Dear Friends, Due to unfortunate considerations of time and cost, Backwards City is no longer a print journal. However, we will maintain our presence on the web that, however meager, we hope you might enjoy.
To be honest I was sort of underwhelmed by this year's Best American Short Stories anthology as well. The stories weren't bad, merely generic, and I found myself doing a lot of page-flipping. Worse, the stories that stuck with me the most were ones from well-known authors writing in the New Yorker: Tobias Wolff and Aleksander Hemon.
Mini-majors like Picturehouse, Focus Features (owned by NBC Universal), Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics and Warner Independent are where most of the genuine energy and excitement in Hollywood is found these days. These companies operate without interference from studio overlords, for the most part, and they're run by people who know and love movies. They also obviously benefit from the deep pockets and business clout of their corporate parents, and they have resources that smaller, free-standing distributors like First Run (or Zeitgeist or New Yorker or Palm Pictures or THINKFilm or a dozen smaller companies I could name) can only dream about. Mauceri argues that the mini-majors and their films, including "Little Miss Sunshine" and "An Inconvenient Truth," should be viewed, at least in business terms, as "a side strategy of the Hollywood conglomerates. Those companies are able to take out half-page, full-color ads in the New York Times," he goes on. "That's not an independent film. That's not the business I work in. You might as well say that 'Flags of Our Fathers' and 'Apocalypto' are independent films."
The options before us appear to fall into four broad categories:
1. Self-destruction. Immolation or desolation or mass-death. Or ecological suicide. Or social collapse. Name your favorite poison. Followed by a long era when our few successors (if any) look back upon us with envy. For a wonderfully depressing and informative look at this option, see Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (Note that Diamond restricts himself to ecological disasters that resonate with civilization-failures of the past; thus he only touches on the range of possible catastrophe modes.)
We are used to imagining self-destruction happening as a result of mistakes by ruling elites. But in this article we have explored how it also could happen if society enters an age of universal democratization of the means of destruction — or, as Thomas Friedman puts it, "the super-empowerment of the angry young man" — without accompanying advances in social maturity and general wisdom.
2. Achieve some form of "Positive Singularity" — or at least a phase shift to a higher and more knowledgeable society (one that may have problems of its own that we can't imagine.) Positive singularities would, in general, offer normal human beings every opportunity to participate in spectacular advances, experiencing voluntary, dramatic self-improvement, without anything being compulsory… or too much of a betrayal to the core values of decency we share.
3. Then there is the "Negative Singularity" — a version of self-destruction in which a skyrocket of technological progress does occur, but in ways that members of our generation would find unpalatable. Specific scenarios that fall into this category might include being abused by new, super-intelligent successors (as in Terminator or The Matrix), or simply being "left behind" by super entities that pat us on the head and move on to great things that we can never understand.
Even the softest and most benign version of such a "Negative Singularity" is perceived as loathsome by some perceptive renunciators, like Bill Joy, who take a dour view of the prospect that humans may become a less-than-pinnacle form of life on Planet Earth.
4. Finally, there is the ultimate outcome that is implicit in every renunciation scenario: Retreat into some more traditional form of human society, like those that maintained static sameness under pyramidal hierarchies of control for at least four millennia. One that quashes the technologies that might lead to results 1 or 2 or 3. With four thousand years of experience at this process, hyper-conservative hierarchies could probably manage this agreeable task, if we give them the power. That is, they could do it for a while.
I can't decide whether or not I like the first season of Showtime's Sopranos knock-off, Brotherhood. On the one hand the show owes so much of its basic plot and cinematic structure to David Chase that I have trouble evaluating it on its own terms. On the other hand, as the season went on I found myself becoming frustrated with the show for reasons which had nothing to do with Tony Soprano, which I suppose is a good thing.
On still another hand, after a few episodes I found myself quite invested in the characters, and in particular in the show's primary area of thematic independence, its political corruption storyline. There's no doubt the series is easily worth a rental.
What's most surprising of all is just how little press the show has gotten. Why so little love?
Back in the seventies, when people marched into the world with convictions about changing it, burnout was considered a noble affliction. It meant that you’d depleted yourself while helping others. Almost all the research that’d been done on the subject, and there’d been quite a lot, was on the people in the “caring professions”—nurses, public-school teachers, legal-aid workers, social workers, clergy. Because many of these people were idealists, and because they worked with the hardest-luck cases, they were highly susceptible to disillusionment. Those who burned out were not only physically and mentally exhausted; they were cynical, detached, convinced their efforts were worthless. They held themselves in contempt. Worse, they held their clients in contempt. They began to loathe the same people they originally sought to help. In her seminal book Burnout: The Cost of Caring, Christina Maslach, perhaps the best-known burnout researcher working in the United States today, collected plenty of vivid, unvarnished testimony. As one Florida social worker told her, “I recently received a call at night, and while I was getting dressed, I was screaming and cursing these motherfuckers for calling me with their goddamned problems.”
Today, in New York City, everyone knows that the ones “screaming and cursing these motherfuckers for calling me with their goddamned problems” are as likely to be hedge-fund managers as any species of do-gooders. Burnout is the illness of just about any averagely driven, obsessive New York professional. Bankers, high-tech workers, advertisers, management consultants, lawyers working in their mustard-lit honeycombed Hades—all of them are as likely to complain about burnout as schoolteachers and social workers. In 21st-century New York, the 60-hour week is considered normal. In some professions, it’s a status symbol. But burnout, for the most part, is considered a sign of weakness, a career killer. (via MeFi)
Saw Rocky Balboa tonight. And, the expected plausability issues aside, I actually sort of liked it. It isn't perfect in any respect—the inevitable fight scene in particular doesn't quite deliver, never really feeling brutal enough—but it's enjoyable enough to justify its own existence, whether or not (and honestly I'm not sure) it works as a capstone for the series as a whole.
In any event, I was surprised to like it as much as I did. Stallone went the distance.
The State of Delaware got two and a half hours of my life tonight. Traffic was backed up to Philadelphia, all so Delaware could bleed each passing car for $5. It's hard to think of anything that would improve quality of life in the Northeastern U.S. as immediately and costlessly as the abolition of the two Delaware toll plazas—but in the absence of this kind of rationality, here's Wikipedia's advice on how to dodge the tolls.
I couldn't find either "Soulful Christmas" or "Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto" on YouTube, so here it is, a now-bittersweet classic: "Living in America."
Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain. Also, birds are no longer migrating, flowers and trees are still blooming, worker bees aren't being allowed to retire, and absolutely none of this has anything to do with global warming. And Merry Christmas. Via MeFi.
UPDATE: Also in today's apocalypse—the first inhabited island has vanished beneath rising sea levels: Lohachara Island, once home to 10,000 people.
He made love like an eagle falling out of the sky; killed his sensei in a duel, and he never said why.Via Neil, a YouTube video saluting George Washington.NSFW, but you really shouldn't be working today anyway. It's Christmas.
Longtime readers know that I'm a fan of the Best American series; despite my reservations about a selection process that inevitably results in 6-10 pieces from the New Yorker every year, the volumes are generally good reads. Unfortunately, this year's Best American Essays, edited by Lauren Slater, is by far the worst edition of the series I've read. The essays themselves are generally decent; what's lacking is anything resembling variety. The chart above is no exaggeration: nearly every essay in the book is about dead pets, dead mothers, or dead mothers and their pets (also dead). A third of the way through the book, this pattern is evident; two-thirds of the way through, it's downright embarassing.
The stand-out essays are the few which escape the hegemony of dead things: Oliver Sacks's "Recalled to Life," Emily Bernard's "Teaching the N-Word," Peter Selgin's "Confessions of a Left-Handed Man." And, yes, to be fair, several of the dead-pets-and-or-moms essays are quite good too: David Rieff remembering his mother, Susan Sontag, for instance.
It's just that people wrote about other things last year. I'm certain of it.
'Professor Richard Dawkins Speaks at Fair Hills Kindergarten Regarding Santa Claus, December 2, 2006'
...My goal in all of this is that, as children, you should be raised only on truth, reason, fact, and intellect. Together we should be working toward a point in the not-so-distant future where the words "Santa Claus" or "Kris Kringle" or "Father Christmas" create the same response as fingernails on a chalkboard. There is nothing wrong with disbelief in Santa. I can see that the topic makes many of you uncomfortable. However, this should not be viewed as a bad thing. You may weep now, but your tears are a positive, not a negative. You are now facing the truth, which comes in many forms and is not always comfortable. This is a fact that you will be exposed to again and again throughout your lives. If you wish to live a life that contains only comfortable information and not necessarily the truth, then yours will be a highly deluded existence. Your intellectual maturity depends on whether or not you are capable of accepting the truth at this early age. That is why there is no better place to begin than with the absurdity that is Santa Claus and Christmas Magic. Now then, with all that said, I wish to thank you for your time today, and I should like very much to open up the floor to any questions you may have.
Apocalypto: Given the hype, I actually came away disappointed by the level of ultraviolence. Sure, it was bloody, but somehow I was expecting something more. Also, the entire movie is two hours of setup for a thirty-second visual punchline; you'll know it when you see it, and you can probably guess what it will be, merely from the historical context.
Maria Full of Grace: The drug-running movie. We just watched it. The general consensus (sample size: four) seemed to be that it was pretty decent, but not much happened. I would add that the early scenes in Colombia were much better than the scenes in America, and that in general the movie got less and less interesting the longer it went on.
Talladega Nights: Even with the subtitles on, I couldn't make heads or tails of this thing.
...for travel—which means posting will be very sporadic for a week or so, while Jaimee and I traverse the East Coast.
...for spontaneous end-of-the-year tax-deductible donations—to good causes, naturally.
...for my traditional yearly link to the definitive work of American Christmas lore—James Thurber's A Visit from Saint Nicholas (In the Ernest Hemingway Manner). It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren’t even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them...
It must be said that the young man, Shekar Ramanuja Sidarth, is not much of a cameraman. In the macaca footage, his hand shakes, though he manages to hold Allen in the frame as the senator points him out, an Indian-American in a crowd of whites. But in the weeks that follow, Sidarth does not shy from the spotlight that surrounds him. He undergoes a transformation of sorts, appearing on CNN and the network news, giving long interviews to the pen-and-paper press. He becomes a symbol of politics in the 21st century, a brave new world in which any video clip can be broadcast instantly everywhere and any 20-year-old with a camera can change the world. He builds a legacy out of happenstance.
Unacceptable dissertations are poorly written and full of errors and mistakes. They are distinguished by “not”—not original, not thoughtful, and not well done. Unacceptable dissertations do not have a good or clearly defined question or problem. They exhibit a poor grasp of the field and either do not use the proper methods or use them inappropriately. Unacceptable dissertations do not yield new or relevant results, and those they yield are often misinterpreted or oversold.
The participants agreed that students produce unacceptable dissertations for different reasons. Most, however, cannot master professional standards and do not have what it takes to be a researcher. Some should not have been admitted into a program in the first place or should have been stopped before advancing to candidacy. Others cannot handle a big project; they do not understand what needs to done. Many cannot or will not take their adviser’s advice or criticism into account and, consequently, produce one bad revision after another. Yet others are capable of producing acceptable dissertations but fail to do so because they have taken jobs or otherwise left the university and have not kept up with research in their area. The result is an unoriginal or out-of-date product. Some fail because they push for the defense even though their advisers have told them they were not ready to defend.
Many advisers simply wait for students whose work is unacceptable to get discouraged and leave instead of proactively terminating them. Some try to disassociate themselves from such students by sending “signals” or by telling them to find another adviser. Others use the defense to get rid of the student. In rare instances, when an unacceptable dissertation makes it to defense, dissertation committees often seek excuses to pass it. They will take into consideration such things as their feelings about the person rather than the objective document. In the end, most defer to the adviser, hold their noses, and vote to pass.
What the Hell is Going on Here? Where Is the Damn SWAT Team When You Need It?
In the New Yorker, Anthony Lane has a review this week of Hannibal Rising, the fourth book in Thomas Harris's increasingly bedraggled Hannibal Lecter series (I've never read any of them), which should probably be required reading for anyone who wants to work in genre.
Why did Harris pursue this line of inquiry? He has written one great Lecter book, “The Silence of the Lambs,” and two lesser ones, so why produce a fourth that is not merely the weakest but that makes you wonder if the others were so gripping after all? There is a puff of grand delusion here, of the sort to which all thriller-writers are susceptible. Compare “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” an early novel by George V. Higgins, with the bulky solemnities of his later work; or, for that matter, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” with more recent le Carré like “The Night Manager” or “The Constant Gardener.” At some point, each man started to hear that he was so much more than the master of a genre (as if that were an ignoble thing to be), and responded to such flattery by expanding his fiction beyond its confines, not realizing that what he felt as a restriction was in fact its natural shape.
* And it turns out soy makes you gay. But not soy sauce, because that's fermented. Fermenting removes the gayness from the molecular structure. That's science.
Though I still have a few hours of editing ahead of me. Let's say they're sort of done. I can live with that.
I'd like to thank the Dude and Robert Anton Wilson for providing me with the inner wisdom, strength, and intestinal fortitude I needed to get through these last two weeks—and of course, as always, Christopher Hitchens, being an idiot so I don't have to.
When I go to the zoo, I feel so sad. All those imprisoned animals sitting in their own feces. What do you suggest?
Animal Lover
Pasadena, Calif.
Dear Animal:
What I suggest is, stop going to the zoo! But, should you find yourself tricked into going to a zoo, think about it as follows: All those animals, coated with their own poop, pacing dry grassless trenches in their “enclosures,” have natural predators, and might very well be dead if they were still in the wild! So ask yourself: Would I rather be dead, or coated in my own poop, repetitively pacing a dry grassless trench? I certainly know what my answer would be!
* Within the first five minutes of the movie, someone eats a testicle. At the time, this graphic display was shocking and repulsive (Gibson employs very able FX people), but somewhere after the heart chewing and around the second beheading, I longed for the halcyon days of the testicle appetizer. We were so young then. The CBC reviews Mel Gibson's latest snuff film, Apocalypto.
I think this technically violates a promise I made to never link to any more remixed trailers, but this remix of Mary Poppins is so good I can't help myself.
Via Boing Boing, which also links to an remarkable (though strangely uninformative) 1965 Chinese propaganda pamphlet about How to Shoot an Airplane.
If you hate using the Motherload program at Comedy Central, you're in luck: iFilm is now showing full episodes of Comedy Central programming, including both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, updated nightly.
Search by actor or film and find out which actors were offered parts, auditioned for parts, or dropped out of projects before their completion. Waste hours of your life (on something other than a flash game).
Worse Than Spinal Tap, Better Than an Actual Spinal Tap
We saw For Your Consideration tonight, further confirming the Tufnel Postulate: As t increases, the quality of Christopher Guest's movies decreases. For Your Consideration is significantly worse than A Mighty Wind, which was rather worse than Best in Show, which was slightly worse than Waiting for Guffman, none of them holding a candle to This Is Spinal Tap. Obviously Christopher Guest needs to quit while he's ahead.
