Arts & Letters

The London Evening Standard trumpeted for all to see: Britons triumph at the Oscars. After the humiliation of the BAFTAs, when all the major and most of the minor prizes were carried away by the Americans, we got our revenge.

Alas, it was not so. Apart from Rachel Weisz getting an award for looking pretty in trying circumstances, the only British film to win anything was “Wallace and Gromit”. As it happens, I have seen it. (Well, how could I resist a film which was titled “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”?) It is very good, indeed. When it comes to amusing animation, the Brits can occasionally come up with the goods.

This has been the year of the least watched nominations, as anyone who has read Mark Steyn or various other commentators knows. The most popular of the winners is the documentary, “The March of the Penguins” and that only in the United States. The first Narnia film that was awarded various prizes also did well.

Read more

Stanley Crouch appreciates that great Nebraskan, Fred Astaire, who

looms not because he seems more masculine than anybody else or more handsome or less corny. He remains more pure than all categories because of his ability, in motion, to transform all things through grace, which is the fundamental dream beneath the gaudy exterior of American civilization.

(Thanks to A&L.)

Meanwhile, over at WSJ, Kimberley A. Strassel laments the passing of the “real” hero. As Astaire showed, he didn’t have to be barrel-chested, though it helped – few could replace that weighty manliness with Astaire’s supreme grace. And Astaire shared with the “big” guys a sense of control, of wit & energy, of the manliness that comes with maturity, of the grace that comes with an assurance hard-won but real. Astaire projected the virility of style & class, of charm & harmony.

Read more

Lex’s post asks what drives demography and notes Spengler’s answer. They seem often right and provocative. (More.) Surely, those who refuse to defend themselves & choose not to reproduce themselves are troubled. And Lex & Spengler demonstrate at least for some it may be a lack of faith. That lack reverberates in the center of the Rothko Chapel, where the ecumenical becomes negation.

As the mother of three daughters, I, like everyone else, has always been pulled by the the nurturer & the bitch, the submerged & the awakend self; I like to talk about the alienation of twentieth century modernism from the biological as Lex sees it solipsistically moving from the spiritual. Or, as my children say, there Mommy goes again – its all life force & castration with her.

Read more

West Coast courage.

Anne Applebaum’s ”A Cartoon Portrait of America” disappoints. She tells us “self-styled U.S. ‘conservatives’ blamed not cynical politicians and clerics but Newsweek for (accidentally) inciting violence in the Muslim world: ‘Newsweek lied, people died.’” She concludes her complaint against the right-wing blogosphere by telling us: “The moral is: We defend press freedom if it means Danish cartoonists’ right to caricature Muhammad; we don’t defend press freedom if it means the mainstream media’s right to investigate the U.S. government.” Well, right-wing blogs are right-wing; certainly we may be guilty of hyperbole & shuffling together in one group many individual opponents. And Applebaum (as repeatedly noted in right-wing blogdom) is one of the good guys – she knows in her gut the importance of proportions; the Gulag she studied was not Duranty’s Russia. Even here she criticizes what she sees as “Hypocrisy of the Cultural Left” as much as she criticizes the right. Her experience has defined her reactions, sure, but she is not a one-note speaker. And her openness is courageous: she engages with Captain Ed. Still her “moral” ignores Newsweek‘s implicit contract.

The blogosphere’s disappointment is with her confusion – and that is certainly what it seems to be – between an artist’s responsibility and that of a reporter, between a genre that honors objective truth and one that projects a subjective one. Nor does her exchange on Captain’s Quarters acknowledge this distinction. She alludes to her authority, but our respect heightens our disappointment. (See Austin Bay; Powerline.) Whether or not some people believe that Abu Ghraib should not have been reported is a red herring used too often to distract us any longer. Seeing criticism as censorship is a ploy that insults opponents & undermines dialogue.

Newsweek defines itself as an accurate source of news. Then it runs a dramatic charge with minimal (and not very credible) sourcing. That an intense investigation was begun is important; that it found Newsweek’s story not true is also important. Indeed, that it was the government & not the media that prized the truth enough to seek it out reinforces our sense that those abdicating their truth-telling responsibilities are less and less often the government and more and more often the media. To brand such observations as censorship is ingenuous at best.

The gap between expectation and fulfillment is likely to influence the audience’s sense of whether they’ve gotten a “good deal” or been snookered.

Read more