A batshit list of the greatest presidents compiled by the Times Online. The only detectable criteria? Executive authority and imperial ambitions. Thus, the high ranking of Polk, Truman, and Reagan. As usual, the Woodrow Wilson entry cops to the disappointed wail of a hundred boring historians: Wilson was "reluctant to lead the US into the First World War, but was then instrumental in building a multi-lateral post-war consensus which included the League of Nations, even if Congress never allowed America to join it." No mention of the Espionage Act, the Palmer raids, or manipulating us into World War One, the craftiest example of passive-aggressiveness in our political history. Small comfort, I suppose, that our former masters across the Atlantic remain such willing collusionists in the composition of our national mythology.

Welcome, November

What a trip the next few days will be. For distraction, I turn to wishing it was my birthday, and that someone would buy this for me, especially after reading this review.

In the meantime, Robert Lowell's "Waking Early Sunday Morning," hours before Daylight Savings Time ends:

O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.

Stop, back off. The salmon breaks
water, and now my body wakes
to feel the unpolluted joy
and criminal leisure of a boy –
no rainbow smashing a dry fly
in the white run is free as I,
here squatting like a dragon on
time's hoard before the day's begun!

Fierce, fireless mind, running downhill.
Look up and see the harbor fill:
business as usual in eclipse
goes down to the sea in ships –
wake of refuse, dacron rope,
bound for Bermuda or Good Hope,
all bright before the morning watch
the wine-dark hulls of yawl and ketch.

I watch a glass of water wet
with a fine fuzz of icy sweat,
silvery colors touched with sky,
serene in their neutrality –
yet if I shift, or change my mood,
I see some object made of wood,
background behind it of brown grain,
to darken it, but not to stain.

O that the spirit could remain
tinged but untarnished by its strain!
Better dressed and stacking birch,
or lost with the Faithful at Church –
anywhere, but somewhere else!
And now the new electric bells,
clearly chiming, "Faith of our fathers,"
and now the congregation gathers.

O Bible chopped and crucified
in hymns we hear but do not read,
none of the milder subtleties
of grace or art will sweeten these
stiff quatrains shoveled out four-square –
they sing of peace, and preach despair;
yet they gave darkness some control,
and left a loophole for the soul.

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.

Hammering military splendor,
top-heavy Goliath in full armor –
little redemption in the mass
liquidations of their brass,
elephant and phalanx moving
with the times and still improving,
when that kingdom hit the crash:
a million foreskins stacked like trash ...

Sing softer! But what if a new
diminuendo brings no true
tenderness, only restlessness,
excess, the hunger for success,
sanity or self-deception
fixed and kicked by reckless caution,
while we listen to the bells –
anywhere, but somewhere else!

O to break loose. All life's grandeur
is something with a girl in summer ...
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!

No weekends for the gods now. Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life ...

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

Diner is a great movie, worthy of the popular comparisons to Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni, another coming-of-age film in which the male director turns a bemused, pitiless gaze on the behavior of young men who don't get enough tail or for whom tail is no longer enough. James Wolcott remembers his favorite moment: the roast beef sandwich exchange between Paul Reiser and Steve Guttenberg, watched by Daniel Stern and Kevin Bacon as grinning Furies. Sure, Quentin Tarantino no doubt rewound this scene at the video store at which he worked many times; the rhythms predict what he'd do with a half dozen hit men in a coffee shop discussing the decline of Madonna's songwriting.

According to Wolcott, Pauline Kael (whose review of this unreleased film in 1982 was instrumental in getting it played somewhere, anywhere) admitted her own bafflement at the screening -- the young Wolcott served as "interpreter to [Diner's] strange tribal ways." Even acknowledging how familiarity dulls us to an older generation's shock, I can't say what struck her as so weird about the roast beef scene. My favorites moments in Diner rely on the "disjointed" rhythms that Wolcott mentions. The post-introductory credits school dance, for example, at which we meet most of the main characters, features Mickey Rourke descending to a basement to rescue a shockingly young, callow, harmless Kevin Bacon. Rourke interrupts Bacon smashing windows. When asked why, Bacon shrugs and says, "For a smile." As we later discover, it's a perfect encapsulation of this spontaneous, doomed character, but in that minute it has the smell of something offhand that analysis can't contain -- it evokes life as lived. I felt protective of Bacon, and Rourke's slight pause as he tries to figure out how to respond is an echo; he wants to protect his buddy too.

Another gem: the close-up of Tim Daly as he stares stolidly into space, while Guttenberg and his mother reenact their habitual coming-home argument: he wants a bologna sandwich, she won't make it, he insists, she surrenders. Daly, also home for the holidays, knows how this scene will play, and he's bored stiff; but we know he'll be back next year, and he'll protect his integrity by signaling his boredom again.

It's true: with the exception of Bacon, and maybe Barkin, not one of the actors has struck these grace notes, or pulled something notable out of themselves this notable again (I say this as a fan of Reiser's King Smarm turn in Aliens). Nor Levinson, for that matter.

McCain the Socialist

At an October 2000 appearance on "Hardball," before a college audience:



Sarah Palin's an even bigger egregious apostle of Marx, Hendrik Hertzberg reminds us:

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

Silly, but I'm a sucker for pastiche like this -- in this case, Edmund Morris' fictional recreation of how Theodore Roosevelt, John McCain's political hero, might have said about the presidential campaign had he been a paid consultant on FOX News or MSNBC (fat chance). As author of one of the great multi-part biographies of the last thirty years, Morris understands how his subject's conflict between staying loyal to an instinctual embrace of muscle-flexing and respect for "logothetes" might have provoked an unprecedented throwing up of hands by the great Bull Moose himself.

On Obama:

A. He may and probably will turn out to be a perfectly respectable president, whose achievements will be disheartening compared with what we had expected, but who nevertheless will have done well enough to justify us in renominating him — for you must remember that to renominate him would be a very serious thing, only to be justified by really strong reasons.

Q. He doesn’t have Mr. McCain’s foreign policy experience. As president, how would he personify us around the world?

A. It always pays for a nation to be a gentleman.

Q. There’ll be Joe Biden to counsel him, of course. Assuming Mr. Obama can keep track of what he’s saying.

A. (laughing) You can’t nail marmalade against a wall.

If I'm to believe Mom's complaints, ACORN is this election's bugaboo. Two of the best rebuttals to claims of voter registration and voter fraud -- or, rather, the conflation of voter registration with voter fraud: Christopher Hayes himself votes twice (sort of); and Dahlia Litwick, who ignores now irrefutable evidence that the presidential election of 1960 was rigged but nevertheless points the finger at the public figures responsible for perpetuating the paranoia as recently as last year (hint: the acronym rhymes with "bloatus") .

These two posts offer comfort. It's hard to consider art when you're constantly checking political blogs until November 4.

Should John McCain win in 11 days, he can't credit his team, which has run the shallowest, most image-centered campaign since the 1988 presidential race. Robert Draper's excellent NYT Magazine story (published this Sunday) may have the same effect as Ron Suskind's infamous Bush White House piece published shortly before Election Day. What emerges from Draper's story is the pathetic fumbling of a man whose eminently marketable virtues – virtues he has never stopped trumpeting – failed to mesh with the designs of his advisers. 

Oh dear:

Despite their leeriness of being quoted, McCain’s senior advisers remained palpably confident of victory — at least until very recently. By October, the succession of backfiring narratives would compel some to reappraise not only McCain’s chances but also the decisions made by Schmidt, who only a short time ago was hailed as the savior who brought discipline and unrepentant toughness to a listing campaign. “For better or for worse, our campaign has been fought from tactic to tactic,” one senior adviser glumly acknowledged to me in early October, just after Schmidt received authorization from McCain to unleash a new wave of ads attacking Obama’s character. “So this is the new tactic.”

"Tactics." When you rely on "tactics," you doom yourself to play defense. The real tragedy is how a person who depended as much on literal and metaphorical war wounds to bolster his integrity as John McCain found, too late, that these wounds and the "tactics" of modern campaigning are irreconcilable. He can talk to Bob Dole about it.

Pokey in spots, and Juliette Binoche's dye job makes her look like she's auditioning to play Courtney Love, but I rather loved The Flight of the Red Balloon, especially since the original film is oh-so-precious. Rewatching a scene in which Binoche and Song Fang gently argue over the acceptance of a gift in the former's apartment, I was struck by how wittily Hou pans between the child and the adults; it's like James' What Maisie Knew -- this child barely cognizant of what these confused adults are up to; yet there's enough distance between his perceptions and ours that the two women's interactions are regarded quizzically, affectionately (the apartment in which most of the drama unspools becomes a fourth main character). As a Hou dilettante (I've only loved The Flowers of Shanghai and the silent bit in Three Times), I accepted the substitution of Paris for Taiwan, and the injection of Binoche's starpower into a scenario which under different circumstances might try my patience as much as it did Godfrey Cheshire's; if we can accept this beautiful woman as harried to the point of desperation, we can absolve the visual didacticism enforced whenever that damn red balloon bumps against a window. Star power as jus' folks.

Ned and I had the same thought about the most important part of Colin Powell's endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama: he emphasized the damage that repeated invocations of "Muslim" does to young men in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Pakistan watching Al Jazeera:

We have two wars. We have economic problems. We have health problems. We have education problems. We have infrastructure problems. We have problems around the world with our allies. So those are the problems the American people wanted to hear about, not about Mr. Ayers, not about who’s a Muslim or who’s not a Muslim. Those kinds of images going out on Al-Jazeera are killing us around the world.

And we have got to say to the world, it doesn’t make any difference who you are or what you are, if you’re an American, you’re an American. And this business, for example, of the congressman from Minnesota who’s going around saying, “Let’s examine all congressmen to see who is pro-America or not pro-America” — we have got to stop this kind of nonsense, pull ourselves together and remember that our great strength is in our unity and in our diversity. And so, that really was driving me.

And Ned's anecdote is wrenching.

A scary loop:

Movies!

Paranoid Park: By far the most effective of the series of teen anomie films that Gus Van Sant has released since abandoning a potentially lucrative career grinding out Good Will Hunting clones. The Warholian stoner ogling of vacuous, pillow-lipped boys around which Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days were centered still dominates, but the chronological games awaken him. Exploiting non actor Gabe Nevins's wan interest in sex and the world of adults is a shrewd move; when things go wrong, so completely is the film's sensibility tied to Nevins that we get no sense of imminent doom, which makes PP's impact vaguely horrifying hours later.

Standard Operating Procedure: Although much more effective than Errol Morris' hagiographic portrait of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara called The Fog of War (it could have been called The Fog of Interviewing), it fetishizes blood and guts (closeups of dripping noses and mouths) and intercuts dramatic recreations of events that look like "Unsolved Mysteries" stock footage. Another strike: who told filmmakers that Philip Glass-inspired scores suggest mystery and seriousness?

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist: In 2020, teens will watch this on their computers and smirk at the fashions, attitudes, and music. Director/screenwriter/retired child actor Michael Cera will explain their intentions on a rueful, punchy commentary track. Adults will note that hackneyed plot contrivances and vomit jokes still charm the young (and some adults). Michael Cera is smart enough to note it publicly too.