Parabasis

One More Battlestar Thought Or Two

I just wanted to make it clear that I am actually quite enjoying this season thus far, even if I'm been critical of it.  I'm enjoying it much more than I did last season, where it seemed like the show had taken off in so many different directions that it had kinda lost its way. This season seems far more focused thus far, now that Earth has turned out to be kinda a Red Herring.  

I am worried that there are too many threads to possibly answer in ten more episodes, especially with this (totally awesome) mutiny going on. But in general, I'm happy with this season.

I also forgot to mention... you know what's awesome about this week's episode? The way that it's overtly about Justice and Revenge.  I mean, besides Adama litereally saying "there will be a reckoning"... Every character before they're assaulted has another character explain why they're being attacked. "Why don't we have a trial?" or "I just can't let it go" or the scene with Helo.  lLthoughI thought the guy being like "I've waited years to rape your Cylon wife!" was maybe a bit much.  

But anyway, there's a theme developing this season of people having to answer for what they've done. Throughout the show, it's seemed like the past gets Put Behind Us very easily.  So to have Lee, for example, dress down Colonel Tigh and be like "dude, what the fuck did you expect? you guys killed all of us" while also still fighting for the democratic process and for the right way forward was totally awesome. 

And we also see how Gaita is driven to do this to make up for what he did as Baltar's aide to camp.  Anyway... just an interesting theme developing.

Oh, and I could watch Pres. Roslin shouting "I AM COMING FOR ALL OF YOU!" on a loop. While eating pecan pie. And smearing it on my body.

Contra Zack Snyder

Just like this “300”sequel that we talked about. I said to them, here’s the thing, this is the way I would do it. The way I would do it is if Frank drew a graphic novel, it came out in the marketplace and people said, “That’s pretty cool.” And I read it and said, “You know what, Frank, that’s pretty cool. Maybe we’ll make this into a movie.” That is the only version – the studio wants it to be, sit with Frank, come up with an idea, write a screenplay, maybe he’ll do a graphic novel based on the screenplay. I’m like, “Yeah, I want nothing to do with that.” I have no interest in that. It would be like me going to Cormac McCarthy and going, “I have an idea for a movie: You write a book and I’ll write a movie, and you can release it. You’ll win a Pulitzer, I’ll win an Oscar. It’ll be awesome.” The attitude toward comic books, they show their hand a little bit. They would never say that about a real novelist, but they would about a comic book.

This is actually, if memory serves, how both 2001 and The Godfather were developed. In fact, in The Kid Stays In The Picture, they show an old reel of Bob Evans bragging about working with several authors to make sure their books were more cinematic-adaptation friendly prior to their publication.

What to Get Me For My Birhday

Pride And Prejudice And Zombies.  Yes this is real.

Some More Thoughts On Infinite Jest

Okay, I'm up to about page 380 now, so if you haven't gotten to there (or at least to the Eschaton section) there's some spoilers in here probably. Here are some thoughts

Mind and Body. Starting around page 120 and continuing pervasively throughout is a real Mind And Body dichotomy theme in the book. I'm reminded of DFW's essay about Federer in which he writes:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits — every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all.

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously — it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important — they make up for a lot.

So some things to think about along this theme.  Don Gately is an exaggeration of David Foster Wallace's large, ungainly body in much the way that Hal Incandenza is a an exaggeration of David Foster Wallace's incandescent mind.  In Tennis, we are told, one must in a way transcend both the Mind and the Body, you must suspend your thinking in a way that gets you to a kind of zen trance in order to overcome the limits of your body. Keep in mind Schtitt's theory that in Tennis the opponent is your self, the guy on the other side of the net is merely the vehicle to self-transcendence.

Also, drugs.  Drugs are basically the anti-Tennis, in a way. They suspend the mind to destroy the body.  Think about The Disease (which is also called The Spider) i.e. addiction. Addiction is a disease of both mind and body.  AA, as described by DFW, focuses basically not at all on the physical aspects of the disease. The way your body literally craves, is dependent on substances. It focuses instead solely on your mind and your soul, and it engages them to, in a way, transcend your physical need for the substance.

Which brings up what is probably my favorite whole section in the entire book, the list of things one learns while in rehab. Which also transitions into a long discussion of addiction tattoos, a way The Spider leaves its mark on its victims bodies.

Some of the Best And Worst Writing of the Book. I'd count the What you Learn in Rehab, Eschaton and James Incandenza senior's long drunken monologue as some of the best writing thus far in the book.  I remembered the first two, but not the last one which really is like an independent short story that detonates in the novel. Its fucking brilliant.  The way DFW captures drunken argot, the way the monologue moves from emotion to emotion, the downright Faulknerian language.  Great stuff.

I've also come across a part that I might as well say is kind of unreadable garbage, namely Madame Psychosis' broadcast at MIT.  I understand what DFW was going for in this section-- talking about hideous disfigurements while also reveling in the beauty of the words... but it just comes across as a kind of masturbatory Don DeLillo homage. I was grateful when it was over and didn't feel like it enriched my experience of the book at all. At the same time, a book of this length and diversity is going to have its ups and downs. 

The Hardest Parts to Read of the book are the not the most difficult necessarily, but the most emotionally strenuous.  I mean, did anyone else think while reading the Poor Tony section "oh god, please, just make it stop, I can't bear this anymore"?  I sure as hell did.  But that's part of the genius of it. DFW does not shy away from what Hitting Bottom looks like, and as a result we as the reader deal with some of the most intense but also enriching depictions of drug addiction I've ever read.  There's something about the lack of moralism in DFW's prose, the way he just describes what is going on in technical detail that makes it horrible but also humanizes it. You feel for Poor Tony, and its quite a feat that DFW is able to make you do that while also not shying away from Poor Tony's more repulsive traits.

Another one: Joelle's overdose at the party. Oy vey. 

At some point in the book, DFW makes the point that all addiction stories are fundamentally the same, but that's kind of beside the point. And sure enough, he's already filled the book with story after story of addiction and Bottom and they all are on some level the same. Erdeddy, Joelle, Poor Tony. Their stories are remarkably similar. But no less compelling.

Who is narrating this f*ing book? I don't know if anyone else noticed this, but in the Eschaton section Michael Pemulis breaks in to dictate on of the endnotes.  Okay, so far so funny, but he mentions that Hal Incandenza is pretentiously narrating the section in third person.  But this is the thing... the narrator's voice hasn't changed for that section, in fact, the third person narrator's voice pretty much never changes.  Is Hal the narrator of the book? Is Hal writing the thing?  Do such questions even matter? This is one of many issues that I'm pretty sure will go unresolved by page 1000.

Battlestar Blogging, 4.5.03!

I thought this week's episode was the best of the season thus far.  I'm sure there are some of you out there going 'Isaac just likes it when there's violence and people kill people and shit" and to some extent that is sometimes true, but I also think one of the strengths of the BSG creative team is how they handle the more action-driven episodes.  They're very good at building tension while having that tension flow from and affect their characters, and they're quite good at making compact, tightly paced white-knuckle rides.  Most of my favorite BSG episodes are pretty action-driven: the Eye of Jupiter two parter, the Admiral Cane subplot, the rescue from New Caprica etc. 

The other thing is that it keeps them from having long remunerative dialogues featuring actors who aren't good enough to handle them. Case in point: The scene with Anders in tonight's episode which almost gets him back on his really butch "Oh yeah I used to sing this song. For a girl. I'm so tortured." crap but luckily he gets blackjacked and put in the brig before it can go there. 

Similarly, Cara Thrace has one boringly angsty scene where Katee Sackoff does that weird heavy-lidded-looks-like-she's-gonna-have-a-seizure thing but soon its back to her being a butch wild west gunslinger which, it bears remembering is what she was cast to do in the first place. I mention this for a moment because I think it's worth keeping in mind that a problem with long running series- especially those like BSG, 24, The Sopranos and 6 Feet Under where the level of long-term multi-season planning is pretty clearly low- is that actors are cast because they can do X, Y and Z and then as their characters grow, they are asked to do A, B and C and might not be able to do it all that well.  The way casting in television and film (and increasingly larger-budget theatre) is partly to blame for this, where people are far more interested in casting the role than the actor, everything's done by type etc. As BSG has progressed from being a character-driven action show about humans fightin' robots and trying to have a post-genocide democracy into... whatever it is now (I say that not as an insult but rathe rbeacuse the show is kind of indescribable at this point) they've run into this problem a lot.  

A few actors have managed to grow as the show needed them to.  Alessandro Juliani, Aaron Douglas, Mary McDonnell and, perhaps most surprisingly, Jamie Bember's Lee Adama (I say most surprisingly because I thought he was the weak point of the show when it started out).  Perhaps he was miscast before. Perhaps its just that his American accent has vastly improved. Who knows?

The only long running show i know to completely avoid this trap is The Wire, but that's because David Simon and Ed Burns planed the first three seasons out halfway through writing the first, and planned season four and five out midway through filming the third.  Given the way the television market works, this is patently insane, as they were planning out seasons for a low-rated show that was very very close to being cancelled from week to week.

Other things that become crystal clear in this week's episode are that Grace Park is really no longer a main character on the show and that the writers really didn't have any long term plan for Gaius Baltar's Lesbian Wiccan Sex Cult or whatever it is. After spending the entirety of Season 4.0 making strange speeches on the wireless and not really having much to do with the plot, now he goes back to being Spineless Fraud Gaius and they sort of just play the whole thing as one extended joke.  Which I didn't mind, it's just interesting to see how literally every single writer on the show has a different view of the Cult and uses it differently down to the level of irony with which it is treated.

Anyway... A good episode all around with a great Wild West Shootout Finish.  Old people kicking ass and makin' out with each other &c. Next week's episode looks frakkin' awesome.

Color Me Stoked.

One of the great sports rivalries of our time, that between Federer and Nadal, will get a new chapter this weekend when they again meet in the championship round of a grand slam. Awesomesauce.

The Human Cost of War

This is just plain sad, there's no two ways about it:

Stressed by war and long overseas tours, U.S. soldiers killed themselves last year at the highest rate on record, the toll rising for a fourth straight year and even surpassing the suicide rate among comparable civilians. Army leaders said they were doing everything they could think of to curb the deaths and appealed for more mental health professionals to join and help out.

At least 128 soldiers committed suicide in 2008, the Army said Thursday. And the final count is likely to be even higher because 15 more suspicious deaths are still being investigated.

"Why do the numbers keep going up? We cannot tell you," said Army Secretary Pete Geren. "We can tell you that across the Army we're committed to doing everything we can to address the problem."

I've got very little else to say about this. It's just deeply sad.

In Dual Honor

In honor of reading Infinite Jest and of the Australian Open, I give you Roger Federer As Religious Experience, David Foster Wallace's essay on the man for the NYTimes which, like much of DFW's writing, captures much of what there is to say on his subject in brilliant, perceptive ways.

One of the great pleasures of reading Infinite Jest is its abundance of writing about Tennis, the only sport I care at all about or enjoy watching.

Quick Question...

NYTimes lede:

Without a single Republican vote, President Obama won House approval on Wednesday for an $819 billion economic recovery plan as Congressional Democrats sought to temper their own differences over the enormous package of tax cuts and spending.

I didn't talk a lot about Obama's attempts to find compromise stimulus positions to woo GOP congresspeople because, frankly, almost every time I've criticized Obama on tactical grounds I've been very, very wrong. The man and his team and pretty damn wily when it comes to longterm tactics.

But let me ask this... what was the point ultimately of preemptively compromising with the GOP in this case? The Obama team stripped useful, good provisions out of the stimulus bill and put unnecessary tax cuts in without any guarantee of Republican support. And look what happened. I hope they've learned something today about the post-partisan American they're hoping to create. They don't have a willing dance partner.

Or as Matt says: The lesson I would hope the administration learns here is this: He needs to spend less time seeking political cover to mitigate the downside to possible policy failure, and more time trying to implement the best policies he can.

UPDATE: I am, however, encouraged by news that, having reached out his hand and gotten his wrist slapped for it, Obama is now going to make it clear to the American people exactly what the Republicans are all about:

We're starting to get a sense of how the White House plans to respond.

Pushing back against the unanimous House Republican vote against President Obama's stimulus plan, the White House plans to release state-by-state job figures "so we can put a number on what folks voted for and against," an administration aide said.

"It's clear the Republicans who voted against the stimulus represent constituents who will be stunned to learn their member of Congress voted against [saving or] creating 4 million jobs," the aide said.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the lawmakers will have to answer to their constituents. And a Democratic official added: "We will run campaigns in their districts."

What's more, Greg Sargent reports that a coalition of groups and unions, including Americans United for Change, MoveOn.org Political Action, AFSCME, and SEIU, are launching a new television ad "targeting Republican Senators and pressuring them to vote for President Obama's stimulus package."

The spot shows some arresting images of the recession -- chained up factories, empty warehouses -- and features Obama talking about our dire economic times and his economic package, an effort to harness Obama's popularity to push the plan at a time when Republicans are training their fire on House Dems, rather than the White House.

One Quick Thought On Ticket Prices

I just bought a ticket for Manhattan Theatre Club's Ruined (for Feb. 6th, if you happen to be stalking me). It cost $75.00.  Now, I don't want to go on some really big harangue about ticket prices. They're too high, we all know they're too high etc. etc. and so forth.

This is what I want to say though: The idea that we won't on some subconscious level have different, higher expectations for a $75.00 show vs. a $15.00 show is naive in the extreme.  We expect (culturally I'm sayin' here) value and price to equal out in some way, and when they don't, we tend to feel much worse about the value than we normally would.  Seeing a so-so show for $75.00 pisses me off. Seeing a so-so show for $18.00 does not. I'm more and more realizing that this (emotional) response is not one I am choosing, it's due to a set of (culturally created perhaps) assumptions about what money means and how it interacts with value.  Our audiences are going to have fairly similar assumptions when they come in to see our shows.

This is one of the many reasons why high ticket prices are self-defeating.

And yes, I know I can see all sorts of theatre for much much less if I'm willing to limit myself to off-off broadway. As much as I love off-off broadway, I'm not willing to do that.

Juan Williams and Michele Obama

During the January 26 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, NPR news analyst and Fox News political contributor Juan Williams again baselessly attacked first lady Michelle Obama, claiming that "her instinct is to start with this 'blame America' ... stuff." Williams asserted that "[i]f you think about liabilities for President [Barack] Obama that are close to him -- [Vice President] Joe Biden's up there -- but Michelle Obama's right there." Williams continued: "[S]he's got this Stokely Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going. If she starts talking, as [Townhall Magazine contributor and Weekly Standard contributing blogger] Mary Katharine [Ham] suggested, her instinct is to start with this 'blame America,' you know, 'I'm the victim.' If that stuff starts to come out, people will go bananas, and she'll go from being the new Jackie O to being something of an albatross."

-- Media Matters, January 27th, 2009

Fox News' Juan Williams asserted of Michelle Obama's upcoming speech at the DNC: "Well, she's got to be herself, but I do not think she can go for it all out in terms of this kind of militant anger that she sometimes uses." Williams gave no examples of what he claims to be "this kind of militant anger" that Michelle Obama "sometimes uses." 

-- Media Matters, August 25th, 2008

Williams is one of the most vocal critics of Hip-hop; of what right-leaning black pundits refer to as "street-culture." I see little that's different in what Williams is saying about Michelle from what you might hear from Young Jeezy. This isn't an isolated statement about something someone said last year, it fits into an established narrative of who black women are. Rather than being the hyper-sexualized Jezebel popular in rap music, she's portrayed as the masculine ball-buster, the kind of women ignorant men write "why I don't date black women" essays about, trying to convince themselves that there's something rational about hating the kind of woman who gave birth to you. Williams' statement makes me angry not because it's about Michelle, but because it's so manifestly not about her, but about black women in general....when people talk about Michelle like this, they're talking about this universe of brilliant, accomplished black women who never seem to get their due. They're talking about the women I know; my mother, my aunts, my cousins. And it makes me furious.

-- A. Serwer, TAPped, January 27th, 2009

A Washington Post reporter who wrote a widely quoted column criticizing the accusations of sexual harassment against Judge Clarence Thomas has been disciplined by the newspaper for his own conduct toward female colleagues and has apologized to the staff, The Post reported today.

The 37-year-old journalist, Juan Williams, said in an open letter to The Post's newsroom on Friday that his conduct had been "wrong" and "inappropriate."

Several female employees had complained that Mr. Williams had harassed them with sexually explicit and hostile comments, and the newspaper investigated those complaints.

-- NYTimes, November 3, 1991

"-It's a dangerous, dangerous thing to make a living running your mouth."

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates, January 28th, 2009

In The Interest Of Fairness...

And sorry for the lack of posting this week, I have two pretty big applications due this Friday and I'm busy writing essays left right and center.

Anyway, in the interest of fairness, here are two recent opinion pieces coming out strongly against centralizing arts policy in the US government under one high ranking position (aka the Arts Czar which could be a Minister of Culture type cabinet level position or a special advisor to the President or whatever).

The first is from the Wall St. Journal, the second is from the Richmond Times-Dispatch.  I find both of the pretty damn unconvincing. The Times-Dispatch raises the only anti-centralization point that gives me any sense of pause which is... won't increased government support and action w/r/t the arts inevitably lead down the road at some point to censorship and interference? Which is something I think we need to grapple with further.

I will also say I think in general arts advocates have not done a great job of laying out why we need an Arts Czar or some form of centralized Arts Policy Person in place in the Executive Branch, something I tried to do here.  The petition, for example, doesn't lay out what an Arts Czar would do. This opens up the door to all sorts of straw manning. You would think reading either of the above opinion pieces that there's a concrete job description that everyone's coalesced around. There isn't. What there is is a feeling in the zeitgeist, something people are agitating for that still remains somewhat vague.  (For more on what such a position could do and how the stimulus might work to help the arts, here's an overview article from the Times).

Quote of the Day II

"They could never make a James Bond movie like any of the Bourne films.. Because Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people. He's repulsive."

-- Matt Damon

I mean... i suppose when you put it that way... 

Quote of the Day

"Now, my job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect. I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries ... the largest one, Indonesia. And so what I want to communicate is the fact that in all my travels throughout the Muslim world, what I've come to understand is that regardless of your faith – and America is a country of Muslims, Jews, Christians, non-believers – regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.

And my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy."

-- Barack Obama (h/t)

Advice for Playwrights

By Adam Szymkowicz. This may be my favorite blog post he's written like ever.

The Best Inaugural Photo Ever

Seriously check it out.

Battlestar Blogging

I thought this week's episode felt stretched. It was like every minute or two there was an ad break. This is odd, because a lot of things happen plot-wise, happily none of them having to do with Ellen Tigh.

No good turn goes unpunished in Battlestar, or at least no good man goes un-ground-down.  I just feel bad for The Chief now.  He really was- is- one of the few truly decent people on the show (and Aaron Douglas is one of the show's best actors) and what happens? He winds up trapped in a loveless horrible marriage to a woman he got pregnant only to have her die and have to know that  (a) he's a cylon, (b) he's not his baby's father.  Ouch.

This episode is basically (if you watched the Scenes From The Next) set up for next week's episode, when the attempted revolt of the Tilium ship grows into a full scale mutinee lead by Felix Gaeta.  It's been interesting to see Gaeta's turn as a character, if for no other reason than Alessandro Juliani is actually a good enough actor to handle what the writers want done with the character.

Unlike... okay, I have to say it, I said it last season and got in trouble, revised my opinion but I'm back where I was. Katee Sackoff. Her performance is overwrought, actory and boring.  I understand that it's pretty fucking hard to play a character who finds out that she's dead and may be a mystical being there's not a lot of sense memory to draw on there. But Sackoff plays Starbuck as "tough" and "troubled" and "dramatic" and "miserable" as opposed to being and of those things.  her one brief scene with Gaeta was really quite tiresome. Part of this is not her fault. The writers have been playing the same one note with her character ever since they got off New Caprica and i'm just fucking sick of it. 

And that in summation is my thoughts on last week's episode. Also, Battlestar has to have (in the words of my girlfriend) "the worst" background acting evah.  That scene with Baltar's cult? That's some bad extras directing, let me tell ya what.

I have now realized as well that i have to stop watching the previews because they have moved into giving away the entire plots of the episodes.

Quick Movie Rec

Reprise, a Swedish film I had always meant to see last year but never did.  It's really really good, I think people who like Michael Winterbottom will especially get a kick out of it.  It takes several well worn subjects-- male friendship, being an artist, young romance etc.-- but treats them with a real humane but not too-sunny attitude.  It's also beautifully filmed. 

You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

Roundabout's description of its mission, from its website:

 At the very heart of our work is our commitment to teaming great theatrical works with the industry's finest artists to re-energize classic plays and musicals. In 1995, we expanded our mission to include the development and production of new works by today's great writers and composers. The production of these new works, alongside the production of classics, enables Roundabout to embody the crossroads of American theatre. 

Roundabout's latest announced addition to its 2009-2010 season according to the Times:

The company will offer the first Broadway production of “Bye Bye Birdie” since its original bow in 1960. Robert Longbottom (“Flower Drum Song”) is the director and choreographer for the new production. 

I really cannot see any non-financial justification for doing "Bye Bye Birdie".  Not only is it bad, there's no compelling historical or conceptual reason for reviving it.  "Bye Bye Birdie" is a show a great number of Americans have experienced largely through lower-rent touring productions and their area middle schools and, not to sound like too much of a dick, but that's a perfectly appropriate way to experience it. I doubt lavishing Roundabout's considerable wealth on a production of "Bye Bye Birdie" is going to help audiences discover some new hidden something in the show.

Ah well, I guess if this is what it takes to fund Roundabout Underground, we should just grin and bear it, but count me unconvinced that the latter requires the former.

Quote of the Day

The Israeli military offensive was sold to the world on several different premises. The operation was supposed to destroy Hamas human infrastructure, convince the people of Gaza to overthrow the government, and destroy smuggling along the border. It's fair to say that none of those objectives have been met; Hamas fighters famously melted away in the face of the IDF, the people of Gaza show no apparent interest in kicking Hamas to the curb (although it's early), and smuggling resumed as soon as the bombs stopped falling. Indeed, the IDF wasn't even able to stop the rocket fire, until Hamas declared its own ceasefire. The offensive has, rather, demonstrated that the Israeli political system produces dangerous, erratic, and strategically suspect policy

-- TAPped's Robert Farley

All I'll say about this is that Robert Farley calmly and rationally evaluates Israel's stated policy goals, provides links supporting his assertions, and measures those stated goals against the actual end results of Israel's recent invasion of Gaza in a fair-minded way.  Clearly, he is an anti-semite on the order of say Osama Bin Laden or and his voice on this issue should be silenced lest a second Holocaust occur inside the Beltway. We can't have people pointing out that Israel slaughtered a bunch of Palestinians- 50% of whom were civilians- simply to demonstrate that they could whenever they wanted to and no one would stop them.