Month: April 2013

Laura Bennett is unimpressed by Vice magazine’s new HBO show of the same name:

“Vice” mostly peddles an aggressive nihilism, an undifferentiated stream of brutal images and events. By the second episode, all the gunshots and explosions have begun to sound as phony and rote as special effects. The thinness of context makes the trauma feel mostly atmospheric, all this highly specific misery and atrocity blending into a single panorama of carnage. War becomes a series of assaultive clips and soundbites, the sum reduced to its parts. So the world is screwed, the government is corrupt, war is a desolate waste. Child soldiers, enslaved sex workers, a cross-dressing basketball star befriending a heinous dictator: It is all sad and mystifying and strange.

Willa Paskin’s view:

Despite showing some very gruesome imagery— a real decapitated head, for example— and having a swaggy, “we’re so hip we send our reporters into dangerous places looking like they just rolled out of bed” self-aggrandizement, “Vice”  is fundamentally earnest: war is terrible, these situations are totally effed up, American foreign policy positions are generally right. The series, according to the voice-over that plays at the beginning, is out to expose the “absurdity of the modern condition,” but it doesn’t really fixate on the “absurdity,” or not much more than any news outlet sending dispatches from dangerous places.

Marah Eakin adds:

Serious journalists had been in Pakistan, Angola, and North Korea for years, so what made Vice think that because it sent some tattooed kids wearing jeans to a war torn area that it was reporting serious news and not just promoting “what the fuck” tourism. With [“Vice”], that question looms large and is never really answered.

Toby Young reflects on a social class quiz that Manchester University created for the BBC (one of many spoofs is seen above):

One advantage of moving beyond the socio-economic definition of class is that you end up with a less inflammatory portrait of modern Britain. Yes, the social elite are quite numerous, but it’s better to belong to a four million-strong group than be bracketed with the dreaded ‘1 per cent’. … Seven different classes also feels more accurate than the usual three, even allowing for such sub-categories as lower-upper-middle (the class George Orwell said he belonged to). The more there are, the easier it is to move between them and the harder it is to keep track of who is a member of which one. That chimes with the general sense that class has become less important in the past 25 years.

Jenny Diski details how class tests were applied in the past:

You looked, you listened, you sniffed the air. And there it was, at 60 paces. Along, of course, with the telltale signs of arrivisme or decline, everyone with an exquisitely precise social degree of their own as obvious as the nose on their face, the first syllable uttered, the cut of their jacket.

It was as easy to know as it was intricate, the British class system. Provided you were born to it. But those of us who didn’t exactly fit because our parents or grandparents still spoke with foreign accents learned pretty quickly how to spot the finest distinctions. Even an Australian classmate knew, at my boarding school, when I tried to join the drama club, that with the wrong accent, I ‘would only be any good at playing maids’.

Nigeness contemplates “the lost richness of the English class system”:

Once among the glories of our national life, this endlessly complex and subtle system (or rather organism) gave us all our best comedies and most of our best fiction, while also proving a remarkably effective engine – and index – of social mobility, both upward and downward. (‘Was he born,’ inquires Lady Bracknell of Jack Worthing’s father, ‘into what the radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise through the ranks of the aristocracy?’). It also gave us something other than the weather to talk – and even think – about.

Noah Berlatsky reviews Alex Sayf Cummings’ Democracy of Sound, a “history of music piracy from the wax cylinders of the 1870s to the present day”:

Music has been compact and easy to reproduce since the days of sheet music. It is, moreover, intensely social: People want to share it with each other, whether by sending a YouTube URL in the 21st century, trading Grateful Dead tapes in the 20th, or copying sheet music for other singers in the church choir in the 19th.

Perhaps even more importantly, music is, and has long been, hard to pin down. A book or a painting is a physical object—but where is a song? Is it notes on paper that tell you how to sing it? Is it a live performance? Is it the recorded notes? Is a singer singing someone else’s song copying that song, or is she making a new artistic work? Turning music into property is, in other words, conceptually complicated—which is why, Cummings, suggests, struggles over intellectual property have often started, or been worked out first, in struggles over ownership of music.

Tom Shone theorizes that “great films arise when there is a triangulation between director, actor and protagonist — when all three share a spiritual umbilicus”:

[T]he Godfather is Coppola’s shadow-King as much as he is Brando’s; “One Flew over The Cuckoo’s Nest” is Milos Forman’s kiss goodbye to soviet Czechoslovakia as much as it is Jack Nicholson’s middle-finger salute to Hollywood. This also explains the airlessness that hangs over “Citizen Kane”, whose star, director and main character are already united in the singular frame of Orson Welles. What was never sundered cannot coalesce.

That’s a slang term for gay or queer in Uganda and the title of a film project about the plight of gays in Uganda, fomented in part by Tim McCarthy, a pathological videographer and fearless gay activist. If you saw “How To Survive A Plague”, you will have seen much of his unforgettable raw footage of the AIDS crisis. He now wants to go to Uganda to join Pepe Onziema and chronicle the grim reality unfolding there. I guess you could call the film, ‘How To Survive A Culture War.” Here’s the project on Kickstarter if you want to help.

After reading Antony Beevor’s The Second World War, TNC grapples with the Holocaust:

It is often said that racism is the result of a lack of education, that it must be defeated by civilization and progress. Nothing points to the silliness of that idea like the Holocaust. “Civilization” is irrelevant to racism. I don’t even know what “civilization” means. When all your great theory, and awesome literature, and philosophy amounts to state bent on genocide, what is it worth? There were groups of hunter-gatherers wandering the Kalahari who were more civilized than Germany in 1943.

In an excerpt from his new book, Cass Sunstein defends certain forms of paternalism:

Here’s a simple but striking example of the possibility that paternalism can actually increase people’s welfare. We would ordinarily expect people to be worse off if government makes it more expensive for them to purchase goods that they want. If government tells you that you have to spend more to buy a computer, a lamp, or a pair of shoes, your life will hardly be better. But empirical work suggests that there are exceptions. More specifically, cigarettes taxes appear [pdf] to make smokers happier. To the extent that this is so, it is because smokers tend to be less happy because they smoke. When they are taxed, they smoke less and might even quit, and they are better off as a result.

For various reasons, including its addictive nature, smoking is a highly unusual activity. In light of the risks of error and abuse, we have to be careful in generalizing from it. But the broader point is that in some cases, there can be real space between anticipated welfare and actual experience, leaving room for a paternalism that respects people’s ends.