Joshua Malbin

Now Paterson is just getting lame:

Gov. David Paterson played the race card in a big way today, suggesting he is facing tougher questions about his performance and political viability than the governors of most other struggling states because he is black.

During a wide-ranging interview with DN columnist and radio personality Errol Louis this morning, Paterson said he feels he feels an effort is being “orchestrated” to get him to bow out of the 2010 race.

Now, the usage “played the race card” makes my skin crawl and always does. It has some really toxic assumptions behind it. But honestly, in this case Paterson’s argument that his unpopularity has anything to do with his race is just weak, weak, weak. Let me re-quote one of those poll findings from a couple of days ago:

Things are so bad for Paterson, the state’s first black governor, that Cuomo leads among registered black Democrats by a nearly 2 to 1 margin.

It is possible that black Democrats are also holding Paterson to a higher standard than they’d hold a white governor. But on the face of it one kinds of doubts it.

Paterson also compares his drop in the polls to Deval Patrick’s and Barack Obama’s. I have no idea what’s going on with Patrick and won’t even speculate. I suspect a good deal of what’s going on with Obama is the bad economy is dragging him down. I’m sure that’s part of what’s weighing on Paterson. Across the river it’s also weighing on Corzine, who’s also polling terribly and who doesn’t happen to be black.

It’s clear that there is a racial aspect to the nation’s nuttiest anti-Obama-ism, especially among those who still refuse to believe he was born in this country. I’ve seen nothing remotely similar in the prevailing criticisms of Paterson, and frankly it’s beneath him to suggest otherwise.

Where there is unfair, possibly bigoted criticism about Paterson going on, it touches on his disability, not his race.

As to the orchestrated campaign to get him to drop out, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t one.

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Rex Libris Vol. I: I, Librarian is one of my absolute favorite finds of the last few years. Rex is a 2,000-year-old librarian at the Middleton Public Library, the greatest library since the the burning of the Library of Alexandria, where Rex started his career. He is a member of Ordo Biblioteca, the secret international order of librarians charged with guarding human civilization, and Rex Libris the comic is his autobiography, published by minor comic magnate B. Barry Horst of Hermeneutic Press. Barry makes frequent appearances to kibitz about the lack of realism and audience-friendliness in Rex’s telling of the story. (“Do you know what the most important thing in comics and film is, Rex? Do you?” “Uh, plot? characterization?” “No! Boobs!”)

The first volume largely concerns Rex’s mission to retrieve an overdue copy of Principia Mathematica (along with $7.00 in fines) from the frozen-world tyrant Vaglox, accompanied only by Simonides the telekinetic bird, who used to be a philosopher until he was transformed by Circe (now mistress of the circulation desk) and who dreams of world conquest (“Take what you wish, my minions, but the bird seed is mine!”). How many comics do you know that throw in the word “floccinaucinihilipilification” just because?

It’s all drawn in a blocky, black-and-white style that looks simultaneously very familiar and totally fresh. I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out what it reminds me of and failing. Constructivist posters, maybe? Take a look and judge for yourself.

Anyway, I was really psyched to pick up Vol. II: Book of Monsters, which collects issues 6 through 13 of the comic, sadly the last of them James Turner has decided to do. The storyline in issues 6 through 8 about Rex fighting his way through a compendium of monsters is a bit of a letdown, with too much action and not enough silliness (even if there are zombie Nazis so evil they smoke cigarettes), but issue 9 (a flashback to Rex vs. the OGPU) is more like it, and finally we get to issue 10, where James Turner wins my everlasting adoration by making one absurd Tristram Shandy reference after another. It even ends with a story of a Cock and a Bull. Then for the last three issues Turner takes on H.P. Lovecraft in a convoluted storyline I won’t even try to describe.

It’s not quite as good as Vol. I, but what sequel ever is? Still highly recommended. Preview here.

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I am very, very excited to see Inglourious Basterds very, very soon. Until I do, I’ll have relatively little to say about it–consider that reticence an exception, not a rule–but here are a few observations and links to kick off the inevitable Josh-vs-Josh Tarantino side-taking.

Kill Bill as Parable of Redemption in Zen Buddhism Kill Bill was developed by QT in partnership with his muse Uma Thurman. Thurman’s father Robert is one of the foremost exponents of Zen Buddhism in the West. Und so weiter.

I made the strategic decision to wait until I could see both Kill Bills on the same day. We rented the DVD of Part 1, and as the credits rolled we dashed to the Vista to make the late matinee. If you don’t think you can handle a marathon, I recommend Kill Bill Parts 1 & 2 in One Minute in One Take.

(There’s no sense in discussing them as two separate movies. They are not separable. If you’re constitutionally unable to take the oceans of blood in Part 1, you could still enjoy Part 2, but you’re coming in in the middle.)

Also at The House Next Door, Keith Uhlich (pro) and Matt Soller Zeitz (anti) debate My Tarantino Problem–And Yours. MSZ discusses his unease with Tarantino’s violence:

That’s what bothered me even the first time I saw Pulp Fiction, although at the time I discounted those misgivings, and I shouldn’t have. When Marvin gets shot in the car, by accident, it’s very much like the rest of Pulp Fiction, and the rest of Tarantino’s work, in that it’s comical, and the sense of humor is superficially very Scorsesean. It’s bloody, savage violence, and the callousness with which characters address — or just as often don’t address — the violence is the source of tension and excitement in the movie. [...] But Tarantino’s missing something about Scorsese [...].

Marvin’s shooting is the sourest note for me in Tarantino’s entire body of work, and it led to an informal rule: I won’t call any movie an all-time favorite in which someone is shot in the head for comic effect. Sorry, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, though you too have considerable charms.

It’s possible to explain away the violence in Tarantino’s work by saying “It’s not about violence, it’s about movies”. That’s true enough, but it only gets you so far down the path towards understanding his work. I think of Tarantino as both a humanist and a film pastichist. He’s working without a net in a number of modes at once, and they aren’t always possible to reconcile.

I think Death Proof may go the furthest towards doing so. There’s a way in which movie-ness solves problems in Tarantino’s work. The scene in which Uma Thurman’s gangster moll asks John Travolta’s thug to the dance floor was the first time I noticed this–was really the first time I thought about metafictional conceits in film at all (so it’s kinda 101, aight?). She goads him to get up there; he’s not eager. She takes her shoes off (revealing the feet that got Antwone thrown into a glass house). He slowly takes his shoes off, taking his time, delaying the beginning. Can he do it? Can he dance? … Of course he can. He’s John Travolta.

Death Proof doesn’t take the everything-and-more approach of Robert Rodriguez’s companion Grindhouse piece Planet Terror. Instead, it’s relatively serious-looking and slow, alternating between talky longeurs that introduce us to and weight the characters, and action sequences. It’s divided into two mirror parts. In one, a group of confident, seemingly intelligent attractive women are annihilated by Kurt Russell’s stunt driver. In the second, a group of confident, seemingly intelligent attractive women who are also stunt drivers give him a taste of his own medicine. It’s a vengeance flick, in which the avenged and avengers have no knowledge of one another, and the secret weapon against the badguy is matching him on his terrain of movieness.

As for Inglorious Basterds, I’ll say this in advance. Two different, both wildly point-missing takes on the Holocaust might be, first, a movie in which none of the Jewish characters die (that’s an excerpt, here’s a pdf of the whole thing), and second, a movie in which the Jews do the killing. I’m kinda into the second.

CONFIDENTIAL TO J.M.: Yes, Tears of the Black Tiger was very good. I’m glad I saw it. Doesn’t change my mind.

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I am not a big George Lakoff fan, but these paragraphs of this much longer post are dead right and actually something I’d been toying with writing myself in almost exactly these terms, though probably not as elegantly:

Howard Dean was right when he said that you can’t get health care reform without a public alternative to the insurance companies. Institutions matter. The list of what needs reform makes sense under one conceptual umbrella. It is a public alternative that unifies the long list of needed reforms: coverage for the uninsured, cost control, no preconditions, no denial of care, keeping care when you change jobs or get sick, equal treatment for women, exorbitant deductibles, no lifetime caps, and on and on. It’s a long list. …

The policymakers focus on the list, not the unifying idea. So Obama’s and Axelrod’s statements last Sunday were just the lists without the unifying institution. And without a powerful institution, the insurance companies will just whittle away at enforcement of any such list, and a future Republican administration will just get rid of the regulators, reassigning them or eliminating their jobs.

I might add: possibly a future Democratic administration. Let’s not forget what the Clinton administration did to banking oversight.

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The New York Times says: bring back the 90 percent tax bracket!

Oh no wait, they’d never say that.

The relative struggles of the rich may elicit little sympathy from less well-off families who are dealing with the effects of the worst recession in a generation.

You think?

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Stickers have been popping up all over my neighborhood: “Kids Used In Illegal Drug Trials: AskDeBlasioWhy.net”. If you visit the site, you get a screed about how “New York City Kidnaps and Force-Drugs Kids”! I won’t link to it. Go type it in yourself if you must.

For those who don’t know, Bill De Blasio is a New York City councilman, the one from my neighborhood, in fact. He is one of several candidates currently running for Public Advocate.

The underlying story is about a city-funded foster home for HIV-positive kids that enrolled some of its sickest wards in drug trials. That story was broken in 2004 by journalist Liam Scheff, and my BS detector immediately went on even higher alert when I read these lines from his original exposé:

The drug Mimi remembers giving most often at ICC is the nucleoside analog AZT. In addition to the drug’s long list of severe and even life-threatening toxicities, AZT also been linked to lymphoma and other cancers.
…
AZT is often referred to in the mainstream press as a “life-saving” drug, despite the fact that it warns of the possibility of fatal anemia and organ failure on its label. A 1999 study in the journal AIDS reported that children born to mothers who are given AZT are sicker and die faster than those not given the drug. It is one of several recent studies reporting that AZT increases the rate of illness, major malformation and death in children whose mothers are fed the drug.

This is the stuff of HIV denialists, and in truth the Village Voice later linked Scheff and his story to HIV-denialist Christine Maggiore, who not only died of her own AIDS but refused to take preventive drugs during her pregnancy and passed her HIV to her daughter, who later died of AIDS herself.

That Voice story also discusses the independent investigation into the case commissioned by the city and conducted by the Vera Institute of Justice, summarized more succinctly by the New York Times here:

That study … determined that city officials had acted in good faith and in the interests of the children, many of whom were seriously ill.

But it also found that the agency had not always followed its own protocols and kept poor records.

About what you’d expect in the real world.

So what does all this have to do with Bill De Blasio? Nearly nothing, as far as I can tell. The attack site charges that as head of the committee that oversees the the Administration for Children’s Services, De Blasio stood in the way of a “real” investigation–presumably the Vera investigation, which is not mentioned, was not real.

There are two possibilities here. One is that this is the continuing crusade of a small group of cranks acting alone to put stickers on every lamppost they see. Another is that this is a smear funded by one of De Blasio’s opponents for Public Advocate. I am not a De Blasio supporter myself; I like Norman Siegel, former head of the NYCLU. But if it turns out that Siegel is behind this site, I will vote against him, and I urge anyone to do the same to their own preferred candidate if necessary.

UPDATE: I’ve had some more time to poke around the Internet. It’s amazing and scary how quickly you can stalk people nowadays. The woman who owns the site in question lists herself on Facebook as a fan of GoodbyeAIDS.info, an AIDS-denialist site. So that supports the “small group of cranks” theory.

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I’d never heard of Joshua Dysart before, though according to his Wikipedia page he’s more than paid his dues. I picked up the trade paperback collecting issues 1 to 6 of his new series Unknown Soldier because the cover looked interesting and the summary on the back intrigued me:

Northern Uganda, 2002. A country of astonishing beauty in a time of unspeakable brutality. Deep in the bush, far from Western eyes, an insane extremist Christian rebel and his army of brainwashed children terrorize their own people and engage in guerrilla warfare against government troops.

Into this madness steps Dr. Lwanga Moses. Only seven years old when his family fled the Amin regime for the States, Lwanga has an Ivy League education, a beautiful Ugandan wife and a staunch pacifist philosophy. The embodiment of the American Dream, he has returned to help heal the Northern Ugandan nightmare.

But within the heart of this healer mysteriously erupts an unstoppable killing machine, an unknown soldier. And when he launches his one-man war against the men… and children… who have turned rural Uganda into a war zone, there’s no telling who will get caught in the crossfire.

A few things to get out of the way. First, the description alone made me feel appallingly ignorant, and reading the book only made it worse, because before this I don’t believe I’d ever heard of the civil war in northern Uganda, even though it’s still going on and has been since 1987. Second, by saying I’d never heard of Joshua Dysart or this series before I don’t mean to imply that I’ve discovered an otherwise overlooked writer. Unknown Soldier has already been nominated for an Eisner Award for Best New Series. Third, Unknown Soldier is apparently a reboot of what looks like a pretty goofy Silver Age war-story book that ran from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s.

As far as I can tell, though, the new Unknown Soldier has very little to do with the original except that the hero’s face is covered in bandages. The current incarnation isn’t goofy at all, it’s very well written and pretty well (though not flashily) drawn by Alberto Ponticelli. It could have been just another Punisher-ilk blood-and-guts fest of a war story in an otherwise anonymous developing-world conflict, but it manages to be much more than that.

For one thing, although we get hints pretty early on that there’s some Bourne Identity kind of killer programming at work with Lwanga, Dysart manages to keep the character human and fallible rather than allowing him to become the quasi-superhero Jason Bourne turns into rather quickly. In the middle of the first issue Lwanga surprises a pair of child soldiers in the middle of raping a young girl. One of them holds a gun to his head and makes him kneel; Lwanga snaps, takes the gun away from him, and kills him. Almost immediately he regrets it bitterly. Not too long afterward the boy appears to him in a dream: “They took me from my school when I was eight,” he says, “I tried to escape but they beat me with canes. Took me to Sudan. To the death camps. They broke me. Turned me inside out. And you killed me for it.”

Over and over the comic returns to this impossible dilemma: to save some children, Lwanga has to kill others. And when he gives in and fights, it’s not always clear that he has made things better. Quite often the story suggests that even though the adults in the rebel army are monsters, fewer civilians get hurt when they are appeased than when they are fought.

Dysart apparently visited the region for a month before beginning to write Unknown Soldier, and his familiarity shows. He links from his own blog to that of a Ugandan woman, whose own review of the comic notes:

Alberto Ponticelli’s art is moving.  For a native of Kampala, I felt his street scenes were a good depiction of the only life I know.

Finally, it’s rare to have a popular comic that talks about colonialism explicitly. There’s even a character floating around who had a part in the American overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, way back in the prehistory we like to forget about.

You can download a PDF of the entire first issue here.

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Edgar Allen Poe says: You can never be too rich, or too thin, or have too much foreshadowing.

…I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinising observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sulilen waters of the tarn.

Old, rotten family, externally appearing sound. Check. Fissure all the way through the house, wonder whether anything will happen with that? Oh yeah. Check.

In other words, use physical metaphors for underlying themes, make them strongly visual, and don’t be afraid to beat your reader over the head with them.

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[Harvey] Weisenberg, 75, a Long Island Democrat, “retired” last year but continued to work as a lawmaker and remained on the payroll. As a result, he earns $101,500 in salary and collects a pension of about $72,000, according to the comptroller’s office.

Similarly, Assemblywoman Rhoda Jacobs, a 72-year-old Brooklyn Democrat, retired last year after 31 years, but continued to serve her district. She earns $104,500 and draws an annual pension of more than $71,000. And Assemblyman John J. McEneny, a 65-year-old Albany-area Democrat who retired last year but kept his seat in the Assembly chamber, now earns $94,500 and a pension of about $73,000.

They’re not even remotely ashamed, either.

Mr. McEneny explained how the system worked. “You have to have a day without being on the payroll,” he said. “You take the last day of your term, New Year’s Eve, and then you resign. On January 1, you come back as the newly elected assemblyman.”

It’s daily stories like these that lead to poll numbers like this:

Today’s Q poll finds a whopping 77 percent of New Yorkers think state government is dysfunctional and the Legislature’s approval rating continues to hover at an all-time low of 18 percent.
…
Ninety-three percent of New Yorkers said they believe the state’s budget problems are either “very” or “somewhat” serious, but only 8 percent think the Legislature has the political courage required to make unpopular budget decisions.

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It’s hard to see how Andrew Cuomo doesn’t run with numbers like these.

Cuomo, the state’s attorney general, leads Paterson in a potential 2010 gubernatorial primary by a 61%-15% margin, a Quinnipiac University poll released today found.

That’s up from Cuomo’s 57%-20% lead in Quinnipiac’s last poll in late June.

“I don’t know how he can run,” said one prominent Democrat of Paterson.

Things are so bad for Paterson, the state’s first black governor, that Cuomo leads among registered black Democrats by a nearly 2 to 1 margin.

I wish he’d stop playing coy. National and state Democrats must be begging him to run. Maybe he just likes being begged.

Like other polls, the Quinnipiac survey shows Paterson getting trounced (53%-33%) in the general election against former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is considering a run for governor.

Cuomo, on the other hand, has a comfortable 48%-39% lead over Giuliani.

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