MISCELLANEOUS

George Bush: Inept Again
from The New Yorker

One of the creepier vanities of most political leaders is the private yearning to be tested on a historical scale. Bill Clinton used to confide that, no matter what else he did as President, without a major war to fight he could never join the ranks of Lincoln and F.D.R. During the Presidential debates in 2000, George W. Bush informed his opponent, Al Gore, that natural catastrophes are “a time to test your mettle.” Bush had seen his father falter after a hurricane in South Florida. But now he has done far worse. Over five days last week, from the onset of the hurricane on the Gulf Coast on Monday morning to his belated visit to the region on Friday, Bush’s mettle was tested—and he failed in almost every respect.

Obviously, a hurricane is beyond human blame, and the political miscalculations that have come to light—the negligent planning, the delayed rescue and aid efforts, the thoroughly confused and uninspired political leadership—cannot all be laid at the feet of President Bush. But you could sense, watching him being interviewed by Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America”—defensive, confused, overwhelmed—that he knew that he had delivered a series of feeble, vague, almost flippant speeches in the early days of the crisis, and that the only way to prevent further political damage was to inoculate himself with the inevitable call for non-partisanship: “I hope people don’t play politics during this period of time.”

And yet, to a frightening degree, Bush’s faults of leadership and character were brought into high relief by the crisis. Suntanned and relaxed after a vacation so long that it would have shamed a French playboy, Bush reacted with fogged delinquency, as if he had been so lulled by his summer sojourn that he was not quite ready to acknowledge reality, let alone attempt to master it. His first view of the floods came, pitifully, theatrically, from the window of a low-flying Air Force One, and all the President could muster was, according to his press secretary, “It’s devastating. It’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.” The moment demanded clarity of mind and rigorous governance, and yet he could not summon them. The performance skills Bush eventually mustered after September 11th—in his bullhorn speech at Ground Zero, in his first speech to Congress—eluded him. The whole conceit of his Presidency, that he was an instinctive chief executive backed by “grownups” like Dick Cheney and tactical wizards like Karl Rove, now seemed as water-logged as Biloxi and New Orleans. The mismanagement of the Katrina floods echoed the White House mismanagement—the cavalier posture, the wretched decisions, the self-delusions—in postwar Iraq.

Just as serious, the President’s priorities, his indifference to questions of infrastructure and the environment, magnified an already complicated disaster. In an era of tax cuts for the wealthy, Bush consistently slashed the Army Corps of Engineers’ funding requests to improve the levees holding back Lake Pontchartrain. This year, he asked for $3.9 million, $23 million less than the Corps requested. In the end, Bush reluctantly agreed to $5.7 million, delaying seven contracts, including one to enlarge the New Orleans levees. Former Republican congressman Michael Parker was forced out as the head of the Corps by Bush in 2002 when he dared to protest the lack of proper funding.

Similarly, the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which is supposed to improve drainage and pumping systems in the New Orleans area, recently asked for $62.5 million; the White House proposed $10.5 million. Former Louisiana Senator John Breaux, a pro-Bush Democrat, said, “All of us said, ‘Look, build it or you’re going to have all of Jefferson Parish under water.’ And they didn’t, and now all of Jefferson Parish is under water.”

The President’s incuriosity, his prideful insistence on being an underbriefed “gut player,” is not looking so charming right now, either, if it ever did. In the ABC interview, he said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” Even the most cursory review shows that there have been comprehensive and chilling warnings of a potential calamity on the Gulf Coast for years. The most telling, but hardly the only, example was a five-part series in 2002 by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, a newspaper that heroically kept publishing on the Internet last week. After evaluating the city’s structural deficiencies, the Times-Picayune reporters concluded that a catastrophe was “a matter of when, not if.” The same paper said last year, “For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area’s east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won’t be finished for at least another decade.” A Category 4 or 5 hurricane would be a catastrophe: “Soon the geographical ‘bowl’ of the Crescent City would fill up with the waters of the lake, leaving those unable to evacuate with little option but to cluster on rooftops—terrain they would have to share with hungry rats, fire ants, nutria, snakes, and perhaps alligators. The water itself would become a festering stew of sewage, gasoline, refinery chemicals, and debris.” And that describes much of the Gulf Coast today.


“The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “March of the Penguins,” “Red Eye.”from The New Yorker

One way or another, sex is always in the head. It’s clear from the opening gag of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” that Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell), the gentle fellow who finds himself in so unhappy a state in early middle age, is not impotent. Anything but. Yet Andy is definitely a head case. His story goes something like this: he got frightened when he was still green (we see an encounter with an eager teen-age girl who sports scary steel braces on her teeth), and thinking about his fear made him more frightened; years later, his anxieties have snowballed so heavily that he’s permanently flummoxed. He won’t even go near a woman.

One of the nice things about this lewd and funny hit comedy is that it springs its wildest, most scabrous jokes from a recognizable male dilemma. Gentility, not to mention sophistication and indirection, has departed from our raucous culture forever, but, if we are going to have our comedies dirty, they might as well be human, too. The Dickensian moniker Stitzer, with its suggestions of “stiff,” “zipper,” and “stitched,” tells us what Steve Carell and Judd Apatow, who wrote the movie together, want us to think of their hero: he’s aroused but all locked up. Carell makes him a pleasant-looking guy with a too bright smile that flashes nervously, a man who has more testosterone than he knows what to do with; his overexercised chest bristles with thick, dark hair—it’s a jungle cry in itself. But Andy’s inhibitions go so deep that he can’t say what he thinks about anything, much less about sex; he clings to blandness as a kind of safety. The movie treats this modern Caspar Milquetoast tenderly: there’s really not much wrong with him except that he’s missing the only heaven that God, in his wisdom, granted us on this earth.

In the past thirty years or so, ever since “Saturday Night Live” went on the air, performers from late-night television have attempted to charge up the movies, not always with happy results. Some of the comics and comedy writers who jumped from one medium to the other have landed on their heads, turning out work that was gag-centered, fitful, and skittish (in both senses). Except for a few inspired sequences, last year’s “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” which involved some of the same TV-based talents as “Virgin,” was a klutzy mess. But Judd Apatow, who produced “Ron Burgundy,” directed this time, and he has developed a rhythm that sustains a long movie. Much of the comedy is as coarse and obvious as a burlesque show and almost as foul-mouthed as “The Aristocrats,” but, within the broad license that Apatow allows himself, he works with considerable delicacy, psychological insight, and a surprising sense of detail. “Virgin” may be a one-joke movie, but a variety of comic styles get packed into the joke. Steve Carell (from “The Daily Show”) is now about halfway between a TV comic doing traits and gags and a good actor who happens to be funny. Like all comics, he trusts laughs, and he makes Andy a mass of tics, twitches, and pratfalls. Here and there, however, a man’s pained temperament steps out from behind the professional comic’s armature—a touch of wounded dignity, of yearning for peace and quiet as well as for love. The only thing a forty-year-old virgin needs more than sex is to be left alone—that’s why he’s still a virgin. Carell understands that agonizing ambivalence.

Apatow surrounds Carell with a large, exuberant cast, beginning with the actors who play Andy’s fellow-workers at a large San Fernando Valley electronics store—the gentle-giant bearded comedy writer Seth Rogen, the speedball rapper and actor Romany Malco, and the unpredictable Paul Rudd, who has a crazy streak lurking behind his good looks and friendly smile. Andy’s friends want to help him find a girl; they are full of stupid schemes, the point being, of course, that they are even more screwed up in their relations with women than he is, and delusional as well. The group scenes with Carell and these noisy clowns were mainly improvised (the best takes were edited together), and they’re full of odd corners and curlicues—for instance, a quasi-obscene phrase passed back and forth among them and elaborated into a kind of bizarre verbal monument that they all stare at in wonder. Each of these madcaps also gets a number of extravagant solo arias—Malco, in particular, lets loose a couple of sex rants so preposterous that he seems to have distilled them from the boasts of a dozen losers topping one another on street corners. Apatow appears to be a generous director and a great fan of comic talent. Elizabeth Banks and Leslie Mann have good bits as predatory women who terrify the hero, and Jane Lynch, as the tough boss at the electronics store who suddenly softens and takes a shine to Andy, breaks into a tender Guatemalan love song—an unexpected gift, and exquisitely sung, too.

“The 40-Year-Old-Virgin” is a hit, I would warrant, because it’s truly dirty and truly romantic at the same time, a combination that’s very hard to pull off. The romantic part comes alive every time Catherine Keener is on the screen. Keener has a big smile and a husky laugh, and she’s warmer, more welcoming than usual. She plays Andy’s new friend, who’s a real woman—that is, she’s loving, and she’s trouble, too. The movie leaves us with the grateful realization that, for a man, love and trouble are worth having more than anything, and it ends with a triumphant double coda that brings the jokes down to earth with a touch of sexual realism and then sends them off again with a flight of lyrical fantasy.

Are we imitating them, or are they imitating us? The hugely successful French documentary “March of the Penguins” yields itself so readily to anthropomorphic readings that it’s hard to say where bird ends and man begins. With a reassuring smack!, the penguins emerge, one after another, from the ocean and hit the ice. It’s the first stage of what the movie presents as the routine, annual sublime—the trek across seventy miles of Antarctic wasteland to the thick-iced mating ground. As they shuffle across the terrain with bowed shoulders, the penguins look, from the rear, like shtetl Jews heading off to shul. Flopping to their bellies for greater speed, they could be kids taking a wave on a surfboard. When male and female find a partner, they stand with heads bowed before each other in what appears to be silent adoration. If we are moved, are we experiencing what they are feeling or what we are feeling? After some demurely photographed funny stuff, a baby is conceived. The egg is then transferred from mother to father, and, as the dad huddles for warmth with the other dads, balancing his package on his toes, the mom makes the long journey back to the water to eat, returning when she is ready to feed her hungry chick. Such scrupulous and selfless devotion to children would not seem out of place in lacrosse-mom precincts like Glen Cove or Montclair. Yet here’s the miracle: the extreme coldness and clarity of the air, and the translucent blues and searing whites of the landscape, lend the ritual, however mundane, familial, and instinct-driven, an aspect of eternal splendor. And, given the extreme difficulties that the filmmakers (led by Luc Jacquet) must have endured, the entire moviemaking enterprise has an aura of heroism, too. A perfect family movie, a perfect date movie, and one of the most eye-ravishing documentaries ever made.



In 1967, the Italian director Elio Petri made a film called “We Still Kill the Old Way.” Well, the veteran American director Wes Craven still kills the old way, too. His dandy little thriller “Red Eye,” which is exactly eighty-five minutes long, has been made with classical technique and bravura skill, and it’s leaving moviegoers in a rare state of satisfaction. (The absence of people whizzing through the air on green wings or deliquescing into corpses and coming back to life again has been much appreciated.) When the beautiful young hotel manager Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) gets picked up at the Dallas airport by a handsome fellow (Cillian Murphy) who jokes about his name—Jackson Rippner, as in Jack the Ripper—we’re alerted to danger by his overfriendly manner, and by the joke itself, which would seem to be unnecessary if he weren’t trying to reassure Lisa of his harmlessness. But the screenwriter, Carl Ellsworth, doesn’t tell us too much. He knows that for the audience the pleasure of this kind of filmmaking lies in taking the bait and then being slowly but inexorably reeled in. Cillian Murphy, who has angelic looks that can turn sinister, is one of the most elegantly seductive monsters in recent movies, and Rachel McAdams has large, doll-like features that mask a surprising amount of calculation and rage. As Murphy sits down next to her on an airplane, the movie turns into a complicated duel that depends on precise observation of physical detail and moment-by-moment continuity so closely calibrated that it’s impossible to find a wasted shot or an exaggerated emotion. Craven, who made “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and the “Scream” series, has a slightly off-center wit. As Murphy and McAdams are engaged in a death struggle in the airplane’s toilet, a huffy stewardess disapproves of what she takes to be an inappropriate use of a public facility. The joke is almost worthy of Hitchcock.

"Willy" by Joni Mitchell (essay by jennifer o'reilly)
from mcsweeneys.net

The first line of this song is "Willy is my child, he is my father." The song goes on to reveal that Willy, besides serving as simultaneous progeny and ancestry, is also a reluctant lover who can't quite commit because of past wounds. "Willy" is a love song, but the jury is still out on whether Joni is incestuous and—let's just say it—a little icky, or whether she has expressed the most profound and beautiful sentiment about love ever made. I shopped it around to my friends to see if I was in the sicko camp for thinking that it was the latter.

The first time I tried this, I was in free-thinking Washington Square Park playing my guitar with my best folk-singer-in-the-making girlfriend. I had just come strong off "Case of You," which she'd never heard and was wild about, so I thought I'd give "Willy" a good ol' whirl. I started the mournful opening chords and my friend was riveted. "Willy is my child, he is my father," I sang cautiously.

"Ew!" Her face screwed in disgust. "That's gross. That is a really gross song."

I tried it out on a couple more people, but eventually I had to stop. The result was clear. Nobody saw the line "Willy is my child, he is my father" the same way I did. People couldn't separate their sexual lives with their lovers from the other various roles they played. But the song seemed to be strikingly apropos for the relationship I had with my own partner. I remember the day it was raining and I was crying because I couldn't find my socks and how he had to comfort me even though I was acting like a stupid spoiled child. I think about how I once cautioned him not to eat the candy he had purloined from the doctors' office because it would spoil the penne arrabiata I was making for dinner. He is my child, he is my father. Strange but true.

There comes a time when you have to separate yourself from everything you know and say what's honest. Every time I hear Joni Mitchell, I know I'm hearing something that's stripped bare, that's passed every bullshit test in the book, something that very possibly took a massive amount of emotional bloodletting to get down on paper. My heart breaks and swells every time I hear this song. I once knew a musician named Blue (remarkably by coincidence) who told me that the first time he heard a Joni Mitchell album he sat down and wept afterward. Joni can do that to you, but only if you admit the things that scare you the most.

At the end of the song, Joni gives us this jewel: "I feel like I'm just being born / A shiny light breaking in a storm / There are so many reason why I love him." I'm newly married and I have to admit, I don't always feel like a "shiny light breaking in a storm," but I understand what she means. There's something about new love that stirs the soul and something about old love that allows your lover to fill every need that you have. It's a miraculous statement about the human condition that we can do this for each other.

In the court of public opinion, the general consensus seems to be that I'm in league with the sickos. But in my own private court of opinion, I have a feeling that Joni knew what she was talking about all along.

Willy is my child, he is my father
I would be his lady all my life
He says he'd love to live with me
But for an ancient injury
That has not healed
He said I feel once again
Like I gave my heart too soon
He stood looking thru the lace
At the face on the conquered moon
And counting all the cars up the hill
And the stars on my window sill
There are still more reasons why I love him

Willy is my joy, he is my sorrow
Now he wants to run away and hide
He says our love cannot be real
He cannot hear the chapels pealing silver bells
But you know it's hard to tell
When you're in the spell if it's wrong or if it?s real
But you're bound to lose
If you let the blues get you scared to feel
And I feel like I'm just being born
Like a shiny light breaking in a storm
There are so many reasons why I love him





I just learned that Mushaboom by Feist is about playing house. It's about dreaming of what's next, what may be, and about taking chances. Mushaboom, Nova Scotia was the inspiration:

Helping the kids out of their coats
But wait the babies haven't been born
Unpacking the bags and setting up
And planting lilacs and buttercups

But in the meantime I've got it hard
Second floor living without a yard
It may be years until the day
My dreams will match up with my pay

Old dirt road Knee deep snow
Watching the fire as we grow old

I got a man to stick it out
And make a home from a rented house
And we'll collect the moments one by one
I guess that's how the future's done

How many acres how much light
Tucked in the woods and out of sight
Talk to the neighbours and tip my cap
On a little road barely on the map

Old dirt road Knee deep snow
Watching the fire as we grow old
Old dirt road Rambling rose
Watching the fire as we grow well I'm sold