gentleman's war

[danschank]

a couple of weeks back, I caught paul wolfowitz on charlie rose. officially, he was there to discuss his time as president of the world bank-- focusing on what he was trying to accomplish in africa... and, inevitably, dodging questions about making his own girlfriend senior communications officer during his time there

Comments

[chocolatebark]

I think it's interesting that Rose comes across as the rude one...We've got some powerful social norms in the information age, still. Don't ask, don't tell, indeed.

[danschank]

I think it's interesting that Rose comes across as the rude one

i'm making myself out to be a lot more naive than i actually am up there, but i couldn't think of a better way of framing the argument. i guess what i meant in regards to rudeness is that the tension produced by charlie's questioning is visceral-- and if you accept the parameters of the interview, he's clearly cheating on the rules. what frightens me (and i should probably read someone like louis althusser, who from what i gather makes these sort of arguments) is that this feels as if it's a natural state of affairs. you have to overcome the etiquette to level the playing field of the argument, and the etiquette is damn near invisible.

[chocolatebark]

Oh no, I'm not saying 'Oh ho ho, danschank, if only it was Charlie Rose who is the problem', I was sort of agreeing that to a lot of people out there watching, they're not really going to think about Paul Wolfowitz as an individual, and what his role in Iraq (or past misadventures), they're just thinking about Wolfowitz in relation to the latest headline, if that makes sense. In that sense, by adopting a level of decorum that assumes that Wolfowitz is a thing that can be reasoned with, Charlie Rose can't help but falter when trying to get Wolfowitz to acknowledge some of the things that he's done in a semi-objective manner. Or, I guess to be a lot more succinct, I think that rather than Charlie Rose's questions, it'd be the format of the show that would have to change.

Which of course, ain't likely to happen on.....what network is Charlie Rose on? MSNBC?

[danschank]

Oh no, I'm not saying 'Oh ho ho, danschank, if only it was Charlie Rose who is the problem'

didn't think you were... sometimes i just like to use the comment threads to qualify what i'm saying in the posts. it's a way of cheating, kinda. i get to make things clearer without paying my usual, bizarre over-attention to the way things sound, read, etc.

but yeah-- its the structure that needs to change, certainly. and as i said to jamezm below, it's also a sense of what public figures owe the public in terms of debate. i don't typically think of coutesy as something terrifying, but lately i'm stuck on how it keeps power in place.

finally, charlie rose is on public television, and is unfortunately one of the pundits least guilty of the kind of softball i'm describing. usually he's a lot tougher and more comprehensive than, say, tim russert. but even charlie has to agree to bogus terms to get someone as high profile as wolfowitz, which is the heart and soul of the problem.

[orchid_and_wasp]

Wonderful.

Hey, who are some of your favourite writers on/about film?

thanks

[danschank]

unfortunately, i tend to read more about film online than anywhere else. as far as real-deal film criticism goes i'm not particularly well-read at all. i never studied film in college or grad school, so i write this stuff without the obligatory survey of eisenstein and so forth.

a book i wholeheartedly recommend is james baldwin's the devil finds work, his totally under-rated look at race and the movies (including a really great assessment of his role as screenwriter for an abandoned malcolm x bio-pic put together by the producers of the che! movie where jack palance plays castro!!!).

as for critics, etc.-- i like j. hoberman, who writes for the village voice, a lot. also jonathan rosenbaum of the chicago reader. most of the stuff on slantmagazine.com is pretty good (though i'm not as into their record reviews).

as for blogs and so forth, i like long pauses film diary quite a bit. the guy is as big of a tsai ming-liang nut as i am. also, take a look at "the pinnochio theory", which is probably my favorite weblog in general, and is

[danschank]

you know, israeli film is one of the most glaring gaps in my movie knowledge... i haven't seen anything by amos gitai at all, actually. truth be told, i've been meaning to read a real-deal history of the nation lately, with all the tension in the area, etc. i'm on a kick where i try to make the films i watch supplement the books i read (not all the time, obvs.), and israel is a subject i'm hoping to get around to

[mrwaggish]

Nice entry. R+W is one of my favorite films of all time, one of the few instances where formalism yields a brutal and affecting result. (Jancso's other films of the time are pretty good with this too!)

[danschank]

well thanks, man... your journal pretty much made me want to rent it in the first place, so thank you too!

i agree that it's got a really peculiar take on formalism, and one that enters the political sphere in a more compelling way than a lot of similar modernist tropes. i'll definitely continue seeking him out. returning has been urging e to check out red psalm for quite some time now...

[mrwaggish]

Red Psalm is quite stunning, but very different. I won't say more. Let me know if you have trouble finding it, nudge nudge.

I can think of a lot of politically engaged formalism that I don't like (Pasolini, Antonioni, Muratova some of Godard's lesser work, the much-loathed-by-me Arguedas), but Jancso is quite rare in being effective in that regard.

[danschank]

yeah, one of the things i liked most about red and the white is how it avoided the, let's say, existentialist cliches of antonioni. curious as to which pasolini films you consider "formalist" though? he's not someone i tend to think of according to those terms. in fact, i'd say that a film with a comparably idiosyncratic take on the political would be the gospel according to saint matthew. both films really surprised me, regarding the angle at which they dished out their relevance.

as for rare dvds, you're really kind! wondering what the deal is with that karagarga thing? for the time being i have a functional computer again, and that's a world i'd love to dive into, but the site isn't particularly user-friendly, and i'm notoriously dumb when it comes to computers (still figuring out how to make windows media player read the discs you sent as something other than audio files... which is why i'm not mentioning their content yet)...

[top_boy]

Agreed!
This is a wonderful post.

thanks

[danschank]

welcome to the freiends list... looking forward to your obsession with grime, a genre i know in the most superficial terms only...

Re: thanks

[top_boy]

sadly, my obsession with grime ended last year when (in my opinion) the genre died! i'd be more than happy to send a compilation of the gems if you're interested though.

Re: thanks

[danschank]

i never know what to think when people declare "the death of" a genre, but yeah-- i'd heard something similar myself. wouldn't know where to begin regarding the music itself, but if you're on soulseek, my username is thebadbaroque. been trading stuff through pando also, if you're familiar with that... so yeah, awesome!