On the Small Screen

Peter Aspden tried downloading a movie onto his iPhone. He wasn't impressed:

It is one of the most famous one-liners in the history of cinema, which also turned out to be an inadvertent prophecy. “I am big,” says the slighted Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950). “It’s the pictures that got small.”

She had no idea. The past half-century has seen the pictures get smaller and smaller, to the point that we wonder if they can ever be big again. From television screen, to laptop, to smartphone, the ever-shrinking movies reach a greater part of the world than ever before. But what have we lost along the way? On a recent flight, I downloaded the relatively well-received Marvel spin-off The Avengers to watch on my iPhone. It was, of course, a ridiculous venture, this squeezing of monumental themes on to a miniaturist canvas, lacking in textural detail, atmosphere, communality of experience. But it was easily accessible, convenient and cheap. Is the trade-off worth it? And how does it affect us and the art form?

"Interesting"

Rebecca Ariel Porte reviews Our Aesthetic Categories:

“Interesting” is an aesthetic judgment so mild and so commonplace that it barely seems to qualify as a judgment at all. But that’s part of Ngai’s point. If interesting is, on some level, an aesthetic judgment, then its ubiquity (especially in critical contexts) stresses the “ambiguous status of aesthetic judgments in criticism,” as they “mediat[e] feelings and concepts.” “Interesting” is our gambit, Ngai contends, when we feel something but we’re not yet sure what to think. When we say something is interesting, we are inviting conversation. We want to be asked to explain ourselves.

Apologies, Etc.

I'm taking a break from blogging until next weekend, as I'm sitting exams next week. It's not ideal to be absent during this important moment of the election season, so I just hope that in the next week or so I don't miss anything too important.

See you next week.

The Week in Review

Tuesday on the Report, we explored the question of whether or not the debates actually matter. I agreed that they mean more for Romney. I applauded California's ban on gay conversion therapy for teenagers, and we found a way to make New York women nod in unison. Kingsley Amis's legacy is all too often dominated by talk of his various eccentricities, and even being indie rock royalty doesn't pay that well. Smoking segregation is an ongoing battle and there are more invisible things than you think. The critics of reason return; so do the critics of American air travel. Soldiers in modern warfare need less muscle and more brains, so why do we continue to recruit eighteen year-old males? The recruiters have it all wrong.

On Wednesday, we found that ditching helmet rules encourages people to cycle, especially in cities like London, where the city sponsors "Boris" bikes for public use, and that the housewives of Japan are giving their husbands less pocket money. Pastors all across America protested an amendment that some on the Right have called a "muzzle on religion" by giving explicitly partisan sermons, a liberal found an unlikely pen pal in a conservative blogger named Esther, and a presidential candidate failed to start a chant. The unbearable debate about grammar rules continued, and we agreed that maybe we should give up on the rules about "whom" and "who." We looked at the Kael answer to the question of why we enjoy movies, and whether or not it matters that we enjoy them.

David Rothkopf called the election for Obama, perhaps prematurely, whose daughter is expected to show good judgement in music and like Motown. No, correlation may not imply causation, but this is no way to deflect a possibly legitimate point. We continued to ask why Americans believed in Muslim Rage, and concluded that the issue was neither political nor religious. Speaking of beliefs, how malleable are your political ones? It turns out that website pagination is evil, and male decline may not be strictly true. Counter to the prevailing logic, it just might be that the best way to help Iran in their efforts to build a nuclear bomb would be to bomb them. The specifics surrounding Paul Ryan's tax plan remain opaque, as does the reasoning behind bans on books like Alice Walker's The Colour Purple (did you know there was such a thing as Banned Books Week?). Finally, let's remind ourselves that this is not the most important election we've ever seen.

Thursday was the day of the first debate. Liveblog here. Reaction round-ups here and here. The verdict? "There was a singular commanding force on stage tonight (or this afternoon, if you're here) and it was Mitt Romney. Obama was tired, lethargic, and even appeared indifferent to the proceedings. And where Romney engaged in the fight, Obama merely endured it." Also that day, are presidential debates too civil, and has another ritual, the TED Talk, lost its spark? The mind of the libertarian is a cold and unfeeling place. Book blogs, however, are brilliant.

The Worst President Ever

The historian H.W. Brands takes a sympathetic view of Ulysses S. Grant, typically the leading contender for the title:

The standard rap on Grant is that he was a drunk who surrounded himself with spoilsmen who stole the country blind. In an era of scandals—the Crédit Mobilier’s siphoning of millions in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the Tweed Ring’s bilking of New York in awarding city contracts, the Whiskey Ring’s dodging of the tax on booze—Grant was said to turn a blind (or drunken) eye to all manner of wrongdoing. Beyond that, the simple soldier was over his head in the White House. At a time of rapid economic change, he hadn’t a clue how to manage an increasingly sophisticated economy.

Considering the current state of the American economy, this last charge might now be the most damning, if true. But it’s not true. And Grant’s surprisingly sophisticated handling of economics, especially in the wake of the Panic of 1873, suggests that he deserves better from the historians than he has been getting.

Ruth Graham is less kind:

When the Panic of 1873 hit -- one major Philadelphia financial firm crumbled, pulling down other top firms and dozens of banks, and prompting mass layoffs by factories and railroads -- there was no reason to think that President Grant, a Civil War hero and a failed businessman, would be equipped to handle the first country’s first national depression. Brands admits it’s hard to know how much Grant’s decisions had to do with the country’s eventual recovery, but in his agonized decision to veto a bill that would have pumped quick cash into the economy to boost inflation, he sees evidence of “a more subtle thinker than he was deemed by contemporaries and most historians since.”

Issues Obama and Romney Avoid

Noam Chomsky can think of a couple.

Romney's Sick Joke

Paul Krugman is pissed about dishonest claims by Mitt Romney about what is and isn't covered under his healthcare plan:

What Mr. Romney did in the debate, in other words, was, at best, to play a word game with voters, pretending to offer something substantive for the uninsured while actually offering nothing. For all practical purposes, he simply lied about what his policy proposals would do.

Marxism Lite

Benjamin Kunkel reviews Slavoj Žižek's strange critique of capitalism.

American Democracy for Sale

Lewis Lapham, learned and eloquent as always, takes on everything that's wrong with American democracy and America itself ("a republic," as Benjamin Franklin said, "if you can keep it"). Money quote:

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney hold each other responsible for stirring up class warfare between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent; each of them can be counted upon to mourn the passing of America's once-upon-a-time egalitarian state of grace. They deliver the message to fund-raising dinners that charge up to $40,000 for the poached salmon, but the only thing worth noting in the ballroom or the hospitality tent is the absence among the invited bank accounts (prospective donor, showcase celebrity, attending journalist) of anybody intimately acquainted with - seriously angry about, other than rhetorically interested in - the fact of being poor.

For obvious reasons, Sheldon Adelson comes to mind a lot while reading such essays.

The Blog as Gravestone

Consider it:

Culture, as Clifford Geertz said, is the web on which we human animals live, and increasingly that web is, for many of us, also the Web. One of the things culture does is to mediate, through ritual and mystification, those parts of life that are too potent or terrible to face directly, particularly sex and death. Sex, or something having to do with sex, has already certainly made its presence felt on the Internet. Commemoration of the dead is just beginning, in turn, to take place online. Though I have said already that it is most foolhardy to make predictions of this sort, I anticipate that soon the Internet will become the primary site of such commemoration, that pixels will replace marble in conferring whatever bit of immortality there is to be had.

Tragedy's Decline and Fall

In tragic Greek theatre, the thing every protagonist has in common is social status. Since the genre depends on the notion of a fall, it's typically better that this fall occurs from a great height. It was one of the requirements Aristotle specified for tragic drama, "that its suffering subject be a person of worldly importance." Like many, Jenny Diski sees a connection between tragic drama and postmodern celebrity:

Maybe with gossip we have settled for Schadenfreude in place of catharsis: thank heavens the pointlessly fortunate Kim [Kardashian] has cellulite, and that we can watch her more-than-human status crumble on her thighs. Yet, on the other hand, there is a case to be made for such domestically scaled disasters – as being a commonplace version of tragedy writ small, and more suitable for the home-based intimacy of television, newspapers, magazines and internet-linked iPads on the breakfast table, rather than the grander scale of the Theatre of Dionysus. The loss of youth and beauty, from whichever social stratum you view it, is a universal experience, pointing to entropy and our common end. Just being young and becoming old was not tragic enough in itself for the Greeks, but death was, and in observing the decaying body that is what we must at some level become aware of. In present, less reverential times, when we can look at the great and the good and imagine ourselves more directly, perhaps we understand better the power and implications of apparently smaller sadnesses more generally suffered. 

Why We'll Never Stop Talking About Steve Jobs

One year on from Steve Jobs's death, Mat Honan examines his enduring significance in how we talk about technology:

We are actually in the early cycles of Talking About Steve. The next phase is analyzing how things have changed since he died. We’ll trot out his corpse and ask it if it would have released iOS 6 or approved of the iPad Mini, or why Messages keeps sending chats to my phone when I want them on my desktop. That’s already happening, but it is going to accelerate as we get further and further away from his leadership, and with every misstep that Apple makes. It is a lazy and inevitable argument that’s going to be made again and again. The contrarian takes won’t stop, either — the Steve Jobs-wasn’t-so-great stories, every word of which, and every ad sold on every page carrying that message, will reinforce the fact that, yes, he was. Otherwise, why are you still jabbering on about him?

The Atlantic collects tributes to Jobs, including the video published to Apple's homepage yesterday. Here's the post I wrote a year ago on this blog.

(Image: Simon Lutrin, via Wired)

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? Ctd

John Dickerson, like most of us, has something on his mind. And it's about Mitt Romney. Should he win in November, which Romney will show up on the first day in the Oval Office? Will it be Moderate Mitt from Massachusetts, or the heartless conservative? Willard has multiple ideological personality disorder, so it's kind of hard to tell:

"Unbelievable"

President Obama was, as you know, given some much-needed assistance, thanks to an encouraging jobs report showing that 114,000 jobs were created by American employers in September. The headline number: 7.8 percent unemployment. The numbers clearly support the positive recovery narrative the Obama campaign is presenting, and helps reassure Americans that, indeed, the Obama-led economy is heading in the right direction. But since this doesn't conform with the Republican narrative, the new number represents something of an inconvenient truth. And nowhere was conservative incredulity more evident than in the newborn "Unemployment-Rate Truther" movement, spearheaded by former GE CEO Jack Welch, who tweeted, "Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers."

Others joined in, too — even Allen West (not that anyone's particularly surprised about that). Joe Scarborough was a little bit confused on Morning Joe, but Ed Morrissey says he was merely 'expressing scepticism'. Eliot Spitzer says people like Welch are just in the first stage of grief: denial. Ezra Klein tries to knock some sense into the truthers.

Flip the Bird

Michele Malkin finds her rationale for supporting PBS subsidy cuts in the familiar realm of the liberal conspiracy:

Under the Obama administration, Elmo has lobbied for the FCC’s national broadband plan and the first lady’s Big Nanny nutrition bill. Investigative journalist James O’Keefe caught former NPR exec Ron Schiller on tape trashing the Tea Party as “racist” and “Islamophobic.” And the official PBS Twitter account sent a special shout-out to radical leftist group Move On last year for leading the government media rescue charge. Moreover, as I’ve previously reported, NPR and PBS have no problem raising money from corporations and left-wing philanthropists, including billionaire George Soros, whose Open Society Institute gave $1.8 million to pay for at least 100 journalists at NPR member radio stations in all 50 states over the next three years.

She also cites the "roughly 10 Solyndras" the government could save over the next ten years. Those who claim to be supporting this idea under the guise of fiscal responsibility really ought to consider that there are places where cuts should be made first. But that's not going to happen, though. Because this isn't about being fiscally responsible; this is about ideology.

More Boy Scout Problems

The organisation's long history of deplorable gay rights abuses is added to yet again:

The "Poshlost" of Instagram

Teju Cole, whose points are pretentious but embarrassingly true, takes on everything most people find offensive about popular photography:

[T]he problem with the new social photography isn’t merely about post-processing: after all, photographers have always manipulated their images in the darkroom. The filters that Hipstamatic and Instagram provide, the argument goes, are simply modern day alternatives to the dodging and burning that have always been integral to making photographs. This argument is in part true. But the rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. So the problem is not that images are being altered—I remember the thrill I felt the first few times I saw Hipstamatic images, and I shot a few myself buoyed by that thrill—it’s that they’re all being altered in the same way: high contrasts, dewy focus, over-saturation, a skewing of the RGB curve in fairly predictable ways. Correspondingly, the range of subjects is also peculiarly narrow: pets, pretty girlfriends, sunsets, lunch. In other words, the photographic function, which should properly be the domain of the eye and the mind, is being outsourced to the camera and to an algorithm.

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? Ctd

Steve Kornacki isn't buying the "moderate Mitt" idea. According to him, not much has changed:

Romney has long been aware that he can’t actually run on the ideas that his party has generated these past few years, but he’s been further constrained by the right’s deep suspicion of his own ideological credentials. Thus, Romney has spent most of the general election campaign awkwardly switching between vague, broad-stroke pronouncements aimed at swing voters and gestures that mesh with the radicalized, Obama-phobic spirit of today’s GOP base.

What’s changed in the last week or so is the balance: Romney is now primarily pitching his message at non-GOP base voters – people who are likely to recoil at the implications of the policy ideas that the national Republican Party has embraced – and skipping the red meat.

And, because it amuses me, the New Yorker's take on the debate, in the form of a cover.

Facebook Is Like a Chair

Yes, a chair. When I posted this video on Facebook, along with "a chair on which a billion people now sit," one of the wittier people among my 'friends' (in the FB parlance) commented, "More of a settee then?" I was amused. But in all seriousness, a billion people:

The social network hit the one-billion mark on Sept. 14, the company said. But the news was not released until an orchestrated announcement Thursday morning, when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, appeared in interviews with “The Today Show” on NBC and with Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Mr. Zuckerberg also posted a brief announcement on Facebook.

“Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life,” it read. “I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”

But reaction to new advertising features is mixed, as Josh Constine writes of Promoted Posts:

Facebook is becoming a critical one-to-many communication medium for people. Often we’re just sharing fun things that we don’t desperately need eyeballs on, but other times a better news feed position could really help. If I’m trying to sell all my possessions before moving to Thailand, Promoted Posts could be a cost-effective way of making sure more friends know about my garage sale. Raising money for charity or looking for bone marrow donors are some other clearly positive applications.

On the ad above, David Haglund thinks it's disingenuous, and the vague analogies only serve to amplify the message that Facebook is the furniture of your life:

Is Mapping the Mind of a Worm Worth It?

The headline caught my eye, but that was about all I understood. See if you can do better.