Submitted For Your Perusal

Just when you thought it was safe to start liking football players again after the whole Michael Vick debacle, the Seattle Times comes out with a special four-part story about the University of Washington’s football program under Rick Neuheisel (now head football coach at UCLA) and company. The first part is a searing indictment of player Jerramy Stevens (yes, that’s how he spells his first name), former Seattle Seahawk and current of Tampa Bay Buccaneer. He’s described by the editors of Jezebel as the kind of guy who has no problems “drugging a virgin sorority girl and anally-raping her in the alley next to a frat house.”

The next time somone says to you that college football programs aren’t as corrupt as people think, that star athletes aren’t ridiculously overindulged, that things like the orgy scene in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut never happen in real life, that Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons didn’t seem realistic, feel free to mention this special four-part story.

Whilst cleaning up some of my Safari bookmarks, I once again came across “Cary Grant’s Suit” by Todd McEwen, a wonderful little piece from a few years ago on the suit Cary Grant wears in North By Northwest.

Money Quote: “North By Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit.”

(Related Reading: The Sartorialist: Cary Grant – North By Northwest.)

1. “Instant Nostalgia? Let’s Go to the Videotape”

“The generation that came of age in the ’80s, as the VCR was becoming a staple, is especially prone to VHS nostalgia, a manifestation of the broader retro culture that has accounted for untold hours of programming on VH1. The first movie to be subjected to a VHS makeover in Be Kind Rewind is the Reagan-era hit Ghostbusters.In the British coming-of-age comedy Son of Rambow (set to open here in May), a couple of preteenagers discover a bootleg copy of the Rambo film First Blood and decide to shoot their own amateur-video version. (Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow are both descendants of the ultimate fan remake, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a shot-for-shot redux of the Spielberg blockbuster created by three teenage boys over a seven-year period in the ’80s. The story of their obsessive backyard adventure is being turned into a film by the producer Scott Rudin and the writer Daniel Clowes.)”

2. “For Strikers, the Agony of Spare Time”

“‘Of course I have time to talk to you,’ Kevin Bleyer, a writer for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” said at the beginning of a recent interview. ‘Let me just put down this copy of ‘War and Peace’ that I now have time to read.’”

3. “Devalued Sonics Seek New Arena or a New City to Call Home”

“When Bennett bought the Sonics, he pledged a good-faith effort to keep them in Seattle. In November 2006, voters approved an initiative restricting tax subsidies for professional sports teams. Last April, the state Legislature rejected a proposal to build a $500 million arena in Renton. Last August, Aubrey McClendon, a part owner, told an Oklahoma newspaper that the ownership group never intended to keep the Sonics in Seattle. The N.B.A. fined him $250,000 for the remark.”

4. “Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless”

“The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.”

5. “Moviegoers in Seoul Will Love This Film”

“In particular, she has been annoyed by I Am Legend, the Warner Brothers hit that stars Will Smith in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, and Cloverfield, the Paramount film about a monster that implodes the Empire State Building, tears down the Brooklyn Bridge and generally reduces the city to a smoking pile of rubble and despair.

“‘Can’t they destroy another city for once?’ Ms. Bern said in an interview at a local movie theater. ‘It’s despicable that the studios are using the destruction of New York to sell movies to me.’

“Hollywood uses the stunt to sell movies all right — but not primarily to Ms. Bern or anyone else in the United States, for that matter. If Americans go to see the Statue of Liberty’s head ripped off, as they have in droves for Cloverfield, all the better. But the fans the studios are really trying to attract with such imagery are in Eastern Europe, South Korea and Latin America.”

6. “Built for the Earth and the Pocketbook”

“The geothermal system is predicated on the fact that, below the frost layer (about six feet underground), the earth’s temperature remains relatively constant. Water passing through pipes laid deep underground picks up heat or deposits it before heading back to a heating or cooling device in the house. The system greatly decreases the cost and energy of heating or cooling.”

7. “Dr. Dippy, Meet Dr. Evil”

“It is also, as it happens, the latest instance of Hollywood’s century-old fascination with Freud and his descendants. Movies and television have both had a long and intimate relationship with a profession that has been alternately fetishized, sent up and rendered a cartoon. And that’s when it wasn’t being seen ‘through the distorting lenses of fear, defensive ridicule and the yearning for an ideal parent,’ said Dr. Irving Schneider, a psychiatrist in Chevy Chase, Md., who has written extensively on depictions of psychotherapists in film.”

8. “The Quarterbacks’ Sideline Play”

“‘I was talking to a friend of mine,’ said Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights, the classic about small-town adoration of high school football players, ‘and we both said if we could come back as anyone, it would be Tom Brady. He seems like a nice guy and he’s talented and he can get any girl in the world.’”

9. “When Icons Die Young”

“Successive generations have felt that impulse — the need to make sense of untimely death, and even justify it, by celebrating the dead young person in an outsize way, or, every so often, to attend the funeral of someone they don’t know.”

10. “A President Like My Father”

“Over the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.”

11. “Alfred Kazin: A Biography”

“Whenever anyone writes about the ‘New York intellectuals’ — the group of male Jewish writers who came to prominence in the years after the Second World War — Kazin’s name is near the top of the list. And yet he wasn’t a typical member of the tribe.”

12. “In the Heart of the Heart of Conspiracy”

“How else could one explain the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe or the fall of Chiang Kai-shek to the army of Mao Zedong? ‘Who lost China?’ propelled McCarthy to the national stage. Along the way, he described General George C. Marshall, the nation’s most respected military commander, as a Communist dupe; urged Secretary of State Dean Acheson to seek asylum in the Soviet Union; purposely confused the names of the convicted perjurer and likely Soviet spy Alger Hiss and the 1952 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (‘Alger — I mean Adlai’); and called Harry Truman a ‘son of a bitch’ who made his key decisions in the midnight darkness while drunk on bourbon.”

13. “Old-School Economics”

“The ‘jobs of the future’ that were promised 20 years ago are here. Choreographers, blackjack dealers and security guards have replaced factory workers as the economy’s backbone, if not yet its symbol.”

In his review of Rambo, film critic David Edelstein mentions something I had never heard before about Stallone, namely that he might have (or had) some father issues:

his impossible-to-please father thought his physique in the first Rocky looked puny – and did he show Dad

If this is true, it’s fascinating. Unlike Schwarzenegger, who started working out seriously as a teenager, Stallone didn’t start hitting the weights in earnest until he was in his thirties, and arguably didn’t peak physically until the mid to late-1980s, sometime between the releases of Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, when he was training with guys like Franco Columbo, Arnold’s old workout partner.

Arnold, by contrast, peaked physically maybe ten years earlier, in the mid-1970s. Arnold has often mentioned that his father was a stern taskmaster, and it doesn’t take a psychology degree to deduce that he has (or had) some father issues, and that those issues might be partially responsible for his throwing myself into bodybuilding as a kid, but I’ve never heard anyone suggest as much about Stallone. Lou Ferrigno, yes, but not Stallone. Come to think of it, I don’t really know much about Stallone’s father. Can anyone confirm this?

Some thoughts on Rambo (2008) — or as Alex Muniz calls it, Rambo IV — on this, the day after I first saw it.

In his review of the film, A.O. Scott notes that Rambo’s name “is sometimes still used, perhaps a bit unfairly, as a synonym for revanchist, go-it-alone militarism.” Note the parenthetical “perhaps a bit unfairly,” for Rambo’s politics — and for that matter the politics of Rambo franchise — have always been more a bit more complicated than most people think.

Stallone maintains that Rambo himself is apolitical, and suggests that Reagan is the reason everyone thinks of him as an essentially conservative, reactionary character:

Rambo has always been apolitical, but once Ronald Reagan, who I admired, stated, “Rambo is a republican.” In some reference to Rambo and Gadhafi in the ’80s, that sort of sealed my fate and since then Rambo has always been equated with America’s military aggressiveness, but nothing could be further from the truth. Rambo is a solitary creature, not part of any military machine.

In short, according to Stallone, Rambo is a loner, a warrior.

Tom Lutz, by contrast, in his wonderful book Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, sees Rambo as a liminal figure:

Rambo was an ambiguous hero, of course, not the tough John Wayne type … or the neotough Clint Eastwood. Rambo straddled the cultural conflict between the peaceniks and law-and-order forces, a hippie Green Beret, a decorated macho killer with long hair and antiestablishment anger: when the [first Rambo] film opened in 1982, Variety deemed the film itself “socially irresponsible.” Rambo’s position on the margin allows him to act in ways unavailable to the men around him, men in more obviously proscribed social roles. He knows no fear and feels no physical pain, but sobs and moans and cries out his emotional woe. Unlike the Greek hero who is expected to cry because he is heroic, Rambo earns the right to violate the macho prohibition against crying (as does Stallone’s previous character, Rocky) through his heroism.

(Of course, one could argue that the Rambo of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988) is more conservative than the Rambo of the first film, but even in these films it’s not quite as cut and dry as people make it out to be. In Rambo III, for instance, Rambo fights on behalf of the Mujahedeen!)

In his aforementioned review, Scott brushes aside questions about Rambo’s politics by suggesting that what’s really important is (1) the quality of the films and (2) how similar Rambo is to the archetypal male characters found in Westerns and Samurai films, two genres with considerably more status among the so-called chattering classes than action films. Scott writes:

The first installments in the cycle were better films than polite opinion might lead you to believe. At the time their politics made some people nervous, but to dwell on Rambo’s ideological significance was (and still is) to miss his kinship with the samurais and gunslingers of older movies.

My point here is to suggest that Rambo (both the character and the movie franchise) deserve to be taken seriously. To its credit, the New York Times published an article titled “Tough Guys For Tough Times” a couple weeks ago that I blogged briefly about. The article unfortunately perpetuates some of the one-dimensional thinking that I have tried to complicate above by including Rambo in a list of the “leading action symbols of the Reagan era — with all their excess, jingoism and good vs. evil bombast,” but it at least tries to make sense of why, two decades after Rambo III, Rambo is suddenly back.

Sociological and cultural reasons aside, the obvious reason, of course, is so Stallone can cash in on his second-most successful screen persona before he gets too old. I wonder, however, if Stallone just wanted a crack at directing a Rambo film? Maybe he thought he could do better than Ted Kotcheff, George P. Cosmatos, and Peter MacDonald, the directors of the first three Rambo films, respectively.

Did he do better? I don’t think so — the characters are paper thin even by action movie standards, the Herschell Gordon Lewis-style gore was a little too one-note for me, and action set-pieces aren’t particularly clever, save perhaps for the scene were Rambo dispatches a group of bad guys with his bow and arrow while a well-armed team of mercenaries cowers on the hill above — but Rambo is still a fascinating film for all sorts of reasons.

I was surprised, for instance, by how critical it was of missionary/relief work. The white bourgeois Christian group from Colorado that engage Rambo to take them into Burma are presented at best as naive, at worst as contributing to the destabilization of the region by sticking their noses in other people’s business. “Go home,” Rambo tells them at one point. A case probably could be made that the movie is actually anti-Christian. It certainly seems contemptuous of humanitarian efforts, religiously based or otherwise, which is odd considering that one of Stallone’s reasons for setting the film in Burma, at least according to his comments on Ain’t It Cool News, was to draw attention to the injustices there.

Military intervention is hardly presented in a better light. The mercenaries are just as incompetent as the missionaries. In the world of the Rambo movies, the only solution to a problem is Rambo. Anything short of Rambo is doomed to failure.

Yet as critical of the movie is of missionary/relief work and military intervention, it also falls into the trap of presenting the Burmese people (both the good guys and the bad guys, I thought) as non-white, primitive “Others.” Whatever light is shed on the problems of Burma, it’s overshadowed by the implicit message that whatever is going on over there in the jungle isn’t something “we” (read: white Americans) have to worry about, unless of course, we’re stupid enough to try and help. For this reason, a case probably also could be made that the movie is racist.

Some might read all this ambivalence as a deceptively sophisticated problemization of American foreign policy, but I don’t think I’d be that generous. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it confused, but I will say it’s complicated, which is what the Rambo franchise ultimately is, despite people’s attempts to reduce to something that’s anything but.

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“I do, however, wonder why so many people experiencing melancholia are now taking pills simply to ease the pain. Of course there is a fine line between what I’m calling melancholia and what society calls depression. In my mind, what separates the two is degree of activity. Both forms are more or less chronic sadness that leads to continuing unease with how things are — persistent feelings that the world is not quite right, that it is a place of suffering, stupidity, and evil. Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another. In contrast, melancholia generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.” —Eric G. Wilson, “In Praise of Melancholy”

“Many of the most impressive characters I know from history are book fanatics. I think of Seneca and Montaigne, both of whom developed a decided preference for books over people, seeing in them not a retreat from the world as much as a means of opening the doors to new worlds and a better class of interlocutors. As time passes, I develop more sympathy for their approach.” —Scott Horton, “Is the Bookworm an Endangered Species?”

1. “Broken Hearts, Sore Thumbs: Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular”

“Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, ‘The Tale of Genji,’ a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.”

2. “Jimmy Breslin’s Perpetual Deadline”

“Much as he has done throughout that career, Mr. Breslin rises early each day, at 6 a.m., first to swim at the Reebok gym near his apartment, then to read the city’s daily papers, then finally to write. It is a modus vivendi much helped by the fact that, in the early 1980s, he gave up his Olympic bouts of drinking, following, he claims, an epic bender with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan resulting in a hangover of such destructive force that he was still crippled after three days.”

3. “What Would Obama Say?”

“Mr. Favreau, or Favs, as everyone calls him, looks every bit his age, with a baby face and closely shorn stubble. And he leads a team of two other young speechwriters: 26-year-old Adam Frankel, who worked with John F. Kennedy’s adviser and speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen on his memoirs, and Ben Rhodes, who, at 30, calls himself the ‘elder statesman’ of the group and who helped write the Iraq Study Group report as an assistant to Lee H. Hamilton.

“Together they are working for a politician who not only is known for his speaking ability but also wrote two best-selling books and gave the much-lauded keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.”

4. “Anonymity Breach”

“Our university requires us students to write anonymous evaluations of our professors. On one evaluation, a student made derogatory comments about a professor’s sexual orientation. The university hired a handwriting expert to confirm the identity of the culprit so punishment could be administered. The university claims the student broke the code of conduct, but if anonymity was promised, is this investigation ethical?”

5. “Unscrambling the Alphabet of Fund Fees”

“Fund prospectuses, nobody’s idea of easy reading, don’t help investors understand what they are paying in expenses, either. Many prospectuses show total return figures that do not factor in sales charges, for example. Even expense ratios, the numbers that most investors look to as a proxy for costs, do not give shareholders what they probably want: an estimate of their account’s value after deducting fees and sales charges.”

6. “Ronald Reagan Is Still Dead”

“The G.O.P. presidential field’s lack of demographic diversity by age, gender, ethnicity or even wardrobe, let alone race, is simply the leading indicator of how out of touch its brand has become.”

7. “The Risk of Innovation: Will Anyone Embrace It? “

“Resistance to technology is an omnipresent risk for every innovator. Even a device as fabulously freeing as the personal computer struck some people as an abomination. In 1990, the poet Wendell Berry famously declared his perpetual allegiance to the typewriter in his essay, ‘Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.’

“Few people joined him, however, a reminder that rejection isn’t the real specter facing new gear. Adaptable humans usually trade one technology for another, rather than reject any and all. To be accepted, innovations must deliver benefits — enough benefits to make change worthwhile.”

In Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969), Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner offer a series of “proposals that attempt to change radically the nature of the existing school environment. Most of them will strike you as thoroughly impractical but only because you will have forgotten for the moment that the present system is among the most impractical imaginable, if the facilitation of learning is your aim.”

Though the book was written in 1969, many of their proposals still strike me as relevant. Some of the proposals I especially like include

4. Require every teacher who thinks he knows his “subject” well to write a book on it. In this way, he will be relieved of the necessity of inflicting his knowledge on other people, particularly his students.

and

10. Classify teachers according to their ability and make the lists public. There would be a “smart” group (the Bluebirds), an “average” group (the Robins), and a “dumb” group (the Sandpipers). The lists would be published each year in the community paper. The I.Q. and reading scores of teachers would also be published, as well as the list of those who are “advantaged” and “disadvantaged” by virtue of what they know in relation to what their students know.

Number 10 is related to number 11:

11. Require all teachers to take a test prepared by students on what the students know. Only if a teacher passes this test should he be permitted to “teach.” This test could be used for “grouping” the teachers as in number 10 above.

(I know quite a few teachers who would struggle to pass such a test.)

My favorite three proposals, however, have got to be numbers 12, 13, and 14. Here’s number 12:

12. Make every class an elective and withhold a teacher’s monthly check if his students do not show any interest in going to next month’s classes. This proposal would simply put the teacher on a par with other professionals, e.g., doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. No one forces you to go to a particular doctor unless you are a “clinic case.” In that instance, you must take what you are given. Our present system makes a “clinic case” of every student. Bureaucrats decide who shall govern your education. In this proposal, we are restoring the American philosophy: no clients, no money; lots of clients, lots of money.

And here’s number 13:

13. Require every teacher to take a one-year leave of absence every fourth year to work in some “field” other than education. Such an experience can be take as evidence, albeit shaky, that the teacher has been in contact with reality at some point in his life. Recommended occupations: bartender, cab driver, garment worker, waiter. One of the common sources of difficulty with teachers can be found in the fact that most of them simply move from one side of the desk (as students) to the other side (as “teachers”) and they have not had much contact with the ways things are outside of school rooms.

As good as those last two are, proposal 14 is my absolute favorite:

14. Require each teacher to provide some sort of evidence that he or she has had a loving relationship with at least one other human being. If the teacher can get someone to say, “I love her (or him),” she should be retained. If she can get two people to say it, she should get a raise. Spouses need not be excluded from testifying.

The authors acknowledge that some people might find number 14 “facetious, if not flippant,” but they ask readers to consider “What kinds of evidence must teachers presently offer to qualify for their jobs? A list of ‘courses.’ Which of these requirements strikes you as more bizarre? From the student’s point of view, which requirement would seem more practical? Bear in mind that it is a very difficult thing for one person to learn anything significant from another. Bear in mind, too, that it is probably not possible for such learning to occur unless there is something resembling a loving relationship between ‘teacher’ and learner.”

“In his blending of the urbane and the rambunctious, he found a way to be true to his own background, which he plainly adored, while reconciling that background to the vision of a suave man-about-town that he had aspired to as a working-class young man. Although Grant’s early Hollywood image seemed a denial of his former self, he kept Leach very much with him after he came into his own: he always spoke matter-of-factly and lovingly of his working-class origins, and he savored playing Cockney characters – see Sylvia Scarlett, Gunga Din, and the uncharacteristically sober None But the Lonely Heart, his most personal film; his references to ‘Archie Leach,’ of course, would be an affectionate running gag in his pictures. The key to his appeal was that, as Kael noted decades ago, his ‘romantic elegance is wrapped around the resilient, tough core of a mutt, and Americans dream of thoroughbreds while identifying with mutts.’” —Benjamin Schwarz, “Becoming Cary Grant,” The Atlantic Monthly