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- "The feminist rage that fuels The Handmaid’s Tale is still omnipresent, as is the harrowing depiction of the torture inflicted by the authority figures of Gilead."
- "What would move a man to say you have to play it 840 times to be complete?"
- "Just as several readers predicted would happen, other corporate journalists responded to this article by engaging in a rank-closing defense of [Natasha] Bertrand...
- In 1998 — the year of "Titanic" — 57 million people watched the Oscars. This year, only 9.85 million watched.
- "W.W. Norton said in a memo to its staff on Tuesday that it will permanently take Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth out of print..."
- "Some collectors questioned the idea of owning art without exclusivity. 'Why pay $69 million for something anyone can see online?'"
| Posted: 28 Apr 2021 09:36 AM PDT "In the third episode, the first of three this season directed by [Elisabeth] Moss, June is subjected to some especially intense punishments that avoid tipping over into torture porn, but just barely.... While the last two seasons meant sitting through a lot of ugly conflict with no relief, this season brings some truly emotional rewards... From "The Handmaid's Tale Gets Its Mojo Back" — a Vulture review of the new seasons — the 4th season — of "The Handmaid's Tale." Did you realize that was still on?! The key phrase in that review summarizes why I have never wanted to watch: torture porn. The review — purporting to resist "spoilers" — gives no information on what the "emotional rewards" might be. Not the titillation of torture porn, one presumes. But what?
The signs I'm seeing are that people don't want to "breathe real, liberating oxygen" when it is available, that they'll go out of their way to construct restraints out of nothing. When people are really locked down, they can long — convincingly — for freedom. But set them free, and they long for captivity. FROM THE EMAIL: Whiskey Mike — reading the last 2 sentence of this post — sends me this Biblical quote, Numbers 14:1-4:
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| "What would move a man to say you have to play it 840 times to be complete?" Posted: 28 Apr 2021 06:32 AM PDT Garry Moore asks John Cale in this 1963 episode of "I've Got a Secret":
How cerebral TV game shows were back then! I'm noticing this today because I was emailed by Jeff Gee, who'd read this post of mine about a 24-hour-long film montage. He said: I am reminded of Erik Satie's "Vexations," which has the notation "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Turns out 840 times = 18 hours, which is how long it took a battery of pianists (every description of it I've seen says "battery," except the Wikipedia article) to perform it at The Pocket Theater in 1963. John Cale, who was one of the pianists, appeared on "I've Got a Secret," and so did the single spectator who made it all the way through (tho Wiki says he was "present" which doesn't mean necessarily awake) I think the Satie scribble is a (good) joke, like the Ring Lardner stage direction that so-and-so exits "as if smuggling waffles," and nicely deadpan. Not sure about "the clock." "The Clock" is the subject of that earlier blog post. Markley seems sort of grimly earnest, but maybe he's another nutty guy with a great deadpan... And let me add — as if smuggling waffles — that John Cale is so handsome in his little quiz show appearance. 1963 is one year before he participated in the creation of The Velvet Underground. His role predominates in things like "Lady Godiva's Operation." Audio at the link. Lyrics here. Excerpt: "Doctor arrives with knife and baggage/Sees the growth as just so much cabbage/That must now be cut away/Now come the moment of Great! Great! Decision!/The doctor is making his first incision." Cerebral! ADDED: I clicked on my "John Cale" tag to see if I'd ever used it before. I had. Twice. Including once where I updated to add that same "I've Got a Secret Clip" (after a commenter linked to it). I don't like to see a repetition. I take some pride in not repeating myself, but there are 62,935 posts on this blog, and it's delusional to believe I know everything in all of them, especially in the updates inspired by comments, which I would characterize as afterthoughts. The post proper was about a current interview with Cale, wherein he was "reclaim[ing] and reconfigur[ing] his dispair," supposedly.  |
| Posted: 28 Apr 2021 05:46 AM PDT "... principally by accusing me of misogyny for publishing this critique of her reporting. Unlike me, they evidently view adult professional woman in highly influential media roles (such as Bertrand) as too fragile to endure critiques of their journalism, unlike adult men, who they apparently believe are strong enough to handle criticisms: a regressive view of the sexes right out of the 1950s. They also apparently skipped over the entire first section of this article detailing how Jeffrey Goldberg and Ken Dilanian — both men — were the pioneers of the CIA-serving career trajectory Bertrand is now following. But the oddest aspect of this media reaction, the only one that makes it worth noting here, is that misogyny allegations against me for this article were led by GQ's own Russiagate fanatic Julia Ioffe, even though Ioffe herself, in 2019, publicly accused Bertrand of a rather serious ethical violation that probably should be added to the list...." Writes Glenn Greenwald in an update to his piece "CNN's New 'Reporter,' Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist/In the U.S. corporate media, the surest way to advance is to loyally spread lies and deceit from the U.S. security state. Bertrand is just the latest example" (Substack).  |
| Posted: 28 Apr 2021 05:46 AM PDT In 1998, The Hill tells us: "The great Billy Crystal served as host of the show," but this year
Oh, come on. If they'd picked anybody to host, that person would have been skewered for one thing or another. Billy Crystal is still alive, but I'll bet he wouldn't even want to be invited back. It's better for him to be remembered as the great Oscars host of his time than to be set up as a target. Not only would people say why him and not a person of color, he's vulnerable to cancellation for having boldly and repeatedly performed in blackface:
That wasn't at the Oscars, of course. Remember when Whoopi Goldberg hosted the Oscars in whiteface?
Those were simpler times. More racist times? ADDED: I'm just kidding about "simpler times." I think those were more complex times. We're simpler now. And it's not a compliment.  |
| Posted: 28 Apr 2021 05:48 AM PDT "... following allegations that Mr. Bailey sexually assaulted multiple women and behaved inappropriately toward his students when he was an eighth grade English teacher. The announcement came after the publisher decided last week that it would stop shipping and promoting the title, which it released earlier in April. It wasn't immediately clear what would happen with existing copies of the book or the digital and audio version.... Norton's president, Julia A. Reidhead... said that Norton would make a donation in the amount of the advance it paid to Mr. Bailey, who received a mid-six-figure book deal, to organizations that support sexual assault survivors and victims of sexual harassment." What insanity. Here's the NYT book review by Cynthia Ozick that calls the biography a "narrative masterwork." A biographer's ingenuity, and certainly Bailey's, is to mold mere chronology — a heap of undifferentiated facts and events — into more than trajectory: into coherent theme. As in a novel, what is seen at first to be casual chance is revealed at last to be a steady and powerfully demanding drive. A beginning attraction may be erotic happenstance; its fulfillment in marriage can be predictable hell... Yet to apply platitudes such as épater la bourgeoisie as either a dominating motive or a defining motif of Roth's work is to fall into undercooked language. His overriding intent is nothing less than to indict humanity's archenemy, whose name is Nemesis (also the title of Roth's final novel). "No," Roth's fictional avatar argues in "Operation Shylock," "a man's character isn't his fate; a man's fate is the joke that his life plays on his character."  |
| Posted: 28 Apr 2021 07:03 AM PDT "... said Peter Kraus, chairman and chief executive of Aperture Investors, a New York advisory firm, who collects with his wife, Jill, a trustee at the Museum of Modern Art. Their acquisitions include one of six existing versions of 'The Clock,' Christian Marclay's 24-hour-long video collage showing thousands of clips from movies throughout history. 'Scarcity is worth something; it's about owning something that you think is beautiful and can't be seen in anybody else's house,' Kraus added. 'There has to be some clarity around what it is that you are owning as a collector.'" From "As Auctioneers and Artists Rush Into NFTs, Many Collectors Stay Away/Auction sales show a schism in the market: speculative buyers flock to crypto art while blue-chip collectors hold back, fearing legal gray areas and copyright issues" by Zachary Small (NYT). The NYT put a link on "The Clock," but it did not go to the full "24-hour-long video collage," only to a short video with where we hear from Siri Engberg, the senior curator of visual arts at the Walker Center in Minneapolis. She seems weirdly lit up — those eyes! — and asserts: "Markley has brilliantly wove together clips to give us this sense of artificial cinematic time." Yes, "has... wove together." Somehow that solecism makes me feel that Engberg isn't really thinking the thoughts that go with the words coming out of her mouth. What Markley has done is take movie clips showing clocks and watches and displayed them so that if you start his montage at the right time, the time displayed in his video is — for the whole 24 hours — the time it really is in your time zone. Did you notice that I used the word "montage" and the NYT wrote "video collage"? That sets off my bullshit detector. The NYT write has got to know the word "montage." The only reason to say "video collage" instead is if you're stretching to make Markley seem like an important visual artist and hoping to distract us from thinking about all the people who labor in conventional film editing. And by conventional, I mean they make films people will watch through to the end. Kraus, the investor adviser quoted in the beginning of this post, questioned buying NFTs when anybody can look at this art on line, but the funny thing about "The Clock" is that no one will watch 24 hours of showing watches and clocks. Hearing the idea alone is enough to get the concept. The 2-minute video I've embedded is probably more than anyone needs to sit through. So how could there possibly be someone who will pay $69 million for the NFT of it? The question answers itself! Owning the NFT isn't about looking at the art. It's about owning a unique token of the art. You're not so much owning art — like some aged plutocrat with paintings on his wall — as you are owning ownership. It's a perfect celebration of nothing. FROM THE EMAIL: A reader named Kay sends me a link to this: "In a horrifying, Orwellian plot twist, the upcoming auction for an NFT of a drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat will allow the winner to destroy the original artwork." I regard this as a publicity stunt, nothing that will ever happen, but, as they say, when you talk about destruction, you can count me out.  |
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