Friend of the Law School. The Capital Times reports:

Frederick W. Miller, the longtime chairman of the board of The Capital Times Co. who died Dec. 15 at the age of 91, left more than $7 million of his estate to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to endow the deanship of its Law School, from which he graduated in 1936....

Life in Madison: chilly, musical, and overworked. Well, I'm horribly busy today. With an edit of a long law review article on one side of my desk and a pile of admissions files on the other, two more pieces to edit arrived as email attachments yesterday. That's not supposed to happen. I'm feeling some pressure! And I started the day by getting up extra early to take advantage of my dentist's first appointment of the day (because it minimizes the time spent in the waiting room). The dentist pipes in music that most resembles the kinds of songs that contestants on American Idol sing. When I'm at the dentist I'm hyper-aware of how much I hate that kind of music, which makes me wonder what strange force makes me watch American Idol. Oh, the Motown stuff last night was good--I like Fantasia--but it's that generic bellowing anthemic crap that I can't tolerate (for example, at the dentist today, Melissa Etheridge singing something along the lines of "It only hurts when I breathe....," where the approach seems to be come up with one line that appears clever and just emote the hell out of that one line over and over). But that is all to say: I really do have a lot of work to get on to. I've got a Conlaw class at 11, where we'll be beginning the always fun topic of the negative Commerce Clause. So let me just leave my valued return readers with another little Madison picture. This one is from a few days back, but the weather today has returned to the state it was the day these two guys were playing. Yes, it's chilly again today, yet many students will just assume the weather, once warm, will continue on a steady path toward summer heat. There will be people out in sandals and T-shirts today, I'm sure, even thought the temperature is back in the 30s. So here are two of our local street musicians as they were two Saturdays ago, playing their hearts out doing one of the kind of songs I really do like, that old 60s tune "I'm a Believer."



UPDATE: I've been informed that wasn't Melissa Etheridge. Sorry, Melissa.

Journeys With George. I didn't have HBO back when Alexandra Pelosi's documentary Journeys With George was on originally, so it was nice to finally get the DVD. It's quite enjoyable. Pelosi did not hesitate to some include footage shot from the TV (usually with the camera tilted to give the talking heads that David-McCallum-on-Outer-Limits giant cranium effect). This encouraged me to continue with my TV photographing propensity, displayed below with John Kerry on Dick Cavett and earlier with Courtney Love on Letterman (TiVo helps you get the best frames). I like the effect of getting extra close, which Pelosi did, and forthrightly showing the lines and imperfections of the TV image. It's similar to the way Roy Lichtenstein gets close to a newspaper image and revels in the dots:


So let me give you a frame I liked from Journey's With George, where George Bush is spelling out the letters to VICTORY in cheerleader style. This is the R:



Anyway, it's a cool documentary, quite funny, about what it's like to be a journalist following a candidate around. At one point, there's a telling statement, that the journalists traveling with Gore can't stand him (though they want him to win), while Bush, surrounded by reporters who are hoping he will fail, has "charmed the pants off" them.

"George Bush has launched a full-scale assault on women while the war in Iraq continues to provide cover for the damage he is doing to our rights at home." So reads a letter from NOW I received yesterday. Oh, how I detest this kind of rhetoric! I suppose it helps raise money to instill a sense of emergency and to make the other side look aggressively evil.

I was particularly struck by the weird invocations of the war on terrorism, because there is no connection between the war and abortion rights (other than that people in politics have positions and fight about both things). The letter calls for a march on Washington in support of abortion rights, and states "we've put our bodies on the line to stop anti-abortion terrorism. And now we must take to the streets again." One could defend the use of the word terrorism by saying it refers only to people who try to murder abortion providers and bomb clinics, but the letter is all about defeating George Bush. The letter says we need to "send the ultra-conservatives who've hijacked out government a message," and I don't think the word "hijack" (or any other word) in this letter is accidental.

The letter describes the faces of "Bush and the applauding crowd of men behind him," as he signed "an abortion ban," as "smirking." It contends that Bush is "pulling out all the stops to impose his anti-woman agenda." (This is done, in case you're interested, by appointing federal judges who are "extremists who will enforce his malicious policies." And did you know that NOW's "allies in the U.S. Senate understand that we expect them to filibuster each and every judicial nominee who opposes" abortion rights?)

The tone of this letter is so overheated and lacking in rationality that if I were not seeing the name of the organization that sent it, I would not believe it was sent by a large, important organization. Clearly, many people who support abortion rights also understand and can respect the position of those who oppose them. I'm completely offended by this characterization of abortion opponents as outrageous extremists who smirk with glee as they exercise ill-gotten power to carry out a dangerous anti-woman agenda.

Slightly off Madison windows. Maybe you should use a window sill as a bookshelf, especially if your window is at street level and people look in all the time. Face the spines inward, and no one will know what you're reading, but they will know that you are a book-reader ... or at least a book-user.



But this other window really disturbs me, not because I'm wasting any time worrying about people getting tattoos. I'm worried to find myself living in a world where people get tattoos in places that display gnomes in the window. (Is tattooing a step in a profit-making scheme that includes stealing underpants?)

Chants recently chanted. The AP reports:

The Massachusetts Legislature adopted a new version of a state constitutional amendment Monday that would ban gay marriage and legalize civil unions ... The vote came at the opening of the third round of a constitutional convention on the contentious issue, as competing cries of "Jesus Christ" and "Equal Rights" shook the Statehouse outside the legislative chamber...

After each intonation of "Jesus" by gay rights opponents, gay rights advocates tacked on "loves us." The two opposing sides then shouted "Jesus Christ" and "Equal Rights" simultaneously, blending into a single, indistinguishable chant.

"I'm just here to support Christ," said Olivia Long, 32, of Boston, a parishioner at New Covenant Christian Church. "We love all people, but we want to keep it like it was in the beginning."

The indecipherable blending of "Jesus Christ" and "Equal Rights" is not the most absurd chant reported in today's news, however. That would be "Karl Rove ain't got no soul," chanted while pounding on the windows of Karl Rove's house, with the bizarre expectation of improving "educational opportunities for immigrants."

Lidrock. We were just talking last night about why CD packaging hasn't been improved (after all these years of complaints about how hard they are to open). If people aren't buying enough of a product--and CD sales are bad these days--they ought to do some things to make it more appealing. Making CDs way cheaper was the main idea that occurred to us (that and making them easier to open). But here's a really new idea: making soda lids that contain little CDs. This is especially cool as a design idea because a soda lid and a CD are both round with a center hole. It seems that CDs have always belonged there. That's really satisfying. There's also a plan to put little DVDs in the lids of movie theater sodas: that's quite elegant!

A Borders encounter with a Bush supporter. I was browsing at the front display table at Borders last night, when an old woman, for some reason, started talking to me about how bad it is that there are so many books attacking Bush. I told her not to worry, that no one who didn't already oppose Bush would read a book like that, so it didn't matter. Maybe I specialize in reassuring old ladies, because I also went so far as to assure her that Bush was going to win and he was going to win by a lot. Another basis for reassuring her occurred to me as I was driving home: the people who buy these Bush-attacking books imagine they are doing something for the anti-Bush cause by buying the book, but a more rational use of the same money would be to donate it to the Kerry campaign; she should feel reassured that money that ought rationally be donated to Kerry is just going to some writers.

UPDATE: I would note that the covers of the books do function as anti-Bush ads, so the books' presence on the display tables and racks in the bookstores does work as advertising that has some effect on the people who are undecided about Bush. If the books sell well enough, they will be prominently displayed, so buying the books helps maintain the display, so the covers (quasi-ads) are seen even by the people who won't buy the book. Thus, buying the anti-Bush book is indirectly buying an advertisement for Kerry.

Kerry in 1971. C-Span showed an old episode of The Dick Cavett Show with the young John Kerry debating a Nixon supporter, also a Vietnam vet, about the Vietnam War--in particular the assertion that the soldiers were war criminals. Kerry was very articulate and also quite mild mannered, almost diffident, with eyes downcast most of the time, making it hard to capture an image of him. Below are two images, one showing the glorious 1970s set, sprouting with orange shag carpeting and space age chairs. The other vet, John O'Neill, started off incredibly stilted, reading an opening statement, and awkwardly trying to attack Kerry, but he loosened up a bit toward the end. Seeing O'Neill reminded me of how tough it was for a young man to be an actively political conservative in those days. It was very uncool! Better to be the frat boy, then, as perhaps George Bush aptly perceived.

The Evil One relents, just enough to preserve the allegiance of one who was about to turn to the light.

The original Eternal Sunshine ending. I can't find a link for it, but the original text of Charlie Kaufman's screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is floating about. Too bad the original ending was not used and we were given more of a Hollywood conventional ending. Maybe they filmed the original ending and we'll get it on the DVD, so don't read on if you don't want it spoiled. [UPDATE IN BRACKETS: Chris tells me the original ending was filmed, but it tested poorly, so expect to find it on the DVD. If you want to wait for the cool surprise ending, skip the next sentence.] But in the original screenplay we see the two main characters as old people and learn that they have gone through their whole lives erasing each other and then getting back together fifteen times!

Another Hollywood decision that was imposed on the film was to concentrate on the two main characters--"This is really Joel and Clementine's story..."--and only use the other characters to further the plot. You may have noticed that the Jim Carrey character referred several times to his current girlfriend Naomi, but then she never showed up. She is in many scenes in the original screenplay.

One thing in the movie that bugged me was that the way the Jim Carrey character is suddenly inspired to skip work and take a train out to Montauk and go to the beach on a cold day. He wonders what came over him. Then, when there's one woman out there on the beach, and there she is again in the restaurant later, and then again on the train home, it never occurs to him to connect her insistent presence with his original impulse to go out there. Wouldn't anyone with half a brain have thought fate made her appear here? I mean, if he did that first impulsive act with this whole "something was drawing me off the one train onto the other train" attitude shouldn't that belief in destiny have stayed with him so that he would expected something to happen? And then she's so obviously it. But it would be dumb to have him just see her as his destiny at that point, so he can't say it, and we're not supposed to notice.

UPDATE: Trimblog has a link for the original screenplay.

Madison themes merge here. In the window of Badger Liquor, there's this chalked sign:



And one of their more traditional signs:



And, to find it from a distance, the familiar ice cubes;

Scenes From a Marriage. I've been watching the DVD of the Ingmar Bergman TV series Scenes From a Marriage, which had been edited down to feature film length for theater release in the US back in 1974. (Of course, being DVD, the film version is included. It's a beautiful Criterion release.) It is so exciting to get a chance to see the original form of the material, because the film itself was incredibly good and one had to assume the TV version was better. I saw the film when it came out, and one scene in particular had made a big impression on me, which I had remembered very clearly for 30 years. Liv Ullman plays a woman who, as presented in the first scene, is happily married. She's a divorce lawyer (so put this on those lists of films about law), and in another scene, which occurs in the second TV episode ("The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug"), she's interviewing a woman who is seeking a divorce after 20 years of marriage, a woman who told her husband 15 years ago that she didn't love him and wanted to leave but then agreed to stay until the children had grown. Now, describing her feelings about the marriage, she starts to speak of her feelings generally: all of her senses have diminished and the whole world lacks feeling and seems "puny" and insignificant. There's a closeup at this point that I waited to see once again, just the woman's fingers touching the wooden table next to her, as she describes having lost her sense of feeling. Then there's a closeup of Liv Ullman's face, the professional demeanor combined with the horrible fear that the same thing is happening to her. Liv Ullman's face at that point, which for some reason I didn't remember as much as the hand on the table, is my candidate for best closeup of all time (oh, along with Ingrid Bergman--another Swedish actress--at the end of Casablanca).

Scenes From a Marriage made an interesting contrast to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, seen earlier yesterday, and written about below. Sunshine is all about how you'll regret leaving, but Scenes is all about how you'll regret staying. In Sunshine, you stand to lose the love of your life. In Scenes, you stand to lose your own senses. There was a different zeitgeist then! Anyway, if that partner you're trying to leave took you to see Sunshine to prove to you why you should stay, you can argue the other side with Scenes, which is designed to stun you out of your complacency. No one wants to be that woman 20 years into a relationship who can't even feel the reality of the table under her hand. I think she might be the most frightening character in the history of film.

The Kerry surgery-snowboarding mystery. There are reports today that John Kerry is going in for surgery on his shoulder, to deal with an old injury that was aggravated while he was campaigning in Iowa. Why did he go snowboarding then? I guess he had to make a big show of being hale and hearty before appearing weak and debilitated. (He's going to be wearing a sling for a week.) No wonder he got pissed off at the Secret Service agent who knocked him over when he was snowboarding.

Ah, poor guy. It's his right shoulder too, and he's had all those hands to shake and still has all those hands left to shake. God forbid he should wince or look at all unenthusiastic when engaging physically with the crowds. And then when one thing goes wrong, it creates opportunities to tie to other things, as the Times reports:

Some campaign aides were concerned about scheduling the surgery, which is elective, because they feared it would ... revive memories of Mr. Kerry's struggle with prostate cancer last year, though it is unrelated.

When he went on vacation earlier this month, some Democrats suggested that Mr. Kerry was leaving himself vulnerable to negative portrayals in President Bush's television advertisements while Mr. Kerry was still relatively unknown to many voters, and the break for surgery presents a similar risk.

As if the "vacation" wasn't part of the campaign. And of course any damn thing a candidate does is "vulnerable to negative portrayals." But I'm particularly tired of the subject of the health of the candidates. Somehow I don't think the Democrats are going to pass up the opportunity to bring up the topic of Cheney's heart or whatever such topic presents itself for "negative portrayal."

The science of reality show casting.The NYT reports--on the front page--on the science of casting for a reality show:

[T]o be cast in the second season of "The Apprentice" this fall, [an auditioner] will have to make it through six rounds of cuts, two extensive questionnaires, a medical exam, an intelligence test and the kind of background check usually reserved for secret agents.

The casting of reality shows, once an intuitive, on-the-fly endeavor, has become much more of a science, with its own growing set of protocols and rituals. Several producers have hired psychologists to help them with the vetting process.

Good subject for a law school exam, isn’t it? Oh, I think the fact that there was science to the casting of reality shows was evident long ago. I did a Civil Procedure II exam using this material maybe ten years ago, after the third season of The Real World. At that point, you could see that the casting was scarcely done “on-the-fly.” There was always a person with conservative or religious principles (e.g. Rachel) who was chosen to react to the outrageous character (e.g., Puck) and the character with something about him that would challenge her values (e.g., Pedro), and a person who was extra sensitive about conflict who was chosen to suffer. The Apprentice is produced by the same company that does The Real World, so it’s no surprise that the cast of characters resembles the mix on the MTV show. You need drama and comedy, so be sure to cast a Puck--that is, in modern parlance, an Omarosa.

But suddenly it’s front page news that the producers of reality shows are putting some major effort into their selections? Oh, I think the NYT is just hot to talk about The Apprentice:

"The Apprentice" — with its majestic views of the New York skyline and lingering shots of the show's other towering presence, Donald J. Trump — is built on a seemingly can't-miss concept, a seductive weave of aspiration and Darwinism.

“Seductive weave”? “Seductive weave”? Quit making me think about Trump’s hair!

"A small incident will shortly develop to your advantage." So says my fortune cookie (which is in no position to know). Time to leave the restaurant: the laptop battery is down at 16%. I did just want to post this one picture, which says at least one true thing about Madison food:

But what movie did you see? I saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the first movie I've gone out to see since House of Sand and Fog, which long time (or archive) readers of this blog know I saw back in January, in the first week of blogging. Fog ... Sunshine ... is there some kind of weather theme to your movie selections?

So was Eternal Sunshine "the best movie of the decade" as Slate would have it? That hardly seemed possible and of course it wasn't. It was bearable, but then I'm impatient. I prefer TV--including watching DVDs--because I don't like being stuck in the theater. Some things need to be seen on the big screen, but ES isn't one of them. It has a music video look that would do better on TV I think. There is a bluish pall over the whole thing, broken only by Kate Winslet's hair, orange sweatshirt, and a few other things. Okay, that's a color idea. I think color movies should have color ideas, but I think it is a video screen, not a movie screen idea.

Other random things I'll say about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:

1. Mark Ruffalo seemed to have the Rick Moranis role.

2. Kirsten Dunst looks like my mother looked as a young woman--not counting the hair.

3. Kate Winslet modeled her American accent after a particular American actress--a la Nicole Kidman doing Meg Ryan in To Die For--but I couldn't figure out which one. Email me if you do.

4. This movie is a powerful date movie, because it teaches the lesson that for all its flaws, the relationship you are in is the great love of your life that you must cling to desperately no matter how intent you may have been to rid yourself of every last vestige of it. Don't leave: you'll be sorry!

5. Romantic movie clichés that were done reasonably well: running about in the lapping waves shows how in love people are, a kooky young woman can show a man who doesn't know what life is what life is, romping in snow is reaching one's human potential.

6. As far as mess-with-your-brain movies go, I can think of three I like better than Eternal Sunshine: Total Recall, Brazil, and Being John Malkovich. There are probably others, but I just can't think of them.

7. With Kate Winslet in the picture, I couldn't help thinking about Titanic a few times, like when Jim Carrey was desperately pulling her along through hallways and when she (in the Leonardo diCaprio position) was dragging Carrey out on the ice to show him how to let lose and start to live (it was like that arms-spread on the prow scene).

End of random observations about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Small pleasures. At the restaurant where I've stopped for an after-movie, mid-afternoon meal of the day, there's wifi. So, a little time to eat Sichuan beef and to check Sitemeter for the day-after effects of an Instapundit link. My Sitemeter graph for the month shows four spikes, all from Instapundit. Thanks, Glenn! There are days when I feel that I'm talking to only a few people or even only writing to myself, but accepting that people can read over my shoulder--that the whole world can read over my shoulder--even though maybe no one at all is. It was that no one's reading feeling I had yesterday when I went out to lunch. The wifi wasn't working right in my usual café (which you can see pictured below, with a big Corona truck parked outside), so I hadn't checked the old Sitemeter in a while. I came back from lunch to find that 2000 people had dropped by. That was pretty amusing!

At the Kubrick archive, the dog is not well. (Via Metafilter) Access to the Kubrick archive leads to strange discoveries:

… a large room painted blue and filled with books. … "Every book in this room is about Napoleon!"

"…just about every ghost book ever written..."

"…a box containing photographs of the exteriors of maybe every mountain hotel in the world."

...fan letters … perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. … Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. ... inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from [a] particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten "F-P" on the positive ones and "F-N" on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked "F-C".

… a box marked "Sniper head - scary". Inside, wrapped in newspaper, is an extremely lifelike and completely disgusting disembodied head of a young Vietnamese girl, the veins in her neck protruding horribly, her eyes staring out, her lips slightly open, her tongue just visible.

… two boxes that read Shadow On The Sun. … The boxes contain two volumes of what appears to be a cheesy sci-fi radio drama script. The story begins with a sick dog: "Can you run me over to Oxford with my dog?" says the dog's owner. "He's not very well. I'm a bit worried about him, John." This is typed. Kubrick has handwritten below it: "THE DOG IS NOT WELL."

The kinder, gentler Madison. It's not all divisive politics. There are spring flowers taking hold in the concrete:




Music in the offing:



And a pleasant café from which to blog and contemplate beer-drinking:

Local politics. Here's a new Madison character, perhaps exemplifying the level of public discourse:

Things I've averted my eyes from. This says it all. (Link via Wonkette.) What a shameful display it's been! Must the Presidential campaign infect everything and make everyone look self-serving?

And the best medicine is.... Okay, kids, go ahead!

Outliner 2.0. The Law School Bookmart is selling a product called Outliner 2.0. Could it possibly be that anyone could think that an automatic process could replace making your own outline? The process of making your own outline from your own class notes is the most useful step in studying for a law school exam. The idea that you want to jump ahead to the point where you are studying from an outline is quite mistaken. The best way to "study" the outline is to extract it from your notes yourself. Studying that final product is relatively easy then. Studying a commercial outline is really hard (and full of extraneous material that doesn't relate to the class). Studying a computer-made concoction is just weird. Does anyone do that? Email me if you have another side to this.

Players. Here's the leaderboard for the Players Championship, where my nephew Cliff Kresge is in the 32d spot, after 5 holes, in the second round. Good luck!

UPDATE: He misses the cut by 1. Alas!

Sex and The Apprentice. Prof. Yin aptly notes that the all-female team, Protege, has now become all-male: the rules of the game providing for elimination and selection of replacements made this sex change operation possible. Interesting how the women worked well as a large group, but one-on-one they hate each other, while the men become pals. That could just be the editing, or just these particular people, or some effect of the kind of competitions, but the show is hugely (yoogely) popular, and I can't help thinking it is going to shape American opinion about the difference between men and women as a general matter. Now Amy is the only woman. She has defeated all rivals. She may think all the boys love her, but even if they do, they still want to win more. It will be fun to see how that plays out.

Prof. Yin has some good questions:

How come Trump's assistant George is always off on important business trips, but Carolyn never is? Glass ceiling?

My theory: George goes "off on a business trip" the way government officials resign jobs to "spend more time with their families." He's not as good--or as pretty--of a character as Carolyn. That's George down there under the ceiling, not Carolyn.

What was with the super-mini skirts that Amy and Katrina wore to the final boardroom? Maybe it's just me, but I would think that if you fighting to stay in the game, you'd want to show Trump that you are professional. . . .

Well, the right thing in the right place, but Amy and Katrina weren't just in the boardroom, they were on a big TV show, so their judgment is appropriate. They also know there will be an opaque table in front of them for the meeting. If they didn't know where they'd be sitting, those skirts would have been an insane risk. It's one thing standing up and striding about in heels. Sitting down is another matter. Note that their upper bodies were quite conservatively covered. But generally, women watching the show shouldn't really be using it as a source of tips on how to look and act in the business world.

Madison photographs. So, you may be wondering (maybe one person is wondering), what happened to all the Madison photographs? Nothing since Monday. Fewer pictures all around, even (only that gorilla). I was locked in another idiotic tech struggle. My camera shut itself off while I was in the middle of an iPhoto operation and this caused iPhoto to go into perpetual "photos loading" mode. I read the helpful discussion boards at Mac.com--it's helpful just to see that other people have been stuck in perpetual loading hell--and eventually tried the right thing (although, as usual, I tried so many different things, that I'm not sure I could solve the same problem again if it turns up). Then, having gotten the computer to work, I found the camera kept shutting off and then I couldn't get it on at all. Seems obviously to be the battery then, right? But I'd charged it overnight....

It turned out to be a classic case of high tech problem is really a low tech problem: the charger was plugged into an outlet which is attached to a little-used wall switch, and the wall switch was off. Not as dumb as the typical not-plugged-in case, but ... Oh, well, I don't care, because I was so happy my new camera was okay. So, for fans of Madison pictures, I'll have some more today and over the weekend. This blog's description is "Art, law, politics, TV, and various random items from Madison, Wisconsin," and let me assure you that photos will be key random items from Madison, so do stop back.

Simulblogging The Apprentice. Gordon decided to join me and Prof. Yin by blogging The Apprentice, but he ups the ante--note clever gambling theme--by simulblogging it. Simulblogging is a good idea, I think, because shows usually aren't interesting enough to warrant full attention. Writing at the same time is one way to keep from losing interest. Like a lot of people, I sometimes play a video game (like Mah Jongg solitaire) while watching a show (like, say, Meet the Press or Road to the White House--how can you just look at that?). Knitting is ideal, but I can't knit. Knitting would let you keep your eyes on the screen. Oh, a treadmill or situps or something like that would be ideal, really. I recommend that to readers.

But anyway, for The Apprentice, I like to keep my eyes fixed on it, because I love the photography and the editing (as I've written before). It is really beautiful. It does go over the line and reveal who is going to be fired though, I believe. Watch and see who gets all the extra interviews edited in, interviews where the person talks about how other people are faltering and focuses on one other person. Oh, they will be wearing a distinctive item of clothing in the interview. Remember Omarosa leaning against the wall by the window? Remember her scarf? Last night it was Katrina in the hairy off-the-shoulder sweater--the hairy off-the-shoulder sweater of doom.

Gordon, watching for the first time, I think, is impressed by Bill and Amy. Amy said she thought Bill was her toughest competition. I don't get the Bill thing. What has he ever done? He seems to be just hanging around trying not to get into trouble. That hasn't been a good strategy. For some reason, I've always thought Troy was going to win. But he went into annoying huckster mode last night. Generally, they always seem too desperate at some point. That may be the editing, but I don't like when they just start accosting customers and begging them to come over. The casino milieu last night was particularly unpleasant. They were acting like circus showmen, and their targets were elderly Atlantic City gambling types. They can voice-over the term "high rollers" all they want to try to make Trump's Taj look glamorous, but the target customers on this show were the least glamorous on the show yet.

Conservative students at Wisconsin. At the UW Law School we have a coffee & doughnuts session about once a week with students. This week the subject was what it's like to be a conservative student at the Law School, and the session was led by my colleague Gordon Smith, who blogged about it beforehand here. Actually, the topic originally proposed was what it's like to be a conservative student here, and at one point there was a proposal to have a panel of some sort with every political perspective represented, and in the end the topic got narrowed to conservative students and Green Party students, which struck me as pretty weird. Do we see conservative and Green Party types as opposites? If so, that suggests that the middle is occupied by Democratic Party liberals.

Gordon began by passing around papers with large letters--either L or C--on them and everyone was supposed to take one. No Ms? I wouldn't take one. He asked one of the Ls to say what position Cs take on a long list of issues, as a way to demonstrate how un-nuanced we are about the other side. The L's view of the C was of a social conservative, opposed to abortion rights and gay marriage, which I didn't think expressed the position of many of the young people who are attracted to conservatism. He had a C do the same for the Ls and on every issue the position was the opposite (e.g., war on terror? opposed!).

So how did the students say they felt? They had almost no criticism of the way faculty teaches the material. There was a bit of criticism about side comments in class: the targets of little jokes seem to be the targets liberals enjoy seeing attacked (e.g., President Bush, Justice Scalia). The worst criticism of faculty seemed to be some sense of disrespect for some of the judges, which seemed to me to be only a problem if the disrespect isn't spread around or if the disrespect doesn't have an educative point. One student gave the impression that humor ought to be avoided, but I tend to think he didn't really mean that in such an extreme way. I dislike stock humor, especially when it's a shallow assertion that a judge is stupid or biased, but naturally one sees humor in all sorts of things when studying and talking about cases, and some of this humor is going involve showing some disrespect for the way something is written, for the bad choices litigants may have made, for the flimsiness of an argument. No reason not to have some fun along the way. But it shouldn't be at the expense of one side.

The real problem students confessed to seemed to be a self-imposed one. They had quite elaborately developed ideas about what the professors and other students must be thinking and how much they would need to constrain themselves in order not to meet with disapproval or even outright punishment (in the form of grading--even though we have blind grading). I understand this feeling. I remember some similar things as a student. Faculty didn't need to do much of anything at all to cause students to think they need to believe or appear to believe a particular ideology and that the teachers and the other students would think ill of them if they didn't say the right thing. Where do these self-imposed restrictions come from? I suppose it is human nature, and that it is also the mechanism that keeps us from doing all sorts of destructive things. But there is also the human capacity to get past this kind of "overthinking" and to begin to just enjoy taking part in debate, trying out different ideas, practicing advocacy, and listening to the things other people will say once the debate opens up. I hope the session had some effect in helping students see that the faculty overwhelmingly wants vigorous debate and a lively classroom experience--whatever our political views may be and whether or not we ever say what those views are.

"[T]his kind of very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing." That's a quote from Justice Breyer from the oral argument yesterday, his suggestion for how to think of the "God" referred to in the Pledge of Allegiance. I enjoy Breyeresque locutions. Here the whole context:

I mean, it's a pretty broad use of religion sometimes. I -- does it make you feel any better, and I think the answer's going to be no, but there is a case called Seeger, which referred to the Constitution -- to the statute that used the word, supreme being, and it said that those words, supreme being, included a set of beliefs, sincere beliefs, which in any ordinary person's life fills the same place as a belief in God fills in the life of an orthodox religionist. So it's reaching out to be inclusive, maybe to include you, I mean, to -- because many people who are not religious nonetheless have a set of beliefs which occupy the same place that religious beliefs occupy in the mind and woman of a religious -- of a religious mind in men and women.

So do you think God is so generic in this context that it could be that inclusive? ...

And if it is, then does your objection disappear? ...

But what I'm thinking there is that perhaps when you get that broad in your idea of what is religious, so it can encompass a set of religious-type beliefs in the minds of people who are not traditionally religious, when you are that broad and in a civic context, it really doesn't violate the Establishment Clause because it's meant to include virtually everybody, and the few whom it doesn't include don't have to take the pledge.

[NEWDOW: You're referring to the two words, under God?]

Yeah, under God is this kind of very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing.

There's something disarmingly roundabout in Breyer's form of expression. It actually reminds me of Ellen DeGeneres. I think it's an intentional backing off from strikingly clear statements that he is surely capable of making. The idea in the end is clear and comprehensible nonetheless, and there is something in the adopted inarticulateness that seems to invite the listener in or to avoid being too overwhelmingly brilliant. Or maybe it's just idiosyncratic or a sort of humor. Anyway, I find it charming.

Jabari was wronged. From The Life of Pi:

[Zoo] animals do not escape to somewhere but from something. Something within their territory has frightened them ... and set off a flight reaction. The animal flees, or tries to. I was surprised to read at the Toronto Zoo ... that leopards can jump up to eighteen feet straight up. Our leopard enclosure in Pondicherry was sixteen feet high at the back. I surmise that Rosie and Copycat never jumped out was not because of constitutional weekness but simply because they had no reason to. Animals that escape go from the known to the unknown--and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown.

Consider then the 300-pound gorilla who escaped from his enclosure last week, "snatching up a toddler with his teeth and attacking three other people before being shot by officers," as CNN.com reports:

How the 13-year-old gorilla exactly broke out was unclear. Some youths had reportedly teased Jabari shortly before he escaped, but it was not known if that was a factor in the breakout.

Zoo director Rich Buickerood said the gorilla "had to have scaled" the enclosure's 15-foot concave wall. But some experts doubt that could have happened.

"Virtually anybody who's worked with great apes has not been able to compute anyway that a gorilla could get up a 15-foot wall," Wharton said....

Police ... are investigating, but they said officers were forced to shoot the charging gorilla after it came within 15 feet of them.

"We did not go out there looking to kill an animal," said Senior Cpl. Chris Gilliam, a Dallas police spokesman. "We went out there in response to a situation where three people had already been injured."

Would they have been forced to shoot to kill an unarmed 300-pound man who "charged" at them? Assume a man known to be incapable of understanding language and not morally responsible for the violence he had committed. Don't the police know how to wrestle down a man that size and handcuff him?

UPDATE: Several people have written to point out that it is harder to wrestle a gorilla down than a man of the same weight. I concede that is probably true with respect to most gorillas and most men. But if you reread what I wrote, I never said Jabari was wronged because they didn't use the identical method that would have been used on a man. I'm objecting to the extreme shoot-to-kill reaction and the way we instinctively think they were justified because the gorilla was only an animal. There is a middle range there, between what we think needs to be done when the charging entity is human and what we think is just fine when it is nonhuman. At the very least they could have shot him in the leg or the shoulder. I think, with a sufficient number of police, he could have been physically restrained without shooting him. Don't they have tranquilizer darts at the zoo? If we are going to have zoos to please ourselves, don't we owe something to the animals? Jabari was taunted, rocks were thrown at him (probably to get him to put on a show of ferocity). It seems to me that, under the circumstances, he deserved a lot better than he got.

In its anti-binge drinking zeal, did the UW organize a cartel? The Capital Times reports:

A class action lawsuit was filed today in Dane County Circuit Court accusing 24 downtown Madison taverns and the Madison-Dane County Tavern League of conspiring to fix prices on beer and liquor.

The suit, filed by a Minneapolis law firm on behalf of three University of Wisconsin-Madison students, says taverns that agreed to eliminate weekend drink specials - a step strongly urged by Chancellor John Wiley - committed felony violations of both state and federal antitrust law, regardless of their intent. It also accuses UW-Madison of participating.

My colleague Peter Carstensen is quoted:

But Peter Carstensen, a professor at the UW-Madison Law School, said he was surprised nobody in the university's legal counsel office, nor at the City Attorney's Office, recognized there was a problem with the voluntary ban.

"The general rule of antitrust law is, competitors cannot agree about how they will compete. If that's what happened with these bars, then they're in serious trouble," Carstensen said.

Straightforwardly. In the hope of finding more news reports that discussed Justice Souter's comment, quoted below, I Googled "tepid radar souter pledge." There was only one result, so weirdly not what I was looking for: a huge list of words that can be typed using only keys in the qwerty and home rows. Well, as long as I'm here, I'm curious. What are the longest words? Why, photofluorographies and stereophotographies, of course. Runners-up: astrophotographers, lepidopterologists, phosphodiesterases, photolithographies, stereoregularities. No, come on, what's the longest one someone might naturally use? It's: straightforwardly. Go ahead, type it, it's fun. Straightforwardly, straightforwardly, straightforwardly.

The Newdow oral argument. Early reports on the oral argument are emerging. The AP report makes it hard to tell how the standing issue will come out:

Rehnquist said that the issues raised in the case "certainly have nothing to do with domestic relations." And, Justice David H. Souter said that Newdow could argue that his interest in his child "is enough to give him personal standing."

On the establishment clause issue, though, it seems to me that the school district has the votes to prevail. Reuters lists these comments:

"She [the daughter] does have a right not to participate," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said.

Rehnquist said the pledge "doesn't sound anything like a prayer."

And Justice David Souter asked whether the affirmation of God in the midst of a civic exercise "is so tepid, so diluted, so far from a compulsory prayer that it should in effect be beneath the constitutional radar."

The Souter vote is especially important. If Newdow is going to accumulate 5 votes, based on past voting patterns, I am certain that one of the votes would need to be Souter's. I can see it's in the form of a question, but I would surmise that Souter likes the de minimis argument. If so, the question becomes: does Newdow lose on the merits or lose because he lacks standing?

A dismissal on the standing ground would leave the constitutional issue open, and local decisionmakers might on their own eliminate the phrase (or the whole Pledge) in an effort to meet what they find to be a constitutional requirement. If standing is met, however, and Newdow loses on the merits, the announcement will have been made that the phrase is constitutional, which will give those who want to use it confidence and clout.

MORE: More oral argument text, specifically on the standing issue, from Linda Greenhouse's article in tomorrow's Times:

"I as her father have a right to know that when she goes into the public schools she's not going to be told every morning to stand up, put her hand over her heart, and say your father is wrong, which is what she's told every morning ... Government is doing this to my child. They're putting her in a milieu where she says, `hey, the government is saying that there is a God and my dad says no,' and that's an injury to me."

The requirement of standing is that a litigant have a "concrete and particularized injury"--as opposed to a "hypothetical" or "abstract" injury--that he is seeking to redress through the lawsuit. The injury asserted in that argument is the mere fact of government having different values from the child's father. But schools are constantly teaching things that are at odds with what parents espouse at home. And government is constantly saying things that many people disagree with. If this is a good enough injury to give standing to sue, that might mean one could sue whenever government acts in a way that reflects a belief that is different from what a parent believes. So what if government says one thing and you think another? You're saying you're injured because your child's respect for you is diminished because you don't agree with the government?

Curly hair. About last night's American Idol: they have taken away Jennifer Hudson's beautiful curly hair and have made a big deal about how great her straight hair is. Could they be a little less offensive with their curly hair bad/straight hair good opinion? Every time they have a great female singer with curly hair--Tamyra Gray, Kim Locke--they have to straighten it! And they wallow in self-praise about the wonderful improvement they've imposed. I'm tired of that!

Who cares about standing? 56 briefs were filed in the Pledge of Allegiance case, but the word "standing" appears in only 10 of them. That doesn't surprise me. I teach and write mostly about the structural limitations in constitutional law--federalism, separation of powers, judicial review--so I'm quite aware of the way this aspect of constitutional law is much less juicy and exciting to most people than the substantive rights. On the up side, there are only 10 briefs to peruse.

UPDATE: Ah, no, I'm wrong! The word "standing" appears in 45 of them. More work then, but the consolation of more attention to a subject that interests me ...

ANOTHER UPDATE: "Standing" was not a good search term for finding discussions of standing doctrine, because many of the briefs refer to the schoolchildren "standing" to say the Pledge. But in fact, most of the briefs discuss standing, generally in terms of the father's interest in suing on behalf of his child, despite his lack of joint custody. I'm especially interested in another argument, that he suffers an injury because the school's endorsement of God in the Pledge makes him, as an atheist, less well respected by his daughter. There's also an argument, that he is injured as a taxpayer. I don't have an opinion on the first argument for standing, which imports a lot of ideas from state family law into federal constitutional law. The other two arguments I think should fail. The taxpayer argument is particularly bad.

Another thing I've noticed is that 40% of the briefs that use the expression "de minimis" misspell it. Misspelling a key word in a Supreme Court brief--that's bad.

Safire's Pledge solution. William Safire discusses the Pledge of Allegiance case, which will be argued in the Supreme Court today, and proposes a solution. Although he thinks "this time-wasting pest Newdow ... is ... right," in that adding the words "under God" back in 1954 was wrong, he thinks taking the words out at this point, "offending the religious majority, would be a ... mistake now." So what's the solution?

First, he rejects the idea of "us[ing] the issue of standing to punt, thereby letting this divisive ruckus fester." That baldly assumes the Court uses the constitutional requirement that a litigant have standing to sue in federal court as a way to get rid of pesky cases. There's reason to suspect the Court doesn't apply the standing doctrine in as neutrally principled a fashion as it purports to do, but standing presents a serious constitutional question about the courts' own power. I haven't studied the briefs, but from what I've read about Newdow's case, I don't think he does have standing. More on that later.

The solution Safire does offer is "for the court to require teachers to inform students they have the added right to remain silent for a couple of seconds while others choose to say 'under God.'" Nice try, but there's a huge problem with that: it directs the teachers to lead the class, in a kind of religious exercise. The teacher would be essentially telling the students to examine their own beliefs with respect to the divine and assess whether they have the set of beliefs that makes it appropriate to say those words and to outwardly manifest those beliefs by either saying or not saying the words. Now, the recitation of the Pledge becomes even more of a display of belief in the classroom, as opposed to the historical or de minimis incantation, and to the recitation has been added an exercise of self-examination about religious beliefs, directed by the class authority figure.

A right not to reveal your name? Here's the nice website of Larry D. Hiibel who was convicted of a crime in Nevada for refusing to tell police his name. His case was argued in the Supreme Court yesterday. The state has made it a crime not to identify yourself to the police when they've stopped you under reasonable suspicion that you've committed a crime. Linda Greenhouse reports in the NYT:

As a matter of Fifth Amendment analysis, one question is whether giving one's name is sufficiently "testimonial" to invoke the constitutional protection against self-incrimination. "The question, it seems to me, is whether a name itself has intrinsic testimonial consequences," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy told [Robert E.] Dolan, the public defender.

If it did not, Mr. Dolan replied, "the government could require name tags."

Snappy answer to a tough question. But actually not that convincing: wearing a name tag would constantly reveal your name to everyone, but the question here is only whether you need to tell it to the police once when they have reason enough to stop you about the commission of a crime.

Quite aside from the particular Nevada criminal statute, there's the issue whether refusal to identify yourself can count toward the "probable cause" needed before you can be arrested, after the police began to question you with only "reasonable suspicion."

"Hiibel" is an interesting name. The double "ii" is quite unusual. And Hiibel seems to be a person with a strong sense of self--of the "I." He's litigating to the hilt the issue of keeping his identity secret.

UPDATE to point out an irony: Hiibel is becoming very famous for his outsized interest in remaining especially unknown.

The Iraqi Federalist Papers. What do you do when you find there are "wild negative rumors about the interim constitution" in Iraq and also that "many of the document's sharpest critics appeared not to have read it"? You write "an Iraqi version of the Federalist Papers."

The Dawn of the Dead/Passion of the Christ Joke. I predicted here that Jon Stewart would go for the ready-made joke about Dawn of the Dead getting the better of The Passion of the Christ at the box office over the weekend. And that it would be "carefully crafted." That is, he wouldn't pass up the material, but he also wouldn't be offensive. The Daily Show writers would wield their great writing skills to surgically extract the usable joke. Here it is:

The Passion of the Christ, after three weekends, got knocked out of the number one movie in America slot. The honor now belongs to: Dawn of the Dead. What it says is this. While Americans enjoy a good resurrection movie, a good movie about one man who rises from the grave, what America has said is: the more people rising from the grave, the better. So that’s really the issue here. It wasn’t the story about religion and its glory. It’s really just dead people coming to life—whether they heal the sick … or eat brains.

Well done! The key was to make it into a joke about how crass our interests are, which really could even have worked as an idea for a sermon.

Madison, weekend. I don't understand sports enough to explain the presence of greenness in redville this weekend. I don't think it was leftover St. Patrick's day, but something about basketball ... or hula.



It got cold again, all blustery, but there was this lovely sign of spring, the first food cart on Library Mall.



And State Street Brats was just waiting for the sports fans to arrive and engage in revelry presided over by those kindred spirits, Bucky Badger and Miss Liberty.

Boo to American Airlines for demanding that one of my sons get off the plane going from O'Hare to Madison at 9 o'clock at night because the plane was overweight. I know there are real safety concerns about weight and removing one person may make a difference and a little weight really does matter on those small planes, but at 9 o'clock at night, with no later flight to take, couldn't you offer more freebies until you get a volunteer? Two people did volunteer, but American only needed to kick off one person and so it would only offer one of these two the measly $200 travel certificate, and the two volunteers didn't want to split up. So one of my sons had to leave, to get the next bus to Madison, at 11 pm, and arrive at the Memorial Union at 2 am--on a cold night, with no shelter open, and nothing warm to wear, because he hadn't worn a coat in Austin, and his luggage had traveled on the plane.

Many passengers on the plane witnessed how rudely my sons were treated and at least one came up afterwards to say how offended he was and how he was going to write a letter to the airline about it. What I simply cannot understand is: 1. If you are going to do something like this at least be scrupulously polite while you're doing it (instead, the method used was: if you don't leave right now, we'll still make you leave and you won't even get the $200 certificate!) and 2. Try much harder to get volunteers (for a second $200 travel certificate, the two volunteers would have left willingly, and everyone else on the plane would have kept a positive opinion about the airline; instead, many people felt really bad about the airline). By the way, I think I would have volunteered in that situation, because the idea of a small plane at its weight limit scares me. That's another reason why they should go for volunteers: pressuring someone makes everyone feel anxious and subject of the dangerous weight of the plane has got to make for some exquisitely bad feeling aboard!

It's interesting that there were seats for everyone on the plane, but the weight didn't add up right. Do you think in that situation the airline ought to pick on the heaviest passengers? Actually, I don't. Yet if I were in that situation, seeing someone being pressured off the plane because of the weight of the plane--especially someone obviously under the 185 weight airlines assume people weigh--I'd be glancing around at passengers to see who was bringing the most weight on the plane and thinking uncharitable thoughts. But that's one more reason why the airline should escalate the inducements until they get a volunteer.

UPDATE: The certificate was for $250, not $200.

AND JUST TO BE CLEAR: The airline was not singling out the heaviest passengers--my sons are way under 185. My point is that if the plane is overweight and that someone is going to have to leave, a certain common sense suggests asking the heaviest person to leave. One person is inconvenienced, either way, but the maximum weight is removed. If you see them trying to oust a thin person, don't you tend to think they ought to be going after somebody big? But they don't, for whatever reason. Fear of lawsuits? Desire not to seem mean? But they were mean!

CHRIS ADDS:

A couple points you missed on the blog about the American Airlines thing:

1) Three or four women working the gate inside the airport knew, and told John and me, that the airplane was overloaded, and even while it was being delayed never made a single announcement that it was overloaded. They knowingly overloaded the plane because they were too lazy to make an announcement over the loadspeaker that they needed a volunteer.

2) What they should do, if they're going to FORCE someone off the plane, is single out the person who checked the heaviest bag. They have that information--they weigh every single checked bag--and they could easily do it that way, something based on weight, without insulting people for being fat. Instead, they got rid of a thin guy, left all the [heaviest people] on the plane, and even left his bag on the plane.

Also, people inside the plane yelled at the guy for not allowing the couple that volunteered to leave the plane. Plus, they were completely unapologetic and even threatening towards us from beginning to end!

Overblogging. Clearly, I was overblogging on Saturday and Sunday, fueled by the return of my iBook and the fun of figuring out my new camera. The wireless café access and accompanying coffee was part of the phenomenon. And the end of Spring Break ... and my sons being away in Austin.

"Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, thank you so much--you've been just lovely--a real knock out." That's Prince, at the Hall of Fame show. He gives a great performance--and changes the words to Kiss:

"You don't have to watch Sex and the City to have an attitude."

Oh, but good Lord, the intro is stilted and prolonged. Alicia Keys seems to be auditioning for a movie role, so earnestly emoting her way through the teleprompter script.

"He's the inspiration that generations will return to until the end of time."

I love Prince, but that's just stupid. Keys should have refused to say those idiotic lines. Ah, what the hell. There's always been something incoherent about the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame. And good old Prince is still raving about freedom and spirituality, God bless him.

I hope Tonya TiVoed the adorable Dave Matthews intro for Traffic. ... There really is something wondrous about Mr. Fantasy. And Steve Winwood's voice is wondrously intact.

The politics of your zip code. Go ahead, just type your zip code here and find out who in the area gave money to which presidential candidates--and how much they gave! (Via Metafilter--where they've got some good comments.) You can get the street addresses and names of all the donors, so if you're thinking of buying a house, you can find, say, the place in Madison where you'll be snuggled up next to the kind of people who gave $200 to Kucinich, or alternatively, the folks who forked over the whole $2000 to Bush. Students can find out who their professors gave money to (and how much). Hmmpf! A new excuse not to give ...

Blogspot ads. I suppose I'd like to be able to get rid of the Blogspot ads, but at the same time, I find it interesting to see what their machine matches up to my writing. I see they've got City Lights Bookstore, which is apt, because I've been blogging about beat poets a fair amount. Then there's "Progressive Politics," which takes you a blogspot blog on that topic. Hmmm... And Nina's blog has ads for the Republican Party! Tonya's blog aptly points you toward buying tickets for the Dave Matthews Band. There's a simple explanation: the not very subtle machine just matches up ads they have with words you have written, with no ability to discern whether you said nice things or not. Not very effective as a way to sell ads, but a bit of a source of humor anyway.

What plays did William Faulkner see? What did he read? I hadn't exactly been wondering, but this article by Javier Marías in Threepenny Review (linked by A&L; Daily) has some answers:

Faulkner was a taciturn man who loved silence, and he had only been to the theater five times in his entire life: he had seen Hamlet three times, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Ben Hur, and that was all. He had not read Freud, either, at least so he said on one occasion: "I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't." He read Don Quixote every year.

Ah! I love silence too. And I've been meaning to read Don Quixote ... there's that new translation ...

I liked this part of the article too, about how he lost his job as a post office clerk at the University of Mississippi:

Apparently one of the lecturers there, quite reasonably, complained: the only way he could get his mail was by rummaging around in the rubbish bin at the back door, where the unopened bags of post all too often ended up. Faulkner did not like having his reading interrupted, and the sale of stamps fell alarmingly; by way of explanation, Faulkner told his family that he was not prepared to keep getting up to wait on people at the window and having to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had the two cents to buy a stamp.

Sounds like Newman on Seinfeld ("The Andrea Doria"). I'd watch a sitcom about this Faulkner character. And don't just tell me to watch Barton Fink--Joel Coel is on record saying the John Mahoney character isn't much like Faulkner.

Are you done talking about the New York Times yet? Well, I wanted to talk about the philosophy therapist and Al Franken and Spalding Gray, but I've been sitting in the café too long, the cappucino is severely frazzling my nerves and I'm getting hungry... And yikes, someone just knocked over a chair and I completely overreacted. So it's time for me to go. Let me leave you with a Madison picture, as I disengage from the newspaper from New York and return to my real environs:

Xiaoze Xie. Here's another artist. (Cool name, too.) More images here.

This is a good insight:

"When I was in China, my fellow students and I felt that art should be for art's sake," Mr. Xie said. "We'd seen a lot of bad critical art for so long. Now I've changed my theory on that. Art should carry some message. But, of course, it has to be beautiful, too."  

"The Weather Project" I like this Olafur Eliasson installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. The NYT writes:

An instant cult site of mood-altering atmospherics, both gloomy and eye-popping, "The Weather Project" consists of a fake sun (yellow lights behind a huge semicircular screen, below a mirrored ceiling) and pumped-in mist. ...

Thrilled but circumspect about the reaction, he is by temperament a skeptical Scandinavian type. Half Danish, half Icelandic, he is not given to expressions of simple contentment, not with a stranger anyway. "I am trying to maintain in my mind an open discourse about its qualities of consumerism and spectacle," he says. "I would like to think that the spectator became the center of this piece, that the project twisted the Tate so the people who came to visit were what the art was about." ...

Previously, he has erected a fake sun, about 41 yards in diameter, like a billboard, on the skyline in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He designed a waterfall that flowed upward. He dyed various rivers in Europe and America green (eco-friendly dye, naturally)....

Hey, wait a minute. I think Chicago got there first.

A side note: why does the Times deal enthusiastically in ethnic stereotypes when the group in question is Nordic? (Like this one, about the "famously silent, stoic Finns.")

An easy to laugh at correction. The NYT has to correct two things about its review of Jayson Blair's book. Here's a more significant mistake:

An article last Sunday about China's energy needs misidentified the main greenhouse gas emitted by burning coal. It is carbon dioxide, not carbon monoxide.

Well, that makes a bit of a difference!

The Plot Skeleton. I wanted to include some discussion of the Scott Meredith "plot skeleton" in that last post, and did some Googling. I'm quite surprised that nothing comes up for "scott meredith 'fee client' plot skeleton," because I would have thought somebody would have told that story by now! So maybe someone will Google here now that I've written that. I'm sure a fair number of writers have posted letters like this one, but did they know they were "fee clients"? They could not have thought the famous literary agent himself wrote the long letter personally. You had to be a pretty good and prolific writer to churn out such letters, so why didn't my Googling turn up some fee department employee's description?

Art formulas. Should we shake our heads at the production of formulas for art, like "Hit Song Science"?

PolyphonicHMI says the software uses a proprietary algorithm to weigh and analyze more than 20 components of a recording (tempo, rhythm, cadence, etc.) and assign each song a value. The company used that algorithm to analyze 50 years of music released in the United States - album tracks and singles, pop, jazz and classical, totaling 3.5 million tracks - and graphed each song in multiple dimensions to create "the music universe." Plotted, it resembles a picture of a far-away galaxy, millions of song-specks floating in cosmic precision, presenting the illusion of randomness.

Some people do object, thinking art is all about individual imagination, but music is already based on some pretty constraining patterns. Artistic creativity always occurs within some kind of structure, and there is reason to think that a constricting structure enhances artistic creation. Think of the sonnet form or Dogme95. These limitations could be based on philosophical principles or scientific analysis of existing works, like Polti's Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, or it could be a game of limiting oneself, like the surrealist games. Obviously, these devices can produce bad art too, but so can a blank sheet of paper or an empty canvas. I love these efforts at constraint and limitation. Some of them are good and some aren't. Devising them is itself creative, even if it is also analytical and scientific. Art is not anarchy.

Punks for Bush. The Times notes a trend:

"Punks will tell me, `Punk and capitalism don't go together,' " [22-year-old Nick] Rizzuto said. "I don't understand where they're coming from. The biggest punk scenes are in capitalist countries like the U.S., Canada and Japan. I haven't heard of any new North Korean punk bands coming out. There's no scene in Iran."

That photograph by Richard Perry is the photo of the year for me. I don't even know how to say how much I love that photograph!

The article notes:

Johnny Ramone, the guitarist for the Ramones, has been an outspoken Republican for years, and some skinhead bands have blended the punk aesthetic with their extreme right-wing views.

(Just go ahead and lump Republicans and skinheads together!)

I like this quote from Ian MacKaye (of Fugazi) who "likened the punk aesthetic to furniture":

"Once it's built you can put it into any house," he said. "You can be a lefty and go to Ikea or you can be a right-winger and go to Ikea." Punk, he said, "is a free space where anything can go — a series of actions and reactions, and people rebelling and then rebelling against rebelling."

He's a smart guy.

Too much ready-made humor. Dawn of the Dead has defeated The Passion of The Christ at the boxoffice this weekend. The potential for jokes in bad taste about rising from the dead is disturbing. Would Letterman or Leno go for the ready-made joke here? There's a line in comedy here: some comics would cross it and some wouldn't. Will Jon Stewart? My guess is that he'll have a carefully crafted witticism on tomorrow's Daily Show.

Another source of ready-made humor this week is Justice Scalia's memo declining to recuse himself after duck-hunting with VP Cheney. There has always been something funny about ducks: the way they look, the way they sound, the word their name rhymes with. The Marx Brothers knew it: Why a Duck? Duck Soup. But Scalia's memo also has the line: ""I never hunted in the same blind as the vice president." So duck blind ... justice is blind ... the Justice is blind ... C'mon! There's a joke here. Here's Maureen Dowd's attempt to pull the seemingly ready-made joke out of that:

No need for justice to be blind when the blinds are just.

Huh? Here's Art Buchwald pointlessly flailing at the material. Enough!

Dada in Canada. What do they give high artistic awards for in Canada these days? Well, according to the NYT, Istvan Kantor got $12,000 for doing things like this:

a video showing two performers slashing the throats of two cats and wearing their bleeding bodies as hats (to express his rage at pet lovers who are hardened to their fellow man) and staging the burning of a car filled with white rats.

Good thing he's concerned about humanity. As one prof puts it, he "files a grievance for underdogs, people who are homeless and displaced." Let's kill dogs for the underdogs!

Born in Hungary in 1949, Mr. Kantor is recognized as the founder of Neoism, an international anarchist art movement that some critics liken to an updating of the Dadaism of Marcel Duchamp, who once declared that anything you called art was art.

"What are the limits?" Mr. Kantor asks matter-of-factly. "There are probably no limits. Art is very dangerous."

It should be seen as inherently impossible to "update" Duchamp, whose original insights already implied all the permutations of dadaism and made actually doing them unnecessary. He withdrew from producing more of his own work, because he perceived that, so people who are claiming to build on his work are frauds. Worse, they are boring. They resort to doing shocking things to cover up this boringness. The crimes they commit to attempt to be interesting as artists may be interesting crimes, but we need to realize that our fascination with crime and violence is independent of art. Those who claim credit for themselves as artists because they are producing shock and outrage are engaging in a very old scam.

Kantor has a new video:

[H]e says it exposes "the post-Orwellian technological society in which everyone is under surveillance and everyone is using transmission systems like computers to send information out to everybody."

Well, I'm about to transmit this message out to everybody: that insight of his is too trite to be expressed in casual conversation, let alone to be the subject of a long, pretentious video.

He's some typical artist-blather:

"You have to be an anti-Neoist to be a Neoist," he said in his typically satirical, dialectical sort of way. "It was very important for Neoism to get rid of all the artistic language of space and time and introduce a different language that was more using state and military and religious expressive terms that had been alien to art before, to subvert, to provoke, to ridicule, to make fun of that very used and abused language of art."

Pressed to explain, he added, "There's not just a bit of destructiveness in this. There's a lot."

All right, enough of that. That reminds me of that horrible and idiotic comment someone made after 9/11, calling the attack a great work of art.

Ah, wait, this is familiar: "He started his artistic career in Budapest in the late 1960's, founding a band of musicians who played only instruments they had not been trained to play." Isn't that Throbbing Gristle? No, I guess a lot of people came up with that idea.

Hmm... Googling "Throbbing Gristle" got me to a reference to a Village Voice article from 1988 called "The Triumph of Neoism: The Last of the Old-Fashioned Avant Garde Makes Its Stand"! Yet still it survives and is rewarded in Canada!

Madison, Saturday morning. With my restored iBook, I'm at Espresso Royale, where the cappucino is extra-hard on the nerves, I'm relieved that some people at the next table--who were annoying me for little reason other than the extra-strong coffee--are finally leaving, and I'm happy to have figured out (again!) how to get my photos up for linking. I do too many things by trial and error on my computer, and then when I get something to work, I have to wonder what I did that time, as opposed to the other ten times. But the truth is, the time I got it to work was the time I used the help menu and read the instructions, and all the trial and error efforts were wasted. So after that miniature ordeal, let me give you a look at Madison. It's a lovely Saturday morning, with temperatures in the 50s (which is great for us) and plenty of sun. Walking to the café, I stopped first to photograph the tree in Library Mall that an artist attached lots of little cloth leaves to:



I'm wondering how that is going to look when the real leaves decide to emerge. Near the tree is the Catholic center, which always has something nicely painted on the line of glass doors in front. Here's the Lenten theme, the crown of thorns:



Next to that is the University Bookstore, which really doesn't concentrate so much on books--which is why I shop for books at Borders. It's specialty, as you can see from this window, is Badger-related products. If your monitor is clear enough, you can tell that the reflection is the UW Memorial Library on the other side of the Mall:



On State Street, there are kiosks covered with flyers. These provide endless material for signage photography devotées.



And here's Expresso Royale, where I am right now, slightly pleased with myself for figuring out how to do it, over-caffeinated, and wondering how much time I just spent on this little display. The red bird in the corner of this picture is a cardinal, and Madisonians will recognize it as part of a "best of" certificate from the student paper The Cardinal. Red is a very big color around here.

The Rainbow Bookstore. A rich source of crude imagery, just off State Street in Madison.

So I did get out to State Street. Why so crowded during Spring Break? Everyone's wearing red and white ... must be something about basketball. Here are some of the local folk near a secondhand store called Gozira that has nice homemade signage. (I've been photographing signage since 1980, so don't think I stole the idea from this terrific site or anywhere else ... Actually, it's an obvious subject, because it stands still, doesn't object, and provides opportunities for word play along with the visuals.)



UPDATE: Here's how the basketball event looked last night.

Lunch plans, diet tips. I'm heading out to lunch. People are saying it's getting a bit springlike, so I think I'll walk up State Street. I want to test out my new camera and have some Madison images for the blog. I'd like to get some lunch, unlike yesterday, when I became so absorbed by my camera that I did not want to take time out to eat and did not eat all day until 7:30 pm. This could be the basis of a new diet: the complete distraction diet. All you need is to be really interested in something. Food is interesting, but it's not that interesting. Just become sufficiently fascinated by something: weight problem solved. (By the way, are the audiences at The Passion of the Christ eating popcorn and drinking soda?)

But I must go out now and get some lunch, take some pictures, and then pick up my iBook at the Do-It Center. Mac lovers will be heartened to learn that the new iBook, which gave me so damn much trouble, was plagued by a bad memory chip--extra memory, not manufactured by Apple.

Courtney Love, Madonna, CivPro, judges. I rewatched the Courtney Love on Letterman performance and am more convinced than before that she was acting. For one thing, she seemed to be performing. In fact, she seemed to be following the script of the famous Madonna Letterman appearance, which was also, obviously, an act, even though people enjoyed believing Madonna was out of control (a really ridiculous idea). Another reason I'm sure Love was acting is that she's promoting a new album and needs the press: she went out afterwards and engaged in various hijinks. She even got arrested, though it doesn't seem that she did anything to deserve it. I don't know how she gets the police to participate in her stunts, but they did. I liked this info about an earlier run in with the law:

[A]fter her 1995 arrest on charges that she punched several fans at an Orlando concert, the judge dismissed the case, ruling that they had been exposed to no more violence than might be reasonably expected at a rock 'n' roll show.

Hmmm ... I have an old civpro exam about rock show violence. Premised on a tort claim, though, not criminal law. Based on the whole stage diving phenomenon and the extent of negligence by the band and the club and some people at the club. How was that civil procedure? You make everyone from different places with different claims against different parties, and there are jurisdiction and joinder issues galore.

Oh, you know, when I saw Love years ago, she dove into the audience and then, afterwards, accused a guy of sexually assaulting her (touching her in the wrong place when she was crowd surfing and therefore had to be touched a lot). She had the guy dragged up on stage, where she proceeded to yell at him. Let's hope that was all staged too.

Love seems to do well with judges. She had a good line about them on Letterman: "Judges are like rock stars." (I'll have to get the whole quote later. It has something to do with being able to do whatever you want and/or running your own show.) I think the fact that she does well with them is one more indication that her public persona is an act. She doesn't act like that in court.

UPDATE: Here's the judge quote: "The thing about judges that's cool is they're a lot like rock stars. They just get their own damn way." She quotes her judge as saying "I will not have a witch hunt in my state," which she then ties to the Martha Stewart case. She appeals to the audience to side with Martha: "Is that fair? Raise your hand if you think that's fair." A second later she's leaping up, yelling "You are sexist!"

The last abstract expressionist has died. The obit in the NYT has this:

Volatile, acerbic, unfailingly blunt, widely read and singularly dedicated to the ideal of the painter's hard, solitary life, [Milton] Resnick was in many ways the popular stereotype of the bohemian angst-ridden artist.

Abstract expressionists were the people who made painting so godawful serious, and I want to give them credit for helping make Pop Art so very much fun. They are also the people who allow you to get more exercise in museums, because you can walk past their huge canvases so quickly. That's easy to do now, but there was a time when you went to the museum and felt you were supposed to have a religious experience with these rectangles. I can still remember how I felt seeing Robert Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic paintings in the 1960s. There were so many of them and they were so huge and presented with such reverence that I just felt manipulated and resentful of the self-importance and grandiosity and sheer, crashing humorlessness of it all. Here's a Motherwell quote:

Making an Elegy is like building a temple, an altar, a ritual place … Unlike the rest of my work, the Elegies are, for the most part, public statements. The Elegies reflect the internationalist in me, interested in the historical forces of the twentieth century, with strong feelings about the conflicting forces in it … The Elegies use a basic pictorial language, in which I seem to have hit on an 'archetypal' image. Even people who are actively hostile to abstract art are, on occasion, moved by them, but do not know 'why'. I think perhaps it is because the Elegies use an essential component of pictorial language…

See? You better be moved and have a deep experience or you're lumped together with every loser who's "actively hostile" to all abstract art, the laughable idiots who say their child could have painted it. Well, the Abstract Expressionists were humorless, but that made them a great source of humor. My personal favorite (to bring up Woody Allen a second time today), is this exchange in "Play It Again Sam":

WOODY ALLEN: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: Yes it is.

WOODY ALLEN: What does it say to you?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void, with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

WOODY ALLEN: What are you doing Saturday night?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: Committing suicide.

WOODY ALLEN: What about Friday night?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: [leaves silently]

"I felt thick inside with happiness." Here's an immensely touching article about children whose gay parents obtained marriage licenses. Some kid quotes to make you cry:

"It was so cool ... I always accepted that `Yeah, they're my moms,' but they were actually getting married. I felt thick inside with happiness. Just thick."

"Before it was, `Oh, your parents are just partners,' ... Now, they're spouses. So it's a bigger way of thinking about them."

"It is something I always wanted. I've always been around people saying, `Oh, my parents anniversary is this week.' It's always been the sight of two parents, married, with rings. And knowing I'd probably never experience it ever."

"I don't think they can take it away ... Maybe they can go into the Hall of Marriages and rip up the papers. But emotionally, they can never take away the feeling that my parents are married."

At first, I thought, how can anyone read this and be opposed to gay marriage? How can anyone not want these children to be happy? A bit later, I realized that a hardcore opponent of gay marriage would have to say that the parents themselves had wronged these children by getting them involved in the concept that their parents were married before the legality of gay marriage had been established. They set their children up for a fall, like, say, a parent who told a child that someone he loved was getting out of prison, even though the parole board hadn't made a decision yet. Or worse, one could say that gay marriage proponents were using their own children to further a political agenda, by letting the kids think there could be a marriage and exposing the kids to reporters who would print charming, innocent words that make newspaper readers cry and cave in to that political agenda. But I think non-hardcore types--aka most Americans--are going to be influenced by the realities of families that already exist and the interests of the children who are already living in them.

Woody Allen in tights. This is sweet--a quote from Diane Keaton in today's NYT:

""We used to hang out, like, when I was going out with him, we had this thing we called 'The Kitchen Follies.'

And we would just sort of pretend, like, we were, you know, SPENCER TRACY and KATHARINE HEPBURN. And then at one time he had this idea that maybe we could be dancers in a movie. And we took dancing lessons.

"We went to MARTHA GRAHAM and took dancing lessons. It was so pathetic. And he wore those tights! And it was, like, neither of us could dance. But he thought he had a great idea for a movie where we could be dancers."

Learning about faster-loading image files. Sorry about the slow-loading files earlier. I am figuring out how to do some things with these digital images. I had a drawing on a back page (in the February archive), that was an insanely huge file, which turned out to be a good thing, because it drove home that I was doing this wrong. There's no point in providing detail that never appears on the screen. Anyway, I'm going to provide some new kinds of illustrations, as I learn how to do some things properly. I realized I could photograph TiVo stills, so I'm going to have some unique content here soon, in appropriately small files, to go with my usual nattering about television.

Yellow place. I've written before that my office is quite yellow. Now it can be seen:

UPDATE: Slow-loading picture removed. You can see it if you go here. It's the third picture.

The morning paper. Yesterday, I got a digital camera, my first one. I set it up to charge overnight, and this morning as I was about to read the NYT, I read enough of the instruction booklet to take my first picture.

UPDATE: Slow-loading picture removed, but you can still see it if you go here. It's the second picture.

Life metaphors of the great authors. Here's a Q&A; from an old BBC interview with Vladimir Nabokov:

[Q] Tolstoy said, so they say, that life was a "tartine de merde" which one was obliged to eat slowly. Do you agree?

[A] I've never heard that story. The old boy was sometimes rather disgusting, wasn't he? My own life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey.

Courtney Love ... Richard Perle ... Jessica Simpson. It was fun clicking from Letterman to Nightline to Leno and back again last night. Courtney was certainly energized. Simpson was funny, telling the story about meeting the Secretary of the Interior at the White House and saying to her, "You've done a nice job decorating the White House." Perle--I don't know--I just found it amusing that he was the meat in that sandwich.

Courtney Love performed in Madison some years ago (at the Paramount, which no longer exists). She didn't like the sound system and kept complaining about it, in elevating stages, ending with her taking off her top, and also throwing food from a deli tray at the audience. We kept some of the food wrapped up in the freezer for a while, thinking it somewhat historic, but it isn't there any more. Not that I think anyone ate it. In a sandwich.

Anyway, breast-baring is a very old routine for Courtney Love. I'm thinking she feels it's not fair that Janet Jackson got so much attention recently for baring a breast and that she's the one who's entitled to the publicity. Hence the Letterman antics. Personally, I think she knows what she's doing, as opposed to being out of her mind. When she had her on-stage freak out at the Paramount, there was a break in the middle, where supposedly people were trying to get her to come back out on stage, and later she did come back out. But during that break, we stepped outside for some air, and she was out there talking to the management, perfectly rationally, about how to deal with the sound problem. That was maybe a decade ago, so who knows? I still am going to guess that she has chosen a role and is playing a part.

UPDATE: Cka3n doesn't want to believe Courtney Love was just acting, but he perceptively realizes the reason he doesn't want to believe she was is that it's only funny if you think she's out of control. The material wasn't really that good. It wasn't as good as Jessica Simpson's Leno material quoted above, and I think that was scripted, by the way, because it's just too good. Simpson may be dumb, but she's not that dumb, and if she were that dumb, she just wouldn't get lucky enough to say the great lines she's famous for. Simpson has writers. Love is doing her own material, improvising, and she's a terrific actress and she's smart, so it works. She may seem a bit old for the crazy punk girl role, but like (Whatever Happened to) Baby Jane, she can entertainingly play crazy punk girl into extreme old age. And if she survives to extreme old age, that's how you'll know it's all been an act. And of course I hope it is. (Oh, and yeah, I TiVoed it. But here's a recap if you didn't. Recap link courtesy of Gawker.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Let me explain the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane reference. In that film, Bette Davis plays a character who had been a successful child star, and who, though quite old, continues to trounce about in baby dresses, acting all cute and coy. No longer the little girl, she's become a really interestingly deluded old lady. So Courtney Love can continue in her punk girl role and, as she ages, let it become wild and outrageous in new ways, like Bette Davis's character. And in fact, Love might do well generally to have Bette Davis as a role model. Just play a raving old hag and grow old in style. Nicole and Drew can't do that. Bette didn't have to be the prettiest or the cutest to be the best actress of them all, and neither do you. And, readers, if you haven't seen that film, you really must. And by the way, it's another one of the great things about one of my all time favorite years, 1962.

TiVo lifestyle.The TiVo website also provides officially downloadable "lifestyle images," and here's one of them. Possible first reactions to the picture:

Let the kid go! ("Son, I'm going to teach you how to really watch TV.")

Why does the man always have to have the remote control?

Would those people really have a sofa like that? Hey, that should be my sofa!

You may have photoshopped smaller feet on that big guy to try to keep me from worrying that he's going to kick the TV off that little table but I'm still worried.

Is that Meryl Streep? What if seven of Meryl Streep's favorite shows were all on at the same time?

"Approachable ... Friendly ... Simple ... Fun ... Clean ... Vibrant ... Playful ... " Searching for a copiable TiVo logo, I came across TiVo's own guidelines for using its logo, which include rules about how you need to set the feet into any horizon line in your drawing so that li'l TiVo guy looks well-grounded. There's also this explanation of li'l TiVo guy's personality:

Simple, friendly and memorable ... with a nod toward TV. It's easy & approachable. It does not suggest technology. ... In as much as subscribers relate to TiVo as a life-changing experience, our vibrant color scheme helps express the enthusiasm of our subscriber base and differentiate TiVo at retail and in communications.

Energizing the base, corporate-style.

TiVo made me an A student! TiVo saved my marriage! The NYT finds the world's biggest TiVo enthusiasts. There's one guy ...

He has a TiVo and a ReplayTV hooked up to satellite receivers with each of his two TV's, and a fifth recorder hooked up to a third, TV-less satellite receiver in his garage. Since each TiVo unit can record two satellite channels at once, [he] can record seven of his and his wife's favorite shows if they are on at the same time.

Good luck with that marriage, TiVo man.

Searching ... not finding. It's hard not to find it funny when people come to your site after searching for something that has so completely nothing to do with the site. Today, somebody searched for "mickey mouse magnetic pages photo album," and I sure hope she (he?) found it. But really, why would you click here, when the snippet that appeared in your search results was:

... is a good folky album--and were dismayed to see ... John Kerry the "Best Photo Op" honor for his appearance ... motifs like skulls with Mickey Mouse ears, marijuana plants or ...

You want a Mickey Mouse photo album. What are the chances that skulls with Mickey Mouse ears could possibly take you in the right direction? Or did I lead some innocent soul astray? She just wanted a Mickey Mouse photo album and then she got all fascinated by the idea of skulls allied with her darling Mickey. And nothing was the same ever after. Good luck, o websearching Mickey fan!

The party of love, the party of fear. Prof. Yin is surprised by the nice, signed photo he received in the mail from the Bush campaign. They laid it on thick thanking him for his grassroots leadership, even though he is a registered Democrat. I get tons of stuff like this from both parties, presumably because I subscribe to a wide range of magazines. I always find it weird that they assume you're a hardcore supporter, but they must find that the assumption helps make people feel needed and willing to chip in. I even receive membership cards to things I've never joined and letters inquiring why I haven't "renewed" my membership, letters full of wacky self-examination, mulling about what they could have done wrong to turn me away, like some needy old lover. Those last few things are all Republican moves. The Democratic letters are always trying to scare me about things that are about to happen, how I'm about to lose all my rights and so forth. I would have thought the Democrats would be more about love and the Republicans more about fear, but not so, at least when speaking to people they think might have some money to hand over. The Democrats try to scare me about the Republicans, and the Republicans just want to be loved.

Infinitely cooler devices await us. It's been a day of petty nuisances, but I think I've gotten through them okay now. I even managed to order a cable modem for home use and got a really nice deal that included "SVOD," something I'd never heard of before. For some reason, it cost $10 a month less than just getting the cable modem. Apparently, it's some desperate attempt to hook people on something really cool before something infinitely cooler arrives, which is what TiVo is also doing. I remember seeing a Sony Betamax in the 1970s, one of the original type, which was huge and incredibly expensive. It seemed mindbogglingly amazing. So for now, I guess, TiVo is normal and SVOD is amazing. But frankly, there's a limit to how much stuff you actually want to watch. Having more control can make you realize you don't really want to watch much of anything. In the old days, if something was on, you had to decide if you ever wanted to watch it, and watch it now or never. Today, you can leave some recorded show festering on the TiVo, never waste any time watching it, and then just delete it. Being empowered to do more helps you do less. What a timesaver!

A new realm of computer befrazzlement. Sorry for the lack of substantive blogging today, but I've been locked in struggle with my (new) computer. Or something beyond locked, because that was the better position I was in before today, when my computer would just freeze up and need to be shut down and restarted constantly. Today, I entered a new realm of computer befrazzlement where you keep trying to start it up in different ways, with different discs, and it gets 98% of the way through the spinning horizontal barberpole of start up and just keeps spinning right there, forever. I did learn some new things today though. I learned the term "kernel panic," for example. I learned I'm entitled to swap for a new computer if I'm lucky enough to have hardware failure within 30 days, and I am so cozily, safely within that limit.

Googling in Arabic. Someone visited this site after Googling the name Abdullah Thabet, whom I wrote about here and re-quoted here. How strange to see the Google results running down the right side of the screen! Maybe it was Abdullah Thabet himself. Doesn't everyone Google their own name?

UPDATE: The Google results only run down the right side of the page in some browsers.

Reattaching the O. So I went to the University's Do-It Center--the ridiculous name for our computer technology place, the "Department of Information Technology"--to get my "o" key reattached. Of course it was within the warranty and two nice young men fixed the thing right away, but it still took more than 25 minutes in all, and with 25 minutes the limit on the center's parking meters, I ended up with a $20 parking ticket. Twenty dollar parking tickets--during Spring Break! Damn! And to think of all the times I've waited for an open parking space, with the zeroes blinking on the meters and no parking enforcement in sight. I suppose with fewer cars on campus it's easier for the parking enforcement people to find the cars that are overstaying their time.

St. Patrick's Day = Happy Birthday John.

WiFi. Speaking of having my iBook on the table, that last post was the first post I've done from a laptop in a café. Ah! But one of the laptop's keys is semi-detached. The "o." Oh!

Art, commerce, politics. Last week at the law school we had a discussion about free speech, privacy, and commerce, prompted by an article that proposed limiting the first amendment free speech clause to political speech (to be protected absolutely), realigning personal expression rights with the right of privacy (to be protected subject to balancing), and withdrawing protection for expression that is not political or personal. Commercial speech is the big loser in the realignment. This has left me thinking about not just the way the personal is political but also the way the personal is commercial. Filmmaking, for example, is a huge commercial enterprise. So is TV. The lone artist at his easel or writer with a typewriter is romantic--I'm picturing Johnny Depp in Secret Window. ...

Long interlude taken at this point in the writing to buy several Depp DVDs on Amazon ... Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Don Juan De Marco, Dead Man, Benny and Joon (with Mary Stuart Masterson at her easel), and Donnie Brasco .... This art/commerce interlude ties to the point I'm going to make.

The lone artist at his easel or writer with a typewriter is romantic but not the source of the kind of artistic expression most of us spend our time taking in. Where is the line between personal expression and commerce? I think Depp is an immensely individualistic artist, making eccentric choices, yet only appearing in works that are the result of elaborate commercial production, and I'm caught up in the stream of commerce buying the films, but also reaching out to an artistic experience.

And it's not just films, other products are personally defining, even if advertisers push us to define ourselves with products. I had my new iBook on the table during the discussion of free speech and couldn't help feeling personally expressed by it. Earlier that day, one colleague had dropped by to show off her iPod and another to show off a new text-messaging cell phone. Buying clothes, buying a car, choosing a soda. These are also personal expressions. Even if these aren't the loftiest aspects of personal expression, they matter, just like how you cut your hair matters. There's even a political dimension. Andy Warhol said it well:

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

"Paisley Park Is in Your Heart." I usually don't write about music that isn't at least 25 years old. I will never get tired of the 1960s music and consider myself lucky to have been a teenager in those years, so that great music became part of my mind in a way no other music could be. To this day I'd rather listen to The Kinks "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" or The Zombies "She's Not There" than anything recorded after 1980. You just don't get excited about music the same way when you're older.

But there is one exception to the rule, the one music person I really fell in love with after I was 30 years old. He got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last night, so I just wanted to pay my little tribute to the man whose music I listened to all the time in the 1980s.

"When I Was Cool." I had to drive from Chicago back home to Madison today, and I was glad to turn on the car radio to find the very beginning of a Fresh Air interview with Sam Kashner about his book "When I Was Cool," which I've been reading--along with a bunch of other things--for the past month. The interview got me half the way home and was just great, with Kashner telling the story of being enamoured of the beatniks, going to study at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, and then finding them all old men, somewhat addled and shambling, and himself not quite so much a student as an apprentice.

Ah! Too bad there weren't video cameras everywhere, because that could be the perfect reality show, combining The Apprentice and The Osbournes!

You can listen to the show here today, and click on the archive after today. Memorable revelations from the interview:

1. William Burroughs said he would never have been a heroin addict if he had realized how badly constipated it would make him when he got to be an old man.

2. Allen Ginsburg made a pass at Kashner and, after Kashner declined, started to find Kashner's poetry terrible. Kashner is still angry ... about the poetry critiques.

3. Ginsburg's guru ordered him to shave off his beard because he was too attached to it--and he did!

4. Kashner's first assignment was to finish one of Ginsburg's poems and when it turned out to be a poem about having sex with Neal Cassady, Kashner went to the Boulder Public Library to ask for information!

5. It was Kashner's job to do Ginsburg's laundry, and the method he used was to ship the dirty laundry in a box home to his mother. She did the laundry and shipped it back!

Oh, listen to the interview. And read the book.

If it worked once .... Though only one crucifixion was needed to save all humanity, Hollywood seems to think if one crucifixion movie was hugely successful, there ought to be more of the same. Read "Hollywood Rethinking Faith Films After 'Passion'" in today's NYT. Gibson's film is a "faith film" in the most literal sense, because it was not concocted as a money-making venture. Hollywood would be continuing on its usual path of trying to make money by making more of whatever has worked in the past. One could say making money is the "faith" behind every Hollywood film, in which case there is nothing to "rethink"--all Hollywood films are "faith films."

The movie's box-office success has been chewed over in studio staff meetings and at pricey watering holes all over Hollywood, echoed in interviews with numerous executives in the last week. In marketing departments the film is regarded as pure genius; its director, Mel Gibson, is credited with stoking a controversy that yanked the film from the margins of the culture to center stage, presenting it as a must-see.

If only someone had filmed that. I would pay to see the edited footage of those meetings! "Chewing over" the popularity of the crucifixion! "Pure genius" to "stoke a controversy" about anti-semitism as a publicity stunt! What else could we do that would be like that??

Is Disney at least going to put the Christianity back into "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," after they tried to take it out to make the movie more widely marketable? Disney is still saying "We are intent on not making this into a Christian movie ... But it will be seen by many loyal readers as a very Christian movie." What does that mean? If you know the book you'll get the Christian part, but if not, it's just a lion story?

What else do these Passion-inflamed producers have in store for us? Please no old-style Bible epics with Gladiator-style special effects. I'd like to see a literal depiction of the book of Revelation, an animation in the style of Spirited Away. (Spirited Away is a great example of a religious movie. I'd also like to see a Spirited Away-like animation of The Life of Pi, which has religious themes.)

According to the article, there's a TV series based on Revelation, done in an X-files way, that NBC has picked up. A nun and a scientist discover evidence of end times. Presumably, a very pretty nun and a hip scientist. TV can do some things much better than film. I'd watch a TV series about a teenaged Jesus, set in present-day America, and his relationship with his parents, played by Joe Mantegna and Mary Steenburgen.

"The imaginative flowering of the primitive urge." Here's an interview with Robbins about his play, and it does confirm--see previous post--that Pearly White is Richard Perle. It's a radio interview with Brooke Gladstone that begins with a dialogue from MacBird, the old Vietnam era play, which melded MacBeth with Lyndon Johnson. MacBird is amazingly crass. Robbins doesn't seem to be terribly bright. Gladstone feeds him a Philip Roth definition of satire and invites him to adopt it:

"Satire is moral rage transformed into cosmic art." What begins as a desire to murder your enemy with blows is, quote, "converted in the attempt to murder him with invective and insult. It's the imaginative flowering of the primitive urge to knock somebody's block off. ...So Tim, what makes you angry enough - if you follow Philip Roth's rubric - to write Embedded?"

Somehow, Robbins doesn't have the sense to reframe the definition to exclude himself from the murderous rage aspect. Perhaps he was distracted by the "imaginative flowering" part. This is also uninspiring:

[Gladstone:] In your play, [the embedded reporters'] stories had to be approved by the military chief there, a character that you call Hardchannel, but when the embedded process started, we read the rules of embedment issued by the Pentagon, and that wasn't in it. Reporters never had to submit their stories. They said they never would have agreed to it.

TIM ROBBINS: Mmmmm-- I don't know if that's true or not ...

When murderous anger gets the imagination flowering, you get satire, which represents the truth in some deeper way than actual, literal truth, which is why you're an artist and not a reporter. Except the play is really bad (I hear), which is the unforgivable part for the artist, and the truth does still matter, even the parts too superficial for an artist to bother to learn.

Political art, that old oxymoron, rears its ugly head again. This time the victim is Tim Robbins, whose new play about the Iraq War, called "Embedded," is trashed by NYT reviewer Ben Brantley. And Brantley loved "Bob Roberts":

There is little compelling sense of the sustained, dizzyingly absurd reality that Mr. Robbins achieved in his spoof movie about a presidential candidate, "Bob Roberts."

Well, I went to see "Bob Roberts" when it came out because I read the raving reviews, and I walked out on that film, something I rarely do, because it wasn't trenchant or funny or anything it was cracked up to be. But then I wouldn't be one of the people in the audience for "Embedded," and the kind of people who would be were, per Brantley, struggling to stay awake.

According to Brantley, the play depicts:

[A]n elitist Washington cabal ... [whose] members have resonant names like Dick, Rum Rum, Gondola, Woof and Pearly White. They wear sinister half-masks and offer Black Sabbath-style hymns of praise to Leo Strauss, the neo-conservative philosopher. And though they plot their military strategy with icy detachment, they become sexually aroused at the mere prospect of more power.

Is Pearly White supposed to be Colin Powell? Well, okay, maybe if that was written broadly and brilliantly enough it could work a la Dr. Strangelove (which Brantley cites), but apparently it fails miserably. But what I'd like to comment on here is the whole "sexually aroused at the mere prospect of more power" idea. It seems to me that years ago, linking political power with sexuality was far more common. With the decline of Freudianism, there's been a decline in observations about sex and power. Too bad! It was interesting. What remains of that sort of commentary seems to lie only on the left. I was thinking about that just the other day, reading this passage in a great article about fundamentalist terrorists, which I linked to here. (Hmm... the Times won't let you get back to the article anymore--some of the old Times links work and some don't. How irritating.) The part I'm interested in is already quoted at my old post and put in some context:

''You can't have a girlfriend in this society. ... It's too expensive to marry, and as a young man, all you're thinking about is sex. So the 'teachers' would tell us, Don't worry, no need now, when you kill yourself you'll have plenty of girls in heaven.'' ... ''If there were girls in our high school,'' he said. ''I never would have joined those groups.''

We tend to be so respectful of religion that we don't even want to begin to explore the whole sex-religion-politics-violence tangle of human psychology that statement reveals. Of course there can still be a play about sex and violence when we are critiquing ourselves. But we don't dare to apply the same sort of satirical attack to our enemies. Go at both sides with your satirical weapons, Mr. Robbins, and I'll go see your play!


UPDATE: On reflection, I think "Pearly White" refers to Richard Perle. It really would be pretty crude to refer to Colin Powell that way, but calling attention to Perle being white is just dumb and dull, though the attempt to connect him to teeth and hence viciousness is noted. Don't know why Perle's name didn't occur to me when I wrote this post several hours ago. If you've read this blog back to day 1--January 14th--you'll see I was cleaning my office and listening to streaming audio of a Fresh Air interview with him (about his book "An End to Evil") when I decided to start a blog.

"Big Girls Don't Cry." Am I the only one who noticed that, in the first episode of The Sopranos this season, AJ was attempting to play "Big Girls Don't Cry" on his new drums? (That song title was once used as an episode title, back in Season 2.) The drum intro to that song is so familiar to me, because I adored The Four Seasons from the moment I first heard "Sherry" on my little transistor radio, when I was in, I think, 6th grade. The radio was a cute white rectangle, an iPod forerunner of sorts, and I used to take it to school and hide it in my desk and attempt to listen to it through an earplug. No one I knew had headphones, or even stereo sound then, certainly not on the radio, so you used an earplug, which was pretty much like having one earbud. "Earbud" is a silly word, but "earplug" is a strange word for something used to send sound into your ear.

Anyway, I would listen and listen to that thing in the hope that they would play a song I loved--and there was a point in 1962 when I loved every song in the top 20. The release of The Four Seasons' second single, "Big Girls Don't Cry" was a huge deal to me, and the sound of the drum intro on the radio would have filled me with joy in those days. You can listen to the beginning of the song here.

If you'd like to see more pictures of old transistor radios, you could start here. There seems to be some passion for the old things out there. The image I'm displaying is the closest I could come to my treasured old radio. Mine was white where this one is red, but that silver, angled, TV-shaped speaker lingers in the mind: I'm sure I had a Realtone.

This blog is two months old today. Feel free to click on the archives and find out what kind of a newborn it was.

Art, commerce, anomie and the high-tech lifestyle. Here's something I bought. I needed something to carry my laptop around in, so why not a handbag with an Edward Hopper painting of a woman reading on a train? I'll be a woman reading the internet on my laptop while traveling about, and somewhere in the past, there's that Hopper woman, on an old passenger train, reading a book.



I got that Hopper image from this page, which isn't in English, but it has a very lovely collection of paintings of women reading. Here, I'll copy another, which I find especially appealing. It's by Jan Sluijters.

The real difference between Kerry and Auntie Em. I'd like to remove myself from the hook for seeming to portray Kerry as not macho enough here. In fact, I don't like the non-gentle parts of his statement: "lying" and "corrupt." And I don't like inarticulate speech; in this case, "you know" and "lying group of people" (for "liars"). But I've been thinking about it, especially after writing that bookstore post, just below, and I really think that the inarticulate parts of the statement may be the real, and better Kerry showing through. I suspect advisors are telling him to be more masculine and to criticize Bush forcibly. You've got to use words like "corrupt" and "liars." You've got to throw red meat to the Bush-haters. Kerry then tried to do what they wanted and just couldn't bring himself to do it. He started to, but felt the "Auntie Em effect." But I mean that in a good way: it is a sign of character to stop yourself like that. The main difference between Kerry and Auntie Em, is that Auntie Em could not even allow one nasty word out of her mouth. That took real strength. I'd like to see a strong President in that sense.

Of course, Em would have made a terrible President because, despite her inability to mouth off, she also completely lacked the ability to speak up in strong but not profane language and to take action to solve any problems. But at least she knew who the real evil person in town was. Kerry's real weakness problem is one that cannot be solved--or even masked--by mouthing off nastily about Bush. Those who are concerned about the problems Bush is taking action to try to solve are going to want to see shows of strength directed at our real enemies and not just attacks on Bush.

What's this world coming to? Email category. Two more subject lines on email I don't open:

I love you

I'm worried about you

That's rather sad.

MORE: Here's another one:

[re] Democracy.

That was for some impotence remedy. An incredibly lame political joke could be made.

YET MORE: This one's a bit evil:

I've had enough of your lies.

Maybe I wouldn't have wanted to open that one anyway.

Shopping at Borders ... with Kerry. The NYT reports on a Kerry shopping trip to Borders. One of the books he buys is One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Oprah book selection. But how would you like to choose a novel with the press watching? Assuming you were running for President, you'd have to try to pick a book that would reflect on you appropriately. You'd have to pick something like One Hundred Years of Solitude. As he's leaving the store, there's this interchange with a 6-year old kid who's just had his picture taken with Kerry:

"Guess who I hate?" Justin called out as Mr. Kerry walked away. "Bush!"

"Uh-oh," Mr. Kerry said. "We don't want to hate anyone."

That's completely non-macho, and I approve. And by the way, why would the kid say that? He's just an innocent who wants Kerry to like him and has to believe that hating Bush is something to be proud of, like reading a chapter book. He could only have gotten that idea one way.

But what did Kerry say afterwards? No running mike to let us know. Maybe it was "That kid ruled!" or "Even a little kid knows what a corrupt liar Bush is." In my dreams it would be, "Ordinary Democrats are going around casually expressing hatred instead of talking about real ideas. I hope I can help change the political discourse in this country. Clinton-hating was wrong, and so is Bush-hating."

"Crooked, you know, lying group." Excuse me if I don't get all excited about Kerry saying , "these guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group of people I've ever seen." Of course, like the Dean scream, this is the sort of thing that everyone can get up to speed and have an opinion about instantly. It's almost impossible for me to get outraged at this, even though I deplore the overuse of the words "lie," "lying," and "liar," in political debate. But my main two problems with Kerry's current gaffe is that it shows ineptitude (in not knowing when a microphone is attached to his person) and poor speaking ability. Here he is trying get tough with the word "crooked," then he has to stop and say "you know," to collect his thoughts. He thinks (I'm guessing): do I dare say "liars"?--do I dare to eat a peach?--and then decides to tone it down by avoiding the noun and going with the adjective "lying" followed by the excessively pussyfooted "group of people." He goes all Auntie Em in the end:

For twenty-three years I've been dying to tell you what I thought of you! And now... well, being a Christian woman, I can't say it!

Aw, dammit, now I have to call Campaign Machismo Watch on myself!

Eisner is to Trump as Simpson is to Osbourne? Prof. Bainbridge is thinking of joining me and Prof. Yin in the lawprofs who blog about reality TV shows business. That would be if Disney devised an Apprentice-like reality show to find a replacement for Michael Eisner, as was jokingly suggested.

There will be attempts to replicate The Apprentice, because it's so successful (and it's great too!), but I wonder what they will look like. The Osbournes was (past tense used intentionally, unfortunately) a great show, but could you just follow another celebrity around? It didn't work with Roseanne. But following Jessica Simpson around on the Newlyweds is actually pretty good. That's because Simpson is a great character. Not as supremely great as Ozzy Osbourne, but decently great. Now Trump is a great character, strangely compelling in his loathsomeness. He's the Ozzy of business competition shows. Is there also a Jessica? We'll find out. I'll bet we'll see a Roseanne, though.

Amish day at the Times--Rumpspringa! (Apparently, I think it is my job to detect repetitions.) First, there's this description of Johnny Depp in a movie review by Elvis Mitchell headlined, "Beware of Amish Hitmen and the Anxiety of Influence":

Dressed ominously in a big-brimmed black hat and a work shirt buttoned to the neck — he looks like an Amish hitman — Shooter drawls menacingly, "You stole my book."

(The movie is just some thriller, not about the Amish at all--and Mitchell manages to refer to Popeye and Danger Mouse too, and I will be waiting for random recurrences of these characters.)

The second is the pathetic story "Man Charged After Snack Cakes Stolen" (why report it at all?):

Robert Lee McKiernan, 35, of Cedar Rapids, was arrested Tuesday after an incident in which authorities say he stole a box of Hostess Ho Hos and a box of Cinnamon Crumb Cakes from a barn at an Amish farm near Hazleton, in northeast Iowa.

The third is this correction, surely the Correction of the Day:

An article in The Arts on March 4 about a planned UPN reality show tentatively called "Amish in the City" misspelled the Pennsylvania Dutch term for a rite of passage in which some teenagers experiment with the outside world. Authorities on Amish tradition use various renditions of the dialect, but the most common version is rumspringa, not Rumpspringa.

Law school life. A dialogue from the seventh floor, on hearing sounds of revelry coming from the Faculty Library at the end of the hall:

What's going on?
I don't know.
It sounds like some sort of reception.
They seem to be having too much fun.
That's not right.

Back to work. No one investigates.

3/11. A witness, reported in the NYT:

"There were pieces of flesh and ribs all over the road ... There were ribs, brains all over. I never saw anything like this. The train was blown apart. I saw a lot of smoke, people running all over, crying. I saw part of a hand up to the elbow and a body without a head face down on the ground. Flesh all over. I started to cry from nerves. There was a 3-year-old boy all burnt and a father was holding him in his arms, crying."

Very sad.

Websites I hate; high speed access I won't buy. Just when I was about to order high speed access from my cable company (Charter Communications), I go to their website and try to click on "high speed internet help" to find out about the rates and so on. A screeching noise begins, gets louder and louder, and then an animation of a racing car "breaks through" the page and swerves to a halt--an ad for something. I don't read the ad and have to wait several seconds for a button to appear so I can click it away. (Don't go here unless you want to see that sort of thing.) So then I click on the help link and get a page that says:

"We do not support your Operating System. Sorry for any inconvenience."

And sorry if I hate you. My operating system is OSX, and if you don't support it, I don't support you. I was even going to order the cable box, even though I hate the box, because I wanted to get HBO.

Another ridiculous page at the website says:

Get Access to a Great New Start Page! As a result of an exciting new agreement with MSN®,
you now have access to a new start page at http://charter.msn.com. Start Your Surfing Off Smart. Charter.msn.com will take you directly to some of the richest and most up to date news, sports, financial and entertainment content on the Internet. It is just a first step towards a more robust offering from Charter scheduled for delivery later in 2004.

So I can "get access"--they'll actually let me go to a MSN® page--and I can even start my "surfing" there? Yeah, that's really "exciting," Charter.

Solving the Jon Peter Lewis mystery. Prof. Yin wrote:

I actually kind of like Jon Peter Lewis' performance, but I don't think there's a chance he'll get through.

Then, it turned out we saw that the li'l guy outpolled even the clearly best person (Jennifer Hudson). Here's Shack's rebuke at Television Without Pity:

You voted spastic dork Jon Peter Lewis into the finals.

Well, I laughed through Lewis's performance and would never have voted for him, but (with hindsight) I understand why he won the vote of the people. The people in question, the ones who speed dial hundreds of times in the alloted two-hour period, are young girls. Personally, I'm not a young girl, but I once was, and I remember very well how I felt about idolizing singers. I was interested in male singers who seemed to be boys, not men. I wrote a few days ago that the group Them wasn't quite what I liked at the time. This was the reason: Van Morrison sounded like a man. For the same reason, I wanted nothing to do with something like, say, Percy Sledge singing When a Man Loves a Woman. Young girls are interested in a singer who is an idealized boyfriend. That's why they liked Clay Aiken so very much. That's why we loved The Monkees.

Gore's raised eybrows. Dowd ends with some approval for Botox:

[T]hink of all the pols who could have benefited from modern cosmetic techniques. ... Richard Nixon could have used Botox to stop his sweating, as Fortune 500 execs do now. And Al Gore could have frozen those condescending eyebrows during the 2000 debate.

Wait ... Gore had eyebrows?

Candidate Machismo Watch. That Cheney joke, as Maureen Dowd's comment below indicates, belongs on the Candidate Machismo Watch list. (The joke is about searching for "missing biowarfare agents in Senator Kerry's forehead" as Dowd recounts it.)

It depends on what the meaning of "don't" is. When Maureen Dowd asked John Kerry if Dick Cheney's joke about Botox was "a way to mock him for an effeminate vanity," he said:

"No, I don't have it," he says coolly. "Vanity or Boxtox [sic]?" I ask, grimacing. "I don't have Botox, but whatever their game is, I don't care," he replies without a wisp of a wince. "That sort of thing is so childish. In the end, people will care about real choices that affect their lives."

Didn't everyone learn from the Lewinsky incident that when someone answers your question in the present tense, you need a follow-up question about the past tense?

Oh, and since Maureen Dowd had gone in search of info about Botox (and was mostly trying to make him react to something, anything, to see if he could still move his face), didn't Kerry implicitly call Dowd childish? But isn't that really why we read Dowd?

Movieoke. Now that there's movieoke--good for people who would do karaoke but won't sing in public--I'm ready for the reality show. As karaoke led to American Idol, movieoke must lead to American Movie Star.

Sampling--for painters. What are we to think of a painter who paints from someone else's photos? Should a key point be that the photographer is not purveying his photos as art but is a photojournalist? Should it matter that the painter is selecting parts of the photographs and adding new elements and painting in a painterly not a photo-realist style? Should it matter that the photo is 30 years old?

I'm a lawprof not a copyright lawprof, so I'm just offering the usual array of lawprof-y questions and not an opinion on copyright law. Yet I can't help feeling sympathy for the artist. I often do a freeze frame on the TV--another reason to have a TiVo--and do a drawing. Here, it seems to make a difference whether I'm drawing from a news or talk show, which is casually performed and photographed, and a fiction show or movie, which is an artist's work. Let's say I freeze frames from a beautifully photographed film from 30 years ago, like Taxi Driver, and make a series of large paintings. I don't see how I could sell that. But then, if I find segments within the frame, discovering compositions that are in some way mine (but in some way not), and if painted them on a different scale and in a painterly style, so that the original film couldn't even be perceived--well, that seems entirely different to me. What if I don't bother to paint them but just extract them from a DVD and fool around cropping and redoing the image in the computer? Though I don't imagine copyright law has much to do with the fact that the second work of art may have taken far more effort than the one it is appropriating, it's hard not to side with the painter against the photographer. The artistic photo-manipulator--like Meghan on The Apprentice last week--seems to be another matter entirely.

Gray's Anatomy. We watched Gray's Anatomy last night. My son had rented it a few days ago, before the news came out that Spalding Gray's body had been identified. His (presumed) suicide changes the way I could see the movie: all the closeups compelled me to try to see into that face to find reasons for what happened. Statements in that film about the terrible effects his mother's suicide had on him cannot be heard the same way any more, because he had children too, though one resists blaming the unfortunate man.

The theater performance of Gray's Anatomy, which I saw at the Union Theater here years ago, was far better than the Steven Soderbergh film that is on the DVD. The Soderbergh film is full of extra scenes, interviews with various people who've had eye injuries. These are actually great interviews, beautifully photographed, and worthy as documentary film, but I want to see Gray's theater performance, which has the static, stark visual of a man at a table with a notebook and a glass of water. When Soderbergh does show Gray in his chair, he propels the chair across the screen in front of various projected images and restlessly moves the camera and changes the lighting.

Though he can claim to be trying to express something about failing vision, Soderbergh's implicit message is that the theater piece is not interesting enough for a film, but in fact it's far more compelling--and much funnier--without all the extra embroidery. I'd like to see a deluxe collection of Gray's work on DVD that would include as many of his performance pieces as exist, including both the official films, like Soderbergh's, and films or tapes that have been made of live theater performances. I'd also like to see--if it exists--a filmed performance of the play Our Town that he talks about in Monster in a Box (with or without projectile vomiting).

How is Jayson Blair's girlfriend like Presidential candidate John Kerry? They both spontaneously launch into quoting "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The info on the girlfriend comes from the great public service feature, "Slate reads the prevaricator's book so you don't have to." The info on John Kerry comes from last Sunday's Maureen Dowd swoon, my aversion to which appears here. Here's the Prufrock part:

But there was Mr. Kerry flying from Boston to New Orleans on Friday, sipping tea for his hoarse throat and reeling off T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

"There are so many great lines in it," he said. " `Do I dare to eat a peach?' `Should I wear my trousers rolled?' `Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets/The muttering retreats/Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells."

Well, why not have a big Prufrock revival?

Here's a nice website with the text of the poem tricked up with links (quite a few of them dead though), to miscellaneous things, like the Seurat painting below, for "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare."

Feel free to pick through the Prufrock quotes and find phrases from which to construct wisecracks about Jayson Blair and John Kerry. There are plenty of juicy ones, though you won't find "Should I wear my trousers rolled?"--one of the "great lines" Kerry "reeled off." It's:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Jennifer Hudson's dress. I've been a big Jennifer Hudson fan since her first appearance on an audition show--February 3rd. (The topic is American Idol, people.) She was by far the best performer last night, as everyone seemed to agree, so here's my theory about her insane dress, that hot pink rhumba thing that a friend supposedly made for her. I say supposedly because when asked his name, she could only come up with a first name, and even that sounded like she just made it up ("George"). Anyone could see that was a ridiculous dress, so why did she wear it? Her bad clothes have been a topic of merriment on previous shows, so what I'm thinking is, the producers knew she would get through, probably by the vote of the people but if not, as one of the judge's selections. Four people are going through, and there is no question that one of them will be her. With that in mind, the producers had an entirely absurd dress made and convinced her to wear it for the sheer comedy of it all. She would agree to do it for any of a number of reasons: 1. She wants to be agreeable, 2. She has a sense of humor, 3. She likes to wear comic clothing, and (this is the real one) 4. She knew, and they told her, that by calling as much attention to her ridiculous clothes as possible, she was setting the stage for the future occasion when she would redo her image and suddenly look fabulous and receive lavish praise for her brilliant transformation.

Multiple confusions. So I'm trying to figure out how to do some things with my new computer and how to get my images up where I can get a url for them, something I thought I was close to doing last night. I think I'm going to try to operate out of .mac, largely because I'm just a 20 year Mac devotée and so I tend to think by staying with Mac, things will be easier, friendlier--and I never test that assumption by checking out alternatives. But frankly, I got really confused trying to post images through .mac. It's that dual confusion where you're confused about whether something can be done at all and confused about how you would do it. As a Mac person, I expect to just look at a thing and see the answers.

A more active lifestyle. I picked up a new laptop yesterday, a tiny, inexpensive iBook, which I see as key to a more active lifestyle, letting me get out to a café or restaurant. One could just step away from the computer, but it's more realistic just to have a computer that isn't too annoying to carry around (like my old laptop) and has a wireless card. My favorite café sometimes has a laptop on every table, with a nice big cup of liquid right next to it, just waiting to destroy it, and no one seems to notice how they are putting an expensive possession at risk.

My Warholized image. This is really mostly just a test of whether I've figured out how to put an image of my own creation someplace on the web where I can then link it to display it here. If this works, I'll probably put up a drawing or a photograph every day. This first image--and I'm hoping it works--is a photograph of me from the 1960s that I've Photoshopped in a way that I like to call "Warholizing." Here goes!

UPDATE: I guess not! I am going to figure this out ...

FINAL UPDATE: Yay!! I did it! I even resized it!!

A front page obituary for Spalding Gray in today's NYT. He deserves it. (When there's a front page obituary, it makes the inside page obituaries seem hidden away. There's one today on the inside for Paul Winfield, who is fondly remembered, especially for Sounder.)

Here's a quote from the Gray obituary:

In addition to his writing, Gray enjoyed skiing and drinking; he once told an interviewer that a 6 p.m. bloody Mary was a staple of his routine.

That's the second Times obituary in less than a week to mention the decedent's interest in Bloody Marys. The subject of drinking is usually suppressed in obituaries. Perhaps there is an artist exception.

"Servicing humanity." People deviate from routine word choice at their own risk. Sometimes they are being pretentious, and sometimes the big words that a pretentious person would use can work nicely as a comic device. Sometimes people are trying to steer clear of cliché or just trying to be striking or original. But please be careful. I was driving to an appointment over the lunch hour, scanning the radio, and there was Rush Limbaugh saying he would be back after the break "to continue servicing humanity." Wouldn't that be a more appropriate expression for his enemies?

service ... TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: ser·viced, ser·vic·ing, ser·vic·es. 1. To make fit for use; adjust, repair, or maintain: service a car. 2. To provide services to. 3. To make interest payments on (a debt). 4a. To copulate with (a female animal). Used of a male animal, especially studs. b. Slang To have sex with.

Ah well, there was once a little market research firm in New York that made a promotional tape bragging about its work by constantly repeating the phrase "It's actionable!" which they seemed to think meant quick and effective.

Bush-v.-Gore-based chortling? Rereading that last post after a break, I'm thinking the part of the excerpted quote that Scalia antagonists will pick up on is the reference to momentous occasions when "the impartiality of even those at the highest levels of the judiciary might not be so clear." He's referring only to trials, of course, since he's talking about decisions whether to admit evidence, but I almost felt I could hear the Bush-v.-Gore-based chortling out there.

"Even Scalia should have problems with this ..." wrote a commenter to a TalkLeft posting last fall after the oral argument in Crawford v. Washington. In the case the Washington state court had allowed the prosecution to use a recorded statement made by the defendant's wife, who did not testify at trial because the state has the kind of spousal privilege where the spouse can't testify without the defendant's consent, and Crawford did not consent. The Washington state court permitted the recorded statement to be used because there was enough evidence of its trustworthiness. Crawford said that violated his Sixth Amendment right to confront the witnesses against him and, yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed.

The idea that "even Scalia" would find a right here is inapt because it is exactly the history-based textualism that his critics complain about that leads him to a literal interpretation of the idea of confronting witnesses at trial. Scalia writes the opinion in Crawford:

Where testimonial statements are involved, we do not think the Framers meant to leave the Sixth Amendment’s protection to the vagaries of the rules of evidence, much less to amorphous notions of “reliability.” ... Reliability is an amorphous, if not entirely subjective, concept. There are countless factors bearing on whether a statement is reliable; the nine-factor balancing test applied by the [lower state court] is representative. ... By replacing categorical constitutional guarantees with open-ended balancing tests, we do violence to their design. Vague standards are manipulable, and, while that might be a small concern in run-of-the-mill assault prosecutions like this one, the Framers had an eye toward politically charged cases like [Sir Walter] Raleigh’s -- great state trials where the impartiality of even those at the highest levels of the judiciary might not be so clear.

... Where testimonial statements are at issue, the only indicium of reliability sufficient to satisfy constitutional demands is the one the Constitution actually prescribes: confrontation.

Surely, Justice Scalia deserves credit for the principled application of his methodology. Is he getting any? I only found one reference in NEXIS for "Scalia and Crawford and (textualism or textualist)." That was a brief note in a piece in the Washington Post that the majority included "the court's two leading adherents to a 'textualist' approach to reading the Constitution, Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas." I haven't seen anything Googling either. I'll update here if anything turns up.

Spalding Gray. I've written about him before--here, here, and here. I can't say how sad I am to know he's dead. What a brilliant man. There are many monologuists, including one I love as much as Spalding Gray, but there is no one else at all like him. I have driven all over the country listening to my tapes of Monster in a Box over and over. Also The Terrors of Pleasure. Everyone should see Swimming to Cambodia. We saw him perform Gray's Anatomy here at the University Theater years ago, with his plain table and chair and notebook and glass of water. From the NYT:

It was a muted end for Mr. Gray, whose singular talent was closely observed autobiography, performed in a style that alternated between conspiratorial whispers and antic screams as he roamed through topics large and small.

Very, very sad. Hearing his monologues, I always found it hard to believe he could have been as sad and he was saying he was, because he was so funny and so deep. I'd like to think he wouldn't have left us if he hadn't also been in physical pain. Love to his wife and children.

Drop City ... Gloria. I drove in to work this morning listening to an NPR interview with T.C. Boyle, who talked about being really a rock star at heart, forced to be a writer for lack of musical talent. (Hey, that's the way I feel about being a law professor! At least there's a live audience.)

[I]n Drop City, the Van Morrison song "Mystic Eyes" is used to underscore the novel's central conflict between a hippie commune in Alaska and the locals they incense.

I'm going to read that. Me, I liked the early Van Morrison, before his name was known, and he was just Them. I bought the first Them single when it came out ("Here Comes the Night"). It wasn't quite the sort of thing I liked at the time, but it was close enough, and it was clearly good. "Gloria" was even better.

So let me say something about "Gloria," which relates to the single best moment of musical performance I ever witnessed live. It was the mid-1970s, in Greenwich Village, in a small music club that was called The Metropolitan (or something close to that). We had gone to see the folk duo Happy and Artie Traum, whom we liked a lot at the time--this is a good folky album--and were dismayed to see that there was an opening act, and it was just some poet who was going to do a reading. That didn't seem right, and I came close to leaving and coming back later so I wouldn't have some idiot's poetry inflicted on me. Well, the poet was Patti Smith, and there was a guitarist sitting in a chair behind her, sort of aimlessly, quietly noodling, while she recited her poetry in the singsongish way typical of beatnik poets. At some point, it became more like singing, and then, somewhere down the line, with the participation of the guitarist, it became "Gloria." That was the coolest thing ever. A version of her Gloria, appears on the album pictured here. I have that album in a frame on my living room wall.

Blue abandonment continues. I see Tonya--inspired by me!--has changed the background color in the Blogspot Bluebird template. She's taken on a nice dark, possibly Harvard-related red. She's got pictures too. Her cartoon taste diverges from mine. (Scroll down here and on Tonya's blog.)

Meanwhile, Nina had a bad HTML experience trying to put up a picture of storks and is now claiming minimal text-only blogging is much better:

Ahhh the svelte black and white sophisticates – stark sumptuousness –all in the word, nothing else, just pure, sensual, cerebral, elegant text.

Since that sounds like sour grapes to me, and since she wanted to post an image of a stork and one of my first images was a fox, here's a link to "The Fox and the Stork."

Candidate Machismo Watch. This is the first entry in a projected series that will concentrate on the ways the Presidential candidates attempt to gain advantage by portraying themselves as more masculine than the other guy. There are two way to do this: by calling attention to one's own masculinity and by calling attention to one's opponent's lack of masculinity. The background assumption, which is offensive, is that the more masculine person should be elected.

In a "Week in Review" piece in today's NYT, John Tierney collects a list of "bests" and "worsts" from the campaign. After awarding John Kerry the "Best Photo Op" honor for his appearance in Iowa with a veteran whose life he saved in Vietnam, Tierney adds:

But there was one even more valuable photo opportunity generously provided by the White House advance team. To rouse an audience, a Democratic candidate had merely to mention the scene of Mr. Bush "playing dress-up" while "prancing" on that aircraft carrier with the "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Well, first, who used those precise quotes, "playing dress-up" and "prancing"? I assume all the Democratic candidates made what they could out of the aircraft carrier event, but who used those quotes, which go beyond criticizing Bush for attempting to display his masculinity and actually try to make him seem as though he were acting effeminate?

Say what you will about Bush, the guy doesn't "prance." It would make more sense to ridicule his excessively masculine way of walking!

Some research will show that "prancing" was Wesley Clark's word, and "playing dress-up" was a Kerry locution. No candidate used both, I'm going to conclude from the fact that a Nexis search only turned up one article other than Tierney's that had both phrases (and "mission accomplished"). The other article, "It's hip to skip the formalities; Presidential candidates, some anxious to shed upper-crust images, use pop-culture phrases to show they're just regular folks. Ain't it cool?", by Renee Tawa, appeared in in the LA Times, on Feb. 7 (it's not linkable). Here's the key part:

Both Kerry and Clark mention Bush's flight deck appearance as a way to underscore their own military service, noted [University of Maryland communications prof Shawn J.] Parry-Giles. "It's creating this kind of hypermasculine kind of discourse," she said. "Clark talks about Bush's 'prancing' on the deck of the aircraft carrier, and Kerry talks about Bush playing dress up," she said. "Clark and Kerry are trying to de-masculinize Bush and his war preparedness."

Okay! Professor Parry-Giles, I completely agree with you!

By the way, Andrew Sullivan himself used "prance" (in the London Times, February 22, 2004--not linkable):

One of the worst decisions that Bush ever made was to prance around on an aircraft carrier in a jump suit gloating that the war in Iraq was "mission accomplished" when it was anything but.

''They said choose: poetry or us.'' After reading the lame praise for Kerry's interest in poetry, I was especially struck by this passage from Elizabeth Rubin's brilliant article in the NYT Magazine, "The Jihadi Who Kept Asking Why":

Abdullah Thabet, the poet in Asir [Saudi Arabia], told me that back in the late 90's, after years of training him to become part of the new generation of religious organizers, the Salifiyya teachers discovered through informers (his friends) that he was reading Hemingway and Hugo and an Arabic Communist philosopher and that he was writing and reading love poetry -- absolute heresy. They beat him mercilessly. ''They said choose: poetry or us.'' He cried for days, not wanting to lose that solidarity. But Abdullah Thabet needed music and poetry more than the harsh Wahhabi creed. Now that he has broken the spell and criticizes Wahhabism, openly writes poetry, advocates women's rights and the teaching of music and painting in school, his parents say they think he's an infidel, and his former Islamic brothers threaten to kill him -- as they did when they saw him with me outside an Asir restaurant.

Yes, poetry is a nice enough thing to dabble in, but would you risk death to keep it in your life? More on Thabet:

[H]e's the image of apostasy -- long sideburns, no beard, jeans, leather jacket, cigarettes. I drove with him around the province one day as a Muzak version of Lionel Richie's ''Say You, Say Me'' strained on his old Ford speakers. ''You can't have a girlfriend in this society,'' he told me. ''It's too expensive to marry, and as a young man, all you're thinking about is sex. So the 'teachers' would tell us, Don't worry, no need now, when you kill yourself you'll have plenty of girls in heaven.'' ... ''If there were girls in our high school,'' he said. ''I never would have joined those groups.''

There's something so sweet and sad about Thabet finding solace in a Muzak "Say You, Say Me." There is much, much more in this article, which is mostly about another man, "the most daring and idiosyncratic of these reformists," Mansour Al-Nogaidan.

Poet or bloviator? Maureen Dowd is drooling over Kerry: he's a poet! Okay, my grandma swooned over Eugene McCarthy because he wrote poetry. (Go ahead, click on that link, you can still be the first person to review his book of selected poems, published seven years ago, which reveals "deep wisdom conveyed with a deft touch," but do hurry, because there's only one left.)

Should we swoon over John Kerry because he responded to Dowd's culture questions with long, long answers, unlike George Bush, who, asked to name his favorite "cultural experience," said "baseball"? Well, consider that, reeling off the names of 37 movies, he doesn't seem to have come up with a single offbeat or obscure title (Dowd cites "National Velvet," "The Deer Hunter," and "Men in Black"). Yet somehow Dowd manages to conclude that, when it comes to culture Kerry is (adopting Kerry's wife's adjective) "insatiable," while Bush is "incurious." She even, weirdly, says Kerry has a "vast palette of cultural preferences." A "vast palette"? Not palate? Well, then let's hope he has a really large thumb. (And, yeah, yeah, don't tell me, I know. And Heinz Kerry was referring to her husband's cultural interests with that adjective, as far as I can tell from Dowd's florid column. Florid column? Now everything sounds dirty. Focus, people!)

But what about poetry, how vast are his interests there? Why they extend to Keats, Yeats, Shelley and Kipling! And he writes it too, so Dowd's just in love. She quotes him:

"I remember flying once; I was looking out at the desert and I wrote a poem about the barren desolation of the desert," he said. "I wrote a poem once about a great encounter I had with a deer early in the morning that was very moving."

Okay, now I just feel compelled to be mean. You want me to love the guy because of this, Maureen? I'm sorry.

First, what the hell was "moving," the encounter with the deer or the poem he managed to author? Either way, Kerry's complimenting himself, and that's unsavory. Either he's saying, I'm a sensitive guy because I have moving encounters with deer in the morning, or he's saying I'm as sensitive guy because I write moving poetry about encounters with deer in the morning. "Great" encounters with deer, no less.

Second, shouldn't a poet have some sort of way with words? It's bad enough to use "moving" ambiguously and come up with nothing more precise than "great" to describe you morning deer encounter, but "the barren desolation of the desert"? I'll pause to say it doesn't take great subtlety of mind to look at a desert and come up with the insight that it's barren and desolate, but I'll assume the poem goes somewhere and compares the desert to some damn thing (life itself!). But what I've just got to rail about is "barren desolation of the desert." As opposed to what? The fertile desolation of the desert? The barren camraderie of the desert? The barren desolation of the fruited plain?

Maureen, the man isn't a poet, he's a windbag!

Celebrity with a handgun and a high, beautiful voice. I see Nina's blogging about the David Crosby arrest. I was going to blog about him yesterday, but then it just seemed too sad. How out of it must you be to abandon a bag with a gun and drugs in it so that the hotel employees feel compelled to open it to try to identify the owner? Is that a cry for help or just utter oblivion? I don't know, I lost a new Pelikan fountain pen a couple months ago and then a burnt velvet scarf, so I know how it is. You can lose things.


I love David Crosby though. Not Crosby-Stills-&-Nash Crosby, but The Byrds Crosby. The first concert I ever saw was The Byrds. Folks, it was their first tour! That's how old I am, though I was pretty young at the time. I've said before that the first group I ever loved was The Four Seasons. That made me a bit resentful of The Beatles at first, and the whole British Invasion set of characters, at least until I discovered one of the groups on my own, listening to a distant radio station late at night. (The song was "I Can't Explain." I loved the early Who, and in fact was a member of The Who fan club before they had even released an album in the United States, purely on the strength of "I Can't Explain.")

But The Byrds were part of America's answer to the British Invasion, folk rock, which took the British sound and made it better because they began with Dylan songs or songs with lyrics that tried to be like Dylan's. So Mr. Tambourine Man by The Byrds was truly sublime. Crosby's voice was supremely beautiful then, and he was a sweet kid who always had a little smile, back in the days when Roger McGuinn was Jim McGuinn and David always wore that green suede poncho with brown suede laces in the front. (Is that thing in a Hard Rock Café somewhere now?)(Want to see how they looked in action then? Get this.)

I hope for the best for David. Part of me wants to say, don't some celebrities need to carry a handgun to protect themselves and why waste any public resources on a guy with a small amount of marijuana? But I can't appreciate a guy with a handgun who leaves it lying around in luggage he doesn't keep track of. I see he got arrested not long after giving a concert in Wayne, New Jersey. That's where I was living in the 1960s when I went to see him that first time. There were no concert halls in Wayne then. Where did I see him? Newark? I don't remember. They played a short set and we all screamed through the entire thing. It couldn't have been more thrilling. Good luck, David.

Hey, I want to make up dialogues too.

Archaic methods still in use. Yesterday, I received a hand-addressed, stamped envelope, containing a handwritten note and a newspaper clipping! You'd think everyone would only email links (or cut and pasted text) nowadays. It seemed so odd, in part, because my mother used to send clippings and she is no longer alive, and in part, because the clipped article was about blogging! It's not as weird as it may seem. I couldn't Google my way to the same article (from the Orlando Sentinel), and it does have a nutty photograph of a smiling graphics-design guy sticking his head in front of a giant painting of a terrified face. (My Dinner With André fans: What does this image remind you of?)

I told my sister about my blog--by email, she does use email--but she's never commented on anything I've written here. Maybe she just read my email, remembered "Ann has a blog, whatever that is," then one day she was reading the Orlando Sentinel, ran across the article and it all came together somehow. But has she ever read the blog? I have no idea! I do post from time to time to cheer on her son, Cliff Kresge, who is on the PGA Tour, but she's never acknowledged it. I'll see if she responds to this!

UPDATE: 5 under for round 4. Nice!

Has Hollywood transformed how we see beauty? Look at these two photographs and observe your own reaction.

Notice anything new? I've abandoned "Bluebird," out of the blue, in another feeble step into the comprehension of html. These colors, they're all just numbers. Mmmm, B1629F is lovely! Perhaps a little F3BO44 would be nice.

Now if only I could figure out how to upload my own scanned things somewhere so I could display them here. Any recommendations? I tried to set something up at freewebspace.com but got discouraged. It didn't seem that I could upload images free. Apparently, there's some damn thing you can do free there, but it doesn't seem to be what I want. I bought this book and will try to learn some more things. What I really want to do is to redesign the page and get a nice image in the banner, but that may take some time.

Another labyrinthine defense of a Kerryism. Here's my earlier one, which I corresponded with Zachary Roth at CJR Campaign Desk about (and he was not buying). Watch now while I attempt to dig Kerry out of another ridiculous hole. Here are two quotes, embarrassingly juxtaposed on the front page of today's NYT:

On Feb. 5, Mr. Kerry reacted to Massachusetts' highest court's decision legalizing same-sex marriages by saying, "I personally believe the court is dead wrong." But when asked on Feb. 24 why he believed the decision was not correct, he shot back, "I didn't say it wasn't."

These two statements can be harmonized. In the Feb. 5 statement, Kerry used the expression "I personally believe," whereas in the Feb. 24 statement, he was answering a question about what he "believed." Arguably there is a difference between "believing" something and "personally believing" something. Perhaps, "personal belief" relates more to instinctive feelings a person has. This is particularly notable since in the first statement the belief is about the decision being "wrong," while in the later statement, he's responding to a question about whether the decision is "correct." There are subtle distinctions between the instinctive, personal feelings about whether permitting gay marriage is right or wrong, and the more intellectual, lawyerly analysis of whether a judicial decision is incorrect. Kerry could thus have "personally believed" that the decision was "wrong," by simply feeling his own emotions, and the use of the heated expression "dead wrong" strongly suggests that this was the nature of his Feb. 5 statement.

To have a belief about whether the decision was "correct," however, he would need to study the relevant state constitutional text and the case law of the Massachusetts courts and engage in some elaborate reasoning, which he has not done. Thus, he could correctly assert on Feb. 24 that he had never said that he believed the decision was incorrect. The reporter was asking him to explain why the decision was incorrect, and, not having studied the law, he was in no position to respond with any legitimate legal analysis. Yet, his personal belief that gay marriage is wrong had led him earlier to a genuine "personal belief" that the state court was doing something that was "dead wrong."

Kerryisms, they're enough to make you appreciate Bushisms.

"The 'Performance of Her Career' Is Now an Academy Award Winner." So reads the new, post-Oscars ad for Cold Mountain, which features a photo of Renée Zellweger in her ceremonial swaddling clothes, clutching the little statue. I was going to criticize the writing: in trying to use that quote, "performance of her career," they ended up having the wrong subject to the sentence, "performance" instead of "Renée Zellweger."

But the award really is for "Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role." Sean Penn had the line in his thank you speech, "There are no best actors." But there are no Best Actor Oscars. That's just shorthand. The Oscar he held in his hands was for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading role. So to be accurate, the actors ought to say:

"I'm happy to accept this award on behalf of my performance, which is unable to be here tonight and in any event, incapable of holding a statuette."

Hmm... did you know that last year, when Renée Zellweger lost the Oscar... I mean, when her performance lost the Oscar .... she went home early, climbed in through the window, gave her dog a bath, and spent the night scrubbing the floor. Sounds like something Joan Crawford would do.

Oh, and the dog's name is Dylan, so presumably, it's black, it's a pedantic mongrel, it's got his bone in the alley, it licks her face when she sleeps, it's collar's from India, it means more to her than a dead lion, and it's barking and running free.

My all-time favorite Rehnquist idea. From an interview in the NYT about his current book, Centennial Crisis, about the disputed 1876 election: when asked about his next book, the Chief Justice says:

I don't know there is going to be a next book. I think maybe some sort of a cartoon history of the court. That has been done, but it's not been done with a very good text. I've always enjoyed cartoons. That's one of the things I would like to have been able to do, I would like to have the ability to draw.

He adds that he can't do the drawings himself, so let me say, I went to art school (long ago), and I've done some cartooning over the years and have quite a collection of artistic comic books. Now that I'm figuring out how to do images here, I'll try to put some of my pictures up at some point. One of my most elaborate ones involves Justice Blackmun and his statement, "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."

Here's my favorite comic book:



That's a style entirely inappropriate for a cartoon history of the Supreme Court, at least the authorized Rehnquist version. Visitors to my law school office may notice a postcard of this Mark Beyer work near my door:



Actually, the more I think about it the more I'd love to read a cartoon history of the Supreme Court illustrated by Mark Beyer. That postcard could represent one of the Justices, hard at work at his desk, haunted by the criticisms of the other Justices (at the left) and worried about the fate of the litigants (on the other side of the window).

C'mon Chief, take a chance! We know you love art from the fact that you told the NYT that if you hadn't become a Supreme Court Justice, you would have liked to be an architect or a symphony conductor ... and from the stripes on your robe (photo from the NYT):

Adding images. Now that I've figured it out, I'll be upgrading some past post with images. Scroll down, and in a few days, check the archives.

Mysteries. I'm just beginning to explore the mystery of getting an image to appear on this site. I had thought I couldn't do it, but that U.N. flag gave me hope. Please, St. Teresa, help me:



That picture of St. Teresa is from an article in The Economist about scientists studying the brain activity of nuns, using positron-emission tomography and functional magnetic-resonance imaging, to "identify the brain processes underlying the Unio Mystica—the Christian notion of mystical union with God." The scientists have a hypothesis that this mental state has something in common with out-of-body experiences and even phantom limbs and the capacity of mescaline to "inspire feelings of spirituality or closeness to God" in anyone. If they are right, shouldn't we all be entitled, as a matter of religious freedom, to use mescaline?

What country are you? I took the what country are you test. In fact, I originally posted their little image thing of the results, but then I decided I really didn't need a big turquoise United Nations flag on my blog and deleted it. Oh, what the hell! In a way, I actually agree with the result, not because I'm a huge U.N. fan, but I do actually believe/hope that reason and dialogue will save us all, eventually. So here it is:

You're the United Nations!

Most people think you're ineffective, but you are trying to completely save the world from itself, so there's always going to be a long way to go. You're always the one trying to get friends to talk to each other, enemies to talk to each other, anyone who can to just talk instead of beating each other about the head and torso. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and you get very schizophrenic as a result. But your heart is in the right place, and sometimes also in New York.
Take the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

Yes, I'm back from lunch, and I've read the Times. And I've got eight observations:

1. Go ahead and hunt the protected-species eagle, because that fox is cute.



2. Who wouldn't want Hirb to give them a bath?

3. A question actually posed by a NYT writer: "Why shouldn't movie moguls get their groove on wearing $2,300 sweaters handmade in Scotland and adorned with elegant motifs like skulls with Mickey Mouse ears, marijuana plants or French phrases inviting observers to perform on one's person acts whose names cannot be printed here?"

4. Kudos to Neil MacFarquhar for thinking of an adjective to precede "clad" other than "scantily." For decades, writers have searched their minds for an alternative and now, finally, a solution: "skimpily clad." (Read the article, too, to learn how "Abdel Hakim, a strapping young Saudi, kissed Kawthar, a raven-haired Tunisian beauty, and all hell broke loose." It's about reality TV in the Mideastern milieu.)

5. When friends couple for purely economic reasons: a letter expanding on the current marriage debate. I raised some similar points here. Can two platonic friends marry just so one can get the other's health insurance benefits? Sure, if they are a man and a woman.

6. Goodbye to Stephen Sprouse, who "served guests his famous Bloody Marys in measuring cups and [whose] address book consisted of writing phone numbers on his arms with his ever-handy felt marker."



7. Harsh but hilarious words from Warren Burger, pre-Supreme Court:

[In 1961:] "I'm getting so I don't read what these 'phonies' on the S.Ct. write ... The horrible thing is that the Eisenhower appointees are doing most of the damage."

"Phonies"? I wonder if he was a big fan of "The Catcher in the Rye."

[Later:] "Last Monday's effluvia of the Nine Great Minds is worse than most. ...As I watch this batch of mediocrities function I fear for the Republic. It would be hard to add up two total Supreme Court-caliber men out of the whole nine of them."

"Effluvia"? Hey, I used to have the word "effluvia" over there in my blog description but I changed it to "various random items" to avoid being offputting when somebody said they had to look it up.

8. Six width-of-the-puzzle answers in the puzzle! Thanks, Will.

Yay! Looks like they moved the cut and Cliff made it.

I thought you said you were going to lunch? Yet here you are still yakking about The Apprentice! Class is over, it's Friday, the morning paper isn't read, there's a Friday-level crossword puzzle to be done. Go to lunch! Go to lunch! .... Remember when Omarosa wanted to go to lunch? .... Go to lunch!

For all you "Omarosa suing" Googlers. Folks, I did a Nexis search and found no articles about Omarosa suing. Here's something to read though. It's a USA Today article about last night's show discussing problems real-world employers would have if they fired people as harshly as Trump does on the show.

USA TODAY expert Earl Stafford, CEO of Unitech, says it's possible to fire people in such a way that, given time, both sides respect each other. Trump says he has fired people in many different ways. "They hate you the next morning and forever after."

He said the firing of Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth in Thursday night's episode was a "vicious deal" and may have led to a lawsuit in real life. "You can never let a lawsuit get in your way of doing what's right."

Don't you think if Omarosa were really suing, USA Today would not have referred to "a lawsuit in real life" like that?

The article goes on to say:

Trump says fired employees have sued him on occasion. "I usually win. If you're willing to take it to the end, juries aren't sympathetic to people who say you destroyed their lives. They'd much prefer somebody go out and get another job."

In another legal development, again according to USA Today, Trump "says he has trademarked the words 'You're fired.'"

Private letters of a private man. I haven't had time to read the morning paper yet. First things first: I had to tend to my blog (and tell the world what I think of The Apprentice) and get my thoughts in order for my Conlaw1 class that meets at 11 (the historical development of commerce clause interpretation). But once class is over, despite the gloomy weather today, I plan to walk down to State Street, get a latte and a sandwich, and plunge into today's NYT. I especially want to read Linda Greenhouse's writing about the Blackmun papers.

I'm starting to get a queasy feeling about some of what I'm reading. Much as I love to know the background to the cases I've studied for so long, the behind the scenes wrangling I've always speculated about, I think it's not quite right to be revealing private letters and notes so recently written, many by persons still living and still active on the Court. I quoted a letter from Justice Souter yesterday, because I found it touching and charming and eloquent, but, really, I don't think it's right that Souter's private letter is available for everyone to read. Souter is a mysterious character and in fact that letter seems to reveal his strong feeling about maintaining the mystery about himself. I can imagine a person committing some wrong that might make us think it's a good thing to deprive them of the private zone they have claimed for themselves, but nothing of the kind can be said about Justice Souter. The man is entitled to be the mystery he chooses to be. Sorry if I added to the deprivation of privacy yesterday, but the letter was in the NYT.

"Drama Queen." Prof. Yin, whose blogging veered over into orange backup territory this week, says he's going to miss Omarosa. Yes, she was powerfully entertaining. So was Sam. But both of them had a way of making everyone else's behavior into a reaction to them. It will be good to get a chance to see how people act without the distortion of reacting to Omarosa/Sam.

Miss Alli at Television Without Pity is totally in love with last night's episode. ("Okay, if you're not watching this show? You must start. You simply must start. Although honestly, you must start like two weeks ago, so I'm already sad you didn't.")

Meanwhile, I keep finding people coming to my blog after Googling "Omarosa + suing," so I guess I better find out what that's all about so as not to disappoint people. Especially, now that writing that will cause my site to come up even higher when they Google that. I'm thinking she's trying to sue her way back on the show or collect some cash on the theory that they aggravated her concussion by pressuring her to work for 48 hours straight without a sit-down lunch break. She shouldn't sue though. Omarosa don't sue! Don't you realize millions of people find you immensely entertaining? You could have a whole reality show built around you--I'd call it "Drama Queen"--but who will want to deal with you if you show yourself to be all litigious?

Trump bonds with Heidi. Did you notice, in the boardroom scene on The Apprentice last night, when Heidi rolled her eyes at one of Omarosa's haughty remarks, Trump smirked a little smile at Heidi? He felt like rolling his eyes too, but resisted that. Another thing I think Trump is resisting in the boardroom, which Heidi also resists in the boardroom, is using what Omarosa calls "the F-bomb." Heidi uses the f-word on the street all the time, of course. When Omarosa primily cited swearing in her effort to get Trump to fire Heidi, did you see the big laugh from the usually impassive Carolyn? Carolyn must know that Trump swears all the time around the office, making Heidi a much more appropriate apprentice.

Great Trump quote:

"By the way, all my life, I've been hit in the head with plaster."

He doesn't like complaining--and exaggerating (when did the bump on the head become a concussion?). And crying has not been a good technique. Bursting into the boardroom, unbidden, because you want to display the tears while you've got them going about as good as you think you'll be able to--that was really bad technique.

Anyway, nice to see Kwame get some camera time. I can see why he hasn't gotten much time before. He's cool and sensible and circumspect. He says just enough and it's well thought out. That's great technique.

I love Carolyn. Aside from looking just perfect, she almost always has an expression on her face that is calm and composed, but seems to convey that she sees and knows everything. When occasionally she gets an expression, it's wonderfully effective, like when she looked with disgust at the picked-over food in the losing team's gallery.

Anyway, great show. Great editing and sound effects foreshadowing the problems the team would have trying to sell the creepy looking art. Hope all the artists, chosen and unchosen, get a boost in sales from the appearance on the show. I'm sure they will. How many people does Meghan need to like her? Millions watched the show. Even if 99% were appalled, if .01% of the nonappalled 1% are interested in buying, she has it made.

Harlan, entertained ... Souter, not so much. Two things I enjoyed reading in Nina Totenberg's NPR reports on the Blackmun Papers (available through SCOTUS here). The first one is Blackmun, in his oral history, describing the Justices and clerks viewing pornographic films to determine whether they were obscene:

I remember one time Justice Harlan was there, sitting with his law clerk up front. Of course, his eyesight was almost totally gone, and it was hard for him to see. I sat right behind him, and as the film moved on--and they were all alike // he'd lean over and say to his law clerk, "and what are they doing now?" and the law clerk would describe it and Justice Harlan would say, "You don't say, you don't say."

The second is a written message from Justice David Souter, explaining why he was declining to go to a speech Blackmun recommended:

"I know you get a kick out of these things, but you have to realize that God gave you an element of sociability, and I think he gave you the share otherwise reserved for me."

Double feature suggestion: Decasia. If you take my advice and see Wisconsin Death Trip, may I suggest that you make a double feature of it with Decasia? Both films are quite short.
Both are inventive reuses of photography. WDT reenacts old photographs (see previous post) and Decasia takes scraps of decaying old silent era films and edits them together to make a rather abstract feature-length visual accompaniment to a strange and beautiful symphony.

The boiling defects in the dying film interact with the original photography making new images, outside of their original contexts. It's quite dreamlike and fascinating and disturbing--and absolutely fitting to the music. You should see it.

Wisconsin Death Trip. The recent film, Wisconsin Death Trip, newly available on DVD, is a dramatization of the book of the same title that was published in the early 1970s. The film takes the newspaper articles from the book as its voice-over script, and, using the style of the period photos from the book, silently reenacts the stories from the old articles, which all tell strange, sad, or violent tales of happenings in Black River Falls, Wisconsin in the 1890s. (LOTR fans--and others--may be interested to know that the voiceover actor is Ian Holm.)

Is there something especially morbid and sick about Wisconsin? As a person living in Wisconsin, I had to wonder if the book was picking on us, or, no I didn't really, because there is always the out for us here in Madison to say Madison is an island of difference within the state. But I knew this film was well regarded, and when I saw yesterday that it had arrived in the mail, I immediately sat down and watched it through. It was quite beautiful and original visually and quite moving and full of fascinating characters (like Mary Sweeney, a cocaine-sniffing woman with a mania for breaking glass).
One could see the film as expressing the idea that in bad economic times, in desolate places, people go mad with despair. Or one could see it as saying that in some very specific times in very specific places, people just go off-the-scale weird.

Here's my interpretation. We tend to think of Wisconsin as a notably healthy, wholesome place. (Notice the characters in movies who say they are from Wisconsin: Annie Hall, Jack Dawson in Titanic, etc., etc.) So I am thinking: to show the dark side to Wisconsin is to say something about the dark side of humanity. This story of Black River Falls in the last decade of the nineteenth century is (as presented through the film, if not the book) a universal story of passion and violence and death and madness.

UPDATE: Another wholesome thing set in Wisconsin, which I only know because I did the NYT crossword puzzle today, is the TV show Happy Days. Wisconsin Death Trip could have been called Unhappy Days.

Titanic and Lord of the Rings--another connection. I noted here that LOTR fans ought to have a special regard for the cast of Titanic because it starred Kate Winslet, who appeared in an early Peter Jackson film, Heavenly Creatures. (HC is one of my all-time favorite films, by the way.) A reader writes in to note another connection between the Titanic and LOTR casts: the captain of the Titanic and the King of Rohan in LOTR were played by the same actor, Bernard Hill.

"From a progressive viewpoint." I wondered a few days ago about how or whether a lawprof asked to speak to the American Constitution Society as opposed to the Federalist Society about a new Supreme Court case ought to tailor her presentation in some particular way. I was asked by ACS to speak about Locke v. Davey, which I did yesterday, having prepared essentially the same talk I would have given to the Federalists except with some differences about how to draw the audience into the issues. I was a bit surprised in the preliminary portion of the meeting, which was administrative and organizational, that the audience was told that the ACS presents speakers who talk about law "from a progressive viewpoint."

Well, I thought, when you asked me to speak and I inquired whether there was any particular way I ought to think about addressing the group, I was told there was not. If I had been asked if I would like to talk to to the group about Locke v. Davey "from a progressive viewpoint," I would have said no. If I had been told in answer to my inquiry that I should know the audience would be expecting to hear a presentation "from a progressive viewpoint," I would have said: maybe you should look for someone else, I don't want to disappoint them, but I'd be happy to talk about Locke v. Davey in a way that takes account of the fact that the audience is composed of persons with progressive viewpoints who like to hear about provocative issues that they will want to think more about.

I can't help suspecting that students just assume a professor will be speaking "from a progressive viewpoint"!

The Chief, myself, and maiden names. Chief Justice Rehnquist once passed this note, along the Supreme Court bench, and revealed a long-held secret:

"I was once William D. (Donald) until I changed my middle name in high school to H (Hubbs — my grandmother's maiden name)"

Hmm... I once toyed with the idea of going back several generations to a maternal line surname as a feminist statement, in recognition of all the maternal names that get lost along the way when people marry and don't choose to keep their maiden names. Althouse is my maiden name, but my father's name, unsurprisingly. (In fact, even my middle name is my father's middle name, for reasons I could explain, but won't pause to do here.) One of the benefits of going back along the maternal line is that I planned to stop at the one that I just liked best as a name. I ended with a choice of Battersea and Holocker!

So, I wonder what the Chief's motivation was. Is there a feminist angle or, more likely, a beloved grandmother, or just a distaste for the name Donald?

"V.P. Agnew Just Resigned!! Mets 2 Reds 0." Notes passed on the Supreme Court bench during oral argument, memos written after one-on-one conversations ("Roe sound"), and more, as the Blackmun Papers become available.

Oh, my dear boy made it! Love to John Stevens, who made it through tonight on American Idol. Love to Jennifer Hudson and Tiara Purifoy, who are invited back for the wild card show next week.

A whimsical building for lower Manhattan. That is a good sign! It's another Santiago Calatrava building, to add to the cool World Trade Center transportation hub. (We have a Calatrava building in Wisconsin, and really, it couldn't be more whimsical: it has wings that open and close.)



The new Eighty South Street Tower is making Herbert Muschamp think about:

1966 and the helium-filled Mylar "Silver Cloud" sculptures that Andy Warhol presented that year at Leo Castelli's gallery. ... I mention Warhol because of the atmosphere of freedom those ridiculous silver pillows created around them. They were a child's garden of existentialism - bits of nothingness, faintly stirring in the breeze of gallerygoer conversation. Still, there was a precision to them: Warhol would go in and adjust the little lead weights attached to the corners so that they would float in midair. And they were balanced, in the rear gallery, by the wallpaper with those silly pink cows.

How did it happen that 1966 suddenly appeared to be encapsulated by the fleeting whimsy of silver clouds and pink cows?

Muschamp notes that Calatrava has gained inspiration reading Spinoza, and recommends Antonio Damasio's book "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain."

Dr. Damasio, a neurologist, has achieved renown by challenging our lingering tendency to regard reason and emotion as polar opposites. Science suggests otherwise. Dr. Damasio, like Freud and Nietzsche, regards these faculties as necessary partners in a dialectic intent on freedom from debilitating habit.

The book will not sit well with those who think that architecture is an art of people-pleasing. Spinoza's scheme of things was undeniably elitist. Only those with disciplined and educated intellects, Dr. Damasio writes, could accumulate sufficient knowledge and reason to put their intuitions to constructive use. But this path toward freedom is accessible to all who would make the sacrifices it entails.

Eighty South Street Tower conveys the idea that an entire city can embark on such a path. That is the design's great gift. This idea is transmitted in the design's perfect balance between the familiar and the unexpected. We recognize the similarity of the individual glass cubes to International Style office towers of the mid-20th century. But we have never seen one of those towers dance.

Calatrava can put together the forms and Muschamp can put together the ideas. I love Damasio (as I've said here) and Warhol and Calatrava, and--what the hell?--even Spinoza, Freud, and Nietzsche are excellent companions if they know their place. In any case, all hail Muschamp for mixing up the most delightful collection of names in a single piece about a really wonderful building that adds to the measure of happiness in lower Manhattan.

Talking to Nina and Tonya via the entire world even though I could just go down the hall and see them in person. First, Nina reports a conversation (with me/a fictionalized version of me/someone else entirely) about revealing personal facts in a blog. Here's an excerpt:

[Interlocutor:] Your blog is so personal, I could never blog in that way ... I would never say where it is that I am traveling..

[Nina]: ...that is completely impersonal! I write travel stories on the side, that’s how impersonal travel is in my mind. ...

My reason for not wanting to talk about where I'm traveling until after I've returned is that I don't want strangers to know when I'll be away from home. I thought you weren't even supposed to say you were going away in a public place, where people could eavesdrop, and that you were supposed to cover your name and address on your luggage tags so that people couldn't pick up that information in airports and elsewhere. So announcing your absence to the whole world definitely seems out of the question. Why not tell everyone where you hide your extra keys? For the record, I never hide extra keys, I never leave my house, and if I ever do, you may rest assured the whole place is wired with spring guns and there are several underfed pit bulls roaming about.

Now, Tonya has joined the enlightened, competent TV watchers by getting a TiVo, which she loves but is also concocting conspiracy theories about. Her TiVo is hard at work filling up the 80 hours of hard drive space with shows and she's wondering why it's picking things like Spanish language shows, self-improvement, crappy sitcoms and other things that don't seem much like what she chose for herself. She's positing:

Good-hearted TiVo ...

TiVo Knows Best ...

Petulant TiVo ...

Stealth Marketer Tivo...

I have one more idea: Eager-student TiVo: TiVo just wants to learn and it wants you to be the teacher. Rather than making too many inferences from the first few things you've chosen, it's giving you a chance to input more information. Go through the list of recorded shows and give thumbs up and thumbs down. Teach the humble mechanical student and give it a chance to show you how well it learns.

More evidence for my American Idol conspiracy theory. Last night's show gives me more reason to think that the producers, faced with way too many bad performers, deliberately clustered the good ones on two nights (the first and third shows) and the bad ones on two other nights (the second and fourth shows). As I said here, I think they are trying to set up a great wild card show by having some memorable people, like Jennifer Hudson, left behind, as Clay Aiken was last year.

Tiara Purifoy, who does have the coolest name, is the Wisconsin candidate (Miss Beloit 1999!), so I'm going to hope she makes it through tonight. She seems good, even though her performance really was a "mess," as Simon pointed out. People have got to stop singing "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," which must be jinxed. I also would like it if no one ever sang "New Attitude" again. Each of those songs, when sung by anyone other than the vocalist who made it famous, just makes you realize how great Whitney Houston/Patti LaBelle must be.

I've got to admit that I like the sweet sixteen-year-old John Stevens (who, if you think about it, looks a bit like the way Supreme Court Justice John Stevens might have looked when he was sixteen).



People may think he's too bland, but he's the only one who sang with charm and taste and understated feeling last night. Stevens loves Frank Sinatra (in his CD player right now is "Come Swing With Me"), big band is his favorite music, and his favorite song to sing is "The Way You Look Tonight." Aw, that's just adorable! Compared to some of the horrific yelling, he seemed quite deserving.

The horrific yelling, however, was pretty darn entertaining in the case of Lisa Wilson, who sang "Come to My Window" (aka "Run as Far Away From My Window as Possible").

Subject lines on email I don't open any more. I'm happy to get email from readers (and will assume you don't mind being quoted, but want to be quoted only anonymously, unless you say otherwise), so let me say a word about subject lines. Too much experience with spam has led me to stop opening email (unless I know the name of the sender) that has no subject or that says: "hi," "hello," "re:" (and then nothing), and a lot of things that sound friendly, but only in a generic way. The more specific the words in the subject line are to things I've actually written about, the less likely it is that your email will get dumped along with "Alecia's" "she'll love it," and "Brett's" "increase your girth" (this "she" will not "love" to increase my "girth," thanks).

How is John Kerry going to keep from boring us to death over the next 8 months? The NYT has some ideas. I can't believe we won't become immediately exasperated with Kerry's oratorical style: at my house we were complaining about it a couple minutes into his acceptance speech last night. That tone, which he uses most when speaking to a crowd, works horribly on TV. The crowd/TV mismatch for Kerry is really as bad as Dean's was (when Dean would yell and growl and scare people). I'd like to see Kerry just take a vacation, a long vacation, maybe two months (four months!) and then come back when we've started to miss him. But I know he can't do that, because the Bush campaign will be--must be--unleashed. But I'm hoping he'll do his speaking in more intimate interviews, where he really does come across well. William Safire writes:

I remember conversations ... over the years with a serious, low-key senator whose thoughtful mien and earnest deliberation belied his down-the-line lefty voting record. I found Kerry to be a nice stiff, not a rigid stiff, who wears and worries well.

You really can warm up to a stiff. Well, it's Kerry's job now to prove that. I think it's true though. I hadn't liked him (or any of the Democratic candidates) very much, and then I watched one of those long, languorous C-Span campaign trail shows where they followed Kerry as he made his way from shop to shop in some small town in New Hampshire. Somewhere along the line, I started really liking him! It was a mystery. Maybe it's a bit like having a stuffy, old lawprof, who seems nowhere near as exciting as the younger, livelier profs, but somewhere along the line, you just start appreciating him.

Note to readers: I'm not committed to either party's candidate.

UPDATE: Wonkette also has some ideas for making the next 8 months interesting, including "Allow Donald Trump to select the vice president via a series of mock-governing contests. (Omarosa's 'White House' experience will finally come in handy!)"

FURTHER UPDATE: Re how long it would take before we'd start missing Kerry, a reader writes: "I can only say you must have a much, much higher boredom tolerance than I do. When trying to figure out how many months it would take before I missed Kerry, I run out of finger and toes pretty quickly, and my gut tells me I'm nowhere near the right number at that point. Maybe I should try again with years, or perhaps decades would be safer."

Aubrey Beardsley, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin. If you clicked on the Oscar Wilde link in the last post, you saw one of the fabulous Beardsley illustrations for Wilde's Salomé. Here's the whole set, at a lovely website. Here's the one I had a poster of on my bedroom wall when I was in high school. My other two posters from that era were of Andy Warhol (from the series of large black and white photo posters that were called, I believe, Personality Posters) and Big Brother and the Holding Company. That was a classic orange and blue psychedelic style silk screen that pre-dated any recognition of Janis Joplin. Boy, I wish I could find that thing somewhere amongst my belongings!

"Solomizing." Newsday.com tells us:

Four days after presiding over a slew of same sex marriages in his quaint Hudson Valley village, the mayor of New Paltz today was charged with 19 violations of New York's domestic relations law, injecting the debate over gay marriages in the state with increasing drama and urgency.

Jason West, 26-year-old Green Party mayor, was ordered to appear in court Wednesday to answer charges that he broke state law by solomizing about two dozen weddings without a marriage license, according to New Paltz police and West's lawyer.

Solomizing??? Is that some combination of solemnizing and sodomizing? With perhaps a dash of Salomé, presumably the Oscar Wilde version.

And, yeah, it's awfully harsh here to take the criminal route. On the other hand, litigating the issue when faced with a criminal charge (with a possible one year sentence) might make the gay marriage cause more sympathetic than it would look in a civil suit.

The alt.house missed opportunity. Prof. Muller of IsThatLegal writes:

Reading your archives yesterday, I saw that back in January you experimented a bit with names for your blog, and settled on "Althouse." I'm sure the decision is now long behind you, but for some reason in the shower this morning I had an idea: you should call your blog "alt.house" (alt-dot-house), which simultaneously (a) uses your name, (b) uses "house" more directly to suggest a place, (c) is a cyber-pun, riffing on the old "alt-dot-whatever" names for usenet newsgroups, and, relatedly, (d) with the "alt" prefix, implies the ever-so-slightly offbeat nature of what you write about and how you write about it.

The original name for the blog was Marginalia. The reason for abandoning it is that someone else had already used the name for a blog. The reason for originally picking it is explained here, which is the first post ever.

UPDATE: Another missed opportunity, even more belatedly recognized. Prof. Muller's message was the perfect set-up for a menopause joke!

UPDATE WRITTEN 9/4/04: I cannot understand my own update. I have no idea what "menopause joke" was once within reach! If I were writing this post today, I would have commented on the fact that Prof. Muller was thinking about me in the shower! But menopause? What could that possibly have been? And I write the update as if any reader, given a little prod, will see the joke. Ridiculous!

That DNA thing again. I wrote the other day about how journalists have been repeating a drastically wrong statistic about DNA exonerations that John Kerry used during the California debate last week. One of my readers wrote to Slate about William Saletan's praise for Kerry's use of this statistic, on the theory that Slate would want to correct the underlying error. Saletan, unlike some of the other journalists, did not actually repeat the bad number, but he did say:

The DNA stuff is good, too: As an argument against the death penalty, the risk of executing innocent people polls much better than moral absolutism does.

Saletan wrote back (and gave permission to quote on this weblog):

I'm happy to correct anything I wrote that's wrong. I don't see anything that I wrote here that's wrong. Your problem seems to be with the number Kerry used and I didn't, so I think Kerry's the guy you need to ask for a correction.

To me, this seems to concede that all journalists do is comment on how everything sounded, rather than to try to figure out whether the actual positions are sound. Also, I can't help thinking that they would have eagerly exposed outrageously wrong assertions of fact if Bush had made them or if a supporter of the death penalty had relied on a statistic that was off by a factor of ten. Saletan does have lots of good and bad to say all around, about all of the candidates, and I do understand that it is awkward to come back to an old piece and raise some secondary point about it. And anyway, Saletan was just making suggestions on how to "poll much better," and not on how to get to the truth about anything.

But really, what gets me in all of this DNA business that I've gotten myself involved in talking about--and I don't have an agenda one way or the other on the death penalty right now--is that people don't notice when facts sound really wrong. Why doesn't a little mental alarm go off and make you think: that doesn't sound right, could that be true? We get so wrapped up in the theatrics of the campaigning and the rhetorical maneuvers in the debates, which seem so interesting to talk about. But why don't we care more about the actual content? If someone said 38 times 46 is 180 thousand, you would know the math was wrong, even if you didn't have the exact right answer in your head. You'd never just repeat the assertion as if it were true. Why don't we have more of a sense of what is true about the real world? And how can we trust ourselves to judge the candidates unless we have some grounding in facts?

Titanic vs. Lord of the Rings. Prof. Bainbridge is responding to my challenge about whether, if there were an ensemble acting Oscar, LOTR would have won it and neither Titanic nor Ben Hur would have, thus making LOTR the biggest Oscar-winning movie ever, with 12, not just 11.

Bainbridge points out that LOTR won the SAG ensemble acting award, but Titanic didn't. The Full Monty did!

I realize now how complex this what-if question is. Bainbridge points out that the SAG ensemble award may be essentially its version of best picture: SAG only gives acting awards, so ensemble works as a way to recognize the whole picture. If that's so, and if the Oscar voters tracked the all-actor SAG voters, we could infer that the ensemble Oscar would have gone to Titanic. But it is a different group of voters, as we can tell from the way the Oscars didn't care at all about The Full Monty.

Bainbridge also theorizes that an ensemble award would be used to honor casts in movies that did not feature one or two dominant stars, that is "true ensembles." Voters might conceive of the ensemble award as a way to make up for the fact that films with large crowds of actors don't have a fair shot at the individual actor awards. Clearly, LOTR had many great actors in it, but they were in relatively small roles. But small roles can earn supporting actor awards, and it's notable that no one even had a nomination in a supporting category.

I can't speak for Ben Hur, because I've never seen it, but I'll accept that Charlton Heston was an overriding star there, and maybe the cast of thousands types would not seem to deserve any recognition.

But how about Titanic? Bainbridge says look at the posters: it's all about Kate Winslet (the sublime Kate Winslet, whom true Peter Jackson fans will love from Heavenly Creatures) and Leonardo diCaprio. But what about Kathy Bates (people love her), Victor Garber (the New Yorker thought he was the best thing in the film), Billy Zane (an acquired taste), David Warner (you want an English actor of long reputation, look at this), Francis Fisher, Jonathan Hyde (deliciously evil as Ismay), Bill Paxton, and the beloved old actress Gloria Stuart?

I say it would have won an ensemble award. What was the real competition? Not The Full Monty. Not Boogie Nights (because of the subject matter). Maybe L.A. Confidential. Considering the extreme love of the acting in Mystic River, I'd say that the ensemble award for Titanic would have been more likely than for LOTR.

UPDATE: Christopher Althouse, who's a devoted student of film, writes: "I think Titanic and Ben Hur would both have won ensemble awards, and to the extent that they could have not won, I don't think it's a given that LOTR would have won."

Federalist Society vs. American Constitution Society. We have both the Federalist Society and the American Constitution Society here at Wisconsin. Assume one or the other group asked a lawprof to speak to them about a new Supreme Court case, for example, last week's Locke v. Davey, which I discussed on this blog here, here, here, and here.

Should the lawprof give the same talk to either group, or is there some different approach that should be taken? I'd really like to know. Email me if you know enough about these two groups to have a useful opinion on the subject, and let me know if I can quote your email, with or without your name, in this blog.

Would LOTR have broken the Oscar record if there were an ensemble acting award? I've written before that I love the ensemble acting SAG award. Today, Prof. Bainbridge writes that if only there were an Oscar for ensemble acting, Lord of the Rings would have not just tied the the record for most Oscars with 11, but beaten it with 12. But wouldn't the other two movies with 11--Titanic and Ben Hur--also have deserved the ensemble award?

In Titanic's year, 1997, the key competition for acting was As Good as It Gets (which won best actor and actress and had a nomination for supporting actor), and Good Will Hunting (which won best supporting actor and had a best actor nomination), as well as Boogie Nights, L.A.Confidential, Wings of the Dove, Wag the Dog, and Jackie Brown (each of which only had one nomination, but had an excellent cast). Titanic had two nominations, and a big and excellent cast. Who knows which film would have gotten the ensemble? Quite possibly Titanic. But, wow, was that a better year for movies than last year!

In Ben Hur's year, 1959, Ben Hur won best actor and best supporting actor. The key competition was Room at the Top (which won 1, and had 3 nominations), Anatomy of a Murder (with 3 nominations), and The Diary of Anne Frank (which won 1, with 2 nominations). There was also Suddenly, Last Summer (with 2 nominations), Pillow Talk (2 nominations), Imitation of Life (2 nominations), and, what appears to be the best movie of the year, and possibly the best movie ever made, Some Like It Hot (only 1 nomination--for Jack Lemmon). Good reason to think Ben Hur would have won. Again, a way better year than this one!

UPDATE: More discussion above. And I've deleted the links for 1997 and 1959, so you'll have to take my word for it that I got this info from the Academy Awards website, which didn't preserve the results of my searches and doesn't have any pages I could find that just lists the historical information. How annoyingly unuseful that site is! Don't go there. I couldn't find any site that listed the awards systematically by year. I guess AMPAS is hoarding the info. One more reason to be irked about the Oscars.

FURTHER UPDATE: I've got new links for the two years, at IMDB, so go ahead and check the years.

Is it unethical for a documentary to exaggerate ambiguity for artistic effect? Harvey A. Silverglate and Carl Takei,writing in Slate, seem to think so:

[T]he makers of Capturing the Friedmans made a studied decision to minimize the historical context of the charges for the sake of drama. Had the filmmakers placed the case in full perspective and included the overwhelming evidence they had uncovered against the prosecution, the movie would have been less evenhanded but perhaps more responsible. Jesse spent 13 years in prison for crimes that almost certainly never occurred—and to which he was forced to plead guilty because the hysteria of the moment made a fair trial impossible. Jarecki continues to maintain that if the film had been less evenhanded the audience would not have thought deeply about where the truth lay. We think, however, that Jarecki underestimates his audience.

Silverglate and Takei are missing a key point about art. This is understandable, as both are involved in working to help persons they believe are falsely accused, as they note in their article. What they are missing is that the filmmaker (Jarecki) made a work of art about the unraveling of a family, showing the family's experiences as they were recorded at the time on home video. It is true that another documentary could have been made about the problems of false confessions and so forth, problems that the movie includes but with less development than Silverglate and Takei would like to see. A documentary of that kind might have run on TV, but would probably not have been released as a feature film, especially these days, since the hysterical period of tainted memory recovery is far in the past and has already been widely covered. By making an artistic documentary from a new perspective, with new techniques, and drawing the viewer into a painful mystery, Jarecki reached a new audience and stirred up new feelings about this old issue. Of course, the people in the audience were capable of understanding the documentary Silverglate and Takei would have preferred, but such a documentary, powerfully advocating the case of the accused, would not have drawn much of an audience at all unless it found some other entrancingly artistic approach to justify paying for and sitting through a feature film.

Importantly, the success of the film made it possible to release a high-profile DVD containing much of the extra material Silverglate and Takei wish was in the film.

UPDATE: David Bernstein (at the Volokh Conspiracy) has a post discussing the film from the perspective of an evidence lawprof.

How to watch the Oscars competently. Let me say that I do know how to watch the Oscars more effectively, using TiVo. You record the E! red carpet show with Joan Rivers and have a couple hours of that stored up. Then you TiVo the Oscars broadcast, but don't start watching it until a half hour or an hour after it begins. Even two hours, really. Then you watch the TiVo'd Oscars show, skipping to points when awards are announced, skipping all award acceptances by anyone who isn't either an actor, a writer, or a director, skipping all songs and commercials. If you catch up to the live broadcast, just fill in with the red carpet show to let the live broadcast get out ahead of you again.

I've used this method in the past. Why didn't I use the TiVo method last night? To oblige a family member. The excitement of live-ness was a big issue. And I do understand this feeling. When you use the TiVo method you experience a heightened awareness of how little anything is really going on, which may make you think it isn't even worth watching at all. The who-cares realization can actually ruin all the fun. Except it was not fun at all last night!

The dreadful Oscars show. The Oscars show was even duller than the SAG Awards. Was there even a single surprise? Billy Crystal's return reminded me of some of the sad returns Lucille Ball made to TV in her waning years: she was doing the same sorts of things that used to be so funny, but now it just seemed wrong for her to strain herself to do it. Crystal seemed to want to throw out lines about current movie happenings, but how much comic traction can you really get out of "The Passion of the Christ"? Everyone seemed afraid of offending, as if they were all massively overshadowed by Janet Jackson's epic breast. Only Erroll Morris said anything with any political sting, and his speech revealed that his true outrage really lay more in the area of the way the Academy has been slighting him all these years. (Of course, he was right about that, but it wasn't all that lovely for him to be the one saying it.) Tim Robbins restricted his politics to concern about child abuse, and Sean Penn only made an oblique reference to WMD. Nearly everyone just thanked people endlessly, tediously. Then more time had to be wasted, lamely, by having Jack Black and Will Ferrell sing about how the thank you speeches are boring. And, oh, the songs, those songs-non-songs that extend the already horrible longueurs of the show's midsection.

I had to read about Sean Penn's statement, because I bailed out before he appeared, somewhere in the show's fourth hour, when I calculated all the awards that had yet to be given, and how long I would need to wait for the big four awards. The show was quite simply torture--impossibility of making "The Passion" quips noted--the least entertaining Oscars show in memory. I enjoyed some of the early red carpet stuff: Jennifer Garner had a lovely tangerine dress and Renee Zellweger looked painfully swaddled in white cardboardish cloth. But it was pretty much downhill from there.

Is Bush an anti-gay bigot? This story, recounted by Elisabeth Bumiller in today's NYT seems quite telling:

Last spring, during a class of 1968 Yale reunion that he held at the White House, Mr. Bush had a particularly striking encounter with Petra Leilani Akwai, who in 2002 had a sex-change operation. At Yale, Ms. Akwai was known as Peter Clarence Akwai.

"I was in the receiving line, I was dressed in an evening dress, and I was being escorted by a male friend from the Yale class of 1986," Ms. Akwai said in a telephone interview this weekend from Germany, where she lives. "And I said, `Hello, George.' And in order for him not to be confused, in case he hadn't been briefed, because our class was all male, I said, `I guess the last time we spoke, I was still living as a man.' "

"And he said," Ms. Akwai recounted, " `But now you're you.' "

Ms. Akwai said the president seemed completely comfortable. "He leaned forward and gave me a little sort of smile," she said. "I thought it was a sincere thing, and it was very charming."

The article believably supports the view that Bush was forced into saying something about gay marriage, because he was "under enormous pressure from his evangelical Christian supporters," but that he is quite uninterested in going back to this issue at all, let alone making it a centerpiece or wedge issue in his campaign.