Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 873

Climate change made this baby sea lion so hungry that it ventured to a restaurant in search of food

Climate change is affecting sea life in Southern California so much that one baby sea lion left the beach in search of food,

America runs on undocumented laborers — and our news media is complicit in their exploitation

In our post-modern (or post-post-modern?) age, we are supposedly transcending the material certainties of the past. The virtual world of the Internet is replacing the “real,” material world, as theory asks us to question the very notion of reality.  Yet that virtual world turns out to rely heavily on some distinctly old systems and realities, including the physical labor of those who produce, care for, and provide the goods and services for the post-industrial information economy. As it happens, this increasingly invisible, underground economy of muscles and sweat, blood and effort intersects in the most intimate ways with those who enjoy the benefits of the virtual world. Of course, our connection to that virtual world comes through physical devices, and each of them follows a commodity chain that begins with the mining of rare earth elements and ends at a toxic disposal or recycling site, usually somewhere in the Third World. Closer to home, too, the incontrovertible realities of our physical lives depend on labor -- often that of undocumented immigrants -- invisible but far from virtual, that makes apparently endless mundane daily routines possible. Even the most ethereal of post-modern cosmopolitans, for instance, eat food.  In twenty-first-century America, as anthropologist Steve Striffler has pointed out, “to find a meal that has not at some point passed through the hands of Mexican immigrants is a difficult task.”  Medical anthropologist Seth Holmes adds, “It is likely that the last hands to hold the blueberries, strawberries, peaches, asparagus, or lettuce before you pick them up in your local grocery store belong to Latin American migrant laborers.” The same is true of the newspaper.  The invisible links between two mutually incomprehensible worlds were revealed to many in the Boston area at the end of December when the Boston Globe, the city’s major newspaper, made what its executives apparently believed would be a minor change.  They contracted out its subscriber delivery service to a new company. Isn’t newspaper delivery part of the old economy and so consigned to the dustbin of history by online news access?  It turns out that a couple of hundred thousand people in the Boston area -- and 56% of newspaper readers nationwide -- still prefer to read their news in what some dismissively call the “dead tree format.”  In addition, despite major ad shrinkage, much of the revenue that allows newspapers to offer online content still comes overwhelmingly from in-print ads. The Globe presented the change as a clean, technical move, nothing more than a new contractor providing newspaper delivery for a lower cost.  But like so many other invisible services that grease the wheels of daily life, that deceptively simple task is in fact provided thanks to grueling, exploited labor performed by some of society’s most marginalized workers, many of them immigrants and undocumented. In this respect, newspaper delivery shares characteristics with other forms of labor that link the privileged with the exploited.  This is especially true in Boston, recently named the most unequal city in the country.  Some of the most dangerous, insecure, and unpleasant jobs with the lowest pay and a general lack of benefits provide key goods and services for citizens who undoubtedly believe that they never interact with immigrants or receive any benefits from them. In fact, immigrant workers harvest, process, and prepare food; they provide home health care; they manicure hands and lawns.  In other words, the system connects some of the most intimate aspects of our daily lives with workers whose very existence is then erased or demonized in the public sphere.  And all of this happens because these workers are regularly rendered silent and invisible. Reporters Heroically Deliver the Paper To get that “dead tree” item from the printer to your doorstep requires hundreds of human workers willing to leave home in the middle of the night, 365 days a year, regardless of the weather and the driving conditions (a serious issue in New England). They must drive to a distribution center to receive, fold, and package the papers, load them in their own car, and spend several hours racing through dark streets to finish their route before dawn.  Although they pay for their own gas, insurance, and car maintenance, the low piece rate that these “independent contractors” receive per-paper-delivered barely allows them to reach the minimum wage.  Many of them are immigrants. The Globe’s workers remained invisible to much of the public until December 28th when the paper replaced its long-time delivery contractor with Long Beach-based ACI Media Group.  Droves of workers were laid off from the previous company when it lost its Globe contract, and ACI promised to cut costs for delivery by paying its newly hired workers less and making them work more under significantly worse conditions.  As a result, ACI had trouble attracting workers and those they did hire began to quit en masse when confronted with the degrading new working conditions.  Thousands of papers went undelivered, day after day.  When subscriber complaints flooded in, the media began to take notice.  But most of the journalists covering the developing story preferred to look everywhere except at the workers themselves in trying to explain what happened. Subscribers may be aware of their paper carriers because they catch a glimpse of them or hear them in the early morning, or they may take seriously those envelopes that the carriers regularly leave, hoping for tips to bolster their meager income.  Apparently, however, the Globe’s own reporters never thought to consider how the newspaper arrived at subscribers’ homes until the system went into crisis. A week into the quagmire, the Globe mobilized its reporters and other staff to help deliver the Sunday paper.  If anyone outside the Boston area heard about the issue, it was undoubtedly because of this unprecedented action. Under the headline “Boston Globe Employees Help Deliver Papers on Sunday,” for instance, the New York Times noted that 200 of them “stayed up all night,” having brought their own “flashlight and a GPS,” and that they “assembled and bagged thousands of newspapers and stacked them in their cars.” On NPR, Renee Montagne chimed in, reporting that “before dawn on Sunday morning, dozens of the Globe's reporters and editors fanned out and delivered the papers themselves. They carried flashlights and GPS.” As one of those reporters told the Times, “You’re following instructions about whether people want it directly on their porch or hidden somewhere, so you have to walk up to the house and drop it where they wanted it.” CNN Money explained that “first, the volunteers had to bag the papers,” and provided a photograph to prove that such a remarkable act had indeed happened. All of this coverage tacitly offered up the same message: reporters had heroically crossed the lines of race, status, and class!  How amazing! Clearly, this foray into the world of immigrant labor proved startling for those reporters.  Columnist Marcela García called it “an unbelievably eye-opening experience.” Columnist Shirley Leung wrote, “We have an old saying in newsrooms: Putting out the paper is a daily miracle. I used to think that was just about filing your story on deadline, but I’ve come to appreciate how it’s the whole package from keyboard to doorstep.” Columnist Joan Vennochi, after spending the night delivering papers, lamented the suffering of the “victims” of the Globe’s decision -- by which, of course, she meant the subscribers.  After a humorous description of his own amateur attempt to follow a morning delivery route, reporter Kevin Cullen concluded casuallythat “whatever they pay the delivery people, it’s not enough, and it’s more than a little depressing to think this debacle has been brought about by a desire to pay them even less.” “Whatever they pay the delivery people...”  Curiously, in the first two weeks of reporting on the crisis, no news source seemed able to find out how much the new company was actually paying.  The Columbia Journalism Review reported widespread speculation “that the labor shortage stems from ACI offering lower pay rates than other carriers. But ACI and Globe management have both denied that claim.”  Apparently it never occurred to CJR reporter David Uberti to ask a worker! Press coverage made it clear that newspapers live in, and speak to, a world of privilege. It was assumed, for instance, that readers shared the utter ignorance of reporters when it came to the work (and the workers) involved in physically transporting newspapers to their doorsteps.  They were, in other words, to enjoy unlimited access to “information” about the world that “matters” -- and complete ignorance when it came to the mundane details that lay behind that access. Only one of the journalists who participated in that Sunday delivery extravaganza, columnist Marcela García, who frequently covers immigrant and Latino issues, even thought to focus her attention on the workers who actually did the same job every day.  “Reporters delivering their own work -- that’s a story,” she wrote. “But off camera, and working side by side with us as we assembled the Sunday paper, were the people who are there every night, making not much more than minimum wage...  Part of the subtext of the crisis the Globe has faced for the past week is that our new delivery vendor can’t seem to find enough people willing and able to do the grueling work.” At her blog, García recorded one of her colleagues saying, “Wow, I can’t believe something like this had to happen for us to learn about these workers and their conditions.”  She was evidently one of the few reporters willing to talk with some of the actual workers that Sunday morning when the Globestaff mobilized to help with the delivery.  Or perhaps she was one of the few able to.  While 35% of Boston’s inhabitants speak a language other than English and the city is now “majority minority,” the paper’s journalists, unlike its delivery workers, remain overwhelmingly white and English speaking. The Vanishing Workers That Tuesday, January 5th, publisher John Henry offered a public apology -- to subscribers, of course, not to the workers with the old carrier who, because of his actions, had lost their jobs, or the ones with the new carrier who had seen their working conditions and pay undermined.  Henry did emphasize that a major reason for switching carriers was ACI’s promise of substantially cheaper service.  Clearly, he felt it unnecessary to mention that these savings would be realized on the backs of the delivery workers.  “Until Globe staffers embarked on an effort to save more than 20,000 subscribers from missing their Sunday paper,” Henry wrote, “we had underestimated what it would take to make this change.”  He then offered a post-modern, post-material explanation for the problem: the new company’s routing software had proven insufficient for the job! On January 9th, almost two weeks after the delivery crisis began, an exposé by reporter Michael Levenson finally brought the issue of “long hours, little pay, no vacation for delivery drivers” out of the shadows.  He described the “grueling nocturnal marathon for low-income workers who toil almost invisibly on the edge of the economy.”  The next day, when 15 workers delivered a letter of protest to the new carrier and walked off the job, reporter Dan Adams explained their demands and actually quoted Lynn Worker Center organizer Julio Ruiz. On January 13th, the Globe published a lead editorial challenging management and bringing labor issues to the fore in a significant way.  It recognized that “drivers get no vacation, and lack worker protections. That’s despite the fact that packaging papers into plastic bags, in the middle of the night, can be grueling work.”  The editorial called on the state attorney general and federal authorities to investigate the delivery business, including implicitly the accusation leveled by workers that their employers misclassify them as “independent contractors” in order to avoid paying the wages or offering the labor protections they deserve. In other words, the organizing and protesting of the workers -- and the experiences of the reporters as one-day delivery people -- helped briefly open a window between the world of those who write and read the news and the world of the exploited labor that transports it from the former to the latter. Yet the window didn’t last long.  A Globe postmortem by Mark Arsenault on January 16th returned to a purely technological explanation of the problem in summing up the three-week debacle.  “The root of the delivery mayhem,” he wrote, “lies in something so simple that nobody gave it much thought until it was too late: sensible paper routes.”  Once again, software and routing lay at the heart of the matter, while workers and working conditions conveniently vanished. If newspaper writers and readers are effectively isolated from the world of the workers who deliver the paper, that divide goes both ways.  One immigrant worker who spoke to García -- in Spanish -- was a Guatemalan who had taken on a second paper route during the crisis.  He worked from one at night to eight in the morning and requested to be identified by a pseudonym. “I asked him if he ever reads the Globe,” García reported.  “He looked up and stared back at me as if I was saying something crazy. And he just laughed.” Our infatuation with virtual modernity should not blind us to the exploitative systems of labor that undergird our world from our front doorsteps to distant parts of the planet.  As the Globe’s delivery crisis made clear, the present system relies on ignorance and on the invisibility of the labor of mostly immigrant, often undocumented workers.  The Globe’s delivery breakdown offered a brief look at just one way in which the worlds of business, journalism, and readers rely on such workers.  And the local and national coverage revealed just how unusual it is for those who own, manage, write, and read newspapers to see this underside of our information economy. So when you next pick up your paper and read the latest blast by Donald Trump against undocumented immigrants, remember: the odds are you can only do so because an undocumented worker brought it to your doorstep.In our post-modern (or post-post-modern?) age, we are supposedly transcending the material certainties of the past. The virtual world of the Internet is replacing the “real,” material world, as theory asks us to question the very notion of reality.  Yet that virtual world turns out to rely heavily on some distinctly old systems and realities, including the physical labor of those who produce, care for, and provide the goods and services for the post-industrial information economy. As it happens, this increasingly invisible, underground economy of muscles and sweat, blood and effort intersects in the most intimate ways with those who enjoy the benefits of the virtual world. Of course, our connection to that virtual world comes through physical devices, and each of them follows a commodity chain that begins with the mining of rare earth elements and ends at a toxic disposal or recycling site, usually somewhere in the Third World. Closer to home, too, the incontrovertible realities of our physical lives depend on labor -- often that of undocumented immigrants -- invisible but far from virtual, that makes apparently endless mundane daily routines possible. Even the most ethereal of post-modern cosmopolitans, for instance, eat food.  In twenty-first-century America, as anthropologist Steve Striffler has pointed out, “to find a meal that has not at some point passed through the hands of Mexican immigrants is a difficult task.”  Medical anthropologist Seth Holmes adds, “It is likely that the last hands to hold the blueberries, strawberries, peaches, asparagus, or lettuce before you pick them up in your local grocery store belong to Latin American migrant laborers.” The same is true of the newspaper.  The invisible links between two mutually incomprehensible worlds were revealed to many in the Boston area at the end of December when the Boston Globe, the city’s major newspaper, made what its executives apparently believed would be a minor change.  They contracted out its subscriber delivery service to a new company. Isn’t newspaper delivery part of the old economy and so consigned to the dustbin of history by online news access?  It turns out that a couple of hundred thousand people in the Boston area -- and 56% of newspaper readers nationwide -- still prefer to read their news in what some dismissively call the “dead tree format.”  In addition, despite major ad shrinkage, much of the revenue that allows newspapers to offer online content still comes overwhelmingly from in-print ads. The Globe presented the change as a clean, technical move, nothing more than a new contractor providing newspaper delivery for a lower cost.  But like so many other invisible services that grease the wheels of daily life, that deceptively simple task is in fact provided thanks to grueling, exploited labor performed by some of society’s most marginalized workers, many of them immigrants and undocumented. In this respect, newspaper delivery shares characteristics with other forms of labor that link the privileged with the exploited.  This is especially true in Boston, recently named the most unequal city in the country.  Some of the most dangerous, insecure, and unpleasant jobs with the lowest pay and a general lack of benefits provide key goods and services for citizens who undoubtedly believe that they never interact with immigrants or receive any benefits from them. In fact, immigrant workers harvest, process, and prepare food; they provide home health care; they manicure hands and lawns.  In other words, the system connects some of the most intimate aspects of our daily lives with workers whose very existence is then erased or demonized in the public sphere.  And all of this happens because these workers are regularly rendered silent and invisible. Reporters Heroically Deliver the Paper To get that “dead tree” item from the printer to your doorstep requires hundreds of human workers willing to leave home in the middle of the night, 365 days a year, regardless of the weather and the driving conditions (a serious issue in New England). They must drive to a distribution center to receive, fold, and package the papers, load them in their own car, and spend several hours racing through dark streets to finish their route before dawn.  Although they pay for their own gas, insurance, and car maintenance, the low piece rate that these “independent contractors” receive per-paper-delivered barely allows them to reach the minimum wage.  Many of them are immigrants. The Globe’s workers remained invisible to much of the public until December 28th when the paper replaced its long-time delivery contractor with Long Beach-based ACI Media Group.  Droves of workers were laid off from the previous company when it lost its Globe contract, and ACI promised to cut costs for delivery by paying its newly hired workers less and making them work more under significantly worse conditions.  As a result, ACI had trouble attracting workers and those they did hire began to quit en masse when confronted with the degrading new working conditions.  Thousands of papers went undelivered, day after day.  When subscriber complaints flooded in, the media began to take notice.  But most of the journalists covering the developing story preferred to look everywhere except at the workers themselves in trying to explain what happened. Subscribers may be aware of their paper carriers because they catch a glimpse of them or hear them in the early morning, or they may take seriously those envelopes that the carriers regularly leave, hoping for tips to bolster their meager income.  Apparently, however, the Globe’s own reporters never thought to consider how the newspaper arrived at subscribers’ homes until the system went into crisis. A week into the quagmire, the Globe mobilized its reporters and other staff to help deliver the Sunday paper.  If anyone outside the Boston area heard about the issue, it was undoubtedly because of this unprecedented action. Under the headline “Boston Globe Employees Help Deliver Papers on Sunday,” for instance, the New York Times noted that 200 of them “stayed up all night,” having brought their own “flashlight and a GPS,” and that they “assembled and bagged thousands of newspapers and stacked them in their cars.” On NPR, Renee Montagne chimed in, reporting that “before dawn on Sunday morning, dozens of the Globe's reporters and editors fanned out and delivered the papers themselves. They carried flashlights and GPS.” As one of those reporters told the Times, “You’re following instructions about whether people want it directly on their porch or hidden somewhere, so you have to walk up to the house and drop it where they wanted it.” CNN Money explained that “first, the volunteers had to bag the papers,” and provided a photograph to prove that such a remarkable act had indeed happened. All of this coverage tacitly offered up the same message: reporters had heroically crossed the lines of race, status, and class!  How amazing! Clearly, this foray into the world of immigrant labor proved startling for those reporters.  Columnist Marcela García called it “an unbelievably eye-opening experience.” Columnist Shirley Leung wrote, “We have an old saying in newsrooms: Putting out the paper is a daily miracle. I used to think that was just about filing your story on deadline, but I’ve come to appreciate how it’s the whole package from keyboard to doorstep.” Columnist Joan Vennochi, after spending the night delivering papers, lamented the suffering of the “victims” of the Globe’s decision -- by which, of course, she meant the subscribers.  After a humorous description of his own amateur attempt to follow a morning delivery route, reporter Kevin Cullen concluded casuallythat “whatever they pay the delivery people, it’s not enough, and it’s more than a little depressing to think this debacle has been brought about by a desire to pay them even less.” “Whatever they pay the delivery people...”  Curiously, in the first two weeks of reporting on the crisis, no news source seemed able to find out how much the new company was actually paying.  The Columbia Journalism Review reported widespread speculation “that the labor shortage stems from ACI offering lower pay rates than other carriers. But ACI and Globe management have both denied that claim.”  Apparently it never occurred to CJR reporter David Uberti to ask a worker! Press coverage made it clear that newspapers live in, and speak to, a world of privilege. It was assumed, for instance, that readers shared the utter ignorance of reporters when it came to the work (and the workers) involved in physically transporting newspapers to their doorsteps.  They were, in other words, to enjoy unlimited access to “information” about the world that “matters” -- and complete ignorance when it came to the mundane details that lay behind that access. Only one of the journalists who participated in that Sunday delivery extravaganza, columnist Marcela García, who frequently covers immigrant and Latino issues, even thought to focus her attention on the workers who actually did the same job every day.  “Reporters delivering their own work -- that’s a story,” she wrote. “But off camera, and working side by side with us as we assembled the Sunday paper, were the people who are there every night, making not much more than minimum wage...  Part of the subtext of the crisis the Globe has faced for the past week is that our new delivery vendor can’t seem to find enough people willing and able to do the grueling work.” At her blog, García recorded one of her colleagues saying, “Wow, I can’t believe something like this had to happen for us to learn about these workers and their conditions.”  She was evidently one of the few reporters willing to talk with some of the actual workers that Sunday morning when the Globestaff mobilized to help with the delivery.  Or perhaps she was one of the few able to.  While 35% of Boston’s inhabitants speak a language other than English and the city is now “majority minority,” the paper’s journalists, unlike its delivery workers, remain overwhelmingly white and English speaking. The Vanishing Workers That Tuesday, January 5th, publisher John Henry offered a public apology -- to subscribers, of course, not to the workers with the old carrier who, because of his actions, had lost their jobs, or the ones with the new carrier who had seen their working conditions and pay undermined.  Henry did emphasize that a major reason for switching carriers was ACI’s promise of substantially cheaper service.  Clearly, he felt it unnecessary to mention that these savings would be realized on the backs of the delivery workers.  “Until Globe staffers embarked on an effort to save more than 20,000 subscribers from missing their Sunday paper,” Henry wrote, “we had underestimated what it would take to make this change.”  He then offered a post-modern, post-material explanation for the problem: the new company’s routing software had proven insufficient for the job! On January 9th, almost two weeks after the delivery crisis began, an exposé by reporter Michael Levenson finally brought the issue of “long hours, little pay, no vacation for delivery drivers” out of the shadows.  He described the “grueling nocturnal marathon for low-income workers who toil almost invisibly on the edge of the economy.”  The next day, when 15 workers delivered a letter of protest to the new carrier and walked off the job, reporter Dan Adams explained their demands and actually quoted Lynn Worker Center organizer Julio Ruiz. On January 13th, the Globe published a lead editorial challenging management and bringing labor issues to the fore in a significant way.  It recognized that “drivers get no vacation, and lack worker protections. That’s despite the fact that packaging papers into plastic bags, in the middle of the night, can be grueling work.”  The editorial called on the state attorney general and federal authorities to investigate the delivery business, including implicitly the accusation leveled by workers that their employers misclassify them as “independent contractors” in order to avoid paying the wages or offering the labor protections they deserve. In other words, the organizing and protesting of the workers -- and the experiences of the reporters as one-day delivery people -- helped briefly open a window between the world of those who write and read the news and the world of the exploited labor that transports it from the former to the latter. Yet the window didn’t last long.  A Globe postmortem by Mark Arsenault on January 16th returned to a purely technological explanation of the problem in summing up the three-week debacle.  “The root of the delivery mayhem,” he wrote, “lies in something so simple that nobody gave it much thought until it was too late: sensible paper routes.”  Once again, software and routing lay at the heart of the matter, while workers and working conditions conveniently vanished. If newspaper writers and readers are effectively isolated from the world of the workers who deliver the paper, that divide goes both ways.  One immigrant worker who spoke to García -- in Spanish -- was a Guatemalan who had taken on a second paper route during the crisis.  He worked from one at night to eight in the morning and requested to be identified by a pseudonym. “I asked him if he ever reads the Globe,” García reported.  “He looked up and stared back at me as if I was saying something crazy. And he just laughed.” Our infatuation with virtual modernity should not blind us to the exploitative systems of labor that undergird our world from our front doorsteps to distant parts of the planet.  As the Globe’s delivery crisis made clear, the present system relies on ignorance and on the invisibility of the labor of mostly immigrant, often undocumented workers.  The Globe’s delivery breakdown offered a brief look at just one way in which the worlds of business, journalism, and readers rely on such workers.  And the local and national coverage revealed just how unusual it is for those who own, manage, write, and read newspapers to see this underside of our information economy. So when you next pick up your paper and read the latest blast by Donald Trump against undocumented immigrants, remember: the odds are you can only do so because an undocumented worker brought it to your doorstep.

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Marco Rubio is not a moderate: Yesterday’s Tea Party loon is today’s establishment favorite

The press wrote this script a very long time ago: Senator Marco Rubio could become the favored establishment candidate in the Republican Party primary as party elites search for answers to the insurgent campaigns of outsiders Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz. That note has been hit especially hard in the press since the Trump circus arrived on the campaign trail last summer: The GOP is hoping for a tempered, pragmatic savior who can appeal to mainstream voters and help Republicans avoid disaster come November. ("Allowing Trump to have its nomination would saddle Republicans with the worst nominee any party has had in decades," wrote Jonathan Chait at New York.) Rubio's third-place finish in the Iowa caucus has only cemented that claim, with the press essentially anointing him the Iowa winner. He "may have won the establishment credibility he needs to stay near the top of the Republican presidential race for the long-term," according to CNN. Reuters agreed, crowning "Florida Senator Marco Rubio and the Republican establishment" as one of the big Iowa winners on the GOP side. But what happens when the facts change but the script does not? What happens when a so-called Establishment candidate like Rubio starts espousing ugly, divisive rhetoric that's synonymous with the darker regions of Fox News and the Republican Party? What happens when he adopts radical policy positions that just years ago would have been seen as borderline even for AM talk radio? (i.e. Outlawing abortions even for victims of rape and incest.) In other words, what happens when Rubio takes a very hard right turn and obliterates meaningful differences between himself and Trump? Between himself and Cruz? Don't calming, feel-good code words like Establishment then become irrelevant and misleading? I don't think there's any doubt that, overall, Rubio has benefited from very generous press coverage. Whether it's the sweeping conclusion that he's a "charismatic" communicator, the media happily running with his campaign's spin that it essentially won in Iowa by finishing third, or the press' steadfast refusal to delve deeply into the senator's questionable finances, watching Rubio at the Republican debate last year attack the press as a liberal super PAC for Democrats was amusing. The truth is, pundits seem to revere him. One way that affection is displayed is to ignore the substance of Rubio's campaign; to whitewash the extremism now at the base of his pitch. To acknowledge that Rubio occupies the far reaches of the political spectrum, and that he's actually sprinted there in recent months, taints the portrait the press likes to paint of him: establishment savior. To me, establishment sounds like a placeholder for "moderate." And in the case of Rubio, that's a complete myth. By placing the Florida senator in that wider establishment lane, pundits and reporters seem to suggest that he's somehow part of a pragmatic Republican wing (does that even exist?) that practices common sense conservatism; that he's separate and above those outlier disrupters like Trump and Cruz who embrace more political chaos. This week, a New York Times dispatch placed Rubio outside of the Republican "hard right" that seems to be flocking to Trump. Reuters explained what distinguished Rubio from the so-called outside, even though Rubio seemed to agree with Trump and Cruz on so many issues, including their disdain for President Obama: "[Rubio] embedded his criticism within a more optimistic, inclusive message." But just because an extremist coats his divisiveness in "optimistic" language, doesn't mean the campaign press should play along and portray him as something he's clearly not. And yet ... Forecasting Rubio's White House chances, FiveThirtyEight recently claimed that Democratic strategists are "terrified to face Rubio in the fall." Why? Because of his establishment ability to broaden the GOP's "appeal with moderates, millennials and Latinos." "Rubio is aiming to be the GOP candidate with the establishment credibility and broad appeal needed to win in a general election, a unifier who can bring together young, moderate voters, along with conservatives and evangelicals," the Christian Science Monitor reported. A unifier? Rubio walked away from his one stab at establishment legislating with the immigration reform bill that he, as part of the Gang of Eight, helped shepherd through Congress. But quickly finding himself out step with a rabid Republican base that's adopted anti-immigration as its defining litmus test, Rubio sprinted so far to the right on this issue that not only does he oppose his own reform proposal, he's connecting the issue to the rise of ISIS. No unity there. As for Rubio's potential appeal to young voters and moderates, a central part of the media's establishment narrative, the senator's increasingly right-wing agenda certainly raises doubts. Rubio opposes expanding background checks for gun owners, even though 90 percent of Americans support the measure, as do an overwhelming majority of gun owners and even NRA members. He opposes marriage equality and "believes some kinds of businesses, like wedding photography, should be allowed to turn away gay customers." He doesn't want to increase the minimum wage (even though he thinks it's currently too low). He doesn't believe in climate change. From PolitiFact [emphasis added]:

Rubio will support anti-abortion legislation that includes an exception for rape and incest, but he prefers that the procedure be illegal even in cases of rape and incest.

It's important to note that in terms of the "Establishment" branding, a string of recent Republican Establishment nominees for president, including Mitt Romney, Sen. John McCain, and George W. Bush, all agreed that allowing abortions to be legal in the case of rape and incest was the best approach. Rubio, though, has broken from that model and staked out a far more radical stance. And when Trump proposed banning all Muslims from entering America, Rubio seemed to out-flank him in the fevered swamps, at least initially. "It's not about closing down mosques," he soon told Fox News' Megyn Kelly. "It's about closing down anyplace -- whether it's a cafe, a diner, an internet site -- anyplace where radicals are being inspired." (Rubio later said Trump hadn't thought through his Muslim ban.) Overall? "He's been Trumped," noted Peter Beinart at The Atlantic. There may still be an establishment candidate lurking in the Republican field who can try to save the party from its own extremism, but based on the media's apparent definition of Establishment, Rubio isn't that person.

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Bernie and Hillary’s tension-filled face-off: Wall Street, health care, Flint crisis and progressive cred highlight latest Democratic debate

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In debate, Hillary Clinton boasted that she is supported by Henry Kissinger, accused war criminal who oversaw policies that led to millions of deaths

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Republicans hate-watch the #DemDebate: “There will be some fun general election campaign ads from this”

By nearly all accounts, Thursday night's MSNBC debate -- the first two person debate of the entire primary cycle -- started off with a bang and never let up. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders faced-off over the parameters of progressivism and the impropriety of Wall Street donations, to the simultaneous delight and dismay of Democrats seeking a substantive reprieve from the GOP clown show. But for the other side, accustomed to food fights with Donald Trump as Triumph, The Insult Dog at center stage and squabbles between the candidates and the moderators overtaking any semblance of substantive debate, watching MSNBC's Democratic debate was an exercise of torture: https://twitter.com/maeganvaz/status/... https://twitter.com/NoahPollak/status... https://twitter.com/bethanyshondark/s... https://twitter.com/nathanlgonzales/s... https://twitter.com/dangainor/status/... https://twitter.com/jpodhoretz/status... https://twitter.com/JonahNRO/status/6... https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status... https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/statu... https://twitter.com/Veribatim/status/... https://twitter.com/FBillMcMorris/sta... https://twitter.com/fordm/status/6954... https://twitter.com/BoSnerdley/status... https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/sta... https://twitter.com/ComfortablySmug/s... https://twitter.com/brithume/status/6...

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Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton clash on what it means to be a progressive: Democratic debate quickly gets heated

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton clashed Thursday night on what exactly it means to be a progressive politician. Clinton opened the fifth Democratic presidential debate insisting that Sanders is "making promises [he] cannot keep" in promising to implement a system of single-payer health care, and that her more conservative policies are pragmatic. Last week, she proclaimed that universal health care will "never, ever" happen in the U.S. Sanders forcefully pushed back. "Every major country on Earth — whether it's the U.K., whether it's France, whether it's Canada — has managed to provide health care to all people as a right and they are spending significantly less per capita on health care than we are. So I do not accept the belief that the United States of America can't do that." "I do not accept the belief that the United States of America and our government can't stand up to the ripoffs of the pharmaceutical industry which charge us by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs," Sanders added. On Wednesday, Sanders argued Clinton — who has previously identified as a moderate, but now insists she is "a progressive who likes to get things done" — cannot simultaneously be both a moderate and a progressive. Sanders' campaign blasted Clinton's record, creating a long list of right-wing policies she has supported.

Some other days... pic.twitter.com/7SjQdgiiQr

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 3, 2016

  In the debate, Clinton responded to Sanders' critiques. "A progressive is someone who makes progress. That's what I intend to do," she said. Clinton argued that, under Sanders' "definition, President Obama is not progressive because he took donations from Wall Street; Vice President Biden is not progressive because she supported Keystone; Senator Shaheen is not progressive because she supports the trade pact" the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pro-corporate agreement between 12 Pacific Rim nations that labor and environmental groups warn will be horrible for American workers and the climate. The former secretary of state proceeded to criticize Sanders for voting against the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act and opposing Ted Kennedy's immigration reform. Defending her past, Clinton maintained she has a "record of having fought for racial justice, having fought for kids rights, having fought the kind of inequities that fueled my interest in service in the first place going back to my days in the Children's Defense Fund." What she did not mention is that, as Salon has previously reported, while Clinton often boasts about having helped children when working with Children's Defense Fund, the group later rebuked her for helping gut welfare in the 1990s. "Hillary Clinton is an old friend, but they are not friends in politics," the president of Children's Defense Fund said in a 2007 interview. At the time, the president noted the children's rights organization "profoundly disagreed with the forms of the welfare reform bill, and we said so." In the debate Wednesday night, the former secretary of state also took credit for inspiring the Affordable Care Act, saying "before it was called Obamacare it was called Hillarycare." When asked if he thinks his policies are "unrealistic," as Clinton alleged, Sanders replied: "No, not at all." "Here's the reality of American economic life today," Sanders explained. "The reality is that we have one of lowest voter turnouts of any major country on earth because so many people have given up on the political process. The reality is that there has been trillions of dollars of wealth going from the middle class in the last 30 years to the top 1/10th of 1 percent.  The reality is we that have a corrupt campaign finance system which separates the American people's needs and desires from what Congress is doing." In response to these problems, Sanders called for building a large grassroots movement. "Now all of the ideas that I'm talking about, they are not radical ideas," the Vermont senator continued. "Making public colleges and universities tuition free, that exists in countries all over the world, used to exist in the United States. Rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, and creating 13 million jobs by doing away with tax loopholes that large corporations now enjoy by putting their money into the Cayman Islands and other tax havens. That is not a radical idea." "What we need to do is to stand up to the big-money interests, and the campaign contributors," Sanders said. "When we do that, we can, in fact, transform America." Sanders also blasted Clinton for taking millions of dollars from Wall Street. Goldman Sachs paid the former secretary of state $675,000 for three speeches. Asked whether she would release the transcripts of these speeches, Clinton refused to give a yes or no answer and said "I will look into it." In January, when The Intercept reporter Lee Fang asked her if she would release the transcripts, she simply laughed. Clinton accused Sanders of oversimplifying economic problems and reducing them to Wall Street. "Wall Street is not just one street. It is an entity of unbelievable economic and political power," Sanders replied. He added, "The business model of Wall Street is fraud."

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“Mom and Dad are fighting!”: Bernie and Hillary’s first one-on-one debate quickly turns into a slugfest and leaves Twitter in shock

More than an hour into the first two person Democratic presidential debate of the cycle, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton carried on their arguments over the definition of a true "progressive" and Clinton's ties to Wall Street, finally heating up the Democratic debate stage for the first time this cycle and leaving #DemDebate Twitter ablaze. "If you’ve got something to say, say it directly, but you will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received," a clearly frustrated Clinton told Sanders, demanding his campaign cease what she called an "artful smear" about her record on Wall Street regulations. For many, the opening fireworks were unsettling. There is still a second hour left .... https://twitter.com/Cave_Knee423/stat... https://twitter.com/therealrenaud/sta... https://twitter.com/tjholmes/status/6... https://twitter.com/ditzkoff/status/6... https://twitter.com/BillinPortland/st... https://twitter.com/anthonyweiner/sta... https://twitter.com/gabrielmalor/stat... https://twitter.com/BlavityLive/statu... https://twitter.com/kath_krueger/stat...

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The GOP’s mosque mania: Obama’s bland speech on tolerance unleashes a torrent of hate—and almost makes Jeb look human

Marco Rubio and Donald Trump — who, if you squint at them sideways while super high on Rand Paul’s bluegrass-grown private stash, are the two most plausible Republican presidential nominees of the moment — joined forces this week to attack Barack Obama for going to a Baltimore mosque and giving a thoroughly uncontroversial speech. That part was a slam-dunk, although it’s dispiriting to realize how far our country, or at least the “Republican base,” has fallen into the bottomless pit of Know-Nothingism over the last 15 years. What startled me was that Obama has been president for seven years, attending services in any number of churches, cathedrals and synagogues, without once setting foot inside a Muslim house of worship. That says a lot, and none of it is good. For once I’m not beating up Obama from the other side; I get it. It never seemed like the right moment. Why get the haters and the birthers all stirred up again? We have an election to fight, a budget bill to pass, and so on. But the fact that one of the world’s major faiths has become so toxic, as an element in American public discourse, that the contamination reached the daily strategic planning of the Obama White House, however indirectly, is remarkable. And no, the Muslims did not bring this on themselves, by being all weird and crazy and beheading people on YouTube. The number of Americans killed in the name of militant Islam since 9/11 barely registers as a statistical asterisk. Add the more serious attacks in Paris, London and Madrid over that period, and Western casualties from Islamic terrorism are still less than one week of highway fatalities in the United States. I won’t bother harping on the fact that the amount of death dealt out in Arab and Muslim countries by the United States and its allies, whether through military means or less directly, is on a completely different scale. Nobody much cares, or wants to think about that. We are conditioned to believe that people unlucky enough to be born in some nutty Allahu akbar country pretty much accept that their lives and their children’s lives are worthless. Who is to say they aren’t all terrorists anyway? No, what has changed the ideological climate around Islam is not the looming threat of Sharia rule in the Mall of America — enjoy those Wendy’s Bacon Fondue Fries without bacon, infidel dog! — but the endless torrent of fearmongering and propaganda feeding into our national slough of cultural stupefaction. This is the sense in which, as I have repeatedly argued, ISIS and the Republican Party are effectively pursuing the same agenda. Fearmongering and propaganda are where Trump and Rubio come in, for sure. What came out of Rubio’s mouth after the Obama mosque visit was, as usual, entirely baffling but calibrated to appeal to the hateful right-wing zeitgeist while somehow sounding sunny and upbeat. “I’m tired of being divided against each other for political reasons like this president’s done,” said the 11-year-old senator from Florida. “Always pitting people against each other. Always. Look at today — he gave a speech at a mosque.” (This in a tone of “doesn’t that just figure?”) “Oh, you know, basically implying that America is discriminating against Muslims.” As Salon’s Simon Maloy observed earlier on Thursday, Rubio’s point is exceptionally difficult to parse, which might serve as a hint that he doesn’t have one, and is simply making animal sounds that resemble speech. Obama spoke at the Baltimore mosque about our national traditions of religious freedom and tolerance (more or less), and assured American Muslims that they were just as entitled to their citizenship rights as anyone else. He even threw in the standard proviso that it was important for Muslims to speak out against terrorism, which in other circumstances might have drawn some flak from the left. How Rubio gets from Obama’s anodyne comments in favor of religious tolerance and against discrimination — if we walk back to the library shelf and grab our Edmund Burke, I think we will find those are conservative principles — to a president who is constantly “pitting people against each other” involves more magic than logic. I have to admit that while Rubio comes across as earnest and not too bright, like a Home Depot salesman way too eager to debate competing brands of drywall, the level of dog-whistle at work here, of almost but not quite saying what you mean, is sophisticated. I think Maloy has it right: The division Rubio perceives is not between Muslims and other Americans, but between people who agree that Muslims face vicious bigotry and discrimination in the United States and people who resent any such assertion and who are sick of all this p.c. groveling over the precious so-called rights of wacky, made-up minority groups who want to make us all pee in the ladies’ room, drive a hempen Prius and turn our backs on Jesus. And bacon. That, I suppose, marks out Rubio’s path to the Republican nomination. He began as a so-called mainstream conservative, slightly soft when it came to manly American hatred (and manly American footwear). That didn’t sell and now he has fully embraced the paranoid, apocalyptic worldview that drove up the poll numbers of Trump and Ted Cruz, coating it in a genial blandness that resembles expensive hair gel and prevents all thought from entering or getting out. Instead of Trump’s horror fables about murderous invading hordes or the Cruz mythology of the Last Christian Hero standing against chaos, Rubio is positively chirpy about the terrible state of everything: It’s really too bad that our president cares more about Muslims than about actual Americans! I’m going to try to crash Rubio’s Super Bowl party at a New Hampshire country club on Sunday (shh--don’t tell him!), and I’m fully expecting it to be a tiny bit cool, at least by Republican standards. Hip-hop hits of the ‘90s may well be heard. Someone may get jiggy with it. It seems possible that something will be kicked Gangnam Style. I’m not worried about encountering any such phenomena at a Trump function. This week’s micro-moment of mosque-mania offered Trump one more chance to play a right-wing hit record that still clings to the charts, even thought it’s almost nostalgia: Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, a Kenyan, a Commie — certainly a something. Maybe the president went to a mosque “because he felt comfortable there,” Trump suggested. Oh snap! Because if you “feel comfortable” visiting a place you’ve never been to before, you must be … oh, forget it. In fairness, Trump seemed visibly bored by this line of attack and quickly let it drop. (Not as bored as he will soon get with this whole presidential-candidate business, I suspect.) There are lots of other places Obama could go, Trump mused, without coming right out and saying that the only possible reason for this visit was treason and surrender. Trump is not running against Obama, unfortunately, and couldn’t quite see an opening to suggest that Ted Cruz, because Canadian by birth, must also be a frequenter of mosques. Meanwhile, in the doldrums of the Republican race and his own private Koch-funded purgatory, Jeb Bush actually praised Obama’s mosque visit to radio host Hugh Hewitt. In the neocon interventionist ideology of his big brother’s administration, that would have made sense: Those guys needed compliant Islamic despots to act out their imperial reconquest of the Middle East, and deliberately avoided any rhetoric of religious war. (George W. Bush visited a Washington mosque a few days after the 9/11 attacks, and said all the same stuff Obama just said.) You can’t feel too bad for Jeb, who has reaped as he has sown, pretty much. He has no idea what hit him, but he knows this: When you say something nice about Barack Obama, as a 2016 Republican, it’s all over.

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“You have naked bodies and genitalia, don’t you? Why are you so adolescent?”: Director Peter Greenaway on “Puritan” Americans and the intense sex scenes in “Eisenstein in Guanajuato”

Cult filmmaker Peter Greenaway wanted to be a painter, and spent four years studying in a London art school. “Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don’t need to ‘read’ painting,” he told me over the phone from Switzerland, where he is scouting locations. “Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can’t we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema? The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn’t have to tell you a story.” Greenaway’s latest extravaganza, the sensational “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” (the first of a planned trilogy) is like a moving painting. The filmmaker thinks in images and about manufacturing them. “We are bludgeoned by text text text text text,” he rages. “We need to realign our notions about the sophistication of images. You [need to] understand color and the golden section ratio. There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Lord of the Rings.’… So if that’s how I was trained—as a painter—I hope that Eisenstein thought that way too.” “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” boasts some astonishing visuals as it chronicles Russian director Sergei Eisenstein (Elmer Bäck) in 1930s Mexico, where he is trying to make a film. Instead, his seductive local guide, Palomino Cañedo (Luis Alberti), puts the make on Eisenstein. Cañedo helps the filmmaker lose his inhibitions along with his gay virginity with the help of some olive oil. (Alberti, who plays Palomino, happens to be hung like a horse.) “Eisenstein was like Dante, going underground in the ‘Divine Comedy’ and meeting Cerberus the dog,” Greenaway observes. Bäck and Alberti fleshed out Greenaway’s comments for me, chatting via Skype in separate interviews about working with the filmmaker and shooting “Eisenstein in Guanajuato’s” intense sex scenes. Peter, you have a very distinct visual style, with silhouettes, fish-eye lenses, split screens, 360-degree pans, visual and aural repetitions, illustrations, film clips, and even re-creations of Eisenstein posing with a skull. Can you talk about all the wondrous imagery? PG: There is a deliberate symmetry in the film’s images and time. The first shot is exactly like the last shot, and the second exactly like the second to last. It’s an American club sandwich. If you go to the middle of the film, the scene is of Eisenstein having the American flag shoved up his backside. There are cinematic references, from “Raging Bull”—a man talking to his prick—to Fellini with the clown, and Abel Gance with the split screens. It’s a homage to Eisenstein and all the films and filmmakers. Peter, why make a film about Eisenstein? Is he a proxy for you? PG: I don’t know. He’s a brilliant man. I believe he pursued a poetic metaphorical cinema. He was a poet who used images to create metaphor not literal truth. Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I’ve no doubt that the editor is key to a film. It’s a tragedy Eisenstein was never allowed to edit the miles of film [he shot in Mexico] so we’ll never know how that film would have turned out! When I discovered him as an art student in the late 1950s he was serious about life and death, an intellectual who believed in dialectical materialism and all that. He was the center of attention and could tell jokes, and thought of himself as a clown and a caricature. I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn’t want me to create a guy who is mortal. He wears his emotions on his body and has mucus coming out of his nose. He’s not afraid of his physicality. There are many photos of Eisenstein. I think he was quite vain, and he liked photos of him. Being a virgin at 33 is strange now, but let’s not be too high-minded about that. Elmer, Eisenstein is a risky role. How did you find a way into his character? EB: I have to say a big part of that is Greenaway’s writing. He was very alive. I played the real Eisenstein and Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein. That’s what made him interesting. He is childlike, and I pictured him very hypersensitive—without skin, no protection—so everything touches him. The key was the sensitivity, and the sexuality. If you never lived out your sexuality—it’s a great force, and if you try to fight it, what does that create? Energy: positive and negative, self-loathing. The nudity too, his showing himself, is self-torture. “I’m a clown,” he tells Cañedo. So I thought about the duality of that: he’s brilliant but his confidence is very low as a man and as a sexual person. It creates a tension in him. Luis, why do you think Cañedo seduced Eisenstein? LA: It was like falling in love, I was looking at him and listening to him. That’s what you do when you admire someone and fall in love with them. You want to know about him or her, and you listen to what they have to say. It’s not Palomino Cañedo seducing Eisenstein, it’s Eisenstein seducing Palomino. Cañedo is an innocent in a way. The decision I made was to make this the first time Cañedo falls in love with a man. I don’t know if that’s true with the real man, but I think it was. Eisenstein was a very important director and an amazing person, and his world was very rich, and enjoyable, so that’s how I approached it—falling in love, admiring. Peter talked to me that he wanted it to be like this. It would be dramatic only if Cañedo falls in love for the first time. The real Palomino Cañedo used to have sex with men, but for me it was more interesting if this was his first time. Peter, given all the sex and nudity on display, how do you respond to the question Eisenstein is asked in the film: Are you a pornographer? PG: Maybe we are all pornographers? Eisenstein made serious porno drawings and was stupid enough—or wise enough—to leave them in his suitcase, so the [customs] authorities would see them. They were shocked by drawings of Christ masturbating on the cross. Why are Americans so obsessed with nudity? You have naked bodies and genitalia, don’t you? Why are you so adolescent? Puritans! I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It’s difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It’s our duty to break taboos. American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us? Elmer, can you discuss how you prepared for all of the copious nudity and sex scenes? EB: For me, I thought about it at first—especially when you have that amount of nudity. After a day, you don’t think about it. You get used to it. You’re not protecting it and your privacy. It’s not difficult to do. Being an actor, and putting on more pounds and then being naked in a not flattering way, was an interesting way to go into it—to be nude and not in a flattering way. The lack of vanity was freeing. I had to forget about that and just jump in. We were rehearsing—Luis, Peter, and I—and these things are difficult. It works or it doesn’t, this kind of connection. I think we all felt that we were able to play off each other. Because we had to that one intimate scene—you need to allow the other person to be close, and create intimacy—and that comes into the film. As actors, we were going quite far. It was not just for us, but for Eisenstein in that moment. We went through the same thing as actors. Luis, what are your thoughts about being nude and performing all the sex scenes? LA: We talked a lot about that. I tried to make three faces for Cañedo—one on the street with clothes and hat—very straight and square. The second was indoors, without a jacket and hat, and more relaxed, protected. The third is without clothes, more free, and more like a child. Each face is different; he relates to the environment. We talked about the sex scene for hours. What can we do? How do we do it and make it work? You don’t make a Peter Greenaway film bad. We had to enjoy it and make it enjoyable. We made the decision to do the sex scene in one take. At the beginning I was concerned about being naked and having a gay sex scene and showing my penis on-screen because of my family and friends, and society—gay things are not always well received by people. This nudity and sex scenes and physicality is very dramatic. Peter Greenaway’s style is very rude about the body and nudity. Everything happens in the flesh. I got the sex scene during the casting so it was clear what was needed from me. I had to process my self-boundaries, and I made the decision to do it. I think the difficult part of creating these scenes is to accept really wanting to do it. I lived it like this: At first it was “NO I don’t want to do this!” You get scared. But in the process, I discovered I wanted to do it, and as an actor, I always really want to go further, and be free and human and live whatever. That’s why an actor decides to do this, and play difficult, risky things. That was what I discovered. I really wanted to do it. I never thought about it before, but when it came to my decision, I thought—not about the sex thing, but in general—I want to do everything. How was working with Peter? Was he demanding in other aspects of shooting, not just the sex scenes? EB: He wanted a real performance—ACT! He can rein me in if I go too far. But doing the part came naturally. I was a little bit afraid of how he would be. Peter knows what he wants, but he doesn’t push you. He gives you freedom. What is great is he creates the scene—he creates paintings. The frame is clear, and the world is so alive you can be alive in it. His world is so strong you can intuitively live in it. He doesn’t direct every hand movement. It’s closer to theater—long takes that let you live in the scene. I really enjoyed it. LA: I didn’t understand his films, but I really liked them, and what I was seeing. Fuck! Peter Greenaway! I was a fan of his composition. His films are beautiful. Working with him was very demanding. He assumes you are a professional actor and that you know how to do the work. He’s clear about what he needs from you and what he wants to see. First you read it and then he says, “I need to see this—can you do that?” He’s challenging you all the time. You can never say no! Yes, of course, I can do that. But then you do what you can. It makes it fun because you are all the time in trouble—what am I going to do?! He creates a live dynamic with you as an actor, so he doesn’t need to tell you a lot of things, or about the character’s psychology—just what he needs. All the conflict and drama is in the script. So you know what you have to do. He leaves you very free and when he doesn’t see what he wants, you have three takes. If you don’t do it, he does another scene. Thank you very much! Peter, we’ve talked about Eisenstein. What are your observations on Cañedo? PG: I think Luis was so good…. Cañedo says money is important. The other thing is power. If you’re a Shakespeare fan, isn’t that a way to negotiate sex and death? We can have our own choices in sex partners, but you cannot avoid birth and death. It’s the content of all religion and art. We familiarize them and if we’re more honest, we’d be far more relaxed about them. Peter, given all your references and research, what can you say about filming a biopic, or telling a person’s history? PG: There’s no such thing as history, only historians. That’s how we know about the past. Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn’t get read. Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian. Every historian has a vested interest. “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?Cult filmmaker Peter Greenaway wanted to be a painter, and spent four years studying in a London art school. “Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don’t need to ‘read’ painting,” he told me over the phone from Switzerland, where he is scouting locations. “Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can’t we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema? The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn’t have to tell you a story.” Greenaway’s latest extravaganza, the sensational “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” (the first of a planned trilogy) is like a moving painting. The filmmaker thinks in images and about manufacturing them. “We are bludgeoned by text text text text text,” he rages. “We need to realign our notions about the sophistication of images. You [need to] understand color and the golden section ratio. There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Lord of the Rings.’… So if that’s how I was trained—as a painter—I hope that Eisenstein thought that way too.” “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” boasts some astonishing visuals as it chronicles Russian director Sergei Eisenstein (Elmer Bäck) in 1930s Mexico, where he is trying to make a film. Instead, his seductive local guide, Palomino Cañedo (Luis Alberti), puts the make on Eisenstein. Cañedo helps the filmmaker lose his inhibitions along with his gay virginity with the help of some olive oil. (Alberti, who plays Palomino, happens to be hung like a horse.) “Eisenstein was like Dante, going underground in the ‘Divine Comedy’ and meeting Cerberus the dog,” Greenaway observes. Bäck and Alberti fleshed out Greenaway’s comments for me, chatting via Skype in separate interviews about working with the filmmaker and shooting “Eisenstein in Guanajuato’s” intense sex scenes. Peter, you have a very distinct visual style, with silhouettes, fish-eye lenses, split screens, 360-degree pans, visual and aural repetitions, illustrations, film clips, and even re-creations of Eisenstein posing with a skull. Can you talk about all the wondrous imagery? PG: There is a deliberate symmetry in the film’s images and time. The first shot is exactly like the last shot, and the second exactly like the second to last. It’s an American club sandwich. If you go to the middle of the film, the scene is of Eisenstein having the American flag shoved up his backside. There are cinematic references, from “Raging Bull”—a man talking to his prick—to Fellini with the clown, and Abel Gance with the split screens. It’s a homage to Eisenstein and all the films and filmmakers. Peter, why make a film about Eisenstein? Is he a proxy for you? PG: I don’t know. He’s a brilliant man. I believe he pursued a poetic metaphorical cinema. He was a poet who used images to create metaphor not literal truth. Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I’ve no doubt that the editor is key to a film. It’s a tragedy Eisenstein was never allowed to edit the miles of film [he shot in Mexico] so we’ll never know how that film would have turned out! When I discovered him as an art student in the late 1950s he was serious about life and death, an intellectual who believed in dialectical materialism and all that. He was the center of attention and could tell jokes, and thought of himself as a clown and a caricature. I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn’t want me to create a guy who is mortal. He wears his emotions on his body and has mucus coming out of his nose. He’s not afraid of his physicality. There are many photos of Eisenstein. I think he was quite vain, and he liked photos of him. Being a virgin at 33 is strange now, but let’s not be too high-minded about that. Elmer, Eisenstein is a risky role. How did you find a way into his character? EB: I have to say a big part of that is Greenaway’s writing. He was very alive. I played the real Eisenstein and Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein. That’s what made him interesting. He is childlike, and I pictured him very hypersensitive—without skin, no protection—so everything touches him. The key was the sensitivity, and the sexuality. If you never lived out your sexuality—it’s a great force, and if you try to fight it, what does that create? Energy: positive and negative, self-loathing. The nudity too, his showing himself, is self-torture. “I’m a clown,” he tells Cañedo. So I thought about the duality of that: he’s brilliant but his confidence is very low as a man and as a sexual person. It creates a tension in him. Luis, why do you think Cañedo seduced Eisenstein? LA: It was like falling in love, I was looking at him and listening to him. That’s what you do when you admire someone and fall in love with them. You want to know about him or her, and you listen to what they have to say. It’s not Palomino Cañedo seducing Eisenstein, it’s Eisenstein seducing Palomino. Cañedo is an innocent in a way. The decision I made was to make this the first time Cañedo falls in love with a man. I don’t know if that’s true with the real man, but I think it was. Eisenstein was a very important director and an amazing person, and his world was very rich, and enjoyable, so that’s how I approached it—falling in love, admiring. Peter talked to me that he wanted it to be like this. It would be dramatic only if Cañedo falls in love for the first time. The real Palomino Cañedo used to have sex with men, but for me it was more interesting if this was his first time. Peter, given all the sex and nudity on display, how do you respond to the question Eisenstein is asked in the film: Are you a pornographer? PG: Maybe we are all pornographers? Eisenstein made serious porno drawings and was stupid enough—or wise enough—to leave them in his suitcase, so the [customs] authorities would see them. They were shocked by drawings of Christ masturbating on the cross. Why are Americans so obsessed with nudity? You have naked bodies and genitalia, don’t you? Why are you so adolescent? Puritans! I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It’s difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It’s our duty to break taboos. American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us? Elmer, can you discuss how you prepared for all of the copious nudity and sex scenes? EB: For me, I thought about it at first—especially when you have that amount of nudity. After a day, you don’t think about it. You get used to it. You’re not protecting it and your privacy. It’s not difficult to do. Being an actor, and putting on more pounds and then being naked in a not flattering way, was an interesting way to go into it—to be nude and not in a flattering way. The lack of vanity was freeing. I had to forget about that and just jump in. We were rehearsing—Luis, Peter, and I—and these things are difficult. It works or it doesn’t, this kind of connection. I think we all felt that we were able to play off each other. Because we had to that one intimate scene—you need to allow the other person to be close, and create intimacy—and that comes into the film. As actors, we were going quite far. It was not just for us, but for Eisenstein in that moment. We went through the same thing as actors. Luis, what are your thoughts about being nude and performing all the sex scenes? LA: We talked a lot about that. I tried to make three faces for Cañedo—one on the street with clothes and hat—very straight and square. The second was indoors, without a jacket and hat, and more relaxed, protected. The third is without clothes, more free, and more like a child. Each face is different; he relates to the environment. We talked about the sex scene for hours. What can we do? How do we do it and make it work? You don’t make a Peter Greenaway film bad. We had to enjoy it and make it enjoyable. We made the decision to do the sex scene in one take. At the beginning I was concerned about being naked and having a gay sex scene and showing my penis on-screen because of my family and friends, and society—gay things are not always well received by people. This nudity and sex scenes and physicality is very dramatic. Peter Greenaway’s style is very rude about the body and nudity. Everything happens in the flesh. I got the sex scene during the casting so it was clear what was needed from me. I had to process my self-boundaries, and I made the decision to do it. I think the difficult part of creating these scenes is to accept really wanting to do it. I lived it like this: At first it was “NO I don’t want to do this!” You get scared. But in the process, I discovered I wanted to do it, and as an actor, I always really want to go further, and be free and human and live whatever. That’s why an actor decides to do this, and play difficult, risky things. That was what I discovered. I really wanted to do it. I never thought about it before, but when it came to my decision, I thought—not about the sex thing, but in general—I want to do everything. How was working with Peter? Was he demanding in other aspects of shooting, not just the sex scenes? EB: He wanted a real performance—ACT! He can rein me in if I go too far. But doing the part came naturally. I was a little bit afraid of how he would be. Peter knows what he wants, but he doesn’t push you. He gives you freedom. What is great is he creates the scene—he creates paintings. The frame is clear, and the world is so alive you can be alive in it. His world is so strong you can intuitively live in it. He doesn’t direct every hand movement. It’s closer to theater—long takes that let you live in the scene. I really enjoyed it. LA: I didn’t understand his films, but I really liked them, and what I was seeing. Fuck! Peter Greenaway! I was a fan of his composition. His films are beautiful. Working with him was very demanding. He assumes you are a professional actor and that you know how to do the work. He’s clear about what he needs from you and what he wants to see. First you read it and then he says, “I need to see this—can you do that?” He’s challenging you all the time. You can never say no! Yes, of course, I can do that. But then you do what you can. It makes it fun because you are all the time in trouble—what am I going to do?! He creates a live dynamic with you as an actor, so he doesn’t need to tell you a lot of things, or about the character’s psychology—just what he needs. All the conflict and drama is in the script. So you know what you have to do. He leaves you very free and when he doesn’t see what he wants, you have three takes. If you don’t do it, he does another scene. Thank you very much! Peter, we’ve talked about Eisenstein. What are your observations on Cañedo? PG: I think Luis was so good…. Cañedo says money is important. The other thing is power. If you’re a Shakespeare fan, isn’t that a way to negotiate sex and death? We can have our own choices in sex partners, but you cannot avoid birth and death. It’s the content of all religion and art. We familiarize them and if we’re more honest, we’d be far more relaxed about them. Peter, given all your references and research, what can you say about filming a biopic, or telling a person’s history? PG: There’s no such thing as history, only historians. That’s how we know about the past. Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn’t get read. Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian. Every historian has a vested interest. “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

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