Monday, March 16, 2009 - Posts
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David Chase, the maestro who created The Sopranos, just announced that his next project will be A Ribbon of Dreams, an HBO miniseries about the early days of Hollywood. (The title comes from an Orson Welles quote. Even the greats use lame metaphors sometimes.). Variety reports that the show will focus on a cowboy and a mechanical engineer who become producing partners in 1913 and go on to work with the likes of D.W. Griffith, John Ford, John Wayne, Bette Davis, and Billy Wilder.
I have a knee-jerk antipathy to Hollywood projects about Hollywood as just so much tiresome navel-gazing (the guy who makes movies for a living thinks movies are uniquely important to the American story? You don't say!), even though the resulting films can turn out mighty fine (Sunset Blvd., etc). But if anyone can make Hollywood fresh, it's Chase, who took a genre (the gangster pic) that seemed pretty well tapped out and proved the opposite was true.
Ribbon is the second upcoming HBO project set in the past. Martin Scorsese's Boardwalk Empire, about Atlantic City, N.J.'s transformation from sleepy beach town to gambling mecca, is scheduled to air sometime this year. This form, the historical TV drama, is a relatively new one, introduced by Deadwood, perfected by Mad Men, and attempted on basic cable by Life on Mars. I wonder what it means about us, right now, that these shows, set in the past but obliquely speaking to the present, are having their moment.
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Emily, you are absolutely right that we've known for a while, in a vague sort of way, that terrible things happened in the CIA's "unofficial" black-hole prisons. But you are also right that the question of what, now, we are going to to do with the legacy of American-government-sanctioned torture is not fading away. On the contrary, it is growing ever sharper. Just as it usually takes awhile—sometimes a whole generation—for countries that have committed political crimes to come to terms with them, so too will it take some time for all of us to understand that the abuses of detainees that took place during the past seven years in CIA and U.S. government custody were not only immoral but illegal, that they violated both our own Constitution as well as international treaties we signed decades ago, and that the people who gave the orders to use torture on prisoners in American custody knew all of this perfectly well.
Right now, the Obama administration—and indeed the general public—is inclined to "focus on the future," not the past, and I sense that even Congress would be made queasy by a full-scale prosecution of the torturers. But give it a few more years, and that might no longer be the case. When I read Mark Danner's essay yesterday, I suddenly thought, for the very first time: President Bush might go to jail for this. Eventually.
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Here's a clip of the frantic females fleeing the scene at the America's Next Top Model auditions on Saturday. Tyra is "concerned" about the situation, according to CNN. Who wants to bet that there's a very special Tyra Banks Show addressing the melee? Thanks to BuzzFeed for the tip.
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The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is worried that fast-rising populist fury at financial sector piggishness (post-bailout bonuses for the very people who dealt in credit-default swaps!!) may threaten its recovery plan. But I wonder if, in fact, we have the ideal recessionary spectacle to watch: call it How To Catch a Greased AIG. Just hang in there, Geithner et al., and don't let the slippery swine go. After refusing all demands for transparency in its use of the huge fall rescue loan, invoking privacy concerns, AIG squealed today: Now—for whatever it's worth—we've got the names of the trading partners who got big chunks of the money. "These are extraordinary times," an AIG spokeswoman explained to the Washington Post.
I confess utter lack of expertise here, but is there a reason not to aim for yet more public squirming by AIG, now on the bonus issue? Citing "privacy obligations," AIG refuses to name the 400 employees covered by the roughly $165 million bonus plan it claims is contractually binding. If those recipients were to get outed, is there a chance that at least a few among them—those, say, in line for more than $3 million—might be too embarrassed to collect? These are, after all, extraordinary times.
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We knew, thanks to Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side, that the International Committee of the Red Cross called the Bush administration's treatment of certain detainees in CIA custody torture. Now we know, from the text of the ICRC's report leaked to writer Mark Danner, about the mountain of specifics behind that label. See here for Danner's shorter New York Times op-ed and here for his longer piece in the New York Review of Books.
The ICRC interviewed 14 high-value detainees in late 2006 at Guantanamo. The Red Cross points out that the "consistency" of their accounts "adds particular weight" to their credibility. Some details also match the stories of former British detainees who described what happened to them after release.
What repeats: a month of standing, arms over the head and shackled, in a frigid room with incessant noise. Little sleep. Face-slapping and head-smashing against walls. Doctors checking for vital signs during water-boarding. The ICRC also picks up on refinements. A towel around the neck of one detainee (Abu Zabaydah) during head-smashing turns into a plastic collar for detainees interrogated later. When Walid ben Attash is forced to stand shackled, the stump of his amputated leg hurts, and he kicks away his prosthesis. Then the pressure on his good leg increases, and he calls his captors to give him back his artificial limb. Afterward, they sometimes take away the prosthesis and then measure the swelling in the leg he has left to stand on.
In Israel in 1999, when a state report came out of the intelligence service's use of cruelly painful stress positions and sleep deprivation on Palestinian detainees, the country's Supreme Court essentially banned torture by forcing the government to plead a necessity defense for any interrogator who used it. Here and now, the Obama administration has forsworn water-boarding and is currently holding the CIA to the standards for interrogation of the U.S. military, which preclude the techniques in the ICRC report. But the government has left open what it will let the CIA do in the future, and at his confirmation hearing, CIA head Leon Panetta signaled that he is open to some harsher techniques, case by case.
Is it better for the executive branch to answer these questions itself, or for a court to step in, as Israel’s did? Does the leak of the ICRC report further the goal of truth-telling for the sake of telling, as Sen. Leahy has been arguing in favor of the truth commission he has proposed for the Senate judiciary committee? Or does knowing what happened mean wanting to know who exactly authorized it, at the highest levels? And then once we know that, how do we thread the president's needle of “looking forward, not backward” and prosecuting the crimes we have evidence of? The questions are sharpening, not going away.
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Dayo, just as you couldn't help but post about the America's Next Top Model stampede (3/14, never forget), I can't resist posting on this New York Times style section piece about the One Taste Urban Retreat Center, epicenter of the "slow sex movement." Naturally it's in San Francisco, and it's "a commune dedicated to men and women publicly creating 'the orgasm that exists between them,' " according to the Times. That orgasm is brought about by the men stroking the women for a prolonged period of time, "in a ritual known as orgasmic meditation — 'OMing,' for short." The men do not make eye contact with the women during OMing, and they don't climax either.
First of all, the authors of the piece don't say how expensive entrance into this vaunted One Taste commune is, but one can assume most of the residents don't need to earn money since they're devoting so much time to that ideal O. The Urban Retreat Center is run by a woman named Nicole Daedone, and late in the piece it is mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that her tech-millionaire boyfriend is bankrolling the joint.
This is not to say that a woman's orgasm isn't an important thing, but isn't it horrifically self-absorbed to join a commune dedicated to the pursuit? In addition, all the focus on the female orgasm somehow feels like another expectation placed on women: If you don't have a 20-minute orgasm, you're not fully realizing your sexuality and have somehow failed. First we're bad mothers because we don't breast-feed, and now we're inadequate because we don't devote hours to coming. We can't win.
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How ‘bout that stampede at the America's Next Top Model tryouts in New York City this weekend? If ever there were a green light for inside-the-beltway crowing at the fallen northern metropolis, this is it. Money quote from the New York Daily News report (complete with video, and screams):
Screaming as they ran for their lives, hundreds of hotties in heels toppled over barricades along W. 55th St. … By the time the model madness ended, six women were injured and two women and one man were busted for inciting a riot, authorities said.
"The girls were running like it was 9/11 part two," said Jennifer Brown, 27, of Kensington, Brooklyn. "I feared for my life."
Apologies for disrespecting those whose modeling dreams were crushed Saturday, but HA! Compare that to the civil proceedings that went on in our nation’s capital earlier in the month: Several thousand women—literal “shorties” this year, at the behest of the ever-enterprising Tyra Banks—tried out without incident. The Washington Post writeup painted a rosy picture:
"D.C.'s off the chain," casting director Michelle Mock-Falcon happily wrote in a text message to the show's producers … Proving that nothing -- bank failures, real estate foreclosures or a stock market freefall -- can dampen the spirit of young people with a dream, women from the Washington region and beyond waited patiently for hours in one line, then a second, and yet another, to get into the secret chamber for their casting call.
And, I submit, the caliber of analytic thought at the DC tryouts was exceptionally high:
“What is the craziest thing you have ever done?" was one question. Apparently, these women were not particularly crazy in the grand scheme of crazy: "Coming here" was a common answer.”
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