by Chris Bertram on November 15, 2009
I saw Michael Haneke’s new film, The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band) last night. A beautiful and disturbing evocation of childhood and evil in a small German village on the eve of World War 1. It really cements Haneke’s reputation as one of the greatest film-makers working today. The central thread of the film concerns a series of vindictive and increasingly sadistic attacks, first on the village doctor, then on small children, starting in the summer of 1913. Haneke doesn’t do “closure” (hooray for that!) , so, as with Hidden, we can never be quite sure what happened and who was responsible for what, though at the end of the film there is a very strong suggestion as to the identity of the culprits. Though such events provide the narrative thread, the real substance of the film is its exploration of the repressive family relationships that pervade the village: most prominently, the pastor’s rule over his children, but also the doctor’s vicious treatment of his mistress, and the cold of the Baron’s marriage.
Heimat is bound to be a point of comparison, though, of course, the action in Edgar Reitz’s work beings with a return to a village in the immediate aftermath of Germany’s defeat in 1918. Haneke’s characters are, with a few exceptions, much less sympathetically portrayed that Reitz’s.
Watching the film, which despite its length, was sufficiently engrossing to pass quickly, I was led to reflect on how close we are in time to the events depicted and how impossibly distant we are from them (two world wars and massive technological and social change stand between us and those villages of feudal deference and agrarian drudgery). A year ago seems nothing, but, iterate 96 times or so, and little remains in common. Still, the real-life counterparts of the smallest of Haneke’s child characters might still be living today.
One small semi-technical note. I believe that the film was shot in digital colour and then converted to black and white. The monochrome imagery is often superb, but a definite digital flavour remained in the tonality: a very small flaw in a terrific movie.
by John Holbo on November 14, 2009
My friend Josh Glenn, and his collaborator Rob Walker, have been running an interesting project: Significant Objects. I’ll quote from the project info page:
THE IDEA
A talented, creative writer invents a story about an object. Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should — according to our hypothesis — acquire not merely subjective but objective value. How to test our theory? Via eBay! [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on November 13, 2009
For the next several hours [sorry, you’re too late] Amazon has all four of the Eccleston/Tennant Doctor Who
seasons for sale at a reasonable price; that is, 60% off the usual, quite absurd price. Last year my brother-in-law bought me the first series for X-Mas and I enjoyed it. But I’ve been unwilling to shell out $80 a season to find out what happened next. What am I? An idiot? Now that’s fixed.
Please feel free to argue about who the best doctor was/is.
Free MP3 for the night (via Stereogum): Pearl Harbor, “California Shakedown”. Sort of … I dunno, droney-droney-drone.
by Henry Farrell on November 12, 2009
I wrote a couple of “blog”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/06/24/annals-of-stupid-lawmaking/ “posts”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/06/30/taking-the-mickey/ last year on the Mickey Tax, or, as its promoters would prefer to describe it, the ‘Travel Promotion Act’ bill, which would seek to ‘promote’ travel to the US by imposing a fee on anyone entering the country which would in turn be handed over (after costs were deducted) to an advertising slush-fund. Now the “FT is reporting”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1fa32e7e-ce05-11de-95e7-00144feabdc0.html that the European Union is threatening to retaliate against it by imposing visas on US visitors.
bq. US plans to levy fees on European Union tourists and business travellers visiting the US have come under fire in Brussels and could prompt the EU to enact its own visa-like system for US travellers, according to diplomats. … In the past, most Europeans visiting the US for less than 90 days have not had to make pre-departure arrangements. The same applies to US visitors to the EU under visa-reciprocity guidelines. “If this tax is indeed introduced, the Commission will have to re-evaluate once again whether it is tantamount to a visa,” said a spokesman for Jacques Barrot, the commissioner for justice and home affairs, on Tuesday.
If the EU carries through on this threat, American tourists to Europe who have to pay visa fees, wait in queues at overworked consulates etc, should know who is responsible – the “Walt Disney Corporation of America”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302837_pf.html.
bq. JAY RASULO STOOD IN FRONT OF TWO MASSIVE SCREENS, each projecting his balding visage, and did what he loves to do: sell a big idea. The dapper, diminutive chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts implored 500 tourist industry executives to ask the federal government for an expensive favor. … Executives from tourism giants such as Marriott, American Express and Hertz buzzed with excitement — and skepticism. Getting taxpayers to underwrite overseas commercials had been the travel industry’s Holy Grail for decades. But the idea had never gotten very far in the councils of government. … A big lobbying push was needed for a big Ask — the term lobbyists use to describe what they are pleading for from Congress.
It’s an interesting story. When it became clear that the travel industry was unlikely to get US taxpayers to pay for a $200 million travel promotion campaign, lobbyists started looking for alternative ways of raising money – and the most obvious was to top up the industry’s own efforts with the Mickey Tax. Hence the bill, and hence the possible retaliatory measures from Europe. All thanks to Jay Rasulo and his balding visage.
by John Holbo on November 12, 2009
Gotta change things up, keep things fresh. This video is fantastic and highly educational. It teaches you how to whittle your own 19th Century dictionary, using only string, a turnip, and a clamp. But first you have to make your own Linotype machine. It’s much easier to go here and just win one of these beautiful artifacts of book artistry. (You will have to be lucky, however.) [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on November 11, 2009
by John Q on November 11, 2009
91 years ago, the world marked the end of the Great War that had consumed tens of millions of lives, mostly those of young men sent to die far from home in a cause that few could explain, then or now. It was a false dawn. The chaos unleashed by the Great War spawned more and greater wars, revolutions and genocides that continued through most of the 20th century and still continue, in places, even to this day.
I’ve written in the past about the futility of war, and that is the most important thought for this day of remembrance. But there is something else that demands more attention than it has received. The cataclysm of the Great War brought forth monsters like Hitler and Stalin, who killed millions. But the War itself, with the millions and tens of millions of lives it took, directly and indirectly, was loosed on the world by political leaders more notable for mediocrity than for monstrous greatness.
The names of Asquith, Bethmann-Hollweg, Berchtold and Poincare are barely remembered, yet on any reasonable accounting they belong among the great criminals of history. Not only did they create the conditions for war, and rush (eagerly in most cases) into it, they carried on even as the death toll mounted into the hundreds of thousands and beyond. Even as the original grounds for war became utterly irrelevant, they continued to intrigue for trivial postwar benefits, carving up imagined conquests among themselves. Eventually, most were displaced by leaders who were marginally less mediocre, and more determined to win at all costs (Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Ludendorff, Hindenburg and others).
How could such ordinary, seemingly decent, men pursue such an evil and self-destructive course, and yet, in most cases, attract and retain the support of their people? I find it hard to understand.
by Henry Farrell on November 10, 2009
Paul Krugman links to an “excellent take-down”:http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/16/091116crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all by Elizabeth Kolbert of the notorious climate change chapter in _Superfreakonomics._
what’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” isn’t the authors’ many blunders; it’s the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are. Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible—have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?—their analysis is terrifyingly cavalier. A world whose atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide, on the one hand, and sulfur dioxide, on the other, would be a fundamentally different place from the earth as we know it. Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO2 above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought), ozone depletion, and increased acid rain.
Kolbert’s closing words are, however, a little unfair.
To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.
Not unfair to Levitt and Dubner, mind you, but to science fiction. After all, two science fiction authors, Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, had their number down way back in 1953 with _The Space Merchants_ (Pohl, amazingly, is still alive and active).
The Conservationists were fair game, those wild eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way “plundering” our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is _always_ a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.
by John Holbo on November 10, 2009
But I’m never going to read a long post on typography and philosophy, you object. There’s life! The whole world awaits me! Well, alright. Just look at this, then.
by John Holbo on November 10, 2009
My colleague Axel Gelfert just launched a bold book review-type literary thing, The Berlin Review of Books. And he kindly invited me to review a big fat book, Jan Tschichold: Master Typographer: His Life, Work and Legacy
[amazon], for his grand opening. So here is my review. It’s a long one. My main pivot is around one quote from the master, from 1959:
In the light of my present knowledge, it was a juvenile opinion to consider the sans serif as the most suitable or even the most contemporary typeface. A typeface has first to be legible, nay, readable, and a sans serif is certainly not the most legible typeface when set in quantity, let alone readable … Good typography has to be perfectly legible and, as such, the result of intelligent planning … The classical typefaces such as Garamond, Janson, Baskerville, and Bell are undoubtedly the most legible. In time, typographical matters, in my eyes, took on a very different aspect, and to my astonishment I detected most shocking parallels between the teachings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fascism. Obvious similarities consist in the ruthless restriction of typefaces, a parallel to Goebbel’s infamous Gleichschaltung (enforced political conformity) and the more or less militaristic arrangement of lines.
[click to continue…]
by Harry on November 10, 2009
by Henry Farrell on November 9, 2009
“This Boston Review piece”:http://bostonreview.net/BR34.6/barry.php by Tom Barry is very much worth reading, as a background briefing to the “prison funding shenanigans”:http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/10/behind_hardin_jail_fiasco_private_prison_salesmen_prey_on_desperate_towns.php recently described by _Talking Points Memo._
These immigration prisons constitute the new face of imprisonment in America: the speculative public-private prison, publicly owned by local governments, privately operated by corporations, publicly financed by tax-exempt bonds, and located in depressed communities. Because they rely on project revenue instead of tax revenue, these prisons do not need voter approval. Instead they are marketed by prison consultants to municipal and county governments as economic-development tools promising job creation and new revenue without new taxes. The possibility of riots usually goes unmentioned. … Initially, most speculative prisons were privately owned, a case of the federal government outsourcing its responsibilities. But prison outsourcing is rarely that simple anymore. The private-prison industry increasingly works with local governments to establish and operate speculative prisons. Prison-town officials have a mantra: “If you build a prison the prisoners will come.”
Most of the time, these public-private prisons are speculative ventures only for bondholders and local governments, because agreements signed with federal agencies do not guarantee prisoners. For the privates, risks are low and the rewards large. Usually paid a set fee by local governments to operate prisons, management companies have no capital investment and lose little, other than hefty monthly fees, if inmate flows from the federal government decline or stop.
… Prisons are owned by local governments, but local oversight of finances is rare, and the condition of prisoners is often ignored. Inmates such as those in Pecos are technically in the custody of the federal government, but they are in fact in the custody of corporations with little or no federal supervision. So labyrinthine are the contracting and financing arrangements that there are no clear pathways to determine responsibility and accountability. Yet every contract provides an obvious and unimpeded flow of money to the private industry and consultants.
The piece isn’t perfect – it can’t quite decide whether it is a story about the problems of the prison system or about the problems of the US approach to immigration. The two are of course closely connected, but each is very complicated in its own right, and trying to explain both at once makes for a top-heavy account. I would also have liked to have seen more aggregate data to support the specific arguments that the author is making (I suspect though that one of the problems with keeping this metastasizing system under control is that there isn’t any source of good general data out there). But it is an eye-opening piece of investigative journalism, looking at a story that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves. Recommended.
by Chris Bertram on November 9, 2009
I watched Paolo Sorrentino’s quite extraordinary film Il Divo last night. It is remarkable in so many ways, but especially, as a portrait of evil in the form for Giulo Andreotti (as depicted by Toni Servillo) and also, in terms of the most marvelous cinematography. In a recent post I attracted hostility from some by doubting the West’s commitment to individual rights. No doubt I overgeneralized a little, but post-war Italy would be a part of any case for the prosecution. Andreotti as portrayed in the film, is prepared to go to almost any lengths, to inflict evil in pursuit of what he takes to be the good, to deal with the Mafia, to sacrifice his colleagues (I’d say his friends, but it isn’t clear that he had any). I wonder if it isn’t possible that Italy between some date in the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, wasn’t the European state where a person was most likely to be the victim of political murder? (Actually, I’m guessing that Romania might take that prize.) Not to be missed.
by Harry on November 8, 2009
Here.
Enjoy. It’s Sunday after all.
by Chris Bertram on November 8, 2009
Two photos today. My partner, Pauline Powell and I visited East Germany and West Berlin in 1984. The first picture is a shot of the Berlin Wall from the western side, and seems appropriate as tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of its fall. The second shot, taken inside the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, announces one of the prayers for peace meetings that helped to build the popular movement that would eventually contribute to the fall of the regime. (Some details of this are on the St. Nikolai Church website.)Both pictures are Pauline’s, not mine (all rights reserved etc). We believe the swords into ploughshares picture is unique on the web, though perhaps others exist as prints. As such, it is something of a historic document.
