Joshua Malbin

Well, we were promised an improvement this week and we got it. There are several obvious reasons for that improvement: the complete absence of Tahmoh Penikett, who’s been seemingly at a loss this season about what to do with his character; the near-absence of Eliza Dushku; the uninterrupted focus on one story rather than the usual TV convention of breaking the week into A and B stories; the fact that that story built on a larger continuing arc rather than trying to be wholly self-contained.

Most of all, though, it succeeded because it gave the characters conflicts (in which they must resolve two competing, incompatible desires) rather than merely challenges (in which the achievement of an uncomplicated desire is blocked by some external obstacle). There’s a pretty low ceiling on how interesting one can make a mere obstacle. (Okay, there’s Iago. Still.) It was a real risk to center that conflict on Fran Kranz, who I wouldn’t have thought capable of shouldering an episode based on his overly ticcy work last season, but he absolutely pulled it off.

As a side note, if Dichen Lachman and Enver Gjokaj don’t get leading roles in something good based on their work on this show, there’s something seriously wrong with the world’s casting agents.

I read that we’ll see the next six episodes over three weeks in December, and the last three who knows when. Maybe next summer.

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1.

Sons of Anarchy

2.

Fables

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Technical support just signed off a customer service chat with “Thank you for choosing AT&T U-verse where we value your business, again this is Joan. Have a blessed day!”

My fervent wish is that Joan is really Jayani or some such,  and that kitschy middle-American spiritual blandishments have made their way into training packets in the office parks of Mumbai.

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A few days ago I complained about Obama’s slowness in nominating, and included the vacant USAID Administrator post as an example. Tonight I attended a speech by Andrew Natsios, USAID Administrator from 2001 to 2005. He claimed that the White House has in fact offered the Administrator job to ten different people and been turned down.

To explain why that might be, we need to go back to the last few years of the Bush administration, when Condoleezza Rice decided it would be a good idea to bring USAID into the State Department house. The agency’s ability to make its own policy and draw up its own budgets was subordinated to State Department officials, a change called the “F Process Reforms” or simply “F.”

USAID people hate this. Natsios, a longtime USAID hand, is among them. As an example of the damage wrought by F, he mentioned Norman Borlaug, the agronomist (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) considered the father of the Green Revolution, who died about a month ago. Work on new varieties of seeds of the kind Borlaug did is still going on at the various centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). After F, Natsios claimed, State Department budget-makers drastically cut USAID’s contribution to CGIAR, because they didn’t see any short-term benefit to it.

So far, the Obama administration has made no move to reverse this Bush-era bureaucratic shift.

Anyway, the real reason there’s no USAID Administrator, said Natsios, is that no one wants to be the titular head of an agency (and take all the flak that comes of that) and yet have no real budget-making or policy-setting power. So USAID is in a Catch-22: with no cabinet-level voice to stand up for it, it cannot really resist its gradual subordination to the State Department. Naturally the people at the State Department see no reason why they shouldn’t absorb USAID—not because they are bad people but because they are invested in diplomacy, not development. That’s as it should be. Yet no one with real credibility to lay on the line will want to take the Administrator job unless that subordination is reversed.

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My friend at Nutgraf has been collecting advice. Mine is up today, an offering slightly more specific and technical than previous entries. Friends and readers of friends–that is to say, you–are very welcome to contribute. Don’t you have any advice to give? Posterity will thank you. So will Nutgraf.

While you’re over there, don’t forget to check out her experiments and product comparisons. Which mineral water is the best? The results may surprise you.

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Back when Dexter first started to air, it was a flawed show made watchable by Michael C. Hall’s riveting enactment of a truly creepy main character. In order to appear normal without ever needing to have sex, Dexter had chosen a girlfriend who’d been a victim of repeated rape. He was truly fascinated with the Ice Truck Killer, who was in turn fascinated with him. You could read the bafflement on Hall’s face when Dexter was forced to deal with ordinary social problems, and veiled menace or murderous glee the rest of the time. Sure, most of the other actors stank and the dialogue was often clunky at best, but Hall was in almost every scene and he made up for it.

Now it feels like Hall is phoning it in, and I don’t blame him. His writers have turned his character from a sociopath into an otherwise normal suburban guy with a nasty hobby. In the first season Dexter was detached enough from human morality to hesitate genuinely over the question of whether or not to kill his adopted sister. Now he loves his boring-ass family and has no interest at all in the serial killer stalking his city (when he should be obsessed with the guy’s track record). They killed off the egregiously bad actor who played the brawny black sergeant guy but then replaced him with the equally bad actor who plays Deborah’s pot-bellied-yet-supposedly-hot partner. I don’t care about the one office romance. I don’t care about the other office romance. I don’t care about the third office romance. Frankly, I don’t think the writers care either. By far the most compelling actor on the show right now is John Lithgow, and it’s clear his character is the only one the writers are interested in. But he’s not in many scenes each episode.

Each of the last two seasons was a step down from the one before, and this one has now gone a step too far down for me to follow.

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Speaking of irony on the Internet…here’s a new story about irony on the Internet.

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This Washington Post article caused a minor blogospheric stir yesterday:

During his first nine months in office, Obama has won confirmation in the Democratic-controlled Senate for just three of his 23 nominations for federal judgeships, largely because Republicans have used anonymous holds and filibuster threats to slow the proceedings to a crawl.
…
Some Republicans contend that the White House has hurt itself by its slow pace in sending over nominations for Senate consideration. President George W. Bush sent 95 names to the Senate in the same period that Obama has forwarded 23.

You can’t control what you can’t control. Senate Republicans are gonna do what they’re gonna do. But there’s really no earthly reason for Obama to have sent over only 23 nominations when, as we learn a few paragraphs later, there are currently 90 vacancies in the federal courts.

If it were only the courts I’d be inclined not to worry about it. But this inexplicable delay in nominations affects every part of the Obama administration. For example:

Obama has filled just 15 of the 93 U.S. Attorney posts, with another 12 recommendations awaiting review by the Senate Judiciary Committee and three awaiting confirmation by the Senate.

So a total of 30 nominations for 93 jobs. As far as I know, Obama still hasn’t nominated a USAID administrator since the Senate Foreign Relations Committee complained about the vacancy three or four weeks ago. There’s been no nomination of an Inspector General for EPA.

Yes, Senate Republicans are putting an unprecedented number of holds on every subcabinet post under the sun for obvious ideological reasons. But the hold is a courtesy. If Senate Democrats believe that courtesy is being abused, they have more than enough power to do something about it, they needn’t just whine.

More importantly, it’s still no excuse for not nominating after this much time. The regulatory decisions of federal agencies can make huge differences in people’s lives much faster than new laws. Obama’s already sacrificed nearly a year’s worth of such policymaking for no good reason.

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I didn’t. You’d have thought it’d have made the news or something.

A general strike in Puerto Rico by public workers protesting government layoffs gripped the capital’s financial district on Thursday, shutting many businesses and schools and disrupting some official agencies.

Labor unions in the U.S. Caribbean island territory called the 24-hour strike to protest the firing of thousands of workers by the government, which is trying to shrink a $3.2 billion budget deficit.

When was the last time we had a general strike in this country?

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Several comic book author-artists have used children’s storybook-style drawing to handle adult themes. James Kochalka springs to mind. The Eternal Smile, written by Gene Luen Yang and drawn by Derek Kirk Kim, does it to tell nested stories about fantasy fulfillment. That is, three separate stories, each about fulfilling wishes by wrapping reality in stories.

The first of these, “Duncan’s Kingdom,” is the only one that really misses. It’s sort of a less interesting version of Vanilla Sky where the main character turns out to be dreaming. But the second and third, “Grandpa Greenbax and the Eternal Smile” and “Urgent Request,” are much better. In “Grandpa Greenbax” a greedy cartoon frog tries to exploit the appearance of a miraculous smile in the sky to make money on a new religion. Then the smile cracks open to reveal he’s part of a children’s show, and what he took for greed is really a misinterpretation of a more primal longing. And in “Urgent Request,” the most successful of the three, an unhappy woman sends thousands of dollars she can ill afford to lose to a Nigerian scam artist, an apparently stupid mistake cleverly inverted by the end into an act of self-empowerment.

The art is quite different from story to story: a kind of Prince Valiant pastiche in the first, maybe Peanuts in the second, and int he third bubbleheaded figures that remind me a little of David Cooper’s Crumple.

I’ve included previews of all three below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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