A good movie review of a great movie, Private Property:
Written by Mr. Lafosse and François Pirot, “Private Property” embraces the banal and the monstrous, and affords Ms. Huppert opportunity to astonish rather than overwhelm. She’s as restrained as Mr. Lafosse’s direction, weeping and still, rather than storming; director and actress twist the knife gently.
Such was the judgment of many Washington drama critics. But there’s a reason that this speech was austere, not pretty. Form followed content. Obama wasn’t just rebuking the outgoing administration. He was delicately but unmistakably calling out the rest of us who went along for the ride as America swerved into the dangerous place we find ourselves now.
“Drama critic” is a very useful descriptor for most political commentary and analysis. (And, in just two words, it lays waste to the recent New Yorker essay on Hanna Arendt.)
Give how much air time, ink and bandwidth was wasted this past week on inexpert rhetorical analysis, it’s worth noting that Rich arrives at his conclusion logically, following the first step of the discipline: establish the audience.
Last week I posted an email I sent to NPR’s Fresh Air after its contributor David Bianculli went on a bizarre rant about NBC not supporting its program “Friday Night Lights” to his satisfaction.
Today, NPR’s All Things Considered answered the question Bianculli failed to ask: how does a show without an audience stay on broadcast television?
Friday Night Lights premiered to great reviews three years ago. The story of a football-obsessed Texas town was praised for its realistic portrayal of lives in the American working and middle classes, which is a surprisingly hard thing to find these days on American television.
But so is an audience.
The critically acclaimed but little-watched drama was on the brink of cancellation until satellite-TV provider DirecTV recently threw the show a fiscal Hail Mary.
“It seemed fairly certain the show would be canceled,” says series writer Jason Katims. “And what happened was, through what I consider to be a stroke of genius, they came up with this idea.”
DirecTV was looking for a cheap way to bring an exclusive show to its lineup; NBC had a good show that wasn’t making any money.
So DirecTV bought the rights to air the new season of Friday Night Lights first, before NBC did. And the network got money to prop up a program that was otherwise doomed.
I still marvel at how someone can be a television critic and willfully ignore how television gets made.
The charming documentary Please Vote for Me documents an unprecedented election for class monitor in a third grade classroom in the city of Wuhan, China.
The filmmakers appear to be implying that when it comes to democracy, the Chinese have the experience of a third grader and can be too easily swayed by gifts, field trips and spirited singalongs. It’s a great movie.
But if Americans, by comparison, have the experience of a college student, we’ve only just left our most sophomoric era. Beer busts, Ayn Rand seminars, a dramatic coup by the College Republicans.
Does the election of President Obama mean we’ve entered grad school? Heavily indebted, well-read, cash poor, with a secure if low-paying career ahead of us.
Two weeks in, I’m a big fan of whitest boy alive. Ana says it reminds her of New Order. It reminds me of what I hoped many of our songs might become. Some definition of perfect.
The BBC World Service had actor Bill Nighy read a final article by the murdered Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga. It’s incredible.
what do these two men have in common?
the one on the left skillfully crash landed a falling plane with 155 passengers aboard.
the one on the right is expected to crash land a failing economy with 350 million aboard.
A few weeks ago, I read with much pleasure all of Matt Taibbi’s pitch perfect and brilliant critiques of Thomas Friedman’s books and several of his columns.
His latest may be the best of them all:
My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesn’t actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind it’s highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.
Also, why did the New Yorker piece on Friedman neglect to mention that he married into General Growth Properties? Do they often write pure puff pieces and I’m too ignorant to know better?
a letter submitted to NPR’s Fresh Air re: this segment by David Bianculli:
Dear Sirs,
re: the Jan. 16, 2009 episode of Fresh Air
Mr. Bianculli angrily denounces NBC for being unwilling to support quality television citing their decision not to buy “Friday Night Lights” outright as evidence. I am not familiar with the budget for that show, is Mr. Bianculli?
What is a matter of public record are the show’s ratings. If Mr. Bianculli has done the math that proves NBC is able to support quality television based on its ratings, I suggest he show us the work. I’m not kidding.
In the times we are living, simply wanting good things is apparently not enough. Somehow, we must find a way to pay for them. And not everyone can afford premium cable.
An ESL moment: I can’t believe I wrote “sirs”.
From the NYT:
Some passengers screamed, others tucked their heads between their knees, and several prayed over and over, “Lord, forgive me for my sins.” But a man named Josh who was sitting in the exit row did exactly what everyone is supposed to but few ever do: He pulled out the safety card and read the instructions on how to open the exit door.
…when hearing the incoming Attorney General refuse to break the law by sanctioning torture sounds like good news.
Golden Cage by The Whitest Boy Alive is both fragile and firm. Teetering. Taunting failure. A remarkably good song.
How, exactly, did this game lead to a more efficient product or marketplace?
Along with many seasoned investors, he was snared in a “short squeeze” after betting that shares in Volkswagen, Europe’s largest automaker, would fall.
Porsche, however, which is taking over the company, had secretly cornered nearly 75 percent of VW stock. This created a scarcity that sent VW shares to more than $1,200, giving the company, briefly, the highest market value in the world.
Or this: “At the same time, Mr. Merckle was using some of his companies mainly to reap tax and financial benefits — as opposed to building things, which is more valued by the Mittelstand and many Germans.”
There are immaterial things with social value – e.g., Unix, feminism, music – and then there are phantoms, things which are not. Things with no value. I think it’s fair to say that wealth that disappears was not. We can say it was destroyed but by what? A fire? A better idea? None of these things.
update
Ron writes:
But doesn’t this just get to the question of monetary value in general? What is the value of paper money, or stock, or credits on an account in the bank? These things have “value” as long as others are willing to accept or redeem them in exchange for other things (or other markers or “value”), but when that comes to an end, so does the exchange value of this stuff. Most forms we have of marking and measuring monetary value today (e.g., data) have no intrinsic or use value of their own.
Very few things that matter to us have an intrinsic value. I’m concerned, primarily, with social value. By definition, money has a social value.
I am arguing that the games that Porsche played with Volkswagen stock or the one that Mr. Merckle played appear to have produced no lasting value. They were games based on the unanticipated uses of tools. It would be like building a basketball strategy on technicalities. It’s possible to play and even win a few games that way but eventually you’ll run out of people with whom to play. That is what has happened over the last decade or so.
I am reminded of children who learn how to cheat for the first time. Yes, trust is an amazing thing. Yes, it has limits.
With a few snips, “Let the right one in” (Låt den rätte komma in) may be the best movie I’ve seen since “Children of Men” which in turn was probably the best movie I’d seen in years.
The NYT engages in wishful thinking I can get behind:
Now, given that all those slick Miami condos are sitting empty in the sky, designers like the Campana Brothers, with their $8,910 Corallo chair, and Hella Jongerius, with her $10,615 Ponder sofa, might have a harder time selling their wares. Already designers are biting their knuckles over the damage reports. The American Institute of Architects reported that last month’s billings index, a gauge of nonresidential construction, reached its lowest level since it began collecting data in 1995.
The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or two — and might actually find a new sense of relevance in the process. That was the case during the Great Depression, when an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings.
“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,” said Kristina Wilson, author of “Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression” and an assistant professor of art history at Clark University. “It was a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable, intelligent design for a broad audience.”
The writer probably means Jongerius’ Polder sofa (not “Ponder”), a smart and sexy design that would probably be a big hit if adapted by Ikea for $850, even with all the subtractions and substitutions that price would require. (It lists at $8,500.) Even at $1,850, it could nudge bourgeois tastes towards contemporary design while nonetheless permitting the manufacturer to use experienced workers and sustainable materials.
Every few months, I find myself citing this study: Group Loyalty and the Taste for Redistribution by Harvard economist Erzo F.P. Luttmer.
It proves with empirical data that voters have refused valuable government assistance if a group they despise would also receive the same aid. It’s an incredibly useful, potent finding.
This same logic of hate was expertly parodied by Chappelle’s Show in its profile of the fictitious Clayton Bigsby: a black man who is blind, believes he is white and espouses white supremacy. Upon discovering that he is, indeed, black, Bigsby divorces his white wife because “she was a nigger lover.”
The Wall Street Journal summarizes a 2005 warning by Raghuram Rajan:
Incentives were horribly skewed in the financial sector, with workers reaping rich rewards for making money, but being only lightly penalized for losses, Mr. Rajan argued. That encouraged financial firms to invest in complex products with potentially big payoffs, which could on occasion fail spectacularly.
Rajan’s analysis also questioned the structure of certain derivatives and the role of banks. But the basic cog of this machinery is the incentive. If the individual worker is not personally exposed to risk how can she or he understand risk writ large?
In a time of existential dread, it’s comforting to assign blame to “synthetic derivatives” but no financial instrument is natural. And while the global market is more complex than ever, the men who participate in it are as simple as ever.
As Rousseau wrote in 1762: No pain, no gain.
(via Paul Krugman, for whom the lesson is also sociological.)
Todd RundgrenI saw the light, particularly at 1m53s.
Of Montreal An Eluardian Instance, starting at 2m50s.