By Way of Deception

I promised myself I'd refrain from saying anything more about Fahrenheit 9/11 until I'd seen it, but want to archive this positive review, By Way of Deception, written by Stuart Klawans, the film critic for The Nation.

In response to my post regarding Hitchens' attack, a friend (y'all will know who immediately, but I'll keep the name anonymous) wrote me the following: "I really dug that piece by Christopher Hitchens from your blog. I saw him on Dennis Miller a few years back and thought he was just about spot on. He was smoking and drinking scotch the whole time too like a true journaliste'. I haven't seen the film yet either, but Moore has long bothered me and Hitchens nails the reasons why. Michael Moore is really a paddy cake and should stick to paddy cake subjects. No wonder the French love him."

Regarding those remarks, I have a few comments... One is that of the three political commentators mentioned above, Hitchens is the only true journalist and writer; Moore is a skilled provocateur, and Dennis Miller is the true paddy cake. I lost my HBO, but as of about 9 months ago I found that Dennis just isn't funny any more, unless you find smarmy frat-boy humor (e.g., jokes about turning the Middle East into a parking lot and other allegedly 'patriotic' statements) to be clever. Dennis ain't anywhere near as smart as he wants to believe, and his rightward turn and subsequent defense of the Bushies and the civil-rights violations and constitutional attacks authorized under Homeland Security just proves that he sees the world in black and white--them (those A-rabs) against us (the US of A). Moore, on the other hand, can be reductive, but at least he does do work that qualifes as, or at least draws from, investigative journalism.

Moore should definitely not stay away from the Iraq War or other difficult topics. In fact, part of what let us into the mess we're currently in is that the mainstream media i.e., the big TV networks, e.g., ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, and newspapers such as The New York Times) refrained from asking the hard questions about the Bush Administration's reasons for invading Iraq. Either the journalists were intimidated by the right-wing pundits into thinking that rigorous questioning of Bush and co. would tag them as the "liberal media" or their corporate handlers silenced them either indirectly or directly. In any case, the Bushies got a pass. The amount of attention paid to Whitewater or Monica Lewinski with Bubba's administration paled in comparison to the attention that should've been devoted to asking the hard questions about Iraq.

I don't know whether Moore asks or answers these questions in his film, but since our media failed to do so, more power to Moore for making an effort before the election to alert the American public to why the Bushies' really wanted this war with Iraq (sorry, Hitch, but helping the Kurds has nothing to do with it) and how our democracy is taking a beating as a result.

Jack Ryan: Just Another Family-Values Republican

Lesson of the day: If you're planning to run for public office, you might not want to marry a famous actress, take her to S&M clubs and try to get her to perform sex acts on you while other people watch, and then get a messy divorce from her. Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan, of Illinois, may have learned that lesson the hard way. Court documents the couple has fought to keep private contain allegations by his ex, actress Jeri Lynn Ryan ("Boston Public," "Star Trek: Voyager") -- made during a hearing about the custody of the couple's young son -- that Ryan demanded that she accompany him to sex clubs in New Orleans, New York and Paris. The New York club, she said, had "cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling." Ryan admitted only that he did take his wife to "one avant-garde nightclub in Paris which was more than either one of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return." Despite controversy over the allegations, Ryan says he'll continue his run for Senate. (Associated Press)

C: Wow. I had no idea Illinois politics was so interesting. I guess Ryan is just another typical "Family Values" Republican.

E: That'd be ILL politics....

My favorite bit was that Jack Ryan referred to the swingin' sex establishments (S&M dungeons for repressed Republicans) as ‘avant-garde’ clubs. I was just discussing the concept of the avant-garde in class on Monday, & will have to bring up Ryan's recent attempt at resignification. (I wonder if he considered the anonymous voyeures, who were invited to watch him and his wife go at it , to be in the position of the vanguard?)

Heh, heh... It's not schadenfreude if the people who get their comeuppance were hypocrites, right?

I hope this incident means that the Illinois senate seat is Obama's come November. Obama, to his credit, has refused to comment on Ryan's sexual past. When asked, he simply responds that the issues he wants to address in the campaign do not involve Ryan's personal character, but are about issues that effect the pubic, such as poverty, health care, etc. Classy.

Hitchens Can't Take Any Moore

I'm eager to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and am curious to compare the reception it receives from the public and the pundits. In "Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore," Hitchens, a man of the left who left the Nation because (as far as I understand) he was the lone hawk regarding Iraq amongst the magazine's regular contributors and editors, attacks Moore what could be (not having seen the film) a legitmate flaw -- an inconsistent argument and position regarding the Bush Administration's foreign policy.

Although I thought Moore's Bowling for Columbine was definitely worth seeing and deserved credit for being ambitious, I left the theater thinking that it raised too many questions about violence in America without seriously, i.e., rigorously, trying to provide any answers. As a consequence, at times the film seemed either exploitative (of the victims of gun violence who appeared to be bearing their wounds publically for no discernable purpose) or too glib. That said, the film was worth seeing, and I hope the scenes of middle-Canadian hunters, etc. might help to dispel the idiotic myth that people in countries with more strict gun regulations are somehow emasculated, disempowered, or less 'free' when compared to Joe America.

At this point, I'm wary of being overly critical of Moore's larger project (unlike Hitchens, I think Moore provides a genuine service by informing people about facts and phenomena--rural poverty, the waste promulgated by the military-industrial complex, etc.--that are generally ignored in school, on television, the radio, etc.) since I think the majority of Moore's political pranks are well intentioned and display enough irony to distinguish them from propaganda.

As Hitchens suggests in his article, the left needs figures who can 'entertain' if they are to attract an audience in our mass-mediated wasteland. It appears that, at present, Moore may be as good as it gets. (I'm told Jon Stewart is rising to the challenge, but alas, this scholar of the postmodern can't afford cable TV, which is, in itself, a perfect pomo paradox.) Moore's message is more fair and better thought through than the bulk of the lies we get via Fox News, etc., but it may ultimately be the case that you can't do justice to complex issues while employing soundbite editing (Please provide with with emperical proof to refute my last hypothesis) for an image-driven medium. In any case, I'm damning Moore with faint praise and will hold off making any more pronouncements until I actually see the film.

Via Chicago, it's Wilco

Wilco (from left, Glenn Kotche, Jeff Tweedy, Nels Cline, John Stirratt and Pat Sandone), photographed by Tony Cenicola for the New York Times.

Wilco Originally uploaded by erasmus.

Warming up to Wilco's "Ghost"

As I was telling Jimmy yesterday, I was out & about in Wrigleyville with my iPod & it just clicked for me--A Ghost Is Born I mean. Initially, the songs I'd downloaded (still don't have the full album, but will break my moratorium on CD purchases for this one) failed to grab me the way, say, "Jesus Etc." did from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but that might've been because I was listening to the tracks as singles, individual songs, shuffled in random order, rather than as part of an organized larger whole. What, back in the day, used to be known as an LP record. Seeing Wilco play "Hummingbird" on Letterman the other night softened me up to the newer songs as well.

In any case, here's an ok article from the Sunday New York Timesabout the band titled "The Ever-Expanding Legend of Wilco" that is slightly annoying, because its stereotype of fervent Wilco worshippers strikes me as being largely a straw man constructed by the reporter to show off how 'broad minded' his or her tastes are. Where the reporter, Kalefa Sannah, gets the notion that the bulk of Wilco fans are aging boomers, I don't know. Someone should tell Sannah that people in their late 20s to mid 40s are not baby boomers. ('Course, as Westerberg put it "We got no war to name us," so perhaps this generation remains as demographically invisible as Douglas Coupland and all those generation-X writers believed back in the early 1990s.) In the course of discussing A Ghost is Born, Sanneh never explains why he would pick J Lo & the "mutiethic hordes" (whores?) on the dance floor over Wilco's rock 'n' roll experiments, but, then again, who cares.

There's not a lot in the article that hasn't been written elsewhere (last week's Chicago Reader cover story had the full scoop on Tweedy's recent struggles with anxiety and addiction and Wilco's shifting lineup and it didn't present it in VH1-behind-the-music-tabloid fashion), but at least this NYT article has a great photo of the band. It'll be interesting to see how Ghost does when it hits the stores on Tuesday.