A Half Note On The Estimable Thomas Chatterton Williams

 https://www.amazon.ca/Losing-My-Cool-Literature-Escape/dp/0143119621

Terrific book by a guy, Thomas Chatterton Williams, who along with Coleman Hughes, gives us a great answer to the absurd Ta Nehisi Coates.

Williams traces his movement from growing up inside BET and Hip Hop culture to the influence of going to Georgetown University majoring in philosophy and then doing an MA at NYU to inhabiting physical and intellectual worlds beyond the ghetto and ghetto culture.

One thing I like that he does is a few times to take a short passage or thought from Hegel or Heidegger and explicate them by the concrete instance of his own life struggles.

He’s a nice prose writer too. 

A Note On Originalism And Changing Condtions AKA New Facts

....nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws... 1/6

Brown Headnote: 

........The question presented in these cases must be determined not on the basis of conditions existing when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, but in the light of the full development of public education and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. Pp. 492-493.(c)...2/6

On it, this extract from the head note of Brown may not be wrong. 

And here may lie a fundamental problem with originalism. Its argument would be that contemporaneous communicative content of the language of the 14th Am is different from the “conditions existing” at the time of its adoption. 3/6

But if the “conditions existing” exhaust the applications of that language, then don’t we have the conclusive range of the meaning of it, save for new conditions that are in principle necessarily “on-all-fours” comparable? 4/6

So then if separate but equal is more consistent with existing conditions than integrated equality, doesn’t originalism hit a road block—namely changing facts or in the language of Brown changing conditions? 5/6

The point is: how can then communicative comment of legal language be understood save by its contemporaneous application to fact situations, i.e. then “existing conditions?” 6/6

Thoughts On 2018’s A Star Is Born

2018’s A Star Is Born:

5.6/10

Spoiler alerts, if that’s possible with this well trodden story.

Why only 5.6? Well: 

The first part of the movie drags. Cooper’s drunkenness isn’t convincing. We’re just presented with it. But he’s so good looking, in such great physical shape, tanned not sunburnt, with beautiful white teeth, with such bright clear eyes; he’s so nice and sunny and sweet and sincere; so, with all that, the image of him as a wasting drunk falls flat. He doesn’t bring it off “organically.” The movie imposes his drunkenness on us with scenes of his drinking that don’t add up. This points to a problem in the movie: it’s cliche ridden and for too much of the time doesn’t earn the emotions and responses it’s trying to evoke.

Gaga is a wooden actress—at least in this film she is. She has no natural on screen sizzle, grace or charisma. She looks dull, doughy and awkward. Her acting is forced. My impression of her and Cooper at the beginning of the movie and for about its first 2/3ds is that they’re more than anything actors trying to play their parts, him a terribly damaged, on-the-skids music star, her an undiscovered ingenue. The very opening scene when she’s walking down the alley singing and then takes a turn as if to an audience seems so unnatural as to be artificial. And the first song she sings in the drag queen cabaret suggests as well the same problem: as she belts out in a booming way La Vie En Rose, we see the talent of Lady Gaga pretending it’s something else, the undiscovered, untested local talent of a performing neophyte. She’s playing at her role: she doesn’t become it.

The scene when she and Cooper meet each other and then the scenes that pass after between them are stilted, near to dead, in their lack of genuine chemistry. Given that their story, their love story, is at the heart of this movie, albeit most often in cardiac arrest, the woodenness  between them deadens much of the whole thing, makes it move too slowly and frustrated me as I kept looking at my watch, wondering if the patient could be revived.

The descent into predictable contrived cliche, betokening a failure of directorial nerve and some laziness too, is evident in two scenes among others.

In the shower scene after the catastrophe of the Grammies, where Gaga’s father, Andrew Dice Clay, giving a stolid performance throughout, lets the shower run on a supine, drunk-wrecked Cooper at a time in the movie when it’s actually picking up emotional steam as Gaga’s and Cooper’s acting tends to come alive, we see Gaga getting soaked, strewn over her man, desperate  to help him,  immiserated by his utter falling apart. There is real pathos here. It’s affecting. And so we’re given a few seconds of it. Then rather than prolonging the scene a little longer to let that pathos penetrate us, to allow us fully to experience their then misery and hopelessness, the scene abruptly ends and we’re shifted on to something new.

The second is near the movie’s end, after Cooper is out of weeks of rehab—another cliche btw, the rehab so superficially shown—and seems to be doing better, so inside his art as Gaga tells her manager, when he, Gaga’s unpleasant, authoritarian manager, has a “this is the way it is” one on one with Cooper. The manager lights the fuse that will explode in Cooper’s suicide. He tells Cooper to give up Gaga, that he’s making a fool of her, that he’s going to self destruct again inevitably and that in all that, what’s he’s done and what he inevitably will do, he’s wrecking her ascending career. He’s telling Cooper this because, he says, Gaga loves him too much ever to.  (Btw, Gaga more submissively than I’d expect or believe accepts her manager’s dictum that Cooper touring with her in Europe is out of the question.) So with what her manager tells him, and with Gaga lying to Cooper about why she isn’t going to Europe, the die, so to speak, is cast. 

Problem is, this sequence is so contrived and unrealistic, it bespeaks lazy directing. Not one conversation about this between these people so much in love? A manager will tell this to his client’s husband with no word to her? Is there no chance that, as would likely happen in life, Cooper might bring up that talk with his wife, who then presumably would fire or at least castigate her brazenly meddling manager? 

Listen, authors can tell any story they wish and it’s a principle of a certain kind of exegetical criticism that we simply accept the story as told. But an evaluative criticism wants to assess all the parts for artistic authenticity and truth. And when a story line runs so afoul of realistic probability so as to strain believability, we can rightly cry, “Foul!” 

The lazy contrivance saps the effect of Cooper hanging himself. Due to the unbelievability of this sequence, the movie hasn’t earned the drama of that suicide, somewhat like in Three Billboards, in which that movie doesn’t earn the drama of Woody Harrelson’s out of context killing himself, let alone its heedless means.

This unsatisfying contrivance in A Star Is Born unhappily complements thematic incoherence in the film. Sketched in but unrealized and undeveloped is an intriguing thematic paradox. For all his being fatally damaged goods, we’re shown true art in Cooper. There are hints for the thematic proposition that without something approaching personal darkness, authentic art can’t grow. Gaga goes in another direction. As her fame grows under the dictatorial hand of her manger—she early on tells him she doesn’t want to be separated from her own artistic truth—she loses herself in glitz and pop meaninglessness. There’s a scene when that so disgusts Cooper he walks out of one of her performances and starts drinking again. He warns her in an extended speech not to lose herself in all that pop fakery, that she doesn’t need it, the glitz, the backing dancers, the self sexualization, all of which is the antithesis, he says, of artistic truth. After that, this paradoxical theme simply fades away. There is no resolution of it that I noted. If it’s there, then I missed it. If it’s there, then what is it? To me this thematic failure suggests a director who does not fully know what he’s about in this movie. 

It can be argued her final song, slow, full of deep feeling,  in memory of Cooper is that resolution. But we have no way of knowing about that. Did she fight with her manager to sing it? Was there any kind of confrontation over her singing? Has she turned her back on what has throughout disgusted Cooper but what has birthed her stardom? Is her manager her manager still? We have no idea as to any of this. And so we have the moving song dedicated to Cooper lovely and moving, but thematically fallow in the unresolved relation between authenticity and true art.

I could go on with instances of what doesn’t work and what’s lacking. But enough of that.

What gives this movie a pass and a bit of change, to my mind, is that in its about last third, as I noted, it picks up emotional resonance. Cooper in the process of his final downfall, his acting chops finally coming to the fore, becomes a rounded, fully realized character with depth. He even manages to pull Gaga at times into a better acting orbit. The scene, for example, where she lies about why she’s not going to Europe works as she conveys genuine but unadmitted regret and Cooper knowing that she’s lying but doesn’t let her in on it that he knows, that scene is effective and complex. Sam Elliott’s acting too helps save the movie from failure (though the scene where Cooper clobbers him and then the brothers have it out, all recriminatory anger, is overwrought and drowns in all we’re being told and not shown.) And also on the saving side, the music is pretty good and is nicely integrated into the film. 

So as I say, 5.6 out of 10

Note To A Friend As To My Reponse To The Kavanaugh Confirmation Process

Thanks for the wise words.

Yeah, fretting, of a constant kind, is also a good way to describe how I feel.

Kavanaugh’s worst case is pretty far reaching. Can he continue to sit on the DC Circuit court? Will a law firm have him? How does he ever get out from under a perpetual cloud? We’ll survive, no doubt, but Kavanaugh  and his family I’m not so sure. Although I feel  most badly for them, at the heart of my feelings about it all is my impotent fury with the reprehensibility of the D tactics.

I’m under no delusion that most Ds will ever be placated or satisfied. The stated presupposition of the woman who yelled at Flake in the elevator is that “investigation must lead to ‘No.’” The Ds were at “No” from before the get go. The Ds’ insistent stooping to “by any means” tactics has tipped them over into their losing their minds as they and their base, and more than their base, more or less the entire left of that country, are in the clutches of a moral fervour that merges in their collective mind the worst of scorched earth with righteousness. They’ve lost sight, so many of them, of their own hypocrisy. 

What Kamala Harris did at the hearing before this issue arose was maliciously misleading and anger-arousing but I could live with it. I could ascribe it sadly to “it’s politics” and think “so it goes.” But what we have now is so wrenching, such an apotheosis of the excesses of #metoo married to sheer political opportunism that has lost sight of its take-no prisoners character-assassinating self, that, I think, the only answer to it all that can satisfy me and purge my deep anger and disgust, my only means of “fighting back,” so to say, is Kavanaugh’s ultimate confirmation. 

And maybe in saying that I’ve hit on the underlying reason for my persistent fretting. 

Wokeness As A Social Status System. Really ???

I wrote this right after the comment by a fella named John Mason, but it was free standing, i.e. not a response to his comment:

.... I have not read the thread comments save for John Mason’s just preceding mine. 

I see in this essay for the most part twinkling in four eyes, each bro having two, and I see two tongues pushing hard against two facial cheeks, as the bros, as I read them, had a good time kibitzing around while making a few points.

I don’t understand why a social status system is necessarily “inexpansible,” if I understand what the bros contend by that. Maybe my social science background, which is non existent, literature and then law my areas of study, fails me here. If a social status system is inexpansible, then does that mean no one who’s not in it can join it? But that’s flatly self refuting. Does it mean that fixed criteria for belonging to that system can never blend into, mix with, adopt or adapt to other such criteria? That seems rigid to a point of sheer reductionism, and, so, missing the complex ebbs and flows and mixings of social dynamics. 

The analogy undergirding this piece to the great religious movements dotting American history seems to me to be a clue to the pervasive kibbitz, a way of poking fun at the self righteous zeal and earnestness of our new woke preachers. But the limit of the analogy speaks to (me at least) a conceptual weakness in the argument that tracks the seeming (to me at least) incoherence of social status systems as inexpansible. 

The attempt to fit the complex phenomenon of what might metonymically be called wokeness into the bros’ conception of a social status system—the very idea of a social status system suggests (to me at least) trying to build a social construction unable to contain what it’s meant to house, like trying to fence in the wind—suffers from fitting it, wokeness, into a Procrustean bed, a social status system. There are some insights to be gained from that fitting no doubt, but finally wokeness as a thing gets descriptive short shrift in that fitting. There’s so much more to it behaviourally then that fitting allows for. 

One final comment on a jarring note in the bros’ conclusion:

....The preceding analysis, although it may deflate some of the pretensions of the most extreme preachers of the Woke faith, does nothing to impugn its accuracy or urgency....

I understand the bros’ point: their social science analysis need not and does not entail any judgment about the content of wokeness: their analysis only is concerned with dispassionately seeing in it the operation of a social status system.

My problem with this is that the essay is filled with so much obvious playfully exuberant derision of both the pretentions and much of key content of wokeness, that the bros are guilty of having it both ways—attacking and mocking that content along the way but then in conclusion disclaiming any substantive judgment of it as irrelevant to their argument. In this I fear, the bros do not sufficiently know what they are about here. 

For with that disclaiming, the twinkle is gone, the exuberance has been leached out and the two tongues have been placed squarely back in the position they normally occupy in the bros’ mouths...

A Note On First Reading Belobaba J. On Reducing Toronto City Council

To some friends:

Just read his reasons, albeit not with laser like focus. 

I can see where on the ground of timing he has an arguable line of reasoning, though the argument seems strained to me. I can see the fundamental unfairness of the province changing the rules of the game in the middle of it but I have trouble seeing how the “legal pigeon hole” for that is the curtailment of the candidates’ right of expression. It feels to me that there’s a better way legally to conceptualize that fundamental unfairness. But maybe not: on first blush I can’t think of what principle to root that fundamental unfairness in. So maybe 2b is the best way to go.

I have more trouble on a more meta level with the ground of denying voters effective representation as an incident of freedom of expression. 

It may well be that Belobaba has the law on his side. He distinguishes this case from the amalgamation case—where the same argument on an unconstitutional curtailment of the right to vote, “effective representation,” as an incident of freedom of expression was made—on the basis that there Ontario led evidence that amalgamation didn’t hobble effective representation while here only the applicants led evidence, the study he cites, while, unlike in the amalgamation case, Ontario led no evidence at all contra the study. (Or if it did, I missed any reference to it. I did for now skip over the section 1 analysis. I’ll get to that later.) 

So it’s hard to fault Belobaba’s reasoning on ground two. The law seems to be that under the Charter, the court has a role to play in ensuring on evidence that electoral systems in fact provide effective representation. On this point, as I have it, Belobaba had a study as to the 45 wards compared to no evidence from Ontario. 

What’s a judge to do?

My difficulty with ground 2 at a more meta level is the notion of courts, short of something egregiously extraordinary, which 45 down to 25 doesn’t seem to be, imposing policy considerations under the umbrella of legal doctrine on the legislature with respect to systems of representation. I already noted the smaller city councils in two other big cities, LA and London. 

On this more meta basis I have some sympathy with the use of the Nwst Clause, as Blatchford argues. 

It does seem to me as a side observation that the city way out-lawyered the province....

On William Blake’s “Ah, Sun-Flower”

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, 

Who countest the steps of the Sun: 

Seeking after that sweet golden clime 

Where the travellers journey is done. 

Where the Youth pined away with desire, 

And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: 

Arise from their graves and aspire, 

Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Actually there is no split between the poem’s voice, a “speaker,” and Blake. Blake as such really doesn’t come into it. It’s one voice, the voice of the poet emerging from the poem. It mimics and mocks a view of the sun flower as aspiring towards death. The poem is shot through with sardonicism. The poem takes on and explodes any view idealizing suppressed passion for sake of afterlife eternal. The poet (not Blake as such but the Blake of the poem) increases that attack by showing that what’s death- creating is that suppression for the sake of nothing. What’s death-creating reaches its heights in the youth pining away with desire—with the intimation of a withering unto death and a pine coffin—and the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: the aspiration for the sweet golden clime inverts itself: the longing for life-everlasting by denying desire is a death-in-life for nothing.  The speaker’s tone is sardonically complex in mocking what it mimics. And so the view of the sun-flower as symbolizing an ideal in inclining toward death, a “sweet golden clime” in following the sun till it sets—a mythologizing of the sunflower’s diurnal “journey:” what it was thought sunflowers do, follow the path of the sun each day—gets exploded.