Category: Uncategorized

I find Tom Vanderbilt’s Slate story about the State Department’s dropping Courier New 12 in favor of Times New Roman 14 as its official typeface timely for two reasons.
1) Courier’s appearance in The Fog of War is evidence of the font’s status as both “the herald of all stripes of dignified officialdom,” and FOIA-driven government conspiracy. [He credits Rob Poynor, of Design Observer. All of a sudden, these guys are everywhere.]
2) I just spent several hours last weekend researching the history and modern use of typewriter typefaces for a new website I’m working on. After growing tired of the clogged upX-files-style fonts that are an empty cliche of “edginess,” I turned to the mechano-corporate precision of the IBM Selectric-era fonts: serifs like Courier, Prestige Elite, and my favorites, the sleek sans-serif Letter Gothic and Script, the “handwriting” of the can-do-no-wrong IBM of the 60’s and 70’s.

Warren St. John wrote with some air of complaint about oblivious iPodders who clog our streets and queues while lost in their own musical worlds. This may be annoying, true, but it’s much better than the opposite situation: music that is piped into the street by retailers and/or Real Estate Experience developers. It’s particularly bad on faux-urban streetscapes, like the Market Commons at Clarendon, a “retail mecca” just outside DC. Nestled among the landscaped bushes are little mushroom-shaped speakers that pump out a chain-store-friendly soundtrack all day and night. It’s freakin’ annoying.

In the NYTimes Book Review, historian/storyteller Joseph Ellis delivers a gushing review of “Washington’s Crossing,” David Hackett Fischer’s “truly riveting” book-length repositioning of the American rebel army crossing the Delaware and defeating Hessians at Trenton as a turning point in the War of Independence.
Hey, I give it points for being the first book in ten years not to have a paragraph-long subtitle that tries to sound like a movie pitch. And what is Ellis’s highest praise?

For reasons beyond my comprehension, there has never been a great film about the War of Independence. The Civil War, World War I, World War II and Vietnam have all been captured memorably, but the American Revolution seems to resist cinematic treatment. More than any other book, ”Washington’s Crossing” provides the opportunity to correct this strange oversight, for in a confined chronological space we have the makings of both Patton and Saving Private Ryan‘ starring none other than George Washington. Fischer has provided the script. And it’s all true.

Of course, Fischer–and Ellis, whose credit line says is working on a biography of Washington–are two years too late, and they both must know it. In 2002, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, responding to the absence of a great film starring Washington, aka “the action hero of his time,” hired Steven Spielberg to produce a 15-minute film for an $85 million interactive museum program being built next to GW’s house. ” As Jim Rees, director of Mount Vernon told the Washington Post, “If it was as exciting and action-packed as Indiana Jones we would be thrilled.”
Shoppertainment links:
Buy Washington’s Crossing before they put out the movie tie-in edition, with Mel Gibson as Washington.
Oh, wait. They already made that movie.
Then buy Band of Brothers(a Spielberg joint), and imagine Bastogne as Trenton, which it probably is. The Trenton of Belgium, anyway.
[update: for those who lack the patriotism to invest $89.99 for the BoB DVD, you can also rent it. Except that GreenCine doesn’t ship to Canada. Pinko.]

What battery would Jesus use? Interstate, of course. It looks like even George Bush’s favorite philosopher is trying to reach the elusive NASCAR Dad this year.
James Caviezel, who plays the Gibsonian version of Jesus Christ, broke The Master’s injunction about keeping the Sabbath Day holy by flacking unto the NASCAR masses for The Passion It was more Event in The Press Tent than Sermon on The Mount; there was a The Passion baseball cap where a crown of thorns should be.
The real miracle of Daytona Sunday, though, comes from the Good Book of indie film marketing: Gibson rendered some serious Caesars unto Bobby Labonte’s Interstate Battery team and got The Passion logo on the hood of his Chevy.

Scott McClellan may have been more right than he knew yesterday. From the Washington Post:

The White House has been unable to produce peers from Bush’s service in Alabama. But Bill Burkett, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard, said in an interview with The Washington Post this week that he overheard a speakerphone call about Bush’s National Guard file in 1997, when Bush was Texas governor. Burkett said he was in a National Guard office when he overheard Joseph M. Allbaugh, then Bush’s chief of staff, tell an officer in reference to Bush’s military file that he “needed to make sure there was nothing to embarrass the governor.”
Burkett said he later witnessed some items from Bush’s file in the trash. [Emphasis mine, for now]

Calpundit has a lengthy transcript of an interview with Burkett, and corroborating comments from Burkett contemporaries in the Guard.
The domain name, trollingfortrash.com, was registered yesterday. I always thought “trawling for trash” was more correct, but I’m happy to wait a few months for Bill Safire’s column.

Although I successfully dodged questions about my activities during the Vietnam war, I fear I have severely limited my electability by submitting to Andrew Krucoff’s Gothamist Interview.

If the story in Mel Gibson’s The Passion sounds vaguely familiar, you won’t be surprised by the revelations in Franklin Foer’s article in the Times today. It apparently comes from a 1979 Warner Bros. movie called Jesus. [o Hollywood, remakes are like manna from heaven.] “JESUS” (the movie) has developed something of a cult following [sic].
Thanks to 300 earnest evangelicals at the Jesus Film Project who have translated it into 848 languages, and thousands of projector-and-generator-toting missionary/exhibitors who circle the globe, “JESUS” has become the centerpiece of a Rocky Horror Picture Show-style filmic conversion experience, albeit one where bread and wine replaces flying toast.
The distributor and original producer, Campus Crusade for Christ, claims that over 3 billion people have seen the movie. For those living in remote Andean and African villages, it was often the first film they’d ever seen. Foer points to Bro. Brian Helstrom’s unsubtly symbolic story of a screening in South Africa:

“‘You could see them physically jump back at the sight of the serpent tempting Jesus,’ he recalled. ‘When soldiers whip Jesus, you could hear grown adults crying.’ After Jesus’s death, but before his resurrection, a black South African missionary told the crowd that they had a chance to pray and to accept Christ. ‘He asked everybody who prayed to walk forward and come into light,’ Mr. Helstrom says. ‘One hundred forty-five people walked out of the darkness into light.'”

And within months, missionaries from the Church of Loew’s set up the bush country’s first multiplex, making it possible for Charlie’s Angels II: Full Throttle to be screened 35 times a day. Hallelujah.
I’m somewhere between troubled and pissed that film experience is so uncritically substituted for (or equated with) religious experience. There’s some serious bill of goods-selling going on here. When I was a missionary (for another demonination) in Japan, I ran across people whose names were on the Church baptism rolls but who had no interest in being Christian at all, any more than eating at a Mongolian BBQ would make them want to be Mongolian. Turns out that ten years earlier, some missionaries with more zeal than sense decided to overcome Japanese teenagers’ general religious apathy by starting a baseball league. After a season or two, they’d help out their cool American friends and climb into that pool there, and…well, what are friends for? Conversion may be embracing and emotionally powerful, but friendship ain’t religion, and neither is a tear-jerking movie.
I wonder, what does the Bible teach us on this subject? There’s the “render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s” thing, which should put the kibbosh on selling cheap, emotionally manipulative cinematic hat tricks based on techonological superiority as salvation. [Unrelated: I can totally picture Mel having a “render unto Caesar his points against the gross” clause in his distribution contract, btw.] But I have another verse in mind: “By their fruits ye shall know them,” or as they say in the picture business, “what else has he done?”
Jesus, it turns out, was an adaptation, or as its opening credits describe it, a “documentary taken entirely from the Gospel of Luke.” But Luke lost his story credit [Luke, baby, you need new representation. C-A-L-L M-E. -ed.] to Barnet Bain, who has gone on to produce such dubious religious schlock as The Apocalypse (starring Sandra Bernhard??) and the eternally punishing Robin Williams CG-hellfest, What Dreams May Come. Decidedly not funny.
Co-director Peter Sykes has even more to answer for at judgment day (not to be confused with T2: Judgment Day, which rocks. Somebody say amen!). Before turning to Jesus (The Movie) Sykes made, um, let me get this straight: Tell Me Lies, Demons of the Mind, and, um, Child of Satan. I mean, I know the well need no physician, but what in hell [sic] was the Campus Crusader behind the project thinking to hire this guy? And where exactly did they meet?
So Campus Crusade is the world’s biggest film distributor, the unsung McDonald’s of global evangelism–with over 3 billion saved–and Mel’s set to open his Passion on 2,500 screens. Whatever. As The Man Himself (verily) says (un)to us, “they have their reward.”

David Foster Wallace parody contest finalists. [via Kottke]
Not enough for you? Just buy Infinite Jest. Hint: the used copies haven’t been opened beyond page 25. They were on the coffee table, not the nightstand.

Xu Bing, a Chinese artist whose frequently subtle engagement with opacity I admire, has installed a piece at Artes Mundi, an exhibition at the National Museum in Wales, made of dust the artist collected on September 11th in lower Manhattan.
Xu scattered the dust across the gallery floor and wrote a Zen poem in it with his finger,
“As there is nothing from the first,
Where does the dust collect itself?”
Several years ago at P.S. 1, Xu placed a giant vase of mulberry branches in the lobby, which were eaten by silkworms, whose cocoons gradually replaced the leaves.
Artes Mundi opens Saturday, (as) if you’re in Cardiff. They’re giving a big prize in order to get press coverage. Read Maev Kennedy’s profile of Xu in the Guardian .

Dramatis Personae: Blacktable, a website of a certain age; Gawker, who witnessed the event.
Setting: Writers hilariously mourn the recent decline of the New York Times‘ Monday write-in feature, Metropolitan Diary by imagining cute crosstown bus encounters that didn’t make it past the Diary’s new editors. [note: any similarities of to these anecdotes last year’s “Adam Gopnik’s Metropolitan Diary“ are purely due to the utter predictability of the MD format.]
The anecdotes I submitted to MD (both of which were published–Choire take note–for a fee of zero dollars per word) were written to highlight my own sophistication and cultural superiority in a suitably oblique way (e.g., “…As the exasperated waiter came out of the Carlyle dining room…” and “…where I overheard two Italians conversing about…”). The one time I recognized myself in someone else’s submission, I was making smartass comments on Canal about buying street turtles.

Film critics David Edelstein and A. O. Scott take time–and wordcount–off from reviewing films to discuss books. Books about films. By critics. J. Hoberman’s The Dream Life, a political/cultural history of film in the 60’s and 70’s and Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, a bitchstory of independent film in the 90’s.