What I did on Election Day, 2008

I had only about two hours worth of sleep last night and I'm only awake now because I want to write this all down before I start forgetting it. I am sure that I will crash pretty soon and sleep a long time, but I hope I can get this out first.

In the past few days, I have volunteered for the Obama Campaign in Northern Virginia. On Saturday, Shirley, Kevin, and I knocked on doors in order to contact voters and convince them to vote. We were given packs with names of voters who were identified as sporadic voters--meaning that they were registered Democrats who had voted in only a few of the most recent elections. Our goal was to knock on their door, make some human contact, and talk to them about Barack Obama. We got started at about 10 in the morning and worked something like 120-150 doors, finishing up in the early evening. Shirley and I did the same thing on Sunday, working for about four hours.

Shirley and I planned to do get out the vote work for the campaign on Election Day, and so I tried to plan ahead the night before. I bought some water and granola bars, and a new umbrella because it was supposed to rain. I picked Shirley up at the East Falls Church metro station at about 8:30 in the morning and we went straight to the staging location for the GOTV work. What they wanted us to do was very simlar to the work we had done over the weekend. We were given a packet with names and addresses of likely Obama voters, and we were to knock on their door, ask if they had voted, tell them how to get to their polling place, and, if necessary, help them get a ride to the polls. Then we were to do it again with the same list before going back to get a different packet.

The first packet was in a fairly typical middle class neighborhood. The polling location was an elementary school within walking distance of every door we knocked on. The houses in the neighborhood were strange. It was obviously an older development put together by a single builder. All the homes were similar rectangular boxes with an overhanging second story above the front door and a roofline that sloped away from the front of the house. Square and angluar. The houses were also set at odd angles to the street. Very few were perfectly square to the street--several were set at 30, 60, and 90 degrees to the street.

About a third of the voters we were told to contact had already voted. We marked them off the list. If someone wasn't home, we left a door hanger with the address for the polling place at the elementary school. If they were home, we told them to go vote, and that the middle of the day was a good time because lines were short. I spoke with a 72 year old woman named Sima who had already voted, a 30 year old black man who said he was on his way, and a 52 year old white woman named Constance who also promised she was about to go.

On the second pass, Shirley and I switched houses so that we wouldn't talk to the same people twice. We didn't need to speak to Sima again. The 30 year old again promised he was about to go, but wondered to Shirley if this constituted harrassment. This became another tool for the day. When we got to our second packet, I started telling people who were home that if they didn't go vote, we would just keep knocking on their door. Shirley spoke to Constance on the second pass, and about a minute after leaving the front porch, Constance left her house to walk up to the school and vote.

Our second packet was in a group of rental townhouses. The complex was horribly confusing because the houses weren't numbered sequentially. Houses set in a row would randomly jump 10 numbers. But we got back to business knocking on doors. A lot of people weren't home--at work certainly--and they got the door hanger. But I still spoke with several people who were going to vote later in the day. There was a woman who had already voted, another who was asleep (according to her granddaughter who answered the door), and a woman who was voting for McCain (according to the shirtless man who answered the door).

But there was also a man named Joseph who had just two months ago received his citizenship. He registered to vote at the same time, but he was concerned that he wouldn't be able to vote because he changed his name on his citizenship papers. He was worried that his name wouldn't match the name in the voter registration list. I told him to take his citizenship papers with him when he went to vote and that he would be able to cast a provisional ballot in any case. On the second pass, he had put an "I Voted" sticker on his front door--probably to keep us from knocking again.

And there was a family of Muslim immigrants--two women answered the door, both covered. One told Shirley that the family was going to vote in the afternoon when the father came home. And two brothers named Hernandez who weren't there on the second pass. Hopefully, they had gone to vote. This fairly well established the pattern for the day. We were largely speaking with immigrants and lower class and lower middle class voters. It seemed to be effective.

Over the course of the day, we did 5 or 6 packets. One was in some very cheap apartments, and one was in some very nice townhouses. The process was the same everywhere we went. Around 12:30, we stopped back at the staging area to get a new packet and were offered lunch. I had a "sandwich" made of three slices of cheese between two slices of bread. The sandwich, the granola bars, and the tootsie pops at the staging area kept me going through the day.

For what it's worth, "staging area" makes it sound much more formal that it was. The staging area was just a local Democrat's house. I learned later in the evening that his first name was Spence, but throughout the day, Shirley and I were just trapsing in and out of his house freely without really having met him before. Spence is a middle aged white guy who married a Japanese woman. Their house was set off a major road in a heavily wooded neighborhood of large old houses. The trees in the neighborhood were bright yellow and red and orange. Spence's house was decorated with traditional Japanese paintings and an ancient set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

At the house, Spence was assisted by a woman named Sarah with wavy blonde hair and another woman with short dark hair. Sarah had taken two weeks vacation in order to volunteer for the campaign but wasn't going to be to make it back to her D.C. apartment in time to cast her absentee ballot. (It was ok--Obama won D.C. with 92% of the vote) The other woman hadn't slept in two days. They kept it running though.

During our lunch, we spoke with a retired teacher who was doing his own best to help elect Obama. He was a large man--at least six foot five, and with white hair. But other than the hair, he was very youthful. He told us that about a third of his union was for McCain, and that a lot of kids were home because Virginia schools always take the first Monday and Tuesday in November off in order to allow teachers to catch up on grading and to hold parent-teacher conferences.

At about 4 p.m. Shirley and I were both feeling a little frustrated. The number of contacts you make doing this sort of door-to-door knocking is actually relatively low since many people are working during the day and others simply want you to go away. So, we asked Spence where we could get a quick beer. He recommended a nearby biker bar called the Sunset Grille, and that's where we went.

It was a small bar--just four or five tables, the bar, and a small platform for bands to play on. There were two guys talking football inside the door and another couple sidled close to the bar and sitting quietly. Two women were serving beers. We sat at the corner of the bar and ordered a couple Yuengling Lagers. There was a short menu written on a board on the wall. Ribs and something with crab and stuffed jalapenos. Stickers on the bar complained of Jane Fonda's treason. The jukebox played Jethro Tull and The Grateful Dead and Tom Petty.

The other people at the bar talked about voting. Two of the men had "I voted" stickers on their chest. One of the bartenders said how she loved voting; that it made her feel powerful, and she flexed her arms as she did this. She said she voted at the high school she attended.

We read Dana Milbank's damning article of McCain's last day on the campaign trail and tried to do the Post's campaign quiz. We talked with one of the bartenders and another patron about the Wonder Twins. We finished our beers and headed back to the house for one more packet.

After our last packet, we were supposed to go to a precinct and see if we could help hand out snacks and drinks to people in line. It was going to be dark and so they gave us little flashlights. We headed back to the confusing townhouses we hit on our second packet. It wasn't the same set of houses, but it was still confusing. We did one pass, and since it was getting later, we waited for 20 minutes before doing our second pass hoping that some people would come home from work. We did our last pass at 6 pm, an hour before the polls closed, but nothing had changed.

It was now dark and misting. It had rained some during the day, but not enough to keep anyone from going to the polls. We drove to Jefferson High School--the polling location for our last packet. I got lost on the way, but after driving around a bit, we found it. We walked up to see if they needed any help, but there wasn't any line. The Democratic Precinct Captain was handing out sample ballots to voters who were intermittently straggling in. Every time someone took one, the Republican precinct captain would rush over and offer a Republican sample ballot.

They didn't need our help, so we tried to contact Sarah and then the campaign office. Eventually we were told there weren't any lines anywhere, and so we could either go randomly knock on doors or go home. We had already planned to go to some friends' house in order to watch the returns so we stopped at Popeyes for a quick dinner and at Giant for some beer and champagne.

We were going to a house where several people live. Most of them are former Peace Corps volunteers whom we sort of accidentally met a few weeks back. One of them is a friend of a friend of Shirley. A few weeks back we went apple picking with them and had a good day. At the house were Conor, Maeve, Josh, Paulo, John, and a few other people whose names I can't recall. Shirley and I brought in the beer but left the champagne in the car so as not to jinx the election.

Maeve had planned games including a Jeopardy style quiz and pin the lipstick on the pitbull. My team lost Jeopardy narrowly even though we gave correct answers--it was stolen. Conor and Josh cheated at pin the tail on the pitbull. We drank a little and watched the returns come in.

On the ride to the house, Shirley and I were listening to NPR's coverage and the reporter at the Republican watch party in Ohio was not impressed. She noted that it couldn't really be called a party since no one was there, and that the Republicans weren't expecting to win the state based on the early returns and the exit polls. Sure enough within an hour of us arriving at Maeve's house, the networks called Ohio for Obama. That pretty much sealed the election, but of course it's not over until someone reaches 270.

By 10:30, they had called Virginia for Obama, giving him a total of 220 electoral votes. Fox News seemed to be calling everything earlier than the other channels. With 220 EVs, the game was pretty much over. Shirley and I retrieved the champagne from the car. I went out in my socks because I couldn't get my shoes on fast enough. The ground was wet and when we came back in, I had to take my socks off.

The champagne was sneakily put in the fridge, but 11 pm was coming up and with it the closure of the polls on the West coast. We could see what was coming. NBC ran a countdown to the next poll closings, and we started shouting the seconds out: 10! 9! 8! . . . With California, Washington, and Oregon immediately being called for Obama, he was up to 297 electoral votes and the game was over. NBC's coverage simply went immediately to the projection that Barack Obama would be elected president without even mentioning CA, WA, and OR. We cheered. People hugged and jumped and screamed. I popped the cork on the champagne and poured some for everyone. We toasted and drank.

Outside there were fireworks a couple blocks over. We went outside to look and listen. In the distance to the south we could hear faint cheering. NBC had given some time to the local affiliate who showed video of people dancing at 14th and U--on the sidewalk and on top of a bus stop shelter. They should video of the growing crowd at the White House. That was the place to be, and we gathered our coats and shoes. Before we could leave, McCain came to the stage to give his concession speech. We all stood silently and listened to him graciously admit defeat.

We started at roughly 10th St. NW and Monroe Ave NW. The walk to the White House would end up being 2.5 miles. As we walked South, there was intermittent cheering and some cars honking their horns. At 14th and U, hundreds of people were in the street. The police began to cut car traffic off between 14th and 16th. We got there just before Obama took the stage in Chicago. We stood outside a bar and watched a TV that had been turned outward. We couldn't hear anything, but the closed captioning was turned on.

As Obama was speaking, it began to rain. The first real heavy rain of the day. Some in the crowd had umbrellas, but I had left mine in the car. We were all drenched, but we still watched and cheered. The rain glowed orange in the streetlights as it fell on us.



After the speech, we continued South on 16th street. For a while we walked with a man and talked a little about what this win was going to mean. Barack made the point: this is a chance to make a difference, and it's not over yet. There is a lot of work to be done. More and more people were going south--all towards the White House. We met another large group at Rhode Island Avenue. A man ran up to Shirley and me and gave us a bear hug. He exclaimed, "You're wet!"

More and more people. Some with Obama signs. Some with hats and shirts. More and more cars honking their horns. Constant cheers from the marchers. Some chants of "Yes we can!" and "O-ba-ma!" Our route took us past the Republican National Committee Headquarters. Some apparent Republicans stood outside dejected. At one point, a man with the flag tied around his neck like a cape rode by on a bicycle.

At Lafayette Square, there was a fence and barrier keeping people from crowding directly south onto Pennsylvania Avenue. It's not clear if that barrier was part of a construction project or was put up by the police to control the crowd. In order to get around in front of the White House, we had to walk around to the side. The crowd was amazing. Happy and excited. Nothing angry. Nothing violent. Just joyous and celebrating.



One group of people was involved in a call and response of "Whose house?" "Obama's House!" And the standard goodbye chants. Shirley said she heard people chanting "Move Bush, get out the way. Get out the way, Bush, get out the way!" (Think Ludacris if you don't catch the rhythm) I saw some people singing American the Beautiful. Mostly people chanted "O-ba-ma!" and "Yes we can!" and the now appropriate "Yes we did!" One woman was giving "Obama hugs" to everyone she saw.



After a while, Shirley and I began the 2.5 mile trek back to my car which I had left at Maeve's house. We had lost everyone else at this point, but it didn't matter. Everyone in the area was cheering and chanting and screaming. People walked in the street and hung out of cars. High-fives were ubiquitous.

_________________________

Saturday. Didn't make it to the end before I had to stop.

On our way back to the car, a man with a slight European accent walked beside us for some time. I couldn't really place his accent, but we talked about the inauguration. He expressed some fear that Obama might not make it that far--that he might be assassinated. I really don't think that is going to happen. I'm not afraid of that. I'm not afraid of much right now. He talked about Bush's inauguration, and how the inauguration is as much for the incoming president as it is for the outgoing president. He said that in 2000, the commentators and pundits summed up Clinton's presidency as good but not great; that there had been so much promise at the start of Clinton's terms and he never really lived up to the expectations. He wonders what could possibly be said about Bush's terms in office as he leaves?

We continued our trek back to the car with less celebrations we got farther north. Fewer and fewer horns. At one point, four men on the other side of the street were spontaneously stepping.

I drove Shirley home and we listened to coverage from NPR and the BBC on WAMU. When we left the house to walk to the White House, we knew that Obama had 333 EVs--Florida had been called, but that was all. The radio wasn't giving any more details about states; just talking about how he won and what it meant. It was a little frustrating.

After dropping Shirley off, I drove home, and got back at about 3:30 am. I parked my car outside because I lost my card for the garage. Walking back to my building, my legs had already started to stiffen up. I hobbled along. Inside I read some more news and tried to reset my alarm for 8 am so I could sleep in a bit. It was about this time that I noticed my shoes are now different colors. They were the same color at the start of the day, but not anymore. They're not wet. They're not dirty. Just different colors.


It didn't work. My alarm woke me up at 6. And I got up. I wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep. So, I cleaned up and went down to Starbucks for a coffee and some breakfast. I bought a copy of the Times and the Post. I'm glad I did. Later in the day, every paper in the city was sold out.

The entire day I was physically exhausted, but it wasn't a bad thing. There is a pleasure that comes with exhaustion. It removes a lot of concerns and worries and leaves me with a feeling of balance and confidence.

Balance and confidence.

What's on Hulu?

Hulu has a surprising mix of movies and television shows. Some of them are clearly old films that don't have a valuable copyright. See, for example, The People that Time Forgot. However, some are rather strong movies that are still available on DVD, and that are still making money for studios. The decision to distribute Sideways for free on the internet is a strange one. Then there are things like Species III, all alone without Species or Species II. On the good side of things, there is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Requiem for a Dream, and Lost in Translation. I have been watching some of these movies on Hulu, and I will be writing them up as I watch them. Today, I watched 28 Days Later.

In 28 Days Later, England is destroyed by a highly contagious virus unknowingly unleashed from a government laboratory by animal rights activists trying to save the chimpanzees in which it originated. Within a few seconds of infection, and victim becomes highly aggressive and attacks anyone nearby. That is merely the premise, however, as the action follows Jim (Cillian Murphy), a man who has been in a coma for the titular four weeks. He wakes up in a hospital and wanders a desolate London before being attacked by the infected, and saved by hardened zombie-fighter Selena (Naomie Harris).

Selena and Jim eventually meet up with Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). The four travel together to Manchester following a weak radio signal promising salvation from the infection. The supposed salvation comes in the form of a squad of soldiers trying to reestablish society within the walls of a fortified manor house. Led by a Major played by Christopher Eccleston, the soldiers offer sanctuary to the survivors, but, of course, they are not as safe as they think.

28 Days Later opened in 2002 to strong critical reviews, but I have largely avoided it because of it's a zombie movie. I can handle some zombie movies, but its one of those premises that can get tired after a while. I have no idea why people are still telling vampire stories. I find that 28 Days Later deserves the praise it has received.

It is very well shot. This clearly isn't a B movie or a second rate production in any noticeable way. The filmmakers have made excellent use of the English countryside in their story about the collapse of civilization. The place of nature is a repeated theme throughout the film. From the beginning where animal rights activists accidentally trigger the worst human tragedy, to the loving shots of England's green fields as the four survivors escape London, to a debate among the soldiers at the manor house. One soldier maintains that given the shortness of human history, if the infection were to wipe humans from the earth, that would be a return to normal. Another maintains that since human history is filled with people killing people, the situation they find themselves in is normal.

Not everything is perfect--Selena the hardened zombie fighter is a little too hardened, but of course she softens up through the course of the movie. Harris's performance is probably the biggest weakness in the movie. Gleeson is an excellent character actor who is great in everything, and should be put to work as much as possible. Cillian Murphy is another fairly strong actor, and he keeps turning up in movies that I really like such as Batman Begins and Sunshine. Eccleston is fun to watch as well. The former Dr. Who star doesn't have to do anything special in the role, but he still gives a strong performance.

Overall, the movie is well made and tightly plotted. It pays homage to other zombie movies in subtle ways such as the apartment block in which Frank and Hannah are surviving which echoes The Omega Man and a night attack by the infected on the manor house which alludes to the classic Night of the Living Dead. After establishing the premise, the film shines in the second and third acts where it takes on some deeper themes.

This isn't a perfect film, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do, and I would reccomend it.

New TV!

The TV season is starting again, and that means new TV! Last night Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season opened with a a pretty decent episode. A decent episode for explicitly bad television. This is a show that I like in spite of itself. Somehow they make mindless fun work. This is what Knight Rider will try to do but will completely fail to accomplish.

This season opens with the aftermath of Cameron's car bomb and the FBI assault on Chromartie's apartment. As the last season closed, Sarah, John, and Cameron were trying to retrieve the Turk, a chess computer that will eventually develop into SkyNet. The man who has the Turk put a bomb in Sarah's Jeep in order to kill her but ended up hitting Cameron instead. Cameron is damaged and reverts to her standard terminator programming: Kill John Connnor. This provides most of the action for the episode as Cameron chases John and Sarah across the city.

At the end of the last season, the FBI had tracked down Chromartie and broke into his apartment only to be slaughtered. The FBI agent (I'll really have to try to remember his name) is left alive and spends the rest of the episode lying to his superiors about what happened. Meanwhile EMT Guy (also don't recall his name) and the guy from 90210 meet up to try to chase down Sarah and John. The biggest development, though, was Shirley Manson as a T-1000 who is running a company that is developing technology that will become the terminators.

Towards the end of the episode, Cameron is squished between two trucks and she resets to normal--that is she decides not to kill John. And thus the season begins with our plucky group of robots, teenagers, freedom fighters from the future set to do battle with Shirley Manson.

Couple things:

The cold open was cool as hell. Has any show ever done anything like that before? It was a solid 3-4 minutes without dialogue. Just visual story telling with a sort of metal soundtrack. The photography wasn't amazing by any means, but it was effective, and it struck me as an innovative way to start the season. It also had a nice symmetry with the final scene from last season with the FBI going after Chromartie.

In Shirley Manson's first scene, it seemed like she was trying to do an American accent. It went away in the rest of her scenes, and it needs to stay gone. I don't think she has the acting skills necessary to do an accent consistently. So, letting her speak naturally will improve her performance and give her character a little more depth.

Buuut, she was playing a T-1000 that likes to hang out in mens' rooms disguised as a urinal. What? Yes. Couldn't she have been a trashcan? And if your staff is small and overworked, would you really want to kill one of them? These robots need to work on their personnel management skills. Step 1. Don't hide in the bathroom. Step 2. Don't kill your staff.

Also, she's a terminator who has come back in time to make sure that future terminators are built. This raises a TON of time travel contradictions, but the most glaring is that it proves that any attempt to stop the creation of terminators is futile since she couldn't come back in time if they weren't built eventually.

More importantly, I started to wonder if this development was at odds with the theme of the original movie. Although it's about killer robots from the future, it really was a movie of it's time. In the original movie (and the second one), it was the government's search for security from external threats and mutually assured destruction that lead to the creation of SkyNet and the end of the world. Without the Soviet Union, why is the government building SkyNet? And shouldn't government scientists be involved in this and not some shadowy private company?

Anyway, better forget all that before next Monday.

Choices

A couple weeks ago, I ran across this book at Borders. As its title indicates, it is a military history of the Iraq war. I have thought about buying it since I think it would interesting to know what the actual strategy was for the war. We pretty much kicked ass in the actual war--it was the aftermath that was a complete mess.

In any case, I flipped through the book and came across this image:


This is a stunning picture. I stopped flipping and stared at it for several moments. It is a picture of a bomb damage assessment being performed on an Iraqi building targeted by the US Air Force during the war. The building was hit with a 5000 pound bomb which penetrated the roof and ceiling and exploded inside. In the bottom right corner is a soldier assessing the damage caused by the bomb.

According to the book, with weapons such as the one used on this building, assessing damage was difficult from the air since the exterior of some buildings did not show much damage. That is why ground teams were sent to targets to report on the damage.

I want to contrast that image with this one:


This is the interior of the Pantheon in Rome. The Pantheon was built in 125 A.D. under Hadrian. It was built as a temple for all the gods, hence pan + theo. It has been in continuous use since it was built, and was converted to a Catholic church in the 7th century. For the first 1200 years of its existence, the Pantheon was the largest masonry dome in the world. It is a masterpiece of architecture and one of the great buildings of the world.

I will leave you to consider the comparison between these two pictures and these two buildings, but I would like to say that we have choices available to us in this world.

Understanding the Presidential Campaign through the Films of the 1980s: Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

This week, Obama has refocused his campaign here at home after a successful overseas trip. The big story has been the McCain campaign's attempt to attack Obama for . . . having a successful overseas trip. So, they started running two new ads, one attacking Obama for cancelling a trip to a military hospital in Germany, and the other accusing Obama of being like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. This second ad is backed by ongoing complaints that the media has been nice to Obama.

This is all very Ferris Bueller. Remember at the end of the Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Jeanie is sitting in the police station. Principal Rooney in a mad attempt to catch Ferris playing hooky has broken into the Bueller's home. Jeanie, with the same mad goal, has attacked him. She's sitting in the police station where she gets some sage advice from a young Charlie Sheen:

Jeanie: I went home to confirm that the shithead was ditching school and a guy broke into the house and I called the cops and they picked me up for making a phony phone call.

Charlie: What do you care if your brother ditches school?

Jeanie: Why should he get to ditch school when everyone else has to go?

Charlie: You could ditch.

Jeanie: I'd get caught.

Charlie: So, you're pissed at him because he ditches and doesn't get caught?

Jeanie: Basically.

Charlie: Then your problem is you.

Jeanie: Excuse me?

Charlie: Excuse you. You oughta spend a little more time dealing with yourself and a little less time worrying about what your brother does. It's just an opinion. . . . There's someone you should talk to.

Jeanie: If you say Ferris Bueller, you lose a testicle.

Charlie: Oh, you know him?

John McCain is Jeanie--she's pissed that Ferris is so popular--he's everyone's friend, even the druggie sitting in the police station. She's pissed that Ferris ditches school, but Ferris doesn't just ditch school, he ditches with style.

Ferris joy rides in a classic Ferrari, talks his way into an upscale restaurant, goes to a Cubs game, and does spontaneous renditions of "Danke Schoen" and "Twist and Shout" with adoring crowds happily joining in.

Sure, who wouldn't be jealous? But in an election, you want to be popular. You don't want to have to argue that being popular is bad. John McCain would happily speak before 200,000 people in Berlin. But 200,000 people wouldn't turn out for John McCain. John McCain's problem isn't that Barack Obama is popular--John McCain's problem is John McCain.

The Politics of The Dark Knight

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS EXTENSIVE SPOILERS OF THE DARK KNIGHT. DO NOT READ ANY MORE IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THE MOVIE.

I hope that warning is sufficient, but let me reiterate, I will be discussing the film candidly and completely without any attempt to conceal what occurs at any point, including the end. Let me say also that this is not a review of the movie but an analysis of its politics. My review of The Dark Knight needs only two words: Absolutely brilliant. I highly recommend it. With that in mind, let's turn to the politics.

The Dark Knight has already garnered a lot of attention. From Heath Ledger's death, to his performance, to its record breaking opening weekend, the movie was always going to create debate and discussion. And since it opened, the discussion has predictably turned to its politics

A commentator in the Wall Street Journal appears to be the first person to assert that Batman is represents President Bush. Despite the stupid superficiality of the argument in the WSJ, the argument has been adopted even by some left leaning commentators, including Open Left and Matt Yglesias. Even at Slate, their culture critics have called the film's politics "incoherent."

I disagree. The film is coherent and Batman does not represent George Bush.

I realize that it may be easy to make the mistake so many other commentators have made because the movie clearly does have something to say about our current politics and the war on terror. Simplistic interpretations are going to be advanced first, and that is what we are dealing with right now.

The WSJ's argument goes like this:

Batman represents Bush because Batman is willing to go outside the law to meet terrorists "on their own terms." Batman, the character, realizes that a free society sometimes must fight those who would destroy it through means that it normally finds unacceptable. Batman is a vigilante who operates without concern for civil rights or civil liberties in order to stop the plots of dangerous terrorists like the Joker.

Before we go any further, it is important to note that the commentator at the WSJ does nothing to justify this interpretation of the film through reference to the film itself. There is no analysis of the events in the movie or explanation for why this interpretation is appropriate to the plot. Thus, one's initial position on this interpretation should be one of skepticism

In order to develop a more serious understanding of the film, there are three significant points that must inform our interpretation. First, this is a movie that draws on a long and well established Batman mythology, and this mythology goes beyond the film. Second, the film itself is a creative work with its own story that is comprehensible without reference to politics. Third, nonetheless, this film is trying to say something about our politics and the war on terror.

Most commentators do not appear willing to allow these three interpretive principles, but each is crucial. I think many people are led astray on the second point, so let me explain its significance.

There are many movies that are transparently about the war on terror. These include things like "Rendition," "Lions for Lambs," and "Redacted." These movies have addressed the war on terror directly, and generally have failed to gain any popular attention or critical praise.

At the WSJ, the commentator argues that these are unsuccessful because they are left leaning movies that attempt to establish moral equivalence between the United States and Islamic terrorists.

However, this point is disproven by another set of left leaning movies like "Children of Men" and "Pan's Labyrinth," and TV shows like "Battlestar Galactica." All of these movies talk about the war on terror, take left leaning positions and have been generally very successful and received critical praise.

The reason is that these movies tell a story within an independent artistic framework. Although they address the war on terror, they do so while also telling a story that is unrelated to the war on terror.

This is important because it will often ensure that the filmmakers do not fall into common political positions. It is very easy to simply repeat the political debates we have on a daily basis in a movie that is about events mimicking those that occur on a daily basis. A story that is about something else, however, offers the opportunity to develop a different perspective on those debates. And a different perspective allows us to reassess, reinterpret, and refine our beliefs.

The Dark Knight is this sort of movie. It has a story to tell about superheroes and villains in a sprawling city. That story is not about terrorism, and its elements simply do not map cleanly onto the aspects of the war on terrorism.

In order to see that we must now turn to the film itself. So, let me once again reiterate:

SPOILERS FOLLOW. DO NOT READ MORE IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THE DARK KNIGHT. THERE WILL BE NO MORE WARNINGS.

In the broad strokes, The Dark Knight is a story about Batman's struggle to bring the Joker to justice. I hope that I can convince you of my position through reference to the movie. Thus, I am going to begin by discussing some of the characters and then move on to specific plot points. I will finish with some general thoughts on the movie as a whole and on the other political interpretations.

Batman, of course, is Bruce Wayne, multi-billionaire playboy industrialist. From the Batman mythology, and the previous film, we know that his parents were killed by criminals when he was a child and this has led him to seek revenge through vigilantism. He has extensive martial arts training, but he is also a detective, using forensics as much as brute force to catch criminals. We know that he does not kill indiscriminately, but rather incapacitates criminals and turns them over to the police. The real villains often end up in Arkham Asylum.

This allows the first departure from the Bush-is-Batman argument. The WSJ argument in part maintains that Bush is Batman because both go outside the law in order to fight terrorism. There are two reasons this analogy does not function. First, as others have noted, as a private person, Batman is not bound by the same laws as government officials. This is a simple argument and I assume it is accepted.

Second, and more importantly, Batman does not have the same relationship with the law as Bush, or to put it another way, their motivations are different. Bush has chosen to go outside the law because he believes the law to be unnecessarily constraining--that the actual terms of the law do not allow him to fight terrorism effectively. It should be noted, of course, that instead of changing the law, Bush has chosen to just violate it.

Batman, however, must go outside the law not because the law is unnecessarily constraining, but because the police and officials responsible for enforcing the law are themselves corrupt and criminal. They cannot be trusted because they are only pursuing their own interests.

Although this point derives from the pre-existing Batman mythology, it is repeatedly made in the film. Bruce Wayne/Batman works with Jim Gordon because he knows he is clean and can trust him. In the film, Batman/Wayne works to find out if he can trust Harvey Dent, the new district attorney. Bruce Wayne can see a time when he can stop being Batman, because he believes that Harvey Dent will be a public hero who upholds the law honestly. Later in the movie when Batman catches Dent about to torture one of Joker's henchmen, he stops Dent and explains that everything would be lost if anyone had seen Dent.

This is all a way of showing that Batman actually believes in the law. He believes in the goodness of society and decent order. But criminals--corrupt officials--undermine that goodness and destroy the order. This is not Bush's view of the law, and it is not his motivation in breaking it. Batman is fighting to restore the power of the law. Bush has struggled to weaken it.

The Joker is an anarchistic criminal who appears without warning to wreak havoc on Gotham first by taking over the criminal underworld and later through random killings and attempts at mass murder. The Joker is not just unknown
but unknowable. He has no fingerprints, his clothes don't even have tags, and he never tells a true story about himself. Without explanation, the Joker simply is.

He does not seek money or power, only disorder. The Joker exists to show that despite our pretensions to law and a liberal order, society is only inches away from collapse. This is why he offers public rewards for killing other characters, so that society will give up its own rules and turn on itself. This is why he plants bombs on the two ferries--to make people face horrible choices, and he hopes, to get them to make those choices.

So, the Joker is in some ways a fair approximation of Islamist terrorists. For we often cannot understand their motivations and they can seem bent on destroying us. But I hope it is also clear that this is not a clean match for terrorists either. Joker does not demand anything of society, he just wants to play games.

Harvey Dent is the good lawyer, the good official. He believes in the law, and if Batman has his way, Dent would be the symbol that brings Gotham back from the edge of collapse. Dent tries to clean up the city through the law and without fear. He faces down death threats, he indicts multiple mobsters on hundreds of criminal charges, and he places himself in direct danger to catch the Joker.

Who could he possibly represent in the Bush administration? Or in the war on terror? If we want to make a direct analogy to our current politics as the WSJ argument would have us do, then there is no explanation for Harvey Dent. Dent is not George Bush, he is not Alberto Gonzalez or John Ashcroft or Michael Mukasey. One might argue that he is part of the independent artistic project of the movie and thus can be ignored in a political interpretation. I will return to this argument later, but for now it is sufficient to say that it is mistaken.

Let's turn to some plot points beginning with Dent. Perhaps the most important aspect of Dent's story line is that he and his girlfriend, Rachel Dawes, are kidnapped by the Joker, and tied to bombs. Rachel is killed in an explosion, but Dent is burned on half his body and becomes Two-Face.

One might point out that this experience forces Dent to face the relentless reality of the Joker's terrorism, and that Dent spends the remainder of the movie ruthlessly killing the people, including police officers, who helped the Joker. In other words, Dent, the honest district attorney, sees the limits of the law and chooses to operate outside of it.

That is a fair interpretation, but it does not account for all relevant circumstances. Once again, it was corrupt cops who helped the Joker--public officials in part led to the creation of Two-Face. This reinforces the above point about the position of the law in the Batman universe. The law itself is good, but the people charged with enforcing it are corrupt.

Second, we must acknowledge that Batman stops Dent from torturing one of Joker's henchmen. In doing so, Batman tells Dent how important it is that he remain clean, that he still stand up for the law, and that he not treat the henchmen that way. Furthermore, Batman chides Dent for wanting to torture a man who is a paranoid schizophrenic--a man who wouldn't be able to provide any information even if he had it. This Batman is against torture.

The counterpoint is, of course, that later in the movie Batman actually beats Joker in order to get him to reveal where Dent and Rachel are being held. This is not perfectly consistent with the earlier position, but there are also important differences. After all, this is the Joker, not a henchman. Bruce Wayne also loves Rachel Dawes and may be acting out of personal rage. And this is part of Joker's plan to force Batman to break his own rules. In the scene, the Joker says that he will reveal Rachel's location only if Batman breaks his "one rule." Again, this reinforces the point that Joker stands at odds with law itself while Batman is ultimately bound by it.

The third major plot point that needs discussion is Batman's broad based surveillance device. This is a system that allows him to see anything in the Gotham at any time. He can watch everyone, invade privacy, without regard for personal rights. This can be seen as NSA spying, warrantless wiretapping, TIA, and whatever other systems the government has in place to look over us. And Batman uses it to catch the Joker.

But the movie does not approve of this technique. In fact, Batman does not use it on his own. He recognizes the danger in the device; he recognizes that it is wrong. That is why he turns it over to Lucius Fox, a trustworthy and decent man that he knows he can trust to first oversee it's use and then destroy it when the need is eliminated. If the device is NSA spying, then Lucius Fox is the FISA court. Yes, the film admits that extraordinary measures are required in extraordinary circumstances, but only with supervision, only with an end point, and only with a return to normality. So, in this instance, Batman is not George Bush, but rather what Bush should have been.

Finally, some general thoughts about the film. I hope I have convinced you that The Dark Knight is anti-torture, anti-surveillance, pro-law, and pro-civil liberties. The movie also believes that people are essentially decent. This is clearly demonstrated by the prisoner's dilemma the Joker gives to the two ferries. Each ferry is rigged to explode and the detonator is given to the opposite ferry. One ferry is full of normal civilians--men, women, children, families. The other has been loaded with dangerous criminals from a prison. Joker provides the ultimatum: Press the button, and blow up the other ferry. The only way to guarantee your own survival is to kill hundreds of other people.

This is a genius piece of work, because the movie wants the audience to reflect on this question. This isn't just a dilemma for the characters, but a problem for the audience as well. We are given time to contemplate it. But ultimately the movie provides the answer: A hardened criminal takes the detonator and throws it out the window--even he knows you can't simply kill other people to save your own life. The same thing happens on the other boat. A man stands up ostensibly to press the button, but facing the reality of killing someone, he can't bring himself to do it. Both sides make the right choice, the moral choice, to face the possibility of own death rather than actively cause the deaths of others.

I just don't see how this can be a conservative message--a message that says it is ok to exceed the law in order to protect society. Instead, it says that we must restrain ourselves; that we are responsible for creating our decent society everyday. In a conservative world, the possibility of an attack from the other ferry would justify the destruction of that ferry.

Is that not what happened with Iraq?

I want to conclude by cautioning everyone against this sort of hagiography of George Bush. Yes, some people will continue to believe that his administration has been morally justified in torturing people, in breaking the laws of this country, and in acting in unconstitutional manners. But there appears to be many attempts to link his behavior with figures from popular culture. Saying that Batman represents Bush is an attempt to attach a specific mythology to Bush's presidency, a mythology that makes Bush the ultimate hero and people who oppose him all villains.

By the standard asserted by the WSJ, any superhero represents George Bush. Superman does not operate within the bounds of the law, nor Spider Man, nor the X-Men. They could all stand in for Bush. But they don't. They don't because they are stories and stories contain predetermined relationships between protagonists and antagonists.

In the real life, we have to make evaluations of actions as they happen. A hagiography that identifies a real life actor with a fictional protagonist that exists in world with predetermined evaluations of its characters risks false associations that justify behaviors that deserve independent assessments. That's all a way of saying that we can't just say Bush is Batman, Batman is good, and therefore Bush is good. We need to ask if Bush is good in himself. That remains a debatable question.

So, what is Family Guy

Family Guy is not a "show about nothing." Family Guy is a show about jokes. The evidence for this is the following:

1. It continues to rely on cut away jokes where a character says something like, "That reminds me of the time I . . ." and it cuts away from the main action to show something that the character just said. This is a way of telling a joke. You get a set up in the main action and a punchline--often a visual punchline--in the cut away.

2. It has no consistent metaphysics. In Family Guy, the Pilsbury Doughboy will show up inexplicably, Kool Aid Man will burst through walls, and the characters are capable of any feat including squeezing Play-Do out of their heads to create hair, or in Bryan's case, being 7 years old, but having a 14 year old human son. This flexibility allows the writers to do whatever they want in service of the jokes.

3. They tell actual jokes on the show. I don't have a good example off the top of my head, but listen to Quagmire's lines. Many of them are jokes you have heard before. Maybe in an email forward, maybe from a friend. But they are still just jokes you tell people.

The Simpsons is a show about nothing.

Seinfeld was the original show about nothing, of course, but I don't see any reason that other shows can't adopt that same mantle.

Seinfeld was a show about nothing because it rejected premises. Just by comparison, Cheers was a show about a bar. M.A.S.H was a show about doctors in war. Growing Pains was a show about the difference between the practice of psychology and the reality of family life. Mr. Belvedere was about a butler. And that brings us back to Seinfeld. In the Seinfeld episode explaining the show about nothing, Jerry and George end up making a fictional show in which comedy is supposed to be created by the fact that a judge sentences a man to be Jerry's butler. That is a premise.

Four friends in New York and their daily travails is not a premise. One critique I saw of Seinfeld said that the show was based on Jerry Seinfeld's personal moral code--a code about politeness, civility, and how people should interact with each other. That seems to be true as well, but it's still about daily life and there is no underlying premise that you have to buy into--there was no artificial background fact that forced these four main characters to be around each other. It was just four people who liked each other.

The Simpsons has reached this point too. It started out as a Honeymooners knockoff designed to comment on the American family. In the first three seasons or so, Homer and Marge cared about teaching and instructing their growing children. Every once in a while, Homer would suffer some real angst and actual regret. As it became more established, the show changed significantly. The family stories were still there, but since the show had covered so much ground, the family got pushed to the background while pop culture and satire moved to the front.

The perfect example of this is the episode in which Homer is hired by an evil mastermind to help bring a nuclear reactor online. After moving to a new town, Lisa finds she is allergic to nature, Bart is held back in school, Marge has nothing to do all day since the house cleans itself. Homer is happy in his new job, but ultimately chooses to move the family back to Springfield to make his family happy. That's a great story about the demands of family life, but the B story really makes the episode special. In the background, we have Mr. Scorpio, a Bond style villain who is also a New-Age boss who tries to make the work environment fun. It works as social satire about the stupidity of making office work fun and as a long form pop culture reference to the Bond films.

From this point, the show for a brief period went very far towards pop culture references. But that ground was ultimately taken up by Family Guy. On the other side, King of the Hill took up a lot of space about simple family issues. The Simpsons was left the middle ground and a slew of well established characters from the whole town.

And that is why The Simpsons is a show about nothing. At this point, Marge, Homer, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie are a family only nominally. Any new episode will essentially be about four and a half people who happen to live together, but without any particular relationships between them. It doesn't really matter that Marge and Homer are married or that Homer is Lisa's father, or that Bart is Lisa's brother. They just happen to live together.

It's not necessarily a bad thing. If you go into an episode with this in mind, you will probably be more satisfied than if you thing it is still about the American family.

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of "Word World"

If you have a job, you might not be aware of a program called Word World running in the mid afternoon on your local PBS station. Word World is an animated children's educational program that is supposed to teach kids how to spell. It tends to be charming and the animation is pretty good. But Word World is strange indeed. In Word World, there are free floating letters, and when organized into words, the letters become the thing that they spell. There are a variety lead characters in word world--a sheep formed of the letters S H E E P, a frog formed from the letters F R O G, and so on. Houses are formed from H O U S E, and you can imagine what red buildings are made from B A R N. With this general understanding in mind, I ask the following questions on the metaphysics of word world:

1. In Word World, does the creation of a word/item require some intent from the person forming the word, or does it simply happen spontaneously when letters are arranged appropriately? If no intention is required, won't word world be ultimately destroyed by an accidental B O M B?

2. In Word World, adding an "s" to any noun creates more and more of the noun without end. This happened in an episode with pizza. A few extra friends came over to Sheep's house, and in order to provide more food, he added an "s" to his pizza. The resulting pizzas spilled out of his house continually. If this is the case, then s's are the most dangerous letter in the alphabet.

3. Isn't word world essentially Marxist? After all, there are no industrial means of production, and there is no need for them. Any object or good one might possibly need can be created simply through arranging the appropriate letters. Frogs and Sheep and dogs are free to pursue their individual fulfillment without any hierarchical power structure. Education has set them free, and they have thrown off the chains of oppression. In short, spelling is important.

4. This, of course, begs the question of the where the free floating letters come from. Are they made in a factory? If so, who controls the factory? Given the way things work in Word World, couldn't you create more letters by arranging L E T T E R S? And if you did, how many letters would you get? In the pizzas episode, they made robots to eat all the pizzas. How do you get rid of letters? Can you create letter eating robots?

5. In word world, if a word is misspelled, it does not form the object you are intending to spell. But what about words that don't have consistent spelling, or spellings that are different in British and American English?

6. What about compound words? The use of 's' to create more pizzas suggests that letters can be added to already completed words. Would anyone ever want to spell "muskrat"? Wouldn't you get musk before you get muskrat?

7. What about nouns that are two separate words? Can you make a dung beetle in word world? Or will you only ever have some dung and a beetle?

8. Finally, the big questions. What happens if you spell "be"?
What about "truth"?
"Beauty"?
And the biggest of all: What happens if you spell "God"?

Things to ponder in your afternoon.

The Frightening World of Presidents

I live in D.C.'s Maryland suburbs and I work in downtown Washington. In fact, every day on my way to work, I walk past the White House. I have only been here a few months, however, and today I saw something I hadn't seen before. It was a motorcade.

I have seen other motorcades, but this one was different. Three cars sped through traffic ignoring traffic signals. The first car was a Metropolitan Police Department black and white with its lights and sirens running. It was followed immediately by two black Chevrolet Tahoes flashing concealed lights. Although the sirens were odd, this normally would not have been too unusual.

The first Tahoe caught my eye. The rear driver side window as rolled down, and a blonde man in a light brown suit sat there looking out at the sidewalk--looking at me. He wore a light blue shirt with a yellow tie. His left hand held the grip of a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun.

I know it was an MP5 because I've played a lot of video games, and because like any good American, I love guns. But, like any good gun lover, I know that guns like that are designed to kill people, and I find it disturbing to see them in public.

As was well reported a few weeks ago, D.C.'s gun ban was struck down by the Supreme Court. You might not have heard that the Metropolitan Police recently set up mandatory road checkpoints in the northeast section of the city in order to curb drive by shootings. On Sunday, bystanders in the Adams-Morgan neighbor chased down and beat a man who shot another man in broad daylight. There is a problem with guns in this city, but the man with the MP5 was not there to protect against random or gang related gun violence.

On a day-to-day basis, my biggest fear is that I will get hit by a car. This fear largely comes from the fact that I walk everywhere, that I am frequently very close to moving vehicles, and the fact that there are an unusually high number of pedestrian deaths in D.C. It is my environment--the cars flying past me, the number of crosswalks I use--that inform and create my fears.

The blonde man in the Tahoe was not there to protect against random gun violence. He was there to stop unknown attempts to kill whoever he was protecting. And he forms that person's daily environment. This the world in which Presidents, Vice-Presidents, and the Secretaries of State and Defense live. A world where they must constantly be on guard against secret plots and vague conspiracies. A world where their life is at risk every moment of every day. A world in which even a man in a suit on his way to work is a potential threat.

This is something to consider as we get ready to elect the next President. If Barack Obama becomes President, he will live in this same environment. The mere fact of such intense protection will change how he perceives the world, but it is impossible at this point to tell how. For those of you who are concerned with the excesses of the war on terror, be ready to fight to keep Obama from falling off the edge. He will live in a frightening world.

Mongol

Last year's Oscar nominees for best foreign language film included a Russian remake of 12 Angry Men, a Polish film about Soviet attrocities during World War 2, an Israeli film about the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, an Austrian movie about Jewish men in a concentration camp who are forced to counterfeit foreign currencies for the Nazis, and Mongol, the story of Genghis Khan's rise to power in Central Asia. Given how much this country loves stories about World War 2, it is perhaps no surprise that the Holocaust drama won.

Mongol certainly deserved to be nominated, but it probably did not deserve to win. This film has a lot going for it and as a production, it is a rather significant achievement. It may be, in fact, the production that is the most impressive part of Mongol. It was written by two Russians, filmed in Kazakhstan, starred Mongolians, and was funded by a multitude of sources including German and Russian non-profit organizations. And for all this, the production values are extremely high: the costumes are well designed, the acting is also more than competent, and the photography is beautiful as they obviously tried very hard to capture the grand sweep of the steppes.

But the story has problems. The writer and director Sergei Bodrov obviously took some dramatic license in telling this story, and there is legitimate ground for complaint for the simple reason that there is a really great story here. In his 2005 book, Jack Weatherford told that story with simplicity and insight. Weatherford managed to recount the most recent research into the early life of Genghis Khan, describe the cultural and political world in which he came to power, and explain why Genghis Khan was so successful militarily. Bodrov's movie forgoes what is, to me at least, an inherently fascinating story in order to tell a somewhat more conventional tale of love and the will to power.

I would have preferred if the movie were more historically accurate and covered more ground. Mongol ends after Temudgin defeats the army of his blood brother Jamukha, and stops with the assumption that we know the rest of the story. But the rest of the story is what really deserves to be told.

Setting aside the ahistorical aspects of the story, it still was not structured very well. In the first half of the movie, the story moves rather quickly and is at best episodic. There is very little explanation of why the scenes fit together or how the characters are able to do what they do. The movie would have benefited from a slower exposition that established the cultural and political framework in which the story exists. Even though the storytelling becomes more coherent in the middle of the film, some of these problems continue until the end.

The problems in the story are perhaps best exemplified by the climatic battle between Temudgin and Jamukha. The conflict between these two characters is a central aspect of the movie as Temudgin refuses to become Jamukha's vassal and actually attracts some of Jamukha's followers by distributing the spoils of battle equally. But to get to this battle scene, Bodrov first creates a one year period in which Temudgin has been defeated and sold as a slave to a Chinese trader. Much of the film, in fact, is told as a flashback during Temudgin's ahistorical imprisonment by a Chinese lord. After escaping from prison, Temudgin manages to gather sufficient followers to challenge Jamukha's preeminence on the steppes, and thus the movie comes to the battle scene. But it doesn't tell the audience anything about how Temudgin gathered these followers. In one scene, he is escaping from prison, and in the next he is at the head of a large army. That is all we are shown, and it simply does not work as a storytelling device. If you are going to tell the story of Genghis Khan's rise to power, it would be wise to show that rise.

Nonetheless, the movie was pretty entertaining. It just wasn't perfect.

The thing about Iron Man

Iron Man has been out for over six weeks now, and I managed to catch a matinee last weekend. It is one of the best reviewed movies of the year so far with 93% at Rotten Tomatoes and 79/100 at Metacritic. These are rather high numbers for a super hero movie. Compare to The Incredible Hulk which is now playing opposite Iron Man, and received scores of 67% and 61/100 from those respective websites.

Much of the credit for Iron Man goes to Robert Downey, Jr. Most critics noted that his performance kept the movie going, and that is undoubtedly true. I really enjoy watching Downey. He usually gives a fun performance even if the movie is otherwise bad. He is a lot like Alec Baldwin in that way. Say what you will about the rest of the Baldwin family, but Alec is entertaining as hell.

But there are two other aspects of Iron Man that really push its ratings up. First, it's a tight film. There isn't a much wasted time--the plot just effortlessly flows forward. Credit for this has to go to John Favreau who put it all together, but the writers also deserve credit for not overburdening the script with expository dialogue. Too many superhero movies get bogged down in that sort of thing. In Iron Man, there is a short sequence explaining that Tony Stark is the son of an arms dealer and that he has his own genius when it comes to weapons design. That's about all you need to know and that is all the movie tells you. Favreau and the writers avoid unnecessary explanation, and in doing so, they keep the film focused on the immediate story and the action. Simple, but it works.

The second thing that really helps the film is that its plot is tangentially related to current events. Most superhero movies are designed escapist fun. That means avoiding politics, avoiding our actual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and when necessary, using stock military characters. The Hulk movies are perfect examples of this. You would think by watching those movies that the army isn't up to anything besides chasing down big green men. Iron Man is different of course, as it features an arms dealer who is captured by terrorists/insurgents in Afghanistan and who has to come to grips with the moral implications of making a fortune off dealing in weapons.

I have been looking for movies that are relevant for a while now. With the state we're in, mainstream movies should have a lot more to say. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is an excellent movie even if you are not a trek fan in large part because it was bold enough to talk about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Iron Man isn't Star Trek VI, but it's a step in the right direction.

On the meaning of Classic Rock

Had a phone conversation with Wyatt a week or so ago trying to determine the meaning of "Classic Rock." I think I have reached my final view.

"Classic Rock" is not simply oldies. Oldies used to be rock and roll from the 50s and 60s--that is, it was hit singles from the initial creation of rock and roll and popular culture targeted at youth in the post war era and early 1950s. Classic rock is more tightly focused around music from the late 1960s through the 1970s to the early 80s. It excludes psychodelic rock, folk, punk, and new wave, but includes glam rock and southern rock.

Furthermore, as wikipedia points out, classic rock is a term that came into being in conjunction with a certain style of radio station. This is what explains the wide range of music that is considered"classic rock."

But for the radio stations to exist, there had to be a market that desired a certain type of music. Radio stations are constantly changing format in order to appeal to changing demographics. What happened with classic rock, however, is that the radio stations were enduring enough to reformulate the genre.

The question then is what was this demographic and what did classic rock represent? I think classic rock became a genre in itself because it represents a period in rock and roll when rock reached a specific height of mainstream acceptance and support. It's largely a result of the history of rock as an art.

In its first couple decades, rock and roll was a rebellious form of art that rejected more adult focussed forms of popular music like jazz, folk, swing. It relied heavily on blues influences, used electric guitars, and introduced the back beat. And it was made by and targeted to teenagers.

By the late 1960s, rock and roll had triumphed and became the dominant popular musical form. It went from being rebellious to being the official art. It was backed by large, well funded record companies. It was still targeting young people, but it was being made by more musicians who had matured under the rock paradigm. These musicians were targeting the people who initially grew up with rock and not just teenagers. Rock and Roll had developed. It became more complex, but in many ways, song structure became more rigid with the standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus developed by The Beatles.

But there were moves that were more expansive from bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd with Freebird and a lot of Led Zeppelin where instead of the normal pop structure, the songs would build in intensity over time. The themes of rock also changed to reflect an older and more experienced audience.

Nonetheless, what all this represented was the fact that rock and roll had become the official
art. It was what all the popular kids at school aspired to. Like Jack in John Mellencamp's classic, the even the football star dreamed of becoming a rocker. Rock and roll represented the middle class, white dream.

And all the ended in the early 1980s under the simultaneous assaults of punk, new wave, resurgent pop by Michael Jackson and Madonna, etc, and ultimately by hip hop. Hip hop killed rock and roll, in turn became the official art, and is now suffering it's own assaults.

So, classic rock is really classical rock because it was the last time that rock and roll was the dominant genre. It's like classical music generally which was the officially supported court music that dominated Europe in the late 18th century.

That's my argument at least.

Movie Update: My Kid Could Paint That

My Kid Could Paint That is a documentary filmed largely in 2005 following the story of a four year old girl who became famous for creating abstract paintings. The story has a lot of natural hooks. First, it's potentially the story of a child genius--a toddler who can paint with the same skill of Jackson Pollock. But it's also a story about modern art: Don't believe that Jackson Pollock really did anything? Well, here is a four year old to prove it.

Those are the two aspects that seem to have drawn the filmmaker, Amir Bar-Lev, into the story. But he got into a story that he didn't fully understand. The four year old, Marla, is the daughter of an amateur artist, and she apparently began painting after her father gave her some materials. Marla has and initial flush of fame--an article in her home town newspaper leads to the New York Times, which leads to other magazines, and then television. And this all naturally leads to a media backlash.

Charlie Rose, working on 60 Minutes went looking for fraud and managed to find a little evidence. The father repeatedly claims that cameras change Marla's behavior, and it is therefore difficult to show her working. To solve the problem, 60 Minutes installed a hidden camera to catch her painting naturally, but on the film, it also caught the father encouraging her to paint. And when the tapes of Marla painting were shown to a child psychologist, the psychologist didn't see anything in her behavior that demonstrated unusual genius for a child.

These charges of fraud essentially destroy the narrative that had been built up around the girl, but there is no resolution to the competing stories. There is no way to show fraud, but there is no way to prove this little girl made these paintings herself. Ultimately, it was a good documentary. Well constructed, tightly controlled, and an interesting subject. That's about as much as anyone can say for any documentary.

Some of it's themes are worth mentioning, though. First, the woman who wrote the initial newspaper story about Marla came to see the episode as a demonstration of how the media works--grabbing onto an interesting story, pumping it for all it's worth, and then turning against the subject in order to keep the story going. That is certainly a good way of interpreting it.

Second, it is a story about modern art, and it presents the interesting idea that abstract art, because it is abstract, necessarily relies on the story of the person who made it. In one of the special features, Bar-Lev notes that you can have two identical objects but one will have more value if, for example, you can show a connection to Abraham Lincoln. Abstract art is not simply about the quality of the art, but also about who made it.

Finally, this was a story about this family. The father is a manager at a factory, the wife a dental assistant. The wife claims to have her child's best interests are heart and appears to be genuinely hurt when the story about her child changes. It's odd, however, that they continue to exploit their daughter. The 60 Minutes piece happened in 2005. They kept putting their daughter out for this sort of scrutiny in 2006, 2007, and presumably this year as well. The difference between their intentions and their actions is really strange.

So, good movie, worth watching.

Reading Update

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning was a decent book, but not amazing. I did not feel like Hedges was telling us any great truths even though as a long time war reporter he has rather deep insight into the subject.

The big points:

1. Most war is based on nationalism and therefore derives from racism.
2. In the middle of war, most people even good people will do things that are unimaginable in a normal context.
3. But some people will not submit to the nationalist rhetoric and corrupted modes of thought that are necessary for war.
4. Young people in love are the antidote to war.

Good book, but it didn't blow me away.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The Day the Earth Stood Still was really enjoyable and well deserving of its reputation.

It was very 1950s, but in a good way. I don't have much to say about this movie other than I enjoyed it.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Is terrible.

The story is really screwy. If you don't know, it's about aliens. Apparently, between Last Crusade and now, Indiana Jones helped with the alien autopsies at Roswell, New Mexico, and before that, he was in the OSS during WW2. These are not good additions to the mythology of Indiana Jones. I kind of think that Indiana Jones needs to stay within the spiritual realm for its stories and not venture into science fiction. So, for me, this movie was a lot like putting the character Indiana Jones into a movie in which he did not belong.

This is true in two other ways. First, the actions sequences were not Jones-y. Combined with the story being the way it was, this movie felt to me like a cross between National Treasure and Pirates of the Caribbean. Both NT and Pirates are essentially knockoffs of the Indiana Jones franchise. So, this movie felt like a cheap imitation of imitations of Indiana Jones. There was one really cool motorcycle chase scene through Indy's college campus. But that was outweighed by Shia LaBeouf swinging through the jungle on vines like Tarzan with monkey helpers, a sword fight in which LaBeouf straddles the gap between two speeding trucks, and an unnecessary tomb sequence in which Indy and Mutt (LaBeouf's character) are attacked by blow dart wielding amazonian natives.

Now normally, when you say things like "blow dart wielding Amazonian natives," that should be pretty cool. It was in Raiders, after all. But this brings us to the second problem: the entire scene was shot on a soundstage and obviously so. It looked terrible. And this is true for most of the film. Even when they introduce the character at the beginning, they are supposed to be standing outside in New Mexico. But nope, it's on a soundstage. Shia LaBeouf doing Tarzan? Soundstage. Amazonian Natives? Soundstage. Things that should have been and could have been easily done outside were shot on a soundstage.

Ultimately because of this, it just didn't look like an Indiana Jones movie. Instead, it looked like Peter Jackson's 2005 version of King Kong which was largely computer created. Everything was lit with bright white lights and then shot in soft focus. Having watched it on Saturday, my impression of it at this point is that the highlights were essentially washed out, but that they used post production processes, either computers or normal techniques, to up the color density of the rest of the composition. If you know what I mean. The point is think King Kong. That's what it looked like.

So, insofar as it involved aliens, that the action sequences were not in keeping with previous versions, and the fact that it simply didn't look like the other entries in the franchise, it felt to me like a movie where the character was out of place.

Generally, I don't have a problem with using soundstages and alternate sites. I mean, Tunisia isn't Egypt, and I know that all the tomb scenes in the previous IJ movies were shot indoors. But they shot them straight and didn't manipulate them afterwards. And when possible, they shot outside. They had that good natural light to help make it look like something.

Piece of Crap. Don't watch it.

Metropolis

I watched Metropolis and Amadeus a couple weeks ago. Both were very interesting movies but I had different experiences with each. Let me talk about Metropolis first.

Metropolis is a German silent film made in 1927, and by now the story is a fairly familiar tale. In the future, there is a great city. It is beautiful and rich. The city is run by a man named Jo Frederman, and he is primarily concerned with keeping the economy running. The economy, of course, is run on the backs of ignorant laborers who work machines all day and barely survive their lives of numbing drudgery. The wealthy men live above ground in tall buildings and big apartments, and their sons live lives of leisure playing games at the coliseum, dancing in the pleasure district, and frolicking in the Eternal Garden.

The laborers live below ground in cramped and bland tenements. They operate huge dangerous machines by day, but spend their nights listening to woman preach about the coming mediator who will lift up out their drudgery. The woman, Maria, takes a group of children above ground one day and meets Freder Frederson, the son of Jo Frederson. Freder falls for Maria at first sight and decides to seek her out below ground. He sees and experiences the lives of the working men, hijinks ensue, and turns out he's the mediator they've been waiting for.

"Hijinks ensue" is pretty much like "yada, yada, yada" in the sense that it covers a lot of ground.

Nonetheless, the movie was fun. What is really impressive about it is the special effects, which look good even today. Specifically, several parts of the film were shot using a mirror technique that allowed the filmmakers to combine live action and full sized sets with matte paintings and miniatures. The matte paintings are not particularly unusual, but the miniatures are very cool. The coliseum where the sons of the rich play games and the underground tenements of the laborers look very real. Not too shabby for an 81 year old film.

Now on to Amadeus. Amadeus won Best Picture in 1984 and F. Murray Abraham won best actor for his portrayal of Antonio Salieri. Essentially, it is a picture about rivalry and envy, and how you can hate what you love. Much of the story is fictional, but it is based on a long history of stories that draw a rivalry between Salieri and Mozart. It begins with Salieri in his dotage confessing to killing Mozart, and most of the film operates as a flashback wherein Salieri relates the story to a priest who has come to hear his last confession.

Salieri is a few years older than Mozart, and eventually becomes court composer for the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Salieri spends his life in devotion to music. He is chaste and respectful and humble. He admires Mozart even before he meets him, and more importantly, he loves Mozart's music. The problem is that he meets Mozart, a childish and lecherous drunk. Mozart's facility with music is, as we all know, extraordinary and far surpasses Salieri's, and more over, he produces such beautiful compositions without hardly trying.

Various bits of rivalry occur. Salieri blocks Mozart from getting a job in the Emperor's court; Mozart embarrasses and mocks Salieri at various points. But eventually, Salieri sets on his plan to kill Mozart: He anonymously commissions a requiem, a death mass, from Mozart, and plans upon it's completion to kill Mozart and play it at his funeral, passing the work off as his own. He'll steal Mozart's work and kill him, and the music will restore his reputation.

Of course, it doesn't quite go off as intended. Instead, Mozart continues to work on other things, operas and symphonies, without finishing the requiem. When Mozart falls ill while conducting an opera, Salieri takes him home to rest. But instead of rest, he uses the chance to help Mozart finish the requiem and they spend the night working furiously. In the morning, Mozart is found dead. Salieri has killed Mozart by forcing him to work, but that was not his intention--Salieri was in love with Mozart's genius and basked in it even as he was killing him.

Famously, at the end of the movie with the tale complete, Salieri declares, "I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint!" The themes are really striking in that way, and the movie is rather enjoyable. It is obvious why it won Best Picture--it is a large production and a period piece. It focuses on famous men in old European cities--it allows Hollywood to do its thing to the fullest extent.

I made an interestingly little mistake when I watched the movie, however. It was one of the older double sided DVDs. Before dual layer DVDs existed, they would occasionally imprint half the movie on one side of the disc and half on the other sort of like a record. I wasn't paying attention when I put it in and so I started in the middle. Eventually, I decided it wasn't right, but only after watching about an hour of the movie.

The odd thing was that I really liked it. The second side starts with the scene where Salieri dresses up in a rather mysterious mask and goes to Mozart's apartment to commission the requiem. Since that is the major plot point in the movie, the second half works as a film in itself, and it's not the same film. Watching the second half alone, you have to work a little more to bring yourself up to speed in understanding the plot. Without the back story established in the first half of the movie, the narrative is much more spartan and intense.

An unusual mistake, but definitely an experience.

hooray for updates

plenty of updates coming today and tomorrow

Reading List Update

With Rosenbaum's travesty out of the way, I am moving on to Chris Hedges's War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, with the hope that I can finish it in the next couple days before begining The American State Constitutional Tradition.

Movies

So, it's going to be a good week for movies. Saw Harold and Kumar on Saturday, and that was very funny. As can be expected, it trailed off when they started wrapping up all the plot issues. It was very gag centric until the last 20 minutes and then it got very sincere. Annoying, but such is life. Also, the complaints that it wasn't as tightly plotted or written as the original are justified. That's not really to take away from the movie though, as I thought it was very funny.

I saw 2001: A Space Oddysey at the AFI Silver Theatre. They had a 70 mm print, and it was beautiful. People can complain that the movie doesn't make any sense, but it is absolutely stunning to watch on the big screen. The fact that they accomplished it 40 years ago, well before digital effects became anywhere close to common, makes it all the more amazing.

One of the things that surprised me about the film was the intensity of the sound. The score is well-known and often parodied, but it is quite good with movie. There is a 5-7 minute overture that plays before the film starts and a roughly 10 minute intermission about 2/3 of the way through the film. Both of those periods have music playing over them. I was not expecting either, so that was a fun experience. The sound during the movie, however, could be excrutiatingly loud. That was also something I wasn't expecting. Kubrick was clearly trying to use music and sound as part of the force of the film.

But again, the main point was that it was genuinely beautiful to watch to the point that it is probably hard to appreciate on a television.

This coming weekend, I'll be seeing "The Final Cut" of Blade Runner and I'm really looking forward to it.

Myth of Moral Justice: The Bloody End

I'm putting the book down. I probably could have finished it if I hadn't spent so much time thinking about what he was saying, but alas, I did. The problem is very clear as I have already spent so much time discussing it: He has no functional conception of morality. This leads him to advocate positions that are profoundly immoral in my view. Exhibit A:

Attorney General John Ashcroft wasn't nearly as forthcoming as Judge Hand when he proposed sweeping investigative and prosecutorial iniatives to combat terrorism in the aftermath of the September 11th tragedy, pursuant to the Patriot Act. The attorney general routinely came across as tentative, and at times even squirming, when asked to explain how his fast-track, furtive procedures to interview, arrest, and interrogate Middle Eastern men was consistent with civil liberties. His concept of military tribunals provoked even greater discomfort--and for good reason. The fact is: Middle Eastern men with any links to Al Qaeda were going to receive a very different brand of justice from the rest of us, and it was absurd for the attorney general to make it seem as though these post-September 11th investigations and prosecutions complied with constitutional safeguards of justice.

These were indeed strange times and special circumstances. There might have been strong moral and political reasons to justify Ashcroft's various undertakings, as abhorrent as they may have sounded to civil libertarians. Ashcroft wasn't entirely truthful when he tried to suggest that his legal initiatives comported with the law. Because they didn't. Unfortunately, he tried to present his case in legal terms. But the constitutional ground on which he was standing was genuinely shaky. He would have been far better off, and more intellectually honest, had he instead rested on the moral found of Ground Zero. The hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood may have warranted an alternative path to justice, one perhaps that was legally suspect by morally sound. (MoMJ at 161, my emphasis)

WHAT THE FUCK? Just to be clear here, Rosenbaum is saying that restricting civil liberties for men of Middle Eastern descent would have been morally justified in the aftermath of 9/11, and that Ashcroft's failure was not pursuing those policies but rather trying to give the policies a veneer of legality. He's throwing out the constitution, and I don't care who you are, that's wrong.

As I said before, I am a Liberal with deontological leanings and aristotelian sympathies. I believe in human rights. His position is unacceptable--he is in fact arguing for something that is profoundly immoral.

So, those two paragraphs were the beginning of the end. He hurt himself further by repeated referring to the Midwest as "Middle America," and praised the politeness of "Middle America and the South." (MoMJ at 191) Of course, this is nonsense. He's just reenacting stereotypes about the Midwest and importantly about eastern cities.

Finally, he maintains enormous contradictions in his theory. Rosenbaum argues that apologies should build the foundation for moral justice. Thus he writes this:

This is what the grieving mother in A Civil Action viscerally understood. This is what she had hoped would happen; as a remedy this is what she most wanted. Although an apology wouldn't bring back her child, it would provide the unfiltered, moral acknowledgement of loss, and the acceptance of responsibility. What she needed--and what she was morally entitled to--was to make a human connection with the person or entity that robbed her of her child, and for that person to stare grief in the face and try to imagine the knee-buckling horror of her loss. (MoMJ at 184)

Purple prose aside, this is stupid for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that even if someone wants to apologize, you can't make them "stare grief in the face" and you certainly can't make them "imagine knee-buckling horror." That's just ridiculous. And Rosenbaum knows it:

The healing power of an apology is morally vital, but seldom seen. . . . In the United States, apologies are cynically applied, given as an excuse or justification for less than exemplary conduct, and not as sincere gestures of contrition. When Americans apologize, they do so grudgingly so as to avoid having to pay some other price, or in order to mitigate their punishment, and not out of a sense of social or moral responsibility--not because they should, but because they have to. (MoMJ at 185)

Note the citations--that paragraph is on the VERY NEXT PAGE. This is also ridiculous on multiple levels. First, he has been arguing the entire book that people don't want money out of their lawsuits, that they really want someone to understand their pain, and apologies are useful to this end. But here he is recognizing that people apologize to avoid paying damages--something he thinks is apparently bad. The real contradiction, though, is his acknowledgement that apologies, though "morally vital," can be used cynically. Guess what, Thane, give people the opportunity to apologize without any legal consequences, and they will say whatever you want them to.

This observation leads to the final blow: Rosenbaum is aiming at the wrong target. He likes to lay all these moral problems at the feet of the legal system, but he's really arguing that society as a whole needs to be more contrite and more willing to apologize. It doesn't have anything to do with the legal system. It has everything to do with how people, individually and outside of their legal actions, are immoral. He needs to write a book entitled, "Be More Moral, Apologize." That's it. That's the point of his book.

So, I couldn't bring myself to finish this book.