Joshua Malbin

For a complete analysis of what happened in today’s gay marriage vote, including political pressures and whose district is winnable in a primary and whose isn’t, you can’t do better than Gatemouth. He has his own axes to grind (as will be apparent), but he knows the contours of the landscape better than anyone.

One point he makes (one that is really so obviously true I feel I should have seen it myself) is that at least some of the difference between the support Tom Duane and his cosponsors thought they had and the support they turned out to have can probably be put down to Doug Hoffman. When Hoffman, running on the Conservative line, forced Republican State Senator Dede Scozzafava out of the special election race to fill Kirsten Gillibrand’s former House seat, blogospheric liberals smirked, then cheered when the Democrat in the race ended up winning the seat. Well, the major issue with which Hoffman cudgeled Scozzafava was her support for gay marriage. She was forced out as a distant third in a race that she should have won easily.

Apparently the rest of New York’s State Senators noticed.

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Beyond their compatible tones and themes, though, Salinger’s and Anderson’s work display a similar approach to characterization—a kind of ornamental realism that suggests Gustave Flaubert’s journalistic romanticism, with its obsessive worrying over the rightness of each word and phrase, only updated and pushed to the brink of caricature, sometimes beyond. The style is rooted in the notion that character can be signified, revealed, perhaps even distilled, through observable details.

–Matt Zoller Seitz, The Substance of Style Pt 4

Margot Tenenbaum’s fur coat shimmies in slow-motion as she gets off a bus, recalling Franny Glass’s sheared-raccoon coat. Anderson’s objective correlatives evoke nostalgia for a bourgeois childhood as enveloping as a hot bubble bath. He personifies things and objectifies people, aiming always for a pleasantly underwhelming sumptuousness. So it’s hard not to see the lovingly manufactured puppets in The Fantastic Mr. Fox as the epitome of this process.

The story Anderson tells reinforces this sense of unecstatic pleasure rooted in precision and thinginess. “I’m a wild animal,” protests George Clooney’s fox at every turn, but the joys of Mr. Fox aren’t rooted in wildness at all. For the characters, pleasure comes via real estate, dinner parties, a supermarket smorgasborg laid out like a gridded city, and, somewhere in there, the wild-but-careful thieveries and acts of cunning. For the audience, the pleasure is in the superfine textures of the characters and their world: ornamental realism, a celebration of the finer things. These are the teddy bears that rich children miss.

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But we must also remember that the Afghans, menaced even though they are by the evil of the Afghans, are not blameless here. Have they sufficiently appreciated our efforts to kill them? No, they have not. Have they effectively and efficiently rebuilt their nation whenever we’ve had cause to blow it up? No, they have not. Have they become full and effective participants in the ongoing mission to kill them? No, they have not. It is long past time for the people of Afghanistan to step up their efforts to kill themselves, and not merely rely on American generosity to finish the job for them.

–Fafblog

I want to scream against this war, but I don’t want to deal with traffic out to Westwood at 5.

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Below the jump, movies from other people’s Best of the Decade lists that I have not seen and would like to see. To be edited repeatedly. This includes neither films I have already seen, nor films I do not wish to see.

I’m quite pleased that I have yet to find a list that includes Crash.

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

• In Praise of Love
• The Darjeeling Limited – I didn’t like The Life Aquatic very much, and Darjeeling got mixed reviews. Still, people I respect loved it deeply, and after Matt Zoller Seitz’s five-part video essay on Wes Anderson, I’m compelled to give him the benefit of the doubt, or at least the benefit of importance.
• The World
• Mooladé

Paste Magazine

• Iraq in Fragments
• L’Enfant or The Son
• Ratatouille – HJ gets easily squicked by rodents, so I missed this one in theatres.
• O Brother Where Art Thou?
• Dogville – Mixed feelings here — The Idiots is the only Lars von Trier film I can really get behind, because the staged idiocy of the main characters so perfectly recapitulates the Dogme 95 project. Reviewers disagree on whether Dogville’s critique of America is shock-the-squares or incisive. I suppose I could see for myself.
• Syndromes and a Century
• Half Nelson

Time Out New York

• Silent Light
• Trouble Every Day and Friday Night
  
• Inland Empire
• Kings and Queen or A Christmas Tale
• Dogville
• Man Push Cart
  

AV Club

• Oldboy – I think it was on a couple of the previous lists, and it just wore me down. At least the hammer scene.
• United 93
• L’Enfant
• The New World – this is another one where I’ve heard both good and horrific things, but the experience of watching Malick is so luscious and unlike anyone else that I’m persuaded to give it a try.

AV Club isn’t as outer-limits as the other three–I think I’d seen more than 40 of their top 50. And they got #1 right, as did…

The Auteurs

• Let the Right One In
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
• O Brother Where Art Thou? Especially considering that its source movie is one of my all-time favorites.

Preview of Coming Attractions: my own movie of the decade was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Nothing else comes close.

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In 2005, Safeway was forking over $1 billion a year to provide health insurance for its workers, and the cost was rising 10 percent a year. It was Mr. Burd’s moment of truth: he realized he could no longer stand by as health care costs ballooned.“We were saying ‘Wow, we’re paying almost twice in health care costs as what we’re making in earnings, and in five years it’s going to be another half a billion dollars,’ ” he recalls.

Health Care Savings Could Start in the Cafeteria, New York Times, 11/28/2009

Was that Steve Burd’s moment of truth? Or did the Safeway CEO’s moment of truth come in 2004, when after a 141-day strike he bludgeoned his workers into accepting a two-tiered contract that would revoke most health benefits for new employees (not to mention leave them with much lower pay)?

Or did the moment of truth come later on, in 2007, when the union representing Safeway workers won back what they’d given up in the previous contract?

The Los Angeles Times suggested back then that the UFCW may have whispered the truth in Burd’s ear:

The new agreement, approved by 87% of workers over the weekend, looks like an unqualified victory for the UFCW, which has reorganized to better negotiate with the large supermarket companies. The UFCW sought wage increases, a single pay scale for all employees and shorter waits for health insurance for new employees and their families — and got practically all of it. Albertsons, Ralphs and Vons rolled back the two-tier wage system. They also acknowledged their crucial role as providers of healthcare for their workers.

For its part, the union agreed that workers also bear some burden for their healthcare expenses. The grocery chains’ new plan will emphasize preventive care, establish healthcare savings accounts for employees and require workers to pay premiums for coverage. The goal is to make employees more sensitive to how they spend their healthcare dollars, in theory leading to less waste.

It’s not entirely surprising to see this industry display a bit of forward thinking. Safeway chief executive Steve Burd has been pondering healthcare since the lockouts of 2004, and has joined forces with Big Labor to call for universal coverage.

Burd would have been happy to save on health care by no longer paying for it. It’s a testament to the resilience of the UFCW that Safeway is pushing towards innovation.

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Very good news, in fact.

A senior Democratic Senate aide just told me that the New York State Senate will be voting on marriage equality, mostly likely either very late tonight (the Senate goes back into session at 9 pm) or tomorrow. As expected, the vote will, at some point, follow the passage of the long-debated deficit reduction package. I also was told that the Senate Democratic conference leader, Sen. John Sampson, privately told staff he expects it to pass “with a high degree of confidence”.

The vote’s been delayed until tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

UPDATE: Shit.

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It’s very annoying.

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I’ve hesitated to review Pictures That Tick, a reissue from Dark Horse Books of Dave McKean’s short comic collection, originally published by Spiegel Fine Arts in 2001. The original became a collector’s item, selling for as much as $500 for a first edition.

McKean is best known for painting all those stunning Sandman covers that were inevitably better than the plodding emo stories inside, and Pictures That Tick shows him stretching his creative wings. The art is amazing, miles beyond what most comic book creators can dream of doing. He often works in collage, combining painting, photographs, drawing, and typography in ways that seem descended from Marcel Duchamp or Hannah Höch.

But, and this is embarrassing to admit, a lot of the time I feel like I’m just not getting it. I’ve mostly decided to think of these as comic poems rather than stories, because that way I don’t have to worry about puzzling out the full sense of the narratives in a literal sense. And that, I suppose, is how I would recommend taking them.

With the critical vocabulary I’ve learned for poetry I have ways to describe when work is ill-formed, sentimental crap or finely balanced, careful, and beautiful. Unfortunately, I don’t have a similar critical vocabulary for comic book poetry, so I can’t really do the same here. Various parts of it strike me each of those ways. I recommend picking up in a store and flipping through to see what you think yourself.

A few isolated pages below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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