Denby is a fine writer, and his criticism is often perceptive and illuminating, but I doubt I’m alone in feeling a pang of disappointment when I see his byline and not Lane’s. I wasn’t surprised, however, to see his name on Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation. It should have been called Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Hilarious, and It’s Upstaging Me on a Biweekly Basis. Denby describes snark as a “strain of nasty, knowing abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation.” The reader soon finds that Denby’s aim is to devalue what he lacks—above-average wit is nowhere to be seen in this book—by conflating it with everything from hyperbolic insult to gossip to jokes that aren’t funny to misogyny to racism. Let’s have a look.

The First Principle of Snark: The “Whatever” Principle. Attack without reason. To illustrate this principle, Denby relates a crack made on the weblog Wonkette the day Teddy Kennedy underwent brain surgery: “[D]octors fixed a clogged artery in his neck. They successfully removed the Jameson bottle.” Denby follows this up with a pious paraphrase of De mortuis nil nisi bonum which also allows that “the senator has lifted a glass now and then.” His disingenuousness is infuriating: Is he inviting us to be outraged by a cheap shot at a cosseted public official? Is that the most convincing example he can muster? No, he also comes to the agonizingly sanctimonious defense of Suri Cruise—an infant, and unlikely to appreciate the gesture. Are these attacks “without reason”? Quite to the contrary, they reinforce a useful sense of shame, by reminding readers that drinking to excess or giving birth to a publicity stunt are aberrant behaviors.

The Second Principle of Snark: The White Man’s Last Stand Principle. Appeal to common, hackneyed prejudices. Denby quotes a McCain ad about Barack Obama: “It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him . . . The One.” “To anyone above the Mason-Dixon line,” Denby writes, “it seemed nothing more than a sour reference to Keanu Reeves’ savior character in the Matrix movies. In the South, however, it may have functioned on another level: ‘The One,’ according to Southerners, is a putdown of someone getting above himself and is likely, in this context, to be taken as derision of an ‘uppity’ black.”

If I had to say whether snark or dishonesty posed a more serious threat to “our” conversation, I would not hesitate to pick the latter. For starters, the line is not a Matrix reference. It’s generic religious language composed to ridicule the religious overtones of Obama fever. Even the staunchest Obama supporters of my acquaintance complained about these quasi-millenarian delusions, if only because they set the bar too high. The TV spot Denby suggests may have been a racist insinuation was unambiguous. It is the height of snark, as Denby tries to define it—self-serving mean-spiritedness—to pretend otherwise.

The Third Principle of Snark: The Pawnshop Principle. Reach into the rotting heap of media referents for old jokes, old insults, and give them a twist. There is already a name for this: unfunny. Calling it “snark” dignifies it unnecessarily.

The Fourth Principle of Snark: The Throw-Some-Mud Principle. Assume anything negative said about someone with power is true—or at least usable. Here Denby is either talking about lies, which are already subject to libel laws, or he’s talking about needlessly embarrassing facts. If he’s talking about lies, then we don’t need new terminology for the phenomenon, least of all terminology that trivializes it. Nevertheless, this argument should find sympathetic ears, especially when Denby lashes out at the former Gawker blogger Emily Gould, a stranger to style and wit, who admitted on television that she felt justified in humiliating celebrities with the cash to console themselves. (Gould later wrote a self-pitying manifesto for the New York Times Magazine detailing how an upbraiding by Jimmy Kimmel sent her straight into the mouth of madness.)

The Fifth Principle of Snark: The Reckless Disregard Principle. Ignore the routine responsibilities of journalism. Denby gnashes his teeth at the “habit of never checking the truth of anything” on blogs and media websites. Yet no mention is made of, for instance, the Killian documents controversy (Dan Rather), Vicki Iseman (The New York Times), or the Soap Opera Plot against the Palin family, in which major media outlets tried to convince us, if memory serves, that Bristol Palin had given birth to all the other members of the family while sequestered in a Mexican convent. Once again, Denby confuses snark with libel while omitting significant recent examples of the latter.

The Sixth Principle of Snark: The Hobbyhorse Principle. Reduce all human complexity to carcicature. Here, Denby’s Nine Theses begin to peter out into inanity. Criticizing some aspect of a public figure is tantamount to murder. Never mind that reducing someone to caricature has been known since time immemorial as “caricature.” Is there reason to complain if Angelina Jolie or Madonna are dressed down (so to speak) as misery tourists or Third World kidnappers? If Tom Cruise is characterized as a mentally ill trampolinist? Denby reaches back into the vault to harass the editors of Spy for their campaign against short people, an ill-conceived joke that few other than Denby and Tom Cruise are likely to remember.

The Seventh Principle of Snark: The You-Suck Principle. It’s snarky, according to Denby, to turn on a celebrity one used to adulate. The catalyst—drug abuse, a disastrous marriage, bizarre behavior—is irrelevant. The beautiful needn’t be damned. Denby sees them as fragile Fabergé eggs; it’s his role to see them safely to the end of the race.

The Eighth Principle of Snark: The Pacemaker Principle. Attack the old. You’ll never guess who doesn’t make an appearance here. Hint: He was permanently crippled by his Vietnamese captors and as a result has been slow to set up a Facebook page.

The Ninth Principle of Snark: The Gastronomic Principle. Attack expensive, underperforming restaurants. Is snark ruining “our” conversation, or the conversations of New Yorker staff writers? In fact, Denby approves of this manifestation of his enemy: “Vicious snark is necessary when it amounts to protest against oppression by overpriced dining.” He’s not even kidding. And I’m not even laughing. And neither, probably, are you.

Denby is at his best, or at least his most justified, when wondering what the Internet will do to the concept of reputation. He is understandably horrified by the ease with which petty, unqualified, and anonymous assailants can spread lies about those with the courage or ambition to put themselves in the public eye, whether or not it’s the limelight. The trouble is, much of the chum he dumps in the snark tank is something else altogether. It is, at best, low comedy—at worst, prejudice or brutality.

And Denby frequently tries his hand at what he calls snark, but he’s abysmal at it. He reduces the brilliantly readable James Wolcott to a “the most adept towel snapper in the locker room.” A paragraph later, he scolds Joe Queenan for his facetious suggestion that the blind are lucky because they “get to go through life without ever seeing Shelley Winters.” With film-major pedantry he reminds us that Winters “had love affairs with Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden”; it never occurs to Denby that the joke would have fallen flat were Winters someone celebrated for her ugliness. Should I write Denby an angry letter reminding him that Wolcott has written criticism—of a variety of genres—far more memorable, entertaining, and penetrating than Denby’s? Wouldn’t that be taking the joke a bit too seriously?

Public life, particularly public life in the arts, is not for the sensitive or timid. Most of the people Denby rails against have hides like depleted-uranium tank armor; his is a rice-paper screen painted with mists and swallows. If you are a professional Snarksmith, to borrow the title of my friend Michael Weiss’s website, the only message to read into Denby’s priggish tract is: Keep up the good work.

The post Epic Fail: David Denby’s “Snark” appeared first on Jewcy.

“Behind the good saint hovers the black, shaggy, goat-horned figure of the Krampus. Cloven hooves and a long tail are conspicuous features of this roaring, prancing Satyr who rattles the chains that hang from his wrists, and brandishes a bundle of birch-twigs which he wields with more energy than discrimination. . . . His habit of throwing naughty children into the wooden tub which hangs at his back, and thence into the nearest stream, earns him deep respect.”

You’ve got an alcoholic uncle who didn’t vote for Obama. Austrian kids have to put up with the village pederast dressed as the villain from Legend. “The birch—apart from its phallic significance—may have a connection with the initiation rites of certain witch-covens.” Terrific. There are also those delightful “Krampuskarten,” greeting cards whose verses “stress the importance of good behavior if one hopes to . . . escape the attentions of Krampus.”

St Nikolaus schickt Dir die Schuh’,

Krampus läszt Dich heut in Ruh’!

WEILST BRAV WARST!

That means something like, “Congratulations, you didn’t get carted off in a bucket.” Now for the bad news. The Krampus lives, and he’s graduated to more loathsome punishments for naughty boys and girls. Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage (2008), directed by Michael Campus (clearly a corruption of Krampus), is just such an ingenious torment. After this, you will beg for the birch-switch.

In case you’ve never been to a shopping mall, Thomas Kinkade is the Painter of Light, which is what Lucifer would call himself if he had a PR firm and patent office at his disposal. Kinkade is famous for painting idyllic scenes using proprietary opalescent pigments that respond to the tender touch of a dimmer switch. Edward Hopper he is not. His online gallery lists such categories as “bridges,” “cottages,” “gardens,” “lighthouses,” and “gazebos,” which are “always the center of attention at big family events. And they’re also ideal for those relaxing lazy mornings with the newspaper and coffee. These images remind us that gazebos provide shelter from the elements and soothe us with their charms.”

I hear gazebos are also swell for conducting a Black Mass. Christmas Cottage is no stranger to deals with the devil: How else did Michael Krampus get Peter O’Toole to act in this direct-to-DVD miscarriage? (He plays young Thomas Kinkade’s artistic mentor; his platitudes make Jack Handey’s sound positively Emersonian.) Apart from starring in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), O’Toole appeared in Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968). He even played Jeffrey Bernard (1999)!

You don’t have to be an art lover to hate the Painter of Light and his gingerbread hellscapes, but it helps. You don’t have to be a film buff to hate The Christmas Cottage; you just have to be a human being. This is essentially It’s a Wonderful Life updated for our crummy times. We’ve got to have a giant bake sale / bikini carwash / treasure hunt / bachelor auction to save the skate park / endangered salamander habitat / Goondocks / Grandma’s house from evil real estate developers! Except that in this case it’s far less interesting than that: Maryanne Kinkade (Marcia Gay Harden), the Blessed Virgin Mother of the Painter of Light, is about to be foreclosed on.

What will become of the Christmas Cottage?

At this point, you could feed a million ant farms with the treacle dripping out of your screen. Who will save us? The real Thomas Kinkade couldn’t paint his way through a picket fence, but the titular hero of this film (Jared Padalecki) sweeps into Placerville, California, in a goddamn motorcycle sidecar, then paints a mural that blows everyone’s mind and saves Christmas. Oh, really? The only town I know of that was ever saved by beautiful murals is Philadelphia, and I don’t think I saw any paintings in here of Benjamin Franklin fist-bumping Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In terms of sheer contempt for reality, the most wonderful character in this movie is Thomas Kinkade’s deadbeat father, a cartoon character in a leisure suit who speaks in Esperanto and throws cherry bombs at emotional moments. You keep wanting him to save everyone with a blue movie called Christmas Frottage, à la Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), but instead he learns a valuable lesson or something. Then, we can only assume, he goes back to a lucrative career in copper-wire theft.

Let me put it this way. Imagine that you’ve just been given the worst greeting card ever—a hideous mélange of red doilies and green crêpe paper—and you’re sitting there nodding and smiling and staring at the lapidary sentiment: May your holiday wishes burn you with the fire of a thousand suns. Now imagine you have to keep on faking it for 103 minutes. Sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? Maybe—but the Painter of Light has to keep on faking it until he dies. There are some fates worse than the Krampus. Just don’t walk toward the light.

The post Dimmer Bait and Switch: “Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage” appeared first on Jewcy.

Seventy-five years ago, the loathsome Eighteenth Amendment yielded to the Twenty-first Amendment, and there was much rejoicing throughout the land as Prohibition took its rightful place in the urinal cake of history. This deserves to be celebrated, like Guy Fawkes Day, with the burning of effigies: May I suggest Carrie Nation? This woman, like some ugly, gargantuan grandmother (she stood nearly six feet tall), was a perfect physical embodiment of the nanny state, and might as well have been the model for Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched.

Here’s the Yale Law Review, Vol. 11, No. 3 (January 1902) on Nation’s infamous “hatchetations”:

NUISANCE—COMMON NUISANCE—ABATEMENT.—STATE V. STARK, 66 Pac. 243 (Kan.).—On Feb. 17, 1901, in the city of Topeka, the appellant, with Carrie Nation and six others, broke into and injured a billiard hall in connection with which intoxicating liquors were sold. By statute, all places where intoxicating liquors are sold or kept for sale are declared to be common nuisances. The court held, however, that this fact does not justify their abatement by any person or persons without process of law.

Of course, the “process of law” frequently results in outcomes every bit as intrusive and infantilizing as Carrie Nation’s barroom smash-ups—hence Prohibition. The Temperance crusader eventually took to calling herself Carry A. Nation, going so far as to trademark the name for use as a slogan, and it couldn’t have been more telling. The present-day nanny state presumes to carry a nation like a snugly swaddled infant. We are free to drink alcohol, but not without being scolded for it at every turn; we are not free, as plenty will remind us today, to use a host of other substances.

Even the Wall Street Journal, hardly a “Legalize It” mouthpiece on the order of High Times magazine, has provided a forum for the inevitable Repeal Day arguments. Ethan A. Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, writes today that “[t]he Americans who voted in 1933 to repeal prohibition differed greatly in their reasons for overturning the system. But almost all agreed that the evils of failed suppression far outweighed the evils of alcohol consumption.” He goes on to write:

Consider the consequences of drug prohibition today: 500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations; 1.8 million drug arrests last year; tens of billions of taxpayer dollars expended annually to fund a drug war that 76% of Americans say has failed; millions now marked for life as former drug felons; many thousands dying each year from drug overdoses that have more to do with prohibitionist policies than the drugs themselves, and tens of thousands more needlessly infected with AIDS and Hepatitis C because those same policies undermine and block responsible public-health policies.

The obvious objection to this cost-benefit analysis is that it’s a cost-benefit analysis: If a behavior is wrong, it’s wrong regardless of the challenges of prevention. But it’s difficult to argue against a behavior when its attendant problems, the ones that make it seem wrong, are already covered by laws against larceny, child neglect or abuse, domestic violence, and so forth.

Nevertheless, a liberatarian argument for the legalization of, for example, heroin, however persuasive philosophically, is bound to run into trouble with the public. Best for the time being to stick with softer drugs—that is, those which do not produce physical dependency, or death from overdose. Alcohol, which is already legal, can convincingly be grouped with hard drugs. So why doesn’t it seem like one?

The real distinction should be clear to anyone with the intellect of a barnacle. There are substances thought throughout history to produce conversation and camaraderie, and those known to result in nothing but stupefaction. We associate alcohol with speakeasies and flappers and, forgive me, literary types, marijuana with noisy dorms and babbling philosophy majors, and heroin with human amoebas crapping themselves in doorways. One is useful, in its own way; one is relatively harmless; one is patently destructive. It seems to me this might be a better guide to legislation, which is concerned to some degree with social cohesion, than all the medical knowledge in the world.

The Deipnosophistae of Athanaeus, an ancient Greece compilation of gastronomic lore, quotes a certain Astydamas thusly: “If someone constantly fills himself with wine, he grows/ careless; but if he drinks only a little, he grows quite thoughtful.” We’ve all seen this in practice, but it isn’t just the moderation that counts—it’s the substance being abused. Some things just aren’t fit for human consumption, and you will know them by their works: William S. Burroughs, Sid Vicious, and countless other sleepy mediocrities. Bartlett’s is full of the wisdom of wine—less so of weed, I suppose—but I can’t think of too many junkies, crackheads, or speed freaks who had anything memorable to say.

The softest drugs, by my definition, are not only great looseners of tongues but also great equalizers: They keep us humble and remind us that we’re human beings, prone to doing and saying foolish, though not necessarily terrible, things. The opposite of pride is shame, not humility, and the small dose of shame that intoxication yields is more of an inoculation than a poison, if “enjoyed responsibly,” as the saying goes. No wonder the teetotalers are so often megalomaniacs. They wage war not against social ills but against the freedom to acknowledge the fact that we are, in the final analysis, at least as small and absurd as we seem to be.

The post Void Where Prohibited: 75 Years of Legalized Hooch appeared first on Jewcy.

I won’t pretend that Anderson’s debut hit me like a fabulous yellow lightning bolt from the clear blue. Nor did I catch its dutiful homage to Catcher in the Rye in the person of Anthony Adams’s precocious younger sister, Grace; it didn’t dawn on me until Anderson reincarnated Salinger’s Glass family in The Royal Tenenbaums.

But what did Anderson’s delightful protagonists Anthony and Dignan have in common with the joyless solipsism of Holden Caulfield, patron saint of misfits and assassins, anyway? It was an allusion in name only. Here’s a spoiler-free synopsis for those fortunate to be able to take Mr. Anderson’s Wild Ride for the first time. The movie opens with Anthony (Luke Wilson) “escaping,” with the help of his friend Dignan (Owen Wilson), from a voluntary mental health clinic. As Anthony later tells his sister, “It wasn’t an insane asylum, Grace. I explained to you back then that it was for exhaustion.” Grace: “You haven’t worked a day in your life. How could you be exhausted?” A bit close to home for a guy who had literally worked a day in his life, but that did nothing if not draw me in further.

Dignan presents Anthony with a “75-Year Plan” toward becoming master criminals, suburban Goldfingers woefully short on diabolical schemes. After recruiting a driver, Bob Mapplethorpe (Robert Musgrave), they pull off a minor theft and go on the lam. “On the run from Johnny Law,” Dignan says portentously. “Ain’t no trip to Cleveland.” This kind of dialogue, always in Dignan’s mouth, is Bottle Rocket’s real spark, and crime lit lovers will think of Sam Spade’s line in The Maltese Falcon: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” Once you’ve seen Bottle Rocket a few times, it takes incredible self-control not to tell your pals to “rendezvous at the checkpoint” whenever you’re meeting up for beers.

It isn’t Anthony’s love affair with a Paraguayan housekeeper but the gang’s Big Heist at the behest of master criminal Mr. Henry (James Caan) that is Bottle Rocket’s emotional centerpiece. It’s the culmination of a will to escape the pull of boredom at all costs. Earlier, explaining his nervous breakdown, Anthony delivers one of the movie’s most quotable lines: “One morning, over at Elizabeth’s beach house, she asked me if I’d rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer that question, but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again, for the rest of my life.” Necessitas non habet legem, and neither, if Anthony and Dignan’s examples are to be trusted, does boredom.

Thus does one of the film’s most minor character become it’s most illustrative one. I mean Bob Mapplethorpe’s sadistic older brother “Future Man” (Andrew Wilson), an avatar of popped-collar douchebaggery such as the world of martinis and Clams Casino has never known. His moniker must be an inside joke among the three brothers Wilson, but it’s suggestive in any case: This is what you run the risk of becoming if you lose your sense of adventure and of the sublimely ridiculous. Rushmore’s Magnus Buchan is a version of this character, someone who lacks the courage or imagination to be anything but a dull brute. Both get their comeuppance and their redemption; as Magnus tells Max Fischer, “I always wanted to be in one of your fuckin’ plays.”

So where did Anderson lose the plot? In the March 2000 issue of Esquire, Martin Scorcese called Dignan “an innocent,” though of course “not in the eyes of the law.” He doesn’t go so far as to say that this special kind of innocence exists only at the movies. Nobody could behave in real life as Anthony and Dignan do without being painfully aware of his protected status as a “dreamer,” which is to say, without being the polar opposite of a dreamer—a cynic.

Bottle Rocket seems to have taught Wes Anderson that there is a market for mannered whimsy, an audience that wants the blueprints for Dignan’s sweet cluelessness, so it can be told, “I could never stay mad at you.” Anderson’s imagination, once working full-bore against boredom, now struggles to fill an insatiable demand for emotional pornography. The most painful thing about Criterion’s new Bottle Rocket is that it includes the black-and-white short on which the movie is based—thirteen minutes that show, like fellow Austinite Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker, what kind of entertainment can be made out of the right kind of boredom.

The post The War on Boredom: “Bottle Rocket” on DVD appeared first on Jewcy.

As I’ve written previously, I support gay marriage. It would be dishonest to claim that I have much of an emotional investment in it, though; I didn’t wail or gnash my teeth when Prop 8 was defeated on the California ballot. I was disappointed, because the vote meant that a majority of my fellow Californians had not been persuaded by what I think are eminently reasonable arguments. What I did not think, despite the best efforts of the gay marriage lobby, is: I am surrounded by rabid hatemongers.

Americans are a notoriously impatient people. Consider the argument that gay marriage will take us down the slippery slope to polygamy. By implication, polygamy is so strange, so alien, that even the most fearful conservatives acknowledge it’s a long way off. Does this make any sense? There is far more historical, not to mention biblical, precedent for polygamy. Gay marriage is the truly alien concept; it does the movement no good to pretend otherwise. It stands to reason that millennia of taboo and discomfort do not vanish overnight because you waved a “NO ON H8” banner in the Castro. And yet, as any right-thinking person knows, the culprit must be hate!

I’m not convinced, partly because in the absence of any emotional response to the issue I took some time to come around to the pro-marriage side of things. I saw marriage as one of two things: the sanctification of a relationship before God, in which case the state has nothing whatsoever to do with it, or a completely secular practice designed to encourage social cohesion by providing for the welfare of children, as well as of one or both partners. In that case, then why not vote for more social cohesion?

I was surprised when I learned, belatedly, that in California homosexuals can already enjoy, under the name “civil union,” the same financial and social benefits that accrue to other married couples. It really is all about a word! And as a person who cares about language—I object, for instance, to the substitution of “right” for “privilege” in discourse about health care—I can understand the complaint. Why should it be implied by a word that heterosexual marriage is more meaningful than homosexual union?

It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t be implied that any union effected by the state means anything other than tax breaks, inheritance rights, hospital visitation privileges, heath care, and so forth. If it’s sanctification you want, find a church, or get a flute and some incense and play dress-up on your own time—whether you’re gay or straight.

The trouble is that voters who oppose gay marriage on such dispassionate grounds will still be branded bigots. And they won’t like it. And they’ll cast protest votes against gay marriage, because they don’t like to be called monsters on the grounds that they make decisions based on logic rather than emotion, or faith rather than logic, or—take your pick, they don’t like to be called monsters at all.

The prevailing attitude among gay marriage supporters seems to be that if it doesn’t actively bother you, you’re obligated to go along with it, whether or not you think it’s philosophically defensible. Justice used to be blind; now it’s meant to be “chill.” If you have lingering doubts, legal, practical, religious, or otherwise, about something that’s been verboten since the dawn of man, you are an asshole or an idiot, end of story. Here’s a little tip for the gay marriage lobby: Calling people assholes and idiots never persauded them of anything. As an old question has it, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to win?”

The post Propped Up: How Not to Support Gay Marriage appeared first on Jewcy.

Here’s a short list, in no particular order, of items used to bring the pain in Quantum of Solace: sewing scissors, crude oil, broken glass, a motorcycle, a telephone, hydrogen fuel cells, a speedboat, an airplane, a long drop, a fire axe, a Bolivian desert, an icy stare. (When Shakespeare wrote of "a killing frost," did he have Daniel Craig’s Bond in mind?) These are infinitely preferable to the gadgets of yesteryear, because they only look like weapons to someone with a killer instinct.

This is not to say that Quantum of Solace is disturbing. It’s an obscene amount of fun. Like the previous Bond films, it appeals to the ten-year-old boy in you, even if you happen to be a girl; unlike those films, with the exception of Casino Royale (2006), it also reassures you that you’re a grown-up, even as you gasp credulously while Bond parachutes into a sinkhole from a burning airplane. The plot involves destabilizing governments and seizing natural resources, just like real life! It also revolves around revenge, a far more grown-up source of narrative propulsion than, say, an improbably named bad guy pointing an improbably named missile at a certain tiny island nation.

Where Casino Royale, in which Bond loses his beloved Vesper Lynd, was a How the Leopard Got His Spots (or, in this case, Naughts) story, Quantum of Solace just shows him doing what leopards do best. "If you could avoid killing every possible lead," M tells him, "it would be deeply appreciated." Alas, she’s just not much of an animal trainer, and Bond’s fury sends him ranging hungrily over the globe.

The film begins in Siena, picking up roughly where Casino Royale left off, with M and Bond discovering an evil organization called Quantum that has infiltrated the highest levels of government. They discover this when M’s personal assistant tries to shoot them. There follows a cracking good rooftop chase, broken tiles flying everywhere, intercut with shots of Siena’s famous horse race Il Palio. From there Bond goes to Haiti, England, Austria, Bolivia-don’t quote me on the order, because it’s all a jumble of blunt trauma, explosions, and cell phone calls. All you need to know is that Quantum, and the late Vesper’s Algerian boyfriend, had something to do with Vesper’s death.

There’s an evil environmentalist-I liked that part-named Dominic Greene, played with lubricious, bug-eyed creepiness by the Frenchman Mathieu Amalric. He dresses and looks like Michel Houellebecq on a tropical sex holiday, but is credibly frightening when he tells a Bolivian dictator that non-compliance will mean waking up with his cojones in his mouth. The Bond Girl, Camille (Olga Kurylenko), wants to make that threat a reality, because the dictator killed her entire family and burned down her house in front of her. Why did he leave her alive? Isn’t that the biggest no-no when killing an entire family? If I had to guess, I’d say it was for the sake of the plot.

"Bond had a sharp sense of ridiculous," Ian Fleming informs us in the short story "Quantum of Solace." The same cannot be said of Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade, the writers of this film, and for that we ought to be grateful. The negative reactions to Quantum of Solace have been curiously at odds with each other, with some critics calling it "boring," "dour," "lacking in emotional depth," or a Jason Bourne knockoff, and others complaining, in effect, that it isn’t boring or dour enough-that it should have been a rumination on revenge rather than a relentlessly violent depiction of it.

Rubbish. It gives real fans exactly what they want: ludicrous adventure leavened with a speck of plot and a vanishingly tiny dash of honest feeling. If you want a rumination on revenge, read "Quantum of Solace," which bears no relation to the movie and consists entirely of a story told to Bond about a cuckolded husband. The title is his interlocutor’s term for the modicum of "common humanity" that, once lost in either partner, makes the dissolution of a relationship, and the incredible emotional violence that can accompany it, all but inevitable:

Bond laughed. Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow. The affair of the Castro rebels and the burned-out yachts was the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper. He had sat next to a dull woman at a dull dinner party and a chance remark had opened for him the book of real violence-of the comédie humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by governments.

All very sensitive, very moving. Now aren’t you relieved that Quantum of Solace didn’t bother about that stuff? Once you’ve seen the affair of the burned-out yachts on the big screen, I think you’ll agree that the comédie humaine is just a little bit overrated.

The post Am Embarrassment of Stitches: “Quantum of Solace” Reviewed appeared first on Jewcy.

One advertises Herbalife, a weight-loss program pushed, like Ginsu cutlery, through multi-level or "network" marketing. The other promises that I can "lose 2-8 pounds per week." The contact name and number are identical: This is Vanessa’s home business. If only she’d noticed the decals, bumper stickers, and license plate frames on most of these cars: "Marathon Freak," "26.2," "Runner Girl," "Running Is My Prozac," and "Western States 100 Mile Endurance Challenge." These are not people greatly in need of weight-loss nostrums. I could use that, I think, my thoughts returning to the Crockpot back at my apartment, in which a four-pound pork shoulder is cooking. I’m one of a few people at the Lake Chabot Marina, the starting point of the Dick Collins Firetrails 50, not there in an athletic capacity. I have no interest in running fifty miles. I have a vested interest in not running any miles. I’m merely the hungry, exhausted, and woefully hung-over chauffeur of rookie ultramarathoner Sarah C. Murray, who strives daily to put the loco in locomotion.

At 6:30 AM I escorted her in complete darkness to the starting line. A surprise to see someone report so cheerfully to a torture chamber.

The gloom was punctuated here and there by headlamps like will-o-wisps. The mood at the registration table, at this hour the only oasis of light in the park, was a kind of mocking inversion of my own. I hadn’t made time to shower, despite not having managed to sleep, either. Yet here was a flock of merry and chattering loons eager to take wing. Everywhere I looked, a pair of striated legs was being stretched out in elaborate and unpleasant-looking ways. One man appeared to be rubbing IcyHot into his thighs; it turned out to be Vaseline, to prevent chafing.

An alien language was spoken here: "Not plantar fasciitis, I hope?"; "You’ve done three ultras in two months?"; "I trashed my patella"; "Did my first 100 in September." CamelBaks and bottled-water holsters were strapped on like armor before a battle. I dreamed of a Camel Light and a bottle of something high-proof to usher me back to slumberland. Put plainly, I loathed these people. They didn’t register how cold it was, how pointless this was, how much happier they’d be in bed-even were that bed the back of a Jeep. Had I not known better, I might have supposed that they wanted to run fifty miserable miles.

I felt myself forming a philosophical objection to the ultramarathon, a term referring to any race longer than 26.2 miles. Some people accept mortality, embracing and, where possible, encouraging bodily limitations. Tempus fugit, as someone wise once observed: The paunch is coming, the double and treble chins, the thunder thighs, the muffin top. To this species of chronological determinism, the ultramarathoner says, no thanks. Ego fugit. Let time catch up with me. And it’s pure hubris.

As a consequence, most ultramarathoners look like the Visible Man science model: bones, muscle, and a pair of eyes to remind you that this was once a human being. Ms. Murray is not among their number. Despite running between seven and twenty miles a day, she pays no special attention to nutrition. Her fuel inheres in beer, soup, and pretzels, a diet fit for hobos and endurance athletes alike. She keeps pace with her metabolism. She looks normal. Appearances can be deceiving.

I’ve rehearsed Latin aphorisms and Greek concepts, and this is no coincidence. Ms. Murray is not only a running fanatic who won her first marathon (Death Valley, 2007), but also a classicist and archaeologist (pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford University). She’s been to Marathon, where a statue of Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee, commemorates the first marathon-as well as the New Balance sneaker company, which commissioned the statue. She runs, coincidentally, in New Balance, women’s size 9.5.

Greece inspired her first fifty-mile run, but not because of the feat attested in Plutarch and Herodotus. It was a sixty-kilometer (roughly forty-mile) walk from Korphos, on the eastern Peloponnese, to Mycenae, during which she discovered a Bronze Age site, that sealed the deal. "If I could walk it," she recalls thinking, "I could run it faster." There are echoes in this straightforward act of will of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the British travel writer who walked across Europe in his youth-a trip chronicled in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water-and went on to write two stunning books about Greece, Roumeli and Mani.

I’m not thinking of any of this as I sleep fitfully in the Jeep, then decide to scout a patch of grass in Chabot Park. In forty-eight hours, I’ve barely slept. Because Ms. Murray is a graduate student and I’m a freelance writer-an "ink-stained wretch," in George Orwell’s memorable phrase-we keep different schedules, and I didn’t manage to adjust my 4:30 AM bedtime in time for the race. It is with mild annoyance that I approach the marina café five hours into the race, order a cheeseburger, and plant myself on a deck with views of both algae-choked Lake Chabot and the red digital clock recording the runners’ final times.

It’s the finest cheeseburger I’ve ever eaten. It renews my commitment to sloth and gluttony. Smothered in onions, pickles, and molten cheese, snug in a nest of potato chips, it reminds me that there are two sources of pleasure in this world: the thing that feels so good when you stop, and the thing that goes on feeling good until you decide to stop. I will always be a fervent devotee of the latter.

But I cannot stifle the awe in which I hold those who choose the former. A little while after the six-hour mark, men begin to attain the finish line. Some have water bottles velcroed to their hands. All have legs chiseled into athletic history. I have something in common with these guys: I too am chiseled from marble. In my case, in the shape of a slob who eats cheeseburgers for breakfast.

Men and women, from the young to the very old, trickle into a victory chute marked off with orange traffic cones. Every flurry of applause yanks my gaze from the book I’m reading without much interest, but there is no Sarah Murray. I perform calculations, first with my cellphone and then, when its battery dies, with my brain. (My iPod, which I’d been using as a stopwatch, has long since crapped out.) What would her mile pace need to be to finish at seven hours? At seven-fifteen? At seven-forty-five? At eight? I watch an old woman remark a skywriter, a bird, a lesbian couple holding hands. I snort when another woman approvingly points out a "Google Bear," left in a stroller, to her daughter. I watch a young boy try to climb the fence surrounding Lake Chabot, to retrieve an escaped soccer ball. He changes his mind; he goes to fetch an adult. "Sissy," I think.

Still no Sarah. I feel concern, then anger. How could she get herself into this? How could she try to run fifty miles without eating a decent meal the night before? Without a hearty, or any, breakfast? Without water? Why doesn’t she have high-tech sweat-wicking apparel like the other runners? I contemplate disaster scenarios: Would anybody stop if a runner collapsed of heat exhaustion, dehydration, or hyponatremia? Running fifty miles isn’t just stupid; it’s dangerous. Too little sodium in the blood can kill you. I begin to wonder if she’s given this possibility the thought it deserves.

I maintain calm, and eventually she appears on the paved track. Most of the Firetrails 50 takes place, as its name suggests, on trails-the middle portion of the altitude profile looks suggestively like devil horns-but the first and last stretches are on asphalt. She’s been beaten by dozens of runners, but she’s alive. Her face is so caked with salt that it looks like she’s wearing a Phantom of the Opera mask. She throws the goat as she passes the finish line, at 8:57:06.

But, as usual, I’ve misjudged the situation. Someone’s handing her a tote bag and a bottle of wine. I understand my mistake: an ordinary marathon, which started later in the day, has been feeding the same finish line. The middle-aged women and senior citizens who’ve been "beating" Sarah for the past two hours aren’t even part of her race. She is, in fact, first in her (21-29) age group, first among women who’ve never run a fifty-mile race before, and fifth among women overall. ("Rookie" appears next to her #169 on the results board, a funny term for someone who can run a greater distance than most people drive without whining about it.) She is thirty-third overall, including men of any age. As usual, she has swung for the fences and crushed it.

"Some girl had a pacer running with her," she says, "so that she could win the rookie title. I had to beat her." She isn’t howling or vomiting or cursing God. She’s eager to be driven-my role, as you recall-to a Classics cookout, where our friends have been drinking Anchor Steam and playing leisurely games of badminton for the past few hours. Is she in terrible pain? She gestures guiltily to a fanny-pack full of Ibuprofen, salt pills, and NoDoz. It turns out she’s been listening to Classics lectures on her iPod so as "not to get bored." Most runners would fret about the postage-stamp-weight of the device. She washes her face in a drinking fountain, and we walk to the Jeep.

The Bear Flag of the California Republic flaps and flutters above the golden hills of Chabot Lake Park. "There were llamas," she informs me. "There were cows looking at us, like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’" I feel a bit bovine myself. "The aid stations were good, though." The aid stations, according to the Firetrails 50 website, had "water, GU 2 0 Hydration drink, Gu, Coke, Sprite, ice, fruit, homemade baked cookies, hard candy, potatoes, P.B. & J sandwiches, pretzels, Succeed Caps, crackers, potato chips, salt, wonderful volunteers, etc."

No pulled pork.

Returning home through the Castro Valley, we pass a sign for the candidacy (I don’t catch the office) of one Hera Alikian. My thoughts return to Greece. Hera, as every classicist worth her salt pills knows, was symbolized by the cow and the peacock. I’m grateful that there’s room for both of us to roam the girdled earth, we ruminants who stand in awe, and the peacocks who can’t resist showing us up. All I ask, over a cioppino meant for two (not a bite of which is offered to me), is that we keep the hundred-miler off the table-but, then, that’s asking a peacock not to strut its stuff.

The post The Looniness of the Long-Distance Runner appeared first on Jewcy.

Allow me to explain. Yesterday, just before sitting down to read a Wall Street Journal piece by Mark Lilla entitled “The Perils of ‘Populist Chic,’” I opened a cube of ’Stones and bagged an elusive “Keystolope.” This, as I hope you’re unaware, is a limited edition orange can depicting a Keystone with antlers.

At first I thought I’d won something, and, in a sense, I had: a bright orange reminder that I have no money and must settle for low-quality goods. See, for me, Keystone isn’t about some kind of weird, condescending faux-populism, like the late great trucker hat, or Fred Thompson. It’s about twelve for eight dollars.

Well, now I’m going to have to shell out for the “good stuff.” You know: Arpeggiator Magic Glockenspiel Doppelbock. Tipsy Terrapin Summer Breeze Hefeweizen. The elitist stuff. (Elitists don’t mind the expense, by the way, because they enjoy it responsibly. You know you’re hanging with an elitist of an evening because he buys a six-pack and means for you to split it. A populist buys a thirty-pack and throws in a fifth of Ancient Age “just in case.”)

But I don’t want to be a populist anymore. I don’t even want to be mistaken for one. And “good” beer is just the beginning. Now instead of girding my guts with pulled pork before hitting Antonio’s Nut House, I’ll be carbo-loading on edamame (no salt, please!) before hitting my Bikram yoga class. And I’ll get there on a bike. And I might even turn off the lights and television before leaving the house.

All because of Sarah.

I wanted so badly to like her. I do like her, I suppose. She is fundamentally good in a way that one might have expected to ensure her some regard or at least civility from the media and general public. I don’t mean kid gloves. I never bought the arguments for her suitability for the presidency, but I was unswayed by the feigned conviction that McCain was likely to croak in office. The nation’s insurance actuaries turn their lonely eyes to those brief few weeks when people cared about what they do.

She was fearless and unashamed, and, though this may be the writer in me talking, she was interesting. She had a story, and a personality, and a pioneer spirit. She was both fierce—dread moose-bane—and profoundly maternal. I had hoped that her principles and personality would be admired even by those who don’t share them. You read that right: who don’t share her principles and who don’t possess anything close to her spark and vigor. The outstanding Tina Fey has more in common with Palin than she does with most of her own female admirers. No wonder it was a perfect match.

Now for the bad news. She really was, as Lilla argues in his essay, both ignorant and provincial. Those flaws can be mended by learning and travel. I’m not among those who imagine that Palin is downright stupid; truly stupid people do not generally give widely-praised speeches or debate U.S. senators. But you wouldn’t pick a very smart layman to engineer a bridge with the expectation that he learn on the job.

All this has been said, and I had no problem with those who said it. I had a problem with their saying it without a modicum of class or mitigating kindness—in short, with their being so elitist about it. I’ll always remember Charlie Gibson looking, as Charles Krauthammer put it, “down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain” at Palin, like an anthropomorphic New York Times.

But forget I said so, because I’m going elitist. I’ve long considered myself a populist because I respect and value the people who do¬ and produce in American society, and I assume that their abilities lend them insight into the workings of the world. (I also assume that a great number of them are book-smart as well, like the WSJ-loving trucker in John McPhee’s Uncommon Carriers.) This may be the case, but I would be no populist at all if I didn’t give a serious hearing to the wishes of Just Folks.

Just Folks have spoken, and it turns out they sounds a lot like Charlie Gibson. They hate Palin just as much as the NPR crowd does. They’ve grown weary of outreach that takes the form of candidates they’d like to have a beer with. Maybe, in fact, they’d like to have a beer with someone smarter than they are—maybe they want to learn something. I’d ask them myself if I hadn’t just decided to stop caring what they think.

It’s hard not to feel chastened by Lilla’s words:

Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward.

All true. And if there’s got to be an annoying, condescending, belittling elite, it might as well be a conservative one, right?  

The post Misoverestimating Palin appeared first on Jewcy.

Remind you of anything? The presidential candidates between whom we just chose are, as even my most liberal friends freely admit, similar in important respects. Both men spoke frequently of “change,” though only one’s followers reduced it to a creepy mantra, less David Bowie than Spahn Ranch. Both argued for clean energy, Obama tilting at windmills and hybrid cars, McCain asking us to accept the powerful and much-maligned technology already at our disposal. Both sought to address the financial crisis by pouring tax dollars into it.

The differences in their prescribed means were significant but technical, and I hope I won’t sound terribly “elitist” if I speculate that many voters focused on the ends and made their choice on the basis of another factor: marketing strategy. Coca-Cola and Pepsi are made with different “secret formulas,” comprehensible only to chemists, but they end up tasting similar to the casual consumer. Americans are not casual consumers, however, and the ad campaign is all.

What are ad campaigns about if not which of two similar things is cooler? John “Mac Is Back” McCain is undeniably the PC to Barack “Politically Correct” Obama’s Mac. Both function most of the time, crash occasionally, and seem “cool” to radically different demographics. That Obama’s brand of cool has so completely outstripped McCain’s is, at the risk of sounding fuddy-duddyish, worrying.

A friend of mine put the dichotomy well: “I’ve got to say that ‘congressional law professor’ has a better ring to it than ‘shot down five times.’”

No, not to these ears. The corollary of having been shot down five times is having climbed into a ground-attack aircraft five times, despite the risk that, with apologies to Randall Jarrell, you will be washed out of it with a hose. Then there’s the unpleasant matter of what happens when you crash alive behind enemy lines—we’ve heard all about that, though many found it unworthy of consideration—and how you comport yourself in captivity.

Combat vets may snicker at McCain’s “incompetence,” but the rest of us ought to keep in mind that we’d probably pick the toughest law school over a hail of anti-aircraft rounds. As Evan Wright memorably wrote in Generation Kill, “In my civilian world . . . half the people I know are on anti-depressants or anti-panic attack drugs because they can’t handle the stress of a mean boss or a crowd at the 7-Eleven.”

This is not at all to disparage Obama’s impressive educational background, only to argue that courage, honor, and self-sacrifice remain more impressive than educational credentials. The former, by the way, played a large part in John F. Kennedy’s brand of cool, but how much of the “youth vote” has seen PT 109? Obama has a few things in common with JFK. (How much of the “youth vote” knows that Frank Sinatra sang about “High Hopes” for Kennedy’s 1960 campaign? At least that had the audacity of a melody—change you can hum, you might say.) The traits that spring to mind are suavity, a silver tongue, a 10-gigawatt smile, and, yes, credentials.

How did Americans do a 180 on what they find admirable? I place the blame on the marketing geniuses hiding in plain sight: the media. Writers and commentators have aggressively devalued what they either aren’t capable of or can’t demonstrate: courage in extremis. Dissent is patriotic because it’s what we laptop jockeys can pull off without any real risk; risking life and limb can be reduced with a rhetorical flourish to “getting shot down five times.” I have harsh words, too, for those conservative pundits who fawn over the troops or “define torture down” solely because they think it makes them sound tough—if they only knew how transparent that strategy is! Then again, at least it shows that they respect toughness.

It would have been a simple matter to say one prefers Barack Obama but respects John McCain’s bravery and service. But it was difficult to say how many of Obama’s supporters did respect McCain’s bravery and service. N+1’s Mark Greif claimed that the “core conceit” of the GOP convention was that “McCain is already dead,” when in fact its core message was that he’d survived an unthinkable ordeal. Many others pretended to ponder why being tortured was a qualification, shutting their minds to the inconvenient fact of McCain’s superhuman loyalty to his fellow prisoners.

Of course: They knew they wouldn’t have been capable of it. “Just as heroism differs in subtle ways from celebrity,” Lasch wrote, “so hero worship, which esteems the hero’s actions and hopes to emulate them or at least to prove worthy of his example, must be distinguished from narcissistic idealization.” Coolness is no longer a function of what you can scarcely imagine being. It’s an outsize version of what you think you already are.

The post Rebirth of the Cool appeared first on Jewcy.

When I saw that it was you, I was shocked. We don’t correspond, and have only hung out once or twice, with our mutual acquaintance. I may be mistaken—asking you directly would be far too “awks”—but I suspect it’s political. I haven’t set my middle name to “Hussein” or posted YouTube videos of Sarah Palin look-alikes being sexually assaulted by moose. Most imprudently, I’ve included in my profile a link to my website, a roiling, mephitic cesspit of hate speech and, uh, food blogging.

If I’m mistaken, I apologize—but I don’t think I am, and what I have to say holds true in any event.

We were promised that Barack Obama would lead us out of the prehistoric wilderness of “partisan politics.” What I’ve seen instead, largely from Obama supporters, is a great deal of disrespect for the opposing camp. That on its own doesn’t bother me. I happen to believe that “partisan politics,” presumably whiner’s code for “partisan rancor,” are what a two-party system demands. No, what I find galling, and disappointing, is the incuriosity of the typical Obama voter.

“Incurious” is a word that has stuck to Sarah Palin like a Homeric epithet, partly because she didn’t have a passport until recently. (Here’s a paradox: The college students sneering at this revelation, the ones with colorful passport stamps from their Wanderjahrs in Bangladesh and Kenya, are the ones shouting loudest that America is in the toilet. Didn’t they learn anything? Perhaps travel’s overrated.) Of course, being curious about “the outside world”—say, having one’s picture taken next to someone in charming local costume—does not mean one is curious about individuals.

When someone like you figures out that I’m voting for John McCain, he instantly knows everything about me. He knows that I yearn for endless war, smog-choked skies, keeping condoms out of Africa, keeping condoms out of America, drowning the poor, raising poultry Bonsai Kitten-style, forcing gays to wear identifying pieces of flair, and abolishing abortion so that unwanted children can be raised in secret CIA janissaries. All this without asking a single question!

Those rare Obama-voting friends who take the time to interrogate me—in a friendly way, I mean, not tied to a chair beneath a hot lamp—find out a few unexpected things:

I voted for Obama in the California primary because I believed at the time that he would make a better president than Hillary Clinton. I don’t uncritically admire McCain, but I’m unmoved by entreaties to vote for a candidate with whom I disagree on so much just because he’s more charismatic and runs a superior campaign. I find Sarah Palin remarkable, appealing, and unqualified. You can’t have it all.

I am not a registered Republican. My vote has nothing to do with party ties. I would have loved that rarest thing, a serious third-party candidate.

I value the environment and clean energy, which is why McCain’s support for nuclear power is so important to me.

I’m not against the poor. I am the poor. I owed no income tax last year, and under Obama’s economic plan would receive a check, funny money he has rather cunningly termed a “tax cut.” This would be no different than Bush’s Economic Stimulus Package, which was also putting a Band-Aid on a brain hemorrhage. Has everyone forgotten that Michelle Obama herself ridiculed that plan thusly: “You’re getting $600—what can you do with that? . . . The short-term quick fix kinda stuff sounds good, and it may even feel good that first month when you get that check, and then you go out and you buy a pair of earrings.” Truer words, etc. I am the poor, and I say keep your charity.

In California I voted against animal confinement and factory farms. It’s a small thing, but it may earn me some sympathy from those readers who have hitherto assumed I shoot puppies for sport.  

Last but not least, because it’s especially relevant to you, I voted to keep gay marriage legal in California. The people who oppose it get married in churches, anyway; they have no business complaining until the government attempts to legislate their religious beliefs as well. As for that “message” gay marriage allegedly sends to children: There’s no law stopping parents from criticizing what they find distasteful in society. In fact, it’s their job.

See? I’m not some party automaton. I don’t hate Obama supporters, though I dislike their religious intensity. I don’t hate Obama, either; I just think he’s a standard-issue Democratic politician, full of good intentions and bad ideas. Why are so few of my friends willing to discuss this with me? Why are Obama’s supporters content to assume that McCain’s are either evil, stupid, or mentally ill? It puts me in mind of what the title character of Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing said about women:

They don’t mean what they say, they don’t use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that’s the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing’s supposed to be about.

Perhaps not true of women as a group, but forgive me if I say it applies nicely to more than a few of my Facebook friends. I wish you weren’t one of them—but, then again, I guess you aren’t.

The post An Open Letter to the Guy Who Defriended Me Over McCain–Palin appeared first on Jewcy.