Shots in the Dark

On his blog, economicprincipals.com, David Warsh weighs in on David McClintick’s article, “How Harvard Lost Russia.”

Like me, Warsh finds McClintick’s story an impressive piece of reporting. Unlike me, he thinks it will have a significant impact around the 02138 zip code.

Here is one of Warsh’s conclusions: “When Summers returns to Cambridge from Davos, it will be to a university more determined than ever to understand the history of its failed Russia project. McClintick’s article will circulate hand to hand. The frustration among the faculty that McClintick details will only grow. Some fellow economist may yet come forward to defend Shleifer publicly (instead of grousing anonymously that he has been treated unfairly), but that hasn’t happened yet.”

As much as I’d like to agree with Warsh, this is wishful thinking. In the past five years, the Harvard faculty has shown a remarkable talent to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that what’s happening on campus—the moral emasculation of their university—isn’t really happening at all. By the time they lift their heads into the air, the change will have been effected, and they can pretend that they never had a choice.

After all, how many faculty members have had the guts to say something publicly about the fact that Andre Shleifer—whose illegal behavior has cost the university between $30 and $40 million—is still a member of the Harvard faculty in good standing?

A grand total of two: Harry Lewis and Richard Thomas.

Meanwhile, FAS dean Bill Kirby refuses to take action on the Shleifer matter and sells Mass Hall to the president because, the Crimson says, he had “little choice.”

Sometimes, I can understand why Larry Summers doesn’t respect the professors who work for him.

Want to hear George W. Bush’s thoughts on Brokeback Mountain? Well, a student at Kansas State University wanted to know if the president had seen it. “You should check it out—you’d really like it,” he says.

Bush’s answer—which is, truth be told, sort of charming—is here.

James Frey’s defenders, such as, um, Oprah, have said that it doesn’t matter if he fudged a few things in his book, because the “essential message” of healing still “resonates.”

Well, what if the healing part of A Million Little Pieces is all made-up, too?

That’s what folks at the Hazelden Clinic, where Frey ostensibly stayed, are saying…Frey’s description of the treatment he received there strikes them as wildly implausible, and very likely fictional.

Well…yes. I have a feeling that if anyone wanted to try to check the rest of Frey’s book, it would all collapse in a heap of pathetic, greedy little lies.

Moreover, it seems that you can’t even defend Frey’s handiwork on the grounds that it inspires people to get treatment, because the Hazelden folks say it could well have the opposite effect.

“Mic Hunter, a psychologist who worked for four years at Hazelden-related treatment centers in Minnesota, said Mr. Frey’s book made him angry. ‘It’s hard enough for people to get accurate information about treatment because of all the confidentiality rules,’ he said. ‘So many people have negative feelings about treatment to begin with. Why would anybody want to send anyone to a treatment program where they would be treated like this?'”

The most interesting part: Folks from Hazelden told Oprah’s producers this before she announced that she was choosing the book for her book club….

Perhaps Oprah would like to explain more about why that message of healing still resonates with her…..

…then check out this brutal, karma-minded story on David Patrick Columbia’s “New York Social Diary.” It’s about two wealthy New York couples and what happens when they spend too much time together, and it feels like an O. Henry story…

Is it real? Or is it cautionary? Or both?

Well, I finally saw Brokeback Mountain over the weekend, and I’m happy to report that a) it’s really quite a good movie, and b) it did not make me question my own sexuality.

(Before everyone gets mad, I’m just kidding!)

I was actually more worried that I’d find it hard to take the movie seriously, as it’s become such an object of cultural discussion that it’s hovering on the verge of self-parody.

(Michael Musto, the very bitchy—and I mean that in the nicest way—and very gay columnist for the Village Voice went to the Golden Globes parties and asked the actors what they thought of “Bareback Mountain.” He cornered Phillip Seymour Hoffman and asked him who was sexier, the guys in “Bareback Mountain” or Truman Capote. Hoffman didn’t quite know what to say. He then asked Hoffman who was sexier, Capote or the Memoirs of a Geisha crew. “I have no idea,” Hoffman said, “looking horrified.” Pretty funny.)

Anyway, I found myself drawn into the movie, which is a beautifully-told story of a doomed love affair. The essential decency of both men involved, and the tragedy of the situation in which they find themselves, is heartbreaking, and I really do think that the film could be a watershed in the long, slow march toward civil rights for gays. It was a stroke of genius on Annie Proulx’s part to embed a gay narrative within the most classically macho American myth, the cowboy. No one can call Jack Twist or Ennis Del Mar sissies.

I did have a couple of thoughts about the film. One is to question whether these characters are actually gay, or whether their relationship is a one-off, a unique result of their particular backgrounds, emotional needs, and the bonding experience of a summer on Brokeback Mountain. My answer: Jack yes, Ennis, I’m not so sure. Ennis, to my mind, is so emotionally limited that it would make a certain cultural sense that the person he bonds most closely with would be another man. Ennis just doesn’t have the emotional self-knowledge to have many deep relationships, and you wonder if, if Jack hadn’t happened along, he’d have had a loving relationship with anyone, male or female.

I also wonder why everyone is talking about Heath Ledger’s performance at the expense of Jake Gyllenhall. (Also: Why is Gyllenhall pronounced with a soft “G”? But I digress.)

It seemed to me that Gyllenhall’s was the braver of the two performances. Ledger gets to be all smoldering and conflicted; I suspect that, for professional actors, those are not different traits to manifest. (Grunt a lot, surround yourself with beer bottles, maintain a stony facial expression….)

Gyllenhall, on the other hand, knows what he wants and gives voice to his desires. He initiates the sex between the two men, and, in a choice that is surely not accidental, is the, um, recipient of it. His desires are more transparent…which is why, I think, his performance is so good. If he’d gone too far, Gyllenhall could have been incredible, laughable. He strikes a remarkable balance. I keep thinking of the scene in which he tries to buy a beer for a fellow rodeo performer, and the man, suspecting that something is up, rudely turns him down. Was Jack really hitting on the guy? Or just reaching out to him in a friendly, non-macho way which was, by itself, enough to run afoul of the cowboy code? It could have been either, and Gyllenhall plays the scene so subtly, he doesn’t tip his hand…which, I imagine, is precisely what you would do if you were a gay man forced to live in the closet.

Finally, a friend and I had a discussion about how graphic was the sex that’s shown in the film. She was surprised by how much was actually shown; I thought that, if director Ang Lee had shown any less, he’d have been pilloried for copping out.

In some ways, I wonder if the film didn’t err on the conservative side. What would have been more shocking than what was shown, in my opinion, would have been to show one of the characters fellating the other. (My friend insisted that these two men would never do that; I disagreed.)

But I wonder if audiences really could have handled the sight of two men in love going down on each other. There’s something about rough anal sex that’s not so shocking; we’ve seen it to one degree or another in Deliverance, Oz, and other film scenarios of violent sex. It conforms to our expectations of the way men behave when giving in to a taboo desire—contradicting the implications of the sexual act by infusing it with violence.

But tender gay sex…I have a feeling that would have made people much more uncomfortable than the rough-and-tumble coupling that occurs between Jack and Ennis.

Regardless of all this, Brokeback Mountain is really a powerful and moving film, a serious work of art. I’m glad I finally saw it.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is selling Mass Hall to the university’s central administration, which plans to end its partial-use as a dormitory and expand the presidential bureaucracy.

The symbolism here is pretty powerful, largely because it’s so dead-on: FAS, in desperate need of cash, is giving up its ownership of the university’s center; the Summers bureaucracy is growing larger and more powerful; the students are getting screwed as a result.

Here’s what I think is especially curious: The Crimson’s Zachary Seward writes, ”’two sources said that Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby was given little choice in approving the sale or the sale price….”

That sentence begs parsing. Follow up please, Mr. Seward. Who initiated the deal? Who told Kirby that he had little choice? And why? And what would have been the outcome if (the horror! the horror!) he’d actually stood his ground.

Surely Kirby could have said no if he wanted to, or had the guts to. What’s the worst that could happen—he’d be fired? That would be the easiest departure to spin since Elliot Richardson resigned from the Nixon Administration.

The very idea that the once-powerful dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard “was given little choice” tells you all you need to know about the shift of power at the world’s most powerful university.

Did Ted Kennedy father a child out of wedlock back in 1983? That’s what the National Enquirer reports this week. According to the Enquirer’s story, the mother is a Cape Cod woman named Caroline Bilodeau, and the son, Christopher, is now of legal age and wants his family status acknowledged. Teddy was still married to his wife Joan at the time, but filed for divorce several months later.

Teddy is denying the story—his spokeswoman, Melissa Wagoner, called it “irresponsible fiction”—but the Enquirer stands by it.

Who to believe? Well, it’s hard to imagine that if Teddy really were the boy’s father, he’d outright deny it; that’d be pretty low. On the other hand, the Enquirer doesn’t usually make claims this dramatic unless it’s really got them nailed down. (Of course, Teddy’s not likely to sue, as the discovery process would be a gauntlet for him.)

Interestingly, the Boston Herald has run with the story—in its gossip column—while the Boston Globe, as far as I can tell, hasn’t printed a word about it. Admirable restraint, or protecting the Kennedys? What a small town Boston really is. If Hillary Clinton had allegedly had a love child (or even Chuck Schumer), it’d be on the front page of both tabloids… I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing, but the differences between the cities are dramatic.

I admire George Clooney, who’s had an interesting career and seems determined to make some intelligent movies. Good for him. But I was surprised by his crude insult of corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff the other night at the Golden Globe awards.

“Who would name their kid Jack with the last words ‘off’ at the end of your last name?” Clooney said. “No wonder that guy is screwed up.”

There’s lots of good reasons to slam Abramoff, but making fun of his name is childish, and the fact that the room responded with laughter shows how easily supposedly mature adults can revert to schoolyard behavior, especially when it comes from someone as “cool” as George Clooney.

I guess Jack Abramoff’s father, Frank, agrees with me; he tells the Palm Springs Desert News that Clooney is an “idiot” and his words were “pure, unadulterated stupidity.”

Jack Abramoff was named after his grandfather, Frank says. “We’ve gone through quite a bit in our family. But the political end of it and the media end of it and all the other areas are one thing. When you see something like that on a show for 500 million people, it was not only a slap in my son’s face but in my father’s.”

As someone who used to be named “Blow,” I can’t help but empathize, and I know exactly what Frank Abramoff means. A few years back, when I was working at George, I went on Fox News to do some commentary about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I was greeted, on air, by anchor Shepherd Smith, who said something like, “Our next guest is George magazine editor Richard Blow, and what an appropriate name that is for a discussion of Monica Lewinsky.”

It was humiliating and infuriating at the same time—and unfortunately not something you can really respond to on national TV. (“Fuck you, Shep,” would have been satisfying, but probably not helpful.) I was later told that Smith was dressed down by Fox News head Roger Ailes for the comment, but that didn’t help me much; the joke had been broadcast to millions, the rebuke was virtually unknown.

All of which, I suppose, is a way of saying that even rogues like Jack Abramoff, when they are faulted, should be faulted on civilized terms, not by making vulgar jokes about their names and masturbation. I know such an appeal for manners and restraint is wildly improbable given the tenor of our popular culture, but still…Clooney is generally an elegant man, and you’d think that he’d be on board with the idea.

George’s father, Nick Clooney, a former candidate for Congress, certainly seems to agree. “I understand what it is like to have one’s son criticized in a very public way,” Clooney told the Desert News. “It’s very painful and it’s very difficult.”

George Clooney’s rep declined, of course, to comment on Frank Abramoff’s words. I think that’s cowardly; you use a podium seen by hundreds of millions to mock a man, and then you decline comment later.

Jack Abramoff is far from the world’s most ethical man…and yet, somehow, George Clooney owes him an apology.

…and nobody cared?

In Michael Mann’s fantastic film, “Collateral,” Tom Cruise plays an assassin at work in Los Angeles, a city he doesn’t much like. Everyone’s too isolated here, he tells Jamie Foxx, the cabdriver he is forcing to do his bidding, and relates the story of a man who died on the LA subway and goes undiscovered for days. The unspoken suggestion: In a city where human life is so little valued, what does it really matter if he kills a few people?

Well, yesterday it happened in New York: A man died on the Q train on his way home from work, and his death went unnoticed for six hours.

Just for the record, let us note that Eugene M. Reilly of Brooklyn was a USPS mail handler and had been for 35 years. He had a wife and three kids, two sons and a daughter. He worked at the Morgan mail processing center, which is on 9th Avenue between 28th and 30th streets, a massive but strangely lonely building; I know it because I sometimes drive by it in taxis late at night, headed back uptown on the West Side Highway. Mr. Reilly was also an Army vet who spent two years in Vietnam as an M.P. According to his neighbor, Yosef Y. Zaklikowsk, “He kept his property very clean.” He was overweight and had had heart surgery a decade ago, so foul play is not suspected.

Somewhere within the circle of those few, scant details lies the story of a man, whose death may have gone unnoticed but whose life, I hope, will not go unremembered.

Daniel Gross over at Slate writes about the diminishing time between movie theatrical and DVD releases. Probably not so good for Hollywood, he concludes, but great for consumers.

I’ve written about this phenomenon before for two reasons: One, I’m fascinated by what is clearly an enormous shifting paradigm, the end of the movie theater era. (The social and economic consequences are going to be really interesting.)

And two, I can’t wait. Every time I go to the theaters these days, I hate myself for doing so—kind of like the way I feel on those rare occasions when I eat fast food.

Among some recent movie theater experiences I’ve had are these:

1) A guy who sat in a seat behind me and repeatedly coughed without putting his hand over his mouth, which had the effect of a gentle but intermittent disease-carrying breeze on my hair, until eventually I turned around and asked him to stop.

2) An older couple who sat down behind me and proceeded to pull out a series of Tupperware containers containing their plentiful, and odiferous, dinner.

3) Moviegoers who laughed and cheered at the most hideously violent scenes in Hostel, a not-particularly-good film about the dangers of globalization and hormones, especially when combined.

There’s an interesting dynamic here: The more people who care about manners stop going to the movies, the more the only people left who do go are the ill-mannered, which means that people who do care will be even less likely to go…and so on and so on. In this way, the movie theater is a reflection of our national public culture generally. Forgive me for sounding like George Will, but manners and civility are beating an increasingly hasty retreat into pockets of isolation…it’s a cultural flight, not unlike the post-World War II exodus to the suburbs. The beneficiaries are Netflix and the makers of plasma TV sets, multimedia stands, couches, and gourmet foods. But I suspect that we’re all losing something…..