Entries Tagged 'art' ↓

 

 

 

 

 

I want to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press. And I just want to say that this movie was a life-changing experience. I saw some amazing, beautiful, invigorating parts of America. But I saw some dark parts of America, an ugly side of America. A side of America that rarely sees the light of day.

I refer, of course, to the anus and testicles of my co-star, Ken Davitian. (Aud laughs as the camera finds Davitian shrugging and raising a wine glass to Cohen.) Ken, when I was in that scene and I stared down and saw your two wrinkled golden globes on my chin, I thought to myself, ‘I better win a bloody award for this.’

And then when my 300-pound co-star decided to sit on my face and squeeze the oxygen from my lungs, I was faced with a choice: Death or to breathe in the air that had been trapped in a small pocket between his buttocks for 30 years.

Kenneth, if it was not for that rancid bubble, I would not be here today.

(Music starts as Cohen holds up Globe gesturing to Davitian. He starts rushing through the rest.)

Thank you to Larry Charles, thank you to Jay Roach, thank you to Isla Fisher, my fiancee. Thank you to Peter Baynham, Anthony Hines and Dan Mazer; thank you to Ari Emanuel; Matt Labov; Erran Baron Cohen, my brother who did the music; and to Jason Alper and (unintelligible due to swelling music). And thank you to every American who has not sued me so far. Thank you.”

No. Thank you, Sacha Baron Cohen.

Here’s the divine Emmylou Harris singing “Love and Happiness“*** from

All the Roadrunning, by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, an inspired—and inspiring—collaboration.

——-
*** The You Tube clip is a bootleg—amateurish video layered over Emmylou singing this song live in November 2006. I think it’s the only live performance of this song available online. You Tube doesn’t permit embedding. View at your own risk. Yadda yadda yadda.

The clip sucks. Listen to the MP3 instead (click on the link above and scroll halfway down the page of the blog post that shows up, and thanks to the blog owner for the MP3).

Better yet: buy the disk. You will want to own it. I promise.

I’ve been enjoying my long-postponed Billy Wilder festival. Last week, we watched Sunset Boulevard and Witness for the Prosecution, both of which I’d seen many times before and enjoyed just as much as if I were coming to them for the first time.

Tonight, we watched One, Two, Three, which I’d never seen before. It’s wicked!—and refreshingly straight-on anti-establishment. Whatever you’re selling, Wilder isn’t having any of it. (You’ve gotta know by now that I love that.)

I’m wild about Billy, and I’m in mourning for his kind of smart filmmaking, which tapped into rich cultural veins (yes they were middlebrow; so what?). I particularly love Wilder when he goes directly at his target. Glenn Erickson of DVD Savant gives you a flavor:

Wilder normally didn’t come out with opinions on politics. He’d participated in the de-Nazification of Germany for the Army, and made a good comedy called A Foreign Affair out of the situation, but he mostly stayed away from topical themes, especially after the backlash of his rather subversive film noir Ace in the Hole.

But in One, Two, Three he comes out swinging at every pitch available. It’s everything American versus everything Eastern-bloc: baseball, soft drinks, Huntley & Brinkley, Gone With the Wind and the Pledge of Allegiance - versus Commisars, party dues, propaganda, missiles, caviar, trains that don’t run on time and pitiless interrogators using The Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini as a torture device. Americans are arrogant, pushy, boorish, ignorant, sex-obsessed and success-driven, while the East Germans and Russians are sneaky, arrogant, paranoid Marx-spouters who hate The Wall Street Journal and want Yankee to Go Home. In between, Wilder gets in a few merciless jabs at the efficient West Germans - every West Berliner seems to have a guilty secret in their closet. A reporter is revealed to be ex-S.S. officer. MacNamara’s own assistant clicks his heels at every command and lets slip that he used to be a pastry cook in the S.S., ” A very bad pastry cook.” MacNamara: “Schlemmer! You’re back in the S.S. again! Smaller Salary!”

Netflix it—Jimmy Cagney is magnificent!

(I wrote this on the run earlier today; embarrassing typos are now fixed)

A delightful and helpful reminder for those contemplating “negotiations” with the Islamic Republic of Iran:

Azar Nafisi, the author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” quoted a former colleague in Tehran who compared dealing with the Islamic Republic to playing chess with a monkey.

“In the middle of the game, the monkey picks up your queen and swallows it,” she said. “Then what are you going to do? You are dealing with a country that is not going to follow your rules.”

Nafisi, like all the Iranian expats/analysts interviewed for the New York Times piece I quoted above, is in favor of engaging Iran, not bombing it.***

Mehdi Khaliji, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute, for example, makes a lot of sense:

With Iran, the United States needs to become both more confrontational in private, and less bellicose publicly, he said. For example, rather than threatening regime change and not doing much to back it up, he said, the American military should have come down hard on Iranian interference in Iraq while sounding more diplomatic in public. That approach would make Iran more amenable to compromise, he said [emphasis added].

Like I was saying yesterday, when I was talking about plan B: it’s all about hypocrisy public diplomacy. Get used to it.

———–

***In a demented attack earlier this year on Nafisi and her wildly successful memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (a work of dissident literature about the soul-killing totalitarian regime of the Mad Mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Columbia “scholar” Hamid Dabashi accused Nafisi of being a “native informer” and “colonial agent” serving the agenda of the Bush administration and of writing “a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire.” He called her work “reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India.”

In an interview, he called Nafisi “the Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib dressed up as the simple, everyday comprador intellectual you might meet in the supermarket.”

I have no desire to get in between Persians. However, this is my wish for “Professor” Dabashi:

May all his teeth fall out except one, and may that one be the source of constant, agonizing pain.

Helen Mirren

(my neighbor!)

All grown-up and making lots of sense about his sure-to-be-controversial new movie, Blood Diamond:

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.

It’s fascinating to read the many viewpoints people are imposing on the film.

Joe Queenan thinks Sacha Baron Cohen is a typical British twit seething with anti-Americanism, that the film is “contemptible,” and that the feminist brigade will soon go gunning for him:

Most of the critics who salivated all over Borat were male, as film criticism is dominated by middle-aged men whose darkest fear is to no longer be perceived as cutting-edge by equally lonely men who write blogs. Similarly, most of the people who have made Borat such a monstrous hit were young men. But eventually the women will be heard from, and a lot of them will not be fawning Baron Cohen groupies. To the women I know, when you ridicule redneck racists, you are a hero. [hmm. really? and that's okay?--ed.] But when you go out of your way to humiliate middle-aged feminists and harmless socialites and hapless hotel employees and office workers on their lunch breaks, and use plump black women as a running sight gag, you expose yourself not as an iconoclastic wit, but as a pig.

Meanwhile, Down Under, Christopher Scanlon zeroes in on the (supposedly) anti-Kazakh angle. He even cites Slovenian Lacanian sociologist/cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek!

the Kazakh Government misses the point of the Borat film, insofar as most of the jokes are not targeted at Kazakhs at all. Kazakhstan is simply a convenient stick with which to poke fun at a culture that is so ignorant of the rest of the world that it swallows the idea that there exists a whole country populated by boorish fools who have only incompletely made it to modernity.

Keep those guesses coming! (As long as it keeps you thinking.)

For some reason, reading a throwaway sentence in Janet Maslin’s NYT review of Gore Vidal’s new memoir [emphasis mine],

Among the many photographs included in “Point to Point Navigation” is a flattering (but of course) picture of Mr. Vidal, in his dashing mid-30s, hovering over “Claire Luce,” as the caption misspells her first name. (It was Clare.)

I was reminded of a passage in Azar Nafisi’s haunting memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Nafisi is describing the period right before the final totalitarian clampdown on Iran by Khomeini’s theocratic revolution [emphasis mine]:

…I walked for about forty-five minutes and stopped by my favorite English bookstore. I went in there on a sudden inspiration, fearful that I might not have the opportunity to do so in the near future. And I was right: only a few months later, the Revolutionary Guards raided the bookstore and closed it down. …
I started picking books up with a greedy urgency. I went after the paperbacks, collecting almost all the Jameses and all six novels by Austen. I picked up Howards End and A Room with a View. Then I went after ones I had not read, four novels by Heinrich Boll, and some I had read a long time ago—Vanity Fair and The Adventures of Roderick Random, Humboldt’s Gift and Henderson the Rain King. I picked up a bilingual selection of Rilke’s poems and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I even lingered for a while debating over an unexpurgated copy of Fanny Hill. Then I went after the mysteries. I picked up some Dorothy Sayers and, to my utter delight, found Trent’s Last Case, two or three new Agatha Christies, a selection of Ross Macdonalds, all of Raymond Chandler and two Dashiell Hammetts.

I didn’t have enough money to pay for them all. [The bookstore owner said:] Don’t worry; no one is going to take these away from you. No one knows who they are anymore.
Besides, who wants to read them now, at this time?

Why does Janet Malcolm’s scolding about a typo remind me of Azar Nafisi’s realization that her world will come crashing down?

Because a typo ["Claire" instead of "Clare"] isn’t always a typo (as in careless mistake). Sometimes it is the result of the cultural illiteracy, as the Bookseller of Tehran told Nafisi: no one knows who they are anymore.

(Those who forget the past, Santayana famously said, are doomed to repeat it.)

Nafisi continues:

Who indeed [wants to read these authors now]? People like me seemed as irrelevant as Fitzgerald was to Mike Gold, or Nabokov to Stalin’s Soviet Union, or James to the Fabian Society, or Austen to the revolutionaries of her time. In the taxi, I took out the few books I had paid for and surveyed their covers, caressing their glossy surfaces, so giving to the touch.

The curators of the Met show Glitter and Doom know that people like Azar Nafisi and, say, George Grosz, who bravely fought the good fight, are definitely not irrelevant—perhaps especially in times when they are made to feel the most irrelevant.

(edited and expanded a bit for clarity)

If ever there was a timely art exhibit, it is this one, “Glitter and Doom,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through mid-February), which the curators introduce thus:

Although often romanticized as the backdrop for erotic cabaret shows and sexual licentiousness, German cities of the 1920s were actually in the throes of rampant unemployment, hyperinflation, and social panic. After the initial patriotic fervor for—followed by the crippling devastation of— World War I, a group of artists known as the Verists questioned their own involvement in the atrocities and focused on the country’s quickly changing social landscape and uncertain political future.

Forgoing new modes of abstraction, the artists found worthy subjects in urban denizens of all walks of life, from the war-wounded to the art dealer. With a stark rejection of idealization, the Verists’ portraits captured the stark existence of a populace through an incisive and often satiric form of realism. Unlike the conservative painting styles popular at the time, the Verists’ psychological portraits do not attempt to reproduce likenesses. Rather, with savage distortions of the face and the figure, the artist turns the sitter into an exaggerated type reflecting the extremes of a turbulent era: wealth and poverty, glamour and violence, decadence and banality.

For example: George Grosz’s Pillars of Society, 1926***

Reviewing the show for New York magazine, Mark Stevens writes [emphasis mine]:

In a famous cartoon by Charles Addams, which shows an audience reacting to a movie, everyone appears horrified—sobbing, distraught—except for one man who’s grinning with glee. That man was me at “Glitter and Doom,” the exhibit of Weimar portraits from the twenties that opened last week at the Met. It cheered me up no end. …

The situation in Germany between the wars was much worse than ours is today, but the dark eye of Weimar still beguiles our culture; it asks us to see through the masks of hypocrisy, platitude, and respectability. Imagine what Dix or Grosz would have made of the simian Bush, the feral Rumsfeld, the gloating bullfrog Cheney. Imagine how these Germans would have treated the Clintons, or Ted Haggard. How uncharmed they would be by the toothpaste smile of Tom Cruise.

Instead of art, we have infotainment: People Glitter

and CNN Doom

In the wonderful documentary Billy Wilder Speaks, Wilder says that people don’t go to the movie theater to be told the truth, which hurts. He was right, of course. We go to shows—documentaries included—expecting to be told a story: to be entertained. That didn’t stop Wilder from nudging us sharply in the ribs with his sometimes savage satires.

Art is about the awful truth, which hurts. It’s about human beings turning a savage eye on themselves.

Which is why I love Sacha Baron Cohen:

I’ve whined before about the cultural (and spiritual) poverty of our times.
——–

*** Grosz’s target was the bourgeoisie: the businessmen, clergy, academics, World War I veterans who supported fascism in 1920s Germany while also indulging in the hedonistic lifestyle whitewashed for Puritanical American audiences by the glittering Hollywood production of Cabaret. A savage critic of the Nazis, Grosz was out of the country when they came to power in 1933 and stayed in the U.S. after he was told that the Nazis had immediately come looking for him. He didn’t return to Germany until 1954. Such is the power of art—as the Nazis knew so well and used so wickedly to their advantage.

(I wrote about the power of documentaries—another form of art—here.)

The Village Voice, which I couldn’t do without at one time in my life—when the paper was the lifeblood of the political and arts and cultural scene in New York City—is (and has been) in deep financial peril. On life support is its famed movie section. The good news is that the great critic J. Hoberman is staying. The bad news is, as I said, that the paper is in deep peril. If you’re an old-time New Yorker mired in nostalgia, you can read about it here and weep (or not).

There’s something here for the rest of you, too. In the comments, former Voice critic Amy Taubin sums up the situation and makes a wish [emphasis mine]:

What I omitted from my brief remarks to you is that the importance of the Voice’s film section was a result of its placement for some 30 years within the paper’s larger progressive cultural and political discourse. That context, rather than individual film critics, made movies matter intellectually and creatively. …
J. Hoberman, in whose company I’m proud to have written for over 15 years, is a great critic, but there’s a limit to what he can do when reduced to 800 word pieces and in an atmosphere where ideas are viewed with contempt. … Instead of moaning about the demise of the Voice, it would better for us in the film and arts communities to figure out a way to convince one or two of its billioniares to bankroll a new publication that would take the measure of and be an inspiration to the times in which we now live.

David Ehrenstein responds with the awful truth:

But that would imply the existence of worthy films dealing with the times in which we live — and on that count the pickins’ are small.

Still I’m glad Jim’s staying in place.

Hear, hear. (And wasn’t I just saying the same thing earlier today?)

The New York Sun pronounces the end (more or less) of the counterculture. [emphasis mine]:

The complexity of [Thomas Pynchon's] novels, and of this eagerly awaited sixth novel in particular, is really a matter of simple multiplicity: They are stuffed to bursting with oddities, so that the reader moves through them at the halting pace of a rubbernecker. In “Against the Day,” which spans the quarter-century between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the end of World War I, Mr. Pynchon dispenses his oddities in double fistfuls. We get a hot-air balloon crewed by boy adventurers, a dynamite-toting anarchist, a mysterious fourth dimension, a crystal lens that splits time, a ship that can sail through sand, the legendary Tibetan kingdom of Shambhala — and that doesn’t even begin to exhaust the list. …

If you are dazzled by the sheer number of odd items Mr. Pynchon accumulates here, by the range of his knowledge and curiosity, you will be still more dazzled by the unstoppable proliferation of the novel, which adds new characters, new plots, and new settings until the very last of its 1,100 pages. Mr. Pynchon writes as if his pleasure in trundling the hoop of the novel from place to place were unlimited, and as if the reader could not help but share it. …

“Against the Day,” then, will inevitably be read as Mr. Pynchon’s contribution to the genre of post-September 11 fiction. Yet by comparison with the other major novelists who have addressed this theme, he displays a surpassingly crude moral imagination. This is a novel, after all, in which most of the heroes are proud terrorists, committed on principle to murdering plutocrats like Scarsdale Vibe. Writing about such characters in our own age of terror, one might expect Mr. Pynchon to have given some thought to the rights and wrongs of political violence.

In fact, however, his attitude towards violence is childishly sentimental, and ruthless in a way only possible to a writer whose imagination has never dwelt among actual human beings. Mr. Pynchon’s heroes (the poor, the workers, Anarchists) assassinate and blow up his villains (mine owners, Pinkerton thugs, the bourgeoisie) with no more qualms than the Road Runner has about dropping an anvil on the Coyote. In the novel as in the cartoon, good and evil are unproblematic, death is unreal, and sheer activity takes the place of human motive. The silliness of “Against the Day” about the very subjects where we are most urgently in quest of wisdom proves that, whatever he once was, Thomas Pynchon is no longer the novelist we need.

Unfortunately, the National Book Award went to an obscure novelist last night (or, at least, one whose work I don’t know—which is another way of saying “obscure”), even if it does seem to address the subjects we need to understand. (There’s nothing wrong with obscurity except the fact that it obscures your message…until [or if] you become less obscure. That ain’t gonna happen here. Count on it.)

Here’s my lament: Where are the novelists, filmmakers, dramatists, and artists we need?

And, no, I don’t mean Botero, whose new work you can read all about at Counterpunch.

Can you stand another post about Sacha Baron Cohen? Good, ’cause you’re getting one. And you will be rewarded for your forbearance, because this time he speaks…as himself to Neil Strauss, for Rolling Stonel And he answers some questions:

“Borat essentially works as a tool,” Baron Cohen says. “By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice, whether it’s anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. ‘Throw the Jew Down the Well’ [a song performed at a country & western bar during Da Ali G Show] was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought that it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism. But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.

“I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’ I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.”

Yes, it’s true. Apathy, indifference, and lack of empathy are mankind’s worst enemies. It takes only a few evil people and a lot of indifferent ones—unwilling to stand up for what they believe is right, uninterested in the suffering of others, afraid to care—to create catastrophes like Nazism, Stalinism, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution in China, the rape of the Balkans, and, yes, the theocracy of Iran and the thugocracy of Egypt, to name just a few.

Here I thought we’d learned these things in the 20th century, but apparently we haven’t. I’m glad Baron Cohen spoke out to explain what he’s up to: it doesn’t hurt the movie, and it helps spread the message: Don’t look away.

Joel Stein of the L.A. Times is annoyed because he didn’t get to be a real journalist while writing a story about the movie Borat, and he thinks every journalist who interviewed Sacha Baron Cohen in character took the easy way out.

But because comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s wild-and-crazy-foreigner-guy character is so amusing, and news is so boring, the “Today” show, Fox News, the Guardian, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere and most local newspapers are willing to pretend that Borat is a real Kazakh reporter who put out a real documentary.   …

I wrote a three-page story about “Borat” for Time magazine, and my editors chose not to have me talk to Cohen in character. Instead, I asked the director and producer about what “Borat’s” candid camera says about Americans and whether the film is offensive to Jews, Gypsies or Kazakhs. Or to people who prefer not to see movies with human feces in bags.

Stein is upset because his important questions for Cohen didn’t get answered [emphasis mine]:

But the most important question in “Borat” — the one that makes it a cultural turning point — is about whether the act of tricking unsuspecting victims and sharing it with millions of people is cruel or funny. If privacy is a 20th century holdover, do we all deserve to have our inner nature outed by Colbert or “Jackass” or YouTube? The answer to that question about comedy — more than music, MySpace or Paris Hilton — is what cleaves the reality TV generation from their parents. And it’s too bad that Cohen, a Cambridge-educated, traditional, observant Jew, isn’t answering it.

Cohen isn’t answering the question?

Damn right he isn’t answering the question! It’s for him to perform and you, Mr. Stein—and the rest of us—to figure out. That’s why they call it performance art.

If you don’t have a chance to see the modernist show “From Cezanne to Picasso” featuring 100 pieces from the collection of turn-of-the-twentieth-century dealer Ambroise Vollard, you can still visit the Met’s site and see some excellent images.

Like this Derain:

London: St. Paul’s Cathedral seen from the Thames

Rent it or buy it, watch it, and savor it:

In 1982, Wilder was celebrated at a gala at Lincon Center. Michiko Kakutani wrote:

[F]or all their disparate forms, the movies share a distinctive point of view, a certain Wilder touch. It is a kind of acerbic wit, a willful desire to expose, through drama and often low gags, society’s venality and greed and lusts….

More often than not, his movies involve elaborate deceptions ending in the loss of innocence, and his characters tend to be unconventional, if not thoroughly disreputable.

”After the whole bit in drag,” said Mr. Lemmon, recalling his role as a member of an all girl orchestra in ”Some Like It Hot,” ”I played six more parts with Billy. These are the characters: a weakling who rents his apartment out for assignations, a guy who lives with a prostitute and pays her, a married man who follows dear old Dad’s footsteps - he arranges a yearly European tryst with another lady, a totally unethical newspaper reporter who’d stoop to any unsavory act to get a story, a cameraman in a neck brace trying to collect money for phony injuries and a loser who wants to kill himself because his wife is holed up in a sex clinic with her therapist.”

Robert McCrum extols Orhan Pamuk’s achievements, and says Pamuk deserves the Nobel Peace Prize in addition to the prize for Literature, which he was awarded:

He is also a brave [writer], speaking out for free expression in a country where powerful factions have wanted to put him in prison for daring to describe the Armenian massacres as genocidal, and for challenging a repressive silence at the highest levels of government and society about the universal issue of human rights. Moreover, he has done this with that instinctive determination to assert the duty of literature to transcend political barriers that has always characterised the great artist. As Pamuk himself put it in 2000: ‘Freedom of thought and expression are freedoms which people long for as much as bread and water. They should never be limited by nationalist sentiment, or (worst of all) business and military interests.’

…

Rarely in modern times has a novelist found the voice to tell his people the daring, possibly transgressive, stories about themselves that they crave. Not since the days of dissident literature in the USSR has a writer been so much the spokesperson for a generation. In Turkey this has brought the adulation of the young.

Sometimes they get it right: Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Then he went on to kick ass:

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature this week, went on television Friday to criticize the French parliamentary vote that would make it a crime to deny that the Ottoman Turks’ mass killing of Armenians constituted genocide.

In a telephone interview broadcast live on the private television network NTV, Mr. Pamuk, who faced criminal charges for his statements acknowledging the massacre, said France had acted against its own fundamental principles of freedom of expression.

“The French tradition of critical thinking influenced and taught me a lot,” he said. “This decision, however, is a prohibition and didn’t suit the libertarian nature of the French tradition.” The legislation was approved by the lower house of Parliament, but it is uncertain whether the upper house will concur.

Bravo. Hate-speech laws suck. They’re illiberal.

————

The Journalist and the Jihadi aired on HBO. Among other things, this documentary it is a portrait of the grace and courage of Daniel Pearl’s loved ones: parents, sisters, wife, and friends.

Judea Pearl: ‘We have to defeat the hatred that took Danny’s life’

Visit the Daniel Pearl Foundation site and get inspired.

———————-

Also, I’ve been listening to this:

It’s awesome. Here’s what Rolling Stone has to say:

Jerry Lee Lewis is older and tougher than you. At seventy, he could eat your liver for breakfast, sleep with your kid sister and then burn down your house after a light lunch. So rounding up twenty-one heavy hitters (Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, etc.) for a Jerry Lee Lewis duets album either means that they’re paying their respects to one of the inventors of rock & roll, the wild man of the piano who came up with the sonic explosion that is “Great Balls of Fire”- or that they’re just afraid of what Jerry Lee would do to them if they said no.

Sacha Baron Cohen is a genius. Better yet: he gets results.

He has taught Kazakhstan something about freedom of speech.

“We understand that the film exposes the hypocrisy that exists both here in the USA and in the UK and understand that Mr Cohen has a right to freedom of speech.

He has also taught them something about the value of projecting a positive image (even if you don’t have one: ah, the wonders of PR).

President Nazarbayev has confirmed his government will buy “educational” TV spots and print advertisements about the “real Kazakhstan” in a bid to save the country’s reputation before the film is released in the US in November.President Nazarbayev has confirmed his government will buy “educational” TV spots and print advertisements about the “real Kazakhstan” in a bid to save the country’s reputation before the film is released in the US in November.

He also drove them ape-shit by responding as Borat when initially they threatened to sue him for maligning Kazakhstan:

Baron Cohen responded to Ashykbayev in character by posting a video on the Official Borat website.

In the video, Borat said, “In response to Mr. Ashykbayev’s comments, I’d like to state I have no connection with Mr. Cohen and fully support my Government’s decision to sue this Jew.

“Since the 2003 Tuleyakiv reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world.

“Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats, and age of consent has been raised to eight years old.”

His blatant outpouring then prompted the Kazakh government to hire two public relations firms to counter the claims, and ran a four-page advertisement in The New York Times. [emphasis mine]

This is why I sing the praises of infotainment (pop culture by another name): because Cohen has actually brought the attention of ignorant Americans to a place outside their world: Kazakhstan, in this case, but think what other artists could do, if only they were as clever (and motivated) as Cohen.

And throughout this he’s still in character:

Cohen’s representatives refused to allow him or his alter ego to respond to the controversy because it’s not close enough to the film’s release date.

Although I find reasons to criticize most of it, I’m a pop culture fan—and a fan of anything that gets people to understand our world a little better, regardless of the format—so it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I’m enthusiastic about this graphic adaptation of The 9/11 Report, which was published a couple of weeks ago to little fanfare but which apparently has been enjoying excellent sales.

The book boasted an initial print run of 60,000 copies, and has gone back for additional printings of 20,000. And like its original source material, which was published two years ago, the adaptation has made the New York Times bestseller list, debuting at No. 6 in the paperback nonfiction category.

Veteran children’s comic book writers Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, who are both in their mid-seventies, are my new heroes. Having spent their 50-year career doing work-for-hire, they made a fascinating discovery (interestingly, one that has not been mentioned anywhere in the hysteria over ABC’s The Path to 9/11) and ran with it:

one of Jacobson’s biggest paydays is coming from a property that he had absolutely no hand in creating. As a work of the U.S. government, the 9/11 report falls in the public domain, a fact discovered by Colón when he read a news story about director Ron Howard’s effort to turn the report into a film. [emphasis added]

(Memo to Bill Clinton, Esq.: The Report is in the public domain, which means anyone has the right to publish it. And toy with it.)

Anyway, the writers took the 567-page report and, in 16 months, condensed it down to 131 comic-book pages:

As expected, the project has its critics:

[S]ome critics of the adaptation argue the medium is an inappropriate venue for such a sensitive topic.

In particular, they’ve taken umbrage with Colón’s use of “Blamm!” in big red letters in a panel showing American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon.

Indeed, I can see that this is not for all tastes:

But Commission co-chairs Hamilton and Kean both endorsed the project after noting that it was serious and faithful to the Report. And Hamilton noted the most important reason for endorsing it: graphic novels reach a different audience—one we especially need to reach.

“It also opens the report up to a whole new audience that doesn’t read much anymore.” [emphasis added]

Oh—and Stan Lee loves it too:

“Never before have I seen a non-fiction book as beautifully and compellingly written and illustrated as The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation. I cannot recommend it too highly. It will surely set the standard for all future works of contemporary history, graphic or otherwise, and should be required reading in every home, school and library.”

Next up for Colon and Jacobson: a graphic adaptation of the war on terror, based on news reports.

So says Louis Menand in his New Yorker Dylan retrospective about the years 1965-66:

At the same time that Dylan was putting out his first three electric albums … [“Bringing It All Back Home” (March, 1965), “Highway 61 Revisited” (August), and the double album “Blonde on Blonde” (May, 1966)], the Beatles released “Help” (August, 1965), “Rubber Soul” (December, 1965), and “Revolver” (August, 1966). It was a good time to be alive.

Yes, but we didn’t appreciate it, because we thought it was normal to live among an embarrassment of riches.

Whereas today, it’s normal to live among the richly embarrassing.

What a great piece from Menand (one of my favorite contemporary writers). Read the whole thing, and then read it again.

It is almost impossible to write a short Dylan piece and get at the essence of the mystery, but Menand does it—he separates the man from the myth and focuses on the music…which is what the man has always wanted us to do anyway. And oh does it make the music shine!

Art critic Robert Hughes shares:

We met at a drinks party in Notting Hill. “Do you want to meet the best fuck in London?” the host delicately inquired. And he pointed to a sofa, on which sat a tall, rangy, square-jawed blonde holding a glass of warm vodka. We were introduced. Things began to click, small cogs and then larger ones to engage….

Two weeks later we were off to Venice. And less than a month after that she had moved with her few belongings into my flat in Cornwall Gardens, SW7: a neat little two-bedroomer, looking out onto a square of winter-bare trees.

Except to pick up groceries and the mail, and occasionally to take in a movie or a play, neither of us stirred outside much for the first couple of months of 1967. We were both in a feverish and untiring rut, a sort of erotic trance: the first thing I bought for the flat was a king-size bed.

Is this guy still doing criticism?

Where is the Sumner Redstone of his profession to tell him that if he’s an art critic (can anyone say “high culture”?)—and he’s in his mid-sixties—we really don’t want to know all about how his wife got the clap from Jimi Hendrix and gave it to him?

Call me old-fashioned, but this is my favorite kind of battle: a war of words.***

The New York Times sets it up:

LONDON, Aug. 4 — A strip of curry joints, neon lights and market stalls in east London might seem an unlikely arena for literary jousting and high-flown debate about freedom of expression. But this narrow street is no ordinary thoroughfare.

It is Brick Lane, as in the title of the best-selling novel by Monica Ali, and the battle has set luminaries like Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer against one another over a campaign that ultimately halted the filming of the book at that location.

In some ways, the debate has revived a much wider discussion in Europe about whether free speech may be limited by the sensitivities of people who feel affronted by it. Should old Western societies, in other words, rewrite their definitions of liberty to accommodate the sensitivities of others?

In a letter to the editor of the Guardian, Rushdie, bless him, lets it rip:

At the height of the assault against my novel The Satanic Verses, Germaine Greer stated: “I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles.” She went on to describe me as “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin”. Now it’s Monica Ali’s turn to be deracinated: “She writes in English and her point of view is, whether she allows herself to impersonate a village Bangladeshi woman or not, British.” There is a kind of double racism in this argument. To suit Greer, the British-Bangladeshi Ali is denied her heritage and belittled for her Britishness, while her British-Bangladeshi critics are denied that same Britishness, which most of them would certainly insist was theirs by right. “Writers are treacherous,” Greer says, and she should know.

***The incident that started this fracas has serious ramifications—it’s a non-violent but much more disheartening version of the Danish cartoon affair, because it shows precisely the lack of confidence in our own values and way of life that Tony Blair talked about in his speech last week: read it.

Indeed, this is a case of extreme political correctness, aka soft totalitarianism, and we are fast sinking into its embrace. It’s the easy way out—the path of least resistance. If we do not resist it, we will live to regret it. (See the quote from Milos Forman in the upper-right-hand corner of my blog or, better yet, read the second half of this speech, which he gave in the wake of the controversy over his misunderstood film The People vs. Larry Flynt, which Forman calls his valentine to the Supreme Court.)

Freedom of speech is a particular obsession of mine. I wrote a lot about the Danish cartoon affair when I first starting blogging—here and here and here.

To reality TV, of course. Not very successfully, either, it appears, according to Dushko Petrovich in Slate:

Radical artists once dreamed of a purified realm of concepts, but thanks in part to business-savvy showmen like [producer and creator] Jeffrey Deitch, the dematerialized scene that ensued has turned into a kind of circus. Watching ARTSTAR, you get the funny feeling that what triumphantly replaced the commodification of objects ended up as the commodification of people.

This is no Marxist critique, however. The show commits the cardinal sin—it’s not entertaining:

But the problem with ARTSTAR isn’t the bad reality so much as the bad reality TV. So far, there is none of the trashy drama, smart editing, and pure sadism that gives the genre its nerve.

How can the Artstars call themselves artists if they can’t even get a good feud going?

Unlike, say, the Brits, who revel in deflating the high and mighty,

(from the “Satirical London” exhibit at the Museum of London)

certain people in Lebanon don’t have a sense of humor.

Several thousand Hizbullah supporters took to the streets of Beirut’s southern suburbs late Thursday night, burning tires and blocking roads in protest against a television comedy show that impersonated the group’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. The trouble began shortly after the LBCI TV show “Bass Mat Watan” aired a skit in which an actor impersonated Nasrallah, wearing the trademark black turban and sporting a similar beard and spectacles.

Apparently, the TV show is like Saturday Night Live. Here, via Tim Cavanaugh, is an account of the skit in question:

In the scene that provoked the riot, a woman — played by a man in drag — asks Nasrallah whether Hizbullah would lay down its arms after Israel’s withdraws from the disputed border region of Shabaa.

Nasrallah replies that Hizbullah’s weapons will still be needed for “liberating the house of Abu Hassan in Detroit from his Jewish neighbor.”

Nasrallah is being mocked for his obsession with blaming Israel for everying. On Lebanese TV. Sweet.

Alan Riding, in writing up the “Satirical London” exhibit for the New York Times, noted that “religious hypocrisy, extremes of wealth and poverty, out-of-touch politicians, enslavement to fashion, obsession with gadgetry” have been the subjects of satire in England, and the targets were “lawyers, doctors, soldiers, clergymen, intellectuals, even shopkeepers. All apparently merited deflating for the power they wielded.”

As to the significance of satire in our own era:

In an atmosphere of growing religious intolerance and social conformity, sustained by fear, political correctness and electoral apathy, satire can probably aid democracy by stretching the limits of the acceptable. That this may offend is precisely its value. Satire should disturb as well as amuse.

It is not always possible. In dictatorships it can be positively foolish to mock rulers, although satire can sometimes be disguised as parody or allegory. And in many parts of the world there is no tradition of questioning authority through wit or caricature; in such countries two preferred targets, religious and political power, are usually taboo for satirists.

The Playgoer writes: “If you agree with this quote, please circulate it widely. [Playwright John Patrick] Shanley should be thanked for speaking out when so many of his peers still remain silent.”

 Agreed. Here’s what Shanley had to say about the play that was a hit in London’s West End but that was taken off the program in New York–postponed, delayed, canceled, whatever (the facts are murky and I don’t have time to research them)–and about what it means for all of us:

“The motives of the people who were going to produce this play [about Rachel Corrie] Off-Broadway in New York are not adequately known and I think that they should be aired…But it highlights a larger phenomenon which is an international gangsterism towards the arts at this time. I consider the New York Times not publishing the cartoons about Mohammed to be an act of editorial cowardice and inappropriate–obviously it was major news–and this idea of it being ’sensitive’ to religion, respectful to religion, not to air differences, not to air slurs, not to air slights, is just giving into intimidation of different kinds. Now the theatre in New York may not have been afraid that they were going to be killed, they may have been afraid they were going to lose funding from somebody, that I don’t know. But I do know there is intimidation across this country in the arts, where plays like Grease are being vetoed by local organizations as being too racy and cartoons are being called unworthy of publication because the sensitivities of people of a certain religion trumps the need of people of every persuasion to know. And I think it has to be looked at. There’s a certain degree of cowardice involved and I think people are going to have to get used to the idea that doing these things–like what happened to [documentary film maker Theo] Van Gogh in the Netherlands–may lead to them being killed.”

Thank you, John Patrick Shanley.
And thank you, Andrew Sullivan, for continuing to highlight this issue.
 

Julian Beever

Originally uploaded by Centripetal Notion.

Here you can see how he does it.

This is great! (hat tip to the under-30 members of Hepzeeba’s Household)

Julian Beever

Originally uploaded by Centripetal Notion.

This is brilliant.