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I have no memory of ever seeing this video, on Friday Night Videos or anywhere else, and it seems to me like I didn't miss much. The lead singer of this one-hit wonder band, David & David, occasionally appears bored out of his skull. Still, when I heard the song on a local radio station the other day, all sorts of late 80s memories came flooding back, mostly involving Miami Vice. There was a harsh, glamorous, cynical drug chic to that era. I would guess that before members of the mainstream suburban audience like myself--and, more importantly, the corporations that marketed our entertainment to us--woke up to just how devastating an effect crack was having on America's cities, drugs were portrayed, so far as I remember anyway, as mostly a cool-bad accoutrement of the white upper classes. Which I suppose they in part still are, and always have been, but in the 80s we had Nancy Reagan teaching us all to "Just Say No," and so of course the folks in Hollywood had to present their temptations to us in neon lights and pastel colors. This video couldn't be more perfectly aligned with that aesthetic, right down to the grainy footage and the streaking street lights. Killer guitar work, though.
Some years Melissa and I do well; this year, despite the expansion of the Best Picture category to 10 films, we did rather poorly. I guess I've been spending all my movie-watching time catchingup. But that's okay, because now I've seen every Oscar-bait film Hollywood will ever produce:
How many Oscar winners did you see parodied in those three and a half minutes? I caught about ten.
Once again, some flicks I've been taking in on my own lately, mostly from four days I spent keeping half an eye on a bunch of students at a Model United Nations conference in St. Louis the week before last, but some just when I stayed up late after my wife crashed early with a headache.
48 Hrs.: how could I have missed this one for so many years? Not quite as fun as some of the buddy-cop films which followed in its wake, but better than more than a few others. Walter Hill's penchant for abrupt violence that really doesn't square with the film built around those set pieces is on good display (I'm thinking of the pointlessly long fist fight between Murphy and Nolte in particular), but overall, a hell of a fun flick. I'd seen Murphy's infamous "I'm a nigger with a badge!" scene before, but it was good to see the whole thing in context.
The Barbarian Invasions: an engaging drama, but most of its time was spent on the film's least engaging characters. Rémy is a fun character to watch, especially for academics like me, but the real intelligence, drama, and humor of the film is to be found in his son Dominique's manipulation of, and comments upon, issues of life and health and death in Quebec. I would have happily traded twenty minutes of tired, irony-drenched ruminations by Rémy's friends about their sex lives for just five more minutes with the hospital administrator who indignantly insists--just before accepting a bribe--that Canada is "not a third world country."
Barbarians at the Gate: an HBO film from the early 90s, long before the success of The Sopranos and all the rest raised their aspirations. Basically just a smart, well-made, tv movie, but it's certainly a much better filmed tale of Wall Street greed than the atrocious adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities (which, in a nice touch, Laurie Johnson, RJ Nabisco bigwig F. Ross Johnson's wife, is seen reading in several scenes). And, of course, watching James Garner chewing the scenery is always a pleasure.
Bon Cop, Bad Cop: another film based, in part, in Quebec, this one strongly recommended by Jacob Levy. And I agree; a good buddy-cop flick, better than 48 Hrs., in fact. But even given buddy-cop conventions, I found myself very curious about how the film's strange mix of in-some-ways-predictable, in-some-ways-surprising, stereotypes played out for home audiences. I mean, the genre is hardly an enlightened one, but I didn't expect a film out of Canada to portray every single woman on screen as either a helpless incompetent, a whiner and a screamer, or as desperately desiring to sleep with one of the two main characters. Maybe Canadians really are Americans after all.
Brokeback Mountain: a very good film; I'm glad I finally saw it. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous, and everything that was said about Heath Ledger's terrific portrayal of the emotionally stunted, deeply confused Ennis Del Mar is correct. As I seem to recall several people observing at the time, it's not actually that much of a gay movie; there were only a few scenes where the fact that the two star-crossed lovers were men took on truly serious narrative significance. Frustrating that so much hand-wringing was elicited for such a basically straightforward drama.
I'm Not There: I'm sorry, but I call this one a failure. I suppose I can understand what Todd Haynes was trying to do, but I simply couldn't relate to any of the different characters which they come up with as...what do you want to call them? Avatars of Bob Dylan? Whatever. I don't need an ordinary biopic, and I don't mind using his music itself as a frame for the story, but for heaven's sake, put a story on screen...and if you're not, make it stylized and self-referential enough to be interesting in how it tells itself. But this film was neither. I hope Bob Dylan himself doesn't approve of these kind of misbegotten hagiographies; I'll think less of him if he does.
Klute: it's a crime that I've not seen this before: a first-rate thriller and a wonderful study of two finely written and performed characters. Jane Fonda's Bree Daniels isn't particularly sexy, but is rather compelling in her charisma and self-confidence, which works perfectly, making her struggle against falling in love with Donald Sutherland's John Klute that much more believable and forceful. And as for Klute himself--man, what a creation. The perfect smart, loyal, 1971 middle-aged buttoned-down straight man; you can imagine his whole life one of patiently, wisely, watching and waiting, perfectly capable of dealing any situation that came his way. I'd love to image Klutemeeting Harry Caul from The Conversation.
Nobody's Fool: a very slight story, really, without nearly enough narrative oomph to make me care all that much about the fate of any of the characters. But the characters themselves...man, what a well-acted bunch. There's not a false note in the whole film. The way that Paul Newman's Sully gets distracted at his old house, has to be reminded that he's supposed to be watching his grandson Will by his miserable boss, takes his grandson home to his estranged son Peter and tries to make it up to him: the whole thing is quiet, and may not add up to much, but every note of it rings tragically true.
The Rookie: not my usual sort of film, but I'm more than willing to check out feel-good films on occasion, the same way I sometimes like movies about animals and little kids. In this case, every step in this inspirational Disney flick was predictable, but some of the steps were worth a look. Long ago, I interviewed for a job in that part of Texas, and drove out there with a friend from Dallas; the scenes with Dennis Quaid practicing his pitch over and over again in an empty field captures the lonely, plain beauty of those stretches of country pretty well.
An Unreasonable Man: hey, I make no apologies (partly because I've made them before)--I like Ralph Nader (more evidence here and here). I recognize that he's often self-righteousness, frequently narrow-minded, that he holds grudges, seems to lack much appreciation for any of the context of the work he and his staffers have done for decades, and that he's probably mainly operating off spite and pride these days. Meaning...what? That his enormous legislation accomplishments should be dismissed? That he isn't fundamentally correct about the relationships between corporations and democratic citizenship? I don't think so. And this film puts all that into balance. Of course, I doubt that most of those who pulled their hair out over Nader back in 2000 would consider the movie to be a "fair" treatment of Nader's impact, but as I saw it, it didn't shy at all away from his monomania, and it gave plenty of air time to those who are convinced that Nader stole the 2000 election from Gore (despite conclusive data to the contrary). The movie's controlling thesis was that Nader is an admirable, "unreasonable," man, and it proves its case well.
Herewith, some thoughts about the arguments taking place over at the Front Porch Republic, on the occasion of its first birthday.
About a month ago, Harvey Mansfield--one of the very few living scholars of political theory whose ideas and arguments have had a real-word impact--wrote a thoughtful essay for The Weekly Standard, alleging that the central problem with President Obama's and the Democratic party's determination to reform our nations health insurance systems was that it betrayed a love for "progress" over a love for "liberty." Mansfield writes: "[Obama's] politics is apolitical; it wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible. Only through this conception can one recognize, and understand, the pretentiousness of wanting to be the last president to take up health care."
The idea of putting an end to politics would--and should--of course inflame anyone who subscribes to at least some of the principles avowed by FPR, as I do; after all, while localism certainly does involve a purely aesthetic or historical affection for one's own community, it also involves the political recognition that it is within one's own community that genuine democracy, and real self-government, is possible. To attempt to "put an end to politics," in the name of moving the whole conversation forward to some progressive end, would thus appear to be an attack on one of the central purposes of localism, and there something that anyone who writes for Front Porch Republic ought to oppose.
Well, William Galston--himself no slouch when it comes to scholars of political theory influencing real-world debates--provides a bit of an answer. In a strong rebuttal to Mansfield's accusations, Galston brushes aside Mansfield's specific characterization of Obama's and the Democrats' proposals as tendentious, and hones in on his basic presumption: that there is an "inherent contradiction between progress and liberty." This he simply rejects: "Simply put," Galston asserts, "removing issues from the political agenda--placing them beyond dispute--often promotes liberty."
I think Galston is correct. I think that the push against a government reform in how insurance companies offer coverage and how costs are to be controlled--about which there are, to be sure, innumerable and important political disputes--too often, and wrongly, seems to partake of an attitude which presents "liberty" primary in terms of a private contest between interests, and "progress" primary in terms of government agencies intervening (presumably in an authoritarian manner) into those private contests to "resolve" issues, and thereby take them out of the people's hands entirely. Galston summarizes this stance succinctly:
If government doesn't have the right [to intervene], then considerations of efficacy are irrelevant. Even if government could bring about a good result by acting ultra vires, doing so would be an invasion of liberty, which is the most fundamental good. Rather than invade liberty, we should be prepared to live with the consequences of government forbearance. (I note for the record that if Abraham Lincoln had accepted this view, we’d probably be presenting passports at the Virginia/Maryland border.)
I say that I think this conception of the argument between liberty and progress is wrong--and wrong in such a way that has implications for the kind of debates which keep me interested in what goes on at FPR--because I think it fails to respect the deep logic (and not just the euphonious quality!) behind the particular arrangement of terms at the top of FPR's masthead: "Place. Limits. Liberty." I think this conception (which I've yammeredabout before, and which in perhaps unavoidable in a country whose bone-deep individualism was diagnosed and fretted over by Tocqueville close to two centuries ago) fails to appreciate that liberty is often, necessarily, a positive and empowering concept, which flows from being able to (politically!) establish and "resolve" ones place, accept and work within the community limits which any such place would entail, and find greater liberty of real opportunity, action and accomplishment accordingly. Galston elaborates upon this distinction at length:
In the real world, there is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There are only specific freedoms, which differ in their conditions and consequences. FDR famously enumerated four such freedoms, dividing them into two pairs: freedom of speech and worship; freedom from want and fear. The first pair had long been recognized and enshrined in the Constitution. The second were a new formulation, and Roosevelt made them concrete when he signed Social Security into law, justifying it as a way of promoting freedom from want....The conservatives of his day dismissed the second pair as "New Deal freedoms" rather than "American freedoms." But those who have experienced the freedoms made possible by the New Deal are not so dismissive. It is often observed, rightly, that Social Security has virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly. But this noble achievement has an equally profound flip side. Throughout human history, those who reached the age where they could no longer work have typically depended on their children or on charity for their basic subsistence. Social Security broke this age-old dependency by giving the elderly a minimum degree of economic self-sufficiency, expanding their range of effective control over the conditions of their post-retirement years....
"Freedom of" points toward spheres of action in which individuals make choices--for example, which faith to embrace, or whether to endorse any faith at all. The task of government is in part to secure those spheres against interference by individuals, groups, or government itself....The other face of freedom--"freedom from"--points toward circumstances that (it is presumed) we all wish to avoid. In such instances, the task of government is, so far as possible, to immunize individuals against undesired circumstances. Here, government acts to protect not individual agency and choice, but rather an individual's life circumstances against outcomes that no one would choose, or willingly endure. It follows that the "right to choose" is but a part of freedom in the fuller sense. As a motorist, I am rightly free to choose my own route and destination. But government correctly infers that I also wish to be protected from smashing into other cars, and so restricts which side of the road I and others can drive on. My desire to avoid an accident is no less real than my desire to drive where I please....
The point is that any society that takes freedom from want and fear seriously has made collective decisions: Certain conditions are objectively bad; its citizens should not have to endure them if the means of their abatement are in hand; and individual choice is not a necessary component of, and may be a hindrance to attaining, these freedoms. The current debate over health care only underscores these truths.
It is worth noting that while Galston's formulation of this debate might strike some readers as accommodating a degree of collective action and communitarian "intervention" and "resolution" that might seem a poor fit for the United States of America (which, if true, doesn't necessary speak well for our political culture, I suspect), Galston himself has insisted that he does not believe positive liberty should be, and would not want to see it, carried too far. In an old debate with Michael Lind, in fact, Galston insisted that "freedom" was the central value for the great majority of Americans, meaning that we are all individualists of one fashion or another, and hence have to think carefully about how we want to speak of providing collective goods so that communities, families, and individuals can enjoy the liberty which a secure and supportive and fair environment can provide. He agrees with many of Lind's civic republican ideas, particularly Lind's observation that a more explicitly communitarian or "public interest" language "permits republican liberals to justify public education, policies promoting widespread economic independence, taxation, military or militia service, jury duty and voting, along with public health policies and environmental protection, without needing to show that these programs and institutions could be derived from separate, individual goods or that each individual citizen is likely to benefit"...but he concludes that, as valuable as the concept of public liberty may be, "the language of republicanism inherently looks backward to a system of economic provision and social class structure that is gone for good and that applying it to the economic and social problems of the present will often lead to damaging results." In other words, as I would say it (putting my own preferred spin on Galston's words), the revolutions of mobility, technology, and individual choice--all diagnosed long ago by Marx so very well--have so disrupted the permanence of our socio-economic ties and traditional relations that all we can do is to empower people in their chosen publics and places, rather than work to instantiate a public liberty that truly belongs to us all. There can be, of course, egalitarian provision and protection on a broad, general, even national scale, for the sake of promoting the aforementioned positive liberties...though the particulars and extent of such are and should be subject to continuous political debate (it is pretty settled that the United States will have a national defense, for example, while the debate about health insurance regulation remains unsettled). But to to really go deep into the ability and the right of a people to democratically govern themselves, to truly create a "beloved community" and truly exercise sovereignty over public things--to go, in other words, fully republican (or socialist, if you prefer)--requires, in today's world, a turn to local places, and their limits. That is where all the more general collective actions will enable the greatest, and most valued, liberty of all.
So the arguments--and they are political arguments--over what it means to value and wish to preserve one's front porch are going to continue, and they will, I think rightly, include arguments that can incorporate possibilities of action that range from the most personal and individual of decisions to some (not many, but some) that will properly involve the highest and broadest levels of government. To argue that there is something illegitimate, something by definition apolitical, and thus opposed to liberty, in an attempt to respond to a particular political issue through the national government, is no more inherently sensible, I think, than claiming it is apolitical to allow a neighborhood council to make a decision about the maintenance of the sidewalks on your street, or to allow a county election to determine policies about the sale of alcohol in your town, or to allow a state legislature to make a decision about gambling in your county. Any of those decisions could be bad, of course, and any might deserve to be protested. But to deny the value of the kind of positive, collective liberty they demonstrate (though, as I said above, I would suggest that you arguably need to see the more interventionary of those demonstrations limited to communities where the relevant scale allows the residents to express themselves more directly and democratically) is to fall, intentionally or not, into a more privatized and negative notion of liberty, one that sees it as an individual possession, and not something that also obtains in places themselves.
About a month ago, Caleb Stegall pointed to a particular taxonomy that he found to be particularly relevant to figuring out where different folks stand at the Front Porch Republic. Suggesting that while some on the left side of FPR might "make common cause against certain Classic Liberal centrists" along with localists like himself, the fact remains that folks like him and me may be "miles apart on a more fundamental level." I'm not entirely in agreement with his taxonomy (I've thought about some of my own), or his conclusion, but he's probably more right than wrong. The Jeffersonian-individualist strain in American localism (and populism too, for that matter) will probably always be far distant from (and far more common than, as well) my own preferred Laschian-communitarian strain. But we go along. And it makes for good discussions--and good politics too--all the same.
From slick, smooth, late-80s rich, African-American R&B to angry, rough, mid-80s poor, blue-eyed R&B: there's a transition for you! All hail Simply Red, the greatest British soul band of them all.
For a thirdtime, I find myself turning to the Plain People of the Internet (I believe John Holbo trademarked that phrase) to answer a dilemma I have relating to movies and politics in the classroom. This time, though, I'm going international.
In two week's time, I'll start teaching a short evening class at Newman University, almost literally next door to Friends, on "World Government Systems." As I read the course description, it really should be called "Government Systems of the World," to avoid any confusion; in any case, I'm going to be teaching it as a comparative politics course, starting with laying down some general groundwork for comparing different forms of government around the world, and then examining in depth seven or eight (I haven't quite finished the syllabus yet) different countries over the next seven weeks. The selection will be pretty standard (that is, Euro-centric) for this kind of course: Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, India, possibly Nigeria, possibly Russia, etc. What is different is that I want to require the students to experience a bit of cinematic culture along with their required readings. And so, I'm going to assign them to find and watch (and perhaps I will obtain and show a clip of, in each class) a film that comes from and/or focuses on the particular country which were are studying that day. The question is, which one?
The only selection I'm absolutely certain of is showing/requiring The Queen for Great Britain. Not only is an absolutely terrific movie, but it looks directly at the nature and limits of the constitutional monarchy in a time of popular crisis. But what should I do for any of the others? Ideally, all the other movies will be like The Queen, in that they will have something to say about the country's governing system, but I'm not sure that will be an absolute requirement; I want the films to be entertaining and to have something to connect to the students with as well. (If I didn't care about the latter, then I could just so some educational documentary.) I'm thinking about The Nasty Girl for Germany (or possibly The Lives of Others), and Ikiru for Japan. What else? Dare I require Au Revoir, Les Enfants for France? (Or maybe Indochine or The Battle of Algiers--though those are both really about the French interacting with the world beyond France, not touching on France itself.) Can I avoid showing Gandhi for India? (I really liked Slumdog Millionaire--talking about the new, post-globalization India? Or perhaps I should ask my wife for Bollywood recommendations...)
Who can resist the crazystuff which OK Go comes up with? I can't. They were saying only yesterday that this video would be everywhere within a day or two, and they're right.
Someone who is better that this (mean, I guess, both digital filmmaking and booby-trap construction) tell me: how many different shots constitute this video? Because I just can't believe it was all done in one.
I've never been much into the smooth R&B musical scene (give me funkier stuff by Earth, Wind & Fire or Stevie Wonder any day), but sometimes the whole "quiet storm" groove really grabs me. Anyway, this song did. I heard it only once or twice, when I saw the video in the summer of 1988 on MTV (my parents briefly flirted with cable when I came home from my freshman year). And then I was off on a church mission for two years to South Korea...and weirdly, this song--or whatever I could remember of it, which became less and less as the months went by--just kept gliding around the back of my consciousness. I came back to the U.S., and would occasionally embark on grand efforts to track down the song, but I couldn't remember who sang it, or its title, or hardly any of the lyrics...and besides, I was in Provo, UT, attending Brigham Young University, not exactly a place where folks familiar with Babyface Edmonds's early work were thick on the ground. It was years before I finally stumbled on to this video again. Glad I did.
I grew up in a family of boys, all of whom were five-year-olds at one point or another--indeed, I was a five-year-old myself, once. But these days I'm surrounded by girls (and emerging teen-agers), and the consciousness of little boys, and really boys in general, seems to be slipping away from me. Thankfully, AXE COP--a comic book written entirely by a five-year-old boy (though drawn by his older brother)--sets me completely straight.
"We should put these heads on a stick, and hide bombs in them." Yes, that's a smart five-year-old boy thinking, right there. It's all coming back to me now....
There are nine episodes in all, so far; do read them all. The one with the "half vampire man, half vampire baby, and half vampire kid in the middle" is our favorite.
You know, I was actually disappointed when the rapper's flunky started talking at 1:45; I found the video far more effective and persuasive when he was just doing the whole thing in pantomime.
So last week I turned to Dead or Alive, presenting it as one of the greatest examples of true flaming goodness. My friend Scott, however, sent me to this website, which suggests that I'd really only just started to scratch the surface. And I guess have to agree. I mean, among other things, how could I have ignored the original?
The aforementioned website claims Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" wins the outrageousness contest hands-down. I can't vouch for that, though, because I ran from the room screaming in horror the last time I saw it.
I've said before, that I think Obama's approach to political economy just isn't quite populist enough, or socialist enough, or radical enough--that is, perverse as it may seem, just not humble enough (in the sense of being willing to ask the American people to humble themselves enough to profoundly rethink how we build, how we finance, and how we consume in our economy)--to do justice to the situation we find ourselves in. More often, he seemed, on the contrary, quite content to work the corprorate institutions and financial establishments that be, in the hopes to turning them towards more egalitarian ends. Which is hardly a bad thing, of course: as I've also said manytimes in connection with health care reform, while I'm frustrated with how Obama and the Democrats have moved their reform proposals along, I'd still like to see them turned into law, because bankruptcies could be prevented and lives saved. But that doesn't stop me from continuing to hope that the populist Obama, the class-conscious Obama, the civic republican Obama, will re-appear.
President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.
The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”
“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”
Obama sought to combat perceptions that his administration is anti-business and trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies.
As Paul Krugman and John Judis both essentially observe, so much for sympathy for the little guy, struggling against corporate power in the marketplace. Or, as Judis summed up, "this interview shows that, in the choice between Main Street and Wall Street, [Obama's] natural inclinations lie more toward one side--and it ain’t Main Street." Depressing. Doesn't Obama know the liberaltarian moment is over? Progressive causes and libertarian/corporate causes don't go hand-in-hand anymore. Oh well; you take what you can get. And at least Ralph Nader is still out there...
Sexual ambiguity and general outrageousness abounded on the American dance-pop scene in the mid- to late-80s, of which this video is my favorite. True, it doesn't feature any kind of terribly outre dress or behavior...but it does feature Peter Burns on a horse, for heaven's sake.
If you can think of a big video hit that can beat this, I'm open to rival nominations.
Too cold for the snow and ice to melt, so I'm not riding my bike to work, which means I'm not getting my exercise. I feel slow and sluggish. Forms and committee meetings are piling up. The whole blogosphere feels the same way to me, this week: weighed down and grumpy. Perhaps the snow in Washington and New York and everywhere else the hip bloggers live is getting us all down. Perhaps we just need another good laugh--something smart, and stupid, and time-wasting, all at once. Like this:
A long time ago I forwarded this to a bunch of friends of mine for a laugh. Glen, who builds killer robots for the U.S. Navy, commented that whole thing makes perfect sense. "The corn starch is the key, of course."
That was some rough Beatles-related stuff that last couple of weeks. Now, how about a video of the single best Beatles pop song which was neither written nor recorded by the Beatles themselves? Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
The magic of the Traveling Wilburys supergroup didn't outlast Orbison's death, but it did make for one sweet album while it lasted.
My plea for help in understanding Lost, which resulted in some commenters making strong cases for the show, has put me in mind of my own occasional experiences with television program fandom. And, of course, because I can't ever just ask myself a simple question, but rather have to turn it into a ponderous, life-examining, navel-gazing blog post, I did so. And here it is. As best I can figure, these are the ten television programs I've watched in my life that I not only enjoyed the most, but which changed my viewing--and thinking--habits most. Enjoy. (List in mostly chronological order, as I encountered them.)
Sesame Street. I've talked about my fond memories of old school Sesame Street before; according to family legend, I would watch it two or three times a day (morning, afternoon, and sometimes at lunch) on a couple of different public television station back when I was three and four years old (say 1972 to 1974, or thereabouts). I can still fondly--though vaguely--remember great stories and gags from those years (didn't they once load up the whole gang on a truck and drive to Mexico to help one of Luis's cousins build a house?). As for what I learned from the basic cognitive boot-camp which Sesame Street provided, I have no idea; it's too fundamental, buried too deep. But really, wasn't that the point?
Star Trek. The original series, of course; my older brother Daniel and I would watch the reruns of TOS obsessively, on Saturday afternoons. The station in our hometown which broadcast them must not have had a license for the whole set of episodes; either that, or they played favorites. Either way, we saw some of them over and over and over again, until we practically had them memorized. Why did we love the show? Because we were kids, and here was a show we could watch (it's 4pm on a Saturday, Mom, what else should we do?) that showed us adults fighting, dying, loving, solving problems, confronting the void, etc., etc. And then we would run off, play Kirk and Spock and McCoy, and create our own worlds. Science fiction, before I knew what the terms meant, before I'd read anything by that label, gave me a language of story-telling (not to mention of geekery) which I still usetoday.
M*A*S*H. In particular, seasons 6 and 7, after the arrival of Winchester and before the departure of Radar. The fact the I even knew that without having to look anything up on Wikipedia is itself the best case I can make for this show: it was he first time I found myself taking a television show seriously as a television show. I read stuff in TV Guide and Reader's Digest about the cast; I would buy copies of People magazine or Newsweek when there were articles about the show or interviews with the stars. Lots of great writing, some awesome laughs, some really affecting (but also sometimes terribly overwrought and melodramatic) drama, but really, overall, the show that gave me an awareness of the mechanics of television drama.
SCTV. When I was a junior in high school, I got my own television set in my bedroom. Why? Because my Commodore 64 needed a monitor, that's why. I would retreat to my room sometime around 9pm, and then do homework or read for the next two hours. Sometimes I suppose I might have watched something on prime time, but I don't remember what. What I do remember is that, at 11pm, one of the local PBS stations would show an episode of Second City Television, and it wasn't long before I was completely hooked. Stupid--yet smart--nutty comedy, from Canada. Much more than Saturday Night Live, which I watched only occasionally during the 1980s, SCTV taught me something which I'd never really known about before: satire. I was already a sarcastic kid (you couldn't read Peanuts obsessively and not become one); SCTV helped me sharpen and refine it, making more pointed and surreal at the same time. And speaking of surreal...
Monty Python's Flying Circus. After SCTV was over, the PBS station would start showing an episode of Flying Circus, and that really blew me away. Dark, lunatic, impossibly intelligent farce, mixed with crude, pointless, cheap slapstick. In dresses, of course. Monty Python has become one of the essential soundtracks to my life, shaping my whole sense of humor and the entire way I mix piety with tactlessness (though not nearly as successfully as they did, through I try). It's a regular feature in my classes; I can't say that about any other television program.
Late Night with David Letterman. So by then, after SCTV and Flying Circus, it was 12:30am, and there I was, tired from laughing but not ready to go to bed. What to watch, then, except Late Night (Monday through Thursday, anyway; on Fridays there was no Late Night, but there was Friday Night Videos instead)? My parents had never been fans of the evening talk shows, and so I didn't know what to expect. What I got was yet another kind of irreverence, a silly and thoroughly American kind, one that mixed pop culture and politics together on a daily basis, schooling me--though I didn't realize at the time--in viewing the news of the day as fodder for the mind, something to chew over and crack wise about. I haven't followed and really haven't cared much about the Letterman vs. Leno (vs. Conan and everyone else) battles, but for a couple of years, Letterman framed my imaginary approach to political life as much as the McLaughlin Group or any news show. What some folks get from John Stewart today, I got from Letterman, as the Reagan years came to a close.
(Plus, as might be apparent from all this, because we lived on a farm and I had to be up milking cows at 5:30am, I didn't sleep much for a couple of years there.)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I watched The Next Generation as a student at BYU, and at first I didn't like it--but then, almost no one liked its first couple of seasons. Eventually, though, it began to put out some pretty good episodes, and I, of course, watched regularly. But I didn't obsess over; it didn't dig into me, the way DS9. It's one of the very, very few television programs--maybe the only one, actually--that I watched from it's premier, all the way through to the end, rarely missing even one episode. It's also the first television program I became part of a wider community for; sure, as a Star Trek geek, I partook in that fandom universe, but only minimally: mostly, it was all in my head. But for DS9 I was talking to others, reading reviews (posted on the "internet," can you believe it?), and basically going beyond my interest in the show as a show: I was viewing it as property, something that I was part-owner of, something that I well, cared about. Seems silly to put it so plainly, but it's true: the show completely fell apart in its last two seasons, especially the final one, and it pissed me off. We were living in Germany the summer of 1999, after DS9 had wrapped up its final episodes, and as I'd missed them (I went over to Germany in early May), Melissa had taped them all for me, and brought them with her. I stayed up late one night, watching the final episodes back to back, and I found myself getting angry, actually stomping around our apartment, arguing with the television set. I'd never done that with a tv show before, and I haven't since.
Northern Exposure. Melissa and I were married and living cheap the year after we'd graduate from BYU, waiting to find which--if any--graduate school I'd go to. All we had for entertainment was our television set, with no cable, and a limited number of stations. So we watched a lot of TV--and we discovered Northern Exposure. It was already winding down by then, to a not particularly enjoyable conclusion, but we watched it together, and faithfully recorded late-night reruns, delighting in the show's whimsical mix of music, character, scenery, mood, and story. We ate it up, and still sometimes share moments of the show with each other in jokes or memories. It was show for us.
Homicide: Life on the Street. The other, much less romantic and funny, much more dark and disturbing, tv show we watched together was Homicide. I'd read a couple of iffy reviews at some time in the past, and avoided it for a few years. But then something--I remember; it was the episode where Robin Williams guest-starred--made me tune it in, and I was hooked. Slowly, but surely, I dragged Melissa in, and it became a show that we argued about. It was the first show either of us had ever followed which provided such detailed, sometimes convoluted, sprawling story-lines; I'd become invested in characters and the world they inhabit before, but never so much in the writing, in the twists and turns of plot and the rotating in and out of characters new and old. It introduced me to a knew way of relating to television story-telling. The fact that Melissa and I became, for a few years, passionate Law and Order--during the years with the classic Jerry Orbach/Chris Noth line-up, years during which L&O and Homicide crossed-over a few times--only made it more complicated, and more worth watching.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Since the kids started arriving, I've watched less and less television. That goes for both of us; I think we've actually been without television reception for most of the past decade or so, and we don't miss it much. The tv set sits there, used for movies, and that's about it. Except, of course, that over the past several years, we've discovered television on dvd. The first real breakthrough here came with getting the superb, Jeremy Brett-starring, BBC-produced Sherlock Holmes stories: all six series of them (though the final one, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, when Brett was very ill, is unfortunately of poor quality). The programs themselves are excellent, but what was most changing is that it made me realize what I'd been missing through the 90s and the decade since, as complicated, long-form, interconnected television shows were made and broadcast, simply begging for dvd treatment. Through Sherlock Holmes my eyes were opened to so much good television; Rome stands out in particular, but also Monk and, lately, Life on Mars. Given our aforementioned affection for Homicide, I suppose one of these days we'll make our way through The Wire, and Melissa is right now delighting our girls with Robin Hood (I watched the first season, but took a pass on the rest.) But Sherlock Holmes will stand out as my real introduction to this format...and, of course, also because it was, as everyone agrees, one of the finest examples of television casting and acting in history.
Ok, so there you go: the ten most important television shows in my personal history. What are yours?
This morning I heard a report on NPR, talking about the final season of Lost, which begins tonight. The show has, apparently, long since stopped being a television program, and become a mythos:
ABC and its owner, Disney, sort of see Lost as a much bigger property. I think they see it as a long-term franchise--not unlike, say, Star Wars or Star Trek--that can live on for 20 or 30 years.
Now, I've never been much of an enthusiast for the Star Wars universe; saw the original film lots when I was a kid, but even by Return of the Jedi I was sitting in the theater, thinking the movie wasn't very good. Star Trek, of course, is a different issue; that's a franchise I can get at least somewhat passionateabout. So I can appreciate how television shows can expand, both from their original premises and within the imagination of their fans, so as to go on seemingly forever, following their characters and foibles and adventures for as long as there is someone to write them (and a corporate entity willing to license such). But still...Lost?
I suppose I could hang out on Wikipedia and try to dope out the whole mythos, but I'd rather turn to knowledgeable others to just give me the essentials. And the key essential is...um, how? Granted, I've seen exactly one episode of Lost in my life (everybody was talking about the first season, so I tuned into the first episode of the second, back in 2005, and watched a couple of guys go down into some deep bunker where they discovered this lunatic watching them with camera and hitting a button to prevent the island from blowing up, and then there was this old film they watched which talked about crazy experiments from the 1970s...am I making any sense here?), so what do I know? But still...aren't they on, like, an island? Doesn't that kind of limit the whole "strange new worlds" element of any possible franchise? How would they get new characters? Would random planes just keep crashing on the island every few years, or what?
I wasn't thrilled by some of the ways J.J. Abrams reconfigured the Star Trek universe, but it made for a fun movie, and I've no doubt Lost is fun for its fans. I'm just not one of them. Is it worth trying to help a Lost innocent like myself understand why some people are talking about a Lost theme park, or at this point, am I better off just continuing to ignore the whole thing? (Hey, it worked with The Sopranos...)
...our states weren't quite so unrepresentative of the people who lived there?
So suppose you find yourself accepting the possibility that within the United States today a discursive space wherein people can truly meet, argue, listen persuade, change their minds, make plans, and otherwise govern themselves democratically can no longer be reasonably expected to emerge. In other words, that republican government is at an end. One possibility would be to wash your hands of the whole thing. Another possibility would be to look at whether there is something in the structure of our 300 million-plus country which makes even the bare elements of democratic republican--that is, representative government--practice harder and harder all the time.
One obviously place to begin would be with the Senate, which has become progressively less democratic and more difficult to get legislation through as the decades have gone by. (Obama talked about this last night--though not nearly harshly enough--with his references to the Republican party's implicit demand for "supermajorities.") But beyond some procedural reforms regarding the filibuster, isn't there something more that could be done to make the states more likely sites for real democracy, whether locally or on the national level. That might require something dramatic. Not as dramatic as abolishing the Senate; for myself, I like federalism, and I like states having power on the national level. (Fact is, it's the 17th Amendment which I'd like to see abolished.) But what if the states the Senate represented were themselves a little more "democratically" organized? Like, say, this?
It's a thought experiment, designed around the idea of creating fifty states, all with essentially equal population. (Find out more about it here, here, and here.) Of course, states will never be--or at least, probably never should be--redrawn solely on the basis of population for electoral purposes, even democratic ones; there is history, culture, geography and more to consider. Still, such reconsiderations go along with my oft-statedwish that we could have more states--more locations for people to center themselves around, identify themselves with, and develop as a culture, a community, a demos capable of listening to, learning from, and even sometimes agreeing with one another. It's worth imagining, at least.
A solid B, I think. Not a great speech, but pretty good. Good content, but too much content to really make his strongest points about the political context within which that content is debated come through as clearly as they should have. State of the Union addresses have been laundry lists of legislative priorities and promises for as long as I can remember, and by now I presume that's just the nature of the beast. Too bad Obama and his people weren't willing to fight that beast a little bit more; a leaner, more directly--but also less detailed--partisan speech, focusing more conceptually on the civic environment that he claims to want to move our government in the direction of--one of more responsibility, and less crassly political calculation (more civic virtue, in other words)--would, I think, been taken more seriously by some of those who need to hear that message most. No doubt it would have cost him the opportunity to appeal to this or that interest group, but it would have been worth it, I suspect. But hey, I'm an intellectual, so what do I know?
Best lines from the speech, I think:
I am not nave. I never thought the mere fact of my election would usher in peace, harmony, and some post-partisan era. I knew that both parties have fed divisions that are deeply entrenched. And on some issues, there are simply philosophical differences that will always cause us to part ways. These disagreements, about the role of government in our lives, about our national priorities and our national security, have been taking place for over two hundred years. They are the very essence of our democracy.
But what frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We cannot wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about their opponent – a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of well-qualified public servants should not be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual Senators. Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game. But it is precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people. Worse yet, it is sowing further division among our citizens and further distrust in our government.
So no, I will not give up on changing the tone of our politics. I know it's an election year. And after last week, it is clear that campaign fever has come even earlier than usual. But we still need to govern. To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills. And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that sixty votes, as supermajority, in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town, then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well. Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it's not leadership. We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions.
Ezra Klein is calling this speech "the most important of [Obama's] young presidency" and "the most revealing of his career." Of course, in a world of 24-hour media attention and the possibility of some random moment going viral and becoming the storyline the mainstream media--and, thus, public opinion--will follow for days or weeks or months to come, practically any speech could potentially become the most "important" or "revealing" of any politician's career. But Ezra is on solid ground, I think, in making this claim. We all know why: health care reform--or rather, the larger political meaning that health reform has come to hold in minds of a great many Americans. For those who support it--even folks like myself whoaredepressed at how a chance to turn our nation in the direction of treating health as a public good has fallen from those heights down to that of a messy, conflicted, worthy-but-still-compromised social welfare program (and now, perhaps, not even that!)--it's fate reflects the promise of the Obama administration that fired us up a year or two ago. A promise that, even if we never fully bought into it, seemed real, in the sense of suggesting real action towards difficult but necessary civic goals. For those who oppose it, of course, it's fate represents a push-back against every bad thing they, rightly or wrongly (in all honesty, probably a little bit of both) associate with his administration: an unfeeling, even un-American intellectualism, a hard-ball determination to imagine a center-right nation as more liberal (in the contemporary sense) than it is or wants to be.
I wonder if that sets us up for failure though--a failure even more profound than the failure of national health insurance reform or any other such broad legislative measure could be. I wonder if it makes us look at the wrong thing: at what Obama is trying to do, rather than at how he's trying to do it. And I wonder, also, whether to two can be separated at all.
Peter Levine suggests they can, at least far enough to properly prioritize them: and for Peter, the latter is clearly more important than the former. Peter's great theme has always been civic action and participatory democracy, with all the communitarian and populist implications which follow from that--he's a strong supporter of health care reforms which will empower individuals to escape the corporate monopolies which dominate our system, to be sure--but he doesn't put the cart of such political content before the horse of political context regarding how it is to be achieved. Levine is frustrated with Paul Krugman, who--after the travails of health care reform over the past two weeks--has declared that he's "pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama." Peter will have none of it, and what he says speaks to the communitarian, the populist, the civic republican in me:
Obama never said he was the one we were waiting for. He said (quoting a line from the Civil Rights Movement): "We're the one's we've been waiting for." This was in the context of explicitly arguing that change does not come from the top down, but from the bottom up. The lack of bottom-up pressure for health reform is a major reason why the bill is being dropped. No major progressive organizations or movements really fought for a bill that could pass Congress, and you can't win a legislative battle without grassroots support.
Now Peter is, I think, eliding a point in how he makes this argument: there were plenty of progressive organizations who fought for the bill--I was part of that fighting, for whatever it was worth here in Kansas--so it's not as thought support was lacking. What was lacking, perhaps, was the ability to follow through, with just as much fervor, once Joe Lieberman kicked away that last option for passing a bill in the Senate which included something that could have become truly social and comprehensive and public. Or maybe not--I'm not sure how to measure that, absent tabulating every phone call, e-mail and Tweet every member of Congress received. But doesn't the fading of civic determination tell us as much about the nature of the American civitas, as it does about our level of civic responsibility and hope as well?
E.J. Dionne thinks the answer is simple: Obama is a believer in civic engagement--and he was wrong to trust in it. He shouldn't, at least when it came to something as large as health care, have tried to "bring the country together." Dionne sees a contradiction in "Obama's commitment to sweeping change and his soothing pragmatism that disdains public fights," and he may be right. Where's the determined leadership? Where's the...well, the content? Can you really conceptually, philosophically, approach a democratic community without presupposing what that democratic community is for--without offering them real specifics about how one intends to interact with that community (and, in our polity, interacting with the national community, at least in an immediately politically effectual way, means using a party, with a platform and goals and all the rest)? Of course, it's not as though Obama hasn't done any of that; on the contrary, he's done a lot. But in the present, very delicate moment, where hope is not yet dead but certainly on life support, perhaps his devotion to a certain civic context, to always encouraging Democrats and Republicans alike to "coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on"...well, perhaps it an betrays inexperience, an unwillingness to fully use the office of the presidency, maybe even an over-reliance upon a pragmatism which borders upon a religion, a deep commitment to the process of listening to the experiences of ordinary people. Which is entirely appropriate to a community organizer, but not so much for a man who, for better or worse, occupies the office of the presidency.
There's a lot of frustration out there; I suppose there always is, but this frustration stands out to me, because it seems to come back, again and again, to our size and diversity, and the sense that maybe civil discussion is a literal impossibility in America today. Patrick Deneen, for one; but then Patrick has suspected (and for good reason; let's not deny that) that America has become an all-but-ungovernable empire for a while now. But even Tim Burke, who has always struck me as an unflappable defender of modern complexity, seems to agree. To the depressing battle over health care in 2009 he's found himself making fatalistic noises: shrugging his shoulders hopelessly, saying "Whatever," adding in the comments that he doubts there's any real communicative, democratic context worth its name in America any more: "[T]he proposition that there’s some communicative connection that can happen, that the content of speech and ideas isn't just a projection of a habitus, that we can somehow connect the hubs and spokes of a social network and make something that links the situated knowledges of people to systematic improvements in our institutions? It just seems like a stupid thing to have ever believed that possible." If he's right--and he may be--then should Obama make any attempt tonight to defend how he aspires to lead America, as opposed to what he's leading us towards, it'll be worse than a joke: it'll be a waste.
As for myself...well, I've defended context over content plenty of times over the years, and I'm not willing to give up on it yet. Maybe I'm wrong to have become so susceptible to disappointment; maybe I've been valuing a particular content--health care reform--too much. Then again, that's a reform which can save lives, and what's the point of a healthy civic context if you can't democratically use it? As usual, I'm wishy-washy. So I'll watch the speech tonight, and think about the slow, hard, longdefeat of those who try to do right, in the right way, knowing that they'll nearly always lose, or at best win far less than they'd originally dreamed. Maybe, in the midst of such somber thoughts, Representative Wilson will be an ass again. I know I'll at least have something definitive to say about that.
It's Sunday morning, and I'm skipping church to stay home with Alison, our third daughter, who is almost-but-quite-recovered from a nasty bug that had her throwing up for past couple of days. I think it may be the first day of church I've missed--leaving aside snow days and such--in four years of so. It feels weird. So what do I do, while Alison crashes on the couch, watching Monsters vs. Aliens? Blog, of course.
1. John Buass is back up and blogging again, at Blog Meridian and Cycling in Wichita, and I'm delighted. I'm particularly delighted with the latter, because through that blog John has done more than anyone to keep me aware of numerous local issues involving transportation, community development, and political and economic planning that are pretty important to me. So I ought to return the favor, by saying something about the most recent Westlink Neighborhood Association meeting, over here on the west wide of Wichita. We hosted a visit and presentation from Robert Layton, Wichita's city manager, and he gave a great, sobering but informative presentation. Of particular interest to Wichita readers might be his comments about public transportation (most of the participants in WNA are older folks, for whom buses, rather than pedestrian or bicycler transportation, is paramount). He noted that, given Wichita's current economic state, any serious rethinking of public transport throughout the city would likely have to be put off until 2012 or later, but he acknowledged the long-term need to get such rethinking done, eventually. Our buses operate on a spoke-and-hub system (all transports extending out and returning to a couple of central points), which is a relatively cheap and straightforward way of covering as much area as possible with as few buses as possible, but a very difficult arrangement to build into a more comprehensive service platform. Layton said that Wichita hasn't been, for a city of its size, hasn't been as progressive as it needs to be, and he indicated that he, at least, is willing to think big about the long-term future of Wichita's infrastructure needs. I talked to him briefly after the meeting, and he said the same thing about bicycle paths: no specifics, but definitely an interest in seeing Wichita's transportation options, over time, reworked from the ground up. I liked him--he seemed smart, realistic, and open-minded; a good sign for those of us who strive to buck Wichita's car-dependency.
2. Before we put on the movie, I read to Alison another chapter from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. We started about a week ago, and she's loving it. She's seen parts of the first couple of movies, but Melissa and I have both tried to police her exposure to the films, so as to prevent her interest in the books being undermined before she gets a chance to experience hearing them aloud. (Besides, she's only six, and the movies obviously get more intense than is appropriate for her as they go on.) Anyway, we're having a blast. Alison is, because the book makes her curious, excited, and inquisitive--it's the longest continuous work we've exposed her to yet, and she's learning how to put plot points together, remembering details (or at least trying to) from one chapter to the next, and wheedling me to give her info about how things are going to turn out: in other words, all the great things which getting immersed in a story can do for you. And I am, because it reminds of all the things I loved about the books, when Melissa and then I were first drawn into Pottermania, and, as the years went by, brought our kids with us. Alison is the third of our four daughters that I've read the books to--though so far only through Prisoner of Azkaban, as in both Megan's and Caitlyn's case by the time we got to the fourth book, they were reading themselves, and unwilling to put up with my slow pace. Megan is the most determined reader of the girls so far; Caitlyn took longer to get through them all, and as for Alison, who knows? Besides being younger than either of the others were when they started, she may not develop enough of a passion for it to carry her through the increasingly longer books, even assuming we think she's ready for Goblet of Fire and what comes later. But that's not a concern right now. Right now, I'm just enjoying being reminded of how much clever, childishly fun detail Rowling can crowd into her simple plots, and why Harry and Snape and all the rest were so compelling in the first place.
3. Speaking of passing along geek traditions to our kids, we've also just started through the Lord of the Rings movies with our two oldest. Megan has, bit by bit, watched them all several times, sometimes with Melissa and I and sometimes without, but Caitlyn has only seen a couple of clips, here are there. We thought about imposing the same rules about reading books before watching movies that we have with Harry Potter, but as good a reader as Caitlyn is for her grade level (she's now nine), she's not like her older sister (now thirteen), and we figured that, so long as we watched them with her, we could give in to her intense longing to watch the films. So we've all embarked on the long march through the whole epic, something Melissa and I haven't done in five years. It's been a wonderfully geeky bit of family bonding so far, one weekend after another, with Megan quoting whole lines out loud while we throw pillows at her to get her to shut up, and Caitlyn hiding her head under a blanket when Saruman starts creating the Uruk-hai. And for me, well, it's been a blast to revisit some great, thrilling filmmaking. (I still think that the battle with the Uruks across the hillside at the end of Fellowship, and Gollum's first appearance climbing down a cliff wall in The Two Towers, are some of the most captivating sequences I've ever seen in movies of this type. I can't wait for when we make it to the big finale.)
4. I showed up late yesterday for the book discussion being hosted by our local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America at Riverside Perk, but I got a lot out of the good discussion taking place nonetheless. We talked about the book, The ABCs of the Economic Crisis, and about health care, public transportation, what Obama is (or isn't) trying to do, and more. They're a good group of people, and I'm happy to be a part of this motley bunch of liberals, progressives, social and Christian democrats, and more. I'm going to be lecturing to them and interested others tomorrow ("If Capitalism Can Go Global, Can Socialism Go Local?", room 200 of the Business and Technology Building, Friends University, 6:30pm all are invited!), as well as running a book club meeting myself next month, on G.A. Cohen's Why Not Socialism? I'm looking forward to it. It's good to be part of party, even a small one. In fact, they might be the best kind--at least as far as book clubs are concerned.
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