Sunday Night in Brussels

* We’re in Brussels tonight, which as I mentioned on Twitter is my kind of town: obsessed with french fries, chocolate, and comic books. We’ve really been enjoying the comics murals walking tours and I’m hoping to snag all 38 by the time we leave. We should have time, because unbeknownst to the person who planned our trip the entire country of Belgium shuts down on Mondays. Somebody really Belgiumed this thing up big time.

* Stay in the same expensive hotels. Don’t live close to the people. Produce lots of stories and make money. Pull up in your rented SUV to a camp of people who lost their homes, still living under the wind and rain. Step out into the mud with your waterproof boots. Fresh notepad in hand. That ragged-looking woman is yelling at you that she needs help, not another foreigner taking her photo. Her 3-year-old boy is standing there, clinging to her leg. Her arms are raised, mouth agape, and you can’t understand her because you don’t speak Haitian Creole. How to write about Haiti, via MetaFilter.

* It’s rare to see Malthusian arithmetic drawn out so explicitly. How many of the world’s poor do we need, really?

* Somebody finally let the New York Times know that the Roberts court is ultraconservative. Via OpenLeft.

* Ph.D. Comics is visiting Comic-Con (1, 2). Part 3 will be posted tomorrow, I think.

* And thirty-forty-five years ago today, Bob Dylan betrayed us all. See also. Via Neil.

Saturday Night Tab Closin’

* If it’s possible to miss the point of Pale Fire any worse than this, I don’t want to know about it. Via PCEgan.

* I second both Steven Chu’s call to paint our roofs white and Atrios’s call for “Green Recovery” government stimulus to pay people to do this work.

* Learned helplessness watch: Congressional Democrats, obviously feeling the heat from my persistent calls to use reconciliation to get around Republican filibusters, have now taken reconciliation off the table altogether. Idiots.

* At least Elaine Marshall is ahead in Carolina.

* Speaking my language: Dreamlands, one of the temporary exhibits currently at the Pompidou Center in Paris, highlights Kandor-Con from artist Mike Kelley, with these observations:

The comics present a different image of the Kryptonian city on each occasion, and Kelley sees in this a complex allegory, the diversity of representations signifying the instability of memory. The installation Kandor-Con includes architecture students who continuously design new Kandors, feeding them to a Superman fan site. For the artist, the inability of the original draughtsmen, the new designers or the hero’s internet fans to fix the form of Kandor once and for all illustrates “the stupidity and ridiculousness of technological utopianism.” The capital of the planet Krypton, says Kelley, is “the utopian city of the future that never came to be.”

You had me at “Bonjour.”

* I was kidnapped by lesbian pirates from outer space! A comic, via MetaFilter.

* Added to my Netflix queue: Brick City, a documentary about Newark said to be “a real-life version of The Wire.” Also via MeFi.

* And added to my torrent queue: The Yes Men Fix the World (legal!). Via Boing Boing.

‘Nothing Rhymes with Gitmo’

I don’t think I’ve blogged this poem from Jaimee before, which is up now at the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize site.

The Very Long Game

Remember, it’s always 11-dimensional chess.

Tea Still Not Weak Enough

The Kerry-Lieberman(-Graham) climate bill the Senate has been sitting on uselessly all this time is apparently dead. The tireless monks who will preserve history amid the ruins of our civilization should take note that I was right all along: they should have pushed “Green Recovery” first.

Stonehenge! Where the Demons Dwell!

* Rachel Maddow on fifty years of race-baiting from the right. See also Tim Wise:

The pattern is familiar. In every generation whites have hyped fears of black anger, black bigotry and the supposed desire of African Americans to exact revenge on whites. From fears about slave rebellions, to claims that integration would lead black children to knife white children in the hallways and rape white girls, to paranoia about Obama’s secret plan for “white slavery,” the cult of white victimhood has long had its charter members. Sadly, nowadays the cult has the attention of the media and a white public already anxious about changing demographics, the presence of a black president and economic insecurity. Unless the targets of their race-baiting (including the President) show the courage to push back and expose them for the venal fear-pimps they are, their methods will only get more extreme, their lies more bold, and their ability to inflict lasting damage on the nation more definitive.

* Shirley Sherrod says she might sue Andrew Breitbart, who is still lying about the entire mess. I don’t know if she has a case, but I hope she does and I hope she wins.

* Debunking the moon landing debunkers the Darryl Cunningham way.

* Lost Kafka writings have resurfaced, but the legal bureaucracy (legendarily immune to irony) is preventing their publication. There really ought to be some word for things like this.

* Sorry, local independent bookshops: Amazon has a new Amazon Student program that includes a free Amazon Prime membership for a full year.

* A “Woodhenge” has been discovered in Ohio. A wooden monument has also been uncovered near the real Stonehenge, which we visited just today. It’s clear that the aliens who ruled over prehistoric Earth loved wood. But why? Why?

* The headline reads, “Stone age dildo unearthed in Sweden.”

* Could the public option return?

* According to NASA, 2010 is on course to be the planet’s hottest year since records started in 1880. The current top 10, in descending order, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008. Climategate! Al Gore! It snowed one time in Washington, D.C.!

* And UNC has pledged to end all coal use by 2020. Sounds like a good start.

Batman Begins Again

Little Tommy Soloman could be your next Riddler.

Lies and Lying Liars

Shirley Sherrod, who never should have been fired in the first place, has now been offered a new job at the Department of Agriculture, working on civil rights. Gibbs has also apologized on behalf of the White House.

There’s been a lot of interesting commentary today on the Sherrod moment and what it says about right-wing domination of mass media, as well as about conservative media more generally. Kevin Drum and Steve Benen are begging “grown-up Republicans” to finally speak out against the race-baiting, though frankly I wouldn’t hold my breath. Sherrod too has gone after Fox directly for its racist slant on the news. Of course there’s plenty to be said about Andrew Breitbart and his striking refusal to even pretend to apologize. But the most important questions it seems to me have to do with the rot at the core of “conservative journalism” so-called. As Yglesias puts it:

At some point conservatives need to ask themselves about the larger meaning of this kind of conduct—and Andrew Breitbart’s—for their movement. Beyond the ethics of lying and smear one’s opponents, I would think conservatives would worry about the fact that a large portion of conservative media is dedicated to lying to conservatives. They regard their audience as marks to be misled and exploited, not as customers to be served with useful information.

It’s been this way for a long time. Most of the political conservatives I know don’t seem to be aware of this, and those that are just don’t seem to care. The fact is some of these people we can’t win back; we have to accept they’ll always hate us, and just dedicate ourselves to winning enough of the rest that we stay in power and they stay out.

‘Inception’

Very quickly, and with spoilers: I’ve been informed that my quick take on Inception’s dream-infiltration as an allegory for film creation—both dreams and films starting in medias res and employing cuts to obscure origins and transitions, both building small but deceptively complex conceptual mazes into which the viewer can pour her secret desires and emotional investments, both organized fundamentally around willed suspension of disbelief and slight-of-hand—has already been taken up by io9 and CHUD. This is what I get for going on vacation!

Most of the other Internet criticism I’ve been reading has been preoccupied with the problem of the ending, particularly whether it “means” the one thing or the other—which of course is about as useful as trying to “prove” it was the lady and not the tiger. The audacious-but-predictable refusal to show the final orientation of the spinning top, which in my theater as in most was greeted with gasps, groans, and happy nervous laughter, isn’t some puzzle to be solved: it’s just the exclamation point for the allegory. The same goes for any of the rest of the film’s many plot holes, inconsistencies, and mild surrealities. Of course none of it makes any sense; it was just a film, it was just a dream.

The stronger criticism, I think, has to do with the utterly mundane nature of the dreamworlds themselves; why, in an age of almost limitless directorial power, do Nolan’s characters dream solely in action-film clichés? In another director’s hands—perhaps in the hands of the young Ridley Scott, for whom the premise seems to call out—Inception might have been a masterpiece; here, it’s merely a very enjoyable spectacle, maybe even the best film of a not-great year for film, but far too impressed with its own limited gimmicks and possessing a startlingly small vision for what either films or dreams might achieve.

Belatedly Closing Some Tabs

* When Breitbart says “Jump!”, the Obama administration asks how high. Humiliating. They should reinstate Shirley Sherrod tomorrow and call Breitbart and Fox out by name. More links and discussion at MetaFilter.

* Surprising: The generic Congressional ballot again favors the Democrats. Steve Benen says caveat emptor. Could this have something to do with their bizarre new “rehabilitate Bush” strategy?

* How Roger Ebert destroyed film criticism.

* How the universe might handle time travel paradoxes.

* Climate change whip count. Doesn’t look good.

* Sarah Palin has a 76% favorability rating among Republicans. If the economy hasn’t significantly recovered by 2012 she could really be president, folks.

* Constance McMillen has received $35,000 from her Mississippi school district. I thought the damages might be higher.

* Arizona, desperate for me to like it again, has disabled all its speed cameras.

* Friends don’t let friends commit confirmation treason.

* Rumors of the next Superman film.

* The Catholic Church’s official impotence index.

* And Glenn Beck says he’s going blind. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Monday

* New maps of science fiction: a 1977 survey attempted to map political and cultural patterns in science fiction fandom. Via MeFi.

* The NAACP was right: the National Tea Party has now expelled the Tea Party Express from its ranks because of its founder’s racist comments.

* I wasn’t that worried about November until Joe Biden predicted victory.

* Why California can’t legalize marijuana.

* And The House Next Door rewatches Exit Through the Gift Shop with the various conspiracy theories in mind.

Goodbye Dublin Airport Links

* Not in My Country: A Tale of Unwanted Immigrants. From Joe Sacco. (Update: link fixed now.)

* Don’t be alarmed, but the latest race-baiting Fox News controversy is nonsense. Not that it matters.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates: The NAACP is right.

* If the GOP takes back the House, can we look forward to the shutdown of 2011?

* Has science fiction lost its world-transformative mojo? More from MetaFilter.

* And old but good: Women and The Wire.

In one of the first season’s early episodes, McNulty tells Kima that all the good women police officers he’s ever met were gay. It is only in retrospect that this assertion seems like more than just characterization. Through poor old fuck-up McNulty, the writers were able to voice this wee-bit contentious idea without fear of reprisal. Maybe what McNulty claimed about female police is true—like I said before, positive images are not good politics. But The Wire gained my trust for exploring the reality behind everyday inequalities. Using flawed characters as a mouthpiece for unhip opinions is a betrayal of the show’s own tireless morality. Instead of confronting the gender politics of the Baltimore police, The Wire gives us Beadie Russell. A capable but dull port cop, Beadie plays a small part in the second season’s action before fading to black in the third season. In the fourth season she’s back and blonde and suddenly significant for her role in “saving” McNulty from “himself”. Cue the strings—if The Wire needs to read up on women’s issues for one reason alone it should be that the most anti-feminist parts of the show are usually the most cringeworthy. There’s more than a hint of the jealous-best-friend syndrome in the fact that McNulty being saved also involves him leaving high-end police work—what he does best!—for home life and an easy day-to-day as a beat cop, not to mention markedly fewer scenes. Don’t ditch us for a broad, McNulty! Look what they did to Randy!

(via zunguzungu, who also deftly takes down some bizarre anti-Shirley-Jackson snobbery).

Saturday!

* 10 Star Wars characters with unnecessary backstories. The comments continue the fun with notes on Skippy the Jedi Droid and George R. Binks.

* The Arrested Development movie is back on again, maybe.

* And your fake trailers for the day: Inglourious Plummers and Wes Anderson’s God of War.

Simple Answers to Simple Questions

Should we clone Neanderthals? Obviously not.

Climate Change Not a Hoax Again

June was the hottest June on record.