Haunting the Web Since 1999
Well, the King’s season isn’t over yet. (Although it may be soon, if there’s another game like tonight’s 120-88 Game 5 fiasco.) Nonetheless, New York Magazine offers LeBron James a multi-part hard sell of NYC on behalf of the Knickerbockers. To my mind, their logic is irrefutable.
Well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? Particularly that she’ll be replacing the irreplaceable John Paul Stevens. In any case, President Obama has made his second pick for the Supreme Court, and it is his Solicitor General and former Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan. “As solicitor general, Ms. Kagan has represented the government before the Supreme Court for the past year, but her own views are to a large extent a matter of supposition.“
Making the progressive case for Kagan: Larry Lessig, an old friend of hers: “The Kagan I know is a progressive…[T]he core of Kagan’s experience over the past two decades has been all about moving people of different beliefs to the position she believes is correct. Not by compromise, or caving, but by insight and strength. I’ve seen her flip the other side.” Lessig expounds on this coalition-builder argument here: “To hear the liberals talk about it, it sounds like they think we need a Thomas or Scalia of the Left…But nobody who understands the actual dynamics of the Supreme Court could actually believe that such a strategy would produce 5 votes.” (To which one must ask, really? Who’s gonna flip?)
Making the progressive case against Kagan: Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald: “[G]iven that there are so many excellent candidates who have a long, clear commitment to a progressive judicial philosophy, why would Obama possibly select someone who — at best — is a huge question mark?…I believe Kagan’s absolute silence over the past decade on the most intense Constitutional controversies speaks very poorly of her.” This was a follow-up from another piece, where he argued: “Kagan, from her time at Harvard, is renowned for accommodating and incorporating conservative views, the kind of ‘post-ideological’ attribute Obama finds so attractive.” Interestingly, this last part seems much the same argument Lessig’s making in her favor, with the valence changed.
(As an aside, this feud got a bit heated, with Greenwald deeming Lessig a liar and stooge. Having been on the wrong end of Greenwald’s wrath myself on the Citizens United case, Lessig’s rebuttal to this charge sounded all-too familiar: “Chill, Glenn. Dial down the outrage. Dial back the hyperbole. And stop calling those who applaud you liars…[Y]ou can make your point well enough without painting everyone else as liars or constitutional crazies.” True story.)
Anyway, speaking of Citizens United, since the President has explicitly said that decision is lousy law several times over, I presume he’s made sure Kagan is in agreement on that front. (He has, right?) And, as I said back during John Roberts’ nomination, my feeling is generally the president’s prerogative in choosing Supreme Court justices should be respected. (Can’t countenance Roberts’ lying, tho’.) So, if Kagan’s the president’s choice, I’m prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt and support the nomination.
But, quite frankly, I shouldn’t have to doubt (and here, the next two links are via Greenwald.) As the NYT editorial page well put it: “President Obama may know that his new nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, shares his thinking on the multitude of issues that face the court and the nation, but the public knows nothing of the kind. Whether by ambitious design or by habit of mind, Ms. Kagan has spent decades carefully husbanding her thoughts and shielding her philosophy from view.“
So, sure, I guess it’s entirely possible Kagan is a secret superprogressive of the Leonard Cohen type. (“They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within.“) But there’s another explanation that’s more likely. And, loath as I am to agree with David Brooks, his column today echoes almost exactly what I was thinking:
“Kagan has apparently wanted to be a judge or justice since adolescence (she posed in judicial robes for her high school yearbook.) There was a brief period, in her early 20s, when she expressed opinions on legal and political matters. But that seems to have ended pretty quickly. She has become a legal scholar without the interest scholars normally have in the contest of ideas. She’s shown relatively little interest in coming up with new theories or influencing public debate. Her publication record is scant and carefully nonideological…What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess.“
That’s my rub too, and it dovetails with larger problems I have with DC political culture. More often than not, the people who tend to succeed here are the ones who keep their head down, play the DC game, stay resolutely non-ideological and unobtrusive in their opinions. never go out on a limb, never say or do anything that could hurt their bid to be a Big (or Bigger) Shot down the road. (Hence, the whole phenomenon of The Village.)The problem is, these plodding, risk-averse careerist types are exactly the type of people you don’t want making decisions in the end, because they will invariably lead to the plodding, risk-averse and too-often rudderless politics of the lowest common denominator.
I’m really hoping the future Justice Kagan isn’t another example of this troubling trend, because as I said when Stevens retired: “The Court needs a strong and unabashed liberal conscience right now. What it emphatically does not need is another centrist technocrat that will help push the Court ever further to the right” But, as Kurt Vonnegut put it in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” And when someone spends decades being so careful and circumspect in the face of so many obvious injustices, both by recent administrations and in the world at large…well, I really have to wonder about their judgment.
In casting news, Colin Farrell (recently signed as Jerry Dandridge 2.0) and Marion Cotillard (currently looking stunning in the trailer for Inception) both sign aboard David Cronenberg’s version of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. “The film, based on Don DeLillo’s novel, will follow a multimillionaire on a 24-hour odyssey across Manhattan. Farrell will play the asset manager who loses all his wealth over the course of one day. Cotillard will play his wife.” Oh, the exquisite, finely-manicured melancholy of the super-rich! Eh, I’ll probably see it anyway.
After a cantankerous election that got positively (In the) loopy at times (or, if you prefer, Coakley-esque), Prime Minister Gordon Brown has resigned, ending thirteen years of Labor rule, and Conservative David Cameron is the new PM of a coalition Tory-Liberal Democrat government. [Bio.]
According to E.J. Dionne, “Cameron’s decision to ally with the Lib Dems could have a far-reaching impact on his own party. Many on the right end of the Tory Party are wary of the alliance — a mirror of the reaction on the Labour left. Cameron’s eagerness for a deal suggests he really may want to remake the Conservative Party along more progressive lines. I guess we’ll soon find out.
Update: Speaking of In the Loop, the man himself, Armando Ianucci, weighs in: “Nnnyaaaaaghwooohaaooooororarararararghhhhhhh. That’s the message the electorate gave on Thursday. A long, angry, discordant noise that eventually became silly…[F]or a result that so perfectly expresses the public’s mounting mix of contempt, confusion, and sheer bloody-minded desire to see the political classes sit down to eat humble pie, stand up to get thwacked on the head with the remainder, and then shoved into a corner to be locked in a dark cupboard to sit in their own mess, Thursday’s result was sheer comic genius.“
This particular tale of the evil that Men do and the fickleness of Fate begins with a tryst — Underneath the overpass and watched by their respective canine companions, two lovers enjoy a brief flurry of passion in a parked car. (As in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, this is the fleeting moment of ecstasy that sets up the tale of woe to follow.) The man here is Ray (David Roberts, most recognizable to me as one of the “other” captains in the Matrix sequels), a married construction foreman not above taking a few kickbacks on the side. The woman is Carla (Claire van der Boom), also married, who works at the local beauty salon and spends her nights deflecting the advances of her thug husband’s creepy, ne’er-do-well friends.
The trouble emerges when said husband, Greg (Anthony Hayes), brings home a ginormous satchel of blood-soaked cash one night, and Carla happens to notice him — unbeknownst that he’s being watched — stowing it away in the attic space above the bathroom. Now that kind of money could change lives, and if she and Ray got their hands on it…They could skip this town, flee their respective spouses, and start anew. Ray has doubts when he hears of the plan (and seems less happy that a decision point has been reached anyway.) But if his choice is Carla and the Big Steal or a return to his loveless marriage and workaday construction life…well, that’s really no choice at all.
And so Ray and Claire enlist the aid of a professional but vaguely dodgy-seeming arsonist (Joel Edgerton, the director’s brother and Uncle Owen of Episode II) and his in-over-her-head girlfriend Lily (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence) to set off a fire that will give them a cover story for when they abscond with the missing loot. But, the best laid plans and all that. Inevitably, something goes horribly wrong…several things, actually. And not only that, but somebody else seems to know about The Plan, and starts blackmailing Ray after the fact. Is it Eddie (Damon Herriman) or Leonard (Brendan Donoghue, eerily Bale-like), one of the aforementioned creepy friends? Or is it one of the guys at his site, like Ray’s #2 Jake (Peter Phelps)? Whoever it is, Ray needs to lock him or her down, before a suspicious husband or an agitated arsonist take matters into their own hands…
That should give you the gist of it — The Square is one of those movies where a seemingly simple criminal plan, through happenstance, incident and a steady confluence of minor screw-ups, just takes one wrong turn after another. (In a way, this is a grimmer Aussie version of The Ice Harvest, except now Xmas is a summertime holiday.) And to its credit, not only do the characters rarely do dumb things in this story, they sometimes do surprisingly smart things: See, for example, Ray’s detective work in his office involving the scented card. Of course, smart, dumb, or otherwise, the gods tend to laugh at the plans of men, and, in this particular world, Edgerton is a cruel master indeed.
In fact, the Fates are so remorseless here that Ray and Claire’s frozen run of luck starts to bleed out into the population at large. It’s not just the supporting cast who have to worry: Bystanders and even pets just minding their own business also have catastrophic events befall them as the story moves on. (C’mon now, the swimming incident was gratuitous.) For what it’s worth, this anything-can-happen-to-anyone feel of The Square was anticipated by Spider, an Edgerton-directed short shown just before The Square here at the Landmark E-Street, about a man’s disastrous attempt to kiss-and-make-up after a recent feud with his girlfriend. And when the writer-director of your movie is also a full-fledged stuntman, you have to expect that some really bad things might happen in the story.
In any case, I have some quibbles with the very end of The Square, which I can’t really talk about in specifics without giving the game away. (To speak in general terms: basically, unfortunate happenstance even trumps plot dynamics at the end — The story doesn’t build to an inevitable conclusion so much as more bad stuff happens.) But, up to that point, The Square is for the most part a crisp, atmospheric, and laudably intelligent neo-noir from the Land Down Under. My advice: You better run, you better take cover.
In surveying the recent foiled Times Square car-bomb attempt, Slate‘s Fred Kaplan makes the case for the prescience of Jane Jacobs, and explains why Dick Cheney is, yet again, wrong. (Kaplan also makes a case for security cameras which I’m less sanguine about — but, hey, two out of three ain’t bad.)
Speaking of the Times Square situation, Twitter wag pourmecoffee had some arch responses to the near-disaster: “Somebody saw something in Times Square. If Cheney were still around, he’d torture entire Lion King cast for answers,” and “When we catch this Times Square guy, I assume he will be too scary to try in New York.” Ah, Twitter.
At once a police procedural, political thriller, chaste love story, and remembrance of days past, Secret is a hard movie to categorize, but Dana Stevens’ concise summary at Slate — “Imagine a really long, really awesome episode of Law & Order set in Buenos Aires” — is a pretty good start. The thing is, Law & Order in Argentina, particularly ’round the time of the Dirty War, isn’t as black and white as it usually is in our 42-minute visits to the island realm of Jack McCoy and Adam Schiff. In Buenos Aires, as in life, everything gets complicated.
So, how to explain Secret? Well, I was reminded occasionally here of David Fincher’s Zodiac, in that the lingering case at the heart of the story drives some of our characters slightly mad. (The difference being, here an eventual resolution brings little comfort — There are still guilt, complicity, and consequences to contend with.) There’s a bravura sequence in a futbol stadium in the middle going which recalls some of the extended-shot marvels of Alfonse Cuaron’s Children of Men. There’s definitely some of The Wire‘s workingman’s blues and gallows humor here, and and as one of my friends noted, there’s also a good bit of The Remains of the Day in this story too. Taken as a whole, Secret moves to its own unique rhythm, and it is a film that’s definitely worth catching.
The tonal ambiguity of Secret is reflected in the opening moments, as we first meet Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) — a recently retired ex-lawyer now settling into the writing life — going through the author’s quandary of figuring how to start the book on his brain. First we see and hear that tired romantic cliche, a sad parting at a train station, and a lover chasing down the train. Wait, scratch that. Let’s start with a final breakfast together with the lost lover, and all the details — the honey, the fruit, her floral-print dress, her sun-dappled smile — that can now never be forgotten. No, that’s not it either. So Benjamin falls back to the case file and we witness some brief and dreadful moments in a brutal, bloody rape/homicide. Ugh. That’s no way to start this tale.
Still struggling with his opening chapter, Benjamin visits his old friend and colleague Irene (Soledad Villamil), now a judge in Buenos Aires, who is not particularly enthused to hear that he’s decided to reopen old wounds and write about the tumultuous Morales case. Nonetheless, she gives him an old typewriter (with a broken A) and some excellent advice — Start with what you remember best. And so he does. And soon we find ourselves thirty years in the past, in the small, paper-strewn offices of Ben, Irene, and their semi-functioning alcoholic co-worker Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), just before they pulled the case that transformed their lives.
Particularly by L&O standards, the whodunit aspect of the story is not all that baroque (although it does rely on some potentially clever, potentially dubious po-lice work that helps give the film its name. While I’m on the subject, there’s some implausibly successful good-cop, bad-cop interrogating later on that took me out of the film.) Instead, our investigative trio has much more trouble finding, catching, and holding on to their man after they’ve made him. After all, Argentina between 1976 and 1983 is a slippery place — down is up and up is down, and searching for criminals is no longer a very safe pastime once the criminals are in charge…
I said in my review of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet that “if The Secret in Their Eyes is better, it must be really something.” And, while I think I ever-so-slightly preferred A Prophet in the end — due to the earlier noted implausibilities here, and because this film’s various acts sometimes feel disconnected from each other– my strong advice is: See them both! A Prophet is a young man’s movie, a coming-of-age, learning-the-ropes story of an ascent into power, while Secret is an older man’s tale, a wistful look back at earlier times and the mistakes, regrets, and chance circumstances that haunted a life. And along with Red Riding, Ellsberg, Terribly Happy, and Kick-Ass, they’re both at the top of my 2010 list so far.
The first thing that came to mind when I saw that ungainly graph above: The Daughters of the American Revolution’s “spider chart” in the 1920’s, which aimed to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the women’s peace and disarmament groups of the time were in fact the fifth column of international socialism. What goes around, comes around, I guess.
1. The actual sailing was good fun, but also a bit more rigorous at times than I anticipated. And if you don’t have someone on board who knows what they’re doing, there could be trouble. As the saying goes, “anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm,” and that was basically true for the first half of our trip. But there were definitely a few days on the back end when the winds and the swells kicked up, and I was very glad we had two seasoned sailors (as well as a Coastie) on board to commandeer the ship. I mean, I can turn a winch or pull a rope as well as the next guy, but the actual boat handling during highly variable and/or gusty winds never really felt intuitive to me. Let’s just say, when it comes to captaining nautical vessels, I think I still prefer my boats oar-powered.
2. Admittedly, extended time on Kauai will turn you into a snorkel snob. Still, while we didn’t see much in the way of spectacular, blow-your-mind reefs, we had really great luck with the local fauna. Turtles abounded, including one barnacle-covered fellow who’d probably seen a few decades. Several rays were spotted at various times, as well as a dolphin (seen from the ship), a barracuda (he camped out under the boat for an afternoon), and, for those who dove, even some members of the shark persuasion. Above ground, a few of the islands were home to feral goats, and every bay we anchored in had more than a few pelicans feasting well. (And if you stop at Little Harbour, bring extra lunchmeats for the hungry dock-daschund.)
3. While clearly less populated than their US counterparts — you can tell that just from their respective nighttime glows — the British Virgin Islands are not particularly British. Although, that being said, they do have roundabouts in Roadtown, as well as the occasional English candy options here and there — Sadly, no Bassetts’ Wine Gums, tho’. (This may not seem important, but it is. Since my English kindergarten days, I’ve been a bit of a wine gum fiend.)
4. Speaking of midnight glow, I always tend to forget, after spending the last 17 years in the East Coast megalopolis of BosWash, how breathtaking the nighttime sky still is in the dark places of the world. One of my personal highlights of the whole experience. (In related news, I really need to brush up on my constellations.)
5. If you want to get the authentic Caribbean pirate experience in the BVI, then head to Norman Island and stop at Pirates’ Bight. Because, trust me, you will end up feeling totally robbed. In general, a lot of the hyped places in the guides were overpriced, underserviced tourist traps — Saba Rock near Virgin Gorda was another — which eventually prompted a lot of jokes among the crew about the “Comcast Virgin Islands.” But the Bight was far and away the worst — come for the sticker shock, stay for the microwave wings and world’s most ornery parrot. (That poor, miserable bastid was a living, breathing, screeching PETA commercial.)
6. Now, that being said, one island haunt that *did* live up to the hype was the much-touted Foxy’s in Great Harbour, Jost van Dyke. After getting burned a few times in the early going (see above), we went to this night spot with rather low expectations. But Foxy’s actually delivered on the local flavor, Caribbean rhythms, and Cocktail-ish beach bar ambience it promised. (The co-ed, drunken gaggle of 40 or so French sailors having their Spring Regatta farewell party may have helped. Good lookin’ people, the French.)
7. If #5 didn’t make the point above, I strongly advise trying to find mooring or anchoring spots off the beaten path. In fact, one of our generally-agreed-upon favorite stops on the trip was just around the corner from the aforementioned Bight. I’d tell you exactly, but then I’d be making the mistake in The Beach. (Granted, some folks may be wired differently than me on this front. One of the more bustling places we stopped at to resupply was The Bitter End, a luxury resort on Virgin Gorda. Well, ok, but I don’t know why you venture all the way out to BVI just to approximate the experience of Hilton Head. But don’t mind me — I’ve been getting more Mosquito Coast-y in recent years.)
8. If you’re enjoying a nighttime campfire on a small island covered with dry wood, brush and other highly flammable material, and the notion strikes you to go all Survivor or Lord of the Flies and make yourself a torch, do NOT use one of your cheap athletic socks in said torch’s construction. Because, for whatever reason, athletic socks apparently explode more than they burn, and watching dozens of tiny embers of flaming nylon or polyester or whatever float away and scatter all over a very arid paradise in the middle of the night is not a happy moment. Just sayin’.
9. Similarly, if you’re a right-wing billionaire who, when not giving millions to the Republican Party or funding Creationist “research”, up and decide to buy yourself a private island, and on that private island, overlooking the, uh, White Bay, you call your exclusive private resort the, um, “Eagle’s Nest“…well, let’s just say the optics aren’t too good. (Nice beach, tho’.)
10. As Herman Melville once wrote, “At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.” And fellowship was in no short supply aboard the Searider. I think it’s safe to say we all had a great time — yes, even at the Bight — and made some memories to last a lifetime. So if you do head out for your own sailing adventure, bring sunscreen, somebody with sailing experience, some extra turkey for the dock-daschund, and, most importantly some interesting folks and old, good friends along with you. You won’t regret it.
