The Wearisomeness of Les Claqueurs

Over the years I have paid a good deal of attention to the entertainment press simply because of the subjects I write about--and personally think that press has got worse. Looking at particular web sites over the years it certainly seems to me that many a site that had once provided at least some interesting comment has been reduced to a platform for listicle-packed clickbait, while the proportion of breathless hype to substance has exploded--enough so that I find myself less and less inclined to bother with anything my immediate research needs do not require me to look at, the claquing that was always an annoyance simply become intolerably exhausting. The result is that where once upon a time the trivia of entertainment news seemed at least capable of offering a respite from the horrors of the headlines, it now seems to me something to avoid just as much.

William Gibson on "Toughness"

As I have remarked in the past William Gibson's nonfiction, even taken on its distinctly postmodernist terms, can be very uneven--but at his very best Gibson can and does offer an important insight, strikingly phrased.

One, rather off-handedly presented in his tribute to Japanese film actor Takeshi Kitano, referred to how toughness and its display is so often "simply the pornography of fascism."

The words ring as true for me now as when I first read them. Indeed, I suggest that the reader watch very carefully the way "journalists" use the word "tough" in referring to politicians and their policies, all too revealing of the real sensibility of many of those who not only would never present themselves as fascists, but indeed react with outrage whenever anyone uses the word at all (even in reference to literal fascists).

"Brutally Honest"

Just as "tough love" is more often about toughness than love, brutal honesty tends to be more about brutality than honesty. A certain kind of person can never pass up a chance to say something hurtful--and does not when they have handy the excuse that they are being "honest."

Considering such "honesty" I find myself thinking about those people with wealth and power and status one hears about, surrounded by people who always tell them what they want to hear, and accordingly tell them only what will flatter them, often to their longer-run cost.

I suspect most of the people on this planet, who lack wealth and power and status, are in the opposite position--surrounded by people telling them what they do not want to hear, not because the person in question needs to hear it, but because it gives those around them pleasure to say it, and in line with brutal honesty being about the brutality rather than the honesty, the brutal things they say need not have anything to do with facts or truth at all.

"Tough Love"

I have always viewed claims of "tough love" with suspicion. It is undeniable that people may not always have the option of being gentle with those they care about--that the only possible way to help them in a situation where they cannot not help them may require them to be blunt and even harsh. Still, it is the case that many a person seizes on any excuse to be brutal, and it seems to me that the cultural moment in which are living has been overly indulgent to those throwing about the excuse--because it approves brutality. This is especially insofar as it is those who have power who are in a position to be brutal, and it approves those who have power, with all that says about that moment.

Another Crappy Celebrity Bio Headed Your Way!

You may have noticed this pattern:

Some celebrity you probably haven't heard much about in a while is suddenly in the news--not for things they are doing now, but because of stories they are telling about the past, which media outlets treats as headline stuff even when, frankly, the stories are pretty trivial, with the practice not necessarily limited to entertainment news. You wonder "Why am I hearing so much about this idiot?" Then you hear they have a memoir coming out. And you realize that is why you were hearing about them.

In this situation the news media was not reporting the news, but acting as advertisers for the book, a book the world almost certainly does not need, ghostwritten on behalf of someone who contributed nothing but a name and maybe some gossip, so that that book the celebrity did not write and which the world does not need might be on the bestseller list the week of its appearance.

This rather revolting game is yet another reminder that it is the Dauriats calling the shots in publishing--and that the media elites who demand so much respect consistently prove themselves unworthy of that respect, all as the portion of the public that still reads books all too depressingly rewards the vile behavior of all of the above, just about every time.

"It's Called . . ."

I am sure the reader is familiar with how in some situations a person will start discussing or explaining something and the person listening to them will, in reply, speak a sentence beginning with the words "It's called . . ."

"I just don't have the stamina anymore," the first person might say feeling winded after a run.

"It's called 'Getting old,'" the second person says.

The first person in that little dialogue is probably well aware that they are aging--and that as one ages their stamina tends to decline, and that feeling winded when they did not expect to do so is likely to be reflective that (even if the reason may well be something else). Telling them "It's called 'Getting old'" is not informative, but rather rubs an unpleasant fact in their face condescendingly--and only served to the purpose of providing the speaker with an unwarranted sense of superiority over the second person as they said something essentially nasty.

That is called "being an asswipe."

Don't be one.

David Walsh Meets Andrew Sarris

Andrew Sarris, of course, is one of the more prominent figures in twentieth century American film criticism--the one who introduced Americans to the auteur theory emergent in the circle centered on the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema.

Sarris also played an important role in the politics of the era's film criticism. As Peter Biskind argued, Sarris and Pauline Kael were the two predominant figures of the post-war years, and Sarris as well as Kael a Cold War centrist, along with her fighting against "ideology" in filmmaking with his typewriter.

Naturally Sarris' exchange with film critic David Walsh makes for very interesting reading, the more in as in spite of their significant intellectual and political differences each is respectful of and gracious to the other. Indeed, Sarris, at least the Sarris of the interview, can come off as more leftish than one might expect from having read a good deal of his work. Answering a question from Walsh about the tenability of the social situation Sarris confessed that it was "awful" and no "fair-minded person" seeing anything at all could call "the situation . . . ideal," the "bourgeois complacency" of political debate reached "a stage . . . such as even a bourgeois like me finds unthinkable," the more in as, if comfortable and secure in his own life at this point, Sarris says that he "can understand the pain out there."

Sarris' remark is the more interesting because the exchange took place way back in 1998--just when the tech boom was reaching its climax, when we were constantly being told how great everything was, globalized info-utopia that would just get better and better near at hand--illusions today long since shattered as the realities to which Sarris alluded remain, and grow only more pressing.

"What is an Independent Filmmaker?"

Over the years I have had something to say of "independent film," and certainly American independent film from the 1990s, as not simply film made on certain financial terms, but film embodying a certain spirit. Summing it up some years ago I basically deemed it a cinema of pseudo-maturity--of young people of hazy ideas, vague rebellious impulses, essential conventionality posing and posturing as smarter and more tough-minded and cooler than they really are, trying to impress us and in the main failing as they rework the same themes and devices over and over again in that spirit of cheap edgelordism, with Quentin Tarantino embodying the extreme limitations of the tendency, and some three decades after its breaking onto the scene, still seeming to me to stand as its symbol (even as he has become the Cranky Old Man talking about the theatrical experience).

Of course, not every independent film was like that (even if the more talked-about movies leading the movement were), while one can add that this spirit soon came to pervade non-independent film, such that there was room for observations such as David Walsh's quip that an "independent filmmaker" is simply "a director whose films have not yet made anyone a great deal of money--a hack commercial filmmaker in training" (a conception not necessarily exclusive).

Still, discussing many of the more ballyhooed independent filmmakers Walsh and his colleagues have suggested certain patterns evident in the more prominent indies as well, with Joanne Laurer recently raising the observation again in her review of The Holdovers (part of their comprehensive coverage of the past year's Best Picture Oscar nominees). As she observed, Alexander Payne, like his fellow indie movie stars Steven Soderbergh, David O. Russell, the Coen Brothers et. al. tend toward "cynicism and misanthropy" as, reflecting the prevailing politics of their formative years, they tended toward "'neutral' or non-commital'" responses to the troubles of the world, As an assessment this seems to me to be entirely fair--and another way in which that generation of filmmakers is, like the rest of their generation, showing its age, persisting in '90s irony even as the 1990s, in many ways, its mood included, recedes into the past.

A "Harvard Man" in 1959

Even the most lightweight-seeming cultural artifacts can acquire a sociological interest with the passage of time--and the 1959 Michael Gordon romantic comedy Pillow Talk is no exception.

In the course of that film's rather tangled goings-on protagonist Jan Morrow (Doris Day) ends up going on a date with "Harvard Man" Tony Walters (Nick Adams). As we come to realize from Walter's incessant references to himself as a "Harvard Man!" to be a Harvard Man was, at this time, to be above all a "gentleman," in the sense of a man of upper-class background. This was as against today's presumption that being a "Harvard Man" marks one as a person of superior intelligence and academic accomplishment.

Given the reality of who really ends up in elite schools, and why--and who does not end up there and why--it seems to me fair to say that being a Harvard Man is still a more reliable indicator of privileged background than of superior intellect, the meritocratic premise confused things rather than demonstrated genuine change on this score.

My Other SSRN Listing

Some years ago I began using the Social Science Research Network to publish past and current research. Most of it has tended to be about economic matters (economic models, the real-world structure of the economy), the record of growth and the causes of its decline in recent decades), political ideology (neoliberalism, centrism), and the manifestation of all this our political culture (in ways ranging from the national "mood" of the 1990s to media bias). With the material accumulating it seemed a good time to try and provide a more organized listing. You can now find that listing at my other blog.

Are People Going to Watch More Old TV?

A while ago music industry-watchers noted that people seemed to be listening to (and even buying) more old music than before. Are they also watching more old TV shows?

I don't know.

Certainly those shows have never been more conveniently available than they in the age of streaming--but also never more likely to get lost in a sea of "content," while I think it all goes over differently with different audiences. For those of us who grew up with an expectation of TV as light entertainment rather than our sole cultural nourishment, and for whom reruns of shows that in many cases went off the air before we were even born were a staple of such light entertainment, may well be doing so--especially if, unimpressed by the pretentious, middlebrow, grimdark, edgelord stuff the critics claque for hardest (and it must be admitted, if finding it congenial to forget the twenty-first century every now and then).

By contrast the young may be more resistant. Still, it does not seem inconceivable that those more dissatisfied with the moment could find themselves pleasantly surprised by the charms of shows that they had initially been prone to write off simply because they came from their parents' day.

The Return of the Rerun?

In the '10s the big streaming companies sought to establish an audience, and, while learning what could and could not work in this format, spent heavily on new production, not always wisely. However, with their brands established, debt loads high, interest rates up, flops mounting, and a particular pattern of failure indeed established (streaming is not the place to try and turn a profit on a megabudget action spectacle), they now devote smaller resources to this end, more cautiously--as they actually pursue more licensing of old stuff at the expense of the creation of new stuff.

Of course, this is not a comfortable thing for those making a living from the creation of new shows, and of course, they have been saying as much. Still, even in the laments there is an admission of what the hosannas over "peak TV" slighted--the appeal of reruns of old shows that people feel they can easily watch over and over and over again.

Considering Fertility Rates in South Korea

For a good long while Japan was the country most associated with demographic decline--its population peaking in 2008, and declining consistently for the nearly two decades since (from 128 million in 2008 to 125 million in 2022 according to the World Bank). However, South Korea has in recent years got more attention, hitting that peak later (2020), and declining only slightly after, but seeming to be in an even more precarious position due to the slippage of its fertility rate even below Japan's in the twenty-first century. Where Japan's figure has fluctuated between 1.3 and 1.4 since the 1990s, Korea's has usually been below that level these past couple of decades, slipping below 1 in 2019, and in 2020-2021 standing at 0.8.

Unsurprisingly the country has got a good deal of attention for the fact, with a recent BBC report from the country interviewing various women about the matter. Most of what they found struck me as unremarkable for anyone who has followed discussion of these matters for any length of time. One expects a BBC report to hew to a particular line about the subject, and for the most part it does.

Still, the story of a woman identified as "Minji" got my attention--because it looked beyond "the usual." Minji discussed what can only be called the brutality of the educational system, and the world of work for which it prepares the young. As she put it "'I've had to compete endlessly, not to achieve my dreams, but just to live a mediocre life'"--and indeed "not want[ing] to put a child through the same competitive misery she experienced" was the decisive factor in her not having a child.

Competing endlessly not to achieve one's dreams, but just to live a "mediocre life," is exactly the kind of life that a great many people, most people, end up with in a society where people are offered aspirationalism instead of egalitarianism, and, in line with the view that society is to be judged not by how it treats its "least" but rather its richest and most powerful members, "winner take all" outcomes as everyone else is told that they have nobody to blame but themselves for their discontent. Of course, they rarely have a platform from which they can speak of their experience, while those who do have platforms (in the main, the courtiers of those rich and powerful winners whose first and foremost qualification for the position of courtier is consistency with the winners' prejudices) are generally disinclined to say anything on their behalf. Still, here is a piece of such testimony, deserving of consideration by those at all capable of a critical view of the way in which people today have grown accustomed to living--the more in as it is here explicitly connected with a deep personal rejection of the Rules of the Game to which the conventional so gleefully insist There Is No Alternative.

Of "Common Sense"

Those who speak of something as "common sense" usually seem to mean that what they describe as such is how all right-thinking people naturally apprehend a matter, with no argument to be brooked on that score.

Of course, subtler and finer minds recognize that this is simply not so--this apprehension they take so naturally a matter of unspoken and unreflected upon prejudices that may or may not lead to a correct apprehension in an instance, such prejudices being a culturally relative thing.

Certainly it is so in the work of Thorstein Veblen, who would describe the "common sense" of a barbarian who thinks in terms of transcendence and personal force as very different from the "common sense" of a civilized person who thinks in matter-of-fact cause-and-effect terms for example--with, reflecting the vast distance between the two positions and the slow progress of peoples across it, many gradations existing in between.

That few appreciate that make much of the ranting about common sense being on their side an expression of their small-mindedness and nothing more.

The Limits of "Hopescrolling"

Just as some (rather problematically) speak of "doomscrolling" some now speak of "hopescrolling"--people looking for positive news stories.

Certainly there are such stories out there. Indeed, over the years I have discovered a number of news sites specializing in positive stores--like the Good News Network.

I do not deny that people might feel better looking at these stories--perhaps enough so as to give seeking them out some justification. However, it strikes me that there are distinct limits to what they can offer. Those who are distressed by the state of the world are probably more often than not in that state because they are aware of massive problems, problems many regard as systemic--like climate change, or war. Alas, those looking here for stories suggesting progress toward solutions are unlikely to find very much grounds for hope about such things in the offering of mainly small and individual stories (tales of personal accomplishment, generosity, "heroism," etc.)--and certainly nothing to compare with the tidal wave of horror coming at them from the rest of the media.