You're not listening

This is an amazing (by that I mean frightening and shameful) statistic pointed out by the good folk at ladida.org. The women of America feel ignored and underrepresented.

A little snippet:

Broken down by candidate, 51 percent of the women polled said that Bush understands them not well or not at all, and 39 percent said the same about Kerry, reports KRON4.com. Women represent 60 percent of all undecided voters, according to Center for Media Research.

Frankly, that sucks. Despite one group being from mars and the other from Venus, men and women have been actively engaged in a gender equality dialogue for a long time now. Maybe not long enough, but certainly longer than I've been alive.

It's not like Feminism is over--the dialogue isn't waning. I often find myself engaged in it. My girlfriend reminds me about the feminist march of progress when I fail to clean up after myself. I remind her about it when she refuses to pick up the bar tab. If not perfectly equal, whatever inequality exists in the relationship is based more on who complains the loudest, not who has the penis. It's about as healthy as two humans living in close quarters can get, I think.

Why then, have the issues and concerns of over 50% of Americans been swept under the rug? Not even abortion is a hot button topic this election year. The ban on partial-birth abortion has been dying a slow, judiciary death for a while now and no one seems to care.

Women's primary issues and concerns, in no particular order, are:

The survey found that women are eager to hear more discussion from the candidates on issues such as violence against women, healthcare, pay equity between the sexes, and access to child care. Reproductive rights and freedom of choice were found to be particularly important issues for younger women aged 18-24.

Erm, I count at least three of those that shouldn't just be feminist talking points, but of concern to everyone. Violence against women? Healthcare reform? Pay equity? Access to child care? I'm sure there are almost as many babydaddies looking for affordable day care as there are babymommas.

So that puts the number well above 50%. Why are these issues getting no play? Maybe they are, but not really on a national level. Reasons for this? I don't know, I'll wager some guesses.

This is wartime. Like all other wartimes, war discourse rules the debate. Iraq is a valid topic, I grant. Less valid is the question of service in Vietnam and Texas, respectively, 30+ years ago.

Blame John Kerry; blame moveon.org; blame those insufferable and poorly spoken swiftboat vets for truth; blame their Republican handlers. This is bi-partisan stupidity. It's undercutting the spotlight issues, and completely obliterating the ones talked about in that survey-- each of which should be spotlight issues.

There's also the economy to worry about. People tend to forgo worrying about perks like day care and equal pay when they're unemployed. The essential and valid point that day care and equal pay should be rights, not perks, takes a back seat when no one's getting their paper. There's nothing less equal than unemployment.

I can't see this lasting though. It's going to be a squeaky tight election by all estimates (except Chris Matthews', and it's increasingly hard to take him seriously). If 60% of undecided voters are women, then I would think touching on these topics would be a great way to bolster the bottom line. It would work especially well for a populist like John Edwards.

Hopefully they figure it out. Then, hopefully, whomever figures it out stands by their promises and pushes these agendas. They probably won't, but that's a different problem altogether.

Anecdotally, I find it strange that this poll was conducted by Lifetime Television, yet had nothing to say about whether Valerie Bertinelli's snubbing for a cabinet level position is a factor in the political alienation women feel.

Incidentally, KRON4 are the same hard-hitting journalists who brought you whistle-tips, and the irascible Bubb-rubb and Li'l Sis. Once again I thank them for their vigilance. Woo-woo

Read the full thing here.

No Kaffir Boys Allowed

I'm going to be posting another blog in like 15 minutes, but this is too infuriating to let slip. From the NY Times (reg req as usual):

'African-American' Becomes a Term for Debate

"I said, 'But I am African and I am an American citizen; am I not African-American?' " said Mr. Kamus, who is an advocate for African immigrants here, recalling his sense of bewilderment. "They said 'No, no, no, not you.' "

"The census is claiming me as an African-American," said Mr. Kamus, 47, who has lived in this country for 20 years. "If I walk down the streets, white people see me as an African-American. Yet African-Americans are saying, 'You are not one of us.' So I ask myself, in this country, how do I define myself?"

***

This month, the debate spilled into public view when Alan Keyes, the black Republican challenger for the Senate seat in Illinois, questioned whether Mr. Obama, the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, should claim an African-American identity.

"Barack Obama claims an African-American heritage," Mr. Keyes said on the ABC program "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos. "Barack Obama and I have the same race - that is, physical characteristics. We are not from the same heritage."

"My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country," Mr. Keyes said. "My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage."

Some black Americans argue that black immigrants, like Mr. Kamus, and the children of immigrants, like Mr. Obama and Mr. Powell, are most certainly African-American. (Mr. Obama and Mr. Powell often use that term when describing themselves.) Yet some immigrants and their children prefer to be called African or Nigerian-American or Jamaican-American, depending on their countries of origin. Other people prefer the term black, which seems to include everyone, regardless of nationality.

So the Black descendents of Caribbean slaves, who have since fled further strife in their countries to come to America and who have fought to become citizens of this country have somehow not been "shaped by [their] struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage"?

Now, it seems, African-American is not just an Ethno-Cultural distinction, it's a statement of how many lashes your great-great-grandfather/mother bore on his/her back--as well as on what continent he/she received them.

My God.

How many generations does it take to be considered an American? Does living in the Caribbean somehow strip you of African status in a way that living in America does not? What country should someone be born in that they can claim slave heritage? Is having descended from people who were torn from their homes and bound in irons and sent to work as animals thousands of miles from their home somehow not enough? Do whips hurt less in Jamaica? Does the beautiful scenery somehow mitigate suffering?

Is this the new classism in America? We've become too equal, so exclusionists have to split these kinds of hairs to set themselves apart?

This string of questions isn't some kind of Socratic literary conceit, I just . . . don't . . . get it.

Short Bio of Alan Keyes

Italy to Cornell to Harvard, what a hellish existence he's had burned into him. My mom was a military brat, does that make her like 1/4 African American? Of course not, Keyes still has a race card to play--but only when it suits him.

I guarantee Abdulaziz Kamus, the Ethiopian-born activist from the beginning of the Times story, has had to overcome more personal hardship than Mr. Keyes.

Then this:

Keyes defended the [Reagan] administration's policy against imposing economic sanctions on South Africa, a position that brought frequent criticism from black leaders.

So somewhere, whilst being "shaped by [his] struggle", Keyes came to support apartheid, or at least oppose the sanctions that could have helped end it. Was he worried about the impact of sanctions upon the disenfranchised black Africans? If so, then why doesn't he welcome these same refugees into the larger fold of African-American brotherhood? The hipocrisy is deep.

This is the new face of Xenophobia I think. This is the new front in the war against them--the war against everyone else. Not even Americans of recent African decent are allowed into the African-American clubhouse. They haven't suffered through enough left-wing battery at Cornell.

If a great white Satan like myself can be maddened by this, where are the black leaders who actually fought for equal rights? They've gotta set these people straight.

Where is Al Sharpton when you need him? Though his great-great-grandparents were probably slaves--American slaves--so I shouldn't assume he's with me on this.

It's good the two parties can share a talking point: that refugees from impoverished and war-ravaged nations haven't suffered enough to consider themselves African-Americans.

This isn't progress.

Why does no one listen to Goethe?

Read the full thing here.

The descriptive arts

A few weeks ago I gave a fairly measured review of M. Night's The Village. It wasn't what it could have been, but it wasn't what most movies are. It was somewhere in between, in the lower half of the Shyamalan Canon, in the upper, say, 25% of the rest of mainstream Hollywood.

Sorry I couldn't be more forceful, but he gave me nothing to love or hate with anything approaching zealotry.

That's why I'll never make it as an upstart Indie journalist. I can't fake zealotry, I can't mock worship or loathe something for the sake of readership.

Case in point:

"Is it me, or is this something an aged Rod Serling might have dreamed up while masturbating on crystal meth?" Village Idiot, Small World, by Steve Wiecking

The article is funny, self-consciously so. It's crammed with as many obscure pop-culture references as one man could possibly fit into a column, and most of the analogies don't hold up

"William Hurt, who’s apparently chosen to ape William Shatner’s distinguished acting technique (Mr. Hurt, we . . . want your . . . Oscar . . . back)"

Hurt sounds nothing like Shatner, he sounds nothing like anyone, neither does anyone else in town. That's the point. In hindsight, what most people complain about as clunky dialogue, I now consider a quiet statement about the nature of the community M. Night has created.

This utopia, like the language the people use, is heavy-handed, artificial and altogether vulnerable, not due to encroachment from without, but from internal collapse.

But I don't want to rehash my review. The point of this is that I'm probably not good enough at the Keith Olbermann school of pop culture journalism to pull off any kind of indie rag writing. Olbermann is a genius, no one tops him--but that doesn't stop every twenty-something in America from trying.

The problem I think is that this new wave have made Trivial Pursuit knowledge a sign of status--an end in itself rather than an added dose of color to the issue of central importance. With this shift of focus, they've also brought a liberal dose of haughtiness. It makes me laugh, probably because I'm also a twenty-something with an intellectual axe to grind. But what does it accomplish aside from establishing a loose pecking order of minutiae-obsessed vainglorious sarcasmbots?

It's also just not that hard. Ahem . . . quiet, I'm creating.

"the whole movie I felt like I was watching something dreamed up by Oscar Wilde on one of his eponymous Opium binges. He could have shat this out, typing with his tongue whilst shooting smack into his eyeball in a carriage on his way to clusterfuck Gilbert and Sullivan and still leave time to recieve the stigmata from Pope Gregory before afternoon tea."

God that's edgy. The best thing about this freeform criticism is that you get to ignore grammar, chronology, veracity and tact. Tact is the last thing you want. Tact doesn't sell free papers.

The worst part is that this is encroaching on the mainstream. Some guy on Dennis Miller (who is the smoldering wreckage of his former self) last night gave a stupid free-form rant about something or other--which amounted to nothing really.

So I've realized that not only is the political discourse being systematically stupidified, all discourse everywhere is meeting that fate.

I know this isn't the blog I promised Omni, I got worked up. I'm drafting.

Read the full thing here.

Improvisation, Evolution, the I Ching

Review of Michael Mann's Collateral

I associate Chris Cornell with Los Angeles. This is a seemingly random, neural-firing kind of association—like I associate Green Day’s Dookie with Warcraft II. It’s something that I don’t think I’ll ever really understand.

I’d like to ascribe some reason to it. I’d like to think it’s because they’re both seedy, both look like they need more one on one time with a loofah and because each has given birth to some awful music. I’d like to think Black Hole Sun fits into the equation somehow, as an expression of one of these things. The video, with its synthetic smiles and washed out cinematography certainly seems seems very LA.

So as all the various archetypes at odds in Collateral—the Feds, LAPD, the kingpin’s henchmen, our hero and antihero—descend upon a night club for a bit of climactic gun violence, it was fitting that some shit Cornell song or another would be thumping out of the theatre’s sound system. It annoyed me, set me on edge--just how I'd be if I was about to walk into the club they shoot holes in. I imagined this was the type of song any of these expendable people would listen to. It crystallized the Cornell/LA association.

I’ve never been to LA.

Tom Cruise describes the kind of place I expect to find if I ever go there:

“Sprawling, disconnected.”

Just like a Chris Cornell song—this Cornell song. Sound and Fury. Big sounds, layered guitar, throbbing base. Utter shit. It sprawls. Every note is drawn out and heavy with distortion. I guess it's technically Audioslave. But anyway you slice it, it's still Cornell's crappy self-indulgent lyrics. My apologies to Tom Morello, but your new band's singer sucks.

I’ve always liked the music in Michael Mann movies. It fits, despite my personal prejudices. I’ve always liked his camera work. The angles he dreams up fit mood at setting perfectly.

I’ve liked every movie Michael Mann has made. Even Ali. As far as I know he has never made a bad movie.

He never lets you forget where you are, who you’re with. He doesn’t waste the medium. He conveys meaning with every shot, every element—setting, music, everything. The little slider on the Plexiglas divider that separates the front and back seat of Max’ cab is always open, but Mann never shoots Cruise or Jamie Foxx through the hole. The glass is always in the way. It’s scratched, it has papers taped to it, there are fares posted. You only see the back of Foxx’ head, Cruise’s eyes. The characters are almost always obscured. When Mann tracks the cab, though, it’s usually from 100 stories directly above.

Disconnected.

Like LA, like Max, like the killer in the back seat.

Michael Mann makes movies the way Henry James wrote books, with obsessive attention to psychological details.

I hate Henry James. I might have mentioned that I like Michael Mann. James plods along, droning endlessly, obsessing over details, psychic minutia. Mann is obsessive too, but he doesn’t have the luxury of plodding along.

Cinema has a built-in metronome to deal with that.

Mann understands the pacing necessary to keep an action movie afloat. He manages to work in all the important stuff wherever he can find a moment. Revelatory glances are exchanged through gun fire. Max has a weird facial tick that always shows itself just before the camera cuts away. Mann puts this stuff in knowing you’ll miss a lot, but hoping that you’ll notice enough. That’s brave and elevates the script above formula.

It’s a familiar formula.

Cruise’s Vincent is one part Tyler Durden, one part T-1000 with a little cheeky Nihilism to keep the dialogue hip. He's the archetypal post-modern killer-philosopher.

Max has a back story that is similar to the 7/11 clerk that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton threaten to kill in Fight Club. He has dreams, but his life is on repeat. Vincent saves him from that.

Vincent kills a lot of people, but in a perverse way gives Max his life back.

Mark Ruffalo has been in every third movie I’ve seen this year. That’s an amazing feat in itself. He’s becoming one of my favorite character actors. He’s very good at transforming himself. This time he's the Latino cop who thinks there might be more going on than meets the eye.

His Detective Fanning is really close to fitting all the pieces together the whole movie. It takes a while, but he eventually gets it. Then just as he gets it, he gets it.

When almost every big budget motion picture is a thriller, all you can really ask from a director and screen writer working in that cramped intellectual space is that they try and kill off characters in unique ways at unexpected times.

Collateral gets high marks for both of those things. That it also manages Max' growth and dreams in very human terms makes a very satisfying experience.

As I said before though, this is essentially a movie of archetypal characters. Max is too human for his own good, Vincent is godlike. In the end it's a struggle against stasis--"Improvisation, Evolution, the I Ching"--it's about breaking free of the tethers that keep life in a holding pattern.

The one who does survives the night and gets the girl.

All in all it’s a great movie and Jamie Foxx does an amazing job. I got home and crossed him off my mental hate list of people who have made a career entertaining white people by doing the black thing.

That's a tough hole to dig yourself out of--just ask Martin Lawrence and Will Smith.

Asking if a Michael Mann movie is good is tautological as far as I'm concerned. "Good" is built in to every Michael Mann movie. This is conditional of course and part of the suspense of every Mann movie is worrying that this new one is going to suck. I call this inevitable downturn "Kevin Spacey Syndrome" (ex 1,2,3).

For one more year I can say with aplomb that Collateral is a Michael Mann movie and mean that it is good without reservation.

Mann goes too far toward the end though, getting very Terminator 2 with his shots of Cruise. It was like he was lifting shots directly from the James Cameron Action Movie Bible. I don't know what he was going for exactly, but I'm sure it wasn't this:

Regarding the blog title, you can tell Eastern Mysticism is hip again in Hollywood when sociopaths begin referring to it in screenplays.

Read the full thing here.