John & Belle Have A Blog

Nerdcore R00lz

God, I love me some Johnny Depp. He is rocking dorkstyle on the red carpet.

I think the spectator shoes really make it.

Kekes on Conservatism and Pluralism

No blog for you! I've got the flu. Everyone else does too.

So read this interesting comment left to my Disraeli post by one De Korenmaat. John Kekes' "What Is Conservatism?" in its entirety. (I'm guessing it was cut & pasted from here. The 'reprinted with kind permission' does my humble blog too much credit, I'm sure.)

OK, a bit more.

Mark is smart

Fortunately I didn't even try to write the long follow-up to last night's post; about how Democrats (liberals) should realize that, yes, they should get more philosophy; but, no, they shouldn't expect the electorate to thank them. Mark Schmitt nails it hard with this one. Liberals and conservatives fighting for the hearts and minds of those who are operational liberals but ideological conservatives. An assymetrical struggle.

Matt is smart

This post is unusually good, even by Matt's high standards. (I was writing something in parallel. His is better.) The seed of the idea came from Jonah Goldberg, you say? Credit where due, then. The contrast between anti-left conservativism and anti-state conservatism seems to me potentially quite tactically - nay, strategically - helpful for Dems in the battle of ideas. There's a contradiction here! Pointing out contradictions in the other side's philosophy is usually a rhetorical loser, of course, because you look like a smug 'gotcha' collector. (They killed Socrates, remember. Wiped that smile clean off his face.) But there are ways. All this relates to the issue raised by Tomasky in his 'philosophy gap' piece, also to the Sager-Ponnuru go-round. Far be it from me to discourage a higher degree of philosophy, but I doubt it would prove a strategic asset. Any such clear intellectual formation would become a focus for grossly disproportionate anti-left feeling. Make it as mild as you like, and the thing will be thoroughly and utterly irrationally carpet-bombed as creeping communism. Any Dem philosophy will be slandered to death in its crib. What is needed, instead, is a strongly philosophical attack: one that picks its targets by seeing contradictions, then drives hard into these philosophy gaps on the other side. The question is how to do that. It's 1:40 AM. I'd better sleep on it.

Were they erased?

A follow-up to this. Listening to the audio commentary, Kaufmann has a different story to tell about the mashed-up Velveteen Rabbit scene. He says he used 25% of Winslet reading Rabbit text, intercut with other material, to synthesize the scene. That makes a little more sense. Here's another bit, about the scene in which Joel is responding to all the artifacts from his life with Clem, sitting in that big white chair:

Michel Gondry: In zis scene Jim is not wearing hiz pants. You don't see eet. But evryzing is going crazee, and he wanted to have his contribution. Zo he pulled his pants down.

Charlie Kaufman: What did that mean? That his pants were down. That they had been erased?

Michel Gondry: Um, I gezz so. Yew should ask heem.

Be Lame

I'm trying to decide whether the movie Be Cool is riding Pulp Fiction's tip so hard that it's supposed to be a wacky homage/joke type thing, or whether some movie exec was like, "hey, they loved that whole Travolta dancing with Uma Thurman things before--don't mess with sucess!" Seriously, a whole scene where she asks him if he dances, and then they're all blowing people's minds on the dance floor. She doesn't do that mask thing with her fingers, she does a marginally different move with her hand coming up over her head. Plus, she's blonde! (I know all this because I watched the Salon ultramercial.) Finally, a Pulp Fiction for the generation that grew up in Bush's America! Maybe she'll mistake a big bag of crystal meth in his jacket pocket for ecstasy!! And he'll have to quickly find her some heavy duty downs! OMG that would be so funny!!

Or, like I say, it's a joke...but it doesn't seem movie-length funny. More like an SNL skit that's funny for the length of the pretend movie trailer and then you realize they're going to actually do a movie part and you have to turn off the TV. Pluses: André 3000 is in it. Minuses: so are Christina Milian, Steven Tyler, and Vince Vaugn. I know, you're thinking, "I kinda liked Vince Vaughn", and so did I, but now his presence in a movie is a bad, bad sign. It's been a long time since he was money. And it's got Harvey Keitel! What, Samuel Jackson was busy? We know for damn sure it isn't pride holding him back. (SWAT! Sphere! XXX!!) I guess that's what they got André Benjamin and Cedric the Entertainer for, so two could do the job of one. Sort of how, on Next Generation, they split up Spock's character into two, with Data taking on the emotionless logic thing and Deanna Troi picking up the mindmeld. So, I don't know. Joke? Really bad idea?

It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord

The Little Professor proposes sensible linguistic reform - term limits. She objects to 'interrogate'. That's one of my pet peeves, too. More specifically: 'interrogating the boundaries'. Someone with too much time on their hands needs to rewrite the first part of the play within a play in Midsummer Night's Dream - "O wicked wall" and "Cursed be thy stones for thus deceiving me!" - so it's about a bunch of idiot graduate students writing a hermeneutically suspicious paper about 'interrogating the boundaries'.

Just plain 'interrogate' is good enough for comedy. Shakespeare in the little room, looking nervous, tapping the table. (Alternatively, just a book on the table.) Critics watching him through the one-way glass. Lots of gritty, cynical banter as they sip coffee in styro. Hardboiled Walter Benjamin: 'You think he's the guy?' 'Hey, even if he isn't, no guy's so civilized he ain't a testament to barbarism. He wouldn't be here if he didn't have somethin' to hide. Just look at him.' Maybe a good-critic/bad-critic routine. One posing as a sympathetic humanist. 'I know you're a good guy and this is all a misunderstanding. But my partner here -' Then the bad critic explodes into a stream of foam-flecked jargony abuse. Then a third critic bursts in, kneecaps and tasers the Bard, who starts bawling and confessing to everything. Alternatively, a version of the Nite Owl interrogation scene from L.A. Confidential. Two famous authors in different rooms and the critic shuttling back and forth, expertly, getting the suspects to cough up dirt about each other, reducing them to blubbering crybabies. Later, over drinks: 'Why'd you become a critic?' 'I guess every kid wants to be a critic. I guess I wanted to help people, do some good, make a difference.' 'So do you? Make a difference, I mean?' 'I dunno. Sometimes it just gets crazy. But I get tenure in two weeks. Then I don't gotta worry about nothin'.' Of course the author escapes from his cell and kills the critic just before he gets tenure. So the critic's partner has to track down the the author and avenge the critic's death. Ah, the function of criticism at the present time. To be the thin blue line between the reading public and the text.

Oh, I know, Jonathan, it's not as bad as that. But it's still funny that people say 'interrogate'.

Becoming What One Is, Charlie Kaufman Style

I'm reading the shooting script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [try Amazon]. A Rob Feld Q&A with Kaufman comes with. Oddly enough, a link.

I wanted to ask you about The Velveteen Rabbit scene, which was really beautiful. It was cut, but reconstructed in a very interesting way.

    We liked the scene but it didn’t play well, I don’t know why. And Michel gave me an assignment. The moment in the movie was really important because it’s a moment where Joel first has a warm memory of Clementine, and when he decides he doesn’t want the erasure to happen anymore. It’s a pivotal moment but it wasn’t playing. So, Michel’s assignment was, using Clementine’s words from that scene, which is basically her reciting that passage from The Velveteen Rabbit, write another monologue for her, using the existing footage, and we’ll cut to Jim’s face when we need to. Everybody laughed when he said that, but Michel knew that I would be excited by it. Such a challenge. So I wrote this thing, and it turned out to be a scene that people talk about as being a really moving moment for them. And it’s completely constructed, completely manufactured. Every once in a while you cut to Clementine saying a couple of words, but mostly you’re on Jim’s face and the dolls. Michel cut more than he had to. I actually did a pretty good job of rearranging the words in the original speech.

I figured Velventeen would be among the deleted scenes for the DVD, but I'm not seeing it. Here's what it looks like in the shooting script:

Clem: Joely?

Joel: Yeah, Tangerine?

Clem: Do you know the Velveteen Rabbit?

Joel: No.

Clem: It's my favorite book. Since I was a kid. It's about these toys. There this part where the Skin Horse tells the Rabbitt what it means to be real. I can't believe I'm crying already.

He says, "It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Here's what it's like in the final version (transcribing from DVD), after reconstruction. This must be the scene in question. Approximately the right point. Mostly looking at dolls and Joel's face. A few quick bits of Winslet under the blanket and - yes - the words don't fit the lips.

Clem: Am I ugly? When I was a kid I thought I was. Can't believe I'm crying already. Sometimes I think people don't understand how lonely it is to be a kid. Like you don't matter. So. I'm eight and I have these toys, these dolls. My favorite is this ugly girl doll who I call Clementine. And I keep yelling at her. You can't be ugly. Be pretty. It's weird. Like if I can transform her, I would magically change, too.

Joel: Pretty.

Clem: Joely, don't ever leave me.

Joel: Pretty, pretty, pretty.

Listening, I'm thinking: wonderful editing. Looking, I don't see enough basic verbal ingredients to turn one into the other. But shooting script is far from final product at points. There could have been extra dialogue in the scene. I would guess they had lots of extra audio, probably not just from this scene, but it made a better story to hint they pulled the whole hat trick out of the rabbit.

What do you think? (Go to your DVDs now, and report back.)

As Nietzsche writes of the cutting room floor of the soul, the metaphysics of mash-up:

... pressing towards man and again and again failing to achieve him, yet everywhere succeeding in producing the most marvellous beginnings, individual traits and forms: so that the men we live among resemble a field over which is scattered the most previous fragments of sculpture where everything calls to us: come, assist, complete, bring together what belongs together, we have an immeasurable longing to become whole.
- "Schopenhauer as Educator"

And:

One thing is needful. - To "give style" to one's character - a great and rare art! It is practiced by all those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed - both times through long practice and daily work at it. here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable.
-The Gay Science, §290.

I'm trying to turn my original Eternal Sunshine post into an essay of sorts. On Nietzsche on Eternal Recurrence and Fatalism: ""I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things:—then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly" (GS, §276). Thus Spake the Velveteen Rabbit.

Theory of Relativity

A satisfying 15 minutes of riding the Powerpuff-Go-Round; daddy drinks his cool Tiger, intermittently bribing the machine with small coins; we proceed home.

Does He Have a Christian Cousin Named Isaac Synagogas?

Is Matthew Yglesias Jewish or something? On a more serious note, I agree with everything in this post.