A (Blessedly) Short-Term Memory

New York is in Hollywood's crosshairs again.

If you happen to be standing around in the subway these days, you might've noticed not one, but two movie posters for films - I Am Legend and the upcoming Cloverfield - that use a ravaged NYC as a shock-tastic marketing ploy as well as a catastrophic plot point.

This has struck me as odd. Most of us may not remember anymore, but after 9/11 New York was a sensitive topic. Just a teeny bit. People all over the country claimed to "be New York" and "love New York"; as cheesy as it sounds there was extraordinary national unity, much of it centered around the plight of metro-NY citizens who had suffered losses or witnessed unimaginable destruction on that day.

Entertainment, too, was itself a sensitive topic. The frivolity of it all! Who, in those serious times, could seriously think about entertainment? Our sensibilities - our society's sensibilities - would be altered by 9/11. The industry, on a whole, was entering an existential crisis. Look at the kinds of things Entertainment Weekly was reporting just two days after the attacks - this is how reactive we were:

Questions remain about such upcoming films as Ben Stiller's ''Zoolander,'' a comedy about a male model who uncovers an assassination plot; ''Serendipity,'' another Manhattan-set romance, and ''The Last Castle,'' about a prison riot led by a jailed general. Bombing and terrorism figure prominently in the plots of three new TV series about CIA agents. Promotions have been yanked for the Ocotber 30 debut of ''24,'' which features the bombing of a Los Angeles-bound jetliner. The first episode of ''The Agency'' contains a reference to terror suspect Osama bin Laden, and the lavish Washington party for its premiere next week has been canceled. A five-hour ''Law & Order'' miniseries planned for later this season, which would deal with a terrorist act in New York, is also up in the air. Then there's next summer's action blockbusters, including ''Spider-Man,'' whose trailer and posters have already been pulled because they prominently feature the World Trade Center's twin towers, and ''The Sum of All Fears,'' the Tom Clancy adaptation that has terrorists rigging a nuclear bomb to blow up a crowded football stadium.

Of course, it turned out to be more a hiccup than a seismic shift in the zeitgeist. Escapism, it seems, is better medicine than CNN.

Then, in 2004 - many terrorist movies and TV episodes later - Hollywood got back into the New York-wrecking game with a spectacular specimen of summer fare, The Day After Tomorrow. In that ridiculous(ly fun) romp through death, destruction, and monumentally bad-ass climate change, the city gets it good. Smacked around. Uninhabitable. (See movie poster at right. Hey, it almost looks like the Cloverfield poster... with snowflakes instead of bullets!)

So. We're back where we began, or, at least, where we were before, in the era of Independence Day (a rousing spectacle in its own right). And I don't really have a problem with it, despite how I say it's "odd" that we've reverted after such earnest soul-searching and serious contemplation of our vulnerability, and after such mourning.

I mean, I figure I'll be the first in line to see Cloverfield. How eerie and foreboding is that poster?

My point? We were serious back then. Wounded, together, humble. And it's funny that to appreciate that time - to appreciate what now seems like a fleeting moment - it somehow helps to see it in relief, next to the cartoonish, grotesque, irresistible fantasies we recoiled from just six years ago.

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Read & Watch: This is almost hard to relate to now, but I think it's good sometimes to try to remember how things felt.

EW's great issue, "What Lies Ahead," just three days after the attacks.

Jon Stewart's return on the Daily Show (click here to go to site and view larger), one week and two days after the attacks. Funny and moving.

Holy Wired Pilgrimage!

Wild. Online Hajj:

http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/3718071

Get In On "The Week"

I've been wanting to get The Week for a while now. More reason to do so: An neat summary by The Week's editor of some of the "bigger" news events of the year that we may not have paid any attention to, including the increasing Midwest gay population and how Congress approved $1 billion for the repair of about 74,000 bridges that actually may require more like $188 billion.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/opinion/27falk.html

The Fluidity of Facts

Back at the Tartan, my school newspaper, we insisted that columnists not face off in op-ed debates. We thought that there would always be other issues to engage and that infighting would make us look fickle and unprofessional, too.

Which is what made this Op-Ed brouhaha so goshdarn fun to follow: These are the pros! At the country's most influential paper! Squabbling about Ronald Reagan and Republicans' exploitation of racism in the South!

This might sound boring to some (all) of you, but it provided a significant amount of entertainment for me over several lunch hours in dreary November. Worry not, once you have been briefed, you just may scurry over to the New York Times site to read Krugman, Brooks, Herbert, Krugman, and (again) Krugman duke it out.

September 24: Paul Krugman, everyone's favorite outraged liberal economist, offers up a thesis: "And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered."

He cites Ronald Reagan's invocation of "state's rights" while at the Neshoba County Fair, where 16 years earlier three black civil rights activists were murdered. By any measure, it's an odd place to begin a presidential campaign.

November 9: David Brooks weights in, weeks later. The op-war has begun, and it has been recentered around Reagan and the Neshoba County Fair. His column begins:

Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

Brooks says Reagan's actions in Philadelphia, Miss. weren't malicious but simply a mistake on his part.

November 10: On his blog, Krugman poo-poos the "campaign to exonerate Ronald Reagan" of the alleged race-baiting in Mississippi. He is biting, sarcastically calling each Reagan anti-civil rights misdeed an "innocent mistake."

November 13: Bob Herbert gets in on it! Now we've got a full-on three-way liberal-conservative-liberal smackdown in the works! His main point? "Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.... The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed."

November 18: Lou Cannon, a chronicler of the Reagan years, weighs in on the Op-Ed page. His piece defends Reagan from charges of racism, which to me don't seem particularly relevant. It's not about whether the Gipper is bigoted, but whether he exploited racism for political gain.

November 19: Krugman puts the kibosh on this thing. He notes that the "controversy unfortunately obscures the larger point, which should be undeniable: the central role of this backlash in the rise of the modern conservative movement."

Stunningly, he says at the end in very un-Krugmanlike fashion: "Now, maybe I’m wrong about all of this. But we should be able to discuss the role of race in American politics honestly. We shouldn’t avert our gaze because we’re unwilling to tarnish Ronald Reagan’s image."

Check it out.

Birthday Math

On GoogleTalk:

Dan: 3^3

me: 27?

Dan: yup!

me: oh
har har
wow, the last time i was a perfect cube was 19 years ago!
this is extraordinarily exciting

Dan: lol
yes it is!