Damn, Ann!

A solution to social ills: film everything

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 20:28:00 -0400

The Karen Klein bullying case presents an innovative template for addressing the social ills of our day: film everything.

It works like this: everybody takes video of potentially abusive interactions he or she experiences or witnesses and posts it on YouTube. Then the users vote with their views and comments on the moral harm of the filmed behavior. If an overwhelming consensus emerges that someone has been victimized and the subsequent outrage leads to fundraising on behalf of the victimized, society has thus self-corrected. This process can spur civil and criminal legal action but its primary function is social and extra-legal.

Of course, in the Karen Klein case, the middle school bullies posted the footage that spurred the controversy, exemplifying the fact that those doing the filming often self-destructively come across the worst (see: the very concept of a sex tape). But never mind that the bullies pointed the weapon at themselves. This incident proves the capacity of that weapon to right social wrongs.

Which is why filming everything has a great potential to empower victims and concerned citizens. Armed with a surreptitious camera, a YouTube account, and the moral imperative to reset the karmic balance of the universe, everyday citizens can rake the muck off of all kinds of abusive behavior committed by everyday citizens. Major political figures and elected officials ought not be the only targets of aggressive guerilla videotaping/public humiliation. We are all targets. If we dare to be dicks to each other.

Publicly posting videos of abusive interactions can be viewed as analogous to suing someone, with crowd-sourced donations functioning as the equivalent to the damages won in a lawsuit. A Kickstarter rival can and likely will emerge that aggregates fundraising efforts for victims. (Paythebullied.com has not been registered as a domain yet). Of course, because the pay-outs are crowd-sourced, the victimizer pays in his reputation alone. For the middle-schoolers in the Klein case, part of their punishment has included being called a ‘monster’ by a journalistic moral authority like Matt Lauer on the Today Show.

Society needs precisely this kind of measure as a supplement to traditional channels of ruining reputations and gaining sympathy for those that have been wronged. Verbal person-to-person communication like gossip tends to add undesirable layers of context and perspective while minimizing the immediacy and injury of a particular controversial incident. This and it’s simply too private. Public text-based web communication like Facebook and mass emails also do not compare to the way in which video conveys the full pathos of a particular victim’s suffering and the heinous cruelty of his victimizer. (It’s like reading about the movie Salo vs. actually seeing it). There is an added retributive power as well at confronting victimizers with a permanent recorded loop of their regrettable behavior. We all know that everything on the web can never really be erased; some site will host a video or offer it as a torrent. If memories of regrettable actions can haunt, I imagine that videos of regrettable actions can destroy, and this is why I believe spying/broadcasting can function as both a potent deterrent against bad, stupid, and/or cruel behavior as well as a severe and novel form of social punishment.

Capturing and broadcasting video also addresses the inadequacies of our criminal and civil courts. Our system is hampered by all kinds of process-driven rules that delay the fast and obvious judgments society needs to quickly purify itself. It’s also dominated by slick attorneys and crusty elitist judges who feel entitled to negotiate the world of torts and laws just because they earned a law degree and have professional experience. Not to mention the fact that the legal system still clings to such antiquated and irrelevant notions of precedent, habeus corpus, and individual liberty. This kind of analog thinking can’t - and thus ought not - survive in the digital age.

Of course, the ideal would be if everything were filmed all the time. From all camera angles. Then we’d really have a grasp on who the bullies, the victimizers, the freaks, the amusing oddities, the sexual deviants, the prodigies, and the heroes in our society really are. And we could allocate funds via Kickstarter on the behalf of the deserving and/or aggrieved. I believe anonymous commenters on YouTube and social media aggregate sites are the best equipped to make these judgments, and only a steady stream of footage can ensure that people behave morally. For these reasons, I can easily see camera phones and YouTube forging an imminent social utopia.

9/11 memorial reaction

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 21:29:00 -0400

Visiting the apolitical, haunting 9/11 memorial recently was a strong start for me to finally contemplate a tragedy that the media sensationalized and turned into a theme park thrill ride and that the Bush Administration manipulated to justify catastrophic political decisions and the most vile of rhetoric. The memorial is devoid of pomp or grandiosity and enables contemplation, meditation, quietness. For the first time since it happened (I was in eighth grade) I felt that I had a vessel into which I could remember the victims and craft my own metaphors, engaging my own feelings of morality on an intimate level. The memorial returns the event to its simplest and original context and is hence universal and apolitical. The tears I cried at the memorial were out of sadness for the loss of life and the horrific suffering the victims endured, but they were also tears of appreciation that our country had finally found a way of bringing a sense of honor - after so many years of dishonor - to what had happened.

On Obama and liberal trolls

Sat, 26 May 2012 16:19:00 -0400

I question Obama’s toughest liberal critics because, to begin with, all Americans of all ideologies ought to be sighing in relief rather than dismay that we have a competent leader. But Obama, unlike our last decent president, Clinton, has been more than merely a competent steward of the government; he has responsibly and honorably addressed the disasters he inherited - the recession and the two un-winnable Middle East wars - as well as begun to advance a liberal agenda - the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Society. The achievements of his Administration are not procedural nor intuitive; they were forged through political shrewdness, courage, and patience, and will affect people positively for decades.

Yet there are a certain wing of liberals who view Obama’s presidency as, on the whole, a failure. To these critics, his achievements either did not go far enough or were not achievements at all: he compromised too much on health care by not passing the public option; Osama Bin Laden’s murder was, if not falsified, then barbaric, possibly illegal and disgracefully celebrated; torture remains an issue on which Obama is as bad as Bush; who cares if Obama ended combat operations in Iraq and is poised to do the same in Afghanistan? - he surged troop levels and we remain in Afghanistan; the commitment of U.S. troops in Libya was not authorized by Congress which makes him as bad of a flouter of the constitution as Bush; the stimulus was not big enough and therefore Obama is just a pawn of Wall Street; and the list goes on. To these critics, Obama’s undeniable achievements on gay rights and immigration are calculated and cynical political ploys for votes and campaign cash.

In my mind, criticizing Obama for any one of these policies is fair unto itself, but to view the Obama presidency through a predominantly negative lens is misguided at best, trollish at worst. It’s misguided because it fails to recognize how much he has accomplished in just one term - given the catastrophic state of domestic and foreign affairs that he inherited and the opposition he has faced from the other two branches of government (lest we forget the 5-4 Republican majority on the Supreme Court). It’s trollish because labeling even his undeniable achievements as politically motivated is both obvious and irrelevant; of course he’s a politician - that he is able to achieve anything through the political process doesn’t degrade him; it elevates the process and proves it can indeed work sometimes.

Sarah Palin: a political horror story

Sat, 26 May 2012 14:45:00 -0400

If you want to spend an hour realizing, with mounting horror, how close America came to having a reckless, deeply pathological figure a heartbeat from the presidency, listen to this interview with Sarah Palin biographer, Joe McGinniss on Australian radio. Detailing her rise to power as mayor of Wasilla, AK, Joe McGinnis reveals Palin’s pattern of vicious retribution against any and all perceived opponents, pathologic propensity for lying, religious and moral extremism, and boundless ignorance.

Gig Reviews Wrap-Up

Sat, 26 May 2012 14:04:00 -0400

A wrap-up of some shows I’ve gone to in May so far.

Wedneday, 5/9 at Webster Hall: AM to AM

AM to AM have all sorts of shiny gizmos in their high-tech arsenal — none more eye-catching than frontman, Will Tendy’s guitar-as-MIDI-pad. But this quintet really stands out in their muscular, tactile musicianship and the humility, even vulnerability with which they sweatily rock out, sans ego or preening. They play the shit out of their instruments, processed or raw. And their most gleaming centerpiece remains their capacity for the mammoth sing-along chorus hook, as heard on standouts songs - ‘Spot of Light” and the aptly named “Pop as Science.” The unabashed hugeness and glamour of early to mid 90’s era alt-rock (aka: Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana) is brought into the twenty-first century.

5/11 at 92YTribeca: Annie and the Beekeepers, Kelly and the Hermanos, Lexi Roth

Annie Lynch and her band of Beekeepers performed a raw, no-frills set - all captivating songwriting and four-part vocal arrangement laid admirably, mesmerizingly bare. As far as pop songwriting goes, it doesn’t get much better than “My Bonneville,” a sexy, playful, and funny 60’s-style romp about “the things we did” in the titular, and ironically grandmotherly, car.

Kelly and the Hermanos play nostalgic, romantic country music in the vein of legends Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Patsy Cline; in other words, the country music of yore (before it disintegrated into the morass of auto-tune, coquettish tween sex-bombs, jingoistic machismo, and plaintive old-men-with-feathered bleached hair that presently dominate mainstream country radio). Kelly and the Hermanos are a band where every instrument knows its role; from pedal steel to bass to guitar to drums, which manifests itself in arresting dynamics - the quietest, most subtle moments played with the same intensity and singularity of purpose as the loudest and most raucous. The music draws upon the iconography of both Western music and movies - and frontwoman Kelly Bartley recalls a Howard Hawksian heroine. They are releasing their record tonight at Rockwood II.

Lexi Roth opened with a solo set of evocative, memorable vocal melodies, impressively ambient guitar finger-picking, and an engaging stage presence that was unexpectedly funny and wholly disarming.

5/24 at Pianos: Vassals

Vassals outclasses the majority of the buzzy Brooklyn indie rock pack with their tension between thoughtful, Elliott Smith-ish melodies and noisy, balls-out trio arrangements. Shay Spence’s distinctive vocals range from a soft whisper to a seething scream, and the lyrics and wordplay remain front and center, even as the guitars and drums create carefully measured chaos. Their refusal of gimmickry, capacity to sound huge as a trio, and the sense that these songs indeed really mean something makes their sound both timely and timeless.

cliche subway rant

Tue, 08 May 2012 23:00:00 -0400

the new york subway proves the point that being inconsiderate, rude, and insufferable spans all races, classes, religions, ethnicities, and other social distinctions. we really are one people. a people that will steal seats, cut in lines on the stairwell, not move too inches to make room for anyone, use the morning commute as an opportunity to test every possible ringtone in our phone, and have inane loud conversations for seemingly no other purpose than to exercise our vocal cords and herculean capacity for injecting the word “like” into every possible pause…though the absence of headphones makes such observations more harshly felt, listening to music too can be a finely sharpened, double-edged weapon wielded on the subway to abuse both the health of our ears and those around us. For those who occupy that precarious space between malevolence and cluelessness (aka: New Yorkers; aka: humanity), the subway train car becomes a proverbial DJ booth upon which we spring a cacophony of tinny dance beats of various styles into the ears of an exasperated, grumpy, and wholly nonconsensual audience who, increasingly provoked, responds with acts that further bludgeon any hope of karma. Foreign policy experts call such reactions blowback.

Random Musings on Electronic Music

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:20:00 -0400

I happen to love electronic music - and think the synth-pop phase favors a certain kind of songwriting that is melodic and creative in a way that I find fun. However, I confess to a certain cringe factor when I hear recordings from a few years that consist exclusively, mostly, or considerably on programming, synth arrangements, and sundry digital post-production tricks. Even if the song is well-crafted. ‘Debut’ by Bjork is a great, exuberant album, but those beats on “Big Time Sensuality” and “Violently Happy” belong on a Calvin Klein catwalk circa ‘92. That’s not to say the beats don’t work on a theoretical level - the groove totally fits the rhythm of the melody. But electronic music somehow becomes so rooted to a specific time and place that its trappings distract from more timeless emotions that a recording may encompass. So instead of feeling Bjork’s euphoria, I’m thinking about how damn annoying and dated those cymbal sounds are. Albums with live instrumentation are dated to a certain degree by the instruments, the tape they were recorded on, the sound of the mic’s and pre-amps, and the evolution of mixing techniques. But the thing is, a lot of those pre-amps and Mic’s and analog tape are still coveted and prized and used. The vintage analog stuff has survived in quality. I don’t think that’ll be true of plug-ins and heavy stylistic post-production editing (unless, in the latter case, done in a way that could also conceivably be performed with turntables). I don’t have all the answers on this but my feeling says that technology dates, and the more of it you have in your music, the more its potential to distract. Then again, who cares? St. Vincent and Sufjan Stevens both have successfully transitioned from chamber pop to something more electronically influenced. The Knife and Fever Ray’s Karin Andersson is an exceptionally fine songwriter and poetic mind. And most people would agree that Radiohead’s palette expansion from Kid A on has been good for everybody. For me, Metric’s sound is on the precipice of descending into datedness. Emily Haines might be the best all-around songwriter of her generation; ‘Torture Me’ and ‘Police and the Private’ are two of the band’s most aching, lyrically expressive, beautifully crafted songs but they both sport beats and synth sounds as dated as yesterday’s uber-hip fashion mullet.

Back

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 17:41:00 -0400

I apologize to all my loyal readers (what up Stoltz family) for my little hiatus from blogging. I’ve been traveling most of the month - back and forth from Cincinnati to New York play shows/attend job interviews and then to Austin for SXSW then back to Cincinnati only to move to New York a week later. I’ve now been in New York for nearly a week, having started a new job working as a quasi-archivalist with classical music programs. I’m learning a lot about classical music repertoire and terminology as well as how royalty distribution works (in the realm of public performances). The world of publishing and copyright law is something I’ve always been interested in in the theoretical sense - and is coming into relevant and organic focus as a highly complex - but no less crucial resource for how musicians get paid, how estates are established, how culture - musical and otherwise - becomes embedded.

Outing Bullies

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 16:04:11 -0400

I am so pleased that anti-bullying laws, films, and initiatives have arisen over the past several years. The anti-bullying movement incorporates pro-gay politics and vital concerns about privacy in the digital age. The awareness it raises seems a vital defense against the abuse that creates so much suffering for American schoolchildren.

Apparently what’s missing from the new Bully documentary is focus on the bullies themselves. “We also hear from the parents of these kids, but Bully never ventures to the other side to hear from those inflicting all this suffering, leaving us moved by poignant scenes of victims’ shattered lives, but, for reasons unclear, keeping the bullies themselves largely out of our reach.” - Slant Magazine.

I wonder if a movement to out and publicly humiliate bullies past and present will arise? To target both current abusers and past abusers living adult lives who were never held responsible for the cruelty and emotional damage they inflicted on children; certainly their former victims remember these bullies’ names and past actions with specificity and pain.

On the other hand, bullying doesn’t occur in a vacuum; it’s a systemic problem, maintained by incompetent administrators and broader social injustices. Such outing could also be viewed as co-opting the tactics of the abusers and as petty vengeance instead of belated justice.

I’d like to see the debate happen nevertheless.

Being broke never sounded so fun and sexy

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:07:25 -0400

“Perspective (Heat)” by new NYC indie band, Blank Paper, is exactly the kind of playful, yet ultra-sophisticated pop song about “page after page of bills, bills, bills” that could become an unofficial anthem of the Occupy generation - or at least earn a spot on any broke young person’s party playlist. Even though lead singer, Marie Kim laments how “money’s all about what you’ve already got/all the right combination of who, where, when, what,” she finds hope in physical intimacy: “when I need a moan/he calls me my baby” and “It’s a luxury just to feel ya.”

Emily King's 'Seven' EP

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:43:00 -0400

Emily King’s Seven EP is a must-listen. I had the chance to see her perform at Rockwood Music Hall Stage II in New York City - an inexplicably free show in which King herself inexplicably gave me a free copy of her second EP, ‘Seven.’ Seeing King live is a must for music lovers of any demographics; not only is she a flawless, passionate vocalist with a highly disciplined, tasteful band but song after song delivered clever, intricate melodies and beautifully arranged vocal and guitar textures. There is nothing show-off-y about King or her band (though they are all technically gifted performers); it’s the power of the songwriting that takes precedent.

The Help critique

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:09:00 -0500

Melissa Perry-Harris has an erudite, fair-minded yet passionate critique of The Help. I agree with pretty much everything she says. Here’s my review:

Though blacks had been emancipated from slavery for a hundred years, life for black Americans in the early 1960’s was characterized by violence, segregation, and servitude. The statistics speak to the brutality: between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 3,446 blacks were lynched. As the Civil Rights movement made gains with Brown v Board of Education, the conflicts intensified.

1963 - the year in which the film takes place - saw George Wallace’s ‘Stand in the Schoolhouse Door,’ protest against University of Alabama’s integration as well as the murder of black civil rights activist, Medgar Evers. In 1962, a violent riot over integration at Ole Miss (the alma mater of the film’s protagonist, Skeeter) broke out, resulting in two deaths. A year after the film takes place, in 1964, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney were murdered by the KKK in Mississippi, which was the inspiration behind the film Mississippi Burning. Though LBJ’s Civil Rights legislation ended brazen political and institutional racism, major racial conflicts persisted throughout the 60’s with riots and assassinations.The legacies of slavery and Jim Crow continue in the discrimination blacks face every day.

I bring this up because, by and large, The Help doesn’t; the movie is bizarrely detached from the emotional, political, and social realities of its subject matter. I use the qualifier, ‘by and large,’ because members of the uniformly outstanding cast are able to wrest compelling moments that capture an authentic character in an authentic place.

Yet you will not learn much about what it was like to live in Jim Crow or what life was like, even on a practical level for maids, from watching The Help. While the film shows that the white employees were bossy and cruel, it fixates on only one specific example of widespread abuse: the refusal of white employers to let black maids use their toilets. A whimsical scene depicting an evil character’s lawn covered in broken toilets exemplifies not only the movie’s childish metaphorical sense but its narrow focus.

The movie has a narrative problem: it’s about an author, Skeeter (Emma Stone, who is excellent and underrated) compiling the stories of maids instead of being about the stories themselves. If Skeeter is both protagonist and framing device, as I believe she’s intended to be, the story that it’s framing is never depicted. For example, just as Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) tearfully begin monologues about what it’s like to work for vicious white ladies, the scene abruptly terminates. One stunted depiction involves an accusation of thievery that results in the arrest of an ancillary maid character, who is never seen from or heard from again. The film supplies its historical context with radio broadcast snippets, newsreel footage, and expository asides. Injustice is not so much systemic as singular - personified in Bryce Dallas Howard’s white employer, who is about as threatening as any teen movie’s cliquey mega-bitch.

The Help is, in very plain terms, a chick flick. It incorporates such staples of thegenre as the plucky, ugly duckling heroine; the gaggle of catty girls; outrageous, gross-out, comedic moments; the unlikely and convenient nature of the protagonists’ triumph; a self-conscious eye for style, hair, and makeup; the annoying but actually kind-hearted parental figure. Tate Johnson seems more concerned with adhering to the formulas of today’s mass-marketed cinema than he does in exploring the structures of the past.

Lydia Fischer

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:09:00 -0500

Lydia Fischer is one of my favorite songwriters that I met at Berklee. This song, “You’re Not Good For Me” is just really well-written dark indie-folk-pop, and her Myspace boasts other gems including “Stuck in Your Head” and “Can’t See Through the Fall.” The beautifully arranged harmonies, hook-laden melodies, and passionate vocal delivery will indeed get “stuck in your head.”

Making sense of the STOCK act

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 01:22:00 -0500

Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act passed the House last week, but it lacks the Senate bill’s provisions for eliminating pensions for former Congress members who violate insider trading laws and for requiring political intelligence traders to formally register as such - a provision opposed by Eric Cantor. Jon Stewart’s segment focused on the latter aspect of the bill, political intelligence trading, and he interviewed liberal stalwart, Louise Slaughter who emphasized the importance of that provision.

To backtrack a little, insider trading laws criminalize trading based upon material, nonpublic information. They also criminalize the disclosure of that information to tip others off. The SEC must prove that the insiders violated a duty of confidence, which can arise from the fiduciary relationship between members of a company and its shareholders or a a non-disclosure agreement. In other words, if you overheard businessmen on the street discussing stock tips and trade based on that information, the SEC can’t really prove that you violated a duty of confidence.

The STOCK act, for the first time, explicitly establishes a duty of confidence among members of Congress with “respect to material, nonpublic information,” prohibiting members of Congress from revealing such information for personal benefit.

But it doesn’t, as far as I can tell, explicitly prohibit the tipping off of financial information unless it can be proven that the tipping off of that information leads to a direct benefit for the member of Congress, which is far weaker than laws that apply to the rest of the population.

Under federal securities laws, both the tipper and the tippee may be liable for insider trading violations. This is true even if the tipper does not engage in any trading activity, and does not realize any financial gain from such information.

And the law doesn’t require a non-disclosure agreement, which would clarify the materiality of information - and its sensitivity to exploitation.

What it doesn’t seem to do is have a Regulation FD equivalent requiring a confidentiality agreement. Just like public companies, Congress can still go around talking about potential plans with interested parties – as long as they’re doing it as part of their job rather than for private profit. Unlike public companies, though, Congress doesn’t need to get an NDA before disclosing nonpublic information. And investors who don’t sign an NDA don’t have a duty not to trade.

Given that members of Congress will still be allowed to confer with pretty much anyone they want to about any kind of nonpublic legislative information, it may be very difficult to prove that crimes occur, which can be difficult to do in the first place. Even the accusations against Pelosi and Boehner waged by the 60 Minutes piece which precipitated the STOCK Act are dubious.

Kroft is heavily suggesting that Pelosi didn’t bring the bill to the floor so that she might profit on her newly acquired stock, but doesn’t mention that there was no time left to do so and that a new Congress was soon to arrive in Washington that January anyhow …

…there’s a wide constellation of political and philosophical reasons Boehner opposed the public option, many of them much more compelling than a few stock purchases. Two, Boehner didn’t really have any inside track on finally killing it off—that happened in the Senate, where Joe Lieberman threatened to join a Republican filibuster if the public option wasn’t removed from the bill. There’s an ongoing debate over whether the White House and moderate Democrats were going to kill it anyway due to a secret deal, but in any case, Boehner didn’t really play a rol

Maybe the best approach is to just ban trading among lawmakers, as we’ve done for the Treasury Secretary since ‘78.

If the problem we wish to address is the possibility that members are using their positions to enrich themselves, then a general ban on trading, via the use of a blind trust, would address this concern with little potential for abuse. Such blind trusts were defined for executive branch officials under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. We don’t debate whether the Treasury Secretary should be trading in financial stocks; we expect the Secretary to not trade at all and instead concentrate his efforts on his day job. We do, after all, elect our public officials to tend to the public’s business, not spend their time day trading.

On the plus side, The STOCK Act ends the kind of brazen graft that Rep. Spencer Bachus committed in 2008. But you can understand why Slaughter - and Stewart - are stressing the political intelligence provision. It’s a practical no-brainer that zeroes in on identifiable and perhaps worsening aspect of the problem: the emergence of an industry whose exclusive goal is to get tipped off by Congress members. The law wouldn’t even stop the tipping off; it would merely force political intelligence industry to identify itself. If the STOCK Act seems to lack real teeth, it should at least stipulate transparency.

Why not? Reblogged from kandylions:

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:20:00 -0500

Why not?

Reblogged from kandylions:

A proposal

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:17:00 -0500

A proposal that I’d like to share with my musician friends: Instead of covering a song on YouTube, write a song worth covering - and post that. I would much rather listen to your lyrics than Lady Gaga’s or Adele’s or Chris Brown’s. Covering today’s pop hits may ensure more views, but it also elevates the stature of manufactured music, degrades talented performers into novelty cover acts, and further devalues original songwriting. Pretty soon, there won’t even be any songs left to cover if musicians continue to expend their energy pandering to an Internet demographic with declining attention spans rather than creating awesome new material. I also hereby declare a moratorium on all Leonard Cohen “Hallelujah” covers. Reject cynicism and embrace creativity and ye shall reap the rewards one day!

Price controls, ya'll

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:18:00 -0500

Matthew Yglesias on why health care is so expensive in the U.S.: because the prices are high.

Medicare is a very expensive government program, but it’s actually cheaper than private health insurance. Liberals sometimes point to administrative efficiencies and lack of advertising and executive compensation as the reason for this, but the main reason is simply that the prices are lower. Medicare is a bulk purchaser of health care services, and offers providers an offer they can’t refuse—perform medicine relatively cheaply, or get locked out of the Medicare client base.

Yglesias in ‘09, in more specifically:

We pay doctors more than other people do, our doctors order more tests than other doctors do, our tests are more expensive than other people’s tests, and we have many more relatively expensive specialists and relatively few relatively cheap GPs. And we have nothing to show for it.

So who wants to take on the doctor lobby?

Republican sex scandal in my community

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:34:00 -0500

The self-delusion that can maintain addiction (I don’t have a problem) sometimes finds its curative corollary in the self-delusion of absolutist religion and ideology (God is the answer, no ifs ands or buts). But what happens you relapse? When the vagaries and foibles of your fragile human state collide with the rigidity and arrogance of your conservative moral thinking? The Republican sex and drugs scandal. Former Clermont County Commissioner, Archie Wilson has been charged with soliciting sex and drug trafficking.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Wilson got clean, served his time, and used the experience to open up a dialog about rethinking the criminalization of drugs and prostitution?

Unlikely; yet, the end of his political career may not, in theory, be permanent. Republicans love stories of absolution and conversion. Theo Anderson explains why reformed baddies do better among the base than a genuine, goody-two-shoes like Mitt Romney.

For evangelical Christians, faith is about change and transformation. Its essence is conversion. They love nothing more than a story about the lost sheep finding his way back to the fold–the more lost, the better. The details are both entertaining and a way of dramatizing the power of accepting Jesus. This is why Bush’s alcoholism and his rumored drug use actually helped him with the base. Evangelicals aren’t judgmental about the depths of the sin you’ve fall into. They’re glad to hear your story about it, in detail. But there has to be a payoff. They have to know that you’ve changed; or that, with God’s miraculous help, you’ve overcome some kind of great hardship.

Drive

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:17:00 -0500

I will continue searching, surely in vain, for evidence to support the popular notion that Ryan Gosling is a good actor. The fruitlessness of the endeavor is part of the obsessive appeal of watching his movies, akin to what ghost hunters and BigFoot experts experience. Undeniably, he’s a hunk with poetry in the eyes; it just happens to be really bad poetry. Gosling is about as overly reliant on his sex appeal as the bimbos of yore. His affectations are degrading to watch, like the gorgeous girl who tosses her luscious blonde hair in the company of men just a little too dramatically and a little too frequently.

Drive is an unimaginably bad movie, not least because of Gosling’s monotone, non-performance performance. It would be tempting, though false, to say that the movie prioritizes “style over substance” because that would indicate that the movie has style - a certain superficial skillfulness, which it doesn’t. A haphazard mishmash of brutal violence, David Lynchian weirdness, slow-paced Michael Mann-ish urban melancholy, and saccharine sentimentalism out of a Nicholas Sparks film adaptation, this arhythmic wanna-be noir is so aesthetically schizophrenic that it can’t even provoke pleasure in the recognition of a skillful hand rearranging (or regurgitating) old tropes. It’s just bad. Like, Boondock Saints bad. But with a better cast, lush cinematography, and a hipper-than-thou vibe of detachment. The 80’s synth-pop revivalist soundtrack only further muddles the movie’s ill-fitting, anything-goes palette. Brave scenery-chewing by Ron Perlman, Bryan Cranston, and Albert Brooks would make Drive watchable, but Nicolas Winding Refn has about as much interest in actors as he does in story, attitude, or coherence.

Whitney Houston: tormented by the closet?

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:50:00 -0500

The Daily Beast compiles the rumors that dogged Whitney Houston about her sexuality since the ‘80’s. I, for one, had no idea such rumors existed.

In Bobby Brown: The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But…, an authorized biography, Brown said that the marriage was “doomed from the very beginning. I think we got married for all the wrong reasons. Now, I realize Whitney had a different agenda than I did when we got married … I believe her agenda was to clean up her image, while mine was to be loved and have children. The media was accusing her of having a bisexual relationship with her assistant, Robin [sic] Crawford. Since she was the American Sweetheart and all, that didn’t go too well with her image … In Whitney’s situation, the only solution was to get married and have kids. That would kill all speculation, whether it was true or not.”

If this is true, then Whitney’s destructive marriage to Bobby Brown, which many blame for her descent into drug addiction, was fueled by her panic to protect her closeted image. Is it possible that Whitney was a high-profile, legendary victim of the shame and torment imposed by homophobic society and the closet?