Obama and Israel: Betrayal in the Broken Places | The New Ledger

Obama and Israel: Betrayal in the Broken Places | The New Ledger

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Obama’s Nobel Prize: The World as Farce | The New Ledger

Obama’s Nobel Prize: The World as Farce | The New Ledger

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Some Nonsense Verse

(Pace Award Elder, Sir Cellar Owl, and Dowager Dyer.)

The Highly Disturbing Event

Mr. Cerberus Petulance was walking home one afternoon
When he noticed a highly disturbing event
He wasn't sure just what it was
But nonetheless, it was extremely unpleasant
And led him to contemplate certain other, unpleasant scenarios
Which, while perhaps unlikely, were nevertheless plausible enough
To cause him a certain indiscreet trepidation

Through no fault whatsoever of his own
This proved even more disturbing than the original, highly disturbing, event
Which, of course, somewhat defeated the purpose of the entire exercise
Leading to certain unforeseen consequences
None of them pleasant
And some of them highly disturbing in their own right
Which only goes to show why no one in their right mind
Goes walking in the afternoons
When, as everybody knows
Highly disturbing events occur

***

Someone or Other

Someone or other was usually very late in the mornings
Which was different from everybody else
Who tended to get up early
Because nobody likes to oversleep
Especially when they're somebody
Not just anybody
Which tends to complicate things
Because anybody could be somebody
And nobody wants to stay nobody
Which is precisely why everybody gets up early
And tries to be somebody
Except for someone or other
And nobody likes that

***

The Illustrious Feast

Before the dingly dangly dawn
They dined upon green figs and prawn
They did enjoy those salty fish
Especially in a Chinese dish
Which reminded them of times gone by
And in a squiggling, wriggling, sniggering cry:

"Oh the bestial benefits of brass!
That laid us low in cupid's grasp!
Oh iron, fire, shame, and steel!
Thy desperate tyranny repeal!"

So the long and lingering languid night
Did spare them all the motley sight
Of the churning, burning, yearning crew
Who marched the road from Xanadu
In the gurgling, spurgling, churgling rain
In wracking, cracking, distracting pain
Their wounds in festering odious state
Dying slow, by steady gait
They came upon the feasting few
And devoured them all, as such will do

***

The Biggledy Boggledy Boom

The scraggly, raggeldy, taggledy, haggardly hardly biggledy boggledy boom

Was confined to the corner of his room
Where all day long and to and fro
He sang his higgledy piggledy, wiggledy, woggeldy worldly woe
Alone for a time, he did his best
To take his snoringly, boringly, dreamily doggedly rest
Where else, you may say, could you see such a thing
As a boggledy boom dance, pray, and sing?
But no one was there to embrace the sad beast
Who in his lachrymose heart, hoped that at least
A pleasantly lovingly tuggingly hopefully mopefully heavenly song
Would pass by his door and take him along

The Age of Catastrophic Thinking

"Probably,” Norman Mailer wrote in 1957, “we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.” Today, however, we have something like an answer: We are living in an age of catastrophic thinking. Our social and cultural discourse on any number of subjects—the environment, the economy, public health, technology—is defined by a vocabulary and a worldview that can only be described as apocalyptic. The world, we are constantly told, is in a state of mortal crisis, and unless we act fast enough to stop it, we are all facing disaster and oblivion. Everything, it seems, is swiftly accelerating toward a terrible end.

Read the whole thing at Azure.

Why Michael Bay Is So Incredibly Awesome

Everyone who writes about movies is now apparently required to hate Michael Bay. The ex-director of commercials and music videos, who has made some of the most successful films of the last decade—Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, Transformers, etc.—has become, without a doubt, the bête noir of modern cinema; or at least of modern movie critics. The critical establishment has never really liked Michael Bay, but the recent release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which despite having been demolished by every respectable critic on both sides of the Atlantic, is hurtling swiftly toward the box-office stratosphere, was unquestionably the nail in the coffin....

It must be admitted that almost everything the critics have said about Revenge of the Fallen is true to a certain extent. It is not a particularly good film, even by Hollywood blockbuster standards, and Bay is most certainly unsubtle, lowbrow, and unapologetically mercenary. Ironically, however, the critics’ belief that Bay is also a threat to all things decent and civilized in the world, the unabashed critical contempt and hatred that has been directed his way from the beginning of his career, says very little about Bay himself. Instead, it says almost everything about the pathetic state of American film criticism.

It was probably dissident film critic Armond White who sounded the first alarm in 2000, when he went to the barricades for controversial director Brian De Palma and his much-maligned Mission to Mars.

Brian De Palma’s critical drubbing over Mission to Mars—reminiscent of the scene in Airplane! where passengers line up to smack an old lady—is the clearest evidence of the catastrophe that has befallen contemporary film criticism. Mission to Mars is a litmus test. It can be said with certainty that any reviewer who pans it does not understand movies, let alone like them. They’d be better off reviewing static, juvenile media like television or comic books.

White, while unquestionably correct, was somewhat premature. As has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, the real litmus test is Michael Bay.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Michael Mann’s Dillinger Debacle

Every great director has at least one truly bad film in him, and Public Enemies is Michael Mann’s. It is not just a failure, but one of those movies in which the gap between its quality and its maker’s talent is so immense as to be nearly inexplicable. To be fair, it is possible that my expectations for Public Enemies, which chronicles the 1933 FBI manhunt for legendary Midwest bank robber John Dillinger, were unfairly high. But from the man who made Manhunter, Thief, Last of the Mohicans, Collateral, and the masterpiece Heat, a film this empty, dull, lifeless, and—most shocking of all—crudely made cannot be anything other than a major disappointment. This may not be fair, but it is a fact. We expect bad films from the likes of Brett Ratner. We expect great ones from Michael Mann. Such is the price of genius, and in Public Enemies, Mann pays it.

In all fairness, however, it must be admitted that Public Enemies is not just Mann’s failure. It is also another in a long line of equally inexplicable failures to successfully translate the myth of John Dillinger and his eventual demise to the screen. I use the term inexplicable because if the Dillinger legend is anything, it is unquestionably a great story. It has love, violence, friendship, irony, and death. It has a charismatic antihero and, in the person of straitlaced FBI agent Melvin Purvis, who led the manhunt, the stoic nemesis who eventually takes him down. It is a quintessentially American story featuring two classic American archetypes—the free-spirited outlaw and the upstanding sheriff—locked in a duel to the death in a world not unlike that of the Western but much more recognizably ours. In other words, it is a story that seems tailor-made for the movies. And yet, Hollywood has proven consistently incapable of doing it justice.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Star Trek For the Masses: To Boldly Go?

No one who did not grow up with a Trekkie can possibly understand the hold the series has on its true believers. While my father is, at best, a middling fan (he never, for instance, took the time to learn the Klingon language), I was nevertheless compelled to spend a great deal of my childhood in the presence of Star Trek and its seemingly endless parade of spinoffs, each more second-rate than the last. There was Star Trek: The Next Generation, then Deep Space Nine, then something else, and I’m fairly certain there was something else after that, and Wikipedia claims there was also an animated series (before my time) and, of course, the feature films (eleven at last count).

Despite, or perhaps because, of my long and reluctant relationship with the franchise, I must admit that the willingness of fans to sit through these endless hours of Trek upon Trek upon Trek still mystifies me. There seems to be an almost limitless appetite, on the part of some people, for such things as large, talking, malevolent clouds of gas, unbearably sanctimonious political bromides, often wretched special effects, endless variations on the complications of time travel, and actors in rubber suits pretending to be suspiciously humanoid aliens. The willingness of the rest of us to do so, however, seems to have been understandably declining over time, which is probably why J.J. Abrams was hired to perform the now ubiquitous Hollywood “reboot” that every moribund franchise must undergo in order to reenter the cultural mainstream.

Abrams’s efforts have been met, as everyone now knows, with immense success, mainly because he has dispensed with almost everything that made the series unbearable to semi-normal human beings—the endless complications of time travel remain, taken to their logical extreme. Star Trek in Abrams’s and his writers’ hands is the biggest Buck Rogers movie ever made; a rollicking thrill-ride through the space opera genre, with more starships exploding and lasers blasting per second than George Lucas ever dreamed of in his unfortunate CGI fantasies. It’s all highly enjoyable, and gives one the same giddy, childlike high that Lucas and his oft-accomplice Steven Spielberg specialize in. And yet, one cannot help feeling that something is missing from Star Trek in its new, MTV incarnation. The truth is that, for all its fun and games, Star Trek is not really a particularly good film.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.