Keith Gessen Gives Up the Ghost.

In the newest edition of Titlepage.tv -- the always awkward new project from Daniel Menaker -- Keith Gessen describes his current book All the Sad Young Literary Men. Ever since I picked it up at a book grab at work, I've suspected that it's only the writings of a cowardly narcissist wondering why girls just can't understand him. In an act against the trend of literary memoirs, Gessen hid in his shallow and one-dimensional characters rather than collecting a list of personal essays. Maybe he thought fictionalizing himself and the cadre of n+1 editors would put a little gravitas in his gut, but a slip on Titlepage.tv, above, proves his Fall Out Boy listening inner self is as shallow as expected. Grow a pair, son, and we'll talk in the future.

An aside: congrats to Menaker for having none of it, and looking over his glasses at this shell of a man.

All You Have to Do Is Throw Money, Throw Money.

The end times.

Bear Sterns finally decided to offer the hat to the highest bidder after homeowners called their bluff. As always, the CJR posted the best roundup of the fall of the suspenders-and-cigars firm's newspaper coverage:

As far as government bailouts go, this one could be worse. We’re glad to see the government did not bailout Bear Stearns shareholders, who are already issuing “howls of protests,” the WSJ reports. The paper quotes one employee (Bear Stearns’ employees own one-third of the firm’s shares) who doesn’t get it:

“I’ve got to think we can get more in a liquidation, I’m not selling my shares, this price is dramatically less than the book value Alan Schwartz told us the company is worth,” said a midlevel Bear Stearns executive. “The building is worth $8 a share.”

The building may be worth $8 a share but the rest of the company is worth negative dollars a share, dude.

Turns out they were to busy playing bridge while their firm went to the poor house. Which brings us to the levity of the situation, the red portion in the chart above shows the difference in Bear Stern's stock price from last friday to this morning, and really drives home how dire the situation is. Basically, Bear Sterns went looking for buyers, found one in the historically philanthropic J.P. Morgan and sold for mere pennies (or $2 a share). Its scarier than this everyday story, though, because the fed threw $30 Billion at the merger to leverage debt effectively in the process nationalizing the risk. J.P. Morgan will win big in this deal because the risk is placed on the taxpayers -- the Fed's loan will most likely never be paid -- and it gets at the least a very prime piece of commercial real estate. And as we dig deeper we see a Fed bailout broadcasting a message of laziness about inflation, a message arguing for a company asleep at the wheel, and one too big to fail. Worst of all, the already stretched taxpayer, facing increased threat of foreclosure, just saved the fuckers who financed their debt in the first place.

Movie Tuesday.

Stylish long hair.

Over the weekend I saw two surprisingly great movies, and since I loved them so much I feel we should start a tradition you and I. We'll call it "Movie Tuesday". When I see a good one, I'll jot a few notes about it, and you, good reader, will use the comments section to dissect my purple prose. Sound fun? Here goes:

The first and most spectacular movie I saw this weekend was Gus Van Sandt's skateboard epic Paranoid Park. I won't try to review the whole movie here, just the most breathtaking bit. Needless to say, the story follows a young skateboarder who has committed the most heinous of crimes. Shortly after the act, in an effort to clean himself of the filth -- and guilt -- of the trainyards, he steps into a shower with his head hung in order to hide. As the water flows through his long hair, it collects the individual strands into streams of water running into separate shifting rivers of weight. The soundtrack, at this point, paints an audio collage of natural sounds of birds chirping and wind rushing through leaves. Slowly Van Sandt stops down the camera, the image darkens, and we hear more industrial and more unsettling sounds. At this point the rivulets become something sinister, a viper coat weighing down our young skateboarder. Near the end of the scene he has become a monster quite ephemeral and clearly unnatural, and at least a bit of our sympathy disappears and is quickly replaced by a feeling of revulsion, a sense of shock and awe at the terrifying apparition on screen.

Skateboarding culture as a whole exists in a state of constant exploration and gives its practitioners a sense of ultimate freedom. These urban reclaimers champion the hidden spaces of our devolving urban decay. In past years and centuries, explorers discovered unknown regions of the globe, now these modern day Aguirres find places where people have already been and constructed, but enjoy those most will never see. The very next scene repeats the themes of the shower scene and shows these youngsters gliding up and down a concrete drain tube in a state of bliss, but the camera reverses the shot and we see that the tube is enclosed in on both sides. Effectively, these men underground are less than explorers or heroes: they are trapped by the very freedom they champion. They have a complete inability to flee and escape from civilization's sewers. Spectacular.

The second of the two, Be Kind, Rewind wasn't so much a movie as it was an argument for movies. It follows two mentally challenged video store clerks -- actually everyone in the movie seems a little dim -- and, after one erases the store's entire library after a tragic accident with a power transformer, their attempts at abridging and remaking the movies we know and love. Chock full of references from 2001 to Ernest Goes to Jail, its a heartfelt appeal for the importance of movies, and since I'm such a sucker for shots of an audience lit solely by the flickering shutter of a projector, it had me in sentimental silly tears over the beauty of pretty much any series of moving pictures. Sappy, funny, silly and with a shred of a storyline, Be Kind, Rewind reminds us how completely awesome movies can be, especially ones made on a sunny summer afternoon.

Pop-Tarts is German for Little Iced Pastry O' Germany.

A short heads up: This article at the New York Review of Books by Nicholson Baker explores the hilarity of Wikipedia and I guarantee you will laugh until your sides ache. Way to go NYRB! Not so stuffy after all! (Don't worry, I'm working on something a bit more substantial, but I thought I'd tide all 4 -- or is it three? Hi mom! -- of you over until I've finished.)

Macbeth and Cardassians.

Everyone knows Patrick Stewart is god's gift to acting. His performance on the Star Trek episode "Chain of Command" should prove that to anyone who's seen it. It certainly opened my eyes to the wonders of spectacularly delicious acting as a kid. So it's disappointing that Director Rupert Goold places Patrick Stewart in a largely static Macbeth in it's current run at the BAM.

Goold's take summons the muses of soviet fascist imagery, and jungle camouflaged british actors revolving around Stewart's Macbeth to illuminate his frantic mind. This Macbeth is an AK carrying counterinsurgent in the mold of Mussolini, but terrified of the actual act of treason and murder. It's an interesting take, but its insistence on video art to animate the characters is distracting: largely the actors hit their marks and stick while video projections inject dynamics and tension to the play. Goold has stated that he's taken inspiration from 70s horror flicks, yet he probably hasn't seen much more than their trailers. Every scene, and most apallingly his no wave take on the weyward sister's "Double, Double" speech, is punctuated and fractured like a trailer for the Saw series. This hamfisted approach, in the 2000s no less, is a silly trick to up tension in an overwhelmingly complex introspective work, full of soliloquy and secrecy. It's far past time to throw this cheap cliche out with the baby:

For three hours, Goold's videos play and repeat and it's increasingly frustrating to watch such a misreading of horror. Horror films aren't as slapdash as most think; good ones strive to make the familiar unfamiliar by creating a plausible but off setting. Macbeth does neither. It's set in what looks like a dirty hospital -- you know the aesthetic: dirty tiles, operating tables-- which hardly anyone has ever visited, except in shlocky stupid horror films. The best horror films (Martin, Last House on the Left, Dawn of the Dead) take a familiar setting, the homefront, a mall, a small town, and inject a twist of social commentary to unset the ground, to make a slightly different reality: it's not just flashy lights, blood, and screaming.

(Also, note to the Times: don't send correspondents to galas to get drunk).

Racketeering.

No matter how attractive it is, uttering "And so it begins" is hardly ever warranted. Take Hillary Clinton for example: its hard to say her campaign's dismissal of party rules from running in Michigan and Florida to the recent run on the superdelegates is a strategy wholly unforeseen. But it would be nice just for once to not be prescient:

Mrs. Clinton’s aides said they would also argue to superdelegates that they should give less deference to a lead from Mr. Obama because much of that had been built up in states where there were caucuses, which tend to attract far fewer voters than primaries, where Mrs. Clinton has tended to do better than she has done in caucuses.

“I think for superdelegates, the quality of where the win comes from should matter in terms of making a judgment about who might be the best general election candidate,” said Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s senior campaign adviser.

Unfortunately, Senator Clinton's campaign aides are right; the democratic races in caucus states, even in this heated political season, are attended far less than those in primary states, and even more frustrating, often these races are thrice removed from the popular vote. In Washington, for example, the caucus on Feb. 9th only served to elect delegates to a district caucus held on May 17th at which point the actual Convention delegates are elected. This sort of tiered voting is a far cry from true popular vote democracy, and therefore lowers the quality of the results, which is a hard pill to swallow. However, as you can see in the table in my previous post below, Obama cleaned up in recent primary races, races run in true democratic fashion (as true as could be hoped at this stage at least).

The other tough pill that her campaign is selling is the question of the Michigan and Florida primaries, both of which Clinton won by ignoring the party's ban on campaigning in each state by doing just that (and by keeping her name on the ballot in Michigan). Michigan is a red herring, for she was the only popular candidate on the ballot, and a choice of one, practically -- Mike Gravel et. al really don't count, is a non choice: if you can only vote Hussein, he'll win. But, Florida is unfortunately not. Any argument for democracy must be based on widespread voter enfranchisement, to argue that Florida can not count because they at the state level broke arbitrary rules is disingenuous to the whole democratic experiment. This is a completely infruriating conclusion. In the end, it will come down to, in a framed debate, a matter of allowing votes from neither or both states, and the argument on those terms is over before it started.

Thugs and 'Cuz Written in Urdu.

One of the shining beacons of New Media Journalism is the New York Times. Since their redesign the amount of new offerings in the form of video and specials, like the way they've been handling Campaign '08, are inspiring especially due to the amount of creativity they've been bringing to the table. One of my favorite recent packages is this wildly entertaining video on two rival Urdu language newspapers in Queens. What's most astounding about it however, is its synergy with the print piece. Rather than following the written story closely, the video branches off towards one of the editor's smoking habits, and the other's perfectly encapsulated relationship with his son. The print article adds a bit of color not in the video: the editor's son is a Chomsky quoting upstart who is wary of his father's close, yet troubled, relationship with his rival working in the building just next door. Having a bit of experience in both of these forms, print and video, it's a pretty amazing accomplishment to have one form not directly echo the other, but add to it.

Also, the Times's blogs are completely spectacular. From Nizza's, the Lede focussing on off-beat news (where a recent post covered how a oil platform was evacuated because of a dream), to Errol Morris's Zoom which includes pie-graphs, faked photographs, and dissertation length articles on the problems of photography, it's a wonder that people would read anywhere else on the web (that's a little far but still...). One of the most fascinating discussions you'll see (anywhere on the web), and I'm a little late on the trigger, is this discussion on the Freakonomics blog where an author sat down with a group of actual reformed criminals and watched The Wire to judge the show's accuracy. They call these viewings "Thugs and 'Cuz," 'Cuz' being the author. Over the course of the series you'll find them making great observations over Bunk's guilty conscience and finding fault with Prop Joe's great failing. It's a must read.

Clinton Hill Chill.

JUST SAYIN'!

Waterboarding Afghanis.

Bobby Gates.

Lede: Super Tuesday is a good day to drop news you want ignored. Fact: and what a good news day it was. Double Fact: Journalism is easy! Start with a lede like that and your story will practically write itself, and so here we are.

In the first bit of bad news, CIA director Michael Hayden acknowledged the US's use of waterboarding on al-Qaeda suspects since 9/11. Of course, Attorney General Mukasey quickly fired back with the time-honored argument that waterboarding is less than torture, in fact it's a bit like having a fresh shower (that's a bit unfair of me but humor is humor). According to Hayden's testimony before congress, the CIA is allowed to use waterboarding if it has the consent of the "of the President and legal approval of the Attorney-General."

What we're seeing here is a CIA director shifting blame to the Attorney General's office and using the "just following orders" defense while the Attorney General is saying yes, in extreme circumstances it can and should be legal and not be investigated. Only, perhaps that's not the only story we should be following. Any debate on the use of waterboarding hinges on the right of "enemy combatants" and whether they can and should be held by the US government, and whether the US can hold them indefinitely. Both waterboarding and holding "enemy combatants" are beyond the charter of the US Army, which congress is trying to get the CIA to follow on these two issues. I've gone and buried the lede.

The second bit comes from Afghanistan. In a completely dismissal of unilateralism, Condeleeza Rice is jetting around the world trying to gain combat support for our troops in Afghanistan. Currently in Kabul, Rice demanded that NATO partners support the US's crumbling venture in Afghanistan by sending in combat troops. Of course, the NATO response was basically "No fucking way." The pretext for all this was Robert Gates' quarterback sneak last week against NATO for not "providing troops prepared to 'fight and die' against the Taliban." Although the were asking for a relatively low number of troops, 7500 spread over many governments, it certainly seems that NATO is making the best call here; both in their own interests, and in the interest of the project in Afghanistan. What Afghanistan really needs, and by extension what Iraq really needs, is a force dedicated to building infrastructure in these war torn countries. The US can take care of rounding up the Taliban, hell, we've already done it twice. (Well once it was to give them weapons...)

And all of this in a week when an internet new money success story finally started acting like big slow old money....

Straw Polls and Armchair Analysis.

I've been wondering exactly what the two party's turnout has been, and finding a drought of journalism on the story -- on a national scale; there are many like this -- so, I decided to boot up the good old Excel and spend a bit crunching some numbers. Call it an experiment in Computer Assisted Journalism, I hear it's all the rage. The New York Times out of all of the leading websites -- CNN, The Washington Post, etc. -- has the most efficient web interface for this. Their Primary schedule categorizes the format of each state's election format, whether a primary or a caucus, and because of the trouble with counting voter turnout in caucuses -- see the brouhaha over Nevada's -- I did not include them in my totals.

So far it looks like the Democrats are leading by a considerable margin in pure voter turnout. According to my numbers they have seen close to 14 million participate in the primaries, while the Republicans are lagging at only around 9 million. This is a heartening result, and of course is entirely unscientific; for example, in California, a heavily democratic state, the total Democratic turnout was close to 2 million more than the Republicans managed to poll which skews these partial results heavily. If we ignore california entirely so as to remove some bias, the split is closer 6 million for the republicans to 8 for the Democrats. The numbers for each state are below:

State	Democratic Turnout	Republican Turnout	Margin
New Hampshire	287,322	238,548	48,774
South Carolina	532,227	431,196	101,031
Alabama	542,511	567,291	24,780
Arizona	376,926	451,641	74,715
Arkansas	287,025	209,543	77,482
California	4,059,713	2,323,663	1,736,050
Connecticut	353,515	151,212	202,303
Deleware	96,341	50,237	46,104
Georgia	1,054,799	960,351	94,448
Massachussetts	1,254,537	497,531	757,006
Missouri	823,503	589,289	234,214
New Jersey	1,115,188	558,201	556,987
New York	1,747,978	606,479	1,141,499
Oklahoma	417,096	333,602	83,494
Tennessee	618,723	549,515	69,208
Utah	124,307	284,790	160,483
Totals	13,691,711	8,803,089	4,888,622

Of course, this is a big hay bale of analysis because these primaries were completely separate: neither party was in contest with the other, so the votes are skewed by statistical anomalies too complex to fathom (some Republicans could've voted in the far more media centric Democratic race for kicks). It's still an interesting bit to figure out.