John Wayne in The Searchers. John Ford, 1956


Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51, Oil on canvas, 7' 11 3/8" x 17' 9 1/4"

On the one hand the comparison is obvious to the point of banality; on the other it's a secret, hidden in plain sight. The image of John Wayne in the doorway has become iconic but has to be seen as synecdochic. A movie frame is not a movie. It is by definition a mediocre photograph, incomplete. Films are built in overlapping images of action and out of a variety of perspectives and contexts. Time is the primary constitutive element.

Both images above are arguments for something, but Newman's is less argument than statement or aphorism. Not predicated on context itself it nonetheless requires one to be understood. Claiming to stand alone, it doesn't. By comparison, and this is dangerously glib, the Searchers is about the claim itself. Both works may come to the same conclusions but only one is loaded with caveats and doubts. One is made to be iconic, and the other is a description of how that same icon is constructed

"Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment..." but not steadily.
The moral chaos and narrative confusion of Hong Kong cinema. Both memorable and forgettable, shallow and rich. The shot of The Joker leaning out the car window feeling the wind on his face really is a moment of "pure cinema," of silent, filmic, poetry. The naturalism in the hospital scene of The Joker and Harvey Dent, Two Face, is unnerving: the two characters simultaneously grotesque cartoons and fully human, the rage so obviously specific and personal.

Terminator II was a sort of collective artwork. Hollywood qua Hollywood and America, occasionally produce a kind of one-off epic cinema. The Dark Knight is smaller, intimate by comparison, and stranger.



You could call Heath Ledger's performance "Stuart's Revenge," (compare the voices) but Franken's character is a cartoon. Cartoon villains show no fear until their last moments. Mostly they die cowards. Ledger's Joker is terrified throughout, but conquers fear by running towards it without stopping. To call him "evil" is to make him a cartoon when the film does the reverse. The Joker is played as human in the depths of psychosis and only from there as our dream. Seeing the touches of skin where the makeup is smeared off his forehead makes the terror that much greater. And as at least one critic has noted Aaron Eckhart's Two Face, goes even deeper.

Idea? Ideology? Philosophy? Aesthetic? What or how does this song mean? Is it an argument for rational action? For technocracy? Is it an argument against individualism? If so it's a pretty idiosyncratic argument. Is it fascist, or democratic in origin? In principle?

Just in case you thought I was joking,





The expression on the face of the Viking before he starts to sing is hilarious.

This ties into earlier comments, and responses to McCracken, among others,
here, and here.

As I said in the earlier posts: instead of the piggybacking on half or one hour television shows, the product pitch is now piggybacking on 20 second narratives. Advertising now deals in McGuffins. That's new. And the implications are the opposite of what MIT and Grant McCracken would say they are. Instrumentalism is undermined, made obvious and also mocked, even in those forms developed to serve its purpose.
While discussed by its intellectual defenders in terms of objective reason and science, in the eyes of the world Capitalism has simply -finally- replaced the Church: it's omnipresent but subject to mockery.
This is progress. And I'm not joking about that either.

Ultimately, though, the article isn't so much about class as it is about race. It's about white people. Which makes it quite a bit weirder.

Strange response.
It's about class, race, and assholes who render every form of thought into the self-justifying rationalism and glassy-eyed optimism of socializing monads.
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Fast Company
The Convergence Culture Consortium
This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics
Grant McCracken makes DeLong seem like Tiresias

Intellectual complexity is the complexity of relations among various perspectives. Intellectual complexity to those who see marketing as a philosophically rewarding activity is the complexity of myopia and narcissism: the collapsing of the interplay of formal and emotional relations in language and communication into the "reciprocity" of a moving fan.
All curiosity is curiosity regarding "X." How to perform the necessary actions more quickly and cleanly? The definition of thinking only and always inside the box. Manic functionalism and unquestioned values.
We don't look at Giotto because of how well he branded the Catholic Church but because of how well he described it and his world: well enough that we who have little relation to either still imagine we have some understanding of both. We're more interested in Giotto than in the men who told him what to paint.

And in LA, the Madison Avenue intellectuals are laughed at by the men and women who bring their dreams to life. What McCracken and the others listed above don't realize is that it's the theater that will be remembered long after they're forgotten.

Sans Soleil

Frederick Wiseman on on DVD. He's never allowed his films released before.
I just found out, but I guess it happened in December

Rodney Graham. (Canadian, born 1949). Rheinmetall/Victoria 8. 2003. Installation: 35mm film (color, silent), Cinemeccanica Victoria 8 film projector, 10:50 min. Loop.

"This film depicts a 1930s German typewriter made by Rheinmetall that Graham found in a junk shop. 'It was just this incredibly beautifully made, solidly designed typewriter. Not one key had ever been pressed on it,' he has said. His filmed homage is projected with a 1961 Victoria 8 projector issued by the Italian company Cinemeccanica, a mechanical wonder that Graham has described as 'very beautiful, kind of overly powerful.' 'It's these two objects confronting one another," the artist has said of the installation. 'Two obsolete technologies facing off.'"

But they aren't quite confronting one another because one of them isn't even there except as an image, and it's only there as an image because the other is producing it. The one is only and quite literally the projection, the dream companion, of the other. And about a minute into the film, it begins to snow.
It's lovely.

Dennett and Determinism, Bill and Buddha Nature: Killers as Heros (and actors as gods) in the Films of Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino's movies are as politically reactionary as Mel Gibson's, but only one of them gets called for it. Honesty in Kill Bill is the following of one's true self. Clark Kent is the sham persona. Bill reminds Beatrix that she's a killer, and that her daughter is one as well, This is neither moral nor immoral but simple determinism, whether genetic or metaphysical is irrelevant. And Beatrix is both the hero and the victor. The best killer wins.
Both Gibson and Tarantino are good filmakers, and I don't really give a shit about the politics of the films as such one way or another. Both men are merely being true to their nature, as filmmakers. Dennett's philosophy is similarly politically reactionary. That's not judgement but simple observation, and by his logic and Tarantino's, everything is reactionary. Compatabilism is a band-aid on a gangrenous limb. The hypocrisy is what's pathetic, not the determinism. I prefer Tarantino's honesty.

It reminds me of judicial conservatives' relation to language and interpretation. You're either a literalist or you aren't. You can't interpret "as" a literalist. It's absurd.

A few points. Apropos the post from Nov. 30, I found only one hit for "Analogical Rationalism" on Google: "Concrete Constructs: The Limits of Rationalism in Swiss Architecture"

Zizek described the last section of a holocaust novel: Jews are being loaded on a train, packed in like cattle. The train goes east for 3 days in freezing temperatures; by the time it reaches its destination only a small group of children are left alive, kept warm by the bodies of the adults who had moved them to the center of the car. When the children are discovered the SS set the dogs on them. Two escape and run off in the snow. Of the two of them the younger one stumbles and the elder reaches back to help. He pulls him up as the dogs find them and attack.

How do justice to the fact of the crime and the inability to do anything but read or watch, how do justice to memory and at the same time to the moral imperative of hope? Zizek says the novel succeeds, but wonders how one could make the film. The easy solution to the ending is to freeze on the image of the clasped hands, but that makes hope too easy, protecting us from the real end. One answer would to freeze the frame but not the sound.
"So idealism in the context of narrative."
"Yes!"

It's not that this scene would work, that would depend on a whole line of specifics in the making of the film (he also brought up the last scene of Thelma and Louise). But how to model the questions, around the making of a film or a work of art or any act of communication. And these are the questions that need to be modeled. Hope, idealism, in the context of narrative. Narrative as actions and descriptions in time, as statements made to be recontextualized in time and history. All propositions in narrative form, even statements of ideology, are provisional.

On a similar note read comment 12 here.

Went dancing with Slavoj The Bear yesterday. JT has been telling me for while that I should meet him, He Invited me to dinner which he usually doesn't do since I'm too much of a wild card, but this wasn't business and he wanted to see what would happen.
The reviews were good.
Zizek said what we're seeing intellectually and what we should be fighting for is a redefinition of public and private with a new focus on the public not as state authority but as public space, as commons. I said the commons includes language.
He defended the value of "appearance." I asked him if he would accept "sense." He referred to Kant's definition of public and private reason, seeing the state and law not as public but private. But by that logic, academic philosophy is private reason and literature is public. I should have asked him that one.

I got him to back up a bit on Chavez. He said he was just trying to piss off Simon Critchley. He criticised Judith Butler along the same lines, and I mentioned Martha Nussbaum, though neither of us remembered her name off the bat.
There's more. He did one thing that really surprised me, in a discussion of the Holocaust and art and one well known novel, I can't remember the name or author, describing how he would construct the last moments of a film based on it. He's got a real awareness of the reciprical relation of poet and critic, and a real literary, moral imagination.
more later.

This begins here.

The new modernism is the historicism of the modern, the re-description of modernity not as an ideal but merely as the sensibility of the present. Dan Graham was the first to do this in architecture as an artist fascinated by (or obsessed with) our emotional responses to the experience of living within systems of ordered design. His twin interests were architecture and film so you see the connection. But what began as the replication of modern form as dystopian anti-ideal is being stretched into something other.
How do you finally kill off the memory of an overpowering father figure? If you're weak you copy him, if you're a little stronger you mock him, but to escape you write his biography. Transforming idealism into narrative, narrative wins and so do you.
It's easy to recognize if you pay attention to history, or if you never had any to begin with. In NY as in academia history is passe; LA has the advantage since they don't even know what it is.

Gehry's from the west coast, and Graham's worked mostly in Europe (where whether they like it or not they remember).
It makes sense that the design firm mentioned in the article has offices in Berlin, Beijing and L.A.

I'm going back to Beijing in the spring.

Saving the last rewrite to my files, I'd forgotten that the original had been rewritten once before, when the editor before rejecting it for any other reason -it was written for an architectural journal- simply said it was too long.


The modern crisis in communication, the struggle between the rhetorics of scientific reason and of poetry, is not a new topic at this point. Science has solved problems and answered questions that we were never able to answer by sense alone. We no longer trust our perceptions to carry meanings about the world, but only about ourselves and our internal lives. It’s enough for many to say that the pleasures of perception are little more than minor habits, indulgences to be categorized by style or taste.

Dalibor Vesely makes the humanist’s argument against the dominance of instrumental reason -the logic of means and ends- in architecture and by extension in anything. He argues that we do not live or learn by impartial reason but through experience; that we rely on perception, and that our sensory awareness of objects and movement binds us to one another and grounds us in the world in ways we lose when we think only in terms of numbers, mechanism, and individual consciousness.

With the argument itself as introduction, Vesely moves on to a discussion of the Renaissance, describing how the technical advances of the quattrocento, the various techniques of perspective that stand as markers of the beginning of the Modern era, were created not as illustrations of scientific principles, and not in isolation from the surrounding culture, but as extensions of the metaphorical and allegorical logic of medieval optics. This moment he describes as the beginning of our divided representation, of the struggle between the worlds of sense and science, first seen in the desire both to describe new things in old language, and to do so in ways appropriate to the new world they make manifest.

The Baroque era in the arts, unlike the sciences, is not so much one of discovery but mastery, where the skills of the Renaissance became commonplace and scientific processes were in full conflict with past descriptions of the world. The result is a poetry not of things but of ideas about them, and Vesely analyzes the sense of space in Baroque architecture, describing the differing notions of infinity in mathematics and in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud (Sacra Sindone) of Guarino Guarini.

From Here the author continues to the age of reason and of industry, the 18th and 19th centuries, and then to modernism itself, where science became the arbiter of truth and ideology it’s political equivalent, with the only alternative to either being little more than a good sense of taste and a better one for self-preservation. The book ends with a plea for an art and architecture of open-ended experience: of communication, neither programmatic nor expressive and eccentric, and not grand but of a human scale.

The book makes a lovely argument, but there are problems in the way the author lays it out. To say that science was once inseparable from art is not a defense of art. That may sound good to the converted, but to skeptics more interested in logic than poetry it means little.

"Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth.”
Timothy Williamson, “Past the Linguistic Turn,” in The Future of Philosophy, ed. Brian Leiter (Oxford, 2004).

As this quote illustrates, those who do not take the arts seriously, who see them as little more than entertainment, will be dismissive of attempts to justify their efficacy as a counterforce to science and the logic of technics. For all his knowledge of history, and his references to phenomenology and scientific studies of perception- of the disorienting effects of zero gravity environments and isolation tanks, of the ways in which sense defines intellect, the author returns always in his argument to the terminology of depth, of innate value, that Williamson among many others mocks so offhandedly.

There are other problems as well. Few people in the arts would not envy the ability of architects and artists in the past to create works where ornament and detail were more than the signposts of luxury, where objects acted as metaphors in the context of a narrative that an audience would immediately understand. There’s an advantage to being an artist in the employ of a universal church. It’s not only that science bled meaning from the world, it’s that the tools of communication changed. The end of the period of great buildings coincided with the era of great literature, and perhaps theater and novels are the cathedrals of democracy. Vesely also leads us through a wonderful discussion of the social and communicative space of Renaissance and Baroque architecture. But doesn’t the cinema at it’s best provide for us a similar experience? The objects and spaces in film and photography are imbued with the same meanings and metaphors once available to architects. Perhaps architecture requires too much stability to play that major a role in such an unstable world?

These criticisms are not minor, but they are not made in opposition to the arguments described above. Vesely reminds us that architecture is a mimetic art. Buildings are the places where we’re born, and are where we spend almost all our lives. They are as much our environment as any landscape. With this in mind, Vesely asks important questions: What form of knowledge can respond to science and its bastard children? What form of awareness does a bricklayer have, or a violinist, a knowledge that can be attained only by practice? And what does it mean that the product of this knowledge can be seen not as illustrative of but a manifestation of an idea? And how much of current building is made as a statement of ideology or opinion, as proposition, without accommodating within itself the possibility of a response?

If architecture is a stage on which many people move and act, why should it be thought of or designed to represent the ideas of an individual alone? Vesely’s defense of a sympathetic intelligence may seem quaint, or he may fall back on a language that is easy to criticize, but to ignore his argument is to accept the possibility of a courthouse designed for the prosecution, or the defense, and not the administration of justice, or a theater designed for the character of Hamlet and not the play. Vesely is not a poststructuralist arguing against the science of medicine, he’s arguing against the absurdity of the false science of architecture.

"American cinema is in the grip of a kind of moribund academicism, which helps explain why a fastidiously polished film like “No Country for Old Men” can receive such gushing praise from critics. “Southland Tales” isn’t as smooth and tightly tuned as “No Country,” a film I admire with few reservations. Even so, I would rather watch a young filmmaker like Mr. Kelly reach beyond the obvious, push past his and the audience’s comfort zones, than follow the example of the Coens and elegantly art-direct yet one more murder for your viewing pleasure and mine. Certainly “Southland Tales” has more ideas, visual and intellectual, in a single scene than most American independent films have in their entirety, though that perhaps goes without saying.

Neither disaster nor masterpiece, “Southland Tales” again confirms that Mr. Kelly, who made a startling feature debut with “Donnie Darko,” is one of the bright lights of his filmmaking generation. He doesn’t make it easy to love his new film, which turns and twists and at times threatens to disappear down the rabbit hole of his obsessions. Happily, it never does, which allows you to share in his unabashed joy in filmmaking as well as in his fury about the times. Only an American who loves his country as much as Mr. Kelly does could blow it to smithereens and then piece it together with help from the Rock, Buffy, Mr. Timberlake and a clutch of professional wisenheimers. He does want to give peace a chance, seriously."

"In 1974 we German filmmakers were still fragile, and when a friend told me Lotte had suffered a massive stroke and I should get on the next plane to Paris, I made the decision not to fly. It was not the right thing to do, and because I just could not accept that she might die, I walked from Munich to her apartment in Paris. I put on a shirt, grabbed a bundle of clothes, a map and a compass, and set off in a straight line, sleeping under bridges, in farms and abandoned houses. I made only one detour to the town of Troyes because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there. I walked against her death, knowing that if I walked on foot she would be alive when I got there. And that is just what happened. Lotte lived until the age of ninety or thereabouts, and years after the walk, when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films, she said to me, ‘Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now.’ Jokingly I said, ‘OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away.’ Three weeks later she died."
Werner Herzog

1988-92 reworked a little.

Like it or not, we are shaped by the present. Liberals may approve and conservatives may have regrets - and liberal and conservative are not the same as ‘left’ and ‘right’- but radicals and reactionaries pretend otherwise. That is their mistake.


We take it for granted that the intellectual and esthetic preoccupations of high modern culture stood opposed to narrative, whether as form, as rhetoric or heuristic. History is storytelling, and the 20th century was the century that tried to forget. But analysis in language is storytelling in the form of a graph, an ideal logic built on a presumption, implying truth by way of a hidden analogy. Society is the result of processes bearing little relation to the dialectics within the individual imagination, yet the cults of individuals and of individualism, less opposed to each other than we like to admit, remain the twinned tenets of modern culture, and of all intellectual and high-cultural life well into our supposedly post-modern present.

My interest in this essay is to describe roughly the parameters of modernism and its relation to the world, not only as partisans described them at the time but as they appear to us in retrospect. The transformations of modernity affected all aspects of cultural life. The template was the same regardless of how the participants saw themselves, though some chose to advocate for progress and others for conservation or reaction. The story of the 20th century is the story of how those groups or desires, often overlapping in the actors themselves, grew together and apart and together again, in ways few or any were able to foretell, least of all those who tried.


High modernism’s preoccupations were twofold and contradictory: on the one hand in absolute identity in self as opposed to society and on the other in abstract principles as opposed to the individual elements actions or people to which they were applied. Formalism, or structuralism (in its most general sense) describes an interest in the infrastructure of ideas and processes and was meant to oppose any implicit and therefore metaphysical predisposition toward one or another technique or methodology. The goal was not so much to choose but to study the process of decision-making, since preference for A or B could be merely that., and not true. This was the allegory of objectivity that gave modernist rhetoric its power, and the paradigmatic form became that of analysis, in all of the ways with which we are now familiar.

Those at the beginning of the last century who were not comfortable with what was becoming an activist modernism were in a bind. Many were more comfortable with a known past than an unstable present and remained attached to what they considered the higher ground of the 19th century bourgeois. But this chimera could not do well against the concrete reality of scientific and mechanical progress and the power that electric lights, and motors, and soon automobiles and airplanes could carry as popular and later universal metaphors. But the recent past was still in living memory; and how else do we describe Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce or Marcel Proust, but as moderns –not modernists- remembering that past in the language of the present.

If some succeeded in documenting this anxious in-between, others chose to identify with the lesser siblings of 19th century high culture, the demimonde following the Marquis de Sade. Their tastes therefore ran from the overtly to the overwhelmingly sensual: towards the easy out of a physical and metaphysical immediacy; and they did this with more desperation than irony. The anti-materialist Marquis rebelled against an enlightenment that he could not take part in and a past that that he could not escape. What he wanted was release, from the social obligations of mediated communication, from the banality of chitchat, and he could he no more accept the pretensions of a Christian faith than of secular optimism, no more than Alfred Jarry, 130 years later, would accept or escape the pontifications of Ubu. The self-destructive acknowledgement of impotence in the face of mediocrity marked de Sade as it marked his descendants, from Sacher-Masoch to Jarry, to Dada, Surrealism, and on. These esthetic radicals therefore share the fringes of modernism with conservative or reactionary fantasists: Jung, Gurdjieff, and a jaded aristocracy best defined as the defenders of an 18th century metaphysical tradition in the age of bourgeois democracy.

SUCCESS

The issue in terms of art is one of successful mediation. Picasso, regardless of his status is not known as an observer. With the exceptions of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or Guernica, we do not look at his paintings to read them as we read Breugel, Rembrandt, Goya, or Corbet, but to understand and experience the architectonic process and philosophy that produced them. William Rubin’s attempt to argue otherwise, to see Picasso as a painter of others in the exhibition Picasso and Portraiture, at MoMA , was laughed at.
Picasso mastered his craft as all artists do by a process of exclusion, removing what he could not accept or use and when we look to his work for enjoyment we follow his lead. The people depicted in his paintings are as abstract as the their surroundings. The Three Musicians are as formalized as the music they play, and the imagery itself is if anything anti-modern, as with some early exceptions it always had been. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is therefore the exception making the rule. It’s as adventurously modern as The Waste Land and the terror of women and sex is as present and palpable in its own way as it is in Prufrock. Although the women in the painting have been deformed or re-formed as became Picasso’s trademark they have a depth and independent character that he rarely allowed. We see something of what might have been Gertrude Stein herself in his famous portrait, much more than we see of Dora Marr 25 years later; but les demoiselles, the whores of Avignon, exist in our imaginations with more force than any other figures male or female in Picasso’s career. And he was always a figurative painter. In this work Picasso crossed over as Eliot did from pre-modernist allegory, the mimetic and the personal, to the impersonal and Modernist, to formalism, and back. [Matisse, The Piano Lesson] He never did that this well again.

FAILURE

The Dadaists and later Surrealists were never able to come to terms with the contradictory nature of their various affiliations. Although they disliked formalism they had contempt for the 19th century as well and became defined by indecision as Picasso was not. They were unable to master or avoid the past as artists like Roerich were unable to leave behind a history they could only imagine in the most vacantly romantic way. They were unable to accept that their childhood was over. But who would want to be an adult in this modern world? Eliot would agree with them in that. It certainly wasn't any better. But Dada’s anti-Modernist theatricality and Surrealist pictorialism were venues for little more than depictions of shocking or perverse expression: Sadean rebellion. The artists had little interest in studying method –formalism was little else- and when they did, as in Dali or later Max Ernst it was facile. While indulging in theatrical rhetoric Dada and Surrealism denied its structure and forfeited any understanding that they might gain from it. Dada considered almost any articulated form bourgeois, while a truly theatrical/narrative esthetic would have saved them from their simpleminded denial of and fixation upon the past. Their card carrying Modernist position comes mostly as a result of their ebullient ''epité le bourgeois!" which they came to share via Surrealism with Vogue and Harpers Bazaar. [Surrealist film is central to my later and larger argument. I’ll get there]

The German Expressionists were in a similar contradictory relation to the past and present. But they were preoccupied not with the shadows of an emasculated theater so much as a fear of what came next, of what they thought art could no longer mediate. German Expressionism is the most claustrophobic formalism, if not the most claustrophobic art on record, fearful of the intellectual and emotional isolation underlying the world that made it. The art seems caught in the rise of an atheatrical or asocial world that it represents only grudgingly, though the artists knew it was inevitable. Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter responded first with folkish simplicity and primitivism, but by Berlin in the post-war years, the years of Grosz and Dix, the sense of urbane isolation is almost complete. This struggle helps to explain the confusion in Max Beckman's most ambitious paintings, a confusion of vague narratives and over-determined architecture. Picasso after all succeeded in resolving this only once, but it was in an act of desperation, and the rest of the time he was still a better architect. Beckman’s strengths were in his smaller paintings and portraits. He had an educated classical eye that Picasso lacked but triumphed over almost be force of will. When Beckman wasn’t trying too hard to care or not care or to impress, was more of a humanist than most.

Just for the hell of it. That's just the beginning of the thing. It didn't get much of a response 20 years ago, I found out recently that my one published essay has been footnoted in another book. The count (as far as I know) stands at 3: Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s by Irving Sandler, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics from Cambridge, and now Film Parody put out by the British Film Institute. There are also a couple of graduate and undergraduate theses that i've run across.
I'm not yet a one hit wonder, but my father is. His essay on Hammett is considered a standard in the field; "seminal" I read somewhere.

"This is a site where I regularly find qualified defenses of Ayn Rand’s literary abilities, so lets just end the discussion of sci fi as such there.

But still, maybe you should read Baudelaire on “philosophic” art; maybe you should read Anthony Grafton on what it was the renaissance left behind; maybe you should wonder at the persistent taste for systematic oversimplification in times of crisis: at the diminution of methodology over time into decadent formalism, internally consistent but describing nothing outside its own consistency; pure brittle logic ill fitted to a vulgar world.

Political Science is to Political life what “Law and Economics” is to economic life, what Literary Theory is to literature, and what Analytic Philosophy is thought. Should I add: what sociology is to careful observation? What documentary is to film? What the myth of objectivity is to newspaper reporting?
What’s missing from all these things?

Knowledge is not wisdom, erudition is not judgment, and self-awareness is necessary for emotional and intellectual maturity. Can someone tell me how Tyler Cowen could be so stupid? So arrogant and unaware? So Rumsfeldian?

I’ve run into shitloads of such stupidity over the years. I had a little fun here at the expense of Donald Davidson, and Richard Dawkins and the “Dims.” At DeLong and Leiter and Posner. Do you think Rumsfeld or Cheney would be any less oblivious to their failure if they proclaimed atheism? I’m not going to go into the brittleness of Weimar.
Troll, at this point, maybe.
Stupid, no.

My stockbroker/doctor wants to start giving me blood pressure medicine. I have to give up on this shit."

Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland
Hitler, a Film from Germany

not very interesting article by a woman who became an un-ironic defender of Syberberg. Sontag was intent on separating the Fascist Kitsch of Weimer Germany from today's variety; but that's not really possible.

Law/Justice/Wisdom
Judgment, discernment, discrimination. sophistication The ability to perceive and to communicate nuance, to describe what has not been named -categorized- previously. It is not creation but observation and description.

This is the root of what Kant might call genius. Genius is wisdom. It is non-cumulative. As a capacity/ability it can be learned but not taught. The record of past acts of wisdom is only that.
Technocrats are experts: craftsmen within the limits of their own knowledge. An honest technocrat is self-deprecating (Politics requires a vulgar definition of the world.) Fascism is politics without irony.
---

Interesting reading the Times. Television critics are sharper more quick witted than most of the book or film critics. They don't take their jobs as seriously. The old line was that the best newspaper writing was in the Sports pages. Sports are trivial. Olberman started at ESPN. Jon Stewart was a stand up comic. Frank Rich is a theater critic. Observation begins with an ironic awareness of the self. Stand-up is ethnography, not Sociology. David Graeber on the beginnings of Sociology as the study of modern man by himself. Self-ethnography makes people nervous. Nervousness/comedy. Edmund Leach is a model of ironic awareness compared to this generation of academic dimwits. Marshall and Bernie Sahlins.
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Idiot Henry Farrell on determinism in Marx. If Ayn Rand rewrote Anna Karenina replicating the novel in her own words it would have the same meaning as Tolstoy. The 20th century was the first century where ideas preceded craft. The culmination of moderism in ideology. In language it's always a mistake to follow. "In the manner of..." Science is predicated on it. Marx was a writer.
Beethoven the first composer to fail by overreaching, but there's less arrogance in Wagner's bombast than in Wen Ho Lee's shy clockmaker smile. The face of a bombmaker.
Intellectual over-determination and moral under-determination (moral passivity.)
---

Zhang Yimou's Hero. Remember A Touch of Zen. An epic that felt independent of Hollywood. Wirework has a theatrical beauty that Hollywood would never have developed on its own. It's too mannered, too recognizably fake. But it's popular epic cinema: an American invention transformed. Eisenstein.

You can call culture a market of ideas, except that the market as such is only one example of the capacity for invention.
Remember the Irish-Bulgarian bartender on whether or not Manhattanites will take over the neighborhood. "I hope not. I like the diversity." Interestingly with the changes in the country over the last generation the standard issue Americans aren't as offensive as the ones who take themselves seriously.

Again[?]
Sincerity reverses ends and means.
Saying "I love you" will not get you laid. Saying it well, might. A gesture is only distinctive if it is seen that way by others. The sincerity of the American singer-songwriter or indie filmmaker is based on a misunderstanding, and the "insincerity" of Hollywood is a misnomer. Moral seriousness and high purpose are best left for others to discover.
Kelly was more serious than Astaire, Ozu more serious that Mizoguchi.

"Fall is traditionally when Hollywood turns to more serious films, and the Toronto International Film Festival is where they are frequently shown. But a new movie that seems certain to raise hackles and induce squirming is a raucous comedy that makes its points by seeming to embrace sexism, racism, homophobia and that most risky of social toxins: anti-Semitism."

What Sascha Baron Cohen does is minstrelsy. I'm waiting to see his version of a settler on the West Bank.
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Khatami at U.Va:

"If you ask me should the Americans leave tomorrow, I'd say 'No, don't do it'."