http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/ en Copyright 2009 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:40:17 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Normally when the stock market has a big up day, as it did yesterday, hitting its highs for the year with a 200-plus point gain, a business channel would exude cheeriness, show a bit of pep in its verbal step. But not if the channel is Fox Business Network. No, what's good for stock investors turns out to be bad for Neil Cavuto's frown lines. "Don't let the soaring market fool you," cautioned Cavuto at the start of his 6 pm show. Man, because if there's one thing Fox Business Network doesn't like it's a soaring market trying to pull a fast one on us. To address this crisis of rising portfolio value, Cavuto introduced his first guest, that financial oracle, that investment wizard, that translucent orb that burns by night: John Bolton, Sheriff of Nottingham. It takes more than a market rally to pull the wool over Bolton's mustache. He perceived the rise as a function of a falling dollar, which is a thumbs down on America's declining status and crumbling balance sheet. Following Bolton on Cavuto's show was fellow C-lister Dick Morris, who never gets anything right, so who cares what the thinks about anything? See, what peeved Cavuto and Fox Biz was that Wall Street refused to follow the doctrinaire script. After the House narrowly passed health reform over the weekend, the market was supposed to go down on Monday as a damning verdict on the socialist overreach of the Obama administration. Here are Glenn Beck, Stewart Varney, that twerp on Fox Biz's "Happy Hour" who keeps crying fascist!, and the jingoistic Capitalist Pig, and the other hobgoblinizers spouting and shouting themselves hoarse that Obama (and Pelosi) are bad for business, profits, and individual investors, and in 2009 the markets have had the indecent gall to go up, daring to contradict them. So if Fox is committed to deprecating a mini-bull market--something strikes me as an unwise business-network strategy (pissing on green arrow signs pointing up in the stock ticker because, like Rush Limbaugh, you're rooting for Obama to fail)--what is the positive case it chooses to make? Gold. It's pimping gold like crazy, and it's probably not a coincidence that the network runs a lot of ads for gold, including that butch one featuring G. Gordon Liddy. On the same show that Cavuto was cautioning us not to be conned by this bull run, there were pull quotes on the screen hailing gold as "the prince of assets" or something. Gold attracts such lordly superlatives, "the barbarous relic," "the Midas metal," etc. And certainly gold has had an appreciable run. But I agree with legendary value investor John Neff (former manager of Vanguard's Windsor Fund) who said, "Gold isn't an investment, it's an enthusiasm." And when I see how many people are being sucked into gold investments from all those cheesy radio and TV ads (with their overt or sometimes explicit survivalist overtones), I see another bubble being blown that at some sad point will go blooey. Mind you, I'm agnostic on the stock market bounceback. Whether it's a true bull or a bull run within a secular bear is for history to determine. So far it's restored my portfolio nicely after the death spiral of 2008, but I'm not whistling down the street and ignoring the warning signs; I read John P. Hussman every week, and I'm resisting pouring new money into stock funds (and not just because I don't have that much to pour as we enter the holiday season). But I also know that if it were a Republican president in the White House and the Dow was hitting such highs the same week of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the hosts and panelists at Fox would be waving little American flags celebrating the market boom as a fitting toast for the triumph of Western capitalism over communism and a rebuke to naysayers and doubters with souls so gray and faith so brittle. In its continuing quest to bring us a narrow slanted sliver of perspective on every complex issue, tonight"s (Tuesday's) edition of America's Nightly Scoreboard, hosted by David "the Assman" Asman, blares: "A case of sticker shock! Can Americans really afford this health care bill? Ann Coulter looks at the dollars and makes sense of it all!" Wow! Can't wait! Unless of course there's a King of Queens rerun on that appears remotely funny. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/normally-when-the-stock-market.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/normally-when-the-stock-market.html Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:40:17 -0500 And so we reach the end of our revels* with the Little Gold Men recap of last night's season finale of Mad Men, which found Don Draper taking arms against a sea of troubles while Pete, pretending to sick, wore a lean and hungry look in his bathrobe, and fruitful tidings were rammed in various ears. Is this a dagger I see before me? No, it's Betty's stirring spoon, which she won't be needing in Reno, the divorce mecca that once played host to Norma Shearer and her noble, chin-raised renunciation in The Women. *Until, you know, next season. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/and-so-we-reach-the.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/and-so-we-reach-the.html Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:00:37 -0500 And so tonight we arrive at Mad Men's season ender,* a bittersweet event that will leave us various degrees of bereft. Whatever shall we do with our wintry Sunday evenings,** wherever shall we go for solace? And Mad Men isn't the only show taking a temporary bow. HBO's Bored to Death will also tucking itself back into bed after its season finale tonight. After initial resistance, I've come around on Bored to Death. As a comic presence Jason Schwartzman I find completely nil, and the "anarchic spark" everybody's always claiming for Zach Galifianakis must be smothered under his chin shrubbery, but the unforced, unpretentious, cheerfully quizzical pace and manner of the show remind me of Paul Mazursky in his prime, with the superb casting of supporting parts that was a Mazursky trademark. Oliver Platt and John Hodgman are terrific as a team of antagonists, those Apple ads, shot at mid-distance, giving no hint of the mad glint Hodgman is capable of flashing as he practices literary oneupsmanship on Schwartzman's Ames. And of course there's the priceless asset of Ted Danson playing a sly, hedonistic midtown magazine editor whose initials just happen to be the same as Graydon Carter's, a coincidence I'm sure. Like many others, my introduction to Danson was as the tap-dancing lawyer in Body Heat; his hair may have gone white since then but he's still slim, game, a model of impulsivity, and a dapper mover. Without him Bored to Death would be an indie movie on the installment plan. To paraphrase Pauline Kael on Barbra Streisand, I'm finding myself falling out of like with Kathy Griffin. Vainglory has infected her standup routine, as reflected in the title of her latest Bravo comedy special, Balls of Steel, where she slovenly slings around four letter words, knowing they'll be bleeped, and takes the acclamation and adoration of her audience for granted, performing her monologues like a slot machine. And what a paltry selection of targets for her red-carpet mockery: reality-TV pseudo celebrities, drug-addled stars fresh out of rehab, Miley Cyrus (why bother), Oprah (again), Barbara Walters (again)...it was like thumbing through a two-month old issue of OK! or the Star, a slumming expedition. And Griffin's gay-friendly proclamations have become pat and patronizing. She goes on about "the gays" and "her gays"--her gays were trying to fix her wig--as if they were the hired help, fussy subordinates in the service of diva-hood. Her shout-outs to "her gays" have become another way of pushing fans' buttons for guaranteed whoops and applause, a lazy ploy. She may have "Balls of Steel" but what she delivered was a mechanical handjob. Wanda Sykes, whose new show made its Fox debut last night, had more laughs than Griffin's special but, as EW's Ken Tucker points out, it was also guilty of pandering--politically preaching to the converted. At times it seemed more like force-feeding and the second half hour went right over the falls with a View-like panel chewing over news and controversies. Such panels have become a staple on everything from The Insider to Chelsea Handler to Joy Behar's new show and this one never got out of the gate. First topic: "Is yelling at your kids the new spanking?" I don't have kids, I never yell at the cats, it's Saturday night, who gives a fuck?--and at that point I turned on Saturday Night Live, hosted by Taylor Swift, whom I adore, as we all do, as loyal Americans. *Which I'll be post-mortem'ing here, later. **Though, for the record, it's pretty damn warm in Manhattan http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/and-so-tonight-we-arrive.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/and-so-tonight-we-arrive.html Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:09:07 -0500 In the run-up to Turner Classic Movies' 100th-birthday salute to Robert Ryan on Wednesday, November 11th, TCM's Movie Morlocks are hosting a Robert Ryan blogathon. So get your rugged asses over there. Whenever I think of Ryan, I first picture his anger, resignation, and lean doggedness in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, wishing he were riding with William Holden's crew than with the mangy lot of scavenging peckerwoods that made up his inept posse. And then I think of him with Ida Lupino in On Dangerous Ground. And with the other shipwrecked souls in The Iceman Cometh... And what a voice he had, the leathery likes of which we'll likely never hear again. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/in-the-run-up-to-turner.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/in-the-run-up-to-turner.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:30:03 -0500 It occurred to me moments after I sent the previous post that the intended echo of "makes the going great" is probably lost on a lot of readers, but it's too late for me to start contracting my frame of reference now, and titles are hard enough to come up with as it is. It is, of course, an allusion to the famous ad campaign "Pan Am Makes the Going Great," a jingle that still lilts for those who cling to the romance of the Golden Age of Commercial Aviation, e.g., this guy. "Pan Am Makes the Going Great" was also the inspiration and title of a George Balanchine ballet, acronymized as PAMTGG and set in an airport terminal. A lost legend in Balinchiniana, it's acquired the reputation of a shiny embarrassment and tacky misfire--a misguided attempt at pop commercialism--but this contemporary review from Time makes it sound rather fun* and Larry Keigwin-ish and a fit candidate for reconsideration, perhaps even revival, for all those Mad Men fans wishing to relive the swinging past. It can't be any worse than the new dullsville ballets I've seen recently from Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon, which were like watching washing being lyrically strung on the clothesline, then taken down, then hung again with courtly aplomb. Rather than entice a new audience to ballet, they may kill off the old one, whose members are having a hard enough time getting up and down the aisle as it is. Upon shallow reflection, that could be me a few years from now wobbily navigating the aisle and accidentally poking people with my cane, so permit me to withdraw the age-ist, mortality-baiting comment above without, you know, actually withdrawing it. *Hey, no "rather" about it: "Between takeoff and landing (complete with last-minute baggage scramble) there is a series of typically flowing Balanchine duets for three couples, vaguely identified as young marrieds, two hippies and a brace of space-age jet-setters. By far the best is an earthy, bluesy number for Frank Ohman and German-born Karin von Aroldingen, a leggy, dramatically athletic beauty who is dressed (if that is the word) in a skimpy blue bikini and a see-through fringed-suede top." Bring--it--on. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/it-occurred-to-me-moments.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/it-occurred-to-me-moments.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:21:33 -0500 Armed with nothing more than a bug-spray can of unscented TRUTH and a deceptive joviality, the cunning mastermind behind Daily Kos leaves an empty chair where Tom Tancredo was sitting, until he fled like a ferret in the night.* And is Tancredo going for that fashionable "Duck look" from Mad Men? I wouldn't put anything past this opportunist. *No offense to ferrets. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/armed-with-nothing-more-than.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/armed-with-nothing-more-than.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:43:26 -0500 Sarah Palin's (or her publisher's) decision to bypass the country's major metropolitan pagan strongholds and blitz the secondary markets to promote her forthcoming memoir It Takes a Pillage is being cited by her admirers as another ingenious stroke of counterintuitive strategery. I heard a radio host on WOR make that very point this morning, before the Yankees victory parade. But as resident historian of this blog, I must issue a cautionary note that such an unorthodox tour tactic has been tried in the past and didn't turn out so pretty. In 1978 a band that had winnowed its way into our hearts known as the Sex Pistols embarked upon their first and only US tour, deliberately skipping the snobby East Coast to make a roadkill swing through the Sun Belt, playing such distinguished venues as Randy's Rodeo in San Antonio, where a culture clash ensued redolent of the last reel of Easy Rider: Clad in black leather, bass player Sid Vicious whipped off his coat to reveal some mysterious words carved into his bare chest, apparently with a knife. Audience members seemed to delight in harassing him the most because Vicious responded to every taunt and catcall. At one point someone hurled a beer can that hit Vicious in the head. The stage spotlights went dark immediately, and when the house lights popped on a few seconds later Vicious was swinging his instrument by the neck like a baseball bat, trying to mow down audience members standing closest to the stage. [Johnny] Rotten also seemed to delight in stoking the crowd. “All you cowboys are faggots,” he said at one point. He was hit square in the face with a food item, possibly a fried pie - but that didn’t stop his endless taunts and goofy facial contortions. No, it would take more than a flying fried pie to dampen Johnny's vaudevillian spirit. And as anyone with any cultural breeding knows, the Pistols broke up only a few days after the last stop of their tour, a dispirited performance in San Francisco which ended with that immortal mutter, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" Sarah Palin will never arouse the deeper harmonies of beauty and truth that the Sex Pistols did while Sid was still semi-erect, but it would be sad if her 2012 presidential test drive were to fall prey to the same curse that blighted those spirited gobbers. Playing it too cute is just another form of hubris, however integral it may be to Palin's "modus operandi." http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/sarah-palins-or-her-publishers.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/sarah-palins-or-her-publishers.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:40:55 -0500 With the impeccable timing that has made him America's favorite band leader, Elvis Mitchell interviews Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner on the portentous eve of the gathering darkness of the post-traumatic season-three finale this Sunday on AMC. It's a fascinating interview, though I was dismayed to learn that Weiner is contemplating beaming Robert Pattinson aboard for season four to play Don Draper's long-lost brooding vampire son in a Beatles haircut and Nehru jacket. This is the sort of "stunt casting" that Mad Men doesn't need, when what it really needs is more Pete, in my Humboldt opinion. Be sure also to listen to Elvis's interview with Chris Rock, because--oh, just go listen. To paraphrase Mykelti Williamson in Heat, I don't need to sell you on this, 'cause it sells itself. In fact, to make your life funnier, quicker, and more reflective of what's whirling around you, simply subscribe to KCRW's "The Treatment" on iTunes or whatever else irrigates your iPod and laptop, along with Marc Maron's WTF and Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time--these three podcasts will help mold you into a Renaissance person, just in case another Renaissance breaks out. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/with-the-impeccable-timing-that.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/with-the-impeccable-timing-that.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:58:46 -0500 http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/madame-x.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/madame-x.html Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:42:20 -0500 ...I am constantly under siege. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/why-i-cant-get-any-work-done.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/why-i-cant-get-any-work-done.html Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:25:17 -0500 I wonder if Fox News may be deciding to dial back its bug-eyed tea-bagginess. Because despite the screen grab shown here at TPM, Fox News has been giving this flocking of the loons at the Capitol rather cursory treatment so far this midday, its sidebar of the breaking stories they're tracking including the climate bill, Bernie Kerik's guilty plea, and a promising new hurricane, but not, not, the valiant effort to find Nancy Pelosi's office and stage a die-in, swooning to the carpet like asphyxiated musketeers. Indeed, as I type, Fox News has cut to a live announcement from the unholy one--Obama, feast of evil--and left the tea baggers' GOP supporters marooned at C-SPAN 3, where a protester is shown toting a homemade sign declaring "Maoism Is Not Reform." Now Jean Schmidt is at the podium, looking like an embittered baked apple. But mostly it's Southern white men in shiny ties lecturing the wind.* I wonder if rightwing bloggers will excoriate Fox News for short-shrifting this revolutionary exercise in live-human puppet theater. Perhaps Fox has been intimidated by the recent blowblack against their relentless teabagger promotion, which put Glenn Beck temporarily out of commish after his appendix staged a suicide bomber attack. All I know is that while Republican congresspeople speak truth to power while trying not to get their hair mussed, the story currently up on Fox News is "5 Senior Citizens Break into Nuke Missile Depot Undetected," which sounds like a possible test run for yet another sequel to Cocoon. *In the spirit of diversity, the Republicans did manage to ascertain the rhetorical services of a blowhard black pastor to deliver the benediction, which brings down righteous thunder on the anti-Judeo-Christian pestilence of Pelosi-wrapped "death care." http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/i-wonder-if-fox-news.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/i-wonder-if-fox-news.html Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:15:33 -0500 Dear Delusional, Nobody nowhere no way no how is going to buy a "book" by defeated tea bagger Doug Hoffman, who will now recede into the woodwork of irrelevancy to spend more time with his hanging ferns. Fox News and its business channel are cluttered with ads from Newsmax offering Sarah Palin's forthcoming Going Rogue for $4.97 ("Save over $24!") as part of a free four-month trial subscription offer to their magazine, which resembles something unsavory you'd extract from a clogged drain. If Sarah Palin's emancipation proclamation is being shoveled out to the rabid faithful as a loss leader, a cheap giveaway, how much additional landfill would be needed to accommodate the return copies of the political testament of an obscure guy whose loss handed the Congressional seat to a Democrat for the first time since dinosaurs walked with Jesus? Regnery can't have that much money to piss into the wind, can it? Getting Doug Hoffman's pencil-necked hopes up will only lead to disappointment later, so let this one go and move on to the next sap, presumably one who actually lives in the district he or she intends to represent just in case there's a pop quiz. Signed, The Voice of Reason http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/dear-delusional-nobody-nowhere-no.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/dear-delusional-nobody-nowhere-no.html Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:33:01 -0500 Watching Dancing with the Stars with the sound off, Laura said: "Everybody looks insane. Maybe the earth should just get hit by a comet and wipe everything out, if this is what it's come to." Destroying civilization struck me as a somewhat inordinate response to the sight of Rod Stewart belting out a big number while dancers went wiggy around him, but I decided not to argue the issue, seeing no upside to the conversation. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/apocalypse-now-cant-come-soon-enough-for-some-people.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/apocalypse-now-cant-come-soon-enough-for-some-people.html Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:59:49 -0500 I'm not going to see Precious, and nobody can make me! http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/now-hear-this.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/now-hear-this.html Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:51:27 -0500 And congratulations too likewise also to the noble equestrians* at London Review of Books, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a special super-crammed issue that isn't so steeped in nostalgia that it coughs up phlegm.** The sheer Englishness of it all makes me want to hop a plane to London, check in at Hazlitt's, and catch Anna Friel in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Here's Jonathan Raban, recalling and celebrating the sui generis critical genius of that weirdie beardie William Empson: In 1971, ten years after first reading Seven Types [of Ambiguity], I met Empson in London. He’d recently retired from his chair at the University of Sheffield and was living with his wife, Hetta, at Studio House, Hampstead Hill Gardens - in a set-up described by Robert Lowell as a ‘household [that] had a weird, sordid nobility that made other Englishmen seem like a veneer’. Empson’s idea of making lunch was to place an assortment of unpunctured cans of Chinese vegetables on the gas cooker, where they tended to explode. Ancient rashers of fried bacon served as bookmarks in his disintegrating copy of Marvell’s Collected Poems. He stirred his tea with the sole remaining earpiece of his glasses. After an alarming lunch, he and I would set off in my car to raid the Wallace Collection, the Sir John Soane Museum, or some unsuspecting country house in Buckinghamshire or Hertfordshire, where he had found out that a family portrait of an ancestor, distantly connected with Marvell, hung on the walls. Doorstepping a secluded mansion, deep in its landscaped park, at the end of a long and gated drive, Empson displayed an imperious persistence, refused to take no for an answer, and forced his way inside past nonplussed butlers and feebly protesting dowagers. I delighted in the disquiet that he gave such people. During the time I knew him, his silver moustache varied in cut from Fu Manchu to Colonel Blimp; he was, always, legendarily scruffy, but his commanding, high-pitched voice announced his lapsed membership of the landowning classes, and the dowager and butler were clearly uncertain as to whether they were confronting Lord Emsworth in his cups, or an unusually determined Kleeneze brush salesman. I wonder whose household was untidier, the Empsons' or John Bayley and Iris Murdoch's, whose grotty kitchen evoked visions of Hieronymous Bosch. I suppose there's no way to adjudicate now that the premises have been cleared, and I apologize for the interruption. Raban: At this time, he was engaged in a campaign to prove that, late in his life, Marvell had married his London landlady, Mary Palmer. This was a question that has interested nobody very much, before or since. But it greatly concerned Empson, who needed to know the full character of the author of ‘The Garden’ and ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’: not knowing would be to leave Marvell’s moral identity in a state of ambiguous incompletion, and Empson meant to get to the bottom of the matter. Delving into the knotted tangle of Marvell’s legal, sexual and financial affairs in the 1670s - and freely speculating and imagining whenever documentary evidence was lacking - Empson was simply continuing his reading of the poems into a larger reading of the man, the times and the language in which Marvell lived and spoke. He was the best close reader of literature alive, but his definition of ‘reading’ was infinitely more generous and catholic than that of the New Critics who were his immediate contemporaries. Empson seems to have remained a loose live wire up to the end. No so W. H. Auden, whom Alan Bennett (writing on the occasion of his new play, The Habit of Art), relates became something of a--well, let him tell it: In The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll, a Christ Church don, wrote: ‘What I tell you three times is true.’ With Auden, also at Christ Church, it was the opposite. What Auden said three times you would begin to doubt and when he’d said it a dozen times nobody cared anyway. Auden somewhere makes the distinction between being boring and being a bore. He was never boring - he was too extraordinary for that - but by the time he came back to live in Oxford he had become a bore. His discourse was persistently pedagogic; he was never not teaching and/or showing off how much he knew, always able to make a long arm and reach for references unavailable to his less well-read hearers. As he got towards the end of his life his conversation and his pedagogy got more and more repetitive, which must have been a particular disappointment to his colleagues at Christ Church where, when he had been briefly resident in the past, he had been an enlivening member of the common room. Now he was just infuriating. And for those who believe that Roman Polanski's artistry ought to provide absolution for past misdeeds, Jenny Diski, in a Diary entitled Rape-Rape that has drawn a few flickers of notice (that's me using understatement), crisply disposes of the leniency argument in a last graf that punctures the hyperbole of Polanski's all-star petitioners. London Review of Books--a stirring, sturdy companion these last thirty years, and may there be many more. *That can't be right. **There's no need to be vile. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/and-congratulations-too-likewise-also.html http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2009/11/and-congratulations-too-likewise-also.html Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:22:05 -0500