PoliticalEye's Snark Attack

2014-07-02T10:29:00.001-05:00

Nutraceuticals vs. pharmaceuticals: there's a place for both in modern medicine
posted 7-2-2014 - 10:34 pm

(Note: this is a shorter version of an op-ed piece that was originally posted to my op-ed blog, PoliticalEye, and addressed mainly to health care professionals; however, the subject is of interest to patients and their families, too. This post is longer than usual because a few paragraphs wouldn’t adequately tell the story, so hang in there to the end and you'll see what I mean. Thanks.)

You never know how good your hospital really is until you need it. Mine’s very good, based on objective criteria. But even an excellent hospital that does all the right things 99.9 percent of the time can still have blinders on about certain ways in which it practices medicine. It’s a question of medical mindset.

My own recent hospitalization is a good case in point. Having covered health care and health policy in the business press for most of the last 30+ years, I’m a picky customer on criteria that matter (hint: they’re not ‘housekeeping’ issues like whether the food tastes good, or the nurses are polite, or the parking’s convenient). I also didn’t choose this hospital because it was the closest one: convenience isn’t an issue when it comes to my health, and people who rank that factor highly either have the wrong priorities or are without reliable transportation. I’m lucky that this place is only 15 minutes away from my house and that I have a car – but I’d travel an hour to get there if I had to.

So when I suddenly had to be admitted a few months ago, it was automatic that as the staff members were evaluating and treating me, I was naturally evaluating them – and in a more detailed, objective manner than most patients would. I expected good medical performance from them because it’s a teaching hospital connected to the top medical, nursing and allied health schools in Chicago and has a Level I trauma unit that is part of the local trauma network. It’s the #4 hospital in the metro area (probably in the state, if we’re being honest) and highly rated nationally, too, according to U.S. News and a few other lists that matter (not all do). Plus, they have the best nurses in town, from what I saw, maybe the best in the state, based on clinical measures and other performance criteria that are independently measured on a regular basis.

While I was there, I had to be given an I.V. antibiotic and painkillers, and that was going to influence my discharge planning. But I’ll get back to those in a moment.

Here’s the thing: I’m well informed and can figure out how to compensate for some less-than-perfect advice about my medical care, and the moment I saw a problem, I talked to my primary care physician about it. But most people don’t have my background and can’t have that kind of conversation with a doctor. They’re stuck, so practitioners have to anticipate and stay well informed themselves. And on a few points that were important to me in recovering faster, they missed some things – because they were focusing on the drugs for my immediate care instead of taking the broader view, and because they had a pharmaceutical-oriented mindset that most health care practitioners in the U.S. share.

The staff didn’t take into consideration what my diet required before this incident, and they should have: I’m on a blood thinner, so I try to be consistent in what I eat and not overdo foods that will interfere with or exaggerate the effects of the blood thinner. Someone besides me should have thought of that when they were prescribing a hospital diet for me. No doubt that the vomiting caused by the morphine they gave me at first (which was then switched to a painkiller that didn’t create as much nausea) had something to do with the soft, bland diet I endured while my system recovered. But that one-size-fits-all diet wasn’t working for me even in the hospital. My doctor and I discussed it before I was discharged; she didn’t see a reason for it, either, and we agreed that I should go back to eating what was right for me.

But that alone wouldn’t solve the immediate problem: I still felt lousy. It took a full day at home before the painkiller was out of my system and I had a clear head. Then I realized I’d missed something obvious and so had the hospital staff. Antibiotics -- of course! All the flora in my system needed to be replaced before I could digest anything properly. And the staff hadn’t even considered the simple, non-pharmaceutical solution: probiotics, in this case yogurt or kefir with live cultures. I should have been given that the moment they took me off the antibiotic. I immediately bought some and began eating it. It took a day or two, but my guts were back to normal much faster than if I’d just blindly followed their instructions. And I was back to a diet that worked well with my blood thinner.

I’ll bet that these same doctors, nurses, dietitians and discharge planners all know that when they themselves take antibiotics, afterwards they have to replace those beneficial ‘bugs.’ But they didn’t take that knowledge to work with them. Probiotic treatment immediately after antibiotic treatment should be a complete no-brainer, an automatic prescription every single time someone takes antibiotics, whether in the hospital or at home – i.e., a systematic part of treatment and aftercare, if only to ward off unpleasant and unnecessary complications like yeast infections – but it wasn’t in my discharge instructions.

Why not? Probably because it’s not traditional pharmaceutical advice. Or rather, it’s not pharmaceutical advice: it’s nutraceutical advice. Those careful, caring professionals weren’t educated to consider that – and they should be. They also need to be more thorough in adjusting diets more accurately to individual patients.

For example: I don’t have high blood pressure, diabetes, or diverticulitis, but I was given a no-salt, soft, bland diet. Why? If anything, after two days of vomiting and not eating I needed to replace some electrolytes and other nutrients, but the liquid diet I had the third day was no-salt. The soft diet also excluded all seeds, raw fruit and raw vegetables. No need, in my case. Also, I don’t have any trouble eating hot sauce or spicy foods, yet all those were banned. Again: why? I wasn’t recovering from an ulcer or short of bile to digest food – I was just temporarily missing some needed bacteria. The reasoning behind avoiding raw vegetables, beans, onions and garlic was to limit the gas in my guts – but come on, has nobody ever heard of products like Beano or Gas-X?? They control or prevent gas, they’ve been around for years, and they’re over-the-counter products. Like yogurt. It doesn’t take four years of medical school to know any of that.

On the other hand, I was routinely prescribed a drug that reduces stomach acid, probably because of the vomiting. I declined to take that drug, and my primary care doctor agreed with me. The two of us had better judgment than the hospitalist who prescribed it, as drugs that limit stomach acid production also interfere with the immune system by lowering the body’s natural resistance to infection. I certainly didn’t need that.

Why did the hospitalist prescribe it? Probably because the pharmaceutical industry has oversold the value of such acid-lowering drugs. It had to: once it became clear that such drugs were no longer useful in treating ulcers – because we now know that ulcers are caused by the bacterium H. pylori, not excess stomach acid or spicy foods – the drug industry lost a lot of money on those acid suppressors. So now they’ve inflated the incidence of acid reflux and marketed these same drugs as ones that help prevent esophageal cancer by limiting reflux. Sorry, folks, but there simply aren’t enough cases of that kind of cancer to justify the massive marketing campaign for these drugs, which are now sold over the counter under names like Zantac and Prilosec and are marketed directly to consumers (who are supposedly easier to fool than doctors).

If the hospitalist was worried about excess acid in my stomach, telling me to drink milk or chew a calcium tablet would have done me far more good – and wouldn’t have put money in the drug industry’s pocket. So I refused the drug and drank the milk instead, and my doctor backed me up. Good for her. Too bad the hospitalist wasn’t as savvy as we were.

What that soft, bland diet did have was plenty of simple carbs – white bread, mashed potatoes and pasta – foods that I limit because I need to lose weight, and my primary care doc knows this. It banned caffeine, too, for no good reason (I drink green tea, which is good for me and much lower in caffeine than coffee, but there wasn’t a green tea bag to be had in the entire hospital, for love or money). The soft diet also limited the kinds of cooked vegetables that I was allowed, but it didn’t even mention asparagus, avocados or beets, three of my favorite veggies; so, was I to eat those or avoid them? Your guess is as good as mine. When I junked that diet and went back to eating as I had before, I didn’t suffer: I felt normal again. And I got better sooner.

The part about the missing green tea confused me. Seriously? All the research done about the benefits of green and white tea, and yet I couldn’t get a bag of green tea to save my life. You’d think that the nurses and dieticians would follow the research news and know about that. Apparently not. Green tea with lemon would have done me a world of good while I was in the hospital and would have been comforting, too. The really vile decaf coffee that they served instead? Not so much. I skipped it.

Sad to say, I’m decades ahead of my health care practitioners when it comes to knowing about nutraceuticals – phytochemicals, bioflavonoids, catechins, and all sorts of other food- and beverage-based helpful chemicals that affect your health and wellness. And these wonderful, talented, highly skilled, very nice professionals who otherwise cared for me so well should be embarrassed by that. They’re excellent at what they were trained to do, but they haven’t added all this other knowledge yet to how they practice in the hospital. They haven’t expanded their treatment mindset – and I and other patients suffer because of that.

My hospital caregivers and the dietician who participated in my discharge planning either didn’t know or didn’t apply what they know to me as a specific patient. And because they didn’t know or didn’t think about how any foods in or absent from the diet they prescribed would affect my condition or recovery, they gave me bad advice. They didn’t mean to, but they did.

Luckily for me, my primary care physician was more insightful than any of the hospital staff. “You’re well informed, and you know what you should or shouldn’t eat,” she told me. “Just use your own common sense.”

But other people faced with inappropriate advice might not complain to the right person or might simply take matters into their own hands – without telling their doctors or nurses, possibly causing themselves avoidable problems. Or, they might follow the instructions to the letter and be miserable for days longer than they had to be. Now which result do you think is more likely? I’m betting on patients doing what they want and not telling anyone, because they’ve lost faith in what their doctors and nurses tell them – probably because they’ve all had incidents like mine, where the medical advice given didn’t make sense. Better to just admit that up front and try to prevent it.

Giving people diets that haven’t been adjusted for their individual situations is just asking for trouble. Health care practitioners would do themselves and their patients a big favor if they started incorporating all the solid research about nutraceuticals into their daily practice and got a lot more detailed about tailoring diets. Their patients would feel better and might be less tempted to dismiss medical advice next time.

Meanwhile, it’s up to the patient to keep an eye on what he or she is being given and to question the right people – your doctors and your nurses – promptly whenever something doesn’t make sense. If you stay quiet instead, how are your physicians and nurses supposed to know you have a problem? Speak up: you have a responsibility, too – to yourself.

2014-06-30T18:44:00.000-05:00

Michael Reese Park: A better spot for the Lucas Museum in Chicago
posted 6-30-2014 - 6:36 pm

Last week, the Chicago Tribune ran an article announcing the site selection for a new museum that director and producer George Lucas is hoping to build. It could have been in San Francisco, but that city blew its chance. That, the fact that we get more than double the annual number of tourists that San Francisco gets, and the fact that Lucas recently married a Chicagoan (Ariel Investments president Mellody Hobson) and lives here part time now gave the nod to us. The museum, which is obviously still in the planning stage, will shortly be renamed the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art; the tentative name had been the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum.

The name change is a minor thing. The thing that does concern me and a lot of other Chicagoans is that Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who vigorously courted the project and supposedly has a Site Selection Task Force, seems willing to let Lucas break a time-honored rule about not building on the lakefront: the proposed museum as presently imagined would tear up the existing parking lots between Soldier Field and McCormick Place. Great idea, bad location; it’s not that those lots shouldn’t be torn up and put underground anyway to create more park space – they should. But the building doesn’t belong there. I hope the Chicago Plan Commission, which has to approve the site, insists on an alternative — and I have one in mind that’s only a few blocks further south.

There is an excellent location that has more than enough land and a train stop nearby: the old Michael Reese Hospital property between 26th Street and 31st Street, from Vernon Avenue east to the Metra tracks. You really have no idea how BIG it is until you've driven through it. And it's convenient: there’s a Metra stop right at 27th Street that goes straight downtown, and a shuttle or trolley could make it from the convention halls of McCormick Place to the Michael Reese site in 5 minutes. There are also Metra stops at the Museum Campus and at McCormick Place. Moreover, the Michael Reese land is already cleared and lying empty, and it has low traffic for now.

Preservationists fought like hell to keep that historic campus from being torn down, but alas, former mayor Richie Daley let it happen anyway on his watch. Whatever plans the city administration had for it at the time remain a mystery (rumor said it might have been one site to be used for our failed Olympics bid) and were never realized anyway, despite many suggestions by interested parties such as Landmarks Illinois and Friends of the Parks, which is opposed to the lakefront site and very likely to sue. This would be a fantastic way to put that several-blocks-long derelict lot to good use.

There's been talk that perhaps the city is suggesting this huge plot as the site of the future Barack Obama Presidential Library. No problem; there's plenty of room for that, the Lucas Museum, and more. We should admit, however, that the University of Chicago is probably in the lead insofar as Chicago sites for the Obama library are concerned, and U of C is a lot more likely to offer a site that is close to campus than anywhere near McCormick Place (and the Michael Reese plot really isn't that close to the university; so much for that). So, the Michael Reese site is quite likely safe for the Lucas Museum.

But wait, there’s more: wasn’t there a big scandal some years ago about plans to move the Chicago Children’s Museum from Navy Pier to Grant Park? Of course there was. Loud adverse public opinion killed that suggestion, and quite appropriately, too, despite support from City Hall back then (Richie again). There are strict rules and legal precedents banning such construction in our front yard, meaning Grant Park, of which world-famous Millennium Park is only one section. There are a few legal barriers for Burnham Park as well, which was itself originally a compromise to avoid the legal problems involving Grant Park; but the Michael Reese lot has no such problems at all.

Meanwhile, the Children’s Museum still needs more room. Why not move it and the Lucas Museum to the Michael Reese site? There would be more than enough room for both plus the presidential library, with one museum at the north end and one at the south, along with landscaped park land, a playground, picnic areas, an outdoor food court or parking area for food trucks, perhaps even an ice-skating rink/skateboard area, plus an underground garage beneath the park (a city-owned and operated lot, please!) — all in between the two museum buildings. Plus, there are other reasons to put the Lucas Museum at the Michael Reese site: 1) it looks to be a vanity museum, so far; other than the Norman Rockwell paintings, we don't know what else will go into it, so it shouldn't automatically be accorded the same status by association as the Field Museum, the planetarium or the aquarium. And 2) putting it on the same campus as the Children's Museum is at least thematically more in agreement.

It’s a perfect solution: it’s close to Lake Shore Drive and rapid train transit, it wouldn’t block or occupy the lakefront, it's still very close to McCormick Place to get the convention visitors but wouldn't dislocate the tailgaters at Bears games, it would put to use a space that’s an eyesore and not collecting taxes now, and it would bring more cultural amenities to the nearby Douglas neighborhood and greater Bronzeville. This would not only be an ideal solution for the two museums but would also solve a huge problem for the city and for the neighborhood, as right now that enormous empty space looks like a bombed-out war zone.

Think about it: the Michael Reese site could work, and work well. You could probably even get the community groups and preservationists on your side. For that matter, there could be an architectural competition for the overall site. This plan could create an entirely new Museum Campus South. Just saying, Rahm: you could have a win-win for all, instead of a political hot potato in a town with a long memory.

2014-06-30T16:26:00.002-05:00

On naming and identities
posted 0-0-2014 - 11:23 pm

Some years ago at a local radio station in Chicago, there was a young intern named Mylanta. No, that’s not the beginning of a joke, and yes, it was Mylanta – I kid you not: spelled just like the trademarked antacid. (Never mind the fact that the station had a ‘smooth jazz’ format, a musical analgesic for daily life not unlike modern Muzak; let’s just set that aside as a fascinating irony.)

It wasn’t the drug that was named after a human being but the other way around. It’s not a ‘real’ name that people give to their children, like David or Jennifer or Gyorgi or Uhura, but one invented by a pharmaceutical firm for a patented product.

What happened there? How did that poor girl end up with a drug name that was sure to provoke smirks? Was that merely the first thing that her befuddled mother saw once she came out of anesthetized labor, and she decided on that without ever once considering the consequences for the girl?

What symbolism was imparted there – that perhaps the girl was to be a palliative for everyday distress and the more indigestible aspects of life, without ever being a real solution to anything? Or something else? One wonders if that young lady had two brothers named Darvon and Tylenol, the latter after an over-the-counter pain killer, the former after a controlled substance, and what the symbolism or consequences of that naming would be.

Mylanta’s mother guaranteed that her girl’s name would forever be a source of at best, giggles and at worst, derision and humiliation. What on earth possesses parents to curse their children like that?

I don’t get intentionally misspelled names, either. What’s up with that? I have a nephew, Tylor, whose name was intentionally misspelled by his parents so that he’d be just a little different (right, like he’d really enjoy that as a teenager). I’d been sending cards for a while to baby Tyler and didn’t realize his name had been purposely misspelled, until I got a family Christmas card one year with all the first names on it. Not wanting to upset his mom, my cousin Irene (note the conventional spelling; she’s successful), I never mentioned it. Tylor is in college now, and I still don’t have the nerve to ask him how he feels about his name. It would be insensitive, and the damage is already done. Maybe he’ll change it someday. But I can’t help but wonder if his indecisiveness about a college major or career direction has something to do with people’s uncertainly about how to spell his name.

Sooner or later, kids with ‘unconventionally spelled’ names (and how’s that for a PC euphemism?) will figure out that their names are purposely misspelled. Then either they’ll feel embarrassed – like there isn’t already enough of that during adolescence – or else it’ll be a constant source of irritation on both sides whenever somebody who can spell tries to spell it correctly, i.e., conventionally. Why do that to your kid?

Then there are those who name their daughters Amber, or Brandy, or Tiffani with an ‘i’ (whose parents evidently couldn’t spell, either, but wanted a name that sounded like bling), thereby probably ensuring that these young women will never be – or seek to be – Nobel laureates, rocket scientists, corporate CEOs, Pulitzer winners, or world-class surgeons (please note: there are no U.S. senators named Bambi, at least not yet; and call me crazy, but I’m not sure I’d trust one if there were). What messages are these parents sending to their daughters about their expectations, and how are they preemptively narrowing these girls’ life paths and career choices? Or how potential employers will see them? Do parents even consider that anymore?

Don’t even get me started on made-up names like Wynona or Lurleen. Yes, I know, eventually every name already in existence was made up at some point, given that all language is a human artifact. But you’d think from all those baby books in umpteen languages that there were already plenty of solid, beautiful, noble, or elegantly exotic names to choose from without spelling some backwards, making up more or relying on drugs for inspiration.

There’s always some degree of potential ego-gratification and status seeking involved in naming children. Any status conferred by a name could be intended as a means of easing a child’s way in life – but it could just as easily be intended to confer greater status on the parents themselves instead, or placate or flatter other family members, or indicate a long, established, high-status line of ancestors and thereby show off to other people. Thus, names like, say, Paige Sydney Davenport or Charles Edgar Whatever IV.

But what fleeting status could possibly be bestowed by names like Nevaeh, or Mylanta, or Wynona, or Tiffani with an ‘i’? Why name a child Apple or Rainbow Sun and give only the impression that (s)he is a unique individual – possibly with overgrown hippie parents – instead of actually teaching him or her to be different by thinking for himself or being true to herself? Could it be because the latter is a much harder, long-term proposition than simply saddling the child with an unusual name and a few exhortations to ‘be different,’ then expecting the child to take it from there? That’s lazy on the parents’ part and rude and cruel to the child.

Words have meaning. Impact. They can inspire or condemn, so you have to use them wisely. A name need not be destiny, but it has influence: it can be formative, both encouraging and discouraging in different directions, especially if the parents abdicate some of their responsibility to raise the child with good values, ones that are life affirming in the broadest possible meaning of that term. A name is not enough to establish an identity, but it can set a direction – perhaps the wrong one. And an exotic or artsy name doesn’t guarantee that the bearer will grow into a solid, rational, loving, intelligent, creative individual instead of an unthinking, mediocre conformist – just as a conventional name doesn’t guarantee that its owner won’t become a serial killer (ever notice that most serial killers, assassins and domestic terrorists have seemingly ‘normal’ names? Usually three of them at a time, like John Wayne Gacy or John Wilkes Booth).

Symbolism isn’t enough: parents actually have to do the hard work of properly raising a child to become a solid, rational, intelligent human being who thinks creatively and knows how to make wise, informed decisions. Naming represents only the most cursory beginning of that process.

Parents can’t ensure that a child will turn out well by giving him or her the ‘right’ name, whatever they think that might be, but they can screw up royally by saddling the poor kid with a laughable, insulting, misspelled or otherwise embarrassing ‘different’ name that leaves the child with just one more unnecessary obstacle to overcome. Kids have more than enough problems to deal with in growing up; parents don’t need to start children off with names that make them feel bad and leave them open to ridicule.

The bottom line for parents is the same as it’s ever been: Don’t inflict your own ego issues or agendas – or other people’s agendas – on your kids. Don’t start them off on the wrong foot with the wrong name. And if you want them to grow up to be decent, loving, lovable individuals instead of rude, clueless jailbirds or sheep, do the work. Don’t expect a name to do it for you. Because if you do expect that, they and the rest of us will pay for it, one way or another.

2012-06-08T22:48:00.003-05:00

Ray Bradbury: The last of the sci-fi ABCs departs
posted 6-8-2012 - 8:16 pm

There is a scene in the middle of The Martian Chronicles wherein a human and a Martian accidentally meet. Each has left his settlement, distracted, and wandered out in search of solitude, quiet, a chance to think. In a strip of Martian desert, past boulders in a narrow place where no one should be, a thin veil separating two realities dissolves, and they suddenly see each other. The thing is, the Martian civilization has been gone for thousands of years. Dead. To the human, the Martian is a ghost of the planet’s past; to the Martian, who is quite alive, the human is a ghost of its future. Surprised, they encounter one another, connect. And marvel.

Whenever I think of The Martian Chronicles, the first thing I remember is that scene: two intelligent beings confronting The Other in the vastness of space. It was breathtaking to me then, and still is. I thought of it again last week when I heard that Ray Bradbury had died.

I grew up reading the ABCs of science fiction: Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. Isaac, Ray and Arthur C. I encountered them by accident at a time when I was first being introduced to real science in school, and the space race was on television for everyone to see. It was all of a piece to me then: I watched the Mercury and Gemini launches on television before I got on the bus to school. I read science in class in SRA reading supplements (one of IBM’s projects) whenever I got my classwork or homework done half an hour before everyone else did, which was daily, and ran out of other things to do. In truth, I hurried to finish my own work so that I could read the SRA materials: I’d quickly run out of things to read in the school library, which was geared to babies, I thought (even in first grade, I was way past the appalling Dick and Jane, which I’d concluded was written for idiots).

It wasn’t until the school librarian decided to let me borrow books two or three reading levels ahead of my grade, however, that I got the idea to do the same at the public library. Having then persuaded that librarian to change my library card so that I could borrow from the adult (i.e., older than grade school level) section, I didn’t know where to start. So I began alphabetically, stumbled first into the science fiction section. And there was Asimov, waiting for me, with Bradbury and Clarke close at hand. The delightful triumvirate, the Three Musketeers of speculative, provocative thought. So began my adventure, one that I’ve never left behind. By the time I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen, I was thoroughly enmeshed, a convert for life. And I took space travel in my future for granted.

Bradbury was a big part of that. His writing somehow always reached me as more of an interior dialogue between writer and reader, on a more personal level than the other two. Each spoke to me in a different voice, each’s ideas fascinating me in a different way. Asimov was the obvious polymath, with his personality far more evident in his nonfiction and mystery writing and the type of gleeful literary voice that cried ‘Look, ma – no hands!’ He was prodigious, his ideas animated, and he was right out there in front, in your face. Clarke was the Zen master who blended into the shadows behind his work, his voice quiet, thoughtful, inscrutable. Even when he explained a mystery to you, it still managed to retain its sense of the mysterious, and the wonderful. He and Stanley Kubrick were aptly suited to each other when together they created the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Bradbury … Bradbury always stirred a complex set of emotions: imagination, whimsy, longing, loss, love, an elegiac quality. A spark of hope. Wonder.

I became more interested in science because of science fiction, and in ethics. I wanted to understand how we got from Here to There, from rockets into orbit to colonies on distant planets. To understand why we were hidebound and stuck on a planet we seemed bent on destroying. How we got beyond that, and met other life. Whether we were worthy of it all. No nostalgia for me; I read my history per George Santayana’s prescription: to learn from it and not repeat it, not to wallow in it or waste time longing for the past. I was always more interested in what was around the next corner, 10 years ahead, 20 years, 90. A millennium. Would we still recognize ourselves? Would they recognize us? Would we last that long? I needed to know.

Science fiction, to me, was that extension of science that might help envision the answers. True science fiction takes science and extrapolates from what we know, then extends it to its logical conclusions, posing questions along the way. Fantasy never does: it has no science at its heart, which is why I consider it a cuckoo in the nest – a far different creature bearing no resemblance to science fiction, even if the fantasy is futuristic – which is why I object so strongly to commingling or confusing the two. Fantasy like Star Wars was a good escape, but it never made me question my world or want a better one the way that science fiction did. And don’t get me started about why: I draw the line at Vikings with ray guns, witch worlds, and talking dragons. I’ve no patience with such. But I read Bradbury's fantasy and horror books, because he was much more imaginative than that.

Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke made me ask those questions about my world and my civilization. I am still asking because of them. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and his robot books, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, and Clarke’s 2001, Songs of Distant Earth, Childhood’s End, his Rama series and his short story “The Nine Billion Names of God” were the foundation on which my worldview developed. They introduced me to Big Ideas long before my watered-down school curriculum ever did. Fahrenheit 451 made a particular impression on a girl whose mother’s family had run through Europe during WW II dodging both Nazis and Russian Communists; I knew from family stories what it was to flee a world where thinking and ideas were dangerous and torture and death routine. To escape with your soul intact was no small thing. Bradbury and the others saw that and made it real for me, in a way that my family’s stories never did.

That complex set of emotions that Bradbury evoked and his unique tone of voice permeated everything that he wrote. You could always recognize his work, not just from the writing style but from how it made you feel. There was no such thing as genre for him, or even format. It didn’t matter whether he was writing a short story, a stage play, a TV script, or an essay, fact or fiction – it was just him, revealing something to you one on one, and making you wistful, glad you’d read it. I recall getting about two chapters into his first mystery novel, Death Is A Lonely Business, and thinking to myself: Oh. Well. That’s just Bradbury again. That’s okay. And then I read on, having recognized the feel. It was a good mystery, too, but the more important thing was that it was Bradbury, enchanting me and provoking unnamed longing and thought. I don’t think that he ever lost that particular young boy’s/young man’s small-town voice that he got during his early years in Waukegan, before his family moved them all first to Arizona, then California. That’s not a West Coast voice, despite his decades of dwelling there.

Mostly, what science fiction gave me was a flicker of hope – about everything. It provided a safe format for us to think out and work out our problems. Asimov and Clarke painted the big pictures. Bradbury made me feel that no matter how problematic our future or how advanced we became, we might still retain some of our humanity, the best of our natures. We would still be people, even if we had evolved into forms of energy beyond the need for bodies.

Like Asimov, Bradbury was prolific. Unlike Asimov, who pretty much stuck to books and short stories, Bradbury covered a range of formats: books, graphic novels, essays, stage plays, screenplays, teleplays, even poetry and operas. He wrote nearly 50 books and hundreds of short stories, 65 of which he adapted for his own TV show, The Ray Bradbury Theater, which earned him an Emmy for his teleplay of "The Halloween Tree." He worked in the film business, too. His screenplay for John Huston's film version of Moby Dick snagged him an Oscar nomination. Isaac couldn't claim that.

For his own part, Bradbury lived simply. He stayed married to the same woman for 57 years and survived her by nine. He helped raise four daughters. He preferred bicycles to cars and never bothered to get a driver's license. He remained a happy person.

The ABCs are gone now, their work taken up by others, both colleagues and genre descendants. Asimov was the first to go, having become somewhat of a recluse as he declined to travel but still having left behind a collection of more than 300 hundred books, about a third of which were science fiction or some other fiction. Showing off a little, Isaac. Still the genial smarty-pants to the end, outdoing everyone else and keeping us excited to the last. Asimov exited in 1992 at 72 like a proper showman, leaving us all still wanting more.

Clarke was next, departing us in 2008 at the age of 90. The elder statesman of the three, he'd given us the concept of geostationary communications satellites and the Clarke Belt in which they dwell – without which modern life would be drastically different – and retired early on to exotic Sri Lanka. A scientist himself, Clarke kept in touch with other scientists and with the space program, via phones, satellites and Internet, and wrote until the very end, during his last years collaboratively. His cerebral works didn’t suffer from it, either. I very much liked his final novel, The Last Theorem, co-authored with another science fiction veteran, Frederik Pohl.

Bradbury, the most whimsical of the trio, was the last to decamp at 91, having had the longest writing career at 70 years and arguably the most public life with his presence in the TV and film industry. In his rare spare time, he had been very vocal about his support for two causes: public libraries and the U.S. space program. The first had helped him educate himself when he skipped college, and the second he considered a necessity. He thought we should have had a moon base and a Mars colony by now. I can't disagree.

At least he got to remote-pilot a Mars rover, courtesy of JPL and NASA, the staffs of which no doubt saw him as one of their own. In my mind’s ear, I can hear him as he drove the joystick: Good boy, Rover. A boy and his dog, in an entirely Other context. How fitting.

Ray Bradbury is gone. Long live the master. He’ll certainly live in my memory.

2011-11-19T12:01:00.019-06:00

The Twilight series: Parsing images in the arts
When providing politically correct criticism really doesn’t help
posted 11-19-2011 - 7:45 pm CST

I got an e-mail yesterday from the Women’s Media Center. I’m on their list for a reason: they have a program called Progressive Women’s Voices that spends decent money to train women like me to be op-ed writers and opinion shapers and gives them the necessary connections. E-mail from the WMC is one of the very few ways to learn when the next class term will be scheduled so that I can apply. So when I get an e-mail from them, I usually glance at it right away.

This one arrived the very same day that the Twilight film franchise’s latest installment, “Breaking Dawn, Part 1,” debuted at movie theaters nationally. The digital missive came with a link and a provocative headline: “Exclusive: Breaking Bella – When Love Equals Violence.” That raised an eyebrow.

Like many other women, I’ve read the books, and that wasn’t exactly the impression I got from reading them. Yeah, they have some serious flaws, but they’re not dangerous or evil. The premise of that headline struck me as too simple minded and not a little blindly PC, but I reminded myself that headlines can be misleading. So I figured I ought to read the column before drawing conclusions.

I read it, all right ... and found myself remembering when I was young, passionate, and foolish enough to try to construct an argument while conveniently ignoring inconvenient facts. I’m still that passionate, no longer that young, and haven’t been that foolish in decades. The same cannot be said of the column’s author, Caitlin Moran, a newbie writer who just graduated university earlier this year. I’ll do her the courtesy of taking her argument seriously, but she won’t like my analysis. Her column is well written; her thesis, however, is not well constructed: it’s a little too PC, too oversimplified, ignores certain facts about the books and this film, and is too over the top to be effective.

Unfortunately, there are those out there who will read it and blindly agree with it in the name of feminism. That’s just silly. Mind you, I’m not against provocative positions. I’m a feminist, plain spoken, and don’t run from an argument or an opinion. I’ve verbally lopped some heads in my day. That said, I also think for myself, don’t go with the herd or trust true believers of any stripe, including politically correct ones. I don’t approach life or discussions from any particular philosophical, religious, psychological, intellectual, or party perspective; instead, I tend to first look for facts, then to analyze them. I have a pretty good brain and mind, and I trust both my brain and my mind to lead me to sensible conclusions.

When it came to this story, I just didn’t see the plot of the books and this film as violent in quite the same way young Ms. Moran does. Oh, there’s plenty of violence, but it’s mostly among vampires or between vampires and wolfy shape-shifting Quileutes. Edward, the romantic hero of the series, has gone out of his way to warn off his beloved, the protagonist teen girl Bella, from himself and from the vampire life in general. She’s not buying it. I may disagree with some of Bella’s choices, but she’s not written as an idiot, weak, masochistic, or unwilling to defend herself. She’s written as a generally well-spoken, thoughtful, modest, non-egotistic, reasonably intelligent teenager, but a teenager nonetheless – and adolescents can cling stubbornly to what they want, even when it doesn’t make sense to do so. So, Bella does some goofy things now and then. In that respect, the character of Bella is realistically written. The violent images that bother Ms. Moran, however, are not the ones between opposing groups of vampires or the vampires and the wolves, and the context of these images isn’t entirely as she represents it.

Yes, there are serious questions to be addressed in the story of Breaking Dawn – ones that a responsible parent will sit down and discuss calmly and rationally with his or her daughter(s) – but the matter is nowhere near as black and white as Ms. Moran presents it. If you can’t make your case without being selective about which facts you’re willing to consider, you’re doing a poor job of it.

Now, I don't usually discourse at this length about every piece of lit criticism I dispute. However, the Twilight franchise, in print and film, is a multimillion-dollar industry and an influential part of popular culture where young girls are concerned. That makes parsing its images a bit more important.

By now, most people who have read the Twilight books know that the author, Stephenie Meyer, is Mormon. There's a valid point to be made about how poorly the Mormon church treats its women and the attitudes its teachings instill in young women. Mormons also have a really big family ethic, so I can't see them encouraging a woman to end a pregnancy even when medical advice dictates an abortion to save the mother's life. And they’re generally anti-abortion anyway.

I don’t have that problem because I don’t consider conception to be the point at which human life begins. To me, according to the physical facts, it's only a potential human life that begins at conception. It can’t actually be a person unless it has fully human consciousness – and that requires a human brain with a sufficient degree of development to support true human consciousness, equivalent to that of a full-term newborn, which happens somewhere late in the third trimester. It isn’t sufficient for the fetus’s brain to be developed enough for a cat’s or a rat’s or even a chimp’s degree of consciousness; that stage is still a potential human being, not an actual one. It is human consciousness that makes a person, not a tiny cluster of dividing human cells. Without that consciousness, a living body is just an empty machine. We recognize this fact when we concede that a brain-dead human is no longer alive because consciousness is irretrievably gone. And that's as true at the beginning of life as it is at the end.

However, there are people who will disagree with me about all that; for them, the possibility of Bella’s fetus being aborted, even though it’s literally killing her, seems a form of violence possibly worse than any other that the vampires might commit. Ms. Moran, on the other hand, implies that Bella’s decision not to abort is a form of self-abuse. We’ll have to agree to disagree about that, even though I don’t agree with Bella’s choice, either.

And here’s where the real problem is, one that Ms. Moran never brings up: the plot is structured to deliberately encourage us to think of the fetus as an actual person in utero, instead of as a potential human being gradually forming until it is developed enough to be an individual and is born. How the story gets us there is sneaky. Edward has a gift for reading minds. We’ve had three previous books to get used to and accept the idea. The only person alive or undead whose thoughts Edward can’t read is Bella. As a plot device, it’s been an exceedingly convenient one throughout the series. But the fourth book is the one in which this device gets an anti-abortion subtext.

At a critical point in Bella’s pregnancy, Edward suddenly ‘hears’ the fetus’s thoughts – and informs Bella that it already knows and loves her. Well, now: that certainly makes this hybrid creature unusual. Human infants have no understanding of love, only an instinct for attachment – love is too sophisticated a concept for a newborn mind to handle when it can only just about recognize its mother. Moreover, human newborns and infants are physically designed to create attachment in their parents and other adults, to help ensure the child’s survival. But of course, in this story the fetus is a part vampire offspring that matures during rapidly progressing pregnancy (barely four weeks long: Bella is already a vampire a month after the wedding); so we are expected to suspend disbelief and entertain this notion. Which makes even Edward love the murderous fetus then (nope, I didn't buy that, either, and neither does Jacob). The plot soon reveals that the newborn’s post-birth development is also unusually rapid and advanced, so this is supposed to rationalize the whole overhearing-the-fetus’s-thoughts nonsense. This insistence that fetuses can think to that degree and even love, despite evidence to the contrary in newborns, is problematic all by itself. But wait, there’s more.

There's also a larger point to be made about how all vampire stories are at least in part about potential violence against others, primarily women either willing or seduced. Not to mention the fact that although most women don't have rape fantasies, many of us are still attracted to vampire stories despite their potential violence. And a small percentage of women are attracted to rape fantasies as well. Where does that come from?? Hell if I know. I’m not one of them.

We should ask ourselves why we like vampire stories at all. The appeal of Charlaine Harris’s Southern vampire series, adapted for HBO’s cable show True Blood, is in part that Harris portrays the vampires as pretty much like everyone else – they’re individuals, some good, some bad, some indifferent, all with their own agendas – except that they’re mortality challenged. Her books are also pretty funny in places: she has a way with zingers and understatement with a Southern twist. But of course, that’s not all of it.

Is it vampires’ physical strength that attracts us on an instinctual level? Aren't women actually programmed by nature to look for that in a mate? Is it their massive self-confidence that we admire, their ability to kick butt and flout authority that we envy? Chloe Neill's Chicagoland vampire series, for example, is about women using their supernatural sides to empower themselves. Same goes for some of Kim Harrison’s books. Maybe we like the idea of women having supernatural powers that let them fight back, and then some. Or is it the possibility of redemption in the Twilight books, of a 'good' vampire struggling with his own nature and trying to prevent his bride from being in his predicament, the essence of what we like about the Twilight series, and so we want to see Edward and Bella succeed? Maybe it’s a combination of things, a little different for each reader.

Well, there's no rape in the Twilight series, no assault between Bella and Edward, and not much actual seduction, unless you count Bella trying to seduce her own boyfriend, now husband. That’s also pretty true to life. Parents may still think that boys are always behind the push to have adolescent sex, but these days it’s just as likely that the girl is behind it. Like nearly every other girl her age, Bella is interested in sex, even though she doesn't get any until after marriage. That isn’t the only reason she wants Edward, of course. Don't we all know of at least one adult woman among our acquaintances who still goes for rebels and 'bad' boys, including their streak of latent (or not so latent) violence? Besides, Edward is a ‘good’ bad boy, i.e., reformed, with great hair, a good mind, a fast car, and courteous manners. It’s not a stretch to think that maybe that influences Bella’s attraction to Edward just a tiny bit.

We also know of or have read about women who insist on carrying fetuses to term against medical advice, regardless that they risk their own lives in the process. That’s a reality, too. They either think they're being moral or ethical or good mothers, or else they can't bring themselves to end a potential life that was co-created by someone they love. Or, perhaps, they have multiple reasons for going to term. And they insist it's their right to make that decision. I’m not one to tell them they can’t. Bella is one such young woman. Life is complicated sometimes, and so are people’s reasons for doing things. It's not always about masochism or weak character or peer pressure, and to reduce the entire discussion to an accusation of that sort is to do an injustice both to the discussion and to the people involved.

To be fair, Bella is more contentious in the books than she is in the films. She often disagrees with Edward and doesn't do things just to please him most of the time. In Breaking Dawn, the only thing she agrees to is marriage, and that's just an excuse to get a sex life and become a vampire so she can be with him forever. Bella thinks she knows what she's up against, at least intellectually. Edward warns her repeatedly that the honeymoon should wait until after she's been turned because with his strength and the distraction involved in sex, he could easily kill her, and that's the last thing he wants. He goes out of his way to point out that everything about him is designed to entice her, so that she shouldn’t trust her attraction to him. He also considers his own soul damned already but not hers, and he’d like to leave at least one rule unbroken while he preserves her virtue. All through the books, he's the one saying no while she pushes him to say yes. Deflowering her (and himself) while she's still human isn't what he had in mind. But it’s what she wants.

True, Bella does overreact to their break-up in the second book, but Edward's overreaction is far greater when he thinks she's dead. They're just rehashing Romeo and Juliet, which is truly idiotic, but they're not the first or the last teens to love that story and emulate it. Shakespeare made those characters teens for a reason (adolescence seems to be a prerequisite for certain kinds of hyperbolic stupidity; if we're lucky, we outgrow them). I don't think that accurately portraying such stupidity is the same as condoning it, but I'll agree that Meyer skirts too close to the edge in that instance.

The bit that I really don't like is that Bella seems to underrate her own abilities through most of the series while putting Edward on a pedestal – right up until she gets the cockamamie idea to endure this crazy pregnancy. Suddenly she's massively self-assured. How credible is that?? Consider: she arrives from Phoenix in the first book as a student with top grades who's been taking advanced placement courses for two and a half years; she knows all the answers in science class, and she reads a lot, more seriously than many of her contemporaries. She and Edward debate books. Yet she considers her intelligence nothing special compared to his, and when it comes time to apply to colleges, she thinks her grades are way too average to get her into Dartmouth (on the contrary, she's probably book-smart enough to get in without any influence from his family). Yeah, all teens are at least a little insecure, but Bella's too-modest self-image is a bit much. It's unsupported by the facts. Then she gets pregnant, and her undue self-effacement suddenly morphs into overweening overconfidence. It's not that she's a martyr: she really doesn't think she's going to die from carrying this killer. Detached from reality much? But again, this is typical teen behavior. No news there. We just wish she'd wise up.

Then there’s the matter of the bruises. At no time does Bella downplay them because she thinks it's okay to endure them for Edward's sake: her reaction has nothing to do with Edward. Rather, she really doesn't feel the injuries and doesn't think they're that bad compared to previous ones from other causes, like exercise. Moreover, she's willing to risk a few bruises on her honeymoon because she's just discovered orgasm and really likes it. Is that truly so surprising?

Let’s face it, lots of average people have vigorous sex that sometimes ends up leaving marks and wrecking furnishings without anyone intending to hurt himself/herself or the other person. Who among us hasn't sported a hickey or been stuck in a hotel room at least once next door to a couple who insist on having headbanging sex and knocking the furniture about just when you're trying to sleep? Hickeys are just the least objectionable side effect. It doesn’t mean the people involved are sadists or masochists. There are also those who simply bruise easily, like me; it doesn't take much for me to get marked – no brutality, just minor clumsiness. I had a few purple splotches after my own honeymoon many years ago, and my spouse and I weren't remotely violent, just highly enthusiastic. We don’t know whether or not Bella has a predisposition to bruising easily, as Meyer doesn’t say; we only know she’s a klutz as a human, then amazingly graceful as a vampire.

Do I consider Bella’s bruises after her wedding night as evidence of masochism that she entertains because she loves Edward? Nah. She’s just a lot more breakable and willing to take a risk than he is. Within a few days, however – before they realize she’s pregnant – even he agrees that with a little practice, the risk isn’t quite as bad as he’d thought (he is, after all, breaking the furniture, not her bones).

So: Bella is 18, hormonal (like all teens), horny (ditto), romantic, googly-eyed in love with her new husband, and desirous of a real human honeymoon before she becomes a vampire and has to be 'in recovery' for a while, perhaps as long as a year. The logic circuits in the front of her brain, like those of all teens, won't even fully mature until she's at least 21, maybe 22 (which, if she gets bitten soon, means maybe never). Are we really surprised that her judgment is maybe a little impaired? But: if she's old enough to be legally married, she's old enough to make her own decisions and live with the consequences. And consequences are what Bella gets, in spades. Breaking Dawn is as much a cautionary tale as it is a romance. Besides, if Meyer had written Bella as agreeable to an abortion, that would have ended a good chunk of the plot right there.

Would I, at that age, have let an unwanted pregnancy go to term when I was about to leave for college? Especially if I knew the pregnancy threatened my life?? Oh, HELL no – I'd have had an abortion in a nanosecond, but that's me. Then again, I wasn’t that careless, either, so the decision never came up; I was prudent about birth control. Moreover, I never had the urge to procreate. Not once. I don't regret not having kids on an overburdened planet that just tilted over the 7 billion mark (I’m also in the minority on that).

But that doesn't mean I haven't been jerked around by my hormones as nature's tool now and then. I've just learned over time not to trust 'chemistry' with any particular person: that's merely nature manipulating me so that I'll get pregnant. A good fit relationship-wise comes from knowing each other well, having complementary dispositions and attitudes, being able to tell the difference between hormones and infatuation versus real affection and admiration, being realistic about each other’s flaws, and a whole bunch of other factors that are best left to another discussion. But chemical attraction as a reliable indicator?? Please. That’s for idiots.

We really shouldn't minimize the strength of the biological imperative. Nature made it virtually irresistible for a reason. But nature is also painfully slower to evolve than the earth is to populate itself. It's only the power of reason, which has evolved almost in opposition to biological urges, that gives us the ability to contravene instinct and choose when, whether, and under what circumstances we women will have sex or children. And we have to fight that biological imperative every second of our childbearing years, lest it ruin our lives in the process. The thing to remember here is that sometimes, nature is the enemy: nature doesn't give a rat's ass about your personal happiness, only about populating the species. Nature only cares about getting you bred with the ‘right’ person, meaning one with a complementary MHC (major histocompatibility complex) so that you make genetically 'good' babies from nature's point of view – and if getting you pregnant ruins your life, hey, them’s the breaks. Tough luck. Nature’s a bitch.

That's what Bella is up against. Just like the rest of us. Reason, free will, and reliable birth control are the only things that give us any choice whatsoever. In Bella's case, nobody for a moment thought that she could get pregnant by Edward, thus the lack of birth control on her honeymoon. She’s not irresponsible or ignorant in that respect. The fact that she does get pregnant almost immediately isn't impossible even for a normal human couple ... but it does indicate that at least one thing about Edward's otherwise growth-frozen body is still working and replicating: sperm. That’s not something that makes sense in the context of a vampire story, given that a vampire’s body is essentially dead and the cells have stopped renewing themselves, but then the whole premise of a vampire story doesn't make sense, either. That doesn't keep us from telling such stories, of course. Neither fantasies nor fairy stories are known to be particularly rational or realistic.

As for the birth scene itself, yeah, it’s bloody and gruesome. Most emergency C-sections are, especially when there’s no time for the pain-killers to get into the mom’s bloodstream. They’re cringe-inducing for the idle bystander. And this fetus has a placenta you can’t cut with a chain saw, let alone a scalpel. That leaves only vampire teeth for a cutting tool. Hey, it’s a half-vampire baby being born – did anybody honestly think this would be a happy, drug-free delivery with whale song playing in the background? Really? Once the delivery is over, Edward races to save his wife’s life, and there’s only one way to do it: try to turn her before her heart gives out. You can guess the rest. So is this worse than you would expect, given the set-up? Truthfully, no.

All of the Twilight books have a unifying underlying question that the books pose: namely, when is it okay to not put your own survival first, or even dispense with it? Answer: when you’re trying to save the life of someone you love. And this premise is supposed to justify Bella’s choices throughout the series. In this case, it’s this horrifying, murderous fetus that she already ‘loves,’ even though everyone other than Rosalie thinks she’s crazy. Is this a first? No: pregnant women with cancer or some other deadly disease who delay treatment until their offspring can be born aren’t unheard of and are the stock in trade of many a TV melodrama. Like it or not, that mother-protecting-her-young instinct is every bit as strong and unreasoning as is the biological imperative.

The crux of the matter is that self-sacrifice can be a noble thing as long as you don’t throw your life away stupidly; but in the end, nobody else can make that decision for you if you’re an adult, even if you’re being irrational about this particular decision. I don’t think that Meyer made her case as well as she could have, but she certainly does set up some dramatic tension. Which is why the books sell.

Bottom line: if you're really worried about what your kids are going to take away from this movie or the Twilight series in general, you need to sit them down and have exactly the kind of discussion I've had here all by myself – and then be sure to tell them that being a pushover is not acceptable and not a survival trait. In the process, don’t shy away from confronting complicated realities or gloss over facts you don’t like; when your kids question you about those inconvenient facts, do your best to address them rather than avoid them. You can't shelter your kids from the world or from popular culture forever, but you can make sure they see it within a proper context and learn to get all the facts, then think for themselves. And you can let them see you doing the same. Example makes a far better case than any argument can supply.

The flawed position Ms. Moran presents, however, doesn’t remotely do the job. Let’s hope she quickly learns not to write arguments that other feminists, let alone any opponents, can pick apart this easily.

2011-06-26T17:48:00.021-05:00

Eliot Porter, Big Sur, and iconic images:
At what point does a copy of a famous image become visual plagiarism? Or does it?
posted 6-25-2011 - 6:45 pm

There are some images that make such a deep impression on us that they stay with us for the rest of our lives. Often, that persistent image may be of a historical event or where we were and what we saw at that moment. If you’re old enough, you probably remember where you were when you learned that JFK or Martin Luther King was shot, when Nixon resigned, when men walked on the moon, when the twin towers came crashing down in New York, or when the Challenger or Columbia space shuttles exploded. In every one of those instances, I have a specific image of the place that I was in and what my surroundings were like – a Policywonk's-eye view, if you will – and when I recall one of those events, it’s always the same image that comes to my mind’s eye first, unbidden.

An image can also become fixed in the mind because of the meaning it has to you personally. But sometimes, an image sticks with you simply because it so accurately sums up precisely what it represents that it becomes the definitive image for thousands, if not millions or billions, of people.

So it is for me with a photo of the Big Sur coastline by the late Eliot Porter: Mist on Coast, Big Sur, California, September 25, 1975. It is a view of the ragged, stepped coastline iced with layers of fog, looking south, as if pulled out of time, and it has become the definitive image of Big Sur, iconic because it sums up in a way that words fail the very essence of the place. From the very first moment I saw it, I fell in love with that image, both stark and soft, with its power and its subtlety, and with the place it represented. It conveyed meaning in ways that I cannot define and became indelible in my mind. There was something about it that simply pulled at me. It continues to do so even today.

It also bugs me when I see that someone else has copied Porter’s image and presents it as his own. Particularly as I’m sensitive to intellectual property issues because as a writer I hope to protect my own work and livelihood, and copyright violations or plagiarism piss me off. But I’ll get to all that in a moment.

Porter, who died in 1990, left most of his work, including the shot of Big Sur, to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It is my understanding that the museum now owns the rights to the photos that Porter bequeathed to the museum, including this particular image of Big Sur, but I could be wrong.

There’s good reason for me to remember that image: it hung on my dining room wall in the first apartment I had as a grown woman, out of school and working, the first place that I really made my own after my separation and divorce. I was several years out of graduate school and a working journalist, with a minor in photography and a growing regret that making a living with the written word would command more and more of my time, leaving very little time for photography and other talents. I knew I’d have to make that choice if I was to build a career. Yet every time I looked at the poster of that perfect image, it summed up for me exactly what I wanted to be able to do with my own photography, and everything that I was letting go of in order to make a life as a journalist – one who was also a single woman with no other means of support, making her way in a profession that was, at the time, largely male. Photography was one of many things that got dropped by the wayside back then, and Porter’s image was a visible reminder.

It also encapsulated for me everything that I knew about coastal California at that point. Having grown up the daughter of an architect, I read old copies of the Sweet’s Catalog as a child and issues of Architectural Record (the one that architects read, not Architectural Digest, the popular magazine sold on newsstands), particularly the annual issue on houses and apartments. That issue was my favorite. From these, random copies of Sunset magazine, and what I learned of Ansel Adams’s work over the years, my mental picture of coastal California was of architect-designed homes sparsely dotted among secluded redwoods like tall treehouses in the modernist style, with clean lines, sleek metal, beautifully grained wood interiors, and lots of glass that eliminated the barrier between outside and in. The kind of house that I wanted to live in someday and hoped my mother would design for me, but that I have never been able to obtain. It’s no surprise, then, that when I first saw Porter’s photograph of Big Sur, my heart rushed to embrace it. It has so many layers of meaning for me.

This is an image that deserves to be seen full size rather than on a small screen, printed with care on highly silvered paper that allows the luminous detail to come through, and viewed up close, so that you can clearly see where the mist lets go and sharpness takes over. It’s a color shot, but the mist has so muted the color that it has the same impact as a black and white shot, the same ability to command your attention and not let you be distracted by hues. It’s an image that I admire as much for its insight as for its technical skill, yet it is Porter’s skill, not just his vision or composition, that made the image what it is. And the informed eye loves to linger over that shimmering detail. The image itself is so powerful, however, that it largely survives conversion into a poster in which much of the detail doesn’t come through. It impresses plenty of people who aren’t schooled in the art or history of photography.

Given how famous Porter’s image has become in the intervening years, you can imagine my surprise when I saw a damned near duplicate on Webshots earlier this month. Webshots is a photo-sharing site run by American Greetings. The copyrighted photo is by Willard Clay, a professor of botany who, according to the bio on his web site, became a landscape photographer about 25 years ago (at which point Porter’s image was at least 10 or 11 years old). Clay has published at least half a dozen photo books and currently teaches photography at Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL, right in Chicago’s back yard. You can read Clay’s bio here.

The thing you need to know at this point is that Eliot Porter was part of that first generation of truly great American photographers that includes Adams, Edward Weston, Weston’s sons Brett and Cole, Imogen Cunningham, and Alfred Stieglitz, among others. He was a contemporary of and knew both Adams and Stieglitz and was a friend of Stieglitz’s wife, painter Georgia O’Keeffe. This is impressive company. Unlike the others, Adams and Porter stuck mostly to landscapes and nature photography, which is why their work later became favored material for Sierra Club publications (Porter was even a member of the board of directors of the Sierra Club from 1966 to 1968). The same is true for Galen Rowell and David Muench, who are from the second generation of great American landscape photographers: Sierra Club desk calendars and copies of National Geographic are where I and many others first saw their work. Willard Clay is a pro, to be sure, and well published, but next to Porter and Adams and certainly in the history of photography, he’s small potatoes. In fact, in his bio, Clay names Eliot Porter as one of his influences.

And the striking similarity of the two images is just something I can’t dismiss. About the only difference I can see is that Porter’s original was a vertical image and Clay’s is a horizontal. That’s it.

Which is why I marvel that nobody appears to have noticed how closely Clay copied the Big Sur shot, and that no one has remarked about that on Webshots. Given the short attention span of so many Internet denizens and the fact that unless they’ve studied photography, most people under 40 don’t know anything about Eliot Porter even if they have seen this famous image, I can’t say that I’m surprised. But I am concerned. While it is true that anyone at all is free to stand in the same spot where Porter stood and shoot the same picture, it’s another thing to copyright that image and pass it off as your own without acknowledging the debt to Porter, who got it first and best.

Is there such a thing as visual plagiarism, and is this an example? I think so. Judge for yourselves. But it concerned me enough that earlier today, I sent an e-mail to and posted a blog comment on Webshots. I have no idea who, if anyone, will receive or read my comment, but I sure hope someone does and mentions it to Willard Clay. He has to know that his image is very nearly a clone of Porter’s and that at the very least he owes a debt to the earlier image, one that should be acknowledged. Why not just call it an homage and provide some attribution that way? Perhaps he will, once the situation is pointed out to him. One can hope.

Meanwhile, below is the text of the e-mail I sent to and blog comment that I made (the two are identical) on Webshots for their blog entry on June 7th, 2011, the day that Clay’s shot was a featured photo. Please note that I sent the e-mail via Webshots’ own customer support page rather than sending a letter through the mail because they made it nearly impossible for me to send them an e-mail directly, and I didn’t want my comment to get lost in snail mail to the lawyers. Here it is:

26 June 2011

Over the years, I've enjoyed the work of many of the professional photographers that Webshots has featured. That includes the work of Willard Clay. However, when I saw the June 7th post of his photo of the Big Sur coastline, headlined "Foggy Morning Along Highway 1, Big Sur, California," something nagged at me. More than two weeks later, here I am to tell you that I finally know what it was: it's virtually the same photo that Eliot Porter made famous more than three decades ago, taken from roughly the same location and angle (the distribution of rocks in the surf is the dead giveaway), though Clay zoomed in a touch more than Porter did in the original.

Frankly, that Porter photo is so famous that I'm surprised a) that nobody at Webshots realized it or mentioned it to Clay and b) nobody online has remarked about it, either in your blog comments or elsewhere. Although it's not exactly the equivalent of plagiarism as anyone with enough skill, patience and the right equipment could duplicate that shot if he/she were willing to go to the trouble, it *is* true that Porter was the first to get that shot and print it -- and that his photo is one of several that helped to create the interest in Big Sur in the first place.

Porter, who died in 1990, was an acquaintance and contemporary of both Ansel Adams and Edward Stieglitz and a friend of Stieglitz's wife, painter Georgia O'Keeffe. As with Adams's work, Porter's photos found their way into Sierra Club calendars and publications. Porter's work also became well known through his gallery shows and through the museum posters created for exhibits. I remember having just such a poster of the Big Sur shot back in my very first apartment (I recall that I bought it at Pier 1, so it was in pretty wide distribution).

Porter left much of his work to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The museum has since put a collection guide online. A look at the following web page will show you the 1975 photo I'm talking about - it's titled "Mist On Coast, Big Sur, California, September 25, 1975":

http://www.cartermuseum.org/collections/porter/collection.php?asn=P1990-51-1212&mcat=4&scat=25

Porter's shot is more vertical, Clay's is horizontal -- but there, the difference ends. Clearly, Clay wanted to duplicate Porter's shot, either consciously or unconsciously, but Porter got the shot first. And that should be acknowledged to all those who see Clay's photo on your web pages and may not know about Porter's work. Moreover, given the importance of intellectual property rights and how critical that must be to Clay's own work, I'd think he'd appreciate that, too. Finally, as far as I know, Porter didn't sell all the rights to that photo to anyone in perpetuity though he clearly allowed it to be made into a poster (presumably, all that can be checked with his estate), and either his estate or the museum might still hold the rights to that image.

Yes, it's true that anyone can photograph any part of nature that is publicly accessible, and in that sense, nature can't be copyrighted, though specific images can; but Eliot Porter is the person who immortalized that image of the Big Sur coast, and the world should remember that. So should you.

2010-09-17T23:21:00.013-05:00

Architecture: the face of a city
In Chicago, everybody has an opinion about which buildings matter
posted 9-17-2010 - 11:25 pm

It was inevitable that architecture would matter to me. I am the daughter of an architect (my mother) and the goddaughter of an architect (my mother's best friend). My father and nearly all my uncles were engineers; many of my parents' friends were architects or engineers. I grew up surrounded by art and architecture books: H.W. Janson's History of Art and the remarkable, now out-of-print book series on the Masters of Modern Architecture by publisher George Braziller were my wish books. Out-of-date Sweet's catalogs and spec samples were my playthings. I've been to more architecture lectures and tours than some people have movies.

I prefer Architectural Record (professional) to Architectural Digest (pretentious). I redesign rooms in my head all the time and have a project box full of floor plans and ideas for changing the place where I dwell, if ever I get the funds. And I have lived virtually all my life in Chicago, the city where modern architecture got its start and where the residents take a more than customary interest in buildings both modern and historic, and in how their city looks.

So of course, when Chicago magazine published its list of the top 40 buildings in Chicago, I had to read it. And formed opinions almost immediately, which led to comment. Unlike most people, however, I talk (and think) in paragraphs – so my comments are usually more than the customary few lines. That might bother me if I thought online editors should cater to readers with short attention spans, but I don't. I remain one of those people who still thinks the Internet is there to give you more context and background that you'd get in a newspaper's or magazine's tight news hole, not less. After all, if you decide you don't want that much, you're free to ignore it; but if you do want that much and the writer skimps instead, you're out of luck. Occasionally, it strikes me that there's no reason a longer comment of mine should go to waste by languishing at the end of someone else's article. And it is my comment, so I ought to be able to reproduce it here. Which I've done.

There will be those who dissent from one or another choice of what gets included in a top-40 list of Chicago buildings, but what is remarkable, really, is how much we usually agree. We who live here know which buildings matter, and we're proud of our skyline, of the character of our streets and neighborhoods. We know that these buildings and their creators have made a significant difference in the way architecture has developed during the last century, and that the effects will be felt for years to come. Our job as citizens is to appreciate this legacy and do what we can to preserve it. Given that much agreement, then, we feel perfectly free to nitpick the rest. We love argument, too: you'll find Chicagoans as willing to argue the merits of one building over another as they are to dispute who makes the best hot dog or the best pizza. It's just the way we are.

So, then: on to the details ...

I'm glad writer Geoffrey Johnson noted that Schipporeit and Heinrich took a Mies van der Rohe design and turned it into Lake Point Tower. No other building is more characteristic of Chicago's lakefront than this. Schipporeit and Heinrich had worked for van der Rohe before they struck out on their own, so they knew about his design. The original plans were for an office building; the big changes were all on the inside, which S&H altered to create apartments. The exterior was kept as Mies had designed it. I still think of it as a Mies building, even though his proteges got it built.

Johnson refuses to call the Sears Tower anything but that, and I concur. I'd no sooner call it by another name than I'd resort to calling White Sox Park by whatever name some advertiser paid for it (hey, I'm not getting paid to shill, and I wouldn't on principle). That's just historical architectural tradition: a building is customarily known by the name it had when it was first built. The Tribune Tower will always be known as such, no matter who may occupy it in the future. Ditto the Marshall Field & Co. Building on State Street – Macy's may do business there now, but those folks are the only ones who call it by that name, and that won't last when/if Macy's sells out or goes out of business some day. Likewise, the Robert Morris building is no such thing; the college just happens to occupy a good chunk of that structure (although the second Leiter Building has less of a ring to it).

The Aon Center is really the Standard Oil Building, once known as 'Big Stan' (oddly appropriate in a town with a big Polish population). The Hotel Burnham may occupy the Reliance Building, but it's still the Reliance Building. The Smurfit-Stone Building is really the Associates Center (I'll always be fond of that one; although Sheldon Schlegman of A. Epstein and Sons got credit for the design, in fact he had an entire team for the design, and my mother's dearest friend, Bronė Kova, was part of that team). The so-called Chase Tower is really the First National Bank Building, even though that enterprise is long gone. And so on.

That doesn't mean people won't still try to rename buildings just because they buy or occupy them; it just means they'll be wrong when they do. Can you imagine anyone trying to rename the Rookery Building, or the John Hancock?? The new names would be completely meaningless. The renaming thing is all vanity, anyway.

We retain original building names, just as we keep our own names instead of changing them every time we move or get a new job, because we need to remember who we are and where we came from. Because like a person, a city has an established identity. Building names, especially those of important, easily recognized buildings, are part of that identity, developed over decades or centuries. History trumps vanity every time, and well it should.

One commenter thought it a travesty that Edward Durrell Stone's Standard Oil building was included in the list and ranked lower than other landmarks. Well, these lists are always somewhat subjective, and we could easily have a list of 100 buildings instead; I believe an AIA guidebook does as much. Chicago has enough important buildings that you wouldn't have to pad the list. So no, it's not a travesty that the Standard Oil Building was included. Besides, it was much more impressive when it was new, clad entirely in white marble; I remember the way it looked, subtly luminous against the sky. You had to see it at dawn or midday to get the full effect. But the slabs used were too thin and cracked, and the adhesive used by the construction company didn't hold for more than a year; pieces fell off and the marble became a safety hazard, causing a big scandal, so it all had to be removed. More's the pity. I keep wishing technological advancement would find a solution, so that the building could be re-shod in its original Cararra marble and returned to former glory.

There are others that should be on the list, such as the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist on Wacker Drive, the Chicago Temple, the Merchandise Mart, the IBM Building, Illinois Center, the Santa Fe Building, the Chicago Board of Trade Building, the Civic Opera House, and the original Chicago Public Library central library, now known as the Chicago Cultural Center. On a longer list, they'd all be there, without question. The debate only begins as the list shortens. But at least The Dick That Trump Built, on the site of the former Sun-Times/Daily News Building, wasn't included (Trump's Folly has no architectural significance; it's merely big and expensive, and it alters the profile of the riverside in a bad way).

I was most pleased, however, by what made the top of the list: the John Hancock Center. Long before the Sears Tower, the Hancock reminded the modern world that Chicago remains an architectural power to be reckoned with. It made the profile of our skyline instantly recognizable. And it's still the fourth tallest building in Chicago and the sixth tallest in the U.S.

But the Hancock is famous for more than its height and distinctive design. In order to get it built, Fazlur Khan of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill had to develop innovative new engineering algorithms that would keep a building that tall together and able to handle stiff winds encountered at that height. Those algorithms for his "tube" structural system subsequently allowed the Sears Tower and all other mega-tall buildings around the world to be constructed. Which just goes to show you: we not only invented skyscrapers in Chicago, we also invented the means of building them ever taller. Everywhere. Eat that, New York.

2010-08-12T00:42:00.018-05:00

To Jolie, Or Not To Jolie:
The perils of bringing Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta to the screen
posted 8-12-2010 - 12:50 am

I love a good mystery. Always have. My affair with Agatha Christie novels began in sixth grade, right around the same time that I discovered Stan Getz records and James Bond films. Christie made Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason look simple and Mickey Spillane look rude and dumb. I favored Hercule Poirot over Miss Marple, but not by much.

It wasn’t long before I discovered Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and British mysteries on public television. It was all downhill from there; I became a mystery reader for life. In time, I ran across crime novelist Patricia Cornwell’s work and became an avid reader of that, too. And a fan of her character Kay Scarpetta, the fictional chief medical examiner of Virginia. It wasn’t hard to identify with her: when I began in journalism, I, too, was the rare woman in a man’s profession and just about as welcome (meaning: not very).

So when it was announced last February that Scarpetta might finally be brought to life on the big screen, naturally, I was interested. Until I learned that Angelina Jolie would probably get the role.

I thought about that again just recently when Jolie’s latest film, Salt, came out to great acclaim (even Roger Ebert likes it, and he’s even pickier than I am). Salt is the pinnacle of Jolie’s action-film career – and a prime example of why she shouldn’t be cast as Kay Scarpetta. Not that Hollywood pays attention to trifling little details like that. Then again, Tinsel Town is rife with stories of film projects that never made it or took years to be realized; Cornwell’s painfully long efforts to bring Scarpetta to film (two decades, in this case) are a common enough tale of frustration.

The word that Angelina Jolie and her agent had signed on to bring Cornwell’s famous character to life – Jolie as the lead, the agent as one of the producers – sat uncomfortably with me when the news broke six months ago. The first day, it wasn’t a big deal to anyone not in the film business, except, possibly, Ms. Cornwell; so the world kept turning with little notice. Until the pissed-off fan reaction began coming in. Turns out the fans sided with me.

My first reaction was: WOW, is this a bad idea. It just struck me as a mistake on so many levels. It was all I could do to hope that this effort, too, would fail. My sympathy was with the frustrated Cornwell, but better yet another delay than to botch the film with the wrong lead. Then I went back to following actual, worthwhile news and forgot about Cornwell and Jolie. Everyone outside of Hollywood seemingly forgot about it, too, and nobody associated with the project brought it back into the limelight. Good strategy, at that point; a low profile made sense, given the sour reaction from Cornwell fans.

Still, the idea just stuck in my craw. I kept noodling over it in the back of my mind, off and on, seeing as I do love good films and am usually contemptuous of star power in Hollywood. I could see why Cornwell would agree to it, after waiting so long: Jolie might actually have the money and clout to pull this off, and in the short-term mentality of Hollywood, that frequently counts more than whether or not the right people might be working on a project. It wouldn’t be the first or last time a studio tried to shoehorn an actor into an ill-fitting role just because the actor was the darling of the moment and could swing some muscle.

There is ample reason for concern, however. One big flop here could be the kiss of death for ever making another Scarpetta film again, thus dooming an entire potential franchise. You’d think that would duly concern Ms. Cornwell, not to mention the studio in question. But no: that seems to be too rational a reaction for Hollywood.

Case in point: nobody’s ever been able to do another V.I. Warshawski film after Kathleen Turner’s 1991 box office disaster. While Sara Paretsky’s novels have continued to sell very well indeed, Turner’s career has never been quite the same after that abysmal adaptation, even though her performance was the only good thing about the film. The dud also seriously hampered the careers of two of the three screenwriters involved as well as director Jeff Kanew, but as he was a big part of the problem (as was the unforgivably tedious script), that was fair: it spared film audiences more of his awful efforts.

Another example: James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels and the flat, cardboard film embarrassment that was Heaven’s Prisoners (1996). Alec Baldwin recovered eventually, having gone on to reinvent himself a time or two in the process (he also did Ghosts of Mississippi that same year, which helped to bail out his reputation). So did the horribly miscast Teri Hatcher, she of the outrageously mangled Southern accent (luckily for her, she was still doing the very popular Lois & Clark series). Scriptwriter Harley Peyton and director Phil Joanou deservedly bombed after that, too (a small courtesy for which I am very grateful, having endured the laughingstock they made out of a book I enjoyed).

Understandably, there wasn't another Robicheaux film until 2009 because nobody wanted to take the risk; and even that one, In The Electric Mist, was underwhelming despite Tommy Lee Jones in the lead role and a handful of equally impressive stars (then again, Bertrand Tavernier was the director; perhaps distinguished French directors really shouldn't tackle mystery novels set in the American south, particularly when using fledgling Polish screenwriters. Ouch). Yet Burke’s novels continue to be best sellers, and Burke himself was made a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 2009.

Besides all that, the folks on the Scarpetta film project seem to have forgotten a salient point: the potential audience for a Scarpetta film will come to see it because of the main character and the books, not so much the star – much the same as with the Harry Potter films and the Twilight films, for which the roles made the stars and not vice-versa. A good choice of a lead actress won’t interfere with the film’s natural audience and can expand that interest to a much wider audience; but a bad choice will ruin the film plus disappoint both the novels’ fans and the potentially larger audience, killing off any box office potential.

Already, this Scarpetta project smells like three-day-old fish during a power outage. Jolie’s physical presence is way off for this role. And I say this as someone who has really liked Jolie in several other roles: casting her as Kay Scarpetta is like casting a 17-year-old anorexic as Mae West. Or Mae West as a 17-year-old anorexic. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and no amount of money, publicity, spin, makeup, or special effects will make it right.

The Scarpetta books are intricate hybrids of mysteries and crime stories – not action films – in which the forensics and the main characters’ relationships are key to the plots. This isn’t big-lipped Lara Croft in a lab coat, and to treat the first Scarpetta film and, potentially, the future franchise as such by casting Ms. Jolie insults the audiences. That’s a fatal mistake with a book series that is so widely read and best selling internationally.

Kay Scarpetta isn’t a larger than life character, a figure of legend, a suffering widow/mother/misunderstood teen drug addict, or an action star – which are the only kinds of roles Jolie has taken on in films, to date – and to rewrite the role to suit Jolie would pervert the character and alienate most of the book series’ existing fans. Is there no casting director with courage enough to say this?

Which brings us to the obvious next question: Who should play forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta? There are a few possibilities.

The name mentioned most often as an alternative to Jolie is Diane Lane. Yes, I can see that. I'm remembering how much I liked Lane’s work in Secretariat, Unfaithful, The Perfect Storm, and Untraceable (the comedies and romances she’s been in, such as Must Love Dogs, Under The Tuscan Sun, and Nights In Rodanthe, are irrelevant here).

Bluntly, the role of Kay Scarpetta, if it is to be portrayed effectively on screen, is not a big-star vehicle. No, this is, paradoxically, a smaller, more tightly focused role that also just happens to be the lead character in 17 hugely popular mystery/crime novels. And that makes the underrated but very talented Diane Lane a go-to candidate.

The reasons for casting Lane rather than Jolie are several:

1) Lane is far more believable as the serious, low-key, honey-blonde Kay Scarpetta, and she has the right physical presence, whereas there is never anything low key about Jolie on screen; moreover, there is nothing that can be done to alter Jolie’s looks to make her suitable for Scarpetta. Jolie is as exotic and out of place as a bird of paradise among pansies. Lane is more like a Peace rose: more refined and elegant than a pansy, but not startlingly out of place in the same garden and not loudly fighting for attention, either.

2) Lane has more ability to project that particular combination of reserve, vulnerability, high intelligence, hard-pressed fire, control, meticulousness, and persistence that are the primary characteristics of Scarpetta, a personality that is absolutely indelible yet does not 'shout' in any way. Jolie just doesn’t have that in her portfolio.

3) This is about drama, not melodrama: Scarpetta is a role of quiet intensity and tension – it's the difference between playing a pirate queen versus doing Kabuki, where there is great intensity but also great restraint. More Alfred Hitchcock or Ingmar Bergman than Joel Silver or Christopher Nolan. Jolie just hasn't demonstrated that kind of restrained intensity in any of her roles over the last 15 years; Lane's acting chops on that score are much better.

4) LANE IS THE RIGHT AGE. I cannot overstate this, because it means that no idiotic rewriting or reimagining to make Scarpetta younger would be necessary: Lane could play Scarpetta as she was written by Cornwall. Which is only right and proper.

A very close second choice would be Saffron Burrows, who at this writing is Jeff Goldblum’s partner on the TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Burrows projects the right kind of cool, professional dead-seriousness and effectiveness needed to portray the bottled-up but thorough, detached Scarpetta that isn’t of the in-your-face, over-the-top-earnest variety (and here, I’m thinking of Jolie’s role in Changeling, the frantic mother who had to do more pleading and screaming than thinking). Kay Scarpetta is a thinking heroine who does hard, thankless detail work to find killers, not an action figure. Burrows can do that.

In fact, I can’t think of one Jolie role to date that shows even a hint of what would be needed here. That might make Kay Scarpetta a welcome challenge for Jolie, but that doesn’t necessarily serve the film well, let alone the character or the audience.

The more I think about it, the more I like the overlooked Burrows as Scarpetta. It could be a real breakout film role for her and still work well for the script and any subsequent franchise.

Third choice? Kyra Sedgwick. She can hold her own in a serious feature film and has repeatedly shown great versatility in the film roles she’s played. In fact, until her starring role on TNT’s The Closer, Sedgwick was considered primarily a film actress, and in indie films at that.

What works against her as Scarpetta is how successful she’s been at inhabiting the character of Deputy Chief Brenda Lee Johnson. The industry may have already unfairly typecast her as a particular kind of character in a crime series, even though I have absolute faith in her ability to bring to life Scarpetta, whose character is markedly different from that of Chief Johnson. But we’re dealing with stupid, superficial Hollywood perceptions here – and no matter how many times those perceptions are proven wrong and the guilty parties end up on their asses, Hollywood never seems to learn from such mistakes. Thus, the bitter irony that Sedgwick’s success with The Closer might doom her for Scarpetta. That’s a real shame.

As for suggestions that Elizabeth Mitchell or Kathryn Morris might do ... well, maybe as ninth or tenth choices if this were going to be a TV mini-series for Lifetime – but not for any serious film franchise. Sorry, but neither of those women has the acting chops to pull off the lead in a huge theatrical film release, let alone star in the premiere film of what could be a big new movie franchise. I mention Lifetime as an example of the disaster this film project could become, for a reason: Lifetime has already botched its own made-for-TV versions of Cornwell’s two Win Garano novels by rendering them as silly melodrama that is overwrought even for that genre and that network. Admittedly, the novels in question, At Risk and The Front, are probably Cornwell’s weakest works to date; but the screenwriters did them much worse anyway.

Even more problematic is the choice of a screenwriter with virtually no history of accomplishment in that field. Kerry Williamson?? Who??? Sure, she might be a diamond in the rough, but wouldn’t someone have discovered that by now? One or two low-key screenplays do not usually a successful career make, unless you’re dealing with highly original scripts rather than adaptation from very well known material. A look at her IMDB page, however – which shows minimal experience – makes you wonder: who the hell is Kerry Williamson, and whom did she bribe/flatter/cozy up to in order to get this break? Or, more likely, did the studio decide it could program this relative novice like a Stepford hack to butcher the book plots in whatever way it chooses, in order to shovel Jolie into the role no matter what?

It remains to be seen whether the director who ends up with this project (if it flies) is smart enough to insist on someone far more appropriate for the role, versus just signing a Big Name with the thought that that would guarantee box office (always a stupid assumption). Then again, Fox has been blithely stupid before, and the Hollywood PR machine says the studio has already locked on Jolie (what else can one expect when Jolie’s manager is one of the people at the reins of this project?). Let the audience beware.

Not that I will lose any sleep over this, no matter how much I love the Scarpetta novels or cinema, but ... I keep thinking of Bonfire Of The Vanities, where the miscast star power overshadowed the story, the script was so much weaker than the remarkable novel, and all the various missteps resulted in box office poison. Worse, it came across as more of a black comedy than a dark, wry cautionary tale about Wall Street. I was disappointed, all the more so because I found Tom Wolfe’s scathing novel all too eerily accurate; it was also far more hauntingly dark than darkly comic, and the scriptwriters never got that.

So: I really hope Patricia Cornwell is paid dearly for the rights to her novel(s) and is laughing all the way to the bank – because I don’t think she’ll like the result with Jolie in it, no matter how much she may like the actress personally. I know I won’t bother with it if Jolie stays. And I’ll bet I’m not alone on that.

2010-08-05T23:13:00.008-05:00

2010 Emmy slots: Just another beauty contest
posted 8-5-2010 - 11:23 pm

So: are we surprised and disappointed again this year by the nominations? Yup. You bet. And there will be much carping about who made it and who didn’t, and about the voting system itself. Again. And no effort made to fix and of the voting system’s flaws. Surprise.

I’m talking about the prime-time Emmy nominations (I don’t watch soap opera, so I couldn’t care less about the daytime awards. Sue me). Truly, if there’s a difference here between the Emmys and the Miss America pageant, it’s not much.

Yes, The Pacific leads in the number of nominations – congrats to powerhouse HBO yet again – yet all of The Pacific’s actors were snubbed. How the hell did THAT happen?? The actors and the writers are what made this ambitious, well executed miniseries fly. Partly at fault here is the fact that whereas the Emmy voting system has separate categories for best film and best miniseries, it lumps the two formats together when it comes to best actors/actresses and best supporting categories. Very unfair: the actors in a miniseries have to sustain a character over several episodes, whereas those in a film have to do it for an hour and a half to two hours. It's a different kettle of fish. Second, never forget that Emmys and Oscars are as much or more about popularity and momentum as they are about merit. How else to explain the nominations of Jeff Bridges for A Dog Year and Ian McKellen for The Prisoner? It's not that either performance was bad; they were both serviceable, but that's far from excellent. Bridges was coming off his Oscar high and phoned in his role, whereas McKellen was just being McKellen; he nearly sleepwalked through it with both hands behind his back. Sure, we love him, but it was nowhere near his best performance, let alone one that deserved recognition more than those of, for example, James Badge Dale and Joe Mazzello in The Pacific. And the remake of The Prisoner was, overall, a dud.

The best actress in a dramatic series nominations are another example of popularity playing more of a part than merit. Yes, January Jones and Connie Britton have done well in and contributed significantly to their respective series, Mad Men and Friday Night Lights, but theirs are the weakest performances in a group that includes some major forces to be reckoned with – Glenn Close and Kyra Sedgwick. And the omission of two other such forces in this category, namely Holly Hunter for Saving Grace and Khandi Alexander for Treme, is simply glaring, rude and inexplicable unless you factor in popularity. Without the popularity factor, one might be tempted to conclude the Emmy voters were either blind, deaf and dumb or just being stupid in excluding Alexander in particular. Her performance in Treme dwarfs anything and everything Jones or Britton have done all year.

Similarly, based on merit, I would have excluded Lost altogether from the best dramatic series and writing categories given the patent absurdities to which the show had descended in the last few years. Expecting the viewership to swallow one or two maguffins during the life of a series is enough, but a whole barrelful each season is just too much. Lost just kept getting more and more senseless and unbelievable up to the very end. Clearly, there's an audience out there for that kind of absurdity. That doesn't mean it should be rewarded with Emmys, however. And the show's last season really wasn't one of its best; just because the show didn't get a win during one of its better seasons doesn't mean it should get a pity vote this time, let alone a win.

Besides, even absurd plots can be better written and more credible than Lost’s were, the obvious example of that being Fringe. Yet Fringe doesn’t get Lost’s inexplicable ratings (perhaps because fantasy absurdities are somehow more acceptable to a wider TV audience than sci-fi absurdities; go figure). So it's obvious that ratings, not merit, had something to do with Lost's nominations for best dramatic series and best writing.

Another example: talk show host Conan O'Brien gets a sympathy nod while Jay Leno gets snubbed. You can say it was justified given Leno's earlier-slot fiasco when he went primetime, but the truth is that O'Brien isn't much of an improvement over Leno. He's just more popular at the moment; but he's got nothing on Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, or Bill Maher as far as comedic talent or performance goes. Next to that trio, Conan's just filler. And Dave Letterman isn't what he used to be.

Treme, on the other hand, was robbed. Blind. And mugged, too. You could say Treme experienced its own kind of Katrina backlash: its excellent, deserving actors and writers were ignored altogether. We're talking David Simon here, the guy most TV critics say wrote maybe the best TV show ever with The Wire, and his writing in Treme, though different from The Wire, is still brilliant.

And the actors? Between them, the riveting duo of Khandi Alexander and Melissa Leo dominated the screen, and when they weren't on, John Goodman and Clarke Peters were chewing up the scenery. Goodman did get nominated for a supporting role in HBO's biopic of Jack Kevorkian (also nominated for 14 other Emmy slots), but he gave a better, edgier performance as the angry, frustrated, and ultimately doomed Creighton Bernette in Treme. Peters, meanwhile, lent his Mardi Gras Indian chief a burning indignation, gravitas, and slumbering menace alternating with protectiveness and principles that fleshed out beautifully what could have easily been a two-dimensional character. Any time Peters was onscreen, you couldn’t take your eyes off him.

The omission of Khandi Alexander in particular has to be the year's biggest snub. No one who actually saw her in Treme could deny her. Which makes you wonder: did the Emmy voters actually see any of Treme? I'm guessing many didn't.

And therein lies a serious, long-standing problem for both Oscar and Emmy voting: those eligible to vote might be obligated to watch all the relevant performances, but there's no way of ensuring that they actually do – and even if they did, no way to ensure that popularity and momentum won't rate higher than the performances. All the helpless viewers can do is watch, and hope.

2010-03-07T23:20:00.007-06:00

Live blogging the Oscars ... or not
posted 3-7-2010 - 11:23 pm

Wow. Never done this before (the live blogging, that is, except it's not quite: I'm writing in real time, but this will get posted the moment the show's over). Oh, well, we do what we can.

I've skipped Barbara Walters and most of the red carpet show on E! (just too much).

Here goes ... If only there were a way to watch the Oscar red carpet without the cloying, annoying announcers gushing so (yes, I can turn down the sound – and did – but that doesn't make them disappear). But BOY, does Meryl Streep look good. I wanna be her when I grow up!

Jeff Bridges seriously needs a haircut ... it’s not wearing well.

Only one night a year do I care who's wearing what in Hollywood, and so far all I can think of is J-Lo in this huge wash of pink on the red carpet; Armani Prive? Really?? At least the lines of the gown were kinda interesting. But it does make her look bigger from behind. Wait, Helen Mirren actually looks really good in a gray Badgley Mishka; excellent – now I can purge J-Lo from my head!

Neil Patrick Harris and many, many showgirls in a Vegas-type intro song does better than the dialogue between Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, although the latter two have their moments. Still, they’ve now officially reached their quota of Meryl Streep jokes; one more will make even Streep cringe.

Zac Efron and Taylor Lautner not quite gracious enough good sports about accepting the joshing from Martin and Baldwin. They’re young; they’ll learn.

Penelope Cruz looks smashing in that deep burgundy red dress. What a presence. Ohhhhhhh!!

Stanley Tucci is really creepy in that clip from The Lovely Bones; but then, so is Christopher Weitz in Inglourious Basterds. Whoops, the latter creep actually WON the best supporting actor award. Guess that means he did an effective job in the role: we weren’t supposed to like him. But I still don’t like him anyway. I would have given it to Tucci. Nuts.

Best animated feature: I don’t have a favorite here. But the expected one wins – Up. Nice, personable, geeky young man comes up to accept the award. Can’t be from Hollywood: he looks and talks like a real person.

Weak joke about a forgettable movie (The Hangover), followed by Miley Cyrus in a weak attempt at a ball gown (looks like a 1940s brassiere-shaper with a fancy skirt attached. The two pieces simply don’t go together. Who dressed this kid?! Or did Cyrus choose her own dress? (Ouch – that would explain much)

Aha, the Crazy Heart mania has started: Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett’s tune wins an Oscar. And the two accepting the award look like Mutt and Jeff. Or maybe Charlie the tuna and Jeff.

Chris Pine intros the clip from District 9? Guess that was the consolation prize for Star Trek receiving only a few technical nominations. But really, much as I liked that film, it was all it deserved re: the Oscars. Let’s be fair.

Tina Fey really working that slit in her gown across the stage. Nice legs! (I’m envious.) Robert Downey makes an evil but very funny joke about geeks and CGI replacing real actors. Best original screenplay award goes to The Hurt Locker. YES!!!! May this be a trend tonight. The scriptwriter tells Kathryn Bigelow his award really belongs to her. Nice touch. Gracious.

Molly Ringwald (there’s someone we haven’t seen in a while on the runway) and Matthew Broderick present a kind remembrance of the late director John Hughes. Excellent clip from Ferris Buehler’s Day Off; some of the other clips, not so much. But then, I was never a devotee of the Brat Pack films. Quite something to see the clip of a very young Alec Baldwin with an equally young Kevin Bacon and realize that they are contemporaries – and that Bacon has aged far better. So has Matthew Broderick (marriage must be good for him, and for his lovely bride).

WHEN is Samuel Jackson going to learn to leave the ugly headgear behind???!? Not on stage!

Stupid voiceover falsely wondering which film will win the F/X award. Oh, come ON now. Needless hype.

Mild-mannered presentations for short subject docs and short animated films.

They shouldn’t have cut the edgy jokes about Avatar: the ones they left in weren’t that good. But Ben Stiller coming out in Avatar-like makeup made up for it. Excellent, dude! And Star Trek gets its consolation prize in the award for best makeup.

Jeff Bridges comes out to present the clip for the Coen Brothers’ strange film A Serious Man.

Things seem to be moving along snappily. And blandly. Not so good. It has the feel of the organizers just wanting to get this over with, which is bad because the viewers may get exactly that same impression and switch it off. Long before it’s over.

Too many commercials!!! But don’t we always think that?

Best adapted screenplay award clips are disturbing, particularly the one from District 9. Geoffrey Fletcher wins it for Precious. Tough work, well deserved.

Queen Latifah works that dress walking upstage to present the Governors’ Award. Shared by Roger Corman and Lauren Bacall. Now that’s an odd couple. And I’m not clear on what that award is really for or what the criteria are.

And they follow that with Robin Williams, of all people, presenting the best supporting actress role??? That has a definite creep factor to it. Eewwwwwwwwww. But Maggie Gyllenhall looks radiant in the audience. Hmmm, perhaps the program organizers thought there would be a certain symmetry, with one comedian presenting to another, if Mo’nique won. And she does win. And thanks her husband in a way nobody else has so far tonight.

Colin Firth presents the clip for An Education, and all I can think is that I love this man’s voice and smile and I want to have his baby – and I really hate the notion of me having any kids at all, so you know he's impressive tonight. Sigh. Firth looks SOoooooo unconsciously good in a tux. Like a beautifully wrapped English bonbon, waiting for someone to unwrap him. Damn.

Sigourney Weaver in beautifully draped deep red, there to present the art direction award, which predictably goes to Avatar. A quiet, impressive presence, as usual.

How appropriate: Tom Ford and Sarah Jessica Parker present the costume design award. A presenter couple that finally makes sense. Sandy Powell wins for The Young Victoria and charmingly dedicates her award to the designers who do contemporary films instead of period ones and don’t get recognized, “but I’m taking it home tonight.” Of course you are, darling! It’s her third, and deserved, but she’s right.

Still more commercials larded in after every single award. I’ve got ad fatigue – enough, already!!!! It’s 9:15 by now, and yet it still feels like they’re rushing through this. They should have started the actual awards program at 8pm Eastern and not rushed. But Martin and Baldwin would still have needed better material to be truly funny. It’s the program organizers’ fault. Get new writers, you dweebs.

Aha, the Twi-hards are kvelling but the Oscar audience is underwhelmed, ’cause Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner are up presenting a clip about horror films. Stewart’s dress is fine but her delivery is wooden: she sounds like she doesn’t really want to be there. Perhaps she’ll feel differently next year if one of her good films this year (The Runaways, Welcome To The Rileys) is nominated. And of course, once the horror compilation is over, they cut to Quentin Tarantino heartily applauding.

Nice twist: this is immediately followed by Anna Kendrick and Zac Efron to present for sound editing and mixing. Kendrick may have the part of a shallow nasty in the Twilight films, but at least she has an Oscar nomination this year for a better film. The Hurt Locker wins both categories, and the same guy wins for both: a grim looking but very grateful Scandinavian type, Paul N.J. Ottosson.

Elizabeth Banks intros the sci-tech awards, and nobody gets named – just a blanket congrats. Ugh. What a cheat for her AND for all those who won. Really: is there any worse way in which to treat these folks like second-class citizens of Hollywood? I think not. They wuz robbed.

John Travolta intros the clip from Inglourious Basterds. Which I just watched night before last. And now, another commercial break. Yes, a few seconds was more than enough of Travolta, but that doesn’t mean I prefer the ads. Still, Jaimie Oliver’s Food Revolution might be interesting if he can actually persuade any kids to eat their vegetables and not spit them out once they’re out of camera range.

Martin gets through some weak jokes with aplomb (as in, just plow through them) to intro a lovely Sandra Bullock looking very un-Bullock-like in a leafy-embroidered gown and sounding very un-Bullock-like in perfectly pronouncing Mauro Fiore’s name (complete with rolling Rs; brava!) before handing him an Oscar for cinematography on Avatar.

Demi Moore looking like a feminine Oscar statuette in copper silk, up to intro James Taylor for the obits segment ... and the first photo up is Patrick Swayze. Always grim to realize how many and who we’ve lost in a year. Yet I recall last year’s clip montage as being far more affecting. Perhaps it’s that rushed feeling again. Or does it seem like it’s being rushed because I’m blogging this instead of just watching – ? Nah, that’s not it.

J-Lo and Sam Worthington, who wore an Elvis-Costello-like skinny tie and black day suit, intro the best musical score award and an awkward, weird dance interpretation of the nominated scores. The Hurt Locker’s entry sounds more like a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western score, probably because of the twangy guitar; was that intended (editorial comment by the orchestra arranger??). And Up’s entry, though enchanting, has this strange guy-meets-gal-next-to-a-robot dance. Avatar’s score sounds perky and ’inspirational’; they may win just for that reason. Ah, no – Michael Gioacchino wins for Up, and it takes the unseen voiceover gal offstage to finally pronounce his surname correctly after both J-Lo and Worthington bungle it. Feh.

Gerard Butler and Bradley Cooper: another ill-suited couple of presenters, announcing for F/X. We know who’s getting this one. I’ll be surprised if it’s anything other than Avatar, after all the hoo-hah over the 3D (no, it’s not, of course: Cameron’s boys get it).

Matt Damon, having cleaned up well in a tux, presents the documentary feature award to – surprise, surprise – The Cove, about dolphins (and Fisher Stevens is involved??? Whoa: never expected him at the Oscars, let alone as a producer). Damn the guys; it’s so much easier for them to look good and to find the right outfit.

Tyler Perry (why is he here?) up to present for film editing, and he does kinda okay with the so-so jokes. The Hurt Locker gets it. That puts Bigelow’s film ahead, so far. Good.

Keanu Reeves is gaunt and nearly unrecognizable, even vocally, as he presents the clip of The Hurt Locker. What happened?? He sounds gravelly, like he’s been screaming for three days straight. And there’s only a wide-angle shot (did I miss the close-up?), so he might actually look even worse. I wouldn’t have recognized him in a billion years. Here’s hoping he’s been starving himself for a movie role he’s accepted instead of starving for some other reason. Call me soft, but I really liked him with Bullock in The Lake House a few years ago: two grown-ups of the same age portraying two adult people the same age falling in love. Finally! Thank you.

Pedro Almodovar and (yikes) Quentin Tarantino up to announce the best foreign language film. And Quentin does a halfway decent job of pronunciation. Who knew? El Secreto De Sus Ojos (Argentina) wins. The guy accepting has a cute speech.

Kathy Bates intros the clip from Avatar. And she strikes me as a big black column in that dress, tho a not-too-shoddy column. Almost elegant, but only almost (yeah, I know: that’s less than she was hoping for).

Another commercial. And another, and another, and another. I hate this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Particularly the frackin’ Windows 7 ad. Yeeesh!

Whoa – FIVE people up to announce best actor? What were they thinking??? Ah, mini-profiles; that explains it. But Michelle Pfeiffer looks ravishing and suitably glam, giving her take on what she knows of Jeff Bridges and comments on his performance. Vera Farmiga, also in red like Pfeiffer, natters on charmingly about Clooney; but I can’t help noticing that her accordion-pleat-trim dress looks more like several useless fans pasted on an otherwise grand dress. Julianne Moore rivetingly describes Colin Firth, in an equally riveting off-white sparkly gown. Tim Robbins (where’s he been?) gets some genuine laughs in talking about Morgan Freeman. Colin Farrell teases and lauds Jeremy Render for The Hurt Locker. On second thought, Farmiga’s gown looks much better in a long shot. And Kate Winslet, looking absolutely wonderful in a slim, tailored, strapless silver gown, hands the statuette to Jeff Bridges. Everyone predicted this, and yet he’s still remarkably informal in his gleeful, laid-back acceptance. And still The Dude while he’s at it. Is he ever not? Nice to know he’s been married to bride Sue for 33 years. Someone in Tinseltown still manages to stay married.

I suppose this means five more people with mini-profiles for the best actress slot ... well, better that than more ads. Which we’ll get anyway. Frack.

Ick. Ad pitchman Billy May may be dead, but now they have a nearly equally loud Brit guy doing voiceover for OxyClean. Both slimy and creepy. And I actually like the product and use it, but this ad has me rethinking that.

Yup, best actress is up next. Here come the profiles. Oh, NO – it’s Oprah. Can I never escape this woman??! At least Forest Whittaker is first, talking about Sandra Bullock. Michael Sheen on Helen Mirren, and his experience of working with her on last year’s nominee, The Queen; well done, Sheen. Carey Mulligan looks lovely, elfin and undernourished as her co-star talks about her. Now Oprah gives us the inspirational take on Gabourey Sidibe; lord, how much of this can I stand ... I liked the film, but I really don’t want to be treated to the Oprah Book Club take on this actress or this role. Yuck. And at last, Stanley Tucci gushes and dishes with a wink (appropriately in both cases) about La Grande Meryl and is the only one who can really get away with another Streep joke, and does. Sean Penn comes out in that same thin-tie-black-suit Worthington wore earlier (Bobbsey Twins?) to give the award to Sandra Bullock. Well of course they weren’t going to give it to Meryl after so many nominations; it’s like she’s expected to be pleased with that much after so much excellence. But Bullock is humble, worthy, and praises extravagantly and sincerely all her fellow nominees in this category, starting off with a great quip: “Did I really win this, or did I just wear you all down?” A cute line to Streep, too, which has the latter giggling, and a humorous swipe at Clooney before Bullock starts tearing up and choking up and thanking the people who need to be mentioned. Nice job.

Ahhhhh, Barbra Streisand – now there’s a real diva. And she remarks on all the politically correct aspects of the nominees for best director and the possible history to be made here tonight. But I think we know who she’s rooting for, even though La Barbra gives her delivery without hint of favoritism, like the pro she is. WOOT, it’s Kathryn Bigelow!!!!!! History it is. Fantastic! She even has a nice, understated gown. Even nicer that Cameron grinned and applauded enthusiastically for his ex (you bet they had that reaction shot). But how absolutely cheesy of the orchestra to spoil it by playing “I am woman, hear me roar” as Bigelow exits the stage. Seriously: Annie Lennox and Aretha singing “Sisters are doing it for themselves” might have actually hit us over the head less. Not that I really wanted to hear either tune.

Tom Hanks puts the frosting on: The Hurt Locker wins best picture. Oh, my. Are we verklempt, or what? How she glows. And the banned producer Nicolas Chartier is duly thanked (take that, you snotty organizers). Somehow, I think James Cameron is well satisfied with his historic box office instead. Everybody wins.

And I never saw most of the gowns because they had the stupid Baba-Wawa clip show beforehand; oh well, never mind. Besides, Ben Stiller had the best look anyway. Didn’t you know? Blue is in now.

Not that Katherine Bigelow needs to wear it. {-D

Hmmmmm; blogging does make the Oscar show go faster. But I don't know that I'll do this again next year; a pile of friends, a big screen at home, and lots of champagne sounds better. Now to check out all those dresses I missed ...

2009-08-20T19:04:00.004-05:00

Shows we hope to love: FlashForward gets reduced to Hollywood's lowest common denominator
posted 7-22-2009 - 8:11 pm

I dread the premiere of this show (relax, no spoilers here: you can learn this much just by watching the ABC trailers). Yet I was prepared to love it, based on my reaction to the book. The show hasn't even debuted yet, and already people are wondering: can this show be saved from its developers' mistakes? Disclosure: I am an aficionada of sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer's work and have just recently reread the novel on which this new TV series is presumably based (except that it isn't, really). Given how much I liked the book, I was looking forward to the show's premiere, until I actually learned something about the show. Talk about disappointing.

It's not new for Hollywood to botch something from the get-go, but I keep hoping at least a few people in the TV and film business will learn from Hollywood's mistakes. That hope isn't usually rewarded, but I comment here just in case there's still time to influence the show's developers. To that end, I left a lengthy comment on one of the industry sites earlier today, then decided I should at least post that much on my own blog; therefore, I'm going to repeat here most of what I've already posted there. When you're the author, you get to do this. But back to Sawyer and FlashForward.

I hesitate to say that I'm a Sawyer fan because fan is short for 'fanatic,' and I'm not a fanatic about anything (except, possibly, the correct use of the English language, which is an occupational hazard for all good writers and editors anyway). But I've enjoyed and been challenged by Sawyer's novel and his books Calculating God and Factoring Humanity. The Neanderthal series, not so much: I've never liked alternative histories and am much more interested in speculations about the present and future. Earlier this summer, I read Sawyer's latest, WWW.Wake, and loved that. So when I heard about the spin-off show, I reread (and again enjoyed) FlashForward.

Let me stop here and admit that I'm a science geek as well as a journalist. Not only am I a long-time hard sci-fi reader, but I also have a strong interest in astronomy and cosmology, therefore in particle physics, and have attended classes and lectures at both Fermilab and the Adler Planetarium for more than 20 years. In the process, I've had teachers that include physicists Leon Lederman (a Nobel Prize winner) and the late David Schramm, and astrophysicist Rocky Kolb, and lecturers that include David Levy (co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which broke up and fell into Jupiter 15 years ago), former Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell, and Dan Hooper, who is one of the current dark matter gurus at Fermilab.

Moreover, I'm one of those people who thinks we really ought to be out there living and working in space, building colonies on the moon and in high earth orbit, because we can't afford to leave humans all in one place in case nature throws another asteroid at us and wipes out all or most of life here. All of which is a long way of saying I'm really into the science of this, not just the fictional part. The dirty little secret is that science is way cool, and so is science fiction when it's done well and based on hard science. So I'm afraid of Hollywood botching yet another attempt at a sci-fi program on prime-time network TV.

FlashForward could turn out to be unexpectedly great, but the early indications worry me. The fact that Robert J. Sawyer is a consultant means almost nothing, because show developers and networks often ignore their nominal consultants. I do NOT want this show to turn into another idiotic clone of Lost that strains credulity. The real physics behind Sawyer's book is already enough to strain credulity for anyone who is unfamiliar with the seeming absurdities of quantum physics. Rather, I want any show based on this book to get a much wider audience/fan base than the book did and have people really thinking about the fascinating questions involved.

The dead giveaway here for me is the fact that once again, TV writers have decided to lift the merest wisp of what is a great plot from a wonderful book and take it completely in another, more trivial direction, thereby spoiling things for everyone. That's the first big mistake. I keep remembering the cinematic abortion known as I, Robot for comparison. Yes, I'm saying that film was a huge failure despite Will Smith and the big box office it got. What scares me even more is that I heard that the writer who made such a mess of I, Robot now has the rights to develop Asimov's Foundation trilogy (heaven help us!!!). Now that's scary. The guy who rewrote I, Robot for film did so in ways that would piss off Isaac Asimov, were he still alive, and betrayed the entire underpinning of the robot stories; he (the scriptwriter) should have been smacked silly for completely mangling and sabotaging the original storyline.

Surely David Goyer and Brannon Braga, who co-wrote the pilot for FlashForward the TV show, have been around long enough to know better by now. One would think so, but apparently not. Oh, and heaven forbid that a protagonist should actually be a Canadian, let alone a physicist ... Really, Hollywood: get over your xenophobia and ethnocentrism already.

Second big mistake: even worse, the setting now is not CERN or anywhere in Europe, but – no, not again! – Los Angeles. Really. I am SO tired of L.A./Hollywood pretending it's the center of the universe. The only alternative TV series locations that Hollywood ever seems to consider are New York or Washington, DC, and yet the rest of the planet is still out there. Bringing the action back to L.A. is just more boring navel gazing by Hollywood, whereas putting FBI characters in charge (as if the CERN physicists wouldn't have been way ahead of them on investigating this phenomenon anyway) reduces FlashForward to just another cop show without it actually being about that – and not a good cop show, either. Besides which, changing the plot's focus like that just makes it smell like another Fringe rip-off (right down to having a black agent as the head of the local FBI task force; I like Courtney B. Vance, but come on now – get a clue). How freaking unoriginal.

Third big mistake: there are two central figures, not one, in Robert J. Sawyer's excellent book – Canadian physicist Lloyd Simcoe and his co-lead investigator on the Higgs particle project, Greek physicist Theo Procopides. Much of the story's drama and development comes from the fact that these two are opposites in a few significant ways. Simcoe is a resigned fatalist who thinks the future is immutable, whereas Theo disagrees and is trying to change what he assumes could be his future. This difference in belief, as well as their age difference, drives much of what the two men do. And Theo's a great character; why get rid of him and substitute multiple boring ones, as in yet more cops? What's the point? Is the character too challenging for the writers? Please: if the writers on Numb3rs can make mathematicians interesting every week, it can be done.

In addition, removing CERN and the physicists from the center of the plot kills an opportunity to let reality help you out with the drama. And there is drama at CERN: the Large Hadron Collider still isn't running right and isn't anywhere near full strength. By now, it's almost a year behind schedule. However, there have already been a few (frivolous) lawsuits by people trying to prevent it from running at full power, by people who are afraid (wrongly) that running the LHC will create a black hole and we'll all get sucked in and die (not likely). Why not use that notoriety and capitalize on it to drive curious people to this story line? Oh wait, maybe nobody in Hollywood watches the news (you think?).

Besides, it IS fascinating to consider what physics experiments at that power level might produce, even though they're only approaching energies of a fragment of the Big Bang. Sawyer knew it to be so and wrote a very compelling, entertaining, and scientifically credible novel. Why mess with that? Only Hollywood would be dumb enough to try: it just can't seem to keep itself from tampering with and dumbing down brilliant ideas, especially if those ideas didn't originate within the TV and film establishment. What crap.

Fourth big mistake: the flash-forward is only 6 months ahead instead of more than two decades. REALLY BIG mistake. Six months is nowhere near as compelling as 21 or 22 years in the future: you can already imagine on your own that you wouldn't look much different in six months, for example, and can probably narrow down most of the likeliest scenarios re: where or how you would be employed, where you'd be living, who you might be with, etc., barring accident or acts of God. Nowhere near as much to worry about or anticipate. But two decades from now?? Way different story: your own predictive ability is virtually eliminated, so of course the flash-forward vision is of much greater interest and speculation.

All I can say is: I hope they paid Sawyer really well for the rights to his novel and that he laughs all the way to the bank – because I suspect the end result here won't make him (or us) very happy. Too bad: Sawyer's book has a fascinating premise.

Then again, those guys could still surprise me. I guess we'll tune in September 24th and see.

UPDATE two months later: Yup, as I predicted, they really messed with Sawyer's story, so badly that the series was canceled after the first season. That didn't have to happen, but those morons at ABC always think they know better than the original authors do about why a story is interesting. And so they screwed up again. I really do hope that Sawyer was well compensated for this nitwit rip-off and laughed all the way to the bank. That would be the only thing that went right.

2009-07-22T20:04:00.004-05:00

Shows we love: exit Kings? Not necessarily
posted 7-22-2009 - 8:11 pm

Kings is the kind of program that NBC hasn’t had in years, at least not since The West Wing ended: a pure, grown-up drama that isn’t in the cops-and-doctors genre. Inspired by the biblical chapters about David and Goliath, King Saul, and Saul’s son Jonathan, the show draws parallels with those parables while going well beyond the original tales to examine timeless issues of ethics, war, politics, and human character. In that respect, it is very like The West Wing and the marvelously reinvented Battlestar Galactica as well as the best episodes of the Star Trek franchise. It's also marvelously well cast

What’s most remarkable is that despite everything it had going for it, Kings got canceled after 12 episodes that almost nobody knew about. If more people had known, they’d have seen it and been glad. Splendidly reimagined in modern terms, Kings is set in the ersatz contemporary coastal kingdom of Gilboa, for which you can substitute New York, Washington, London, Beijing, several central African regimes, or pretty much any modern capital located in an industrialized nation.

Gilboa is led by King Silas Benjamin, a former general who dethroned and imprisoned his former monarch and dragged his nation into the 21st century, both modernizing it drastically and enmeshing it in costly warfare with less than impressed neighbors. The young David in this case is Captain David Shepherd, who serves his king and country loyally despite grave misgivings and in the process becomes a hero uncomfortable in the limelight, providing a very public contrast to the less than scrupulous monarch. And from there, the conflicts and combatants multiply, even (most pointedly) within the royal family. Nearly everyone but David is ambitious and maneuvering for something.

The series is peopled with a large, varied, captivating ensemble; no perfect people here, only a few who are trying for goodness and spiritual nobility amid many more of vague, dubious, or declining ethical character. No naivete, but as with the recent BSG, a bit of early innocence tempered by plenty of morally ambiguous dilemmas. The characters are complex, well drawn, remarkably well cast and well played, accessible but not predictable.

The cast, led by the impressive Ian McShane as King Silas, never fails to strike just the right note of revelation bound up in mystery, with everything and everyone in conflict no matter how loud the clamor for peace. Susanna Thompson is his regal, pragmatic, politically smooth but cutthroat and very well matched queen. Sebastian Stan plays the king's surly, unhappy, resentful and vengeful son, Allison Miller the dutiful but ultimately torn daughter who falls for the young captain, her social inferior. The part of Captain Shepherd seems tailor made for Chris Egan, who inhabits the role of a wary, battle-worn David effortlessly. The queen's conniving war profiteer brother is craftily played by Dylan Baker, and the splendid Eamonn Walker's portrayal of Rev. Samuels as a latter-day doomsaying prophet is enough to give you shivers. A supporting cast that includes Sarita Choudhury, Wes Studi, Marlyne Barrett and (surprise!) Macaulay Culkin, in a thankless, ironic role that suits him completely, all acquit themselves well. Not one actor seems less than perfect or out of place.

Same for the plots: they’re arresting and intriguing, without going over the top and out of control like Lost did. Quite the contrary; these plots are perfectly credible without being the least bit boring or strained. The scripts are well crafted gems of language that does exactly what it needs to do and not one whit more, retaining a generous amount of suspense.

Everyone speaks in complete sentences, which seem to flow naturally from their respective personae. For that fact alone, through which the writers credit the audience’s intelligence, writer-producer Michael Green deserves loud, protracted applause. Just the way in which each character uses language tells us who he or she is and who each wants to be: like the music in opera, the way each person uses words is a form of shorthand that reveals character and intent every bit as much as facial expressions and body language do. Yet nobody sounds like anyone else. What a beautiful use of language, and what a joy to listen to these people talk.

Finally: a network TV program that doesn’t make me feel like I’ve lost I.Q. points by watching it. It’s good enough to have been made for public television; you’d think it was perhaps a modern mini-series for Masterpiece Theatre, along the lines of Traffic, if you didn’t know better. No wonder I got hooked on the first episode.

Add to that some prodigiously high production values (thank you!!), and you have such a winning series that one has to believe NBC deliberately went out of its way from the start to derail this show. How else can one explain the frugal, horribly mismanaged, almost nonexistent marketing? A March premiere, in the middle of the spring TV season? What were they thinking??!

I’d never heard of Kings until it went into summer reruns; and even then, it landed on the Saturday night schedule – during SUMMER, for heaven’s sake, when nobody expects to be home on a Saturday night (certainly not I: I’ve been reduced to either taping it or watching it online because I try not to be home Saturday nights). Seriously? Earth to NBC: is the air so thin up there in your terminally out-of-touch ivory towers that you-all passed out, or were your execs just too embarrassed about the way Kings stood out against your pitiful, juvenile, ill-conceived unreality-show-and-sitcom roster and rendered the latter unwatchable by comparison? What else can account for such complete bloody-mindedness by NBC? Grow up, already!

Kings needs to move to a network that can make the most of it and promote the hell out of it – probably to cable. If you want a lesson on how to do this, take a gander at the selling of Torchwood, season 3: nearly everywhere I turn, cable or broadcast, there are promos for this, and all of them made me want to see more. It’s not that hard to do marketing right.

In fact, Kings would be a nice fit on HBO, right after True Blood – the two shows would have between them the same kind of one-two punch that made both The Closer and Saving Grace such smash hits on TNT, or that Burn Notice and Royal Pains are becoming on USA Network. I’d think that if the choice is HBO, Kings would make a good match for True Blood, at 10pm/9pm Central, given that Kings is appropriately all drama (reminiscent of MI-5), whereas True Blood is both scary and whimsical without ever losing its drama or descending into the pointlessly gory and camp (well, not much, at least until its sixth season, when it needlessly jumped the shark). Fans of HBO's Deadwood also might find themselves surprisingly drawn into Kings, given plenty of suspense in both shows and a similar well-crafted use of language; and in both series, individual episodes work as stand-alone modern fables while simultaneously knitting into larger, more complex and compelling story arcs.

Conversely, Kings fans might appreciate True Blood’s bit of comic relief mixed into the spooky, strange and grim before the really hard stuff comes on. Kind of like starting with a good champagne for some classy fizz and ending with a double Armagnac for an elegant kick in the head (or, in the case of True Blood, starting with a light beer and ending with a moonshine-backed boilermaker). That’s one heady combination, and not for kids or sissies.

It would be a real treat for viewers otherwise surrounded by mindless fare for hormonal teenage boys if Kings were to continue on cable, which (other than PBS) is where the ambitious quality programming seems to be right now. Some cable-exec genius should snap up the series while the excellent cast is still available – and before one of his competitors gets wise and grabs it instead.

2009-05-09T00:43:00.005-05:00

Movies we love: the new Star Trek film —
He said, she said, but nobody said the right things
posted 5-9-2009 - 1:23 am

This isn't a review of the film: I'll get to that in another post. Rather, this is more of an observation regarding other reviews of the film. Other than Roger Ebert's, of course; I always like his comments, whether or not I agree with them.

Now that the new Star Trek has previewed here this weekend, I’ve been perusing some of the reviews here and there. Accordingly, I ran across the He Said, She Said commentary in The Scorecard Review online ... and after reading it and others on the Web, I began to wonder just exactly how many of the younger film critics are familiar enough with the Star Trek universe. If they’ve seen the films but never watched the original series, they’re really not qualified to say much of consequence about the new film.

As expected, He (Nick Allen) and She (Morrow McLaughlin) did their thing, parsing the movie’s action and wow factor, comparing it to the less favorably received X-Men outing, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Yet I found their comments off target, surprisingly. Not that I expected them to be anywhere near as lucid as Roger Ebert, but hey, somebody’s gonna have to pick up his baton and run with it one of these days. It would help if that person or persons were good at being on point.

She liked the new film, He didn’t and preferred Wolverine for some strange reason, but that’s not the problem. What’s wrong with their critique is that they analyze Star Trek without seeming to know much about the franchise or what made the best of the Star Trek episodes and films well worth watching and elevated them from simple space opera/fantasy to genuinely thought-provoking science fiction. Not all the Star Trek efforts represented real science fiction rather than fantasy, but more than enough did to put the franchise as a whole solidly in the sci-fi column. And it was all the better for it. Long before Alias, Lost, or the marvelously reinvented Battlestar Galactica, good Star Trek episodes and films made viewers jump at the chance to analyze and debate them, endlessly and enthusiastically. Before Star Trek, the only TV program that evoked a similar response was The Twilight Zone.

Disappointed in the He Said, She Said analysis, I left the following comment, for whatever it’s worth:

Well! Morrow and Nick, I'm surprised that both of you missed some essentials that made the best of the Star Trek films and TV episodes great, not just good. The first is a plot that thoughtfully explores ethical dilemmas and crises of the future. There are tons of examples I can cite from the Star Trek canon and the various series, but if you can't think of even one instance on your own, then you weren't paying attention. This new film ignored that essential and focused far more on pure action with a thin plot instead. Plenty of whiz-bang, not much food for thought. It's still fun, like eating cotton candy, but it doesn't really satisfy like earlier efforts did; however, the film may have done just enough to revitalize the franchise for a bit longer, IF J.J. Abrams learns from these mistakes (he may not, sadly, if big box office performance distracts him, though that in itself is not an indicator of quality).

The second Star Trek essential is clever verbal and physical asides that demonstrate the film isn't taking itself too seriously, and neither, perhaps, are some of the characters. Wit is always more entertaining than explosions. I'll give you three examples from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986):

* the scene on the bus where some biker is blaring a boombox, to the annoyance of other passengers, and Spock applies the Vulcan nerve-pinch to change that — I laughed so hard the first time I saw that that tears were leaking from my eyes! The rest of the audience had pretty much the same reaction.

* Kirk, on leaving their cloaked Klingon vessel in Golden Gate Park: "Everybody remember where we parked!"

* Dr. Gillian Taylor: [Wait,] Don't tell me — you're from outer space.
Kirk: No, I'm from Iowa. I only work in outer space.

Love it!

Finally, Nick, 'pulling a Kirk' does NOT consist of going against everyone else, being a contrarian, etc. It means using ‘cowboy diplomacy,’ a phrase that I believe the Trek world may have coined and is now in common use. It means taking action, any action, instead of trying actual diplomacy first. Just what one might expect out on the frontier, but something that was used far less often by the time Jean-Luc Picard commanded the Enterprise and the Federation was older, larger and more established.

BTW, I think I like Chris Pine's Kirk much better than I did William Shatner's Kirk in the TV series (waaaaay too full of himself, more smarmy and narcissistic than genuinely confident, and I never once believed that women in the future would find his pick-up lines remotely persuasive or that Shatner's Kirk would, in fact, get all the girls). Pine's take, however, gives us a good starting place to chart the long evolution of Kirk's persona into the at last more reflective, less boorish, self-mocking Kirk who departed in Star Trek: Generations. Besides, young women like the bad boys until they learn differently, usually the hard way. And those eyes — WHOOOOEEEEEE! We haven't seen blue eyes like that since Paul Newman died! Mmmmmmmm ....

Karl Urban's Bones McCoy, on the other hand, has too big a stick up his behind. The original Bones tempered his barbs and outrage with more wry, dry delivery and, again, a touch of self-mockery; McCoy always knew damned well when he was being a touch too hyperbolic and could dish out his sarcasm with a wink. That's what made his criticism easier to swallow.

In contrast, I find the old Spock/young Spock counterpoint credible and interesting — in fact, "fascinating!" ;D It's also satisfying to see a younger, more enthusiastic Scotty with some of that wonder and energy still intact.

Given all this, there might be room in the future for maybe one more outing with these younger incarnations of the original Enterprise crew we've come to know and love. After all, we're curious as to how they get from here to there.

And frankly, the buff Chris Pine is much better eye candy, filling out that uniform more handsomely than the lumpy Shatner ever did. At last: a Kirk worth ogling. One finally believes that the young Uhura might have been attracted to him, even if it was for only a nanosecond.

I think I’ll go see it again, this time on IMAX, and ogle just a wee bit longer ...

2009-03-03T02:27:00.009-06:00

Well, at least they like the best of us ...
posted 3-3-2008 - 3:05 am

Not everybody hates print journalism or considers it obsolete yet. Or at least, not everyone in business hates newspapers and magazines.

Fortune's annual series of articles on the World's Most Admired Companies is just out. The Top 50 list frankly gives me pause. After all, it has Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America on it — and I can't see why any company that's received or is asking for a bailout should be on that list. Then again, this survey must have been taken before the bailouts really began; it's the only thing I can think of that would make sense of those rankings.

Comparisons are broken down into nine different categories, for which points are assigned — financial soundness being only one of those nine — and then all firms are also ranked on each of those individual categories. Fortune compiled its rankings based on a survey conducted in cooperation with Hay Group. Fortune explains its methods here.

Unsurprisingly, for newspapers and magazines, the four top rated companies (most admired) are the Washington Post Co., the New York Times Co., the McGraw-Hill Cos., and Gannett Co. All of this may seem ho-hum to many of you. On the other hand, as aggrieved as many of us have felt lately about the condition and future of journalism, there is one set of comparisons that might interest you. When Fortune examined which companies across all industries were most and least admired on the basis of product quality, the New York Times was at the top — ahead of firms like Anheuser Busch, Walt Disney, Herman Miller, Nordstrom, and Polo Ralph Lauren. Apple, which is once again the overall leader at number 1 in the Top 50 overall rankings, isn't even in the top 10 for product quality. Neither is Sony (no computer, software, or electronics firm is). The fact that the New York Times is at the top just goes to show that not everyone tars all media outlets with the same brush. The reporters and editors at The New York Times should feel a little better this morning, despite the company's financial difficulties.

And what about the 10 least admired in terms of product quality? You guessed it: McClatchy, Tribune and Gannett, which rank 5, 6 and 10 respectively on that list — which, curiously, is led by Fiat. Now, I've always known that much of the world has long considered Fiats to be throwaway cars: they're the auto of choice for smashing in chase scenes if you're making a film in Europe (like, say, a Bond film; check it out the next time you watch one of the Sean Connery or Roger Moore 007 films shot in Europe). I just didn't know that business folks thought even less of Fiat's quality than I imagined. But much as I've disliked the Chicago Tribune's ownership over the years, I didn't think I'd see the Tribune Co. sharing a spot with Fiat on a Worst Of list. I'll bet Trib owner Sam Zell didn't expect that, either.

The Tribune Co. is also ranked 4th worst on use of assets (McClatchy leads that list), 4th worst for management quality, 5th worst in terms of social responsibility (actually ahead of Fiat, which is 7th on that list), 5th worst in terms of financial soundness (McClatchy is 4th), 5th worst on long-term investment (McClatchy is 4th again), and 8th worst on people management. Whoa. That takes some doing.

Nice going, Sam! Any other dubious awards you're planning on getting? Do let us know.

For the record, neither the Sun-Times Media Group nor Hollister, Inc. were on any of Fortune's lists, good or bad. Somehow, I suspect they're probably relieved to have escaped notice in this case.

(Condolences to Tribune employees, who are already depressed enough from repeated downsizings and various Zell utterances. For them, this has to be just one more bamboo shiv under the fingernails. Sigh ...)

2009-01-31T14:44:00.009-06:00

Shows I love: Battlestar Galactica season 5, so far
posted 1-31-2009 - 4:37 pm

So: Felix Gaeda has deteriorated into a bad guy. He's not the fifth Cylon, Ellen Tigh is; but he is a mutineer and a traitor, demoralized by having come this far for nothing and blaming everything on the Cylons, including rebel Cylons. And this requires a lot of rationalization, but there's a lot of that going around now in the fleet as morale descends into near nothing and order into chaos.

I'm wondering, on this morning after the third episode, why neither Tigh nor Adama anticipates the rebels tossing in a grenade once they crack the door and isn't in place to immediately toss it right back, where it could explode on the other side. I was thinking about that even as it happened. They did have just enough time to prepare, after all. But I digress.

I love the way Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell have evolved their characters' natures and relationship over time. They're finally comfortable in their bickering way and can finish each other's thoughts and sentences but rarely need to, now that they're so tight. How fitting that he pushes her onto the escaping transport while remaining himself: the captain gong down with his ship, if need be, but not ready to surrender it or himself just yet. These must be the roles of Olmos's and McDonnell's lives, and they play them that way. Excellent.

Not that anybody else is a slouch.

The writers take us deeper into the mental and ethical devolution of the remaining humans in the fleet. All are shocked by the dead planet they think is Earth, as are the rebel Cylons; some individuals recover faster than others. D'anna's resignation and Dualla's quiet suicide are both stunning, then immediately comprehensible: each in her way has simply given up, won't play anaymore. What a kick that Starbuck ends up so much stronger, even in her confusion, than Leoben; we didn't see that coming, but it's a nice touch. And how satisfying that smug Leoben is finally feeling fearful and completely out of control.

And yet, I'm still pissed off by how suddenly and quickly they made their way to 'Earth' in the last episode of season 4. It simply wasn't believable, in so many ways. To clarify, a few things need to be straightened out here:

a. The Cylons are indeed vulnerable to at least some kinds of radiation, or have all the viewers simply forgotten what happened to the first Leoben we met on Ragnarok Station? This means D'anna is probably choosing a miserable death by remaining on the dead planet, if the radiation sickness of the first Leoben we met is any indication.

b. We know only that the 13th colony found this planet that has approximately the right night sky, and they called it Earth (perhaps because names from the 12 constellations were already used by the first 12 colonies?). Note, however, that all these planets are named 'colonies' — which implies that humanity originated somewhere else on the first Earth, but that doesn't mean the planet that was the 13th colony was the Earth on which all of humanity began: it IS still referred to as a colony. Besides, it's far enough away from the 12 that the sky above the 12 is WAY different. Which leads me to my next point:

c. The stars that form the skies over our own planet are generally so much further away than we realize — being nowhere near the same part of the Orion spur of this spiral arm of the Milky Way — that you could travel a considerable distance (i.e, for tens of years, even at light speed) before the sky began to look even a little different. This is the main reason I didn't buy that hurry-up travel from skies that look absolutely nothing like ours in the last episode of season 4.0 all the way to our section of the Orion spur. That's just scientifically impossible.

If they could travel that distance that fast, why hadn't the skies begun to look more recognizeable long before then, so that the fleet had some clue they were going in the right direction? Just how many months or years were supposed to have gone by at the end of that last season 4.0 episode?? And how would Adama, et al. have been able to hold together that fragile alliance with the rebel Cylons for that many more months, until they reached Earth? Highly unlikely. Sorry, but NOTHING that Eick and Moore can come up with could explain that with any believability. This is what happens when people who write science fiction are scientifically illiterate (and they think others are, too).

d. Given that nothing in that episode or the first one of this season indicates that the trip to 'Earth' — once Starbuck's Viper indicates a direction — is more than a few days to weeks, at that point, it's clearly not the original Earth: it's not possible for the jumps to be THAT big and the sky to change so rapidly, given the distances involved between the stars in those 12 constellations and our Earth. Some of the stars in Orion alone are 1,300 light years away: that's 1,300 years of traveling at light speed. You can't have the slow travel, even with jumps, that this program had for 3-1/2 seasons, then suddenly have them covering such enormous distances.

More than likely, the stars above the 'Earth' where the 13th tribe used to live are only approximately what they should be, not entirely so — and the dead planet our survivors found wasn't the 13th colony but the first, or at least was settled much earlier than the other 12 colonies. It would have been, because of the similarity of the skies, a stepping stone to the others as colonization spread out from our solar system, and perhaps not even the first such stepping stone. There may have been other, closer, less populated colonies in between, even colonies that failed or were temporary as humans made their migration away from this solar system.

Now THAT would be scientifically possible, even logical, and astronomically correct. The writers' "magic" jump from wherever they were when Starbuck's Viper suddenly found a heading to the dead planet that was the 13th colony simply is wrong and very annoying in the writers' underrating the intelligence of their audience. And impossible. No wonder I’m pissed off by that episode: asking me to suspend a bit of disbelief is far different than expecting me to be suddenly stupid and suspend all reasonable thought.

The only thing I can figure is that Moore and Eick were so intent on finishing up this series in five seasons and moving on to other projects (sorry, Sanctuary is ridiculously bad; I feel awful for Amanda Tapping) that they threw this stupid maguffin at us in the form of this suddenly short trip to ‘Earth' and expect us to swallow it whole, without serious questions. Guess again, boys. Or maybe it just took a science-literate woman who likes the series instead of a fanboy to pose the question and expose the fraud, chapter and verse. Gotcha, dudes.

e. We know from interviews Moore has given to others that it is fair to consider the dead planet of the 13th colony to be the home of a colony of human-looking Cylons. He never says whether the entire planet was populated only with Cylons, but clearly, there were a lot more of them there than there ever were in the 13 colonies. And at least one, Ellen, knew about the possibility of a reboot into a new body. And when in the flashback she tells Saul not to worry because of the reboot, he doesn't seem entirely surprised by the notion. So he may have known or suspected then, and she merely reminded him. We don't know how many other hybrid Cylons of that time and place also knew about the reboot capability.

f. As George Santayana said, those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it — but that doesn't mean that all the details play out in the same way, merely that the same overall basic lessons have to be relearned no matter how much the society has changed in the meantime. As a parallel, you could say that by descending into a service-only economy, the U.S. has failed to learn from the Roman Empire, which was severely weakened because it relied too much on others making and supplying what Romans once made for themselves — which made the empire very vulnerable to protracted assault and defeat by outsiders. So this doesn't have to be an episode-by-episode repeat of human and Cylon history in the 13 colonies that runs like an endless loop, merely a failure to learn and remember the lessons as the details change over time. But none of that tells you what happened to the original Earth, on which humanity began long before there were Cylons.

g. How stupid was it that nobody in the fleet thought to look first for radio or other transmissions before they sent down flyers to the dead planet they assumed was our Earth? Why didn't they look for communications satellites or some other sign of civilized life? And why did the episode gloss over the entry into that solar system, with no mention of how many planets there were or were not in that system? We don’t even know that that ‘Earth’ has a moon above it. Perhaps because mentioning fewer than 8 or 9 planets in the system or no moon above would be a BIG tipoff that this wasn't the original Earth, merely a place that the colonists called 'Earth' in honor of the homeworld humanity had departed SO long ago that nobody remembered where it really was.

That implies thousands of years have passed since travelers left the homeworld. And it doesn't exclude the possibility that humans also expanded in other directions to colonize other planets. The homeworld might still be empty, with its resources exhausted and unable to support several billion occupants, but it need not be radioactive, merely abandoned for other worlds lying in many directions away from the originating planet. So there could still be other flourishing human colonies many light years beyond the original Earth — colonies that survive, thrive, and remember homeworld Earth but have forgotten about early colonists who went in another direction to settle elsewhere. And it would take much longer than the series has left for the humans and hybrid Cylons in the fleet to ever get there, folks.

What a kick in the head that would be. And it would open up the possibility of a new chain of stories explaining how and why humans first left Earth and how many attempts they made (and failed at) to establish colonies further and further away from the homeworld.

Does this give you enough to think about, folks?

BTW, isn't there anybody besides me who was glad that Starbuck came alive and really kissed Lee to within an inch of his life as they were running to save the admiral? That gal lives large and eats trouble for breakfast; GOD, but I love her character! She's got a new lease on life just as everyone else is succumbing to the insanity; but then, Starbuck copes with insanity much better than most. She’s firing on all engines now. And Dirk Benedict can go hang: Kara Thrace’s Starbuck has it all over his version. And always will. Go, girl!

I've loved the way Katee Sackhoff has inhabited the character of Starbuck throughout the mini-series and four seasons of the series. A crazy person may be a problem in a sane world, if only because a warrior like Starbuck would likely find peace and stability boring, but a crazy person in an even more insane universe is probably the sanest and most savvy person in it. And that may be why Starbuck is always at her best under duress, when things look their worst and danger is immediate.

Damn, I'm going to miss her when she's gone. But we still have her for a few weeks more, thank heavens. We do need something to distract us form the oncoming depression; the 1930s had Fred and Ginger dancing and screwball comedy. Maybe we need Starbuck kicking Cylon ass. Wheeeeeee! I'm all for it.

2009-01-16T19:26:00.011-06:00

Shows I love: awaiting Battlestar Galactica
posted 1-16-2009 - 7:27 pm

In less than an hour, Battlestar Galactica returns after months of absence. Its fans have been alternately hopeful, pissed, confused, exasperated, and excited. Same here, but I've been mostly pissed -- at the lousy ending of the last episode that aired, at the fact that the timeline was so drastically condensed in the last 15 minutes of that episode, and that it was done in such a not-at-all credible, nonsensical fashion.

I'll get to more about that later, perhaps after I've seen the new episode of this final half-season. For now, let me indulge in what has preoccupied most fans for months: the identity of the final secret Cylon. That will be revealed in tonight's episode anyway, so the wait is nearly ended by now.

And I've really missed Starbuck. Who wouldn't?

To make an educated guess about the final Cylon, I went to the SciFi Channel website and reviewed all the clues offered. Or should I say, 'clues' -- because some of them are clearly misdirection, which is par for the course (the writers have been playing with us from the start, and we've all marveled at their skill). I didn't bother with the webisodes, because they're supposed to be able to stand alone and, therefore, can't have much predictive value.

So here's my guess: it's Mr. Geda, who's been in CIC and near the conn all this time, who was the ambivalent aide to Gaius Baltar on New Caprica when the latter was president and the secret source for the rebel humans. Geda, who lost his leg while on Starbuck's team as she searched for the route back to earth but found a Cylon base ship and learned about the Resurrection ship instead. The dead giveaway? Two of the hints: one in which he said he hoped someone would finally know who he was, and another in which Laura Roslin remarks to Baltar that neither of them made good choices when it came to their aides de camp. We already know Torie is one of the final five. That leaves Mr. Geda of the beautiful voice.

I guess we'll see shortly, won't we?

2009-01-15T04:05:00.012-06:00

Much ado about the swan that didn't die
posted 1-15-2009 - 6:30 am

I hate artistic revisionism. At least in ballet. And I blame the post-Walt-Disney Disney Company for it.

What started this rant, you ask? I attended a performance last Sunday of the Russian National Ballet Theater, and they performed Swan Lake. Theirs is a relatively new company, having been founded during the late 1980s, and, by the caliber of dancing that I saw, clearly second tier: fine, but certainly no threat to either the Bolshoi or the Kirov. I wouldn't put them on the same level as the New York City Ballet or the American Ballet Theater, either, but those two are also world class, so no surprise there. But I love Swan Lake and Tchaikovsky's score, so I really didn't mind.

Despite some lack of precision now and then among the corps de ballet, I was enjoying the production, for the most part. Particularly the performance of the prima ballerina portraying Odette/Odile, whose performance was clearly on a higher level than the rest of the company but whose name I don't know because the program listed four names for that role (this is a traveling company, and this role is obviously rotated, as are several others). In fact, I eagerly anticipated watching that particular Odette do the dying swan scene.

Now, if you've never seen Swan Lake, you may or may not know that there's a famous scene near the end where the heroine dies brokenhearted because her lover the prince has been duped by a double and has proposed to the impostor instead, thus dooming the heroine to be a swan forever — whereas staying true to Odette would have freed her from a sorcerer's curse and let the lovers unite. Having been betrayed, she kills herself as the evening reaches midnight, living only long enough for the grieving prince to scoop her up in his arms as she dies.

If you're a professional ballerina, it's a big deal to dance the lead in Swan Lake and an even bigger deal to do the dying swan scene. Reputations have been gained or lost based on the performance of the dying swan scene. It's really a measure of a ballerina's acting as well as her dancing skills and body language. The dying swan is a killer role (forgive the pun) for a prima ballerina, just as much as playing Juliet is for an actress.

So you can imagine my shock when the dying swan suddenly gets up and doesn't die. Say WHAT??? You got it: they rewrote the ending.

Blasphemy! Philistines!! How DARE they!?!

You see, this change is problematic for many reasons. If you've never seen Swan Lake before and don't know the real ending, you'll still be confused. As was my culture-partner for the afternoon. The reason? First, Tchaikovsky's music itself provides for a death — and because the score in a ballet is shorthand for not only what's going on at the moment but the whole mood and subtext as well, there's just no way to pull off the heroine being saved at the last moment. The music's setting you up for one thing, but you're seeing something else, and you're confused: cognitive dissonance is unavoidable. You feel like you've missed something when you blinked for a nanosecond but you just can't figure out what happened, when, or how you missed it.

Second, the whole breaking the curse thing is dependent not really on the prince showing up that night while the swans are still young women (they're only swans during the day, until the curse is made permanent) but on his remaining true to Odette. The moment he proposes to Odile at the ball, having mistaken her for Odette, he has betrayed his swan-girl and the jig is up. Game over. There's no way to justify the ending, then, and my partner's confusion at the finale is testimony to this impossibility. Besides, it means changing the Marius Petipa choreography, and frankly, that's just something that shouldn't be messed with unless you're going to do an entirely new staging with new choreography.

But the other reason the not-dying swan is problematic is that it means the Disneyfication of fairy tales has now begun affecting the world of ballet, not just cinema. This is a corporate response to focus groups, which should NEVER be allowed to influence the arts!@!#! It all started when the Disney folks reworked The Little Mermaid and then got a script for Pretty Woman and changed the ending for that, too, to make it a happy one. They were pretty desperate for a hit at the time, having had a few flops in a row, so perhaps that's how they justified it to themselves. In the original script of Pretty Woman, the hooker with a heart of gold doesn't get her guy: he goes home without her, and she has to make a decision on her own to get out of the business and make something better of herself. Bleaker, sure, but truer to life. But the Disney folks were afraid it would be poison at the box office, and cowardice won out. Same for The Little Mermaid.

That led to Disney having happy endings for all of its later animated films. But it's a BIG problem when you decide to drastically rewrite well-known stories like those by Hans Christian Andersen. Fairy tales were never mere entertainment when they were written. Most were cautionary tales, not unlike Aesop's fables: they provided warnings, morals, lessons to be learned. They warned you about the harsh realities and inequities of life, starting with step-parents who'd rather have you gone so that their own kids can inherit the estate, and ending with dire warnings about what happens when you make shady deals with ugly characters like Rumpelstiltskin.

Andersen's Little Mermaid, like so many Andersen characters, loses in the end; hers is another one of those tales about what happens when you make a bad bargain. Having traded her beautiful voice for legs instead of a tail, she loses the prince she gave up her voice for — precisely because she can no longer speak up for herself (moral: never silence your own voice for any reason, or you won't be able to defend or save yourself when you really need to). Yet the Disney people did a 180 and had her getting both the prince and her voice back, which required substantial rewriting of the entire story. Idiots!!! Nobody's that lucky in real life. Where's the lesson? Let's not even go into what they did to Pocahontas.

Fairy tales and fables are a way to introduce children to the notion that life isn't all sugar and spice, as nice or fair as we'd like it to be, but without scaring the kids too much (time enough for that later). We'd all like a happy ending exactly because life is so capricious, unpredictable, and often disappointing or unfair. But as adults, we know when we're being humored with a happy ending and know the difference between that and day-to-day reality.

Young children don't know that yet; thus, the utility of fairy tales. Stories about how the kind brother or generous sister gets the help of strangers easier than the mean, selfish siblings. Tales about not taking things for granted, like the hare who goofs off because he's sure he'll win the race, only to have the slow and steady tortoise beat him. And so on. You get the drift.

Which means that when you mess with the endings of long-treasured fairy tales, you're completely removing their value. Instead of being a well-balanced metaphorical meal, they become junk food. The dying swan provides a much more memorable lesson than one who is incomprehensibly 'saved' at the end, contrary to all expectations raised by the terms of the story, let alone the music. Would anybody remember Romeo and Juliet if they'd just run off after marrying and never returned, living happily ever after? No: no point to all that drama that came beforehand, not to mention that it wouldn't seem authentic.

Walt Disney himself knew the value of injecting some realism for the sake of dramatic storytelling. Remember, he killed off Bambi's mother, yet Bambi still remains a popular animated film. Contemporary parents who are tempted to avoid showing Bambi to their kids would do better to simply talk to them afterward about the doe's death and how things work in nature. That's a much more valuable lesson than the false one of trying to avoid all pain and grief, for their children won't be able to do that in real life — and any attempt to do so will simply make them neurotic and dysfunctional.

Uncle Walt wrote some happy endings, too, but he didn't flinch from using realism now and then. And he knew better than to mess significantly with the classics; instead of changing endings, he changed side characters or streamlined plots, as he did with Cinderella and Snow White. And he barely tampered with Sleeping Beauty. The same cannot be said of the folks running the firm he left behind: those dopes are way too timid to keep from changing endings.

By now, American films have a truly global reach and influence the arts elsewhere. Wikipedia tells us that there have been several different endings to Swan Lake over the years — yet in all but one of them, the swan still dies. It seems that a version danced by the Mariinsky Ballet in 2006 has the prince saving Odette and killing the sorcerer by breaking one of the latter's swan wings, though why the sorcerer is a swan himself at that moment isn't explained. It may be this version that the performance I saw alluded to. But consider: Disney's abomination on The Little Mermaid was released in 1989, and Pretty Woman came out in 1990. That was a fast one-two punch at the box office, and the lesson the company erroneously took away was that happy endings are better, no matter that you've removed reality. So by the time the Mariinsky Ballet got around to altering Swan Lake, changing sad endings had already become 'fashionable,' thanks to Disney.

Perhaps reality is grim enough today that we want our equivalent of Fred and Ginger movies. That's fine, so long as you're making those daydreams for adults. For kids, the occasional unhappy ending with a lesson behind it is much more useful. Kids have more than enough fantasy as it is. Anything that gives them some grounding in reality, even if it comes in the form of a fairy tale, is of greater value than absurdity or throwaway escapism — they already get enough of that with video games. Proper fairy tales, authentically told, can actually provide an antidote to the unreality that video games foster.

Besides, it's a good encouragement for them to pick up a book now and then, if only to learn more fairy tales or fables. No harm in that, so long as the morals of the stories aren't diluted. And what a painless way for parents to pass along some good values.

2009-01-10T01:13:00.011-06:00

Ranting for academics
posted 1-10-2009 - 2:56 am

I have friends whose kids are visiting high schools and colleges now, in anticipation of attending those same come autumn, and I've noticed something: they're increasingly feeling a very specific kind of rage, one fed by the harsh realities of ever higher tuition rates and a snotty streak of anti-intellectualism in this country that glorifies sport at the expense of academics.

It is a very normal and rational reaction to an absurd status quo, one that has to change, though you know the sports fans will go down fighting. Well, on second thought, perhaps that gets more complicated if the sports fans in question are also parents whose happily geeky kids turn out to be more interested in field theory than field goals. I hope so.

The backdrop for this, of course, is the worst economic recession since the Great Depression and the worst unemployment statistics in the last 16 years, courtesy of the December 2008 numbers released earlier today. These campus-visiting parents are bloody well pissed off, and justifiably so: not just about tuition costs in this economy, but about the indefensible favoritism shown to boys' athletic programs while math, science and engineering students (not to mention girls' athletics) go begging for scholarships and loans. Just who do the sports nuts think is going to pull us out of this economic disaster — football players?? Of course not!

I really feel sorry for these parents. Not only do they have to cope with keeping their families intact while being hard pressed from all sides, they're being asked to hand over their life savings in tuition to schools that seem to care more about their NCAA standings than about how many students they'll graduate who will be able to get good jobs and be useful in advancing society to a better future. For which sports stars will be completely useless. Of course.

Considering that colleges' and universities' own endowment funds have suffered lately just as other investments have and academic institutions need all the paying students they can get, you'd think college administrations would have more leverage (and courage) to tell the sports-crazy alumni and team boosters to either shut up and start supporting the school as a whole, or else go stick a pigskin where the sun doesn't shine. But no: somehow, too many academic institutions seem oddly peopled by clueless, gutless wonders who make even Lawrence Summers look good. How did that happen?

Here's part of a note that one such friend sent me yesterday:

... Education in America is always downplayed and sports glorified. Even last night at a high school orientation for Tim, it was mentioned that "we would try to get out early so that everyone could watch the Oklahoma-Florida game. Hell, I couldn't care less when my child's education is at stake! In the long run, that outcome really is very insignificant. And that also brings up the question of scholarships. Monies have always been available in our local school district for sports - but for academics, they are few and far between. Even at [the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign], it was mentioned to us that the football players have a brand new lounge with a huge flat-panel television. The rest of the students just [barely] get along ...

And this is an excerpt from my reaction:

... You're right about scholarships; don't get me started. Part of my views about getting national health insurance (and getting enough practitioners so that there aren't any long waits for care) involve massive government forgiveness of med school and nursing school loans, provided that the students in question permanently go into primary care, pediatrics, ob/gyn, infectious disease, gerontology, or rheumatology; all other specialties can damned well fend for themselves ... We should also have massive loan forgiveness and scholarships for science, tech, math and engineering, and for IT that is not related to entertainment (nope, sorry: nothing for the CGI/fx or videogame crowd — they can damned well survive on their own, too). Our economic infrastructure requires more of those professions, and the market won't provide them on its own: the market never has done that in a timely fashion or in sufficient quantities, and it stupidly punishes investment in R&D.

Which reminds me (how to put this gently without losing the impact?) ... When that tour guide at [U of I in Urbana] bragged about the new flat screen in the athletes' lounge, did you eat him alive in front of all those people for such misplaced priorities and egregious excess?? Did you rip him to shreds over the fact that sports make NO contribution to our economic security or national security, whereas the sciences, math and engineering DO, and here we are in the worst economic slump since the Great Depression — yet they do nothing for the academic students? Did you tear into him and make him explain this bit of stupidity in front of the other parents??? Because I would have, to make the point! Bloody hell YES: I'd have chewed him up and spit him across the quad like an olive pit.

(No, the tour guide isn't responsible for stupid school policies, but he is responsible for promoting that idiot mindset, and the other parents there would've gotten the message, too — and you can bet the administration would have heard about your outburst as well and worried that it might be contagious, especially if the other parents took up your point and cornered him — which might give the school a few minutes' pause before glorifying their athletes again. That might be enough to nudge priorities, too, if enough parents reacted that way.)

Now, before you decide I'm jumping on you unnecessarily, please understand: all I'm saying is that you have an opportunity to let college administrations know your unhappiness with this situation for academic students — and the way to do it is to complain loudly in front of other parents when you see this kind of useless favoritism for boys' athletics (I'm guessing that there IS no plasma screen in the girl athletes' lounge, or that the gals even have a lounge — I'm thinking they get stiffed like all the rest).

Nor should you buy the specious argument that male athletic programs bring money into the school, AND YOU SHOULD SAY SO, because none of that money ever leaves the athletic department; if the cash really did go to benefit the rest of the school, the men's athletic department would get nothing that the other departments don't get, and that would be absolutely fair. When money from football and generous alumni donors who support male collegiate athletics ends up funding a new science lab, or engineering and IT scholarships for girls, or stipends for kids going into research sciences, THEN and only then will I buy those ridiculous arguments. And meanwhile, the rich alumni can go fuck themselves. What happened to the duty of an academic institution to educate its donors about what kind of graduates the nation actually needs??

Nothing will ever change if you don't question it out loud, especially in front of other potential allies — like the parents of other academically inclined kids who are on the same orientation tour. Those brain-damaged tour guides need to hear YOU yelling at them that you're not going to pay the school your hard-earned money for an absurdly high tuition just so they can throw money at idiot athletes, at the expense of your kids. You need the other parents behind you, saying "Right!" out loud and demanding explanations. And that plasma TV in the lounge should be sold and the proceeds donated to the general scholarship fund for ALL students, not earmarked for athletics. You can suggest that out loud next time.

But you get my point: make your unhappiness about this situation their unhappiness at every opportunity, once they're dumb enough to give you an opening. Venting in the right situation will make you feel SO much better and may actually send a useful message. Much better than staying silent and grinding your teeth. ...

I haven't heard back from my friend yet, but I think he and his kid still have a few campus visits to go yet. And I hope he finds his rage and vents it effectively. Thing is, it's very tempting for a parent at that kind of moment to just stew silently and glower at the tour guide instead of speaking up; I can sympathize with a natural tendency to avoid causing grief for anyone who might keep your kid from getting accepted at the school of his or her choice. The problem, however, is that the only time parents have any influence whatsoever on college administrations is before their kids are accepted and enrolled, and that's when you have to make noise and get all the concessions you can. Once your child is in, you're stuck with whatever conditions the school wants to impose and whatever decisions it makes on scholarships and loans. You have to get what concessions you want up front and send the message you want to send in advance, or you won't be heard at all: once they've got you, they can safely ignore you.

So I wonder: now that parents have so little to lose in this economic environment, will they find their healthy rage and finally let college administrations have it, or will they fall back on old fears and cowed deference, stay silent, and miss a singular opportunity to be heard?

If I had kids, I know which option I'd choose — but then, I've always been a smart, mouthy dame. Good thing it comes in handy.

2009-01-09T05:52:00.015-06:00

Shedding light on dark matters
posted 1-9-2009 - 7:33 am

I started my day yesterday by reading through my usual selection of news sources, then skipped over to check my e-mail, where I was presented with yet more headlines, and ran across a science story in Time magazine that piqued my interest. I ended up pissed off at the reporter, the Nobel prize committee, and academia in general. And thus, a rant developed, but not without cause.

Let me back up a bit here and give you the name of the article first:

The Milky Way: Bigger, Faster, Better Understood
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1870049,00.html

The first thing that struck me was the rather middling handling the reporter gave the story; nothing grossly wrong, just not much in the way of putting this item in perspective so that I know why it's important for me to know any of this. Besides, I've read far better science reporting than this mediocre little bit. The second thing that struck me was that Mark Reid, the Harvard astronomer she interviewed, is really just tweaking the kind of work Vera Rubin has been doing for more than 40 years — and without half as much fanfare and very little public credit.

Who's Vera Rubin, you ask? Ahhhhhhhhhh, here we come to it.

The news story is about more precisely measuring the velocity of our own galaxy as it moves through space. It seems the Milky Way is moving faster than we previously thought. Because velocity is related to mass, this means our galaxy is more massive than previously thought — but because our estimate of the visible matter hasn't changed dramatically, all that additional mass is represented by astronomy's sexiest phenomenon of the moment, dark matter.

Vera Rubin is the gal who discovered dark matter long before we had a name for it. And almost nobody outside of astronomy or astrophysics knows who she is.

Now, when I say that Vera Rubin discovered dark matter, I don't mean she was having an Al Gore moment: I literally mean that she discovered that galaxies weren't behaving as they should if there were nothing in between the visible matter in them. She did this by painstakingly making countless detailed observations and photographs of galaxies. A few others, starting with Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, had speculated that there might be some 'missing' matter holding galaxies together, but at the time, there were other plausible explanations and nobody had followed up by actually trying to document how galaxies move and making measurements. Until Vera Rubin did. Mind you, she documented the existence of dark matter, but even now we still don't know what it consists of, let alone how it came into existence. There's a lot of speculation, many competing theories, but none that provide sufficient explanation for what Rubin, her colleagues, and her students have documented over the last 40 years. All we know is that 90 percent or more of the universe is made up of stuff that isn't like the stuff that makes up you or me. We're the exceptions; dark matter, whatever it is, is the rule.

Given what a controversial subject and counter-intuitive phenomenon dark matter is, you'd think we'd have heard about Vera Rubin by now. We know Bill Nye the Science Guy; Neil DeGrasse Tyson from Nova and the Hayden Planetarium; Brian Greene, who writes popular books about string theory; and of course, Stephen Hawking — but not Vera Rubin. Her ego's not that big; she's not into self-promotion, nor does she spend a lot of time popularizing science for non-scientists, like the late Carl Sagan did. Rubin just focuses on making astronomical observations, publishing occasional papers, and teaching others how to do what she does. But the science establishment hasn't exactly bent over backwards to tell us about her, either; in fact, like many other women in science, Rubin was actively discouraged by many of her male teachers from entering science and entering astronomy in particular.

Here's what I wonder: how did Time manage to report this story about what Mark Reid and his team are doing without 1) mentioning higher up that the existence of dark matter is still based on indirect measurements like gravitational effects or 2) mentioning that the first proof we had about the existence of dark matter came from photographs of galaxies taken by Vera Rubin, who was ignored and criticized for decades because nobody wanted to deal with the implications of dark matter just then — and because she was a young post-doc and a woman?

Rubin's work showed that galaxies rotate as a unit, kind of like CDs or vinyl records on a turntable, rather than as long 'strips' of stars and dust clouds that would move at differing rates — thus demonstrating that there was unknown 'missing' mass holding together the disc of a galaxy. Long before anyone other than Zwicky was even idly speculating about this particular missing mass in the universe, Rubin was busy documenting the reality that dark matter and Big Bang theorists now have to account for in their theories. In fact, Rubin's work really forced astronomers and astrophysicists to face the question of what constitutes the 'missing' mass in galaxy discs and in the universe as a whole, which prompted the whole business of looking for and identifying dark matter.

To quote the University of Wichita's web page on Vera Rubin's Dark Universe:

" ... Rubin realized that the dark matter she and her colleagues had observed could be the missing mass Zwicky had predicted. Since 1978, Rubin and a team of Carnegie postdocs have analyzed more than 200 galaxies. They estimate that 90% or more of the universe is made of this mysterious dark matter. In other words, everything astronomers had studied until the discovery of dark matter was only one tenth of the universe." But Rubin had actually begun doing that kind of observing while working on her master's thesis; one teacher actually tried to discourage her from publishing her results, warning her that she'd doom her career before it had really begun (she ignored his advice, fortunately).

This is the woman who discovered that most of the universe has this huge, unseen structure to it and is made up of something other than the kind of visible matter that forms human beings, planets and stars. This is also the person that Princeton University profs wouldn't even send a graduate school catalog to because they didn't think women could hack it in science. Yeah, right. Didn't matter, as it turns out: she went to Cornell instead, where she learned from the likes of Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, then on to Georgetown, where she gained a Ph.D. under George Gamow. She accepted a position at the Carnegie Institution in the 1970s for less than she was making at Georgetown, just so that she could continue her work without the pressure of having to publish often. Seems to have worked out; it's at Carnegie that her work really took off, the place where she's made most of those painstaking observations that others now take for granted when discussing dark matter.

Why isn't her name a household word by now? She's a pioneer of modern cosmology, for heaven's sake: she discovered that the universe is fundamentally A LOT different than we thought it was. How much bigger a deal can you get than that? Had a guy discovered that, by now we would have named at least one mountain, a couple of expressways, several cocktails, maybe an asteroid or a moon, and possibly a new car after him. Vera Rubin gets nothing. Huh??

As it happens, Dr. Rubin finally has a significant degree of respect within her own profession, though it was long in coming; but I'm wondering if she's ever going to get full credit while she's still alive ... and, if she'd been a guy, whether we wouldn't have been talking about a Nobel Prize by now instead of taking her work for granted and giving all the credit to dark matter theorists instead. Mark my words, the folks who will do the heavy lifting on providing evidence for what dark matter is will be, as usual, observational astronomers like Vera Rubin and observational physicists like those at Fermilab or CERN, not the theoretical physicists and theoretical astrophysicists — but whichever theorist has the explanation that most closely matches all those detailed observations will end up with all the credit in public.

Unless, of course, science reporters get smarter and more knowledgeable about the subject matter they cover, so that scientists can be less concerned about publicizing their work and more concerned about actually doing it (but I'm not holding my breath about that; there are a lot of big egos in science).

Vera Rubin discovered something that radically changes how we look at our universe, but she'll probably die without the Nobel committee ever recognizing her work. She is, after all, well past normal retirement age, even though she continues to work anyway (born in 1928; you do the math). Besides, astronomers continue to be underrepresented on the Nobel committee.

Think I'm overstating the case? Hardly: this year's Nobel winners in physics were three Japanese guys (one of whom is at U. Chicago) who received the prize for their work in partially explaining symmetry breaking in particle physics, something that's important to understanding the Standard Model of the universe per the Big Bang theory. Symmetry breaking helps explain why there's more matter than antimatter in the universe, which is how the universe is here at all. However, these three guys each worked on a very small part of this larger discussion; and while what they've done is important in the larger scheme of particle physics and cosmology, their work is still a comparatively more minor part of that discussion than, say, discovering and documenting in detail over the last 40 years that the structure of the universe is radically different than anyone thought.

So why does the Nobel prize committee, among others, continue to ignore Vera Rubin? Well, first, the odds are stacked against women. No, really. Academia is still far more blatantly sexist than a lot of other areas of society (the American Association of University Women can tell you all about that, but I digress). Only two women have ever won a Nobel prize in physics, and only a handful have won Nobels in other disciplines. The first woman to receive a Nobel in physics was Marie Curie in 1903, who won it together with her husband, Pierre, for their work on radiation; the other, U.S. physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer, shared the 1963 Nobel in physics with Eugene Wigner and Hans Jensen for her discoveries in describing nuclear shell structure (she developed a theory of the structure of the nucleus of the atom while she was at University of Chicago and Argonne National Labs from 1946-60).

Second, only 11 astronomers and astrophysicists of a total 185 recipients have received the Nobel prize in physics; the prize is tilted very heavily in favor of physicists, and there is no separate Nobel for astronomy. The last astronomers to win a Nobel prize were George Smoot and John Mather in 2006 for their work with the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite, starting in November 1989, in documenting variations in the cosmic microwave background — the background temperature of the universe that is the leftover heat signature or 'footprint' of the Big Bang (part of the reason their results were as publicized as they were is that Smoot broke with tradition and gave their results to the press before those results had actually been published; academia was furious about that for a while, but even Mather now concedes that the resulting publicity was very useful).

In 2002, two U.S. astrophysicists and one Japanese astrophysicist won the Nobel in physics for their work involving cosmic neutrinos and cosmic x-ray sources. Before that, you have to go all the way back to 1993, when astrophysicist Joseph Taylor shared the prize with partner physicist Russell Hulse for their radioastronomy work in discovering a new type of pulsar. A decade earlier, U.S. astrophysicists Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and William Fowler shared the 1983 prize for their work on the theoretical structure and evolution of stars.

In 1978, astronomer Robert W. Wilson shared the physics prize with physicist Arno Penzias for having accidentally discovered the cosmic background radiation (which Smoot and Mather later measured in detail) while Wilson and Penzias were both working at Bell Labs on developing a microwave receiver for radioastronomy. And before that, British astronomers Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish shared the prize in 1974 for their work in developing radioastronomy systems; the committee also simultaneously cited Hewish for the role his work played in the discovery of radio pulsars — even though the person who actually discovered those pulsars, Hewish's then postgrad student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, went unrecognized (she was the one who first noticed the stellar radio source later identified as a pulsar). Now known as Dame Jocelyn, thank you very much, Burnell discovered the first radio pulsars using systems that Hewish developed and refined — but Hewish got the Nobel (see? Women have been stiffed in astronomy for years; don't get me started).

Oh, yeah: the place where I first read about Vera Rubin and her contributions was in the history of astronomy book series published about 25 years ago by Time-Life Books. Ha! How's that for delicious irony? Perhaps the folks at Time should have perused the stacks at Time-Life books first, before writing the story ...

Rubin has also been very active in encouraging more girls and women to get into science. You can read more about Vera Rubin and her discoveries at:

Answers.com: http://www.answers.com/Vera Rubin
U. Wichita: http://webs.wichita.edu/lapo/vr.htm
NSF: http://www.nsf.gov/about/history/nsf0050/astronomy/darkmatter.htm
Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42271-2005Mar16.html
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: http://www.post-gazette.com/magazine/20000320kids9.asp
Discover: http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/breakdialogue
Scientific American Frontiers: http://www.pbs.org/saf/1405/segments/1405-2.htm
Newsweek: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2008/10/03/the-nobel-prizes-place-your-bets.aspx
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin
Peter Gruber Foundation: http://www.petergruberfoundation.org/Site/cosmologynews_2002.htm
SpaceRef.com: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=11424
UCLA: http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~cwp/articles/rubindm/rubindm.html
BookRags: http://www.bookrags.com/Vera_Rubin

Whew! I feel better now.

2008-12-04T22:38:00.006-06:00

Guillotining the press
posted 12-4-2008 - 10:50 pm

[Editor's note: this item was written just days before the Tribune Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (reorganization, not liquidation; but given Mr. Zell's ineptitude, it could yet convert to the latter; one hopes for the sake of the employees and readers that it doesn't). Moreover, Conde Nast's Portfolio magazine, cited below, is now itself in a financial bind and may only survive as an online-only publication.]

So today we read about yet another round of firings — what else can you call them? Not layoffs, because those laid off are presumably rehired in time — at the Chicago Tribune. I ran across this bit of news while simultaneously looking at something else on Huffington Post and perusing my e-mail. The mail included the daily post from Gorkana.com, which lets journalists know where their colleagues have taken new positions. We use it to keep tabs on each other; but lately, it's become less a source of information than an exercise in envy and permanently diminished expectations for what David Brooks recently called "The Formerly Middle Class."

So many journalists are now in that category, the one with radically altered prospects, and there will be more before this recession is over. Assuming it doesn't slide into an actual depression. That's why reading those notices of promotions in the daily Gorkana post stings. Instead of being at a high point in our careers, looking toward advancement, some of us have had our futures dynamited before our eyes. The Romenesko column at Poynter.org reads like a morgue attendant's log with all its items about newspapers that are failing or for sale, broadcast staffs being reduced (this time, CNN's cut its science, technology and environment news staff, and the Rocky Mountain News is only one of several papers up for sale; what next?).

I'm glad Gorkana's providing the information on our colleagues; it might be useful some day for networking. But in this economy and in a town where the Chicago Tribune just cut another 11 reporters in its third round of cuts and the Sun-Times already cut staff three times in the last year, having daily updates about the more fortunate among us changing jobs just reads like rubbing salt in the wound. So I unsubscribed from that daily bit of masochism and hoped it would help unstuff my mailbox.

But the essential problem remains. We have a glut of mid-career out-of-work journalists, here and elsewhere, broadcast as well as print, and most of them won't be rehired if/when the economy improves. I see my profession imploding, and it hurts. And I see no ripple of concern among the citizenry. Democracy requires an accurately informed public, which you won't get from blogs alone, but that marketplace of ideas keeps steadily shrinking even as there are more voices shrieking on the 'net. Never mind that the quality of reporting in Chicago is plummeting for lack of adequate personnel; Sam Zell cares not for Pulitzer prizes as indicators of good reporting, as he snidely told Portfolio.com last week. One wouldn't think he'd pay all that money for a newspaper just to rip it apart bit by bit, yet that's what he's doing. Perhaps he needed a tax write-off. Or perhaps he's just an undertaker who doesn't know what he's doing. Too bad the Trib needed a good surgeon instead.

An extra tidbit of insult: on the very page where the online Tribune today reported its job cuts, what should be running next to that story but an ad for luxury home sales? Really; I'm reading this, and I'm supposed to be impressed that there are luxury homes going begging when more of my colleagues have been unceremoniously dumped into the street? Three weeks before Christmas?? Who on earth would think that a good ad placement? (Oh wait, that must be Sam Zell thinking he could combine the job at which he made his millions with the one he knows nothing about ...) No doubt the ad was put there because all those people with permanently diminished expectations in this economy still have seven figures to throw around on overpriced real estate. Yeah, right.

If you suspect this is an unhappy town for those in the media, you don't know the half of it. And it will get worse.

Here's an interesting question for you: where do all you people who turn to the Internet for your news and want to get it for free think it comes from? It comes from print and broadcast operations, folks — and those outlets have to pay reporters and editors to do the work. Take those operations away, and you have no means to pay for putting the news on the Internet. Nobody's figured out yet how to make money from online news alone.

Nothing but demagoguery comes free. If you want good journalism, you have to be willing to pay good reporters a decent wage to do it. Of course, you can stop looking for it at the Trib because Sam Zell doesn't give a damn about the fourth estate or much else. Hmmmmmmm, that sounds an awful lot like that felon Conrad Black and those twerps who still survive to run the Sun-Times into the ground ...

There are plenty of excellent reporters and editors in Chicago, but most of the experienced ones are being or have already been pushed out of their jobs. We could have the Chicago equivalent of the New York Times, but we've not had any publishers in the last 40 years who want to produce so high quality a paper, in print or online. Now, everyone who's left in the newsrooms is looking over his or her shoulder, wondering when the axe will come for them.

If you think things are bad now, just wait. Perhaps Sam Zell will try to bring back Wingo Bingo or the like, even though that failed for Rupert Murdoch when the latter bought the Sun-Times (after all, Zell seems unable to come up with any ideas of his own). Then again, not even Murdoch managed to last here: there are levels of quality low enough that not even Chicagoans will accept. But what's left of Chicago print and broadcast media after management is done lopping off heads could very well devolve into infotainment. Easily.

You want decent news reporting? Start being willing to support it. Channel 11 and PBS can't do everything, wonderful as those folks are. We still need reliable mainstream print/online news here, but heaven only knows when we'll get a publisher willing to do what it takes for us to have that, on the Internet or otherwise. Not likely in this economy. And we still don't have a good advertising model for online news that would provide enough financial support to maintain an online equivalent of a big-city newspaper, so that investigative and analytical reporting didn't become extinct. That would be an unforgiveable loss.

Publishers who come to newspapers from other industries just don't seem to do journalism or journalists any good ...

Still, it makes you wish that we had us a Ted-Turner-like moneybags with a good attitude who thought it important to do a really good job at just reporting the news, now doesn't it? One can still dream ...

2008-08-12T02:42:00.010-05:00

Films we love/hate: Waiting for Hollywood to catch up to the 21st century
posted 8-12-2008 - 7:18 am

Last Friday, USA Today reporter Susan Wloszczyna went looking for influential women in the film business to get their take on what the future holds for women in Hollywood. Too bad some of them still have no idea about what real women want to see at the movies. Perhaps they've spent too much time with male colleagues who make juvenile films for other overgrown teenagers to realize that a female equivalent of The Pineapple Express isn't what we're looking for. And like Freud, maybe they should just ask us instead of making silly assumptions and even sillier films.

Movie producer Nancy Juvonen has made 10 films to date with partner Drew Barrymore. Juvonen is right when she says women are picky about which films they see and "want a guarantee for their time," i.e., to walk out satisfied and smiling afterwards. Women don't automatically rush out to see every new 'chick' flick – they want to know a film is worth the effort to see it at the theater. It doesn't necessarily hurt for a film to be more realistic, either. But Juvonen is dead wrong when she asserts that "Knocked Up and The Break-Up are more appealing than 'One day my prince will come.'" Bad choices there: they make a fairy tale, even a grim one, sound good.

Knocked Up and The Break-Up were not that appealing to anyone with a brain, male or female. I'm a woman, and I hated both films. They STANK. And I haven't thought much of most of the films Juvonen's turned out with partner Drew Barrymore, either.

Bluntly, Knocked Up was incredibly stupid and unrealistic: we've had reliable birth control for 35 years now, this babe has a decent-paying TV job at a time when hundreds of mid-career journalists are being let go, there's a public health epidemic of sexually-transmitted diseases that she can be exposed to (including AIDS/HIV), and she's idiot enough not to use a condom and gets pregnant – thereby not only possibly jeopardizing her early career in a shrinking market but also permanently changing the course of her life??? Oh, give me a break! Nobody I know in journalism, not even in small-town TV, is that stupid. Suddenly, there's a rash of 'accidental' film pregnancies when there's no good reason for the overwhelming majority of American women to have those accidents anymore. Teenagers, maybe; but adult women? Sorry: so last century.

The Break-Up was unremarkable and irritating; I didn't care for either Vince Vaughn's or Jennifer Anniston's characters – both were annoying and whiny. I can think of better ways to spend my time. I couldn't even stomach it for free on cable.

On the other hand, 300 was a rush in part because there was real heroism and principle informing the plot, and the relationship between the Spartan king and queen was part of that. Those ancient Greeks knew their drama, and much of it survives even when Hollywood needlessly reworks it.

This year isn't shaping up so well for women's roles, but there are a few promising films to come. I always loved Murphy Brown on TV and appreciated Clare Boothe Luce as a playwright, so it'll be interesting to see what Diane English accomplishes with The Women. The drama Frozen River looks like it'll grab you, as does the Civil Rights-era tale The Secret Life of Bees. Still, it appears that those films will be exceptions to the rule this fall. Where's this year's Shakespeare in Love or Mona Lisa Smile? Where's the female answer to The Matrix or Ronin?

Cable has The Closer and Saving Grace, but similar strong female leads are nowhere to be seen in current cinema. Hard science fiction has often given us fascinating heroines; if we can have strong, provocative women on a blockbuster cable show like Battlestar Galactica, why can't we find them at the theater? I don't need another useless remake of a witless TV program (read: Charlie's Angels), so don't bother to remake Dallas.

In current release, The House Bunny is just another bimbo flick with a fish-out-of-water premise; I have no doubt men will be willing to see it because the female lead is yet another dumb, nonthreatening blonde wearing inappropriately tight clothes who's falling out of them most of the time and to whom a makeover represents the highest achievement possible. Aw, c'mon, they couldn't make her as smart as Lauren Bacall or Joanne Woodward and as appealing as Tim Gunn? In other words, the friendly, accessible style maven with brains and taste? Besides, as a highly intelligent blonde, I'm really sick of the nitwit stereotype. At least Legally Blonde went against type, which is what helped make the film fun; in contrast, The House Bunny recycles not just the blonde myth but also that old canard about smart women being if not actually plain, then at least somehow inept at dealing with their looks, which makes Bunny pointlessly insulting to the vast majority of women (at least they missed that other blonde myth, the one that says if she's somehow pretty and smart after all, then she's got to be a bitch a la Sharon Stone, or at least Hitchcockian icy and untouchable if not actually frigid; think Kim Novak in Vertigo or, more recently, Nicole Kidman in The Golden Compass). Oh, please.

And as I absolutely hate ABBA songs, I won't be seeing Mamma Mia (also in current release), either, despite the fact that it has Meryl Streep in it (I hope she got paid tons of money and laughed all the way to the bank, because it won't do much for her resume). Give me a Jane Austen remake any day. Better still, think of something original.

As for writer Pam Brady, also quoted in the article, she's even more clueless than Juvonen and has been hanging out with those aging slackers on South Park way too long if she thinks we need more films "where women can be stupid and funny." I despise most of Will Ferrell's infantile roles (that goes for most of Adam Sandler's roles, too, nearly everything Rob Schneider has ever done, and Mike Myers's Austin Powers franchise: only a testosterone-poisoned, hallucinating male would think that little twerp would ever be sexy to real women, in this decade or any other). Why would anyone think I'd be happier with female versions of the same?

Hey, Brady: isn't the bimbo image one modern women have been trying to get rid of for at least half a century, maybe longer? What happened to making movies about women who are funny and smart?? Ones who can deliver a line and a thought behind it, like Lauren Bacall in just about anything? Where's the heroine who's as clever, tart and appealing as Emma Thompson's Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing? Beatrice has every bit as much man trouble as those gals on Sex and The City, but she gets much better lines and skips the inane, self-absorbed behavior (then again, she had a better writer). And let's face it: on her worst days, Emma Thompson is much funnier than any bimbo I ever met. Anything less than that kind of film is something I'm not going to spend time or money to watch.

You can take your anti-intellectual South Park and your House Bunny and anything else like them and stuff them where the sun doesn't shine. Give me a film with a female lead who's confident, witty, sexy, not neurotic, and can deliver snappy dialogue with panache, one who's brainy, merry and can stand up to a guy yet still charm him, a worthy successor to Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, Katharine Hepburn in Holiday, Myrna Loy in The Thin Man series, or Ingrid Bergman in Indiscreet. Point me toward that film, and I'll be there like a shot on opening night and buy the DVD.

2008-04-19T22:22:00.006-05:00

Pitiful performance, part 2
or: What the hell were they thinking??
posted 4-20-2008 - 5:15 pm

So I get home very late Wednesday night, well after midnight, and I turn on the TV to review what I've taped. Included in what's on the VCR is Wednesday night's debate between the presidential candidates, hosted by ABC. I've seen loads of debates before. Given that this one wasn't hosted by PBS, I wasn't expecting much but the usual tame stuff with maybe one or two legit 'gotchas' on accidentally pertinent subjects. After all, David Brinkley and Ted Koppel are gone, and I couldn't think of anyone at ABC who'd ask much in the way of incisive questions; but you never know. Perhaps one of their Washington-based correspondents would come up with a decent question or two.

Let's just say it right up front: egregiously bad. Terminally stupid questions. Unquestionably the worst debate since presidential debates were first televised. An embarrassment to journalists everywhere. I felt personally offended and insulted by the moderators' blithering inanity.

Now, I'm in the news business, so no matter how boring this turned out to be, I felt obligated to watch at least part of it. I expected to be underwhelmed. What I didn't expect was to be yelling at the TV at 1 in the morning because I'm flaming pissed off at the moderators. They were complete asses.

Imagine: 50 minutes went by without a single policy question; what else were we all there for if not to pose serious policy questions to the candidates and push for detailed answers?? The debate was front-loaded with trivia, and the whole program was larded with commercials anyway, leaving not much time for substance — not that substance was present. Even the remainder of the debate didn't cover much.

I was so furious that I could barely make it through the program (I *didn't* make it through more than 2 minutes before I started sniping back at the screen; it only took 10 before the yelling began). I got SO bloody angry that I was still pacing around the room a few hours later, unable to simmer down enough to go to sleep but too steamed to write. Irritated thoughts like 'Who approved those idiot questions?' or 'Why didn't they remove Stephanopoulos due to conflict of interest? Do they even *know* what conflict of interest means??' and vicious retorts kept running through my head.

By then, I was spitting fire, upset because the debate audience would conclude (almost fairly) that most journalists are self-aggrandizing, headline-grabbing incompetents, me included. My reputation has been blackened by association, and I'm not earning one-twentieth of the money Charlie Gibson makes. That pissed me off even more. Even if they fired Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos immediately, they'd probably get a nice severance package. Even their severance package would probably be more than I make in a year, and I'm a better journalist. The whole business gave me a headache.

A glass of wine and five hours of restless sleep later, I woke to discover that much of the rest of the audience had the same incendiary reaction that I did. Thank heavens; I'd figured the audience would be too bored or too clueless to react. I was glad to be wrong.

More than 17,000 messages within 24 hours had been left on ABC's web site alone, overwhelmingly negative, and more were pouring in. Checking my e-mail, I noted that MoveOn had already organized a protest petition directed at ABC (to be sure, they're supporting Obama, but he's not the only one who got short shrift during the debate). Naturally, I logged on to their site and signed the protest petition myself, adding just enough observations of my own to cause third-degree burns. Then I sent out a scathing e-mail of my own to about 20 people, lambasting ABC News and asking my friends and colleagues to sign, too. Within a day of announcing the petition, MoveOn had more than 250,000 signatures, and more were coming in.

The media caught on to the reaction story and played it up over the next two days, updating as needed. One of the earliest salvos came from Editor & Publisher, an industry publication for managers and owners in the news business. E&P called the debate "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years." That pretty much set the tone for the majority of the other critics.

Even ABC News ran a piece that night on the evening news, but it was tame and didn’t really go into how negative the reaction was to the moderators’ questions and the overall lack of substantial policy discussion, which, for once, wasn’t the candidates’ fault. Well, we didn’t really expect them to dis their own homeboys, now did we, though that would have been a refreshing change.

The big question now is: did ABC News learn anything from this, or will it do just as badly the next time? Because I really rather doubt that those guys in the big corporate offices get it, or they and their counterparts at CBS and NBC wouldn’t be gutting their news departments like they are. Even CNN is an embarrassing parody of itself now, compared to the Ted Turner years. They had a great journalist like Judy Woodruff — for, what, about a decade? — and didn’t know what to do with her. Now she’s back at PBS on The News Hour and has a chance to do good work again.

The next primary — and, therefore, the next debate — will be in Oregon next month. There is one group pushing for substantial discussion by the candidates: the folks behind Science Debate 2008, who are overwhelmingly scientists, engineers, and those who have an interest in those subjects. In other words, smart people who think the nation’s decisionmakers ought to be guided in their decision by the best possible information rather than party politics or personal agendas. You should check out their web site: that’s a very long list of supporters they have, both individual and organizational. Their subject for the debate is: “Is America Losing its Competitive Edge? A Presidential Debate on the role of Science in America's Future.”

Science Debate 2008 has a commitment from the PBS programs Now and NOVA, along with public television stations KOPB in Portland, WGBH in Boston, and WNET in New York, to sponsor and broadcast the event nationally on a Friday in May. The moderator for the event will be David Brancaccio, the host of Now on PBS, with a panel of internationally recognized scientists selected by the organizers, Science Debate 2008. Science Debate 2008 itself has the backing of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Council on Competitiveness.

What the group doesn’t have is a commitment from any of the candidates, which ought to embarrass all three of them but somehow doesn’t. You’d think a discussion about our competitiveness as a nation would be of interest to them.

Viewers could get a worthwhile discussion like that, or they could end up with another ‘he said, she said’ but of nonsense from another of the network news departments. One thing’s for certain: after the ABC debacle, whoever is doing the next debate has been put on notice. Viewers and voters want more than the same old, same old, and they’re not shy about saying so. It remains to be seen whether or not the candidates are listening.

2008-04-19T15:25:00.011-05:00

Shows I love: Battlestar Galactica
posted 4-19-2008 - 10:04 pm

WELL. Only three episodes into the new season, and Battlestar Galactica has gotten even stranger than usual.

Everyone and everything seems to be unraveling in its own way. The four newly revealed human-looking Cylons, aka 'skin jobs', the relationships among the key Galactica players, and, interestingly, even the Cylons themsevles are comping apart. As convoluted as things already are, they manage to get even more complicated. Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice. This is indeed a human diaspora through the looking glass.

At the end of last season, four of the five remaining skin-job Cylons were revealed to be key Galactica players — Tigh, Tyrol, Torie, and Sam — who are in critical positions attached to other key Galactica players. They're all stunned by the realization that they're been secret Cylons all their lives and have pledged to each other to collectively keep the secret; but that's getting increasingly harder to do. Even more shocking is the return of the presumed-dead Starbuck, whose fighter plane exploded as it spiraled down into the atmosphere of a gas giant and who claims to have been to Earth. No one is more stunned than she is to learn that she's been gone for two months, not the mere hours that it appeared to her. As glad as some are to see her, they all suspect she's a Cylon — how else could she have cheated death?

Even Starbuck herself, at one point, wonders whether she's an unwitting Cylon, given that she has no clue how she survived or how her fighter came back in pristine condition, or where the exact location of Earth is. She only knows that she's been there and is dead positive she can lead them back there. But with every jump the fleet takes further away from where they found her, the more her sense of how to find Earth fades and the crazier that makes her. That gets her thrown into the brig.

Poor Starbuck. She's obsessed, she looks paranoid, she screams, she cries, she's back to insulting people, and she's willing to die to prove her point. Would a Cylon do that? Tigh remarks to the other three skin jobs that Starbuck is more like herself than she ever was and is therefore doubtful as a candidate for the last unknown Cylon. Adama and President Roslin can't afford to believe her, but Adama can't quite bring himself to disbelieve her, either, and that bothers him. He wants to believe. He's acutely aware of the risks either way.

Lee Adama, on the other hand, does believe. He's the only one who has no doubts. At the moment of her return when she steps from her fighter to the flight deck, Lee simply walks up and throws his arms around Starbuck, hanging on wordlessly, to their mutual relief. To him, she is still the brilliant, infuriating, endearing Kara Thrace he fell in love with, and he's unabashedly happy to have her back. It's evident to anyone with eyes how lost they have been without each other and how happy to be reunited.

But she's still married, whereas he's divorced since she left, and she soon falls out of Lee's arms on the deck and into Sam's, if only to keep up appearances. In front of all those people, a stunned, self-conscious Sam hugs her back fiercely; he has reasons of his own to keep up appearances and, like everyone else, doesn't know what to make of his resurrected wife's return. When she doubts herself later, he says it doesn't matter whether or not she's a Cylon because she's still the same person and he loves her anyway. She retorts that he's more generous than she is, because if she thought he was a Cylon, she'd shoot him right between the eyes. Was he responding to her self-doubt as a husband, trying to deny his own reality as a Cylon, or trying to draw her out as a possible fellow Cylon by saying that? Doesn't matter — true to her contrarian nature, Starbuck has gotten in his face again and given him pause.

Sam, the former pyramid player turned pilot and now former widower of the wild, crazy and off-kilter Starbuck, wants nothing to do with the other three skin jobs and keeps a low profile. But he's still as much a member of the fleet as is Tigh, to whom he answers. Starbuck's return from the dead derails him even further, as she's clearly not the woman he thought he knew before. Moreover, as his wife she's closer to him than the others and harder to hide the truth from if she's not distracted. Even worse, now that Sam has volunteered for Starbuck's secret mission and there's no turning back, Starbuck has no problem using him for sex to distract herself from her own obsessions, while pointedly reminding Sam that their marriage is and always has been a sham. All this, while Starbuck mystifies and continues to alienate everyone else who's volunteered for her mission, including Geda, Athena-Sharon and Helo.

Col. Tigh keeps up a good front before Starbuck, but he's a lot more unsettled than he looks. As one who's been Admiral Adama's best friend forever almost as far back as their entry into the service, he's now having hallucinations in CIC of shooting the Old Man himself. That terrifies him. At the moment his own existence as a Cylon was revealed to him, Tigh took the stoic route and decided to stick to the human fleet and to Adama to the bitter end: "No matter what else I am, this is who I choose to be."

Easier said than done; still lingering in the back of Tigh's mind is the torture the Cylons put him through on New Caprica, and the fact that he killed his own wife because she betrayed resistance secrets to the Cylons in order to get him released. Now he turns out to be the very thing he hates most. Tigh is a ticking time bomb, and we wonder how long it will be before he explodes or hits the bottle again.

Adama and son are momentarily at peace with each other, but Lee has left the service for a position in civilian government. His relationship with Roslin, which has been friendly since the start of the war, isn't as secure as he thinks it is. Like a good politician, she says all the right things when Lee takes up his office; but it's hard to tell whether she's being deliberately cool to him or just trying to get through a tough agenda in an authoritarian manner.

Still, Roslin may be nursing a grudge against Lee for getting Baltar acquitted of war crimes at the end of last season. It's the shady, less-than-credible Tom Zarek who suggests this to Lee. Zarek undoubtedly has his own reasons for doing so and thereby possibly separating Lee from Roslin politically, but that's still unknown. Lee, however, doesn't know whom to believe. He continues to do what he considers the right thing, albeit that's been shaded now by Zarek's assertions, yet he soon finds himself politically isolated and feeling adrift (yes, he's been Zarek's tool, predictably). It begins to look like Lee may become part of the opposition now, yet for the moment, he and Roslin are both without allies, whereas Zarek's partisans, if he has any, are still lurking the background.

Admiral Adama, meanwhile, has had a hard time replacing Lee. Again. The Old Man pushes to keep his troops in order, but it's tough. His relationship with Roslin is messy and under duress. She's dying for sure this time and knows it, is physically weakened by her treatment even as she tries to keep a strong hand on the government, and she and the admiral fight repeatedly over Starbuck. Roslin adamantly refuses to heed a word Kara says or risk the future of the fleet on Kara's ravings, whereas Adama is tired of distrusting everything and everyone. He can't ignore the possibility that Starbuck is telling the truth, either, so he gives his star pilot one opportunity to prove her case.

In the process, Adama drags Roslin into keeping that confidential. It's a secret the president then has to keep from the press and other members of the government, and she resents that. It complicates her already complicated relationship with Adama, who's letting her stay on Galactica so that he can keep a closer eye on her and take care of her, and she can be closer to the infirmary. They may be testy with each other at any given moment and annoyingly accurate in their bitter barbs, but he still reads aloud to her while she's getting her chemo, and he lets her use his quarters to catch up on her paperwork. They're under each other's skin in more ways than one. If there's more to it than that, we can't tell; they're being discreet. But we suspect there is.

This gives Tori, the president's aide, more reasons to hang out on Galactica. She has as unstable a sense of self as the rest but by the third episode is beginning to allow for other, more amoral possibilities and choices. We knew early on that Tori had an opportunistic streak when she suggested to Roslin before New Caprica that the election could be rigged in Roslin's favor. Now Tori is persuaded by Col. Tigh to get closer to the thoroughly discredited Dr. Baltar, a man whose own life has deteriorated into an absurdist play after his acquittal.

Tori balks at first, prompting Tigh to concede that she doesn't have to sleep with the guy, just seduce him enough to find out if he's a Cylon or if he realizes who else might be one — like Starbuck, for instance. Yet shag Baltar she does, to her own surprise, and Tori's not sorry about it afterwards. She even admits to Chief Tyrol in the third episode that she has new feelings and sensations that might be worth exploring — and, with a knowing look and less than casual touch, suggests the same to him. Just at the moment that his wife, Callie, catches the two of them together in a bar. Callie assumes the worst.

Tyrol is having his own meltdown. He no longer has a sense of himself, doesn't know who he is or what he should do about it, is angry with the universe for having made him live a lie, and is afraid to think about where his loyalties really lay. Overwork is getting to him, though he buries himself in it, and so is his colicky son, who can't seem to stop screaming. Meanwhile, he and Callie can't seem to stop arguing. She wants him to be home more often, stop being on call all the time, and pitch in more with the child care; but after being lit into by Callie, he storms out instead.

While Tyrol's meltdown is slowly coming to a boil, Callie's is much further ahead: she's depressed, she can't sleep, she can't seem to quiet the baby for more than a few minutes at a time, and there's no one else to help out other than the absent Tyrol. It might as well be raging post-partum depression time, many months late. Callie's hooked on pills that make her restless and paranoid, and everything in her life seems to be going to hell. Even without the Cylons — whom she loathes with a vengeance — at the moment she catches Tyrol and Tori in the bar, Callie is Medea on steroids. And then after secretly tracking him to a meeting, she learns that her own husband is a skin job. It's enough to push her to the edge. And to bring out a new nasty streak in Tori.

Back in the Cylon fleet, the other skin jobs are unraveling into factions. The most recent trouble began when all the Cylon fighters suddenly pulled out of a dogfight after one of them recognized the newly outed Sam as a fellow Cylon and abandoned pursuit, leaving both the Cylons and the human fleet astonished. The Sixes, Sharons, and Leobens protested wildly when the Cavil in charge then decided to gut any independence and self-awareness from the now sentient fighters and render them 'tools' again. A vote is demanded, which is expected to end in stalemate: each member of a Cylon model line usually votes with its other members as a bloc, which would make the vote evenly split (the D'anna line, you'll recall, was locked into cold storage because she killed herself once too often while seeking to learn the identity of the final five). This time, however, the principal Brother Cavil has a majority — a swing vote from Boomer, the 'original' Sharon from Galactica, who has fallen in with him. Unlike the minority, who claim a destiny set by a Cylon god, Cavil and his allies admit that they are godless, soulless machines. The reprogramming begins.

Horrified by what they consider an unspeakable crime against the fighters, the Sixes, Sharons and Leobens plot their revenge: they remove the intelligence inhibitors from the metal centurions, aka 'toasters.' The lead Six, a decidedly un-Six-like brunette, gives Cavil prime and his allies one last chance to stop the reprogramming of the fighters, and they refuse. She then informs them of the new situation and lets the enraged centurions shoot Cavil and his three cohorts. Once reborn, they find changed circumstances, but this doesn't prevent them from taking countermeasures that split the entire Cylon fleet and throw it into chaos. Still, the damage has been done, and the Cavil faction worries about what the centurions will do next.

It seems toasters and skin jobs can be just as vengeful and divisive as the rest.

By the end of the episode, Admiral Adama is seen silently consoling a somber, bitter Tyrol in the latter's quarters. It's not clear whether or not Tyrol thinks Callie did a Medea: his son is not to be heard, nowhere to be seen. Is this another instance of a half-human, half-Cylon child being taken from its parent, or something else? We don't know.

In fact, we haven't a clue where any of the characters are headed. Talk about a cliff-hanger. And it's just the beginning of the season.

Damn, but I love this show!

2008-03-12T16:27:00.008-05:00

Pitiful performance: The failed potty-training of public officials
or How Eliot Spitzer Became a Bimbo
posted 3-12-2008 - 4:37 pm
amended 4-19-2008 2:55 pm; see addendum below

I don't envy New Yorkers right now. Two of their favorite offspring have just messed themselves in public, and the entire business smells like a soiled diaper. First Eliot Spitzer, now Geraldine Ferraro. Two politicians once above reproach, and now deep in manure because of their respective impulse control problems.

Spitzer's problem, like Bill Clinton's and so many other male politicians before him, was the inability to keep his plumbing to himself and his pants zipped while he was busy rooting out fraud and corruption, with a righteousness and rough arrogance that made voters proud but won him few friends among Republicans and Democrats alike. Ferraro's was, in the heat of a tight race, the inability to resist saying something controversial and find a less inflammatory way of making her point. And because of their intemperance and bad judgment, both Democrats had to resign their positions today; in so doing, they've damaged some of their party colleagues by proxy as well, and their Republican opponents must be thrilled.

Spitzer wasn't corrupt per se, just willfully blind and criminally stupid about his sex habits. It's as if his mind somehow compartmentalized his own bedroom behavior and decided it didn't affect the rest of his life, public or private. Clearly, he had to know that it would, given the measures he took to conceal the funds transfers that paid for his very expensive call girls — and yet he was completely mindless about the very measures he took, making the same mistakes that had earlier allowed him to catch criminals he'd targeted (sending text messages, e-mail, not sticking to cash transactions that were harder to trace). He did the very things that anyone else could have guaranteed him would get him caught, yet he did them anyway, as if he were somehow untouchable or immune to such failure.

Self-sabotage, yes, but why? Was it hubris? Self-loathing? A guilty desire to be caught in his infidelity? A political death wish? Or was he just victim to his own arrogant, undisciplined, testosterone-driven, self-gratifying folly, insistently blind to consequences and egged on by midlife crisis: an inane desire to pursue young, nubile, available beauties no matter the cost and thereby try to avoid thinking about the fact that his life — including his sex life — is more than half over, closer to death and oblivion than to birth and limitless opportunity. Trite, predictable, disappointing, and stupid. Incredibly stupid.

This was a guy we were sure knew better. Of course he knew better — but like so many other men, he thought he'd miraculously be the exception (typical: guy hits on a girl, girl gets annoyed, throws her drink in his face and walks away; guy, still dripping wet, turns to his friend and says, "She likes me!" And he believes it as he says it, the fool). The magical thinking of the adolescent male, embarrassingly popping up in middle age, and Spitzer let himself believe it, believe that he deserved this expensive indulgence despite the fact that he knew it to be criminal, had prosecuted others for that same license, and had to know what an enormous betrayal it would be of his most sacred vows, not just to the public but to to the woman he claims to love.

Consider: he's famous, even infamous, righteous, crusading against fraud and corruption, at the top of his career, and it might easily be all downhill from here on. This is his star turn. So what does he do? He puts his brains on hold and picks this moment to scratch an itch. Incredible.

Aging celebrities like Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, and the years younger but still middle-aged George Clooney get to date and even marry babes half their age or less — because they're famous, handsome, wealthy, powerful, and they were available at the time. Not Spitzer: he had a brilliant, loyal wife who was a huge political asset; perhaps he never even thought of leaving her, would never want to — but the urge to wag that weenie one more time at a lovely, willing twentysomething, even if he had to pay plenty for it, was just too tempting for his brains to click in and save him from political suicide.

Or as one of my male friends put it, Spitzer was thinking with his other head, like a lot of men nervous about their age and lost chances. And here we come to two key words that may explain why Spitzer fell: entitlement, and arrogance. There is something about midlife crisis and the realization that this may be the last chance they ever have again to shag a sweet young thing that makes men think they're entitled to try. Well, guess what, you sluts: you're NOT entitled. You were NEVER entitled to that — that's your hormones talking, not your conscience. Just because you might be able to get away with it doesn't mean you should, most particularly if you're already married or otherwise committed to someone. And whatever happened to dating age-appropriate women so that you have more things in common?

For most middle-aged or elderly men, the yen to get laid by a overwhelmingly younger woman is moot: these men aren't handsome, famous, powerful, or rich enough for that to happen. The aforementioned Messrs. Douglas, Ford and Clooney got away with it because they are rich, powerful and good-looking enough to do it, and the women they attracted all expect to profit from the association — each of them was in a less powerful, less famous, less affluent, and less accomplished situation that was made far easier to live with by becoming associated with rich, powerful, famous and still attractive men, so the gals went for it. Their maxim, no doubt, was that it's just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as with a poor man, which is as cynical a statement about love as you can get. But if you're a guy in midlife crisis who IS rich, powerful, famous and just handsome enough to attract a young, nubile golddigger, you stand a good chance of being able to act on that erroneous sense of entitlement.

Eliot Spitzer not only acted on his wrongheaded sense of entitlement but at the same time realized he'd have to do it in such a way as to keep it quiet. As a powerful and influential public figure and very married, he wouldn't be able to do what Messrs. Douglas, Ford and Clooney did so openly; he'd have to settle for something concealed with no possibility of personal attachment, meaning a prostitute. And this is where his arrogance came in: not only did he think he was entitled to scratch that midlife itch, he thought he could do it illegally and not get caught. This, from a former prosecutor and attorney general. One might well ask whether he left his brains under the bed.

Which is to say, Spitzer wasn't thinking at all: his brains were on hold, and he lied to himself that it wasn't a problem, never mind that he surely knew the consequences of breaking the Mann Act, a federal law all prosecutors should be familiar with. It's cost him everything he's ever worked for and may have seriously harmed his party during an election year (that's still to be seen; there may be enough time for his fellow Democrats in the state legislature and those running in local elections to recover). Lucky for the Democrats that his lieutenant governor seems to be as well liked as Spitzer is despised and that he was up front about having strayed years ago himself. Unlike Bill Clinton, who likes just about everyone he meets and is liked by many in return, Spitzer alienated so many people there's hardly anyone sorry to see him go; whereas Clinton managed to hang on and still govern, Spitzer politically castrated himself and has no future left.

If Spitzer's was a classic male blunder kicked up a notch, Geraldine Ferraro's mistake was one many women have made: the inability to resist taking a possibly overconfident man down a notch in public and not paying enough attention to either the timing or the way she did it.

She may have put Sen. Obama's success in a certain perspective that may or may not be true, but at least Ferraro did it in a way that didn't break any laws — unless you mean the unwritten ones about political correctness during a touchy and groundbreaking primary campaign. Naturally, it came back to bite her in the butt, no matter how she tried to restate what she'd said or justify it. And like Spitzer, she did damage to a friend and political colleague locked in a close race. Ferraro is gone from Sen. Clinton's finance staff, but the damage is done. She did nothing illegal, just something highly imprudent.

That's a lot of apologizing there to be done. At least Ferraro still has friends in her own party, friendships bought with years of good will that may not have been quite completely negated yet. Besides, she can still be wrong about some things regarding Sen. Obama yet oh so right about what a beating women candidates take in the way they're covered. It's not an either/or thing.

Spitzer, however, made himself so disliked by both parties in NY state that almost nobody has any sympathy for him. He's turned out to be an enormous hypocrite in his private life, and those he offended must be gloating. In every other way, he may have been an anti-corruption, anti-graft, good-government governor, yet at the same time he's a walking cliche who can't manage to keep his pants zipped and his dick reserved for his wife. And he just threw away a political future during which he might have continued to do so much good for his constituents, leaving it doubtful that any successor will be able to accomplish half as much for years to come.

This leaves us in a strange place with a bad taste in our collective mouths and one more thing to hold against politicians in general. As attorney and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz said on Charlie Rose, we don't want things like federal wiretaps meant to uncover fraud, abuse, corruption and other big-time felonies to be used merely to find prostitution rings or guys who can't keep their weenies at home (that's overkill when you can easily find ads for high-end 'escort' services in the ads right in the back of New York magazine, as Dershowitz pointed out). Nor should we want impeachment proceedings to be used to punish moral failings that qualify as minor misdemeanors in a lot of states (meaning, the johns get fines, if they're punished at all) instead of reserving impeachment for the high crimes it was intended for, like fraud, corruption, and treason.

On the other hand, this was a betrayal of the public trust just as much as it was a betrayal of Silda Spitzer. And Dershowitz was out of his frakking mind when he tried in typical male fashion to justify his take on Spitzer's Folly by saying Spitzer was caught in a victimless crime that wouldn't raise any eyebrows in Europe (apparently, he hasn't kept up with recent political scandals in France). Prostitution and infidelity were never victimless crimes (a topic reserved for further discussion on another occasion).

Impeachment or resignation might be inappropriate punishments for another man's foibles in his private life, but not for Spitzer. He ended up being forced into resignation not just because he's a former prosecutor and a goody two-shoes in every other way, but because he's been arrogant and abrasive with members of both parties, and his Republican opponents as well as many of his own party members want to see him humiliated for their own reasons — ones that have nothing to do with his 'fitness' to be governor.

As for Ferraro, I have a feeling she's still unhappy about the way things went down years ago. She's a woman who knows something about having a husband who misbehaves — except that hers was involved in a felony or two, and her campaign was badly affected by it. Not that the Reagan-Bush train didn't have momentum on its own. But until today, Ferraro was still thought of kindly in her own right. Frankly, if she'd said that any man, black or white, would do better than a woman of any color in a presidential race and had stopped there, she'd probably have been okay; but she went that extra little bit too far, got herself into deep water without a life raft, and sounded more like a bitter former contender who got cheated by circumstance than a woman stating an obvious fact. In the process, she did her candidate no favors.

Righteousness sure can be convenient sometimes; but when it's coupled with arrogance and abrasiveness, it usually backfires. There's been a lot of that going around lately. Makes you wonder when McCain will slip; it's still a long campaign ahead ... Now, if only Obama and Clinton would start focusing on him instead of each other — otherwise, he gets a free pass for five months. BAD IDEA. Very bad. One of many in a sea of bad ideas.

Addendum: Geraldine Ferraro made her misstep, then faded after a week or so as Sen. Clinton went on to other blunders. Former governor Spitzer similarly faded from view about two weeks after his resignation. But Sen. Obama made a misstep of his own in Pennsylvania while trying and failing to connect with hard-pressed blue-collar voters there, while Sen. McCain is indeed getting a pass, from the press and from his opponents. More on that later.

2008-03-04T20:44:00.009-06:00

Defeating the destructive Republican agenda
posted 3-18-2008 - 7:55 pm

A colleague and I have been having an on-again, off-again e-mail conversation as the Democratic primary process staggers on. Mostly, it's been about the policy topics that haven't been discussed in any detail and the relative merits of the remaining candidates. But it's also been about the need to press forward the progressive agenda and, more to the point, derail the Republican agenda, which has been harmful to the average American and destructive to the long-term economic health of the nation ever since Jimmy Carter left office. We and the economy got a brief respite during the Clinton years, but the damage done since by the Bush family Know-Nothing probably wouldn't allow another such respite, even if the other Clinton got elected with a decisive majority in both houses of Congress.

The need to press forward with that progressive agenda at all costs and begin to undo the ultraconservative Republican damage seems to be temporarily lost on Senators Clinton and Obama, as is the importance of their spending much more time and effort criticizing Dubya Bush and John McCain, seeing how the latter will get a free ride for five months if Hillary and Barack dump on each other instead. Still, what seems to grab Democrats the most at the moment is the extreme polarization between Clinton partisans and apologists on one side and Obama partisans and apologists on the other. The fact that both candidates have issues they have yet to fully address appears only to have sharpened this bitterness between the two Democrats' supporters — at a time when both candidates can least afford it.

I've even seen this polarization and attendant sniping on a few of the journalism listservs I belong to, instead of the more balanced analysis I've come to expect from my brethren in the press. Yet my friend and I, no matter how pointed our discussion, are still speaking to one another regardless of this continuing dialogue. Which is what gave me the idea to reprint the latest installments of it here, with the thought that it might help others who can't seem to choose between or agree on Clinton vs. Obama think through some of the issues involved.

Our exchanges often seem to be fueled by columns or reportage in the New York Times, although items from the Washington Post, Slate and Chicago Tribune occasionally also make it into the fray. The exchange below was prompted by a Paul Krugman column entitled "Deliverance or Diversion?" that ran earlier this month. A full listing of his columns can be found here.

The exchange began with a mailed link to the Krugman article from me:

X —

Read Krugman, then ask yourself: what will Obama will do, or at least attempt, his first month in office? Where will the change begin? What issue besides Iraq will he grapple with first? Do you know? If you don't know, why aren't you worried? I'm an unapologetic progressive, and Krugman is right about one thing: given the last 7 years, this election OUGHT to be about the drastic differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. If you can't make the case for that now, when can you? It ought to be about philosophy, issues, policies, who should have influence as opposed to who does, consequences. About agendas.

The Republicans have never forgotten that they're all about the conservative agenda, no matter who they had at any given moment as their figurehead. Democrats forget, until a Republican president whacks them upside the head and reminds them. Yet Bush the Lesser is still in office, and already the Democrats have forgotten IT'S ABOUT THE AGENDA, STUPID! Instead, we're given a cult of personality, the bright-eyed novice versus the woman everyone loves to hate. Once she's out of the picture, how long do you think it'll take the GOP to start bashing and deconstructing Obama's cult of personality? A nanosecond, maybe??

Obama has hard work ahead, and it's like he thinks he can get by on confidence and vagueness alone. Preaching unity and togetherness is fine for getting through the primaries. Once they're over, it's time for bloody-mindedness: he needs to show detail by detail where and how the Republican agenda has failed the nation since 1980, and just how much we've lost because of it. We're worse off since Bill Clinton left office, and Obama has to point that out, chapter and verse. Most of those college kids weren't even born when Bill Clinton became president. They need to get up to speed, and fast.

Cheers,
P

To which my friend replied, more to my attached comment than to Krugman's column per se:

P —

Exactly what serious Republican opposition has Hillary Clinton faced?????? Very few people even know who ran against her in New York (oddly and just as an aside, one columnist the other day said she had no primary competition in 2006, which she did, a journalist in fact: Jonathan Tasini). Krugman for some reason doesn't like Obama. He likes Hillary. I cannot speculate why. I have a feeling he has become friends with her, being from the same state and all.

She got where she is because people liked her husband.

People seem to like Obama much better than they like her. We know what we will get with Hillary. Her health care plan was such a failure that it helped propel the Gingrich era into being, the remnants of which we are still contending with. Her campaign has been a mismanaged mess, and she has gone from whiny to teary to angry to sarcastic to mean to lying to fear mongering. She has become more and more like Bush every day. For a Dem, she has been a disgrace — playing the race card and the fear card.

I would like to give Obama a chance to do what he says he can. He seems sober, even, friendly and very intelligent. He surrounds himself with good people, [Tony] Rezko notwithstanding. His campaign has been masterful. Until a few months ago, hardly anyone knew who he was outside of Illinois. He is funny looking, and he has about the worst name you can have in this country. The fact that he has come so far speaks to a solid and competent person there ... a truly confident and self-made man (a little like Bill Clinton, in fact). I have faith that he will have innovative ideas, inspire young people to be a hell of a lot better than they are. I think if Hillary wants to get things done her way, a perfect job for her would be majority leader in the senate, where so many of our progressive hopes and dreams die.

love, X

This prompted the following response from me:

X —

You know I love you, doll, and like I've said before, I have no problem with [either Clinton or] Obama getting elected — in fact, I desperately want a progressive to win because the progressive agenda needs to become absolutely entrenched if there's to be any hope of turnings things around in this country; but if we progressives can't look at Obama's shortcomings frankly and discuss them bluntly now while he has a chance to fix them, he hasn't a hope in hell against the Republicans. And he DOES have shortcomings: he ducks questions just as readily as any other politician, he has more than just a touch of hubris, though he masks it faster than either of the Clintons, and I'm not about to canonize the man. As for faith, that's bloody well not enough against Republicans. I'd rather see some solid strategy instead, and the strategy for beating them is way different than it is for beating another Democrat.

To read what Krugman wrote and say, 'well, Hillary hasn't ... etc.,' is not an answer — it's a dodge and a debating tactic to change the conversation, and unworthy of true analysis. Frankly, it behooves Obama's partisans to be braver and smarter than that. I'll be happy to go into Hillary's problems separately, but 1) there are already plenty of people doing that in detail, and 2) it won't fix Obama's flaws to debate anything about Hillary. Enough on that.

Finally, if you think the Clintons' health care failure rather than a consistent and tenacious Republican agenda and war machine (dating back to Barry Goldwater) helped propel Gingrich or ANY Republican into office during the Clinton years, you are SADLY misinformed, perhaps even hallucinating, and need to do much better than that (you forget: I was covering health care policy in detail before, during, and after the Clinton years, and the failure of health reform, while it demoralized many including me, had nothing to do with the interim election; Republican preparedness, money, strategy, and effort did). AND you need to read David Brock's book "The Republican Noise Machine," which should be required reading not only for every dewy-eyed liberal naif (especially those under 30) but for every member of Obama's campaign staff, right down to the janitors. I'm dead serious.

The Republicans are down, they are dirty, they're unforgiving, they're rabid, they're tenacious, they're powerful, they're disciplined about their attack methods, they have more money than God, they have a long-term agenda that they've pressed for FIVE DECADES(!) and will continue to push for decades more, they have a deep and abiding hatred of all things liberal or progressive, they have an unbelievably extensive smear organization in place, and they won't rest until every liberal and progressive has been wiped off the face of American politics. How do you think they turned FOX News into a propaganda factory?? Any liberal who doesn't believe that this war machine is dedicated to his or her destruction is divorced from reality and needs a whack upside the head — which the GOP's war and disinformation machine will be happy to give them. WE NEED NOT ONLY TO COUNTER THAT MACHINE BUT TO PREVAIL AGAINST IT, which takes just as much work and tenaciousness and strategy as the Republicans are willing to spend.

The Wikipedia references won't even begin to give you an idea of just how insidious, relentless, and extensive this Republican network is (shit, their funding rivals the CIA's — The American Spectator was getting outside money to be able to pay Brock a $300K a year salary just to dig up dirt on the Clintons and nothing else; when have you EVER heard of liberals doing that??), but you should read the entries anyway:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brock
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Republican_Noise_Machine

Politics is not a business for sissies or the sadly uninformed. Mr. Nice-little-goody-two-shoes Obama hasn't a clue about that war machine, and he needs to get up to speed NOW. We need somebody who can smile and nod and kiss babies and answer substantive questions while he's mercilessly riding roughshod over the Republicans, wittily exposing their tactics and lies point by point, and pounding them into the earth. We need a savvy, unapologetic, RELENTLESS progressive Democrat, someone with sharp teeth he's willing to sink into the GOP agenda. Faith??? No thanks — I'll save that for *after the election, provided a Democrat gets in. Until then, what's needed is gimlet-eyed, steel-spined, disciplined, intelligent, skeptical, shrewd, relentless bloody-mindedness aimed at the Republicans — because that's *exactly what they're going to be aiming at us. Heaven help us ...

Now get out there and read that book!!!! {D

Love ya, sweetie.
P.

This, of course, just begged for a retort from my colleague:

> but if we progressives can't look at Obama's shortcomings frankly and discuss them bluntly now while he has a chance to fix them, he hasn't a hope in hell against the Republicans.
Well, he has a chance to "fix them." I also think that he will be far more energetic and effective against the Repubs (who polling says the Repubs like as well as they like McCain — see the Washington Times)... Hillary is a dirty dog for saying the things she has been saying about Obama the last two days, esp. 'I have lots of experience, and John McCain has lots of experience, and Obama has a speech in 2002.' Is that the way to get a Dem in the white house??? She as much as endorsed McCain. She's worse than [Sen. Joseph] Lieberman. She is ONLY out for herself, and she is a disgrace. I used to like her, but now I see everything the crazy Repubs and Dick Morris say about her are true. I hate to say it — but i have to believe my own eyes and ears.

love, X

This, in turn, resulted in a response long enough to qualify as a separate blog entry on my op-ed blog, PoliticalEye:

Barack, Hillary, supermajorities, and keeping up with the primaries

We will, of course, be continuing this discussion — right up to the Democratic convention, probably even the November election and past that, if a Democrat gets elected. Those Cabinet choices and judgeships will be all important for derailing the GOP and religious-right agenda.

Meanwhile, we hope this gave you food for thought. Please don't hesitate to send the link for this entry to your friends and colleagues. We like notoriety!
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