The Gorgon Cometh: Every snake in her bonnet hisses for peace

"She's a global celebrity, but can Secretary Clinton make a more peaceful world?"

Obama was just lecturing the Chinese about freedom of speech.

Free speech. It's our secret ingredient--our MSG. We sprinkle it in the inanities and lies to give them flavor.

The global celebrity pictured above, for instance, once was wont to say she would "totally obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel. She loudly advocated invading Iraq and Afghanistan. She consistently demands increased war spending. She has never met a war she didn't like. In photo-ops from war zones, she can be seen looking like a giddy 60-something cheerleader with her frightening eyes a-twinkle, a war tourist jazzing her career with a little glamorous dust.

Can she make a more peaceful world? Depends. Is she willing to resign, admit her every foreign policy stance has been farcically destructive to U.S. interests not to mention to innocent lives abroad, and confine herself to a future of shrieking on political chat shows? How about a plea bargain--she walks, but we let her keep the snakes.

McCarthy's "The Road" Out In October

Word that the film version of "The Road" is in post-production is good to hear, especially as it's directed by John Hillcoat. Hillcoat's "The Proposition" (2005) is artful in its terror and melancholy, two terms that can be applied to Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

Personally I won't see the film -- I would prefer to live with the book as I have experienced it. But we aren't a country of readers and the value of the film may lie just in its ability to plant a seed of horror of abysses -- nuclear and cultural -- in the triumphalist American skull. Something must scare us off our savage trajectory. I don't know if art can do that today or ever could; I would like to think maybe, sometimes, yes.

The Many Deaths of Arturo Gatti

June 25, 2005: doomsday

I was saddened to read about Arturo Gatti. Brutally murdered this past weekend, a mere two years after retiring, at 35, from boxing. Strangled in a Brazilian vacation rental. A bloody purse strap. His young wife suspected. The early press reports spoke of a "second honeymoon" ending in the macabre. She -- plump, 23, her face covered by a hoodie in custody -- claiming to have slept soundly as his corpse grew cold in the next room. He just weeks shy of testifying in a suit against a boxing commission concerning brain damage he dealt to another boxer. Does this sound like pulp fiction yet?

It was a squalid end for the much-loved former champ. Boxing is often about dark ends, in the ring and out, but there was extra pathos given Gatti's legend. He was a sunnily optimistic journeyman. He bled like nobody's business and he hoisted his matinee idol's mug, however dented or red, every round for more. In interviews he was soft-spoken, humble, no braggart, no trash talker. He sounded like the archetypal kid brother in a 1950s TV sitcom. Like, say, the Beav after a Charles Atlas course. Well, I'm gonna go out and do what I can against that Eddie Haskel, I know he's bigger 'n me but I'm gonna try. He could handle most guys but never the best. Oscar de la Hoya whipped him.

And of course he went to war when equally matched, as in his famous trilogy in 2002-2003 with "Irish" Mickey Ward. These are thought to be among the best classic fights in the recent era. They are rebroadcast endlessly. They are exhilarating, they are ferocious. They are almost medieval in their seesawed bloodiness. They have little to do with good boxing actually. Raised on Ali, I like boxing for technical prowess mainly, for its grace and art. Neither Ward nor Gatti possessed much art nor defense nor any idea other than go forward, swing, get hit, swing, sit down, get stitched up, hear the bell, rise and gedbackoutdere. Yes they had heart, mad gonzo courage and nerve beyond all sizing as if they knew the lessons of the world are told in a catechism of pain from one man to the next. So they stood face to face and tortured each other. Always the dumbfounded look as they swung on. Bones breaking. Gatti's shattered hand hanging limply at his side as, one-fisted, he laid into the mutilated Irishman. "Fight of the year," according to Ring Magazine. 

In later years, beloved on the eastern seaboard for such heart, Gatti made many people rich. Promoters, HBO, trainers, bookies, gamblers, mooks of all vintage and origin: all got a taste. This led to him being grotesquely overmatched--elevated, foolishly, as the Great White Hope. His dismantling by Floyd Mayweather, Jr. in 2005 is a terrible thing to see. This spectacle, and not Gatti-Ward I, II or III, is among the classic fights of recent years because it is in fact representative. Its raw materials: so-so slugger vs. supernaturally gifted boxer, brute versus technical genius, plodding versus blinding speed, and most tellingly, plucky B-list endearing Everyman versus top-of-the-food-chain nihilist. Hope vs. Truth. Darwinism in three-minute bursts. In its cruel inevitability, as it ends with Gatti somehow able to cry out of eyes bulging like chemically-enlarged turnips, it epitomizes how money and horseshit fantasy rather than quality or qualifications drive this sport. I've never watched a sadder six rounds in my life. As criminal as it was to stage this event, it revealed in microcosm the business of boxing as it is usually conducted: bait for sharks.

I don't doubt Gatti died in some measure that night when his egregious hopes were mercilessly judged. It wasn't the beating, it was the meaning of the beating. Boxing careers are short fuses in a long life and his had burnt out. Two more knockouts would stretch him out before the end. According to news stories, grief followed in retirement: arrested for assaulting a former girlfriend, jailed for skipping a court date, restraining orders, hauled from a strip club, drugs and booze. And now this purse strap, this unseemly and pathetic death. Don't get up, champ. RIP, hopefully, at long last.

You Take The Ankles, and I'll Take The Stairs

My pal Rick Griffith has a new CD out. Take the Stairs is a fusion of every mad idea the Saint Paul-based lutenist/guitarist/mandolinist/bassist has had in the year since his last CD, the pop-subverso Tool Factory Project. Rick writes like he's channeling all the stuff your mother told you would rot your brain (and oh was she right), or as he puts it:

influences include everything from Edgard Varese to The Jam to TV cop shows to Neil Innes to the Ventures to 50's B sci-fi movies to Japanese power pop to 70's UFO abduction paranoia literature to Frank Zappa, Jay Ungar, Tom Waits, They Might Be Giants, The Archies (the cartoon, comic books AND bubble gum pop group), Monty Python, Ed Wood, Charles Fort, Marcel DuChamp, the Hair Bear Bunch, Jonny Quest, the Marx Brothers (but NOT the Stooges--unless you're talking about Iggy Pop), the Ritz Brothers, the Chambers Brothers, the Buscema brothers, Steve Ditko, Steve Gerber, the Fuzztones, Bart Hopkin, Harry Partch, lutenist Nigel North, those wild Japanese robot toys from the 1980's, and every single dog in the whole wide world, plus a whole bunch of other stuff for which there just isn't room to list here...

So we are in a place where pastiche and homage are spoken, often with bite and always with verve. (Fond memory: I once saw Rick lecture to a packed house in the rotunda at the Highland Park Library on the roots of the medieval anti-witch crusades, while he played bewitching lute and performed magic tricks.) Favorites this time around are his Morriconesque "Love Theme From An Imaginary Foreign Film" and the gorgeous instrumental, "Under the Northern Stars," which gives a hint of the renaissance musician he is in another, leotarded life.

Silence! Mr. Bale Is "Thinking"!

Thank you all for coming to the associate producers meeting. 

If you've only heard Christian Bale's leaked on-set emoting, where he goes off on a poor crew member who had the nerve to walk around during his oh-so-heavy creative labors ("...kick your fucking ass! I want you off the set, you prick!"), skip Terminator Salvation. All the fireworks are on that mp3. Bale is much more wheezily dramatic when he feels his golden line to his muse has been cut by insufficiently reverent peons than in this flat, boring dud. Ironically, this is the same Bale who once casually told an interviewer that acting is so simple it can be learned in a day. His variety, maybe.

Worse than a bad day at work, the movie feels like it has possibly the highest budget-to-boredom ratio of all time. Much blame must fall on the filmmaker, the vowel-deprived McG, who directs like a T-800 robot. So incapable is he of doing anything new or interesting, as he raids every previous Terminator movie and Tom Clancy jackass fest he's ever seen, that nothing feels fresh even when he is launching gobs of molten CGI into the frame. It's no fun. The script is supremely godawful, as is to be expected from half the creative genius behind Halle Berry's Catwoman bomb. (You might think participating in that fiasco would be a slight impediment to writing future blockbusters. But no. Hollywood's like American finance: you can fail all the way to the moon, baby.)

By the second reel, I was rooting for the poor robots to hose the entire insufferable human cast. Yes the lot, from Lord High Bale on down to the cute mute ragamuffin, the wise Boomer earth mother vegan, the butt-kicking Asian sexbomb chick, the unwilling half-man half-robot and certainly the young striving 20-something hero out to prove he's fit to join this man's anti-terminator army. We are a long way from the James Cameron movies which originally made this silliness watchable. Could it be that twenty years of life in an increasingly robotic, soulless society has drained this vision of its incipient dread? Is there anything left to the myth that we will be ruled by machines when we live in the age of the real, live governator? I've seen 21st century real estate agents who look scarier than anything McG can dream up. 

From the crappy to the not-so-crappy: over the weekend, I caught the Scottish supernatural Nazis-back-from-the-grave flick Outpost (2008). At a budget of roughly 1/200th of Terminator Salvation's $200m cost, it delivers many more spills and chills, while managing to rework its own well-used cliches into something at least mildly entertaining. That the filmmakers mortgaged their house to get it made only adds to the charm. McG could learn lots watching it.

Just Say Infer-NO

Lesser-known 10th circle of hell glimpsed

Outside the LA convention center where the E3 gaming expo is being held, redneck Christians are protesting the Dante's Inferno video game. They don't want hell taken lightly. "My high score," says one sign, "is in heaven." Proselytizing gold, that one.

You can understand their fear, which is somewhat different to the usual proprietary hands-off-our-symbolism of Catholics, say, offended by The Last Temptation of Christ or Godard's Hail Mary. This goes deeper, past denominational wrinkles to the mythological core: take away the boogeyman, make him easy to whup, and supernaturalism is a much harder sell. The brimstone crowd needs an indomitable evil. If you can beat their all-time baddie with a lightsabre, what use have you for their long-haired superhero sky god?

Religious myths depend on tradition for power, but in our visual age they are at a disadvantage. Walking on water wowed 'em, as a story, two millennia ago. Today that sounds slightly less banal than one of David Blaine's dumb feats. Advances in the fantastic, or adjustments to what an age considers fantastic as well as how it consumes such imagery, chip away at classic omnipotence style. Video games are the first experiential form outside of drugs to give their users god-like powers. That's what the humbugs should worry about. How are you going to keep them down on the farm when they've shot lasers out of their eyes?

Games, of course, now outsell movie tickets, DVDs and CDs. It's wrong to think of them as mere entertainment. They're the predominant expression of American culture, or more accurately, of international digital culture, which has fused with ours. Their mythic underpinnings vie with their mission to coax floods of endorphins into coach potato brains. I would argue that in their enactments of rage, salvation and endless slaughter they say more about American dreams and desires in 2009 than do baseball, The NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams or the two-party political system. Their gravitational pull on the 21st century mind may be enormous.

I doubt they're either as baleful as their foes say or as benign as their addicts hope. Undeniably they are what we are now: visual, post-literate, sensation-bound, honking mad and able to jack in to our id with the push of a button. Speaking of id, let it be known I like my video baddies steeped in old-school Lovecraft style as is to be expected when your dog is named after John Carmack (as much in admiration of his coding artistry as of his humanity). I will give Dante's Inferno a go, without a care for heaven or hell.

Making The World Safe For Facebook

Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the tit shift

Is there anything drearier than a young prude?

Yes, a professional young prude:

The 26-year-old Stanford grad is one of some 150 people the young company employs to keep the site clean—out of a total head count of 850. Facebook describes these staffers as an internal police force, charged with regulating users' decorum, hunting spammers and working with actual law-enforcement agencies to help solve crimes. Part hall monitors, part vice cops, these employees are key weapons in Facebook's efforts to maintain its image as a place that's safe for corporate advertisers—more so than predecessor social networks like Friendster and MySpace. 

That's Newsweek in "Walking The Cyberbeat" lauding Facebook's "porn cops," the crew seen above, as they go about their work days with lips pursed and mouse hand poised, making the deletions that will keep the social networking site safe for corporate advertising. For performing this Winston Smith-meets-Ruth Buzzi work, these recent grads do OK:

Behind all these actions is a team of employees who set guidelines and make judgment calls, each earning in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year—making "porn cop" one of the quirkier entry-level jobs to emerge in the Silicon Valley economy. 

"Quirkier"-- when did that come to mean more pathetic?  Sure, it's a lousy economy, you take what you can get.  What a waste of minds, let alone seats in colleges, though, if we're sending people to school only in order to train tomorrow's areola hunters. The only more depressing example I've heard recently is a friend's friend's kid getting a job through the Obama gravy train. Idealistic campaign worker, change you can believe in, making history, etc. He's now riveting together Homeland Security press releases. Given the choice between Facebook and the vee-haf-ways people, I'd probably rather click the OBSCENE button all day long.

Maybe these folks hate their jobs, maybe they love them, who knows? Newsweek's too busy making it sound like derring-do to ask anyone; not that the answer is likely to be, "Yes, when I removed the shot of that guy in the chaps with an ass like the lid of the Popemobile, I knew this was why I studied history." Clicking through naughty Facebook pages admittedly beats what I did at their age. When the economy sucked in the 80s and I had yet to cobble up enough credits to graduate, I sold shoes. Millionaire TV news bimbos, banker-slavers, pampered athletes and Saint Paul's coked-up scandahoovian elite stuck out their dogs for the cool embrace of a Cole Haun, which I obligingly squirmed onto their toesy woesies in the usual sad bid for commission. Tennessee Williams, who also sold shoes for a spell and decided those years didn't count, would later subtract the time when giving his age.

How can this tit-nitpicking be economical? Facebook has yet to earn a cent. Not that I'm trying to downsize anyone, but really, people do this kind of thing for free. Ask any librarian. $50K to censor seems like dear pay for work that has been done down the ages, from Milton's era to ours, by simpletons, busybodies, bitter pensioners, seething mobs, vituperative churchmen and so on, with remuneration only the flames in their eyes and a happy clenching in the bowels. It's a vast dishonorable tradition. Facebook's clueless. Out there, beyond the darkness on the edge of town, is a congress of sere and vengeful fogies who'd gladly devote their every free minute as canaries in the coal mines of exposed flesh.

Yes, I know it's called Facebook and not Arsebook. So? Why glamorize a grubby gig? Half the trouble here is Newsweek being so approving, so panting, in its usual conceit of having located the cutting edge.  (News magazine trend-hopping can be a millstone of embarrassment. Back in those heady post-9-11 days, Newsweek's resident fuckwit Jonathan Alter got excited about torture, declaring himself all manned-up and ready at last to think the unthinkable.*  That sure worked out well.)  But today in newsmagazine land, the edge only gets blunter as the readers thin out along with the ad pages. There's desperation for anything that can bring the audience back. Maybe that's why the article has the anti-porn posse posing like a TV crime-show cast, unless they've all watched so much CSI that the pack-of-uptight-dicks look just comes naturally.

--

* His pro-torture piece ran the very same week FOX's 24 debuted; Alter, you might say, cut Jack Bauer's umbilical cord. 

Oscar Wilde For Beginners

My Sony PRS-505 is a real treat, easily my favorite all-time gizmo.

No more dead-tree books for me if I can get them digitally. I realize this won't be universally true, ever, especially as my tastes are eclectic and often far from the commercial norm; but it's going to be more possible as time goes by. No, I'm not expecting Thomas Bernhard in digital form any time soon. But I should point out it wasn't cheap or easy getting him in paper, either. So there.

Generally, shopping at the Sony eBook Store is pretty painless. I do it by booting into Windoze on the Mac. Are prices fair? Not fair enough, as reflects a top-heavy corporate publishing world heaving under its profit demands. (Something like the mp3 revolution will soon set it straight.) But as weighed against waiting on a book I want to read now and as against buying a smelly used copy, it's a value proposition I accept. I've bought a couple books from Sony in the month I've had my Reader -- Gary Shteyngart's delicious satirical novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Andrzej Sapkowski's droll arcane fantasy "witcher" stories, The Last Wish.) As the image above from the Sony store shows, though, there are still a few small kinks to work out.

Choosing the Sony Reader wasn't hard. The community at Mobileread.com was helpful for model comparisons and answering questions. The Sony technology I've owned has performed well (indeed more reliably than Apple hardware), and its marginally more open platform for ebook formats was a critical advantage. I didn't see myself being tethered to Amazon.com, figuratively or literally by way of its Whispernet. The Kindle has lock-in written all over it.

The Sony experience? Invisible, as it should be.  The e-ink is gorgeous in a just-minted way, and the page turning swift.  Holding a leather cover (detachable from the slender Reader) is at least as pleasant as holding a paperback and much lighter than a hardcover.  I find the page-turning buttons a small weak point: ergonomically positioned, some click louder than I'd like. This matters when you are trying not to wake up your dear, light-sleeping wife. But as I say the device is lovable, in the way an Eames chair is lovable: beauty and practicality merge in it like fond hands entwined.

Of course to read ebooks is fairly controversial in some quarters. Denunciations abound. Many of these are gurgles from a vanishing world, a few nostalgic to the point of preciousness or crabby in their demand for the old order. 

"Decimation of context," as electronic culture foe Sven Birkerts thunders in The Atlantic Monthly online, is a fair complaint.  Some context vanishes when physicality elides into the digital. My pal Nik, for instance, showing me his own handicraft, a book bound by hand; that's a context no ebook device will ever broach.  The ancient texts my philologist friend Evelyn has been translating and annotating for decades; again, context.  Even my old childhood paperback copy of The Fellowship of the Ring (the first place I encountered the name W.H. Auden), handed down from one reader to the next, provides qualities that will go missing from ebooks: linkages, associations, book sharing, even the sour passport of must. But grousing about context is also more -- it's sneakily an appeal for authority to be kept in someone very much like, oh, say, Birkerts, a critic, scholar and administrator. The context most feared to be in danger may be his own.

Much in the same spirit was lit-crit giant Harold Bloom's earlier denunciation of the Internet as a place where there are no "intellectual and aesthetic standards of judgment." (So?  Even offline, Bloom finds this to be true. Visiting at Stanford in the late 90s, he perceived opposition to his ideas at a debate as so "abusive" that he ordered opposing scholars off the stage.) Bloom has since gone on to deplore ebooks. It's wildly hard for these old men to accept the world changing.

Hard for all of us, in truth, sometimes. Stick to paper if you must. That's a country for old men.

Swine Flu . . . And You!

Worried?

I can think of worse ways to go, but I'm rather fond of staying.

Hell, only this week did I discover Morton Feldman's music.  The Viola In My Life.  I've heard it just twice so far.  No fair!