December 5th, 2006 — art, celebrities, movies
All grown-up and making lots of sense about his sure-to-be-controversial new movie, Blood Diamond:
PIYAL HOSAIN / FOTOS INTERNATIONAL / GETTY
The movie has come under fire from the diamond industry, which insists the issue of conflict diamonds took place in the 1990s and has been almost completely eradicated. Did the gemstone industry contact you directly?
I’ve gotten letters, and I didn’t respond to any of them. There’s been a huge PR push to let people get a better understanding that this stuff has dramatically decreased. But certainly if you talk to Global Witness or Amnesty International they’d tell you there are still major problems, especially on the Ivory Coast. They want to end conflict diamonds for good. I don’t want to go out there and project myself as an expert on the issue. I’m not an expert, and this is not what I do full time. I’m an actor who’s playing a part. If the movie does anything, it will bring more awareness to the issue and people will be asking more questions, and the industry is going to have to have viable answers.
Hear, hear.
December 5th, 2006 — political correctness
Occasionally my local paper, the New York Times, lets down its PC guard and tells it like it is, as in this story in the Sunday paper about the aftermath of the terrible, misbegotten shooting of Sean Bell, gunned down in error by five New York City policemen.
Diane Cardwell frames her piece around the good all-around relationship between bazillionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Queens neighborhood’s black community:
Since the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man in southeast Queens last weekend, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has been able to cool tempers by tapping into an abundant reservoir of black political supporters, many from the area where the chaotic event occurred.
That support is a product of Mr. Bloomberg’s careful cultivation of voters and politicians in the middle-class black neighborhoods of southeast Queens, which swung to the Republican mayor in the 2005 election, helping grant him a huge margin of victory.
This lovefest is in pointed contrast to Rudy Giuliani’s famously tense relationship with every interest group in the city, Cardwell underscores, but she isn’t shy about listing other reasons for the bonhomie:
Mr. Bloomberg has shown a willingness to repay that support, for instance by breaking with his party to raise money for the State Senate campaign of Malcolm A. Smith, who has emerged as one of the important leaders working with City Hall in dealing with the Bell shooting. …
In addition, it does not hurt matters that Mr. Bloomberg spreads some of his wealth around the community. Last year, three Jamaica-based organizations — one that helps small businesses, an arts and education center and a social service group for the elderly received donations from him.
So far so good. But you knew that it’s not all champagne and roses, right? So—predictably, there are those hotheads who want Bloomberg to fire the police commissioner, who threaten street protests and congressional hearings. Then there’s Al “Jack-in-the-Box” Sharpton, a one-man PC Probe Attack (TM) machine:
The Rev. Al Sharpton, for example, is organizing a meeting of black and Latino elected officials, clergy members and labor leaders on Tuesday to discuss their next moves, hinting at some sort of mass civil action just as the city gears up for the holidays. He already called in national leaders like the Rev. Jesse Jackson and corralled a group of lawyers to represent witnesses to the shooting, which occurred on the day Mr. Bell was to be married. …
Mr. Sharpton, a veteran of other police-conduct controversies, has again acted as a point person, taking the lead in putting a focus on the case’s potential civil rights aspects.
That’s the end of the honest reporting in the piece—the part where she says Sharpton is a bloodhound for “potential” civil rights cases. Cardwell undermines her own argument at the end:
Once labeled a race-baiting firebrand, Mr. Sharpton is now considered to be closer to the center of the broader leadership group.
At the private meeting with Mr. Bloomberg, for example, Mr. Sharpton did not second Mr. Barron’s call for Police Commissioner Kelly’s resignation, telling Mr. Kelly that he supported him.
This is the mainstream position of the “broader leadership group” representing New York City’s black community?
Call me crazy, but trolling for potential civil rights violations is still race-baiting. It may be dressed up in a (to some) more respectable package, but it still fuels the fires of racial disharmony.
December 5th, 2006 — America at war, Iraq, politics
Sylvestre Reyes, named by Nancy “if we leave Iraq, al Qaeda will leave Iraq” Pelosi to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committe, wants to increase troop levels in Iraq in order to eliminate the militias. Newsweek reports:
Reyes pointedly distanced himself from many of his Democratic colleagues who have called for fixed timetables for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Coming on the eve of tomorrow’s recommendations from the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission, Reyes’s comments were immediately cited by some Iraq war analysts as fresh evidence that the intense debate over U.S. policy may be more fluid than many have expected.
“We’re not going to have stability in Iraq until we eliminate those militias, those private armies,” Reyes said. “We have to consider the need for additional troops to be in Iraq, to take out the militias and stabilize Iraq … We certainly can’t leave Iraq and run the risk that it becomes [like] Afghanistan” was before the 2001 invasion by the United States.
Even the reporter was stunned to find a Democrat—and a newly powerful one at that, someone who was completely underestimated—who wants to win in Iraq:
When a reporter suggested that was not a position that was likely to be popular with many House Democrats, Reyes replied: “Well again, I differ in that I don’t want Iraq to become the next Afghanistan. We could not allow Iraq to become a safe haven for Al Qaeda, for Hamas, for Hizbullah, or anybody else. We cannot allow Iran or Syria to have a free hand in there to further destabilize the Middle East.”
Reyes added that he was “very clear” about his position to Pelosi when she chose him over two rivals
Food fight!
(via Memeorandum)
December 5th, 2006 — books, publishing
GalleyCat links to a report at
Shelf Awareness about the publication of a statistics-filled—and thus supposedly very serious—book about the book publishing industry,
The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century, by Al Greco, Clara Rodriguez and Robert Wharton.According to Greco, this is a “comprehensive” look at the industry, about which he has this to say:
“It’s a nutty business but a great business,” Greco said in a conversation with Shelf Awareness. “It’s a cultural business that’s different. Hollywood talks about culture but couldn’t care less, and newspapers have a cultural tradition but they’re publicly owned and under major pressure.”
This author of a book about the business side of book publishing loves the biz! He really, really loves the biz!—despite the fact that it’s, um, differently abled than other businesses [emphasis mine]:
One way the business is different from many others: it “adapts quickly and is willing to take risks,” Greco said. “If there’s a trend, we pick up on it. It’s one of the wonders of the business. Editors look at cultural trends, the arts, pop trends, and crank out books in response.” And another way the business is different: “most of the product doesn’t work.” Naturally Greco has statistics to illustrate this point: “Seven out of 10 new trade books lose money,” he said. “Two break even. One makes money. The ratio hasn’t changed for years, and it explains why we’re a hit-driven business.”
I love GalleyCat, but I’m surprised they didn’t use that sad but salient part of Greco’s quote. Maybe GalleyCat doesn’t want to think about it, or to repeat it, but I will:
An industry that cannot replace the customers it loses (to other media to death), much less increase its customer base, can simply not afford to keep doing the same old same old. I’m no mogul, but even I know that a 10% success rate (one out of ten books makes money, Greco says) is not exactly a formula for success—particularly when you’re an enterprise that makes a static product in a super-dynamic media landscape. Sooner rather than later, you will be blown away.
Greco is also full of shit about the digital future of trade books:
It’s been a busy period to cover. Not surprisingly a major change in the book business is “the impact of technology, which is obviously moving the business in a faster way,” Greco said. This explains RiverDeep’s purchase last week of Houghton Mifflin. “Now RiverDeep has electronic products and textbooks,” he said. “That technology will ultimately change el-hi but not trade.” (The Sony Reader is not the e-book product that will revolutionize trade book reading, he maintained. “Who’s going to buy that?” Greco asked.)
Hmm, let’s see. Why, no less a literary eminence than Chip McGrath, formerly of the New Yorker and the New York Times Books Review, that’s who. He didn’t buy it, but he reviewed it —favorably, if with a few reservations—for the Times:
By far the best things about the Reader are its capacity — it can hold about 80 books, or more if you use a memory card — and portability. I have crammed mine with both recreational reading and stuff for work, and it all fits in my pocket: a couple of thousand pages of James, two novels by Somerset Maugham and a play by Harley Granville Barker, not to mention Ms. Copland’s masterwork and Ian Rankin’s newest thriller.
I have happily skipped from book to book while riding on a bus, in the car and in between periods at a hockey game, and I even used my Reader at the beach on a bright October day, when it was a great relief not to have to worry about dampness, sand or wind-tossed pages. The Reader is so light and so compact that you can easily forget all about it, and even lose the thing, as I have twice: once between the sofa cushions and once, embarrassingly, right inside my own tote bag when it slithered inside a magazine and I thought it was gone forever.
Call me crazy, but I find it encouraging that when he’s reading, McGrath cares about what he’s reading, not the medium that delivers the reading experience to him.
December 5th, 2006 — Israel, liberal opinion
The New York Times fronts a story about a report released by Israel about its 33-day war with Hezbollah this past summer. The article carries the headline “Offering Video, Israel Answers Critics on War”—which is more or less guaranteed to attract even more ciriticism of Israel, even before anyone reads the article, because it suggests that Israel was in the right and that its critics (who consider it an “immoral” war waged by Israel) are in the wrong.
That’s the politics, which I won’t address except to say that I see an international stampede to see who can feed more pieces of Israel to the Islamist crocodile, and how quickly. (The resignation of John Bolton, who spoke out loudly and often about the UN’s repeated attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel, is but another indication of how isolated Israel will be.) Certainly, Ehud Olmert recognizes this: thus the many olive branches he has offered the Palestinians in the last few weeks.
Let there be no mistake: we are witnessing the abandonment of the Jews of Israel to Islamist jihad. They, of course, can and will take care of themselves. And when it comes to their survival, they will not follow international law if it undermines their survival—of that, everyone should be assured.
In the meantime, however, they do what’s required in our politically correct world and submit their report for our consideration.
In a new report, an Israeli research group says Hezbollah stored weapons in mosques, battled Israelis from inside empty schools, flew white flags while transporting missiles and launched rockets near United Nations monitoring posts. …
“This study explains the dilemma facing the Israeli military as it fights an enemy that intentionally operates from civilian areas,” Mr. Erlich said. “This is the kind of asymmetric warfare we are seeing today. It’s not only relevant to Lebanon, but is also what we are seeing in the Gaza Strip and in Iraq.”
The report says: “The construction of a broad military infrastructure, positioned and hidden in populated areas, was intended to minimize Hezbollah’s vulnerability. Hezbollah would also gain a propaganda advantage if it could represent Israel as attacking innocent civilians.”
In the same Times story, a Lebanese general confirms Israel’s claims:
Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese Army general, said of the Israeli allegations, “Of course there are hidden invisible tunnels, bunkers of missile launchers, bunkers of explosive charges amongst civilians.”
He added: “You cannot separate the southern society from Hezbollah, because Hezbollah is the society and the society is Hezbollah. Hezbollah is holding this society together through its political, military and economic services. It is providing the welfare for the south.”
Asked whether Hezbollah should be seen as responsible for the deaths of Lebanese civilians in the war, he replied: “Of course Hezbollah is responsible. But these people are ready to sacrifice their lives for Hezbollah. If you tell them, ‘Your relative died,’ they will tell you ‘No, he was a martyr.’ The party’s military preparations from 2000 till 2006 took place in their areas. They were of course done with complete secrecy, but in accordance with the civilians.”
The Lebanese are all Hezbollah now.
Let’s see about the West.
