Matins

¶ At Salon, Michael Lind writs about the faux upper middle class, saddled with “worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford.” Cui bono? The left and the right are pretty much in pari delicto. (via The Awl)

But many have profited from the peddling of the dream of the mass upper middle class. The claim that everyone should go to college served the interests of the educational-industrial complex, from K-12 to the universities, that now serves as an important constituency of the Democratic Party. (Along with Wall Street investment banks, universities provided Barack Obama with his largest campaign donations.) And the claim that everyone needs to pour money into the stock market, to be managed by banks and brokers who fleece their clients, served the interests of the financial-industrial complex that has replaced real-economy businesses as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Both the educators and the brokers have successfully lobbied Congress to subsidize their bloated industries, swelling them even further, by means of tax breaks for student loans and personal retirement savings. The big losers have been the millions of working Americans whom many Democrats and Republicans alike have persuaded, against their interests, to indulge champagne tastes on beer budgets.

Lauds

¶ Ellen Moody assesses The Kids Are All Right as a serious women’s film that updates, without substantially revising, our idea of the American family.

Though again we are confronted by the ritual humiliation of the woman character. After all, it is Jules who plays the woman in this marriage who almost destroys it by having sex with Paul; Jules who must apologize and beg for forgiveness. At the same time to be fair (and explain why I so enjoyed the film), as Jules Julianne Moore holds the family together for real. Her loving interventions, her continual kindnesses and urging of everyone to get along; the way she goes over to Joni and Laser after Nick makes it clear she has gone to bed with Paul — the film values someone intensely who has no career, makes no money. It’s she who has to sleep downstairs when Nick throws her out of their bed, and she holds no grudges. I’ve usually liked the characters Julianne Moore plays and this film showed the best sides of her typology. Not abject, giving and then appreciated.

What saves this film are the nuances of the individual scenes and dialogue — script, acting, the perfect timing, and discordant moments. Especially the ongoing little jarring comments by Jules and Nick at and to one another. Jules reminds Nick that she has drunk too much. Nick cuts across Jules’s super-kindness to the kids (Jules is the woman reconciling everyone) to insist on making choices based on remembering harder dangers: riding on motorcycles the way Paul loves to is dangerous, statistically you are courting death or crippling, so she works hard to prevent Joni and Paul from doing it.

¶ Noting an interesting paradox about Christopher Nolan (“he’s fascinated by identity but not much good with character”), The Owls (Ben Walters and JM Tyree) air their disappointment with Inception.

BW: Well, his protagonists tend to (mis)remember and investigate rather than, um, live. We root for them because they’re the narrative engine, not because we’re actually invested in their welfare to any great degree. And I think this brings us to another problem with Inception – this lack of facility for the quirks and charms of actual present people result in a film basically comprised of really boring, thuddingly rational dream sequences.

JMT: They’re not that dreamy. A friend pointed out that the snow level of the narrative/dream is a Bond film. And really it’s also an Inception video game. Blam! I’m using the bigger gun now. Someone else I talked to reminded me, though, that since the dreams are constructed they would tend to be less weird than “real” dreams. So that can be unwound as possibly more interesting…

BW: Cop-out! Dreams should be weird and woozy and hot and fickle. Inception plays like a two-and-a-half-hour American Express ad

In their utterly different ways, these are the big movies of Summer 2010 — the shows that anyone interested in film must see. We’ve had our say here and here.

Prime

¶ At the Boston Globe, Michael Fitzgerald talks to Mark Valeri about Heavenly Merchandize, his intriguing reconsideration of the relationship between Puritanism and capitalism in Colonial America. How did the austere Puritans become energetic businessmen? It seems to have something to do with settling down and discovering home in exile.

Tierce

¶ At Not Science Fiction, Kyle Munkittrick considers how handy an AI Physician X Prize-winning tricorder would be at solving the problem that too many doctors are poor diagnosticians.

Now imagine an app as smart and accurate as a panel of ten doctors in the hands of a trained MD or EMT, emphasis on the “trained.” Walker’s essay focuses on allowing patients to self-diagnose, but the huge benefit would be for professional diagnoses. Instead of being required to memorize thousands of potential diseases and syndromes, each with their own fickle and bizarre permutations, a doctor’s two primary goals would become 1) ensuring accurate, exhaustive entry of symptoms into the tricorder and 2) giving comprehensive, patient oriented care. Diagnoses, particularly esoteric ones, would become the prerogative of the device, instead of certain hobbled, cantankerous MDs named “House.” In addition to the symptoms entered by the doctor, the tricorder would have access to the patient’s entire medical history — including reoccurring issues, worsening conditions, potential genetic dispositions, and a plethora of other minutia — that could be the difference between sending someone home with “drink fluids and come back if it gets worse” and hospitalization. Furthermore, long, infection-prone hospital stays for “observation” would be reduced or even eliminated thanks to better initial diagnoses. The health industry as we know it might change so much as to become unrecognizable.

Sext

¶ Choire Sicha has fun with the strangely overlapping interviews of highbrow actresses in the Sunday Times. Laura Linney’s alabaster complexion graced the Magazine, while, in a much pithier Arts & Leisure piece, Michelle Orange interviewed Patricia Clarkson. Choire wants to know if you can attribute fifteen snips correctly. Of course Choire picks the most generically puffy bits. Here they are on the subject of family life. First Linney —

She declared her husband and her family off-limits for interviews. Friends who talked with me about her worried aloud that they might be straying into areas she might not want them to. And while Linney never took offense or balked at any question I asked, she would dispense with some topics — like whether she ever wanted, or still wants, children — with a just a few inconclusive, anodyne words. She clearly meant to be professional and polite, but she just as clearly had no intention of serving up a quivering, tremulous heart on a platter.

— then Clarkson.

Living the dream doesn’t leave much room for sleep. Or settling down, an expression that makes Ms. Clarkson — who has never married and has no children, nor a computer or an assistant, for that matter — visibly recoil.

“I have very strong ideas and strong convictions, and I think I have brought to fulfillment the life I’ve really always wanted,” she said. “There isn’t really anything I would change about my career right now.”

She paused, the mischief returning to her eyes. “O.K., a few things,” she relented. “Usually involving a check with some zeros.”

Nones

If we weren’t ticked off at The Economist ourselves (all that tendentious reporting!), we probably wouldn’t link to this story, in which Edward Hugh, of A Fistful of Dollars, is ticked off at The Economist, for its anti-Catalonian approach to the bullfighting ban in the region. (And the age of unsigned articles is so over!)

At the same time it is hard not to notice that the correspondent does his best not to find too many positive things to say about Catalans. In an article back in July 2009 “All must have prizes”, he also argues that one of the reasons for Mr Zapatero’s continuing spending spree was to keep Catalan politicians happy, without mentioning – as the group of young professionals who for Collectiu Emma point out – that there is a net fiscal transfer annually from Catalunya to the rest of Spain of around 10% of GDP. Indeed trying to hold Catalonia responsible for Spain’s economic woes makes about as much (and as little) sense as holding Germany responsible for the Greek economic mess. In fact, the comparison goes further, since it is reasonably clear that Catalonia has an external surplus with the rest of the world just like Germany does, which is why the Catalans share the same kind of reputation inside Spain for being thrifty and austere as their German counterparts on the European level.¶

Vespers

¶ We’ll read anything by or about Jennifer Egan, and Patricia Z0hn’s intereview at The Huffington Post is a nice “addition to the literature.” But in answer to a question about the Sixties, Ms Egan deftly binds the overtly Sixties-era themes that have freckled her fiction with the covert activities, also beginning in the Sixties, that have inspired her technique.

CZ: Though you were born a decade late, you seem to have been defined by the Sixties. People who were adolescent then are tired of hearing all of us say it was, so far, the most interesting time to come of age. Yet you have not only embraced these years but have made their themes–sex, drugs, rock and roll, politics, and the subsequent disillusionment and burnout–the calling cards to your work. Why, and what was missing from your own era that they were so easily able to eclipse it?

JE: I’d say that I’ve been defined by missing the Sixties. My mother and stepfather moved us to San Francisco in 1969, when I was seven, and I grew up there convinced that everything spontaneous and raw and thrilling had passed me by. Had I actually experienced the sixties, I might have a more nuanced memory of that era. I guess what I’m saying is that in San Francisco, anyway, “my” era was mostly about processing the era that had just passed. Until the punk rock scene of the late seventies, there wasn’t much, counterculturally, to compete with it.

Looking back, though, I’d say that my era has actually been defined by dizzying technological change. I grew up before there were answering machines, and in 47 years I’ve watched us hurtle into a hyperconnected state whose implications none of us can fully grasp. Funnily, the origins of that change can be traced right back to the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970’s–the very same years when it seemed like nothing new was happening! Things were happening, it turns out, but we couldn’t see them yet.

Compline

¶ Ann Jones, seneior citizen and embedded journalist, tootles around an American operation in Afghanistan that makes Men Who Stare At Goats look like a documentary. On top of all the surreal weirdness, she plops the following sundae cherry, which might explain why COIN isn’t working as well as we might like. (Asia Times; via MetaFilter)

On the base, I heard incessant talk about COIN, the “new” doctrine resurrected from the disaster of Vietnam in the irrational hope that it will work this time. From my experience at the FOB, however, it’s clear enough that the hearts-and-minds part of COIN is already dead in the water, and one widespread practice in the military that’s gone unreported by other embedded journalists helps explain why.

So here’s a TomDispatch exclusive, courtesy of Afghan-American men serving as interpreters for the soldiers. They were embarrassed to the point of agony when mentioning this habit, but desperate to put a stop to it. COIN calls for the military to meet and make friends with village elders, drink tea, plan “development”, and captivate their hearts and minds. Several interpreters told me, however, that every meeting includes some young American soldiers whose locker-room-style male bonding features bouts of hilarious farting.

To Afghan men, nothing is more shameful. A fart is proof that a man cannot control any of his apparatus below the belt. The man who farts is thus not a man at all. He cannot be taken seriously, nor can any of his ideas or promises or plans.

Blissfully unaware of such things, the army goes on planning together with its civilian consultants (representatives of the US State Department, the US Department of Agriculture and various independent contractors who make up what’s called a Human Terrain Team charged with interpreting local culture and helping to win the locals over to our side). Some speak of “building infrastructure”, others of advancing “good governance” or planning “economic development”. All talk of “doing good” and “helping” Afghanistan.

In a typical mess-up on the actual terrain of Afghanistan, army experts previously in charge of this base had already had a million-dollar suspension bridge built over a river some distance away, but hadn’t thought to secure land rights, so no road leads to it. Now the local American agriculture specialist wants to introduce alfalfa to these waterless, rocky mountains to feed herds of cattle principally pastured in his mind.

Have a Look

¶ Clandestine grilled cheese sandwiches. Should this be “Anywhere But New York”? Or is it a hoax? (New York Post; via The Awl)

¶ Design Disasters of the Past 25 Years. (The Infrastructurist) Our favorite is the top-rated Lotus Riverside Complex.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 10:30 am.