Month: December 2012

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 12.50 pm

Brian Blickenstaff disrobes at a co-ed naked bathhouse in Baden-Baden, Germany:

[A]s I looked around, my gaze would inevitably fall upon the naked bodies of the other bathers – and, well, it got me thinking. Throughout our lives, how often are we actually naked? Excluding showering and (for some) sleeping, it happens pretty seldom, right? I mean, the only other time we shed clothing is when we’re getting intimate. Try as we might, it becomes difficult to divorce intimacy from the act of being nude, and this coupling casts a certain strange, erotic shadow over the proceedings at a place like Friedrichsbad.

Don’t get me wrong, there was no hanky-panky going on (and frankly, there’s not a place in Friedrichsbad where it could). I only mean that it creates a social situation that’s ripe for misinterpretation. Turning to look at a person when he or she enters a room becomes complicated because anything anybody does—those perfectly normal, friendly signals we give to one another all the time without even thinking—is re-routed through this erotic zone in our brain that has been activated by the absence of clothes and which we can’t really turn off. So a casual glance becomes a potential check-out. A friendly smile is now a creepy wink. That’s what it seemed like at first, anyway.

A silly way to use science:

Dan Duray is unimpressed with John Updike’s recent collection of art criticism, Always Looking:

Most art writing tends to be decisive, nuanced and centered around a few key ideas that build to some kind of conclusion, like any book or movie review. Updike positions himself as more of an explorer, in a meandering, Lewis and Clark vein, cataloging each and every thing he saw as he walked through a room, squeezing in biographical details and descriptive flourishes where he can. He’s a wordy tour guide, riffing on each and every painting, so in the room that even the "zombified wearers of pedagogical headsets" do not escape his adjectival assault. It’s informative, if that’s the word for it, but it proceeds without too many well-argued opinions about the art, and this doesn’t jibe at all with Updike’s clear knowledge of art history, or the buoyancy of his fiction. …

The man who so memorably turned breasts into ice cream scoops in "A&P" seems like he’s trying too hard when he describes not reality but the world as already interpreted by another artist. This is a shame, because if he’d chosen to focus his attention on a few works rather than describe everything in an exhibition, he might have been able to build to some kind of a point. Finishing one of these essays gives you little to agree or disagree with. There’s just a lingering sensation of having sort of seen the show, albeit through a haze of adverbs.

Jane Mayer has a very different response than I did. Here is where I think she hits on something important:

Despite Boal’s contentions, “Zero Dark Thirty” does not capture the complexity of the debate about America’s brutal detention program. It doesn’t include a single scene in which torture is questioned, even though the Bush years were racked by internal strife over just that issue—again, not just among human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, but inside the F.B.I., the military, the Justice Department, and the C.I.A. itself, which eventually abandoned waterboarding because it feared, correctly, that the act constituted a war crime. None of this ethical drama seems to interest Bigelow.

The movie is careful not to take a stand on torture. Can you imagine that in any other context?

One has to wonder whether any morally serious director would have chosen a morally-neutral approach to torture if she were portraying torture practiced by, say, the Iranian terror state, or by Nazis or Communists? The techniques are exactly the same. Is not taking a stand as you present such evil itself an endorsement? My sense is that Bigelow and Boal talked to some of those war criminals who did the torture and since torturers have to find some way to justify their acts, and because they are modern Americans fighting terror, the director simply did not have the courage to confront them with the fact that they belong in jail and hell for what they did.

To connect finding the name of the courier in any way with torture is, as Jane insists, factually untrue:

As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent first reported, shortly after bin Laden was killed, Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., sent a letter to Arizona Senator John McCain, clearly stating that “we first learned about ‘the facilitator / courier’s nom de guerre’ from a detainee not in the C.I.A.’s custody.” Panetta wrote that “no detainee in C.I.A. custody revealed the facilitator / courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts.”

Then this:

At one point, the film’s chief C.I.A. interrogator claims, without being challenged, that “everyone breaks in the end,” adding, “it’s biology.” Maybe that’s what they think in Hollywood, but experts on the history of torture disagree. Indeed, many prisoners have been tortured to death without ever revealing secrets, while many others—including some of those who were brutalized during the Bush years—have fabricated disinformation while being tortured. Some of the disinformation provided under duress during those years, in fact, helped to lead the U.S. into the war in Iraq under false premises.

Yes, but a chief CIA torturer would defend his crimes in such a fashion, wouldn’t he? The pro-torture claims are not authorial commentary, but embedded in characters.

I would have preferred an anti-torture movie, with characters in the government protesting, as so many did, against our descent into barbarism. Bigelow couldn’t summon the moral courage to show that – and it was integral to the full picture. But a director has such artistic license. And what she did do – which, to my mind, rescues the film –  is simply expose the lie at the heart of the Bush administration: Abu Ghraib was “not America.” Under Bush and Cheney, it was – and far worse.

You simply cannot watch that movie and pretend that torture didn’t occur – no euphemisms, lies, or denial can take that away. Maybe a democracy needs simply to confront the fact of what it has done before it can being to process it. Bigelow doesn’t process it; she doesn’t move the ball forward. She simply lays it out in public. It’s an act of cowardice expertly delivered. But it is our own cowardice as a nation that has been worse.

And it is not, as I have written, in my mind, a pro-torture film.

Katherine A. Powers reviews Robert Gottlieb's Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens:

Dickens rejoiced in his children when they were young and gave them a merry time, with the high point of every year being, as in his stories, Christmas. But soon enough the warping effect of his own disordered childhood showed itself, and he began to discern in his sons what he loathed and feared most: passivity, lack of direction, and fecklessness, the qualities that had put his parents in a debtors' prison and led them to deposit his young self in the infamous blacking factory. And while he believed that the germ of the financial irresponsibility that marked a number of his sons came from his side of the family, he was convinced  that the odious lethargy and purposeless drifting he also found in them was inherited from his wife, Catherine. Beginning with the eldest, Charley, in whom he saw Catherine's "indescribable lassitude of character," he really spared only Henry (a success from the start) in his laments over "deficiencies in energy and attitude," even going so far as to say he wished Sydney, his fifth son, were dead.

Anthony Gardner rants against "the use of the plural where the singular has always been used before, and indeed would make much more sense":

I first noticed the shift a few months ago when another speaker on Radio 4 came out with "geographies". For a while I thought it might be confined to academia; then I realised that it was creeping into the high-faluting vocabulary beloved of arts organisations. One spoke proudly of its "artistic outputs" and what the public wanted "in terms of outcomes".

Even so, I felt reasonably confident that this would never spread to the world at large. But then, suddenly, I found new examples coming at me every day: watching the YouTube video of a political seminar, I heard a historian pontificating about "socialisms" and "desirable futures"; opening an email from a novelist, I discovered a blithe reference to "fictions"; browsing a press release from the ICA, I came upon "the interrelationships between African and European political histories". …

So what lies ahead? Will we be subjected to "contradictory thinkings", "beautiful lyricisms" and "heartfelt mournings"? Almost certainly. The nonsenses of using plurals are merely in their infancies.

Hitchens passed away a year ago today. In 2010, Michael reviewed Hitch’s memoir:

Hitchens ends with a stirring and necessary call to arms, upbraiding those who believe that free speech needs to be constrained, that we in the West must learn to be “respectful” of the theological Other: “More depressing still, to see that in the face of this vicious assault so many of the best lack all conviction, hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over with murderous exaltation.”

As I read these words, Viacom was censoring South Park for satirizing the supposed prohibition on depictions of Mohammed; the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who had drawn the Muslim Prophet, was assaulted during a lecture on free speech and soon thereafter had his house set ablaze; and a Danish newspaper that had reprinted the famous 2005 cartoons issued another groveling apology to those “offended” by pen and ink drawings, promising that the images would never again befoul their pages.

For the unreflective and rigidly ideological, those who insist upon ignoring Hitchens for his pungent atheism, his promotion of war against Iraq, or his rejection of Zionism, be aware that you will miss a book that is touching, enraging, wonderfully crafted, and brimming with gossipy anecdotes. And it answers the question posed by The New Yorker during the darkest days of the Iraq War: What happened to Christopher Hitchens, the man who had a crush on Thatcher, supported wars in the Falklands, Balkans, and Iraq, and scoffed long ago at Alexander Cockburn’s sympathy for the Soviet Union? 

Nothing much, actually.

Read Michael’s writing for the Beast here, including the piece that he mentions above about great mentors. Watch Michael’s previous videos here, here, here, here, here and here.