The Future Has Arrived

Once Upon a Time in Nazi–Occupied France

Putting out the fire with gasoline

In a 1972 film essay, Jean-Luc Godard asked, "How can cinema help the Vietnamese people win their independence?" In 2009, Quentin Tarantino asks, "How can cinema help the Allies win the Second World War?" and then proceeds, over the course of 2 1/2 hours, to answer his own question. Inglourious Basterds, like its nearest antecedent, Jean-Pierre Melville's brilliant, torturous Resistance film Army of Shadows, is a genre picture cloaked in the trappings of Nazi-occupied France. Unlike Melville's deeply personal gangster movie (he was actually a member of the French Resistance) however, Tarantino's Basterds is an inversion–his celluloid Nazis are not cinematic representations of the real thing, but deserve, in fact, to be bound in quotes.

Indeed, the line on Inglourious Basterds is that it takes place "at The Movies," as the Village Voice's J. Hoberman put it. The criticism isn't new; ever since the 1-2-3 punch of Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2 and Death Proof, the knock on Tarantino has been that his films are nothing more than hyperliterate exercises in junk genre tourism: intricately observed, immaculately realized, but ultimately devoid of meaningful content. Yet those films were essentially advertisements for the careers of others, whereas Basterds, though it certainly rephrases great swathes of sub-classic cinema–Tarantino himself has characterized it as a Spaghetti Western, and he has the Morricone score to prove it–is more an act of cultural criticism than a simple synthesis of tastes. Tarantino recognizes what is all but explicit: as the ranks of the World War II generation continue to thin day after day, the living memory of Nazi atrocities presses closer to extinction; soon, all that will be left will be the movies–Nazism as mediated by cinema. What Basterds says is that the vision of National Socialism likely to persist will be the silver-tongued, jack-booted version articulated by Casablanca, by The Guns of Navarone, and by (appositely enough) Raiders of the Lost Ark. Abstracted from any sociological, political, economic, or historical context, all that his left is the so-call banality of evil; an evil that, in the hands of the cinema, is not so banal at all.

Since the actual story of World War II is far too complex, depressing, and ambiguous to turn into a straightforward action film, Hollywood and its global intellectual subsidiaries have elided, sending small, appealingly international cliques of movie stars to eliminate this faceless, but appropriately high ranking Third Reich apparatchik or blow up that fictional bridge, train, gun emplacement, et cetera, et cetera. Tarantino obviously modeled Basterds on this genre: The Dirty Dozen is simply the most obvious influence (right down to its destroy-gobs-of-high-ranking-Nazis objective), with Kelly's Heroes, Force 10 From Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, A Bridge Too Far, The Train, and others too numerous to mention serving as spiritual predecessors. Where Basterds departs from these pictures (at least content-wise; formally, Tarantino is all over the map) is 1) that it envisions Jews taking their revenge on the Nazis, and 2) Tarantino bends the moral arc of the universe so far that he pushes it completely out of alignment with history. Indeed, Basterds is a maximalist fantasia: rather than simply use the Second World War as a backdrop for his story, Tarantino rewrites it, subbing in the actual Nazi high command for the usual fictionalized cadres of German officers who get rubbed out at the end of these things. In ripping open this complete breach between the reality of the war and his fictionalized version thereof, Tarantino realizes a vision of the film Nazi as a trope existing apart from the inconceivable real-world atrocities; it is an unmoored symbol, wholly bound by a cinematic grammar that accrues from movie to movie as the reality beneath becomes totally obscured. Once the symbol is stripped of its actual value, the boundaries of what is permissible are exploded; hence Tarantino is free to have Hitler and Goebbels mown down in a hail of Basterd bullets as the rest of the Reich is incinerated "by the face of Jewish vengeance."

Thus it is that the criticisms–that Tarantino is insensitive to historical fact, or worse, exploiting atrocity–are defused. To be sure, the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds are evil, but their evil, typified by Christoph Waltz's insinuatingly brilliant turn as the charming, sinister Colonel Hans Landa, is discrete, bounded by what we see on the screen. The sense of menace that pervades the whole proceedings is purchased by Tarantino's artful manipulation of a cinematic grammar established by the hundreds, if not thousands, of war movies that have preceded, and informed, his. The mechanized death of the real Nazis, the death camps and armored hordes laying waste to one end of Europe while strangling the other under a yoke of occupation, has a presence insofar as it purchases our fear, our revulsion, and, Tarantino hopes, our unyielding hatred. These two points–the reality of Nazi terror and the urbane, gleaming film analog–bear relation to one another, but also repulse one another. That they never occupy the same point is Tarantino's revelation. That he uses this fact to take brutal, ahistorical revenge against his Nazis is the ultimate expression of their unreality and perhaps a more damning indictment of the legions of filmmakers who have used the Third Reich as mere wallpaper for their Boy's Own tales than any that could be leveled against his film.

On Paglia On Hate Crimes

The debate, such as it is

Camille Paglia's latest assault on the senses (scroll down) stems from a reader's letter expressing the same old shopworn confusion about hate crimes: why do we not just punish people the same for the same net result? "If I am murdered, is that less heinous than a member of a protected class being murdered?" asks Steve Larson of Conejo Valley, California.

This question misses the entire point of hate crimes legislation by reducing the issue to "one dead black/gay/Muslim person > one dead white male." Hate crime legislation is not predicated solely on the identity of the victim, but on the motivation of the individual committing the crime: the victim must be targeted based upon a protected characteristic. Of course, the characteristics are all in fact race/gender/religion/sexual orientation neutral, but let's face it: people don't usually target white straight male Christians because of those particular characteristics, so the popular image of the law is that it protects African-Americans, Jews, gays, women to a greater degree and thus by implication lowers the relative value of everyone else.

The alternative image problem of hate crime legislation is the one Paglia addresses and embraces:

I have been on the record since the 1990s as strongly opposing hate crimes legislation. I think it is a totalitarian intrusion into citizens' thought processes. Government functionaries should not be ceded the dangerous authority to make decisions about motivation. They aren't novelists, psychologists or sibyls! Furthermore, there should be no special privileged class of protected groups in a democracy. A crime is a crime -- period.

Of course, crime is a crime – period. Murder is a crime. So is terrorism. If a person commits an act of terrorism that kills five people – plants a bomb at a shopping mall, say – and another kills his entire family in the confines of their home, also five people, are those equivalent crimes? Based on the raw loss of human life, you might say yes. Of course, terrorism is called terrorism for a reason: it's meant to instill fear in a targeted population, to extend far beyond the tangible consequences of the individual act and to disrupt society at large. The man who murders his family, on the other hand, though he may be a monster, is unlikely to have caused the same systemic shock as the terrorist. While each has taken the same number of lives, we instinctively feel that the terrorist is worthy of greater punishment, and by and large our laws presently reflect that judgment.

Terrorism is an instructive example, because hate criminals are basically terrorists. They target people based on a protected characteristic and then victimize them. The immediate victim suffers, but the broader audience for the act, intended or not, is all members of that protected group, and beyond that, society at large. When Emmett Till was beaten to death for addressing a white woman, it was an act of political violence reinforcing the deeply illegitimate regime of Jim Crow by demonstrating the impunity with which whites could victimize blacks. When Matthew Shepard was beaten and left to die, tied to a fence post, it was an act of political violence reinforcing heterosexual dominance by demonstrating the worthlessness of homosexuals.

I bring up Shepard because Mr. Larson and Ms. Paglia do. Curiously, Paglia, who considers inquiring into the motivations of Shepard's killers by the government "totalitarian," professes to give them the benefit of the doubt as to those same motives:

Although I am a supporter of the death penalty in extreme cases, I think there were ambiguities here: The aimless hooligans who beat Shepard and tied him to a fence perhaps didn't necessarily mean to kill him.

But "a crime is a crime -- period," right? Who cares if these "aimless hooligans...didn't necessarily mean to kill" Matthew Shepard – they did, didn't they? Yet Paglia believes, based on her perception of the observable indicia surrounding the case, that the killers – whom she reduces to "hooligans," as though they'd bashed in a couple of mailboxes instead of another human being – are worthy of some measure of clemency.

Hate crimes legislation is not thought policing. People are just as free to be bigots as they ever were, provided that they do not translate their poisonous beliefs into violent actions. By adopting hate crimes legislation, society recognizes this political violence for what it is – an attempt by private actors to demonstrate that the full rights and privileges of American citizenship do not apply to all Americans. Much like President Bush opined that terrorists "hate us for our freedom," hate criminals target their victims because they presume to be equal. When this fundamental equality is denied, it is only proper that a democratic society should demonstrate the legitimacy of its political order by raising the cost of that denial.

It's not entirely clear why Paglia considers such a system to be totalitarian. Hate criminals commit an underlying crime – they are not being punished solely for their motivations. What makes a hate crime a hate crime is still very much oriented around the result: the terror the act inspires in the target population. Obviously, motive goes to establishing that a hate crime has occurred, but inquiring about a defendant's motivation is hardly thought policing; it is just plain old policing. Indeed, motive is, in large part, what separates a broken window from being vandalism or an attempted burglary. Surely Paglia would not suggest that we just have a "broken window" crime and leave it at that.

Perhaps it's the notion that hate crimes legislation suggests a correct, government-endorsed alternative political position. This train, however, has left the station. The federal government, to varying degrees over the past half-century, has been committed to full political equality for most minority groups (not counting the odious omission of gays). As the near-century of segregation following the abolition of slavery demonstrated, the equality guaranteed by the Thirteen, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution is not self-enforcing; robust governmental action was, and remains, at least insofar as Congress is concerned, required to make those rights a reality. People have the right to hold and express contrary opinions, but they do not have the right to hold them unopposed, even by the federal government. Thus Paglia's contrariness does not even hold up as a full-throated libertarian defense of the First Amendment, which is in no way impinged by hate crimes legislation unless you think it your constitutional prerogative to brutalize categories of people you don't like.

A crime is a crime – period. And our response to crime should reflect the true nature of the crime, not merely a mechanical reaction to quantity. To assert that hate crime legislation is unnecessary because, as the trope goes, "all crime is hate" is a profound misreading of what happens every time someone is victimized because of their race, religion, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation. To ignore that reality because we aspire to live in a "colorblind" society – indeed, if something so simplistic is what we aspire to – is to deny the direct challenge that hate criminals pose to our constitutional system. It is the epitome of wishful thinking.

* * * * *

It's not salient to my main point, so I didn't address it above, but special opprobrium should be reserved for Paglia's treatment of Matthew Shepard, which follows here:

Despite my abhorrence of the crime, I was a dissenter about the sanctification of Shepard, a charming young man with a troubled family background who had faced many difficulties in life because of his frailty and lack of conventional masculinity.

Only a week before, Shepard had expressed fears about being killed. Given that apprehension, it is still inexplicable -- if the case is examined only through a political lens -- why Shepard would leave a public place in the company of such blatant thugs. A hate crimes law that claims to be able to penetrate the mind of the perpetrator should be equally open to questions about the victim. If, out of fairness or pity, one avenue of inquiry is shut down, then the other must be too.

I'm not certain how to read this except to say that Paglia is open to the possibility that Shepard might have gotten what was coming to him. After all, I fail to see what "questions about the victim" might alter the moral calculus of what was done to him. Yes, it's possible that Shepard, a marginalized 21 year old kid, might have exercised poor judgment the night he was killed, if that's what Paglia is implying (and if it's not, than she ought to be more forthright about what she is implying). But implicating Shepard in his own murder is an act of moral bankruptcy that is emblematic of Paglia's misplaced intellectual vanity. Only she can see the truth, even when the truth is just her own opinion marinated in an unhealthy measure of self-regard. After all darling, don't you know she was a "dissenter" back when they were sanctifying that "charming young man with a troubled family background?"

Long May You Wavves

Pitchfork: It's kind of a Lindsay Lohan thing where you get more famous for going out drunk than for making Mean Girls.

NW: Well, yeah. It's like the fucking indie TMZ or something. It's like all that I've done now up to this point is condensed into YouTube video that shows me soundchecking. I thought it was blown out of proportion.

Frankly, I completely buy Nathan Williams' a.k.a. Wavves explanation for his breakdown at the Primavera Festival - going from playing Little Rock w/ 25 people in the crowd to playing Euro festivals with thousands would probably put the zap on a lot of people, especially in today's internet-fueled era of fame-cycle hypertelescoping. Indeed, I'm shocked that more of these scuzz rock bandits don't go psycho when they hit the medium-time. Just listen to the music: its lo-fi production values no longer signify as we-couldn't-afford-it DIY; fuck, if you've got a MacBook you've got your hands on the means of production to make a semi-professional-sounding recording. Rather, lo-fi is an aesthetic that appears to symbolize intimacy - the ideal is playing basement shows and having your own little slice of the world, and that value system is deeply embedded within the music these bands make. If it's punk - a term so elastic that it no longer has descriptive value, in my book - it's punk in the way that people who make and sell handicrafts at the Artists & Fleas market are punk. Most of these bands (there are counterexamples, e.g., Times New Viking) seem to be opting out, or more precisely, they're opting in by opting out, consciously forming a subculture whose insularity is not a gesture of defiance, but perhaps not a gesture at all. Thus, while anybody who plays music for a living would be inclined to grab for that brass ring of (relative) fame and (relative) fortune, it's not a given that these bands are fundamentally equipped to make the leap. A lot of this music oxidizes upon emerging from the basement. That its practitioners, many cocooned in climate-controlled scenes until someone starts circulating ripped mp3s of their demo cassette, should go a little batshit when confronted with playing to massive crowds of the yet-to-be-converted, if not actively hostile, should not be particularly surprising. The following exchanges say it all:

Pitchfork: If you had your way, would you prefer to be playing warehouse parties instead of big festivals?

NW: Yeah! But then again, it's not that I don't want to play festivals or do stuff like that. It's just, I think, the realization of how big it is maybe overwhelmed me, and I needed to take a step back and see what was in front of me and try and figure it out. Also, I was extremely fucked up and made a series of really bad decisions.

*****

Pitchfork: Did you ever consider doing Wavves as something where you just recorded and didn't play live?

NW: In the beginning, that's all it was. And everything happened so fast. Ryan came out to play drums a month before I started touring, or a month before we started touring. And then until the day of Barcelona, we were just touring nonstop. So we practiced for three weeks, me and Ryan, and then we went on tour nonstop, so there was never really any time for me to like transfer the songs from recordings to how they would pan out live. And I still haven't had the chance to do that. It was just kind of: "OK, this is how the songs go. Let's just go play them and have fun." And that's when it was the most fun. It just got kind of... I don't know what it got.

I don't blame Pitchfork for becoming "the fucking indie TMZ," (a bit of an overstatement) much like I don't blame Marlo Stanfield for killing people and putting them in vacant houses; after all, the game's the game. It's not like Williams' breakdown wasn't what passes for news at the just-above-the-gutter indie rock level - what was Pitchfork going to do, not report on it? Turning around and lending a sympathetic ear is all in the game, too, a symbiotic exercise in public self-laceration that presumably benefits not only Pitchfork, which gets to reinforce its image as a leading news source (indeed, we are informed that this interview represents Williams "breaking his silence," as though he were Deep Throat or some shit) while giving Williams a chance to promote his modest career by flogging an upcoming tour and quasi-announcing a new record. Everybody benefits, even when you suspect, especially from Williams' frail, overawed demeanor, they don't.

1000 Times Nay

Watched Christopher Weingarten's much tweeted (as opposed to bruited?)-about presentation at some Web 2.0 shitstorm wherein everybody tells you how much better your life will or will not be because of social media technologies that, in reality, only a very small, but very self-important segment of the population (myself included) abuse regularly. Basically Weingarten traces the devolution of music criticism from elite critics getting coke and vacations from record labels (his hyperbole, not mine), to the Web 1.0 era wherein young folk writing for Pitchfork and the sainted, departed Stylus became the outlet through which bands were broken, to today, when, because of leak culture, "All the review does now...is reinforce the opinion someone already has." This is bad because "crowds have terrible taste" thus enabling the rise of Fleet Foxes (about whom Weingarten and I are simpatico) in an NPR echo chamber because the "link economy" requires outlets to report on not what they want to report on but "trending topics" like Phish at Bonnaroo and so on and so forth. The general thrust is the oft-whispered (usually) refrain that bottom-up cultural consensus is bad because popular taste always regresses to some sort of mushy gray mean and that top-down outlets (like those that employ Weingarten, who is an outstanding critic, and certainly deserves to be employed by said outlets) are required to...I don't know...mediate popular taste? Validate it? Are we even talking about popular taste here? After all, Weingarten saves his invective for indie rock bands and the outlets who cover them; his example of the deleterious impact of "crowdsourcing" is Fleet Foxes – cited immediately after he bemoans the fact that his indie rock-fan friends are so self-segregated that they haven't heard of Lady Gaga, the present epitome of American popular taste.

Really, Weingarten's presentation was a grade-A rant, seeming more like a string of tweets at points than a coherent argument. "Crowdsourcing killed punk rock" is a wonderful bon mot, but what the fuck it actually means, I have no idea. Couple that with Weingarten's counterintuitive embrace of Twitter, which would seem to be the present epicenter of mediocrity and genre stratification, and you can reduce his speech to "things suck. Things will continue to suck. We will all be unemployed. Without gatekeepers, everything will sound like Fleet Foxes. In the absence of editors, a 140 character limit is a boon; anything worth saying can be said in 140 characters. I have a Twitter account. Make your tweets interesting." At the very least, though, it was certainly entertaining, and one detects that Weingarten has gotten at a core emotional truth: that those of us who enjoy reading rock criticism, and want it to have meant something, will have to do without in the future as crit is commoditized down into what Liz Colville aptly termed "the WHAT." Thus I cannot deny having derived great pleasure from watching Weingarten eulogize the dodo all the while staging a dance on its grave and hawking the very gun that wiped it out.

You can follow Christopher Weingarten @1000timesyes on Twitter, where he is the midst of reviewing 1000 new albums this year in 140 characters or less, and thus far has remained true to his own creed.

The King Is Dead

Get On Your Boots(traps)

Get back to work...at the job you don't have

I didn't watch Obama's faux State of the Union address, I admit. However, I did tune in on time to see Lousiana Gov. Bobby Jindal deliver the Republican response. Gov. Jindal is a rising star in the G.O.P.; a university president, congressman, and governor all before his 40th birthday, Jindal is obviously a man of great intellect, talent, and ambition, and it is easy to see why the Republicans would pin their hopes to him as opposed to many of the stale faces that make up the party's leadership within Washington. Furthermore, Jindal is the son of two Indian immigrants with something of a Horatio Alger background – presumably he, like newly-elected party chairman Michael Steele, serves as a shorthand for the rebranded G.O.P., willing to reach out beyond the Republican faithful and unprepared to cede to Obama the high ground of optimism.

Yet Jindal's message, rebutting the President's speech on the freshly-minted stimulus, was disappointingly trite. He opened with what can only be described as a curious mix of condescension – basically "Gee, isn't it neat-o that we have a black president?" – before attempting to co-opt Obama's mojo by reminding everyone that he, too, comes from what a shallower man would characterize as a "non-traditional" background. He then proceeded to engage in the kind of vacuous pro-America fluff that constitutes the G.O.P.'s message in the post-Reagan era, best summed up by the title of his response, "Americans Can Do Anything." What is "anything" you ask? Couldn't rightly say, although we got some great lines about how we need to pull together and how we're much wiser than the folks in Washington. A smart man might say, "Hey, governor, when we want to pull together – isn't that a core function of our federal government?" Of course, not, stupid: if you should have learned one thing from the Bush Administration New Deal Era it is that government is a self-perpetuating tumor destined by design to frustrate the incredible ingenuity of the American people. Nevermind the fact that we all have electricity now and there aren't any more cholera outbreaks.

While Gov. Jindal did not refer to the stimulus as the "porkulus" – Rush Limbaugh's preferred term – he did bemoan the inclusion of money for mag-lev trains and volcano monitoring as representative of its contents: frivolous bonbons that a money-drunk Democratic Congress couldn't help but stuff into government's pockets. Nevermind the fact that an effective stimulus by definition requires massive and quick amounts of spending, or that modern infrastructure or emergency warning systems – replace "volcano monitoring" with "hurricane monitoring" and you catch my drift – are precisely the types of investments government should be making. Also ignore the fact that Louisiana is slated to receive $3.8 billion in funding from the stimulus, though Jindal has indicated that he will only accept $3.7 billion on principle – doesn't want to have to raise taxes on business to support expanded unemployment benefits.

Speaking of tax cuts, why, if you guessed that they were Gov. Jindal's solution to the problem, well, you'd be right! Nevermind the fact that unemployed Americans don't typically have incomes and ergo don't pay income taxes. Or the fact that Obama's plan actually does contain enormous tax cuts in addition to the Bush legacy. Tax cuts remain the panacea that will fix every problem, dot every i, and put a chicken in every pot. Why, Bobby's cut taxes six times in Louisiana! Nevermind that sticky fact that the federal government – read: you and I – have been pumping money to Lousiana hand over fist since Katrina, or that we're chucking another $4B their way, or that Louisiana has some of the most grinding poverty in America, why cutting taxes works like a charm! You'd be a fool not to cut away! Also, while we're on the subject, can I interest you in some tax credits for exploratory drilling for oil and natural gas?

Jindal, like many Republicans, has also found religion on deficit spending: we mustn't borrow from our children in order to fund today's trillion dollar stimulus. Of course, borrowing from our children was a-OK when it came to funding an elective war in Iraq or cutting taxes for the Bernie Madoffs of the world. Frankly, I wonder if our children might not be happy that we borrowed from them if the choice was between deficits later or, you know, another Great Depression today. Naw, they would just say, "But mom, dad, don't you know that Americans can do anything? Don't worry about us, we love sleeping in the car and eating all of our meals out of a can! We can huddle next to each other for warmth! Anyways, we don't want you taking any of those soul-crushing, character-depleting handouts from our European-style socialist government on our account."

Most frustrating, perhaps, is either the complete disingenuousness or obliviousness that the G.O.P. continues to display in the face of its epic ideological failure. It breaks my heart every time I see a Republican pol like Jindal get up and tell some horrible story about how his father had to find an extra job in order to pay for Jindal's delivery at birth, and then, rather than saying, "Hey, we ought to do something about that," goes back to the same old bootstraps-and-ingenuity razmatazz that is basically G.O.Pig latin for "sink or swim." Essentially it implies that Americans who are unable to overcome serious economic hardships are somehow morally defective and ergo undeserving of having their most basic human needs met. The disappointment/absurdity was only compounded when Jindal assured the audience that the Republican Party stood for universal access to health coverage, and then in the very next sentence derided the possibility of a government health care scheme. To me, this sounds like, "The Republican Party stands for extinguishing fires, but not if it means adopting a big government solution like a fire department. I was thinking that if we gave the town's wealthiest citizens another tax cut we could convince them to collectively stand around burning buildings and urinate." Of course you know how the story will end: they'll take the money and still won't piss on you to put the fire out.

iTunes Game

Hats with polo shirts? Why, it must be 2004!

To reassure you that I haven't given up (completely) on this space, I'm picking up on this from a whole bunch of different places:

Number of Songs: 17,728
Number of Albums: 1,593
Most Recently Played Song: St. Vincent, "What Me Worry?"
Most Played Song: The Thermals, "Pillar of Salt"
Most Recently Added Album: Juana Molina, Una Dia

First Song Alphabetically: Vampire Weekend, "A-Punk"
Last Song Alphabetically: Pavement, "Zurich is Stained"
Smallest Song Numerically: Animal Collective, "#1"
Largest Song Numerically: Patti Smith, "54321/Wave"

Shortest Song: John Mayer, "Blank" (0 seconds)
Longest Song: LCD Soundsystem, "45:33"

First Album Alphabetically: The Beatles, Abbey Road
Last Album Alphabetically: Neil Young, Zuma
First Band Alphabetically: A-Ha
Last Band Alphabetically: Zounds

First Ten Songs That Pop Up on Shuffle:

1. Duran Duran - "Wild Boys"
2. AC/DC - "Let Me Put My Love Into You"
3. The Police - "A Sermon"
4. Cat Power - "I Believe in You"
5. A.C. Newman - "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer"
6. The Beatles - "I'll Cry Instead"
7. Dim Stars - "The Night Is Coming On"
8. Broadcast - "A Man Is Not a Bird"
9. The Rolling Stones - "The Lantern"
10. Animal Collective - "Turn Into Something"

Tumblr Censrshp

Too small to be Blogger, too big to be Twitter

Tumblr has apparently instituted a policy of deleting blogs on its service dedicated to stalking other bloggers, reblogging their posts and adding demeaning, often profane commentary. This NYT blog piece focuses on one Julia Allison, who has characterized herself as "internet famous" (never heard of her) and evidently contributes to a widely-read blog. Anyways, somebody set up a Tumblr called Reblogging Julia, indexed on Google here, making fun of the actual Ms. Allison. Bearing in mind that I haven't read much of it, I wouldn't characterize anything I've seen as being beyond the pale. Mean-spirited, certainly, but crossing some sort of societal bright-line, no. At any rate, Tumblr has characterized the behavior in which "Reblogging Julia" engages "harassment" and announced a policy stating that "Accounts with the sole or primary purpose of repeatedly harassing or abusing specific members or groups within the Tumblr community will be suspended."

Isn't part of "internet fame" learning to deal with "internet criticism?" Even from the anonymous? (Frankly, the anonymity angle is played up in the piece, but I can't understand why; would it be better if Julia or whomever had a name or address or something? Would she send them a nasty e-mail, or attempt to change their mind about her? I mean, I know that anonymity is largely associated with cowardice – although I'd point out that the Federalist Papers were all written pseudonymously – but I'm not sure why that rankles so much in the world of internet snark. Btdubs, I just compared Tumblr hecklers with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, et al.) Seriously, while I think that there can/should be limitations on internet fora, in terms of threats, posting personal data, etc., simply mocking someone who trades on their blogger celebrity seems not only to be relatively harmless but wholly within the spirit of what the internet is basically all about. Without Tumblr or services like it, "Julia Allison" wouldn't exist; the democratic beauty of the technology is that people who have an opinion about her one way or another have a platform with which to praise/discuss/disdain her which is equally accessible.

Admittedly, I feel a little bit like Campbell Brown here: I'm telling you something you already know, and, more than likely, I'm even having the same "well, duh" reaction as you. Still, it is kind of bullshit that the very same people who exploit the internet to go from essentially non-entities to elevating the most banal facets of their existence into "content" get pissed off when people actually take a couple of pot shots at the sitting ducks. E.g.:

Dan: People will not stop asking me about Mary's haircut.
Me: HAHHAHA are they talking about how I'm fat, too?
Me: I've been getting that a lot lately. "Julia looks like she's about to implode" was my favorite.
Dan: No, no one who talks to me says you're fat.
Me: Oh that's good. That's a plus.
Dan: They all agree with me that you hang out with too many people that are anorexically skinny. And if you are around normal sized people, you look tiny, because you are, in fact, tiny.
Me: I just feel like my face is fat. I feel sort of ugly and fat bc of fashion week. I think one tends to lose perspective.

P.S. Though I'm not really interested into going into it, evidently there's a personal connection b/w Allison and Tumblr CEO David Karp; plus Allison, though she denies asking Karp to take the offending blogs down, isn't exactly broken up about the whole thing.

Grow Young and Die Together

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could not have existed without Brad Pitt, and I mean that not only commercially (though it is difficult to see a major studio bankrolling this picture without a top-tier star attached), but artistically as well. The present day Pitt is the film's big reveal, what the audience is led to anticipate for the first two-thirds of the film's run time, and when he does arrive, Cate Blanchett's Daisy sums up the moment with almost hilarious economy: "You're perfect." After two hours of watching Pitt shed special effect after special effect, turning him from a prematurely-pruned toddler to a long-haired Donald Rumsfeld look-alike to a, well, 60 year-old Brad Pitt, the moment the man himself does arrive has the punch of every magazine cover that has ever borne his image behind it, eliciting a Pavlovian response that is much a comment on the demi-religious nature of celebrity worship as anything the picture itself might intentionally hope to raise. That most of the film's final third closely tracks a Calvin Kline ad – sailing, moonlight trysts on the beach, Brad Pitt – only cements the effect.

I liked Benjamin Button; many did not. All of the criticisms are deadly accurate: it's three hours long (nowadays a sub-Lawrence of Arabia film can only presume upon an audience for two); sharing a screenwriter with Forrest Gump, it sometimes too closely tracks the former picture, though Pitt never shakes hands with FDR or anything; and it seems almost perilously naive about issues of race given its setting in Jim Crow-era New Orleans. Yet none of these flaws are fatal, and none undermine what is essentially a simple love story, albeit one with quasi-sci-fi underpinnings and the sweep of much of the twentieth century behind it. Director David Fincher, who delivered his masterpiece last time out with the vastly underappreciated Zodiac, brings his impeccable eye for composition and visual detail to bear here, though the ostentatious trickery that marked his mid-period work (Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room) is largely absent. All in all, I imagine that once the intense scrutiny of awards season has faded (and after the equally problematic Slumdog Millionaire has claimed its Oscars), Benjamin Button will be more kindly reassessed as a small picture ensnared in the body of an epic. That it sheds the lugubrious trappings of self-importance as its runtime wears on – and distinctly improves as a result – is either the film's slyest metaphysical conceit or an extraordinarily happy accident.

The Middle of the Road Ain't a Bad Place to Be

Is that a dude in a Robert Plant mask?

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' Raising Sand is a perfectly fine, tasteful, modest little record; that it won the Grammy for Best Album last night is not surprising in the least, and even though I'd like to say that if it weren't for Plant's name on the plastic, it wouldn't have sniffed a Grammy, I'm not even sure that'd be true. Well, sure, Grammys go to names or sales (and Plant sold a million copies), but musically Raising Sand radiates a folkified West Coast pleasantness that signifies as middlebrow class. It isn't hard to imagine an academy of aging voters (a lot of these people were in the record business when Led Zepp were around) listening to the bombast of Coldplay, the willful obscurantism of Radiohead, the profane verbal gymnastics of Lil Wayne, and the detached loverman-ness of Ne-Yo, and settling on a well-executed minor-key bluegrass record for which they are the raison d'être. Still, even if you're miffed that Lil Wayne didn't walk off with the hardware after producing the consensus media event record of 2008, you can't be too mad at Robert Plant. Raising Sand is no Two Against Nature or Genius Loves Company; it's a record with a quiet vitality that suggests a path forward for its principals rather than a gaudy headstone for Led Zeppelin. Just listen to "Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)" and if it doesn't move you a little bit, well, there's a reason I don't do money-back guarantees.

Asterisk-Rod

Never gets old

Alex Rodriguez has admitted to taking banned substances in an interview with ESPN following news reports over the weekend that he had tested positive during a confidential survey test undertaken by MLB in 2003. The revelation is a bombshell: Rodriguez is the highest-paid player in the game with an astronomical 10 year, $275 million deal; he plays for the New York Yankees, the most heavily scrutinized franchise in professional sport; and, most importantly, he is the active player most likely – perhaps nearly certain – to surpass Barry Bonds' tainted career home run record, currently standing at 762. For all of his flaws both on the field – his perceived inability to perform in the clutch – and off – uh, getting caught on film with strippers who aren't his wife, evidently alienating the rest of his clubhouse, his general "I live in a bubble" mentality – he stood as something of a rejoinder to the Steroids Era. A-Rod's superhuman performance (though not super-superhuman, a la Bonds, McGwire, or Sosa) was attributed to a natural giftedness and an unparalleled work ethic. He stood for the proposition that the genuine article was possible, that Ruthian heights could still be scaled without the illicit shortcut afforded by PEDs. Well, as with Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Roger Clemens (another one with a vaunted work ethic), Rafael Palmeiro, Miguel Tejada, et cetera, et cetera, A-Rod is now tainted, removing the last shred of doubt that much of the last two decade – probably the whole post-strike era – was a massive fraud perpetrated against baseball fans.

Frankly, I don't know whether or not A-Rod's scarlet 'S' will ruin his legacy the way it did Bonds'. A-Rod has already admitted to taking PEDs, thereby skipping the Giambi "weasely vague non-apology" apology and heading right for the Andy Pettitte "yeah, I did it but only because of x." Whether A-Rod's x, coping with the pressures of earning an insane $25 million a year to hit a ball with a stick, will equate to Pettitte's x, recovering from injury at a relatively advanced age, remains to be seen. My guess is that it's not even super relevant, at least to Yankee fans. As long as A-Rod didn't lie to federal investigators, and there's no suggestion that he's even spoken to them about PEDs, then he's in no real jeopardy of being sanctioned under the law or by MLB. (Of course, Congress could haul him in for a dog and pony show, but that's beyond anybody's control at this point.) This circus will go on for as long as the media wills it, which, given their love of A-Rod as a punching bag at home (and the already-simmering distaste/hatred for A-Rod and the Yanks on the road), will last at least through the rest of this season.

However, A-Rod is signed up to be a Yankee for the next nine seasons; furthermore, it's not likely that he'll approach the vaunted 763 HR milestone for at least another six or seven years – sitting at 553 homers right now, he would need at least five season even if he produced at a highly-unlikely 50 homer pace. The intensity surrounding this story isn't apt to last that long; by admitting to taking PEDs immediately, A-Rod has probably pursued the best course of action available in terms of putting this story behind him. Now speculation will likely be focused on a) how the other Yankees (most pivotally, Jeter) will react to the revelation, b) how Yankee fans will react to A-Rod, c) how fans on the road will react to A-Rod (Red Sox fans: I am looking forward to some clever signs), and d) who are the 103 other players who tested positive? Three of those four questions will answer themselves sooner rather than later, and the fourth concerns A-Rod only tangentially.

[Of course, there is one caveat to all of this, and that is the caveat A-Rod himself inserted into his admission: he claims to never have taken steroids as a Yankee. I expect, in part, that this bit of probable wishful thinking will catch on with gullible/willfully-blind Yankee fans who want to pretend that his achievements with their team are completely untainted. Of course there is always the possibility that new evidence will surface that A-Rod did in fact juice in pinstripes (oh what I wouldn't give for a photo of Jeter injecting A-Rod in the ass to surface), thereby ripping off what is already sure to be a very tenuous scab. If he gets caught lying now, it will be about 10 times as bad, if that is even possible.]

My gut feeling is that A-Rod's public act of contrition, coupled with a couple of clean piss tests and the passage of time, will put a damper on the public's appetite for opprobrium. After all, I think a large part of why America hated Bonds and Clemens so intensely was a) that both men behaved supremely villainously – in the WWE sense – both on and off the field and b) they refused to admit what was obvious to the rest of us. (To Bonds' "credit", he told a "take-it-or-leave-it" lie; either you believed him or you didn't. Whereas Clemens, apparently advised by his lawyer, engaged in an incredibly bizarre act of P.R. self-immolation, essentially staging an inconclusive show trial of his accuser and inadvertently hanging himself in the process.) A-Rod can ride this thing out now that the cat's out of the bag; it's difficult to imagine people really working themselves into a lather year after year, apart from the smattering of boos likely to greet him on the road with every first at-bat.

The real losers in all of this are the Yankees. The opening of their brand new Xanadu-esque ballpark, already tainted by tales of excessive abuse of the public till, will now be overshadowed by the year of A-Roid (credit to my Yankee fan friend Vinnie on that one). Their planned promotional push surrounding Rodriguez's drive to 763 homers will invariably have to be scaled back, costing the team potentially hundreds of millions in revenue. Vis-a-vis the actual team, we know from Joe Torre's book that A-Rod already doesn't have the best of relationships with his teammates; this certainly won't help matters. (Though it is delightful to imagine Mark Teixiera and C.C. Sabathia getting YES Network mics shoved into their faces and being asked about Rodriguez night in and night out – welcome to the Bronx!) Of course, as a Mets fan, the best thing that can happen apart from a Mets World Series win (sign Manny) is watching the Yankees devolved into some vintage Steinbrenner-esque chaos, so this is like a gift from the baseball gods.

U2, Brute?

U2 - Get On Your Boots

"Get On Your Boots" is really no better or worse than the rest of the late period singles the band has intermittently pumped out since 2000's "return to form" record All That You Can't Leave Behind. Lyrically, it's no prize winner – "If someone's into blowin' up/We're into growin' up" – but then again, who could forget the "mole diggin' in a hole" from "Elevation" (or "El!Ev!A!Shun!")? Sonically, "Boots" is in keeping with promises that No Line on the Horizon would be a more adventurous record than its immediate predecessors: low end up front with the bass pushed to the edge of distortion, the vaguely "Sunday Bloody Sunday"-esque drum-stomp at the bridge, the substitution of fuzztone for the Edge's typically windchimey guitar – it's fair to say that U2 haven't tried to sound this interesting since Pop. On the whole, it will help the band sell 2 million copies of the record, and give them at least one new song they can play on their inevitable forthcoming world tour that won't send fans streaming for the restrooms. Given the recent Springsteen debacle, I suppose that's more than we can ask for from our rock and roll dinosaurs at this point.

On the bright side, "Get On Your Boots" gave me an excuse to listen to one of my favorite U2 songs, "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)". The video, directed by Wim Wenders and based upon his Wings of Desire, features, if possible, an even douchier Christ-complexified Bono:

Kickin Ur Dick In

This is the greatest thing ever. I'm a late comer to hardcore – really, if you're over 15, you're a late comer – but it doesn't take an expert to see that JD Twitch has piled the cream on thick here, even if his definition of hardcore is a bit more expansive than most: The Pop Group? Swans? Sonic Youth? Hey, I'm all for inclusiveness; depending on your point of view, the only thing (well, not the only thing, but if you don't already own Minor Threat's Complete Discography...) missing is some Millions of Dead Cops or "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting".

Regime Change