Wild nights would be our luxury
Jan. 28th, 2004 12:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaSnow again tonight. The Empire State Building dissolving in a thick gray cloud: there and not-there.
The city under snow is Draco!New York: white, cold, impossibly silent, inexpressibly beautiful, and an emotional wreck. Ah, I love it.
* * *
Office closed tomorrow, so I think I will take myself back downtown to see The Battle of Algiers again. And after that, I will go to B&N and buy the DVD.
I'm amazed that I remember so many of the individual scenes from years ago.
When the women cut their hair and turn themselves into westerners. The child in the cafe with the ice-cream cone. The marchers pouring down the steps of the casbah, ullulating.
That amazing actor who played Col. Mathieu, heroic and horrible. (And surely the model for Robert Duvall's Col. Killgore in Apocalypse Now.) And of course the guy who played Ali. Damn.
And the faces.
And Morricone's score. And the B&W: the film stock shifting almost randomly from grainy high-contrast to grey and documentary, and back again. And the camera work--that closing scene through the smoke and mist, everyone reduced to shadows.
This time round, because I am so interested just now in how fiction constructs heroes, I was mesmerized by the way the movie keeps giving us passionate portraits of extraordinarily heroic people (on both sides), and then peeling back their valor, their high ideals, to show us the bitter consequences of their idealism.
And we are drawn in by the power of ideas and the exquisite beauty of the story telling, until we find ourselves rooting for the bombers to blow up the cafe, even after we are shown the children in it. We turn our unwilling admiration on the colonel, even though we know he has performed torture,and ordered others to perform torture, and does not believe in his own cause.
It's the pull of myth that persuades us, and--terrible to say--that persuades the terrorists themselves, and the colonialists. The myth of righteousness. The corrupt power of art.
A movie with an irreducible moral center and an unequalled sense of beauty, compassion, and horror. Maybe Goya, maybe Caravaggio, maybe Conrad can match it.
Makes me want to see Fires on the Plain again.
* * *
The Horror! The Horror!
What are these rumors I hear that Nader is thinking of running again?
Tell him not to here.
The city under snow is Draco!New York: white, cold, impossibly silent, inexpressibly beautiful, and an emotional wreck. Ah, I love it.
* * *
Office closed tomorrow, so I think I will take myself back downtown to see The Battle of Algiers again. And after that, I will go to B&N and buy the DVD.
I'm amazed that I remember so many of the individual scenes from years ago.
When the women cut their hair and turn themselves into westerners. The child in the cafe with the ice-cream cone. The marchers pouring down the steps of the casbah, ullulating.
That amazing actor who played Col. Mathieu, heroic and horrible. (And surely the model for Robert Duvall's Col. Killgore in Apocalypse Now.) And of course the guy who played Ali. Damn.
And the faces.
And Morricone's score. And the B&W: the film stock shifting almost randomly from grainy high-contrast to grey and documentary, and back again. And the camera work--that closing scene through the smoke and mist, everyone reduced to shadows.
This time round, because I am so interested just now in how fiction constructs heroes, I was mesmerized by the way the movie keeps giving us passionate portraits of extraordinarily heroic people (on both sides), and then peeling back their valor, their high ideals, to show us the bitter consequences of their idealism.
And we are drawn in by the power of ideas and the exquisite beauty of the story telling, until we find ourselves rooting for the bombers to blow up the cafe, even after we are shown the children in it. We turn our unwilling admiration on the colonel, even though we know he has performed torture,and ordered others to perform torture, and does not believe in his own cause.
It's the pull of myth that persuades us, and--terrible to say--that persuades the terrorists themselves, and the colonialists. The myth of righteousness. The corrupt power of art.
A movie with an irreducible moral center and an unequalled sense of beauty, compassion, and horror. Maybe Goya, maybe Caravaggio, maybe Conrad can match it.
Makes me want to see Fires on the Plain again.
* * *
The Horror! The Horror!
What are these rumors I hear that Nader is thinking of running again?
Tell him not to here.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re:
Date: 2004-01-31 03:07 am (UTC)Don't count on it. Consider all those folks who voted for Nader on the grounds that "there isn't that much difference between Bush and Gore"; or because "this country needs shaking up" and a tiny little fringe third party is just the way to do it; or because voting for president is a game, and i"t's more important to vote my pure pristine conscience than to elect someone I don't love with all my heart." Feh.
If Nader had done the right thing, he would have rallied and inspired the Left, gotten out the vote, and then withdrawn from the race in early autumn of 2000, endorsing Gore. Gore would have won easily with Nader's votes, and thus would have owed the Green party bigtime. Nader would have been able to exert influence on a Gore presidency. Instead, Nader chose to split the Left, in order to create a cloud cuckooland called the Green Party (heard from them lately? No? I didn't think so).
Gore lost a couple of states (New Hampshire, Tennessee), by tiny margins; the margins of difference were all votes that went to Nader. It's safe to assume that the great majority of these were votes that would have gone to Gore, not Bush. Thus, even setting aside the vote fraud in Florida, if Nader had withdrawn from the race, Gore would have carried the electoral college *and* the popular vote by a visible margin.
Same song, second verse: even without other states, and even including all the (probable) vote fraud in Florida, Gore still "lost" by a few thousand votes. Nader polled about 100,000 votes in Florida, and again, these were probably mainly leftists and Democrats.
So even with all the fraud (the uncounted votes, the people in Democratic precincts prevented from voting, the misleading ballot that caused many Democrats to vote for Buchanan, the illegally discarded votes, etc. etc., not to mention the Supreme Court's little fan-dance) Gore should have carried Florida by a small but uncontested margin.
Ach. Even without Voldemort!Ralph it's going to be hard enough to get a Dem elected; watching the candidates squabble like brats in the back seat of the car makes me ill.
Malsperanza/NYC: OTP.