The Glenn Beck-Bo Gritz Continuum

I really thought I could stay away from the whole Glenn Beck thing. I mean, I've laughed at him before, like most of the people who share my political beliefs and/or my professional class have probably laughed at him, but I never got upset or outraged by any of his conspiratorial mud-slinging, because I just dismissed it. It was out there, on the corner of my consciousness, but not much more than that. I mean, he's just an entertainer, right? I don't pay attention to Rush Limbaugh either. Yes, I realize that entertainers like Limbaugh and Beck have become hugely important to the ideological structuring of what passes for "conservatism" in the United States, but honestly, I just thought I could spend whatever awareness I bother to devote to the mass media on something more worthwhile.

And, of course, that's still true. But over the past week, Beck's stupid comments about "social justice" exploded all across the internet--and, perhaps inevitably, elicited comments from numerous of my fellow Mormon bloggers, since Beck is himself a member of the Mormon church...and for him to, however unintentionally, distinguish himself, with his emotionally overwrought patriotic Mormon Christianity, from the rest of the Christian world which foolishly talks about "social justice" was just a little too much. But I didn't blog about it. It's not as though I don't understand what he presumably thinks he's saying, trying to strike back against the "collectivism" which he apparently thinks has somehow sneaked its way into Christian thought; and it's not as though I like Beck being served up as a fat, easy target for much of the religious left, who for the most part really need to do some serious soul-searching themselves. I just didn't know what I could add to the flood of commentary.

Then my old friend Matt Stannard pointed out another bit of Beckian weirdness: he has this convoluted, confused argument which equates state and federal affirmative action programs with the enslavement of human beings, and as a consequence is urging his listeners not to fill out the U.S. Census, which the Constitution requires be conducted every ten years. And all of sudden it came to me: Bo Gritz!

For those of you who don't know, or don't care, James Gordon "Bo" Gritz (rhymes with "rights") as a US Army Special Forces officer who, sometime in the 1980s, discovered countless drug-money-fueled, internationally-coordinated conspiracies working to undermine America's strength and security, its Christian heritage, its moral values, etc., etc. Your typical right-wing extremist, right? Well, actually, Gritz managed a tad more than most of them have ever dreamed. By the 1990s he'd written multiple books, successfully inserted himself into the FBI's (often, it must be admitted, incompetent) engagements with various Freemen and Christian Patriot militias and survivalist groups which proliferated during the glory years of the "New World Order" (and, not coincidentally, became a hero to many of them; he probably saved Randy Weaver's life during the botched stand-off at Ruby Ridge), and had run for president under the slogan, "God, Guns, and Gritz." And here's where it gets interesting: just about everywhere else in America, Gritz was down at the bottom of the ballot, with various other marginalized candidates...but in my Mormon homeland of Utah and Idaho, he was big news. You see, Gritz himself was, for a time anyway, a member of the Mormon church, and thus was able to plug into a lot of deeply subterranean, arch-conservative, anti-government, John-Bircher, "the Constitution-hanging-by-a-thread-and-the-elders-of-Zion-must-save-it" stuff (for contrasting approaches to that venerable bit of Mormon folklore, see here and here) which has echoed around western American Mormon culture for more than a half-century. The result was, perhaps, predictable.

I was an undergraduate at BYU at the time, working for the campus newspaper, and when the election season of 1992 rolled around we student journalists found ourselves surrounded by sometimes-amusing, sometimes-intimidating, zealous, slightly paranoid, deeply moralistic, Christian Mormon patriots. (I can remember a couple of earnest old fellows who visited the newsroom, insisted on speaking to me, and took up an hour of my time explaining how the Federal Reserve had been complicit in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.) Such folks weren't in the majority, not by any means; the great bulk of Utah voters were solid, respectable, socially conservative Republicans, and rolled their eyes at talk about the Illuminati along with the rest of us. But still: there were huge banners and billboard for Bo Gritz to be found all over the countryside. I attended a political rally/religious revival with Gritz which filled an arena up in Salt Lake City; there were thousands of people there, from all over the Intermountain West. Gritz came to a stage set with empty chairs, representing the spirits of the founding fathers, was introduced as another "Captain Moroni" (a widely admired--amongst some Mormons, anyway--military hero from the Book of Mormon), and proceeded to lecture and fulminate to great acclaim about the threats posed to America by Godless Others, the rally concluding with a frankly ritualistic burning of the United Nation's flag.

Well, Gritz earned a respectable 4% of Utah's total votes in 1992 (hey, four percent is more than Ralph Nader ever managed), and in some counties won up to 10%. Then he went off to Idaho to form his own survivalist training compound, and the Mormon church leadership eventually got around to inveighing heavily against that particular style of fundamentalist Mormon who rejects the U.S. court system as apostate and stockpiles eight years worth of wheat in their basement in preparation for Armageddon, and life went on? What does this all this have to do with Glenn Beck? I'm not suggesting there's any direct connection between the two; I'm only observing a pattern. A man finds a faith that includes elements, should he choose to look for them, of patriotic extremism, of warnings about "secret combinations" and historical conspiracies, all in the midst of a broader church culture that is strongly "conservative" (in the Republican sense, mostly) but otherwise, except in the eyes of assorted anti-cult zealots, basically a thoroughly Americanized, modernized, ordinary Christian church. (Which, not surprisingly, has reminded all its American members to be responsible citizens and fill out their census forms completely.) This means, of course, that the community must be enlightened. They must be warned. Glenn Beck, telling his listeners to beware the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing that is "social justice"? Makes perfect sense. He's proselyting, doing missionary work amongst the deluded, sharing the important information that he has discovered (or has been revealed to him? perhaps he thinks so...) with an America that has had the wool pulled over its eyes. Twenty years ago, it was the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Bill Clinton who had put the wool there; today, it's Barack Obama, health care reform, and, apparently, the U.S. Census. Any paranoid fantasy will do, because any one of them can be connected to the larger moral struggle which, for reasons both good and bad, much of my own Mormon culture and many of the Mormon teachings I accept make not just theoretically possible, but on some readings, downright credible.

I don't feel too bad about this--most of American Christianity makes possible its own fringes as well, so in a way I suppose it's comforting to know what we Mormons, just like the rest of you, have our clowns and kooks too. And hey, given that the line between fringe kookiness and thoughtful criticism is sometimes thin, I'm actually kind of grateful that we can call a nut like Beck our own: after all, someone has to keep outlandish arguments alive, just in case they someday turn out to be true. But I do feel bad for Beck himself. My friend Matt, in a different post, suggests that he's already almost entirely burned through his 15 minutes of fame--and that, in having invested so heavily in a fearful, suspicious mindset that has so little to do with the heart of the faith he has chosen, may find that after his star has been eclipsed that he won't have enough ordinary connection and commitment to the unfortunately mostly ordinary folks who fill Mormon congregations to get the kind of support from his ward that he may need. Which would be a loss--and I say that not just as a believer myself, but also as someone who, in watching clips of the show, keeps feeling that Beck himself, probably like Gritz, seriously needs a hug.

Friday Morning Videos: "Welcome to the Boomtown"

I have no memory of ever seeing this video, on Friday Night Videos or anywhere else, and it seems to me like I didn't miss much. The lead singer of this one-hit wonder band, David & David, occasionally appears bored out of his skull. Still, when I heard the song on a local radio station the other day, all sorts of late 80s memories came flooding back, mostly involving Miami Vice. There was a harsh, glamorous, cynical drug chic to that era. I would guess that before members of the mainstream suburban audience like myself--and, more importantly, the corporations that marketed our entertainment to us--woke up to just how devastating an effect crack was having on America's cities, drugs were portrayed, so far as I remember anyway, as mostly a cool-bad accoutrement of the white upper classes. Which I suppose they in part still are, and always have been, but in the 80s we had Nancy Reagan teaching us all to "Just Say No," and so of course the folks in Hollywood had to present their temptations to us in neon lights and pastel colors. This video couldn't be more perfectly aligned with that aesthetic, right down to the grainy footage and the streaking street lights. Killer guitar work, though.

I Don't Feel So Bad About Missing Nearly All of This Year's Oscar-Nominated Movies Anymore

Some years Melissa and I do well; this year, despite the expansion of the Best Picture category to 10 films, we did rather poorly. I guess I've been spending all my movie-watching time catching up. But that's okay, because now I've seen every Oscar-bait film Hollywood will ever produce:



How many Oscar winners did you see parodied in those three and a half minutes? I caught about ten.

More Movies Without Melissa

Once again, some flicks I've been taking in on my own lately, mostly from four days I spent keeping half an eye on a bunch of students at a Model United Nations conference in St. Louis the week before last, but some just when I stayed up late after my wife crashed early with a headache.

48 Hrs.: how could I have missed this one for so many years? Not quite as fun as some of the buddy-cop films which followed in its wake, but better than more than a few others. Walter Hill's penchant for abrupt violence that really doesn't square with the film built around those set pieces is on good display (I'm thinking of the pointlessly long fist fight between Murphy and Nolte in particular), but overall, a hell of a fun flick. I'd seen Murphy's infamous "I'm a nigger with a badge!" scene before, but it was good to see the whole thing in context.

The Barbarian Invasions: an engaging drama, but most of its time was spent on the film's least engaging characters. Rémy is a fun character to watch, especially for academics like me, but the real intelligence, drama, and humor of the film is to be found in his son Dominique's manipulation of, and comments upon, issues of life and health and death in Quebec. I would have happily traded twenty minutes of tired, irony-drenched ruminations by Rémy's friends about their sex lives for just five more minutes with the hospital administrator who indignantly insists--just before accepting a bribe--that Canada is "not a third world country."

Barbarians at the Gate: an HBO film from the early 90s, long before the success of The Sopranos and all the rest raised their aspirations. Basically just a smart, well-made, tv movie, but it's certainly a much better filmed tale of Wall Street greed than the atrocious adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities (which, in a nice touch, Laurie Johnson, RJ Nabisco bigwig F. Ross Johnson's wife, is seen reading in several scenes). And, of course, watching James Garner chewing the scenery is always a pleasure.

Bon Cop, Bad Cop: another film based, in part, in Quebec, this one strongly recommended by Jacob Levy. And I agree; a good buddy-cop flick, better than 48 Hrs., in fact. But even given buddy-cop conventions, I found myself very curious about how the film's strange mix of in-some-ways-predictable, in-some-ways-surprising, stereotypes played out for home audiences. I mean, the genre is hardly an enlightened one, but I didn't expect a film out of Canada to portray every single woman on screen as either a helpless incompetent, a whiner and a screamer, or as desperately desiring to sleep with one of the two main characters. Maybe Canadians really are Americans after all.

Brokeback Mountain: a very good film; I'm glad I finally saw it. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous, and everything that was said about Heath Ledger's terrific portrayal of the emotionally stunted, deeply confused Ennis Del Mar is correct. As I seem to recall several people observing at the time, it's not actually that much of a gay movie; there were only a few scenes where the fact that the two star-crossed lovers were men took on truly serious narrative significance. Frustrating that so much hand-wringing was elicited for such a basically straightforward drama.

I'm Not There: I'm sorry, but I call this one a failure. I suppose I can understand what Todd Haynes was trying to do, but I simply couldn't relate to any of the different characters which they come up with as...what do you want to call them? Avatars of Bob Dylan? Whatever. I don't need an ordinary biopic, and I don't mind using his music itself as a frame for the story, but for heaven's sake, put a story on screen...and if you're not, make it stylized and self-referential enough to be interesting in how it tells itself. But this film was neither. I hope Bob Dylan himself doesn't approve of these kind of misbegotten hagiographies; I'll think less of him if he does.

Klute: it's a crime that I've not seen this before: a first-rate thriller and a wonderful study of two finely written and performed characters. Jane Fonda's Bree Daniels isn't particularly sexy, but is rather compelling in her charisma and self-confidence, which works perfectly, making her struggle against falling in love with Donald Sutherland's John Klute that much more believable and forceful. And as for Klute himself--man, what a creation. The perfect smart, loyal, 1971 middle-aged buttoned-down straight man; you can imagine his whole life one of patiently, wisely, watching and waiting, perfectly capable of dealing any situation that came his way. I'd love to image Klute meeting Harry Caul from The Conversation.

Nobody's Fool: a very slight story, really, without nearly enough narrative oomph to make me care all that much about the fate of any of the characters. But the characters themselves...man, what a well-acted bunch. There's not a false note in the whole film. The way that Paul Newman's Sully gets distracted at his old house, has to be reminded that he's supposed to be watching his grandson Will by his miserable boss, takes his grandson home to his estranged son Peter and tries to make it up to him: the whole thing is quiet, and may not add up to much, but every note of it rings tragically true.

The Rookie: not my usual sort of film, but I'm more than willing to check out feel-good films on occasion, the same way I sometimes like movies about animals and little kids. In this case, every step in this inspirational Disney flick was predictable, but some of the steps were worth a look. Long ago, I interviewed for a job in that part of Texas, and drove out there with a friend from Dallas; the scenes with Dennis Quaid practicing his pitch over and over again in an empty field captures the lonely, plain beauty of those stretches of country pretty well.

An Unreasonable Man: hey, I make no apologies (partly because I've made them before)--I like Ralph Nader (more evidence here and here). I recognize that he's often self-righteousness, frequently narrow-minded, that he holds grudges, seems to lack much appreciation for any of the context of the work he and his staffers have done for decades, and that he's probably mainly operating off spite and pride these days. Meaning...what? That his enormous legislation accomplishments should be dismissed? That he isn't fundamentally correct about the relationships between corporations and democratic citizenship? I don't think so. And this film puts all that into balance. Of course, I doubt that most of those who pulled their hair out over Nader back in 2000 would consider the movie to be a "fair" treatment of Nader's impact, but as I saw it, it didn't shy at all away from his monomania, and it gave plenty of air time to those who are convinced that Nader stole the 2000 election from Gore (despite conclusive data to the contrary). The movie's controlling thesis was that Nader is an admirable, "unreasonable," man, and it proves its case well.

Place, Limits, Liberty (In That Order)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Herewith, some thoughts about the arguments taking place over at the Front Porch Republic, on the occasion of its first birthday.

About a month ago, Harvey Mansfield--one of the very few living scholars of political theory whose ideas and arguments have had a real-word impact--wrote a thoughtful essay for The Weekly Standard, alleging that the central problem with President Obama's and the Democratic party's determination to reform our nations health insurance systems was that it betrayed a love for "progress" over a love for "liberty." Mansfield writes: "[Obama's] politics is apolitical; it wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible. Only through this conception can one recognize, and understand, the pretentiousness of wanting to be the last president to take up health care."

The idea of putting an end to politics would--and should--of course inflame anyone who subscribes to at least some of the principles avowed by FPR, as I do; after all, while localism certainly does involve a purely aesthetic or historical affection for one's own community, it also involves the political recognition that it is within one's own community that genuine democracy, and real self-government, is possible. To attempt to "put an end to politics," in the name of moving the whole conversation forward to some progressive end, would thus appear to be an attack on one of the central purposes of localism, and there something that anyone who writes for Front Porch Republic ought to oppose.

So how is it that I, someone who has pleasantly participated at FPR since only a couple of weeks after its beginning, have regularly defended it?

Well, William Galston--himself no slouch when it comes to scholars of political theory influencing real-world debates--provides a bit of an answer. In a strong rebuttal to Mansfield's accusations, Galston brushes aside Mansfield's specific characterization of Obama's and the Democrats' proposals as tendentious, and hones in on his basic presumption: that there is an "inherent contradiction between progress and liberty." This he simply rejects: "Simply put," Galston asserts, "removing issues from the political agenda--placing them beyond dispute--often promotes liberty."

I think Galston is correct. I think that the push against a government reform in how insurance companies offer coverage and how costs are to be controlled--about which there are, to be sure, innumerable and important political disputes--too often, and wrongly, seems to partake of an attitude which presents "liberty" primary in terms of a private contest between interests, and "progress" primary in terms of government agencies intervening (presumably in an authoritarian manner) into those private contests to "resolve" issues, and thereby take them out of the people's hands entirely. Galston summarizes this stance succinctly:

If government doesn't have the right [to intervene], then considerations of efficacy are irrelevant. Even if government could bring about a good result by acting ultra vires, doing so would be an invasion of liberty, which is the most fundamental good. Rather than invade liberty, we should be prepared to live with the consequences of government forbearance. (I note for the record that if Abraham Lincoln had accepted this view, we’d probably be presenting passports at the Virginia/Maryland border.)

I say that I think this conception of the argument between liberty and progress is wrong--and wrong in such a way that has implications for the kind of debates which keep me interested in what goes on at FPR--because I think it fails to respect the deep logic (and not just the euphonious quality!) behind the particular arrangement of terms at the top of FPR's masthead: "Place. Limits. Liberty." I think this conception (which I've yammered about before, and which in perhaps unavoidable in a country whose bone-deep individualism was diagnosed and fretted over by Tocqueville close to two centuries ago) fails to appreciate that liberty is often, necessarily, a positive and empowering concept, which flows from being able to (politically!) establish and "resolve" ones place, accept and work within the community limits which any such place would entail, and find greater liberty of real opportunity, action and accomplishment accordingly. Galston elaborates upon this distinction at length:

In the real world, there is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There are only specific freedoms, which differ in their conditions and consequences. FDR famously enumerated four such freedoms, dividing them into two pairs: freedom of speech and worship; freedom from want and fear. The first pair had long been recognized and enshrined in the Constitution. The second were a new formulation, and Roosevelt made them concrete when he signed Social Security into law, justifying it as a way of promoting freedom from want....The conservatives of his day dismissed the second pair as "New Deal freedoms" rather than "American freedoms." But those who have experienced the freedoms made possible by the New Deal are not so dismissive. It is often observed, rightly, that Social Security has virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly. But this noble achievement has an equally profound flip side. Throughout human history, those who reached the age where they could no longer work have typically depended on their children or on charity for their basic subsistence. Social Security broke this age-old dependency by giving the elderly a minimum degree of economic self-sufficiency, expanding their range of effective control over the conditions of their post-retirement years....

"Freedom of" points toward spheres of action in which individuals make choices--for example, which faith to embrace, or whether to endorse any faith at all. The task of government is in part to secure those spheres against interference by individuals, groups, or government itself....The other face of freedom--"freedom from"--points toward circumstances that (it is presumed) we all wish to avoid. In such instances, the task of government is, so far as possible, to immunize individuals against undesired circumstances. Here, government acts to protect not individual agency and choice, but rather an individual's life circumstances against outcomes that no one would choose, or willingly endure. It follows that the "right to choose" is but a part of freedom in the fuller sense. As a motorist, I am rightly free to choose my own route and destination. But government correctly infers that I also wish to be protected from smashing into other cars, and so restricts which side of the road I and others can drive on. My desire to avoid an accident is no less real than my desire to drive where I please....

The point is that any society that takes freedom from want and fear seriously has made collective decisions: Certain conditions are objectively bad; its citizens should not have to endure them if the means of their abatement are in hand; and individual choice is not a necessary component of, and may be a hindrance to attaining, these freedoms. The current debate over health care only underscores these truths.

It is worth noting that while Galston's formulation of this debate might strike some readers as accommodating a degree of collective action and communitarian "intervention" and "resolution" that might seem a poor fit for the United States of America (which, if true, doesn't necessary speak well for our political culture, I suspect), Galston himself has insisted that he does not believe positive liberty should be, and would not want to see it, carried too far. In an old debate with Michael Lind, in fact, Galston insisted that "freedom" was the central value for the great majority of Americans, meaning that we are all individualists of one fashion or another, and hence have to think carefully about how we want to speak of providing collective goods so that communities, families, and individuals can enjoy the liberty which a secure and supportive and fair environment can provide. He agrees with many of Lind's civic republican ideas, particularly Lind's observation that a more explicitly communitarian or "public interest" language "permits republican liberals to justify public education, policies promoting widespread economic independence, taxation, military or militia service, jury duty and voting, along with public health policies and environmental protection, without needing to show that these programs and institutions could be derived from separate, individual goods or that each individual citizen is likely to benefit"...but he concludes that, as valuable as the concept of public liberty may be, "the language of republicanism inherently looks backward to a system of economic provision and social class structure that is gone for good and that applying it to the economic and social problems of the present will often lead to damaging results." In other words, as I would say it (putting my own preferred spin on Galston's words), the revolutions of mobility, technology, and individual choice--all diagnosed long ago by Marx so very well--have so disrupted the permanence of our socio-economic ties and traditional relations that all we can do is to empower people in their chosen publics and places, rather than work to instantiate a public liberty that truly belongs to us all. There can be, of course, egalitarian provision and protection on a broad, general, even national scale, for the sake of promoting the aforementioned positive liberties...though the particulars and extent of such are and should be subject to continuous political debate (it is pretty settled that the United States will have a national defense, for example, while the debate about health insurance regulation remains unsettled). But to to really go deep into the ability and the right of a people to democratically govern themselves, to truly create a "beloved community" and truly exercise sovereignty over public things--to go, in other words, fully republican (or socialist, if you prefer)--requires, in today's world, a turn to local places, and their limits. That is where all the more general collective actions will enable the greatest, and most valued, liberty of all.

So the arguments--and they are political arguments--over what it means to value and wish to preserve one's front porch are going to continue, and they will, I think rightly, include arguments that can incorporate possibilities of action that range from the most personal and individual of decisions to some (not many, but some) that will properly involve the highest and broadest levels of government. To argue that there is something illegitimate, something by definition apolitical, and thus opposed to liberty, in an attempt to respond to a particular political issue through the national government, is no more inherently sensible, I think, than claiming it is apolitical to allow a neighborhood council to make a decision about the maintenance of the sidewalks on your street, or to allow a county election to determine policies about the sale of alcohol in your town, or to allow a state legislature to make a decision about gambling in your county. Any of those decisions could be bad, of course, and any might deserve to be protested. But to deny the value of the kind of positive, collective liberty they demonstrate (though, as I said above, I would suggest that you arguably need to see the more interventionary of those demonstrations limited to communities where the relevant scale allows the residents to express themselves more directly and democratically) is to fall, intentionally or not, into a more privatized and negative notion of liberty, one that sees it as an individual possession, and not something that also obtains in places themselves.

About a month ago, Caleb Stegall pointed to a particular taxonomy that he found to be particularly relevant to figuring out where different folks stand at the Front Porch Republic. Suggesting that while some on the left side of FPR might "make common cause against certain Classic Liberal centrists" along with localists like himself, the fact remains that folks like him and me may be "miles apart on a more fundamental level." I'm not entirely in agreement with his taxonomy (I've thought about some of my own), or his conclusion, but he's probably more right than wrong. The Jeffersonian-individualist strain in American localism (and populism too, for that matter) will probably always be far distant from (and far more common than, as well) my own preferred Laschian-communitarian strain. But we go along. And it makes for good discussions--and good politics too--all the same.

Friday Morning Videos: "Money's Too Tight (to Mention)"

From slick, smooth, late-80s rich, African-American R&B to angry, rough, mid-80s poor, blue-eyed R&B: there's a transition for you! All hail Simply Red, the greatest British soul band of them all.

Yet Another Politics and Movies Bleg

For a third time, I find myself turning to the Plain People of the Internet (I believe John Holbo trademarked that phrase) to answer a dilemma I have relating to movies and politics in the classroom. This time, though, I'm going international.

In two week's time, I'll start teaching a short evening class at Newman University, almost literally next door to Friends, on "World Government Systems." As I read the course description, it really should be called "Government Systems of the World," to avoid any confusion; in any case, I'm going to be teaching it as a comparative politics course, starting with laying down some general groundwork for comparing different forms of government around the world, and then examining in depth seven or eight (I haven't quite finished the syllabus yet) different countries over the next seven weeks. The selection will be pretty standard (that is, Euro-centric) for this kind of course: Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, India, possibly Nigeria, possibly Russia, etc. What is different is that I want to require the students to experience a bit of cinematic culture along with their required readings. And so, I'm going to assign them to find and watch (and perhaps I will obtain and show a clip of, in each class) a film that comes from and/or focuses on the particular country which were are studying that day. The question is, which one?

The only selection I'm absolutely certain of is showing/requiring The Queen for Great Britain. Not only is an absolutely terrific movie, but it looks directly at the nature and limits of the constitutional monarchy in a time of popular crisis. But what should I do for any of the others? Ideally, all the other movies will be like The Queen, in that they will have something to say about the country's governing system, but I'm not sure that will be an absolute requirement; I want the films to be entertaining and to have something to connect to the students with as well. (If I didn't care about the latter, then I could just so some educational documentary.) I'm thinking about The Nasty Girl for Germany (or possibly The Lives of Others), and Ikiru for Japan. What else? Dare I require Au Revoir, Les Enfants for France? (Or maybe Indochine or The Battle of Algiers--though those are both really about the French interacting with the world beyond France, not touching on France itself.) Can I avoid showing Gandhi for India? (I really liked Slumdog Millionaire--talking about the new, post-globalization India? Or perhaps I should ask my wife for Bollywood recommendations...)

More thoughts, recommendations, anyone?

Maybe Not the Best Music Video Ever, But Certainly the Most Awesome

Who can resist the crazy stuff which OK Go comes up with? I can't. They were saying only yesterday that this video would be everywhere within a day or two, and they're right.



Someone who is better that this (mean, I guess, both digital filmmaking and booby-trap construction) tell me: how many different shots constitute this video? Because I just can't believe it was all done in one.

Friday Morning Videos: "Two Occasions"

I've never been much into the smooth R&B musical scene (give me funkier stuff by Earth, Wind & Fire or Stevie Wonder any day), but sometimes the whole "quiet storm" groove really grabs me. Anyway, this song did. I heard it only once or twice, when I saw the video in the summer of 1988 on MTV (my parents briefly flirted with cable when I came home from my freshman year). And then I was off on a church mission for two years to South Korea...and weirdly, this song--or whatever I could remember of it, which became less and less as the months went by--just kept gliding around the back of my consciousness. I came back to the U.S., and would occasionally embark on grand efforts to track down the song, but I couldn't remember who sang it, or its title, or hardly any of the lyrics...and besides, I was in Provo, UT, attending Brigham Young University, not exactly a place where folks familiar with Babyface Edmonds's early work were thick on the ground. It was years before I finally stumbled on to this video again. Glad I did.

This is What is Going to Be on My Computer All Day

Because that's just the kind of nerd I am.

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