Gender Inequality In The Comedy Cinema

Did I put you to sleep with that title? Sorry.

I like to grind all sorts of axes, but I usually leave the gender axe for my wife to grind so I can take notes and learn something.

But last night I was channel surfing a little bit and landed on a movie I saw and liked in the theater, the bromantic comedy I Love You, Man. Rashida Jones, formerly of The Office and now on Parks and Recreation, plays the fiance of Paul Rudd's main character.

Ms. Jones is funny. But she does nothing but carry the water here. Lots of funny, cameo-ish, weird random character stuff in the movie, but all those laughs go to male actors. Nothing for Ms. Jones. (That, and she was saddled with a pair of jeans that made her ass look terrible, but that's a post for another day when I debut my spin-off blog Ask the Ass-pert)

Now this example came off the top of my head. But I can confidently say that's how it is in most--if not all-- movie comedies. What's up with that, especially considering it certainly isn't so pronounced on TV? Again, off the top of my head, Courney Cox is killing it in Cougar Town, as is Liz Lemon--I mean Tina Fey--on 30 Rock. As for women who are seasonings on the main dish, all the women on The Office are absolutely terrific.

So I ask What's Up With That?
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The Right May Rely On The Mendacious, But Everybody Needs The Sycophants

Sure, the Republican bullshit on health care reform ("death panels", "government takeover of the economy") and financial reform ("more bailouts") either gets repeated uncritically by the MSM or amplified by Fox News. That ain't a news flash. If it is, spend some time here and here.

But just as I had focused on the lubricant that lets Republican bullshit slide by so frictionlessly, leave it to GG to keep me in check regarding something on the other side of the aisle, something less obvious but no less pernicious:

National political reporters are furious over various White House practices involving transparency and information control, but are unwilling to say so for attribution due to fear of "retaliation," instead insisting on hiding behind a wall of anonymity (which Politico, needless to say, happily provides). Isn't that a rather serious problem: that the White House press corps is afraid to criticize the President and the White House for fear of losing access and suffering other forms of retribution? What does that say about their "journalism"? It's the flip side of those White House reporters who need the good graces of Obama aides for their behind-the-scenes books and thus desperately do their bidding: what kind of reporter covering the White House would possibly admit that they're afraid to say anything with their names attached that might anger the President and his aides? How could you possibly be a minimally credible White House reporter if you have that fear? Doesn't that unwillingness rather obviously render their reporting worthless?

Worthless, for sure. And dangerous, too. This same dynamic helped us march uncritically into our unending War on Terror.

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Don't Blame Us, We Just Parrot The Bullshit

Syndicated columnist Gene Lyons gives a concise description of Republican media effectiveness:

BloggerMatt Yglesias fears that such tactics do nothing but work. "True or false," he writes, "the overwhelming evidence is that the media gets bored with these fact checks very quickly and that if you just put your head down and charge forward, you come out a couple of weeks later back into 'he said, she said' territory. The only real test for whether or not lying works is whether or not you can bring your ideological fellow travelers along. Will Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck echo your line? Will the Weekly Standard and National Review? Will the bulk of your legislative caucus? The answers are yes, yes, and yes."

Actually, we're already there. Just watch. Virtually every TV report on the financial-regulation bill you see will feature a sound bite from McConnell, who'll continue to shill for Citibank and Goldman Sachs while pretending to defend the little guy. Bailout, bailout, bailout. The fact that he's engaging in pure doublespeak is highly unlikely to be mentioned. Instead, you'll likely see a snippet from a Democrat making the opposite claim. For an awful lot of viewers, that's like flipping a coin.

For Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners, it's actually easier than that. Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

This is the "false equivalency" problem, and the blame doesn't lay with viewers, necessarily: there's no shame in believing the arguments made by the party whose platform or ideologies you agree with; the problem is a media that only cares to present claims as equally grounded in truth, solely because they seek a "he said, she said" narrative to feed their daily "scorekeeping" type of entertainment. Of course this begs the question, why is this the current media paradigm? Why does it work? Who does it serve?

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Q: The Definition of Treason?

A: Anything done by someone I didn't vote for!

Lest anybody think this paranoid "tea party" shit is new, take a look at that flyer. The only difference is that these version 2.0 right wing nuts could never string together 7 coherent sentences. That might be the saddest thing this "tea party" says about America in 2010.


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The Way Of No Way

I first learned of this concept while reading about the "style" of martial arts that Bruce Lee created, Jeet Kune Do. Literally, it means Way of the Intercepting Fist. But in describing how he conceived of it, he said it had no limitation as limitation; using no way as way. Use what works, cast away the rest and don't get caught up in the doctrine of technique. It wasn't a style, per se, but a process for figuring out and incorporating what works best.

Few things have resonated as deeply with me, for it confirmed for me the awesomeness of how I was beginning to see the world and how I wanted to be in it. Shit, it was how I wanted the whole world to be--in my more messianic moments, of course. But for as reasonable as it might sound, the world sure as hell ain't like this at all. It's full of rules, instructions, doctrine, identification, genres, uniforms--you name it, and someone's quick to tell you just exactly how you are or aren't that.

All this has been at the forefront of my mind lately as I try to make sense of the current American political landscape. But it also pops up when I consider elements of society and popular culture. My awareness and understanding of the Way of No Way frustrates me terribly but also gives me great hope. The irony, of course, is that in my weaker moments I think the the Way of No Way is the Only Way. But then I remind myself it's really no way at all.
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Fuck You And Your Fucking Poll

Any asshole of any stripe that brings up a poll result for the purpose of arguing that some legislation should or shouldn't be passed by Congress can choke on a bag of shit and die.

Sure, in some vague and easily-manipulated way polls can show us how a small sample of people think about a certain issue. And by "think" I mean never seriously consider the issues until someone asks them to tick a box  on a preset number of choices, as if there is something fucking scientific about the difference between "likely" and "somewhat likely" or some other meaningless weasel words.
Even if Jesus Christ had a pow-wow with Albert Einstein and came up with an infallibly perfect set of poll questions, polls get conducted over the phone and have no consequences, so people are free to say whatever the fuck they want or whatever they think the pollster wants to hear.

We have elections. This is not ancient Greek-style mob democracy (if you want that you'll have to move to California). Let's give some credit to the Founders who wanted, more than anything, to make sure they avoided majority-mob rule, both out of philosophical logic and because, being smart fucking elitists themselves, they knew that people--not,necessarily individually but as sheep-like herd--are too fucking stupid and easily swayed to make complicated governing decisions themselves.


Elections have consequences. We elect politicians to make decisions. We elect them based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to their positions on issues and their general decision-making acumen. We can write letters to them once in office, we can organize to make sure they hear our voices. We can do actual, real things to let politicians know how we think about issues. Or we can sit back and let paid scumbags whip together pseudo-scientific bullshit to convince politicians of what we really think.

For fuck's sake, gimme an hour and I can word some poll questions guaranteed to get you any result you want--and even if I don't get it I can twist the results to mean anything I want.


Poll: Am I unlikely, somewhat likely, or very likely to kick a fucking pollster in the nuts if I ever actually meet one?
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Ooops

Oh, somebody is so fucking fired.











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Heh

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A Low-Profile Classic

Oliver Stone's W.

I saw it in the theater back in 2008 and I've seen chunks of it again on cable. It has something I value greatly in movies--a high degree of re-watchability. I love it. Absolutely love it. Rocket science it ain't, entertaining it sure is.

Some might have thought it strange to make this movie while Bush was still in office, but, hell, why not strike while things are still fresh in everybody's consciousness? What's to be gained by waiting? Sure, history will judge us when we're dead. But what about now?

The movie's structure is pretty straightforward--one arc covering Bush's growth(?) from drunken frat-boy to president, intertwined with the other arc tracing his decision to go war in Iraq. It isn't a comedy, but it is...funny. Brolin and Stone's W. is charming, wounded, headstrong, optimistic, wrong about stuff. It's not a comedic performance exactly, but it's pleasantly compelling if not downright funny. One might even say nuanced, which is hard to detect at first blush, and probably hard to imagine, because, well, he's playing George fucking Bush.

Josh Brolin's performance is so smooth and assured that it's very easy to take for granted what a great job he did. And not just in the speech and mannerisms--things we're all familiar with from seeing the real Dubya in action for 8 years--but Brolin also conveys an essential Bush-ness in the scenes that depict what 43 was doing when we weren't around to see--the boozy swagger, the insecurity/fear/resentment of his powerful father, the new-found godliness, the straightforward and simplified views. Really an amazing performance, one that I think will grow in esteem as years go by (though I'm slinging praise at Brolin, I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you the supporting cast does a phenomenal job maintaining the right tone set by their fearless leader).

Anyway, don't listen to what anyone else tells you about this one. See it. In Stone's oevre, it's akin to Wall Street, in that it gets at a time and a place and way of seeing the world. Maybe I'm not saying it's Wall Street-good, but I am telling you this is no Any Given Sunday or Alexander.
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Corporate Personhood

I've written about this topic before, but seeing this made me think about something that might make my objections to aspects of it seem less abstract.

I'm going to make this brief and general, so nitpicking will be beside the point: if a person gets convicted of fraud, that person is sent to prison. If a person gets convicted of murder, that person is sent to prison.

If a corporation gets convicted of fraud or of killing people as a direct results of its actions, what happens? Monetary fines and/or certain responsible people are scapegoated and sent to prison.

A person in prison? Think of how seriously a person's life is affected by prison (I'm not talking about white-collar, minimum security prison). Think about all the freedoms curtailed by being in prison. Can't work while in prison, of course, and even after getting out job prospects remain bleak for an ex-con. That is really an almost-mortal blow to one's financial well-being. And of course there is social stigma attached to being an convicted criminal.

But a corporation? It has the privilege of never having to stop working, and it can make money for its shareholders knowing that even the largest fines will be a small wound from which it can quickly recover. Even if we could "imprison" the company, imagine the consequences? How dare we think of depriving the shareholders opportunity to profit. How dare we penalize employees and their families. How dare we imperil the economy?  Just suggesting it sounds ludicrous, because it is ludicrous. (Now of course I understand the benefits from not doing those things, such as the freedom to take risks with capital that drives capitalism. I know it's intertwined with the very success of the modern Western world, at whose pinnacle the United States sits.)

A century of treating corporations this way has resulted in a legal and cultural blindness to the truly fundamental differences between corporations and humans. This blindness results in an ignorance of the problems that arise from treating corporations and people similarly under the law while the consequences for each are so very different when they run afoul of the law.

Perhaps in a future post I'll take up a description of what I believe those problems to be, but for the moment, a hearty Fuck You, Goldman Sachs will suffice.
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Fuck Me? No, Fuck You!

Came across this discussion in the NYT and decided that I'd put down on paper one of my favorite anecdotes, one that concerns the use of the word "fuck" and leads me to believe that fearing today's youth swear too fucking much is something today's worry-warts share with, well, every other fuddy-duddy that's drawn a breath since someone overheard Cain tell Abel to fuck off.

Picture it: Summer, 1985. The San Fernando Valley. Joe Torre's Baseball Camp. A laid-back dude who was attending Princeton, probably 19 or so, drives campers to and from the Camp's complex each day. He overhears, and participates in, lots of spirited camper conversations.

One day he decides he's had enough of something. It being 1985, the parallel to the Cold War was probably clear to him. He decides--for himself, for his campers, for society!--to make his stand and impart some wisdom, turning his bus into Helsinki and our ride home that day into a Strategic Arms Limitation Talk: "You guys, you use the f-word WAY too much." He then proceeds to explain that swearing is ok, and can be used effectively, but its effectiveness is diminished by overuse. "You start off by saying 'Fuck you' but you've got nowhere to go from there. When I was your age, if you resorted to 'Fuck you' it meant the argument was over and if the other guy didn't stop, punches would be thrown." Make no mistake, our failure to respect the power of the word "fuck" mutually assured the destruction of civilization! Whether the other fuckheads in that van that day took it to heart, I can't say. But I sure did.

All these years later, when I speak and when I write, I think of myself not as a Cold War military strategist buts as a painter--every color in the spectrum is on my palette: archaic words, slang words, long words, short words, hard-to-pronounce words, words-I-think-I-know-the-meaning-of-but-look-up-just-to-be-sure. To mix analogies though, I think of high-powered curse words like the F-Bomb not just as nuclear-tipped ICBMs, but as bold, deep, rich colors. Sometimes it wouldn't look right to use them, but sometimes it wouldn't look right without them.

So I had to smile last week when Joe Biden referred to the passage of health care reform as a Big Fucking Deal, because it certainly fucking was!
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Now I Don't Usually Do This, But, Uh

I just donated, via PayPal, $20 to Glenn Greenwald. I don't ever donate anything to anybody. Sure, tons of people and organizations deserve my money. But GG? I feel compelled to support him.

I know y'all are sick of me linking to his blog, and I understand that. So I'll take this opportunity to tell you why I support Mr. Greenwald even more than I agree with him--and if I merely agreed with him the thought of donating would never cross my mind, trust me.

Because he's fucking objective. That's it. He has his political beliefs and his personal biases, sure, but he exhibits his respect for the U.S. Constitution by applying its principles and the letters of its laws to the topics of the day in an even-handed and open-minded fashion.

And that means he's going to piss off far more people than a run-of-the-mill columnist or blogger who tosses red meat to his faithful day in and day out, only writing an occasionally contrarian piece to keep them on their toes and his name on people's lips . Some days Mr. Greenwald does nothing but piss off the very people who want to agree with him, but can't because they're so blinded with Obama-love or Republican-hate. Only an idiot or a very principled man would try to earn a living doing that, and he is nobody's fool.

So that's where I stand. I may post links to other writers I respect, but only Glenn Greenwald gets my motherfucking money.

As for the title of this post, well, that was just an excuse to reference this. And if you're new to my blog I will absolutely reference that masterpiece for any and all reasons.
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Really? It's Gonna Be Like This? (SCOTUS Content)

I don't like the sound of this:

"The prospect that Stevens will be replaced by Elena Kagan has led to the growing perception that Barack Obama will actually take a Supreme Court dominated by Justices Scalia (Reagan), Thomas (Bush 41), Roberts (Bush 43), Alito (Bush 43) and Kennedy (Reagan); move it further to the Right."

I start to worry when GG isn't the only one saying it. I really start to worry when this dickbag agrees.

Just as the health care bill passed only because the Obama administration made its deals with the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies before Congress battled it out, I wouldn't be surprised to see Obama nominate someone like Kagan in an attempt to avoid a fight...which would, of course, like health care, still result in an ugly fight that they barely win.

But these situations are quite different. With regard to the health care fight, once you can swallow the cynicism, you can see the deal with Insurance and Pharma at least took out the two opponents with the most skin in the game. But when it comes to nominating a Supreme Court justice, this is nothing but a partisan, ideological fight--it's straight up Donkeys v. Elephants, and there is no deep-pocketed giant who can put its thumb on the scale to make sure you lose.

So does it need to be said you're a shitty negotiator if you telegraph right away what you're willing to give up? Does it need to be said you're even shittier if that becomes your trademark style? Seems like it. I mean, c'mon! Nominate some 9th Circuit liberal freak show--or even a Muslim!!--and let The Opposition lose its collective mind. Then dial it back a few notches and nominate somebody still to your liking, but someone much more acceptable to the Opposition relative to your "first" choice.

Unless of course Obama has no desire to counteract the Supreme Court's 30 year tack to the right, in which case...
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Coolest Picture You'll See Today

Miles Davis at the wheel of a Ferrari.

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Lest Anybody Forget

I just read that Justice John Paul Stevens will retire from the Supreme Court this summer. As talk turns to potential replacements, I recalled the most underrated disgusting political move of all time: George H.W. Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to fill Thurgood Marshall's seat. You couldn't throw down a bigger fuck you if you devoted your life to figuring one out.

That's like appointing Lex Luthor to replace Superman.

In semi-related news, how sorry are the Cubs? Justice Stevens actually saw Babe Ruth call his famed shot, but he'll still likely die without seeing his beloved Cubs win a World Series.

That certainly takes the sting out when I whine about the Dodgers not having been back to the WS since they won it in 1988.
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Cooking Chicken The Icecreammang Way

I'm no whiz in the kitchen, but what I can do, I do well. Like cooking chicken. How well? I won't order a chicken dish in restaurants because my chicken is superior. So superior, in fact, that I don't care how a chef wants to prepare it [fried chicken doesn't count because it's really about the frying and I don't currently have chicken-frying capability].

Then again, it's not fair to compare myself to most restaurants--they have to worry about health safety and probably over-cook chicken out of fear. Which leads me to my secret:

Don't cook chicken one second longer than you have to--and you don't have to cook it as long as you might think. As soon as ALL the translucent-pink flesh becomes opaque--boom! you're good to go. Yes, even if it's pinkish. You could let it go just a tad longer, until it's just become white--but no longer! The key is constant attention. You can't be half-stepping here. No tv, no phone, no FaceSpace. Wait too long and you may as well have baked that shit in the oven like it was the fucking 1950s in Des Moines. No sir!

Chicken prep? Minimal. Why? Let's face it, you're an American, so you're gonna throw some sort of sauce or condiment at it--why waste effort on marinating? Liberal but not excessive application of Worcestershire sauce and Lawry's Seasoned Salt, anywhere from 5-20 minutes before cooking. I cook it on the stove top, in a grilling pan, with a little bit of olive oil (or if I've switched out Worcestershire for soy sauce, sesame oil), only enough to coat the pan and prevent sticking.

That's it.

What you get is chicken so tender you can't believe it. And what you don't get, if you constantly monitor it, is salmonella.
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But Where It's Goin' No One Knows

Last week I picked out a piece of pop candy for your ears.

Here's another piece:



A live performance:



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Make No Mistake: This Is Who We Are. This Is What We Do [UPDATED]

[UPDATED: I've linked to Glenn Greenwald's follow up to his post I linked to yesterday. You can see it after the jump.]

We may think we've made the world safer for ourselves with the hundreds of billions we've poured into our Middle East escapades, but delivering death from above upon unarmed civilians just doesn't make me feel any safer. Angry survivors probably don't have those warm, fuzzy "liberated" feelings.

But wait. If my taxes were never raised to pay for it, then it hasn't cost me anything, right? And it's not like those hundreds of billions could have been spent on anything else, right? Ok, carry on then. 
Greenwald's follow up
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Cognitive Surplus (plus bonus Weird Al content)

This is something I've thought about on my own over the years, and this fellow has a name for it: Cognitive Surplus.

Here is a quick example of what Clay Shirky means by cognitive surplus:

[I]f you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.

Not really sure what else I want to say about this, other than to note how much I love stumbling upon someone who has done the homework on something that's been rattling around my brain.

This confirms my suspicion that human potential is seriously untapped. As for my related suspicion--that anyone seeking to undermine, overthrow, or otherwise fuck with the organizational structures which suppress human potential is digging their own grave--well, I've said too much and I think I hear the black helicopters approaching.

At any rate, keep up the good work, Clay. One fewer thing for me to worry about! (One less thing thing to worry about? Wait, that sounds right. But it shouldn't be. But...)

Anyway, there's no doubt about who's right in this one:



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