Category Archives: Pop-Culture

On Grief And The Aggrieved

Crime, Democrats, Etiquette, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The State, The Zeitgeist

In the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, our masters in modern Rome are foregoing “partisanship” (read principle) and are coming together to spend funds not their own to secure their sorry asses against the statistically minuscule chance that these royal behinds will come to harm. Curiously, House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is commending House Speaker John Boehner for being “extraordinary in setting the right tone” for “a more enlightened way.”

“A more enlightened way” than what?” It’s almost as though Larson is the aggrieved party and Boehner a member of the offending group. Both parties have assumed these respective roles.

Indeed: “Republicans are clearly responding as if they feel somewhat incriminated,” said University of Michigan political science professor Lisa Disch. “On the one hand, they are acting very quickly to distance themselves from the incident, but on the other hand, they seem to be feeling as if they have been caught at something; caught at using rhetoric that is incendiary.”

On the topic of grief: A day after their child’s dreadful demise, the parents of the “9-year-old girl gunned down in Saturday’s shooting rampage outside an Arizona grocery store” were liberally granting interviews.

To me this is unsettling. We once used to grieve privately—at least initially. These days, there is nothing people will not share and express in public, and ASAP. They have no private selves.

This is part of our festering cultural commons.

America’s Most Admired

Affirmative Action, America, Barack Obama, Bush, Politics, Pop-Culture, Race, South-Africa

They are two ponces who’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives, unless the wholesale destruction of a couple of countries is considered honest work. The one has made his fortune off the American, racial-spoils system; the other off the privileges accrued to a political dynasty. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll “President Barack Obama is Americans’ Most Admired Man of 2010, substantially ahead of the former presidents, iconic religious leaders, and others who fill out the top 10 list.”

America’s second choice is George Bush. One has to, at least, admire the consistency of the majority’s damning affinities: Both men are remarkably similar in their political philosophy and destroyer capabilities.

About hot favorite Nelson Mandela, coming in at 4th place, I’ll quote from my address to the HL Mencken Club, on the occasion of its 3rd annual meeting in October of 2010, which will be published shortly by VDARE.COM, and is titled, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither? South Africa As A Case Study”: “Republicans have slipped between the sheets with the fashionable Left. Today they are as eager as the next drug-addled supermodel to press flesh with Nelson Mandela” (a former terrorist and avowed communist).

“WE ARE DOOMED.”

UPDATED: “The Secret In Their Eyes”

Aesthetics, Art, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture

Imagine a film without loud-mouthed, humorless, self-referential Hollywood hedonists, congratulating themselves on their American exceptionalism (and sensitivity). Imagine a film with a plot you don’t figure out in the first minute of the movie (because it’s a fairly typical ad hoc abomination, like “Salt,” with Angelina Jolie). Imagine actresses sans silicone who act rather than act-out. Imagine actors who transport you into a world that goes beyond their bathroom mirrors (and every other surface that reflects … their image). Imagine no political correctness—no invisible wagging finger suggesting The Right Political Perspective; no ideology, only a story, and interactions between the sexes that are positive and natural; the kind that happened before women became menaces and men were made over in their image.

“The Secret In Their Eyes,” directed by writer-director Juan José Campanella, is such a film. It “won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards [2009], making Argentina the first country in Latin America to win it twice …” (Wikipedia.)

The New York Times’ review of this exceptional film did not do it justice. American film reviewers labor under the chauvinistic impression that Hollywood is where it all begins, and that there is no filmic life outside it. I guess this could blind a reviewer to excellence elsewhere.

The New Yorker gets it, writing that this “legal thriller” is “powerfully and richly imagined: a genre-busting movie that successfully combines the utmost in romanticism with the utmost in realism.”

Writer-director, Juan José Campanella, working with the screenwriter and novelist Eduardo Sacheri, sends us deeper into mystery and passion; the movie presses forward with a rhapsodic urgency and with flashes of violence and pungent humor. “The Secret in Their Eyes” is a finely wrought, labyrinthine entertainment whose corners and passageways will be discussed by moviegoers for hours afterward as they exit into the cool night air.

Watch it. It’s achingly beautiful and deep, “an effortless mastery, from moment to moment, of whatever the dramatic situation requires.”

UPDATE: And imagine wit and humor, organic to a situation— as people use colloquially—instead of the American, “I kicked him in the butt, ha, ha, ha, ha. I’m Brad Pitt.” Funny conversational lines from the better-than-decent effort that is “The Secret In Their Eyes”:

“Hurry up or you’ll find not a crime scene but a wake.”

The hero’s “antic partner,” Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), answers the phone in the criminal-court office (he doesn’t really want to answer): “No, wrong number, this is the sperm bank …”

The love object, the lovely Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), a judge’s assistant, must get hero Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darín) off the hook for his investigative zeal. She mentions having had to win some official over with her smile (she’s being self-deprecating). Espósito (who loves her deeply and desperately), a subordinate, teases her gently: “What is this smile? Have I seen it?”

There is a powerful scene in which Irene walks in on Espósito’s interrogation of the killer. It’s amateurish if penetrating compared to the American power protocol.

Sensitive woman that she is, she catches the creep undressing her with his eyes. Then and there “she turns the questioning into a sexual duel, taunting Gomez’s manhood, her words more wounding and more effective than a beating with brass knuckles.” She’s brave, smart and politically incorrect.

There is also considerable depth to perceptions related; ordinary conversation which make you say to yourself, “That’s so true.” The victim’s husband, “a bank employee named Morales (Pablo Rago), who remains obsessed with his dead wife for the rest of his life,” is relating to Espósito how he knows no longer if his memories of his beloved are true memories or memories of memories. (How often have you wondered whether what you remember even happened?)

Sandoval, a drunk, gives his life for his friend, Espósito. An opportunity presents itself, and out of the delirium of drunkenness, Sandoval finds the presence of mind to do a great thing. Or did he really? So subtle and unassuming is this act of sacrifice performed by a flawed, if delightful, character, that it almost goes unnoticed. It is certainly not accompanied by the soaring, sentimental f-cking sound/music/noise that masks similar, but staged, moments in your typical Hollywood production.

I don’t want to sully my impressions of this gem of a movie, but watching “Salt” last night was unsettling. America’s XBox, special effects, language-less movie culture reflects a certain reality-averse atavism. Up-close, Jolie the star is frightening. She has cultivated a comic-book look with a newly sculptured nose and cheekbones that might have been enhanced. Her mouth is hemorrhoidal. The chick is scary. And her come-hither glances! A CIA agent, or whatever she is supposed to be in this moronic movie, struts her stuff in a skirt slit up to her panties, which she promptly removes to make a bomb (an underwear bomber). My G-d; that’s not even Avatar-like clever. (Well, they say Avatar was clever. I don’t know; I would never watch such far-removed rubbish about a blue people fighting for their invaded fairy forest.)

Fashion Police (http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/fashion/index.html)

Cultural Foot-And-Mouth Can Kill

Art, Music, Pop-Culture, Technology, The Zeitgeist

An abundance of flying objects and a minimalist script, as far as music and language go: This encapsulates the artistic tastes pervading the culture. “Sixty Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, however, was enraptured by the sounds of a bad band called “The Edge,” collaborating with Bono, another three-chord wonder, to produce the “new musical ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.'”

In order to better describe the audial effects he wanted to achieve, Bono told “The Edge”: “ta, ta, ta, tum; give me that John Lennon-kinda sound.” He can’t even read music. Neither could they, presumably. That was “the creative process in real time” to which Stahl treated her viewers.

About the pretentious director, Julie Taymor—without whom Bono said he would not have been willing to warble worthlessly—the media seem to be saying less since her set has started buckling under poor Super Man and his supporting crew. She must be a card-carrying liberal.

The show’s financial scaffolding is rickety too. It so happens that Taymor’s talents for entertaining are not commercially viable: she has been at this production longer than the Iraq war has been entertaining the political deadheads. Before its financial sponsors can break even, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” will have to run for decades. That is if it holds up.