Internal Monologue

While waiting for the next season, we call mull this over: No contemporary television show employs a quieter camera than Mad Men. Its disdain for the Law & Order version of cinematic realism that reached its apogee (or nadir) in Cloverfield is palpable: the camera frames scenes from multiple fixed positions and the shots are spliced together at a pace designed to have a soporific effect on anyone born after 1980. The framing and the pacing are a deliberate homage to the films of the period represented on the show. Though it may seem natural to direct a series set in the early 1960s in the same mode Douglas Sirk shot films in the 1960s, it is anything but. Most films that aim to be realist depict the past in the dominant contemporary realist mode: Saving Private Ryan looks realistic to us because it panders to what we think looks realistic. Had Spielberg directed it in accordance with the realism regnant in 1942 the film would have looked dated. I point out the obvious here

Would House Democrats please pass the deeply-flawed Senate health care reform bill? We can do some fixes by budget reconciliation later. Don't let one special election against a lackluster candidate send you into some kind of feinting spell tizzy. And if you don't do anything, that will be a horrible moral catastrophe. And if that doesn't motivate you, it will be a horrible political catastrophe for you as well. Your base is already very upset with you. If you let this chance slip away, it will be awful awful awful.

If what I'm hearing is correct, I'm very scared of the latest supreme court ruling. Here's digby : A century of campaign finance law was thrown in the trash today and that is going to be the result. These corporations have virtually unlimited money to spend on this --- ad campaigns are chump change by their standards and well worth every penny if they deliver politicians who will represent them in the congress. The deal is now explicit and it will be very difficult to unseat them if their elections are financed entirely by special interests. Meteor Blades on DailyKos is similarly gloomy: With this ruling, the concentrated big media will now be a megaphone for even more of the oligarchs' points of view. As if we weren't already inundated. As if they didn't already have us by the short hairs. As usual, the class war will be blamed not on the guys who started it, but on those who resist. Here's a brief blurb in The Atlantic's online politics section: Cit

Here's a strange idea explored in this New York Times Magazine article : as American ideas about mental illness spread, the symptoms that mentally ill people around the world suffer are actually changing, becoming more like the symptoms Americans suffer. A snippet: For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreadin

I once told a friend that going back to Yale felt like visit the set of a movie about my college years. After viewing this, I'll probably feel even more like that. And now my precious college memories have been contaminated by feel-good musical theaterism. Note to prospective Yale students: THE SUN RARELY SHINES THERE (and generally only during spring semester finals). My life at Yale rarely had the feeling of musical theater. Some of it was quite wonderful, but it wasn't musical-theater wonderful. Anyway, if you went to Yale, you might get a kick out of this: I did feel good that when they were listing all the cool stuff Yale has, they mention "8 Comedy Groups." I was a founding member of one of them ( The Fifth Humour ).

A letter to the StarTribune about Pat Robertson's recent comment that Haiti made a pact with the devil (HT: Pablo via email) Dear Pat Robertson, I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"? If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Boto