were in it for the money; but a lawyer like Robert Rubin has dedicated his entire life to public interest work. He’s certainly not in this line of work for the money.”

“I’ll make two points,” adds Brad Seligman, a civil rights attorney with Impact Fund. “The first is voting rights litigation is extremely difficult. It’s often unsuccessful. And unlike many other areas of the law they don’t create any damage pot. The only way to get paid in those cases is if you actually win the case. Then it’s up to a judge to decide how much you get paid. That’s number one. It’s unlike almost every other area of law. There are no rich lawyers doing voting rights cases.

“The second is Robert is an employee of a nonprofit organization. He doesn’t make any money personally from these cases. And his salary level as an employee is way lower than what he could command in private practice. In fact, if he was in private practice, given his reputation and experience, he’d be making a million dollars a year. But he’s working in a nonprofit agency.”

“How can I not be serious? What's not to be serious about? What could I take more seriously than this? And what's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?”

--from Don DeLillo's “Underworld,” pg. 323. I've always like that description. I think that's what gets most people, eventually: the enormousness of the known forces in the world.

 “Did it hurt? No, it felt good. Of course it hurt. You get hit with a 90-something-mile-per-hour fastball, it's going to hurt.”

--Derek Jeter, Yankees shortstop, after being hit in the head by Indians pitcher Cory Kluber last Friday, Aug 24.

I know. Some of you are wondering if it's really me, the majority owner of the Yankees Suck page, writing this, but, you know, it's a good response. Made me laugh. Gotta tip your cap. Jayson Stark has more on the records Jeter, Mike Trout and Adam Dunn might break this September to remember.

Some scary footage of the beaning (while it lasts) here:

“What arrogance! Who do you think you are anyway? ... The movie colony may root for the Jews all they wish but don't think that the people of the United States are going to fall in with your plans. ... Those of us who know World History and the Bible know that the Jews have always been in trouble up to their ears. ... They are trouble makers.”

--a letter from a self-proclaimed “Bible Christian” in Minneapolis, Minn., to actor Edward G. Robinson, who, as part of an anti-Nazi organization in Hollywood in the 1930s, called for a boycott of Germany in early 1939. At the time, according to Steven J. Ross' “Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics,” “nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that Jews as a group had 'objectionable traits' and over 50 percent thought that Nazi Germany's antisemitism stemmed partially or wholly from the actions of German Jews.” (pp. 97-102)

“'We did build that,' has already been established as one of the more dishonest political memes in a campaign season undisturbed by shame. The Republicans took a clumsy phrase from an Obama speech in July, in which the president pointed out that most American business successes have been assisted by infrastructure, education or incentives underwritten by the government. The Republican spin-masters whipped this into a preposterous claim that Obama denied American entrepreneurs any credit for their creations. The fact that this slogan has been thoroughly debunked has not kept it from being the defining theme in Tampa.“

--Bill Keller, ”Lies, Damn Lies and GOP Video," on The New York Times site.

What's the mandate if Romney wins? What's the lesson? The GOP always contends that people get ahead by hard work; if Romney wins, it will be obvious to all but the most blinkered that he won with money and lies ... which at least will be a more honest appraisal of the way the world works.

ADDENDA:

• Paul Krugman nails it.
• George Packer on the frightfully misinformed GOP.

On the day after the day Gore Vidal died, when I was compiling my 19 Gore Vidal quotes of the day--which led regular reader, Biblical Studies scholar, and frequent Happy Hour comrade Uncle Vinny to complain “What part of 'of the day' don't you understand?”--one of my Vidal books, “Rocking the Boat,” was on loan to a friend, so I couldn't go through it to search what I'd underlined and present it, wah-lah, here. Now I've got it back. On with the countdown.

Number 20!

“When John Crosby of The New York Herald Tribune went on vacation in the summer, he asked me to write a column for him. I wrote about The Unamericans. Well, sir, the Radical Right really hit the fan. The counterattack began. From ultra-foolish Fulton Lewis Jr. to the Committee's chairman, Francis Walter, the attack was suspiciously the same. The book should be completely discredited because Donner had been a Communist. None of the charges made against HUAC were answered. The smear-tactic, second nature to these patriots, is always the same: get your critic on some other ground; never answer a charge; never defend, attack!”

--Gore Vidal in “HUAC Revisited,” December 1961, from his book of essays, “Rocking the Boat.”

Plus ca change...

“If they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.”

--Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson on the Republican party during the 1952 election.

From the Left:

Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.

--Paul Krugman, Nobel-prize-winning economist, in his post “The Ryan Role,” on the Conscience of a Liberal blog.

From the Right:

The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends. The crony capitalists of K Street already own more than enough Republican votes to stop that train before it leaves the station.

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

--David Stockman, former director of Office of Management and Budget under Pres. Reagan, in his Op-Ed, “Paul Ryan's Fairy-Tale Budget Plan,” in The New York Times

Who knew the Right would be more brutal to him?

1. “Many millions of working-age Americans would lose health insurance. Senior citizens would anguish over whether to pay their rent or their medical bills, in a way they haven’t since the 1960s. Government would be so starved of resources that, by 2050, it wouldn’t have enough money for core functions like food inspections and highway maintenance. And the richest Americans would get a huge tax cut.”This is the America that Paul Ryan envisions. And now we know that it is the America Mitt Romney envisions.“
   
   --Jonathan Cohn, ”Six Things to Know About Ryan (And Romney),“ The New Republic


2. ”Ryan does a good job of cloaking his radicalism in unthreatening everyday language. He doesn’t foam at the mouth or get too academic. He doesn’t blather on about Friedrich Hayek or Saul Alinsky. As he was standing up there saying, “we won’t replace the founding principles, we’ll reapply them,” he looked more like the youthful general manager of a baseball team—a Theo Epstein or a Brian Cashman—than a committed ideologue.“
   
   --John Cassidy, ”Why Romney Picked Ryan: Let's Change the Subject from Me,“ The New Yorker


3. ”People love that Paul Ryan! The only downside, with Paul Ryan, is everything he believes.“
   
   --Alex Pareene, ”Romney’s running mate distraction campaign reaches its zenith,“ Salon.com 


4. ”Ryan’s views are crystallized in the budget he produced for House Republicans last March as chairman of the House Budget committee. That budget would cut $3.3 trillion from low-income programs over the next decade. The biggest cuts would be in Medicaid, which provides healthcare for the nation’s poor – forcing states to drop coverage for an estimated 14 million to 28 million low-income people, according to the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. ... In all, 62 percent of the budget cuts proposed by Ryan would come from low-income programs.
   
   “The Ryan plan would also turn Medicare into vouchers whose value won’t possibly keep up with rising health-care costs – thereby shifting those costs on to seniors. At the same time, Ryan would provide a substantial tax cut to the very rich – who are already taking home an almost unprecedented share of the nation’s total income. Today’s 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.”
   
   --Robert Reich, “The Ryan Choice,” RobertReich.org 


5. “Ryan and other conservative leaders, among them Senator John Sununu, of New Hampshire, wanted to be sure that Bush returned to [Social Security privatization] in 2005. Under Ryan’s initial version, American workers would be able to invest about half of their payroll taxes, which fund Social Security, in private accounts. As a plan to reduce government debt, it made no sense. It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses. But, as an ideological statement about the proper relationship between individuals and the federal government, Ryan’s plan was clear.”
   
   --Ryan Lizza, “Fussbudget: How Paul Ryan Captured the GOP,” The New Yorker 


6. “... anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered. Mark Thoma reviews selected pieces I’ve written about Ryan; he is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine.
   
   ”As I said, I have no idea how this will play politically. But it does look like a move from weakness, rather than strength; Romney obviously felt he needed a VP who will get people to stop talking about him.“
   
   --Paul Krugman, ”Galt/Gekko 2012,“ The New York Times 


7. ”Mr. Ryan is a national figure of some repute — before Saturday morning, his national name recognition was about 50 percent — but he has never been elected to anything larger than his Congressional district of about 700,000 people. Members of the House of Representatives have only occasionally been selected as running mates. The last one on a winning ticket was John Nance Garner, the speaker of the House, in 1932. The last time an ordinary member of the House was elected vice president, and the last Republican, was more than 100 years ago: in 1908, when William Howard Taft and James S. Sherman, a New York congressman, were chosen by voters. (Coincidentally, that fall was also the last time that the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.)“
   
   --Nate Silver, ”A Risky Rationale Behind Romney's Choice of Ryan," Five Thirty Eight

For me? The key to taking down Ryan is not what he'd do to Medicaid and food-stamp programs, because, for most people, if it doesn't affect them, they don't care. The key to taking down Ryan is in his overhaul of Medicare and his attempted overhaul of Social Security. The social safety net that is holding you up, or might hold you up one day? He wants it down. Money that the government already has, for the few tattered programs it has, Paul Ryan wants to give away, in the form of tax breaks, to the richest people in this country. More for those who have more; less for we who have less. The health of the country, in essence, be damned.

“...the film is redeemed—rescued from itself, ironically, by another mouth. Rimmed in scarlet, it belongs to Anne Hathaway. She plays Selina Kyle, a Catwoman in the making, though really just a jewel thief. Deft and purring, she seems to pounce in from another land entirely, a Hitchcockian pleasure ground of light fingers and matching repartee, and her expression is that of a grown woman who surveys all these sombre boys, plus their whizzing toys, and sees only Bat-crap. When Bruce dances with her at a costume party, the music behind them is Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” which must be Nolan’s idea of a waltz; yet still she smiles. Her silver heels are like knives, her working costume is tauter than a second skin, and, when she straddles the Pod, as if planning to have kittens with it, the only one not to notice is poor old Batman. What can you expect? This is a fellow whose permanent frown is ready-carved between the brows of his black rubber mask, and who was warned by Alfred not to take up Gotham’s cause, because “there is nothing here for you but pain and tragedy.” Christopher Nolan, for all his visionary flair, wants to suck the comic out of comic books; Anne Hathaway wants to put it back in. Take your pick.”

--Anthony Lane in his review of Christopher Nolan's “The Dark Knight Rises.” I agree with a lot of this. Hathaway was my favorite part of the movie, and Lane's line about kittens kills. Plus comic book movies need to be fun again--as “The Avengers' was. On the other hand, Batman should be humorless and tunnel-visioned. Otherwise, why be Batman? My review here.

Lane: ”When Bruce dances with her at a costume party, the music behind them is Ravel’s 'Pavane for a Dead Princess,' which must be Nolan’s idea of a waltz; yet still she smiles.“

ADDENDUM: Pres. Obama agrees that Anne Hathaway was the best part of ”Dark Knight Rises"

“Tucked away in Seattle, Hernandez has won a Cy Young Award and made three All-Star teams, but he continues pitching against the Yankees as if he has a chip on his shoulder, as if their entitled lineup needs a stir.

”The last time he faced them, he hit three batters. This time, on Saturday afternoon, the Yankees could hardly hit him, as he utterly mystified their offense with a two-hit shutout in the Mariners’ 1-0 win at Yankee Stadium. ...

“There was no sign of hesitation from the Yankees’ hitters Saturday, but Hernandez can be an intimidating presence. He is a hulking right-hander with an expressionless focus and superb athleticism balanced on thighs the approximate size and shape of fire hydrants.”

--Zach Schonbrun, writing for The New York Times, on the Seattle Mariners 1-0 victory over the New York Yankees yesterday. Is Schonbrun, a 2011 j-school grad, now covering the Yankees for the Times? His online resume still lists him as a freelancer. He's certainly writing like he has something to prove. I'd say he's writing as if the entitled lineup at the Times needs a stir ... except no one in print journalism is entitled anymore, not even the folks at the Times.

“Once, in candid mood, she confessed that rage mader her orgasmic. I forgot to ask her if sex ever did. But I did enjoy her candor about herself.”

--Gore Vidal on his mother, Nina Gore, in “Palimpsest,” 1995

“...Clinton seems almost in the Kennedy class of innummerable brief encounters with that majority of the electorate which, appreciatively, favors him by an astonishing 24 percent over Dole, while with the male minority he barely holds his own. Women like men who like women, no matter how exasperating.”

--Gore Vidal, “Clinton-Gore II,” GQ, October 1996

“Mr. Manchester has written a book [Death of a President, 1967, on the JFK assassination] hard to resist reading, despite its inordinate length. The narrative is compelling even though one knows in advance everything that is going to happen. Breakfast in Fort Worth. Flight to Dallas. Governor Connally. The roses. The sun. The friendly crowds. The Governor's wife: 'Well, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you, Mr. President.' And then one hopes that for once the story will be different—the car swerves, the bullets miss, and the splendid progress continues. But each time, like a recurrent nightmare, the handsome head is shattered. It is probably the only story that everyone in the world knows by heart. Therefore it is, in the truest sense, legend, and like all legends it can bear much repetition and reinterpretation.”

--Gore Vidal, “The Manchester Book,” Book Week, April 9, 1967

“Like all legends it can bear much repetition and reinterpretation.” And has.

“To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.”

--Gore Vidal, “Screening History,” 1992. This may be the Vidal quote I quote most often. Two pages later, Vidal writes, “Today, where literature was movies are.” I read it at age of 30, a budding, flailing writer, and it was news to me. It shouldn't have been. Do we amend it yet? Do we write: “Today, where movies were...” What? Video games? Are we there yet? Can we get there from here?

“... this does not mean, as I am said to have said and did not say, that history is fiction. I only suggest that much of what we take to be true is often seriously wrong, and the way it is wrong is often more worthy of investigation than the often trivial disagreed-upon facts of the case.”

--Gore Vidal, “Screening History,” 1992

“I would make history the spine of the mandatory twelve years of state-imposed indoctrination. ... By the last year of high school, the young adult would know pretty much where the human race (as well as his tribe) had been in time and space; and where it now is. So much general knowledge might even inspire him to show interest in where we are going or could go. During the twelve years, those of a scientific bent  would be encouraged and various additional courses made available to them. Those interested in the arts would be sternly discouraged from pursuing any of the arts. This will save many people from lifelong disappointments while limiting production, in the most Darwinian way, to the born artist who cannot be discouraged.”

-- Gore Vidal, “Screening History,” 1992, on how he would remake the U.S. education system.

“I was born eight years after the end of the First World War. As I was growing up, it was well remembered that we had got nothing out of that war in Europe except an attack on the Bill of Rights at home and, of course, the noble experiment, Prohibition. Young people often ask me, with wonder, why so many of us enlisted in 1943. I tell them that since we had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, we were obliged to defend our country. But I should note that where, in 1917, millions of boys were eager to go fight the Hun, we were not eager. We were fatalistic. In the three years that I spent in the army, I heard no soldier express a patriotic sentiment, rather the reverse when we saw the likes of Errol Flynn on the screen winning freedom's war, or even worse, John Wayne, known to us by his real name, Marion, the archetypal draft-dodging actor who, to rub it in, impersonated a Flying Tiger in the movies.”

--Gore Vidal, “How We Missed the Saturday Dance,” Newsweek, January 11, 1993

John Wayne and Paul Kelly in “Flying Tigers” (1942)

“Put bluntly, who collects what money from whom in order to spend on what is all there is to politics, and in a serious country should be the central preoccupation of the media.”

--Gore Vidal, “Hersh's JFK,” The New Yorker, December 1, 1997

“On June 3, 1996, The Nation showed in a foldout chart how most of the U.S. media was now owned by a handful of corporations ... As I studied this beast, I felt a litle like Rip Van Winkle. When last I nodded off, there was something called the Sherman Antitrust Act. Whatever happened to it?”

--Gore Vidal, “Mickey Mouse, Historian,” The Nation, September 30, 1996

“The media constantly deplore the drug culture and, variously, blame foreign countries like Colombia for obeying the iron law of supply and demand to which we have, as a notion and as a nation, sworn eternal allegiance...

”Although drugs are immoral and must be kept from the young, thousands of schools pressure parents to give the drug Ritalin to any lively child who may, sensibly, show signs of boredom in his classroom. Ritalin renders the child docile if not comatose. Side effects? 'Stunted growth, facial tics, agitation and aggression, insomnia, appetite loss, headaches, stomach pains and seizures.' Marijuana would be far less harmful.“

--Gore Vidal, ”Shredding the Bill of Rights," Vanity Fair, November 1998

“While filming With Honors in Chicago, I was told that since the star, Joe Pesci, had a degree of control over the cast, the producer proposed five names to him for the part of the villainous Harvard professor. Four English actors and me. Alec [Guinness]'s name headed the list. Pesci is supposed to have said, 'Why do we always have to go for an English asshole for this sort of part when we have one of our own?' Thus, I was hired.”

Gore Vidal, Palimpsest, 1995

“I also came out for federal aid to education, a sign that I was a pro- or crypto- Red. The incumbent made much of this. He finally debated me in his county of Scoharie. The dairy interests were powerful in that section, and I had to learn, rather quickly, all about milk marketing orders, a subject far from my heart. As the milk producers were few though passionate—and rich—I responded to threats that they would do me in if milk was not properly subsidized by saying that I was essentially the consumers' candidate and consumers outnumber dairymen by a vast number. Then, innocently, I wondered aloud whether or not these subsidies were—well, socialist? If so, we had achieved socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.”

--Gore Vidal on his 1960 run for U.S. Congress (NY-29th), in his memoir, Palimpsest, 1995. He lost, of course, but began a tradition of writers with a political bent (Mailer, Buckley, Mailer again, Vidal again) running for political office and losing. In this 1960 New York Times profile on the 34-year-old candidate, the newspaper or record describes Vidal as slender, sharp, sophisticated, and (and despite the publication of The City and the Pillar 13 years earlier) “a bachelor.”

“This morning, Jackie [Kennedy]'s will was described in the Italian press. Lee [Radziwill] was left out of it on the grounds that Jackie had done quite enough for her in life, which was certainly true. I wonder if, at the end, Jackie had come to dislike Lee as much as everyone else did. Happily, Lee's malice is mitigated by her slowness of mind.”

--Gore Vidal, Palimpsest, 1995

“'Whenever there's a Republican president, I'm a Democrat, and when there's a Democratic one, I'm out of step.'”

--Gore Vidal, quoting his grandfather, Sen. Thomas Pryor Gore (D-OK), in the chapter, “Dah,” from his memoir Palimpsest, 1995. Gore, we're told by his grandson, thought no foreign war worth the life of an American, and when wired by the Oklahoma City chamber of commerce to vote for war in 1917, he wired back, “How many of your members are of draft age?”

“Without the idea of free will, the human race is of no interest at all; certainly, without the idea of free will there can be no literature. To watch Milton's Lucifer serenely overthrow the controlling intelligence of his writerly creator is an awesome thing.”

--Gore Vidal, “Lessing's Science Fiction,” The New York Review of Books, December 20, 1979

“In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect: that is the only way out of the dead end of the Serious Novel which so many ambitious people want to write and no one on earth—or even on campus—wants to read.”

--Gore Vidal, “Thomas Love Peacock: The Novel of Ideas,” The New York Review of Books, December 4, 1980

“Most men—homo or hetero—given the opportunity to have sex with 500 different people would do so, gladly; but most men are not going to be given the opportunity by a society that wants them safely married so they will be docile workers and loyal consumers. It does not suit our rulers to have the proles tomcatting around the way that our rulers do.”

--Gore Vidal, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” The Nation, November 14, 1981

“When Confucius was asked what would be the first thing that he would do if he were to lead the state—his never-to-be-fulfilled dream—he said rectify the language. This is wise. This is subtle. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”

--Gore Vidal, “The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas,” The Nation, January 11, 1986

“I had seen [Ronald Reagan] in the flesh for a decade or so as each of us earned his mite in the Hollyjungle. Ronnie was already notorious for his speeches for General Electric, excoriating communists who were, apparently, everywhere. I had never actually spoken to him at a party because I knew—as who did not?—that although he was the soul of amiability when not excoriating the international monolithic menace of atheistic godless communism, he was, far and away, Hollywood's most grinding bore—Chester Chatterbox, in fact. Ronnie never stopped talking, even though he never had anything to say except what he had just read in the Reader's Digest, which he studied the way Jefferson studied Montesquieu.”

--Gore Vidal, “Ron and Nancy: A Life in Pictures,” from The New York Review of Books, September 29, 1983

“Mais precisez, mon cher monsieur, n'allez pas trop vite.”

--Marcel Proust, in 1919, when asking diplomat Harold Nicholson to explain his work. Proust wouldn't be put off by a general description; he wanted all the details: the sham cordiality; the handshakes; the maps; the rustle of the papers; the macaroons.

The quote is taken from the third chapter of Alain de Botton's “How Proust Can Change Your Life,” which is the book's most meaningful chapter to me. People complained about the 3,000-page length of “Remembrance of Things Past” even when it was published 100 years ago. “I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns before falling asleep,” wrote Albert Humblot, head of Ollendorf, a publishing house. Jacques Madeleine, a reader for another publishing house, Fasquelle, 700 pages in, complained, “...one doesn't have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it mean?” An American reader, 27, who spent years with the book, wrote Proust himself. “Just tell me in two lines,” she suggested, “what you really wanted to say.”

This is a battle, on a much smaller level, of course, that I've been fighting most of my writing life. Editors generally want shorter and shorter pieces—from 1,000 words, to 750, to 350, to 140 characters—for what they feel are shorter and shorter attention spans. The Internet, with its unlimited space, hasn't helped. The opposite. The pace of life speeds up, and it seems normal for every generation until it doesn't, until it speeds past them, and that becomes the norm for the next generation. That's partly why I write here, for nothing, rather than elsewhere, for something. Elsewhere, they're not interested in 3,500-word reviews of “Moneyball.” They want trash. And in such small portions, too.

De Botton juxtaposes the above complaints against Proust with Proust's own complaints about the newspapers of his day:

That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, bleinding in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.

But he kept reading the newspaper. He even turned one news-in-brief account of a young man killing his mother, and then, bumblingly, himself, into a five-page article with overtones of the Greek classics.

It's this kind of detail and precision, De Botton argues, which leads to understanding, and sympathy, and empathy, while abbreviation, which is what we mostly get, leads to the opposite. Generally the deeper you go into someone's story, the more you care. The more you skim, the more you tweet, the less you care. Speed things up enough and eventually you wind up with societies like ours.

Proust, reflective.

“After watching this I've finally decided that I just don't like Aaron Sorkin. The clip pretends to rise above jingoism (but ends up falling hard for it), above a straw-man of liberalism, and instead presents a sentimental, white-washed version of US history. And it does so with the intent of rallying us all to 'remake' the US as the 'greatest country in the world'... a misguided, foolishly competitive errand if there ever was one. ...

”'If liberals are so smart, how come they lose all the time?' If you think this line is funny, enjoy it. Liberals look back at the last 100 years of politics and see huge, lasting victories: women's suffrage, major civil rights victories for blacks, winning the Cold War, creation and protection of Social Security/Medicare/ Medicaid, and the widespread acceptance of gay rights. What can conservatives be proud of in that time? Give me your list; 'destroying the power of unions' better be on it.

“I'm judging Sorkin on seeing plenty of 'West Wing' and 'The Social Network.' It's feel-good, self-important drama, not drama that has much to do with the real world. His writing is catchy, like eating a bucket full of Skittles. It's juicy and gives you a little high; when it's over you just feel gross.

”This bullshit about how America didn't use to be 'afraid,' and how we 'used' to make decisions based on facts, etc. is just nauseating. Look at the Japanese internment camps during WW2, look at the Sedition laws in WW1. Look at Joe McCarthy. Americans, throughout history, like every other country in the world, ever, have always had a wide streak of fear, paranoia and irrationality. Throwing pixie dust around about how we used to be soooo strong, and how that was based on the strength of our 'core values' that we've somehow drifted away from is ridiculous. The US was incredibly strong following WW2 because we'd devoted our entire nation to the purpose of building up our military. We entered the war long after it was over, and lost a tiny fraction of our materiel and men after the rest of the major powers had crushed each other. We were the only one left standing. And we were able to do that because we basically had the Western Hemisphere to ourselves. If you swap the American People with the Russian People circa 1938, there is nothing inherently Awesome about us that would have dealt with Hitler any better than the Russians did.

“We've also had the luxury of starting modern life in 1700 on a fantastically huge, undeveloped treasure trove of natural resources. Every other major nation was surrounded by competitors, and had been developing their natural environment for hundreds if not thousands of years. The exploitation (some good, some bad) of resources in our 300+ year history has given us a titanic 'head start' in the race to become 'the greatest.' For a time following WW2, we were probably 'the greatest'... not that I give a shit about which country is 'winning' that race, nor should anyone.

”So... do I think the media should switch to reporting facts, and encouraging rational debate? Of course. It would make us wiser, and lead to better policies. Do I think Aaron Fucking Sorkin is contributing to this cause in any way? Nope. He's selling Hallmark cards.“

--my friend Uncle Vinny in a Facebook rant against the five-minute open to Aaron Sorkin's HBO series ”The Newsroom,“ which he apparently saw via Neil deGrasse Tyson's Facebook page. For the record, Mr. deGrasse Tyson posted the video because ”One of the great forces of delusion is under-informed pride of country." Here's the clip:

“Mom, I'd rather die in New York than live in New Jersey.”

--Vito Russo, gay liberation activist in the 1970s, AIDS activist in the 1980s, and author of “The Celluloid Closet,” refusing his mother's offer to stay with her in New Jersey when he revealed to her he was dying of AIDS. It's part of Jeffrey Schwarz's documentary, “Vito,” which premiered last night on HBO. I only saw the second half—basically from Reagan on—which was powerful. I'll watch the first half later this week. 

“That James Holmes is insane, few may doubt. Our gun laws are also insane, but many refuse to make the connection.”

Roger Ebert in his New York Times Op-Ed, “We've Seen This Movie Before,” on the gunman who opened fire on a movie-theater crowd at a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” last night in Aurora, Colorado.

You’ve also been a big proponent of the legalization of marijuana.
Marijuana! Heavens, oh yeah. It’s just the stupidest law possible...

--Morgan Freeman, during a Q&A with Newsweek's Marlow Stern, on The Daily Beast site. My years-old piece on Morgan Freeman here. My years-older review of Dan Baum's critique of the War on Drugs, “Smoke & Mirrors,” here.

I came across this while re-reading Gore Vidal's book of essays, “Rocking the Boat,” from 1963. The review itself, “Two Immoralists Orville Prescott and Ayn Rand,” appeared in Esquire magazine in July 1961

Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read. She has just published a book, For the New Intellectual, subtitled The Philosophy of Ayn Rand; it is a collection of pensées and arias from her novels and it must be read to be believed. Herewith, a few excerpts from the Rand collection.

• “It was the morality of altruism that undercut American and is now destroying her.”
• “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequence of freedom…or the primordial morality of altruism with its consequences of slavery, etc.”
• “I am done with the monster of ‘we,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame. And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: ‘I.’”
• “To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men.”
• “The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral….”

This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the “freedom is slavery” sort. What interests me most about her is not the absurdity of her “philosophy,” but the size of her audience (in my campaign for the House she was the one writer people knew and talked about). She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the “welfare” state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you’re dumb or incompetent that’s your lookout.

She is fighting two battles: the first, against the idea of the State being anything more than a police force and a judiciary to restrain people from stealing each other’s money openly. She is in legitimate company here. There is a reactionary position which has many valid attractions, among them lean, sinewy, regular-guy Barry Goldwater. But it is Miss Rand’s second battle that is the moral one. She has declared war not only on Marx but on Christ. Now, although my own enthusiasm for the various systems evolved in the names of those two figures is limited, I doubt if even the most anti-Christian free-thinker would want to deny the ethical value of Christ in the Gospels. To reject that Christ is to embark on dangerous waters indeed. For to justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil. For one thing, it is gratuitous to advise any human being to look out for himself. You can be sure that he will. It is far more difficult to persuade him to help his neighbor to build a dam or to defend a town or to give food he has accumulated to the victims of a famine. But since we must live together, dependent upon one another for many things and services, altruism is necessary to survival. To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy. That it is right to help someone less fortunate is an idea which has figured in most systems of conduct since the beginning of the race. We often fail. That predatory demon “I” is difficult to contain but until now we have all agreed that to help others is a right action. Now the dictionary definition of “moral” is: “concerned with the distinction between right and wrong” as in “moral law, the requirements to which right action must conform.” Though Miss Rand’s grasp of logic is uncertain, she does realize that to make even a modicum of sense she must change all the terms. Both Marx and Christ agree that in this life a right action is consideration for the welfare of others. In the one case, through a state which was to wither away, in the other through the private exercise of the moral sense. Miss Rand now tells us that what we have thought was right is really wrong. The lesson should have read: One for one and none for all.

Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society...

Here's a quote from Marcel Proust, from around 1907, that I came across while reading Alain de Botton's book “How Proust Can Change Your Life”:

“[The telephone is] a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream. ...

”Since we are children who play with divine forces without shuddering before their mystery, we only find the telephone 'convenient', or rather, as we are spoilt children, we find that 'it isn't convenient', and we fill Le Figaro with our complaints."

Here's Louis C.K.'s update 101 years later. Apologies that the audio is slightly out of sync with the video:

UPDATE: a portrait of the artist as a stand-up comedian.

“I'll never forget an extended interview I did with Kirk Douglas in Laredo, Texas, between takes of Eddie Macon's Run ('82). I was doing a set-visit piece for the N.Y. Post, and since Run wasn't much more than a servicable B-level programmer we mostly talked about his career hallmarks...

”I told him I half-loved the foyer freakout scene with Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. And much of The Devil's Disciple. And almost all of Champion. And every frame of Paths of Glory and The Big Sky and Lonely Are The Brave. And then I made an attempt at quoting his “eight spindly trees in Rockefeller Center” speech from Ace in the Hole. Douglas was drinking a bourbon (or something fairly stiff), and I remember his leaning forward at this point and saying, 'You've really done your homework.'“

--Jeffrey Wells, ”Not By a Long Shot," on his Hollywood Elsewhere site.

Louis Menand, who's too smart for this country, has, in the latest issue of The New Yorker, a good piece on a new James Joyce biography. As New Yorker writers are wont to do, he spends more column inches delivering his own mini-bio of the artist as young, middle-aged and old man than in actually reviewing the book. But it's a great read. It also includes my favorite recent example of the parenthetical.

Menand writes about Joyce's love of puns. He writes about the near autobiographical nature of his work. He writes about how some of his characters have the same names as the people they were based upon, and that's why Joyce never returned to Ireland, because he was afraid of libel suits. He writes about Joyce's favorite writer, Dante, “another exile, who created a verbal universe that he populated with old Florentine comrades and enemies, each caricatured with exquisite precision for all time, and who placed at the center of his imaginary cosmos a woman he had fallen in love with after seeing her on the street, Beatrice Portinari.”

Then he goes into Joyce's Beatrice, Nora Barnacle, a Galway girl, who, in 1904, was working as a chambermaid in Dublin when Joyce saw her on the street and asked her out. She didn't show for the first date. She did for the second. Menand writes:

They walked to Ringsend, on the south bank of the Liffey, where (and here we can drop the Dante analogy) she put her hand inside his trousers and masturbated him. It was June 16, 1904, the day on which Joyce set “Ulysses.” When people celebrate Bloomsday, that is what they are celebrating.

I read that last night. Laughed out loud. The entire piece can be found here: “Silence, Exile, Punning: James Joyce's chance encounters.”

In the meantime, other great examples of the parenthetical? Bueller?

...and yes I said yes I will Yes.

“Dear Jane, it would distress me big time if you were to lose a minute's sleep over this. I know I haven't. And besides, you're probably not off by much.”

--Former Red Sox pitcher Frank Sullivan, 82, responding via email to author Jane Leavy, who had referred to him as “the late Frank Sullivan” in her book, “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood.”  As reported in her article, “Sully and the Mick” in the book “Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World's Most Hated (and Loved) Team.”

When she phoned to again apologize, he was again classy and humorous. “Water off a duck's back,” he said. “Don't forget you're dealing with a guy who was booed by thousands.”

Later in his career, Sullivan, who was 97-100 with a lifetime 3.60 ERA, appeared in two All-Star games, and ended his career in Minnesota about the time I was being born in Minnesota, posed for Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post cover “The Rookie.”

Sullivan, No. 18, third from left.

“In the end, it ended as it had to end. Cleveland waits. And LeBron James won just like he knew he would.”

--Joe Posnanski in his bittersweet post, “LeBron: Champion”

“I was born in 1928. Same year as Mickey Mouse, but he made out better—straight to Hollywood, straight to the cosmetic department. I did not approve of his buying into all that crap and letting his soul get despoiled. I remained poor and depressed, as a Brooklyn child should. Mickey wasn’t depressed but anyone who looked like him should have been. He became a schmuck, a very famous schmuck. And God knows I adored him, but I was a schmuck, too. I lived in Brooklyn.”

--Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), author of “Where the Wild Things Are,” to Marianna Cook, in a New Yorker Postcript, “Wild Things,” May 21, 2012. It's unfortunately an abstract of the article, not the whole thing. Fortunately, you can subscribe to The New Yorker, and should. And if you haven't seen Sendak in his two-part interview with Stephen Colbert, you should check that out, too. Sendak may be the best partner Colbert's ever had.

“The maintenance of a complex society depends increasingly on routine work, work with no zest or creativity. The things we eat, clothes we wear, places we live become increasingly standardized, because standardization is the price we pay for the prices we are able to pay. Life ticks along for most of us like a Woolworth's alarm clock. We grow used to the rhythm imposed on us by our need to subsist: soon we get to like our bondage.”

--Anthony Burgess, “The Clockwork Condition: The author comments on his most famous book, in 1973,” in the June 4/11, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

Happy Thursday.

“Remember, Don…when God closes a door, he opens a dress.”

--Roger Sterling, whom I liked more and more this past season on “Mad Men.” Which makes me think Matthew Weiner will make me hate him next year.

“It’s not exactly a news flash that [Adam] Sandler isn’t making movies for me or people like me, but even by the standards of his lackadaisical, vulgar comedies, 'That’s My Boy' plumbs a new low. (Admittedly, it’s probably not worse than the insulting 'Grown Ups' or the bilious and hateful 'Jack and Jill,' although it’s dirtier than either. Suddenly 'You Don’t Mess With the Zohan' and 'I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry,' both of which are basically terrible, look like understated works of Lubitsch-style comic genius.)”

--Andrew O'Hehir in “Adam Sandler Hates You,” his review of “That's My Boy,” which, incidentally, died at the box office.

“Markets don't just happen.”

--Gov. George Romney

“No one in his right mind would today argue that there is no place for the federal government in the reawakening of America. Indeed, we need another Republican-sponsored Marshall Plan for our cities and schools.”

--Henry Cabot Lodge

Both men were urging greater federal involvement in business and education to the platform committee at the 1964 Republican National Convention. According to Rick Perlstein, in his book, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” (pg. 374), they were met with “stony silence” by a committee taken over by uncompromising, upstart Goldwaterites—the same type who now run the GOP, and to whom Romney's son, Mitt, now pays obeisance.

Gov. George W. Romney and son in 1964.

“When we started writing the show, I said to the writers, ‘In order to write, I think you need to have an idea in your head about what the purpose of life is. It doesn’t matter what idea you have, you just have to have one. So if you think life is a Darwinian struggle for survival, then at any given moment when you’re confused about what to write, you can say, ‘Well, if life is a Darwinian struggle for survival, then I guess this is what we should do.’

“‘But if you’re going to write on this show, you have to provisionally at least go along with what I believe, which is that the reason for living is to love and create. But then you look at the world and you realize that that’s not happening everywhere, is it? There must be a reason why. Why is it not happening? The reason it doesn’t happen is fear.

“People are essentially good, so they want to solve the problem of fear. So they go, ‘I know what I’ll do. I will make money. And if I make enough money, I will then feel safe enough to love and create, and it will immunize me against fear.’ But that’s an illusion, because the fear is too big and the money is never enough.

“The real answer is that people do not need money in order to love and create; they need purpose. So I said to the writers, ‘Armed with that four-pronged idea that love and creation are the positives, fear is the problem, money is the false answer and purpose is the real one, then at any given moment you know how to write a story on ‘Underemployed.’ Every episode, over and over again, is the story of people learning in various ways that the answer to the problems of our age is not money, it is purpose.”

--Craig Wright, playwright, and writer for “Six Feet Under,” “Brothers and Sisters,” and creator of “Dirty Sexy Money” and the new MTV show “Underemployed,” in Jim Walsh's MinnPost article “Craig Wright and MTV's 'Underemployed' Feel the Pain of Millennials”

On the way to see Craig Wright's “Orange Flower Water” at the New Century Theater in downtown Seattle, June 2009

“We can't justify foreign aid funds which went to the purchase of extra wives for some tribal chiefs in Kenya.”

--Then-GE spokesman and sometime actor Ronald Reagan in a speech to the Young Republicans Convention in February 1964. “Our money” going to “bad black people” was merely a forerunner to Reagan's “welfare queen” stump speech in the 1970s, which helped Reagan ride into the White House in November 1980 and change the country.

The above quote is from “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus,” by Rick Perlstein; pg. 336. (Much recommended.) According to Perlstein, the speech was received “with delerium” by Republicans, who obviously haven't changed much in the past 50 years. They're still filled with delerium. They're still fostering resentment of those with less. And they're still harping on Kenya.

Ronald Reagan in 1964.

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry, don't cry

--Paul Simon, “The Boy in the Bubble,” from his album “Graceland”

“That you're not very talented needn't be the end of it.”

--John Irving (my literary No. 5 hitter) in his memoir, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, p.131.

“Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.””

--Ricky Gervais, “A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I'm an Athiest,” The Wall Street Journal.

Later in the article, there's this: “You see, growing up where I did, mums didn’t hope as high as their kids growing up to be doctors; they just hoped their kids didn’t go to jail. So bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law abiding. It’s a perfect system. Well, nearly. 75 percent of Americans are God-­fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-­fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.”

“I was just working as a mechanic and one day I got this call from the boss and he said, ‘Hey, Paul Simon is in town, you know, and he’s looking for some musicians.’ And I said, ‘Paul Simon, who is Paul Simon?’ I mean I had no idea. And then the guy tried to explain to me. He’s singing all the songs. You know, like the songs from Simon and Garfunkel. And I’m like, ‘It doesn’t ring a bell.’ And then I take my bass and I go to the studio and so I meet Paul and Roy Halee, the engineer, and they’re like ‘Hey, man, let’s, you know, let’s play some.’ We’d play a chord — Paul would smile ... and then he’ll stop and change it. We didn’t know why is he changing? But he needed another part there that we didn’t know. Then he’ll break and give us different chords, and then we learned different things, and it was like going back to music school.”

--Bass player Bakithi Kumalo on Paul Simon and the making of “Graceland,” from the documentary “Under African Skies.” The quote was included in Thomas Friedman's column today. Her'es my review of the documentary from last week.

“I'm the President of the United States not the President of the People Who Agree With Me. And by the way if the Left has a problem with that, they should vote for somebody else.”

--Pres. Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, “West Wing.” I've often been defending Pres. Obama along these lines over the last three years. The clip:

In “Under African Skies,” Joe Berlinger's documentary about the making of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and his return to South Africa 25 years later to perform a concert with the musicians with whom he worked, Simon recounts how back then he wondered whether the songs they were recording shouldn't be more political. He wasn't blind to what was going on in South Africa, after all; he felt the tension. Shouldn't the album reflect that tension?

So he asked the South African artist, General M.D. Shirinda, about the song that became “I Know What I Know.” What were its original South African lyrics? He assumed they would be political. This is what Shirinda responded:

“Remember in the sixties when girls wore short skirts? Wasn’t that great?”

The trailer:

“Forgive me, but if someone had told me two decades ago that by 2012, a black president would be endorsing gay marriage, I would have asked where he got that stuff he was smoking.”

--Andrew Sullivan, “The Greenwald Pounce,” on his blog “The Dish”

“We all need genius. It's essential to know that Great Souls are out there, revealing the potential of the species, and we want to believe that true genius creates itself, and forces itself on the world. But we only know those geniuses who have broken through, and when we look at their stories, we often find that a random stroke of luck or a passionate believer made all the difference. If ever there was a movie genius, it was Charlie Chaplin. But anyone who works in movies will tell you that when it comes to pictures, nobody does anything alone.”

--Jon Boorstin, from the article “Who Invented Chaplin's Tramp?” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Charlie Chaplin in “The Kid” (1921). But who helped him invent the Tramp?

“The New York Yankees have their own cologne. It's made from the most expensive ingredients of all the competing colognes.”

—Stephen Colbert

“I guess some of this mad right-wing love comes from the idea that in America, anyone can become a Rich Guy if he just works hard and saves his pennies. Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that—sorry, kiddies—you’re on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay—not to give, not to “cut a check and shut up,” in Governor Christie’s words, but to pay—in the same proportion. That’s called stepping up and not whining about it. That’s called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn’t cost their beloved rich folks any money.”

--Stephen King in a must-read, fun-to-read column, “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!” on The Daily Beast site

“There’s just something about Sarah Palin that upsets me. Sometimes you can’t argue with a stupid person. It’s like a toy super villain absorbing your firepower—you point out their mistakes and it makes them stronger.”

--Barry Blitt in the online article: “New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant To See.” I also like Blitt's Monica/Hilary cover and Art Spiegelman's Lady Justice.

“'She was funny and lethal right up to the end,' said Craig Seligman, a speaker at Pauline Kael's memorial service. 'One day when she was near death and I was trying to divert her with chatter about working as an editor, I said, ”It never ceases to amaze me how many people who call themselves writers actually can't write.“ And she said — very weakly — ”Yes, they say things like 'It never ceases to amaze me.'“'”

--from “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” by Brian Kellow, which the old man, Bob Lundegaard, is currently reading. Thanks, Dad!

“I hate America very deeply. The economic repression of the masses—institutionalized. Even Lenin couldn't foresee the extent of that.”

--Bill Haydon (Ian Richardson) in the 1979 BBC-TV miniseries, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” based upon the novel by John le Carré.

Bill Haydon, Soviet spy and traitor, with George Smiley (Alec Guinness) in the foreground.

“Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.”

—Opening line of Roger Ebert's review of the new movie “Think Like a Man.”

“It’ll never be boring with him.“

-- Miami Marlins' owner Jeff Loria, about manager Ozzie Guillen before the ”I love Fidel Castro, I respect Fidel Castro“ controversy that led to his five-game suspension last week. The above quote is taken from the April 9th New Yorker article ”Old Fish, New Fish: The Marlins get a Miami makeover,“ by Ben McGrath.

At one point in the article, just before Loria says the above, he and Guillen engage in what sounds like an Abbott & Costello ”Who's On First" routine. It's really someone rational trying to follow the logic of someone who is ... less so:

Guillen: If I get this man [Loria] to where he should be, it gonna be a raise.
Loria: The World Series?
Guillen: Oh, no, that’s up to them. [Nods toward players on field.]
Loria: Oh, so they should get the raise.
Guillen: I get paid to win World Series.
Loria [impatient]: O.K. So just do it.
Guillen [nods toward players again]: They gonna do it. My job? Hey, listen, if I get involved in the game more often, that means we’re horseshit. See, I stay away from them? That means we winning.

The full article, worthwhile, can be read here.

Guillen and Loria practice their routine earlier this year.

“Remember how he used to agitate on the bases? You never knew what he was going to do... So I decided I had better switch over and work from a stretch position. But you can see right there what happened—Robinson had broken my concentration. I was pitching more to Robinson than I was to Hodges, and as a result I threw one up into Gil's power and he got the base hit that beat me.”

--Vic Raschi, pitcher, New York Yankees, most likely talking about Game 2 of the 1949 World Series, which Brooklyn won 1-0.

“Carl Furillo got all the headlines the next day, and he deserved them, because he did the job. But I knew that it was Robinson who had distracted me just enough to get me to hang that curve.”

--Gene Conley, pitcher, Milwaukee Braves, most likely talking about a game, May 2, 1955, in which, in the bottom of the 12th inning, with one out, Robinson walked and Furillo followed with a 2-run, walk-off homer to beat the Braves 2-0.

It's stories like these, both from Donald Honig's oral history, “Baseball: Between the Lines,” which must give any sabremetrician pause about their ability to quantify every aspect of the game. Some stuff just doesn't show up in the stats.

Jackie Robinson, in 1955, breaking concentration

“The written rules were rigid and righteous, while the real rules were often wide open and dirty.”

--Eliot Asinof in “Eight Men Out,” his great book about the 1919 Chicago White Sox/Black Sox scandal.

Eight men who got caught, and punished, so we wouldn't know the written rules weren't the real rules.

“The moment you start preaching in a film, the moment you want to teach your audience, you are making a bad film.”

--Douglas Sirk (1897-1987), film director. I first heard this quote in Martin Scorsese's documentary “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” a must-watch for anyone who cares about film.

“You get Ingrid Bergman giving you a certain look in a movie and everyone thinks you're gorgeous."

--Humphrey Bogart

“They just came back and said, 'You're fired.' I really didn't say anything. It was like — God, I can't lose my job. I got to have my health insurance.”

--Jennifer Owens, who worked in an Amazon.com warehouse, called a “fulfillment center,” in Campbellsville, KY, in the article, “Intense Pressure on Warehouse Floor,” the fourth of The Seattle Times' four-part series on the online company.

“I'm just trying to get along without shoving anybody, that's all.”

--Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in John Ford's “The Grapes of Wrath”

SCENE: Yesterday on the Wenatchee ferry during the 4:35 PM run from Bainbridge Island to Seattle. A middle-aged man, quiet but charming, and devastatingly handsome, is hanging on the prow of the boat by himself, in the sun, and attempting to ignore the cold winds buffeting his windbreaker. He looks around toward the rest of the boat, and then up, where, on the level above him, another middle-aged man, less quiet and not quite so charming, and certainly not devastatingly handsome, is hanging with his wife. He yells down at the more charming man.

LESS QUIET MAN: You're supposed to spread your arms wide like you're in that “Titanic” movie! “King of the World!” [Laughs]

[More charming man looks up at the man, back at the prow of the boat, then back up at the man.]

MORE CHARMING MAN: Isn't there supposed to be a girl?

LESS QUIET MAN'S WIFE: That's right! [Laughs]

MORE CHARMING MAN: You get me a girl who looks like Kate Winslet and I'll do that 'King of the World' thing for you.

In truth, I was surprised we were still making 'King of the World!' jokes on the Wenatchee ferry in 2012, but I guess the movie did just get a re-release. But I had a nice ride over to Seattle. Kate Winslet did not show up.

“[Early French filmmaker George] Méliès was non-stop women. He loved the ladies, married often, had 150 mistresses if not a thousand. Méliès in a nutshell. Méliès died poor—the fate of all those who pursue something out of love.”

--Henri Langlois in the documentary “Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque.” Langlois died in 1977, aged 62, and poor.

Langlois, who pursued film.

“Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose.”

--Pauline Kael, from her 1969 essay, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” which I culled from this Jonathan Kirshner quadruple book review. I'm not sure if Kirshner's review had an obvious purpose, but he told me so much of what I already know, or what is already established, that I never bothered to finish it.

“I am certainly not an advocate for for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects.

”But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.“

-- Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval on July 12, 1816. I first came across this while reading Gore Vidal's ”The Second American Revolution and other Essays (1976-1982).

“People who look ahead are very rare. Most people look to the past. We walk backwards, we back our way through life. We move forward but always while looking backwards. People who envision their future and move toward it, peering ahead, are incredibly rare.”

--Henri Langlois in the documentary “Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque.”

“Jack [Kirby] also watched the [1990] Captain America movie. He attended the premier with Mike [Thibodeaux] by his side and thought the beginning--Cap fighting the war--wasn't that bad. Once the film moved to the present, however, showing the Red Skull on an island, he was appalled.

”'He fought to get his name on that thing,' Thibodeaux said. 'But when he came out of the theater, Jack was saying he wanted his name off the movie.'“

--from ”Tales to Astonish: Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American Comic Book Revolution,“ by Ronin Ro

”Captain America" was created by ... Ah, forget it.

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

--Ernest Hemingway.

I forget where I read this. I have an old Word doc with favorite quotes in it that I haven't looked at in a while and this was among them. It's also my 100th Quote of the Day, or the 100th Quote of the Day officially titled “Quote of the Day.” There are others with different titles. I chose this one for the 100th quote because ... well, that's it, isn't it? That's what we need to do. It's a quote that should be tattooed on the knuckles of my hands.

“There is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.”

--Gore Vidal, in his essay, “Love Love Love,” which first appeared in the Partisan Review, Spring 1959. Vidal was a privileged man: most things in life are more debasing than this. But the description does fit most every job I've had in my adult life.

“It's quite simple to kill off your public. A distant example: Moscow. 'Ivan the Terrible' is released in Moscow and audiences flee. They can't take it. But why not? Because the were no longer operating on the film's level of artistry. Why? They'd seen nothing but crap for ages. When you feed the people crap, they lose their taste buds.”

--Henri Langlois, in the documentary “Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the  Cinémathèque” (2004). Langlois is considered the father of film preservation, the father of the auteur theory, and the father of the Nouvelle Vague.

“If you want your art to matter, stay in touch with the world. Keep in the human drama, take walks, go to baseball games, chase women, argue with waiters, ride motorcycles, hang out with children, play poker, visit Paris as often as possible and always keep in touch with the craggy old guy with the bad cough who runs the news stand.

”Kubrick apparently did very little of this. The more invested he became in his secretive, secluded, every-detail-controlled, nothing-left-to-chance lifestyle in England — which he began to construct when he left Hollywood and moved there in the early '60s — and the less familiar he became with the rude hustle-bustle of life on the outside, the more rigid and formalized and apart-from-life his films became.“

--Jeff Wells, from his 2000 review of Stanley Kubrick's ”Eyes Wide Shut,“ recently resurrected on his Hollywood Elsewhere site after rewatching the film on Blu-Ray. He also quotes from David Thomson's review: ”It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes. Every frame feels like a prison."

“Apparently, he was not totally ignorant of one of life's great secrets: women don't look for handsome men, they look for men with beautiful women.”

-- Milan Kundera, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” pg. 12.

“It’s not intellectual. You’re mostly aware of what you don’t like. Henry Moore said something like that. You keep chipping away at what isn’t an elephant. And Miles Davis said: ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there’ — I’ve put it on my wall. We think the conscious is the determining factor, and actually it’s the least reliable instrument. The knowing is the infringement.“

--Dustin Hoffman in ”The Tao of Hoffman" by Giles Foden in The New York Times Style Magazine, Sunday, March 4, 2012

“Despite its soft environmentalist message 'The Lorax' is an example of what it pretends to oppose. Its relationship to Dr. Seuss’s book is precisely that of the synthetic trees that line the streets of Thneedville to the organic Truffulas they have displaced. The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, reverse-engineered into something resembling popular art in accordance with the reigning imperatives of marketing and brand extension.”

--A.O. Scott in his review “How the Grinch Stole the Lorax” in The New York Times

“The studios that churn out 'This Means War' and its ilk ... seem geuinely worried that an audience left to contemplate human deeds without the assistance of sonic or editorial frenzy might start to think for itself. People might look at Chris Pine's eyes and wonder, first, why a blue so startling and unreal should suggest not the gleam of a born seducer but one of the stronger brands of industrial cleaning gel. And, second, whether the character he depicts here, for all its vigor, is anything more than a jerk.

”That is certainly how Lauren [Reese Witherspoon] reads him at the start. They meet at a video store, a setting that might have seemed fresh and topical sometime around the summer of 1993. He actually says, 'I know movies. And women,' a boast that would be correct only if uttered by George Cukor.“

--Anthony Lane in ”The Current Cinema: Big Men," in the 2/27/12 issue of The New Yorker

Cukor and subject. His IMDb CV.

“The fact that the Oscar telecast is a bust, that it is doomed—almost designed—to be a bust, and that the varying degrees of bustness are all that separates one year from the next, should neither surprise nor even dismay us, because the Academy Awards are like teen-age sex. It’s all about the fizzing buildup, and the self-persuading aftermath: the occurrence itself, nowadays, is nothing but fumble and flub...”

-- Anthony Lane, “The Oscars: Man or Muppet?” on The New Yorker site, in what is easily the best post-Oscar commentary. Most critics fulminate. They snipe. Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes of The New York Times write about the Academy's doomed ratings ... even though, they admit, the ratings were up 3.7 percent. The Hollywood Reporter slams host Billy Crystal, as it slams all hosts, even though he was funny and got off several of the evening's best lines, particularly: “Nothing takes the sting out of these tough economic times like watching a bunch of millionaires giving golden statues to each other.” Julia Turner over at Slate.com actually criticized the way Penelope Cruz looked. (“The look is blah ... stupid princess gown.”) Lane keeps the proper distance. He expects little and is amused when he gets less. He unleashes bon mots with a shrug. All other critics should read and learn.

“Ryan Seacrest,” Lane writes, “whose very name resembles a brand of luxury yacht, so smooth are the waves on which he sails through life...” Choppier waters here thanks (and yes, thanks) to Sacha Baron Cohen.

“When Ted Williams refused to wear a necktie in the late 1940s, he got scant argument from Red Sox manager Joe McCarthy, even though the skipper insisted that everyone else on the club be so attired. When a sportswriter asked McCarthy why he let Williams get away with it, the manager offered a simple answer. 'I want to be fair,' he said. 'Any other gentleman on this club hits. .390, he won't have to wear a necktie, either.'”

--Jason Turbow and Michael Duca in their book, “The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing & Bench-Clearing Brawls: The unwritten rules of America's pastime.” According to the book's footnotes, they got the quote from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cooperstown,” by Mickey McDermott and Howard Eisenberg.

Ted Williams, tieless, signing a contract at the desk of Red Sox general manager Eddie Collins at Fenway Park in the late 1940s. Photograph by Leslie Jones (1886-1967). Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

“...rarer has it been clearer to me that 'the Academy' is not a monolithic individual entity we conveniently paint it as for the purpose of analysis, but a hive of conflicting individual opinions and personalities. The new voting structure for the Best Picture race is a case in point. We know each of these nine nominees received at least 5% of the number-one votes cast, suggesting a diverse range of committed camps. The people responsible for The Tree of Life being on the list are not the same people who put War Horse there, who in turn are different from the sneaky contingent who came through for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

”There's evidence of contrasting impulses within individual branches, too. Are the actors who rallied for Demián Bichir the same ones who are high on Rooney Mara? Are there Academy screenwriters who are equally jazzed about Bridesmaids and A Separation? I'm sure there are some — speaking as the person whose best-of-2011 list found room for Margaret and Immortals — but I'm sure you'd find plenty more who are befuddled by at least one of those nominations. Get angry with the Academy if you like, but wonder first what — or who — you're even getting angry with.“

-- Guy Lodge, ”Stuck in the middle with you: Thoughts on the Oscar nominations,“ on the ”In Contention" site. Which is now, what, HitFix? Too bad.

“After nearly twenty years in England, my wife and I had taken the decision to move back to America for a while, to give the children the chance of experiencing life in another country and my wife the chance to shop until 10 P.M. seven nights a week. I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans, according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me.”

--Bill Bryson, “Notes From a Small Island” (1995), pg. 5

“Feeling wrapped in light gives me a sense of spiritual atmosphere. You've got light, you needn't feel alone.”

--Cinematographer Sven Nykvist (1922-2006), in the documentary “Ljuset håller mig sällskap” (“Light Keeps Me Company”), which is currently streaming on Netflix.

Some of the movies Nykvist photographed:

• 1993 What's Eating Gilbert Grape 
• 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors
• 1989 New York Stories (segment “Oedipus Wrecks”)
• 1988 The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• 1983 Star 80
• 1982 Fanny and Alexander
• 1978 Autumn Sonata
• 1978 Pretty Baby
• 1976 Face to Face
• 1973 Scenes from a Marriage
• 1972 Cries and Whispers
• 1970 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• 1968 Hour of the Wolf
• 1966 Persona
• 1963 Winter Light
• 1961 Through a Glass Darkly
• 1960 The Virgin Spring

“Has there ever been a more decent, upstanding, all-American president, with his dog and his family and his Apollo Theatre song solos, treated more shamefully by his opponents? I’d be more horrified by the abuse if I wasn’t sure it was backfiring.”

--Joan Walsh, “Demonizing the decent guy who is president: Will the crazy-nasty GOP attacks on Obama provoke a voter backlash to defend the flawed but human Democrat?,” on Salon.com.

“As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.”

--Adam Gopnik in the article, “THE CAGING OF AMERICA: Why do we lock up so many people?” in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker

“Many would argue, if they ever had cause to think about it, that one Bad News Bears movie was enough. But no nine-year-old baseball-loving boy in 1977 would agree, not even one who had, unlke me, seen the first movie. The sequel came out that summer, after Little League season had ended all over the land, and who wouldn't want the season and the summer to somehow go on and on?

”The makers of the Bears sequel keyed in on this need to go on and on. Really, the premise of another Bears movie couldn't have been otherwise: there would have to be another game. But whether by design or happy accident, or some combination of the two, the sequel not only centers on the idea that the season can go on but continually frames it as an urgent question: can the season go on? It is, in a way, the prototypical sequel. Its plot mirrors the very question of its exisence. One story has ended. Can there be another?“

-- from ”The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training,“ by Josh Wilker, part of the ”A Novel Approach to Cinema“ series edited by Sean Howe.

I think ”Breaking Training“ one of the worst baseball movies ever made; but Wilker's short book, with its asides to the American myth of the road, the catchphrases of ”Happy Days,“ Jimmy Carter's ”malaise“ speech, the ”USA! USA!" chant, and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, and how they all intertwine with this horrible, horrible movie, is something close to a work of art.

“When I had lunch with the unnaturally clever actor Stephen Fry, for instance, he said it was no big deal that he was an actor, a novelist, memoirist, television personality, talk-show host, and amateur magician who in his spare time had written the script for a Christmas pantomime at the Old Vic, and who, when his friend Emma Thompson's book was swallowed by her computer, resurrected the lost chapters by single-handedly repairing the hard drive (he dabbles in technology on the side). Fry suffers from manic-depressive disorder--also in his spare time, he researched and hosted a television series in which he explored his and others' experiences with the illness--and I think one of the things that distresses him is that no one else is as smart as he is. Bu he would never put it that way; he claims it's all a fluke.”

--Sarah Lyall, “The Angle Files: A Field Guide to the British,” pg. 147.

“Perhaps the master of the British art of telling stories against oneself is the writer and playwright Alan Bennett, who is about the closest thing Britain has to a national treasure. He seems genetically incapable of being pleased with himself. When asked by the actor Ian McKellen in 1987 whether he was gay or straight, he responded that it was like asking a man crawling across the Sahara Desert what sort of water he preferred, Perrier or Malvern.”

--Sarah Lyall, “The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British,” pg. 154

“It seems to me that a Democratic president who gets us health care reform and tough new financial protection for consumers, who guides the economy through its roughest period in 80 years with moderate success (who could do better?), who ends our long war in Iraq and avenges the worst insult to our sovereignty since Pearl Harbor (as his Republican predecessor manifestly failed to do, despite a lot of noise and promises); a president who faced an opposition of really spectacular intransigence and downright meanness; a president who has the self-knowledge and wisdom about Washington to write the passage quoted above, and the courage to publish it: that president deserves a bit more credit from the left than [Thomas] Frank is willing to give him.”

--Michael Kinsley in his review of “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right,” by Thomas Frank, which is as critical of Pres. Obama as Frank's previous book, “What's the Matter with Kansas?,” was critical of Kansas.

“Mantle's might inflicted damage on bats, balls and egos. ... Billy Pierce, then pitching for the White Sox, recalled a July night at Yankee Stadium in 1959 when Mantle KO'ed a rookie outfielder with a line drive. '[Jim McAnany] went to catch the ball, and it hit him right in the chest,' Pierce said....

”'Just to the right of the breastbone,' McAnany said. 'I just went down like I was shot. It knocked me off my feet.'

“Jim Kaat of the Minnesota Twins sought divine intervention when he fell behind on The Mick. 'Two-and-oh on Mantle, Earl Battey would wave his arms and make the sign of the cross.'”

--from Jane Leavy's “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of Amerca's Chlldhood”

“The best days of the Tri-State Mining District were ten years gone when Mutt [Mantle] moved his family to the region. The land's lucre was first discovered in 1848, the year Mantle's great-grandfther, an English coal miner, immigrated to America. The Twenties were the glory days. Between 1908 and 1930, the ore that came out of the mines was worth more than $300 million. The human cost of extracting the wealth was clear as early as 1915, when doctors noted pulmonary disease in almost two out of three miners ...

”Silicosis was feared and far more common than the random but inevitable collapse of rock. A clinic opened in Pitcher in 1927, but it was for the benefit of the mine operators, who were anxious to cull the sick from the workforce. Doctors provided advice but no treatment. Annual X-ray examinations were compulsory. Miners were required to carry a wallet-sized health card certifying that they were free of disease. Those whose X-rays came back positive were fired the same day and could never be hired by another mine. An attorney for Eagle-Picher explained the company's methodology for ridding the area of silicosis and the rampant tuberculosis that ensued: 'When they get sick and can't work, we throw them on the dump heap.'“

--From Jane Leavy's ”The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood," pg. 43

Q. How did you prepare for the role [of a former P.O.W. turned war hero who might also be an undercover jihadist in Showtime's “Homeland”]?

A. I investigated post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve been to a unit where people are suffering from it, and I read a lot of literature. I looked at footage of soldiers in the combat zone. I found “Restrepo” to be unbelievably useful.

--Actor Damian Lewis (“Band of Brothers”) in the Q&A “A World War II Soldier Enters the Post-Iraq Age,” in the Sunday New York Times

“I love baseball. You know, it doesn't have to mean anything, it's just beautiful to watch.”

--Leonard Zelig in Woody Allen's “Zelig” (1983)

Target Field, July 4, 2011.

“The greatness of 'Funny People' hinges on Sandler’s ability to adeptly capture the sadness of a comedic actor looking back on his career when confronted with mortality. And Sandler nails it! Hits every goddamn note, moment and scene, masterfully. And while I do believe he’s a great actor (when he wants to be), part of it also comes from Judd Apatow so skillfully tapping into Sandler’s own regret about his own choices and then seamlessly filtering them through the character of George Simmons. That’s why the parodies within 'Funny People' — like 'Re-Do,' where a lawyer gets magically turned back into a baby or 'MerMan,' the story of a male mermaid — hit so hard. It feels like Sandler is acknowledging the ridiculousness of his filmography and owning up to it.

”That’s what makes 'Jack and Jill' so perplexing. How can you soberly acknowledge all that one year, and then star in 'Jack and Jill' the very next? And more important, how can you leave that much talent on the table? It’s like turning down the opportunity to play for a championship in order to spend another year on a bottom feeder.“

--Toph Eggers, screenwriter, in the salon.com piece ”The Tragedy of Adam Sandler."

“If you live in France and you have written one good book, or painted a good picture, or directed one outstanding fim, 50 years ago, and nothing ever since, you are still recognized as an artist, and honored accordingly. People take their hats off and call you maitre. They do not forget. In Hollywood--in Hollywood you're as good as your last picture. If you didn't have one in production in the last three months, you're forgotten, no matter what you have achieved ere this.”

--Erich von Stroheim, “Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial Treasury” by Joe Franklin

“Yes, a great game and never mind the early stuff. Tied five times, it produced six lead changes, and rehabilitated itself, from stinker to thriller, along the way. Stricken Cardinals fans at Busch Stadium stood in silence in the ninth inning and again in the tenth, with their mittened paws covering their faces up to the eyes, while their team teetered on the brink of elimination, one strike away from winter. In the ninth, with the Redbirds down by two runs, there was a brief shot of Cardinals ace pitcher Chris Carpenter and a couple of teammates laughing about something at the dugout rail, and I thought, What’s with these guys? Now we know...”

--Roger Angell in his New Yorker post “Cards Win”

*  *  *

“The Cardinals' next four hitters were Lance Berkman, Allen Craig, David Freese, and Yadier Molina. Holland throws left-handed. Berkman, a switch-hitter, is significantly better against righties than lefties, so letting Holland pitch to Berkman made sense. Indeed, Holland retired Berkman on a fly ball.

”After that, though? The Cardinals had three right-handed hitters coming up, and Washington had Mike Adams, one of baseball's best right-handed relief pitchers, warming up in the bullpen. It was the eighth inning. Mike Adams makes his living in the eighth inning. Against right-handed hitters, especially.

“Washington didn't leave the dugout, but Craig left the yard with a solo homer that trimmed the Rangers' lead by a run. Eventually, Adams did enter the game and killed an incipient St. Louis rally. One wonders, though ... Would Allen Craig have hit a home run against Mike Adams?

”Oddly, nobody's really talking about Adams' late entrance, perhaps because everybody still seems to think that Derek Holland walks on water. Hint: He doesn't. He's a good pitcher who pitched great in Game 4, and might be slightly more effective coming out of the bullpen than starting. But he's not Mike Adams.“

--Rob Neyer, ”2011 World Series, Game 6: Did Ron Washington Blow It?“

*  *  *

”Feliz looked uncomfortable on the mound, but I think he tends to look that way. Part of the magic of Mariano is the placid look, the slumped shoulders, as if this is all just a formality, as if he had already saved the game a few hours before and is only performing it once more for those people who missed it. Feliz, though, is a bit twitchy, he expresses disgust, his motion is violent and impassioned, and I thought after he walked Berkman he looked unsure.“

--Joe Posnanski, ”Game Six“

*  *  *

”Really and truly, this was an ugly game for about six or seven innings. But then it got beautiful right at the end.“

--Lance Berkman in Jayson Stark's piece, ”David Freese, St. Louis, Force Game 7"

“I find they are pedestrian people. Their consensus is cliche. Something is good because they've seen it before.”

--Herbert B. Leonard (1922-2006), producer of “Naked City,” “Route 66,” and “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,” and known as a writer's producer, as quoted in Susan Orlean's biography, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and The Legend.” The “they” he is referring to are studio executives.

“Hitler cared deeply about animals and animal welfare. 'In the Third Reich,' he once announced, 'cruelty to animals should no longer exist.' Some of the earliest laws enacted by the Nazi Party pertained to animal protection, and violators could be sent to concentration camps. Vivisection, tail docking, and neutering were banned...

”What accounted for this concern for animals? Some of these laws, such as a ban on kosher butchering and on Jews having pets, were probably enacted because they furthered the goal of religious persecution; the restriction on vivisection might have been an effort to inhibit Jewish scientists. But the Nazi reverence for nature and natural order was more far-reaching and fundamental than a simple anti-Semitic attack. The pagan-like worship of nature as an immutable force was at the core of the Nazi belief system. Nature, with its invioable schematic and pitiless ranking of strong over weak, was held up as a model and a justification for the Nazis' worldview, and therefore nature and animals had to be honored and protected...

“Nazis also used their attention to animal well-being as a way to further humiliate their victims ... illustrated by the Angora Project, a rabbit-breeding program operated by the SS at the Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald concentration camps. Raised by inmates at the camps, the rabbits lived in gorgeous hutches and were fed lavish meals; their fur was trimmed and used as insulation in Luftwaffe pilots' winter jackets. But Henreich Himmler, the chief of the SS, who ran the project and kept a notebook documenting it, also wanted the rabbits for another purpose; he liked the starving prisoners to be reminded, as they prepared meals for the animals and cleaned their cages, that they had less value in the Nazi world order, deserved less dignity and fewer rights than the animals they cared for.”

--Susan Orlean, in one of the many interesting sidebars in her book, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” pp. 145-46

“That year [1927], Rin Tin Tin was designated the most popular performer in the United States, and his four films—A Dog of the Regiment, Jaws of Steel, Tracked by the Police and Hills of Kentucky—were box office hits as well as critical successes. The Academy Awards were presented for the first time, and Rinty received the most votes for Best Actor. But members of the Academy, anxious to establish the new awards as serious and important, decided that giving an Oscar to a dog did not serve that end, so the votes were recalculated and the award was diverted to Emil Jannings, for his performances in both The Way of the Flesh and The Last Command.”

--Susan Orlean, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” pp. 88-89. Orlean will appear next Friday, October 28, at SIFF Uptown for a reading, a Q&A, and a showing of the Rin Tin Tin silent film “Clash of the Wolves.”

The original Rin Tin Tin in “Hills of Kentucky” (1927).

“To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.”

--Andrew Sullivan, “A Tale of Two Presidents”

Also worth reading: Sullivan's post, “The Untold Story of the Actual Obama Record.”

I'm disappointed that we didn't get better articles about the Yankees' quick postseason exit from stalwarts Rob Neyer or Joe Posnanski. But the Internet's a big place and good comments could be found. My favorite is listed last. Enjoy.

“It hurts. It hurts for the Yankees to lose in the playoffs and for their season to end. I once knew a therapist who said that sports were a leading cause of depression among men – trailing behind events like losing a loved one or being fired from one’s job. I take these losses seriously. I also know that the closer your team comes to winning it all, the harder it is to have them lose. I remember 2001. I know this might sound like self-entitled nonsense to fans of teams like the Cubs who haven’t sniffed a World Championship in eons. But every Yankee fan is also a fan of less successful teams. My California Golden Bears haven’t seen a Rose Bowl since Eisenhower was President, but it didn’t hurt that much when they gave up 29 unanswered points to Oregon last night.”

--ItsAboutTheMoney.Net, “A Rational Goodbye to the 2011 Season”

*  *  *

Dear Mr. Manners,
I'm really enjoying the fact that the Red Sox choked to miss the playoffs and that the Yankees lost in the first round. Is it poor manners to root against them and mock the teams and their fans?

-- United S. (of America)

Dear United Schadenfreude of America,
Normally it is poor manners to find joy in the failure of others, but rooting against the Yankees and Red Sox is as American as mom, apple pie and baseball teams trying to buy championships. I have no problem reveling in their defeat. However, I would encourage you to balance your ridicule with a positive comment to show that you are a person of refined manners.

Say: “Keep your chin up ... so you can see the scoreboard, which is the official record of you being a loser.”

Or: “Hey, no one wins them all. In fact, some teams only win one of them in 11 years, which is almost impossible if you think about it, considering they had the biggest payroll in every one of those years.”

--D.J. Gallo, “Mr. Manners' Etiquette for Sports World”

Keep your chin up...

*  *  *

“Not enough fans understand that the baseball playoffs are a crapshoot. Since 1990, you know how many teams with the best regular-season record have won the World Series? Three — the '98 Yankees, '07 Red Sox and '09 Yankees. If you make the playoffs, you essentially have a 1-in-4 chance of reaching the World Series. If you get to the World Series, you have 1-in-2 chance of winning. So if you make the playoffs every season you should win a World Series once every eight years. In their past eight trips to the postseason, the Yankees have reached two World Series and won one. Exactly what the odds would predict.”

-- David Schoenfield, “The Day After: Yankees Postscript”

*  *  *

And my favorite...

To the Sports Editor:

The Yankees’ postseason failure over the last two years suggests the possibility of another Curse of the Bambino. Its predecessor never made sense: why would the Babe have been anything but thrilled to be sent from Boston to the greatest sports stage of the era? Overshadowing Ruth’s monument with the huge tribute plaque to George Steinbrenner? Well, that just might be cause for vengeance. So here is the new curse: the Yankees will never win another World Series until the plaque is moved to a more appropriate site.

-- Charles E. Knapp, Scarsdale, N.Y., “At a Loss in the Bronx”

Magic, Maier, gone.

“But [Pauline] Kael had stumbled upon something that could be very disconcerting to the best film critic in the world, just as it appalled the man [Orson Welles] who was increasingly the idol of young directors: that the movies were not and never would be good enough, deep enough, to hold his interest. He had gone deep—no one yet had gone deeper. But it was not enough, not compared with literature, music, painting or just watching life go by. The movies, in other words,  are the art of a culture prepared to settle for the shallow. The artistic status of the filmmaker was not actually substantiated by the work. Citizen Kane was the first move to reveal that—and Welles, for a long time, was the lone man who noticed it.”

--David Thomson, “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles,” pg. 398

Discuss.

“You're a Christian, right, Chad?

”Yeah.“

”You believe in Jesus?“

”Yeah.“

”Have you ever seen him?“

”No, I've never seen him.“

”Ever seen yourself get hitters out?“

”Yeah.“

”So why the fuck do you have faith in Jesus when you never seen him, but you don't have faith in your ability to get hitters out when you get hitters out all the time?“

--2002 Oakland A's pitching coach Rick Peterson to 2002 Oakland A's reliever Chad Bradford in Michael Lewis's ”Moneyball," pg. 253.

“Your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of someone else's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition; they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

--Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005. Via Jim Walsh.

“[Bill] James's first proper essay was the preview to an astonishing literary career. There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurements of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- and under-valued, who couldn't? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn't play baseball for a living.”

--Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, pg. 72. The movie, starring Brad Pitt, and which has been getting astonishingly good reviews (“Has to be described as an example of what Hollywood does best” - Andrew O'Hehir; “...in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life” - Dana Stevens), opens tomorrow.

“When the axe came into the woods, the trees whispered, 'The handle is one of us.'”

--a Turkish proverb quoted in Arlene Kim's book of poetry, “What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes?”

Arlene Kim reading from her book of poetry, “What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes?” at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle; September 2011

“Though I have some respect for 'The Virtue of Selfishness,' her collection of essays ... I don't think there's a need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings. I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.”

--Christopher Hitchens on Ayn Rand, from the Q&A portion of his lecture, “The Moral Necessity of Atheism,” given on February 23, 2004 at Sewanee University

“8.46 pm. So far, we have repealed universal health insurance, Dodd-Frank, much of the Pentagon, the Department of Education, and are so-so on Medicare and social security. What should government actually do to help the economy? Cut and reform taxes. Unless Obama proposes to cut taxes. Then that's more spending. ... God, this is depressing.”

--Andrew Sullivan, a half-hour into live-blogging the Republican/Tea-Party Debates, over at The Dish

“I do think there is a tendency to underestimate audiences, I do think there is an appetite to be stretched. I do think people want to hear language at its best on the screen. I'm optimistic about it having an enormous audience.”

--Colin Firth on “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” specifically, and the film industry in general, at the Venice Film Festival.

I go back and forth on this issue, bitching about audiences one minute, insisting that audiences are smarter than we realize the next. I think studios pay too much attention to market research and test screenings, and don't promote and distribute better movies the way they should, and that, if they did, these movies would make money. At the same time, there are a lot of Big Jim McBobs and Billy Sol Hureks out there.

“As the writing team came back from Victorville, and as Houseman returned to New York, Welles took over the task of making the script into a picture. From mid-April to mid-July, the script came down to 172 pages [from 268]. Many episodes were abandoned—for example, Kane's honeymoon with his first wife, Emily; a later meeting between Kane and his father, when the older man is remarried to a 'young tart'; Kane's son's involvement in a fascist movement; a good deal of political byplay with an oil scandal; scenes in Rome, when Thatcher goes to visit Kane; an affair Susan Kane has with a younger man at Xanadu. These deletions made Kane simpler to follow—and we should realize that nothing hurt it more on first release than its difficulty. In addition, Welles strengthened the line of dramatic consequence—the way Kane's career hinges upon the exposure of the love nest during the electoral battle with Jim Gettys, and the way Susan's nightmare career breaks the bond between Kane and Leland.”

--from “Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles,” by David Thomson; pg. 147

“I can’t help wondering if 'Believing Is Seeing' is the first installment in a three-volume attempt to make sense of the relationship between the documentarian, the documented and the truth. I hope so. For Morris, the truth is (as they say) out there; the question is how to pick our way in its direction. There is no mechanical means of doing so, he argues; the camera is never wholly obscura or lucida. Perhaps this is why Morris’s book feels so human. It combines the hubris of his ends — the desire, shared by approximately all of us, to lay claim to the truth — with the humility of his means.”

--Kathryn Schulz in “Limited Vision,” her review of Errol Morris' new book “Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography,” in last Sunday's New York Times

At an outdoor dinner party last night, overlooking Puget Sound, the subject got around to freedom vs. safety, and I mentioned how most people would give up the former for an imagined version of the latter (not a very original thought), and that our reaction to 9/11 was indicative of this (another not very original thought). One of the other guests disagreed. We went back and forth in a genial enough manner. He felt we hadn't given up any freedoms post-9/11. Then he talked about how 9/11 was foreseeable to anyone who was paying attention. We had the following exchange:

He: Anyone who didn't see 9/11 coming was an idiot.
Me: Or in the Bush administration.
He: Don't go there.

At this point I was warned away from the conversation by the hostess. I later found out that the guy I'd been talking to was, like the hostess, a Republican and a Bush supporter. If only I'd known. I would've totally gone there.

“In so many respects, the Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing sixty-two countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world. There was an ex-hippie stockbroker, the gay Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadoran sous chef, a Barbie doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant. ... The manifold ways in which they attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction that the taking of a single life destroys a universe. Al-Qaeda had aimed its attacks at America, but it struck all of humanity.”

--from pg. 415 of Lawrence Wright's “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaed and the Road to 9/11”

“Your mother has asked me to adopt you. Do you know about that? I've thought about it and I've decided that it's not a good idea. I came here to tell you that.

I didn't know your dad but I think he was a great guy. He gave you a load of things: your name, your face...

So you already have a father. Okay, he's dead. That's sad. But it was before you were born and it's not easy to mourn a stranger.

There's a German poem about a boy whose mother is dead. [Speaks German] That means,”Your mother's soul lashes out at the sharks before you.“ That poem always reminds me of you because I think your dad's soul protects you from sharks.

So it wouldn't be a good idea for me to pretend to be your father now. Your mother used to say you and I should be friends. But a grown-up and a child shouldn't be friends. I know that when I was little, I didn't like those grown-ups who'd try to charm me or try to establish complicity with me. ...

I carry you in my heart now. Even if you turn into a total bastard or I don't see you for 1279 years, I have to think about you because I enjoy doing it. As a child, you don't have to think about grown-ups or about me. Unless you need to. ...

You see, the past isn't what's vanished. No, it's what belongs to us. What belongs to us now are the memories we both have. It's weird, isn't it? Because there's no name for what we share. ...

And I'd like you to see that doctor you got on well with. A child shouldn't talk only to his mother. A mother is great to look after you, to love you, for you to love, etc. But she's not enough to make you grow up. You need an extra adult to help you to grow so you're not shut up in the love between parents... and children. Maybe that scares Nora and not you. Nora probably thinks, ”My God, am I a good mother for Elias? Let's see the doctor.“ And you think, ”Nora's the one who needs the doctor, not me!“

That's smart. You can separate what she wants from what you want. In a way, you're right but... This is the only advice I have for now: Of course, we're always right. But it's always possible that we could be a bit wrong too. Being a bit wrong is very good news! It means you don't have the whole answer. That life will be more exciting and full of surprises than you thought.”

--Ismaël (Mathieu Amalric) talking to Elias (Valentin Lelong) in the great epilogue to Arnaud Desplechin's “Rois et reine” (“Kings and Queen”) (2004).

I've had some good conversations today, long ones, too, but this short, awful conversation stands out. I was leaving Metropolitan Market on Mercer with some red peppers for Patricia, who's recovering nicely from arthroscopic surgery, thank you, when a clean-cut, 20-ish dude, a young man really, waved his hands at me to get my attention. I looked down at his table, on which there was a poster of Pres. Obama with a Hitler moustache and the words “Dump Obama.” He smiled at me. I shook my head at him and kept going. He called after me.

He: Are you ready to end the madness?
Me: Yours?

And kept going.

“Toscanini once recorded a piece 65 times. You know what he said? 'It could be better.'”

--the father (Brad Pitt) in Terrence Malick's “The Tree of Life,” no doubt channeling Malick, a perfectionist, for whom 65 attempts is a dry run.

Larry Bowa: And the thing is, he did it the right way--without steroids.
Mitch Williams: He did it with hay. Oats and hay.

--MLB Network announcers, and former Major Leaguers, reacting to the news of Jim Thome's 600th career homerun.

My reaction? Thome is the 8th player in baseball history to do this. Derek Jeter was the 28th player in baseball history to reach 3,000 hits. Which got more press?

I wrote the following for an essay but it turned out to be the little darling that had to be cut. I offer it here instead:

My parents were married in 1960 and didn’t last much longer than their 13th wedding anniversary, for which, I remember, my older brother, younger sister and I made them a cake. It was single-layer and heart-shaped. You baked a cake in both a square and a round pan, set the square cake like a diamond, cut the round cake in half and then placed either end on the flat, upper-sides of the diamond. Voila: a heart. I liked how easy it was to make a heart: just take two familiar shapes and make that third, more complicated shape. It turned out that marriage—in which two familiar shapes make a third, more complicated shape—wasn’t so easy.

“I’ve never understood exactly why we [we have a debt ceiling], or why anyone can think it’s ‘fiscally responsible’ to vote against raising the debt ceiling when we’ve already incurred the responsibilities. It’s like not paying your bills. It’s silly to go through the posturing that you’re saving money by not voting to increase the national debt.”

--Rep. Tom Foley on raising the debt ceiling, in The New Yorker: April 1979

“As inconsequential and virtually indistinguishable sub-Judd Apatow white-boy comedies fueled by prison-rape gags and pants-pissing anxiety around black people go, ”Horrible Bosses“ is pretty solid entertainment.”

--Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com.

His full review here. My review here. We have pretty much the same take on the movie - right down to its inconsequentiality. “The bosses are ... three caricatures rather than three human beings,” I write. “Farrell and Aniston's horrible bosses never remotely resemble real people,” O'Hehir writes. Add it up and it's 70% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Hey Little Hypocrite
What you gonna say
When you wind up standin' naked
On the final Judgement Day
How you gonna justify it
Who you gonna call
What if it turns out that
God don't look like you at all

--“Little Emperor” by Steve Earle, from the album “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive”

“When you say MEDIUM, we hear LARGE.”

--Sign outside the Southdale Theater, an AMC chain, promoting AMC's “Stubs” program, which involves tracking your movie purchases (seemingly for you, really for them), rewards for every $100 spent (encouraging you to spend that), and free upgrades on popcorn and “fountain drinks” (i.e., the cheap stuff). Bad name, bad campaign, bad slogan. Seriously, when I say 'medium,' I'd rather you heard 'medium.'

THE BELIEVER: Rumor has it that you turned down the chance to direct Disney’s remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner because you felt they weren’t interested in really exploring racism.

HAROLD RAMIS: The way they wanted to do it didn’t have a lot to do with the colossal amount of pain and violence that swirls around racial injustice. It would’ve been like an episode of The Jeffersons. What’s the point? But who knows, maybe that’s as much as most people want. I can’t tell you how many people have told me, “When I go to the movies, I don’t want to think.”

THE BELIEVER: Does that offend you as a filmmaker?

HAROLD RAMIS: It offends me as a human being. Why wouldn’t you want to think? What does that mean? Why not just shoot yourself in the fucking head?

--Conversation between actor-writer-director-surgeon Harold Ramis and Eric Spitznagel, from the March 2006 issue of The Believer

“But the vote [on same-sex marriage before the New York legislature, which passed last night 33-29] and the lead-up to it showed us something else, too, something we ought to see often, but don’t: the spectacle of politicians changing their minds. That, in fact, has been one of the singular benefits of the same-sex marriage debate overall. On most issues, partisanship and the fear of being labelled a waffler effectively discourage politicians from publicly wrestling with conscience and contradiction. But same-sex marriage has been different. Public opinion on this issue has shifted fast in the direction of approval and party affiliation has turned out to matter somewhat less than other factors: generation, whether somebody has gay friends or relatives, gut feelings. President Obama can say that his views on whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry are 'evolving'—and in this context, as in few others, 'evolving' doesn’t by itself carry a political cost.”

--Margaret Talbot, in her post, “On Gay Marriage, It's OK to Waffle,” on the New Yorker website

“In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And [Michele] Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.”

--Matt Taibbi, “Michele Bachmann's Holy War,” in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine

“In [Ayman al-]Zawahiri's hands, al-Jihad had splintered into angry and homeless gangs. ... His disillusioned followers often reflected on the pronouncement, made during the prison years by the man Zawahiri betrayed, Major Essam al-Qamari, that some vital quality was missing in Zawahiri. Qamari was the one who had told him, 'If you are the member of any group, you cannot be the leader.' that now sounded like a prophecy.”

—from page 246 of Lawrence Wright's much-recommended book, “The Looming Tower,” on one of the low points for Ayman al-Zawahri, the former leader of al-Jihad, and current leader of al-Qaeda. The Christian Science Monitor agrees about his lack of charisma.

This Wright paragraph, by the way, follows a horrific story of Egyptian intelligence drugging and sodomizing the thirteen-year-old son of a senior member of al-Jihad, then blackmailing him to spy on his father, then recruiting another boy, a friend, for the same purpose. When the two boys were discovered, Zawahiri convened a Sharia court, forced the boys to strip to determine if they had attained puberty, and, since they had, and so were officially men, had them convicted of sodomy, treason and attempted murder. “Zawahiri had the boys shot,” Wright writes. “To make sure he got his point across, he videotaped their confessions and their executions, and distributed the tapes as an example to others who might betray the organization.”

“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn't black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing.

”You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don't care what you think. I'm trying to do the right thing.

“I'm tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I'm trying to do the right thing, and that's where I'm going with this.”

--State Sen. Roy McDonald (R-Saratoga), in The New York Daily News, on why he'll vote to legalize gay marriage in New York.

Ross: Face it, every Derek Jeter hit from now until the end of his career will be a major production.
Me: I think it'll die down after 3,000. Besides, even NY can only get so excited about singles...
Ross: They're not just singles, they're LEADERSHIP.

--Back and forth between me and fellow editor Ross Pfund after I posted a link to Roger Angell's New Yorker article on Jeter and 3,000 hits. (Read all the way through for a great quote from Lou Brock...)

“I don't believe you can trust a man who doesn't have a little twinkle in his eye.”

--Wendy Burden, author of “Dead End Gene Pool,” and long-time friend of Patricia's, Tuesday night during dinner at Meriwether's in Portland, Or.

“This spring, Obama officials often expressed impatience with questions about theory or about the elusive quest for an Obama doctrine. One senior Administration official reminded me what the former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said when asked what was likely to set the course of his government: 'Events, dear boy, events.'”

-- from “The Consequentialist: How the Arab Spring remade Obama's foreign policy” by Ryan Lizza in the May 2, 2011 New Yorker. Amusingly, Lizza's last graf begins thus: “Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine.” Oh, Ryan. Read the whole thing here.

“I was at a family function over the weekend and spent much of it talking baseball with my wife's uncle, a huge Yankees fan. The short version of his analysis: He's not too concerned about the state of the team because he's convinced the Yankees will make a few trades.

”You know ... like for Felix Hernandez. Everybody in New York still thinks the Yankees can just trade for Felix because ... well, I guess because they're the Yankees. Now, let's repeat something we've said several times:

“The Mariners aren't going to trade Felix Hernandez.

”Repeat: The Mariners aren't going to trade Felix Hernandez.

“Now, my wife's uncle says that's OK, because the Yankees will just acquire Mark Buehrle instead. Now, maybe the White Sox will eventually fall far enough out of the race that trading Buehrle will make sense. But it doesn't now.”

-- David Schoenfield, “Sweet Spot” column, ESPN.com

“One thing that stood out about Harmon [Killebrew] was that he always had his hand out to shake your hand when you were a young man. I know, when I came up as a rookie, he had a conversation with me. ...

“He, Richie Allen and Frank Howard hit the high balls that just kept going. It looked like it would be a pop-up. You’d come in for it. Then you’d have to look in the upper deck for it.”

--former Detroit Tigers' slugger Willie Horton on Minnesota Twins slugger Harmon Killebrew, who died of cancer this week.

“The Mariners are doing it with Smoak and mirrors.”

—my friend Jim McCloskey sitting with me at the M's game last night, which the M's won 5-2 over the Minnesota Twins. It's Jim's contention that the Mariners only have two Major Leaguers in their everyday lineup—Ichiro Suzuki and Justin Smoak—and yet we got to see another victory. Ringing doubles, solo homeruns. Back-to-back homeruns by Adam Kennedy and recent call-up Carlos Peguero. When was the last time I saw the M's do that at Safeco? 2003? Another great pitching performance by Michael Pineda, who's a top tier rookie-of-the-year candidate. In the 9th we saw some shoddy defense and overmanagement by Eric Wedge as he needlessly went to his bullpen to relieve a reliver. But still a victory.

Smoak now has the 8th-best OPS in the American League: .933. The next-best Mariner is 58th, Ichiro, with .700. Among the bottom seven in the league you'll find three Mariners: Miguel Olivo at .535, Brendan Ryan at .525, and dead last, Michael Saunders at .483. Smoak and mirrors, indeed. 

Oddly, I'm 3-0 at Safeco this year. The law of averages salivates at the thought of my return.

“I was just learning the basic language of baseball statistics in 1975, and so took in Harmon Killebrew’s long litany of 40-homer, 100-plus RBI years with the pure and enthusiastic fascination of the true beginner. I have an attraction to anonymous players, to failure and ignominy, to the fallen and the wilkerized, but I am as drawn to the players whose feats stand in bold opposition to the general entropy of the universe as any other baseball fan. I am sure that I found this card soothing. There is greatness in the world. There are things that won’t be forgotten. ...

”Harmon Killebrew had basically been playing baseball forever. The first few years, which occurred long before I’d even been born, were spent on a team, the Senators, that no longer even existed. They were, like the wooly mammoth and tyrannosaurus rex, long extinct. And yet, here was one of them, an Original Senator, alive and well and still grayly slugging home runs. I was drawn to this not only for its mysteriousness but also for the odd feeling of comfort it gave me. I sensed at times that I was an infinitesimally small speck, inconsequential and frail in an unfathomably large expanse not only of space but of time. The universe went on forever and time stretched forward and backward forever and I was an almost-nothing within it. But Harmon Killebrew was something, and I could hold onto Harmon Killebrew.“

--Josh Wilker, ”Cardboard Gods," on that 1975 Topps Harmon Killebrew card. All the more poignant after today's news.

''He always speaks with huge enthusiasm about the actors he's worked with and the performances he's seen. He's recently discovered the talents of Bette Davis. He said to me the other day — and this is where his youth can be alarming — he said, 'Have you ever seen a movie called ''All About Eve''?' I said, 'Yes, I have heard of it.'“

--Sir Ian McKellen on director Bryan Singer in ”An Unusual Choice for the Role of Studio Superhero," by Bernard Weinraub: The New York Times, July 9, 2000

“The city for the first time in its long history is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.”

E.B. White, Here is New York, 1949

Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, surveying the books about Osama bin Laden:

As for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, most of these books agree that it was a terrible misstep that played into Bin Laden’s hands, fueling Qaeda recruitment efforts and diverting critical military and intelligence resources away from Afghanistan, which in turn led to the resurgence there of the Taliban. Peter L. Bergen’s new book, “The Longest War,” provides a devastating indictment of the Bush administration on many levels, from its failure to heed warnings about a terrorist threat, to its determination to conduct the war in Afghanistan on the cheap, to its costly, unnecessary and inept occupation of Iraq.

Both “The Longest War” and Lawrence Wright’s “Looming Tower” give readers a visceral sense of what day-to-day life was like in Qaeda training camps. Mr. Wright, noting that Bin Laden was not opposed to the United States because of its culture or ideas but because of its political and military actions in the Islamic world, observes that Qaeda trainees often watched Hollywood thrillers at night ( Arnold Schwarzenegger movies were particular favorites) in an effort to gather tactical tips.

“I wish the royal couple the very best. They seem like nice people, truly. Fellow human beings, at the very least. And that's why I hope that when in the unlikely event that they ever read this, that they won't take it personally when I say that the coverage of this whole ceremony and its run-up was revoltingly obsequious and almost entirely devoid of news value, and so altogether bubble-brained that it makes me think that if there is such a thing as karmic payback for wrong priorities, we're due for some major trauma.”

--Matthew Zoller Seitz, “The mind-numbing stupidity of the Royal Wedding,” Salon.com

That's a great paragraph but overall Seitz's analysis doesn't parse the blame properly. He blames us all equally but I wouldn't. I would mostly blame women.

Most of the men I know don't care one wit for this thing. It's noise to them. Women I assumed have better priorities, meanwhile, actually asked me to DVR it for them. They need to watch it. Why?

Here's an answer. It's from the book “Which Lie Did I Tell?” by screenwriter William Goldman, who also write the novel, and the screenplay for, “The Princess Bride”:

I loved telling stories to my daughters. When they were small, I would go into their room and stories would just be there ... I was on my way to Magic Town around 1970, and I said to them both, to Jenny, then seven, and Susanna, then four, “I'll write you a story, what do you most want it to be about?” And one of them said “princesses” and the other one said “brides.”

“Then that will be the title,” i told them. And so it has remained.

Seven and four. This stuff is as ingrained in girls as Superman is ingrained in boys. “Princesses” and “brides” are female wish fulfillment, and so the royal wedding brings out the girl in all of them as much as “Superman: The Movie” brings out the boy in me.

But I'm a boy. I get Superman. The wish is to be strong, good, and help people. It's to be able to fly.

What's the wish being fulfilled with a royal wedding? To get attention without earning it? To be greater than others by virtue of station?

Ladies? Ladies?

“I'll write you a story, what do you most want it to be about?” And one of them said “princesses” and the other one said “brides.”

“Then I went to the Uptown Theater to see 'I Am,' a documentary in which filmmaker Tom Shadyac asks 'What’s wrong with the world and what can we do about it?' Oprah has an entire television network dedicated to same, though I don’t have the stomach for her shark-swim in the shallow end. The same could be said of 'I Am' and several have, but in a culture war where three new poems by Mary Oliver (Parabola, exactly) gets no play and Donald Trump can flick a booger and be “part of the conversation” if not the next president of the United States, I’ll go down casting my vote for a mainstream film that quotes the mystical Sufi poet Rumi (love is the answer, always) and the calm spiritual minds of Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomksy, Howard Zinn, and dozens of others interviewed by Shadyac.

--Jim Walsh, ”Fear and Loving in South Minneapolis," an article which can be read in the print version of Southwest Journal, if you're in South Minneapolis, but will only be available online for the rest of us, you know, eventually. I'll keep you posted. Or you keep me posted. In the meantime, here's Jim's archive for the paper. He's always worth reading. He always reminds me what's valuable.

Jim Walsh, the man who puts the sexy in Sexy South Minneapolis

“Maybe Misrata wasn’t worth dying for—surely that thought must have crossed your mind in those last moments—but what about all the Misratas of the world? What about Liberia and Darfur and Sri Lanka and all those terrible, ugly stories that you brought such humanity to? That you helped bring the world’s attention to?

”After the war in Liberia you rented a house in the capital and lived there for years. Years. Who does that? No one I know except you, my dear friend. That’s part of Misrata, too. That’s also part of what you died for: the decision to live a life that was thrown open to all the beauty and misery and ugliness and joy in the world. Before this last trip you told me that you wanted to make a film about the relationship between young men and violence. You had this idea that young men in combat act in ways that emulate images they’ve seen—movies, photographs—of other men in other wars, other battles. You had this idea of a feedback loop between the world of images and the world of men that continually reinforced and altered itself as one war inevitably replaced another in the long tragic grind of human affairs.

“That was a fine idea, Tim—one of your very best. It was an idea that our world very much needs to understand. I don’t know if it was worth dying for—what is?—but it was certainly an idea worth devoting one’s life to. Which is what you did. What a vision you had, my friend. What a goddamned terrible, beautiful vision of things.”

--Sebastian Junger: “Sebastian Junger Remembers Tim Hetherington,” Vanity Fair.

Read the whole thing. Please.

“Mitt Romney Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help Uninsured Sick People”

--Onion headline, which is a truer statement of how effed-up the modern Republican party is than any headline in any legitimate newspaper.

The whole mock article is worth reading. A sample: “I don't think I can vote for someone like that,” Pennsylvania Republican Eric Tolbert said. “He says he's sorry, but how do I know that's the real Mitt Romney? What happens if he gets elected and tries to help sick people again?”

Happy Good Friday.

“I think it’s safe for me to say that what Tim was trying to do by going to war was to look into the souls of men, whose truths are perhaps more exposed in that environment than in any other—and to show the rest of us what he saw. He gave us a legacy in the important work he left behind, and, for those of us who had the honor to know Tim as a friend, a cherished memory of a man whose own soul was very intact.”

--Jon Lee Anderson in his post, “Remembering Tim Hetherington,” about the co-director of “Restrepo,” on The New Yorker site. The site has also posted a slideshow of Hetherington's photography.

“And to make sure no one steals them en route, I'll put 'ATTENTION: MARINERS TICKETS!' prominently on the envelope.”

--Our season-ticket coordinator Stephen Manes sending out tickets to the hapless Seattle Mariners, who already look like the worst team in baseball ...

“Memo to President Obama: How about appointing [labor lawyer Thomas] Geoghegan (whom you surely know, or know of, from his quiet heroics on behalf of working folk in Chicago) to the federal bench, preferably the Supreme Court? He’s eminently qualified. He writes prose that can be read for pleasure. He thinks clearly and creatively. He even ran for dogcatcher once. Admittedly, he’s not one of your chronically cautious “centrists,” but isn’t it about time the Court had a serious (and funny) counterweight to the charmless right-wing dittoheads who now dominate it and who are so politically and morally insensible that they cannot distinguish between a Fortune 500 corporation and a human being?”

--Hendrik Hertzberg in “Mr. Justice Geoghegan, Dissenting,” on The New Yorker Web site.

I'm not smart enough to say who does or doesn't belong on the USSC, but I interviewed Mr. Geoghegan for Illinois Super Lawyers a few years back—about running for U.S. Congress, about why the left seems so beaten down in this country, about why productivity goes up and real wages don't—and he's impressive. Put it this way: I'd certainly like to hear his voice, his point of view, more often in national discussions than, as Hertzberg says above, the usual charmless dittoheads. I asked him, for example, what stayed with him about his campaign for Rahm Emanuel's seat and he said: “I met a lot of elderly people living alone who don’t have enough to live on.” Please send that sentence to Paul Ryan and John Boehner, symptomatic of the unsympathetic right.

“With this budget deal, America's brief flirtation with milquetoast progressivism comes to an end.”

--Mark Siegel, the 19th floor, via Facebook. A short post on the subject is here.

“Whom do you want to believe? What vague and indeterminate misinformation do you want to poison your heart like the waves and specks of deadly low-level radiation currently not heading out way over 6,000 miles of ocean in the form of mist and seagulls and furious dolphins, soiled Toyota Corollas and shrill Fox News idiocy that makes you embarrassed to be alive in the modern world?”

Mike Schmidt was standing behind a batting cage, still as trim as during his playing days. A handsome, middle-aged man with swept-back, silvery hair and a thick mustache. I asked him what he thought of the four Phillies pitchers

“Well,” he said, “now when the Phillies come to town, the other team knows they’re being challenged by four No. 1 pitchers. They have to amp up their mental game. I used to see my at-bats the night before a game when I laid my head down on the pillow. Gibson, Seaver, Ryan. I had to have a plan. When I went to Houston, they had three good pitchers. The fourth was Nolan Ryan. I could go to sleep with the other three, but Ryan kept me awake. Ryan! Ryan! Ryan! My plan was, don’t miss his fastball if he threw it over the plate. If he got two strikes on me, I’d have to face his curveball.” He turned and looked at me with his small blue eyes, which had fear in them. “Ryan was scary!” he said. He shook his head, as if seeing Ryan on the mound. Ryan began his motion and fired the ball at his head. Schmidt had a split second to make a decision. Was it a 100 m.p.h. fastball that could kill him if it hit him in the head, or was it that wicked curveball? If he dove away from the plate and the pitch was a curveball that broke over the plate, he’d look like a fool and a coward. But if it wasn’t a curveball, if it was that 100 m.p.h. fastball, and he didn’t dive away from the plate . . . well, he didn’t even want to think about that.

“Ryan, Gibson, Seaver, they made you defensive,” he said. “Does that make sense? You were afraid of the ball. There’s no fear of the ball today with cutters, splitters and changeups.”

“What about the Phillies’ four pitchers?” I said.

“They’re not scary,” he said. “Even if they all win 20 games, the Phillies don’t have a pitcher who strikes fear in a hitter.”

----from “The Phillies Four Aces” by Pat Jordan in yesterday's New York Times Magazine

I asked [Cliff Lee] which batters gave him the most trouble. Punchy hitters, he said, who foul off a lot of pitches, then slap the ball the other way. “Like Ichiro,” he said. “Sometimes you just want to let him hit his ground ball and hope someone catches it. He’s gonna get his hits. The quicker he does, the better for me. The more pitches a batter sees, the better hitters they become.”

--from “The Phillies Four Aces” by Pat Jordan in today's New York Times Magazine

Ichiro, who set the Mariners club record for hits, with 2248,
surpassing Edgar Martinez, Saturday night.

“If it had been my call, I wouldn't have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust him, and I still do.

”For now, anyway. But I wouldn't have intervened in Libya and he did. I sure hope his judgment really does turn out to have been better than mine.“

—Kevin Drum, ”Obama, Libya and Me," in Mother Jones

“For airmen [in the Pacific Theater in WWII], the risks were impossible to shrug off. The dead weren't numbers on a page. They were their roommates, their drinking buddies, the crew that had been flying off their wing ten seconds ago. Men didn't go one by one. A quarter of the barracks were lost at once. There were rarely funerals, for there were rarely bodies. Men were just gone, and that was the end of it. ...

”In the early days of 1943, as men died one after another, every man dealt with the losses in a different way. Somewhere along the way, a ritual sprang up. If a man didn't return, the others would open his foot-locker, take out his liquor, and have a drink in his honor. In a war without funerals, it was the best they could do.“

—pp. 89-90 of ”Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption" by Laura Hillenbrand

“We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. Every serious candidate should have a proven track record of conceiving, reporting and writing stellar investigative pieces that provoke change. However, our ideal candidate has also cursed out an editor, had spokespeople hang up on them in anger and threatened to resign at least once because some fool wanted to screw around with their perfect lede.

”We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: “I can’t believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20th Pulitzer.” As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.

“For those unaware of Florida’s reputation, it’s arguably the best news state in the country and not just because of the great public records laws. We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal clusterfucks. Our new governor once ran a health care company that got hit with a record fine because of rampant Medicare fraud. We have hurricanes, wildfires, tar balls, bedbugs, diseased citrus trees and an entire town overrun by giant roaches (only one of those things is made up). And we have Disney World and beaches, so bring the whole family.

”Send questions, or a resume/cover letter/links to clips to my email address below. If you already have your dream job, please pass this along to someone whose skills you covet. Thanks."

Matthew Doig
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
1741 Main St.
Sarasota FL, 34236
(941) 361-4903

“We will have high-definition, wide-screen television sets and a push-button dialing system to order the movie you want at the time you want it. You'll not go to a video store but instead order a movie on demand and then pay for it. Videocassette tapes as we know them now will be obsolete both for showing prerecorded movies and for recording movies. People will record films on 8mm and will play them back using laser-disk/CD technology. I also am very, very excited by the fact that before long, alternative films will penetrate the entire country. Today seventy-five percent of the gross from a typical art film in America comes from as few as six --six-- different theaters in six different cities. Ninety percent of the American motion-picture marketplace never shows art films. With this revolution in delivery and distribution, anyone, in any size town or hamlet, will see the movies he or she wants to see.”

--Roger Ebert, in Omni magazine, in 1987, as dug up by Paleofuture (a pretty remarkable-looking site)

Roger Ebert defending his position on Eddie Murphy's “Raw” in 1987. During this same period, he was also playing Nostradamus in the pages of Omni magazine.

“At any rate, I didn't ask to be an individual, but I find I am one, and by definition I occupy a space that no other individual occupies, or in other words, for what it's worth, I have my own point of view. I'm not proud to be me, I'm not excited to be me, but I find that I am me, and like most other individuals, I send out little signals, I tell everyone else how everything looks from where I am. I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write.”

--Wallace Shawn, in the introduction to his book, “Essays”

“Well, now there are two Minnesotans in the 2012 race, despite the fact that the Constitution strictly states that no Minnesotan will ever reach office higher than vice president. Michele Bachmann, three-term congresswoman with no accomplishments beyond an ability to enrage Chris Matthews, will form an exploratory committee, according to CNN.”

--Alex Pareene, “Michele Bachmann is running for president now, sigh,” on Salon.com

Given that Barry Bonds passed you on the career home run list while under suspicion that he used performance enhancers, do you feel in your heart that you’re the real home run king?
I will answer that as best I can. I feel like I hit 755 home runs and somebody else broke my record. Whatever people want to say about that is fine, but I don’t think about it too much. ...

Who was the toughest pitcher you faced in your career?
There were a lot of them, but I’d have to say Curt Simmons. He was a lefty who came up with Philadelphia Phillies and he threw really, really hard.

--Part of “30 Seconds with Hank Aaron” by Vincent Mallozzi in The New York Times

“A Quinnipiac University poll that the Times’ City Room blog featured last week asked voters which of two statements about the expansion of bicycle lanes more closely resembles their point of view:

”Anti-bikism never rises above fifty per cent in any age, ethnic, political, or geographic category of New Yorkers—except one. That’s right. Republicans. By 59 to 35 per cent, they say that bike lanes are a bad thing.

“I’m sure there are many decent, sensible individual Republicans. But as a category, Republican appears to have absolutely no positive qualities whatsoever. Am I wrong about that? If so, could someone please tell me what I am overlooking?”

--Hendrik Hertzberg, “Poll Confirms New Yorkers' Bikeophilia,” on The New Yorker site.

“When I think of the elegant construction of something like 'Gunfight at the OK Corral,' I want to rend the hair from my head and weep bitter tears of despair. Generations of filmmakers devoted their lives to perfecting techniques that a director like Jonathan Liebesman is either ignorant of or indifferent to. Yet he is given millions of dollars to produce this assault on the attention span of a generation.”

—Roger Ebert, in his beautiful, scathing review of “Battle: Los Angeles.”

Follow-up: “BLA” (great acronym) isn't the worst movie Andrew O'Hehir has seen this year but it's the fourth-worst. (Be sure to read the fourth paragraph of his review.)

“Sean Penn is the guy most commonly associated with Fast Times at Ridgemont High these days, and even though his role is relegated to the B-plot, I can see why his character has endured. He’s great. If I didn’t know anything about the rest of his career, I would have assumed he was a talentless stoner they brought in off the beach and paid in Hawaiian shirts and Fritos. He’s so perfectly oblivious it looks like he showed up on set by accident. It’s a pretty impressive turn to be so broad and also so believable, especially in a movie that tends to be more earnest and deliberate in the rest of its scenes. He’s got the lion’s share of the written jokes, too, but some of the funniest stuff in the film comes from his reactions, obviously an organic byproduct of his total dedication to the role.”

—Alden Ford, “Watching 'Fast Times at Ridgement High' For the First Time”

The rest of the article doesn't do much for me, since, unlike Alden, high school kind of wrecked me. It wasn't a shrug, as it was for him.

But the above is a great encapsulation of Penn as Spicoli. As someone who's had to encapsulate that performance, too, I'm particularly jealous of the “so broad and so believable” riff. That's spot-on.

“Who would want to break into it? It’s like a bank that’s already been robbed.”

—Randy Newman, backstage at the Oscars, after a college reporter asked him about breaking into the music business. (As recounted in Michael Cieply and Brookes Barnes' article, “Younger Audience Still Eludes the Oscars,” in The New York Times.)

“Any critic who is any good is going to write out of a profound inner struggle between what has been and what must be, the values he is used to and those which presently exist, between the past and the present out of which the future must be born. This struggle with oneself as well as with the age, out of which something must be written and which therefore can be read—this is my test for a critic.”

—Alfred Kazin, 1960

“[George] Washington was a very good President, and an unhappy one. Distraught by growing factionalism within and outside his Administration, especially by the squabbling of Hamilton and Jefferson and the rise of a Jeffersonian opposition, he served another term only reluctantly. His second Inaugural Address was just a hundred and thirty-five words long; he said, more or less, Please, I’m doing my best. In 1796, in his enduringly eloquent Farewell Address (written by Madison and Hamilton), he cautioned the American people about party rancor: 'The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.' And then he went back to Mount Vernon. He freed his slaves in his will, possibly hoping that this, too, would set a precedent. It did not.”

--Jill Lepore in her article, “His Highness: George Washington scales new heights” in The New Yorker. Much recommended.

“My gosh, what a character [1960s-1970s Minnesota Twins' color announcer] Halsey Hall was. You never wanted to get too close when Halsey talked to you because you could smell the onions on his breath. During my first year in the big leagues, Halsey told me, 'You're going to make the Hall of Fame one day.' I said, 'Oh, do you think so?' He said, 'Yes, you just keep pitching like you are, young man.'”

—Bert Blyleven, who was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame today with nearly 80 percent of the vote, in Bob Showers' oral and pictoral history, “The Twins at the Met”

• Here's the ESPN story on the voting. (My man Edgar got only 32.9 percent of the vote (75 percent is needed).)
• For those on Facebook, the current Twins scoreboard with Circle-Me-Bert circled.
• Rob Neyer comments.

“I encountered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled me so much as this American addiction to make-believe. Apparently, not even empty bellies can cure it. Of all the facts I dug up, none seemed so significant or so dangerous as the overwhelming fact of our lazy, irresponsible, adolescent inability to face the truth or tell it.”

—James Rorty, “Where Life is Better” (1936)

“There is no reason to believe [Cliff] Lee will forgo free agency, and when he hits the market, other teams might as well back off. Every factor points to Lee’s joining the Yankees.”

—Tyler Kepner, “Waiting for Lee, Maybe Until Winter,” New York Times, June 29, 2010

“Lee was their guy, and the Yankees believed he had the stuff, the makeup and the experience to succeed in pinstripes. But, really, Lee was never their guy. He wanted to go back to the Phillies all along, and has taken far less money to do so.”

—Tyler Kepner and Michael S. Schmidt, “Cliff Lee Accepts Late Bid by Phillies,” New York Times, December 14, 2010.

Mea culpa? Nowhere. Not even on Twitter, where, on Dec. 10, he wrote, “Still think Lee will go for highest offer, which is Yanks' 7 yrs/$161M. But sense I get from people involved is he feels pull toward Texas.”

“He mentioned another company that was making very low-budget movies, which were not terribly good, and which were doing very well at the box office. And his feeling was, ‘How would it be if somebody good did one of these low-budget movies?’”

—Screenwriter Joe Stefano on Alfred Hitchcock's pre-production thoughts for “Psycho”

“Privatization does not mean you take a public institution and give it to some nice person. It means you take a public institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny.

"Public institutions have many side benefits. For one thing they may purposely run at a loss. They're not out for profit. They may purposely run at a loss because of the side benefits. So, for example, if a public steel industry runs at a loss it's providing cheap steel to other industries. Maybe that's a good thing. Public institutions can have a counter-cyclic property. That means they can maintain employment in periods of recession, which increases demand, which helps you to get out of recession. A private company can't do that. In a recession, you throw out the work force. That's the way you make money.”

—Noam Chomsky
“The Corporation” (2002)

“What the fuck are you talking about? Willie makes fucking catches like that every day. Do you keep your fucking eyes closed in the press box?”

—Giants' Manager Leo Durocher, when asked by a reporter, after the game, if Willie Mays's catch off Vic Wertz in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series was the greatest catch he'd ever seen. From James S. Hirsch's Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, page. 199.

"Senior management's job is to pay people. If they fuck a hundred guys out of a hundred grand each, that's ten miliion more for them. They have four categories: happy, satisfied, dissatisfied, disgusted. If they hit happy, they've screwed up; They never want you to be happy. On the other hand, they don't want you so disgusted you quit. The sweet spot is somewhere between dissatisfied and disgusted."

—Greg Lippmann of Deutsche Bank, in Michael Lewis' "The Big Short," pg. 63. Last week, Lippmann, who not only bet against the subprime housing market but spread word that others should bet against the subprime housing market, too (he was, Lewis, writes, the "Patient Zero" of those bets), left Deutsche Bank for a hedge fund founded by Fred Brettschneider.

"Really, it was a federal issue. Household [Finance Corporation] was peddling these deceptive mortgages all over the country. Yet the federal government failed to act. Instead, at the end of 2002, Household settled a class action suit out of court and agreed to pay a $484 million fine distributed to twelve states. The following year it sold itself, and its giant portfolio of subprime loans, for $15.5 billion to the British financial conglomerate the HSBC Group.

"Eisman was genuinely shocked. 'It never entered my mind that this could possibly happen,' he said. 'This wasn't just another company—this was the biggest company by far making subprime loans. And it was engaged in just blatant fraud. They should have taken the CEO out and hung him up by his fucking testicles. Instead they sold the company and the CEO made a hundred million dollars. And I thought, Whoa! That one didn't end the way it should have.'"

—from Michael Lewis' "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine," pg. 18

Interviewer: Do you think we’ve learned anything from [the Vietnam War]?

Former Capt. Randy Floyd: I think we’re trying not to. I think I’m trying not to sometimes. I can’t even cry easily—from my manhood image. I think Americans have tried, we’ve all tried, very hard, to escape what we’ve learned in Vietnam. To not come to the logical conclusions of what’s happened there. You know, the military does the same thing. They don’t realize that people fighting for their own freedom are not going to be stopped by changing your tactics—adding a little more sophisticated technology over here, improving the tactics we used last time and not making quite so many mistakes. I think history operates a little different than that. That those kind of forces are not going to be stopped. I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminality that their officials and their policymakers have exhibited.

—from “Hearts and Minds” (1974), the Academy-Award-winning documentary by Peter Davis on the Vietnam War

“Freedom is moot if you waste it. If the internet is really destined to be no more than an ancillary medium, which I would view as a profound defeat, then it at least ought to do whatever it can not to bite the hand that feeds it—that is, it shouldn't starve the commercial media industries.”

—Jaron Lanier, “You Are Not a Gadget”

“Politically, these issues are poisonous. That’s what Rahm Emanuel is looking at. [But] you can’t finesse it, and you can’t spin it. The President just has to lead the American people away from fear.”

—Elisa Massimino, the president of Human Rights First, on civilian trials vs. military tribunals, Guantanamo, and what kind of war is the War on Terror, in Jane Mayer's New Yorker article, "The Trial: Eric Holder and the battle over Khalid Sheikh Mohammed."

Related:

• The New York Times gives equal weight to all sides by letting five lawyers, including Andrew McCarthy, who led the prosecution in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and is now legal affairs editor of The National Review, have their say. 
• Jon Stewart spars with conservative columnist and former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen on "The Daily Show." 
• Scott Horton is less kind to Thiessen in this Harper's column.
• A letter from conservative lawyers, such as Ken Starr, coming to the defense of Dept. of Justice lawyers against the attacks of Liz Cheney's organization "Keep America Safe."

"A little over a decade and a half ago, with the birth of the World Wide Web, a clock started. The old-media empires were put on a path of predictable obsolescence. But would a superior replacement arise in time? What we idealists said then was, 'Just wait! More opportunities will be created than destroyed.' Isn't fifteen years long enough to wait before we switch from hope to empiricism? The time has come to ask, 'Are we building the digital utopia for people or machines?' If it's for people, we have a problem."

—from "You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto" by Jaron Lanier

"You're not so nice and polite in your fiction," he said. "You're a different person."
"Am I?"
"I should hope so."

—E.I. Lonoff talking to Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth's "The Ghost Writer," an underrated classic.

"A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing. It takes me at least an hour to warm up when I sit down to work. ... Just taking off my own disguises takes an hour or more."

—J.D. Salinger, in a letter to Lillian Ross, and quoted in The New Yorker, Feb. 8, 2010

“On every single major issue of the day, [the Republicans] are incoherent. They have no workable plans to insure the uninsured and no practical way to contain healthcare costs; most deny climate change even exists; most seek to prolong wars because ... er, we have to be tough; their response to the massive debt is to defend Medicare and call for tax cuts; their position on civil rights is that gay people need to go to Jesus; their position on terror suspects is to detain them and torture them, violating domestic and international law; their position on immigration is to round up millions and force them to go home.

”My worry, however, is that there are enough Americans perfectly happy to live with this nihilism indefinitely, and to perpetuate the policies of spend-and-borrow and invade-and-occupy that any serious attempt to address our problems is impossible. And their response to that will be to blame all those problems on a Democratic president, if there is one; and if there's a Republican president, to simply deny that any of the problems exist at all.

—Andrew Sullivan, “Tactics Over Strategy”

"After all, what keeps baseball going? It's the records. People are always talking about records, and if you elminate the records, the game loses a lot of its romance. Yet that's what they're doing. They are making records easier to erase."

—Mickey Mantle on the advent of the designated hitter in 1973, with obvious repurcussions for today; from the book, "Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid: The Year That Changed Baseball Forever," by John Rosengren

Rebuttal? Joe Posnanski argues that most baseball records are hardly as sacrosanct, or as pure, as we imagine them to be; that many factors—some as small as a strike zone, some as big as a ballpark—help create even the purer records:

Stuff usually isn’t black or white, up or down, left or right. It’s complicated. Carlton Fisk, of all people, should know that. If it makes people feel better to shout “fraud” in a crowded theater, hey, it’s a free country. But it seems to me there’s already enough noise out there.

"This is the point, to me, where art and fandom coincide. Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. ... Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed...

"Though I derive a sense of strength and confidence from writing and from my life as a husband and father, those pursuits are notoriously subject to endless setbacks and the steady exposure of shortcomings, weakness, and insufficiency—in particular in the raising of children. A father is a man who fails every day. Sometimes things work out: Your flashed message is received and read, your song is rerecorded by another band and goes straight to No. 1, you son blesses the memory of the day you helped him arrange the empty chairs of his foredoomed dream, your act of last-ditch desperation sends your comic-book company to the top of the industry. Success, however, does nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do. But you always knew that. Nobody gets past the age of ten without that knowledge. Welcome to the club."

—Michael Chabon, "The Loser's Club," from the book Manhood for Amateurs

"It is our misfortune to live through the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race, a misfortune because surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to integrate. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.

"To make a historical analogy with the last major increase in the written word, you could earn a living in 1500 simply by knowing how to read and write. The spread of those abilities in the subsequent century had the curious property of making literacy both more essential and less professional; literacy became critical at the same time as the scribes lost their jobs.

"The same thing is happening with publishing; in the 20th century, the mere fact of owning the apparatus to make something public, whether a printing press or a TV tower, made you a person of considerable importance. Today, though, publishing, in its sense of making things public, is becoming similarly de-professionalized; YouTube is now in the position of having to stop 8 year olds from becoming global publishers of video. The mere fact of being able to publish to a global audience is the new literacy, formerly valuable, now so widely available that you can't make any money with the basic capability any more.

"This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.

"So it falls to us to make sure that isn't all that happens."

—Clay Shirky, in a collection of World Question Center pieces

As an immigrant to the United States, Mr. Tesich says, he was for a long time very positive and very optimistic about this country. That optimism, he says, has changed, and the change started with Vietnam.

"I didn't just love America," he says. "I was in love with America. I honestly believed that it was going to be one of those nations that would take care of everybody, that would try to make its rewards available to all. And now I feel there is absolutely no agenda for helping those on the bottom in this country. Nobody is really interested in them. And I don't know what the country stands for."

—from a New York Times article on "Breaking Away" screenwriter Steve Tesich, March 12, 1991

"It was, readers of The New York Times recently learned, a very good year for Paramount Pictures. Two of the year’s biggest hits, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” have helped the studio climb out of its financial hole with a combined domestic take of more than $500 million. Both movies are deeply stupid, often incoherent and hinged on the principle that the spectacle of violence is its own pleasurable end. “Transformers” is also casually racist. But hey, that’s entertainment.

Or, more specifically, that’s Hollywood entertainment in the conglomerate age. The major studios have long been in the business of serving sludge to the world, but now the reek often spreads around the globe simultaneously with massive coordinated openings. “Revenge of the Fallen,” for instance, opened the same day on more than 4,000 screens in the United States — about a 10th of all the screens in the country — and soon about 10,000 more abroad. “Angels & Demons,” the sequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” opened on some 3,500 screens domestically and ate up more than 10,000 internationally. The French film “Summer Hours,” meanwhile, the best-reviewed release in The Times that weekend, opened on two screens.

—Manohla Dargis, "Amid Studio Product, Independents' Resilience," December 17, 2009

“What delight and joy in reading the Auburn Plainsman's Ben Bartley, some red-white-and-blue type guy from Texas who's fuming that such an anti-corporate, anti-arrogant, anti-Bush legacy, pro-eco, pro-nativist pantheist tract is raking it in big-time and spreading the myth everywhere, and there's nothing this guy can do about it. Hah! Eat shit, Christian asshole!”

—Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

“[Lamont] Cranston himself I thought a little slow-moving; he was fairly sedentary, as compared, say, with the Green Hornet, who could probably lick him in a fight if they went at it visibly. I didn’t think of the Shadow as being able to jump rooftops or climb ropes or run very fast. On the other hand, why should he have to? Also, I wondered about his restraint when he could become invisible anytime he chose. I wondered if he ever took advantage of women, as I surely would. Did he ever watch Margo Lane go to the bathroom? I knew that if I had the power to be invisible I would go into the girls’ bathroom at P.S. 70 and watch them pulling their drawers down. I would watch women take their clothes off in their homes and they wouldn’t even know I was there. I wouldn’t make the mistake of speaking up or making a sound, they would never even know I had been there. But I would forever after know what they looked like. The thought of having this power made my ears hot. Yes, I would spy on naked girls but I would also do good. I would invisibly board a ship, or, better still, a China Clipper, and I would fly to Germany and find out where Adolf Hitler lived. I would in absolute safety, and with no chance of being caught, go to Hitler’s palace, or whatever it was, and kill him. Then I would kill all of his generals and ministers. The Germans would be going crazy trying to find the invisible avenger. I would whisper in their ears to be good and kind, and they would thereafter be thinking God had been speaking. The Shadow had no imagination. He never looked at naked women nor thought of ridding he world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini. If his program hadn’t been on a Sunday afternoon, I would probably not have listened to it.”

—from E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, which I recently re-read for the first time in 20 years. It’s a beautiful book, and reminds me of Willa Cather’s lyrical My Antonia. Both are coming-of-age stories. This one's about coming into consciousness and perception in the Bronx in the 1930s. Funny, but I never thought about the double meaning of the title before: Not only a destination—the 1939/40 version in Flushing Meadows, New York—but a declaration of the way things are, which, given the circumstances of the story, not to mention our own perceptions, can only be viewed as ironic. Was Doctorow ever going to call it the title of the World's Fair essay contest our protagonist enters? “The Typical American Boy”? And how much of the book grew out of writing The Book of Daniel?

"Thank you, God. For letting me have another day."

—Amarante Cordova (Carlos Riquelme) upon arising, painfully, in the morning, in Robert Redford's underrated "The Milagro Beanfield War." For all the movie's magic realism, and its issues of class and rampant development (it's a Redford movie, after all), this is what stays with me. This simple line. I wish I could live it. Doesn't mean I won't keep trying.

“I always remember that actor [in the Australian low-budget thriller ”Patrick,“ who spends the movie in a coma]. I thought he was amazing looking in that movie with his eyes just wide open and everything, and in the original script [for ”Kill Bill“] I had it written like that. Then I showed it to Uma and she goes, 'I'm not going to do that,' and I go 'Why?' and she goes 'You wouldn't have your eyes open like that if you were in a coma! That's not realistic.' I go, 'Actually I never thought was it realistic or not, it's just Patrick did it, alright, and it looked really cool.”

—Quentin Tarantino in the documentary about Australian exploitation movies, “Not Quite Hollywood,” demonstrating what is right and wrong about him as a filmmaker.

“But, sadly, any time a racist criticizes the President, someone cries 'racism.'”

—Stephen Colbert

"I like to be the good guy because the good guy gets to kill the bad guy."

— my nephew, Ryan, 6, talking about playacting, but encapsulating the schizophrenia at the heart of our culture, during a walk around Mountain Lake on Orcas Island.

“It is unwise for anyone of any race to raise their voice to a law enforcement officer. But the result at the end of the day is this was a man who violated no law, was in his own house, who is the top academic star at the top academic school in the nation, and he was still taken away and arrested.”

— Al Vivian, diversity consultant, Atlanta, in the New York Times article “Professor's Arrest Tests Beliefs on Racial Progress”

ADDENDUM: Stanley Fish has a great post comparing both Henry Louis Gates' troubles in North Carolina and now Cambridge with the non-issue of Pres. Obama's birth certificate: “It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it's the White House.”

Added thought: From Birchers to birthers. In 50 years, the extreme right in this country has managed to change nothing but one letter.

"She may decide that she does not need office in order to have great influence—any more than Rush Limbaugh does."

—Todd S. Purdam in his August 2009 Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin, "It Came from Wasilla," published before her July 3rd resignation announcement.

Hey all. Just got back from a family vacation in Minnesota, where I re-encountered two of my favorite junk foods: Old Dutch Rip-L Potato Chips and Sebastian Joe's ice cream. It's a good thing I don't live there anymore or I'd be 200 pounds.

While on vacation I read Cinemas of the World by James Chapman, from which I'll be quoting in the next couple of days. A bit academic but mostly interesting and always informative. British press. Here's the first of them:

Triumph des Willens represented the high point of Nazi propaganda: it enshrined the 'Hitler myth' so completely that no further films of the sort ever needed to be commissioned. Goebbels, for his part, was firmly of the opinion that feature films should provide escapist entertainment for the masses and that direct propaganda should be confined to the newsreels.

“[Critics] forget what the goal of the movie ['Transformers 2'] was. The goal of the movie is to entertain and have fun. What the audience tells us is, ‘We couldn’t be more entertained and having more fun.’ They kind of roll their eyes at the critics and say, ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’”

—Rob Moore, vice chairman of Paramount, which is distributing ”Transformers 2 for DreamWorks, in an uncredited AP article.

“Until the spring of 1978, when Salomon Brothers formed Wall Street’s first mortgage security department, the term borrower referred to large corporations and to federal, state, and local governments. It did not include homeowners. A Salomon Brothers partner named Robert Dall thought this strange...

”The problem [with the inability to see big business in home mortgages] was more fundamental than a disdain for Middle America. Mortgages were not tradable pieces of paper; they were not bonds. They were loans made by savings banks that were never supposed to leave the saving banks. A single home mortgage was a messy investment for Wall Street, which was used to dealing in bigger numbers. No trader or investor wanted to poke around suburbs to find out whether the homeowner to whom he had just lent money was creditworthy. For the home mortgage to become a bond, it had to be depersonalized.

“At the very least, a mortgage had to be pooled with other mortgages of other homeowners. Traders and investors would trust statistics and buy into a pool of several thousand mortgage loans made by a savings and loan, of which, by the laws of probability, only a small fraction should default...”

— from Michael Lewis’ “Liar’s Poker,” pp. 83-85

"In a career that spanned almost 50 years Jack Lemmon was seldom a soothing presence. Sweaty, stammering and hyperactive, Lemmon seemed to embody the countertype of the monumental, granite-jawed leading men of the 1950s — stars like John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck.

"Where Peck, for example, seemed to embody the World War II squadron leader slipping into middle age and forced to operate on the unfamiliar corporate battlefields of Madison Avenue (“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”), Lemmon was the junior officer eagerly polishing the brass of his superiors (in his Oscar-winning supporting performance in “Mister Roberts”), a tactic he queasily carried with him into the business world (“The Apartment”). Lemmon’s recurring predicament is that of the desperate conformist who ultimately discovers that conformity comes at too high a price."

—Dave Kehr in his NY Times article, "Everyman, Tempted" about a new Jack Lemmon DVD collection

James Allen: Must you go home?
Helen: There are no musts in my life. I'm free, white and 21."

—from "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932). The Worldwide Dubya isn't much help with the phrase. One assumes it was a semi-common, possibly regional (i.e., southern) comment back in the day, but I don't see any specific reference to it before this film—which, I should add, includes a lot of black actors in roles that, while mostly non-speaking, aren't too embarrassing for the time. The line subsequently wound up in a few other films from the era: "Dames" (1935) and "Kitty Foyle" (1940). It also became the title of indie movie from 1963 about an African American on trial for the rape of a white woman.

“Up,” which begins in the nineteen-thirties, is steeped in the style of that period, with its gee-whiz appreciation of exotic adventure and its worship of heroes who have journeyed to strange, distant places. A little boy, Carl, watches newsreels at a theatre, and sees an explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), first celebrated then humiliated: no one believes the skeleton of a large flightless bird that Muntz has brought back from South America is authentic. When Carl leaves the theatre, he imagines the newsreel narrator describing his walk home, turning his stepping over a crack in the sidewalk into a vault over a canyon. It’s a gracious moment: the co-directors, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, who also wrote the screenplay, pay affectionate tribute to daydreaming as a noble and necessary human activity. In dreams begin responsibilities, and in dreams begin movies, too.

—David Denby on “Up” in the June 8th New Yorker. Read on and discover why Denby feels Pixar at its best is better than Disney at its best.

Yesterday's reference to Philip Roth’s “Patrimony” reminded me of one of my favorite anecdotes ever. It’s on pages 125-26 of the Simon & Schuster paperback edition. Philip, dutiful, distant son, is having a late-night talk with his friend Joanna, originally from Poland, now a recovering alcoholic living in Princeton, about his 86-year-old father, who is beginning to physically break down:

“Did I ever tell you what happened when he was mugged a couple of years ago? He could have got himself killed.”

“No. Tell me.”

“A black kid about fourteen approached him with a gun on a side street leading to their little temple. It was the middle of the afternoon. My father had been at the temple office helping them with mailing or something and he was coming home. The black kids prey on the elderly Jews in his neighborhood even in broad daylight. They bicycle in from Newark, he tells me, take their money, laugh, and go home. ‘Get in the bushes,’ he tells my father. ‘I’m not getting in any bushes,’ my father says. ‘You can have whatever you want, and you don’t need that piece to get it. You can put that piece away.’ The kid lowers the gun and my father gives him his wallet. ‘Take all the money,’ my father says, ‘ but if the wallet’s of no value to you, I wouldn’t mind it back.’ The kid takes the money, gives back the wallet, and he runs. And you know what my father does? He calls across the street. ‘How much did you get?’ And the kid is obedient—he counts it for him. ‘Twenty-three dollars,’ the kid says. ‘Good,’ my father tells him—‘now don’t go out and spend it on crap.’”

I now “get” that Pup’s greatness was a piece with the way he conducted himself at sea. Great men always have too much canvas up. Great men take risks. It’s the timorous souls—like myself—who err on the side of caution; who take in sail when they see a storm approaching and look for snug harbor. Not my old man. Or as Mum used to put it, “Bill, why are you trying to kill us?”

—Christopher Buckley, “Losing Mum and Pup,” pg. 122

I’m a similar timorous soul, a worst-case scenario man, and so I inevitably feel some admiration for men who are tougher and braver, who venture out in worst-case scenarios rather than imagining them, as I do, during best-case situations.

Even so.

Not sure where one crosses the line from “adventurer” into “asshole” but William F. Buckley seems to cross it. He constantly plows his boat into docks; he risks lives—including his only son’s—to venture forth in storms; he steals lobsters from the traps of fishermen (but leaves behind bottles of Johnnie Walker as payment); he switches channels and movies and party locations without consultation. Consultation? What’s that? Hell, in his later days he often opened the front door of his car while it was moving to pee. Sometimes he did this in traffic. Onto other cars.

It would be easy to see this as a metaphor for the right-wing in this country but it’s probably a better metaphor for our ruling classes—regardless of political persuasion. Buckley, it turns out, was friends with not just Henry Kissinger but George McGovern and Ted Kennedy. One almost gets the feeling that the whole thing is a game to them and we’re the pieces. A less chilling comparison is to professional sports. Yankees and Red Sox fans may hate each other but it doesn’t mean David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez have to. They’re just two men playing the same game. They have more in common with each other than with the fans in the stands.

In the end no metaphors are truly needed to fathom the conservative mind. Merely go to the footnote on pg 117:

The book [on Goldwater] ends with an anecdote in which I, age twelve at the time, figure. Pup had gotten the details a bit wrong, and I had e-mailed him from Zermatt the correct version. He declined it, saying “I like my version better.” I thought to say, “Pup, it’s not a question of liking your version better, but of using the accurate version,” but then thought, Never mind.

That’s part of the reason why we’re in this mess. They always liked their version better.

As for C. Buckley’s book? It’s breezy and funny—although the humor is occasionally too rim-shot. The book jacket compares Buckley’s effort to Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” but that book was devastating while this one is...kinda fun. Meanwhile, the best book I’ve read in the genre, if you want to call it a genre—“the death of loved ones by famous authors”—is Philip Roth’s “Patrimony,” in which the sickness and eventual death of his father is grounded and specific, and no messy detail is ignored. Put it this way: Christopher may have put up with his father’s shit but Philip cleaned up his father’s.

So we begin with piss and end with shit. The way of the world.

“In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, [John] Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.”

—Jeffrey Toobin in his New Yorker article “No More Mr. Nice Guy.” Worth reading in its entirety. I was a little perplexed that we got this now, rather than at the end of June when the decisions in the more controversial Supreme Court cases are announced. And the end of the piece is a little weak, particularly for Toobin, who's such a good writer. But worth reading, and considering, as the more vocal part of the conservative nation picks-a-little, talks-a-little about Pres. Obama's recent U.S. Supreme Court nominee.

"The Academy Awards race was hardly a gentleman's game in the 1960s. If campaigning was less costly and public than in more recent years, it wasn't due to a sense of decorum as much as to the fact that the Academy itself was half the size it is today, much more heavily populated with rank-and-file studio employees, and thus easier to manipulate and control. Oscar prognostication was not yet a blood sport; each year, the movies that would be the subject of campaigns were selected by their studios, and then essentially dictated to selected gossip columnists and writers from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times, the only major publications that then took much notice of the nominating process."

— from Mark Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution," pg. 385

"Beatty had tried to plan his entire career by studyng the work of directors he admired, but as Bonnie and Clyde's producer, suddenly he was feeling impatient with auteurism. 'To attribute [movies] wholly to their directors—not to the actors, not to the producer, not [to] the leading lady...well's that's just bullshit!' he fumed. 'Those pictures were made by directors, writers, and sound men and cameramen and actors and so forth, but suddenly it's "Otto Preminger's Hurry Sundown"... It's not healthy."

— from Mark Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution," pg. 247, citing a Beatty quote from The Bonnie and Clyde Book

**

"If [Mike] Nichols felt relaxed as production [on The Graduate] began, the reason was probably that, as he puts it, 'I saw the whole thing—I knew what the movie was.' In that, he was a minority of one."

— from Mark Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution," pg. 312, citing an author interview

 **

"The auteurist critics look for recurring patterns, the incandescent joining of visual style and idea. You can’t find such patterns, or even a consistent visual motif, in [Victor] Fleming’s movies. But you can find a powerful grasp of fable... He didn’t direct the entirety of either of his two classics [The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind], and he wasn’t, by definition, an auteur. But this absence from the list of the blessed suggests a fault in auteur theory and not in Fleming—a prejudice against the generalists, the non-obsessed, the “chameleons,” as Steven Spielberg called them, who re-created themselves for each project and made good movies in many different styles."

— from David Denby's article "The Real Rhett Butler: The forgotten man behind two of Hollywood's most enduring classics," in the latest New Yorker

[Mike] Nichols, who had championed the idea [of casting Robert Redford as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate], surprised himself by turning the actor down. "We were friends, we had done Barefoot, I was playing pool with him, and I said, 'I'm really sad, but you can't do it. You can't play a loser,'" says Nichols. "He said, 'Of course I can play a loser!' I said, 'You can't! Look at you! How many times have you ever struck out with a woman?' And he said, I swear to you, 'What do you mean?' He didn't even understand the concept. To him, it was like saying, 'How many times have you been to a restaurant and not had a meal?'"

— from Mark Harris' "Pictures at a Revolution," pg. 237

“Nonetheless, by the beginning of 1965, [Dustin] Hoffman was twenty-seven, seriously demoralized by his inability to land an acting job, and considerng a change in careers. ... [Susan] Anspach, who met him during that production [of A View from a Bridge], recalls a lunch for the cast and crew of the play at which he told her with bravado, '”You know, if I were older, I'd be playing Bobby's [Duvall] part.“ and I said, ”Sure, right, Dusty.“ And he said, ”What do you mean? I'm fuckin' talented! Ask Bobby! He'll tell you himself!“ I said to Bobby, ”Is he putting me on? He's the sweep-up guy!“ And Bobby said, ”No, it's true, he's the most talented guy among all of us.“'”

— from Mark Harris' “Pictures at a Revolution,” pg. 164

"Building is interesting, because it's ultimately impossible, I suppose, but killing is boring. It's easy to see through something—to show how stupid it is, or how wrong—but that doesn't take very long, and then you're finished. ... Killing doesn't solve the problem of boredom."

—Wendy O'Flaherty, professor at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, in Janet Malcolm's "In the Freud Archives," pg. 155

Overstates the case but it reminds me of the emptiness I feel after writing a movie review. It also reminds me that it's always easier to write a negative review than a positive one—in part because you want to do justice to the good film ("The Soloist") and could give a crap about the bad one ("Wolverine"). Writing a negative review is more freeing; you're not beholden to anything but the truth. The above quote also reminds me of most things on the Internet.

"Heighdy! See how I'm picking up the local jargon? Things going extremely well for us. Found the graves of Clyde and Buck in abandoned cemetery overgrown with weeds. One of the strangest sensations we ever had—standing six feet over Clyde. On Monday we'll see Bonnie's. ... Bob is taking a lot of pictures. Perfect Bonnie and Clyde locations! Quite uncanny to see cities and towns that look like 1932 this year."

— David Newman (with Robert Benton), in East Texas for further research for their script, "Bonnie and Clyde," May 1964. From "Pictures at the Revolution" by Mark Harris, pg. 60

""Anvil!" owes much to Penelope Spheeris’ "Decline of Western Civilization, Pt. II: The Metal Years" and “American Movie.” In all three, the rawness of people chasing -- not living -- dreams is uncomfortable to watch, because they’ve bought the concept that what they do isn’t valid unless they become big stars... Anvil plays gigs, makes records, and has a small but avid fan base. But they always want more, they rarely talk about artistry or what they want to do with their music, and whatever success they have is contingent on how others see them."

— Jim Walsh in his MN Post review of "Anvil! The Story of Anvil."

This gets to the heart of it even if Jim, who's a friend, is, I believe, overstating his case. It could be the boys in Anvil feel that what they do isn't valid unless they make a living at it. And they don't. At 50. That's when you begin to wonder if it's all worth it. But in general I concede Jim's point—for Anvil, for our culture, for me—even if I know that, with me anyway, I'll forever be trapped between doing the thing for the thing and needing a little something in response.

   "Denise is echt California," Masson said fondly. "When I first met her, you couldn't get more than six words out of her, and they were generally 'like,' 'you know,' 'I mean, like.' She spoke in half sentences. There is something so echt California about that."
   "It has nothing to do with California," Denise said.
   "But you have a basic mistrust of speech, right?"
   "It's just not fast enough," Denise said. "It doesn't say what I mean."

-- from Janet Malcolm's "In the Freud Archives."

"We are all perpetually smoothing and rearranging reality to conform to our wishes; we lie to others and to ourselves constantly, unthinkingly. When, occasionally—and not by dint of our own efforts but under the pressue of external events—we are forced to see things as they are, we are like naked people in a storm. There are a few of us—psychoanalysts have encountered them—who are blessed or cursed with a strange imperviousness to the unpleasantness of self-knowledge. Their lies to themselves are so convincing that they are never unmasked. These are the people who never feel in the wrong, who are always able to justify their conduct, and who in the end—human nature being what it is—cause their fallible fellow-men to turn away from them."

— Janet Malcolm, "In the Freud Archives," pg. 70. Here's to turning away from them. Here's to naked people in a storm.

In case the moral argument against torture isn't swaying you:

Imagine if an American operative out of uniform were captured by the Iranians tomorrow. Imagine he were put into a coffin for hours with no light and barely enough air to breathe, imagine if he were then removed and smashed against a plywood wall by a towel tied around his neck thirty times, imagine if he were then kept awake for eleven days in a row, then kept in a cell frozen to hypothermia levels, and then waterboarded multiple times, after which he confessed to being a spy trying to sabotage Iran's nuclear program. Would you believe that intelligence? Would Krauthammer? Would you believe both that he wasn't tortured and that the information he gave was reliable?

—Andrew Sullivan, taking on Charles Krauthammer, here.

“You know what the trouble is, Bruce? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.”

— Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer) in Season 2, Episode 11 of “The Wire,” originally aired on August 17, 2003

“We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect. We will listen carefully, we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground. We will be respectful, even when we do not agree. We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world — including in my own country. The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know, because I am one of them.”

— Pres. Barack Obama in a speech before the Turkish parliament.

I read this in The New York Times (newspaper version) while sitting at the Kerry Park overlook on this sunny Seattle day, eating my lunch and listening to Teddy Thompson's “In My Arms.” I was pretty happy for that half hour. Tomorrow it's supposed to rain. Tomorrow things may get worse economically. But for now it's sunny and more people realize we're at least heading in the direction we should. Amen.

"They were both of them jovial about the cold in winter and the heat in summer, always ready to work overtime and to meet emergencies. It was a matter of pride with them not to spare themselves. Yet they were the sort of men who never get on, somehow, or do anything but work hard for a dollar or two a day."

— "My Antonia" by Willa Cather, published 1918

"I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.... The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermillion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."

— "My Antonia" by Willa Cather

A group of friends gather in the kitchen as a friend, Honore Panisse, dying upstairs, confesses to a priest.

Cesar: One thing worries me, though. What if our God isn’t the true god?
Felix: Good lord! What are you saying?
Cesar: I know Moslems, Hindus, Chinese, blacks. Their god isn’t the same as ours. What’s a sin for us isn’t necessarily a sin for them. They may not be right but suppose they are, Monsieur Brun.
Brun: That’s the question.
Cesar: Poor old Panisse is well-prepared for a meeting with Elzear’s God. But suppose that up there in the clouds, he finds a god he doesn’t know at all. A red, black or yellow one. Or one like you see in antique shops, wth a big belly and lots of arms. What could poor Panisee says to a god like that? How would they communicate? Put yourself in his place. Tired by your death and dizzy after your journey, trying to make yourelf understood to this god. You pray and he says, “What’s that? What are you saying?” All in Chinese.
Felix: That’s tragic. You give me the creeps.
Woman: So the Bible’s all a lie? Aren’t you ashamed to talk like that in front of an altar boy?
Woman 2: If you went to church more, you’d know there’s only one god – ours!

— from "Cesar" (1936), the third of Marcel Pagnol's "Fanny" trilogy

"The days of Nicolas Cage’s sensitivity and risk-taking as an actor have been over for so long it’s hard to get worked up about a new lame performance. But I’ll try. He makes only the broadest of acting choices. He MOPES in capital letters. He DRINKS in capital letters. He SHOUTS whenever he can get away with it (the late film bad acting shouting duet with Rose Byrne is especially funny). When the movie needs him to cry he doesn’t cry so much as hunch his shoulders and jam his eyelids together as if he can force tears out physically. He’s like a Terminator mimicking emotions they’ve seen humans express that they don't quite grasp. Cage doesn’t just overact. He overacts and then underlines. Then he starts circling his emotions with a big fat red marker."

— Nathaniel Rogers, from his review of "Knowing," on Film Experience Blog

"Why does the audience keep coming to this type of photoplay [Action Pictures] if neither lust, love, hate, nor hunger is adequately conveyed? Simply because such spectacles gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American."

— Vachel Lindsay, "The Art of the Moving Picture," 1915

"We all have the right to be free from the interference of petty, small-minded, single-track dirty sniffers who feel that they have to justify their official existence. The motion picture industry is often faced by pressures from narrow, ignorant individuals and groups. Some of them may have the best intentions in the world. But it’s a mistake to take that pressure lying down."

— Samuel Goldwyn on HUAC, from the documentary "Goldwyn: The Man and His Movies"