Slash, of the erstwhile Guns n’ Roses (whom I listened to religiously in junior high), and whom I’ve been told is now a neighbor here in our Lower East Side complex, is coming out with an autobiography shortly, a portion of which has been published by the Guardian. Some kwality snips below:

Izzy [Stradlin, Guns N'Roses' rhythm guitarist] made a call and we went over to a friend of a friend who we’ll call ‘Bill’. We’d gotten a taste of smack again in Australia, so the craving was there by the time we got home. Besides, after two years of touring, subconsciously, we both felt that we deserved it. Anyway, Bill had a taste for drugs and always had plenty of every variety; he was also very generous. When you start to get famous at all, a few typical things start happening: in Hollywood, if you’re out at a bar, everyone wants to buy you a drink, you can get into any club; whether you like it or not, you are suddenly a figure on the nightlife circuit. When that started happening to us, there was nothing less interesting that I could have imagined doing with my time. That Hollywood scene was the same old shit, and the more recognisable I was, the less I liked it. The amount of ‘dudes’ who wanted to ‘party with me’ had quadrupled, so I became entirely insular; looking back, it makes complete sense to me that I allowed myself to slip into a seductive heroin comfort zone. I didn’t want to go to strip clubs or look for hot chicks or otherwise exercise my newly found status. All I wanted to do was hang out at Bill’s and do drugs. It turned out to be the start of a long and nightmarish obsession with heroin that lasted from 1989 through 1991….

Soon I started speedballing heavily and really enjoyed the unique brand of hallucinatory paranoia that comes with it. No one had taught me to speedball; I just thought it would be like a narcotic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Coke and heroin were two great tastes that I knew would go great together. The rush of the coke would send me up and then the dope would kick in and the trip would take a wonderful turn; and the two would weave in and out of each other from there on out. I’d always end up shooting all of the heroin before I’d mowed through the coke, so usually I’d get wired to the point of an impending heart attack. At the end of those nights, I was also often left with the distinct feeling that I was being watched, so I started to think that walking around my house armed to the teeth was a good idea.

There are shades of Hunter S. Thompson (R.I.P.) in Slash’s retelling, in all its maniacal, drug-fueled outrageousness. But the difference therein is that Slash is all about the matter-of-fact; so remarkable is the complete abscence of rockstar pretension. While Thompson’s prose feverishly incarnated his establishment-crashing hijinks and mind-bending freakouts, Slash’s writing is cucumber-cool; in relief against the deadpan delivery, the contours of his hallucinations (which were every bit as far-gone as the Doctor’s) are all the more exaggerated. The madness seeps off the page and contaminates your banal reality …Makes for a highly entertaining read.

Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 this morning.

From the Nobel Foundation’s statement:

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

And the response from the Gores:

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis – a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

Well, after a tremendous year of accomplishments and honors (an Emmy for Current TV, an Oscar for Inconvenient Truth, the Live Earth global concert over the summer), this is the final benchmark for Gore; if he doesn’t run for president in 2008 now, then he definitely ain’t runnin’ …

JG Ballard’s writing room

As an undergraduate architecture student, I often found a strange, ineffable kinship between architecture and english majors.

Maybe it was due to the symmetry between our pursuits of ideal worlds. Or to their difference in kind … The writers, using words, lack materiality of expression yet are equipped with an infinite malleability of meaning. Architects have ‘bricks and mortars,’ but ultimately silent form; it was up to the critics and the theorists (and sometimes, the clients) to derive – often strainingly – the semiotics of their creations. The two occupations revolve around this seemingly exclusive reciprocity, but perhaps it’s this longing, across an unseen, subterranean divide, that fuels and intensifies the mutual appreciation.

Who really knows what it is, but your belief in this mythology of the writer/architect will probably inform your fascination for, and interpretations of, the following photographs, taken of various accomplished writers’ writing spaces.

Alain de Boton

Seamus Heaney

Hanif Kureishi

Mark Haddon

[via The Guardian]

In an effort to muster up an adequate escape velocity to leave my end-of-summer doldrums behind, I have been re-reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. There are too many memorable snippets to excise, and anyway it’s the exuberance and vividness of the sometimes stream-of-consciousness writing rather than individual, underlineable passages that matter (Miller, like Nietzsche, refers to his writing as song. And if that is so, then Tropic of Cancer is an opera inverted; extended arias interspersed with the occasional recitative).

BTAIM, two bits that I love:

Walking along the Champs-Elysées I keep thinking of my really superb health. When I say “health” I mean optimism, to be truthful. Incurably optimistic! Still have one foot in the nineteenth century. I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans. Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. “I have only to talk about a meal,” he say, “and you’re radiant!” It’s a fact. There mere thought of a meal—another meal—rejuvenates me. A meal! That means something to go on—a few solid hours of work, an erection possibly. I don’t deny it. I have health, good solid, animal health. The only thing that stands between me and a future is a meal, another meal.

And this:

Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoopla that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust—what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fangwhorl and star cluster.

Whatever one thinks of Henry Miller (and the courts didn’t much, as Tropic of Cancer was banned in the US for a good 30 years on grounds of obscenity), that motherfucker can sing.

While it’s easy to smile at stories of people changing their lightbulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescents, or choosing to ride to work on a bike over driving a car, it takes more than anecdotal blips at the grass roots level to feel confident that a sea change in attitudes and behaviors is happening in the face of our looming environmental crisis. Sometimes it takes knowing that Big Capital is playing on the same team — a dicey proposition however you cut it, given that powerful corporations are the worst offenders and their political influence and financial machinations ensure that their loyal politicians sit out badly needed regulatory measures to keep those very corporations in heed.

All of which is why stories, such as this one in Vanity Fair about General Electric and its young and dynamic CEO Jeffrey Immelt, seem so encouraging. When the second largest company in the world, after Wal-Mart (which too has recently embraced sustainability). His emphasis, for better or worse, is not ‘about being trendy or moral. It’s about accelerating economic growth.’ Green must beget green, in other words. Schmarmy as that may seem, it is realpolitik; for a shift in the environmental practices of major corporations can’t be catalyzed unless they are convinced of that shift’s benefits in terms of the bottom line.

 

The August 21 issue of the New Yorker profiles the posthumously influential Jewish-German critic Walter Benjamin. The article, called ‘The Philosopher Stoned’ and written by Adam Kirsch, is ostensibly an essay on Benjamin’s attempt — an unsuccessful one by any measure — to gain inspiration and insight through the use of hashish. The discussion of the drug’s effect on Benjamin’s life and thinking aren’t particular valuable and merely form bookends for the more interesting central substance of the article, which describe Benjamin’s move away from academic philosophy towards popular criticism (a deflection which would have a positive effect on Benjamin’s thematic and stylistic accessibility), his shallow and facile flirtations with Marxism, and the state of his thinking towards the end of his life in the early 40s, as he struggled to finish his unwieldy Arcades Project with Nazism expanding rapidly across Europe.
 

A profile in the recent Sunday times of China’s ambassador to the United Nations, Wang Guangya. As China’s economic and political might have grown, so have its interests in ensuring that international policy, as directly by an assortment of Western nations at the UN, works to its advantage. Through Wang’s wiley diplomacy, China has evolved from a awkward, quiet, shadow player to a major rival to the US at the United Nations.

Read the piece here.

The picture says it all, really. Holla.

To be honest, I don’t really give a shit about Dane Cook. Whenever I came across one of his performances on Comedy Central or HBO (which happened often, because his taped gigs and his on tour reality show Tourgasm continue to get heavy rotation on cable television), I’d watch for a few minutes, develop a mild irritation / low-grade loathing, then simply change the channel. My feelings about him, though vaguely negative, were alway imprecise, unformed. I never bothered to ask why, but then Heather Havrilesky, my favorite columnist from the halcyon Suck days (nom de plume Polly Esther), crystallized it for me when she wrote:

From his sloppy college kid look to his avoidance of anything political, cultural or remotely critical, Cook aims at appealing to those vast numbers of kids who haven’t really developed any interests yet, and are most of all focused on having fun with a big group of people. While Seinfeld or Rock or Carlin or Miller react against the world, working themselves into a lather over just how idiotic and bizarre other people’s behavior is, Cook’s stories all boil down to the most familiar, relatable experiences he’s had. His humor doesn’t require even a glance at the wider world; it strengthens the bonds within a homogenous group. “Isn’t it crazy when you…” or “How weird is it when…” By celebrating the myopia of the young, Cook has become the hottest comedian around.

Not only is his comedy opaque and totally uninteresting, but he’s an embodiment (or worse, a stereotype that turns out to be real) of common denominator imbecility masquerading as embracing accessibility. He’s the dumb kid in class who’s acts a clown and sticks pins on the teacher’s seat and ‘kick me’ stickers on people’s backs and adores the adoration he receives from his snickering comrades but is still in the end too dumb to know he’s dumb. The dumb kid who thinks he’s a riot whose antics are now amplified by television and loved afar by a country of feeble-minded fans who feel they are all in on the same big, dumb, unfunny joke.

Polly — err, I mean Heather Havrilesky – slams the overhyped and overrated pseudo-comedic buffoon in Salon here.

 

Bully for MSNBC’s Ken Olbermann and his classy and eloquent primetime response to Rumsfeld’s recent speech, in which he compared critics of the botched Iraq war to Chamberlain-style appeasers of Hitler during World War II. Although the cynics out there might fault his speech as presumptuous for its evocation of Murrow, but I can more than dig the attempt for its ambition and earnestness in this otherwise craven day and age of lapdog journalism.

Crooks and Liars has the video posted here. Richard Greene offers strong praise for the piece in the Huffington Post. And the ever-on point Frank Rich calls Rumsfeld out by invoking this damning image of a smiling Rummy himself shaking hands with Saddam 20 years ago. Sets up an amusing parallelism to the image of Neville Chamberlain swapping skins with Adolph Hitler, no?

 

As depressingly doubtful as it often seems, however, Olbermann is not the only one working in television news who hasn’t completely lost their sense of up and down. Two others, while not journalists themselves, carry the burden of journalism’s supposed commitments to rigor and investigation (noble commitments that since Murrow’s day seem to have mutated into a kind of vampiric and solipsistic pursuit of ratings and ad revenue; news has turned into an empty, anodyne, complacent, PR- and quote-friendly form of mythmaking) by mercilessly satirizing TV news journalism itself. Of course, I am talking about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Here are some other seminal, declarative moments of television news which have cracked and rolled like heavy thunder in the fuzzy white noise of the contemporary mediasphere, seeming to stop, if only for a moment, everything in their tracks.

Jon Stewart’s brilliantly acerbic appearance (which struck a notable contrast with his warm and congenial host persona on The Daily Show) in 2004 on CNN’s erstwhile ‘debate’ show Crossfire resulted in CNN’s termination of the program shortly after this broadcast. Jon Stewart derides the left-vs-right debate format of the show as political theater, a spectacle of soundbites and crude witticisms more akin to verbal pro-wrestling than with real debate, with its hosts shilling and spouting rhetoric in their roles as partisan henchmen.

Then there is Stephen Colbert’s famous dinner roast of Bush — delivered to the president’s dazed and reddening face! — back in April.

Colbert, in a virtuoso and magnificently unfazed deadpan, delivers a ballsy calvacade of broadsides against the administration over the course of 20 earth-stopping minutes, including this one:

“I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, has he stood on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.”

This stuff that Bush, in his insulated bubble, never gets to hear, let alone hear live and in person and in front of a public. But moreover, just as he’s shielded from criticism, he is also consitutionally impervious to it; Bush, after all, believes in Divine insight, in his personal connection to jesus. Did Colbert’s lancing of his imcompetence and hipocrisy grant the Decider-in-Chief one iota wisdom, thoughtfulness, or humility? Seems unlikely (in fact, the fiercely supportive response among the blogging world was a world away from the MSM’s tepid coverage of the event). Did Stewart’s plea strip down the propagandistic facades of television news and inspire a revision in its intelligence-deadening practices? Not really (though, but Crossfire did get canceled and Fox’s ratings are declining). Will Rumsfeld watch Olbermann and take a minute to reflect, rethink his choice of words, let alone worldview? Again, doubtful. And even if our SoD suddenly ‘gets it,’ isn’t it too late for the broken Iraq and the thousands dead he’s helped create and the hubris, professional ineptitude and moral callousness he’s already displayed?

But of course to ask Olbermann, Stewart and Colbert those things is unfair. They are for their own part and in their own ways and by their own degrees rousing a sleeping country, slumbering in front of its televisions, into a state of reason and alertness. One only wishes that in 2006, as far as wider tv news culture is concerned, they were the rule rather than the exception.

The inaugural issue of Wholphin (McSweeney’s DVD media arm) includes a gem of a mini-doc of Al Gore in 1999, shot and directed by Spike Jonze. It’s a warm and intimate look at a day in the life of then-presidential candidate, chilling in Carthage, Tennessee, and at a vacation spot in North Carolina, with Tipper and his daughter Karenna.

The film was made for the Democratic Convention of 2000, but was never more widely released. The liner notes (which includes a short interview with Jonze) suggest the possibility that a larger airing of this short may have offset the media portrayal of Gore as a stiff and uncharismatic candidate. Indeed, watching this relaxed, witty and completely amiable man putz around the house with his family leaves you aching, knowing that he would soon lose to the privileged, unprincipled fratboy failure who has now occupied the White House for two craptastic terms. Little did Al Gore or Spike Jonze know that this tiny film would be viewed, in 2006, as a tragedy. Watching this film is a little like peering back through the looking glass to a brighter time and place, before we were all plunged into this collective nightmarish alternate reality …

View the 15-minute piece on the Wholphin site, or on Video Google.

[via BoingBoing]

*** 

Lastly, I leave you with this (rhetorical) question: why should we draft Al Gore?

Thom Yorke, tortured lead of Radiohead, recently released the hauntingly beautiful album ‘The Eraser,’ his first ’solo’ effort (solo in rabbit ears because Yorke prefers not to think of it as one, so sez he in this interview in the Guardian).

NPR also has a recorded interview with Yorke that is streamable from the site. It’s worth a listen. For those who have followed Radiohead over the years, you may find his engaging manner unexpected; where is the pained, rueful and temperamental Yorke we witnessed in the 1999 doc Meeting People Is Easy? He is articulate and exudes quiet, easy circumspection …

Two weeks ago, billionaire investor Warren Buffett announced that he will give away 85% of his wealth to charity. That’s $37.4 billion in liquid stock, $31 billion of which will pass on to the hands of Bill Gates (the only person on the planet richer than he is), who along with his wife Melinda, as you know, runs the formidable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (as you might also know, Bill recently quit day-to-day operations at Microsoft in order to administrate his charitable organization full-time).

Bravo to both of these guys — fat cats with soul. Buffett, the folksy, gnomic financial figure who belongs to a previous, more upright era of money-making, has some choice quotables in this NYTimes article:

***

“I’m not an enthusiast for dynastic wealth, particularly when 6 billion others have much poorer hands than we do in life.”

***

“I love it when I’m around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society,” he said. “At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds.”

***

Not that his children will be left empty-handed. Mr. Buffett said that the assets he is not giving to charity today will be divided up later between other philanthropic causes and his family. His children, he said, were not at all disappointed not to be receiving the lion’s share of his fortune.

“They’ve known all along my views on inherited wealth, and share them,” he said in a news conference this afternoon. “They have money that most people would dream of. They’re lucky, in that respect, when they selected their parents.”

 

Not new news, but Wes Anderson recently directed a new AMEX commercial in the Wes Anderson-style. Which is to say, an au courant style of filmmaking that effuses such imprecise, mood-based adjectives as ‘whimsical’ or ‘charming’ or ‘eccentric’ or ‘quirky’ or ‘playful’ or ‘offbeat’ or ‘quixotic,’ you get the idea. Kind of Woody Allen-esque, where the neurosis is not hyper-articulated through dialogue or soliloquy, but folded upon itself, only burbling out through indirect, much more subdued means, in longing glances or in hip and tasteful (and just as often, deliberately inappropriate) retro clothing and musical selections. Most of the dialogue, in fact, does not serve the purpose of communication but is instead used to evoke the painful and sweetly awkard inability of these characters to connect with one other.

I didn’t even know that this sensibility, prevalent in the ‘X’ (now in their 30s) generation of American filmmakers comprised of Wes Anderson, Sophia Coppola, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, PT Anderson, and some would put French ex-pat Michel Gondry in this category, had a name, until I read this Slate article, which gave them one (as with all nomenclatures it is deadening and useful at the same time): ‘The American Eccentrics.’

The article criticizes the turgid pace of The Eccentrics’ output, brandishing the high-flying concept and lavish production costs of the AMEX commercial as, paradoxically, evidence of Wes Anderson’s ambitions and capabilities, as well as his laziness:

It seems that the Eccentrics’ own egotistical indolence has resulted in self-imposed limits to their skills—at the very least it deprives the world of more of their unique cultural prognostications. If they are ever to truly change film culture, their maneuvers have to increase. When Anderson casually pays for extra production expenses in the AmEx ad, he pokes mischief at the ’80s archetype of a hungry filmmaker using credit cards to see a film to completion. (The ad opens with typical Anderson piquancy: Rushmore star Jason Schwartzman onset in a new guise shouts, “François!” at the sight of an auto accident—a Day for Night in-joke as well as a mournful cry for Truffaut, who died in 1985.) But it’s not really the way Anderson works—he pretends to be making a gimmicky action movie such as he never really has. My Life, My Card is insistently money-conscious, but its charm comes from envisioning a paradise of art-making, where all problems are immediately solved and where instinct flies with nature. Indeed, while riding a floating crane, Anderson is attacked by a flock of Hitchcock’s birds. It bemuses him. (You have to be a real cinephile—perhaps own a certain Truffaut-authored interview book in your library—to appreciate such delicious free association.)

That Anderson came up with this fanciful new-millennium fabrication suggests that he, and the other Eccentrics, want to work more, and that they need a mythology to define their own filmmaking era. Anderson’s movie-within-a-commercial recalls the antic film parodies staged as prep-school pageants in Rushmore—a poignant act toward wish-fulfillment and self-realization. That’s the impulse the Eccentrics have in common: They want to be appreciated as whiz kids—the gifted children of the counterculture. This social development gains nuance and significance each time you see Anderson’s celebratory, confessional spot. Because My Life, My Card has the stylish breadth and the Crayola-bright look of Anderson’s previous films, it raises your hopes for the splendidly eccentric movies we’re thirsting for. But, as funny, lovely, and candid as this mini meta-movie is, given the paucity and slowness of the Eccentrics’ output, it’s just a mirage.

Whatever though, as our generation would be inclined to say. These movies don’t need to come out in pairs every year (Steven Solderbergh did the prolific thing for a while and his films got real shitty). Part of the charm is the anticipation, like a good, beneath-the-scab kind of itch.

***

Another useful description of the Eccentrics comes from this NYPress review of the David O. Russell joint I Heart Huckabees:

A friend calls this new breed the American Eccentrics, a good categorization since it distinguishes these upstarts from that last significant grouping of 70s filmmakers who were drawn to exploring American experience and pop tradition in order to understand their place in the world. The Eccentrics, formed by the fragmentation and solipsism of the 80s indie movement, are more interested in their personal idiosyncrasy. They don’t connect to life outside their own world but view it as absurd and different. Films like The Royal Tenenbaums, Punch-Drunk Love, Adaptation, Lost in Translation and Russell’s I Heart Huckabees reinforce a sense of boomers’ egotism; as with Payne’s About Schmidt, there is an insistence on braininess rather than connection with popular sentiment.

 

Popular feeling is distrusted; that’s what the Eccentrics intuit about modern film culture. These post-hipsters are too smart to go for the empty, stylish attitudes of Todd Haynes or Guy Maddin. Rather than submit to the common emotion of Spider-Man 2 (with its attendant juvenilia), or Spielberg and Demme’s humbling universality, these clever Dicks show their estrangement from the collective experience in preference for private feeling.

This chummy interview with Rem Koolhaas appeared in the German rag Der Spiegel last week. The issue of his desire to enter politics is addressed, but is also frustratingly short on detail.

I mean, Koolhaas spent the nineties, in the face of sweeping globalization, in a non-ideological, agnostic, pro-active stance. His call to arms for architects, if I recall, was to drop the reflexive Modernist postures of utopianism and to engage the crushing wave of capital as a surfer, not as a wall. So his entry into politics as a socialist begs an inquiry beyond the teasy answers given here, though for the most part this interview provides a fun, low-calorie read, featuring some vintage Koolhaasian dialectical exchanges such as this one:

Koolhaas: Ugliness also has a right to exist. Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. But seriously, if something like [Berlin's Palace of the Republic] is ugly but nevertheless important, we must preserve it.

SPIEGEL: And if it had been beautiful and important? Shouldn’t architects be the prophets of beauty?

Koolhaas: Beauty isn’t what I’m primarily interested in. I think appropriateness is more important.

SPIEGEL: What do you think is the world’s most beautiful building?

Koolhaas: Very conventionally, the Pantheon in Rome, for example. Isn’t it remarkable? Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

[via Archinect]

 

I don’t know if its due to the way art is taught in school these days, or the elimination of lead-based paint, but artists nowadays are so damn articulate. Gone is van Gogh-style torment. No more Pollockian infantile rage. Warholian inscrutability has evaporated like morning mist … Star artists know how to sell shit, smooth-talk and sound good in art magazine interviews. Anything less polished and operatic toes the line of faggy pretension.

The last time Matthew Barney was in the news was in 2003, when his retrospective (along with the premiere of Cremaster 3) arrived at the Guggenheim. While I had run across the Cremaster series in various settings in the past (usually at random exhibitions, playing in the background, perplexing passers by with scenes of — omg is that funky satyr sex??) I had never, before the Guggenheim, sat down and watched any of the films end to end. Following these close viewings I became convinced Barney was from outer space. And if he was not extra-terrestrial, then he was certainly extra-temporal — i.e., from another time, some halcyon era, when there was no such thing as self-consciousness and no one knew how to play ironic, under-the-table shinkicking games. Before arty became farty … Creations of such anti-semantic insanity such as Cremaster — the name of the muscle which controls scrotal contraction, for chrissake – defied explication; in fact, explication would be so dreary and unseductive. Better to be a Believer.

Barney is back in the news with the release of Drawing Restraint, his new film starring himself and his odder-half Björk. I was looking forward to tumbling into Barney’s super-viscous exegesis. But then I came across an interview he gave with New York Magazine in which he actually sounded sensical, and I have to admit a measurable quotient of the Barney mythology seeped out of my balloon.

 

If you listen hard enough these days, you can hear the trees whispering: Al Gore, Al Gore …

Is he our man? And if he can’t do it, then who out there can? Hillary? Meh, fuggedaboutit. John Kerry? Next. Mark Warner? Only if your glass reads half-full and not half-defensive capitulation. It’s not a field of good options for the Democrats in 2008, and the idea of a McCain presidency, which at one point may have been tolerable, even desirable, seems to be growing more and more gangrenous everyday; at the rate he’s been feeling out the rightwing nutjob fringes, the ’straight-talking’ liberal centrists and moderate Republicans will have to amputate, and soon.

I’ve been talking to friends who have begun getting excited about a possible return for Gore into the fray. In the last six years, freed from the cultural constraints of beltway politesse, Gore has been aggressively outspoken in his views ranging from the Iraq war to the environment to the sorry state of contemporary journalism, and has conveyed a charisma and ferocity that was entirely missing from his milquetoast 2000 run. Now, do his newly forged lefty credentials translate into a viable presidential run? That’s hard to say, but the question is not as opaque as it was in the fall of 2004; since then an unceasing accumulation of Republican-branded bad news has fermented into a thoroughly toxic stew for the GOP that has resonance not just for the 2006 midterms, but quite possibly well beyond. Iraq, Katrina, Abramoff, global warming (and the Bush administration’s reluctance to deal with it), and Bush himself’s southbound approval ratings have created buoyant conditions for an electable Democratic insurgent, a scenario which was unthinkable when Kerry and Edwards took their turns on the sacrificial pyre of ‘domestic insecurity’ and ‘out-of-touch liberal’ two short years ago.

So then the question is: who can stake a liberal position on good faith, who a) doesn’t have a contradictory or ambiguous record having signed on to the Iraqi misadventure in 2002, who b) has the name-recognition and gravitas to not easily get called out on opportunism or so-called coastal liberal detachment, and who c) is actually experienced enough in administration and statecraft to deflect charges of inadequacy and softness? Well, arguably, Al Gore.

This intriguing piece in The American Prospect about the ‘new new Gore’ is a really thoughtful primer for the fanboy and the skeptic alike. I recommend it mightily.

His official line, btw, is that he’s out of the running. His non-official 2008 netroots site is here. And later this summer, Gore’s documentary film about global climate collapse An Inconvenient Truth (produced by the smart and progressive Participant Productions, production company for Good Night, Good Luck and Syriana) will be released.

I generally try to avoid reading movie reviews before I see the movie in question, but anticipation of the release of Block Party, a documentary involving two of my favorite artist/entertainers, comedian Dave Chappelle and director Michel Gondry, became overwhelming, and so I indulged in a little bit of pregnostication.

I first read Stephanie Zacharek’s piece in Salon, and it seemed to me a little overcooked. A sample quote:

While the rest of us are busy carving up the country — red state, blue state; urban, suburban; sophisticated, rustic; them, us — in ‘Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,’ there’s room for only one America, but it’s one big enough to include everybody.

While I love Salon, and have nothing but disdain and contempt for the state of our politics in 2006, I have been somewhat saddened by the heavily politicized air the webzine has taken on since its more genteel, arts and literary editorial origins in the late 90s. Salon is fighting the good fight, but I miss the frivolous decadence of, say, its ’Masterpiece’ series, one of which elaborated on Seinfeld as ’one of the most complex and troubling art works of our time.’ Sigh …

The mention of the insidious and tired red state / blue state trope in Zacharek’s review seemed unwelcome, jarring, limp-wristed, a little too simplistically and cloyingly topical. But it’s a sign of how the malady of the times has infected and desensitized us all that I only became simpatico with Zacharek while watching the film, thinking: Jesus, what a lovely, beautiful, joyous, exuberant movie … With belated clarity came the realization that it wasn’t that Zacharek was placing the film within a ‘red/blue’ framework (the mention of which must have triggered some kind of involuntary gag response in me), but that she was arguing precisely the opposite; that historicized frames simply cannot contain the bursting spirit and abundant soulfulness of this film.

 

There was an extraordinary feature in this past weekend’s Sunday Times Magazine on Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, a young, former Taliban diplomat who went from civil war in Afghanistan and exile in rural Pakistan to the peaceable cloisters of Yale …

Read it here.

 

As the torch is extinguished in Torino, the story of speedskater Joey Cheek’s donation of his prize money to the charity Right To Play (with money earmarked for children from Darfur, Sudan) will, at least for me, linger for a while longer.

‘The Olympics, in general, and athletics is a very selfish pursuit,’ Cheek said. ‘I wake up every morning and as I get ready for the day ask myself how can I focus all my energies on what I can do so I can be the best in the world.

‘After years of this and years of people sacrificing so I can be the best in the world, I feel that it is imperative for myself and also for anyone else who’s able to reach a pinnacle of their career — or whatever they’re striving for — to reach out a hand and help somebody else.’

***

Cheek was asked again what the Olympics meant to him:

‘It becomes very easy when you start having to sell stories and sell the Games like this prepackaged thing, it becomes very easy to make it a mockery of itself, mockery of what the ideals are,’ he said. ‘I look at sport and competition as something that has been personally enormously beneficial to me. It’s helped me create life skills.

‘And if we carry ourselves with grace and dignity and try our best — even when we fall on our faces, as will happen sometimes — then I think people will see that. And that will be the message of sport and the Olympics.’

Damn. What a swell bloke …

Read Mike Wise’s Washington Post column here.

As we slide into post-Olympics depression, we await the Next Big Thing with bated breath. The question is indeed existential — what will we do with all that time not spent staring at the tv for hours on end (equivalent to four hours a night for two weeks straight!), oblivious to the dissonance of watching world-level feats of athleticism while planted on our asses, eating takeout? What type of filler will pad the crater of meaning in our lives?

For all the spasmodic sportsfans (like myself) out there, a mental note: the World Cup begins in four months …

 

The Guardian has a terrific, rather literary piece from 2002 about Mark Rothko’s presitigious late-career commission for murals in the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. It was a commission he himself scotched, giving his paintings instead to the Tate in London.

There is much psychobabble here about Rothko’s vengeful artistic temperament, and the elite social and cultural scene of late 50s New York — centered in the Four Seasons, in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building – on which he wanted to inflict it, as well as some discussion of Michelangelo’s vestibule to the Laurentian Library in Florence, whose spatial derangement served as Rothko’s muse.

[from BoingBoing via Things Magazine]