Beam Me Up, Whitey Saturday, March 05, 2005

A friend suggested that Commander Cisco, of Deep Space Nine, met the Sipowicz Test I pitched earlier. I don't think he fits. There was a fairly steady cast around him for the show's whole run--unlike Sipowicz, who anchored NYPD Blue while the supporting players came and went, and became a natural focal point for the show. And I just don't remember there being lots of tension about whether or not Cisco was going to turn into a black-hole space ghost. It's not like every single episode was about that; DS9 was an ensemble, and everyone had their little storyline each week. I'd bet that by the time the last episode rolled around, more people were biting their nails about what would happen to Odo et al than El Jefe.

How about the X-Files folks? A big subtext of the show was Gillian Anderson learning to trust Duchovny and accept his dumbass explanations for things; and Duchovny (I guess) sinking into lunacy.

I guess my prejudice against them, and Cisco, is that they didn't really assert themselves as personalities. Maybe Sipowicz scored points by chewing the scenery, but that wasn't all: He had the chops to act the hell out of any scene he was in, and you genuinely believed he was a cop. Duchovny and Anderson were likeable, but there is no way in hell they were FBI agents on Planet Earth. Duchovny was stuck on Whine, Anderson was always whispering her way through Chris Carter's undergraduate comparative-religion textbook. Cisco, meanwhile, wouldn't emote during a colonoscopy.

Anyhow, enough snark. Talk later.

@ 7:06:00 AM, ,

Sextet Thursday, March 03, 2005

I should also note that old videotapes are really startling to watch. This one looked like it had been a rental for many moons, and the action in some scenes was literally impossible to make out. I essentially missed the most important plot point in the movie because I couldn't see what was going on, and I'm still not sure I understand the ending completely. (Hey Bay Ridge: What does Paul Newman see in that box at his brother's place at the end?)

@ 9:41:00 AM, ,

Quintet Offensive

For lack of a better title. A friend of mine, the same one who makes sure I maintain rigorous neutrality in political disputes, has been trying to get me to watch the Robert Altman movie Quintet for about a gazillion years--essentially, since I started working on the Secret Thing, which as we all know is a sci-fi game called Damnation Decade. I finally got around to it last night, while Wrong Turn Jr. battled a plastic monkey in his ExerSaucer.
 
It's...well, it's about what you'd expect from an Altman film starring Paul Newman, with a mostly Swedish cast. Imagine Ingmar Bergman directing a Tarkovsky movie on an Ed Wood budget. The world is frozen over, and Paul Newman shows up at a (formerly domed?) city where everybody is obsessed with the eponymous board game. Then it turns out there's this other version of the game where people kill each other, which Newman gets caught up in...and it all ends with a big existential pronouncement.
 
I guess I liked it. If I had been a few years older when it came out (1979) I probably would've seen it at the time and been raving about it today. It reminds me of the stories I used to write when I was a teenager: sci-fi with a Modernist message in 72-point type. (Now, of course, I write sci-fi with a Roman Catholic message in 72-point type. So you can see I've matured.) Now that style grates. I guess I wouldn't mind so much if the message of the movie didn't seem so old and so obvious: God is dead, life is meaningless, the journey is the destination, etc. Yeah yeah yeah. What else ya got? On top of that, Newman phones this one in, and Altman never bothers to make Quintet itself seem like a compelling game, or even to explain the rules. If society's going to give up everything else to play a game, it's got to be pretty goddamn compelling, and Quintet just didn't look it.
 
On the other hand, I liked the way Altman sets up the world. He never explains what happened to the world, and he sets up the society effectively and efficiently: The sets are pretty basic but they never feel fake. After a while you feel like you know every corner of that oddball city.
 
I forgot to mention the other day that an old favorite said goodbye: NYPD Blue. I was obsessed with it for years, then fell away somewhere in the middle of Mark-Paul's run. Things got to be too rote, and it was too hard to stay up late. But I had to come back for the finale. It was nice, very low-key, and the clip show beforehand made me think I've missed some great stuff this season. (Including Jimmy Smits coming back as a ghost. Spoooooooky!) The big ending was, of course, that Dennis Franz is put in charge of the squad, completing his redemption and (maybe) ending the cosmic reaming he's been suffering for 12 seasons.
 
Here's a question. The first season of the show was fairly obviously Caruso's show. After that, Franz became the focus and the show developed a huge overall storyline: Sipowicz turns from a loose cannon into a standout cop. Has there ever been another show that did that--consciously making its whole run "about" a character's evolution? I mean, Archie Bunker softened up over time, but the show wasn't really about that.
 
Come on, couch potatoes! Let me know.

@ 9:28:00 AM, ,

By the Way... Monday, February 28, 2005

The site now has comments enabled, but you have to click on the little pound-sign at the bottom of each post to activate/view them. If anybody knows how to get these onto the main page, let me know.

@ 10:38:00 PM, ,

The Heuristics of the Mystics

Another reason I absolutely love posting ten-paragraph dead-earnest political asides is that inevitably I screw something up and have to correct it. In this case, the Bay Ridge office of Wrong Turn Journal informs me (twice) that two points in my Gannon post were incorrect: Gannon had, apparently, been called on before in briefings; and his bit about Harry Reid saying "soup lines" were just around the corner is a paraphrase of a commentary on Reid's line--not what the guy actually said.

We aims to please here at Wrong Turn Journal, but I will note that neither fact changes the broader thrust of the argument, and that if the Earth opened up tomorrow and Tim Curry's "Darkness" character from Legend devoured the entire White House Press Corps, I would probably write an item about the new Doves record instead.

@ 10:28:00 PM, ,

A Dead Salmon Frozen in a Waterfall Sunday, February 27, 2005

Another reason I hate political posts is all the caveats, which I neglected to include last time. I am not saying journalists should not have opinions or should not ask pointed questions or should only ask pointed questions with which I agree. However: It would be nice if it were generally acknowledged that pointed questions can be skewed left as well as right. In other words, the trend is to see Fox News and the New York Post et al as presenting a horrible Bizarro right-wing view of reality, as opposed to middle-of-the-road, straight-faced sources like the New York Times or Washington Post. But, by my reading and many others', those guys are definitively Left.

I don't mind a news source (note again that I say news source and not opinion page) that lets you know it's attacking stories from a certain political perspective. It just gets wearying to see news sources that clearly have a political perspective deny that they have any perspective.

At any rate, the caveat. And a comment: For all the crap Sting has done since, "Synchronicity" still impresses.

@ 1:06:00 PM, ,

How About a Kiss for Your Cousin Dupree?

After a couple weeks, I finally feel confident enough to make some comment about the Gannon/Talon news business. As far as I can tell, the relevant issues are: How did a guy like that get access to a press briefing? And how dare somebody ask such a softball question? In both cases the answer seems to point to stinkiness on the part of GWB or one of his (alleged) puppet masters.

I'm going to cheat a little, and quote a National Review article on the topic:

First off, let's give Gannon's question in full:

Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock-solid and there’s no crisis there. You’ve said you’re going to reach out to these people. How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?


Clearly he had an agenda. But he was describing what appeared to be a contradiction, no? Onto his access, and his bias:

[T]he White House said unequivocally that Gannon did not have a hard pass. Instead, he was allowed in on what are known as daily passes, in which the journalist calls the White House ahead of time and gives his name, date of birth, and Social Security number. Gannon, the White House said, entered under his real name, Guckert.

...

The fact is, it's simply not too hard to get inside for a briefing, and people of all professional and ideological stripes are there. There is, for example, Russell Mokhiber, who runs a far-left newsletter and sometimes asks McClellan off-the-wall questions: Recently, he wanted to know whether President Bush believes the Sixth Commandment applies to the war in Iraq. Last year, Mokhiber took time off to volunteer for the Ralph Nader campaign. When he returned, McClellan said, at the briefing, "Russ, welcome back. It's been a while. How was the Nader campaign?"

That's not exactly an atmosphere of enforced ideological rigidity. And White House correspondents, by and large, want to keep the door as open as possible. "The whole story here is that there's a low bar to get into the White House, which I'm perfectly fine with as a journalist and as a member of the White House Correspondents' Association," says Ron Hutcheson, who covers the White House for Knight-Ridder newspapers and is president of the correspondents' group. "My outrage factor on this is pretty low."


While we're talking about off-the-wall, or wildly biased, questions, here's a list of quotes from one Helen Thomas, who has been covering the White House since the Camelot days. Courtesy John Hawkins:

"My follow-up is, why does (George Bush) want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis?" -- January 6, 2003

"Is this (war) revenge, 11 years of revenge?" -- January 6, 2003

"[W]hy is [Bush] going to bomb them? I mean, how do you bomb people back to democracy? This is a question of conquest. They didn't ask to be "liberated" by the United States. This is our self-imposed political solution for them." — Feb. 26, 2003

"We didn't go in to win the war on terrorism when we invaded Iraq." -- April 29, 2004

"...following up Ann Compton's question [regarding Saddam Hussein's court hearing], does [President Bush] agree with Saddam that Presidents are above the law?" -- July 1, 2004

Q: "Prime Minister Blair took full personal responsibility for taking his nation into war under falsehoods -- under reasons that have been determined now to be false. Is President Bush also willing to take full, personal responsibility --"

A: "I think Prime Minister Blair said that it was the right thing to do; that Saddam Hussein's regime was a threat."

Q: "Those were not the reasons he took his country into war. It turned out to be untrue, and the same is true for us. Does the President take full, personal responsibility for this war?"

A: "The issue here is what do you to with a threat in a post-September 11th world? Either you live with a threat, or you confront the threat."

Q: "There was no threat."

A: "The President made the decision to confront the threat."

Q: "Saddam Hussein did not threaten this country." -- July 19, 2004

"Why are we killing people in Iraq? There are many men, women and children being killed there. I mean, what is the reason we are there, killing people, continuing. It's outrageous." -- Nov. 29, 2004

"Has the President given any orders to stop the ongoing brutalization of Iraqi prisoners?" -- Dec. 8, 2004.


You may read that list and say, "Testify, sister!" You may even think she didn't go far enough. But there's no way you can look at that and tell me that the Bushies are trying to stifle dissent at press conferences; or that they're stacking the gallery with lockstep ideologues--or, most important, that reporters for "real" news sources don't have their own angles just as Gannon did. If Helen Thomas gets her questions in every time, why shouldn't somebody on Gannon's side of the fence?

I find it hilarious and instructive that most people don't blink at Thomas's style of questions, but when Gannon asked one with his colors showing (the first time he'd ever been called on, by the way) the hunt was on to figure out what the hell was up. A number of people e-mailed me within hours to ask what I thought of the "Jeff Gannon thing." Nobody has ever e-mailed me to ask what I thought of the "Helen Thomas thing" or the "Sam Donaldson thing." Hold on, Mr. President!

The commonplace thought in this area is: Public officials deserve to have their feet held to the fire. Fair enough. But that principle should apply to everyone. Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, whom Gannon zinged, deserve to get called out just as consistently and just as strongly--and by my reading they clearly do not, except in disreputable outlets like The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. You'll notice I didn't say The WSJ's "news pages"--which, again by my reading, are about as centrist-left as the Times or Washington Post's daily coverage. I can count the number of Republicans, which is not even to say conservatives, I have met there on one hand.

One final thought. Another commonplace around this story is that Jeff Gannon wasn't a "real" journalist. I offer you a couple examples of what "real journalists" do, and how vigorously they pursue the truth.

During the closing days of the campaign last year, Dan Rather and his cronies essentially invented news stories to trash GWB: They accepted patently phony documents from a source they knew was unreliable and had a history of Bush-bashing, and didn't bother to do due diligence with the people involved who might have supported Bush's claims in this area. Everybody involved in these stories will walk away and find jobs if they want them.

Eason Jordan, late of CNN, admitted that he altered news coverage of Saddam's regime before the war so that he would continue to have access to this modern-day Saladin. Nobody blinked. Then, at the Davos economic conference this year he threw off an accusation that American soldiers deliberately targeted journalists in Baghdad, without any supporting evidence. When bloggers pressed the story, he didn't bother trying to back up his claim. He resigned, with much gnashing of teeth from the rest of the press about right-wing hate squads. The story through the media isn't "What has Jordan been up to all this time?" but "Who are these mysterious Internet loonies?"

Remember all that when you question Gannon's credentials. And also remember what he's being fucked for: asking one tart question--asking a question!--at a presser. Who's stifling dissent here?

@ 8:40:00 AM, ,