new film review: the reader

I'm not normally compelled to claim a privileged position in regards to a film, namely, of having a reasonable and, dare I say, correct interpretation of a film. But in this case, many of the film critics reviewing The Reader, favourable and unfavourable, seem to have missed the bull's eye. Some critics, like the New York Post's Kyle Smith, were overly distracted by tits and ass like a frat boy at a strip joint and didn't even bother to peek beneath the film's outermost layers. Other's were mercifully less superficial and puerile, but still succeeded in playing a sleight-of-mind trick on themselves.

In New York Magazine, for example, David Edelstein writes:

In the movie’s second half, Michael tries to understand how not-bad people can do very bad things and whether learning to read can make a difference. It appears that the filmmakers have taken Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” way too literally.

Give Edelstein credit for mentioning Hannah Arendt, but cancel it out for being too cavalier with his "whether learning to read can make a difference" comment. The issue is not whether the Holocaust was evil or not - it was. The issue is also not about reading ability. It's not about sex either, except in so far as it manifests character psychologies. To give Arendt her due as the philosophical progenitor of the moral dilemmas at the story's heart, the issue is about how evil occurs in the world and how we come to grips with it. It's not about the Nazis, but about the German society they existed in and the tragic legacy they left behind for later generations to struggle with. Roger Ebert gets it.

It's too early for me to declare my preference for best movie of the year - a game I don't particularly like to play. But at the very least, The Reader does deserve its surprise Best Picture nomination.

My review at The Front Page Online:

The Reader: Reading History Through a Provocative Lens

CEOs suck

A few months ago, my wife and I received a notice from our car insurance company about a name change. Gone was 21st Century Insurance; the company’s new (well, adopted) nom de guerre was AIG. I admit, I hadn’t really heard of AIG before, but soon discovered two things. 1) AIG is gargantuan; and 2) AIG was one of those companies in need of a bailout. And, oh yes, this little item in the news about AIG executives’ fun-filled, $440,000 trip to a California resort one week after AIG received $85 billion in bailout money.

Just the other day, we received another notice that, henceforth, our AIG car insurance company will no longer be called AIG, but will be called, instead, by a trusted, proven name brand. And that name is…wait for it…21st Century Insurance.

Ah, a corpse by any other name – would stink just as bad.

Do you get the impression that CEOs have an overinflated sense of entitlement? And do you get the feeling they think we’re unpleasant and odourous stains on the bottom of their shoes? Here’s some perspective:

The chief executive officers of large U.S. companies averaged $10.8 million in total compensation in 2006, more than 364 times the pay of the average U.S. worker, according to the latest survey by the United for a Fair Economy.

364 times the pay of the average US worker.

It’s not entirely surprising, though, that CEO salaries have reach aristocratic proportions. After all, CEOs and upper management are very much the modern, corporate incarnation of the aristocrats of yore, and this is a direct consequence of how we conceive the organization of labour in a company. The dominant metaphor is the ladder, more precisely the pyramid. Workers at the bottom, some management in the middle, and senior executives headed by a grand poobah at the top. Implied is a hierarchy not only of job function – upper levels oversee lower levers – but of status. The further up you are, the greater the exclusivity of your position, the better the status. Naturally, with this comes the view of the company as some sort of fiefdom, with the poobah feeling entitled to all the riches and luxuries. Unfortunately, this entitlement has led to the view that CEOs can reap the rewards for sailing the company ship to golden lands without being left to drown if they sink the boat. That life preserver? Yup; it’s made of money. And this is class warfare, pitting the employers versus the employees.

Yet this is the wrong way to look at it, because when it comes down to it, a company would fail without its workers. A CEO can’t be CEO of nothing. Similarly, workers can’t necessarily work towards a common goal without the assistance of someone to coordinate all the tasks and activities necessary to achieve that goal. In other words, the hierarchy is not really a pyramid or a ladder, but a concentric circle (or web of networked nodes) on the same level.

I suppose it’s a capitalistic attitude that views business through a competitive paradigm – hence clawing and scratching your way to the top – rather than a cooperative paradigm in which workers are valued on equal terms with the CEO, as partners working jointly towards the company’s success. Until we reform our corporate culture – a Sisyphean task, perhaps, dependent on reforming our views of capitalism itself – we shouldn’t be surprised that CEOs misbehave to further their own self-interest that, in all fairness, should be called what it is: greed.

new film review: IRANgeles

It's ever so fun to discover a gem, even if it still a bit rough. Hence, this week's review of an Echelon Studios release, IRANgeles:

Iran Meets LA: Sweet, but No Shakespeare

And, of course, also available at www.inkandashes.net.

writing exercise on the topic of old acquaintances

And so you’re sitting at the your computer, browser set to whatever homepage you’ve set for yourself – yahoo, perhaps, if you need your daily fix of information, or google if you’re the kind to want the search and nothing but the search. As a lark, you type in your name, just to see what happens, and you marvel at the search results. Your blog. Your website. That letter you wrote to the editor a big-city newspaper. The Internet knows you exist; you have been validated. Validated! Buoyed, you type in other names. People you went to school with. Some you don’t find, and you wonder how it’s possible, in this cybernetic age, for someone to escape the Internet’s notice. But others you do find. Their blog. Their website. A book review at Amazon.

For a moment, you consider finding their eMail address and sending them a friendly “hey, long time, what’s up?” Then, with visions of happy reunions and friendships rekindled, you look up old friends and other people you may have met along to way. Yes, surely you should reach out, build bridges, close the circuit and generate a current.

Then you remember all those search results for your own name. You are easy to find. So easy! Has anyone ever typed your name in the search? Have any of these classmates, these old friends, wondered about you, what you’re up to, how you’re doing? You ask: where is everybody? Then it occurs to you that they obviously haven’t given you any thought, because here you are, sitting in front of that shiny new flatscreen monitor and new gazillion gigahertz toy, with not a word, not an eMail, not an IM. Nothing. Maybe you just weren’t memorable. Maybe you just weren’t anyone special.

Or, maybe, once the irritating self-pity has passed, it’s just the nature of things. You have your own life; they have theirs. Chapters end and chapters begin. You wonder again where everybody is, where they have gone to, but of course you know the answer. All those old friends, those classmates, those missed opportunities, those fulfilled opportunities, all of them; they have gone to the one place, other than that undiscovered country, from which no one returns.

They have gone into the past.

Like Opus, sound and snug in the last page of Goodnight, Moon, all you can do is lay to comfortable rest, in memory, those fondly-remembered companions, and leave the remainder to time.

new column: secret tribunals and how the vatican deals with GASS

This week's column at The Front Page Online features some more fun from those wacky folks at the Vatican:

Secret Tribunals and How the Vatican Deals with GASS

I can sympathize with that whole spitting and chewing the Jesus wafer thing. But maybe there’s a glitch in the transubstantiation process, in which the wafer is held to literally become the body of Christ. Setting aside the icky, ghoulish cannibalism eating the Eucharist represents, maybe they just need to offer flavoured wafers. As I recall from my days as an altar boy, the wafer tasted kind of…dusty. Which can make some kind of symbolic sense considering that Jesus is two-thousand years old. But how about some flavouring? Beef jerky wafers – bubblegum for the kids – might offer a tasty incentive to swallow the Messiah.

new film review: the curious case of benjamin button

I enjoyed the story, and looked forward to seeing how they translated it into a film - despite my skepticism regarding the romance. I'm surprised that I didn't enjoy the film as much as I thought I would. In fact, as much as I can respect this or that aspect of the movie, I can't say I quite liked it.

Read The Bloated Case of Benjamin Button at the Front Page Online, also at inkandashes.net.

it's not a miracle

New York Governor David Paterson apparently referred to the perfectly performed emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 as “a miracle on the Hudson.”

It’s not a miracle.

Miracles, by definition, are impossible, violations of the laws of nature usually held to be achievable only through divine/supernatural intervention. So it did take some imaginary entity to pull off the feat of landing a plane safely and without any casualties? Nope; this is strictly human stuff. And that’s the whole thing; if it can be explained naturally, if it isn’t even remotely beyond the bounds of human achievement, it’s not a miracle no matter how unlikely.

Of course, there’s a bit of a problem, namely, that we don’t know the universe close to well enough to know what is truly possible and impossible. We’ve only scratched the surface. And without knowing that, how we can possibly judge whether something is a miracle or not? Oh, I know, this is just rhetoric on Governor Paterson’s part, something to say because it seems so awesome that the plane landed on the Hudson river and no one was killed or seriously injured. But at the risk of being cranky: safe landings are what pilots are trained and paid to do. Remarkable piloting? Sure. But are we so accustomed to incompetence and people screwing up that when it gets done right we invoke divine intervention, even if only rhetorically? Okay, after 8 years of the Bush Administration, I can understand that competence has become a novelty. But still. Let’s all breathe a sign of relief that everyone is safe, step away from the crazy miracle talk, and move on.

new film review: milk

With so many movies released throughout the holiday season - there's the problem right there - I'm not quite on the curve of new releases. But that's par for the course, and will correct itself in the next few weeks. In the meantime, this week's review is of "Milk," a film that's been buzzing around lately with good reason.

Sean Penn is the first to be showered with accolades for his work in “Milk”, and understandably so. He dissolves effortlessly into his role as Harvey Milk, the real-life gay rights activist and San Francisco City Supervisor who was tragically assassinated in 1978, without a residual “Penn-ness” to give away the role as a performance. But it would be unfair to single Penn out when there so many other cast members who deliver similarly un-self-conscious performances of equal strength and emotional power.

Read the rest of ‘Milk’ Succeeds as a History Lesson, Character Portrait and Call to Arms.

new column: baseline vegans in napa

Happy New Year, folks. May 2009 be a good one.

I get back in the saddle with a report on what I did during the holiday vacation: wine sampling in Napa valley. Or, to be accurate, trying to find something to eat that didn't involve meat.

It’s easy to be vegan at home, when you have total control over ingredients, recipes, and cooking methods. Hard, as my wife and I expected on our recent trip to Napa, is venturing out into the world where eating is left to restaurants who are very much geared towards the fat-laden, meat-heavy, dairy-heavy, “Western” diet. Fortunately, we are what I’ve come to term “baseline” vegans, or bVegans, which means that while we use the vegan diet (no animal products) as a daily standard for what we eat, we have the ideological flexibility that allows for pragmatism – ethical, nutritional, and so on. Typically, this means that we normally eat vegan, but we’ll go to vegetarian, or sometimes further (only to fish, however, and only rarely), depending on the occasion.

Read the rest of Baseline Vegans in Napa: A Culinary Adventure Outside the Home Kitchen

Future blog posts will deal with more results from that goth and politics survey I did for Morbid Outlook (promise!) and the usual potpourri of this and that taken from the headlines and whatever whims I happen to be afflicted by.

cantilevered footwear

Little known fact: fashion fascinates me. I can even fake my way through a conversation on shoes and get away with it. In fact, I'm thinking of starting a separate blog to ramble, rant, and muse about fashion in general and men's fashion in particular. I still have to refine the idea to make the blog distinctive from all of those other blogs. And I have to figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't conflict with my zillions of other writing projects. It would also be nice to use the blog to make some money somehow. Maybe I'm trying to do too much, though, with a resulting dilution of the "Frédérik" brand (whatever that is.) What do you think? Let me know in the comments below. In the meantime, here are some thoughts on intriguing, but odd, footwear, modified from comments I made at the Facebook group "Wicked Shoes."

**** I thought I’d seen something like shoes in the image above before, and sure enough, I did: Victoria Bechkam and her PVC heelless boots. A bit of digging revealed that Antonio Berardi designed these engineering oddities. A bit more digging loosely confirmed my suspicion: the soles at the ball of the foot are most likely weighted. I suppose this is the footwear equivalent of a cantilever, although I can’t imagine that it would be possible for a woman to fully relax her weight onto the heel without tipping over – that is, weight has to really be focused on the ball instead of distributed, however unevenly, throughout the foot. And it undoubtedly requires more muscle power for the foot to pull the weight upwards using the upper than it does with heeled shoes.

Biomechanics aside, though, I think Berardi has essentially taken the stiletto’s fetishied precariousness one step further by creating the illusion of complete instability. The shoe doesn’t merely look unstable; it looks impossible. Does it work? As an abstract, high-fashion concept it’s bold and innovative, making it an ideal runway object. But it seems too far removed from the practical to be anything other than a curiosity. Unlike Aminaka and Wilmont’s equally bold soleless heel, this doesn’t respect the form of the foot. By working against it, it creates an unsettling aesthetic that intrigues but doesn’t persuade – at least, I’m too busy worrying about the shoe’s engineering to really get into appreciating the shoe as a shoe a woman is wearing.

But here’s a fun variation; pony boots, also available in a thigh-high version.

The whimsy is enough to overcome the initial shock that comes from the absence of a heel - note the horseshoes! But the construction seems far less cantilevered and precarious, even though the foot is elevated at an extreme angle, giving the shoe an engineering elegance Berardi’s shoes lack. It might appropriate to bring in the word “gait,” since these pony boots must result in a rather contrived walk. I’m not entirely sure whose boots these are, but I suspect that these are not from Berardi, but rather from Dressing for Pleasure, a BDSM/fetish/roleplay retailer. That would explain quite a bit, actually.

Edit (01.06.09): the pony boots are called Rancho and are fabricated by punitiveshoes.com, a BDSM/fetish retailer. Palio is the thigh-high variant. Thanks to Anna Valentina for the link.