Archives for 2014
Saturday Night Happy Thoughts Open Thread
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Because it’s time for a break. From the NYTimes, at its most parochial:
… Television is rich with year-end traditions, whether it’s Rudolph’s resplendent nose or Charlie Brown’s defeated Christmas tree. But now one of these enduring institutions is about to fade out like so many Yule logs.
A few hours after this interview, Ms. Love, 73, stepped onto the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theater and sang this signature song on Mr. Letterman’s “Late Show” for the final time…
Her association with Mr. Letterman goes back to 1986, when she sang the song on his NBC show, “Late Night,” with the bandleader Paul Shaffer and what was then a four-piece rock group trying to replicate Mr. Spector’s echoing Wall of Sound style….
Ms. Love’s thunderous and heartfelt performance went so well that she was invited back the next year, and year after year, with more and more musicians joining the occasion.
“We started expanding, with the strings and horns and everything else that we need,” Mr. Shaffer said. “And now, it’s really become a party.”…
More details about Ms. Love’s career at the link.
What party or other holiday traditions are on the agenda in your neighborhoods this week?
Saturday Night Happy Thoughts Open ThreadPost + Comments (81)
Not A Good Day In Brooklyn
Two NYPD officers were shot and killed in their car by a black suspect, and it’s pretty much all gone to hell.
Two New York City police officers were shot and killed ambush-style Saturday as they sat in their patrol car in Brooklyn, according to two law enforcement sources.
Both officers were shot in the head, one of the sources said. Few other details were available.
They had been rushed to a hospital in critical condition, said police spokesman Sgt. Lee Jones.
The families of the fallen officers arrived at Woodhull Medical Center on Saturday afternoon, as dozens of police officers gathered in a show of support.
The alleged shooter was found dead in a nearby subway station from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to a law enforcement official.
The shooting occurred near Myrtle and Tompkins avenues in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
Supposedly the suspect also shot and killed his girlfriend and posted a picture of his blood-covered leg to Facebook, but at this point details are still coming in. It’s completely rational to say that nobody here deserved to die, the cops, the suspect, his girlfriend, and neither did Tamir Rice or Eric Garner or Michael Brown.
That’s all I’ve got. I’m just sick about this, for a number of reasons.
Promotions All the Way Around
I don’t know if you all saw the Jane Mayer piece about the so-called “Queen of torture,” but it is a must read:
The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.
Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”
Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.’s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in “Zero Dark Thirty.”)
Basically, it’s the old concept of “Fuck up, Move up” on a grand scale. A new report today suggest that may be the modus operandi at the CIA:
A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode, according to current and former government officials.
The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director.
While effectively rejecting the most significant conclusions of the inspector general’s report, the panel, appointed by Mr. Brennan and composed of three C.I.A. officers and two members from outside the agency, is still expected to criticize agency missteps that contributed to the fight with Congress.
Quite a dysfunctional organizational culture they have at the CIA. And it simply amazes me that Brennan continues to have a job.
Saturday Afternoon Open Thread
My bunny guests:
Busy, busy, biz-zay getting the place presentable for the holidays. What are you up to today?
Saturday Morning Open Thread
"After 12 hours of full Internet access, Cuba would now like to close up again. Seriously. Right now. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!"
— John Rogers (@jonrog1) December 17, 2014
Gotta love the Kung Fu Monkey Master.
What’s on the agenda for the year’s Last Overhyped Shopping Weekend?
And just because I find it pleasant…
Late Night At the Movies Open Thread: “The Crazy History of Star Wars“
There’s a school of literary criticism which holds that American popular culture is mostly about people who, like Huck Finn, want or need to “light out for the territory“. Joshua Rothman, in the New Yorker, finds George Lucas squarely in that tradition:
From “How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,” the new history of the sci-fi franchise, by Chris Taylor, I learned many incredible facts. Among them: Brian De Palma, the director of “Carrie,” helped to write the opening crawl (“Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire”). Christopher Walken was originally cast as Han Solo, and Solo was partly based on Francis Ford Coppola. (At the time, he was a young, seductive, swashbuckling smoothie who had impressed George Lucas by talking Warner Brothers into funding “Apocalypse Now.”) Lucas studied briefly with Jean-Luc Godard—a title card from one of his student productions reads “A film by LUCAS”—and he got the idea for the Force from “21–87,” an avant-garde film by the Canadian director Arthur Lipsett. “Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something,” a man’s voice says, over images of city life. Sometimes, “they call it God.”
Taylor’s book doesn’t evoke the wonder of “Star Wars” so much as the strangeness of its vast success. At the movies’ core, of course, is familiarity: they’re exceptionally good reimaginings of nineteen-thirties sci-fi serials like “Flash Gordon.” As a child, Lucas was addicted to those shows; even in college, the world of military-space fantasy was so alive in his imagination that, according to one roommate, he preferred to “stay in his room and draw star troopers” instead of going out.
But “Star Wars” isn’t an homage; it became great, Taylor shows, because Lucas was willing to expand his vision. He spent years “lightly, unself-consciously building something unusual out of whatever was to hand.” To the “Flash Gordon” formula, Lucas added nineteen-fifties car culture (he was an autocross champion in his teens), the hallucinogenic spirituality of Carlos Castaneda (the release of “Star Wars” coincided with a peak in pot-smoking among high schoolers, Taylor writes, which “certainly didn’t hurt those first-week grosses”), and a Vietnam allegory (the Rebels are the North Vietnamese). He read “The Golden Bough” (Joseph Campbell’s influence is overstated) and channelled Kurosawa (he almost cast Toshiro Mifune as Obi-Wan Kenobi). Amused by the last name of a friend of a friend, Bill Wookey, he repurposed it as the name for Chewbacca and his brethren. (Wookey, who happens to be tall and hairy, had no idea about this until he took his kids to see “Star Wars,” in 1977.) The finished product compresses fifty years of pop culture into two hours of space adventure. “Look around you,” Lucas has said. “Ideas are everywhere.”…
… Taylor—who is the San Francisco bureau chief of Mashable, an Englishman, and a fan of “Doctor Who”—seems broadly optimistic about the future of “Star Wars.” I spoke with him recently on the phone. This interview has been edited and condensed…
Your account of the franchise strongly emphasizes its roots in “Flash Gordon.”
“Flash Gordon” is such a forgotten corner of the culture, and yet, if we actually listen to Lucas, he says that people have overstated the influence of other aspects, like Kurosawa, and understated the importance of this silly little serial from the late thirties and early forties. The comic strip and the serials were hugely influential, and they very much filled the role that “Star Wars” does today: it was O.K. to be an adult and to like “Flash Gordon.” And, as in “Star Wars,” when you watch “Flash Gordon,” you get this constant sense of movement. They’re always going somewhere, trying to defeat a guard, or escape a monster, or flee in a rocket ship. It is pure action adventure with very little pretense of being anything else. That’s very much what Lucas was going for, especially with the first movie—that sense of freedom, of movement…
Late Night At the Movies Open Thread: “The Crazy History of <em>Star Wars</em>“Post + Comments (78)