Something to set your sights on for next year. (via Malevole)

I understand that Random House has a contest on to help them design the cover for one of their most eagerly awaited titles of 2003. The Random House website strangely fails to list an appropriate email address for the Treason-ous Design competition, but I'm sure this is an oversight soon to be corrected. In the meanwhile I hope all of you visually skillful Ann Coulter fans out there will ask yourselves how you imagine the cover of Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism can best convey its message of extremism in defense of virtue, and send your solution in .jpg or .gif form to Coulter's editor at Crown.

My preliminary notion, which I'll have to describe since I really suck with Photoshop, runs something like this: against a red/white/blue backround, Coulter-as-Joan-of-Arc (no helmet, let the tresses blow majestically in the breeze), smiles beatifically as she drives an enormous broadsword into the belly of a medieval-style dragon with heads done as cariacatures of FDR, MLK, Hilary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Jesse Jackson, Norman Lear and Ralph Nader. The monster's gushing blood should pool and form the title of the book. If possible, Coulter should show leg.

Returned, all waterlogged and pine-scented from a couple of cities I haven't visited in approximately a decade, which count as their inhabitants now pretty much all of my near relations (with the exception of my sister, though she was there last week as well).

One morning dawned dry and blustery and we headed out along the Columbia Gorge in the direction of Mt. Hood, which stood off, rather aloof and self-satisfied in the eastern distance. The gorge was a lovely vastness which seemed to chiefly exist to funnel a great deal of cold wind toward the Pacific. We concluded our drive as clouds came on, at Multnomah Falls, an impressive double-waterfall with an elegant bridge spanning the lower part. Very Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The rest of our stay in the Northwest was sunless and damp, although since we'd come to see my parents' new house and to dazzle Theresa and her mother with the intensity of a marathon week of in-law exposure (mission accomplished), it wasn't of the greatest consequence. It cleared up long enough for my uncle to show off his favorite view of downtown Seattle, from a little hillside park in the Queen Anne district. A picture-postcard view, that remained jaw-dropping despite the fact that it was almost certainly the viewpoint of a million banal, um, postcards. The light-filled bowl of the city center, with the utopian spike of the needle enthroned within, presiding over the darkening Sound.

The rain started again the next morning.

***

Some people have been making with their year-end Top Tens. I would have a hard time with this task, because as much as I ransack the cluttered closet of memory, I can't come up with ten great movies or plays or books or records that I'm certain I saw or read or heard for the first time in 2002. It seemed preposterous at first; I cast my nets out again, and came up with the same pathetically small catch.

Hypothetical reasons: (a) I read too many magazine articles, (b) I'm too cheap about buying new CDs, (c) I make awful, awful impulse choices when I *do* buy new records, and (d) I stay in Brooklyn too much on weekends to catch many plays or films.

Some standouts from what I did manage to stumble across in what seems on my part to have been an aesthetically somnolent 365 days:

Atonement, Ian McEwan. Simply the most riveting and satisfying story I have read this year; and I think it beats anything from 2000 onward that I can remember reading (save perhaps a quite different book with a confusingly similar title: Austerlitz). A Rush of Blood to the Head, Coldplay. Not revolutionary by any means, but seductive and grand and as involving as a rock record ought to be. Y tu Mama Tambien. Alfonso Cuaron; Minority Report, Steven Spielberg. The only two new films I saw in which I found myself completely wrapped up -- despite rather heavy-handed moves by both directors. Neither was as good as Jacques Becker's Le Trou (1960), which was the best film in revival I saw this year.

Finally, a note about a trio of books not published this year, but which I discovered for the first time: Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. I'm not someone who has kept up with SF as it's developed in the last fifteen or so years, but I'm glad that these finally intruded long enough on my consciousness for me to give Red Mars a shot. Robinson has been lionized as past of a renaissance in "hard" (that is, science-fact-oriented) science fiction, but to emphasize the technological and scientific detail of this epic is to sell it short. It's the kind of complex envisioning of the future that science fiction (or speculative fiction, if you like, whatever) aspires to and rarely achieves. Deeply imagined characters, finely worked-out political problems, and brilliantly rendered landscapes of Mars both real and possible. I can't recommend it if you don't like science fiction -- but if, like me, you walked past these on shelves because you just don't read these books anymore...well, perhaps it's time to revisit a former interest.

In today's quiz we celebrate the Season of Consumption with a quiz that tests your knowledge of the exciting world of...brands!

The "brand consultant" company Interbrand assigns a "brand value" to companies and their branded products. As of their most recent published rankings, the top four brands in terms of global value were all wielded by U.S.-based corporations: Coca-Cola, Microsoft Windows,IBM, and Intel.

Number 5, however, is not a U.S.-based company (though its products are widely available here as well as elsewhere).

What is the name and country of origin of the No. 5 Most Valuable Brand?

First correct answer to comments wins my copy of the now outdated The Top 10 of Everything 2002. One guess per comment, please. No Googling, waffling, pandering, needling, wheedling, or malingering.

A note to the dedicated: Next week at this time I will be zipping between the glorious metropoli of the Northwest -- Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon, high on strong coffee and the smell of freshly clear-cut woodlands. The Quiz will return on Friday, January 4, 2003.

This morning at the doctor's office, I walked in to find a surprisingly crowded waiting room, full of an unusual bunch of people -- men and one woman, of various ages (mostly well over thirty) and assorted ethnicities, waiting for the doctor, clutching a handful of forms, chatting away together as if they knew each other -- when it was clear from overhearing bits of their conversation that many of them did not, or not well. There was an air of camaraderie that was hard to place until enough references to ships and the Persian Gulf made everything clear -- they were sailors, merchant marine.

The unofficial leader of the bunch was a heavyset, fiftyish guy with the deep, easy drawl of Southern guy of a certain generation (by his accent, I'd put him in South Carolina or Georgia), wearing a USMC cap and a surprisingly mod pair of eyeglasses. He looked me over -- "sailor?" he asked. Then he stopped me before I could reply. "No, you look more like a doctor." I told him that I was a writer (always an occupation I feel strange about claiming, but what the hey), and he turned to his acquaintance from the same ship-- a slender Latino man about ten years his junior -- and said "Lots to write about in this town."

He told me that the whole bunch had been sent over to my doctor by the union to get immunizations, and they didn't mind if I went ahead of them ("Nobody here's in a hurry. We're on the clock. They sent us over here on shift -- not our problem.") USMC Hat and his buddy were from the John Cole, an ammo transport ship that is apparently, as they put it "owned by the Navy" but mothballed between major operations. (It seemed to be a civilian ship, but I might have misunderstood).

Most of them, it seemed had been either active duty military or serving on similar civilian supply ships during the Gulf War. USMC Hat referred to it as the "Poison Gulf." He and the Latino guy were talking about how much they liked Dubai and Bahrain. I wanted to ask what exactly they did for fun in Dubai and Bahrain, but I didn't get the chance.

They were fully loaded and waiting to sail "whenever we go to war with Iraq." There was a lot of talk about the gas masks they were supposed to be issued. I asked what they were carrying (this was before I knew it was an ammo ship). "Christmas presents for the Iraqis," the Latino guy said. "Real expensive ones." Grim laughter followed and USMC Hat added "Air Mail." He liked that, and said it again so his pal would hear it.

They left to get some coffee and shook my hand. I wished them, awkwardly, good luck.

****

As long as we're talking about such things, this month's new Harper's has several pieces which are absolutely essential reading. One of them, Perry Anderson's essay "Force and Consent," is excerpted from the one he published a couple of months ago in the New Left Review, which can be found here. As a kind of absolutely pitiless dissection of the evolution of U.S. foreign policy and its relation to the U.N. -- along with its apparently inevitable manifestation in Baghdad, Anderson's piece has that breathtaking quality to it that you find in some very surefooted essays.

I'm not sure I fully agree with his conclusion, which seems to be summed up in his last paragraph. This follows a ringing denunciation of the Bush administrations argument for war ("The tissue of cruelties and hypocrises that has justified the blockade of Iraq for a decade, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, requires no further exposure in these pages."); Anderson goes on, however, to make a broader point about what he considers to be illegitimate actions. I quote here in full:

Republican and Democratic administrations in the US are not the same, any more than Centre Right and Centre Left governments in Europe. It is always necessary to register the differences between them. But these are rarely distributed along a moral continuum of decreasing good or evil. The contrasts are nearly always more mixed. So it is today. There is no cause to regret that the Bush administration has scotched the wretched charade of the International Criminal Court, or swept aside the withered fig-leaves of the Kyoto Protocol. But there is every reason to resist its erosion of civil liberties in America. The doctrine of pre-emption is a menace to every state that might in future cross the will of the hegemon or its allies. But it is no better when proclaimed in the name of human rights than of non-proliferation. What is sauce for the Balkan goose is sauce for the Mesopotamian gander. The remonstrants who pretend otherwise deserve less respect than those they implore not to act on their common presumptions. The arrogance of the ‘international community’ and its rights of intervention across the globe are not a series of arbitrary events or disconnected episodes. They compose a system, which needs to be fought with a coherence not less than its own.

Somewhere in here, it seems to me, lies a problem -- what are the rights of the international community? Does it have any? Or are the hash marks around those two words mean that we haven't really got one as yet, and that what passes for one politically just doesn't qualify, as it is essentially a policy instrument of U.S. hegemony? Or something else? Really, these aren't rhetorical questions -- what'd I miss?

"It's just us and that goddam cat." -- Louis Menand waxes entertainingly theoretical on the Cold War, phonics, and the chat in the chapeau.

Current number of uses: 14 (via The Fractures).

Trent Lott will be forced to step down. I think so because while he might have survived the fallout from his Strom-stroking alone, I think this will make his past a little too uncomfortably...present.

To quote someone else who has had her public image tarnished, it's a good thing.

UPDATE: Well maybe not. But with Law and Kissinger stepping down today, perhaps I should count our blessings.

After last week's delay, we are pleased to announce this week's Guest Quizmaster, Chicago's own Boxjam, returning to us after a long hiatus. His question follows:

In 1943 a contemporary comic strip was collected in book form. So esteemed was the comic strip that Dorothy Parker wrote a review of this collection, excerpted here:

The artist of the strip became most famous for an unrelated children's book written later.

What was the book? Bonus - who is the artist, and what was the strip?

A very special prize this week, in the form of a limited edition Boxjam's Doodle printout -- signed by the artist!

As always the first correct answer posted to comments wins, with Mr. Boxjam to be the final arbiter of correctness. No Googling or going on "Crossing Over" to get Joanthan Edward to commune with the spirit of Dorothy Parker. Guess as many times as you like, but please make only one guess per comment (that way we get lots of comments and feel all big and important).

Today's Times reveals the White House's thoughtful reaction to Trentt Lott's revelatory gaffe at the recent celebration of Strom Thurmond's birthday:

The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, stood by his defense of Mr. Lott on Tuesday and addressed potential political damage with minorities.

"The president, as I said yesterday, understands and knows that America is a much richer and better nation as a result of the changes that have been made to our society involving integration and the improvement of relations between races," Mr. Fleischer said.

Well, as far as I'm concerned, the difference between understanding and knowing is a subtle thing better left to pointy-headed intellectuals like Bush and Fleischer. Ordinary Americans like myself would be satisfied with either understanding or knowledge on the part of the President -- both at once seems like it might be a tall order.

But whatever: where I'm still really in the dark is on the phrase "improvement of relations between races." Now, is that some kind of code word for "ending institutionalized racism" or "extending justice to all Americans"? (I would have thought those phrases would have been a little clearer, but perhaps it's expecting a lot for the president to come out publicly in favor of hot-button
radicalism like the Civil Rights Act.)

Or maybe the choice of words was more reflective of what the White House actually understands to have been historically important, in which case perhaps Fleischer meant "We wouldn't want to go back to that situation we used to have where no one was really to blame, but, like, black and white people weren't relating well? And it just seemed silly that we all couldn't just get along, like Rodney King or whoever wanted? So, like, we needed to improve the relations between the races by hanging out together a little more and plus that J. Lo is really, you know, something else, so it's also about people of all colors and races and etcetera? And not playing the blame game and so forth."

Somebody fill me in?

UPDATE: Bush just came out with a statement somewhat clearer than Fleischer's evasive locutions above, you can read about it here. The same piece notes that Fleischer again offered up some choice imagery, which was that the president spoke out today because he felt the need to express what was "in his heart" -- an odd, distorted echo of Lott's own retread of the Jesse Jackson excuse for a racist remark: "It was a sin of the head, and not the heart."

Since Bush has run his recent political career on the premise that his heart is in the right place, regardless of how unconcerned he is with the details which fill the heads of others, this makes a lot of sense for him. Nevertheless, there is something in the idea that Bush woke up this morning and said "My heart tells me to speak out more clearly against these remarks" that troubles not so much the heart, nor the head, but the stomach.

At an otherwise A-1 party this weekend Theresa and I were completely skeeved out by this smirking guy who first played on us this dopey "cardless card trick" he claimed to have learned at an accounting seminar in Atlantic City. He then showed us his credentials as a hypnotherapist, which seemed like a fine joke at first until we realized he took himself and his credentials quite seriously. Then it just got, well, skeevy. He also told us that he had been trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which I have since found out translates into English as "trying to make people believe stuff."

Then, familiar skeevy sensations returned tonight when we channel-surfed over to A&E and found "Skeevage", and what skeeved us to the max was the interview with the hypnotherapist who offers breast enlargement. They showed her "working with a client" -- from a camera angle that certainly foregrounded the relevant issues.

Final skeeverino: When I went to the site run by the American Hypnotherapy Board which supposedly "licensed and registered" our creepish new pal, in order to link to it, it immediately downloaded some furshlugginer Shockwave player and in so doing wiped out my Movable Type window and my post-in-progress, which I've now finally finished redoing. Consider me skeeved beyond the point of no return.

Personal Velocity (Rebecca Miller, 2002)

Adapted by the director/screenwriter from her book of the same title, this film has somehow garnered a reputation for being a rough-hewn but potent set of character studies, driven by powerful turns from Kyra Sedgwick, Fairuza Balk, and Parker Posey as the leads in three interconnected stories. Unfortunately, that description applies to this film in the same way that, say "fine-boned" applies to Jonathan Winters.

Because of the strength of many positive reviews, we went to see this last weekend. And, given the level of good press this wretched film has gotten, I am obliged to supply a corrective of sorts. Here then: Things begin badly in this film as we discover that the writer-director, so in love with her own uninspired prose that she has a voice-over narrator supply all the detail she doesn't know how to dramatize, has apparently decided to emulate Dogme filmmakers in every department except for the possession of a visual sensibility. Personal Velocity supplies the migraines delivered by a very poorly shot student film, and as such is a good example of how technique doesn't defeat a sense of fresh vision -- indeed, it's likely a prerequisite.

The script is of a piece, or maybe worse -- not merely a stream of clichés, but a torrent which threatens to drown the audience. The "keenly observed" characters, the subject of much of the film's praise, have as much to them as the women in a novelization of a Sex In the City script might. Of the three stories, the only one that doesn't elicit constant groans of disbelief is the one set amongst careerist, amoral publishing professionals (draw your own conclusions). That vignette isn't any good either, but at least one feels the director knows the territory she plods through. Proof that a small budget, a belief in one's own work, and some committed performances by talented actresses can, with luck, turn out a piece of shit as bad as anything major studios are capable of excreting.

Don Juan de Marco (Jeremy Leven, 1998)

Why did we rent this? Wait 'til you hear this: an instructor of T.'s suggested that it provided an illuminating perspective on the complex process of psychotherapy.

Of course, as everyone else probably already knows, the only thing illuminated by Don Juan De Marco is the extent to which viewers like ourselves are gullible fools who would probably have starved in an era of really serious survival-of-the-fittest-style economic competition. However, if you don't already know how bad this film is: remember that annoying Bryan Adams song "Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?" Well, versions of that skull-scraper melody play, in a sort of Spanish-guitar mode, throughout this tale of Johnny Depp's pschotic devotion to a sort of soft-core version of the Don Juan myth, as played out in fantasy-flashback mode. That should give you some idea.

Basically, Depp convinces his psychiatrist, played amazingly well by a large trained sea lion who is billed as "Marlon Brando," to accept his delusion that he has slept with thousands of women, which for some unexplained reason makes Brando feel better about the fact that he is old.

Depp is actually a little charismatic in the movie, which is good because the dippy faux-Castilian accent he sports is only slightly funnier than the Burt Ward mask he wears through much of the picture. The glacial pace allows time for plenty of rumination about how a film which includes one very good-looking dude getting it on with a considerable number of extremely good-looking women could wind up about as sexy as an instructional video about choosing and installing vinyl siding.

The Goddamned Upstairs Neighbors (244 6th Ave Collective, 2002 -- plays in select locations only)

This latest installment of an irregularly-but-ongoing series hits many of lowlights of former efforts: the soundtrack, swerving from kicking beats to long stretches of party chatter; the length of the feature, which runs from early in the evening for over six hours -- at 1:00 AM this baby is far from wrapping up; and, most importantly, the failure of the principal performers to break out of the roles they've established so thoroughly in the countless previous versions. Even the plot is stale -- a casual Friday night dinner hosted by a brother and sister for their friends turns into a marathon affair which keeps the downstairs tenants awake? Haven't we all been here before?

A late appearance by a pair of sympathetic landlords offers some hope that this epic will wrap up in a reasonable amount of time, but just when you think there's no more that this thin material can be stretched, some furniture is loudly rearranged, and it's clear that the directing team don't feel they've exhausted their subject yet. While the main performers enjoy themselves exuberantly in the making of this feature, somehow their sincerity, their animal lust for life, and their shrieks of bibulous laughter don't translate into a rewarding experience for the audience. I dunno. Maybe my taste just isn't refined enough to really appreciate this group's work.

Today's Quiz was slated to feature the return of guest Quizmaster Boxjam; however, our Chicago colleague being temporarily incommunicado, we've had to reschedule his resumption of the quizmaster's chair, and instead offer this trivial tidbit for you to chew on.

According to United Nations-provided statistics, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the country with the largest percentage of teenage brides -- that is, women from 15-19 years of age who are or have ever been married.

Using the same standards, what nation boasts the highest percentage of teenage husbands?

No googling, please. One guess per comment, though you may guess as many times as you like The first correct answer posted to comments wins a packetful of antibacterial wipes, courtesy of everyone's most hygenic pal, Henry the Hand.

Today: Modern technology helps tidy up after God has a party: Rapture Letters! (via MeFi)

Tomorrow: The Quiz, with Guest Quizmaster Boxjam!

No cleverness, today. Just outrage and irritation, garnished with a sense of bewilderment.

Mike points out here the Bush administration's jaw-dropping blindness to what should be public outrage about the two recent appointees: the first, to head up the Commission to investigate the intelligence unpreparedness for the events of September 11, and the second, to run the disturbingly constituted "Information Awareness Office" of the Pentagon.

Mike's summary of the reasons the choice of Kissinger run counter to logic is perfectly lucid. I'll only add the failure of the mainstream press to treat this as shocking news is a confirmation of Christopher Hitchens' oft-made observation that our country and our media insists on treating Kissinger as a respectable and, indeed, eminent citizen. Of course, Hitchens has been on point about this, but he remains a mostly solo act. The New York Times weigh-in on the subject was particularly weak.

It's hard to blame the White House for our inability to mount a reasonable dissent. While the administration's choice of Kissinger remains an almost bizarrely cynical one, why shouldn't they make such self-serving choices when no one is interested in raising their voice in opposition. The real problem here is with the failure of the Democratic party, mainstream newspapers, and well-informed citizens to treat this appointment as an affront to sense. The administration has already revealed itself to be savagely partisan and unable to find fault with any conservative figure, so it's unsurprising that they would see Kissinger's bloody hands as clean enough for government work. But he's both so repellent in himself, as well as (Mike's point) so unsuited for the job both temperamentally and in terms of international reputation that there is no excuse for this. It should be treated with the same horror as if Bush had appointed a convicted felon.

Speaking of convicted felons, there's the other appointment. The DARPA Information Office's project for "Total Information Awareness" is now headed by none other than former National Security Adviser and Iran-Contra mastermind John Poindexter, a man not known for his ability to make what you and I might call sensible ethical judgements. But that won't matter -- he's just responsible for a project to co-ordinate and monitor all electronic transactions between everyone in the country. So ethics, I guess, won't come into it.

Also, this morning I heard Donald Rumsfeld quoted as saying that it doesn't matter what the U.N. inspectors find or don't find in Iraq, Hyssein will still need to produce "evidence" that he's disarming. No word on what might constitute such evidence, though...