Samir Chopra's Blog, page 117

More Than 140 Characters on Twitter

I must be a very savvy social networker, because I use both Facebook and Twitter (and indeed, I even have a Tumblr page). That’s a little inside joke – just between me and myself, because in point of fact, I don’t consider myself to be any such thing. And nothing quite shows up my social networking incompetence like Twitter does.

To back up: I joined Twitter a year and a half ago because: I kept glimpsing portions of Twitter conversations; I heard about ‘tweetstorms’ and was intrigued; my cricket book was due to be released, and as I had noted in my ‘Reflections on Facebook’ series of posts, I had been advised to ‘build a social media presence’; most importantly, because I had begun working on new blogs–this one and one over at ESPN-Cricinfo–and wanted readers. I signed up, sent out a few greetings to folks I knew on Twitter, and began tweeting infrequently.

Flash forward: I have almost 900 ‘followers’; I still tweet very infrequently; I get very few readers to my blogs through Twitter. In sum, I wouldn’t say my Twitter experience has been a ‘success’. I have heard and read about the various ‘strategies’ for being a ‘successful Twitterer’ and find myself unable to implement them: I’m not a very witty and prolific tweeter; I don’t tweet all sorts of ‘interesting’ links to photo-essays, blog posts, breaking news, or even dog/cat/baby videos. I do not retweet others too often; I do not get into long discussions with other Twitterers (or is it tweeters?);  I cannot compose ‘tweet poems’; I’m not an ‘influencer’ or ‘thought leader’ or ‘conversation leader’ or whatever. In sum: I’m a pretty useless user of Twitter;

Some of this failure is easily explainable by my indolence. But not all of it: I still find 140 characters a frustrating length for any kind of communication; I do not quite see the point of supplying links that I have ‘found’ on my ‘net travels, which are actually quite limited because most of my time online is spent on a very small cluster of sites. On the few occasions that a tweet of mine actually elicits a response from someone, I either miss it completely because I am not actively paying attention or I get embroiled in a discussion, which I’m always keen to interrupt as soon as possible because I find it too hard to keep up.

At its best Twitter reminds me of Internet Relay Chat channels populated by people with similar interests. It approaches this when there is a critical mass of like-minded folks on my timeline, ‘gathered around’ a live event: perhaps a big game or an election debate or result or something else on those lines. But those events are quite rare; most times, I barely respond to my Twitter feed, not because the content there is inherently dull or anything like that, but rather, because I simply do not have the time to chase down everything linked to there, and because of my reluctance to commence Tweet-conversations, more often than not, I simply bite my tongue rather than respond to a tweet.

I don’t actively dislike Twitter, in the way that I sometimes do Facebook, even though it encourages some of the same narcissistic behavior. Rather, I’m perplexed by it. I don’t understand its appeal for online discussion; I think its role in news and political organizing is overstated; many of its functions are replicable in other forms of social networking. And clearly, I don’t have what it takes to be a ‘successful’ Twitterer.

A year and half on, and I still feel still like a newbie. I should tweet that.

Crossfit, Women, and ‘Tough Titsday’: A Woman’s Perspective

I have often blogged on Crossfit here in these pages. In large part that is because I genuinely enjoy my experiences at Crossfit South Brooklyn (CFSBK), a very unique and distinctive space in which to work out and pursue the ever-elusive objective of being mens sana in corpore sano. It is also because I find a fitness phenomenon an interesting context within which to think about–among other things–the issues of masculinity, militarism, sexism, and misogyny. So, I’ve blogged here on Crossfit and strong women, the question of Crossfit’s relationship to the military, and for a long time, have wanted to write something on whether Crossfit provides a female-friendly space.

That last post will get written soon, but for the time being there is this: yesterday Jezebel ran a blog post that accused Crossfit South Brooklyn of sexism and/or misogyny.  I found the charge baseless, and so did many of the other folks that work out with me. Crossfit South Brooklyn, for its part, posted a rejoinder here. (The comments are worth reading to get a broad perspective on all the issues raised by the article and CFSBK’s response.)

My wife–who works out at CFSBK like me–and has participated in the Tough Titsday program and meet, was moved to email me the following:

If anyone could take something good and misread it completely, it is cheap and frivolous publications like Jezebel. That article, loaded with preconceived notions of what Crossfit is, and armed with the rantings of a single, incredibly imperceptive female visitor to the gym, actually does a great deal to strengthen a misogynistic view of women in its attempt to “expose” Crossfit South Brooklyn’s imagined affront by naming its female-centered strength training course and competition “Tough Titsday”.

As someone who has both participated in the course and who has done quite a bit of strength training at Crossfit, I find the article itself insulting. First, it is clear that the author, Ms. Katie J.M. Baker, could not be bothered finding out anything about the institution she seeks to criticize. Although each Crossfit affiliate is its own entity with cultures varying widely depending on the coaching staff and the location, Baker chooses to assume all participants and Crossfit gyms are some sort of stereotypical “bro-fest.” And despite the fact that the Tough Titsday class was actually created by an incredibly forward thinking and badass woman as a way to encourage other women, many whom were initially intimidated by heavy weightlifting, to get on the platform, Baker insists on creating her own imaginary universe, one where the “douchey bros” in the gym simply decided to form a class for us, their harem girls, in which they could sit around and comment on our tits or something. It insinuates that the women that participate in this course are perhaps too dumb or self-effacing to realize that they are being insulted. Perhaps Jezebel imagines us as a bunch of air-headed sorority girls all too happy to be on display at the meat market.

Well, Ms. Baker may get her rocks off with her fantasies, but if she took a couple minutes to get off her lazy ass and do some real journalism, she would have found out that I share the platform with female economists, philosophers, prosecutors, stand-up comedians, teachers, mothers, and other genuinely impressive women who find strength in each other’s companionship and are motivated by one another’s accomplishments. And, unlike our disgruntled visitor, we think the name is funny.

This is not to say that we are unaware of sexism. Context is everything. If you don’t believe me, think about this joke: three women go for a job interview, one with a degree in economics, one with a law degree, and one with 10 years experience. Who gets the job? Answer: the one with the biggest tits. Told by a 40-year old white man, the joke is crass and offensive, but told by a 40-year old woman, it becomes social commentary. Without placing CFSBK and its Tough Titsday training program and meet, in the context of what it is– a gym attracting a wide array of people of different backgrounds, genders, and body types–and refusing to find out what type of community is being created, the article misleads and misinforms. It seems too obvious to have to point out, but because programs like Tough Titsday go out of their way to promote women’s strength, the context renders the name inoffensive.

As a woman and a feminist, I begrudge Jezebel for carelessly demonizing something that gives myself, and many other women at our gym, strength and confidence. But frankly, I don’t really have time to get too bothered over half-baked writing like that in Jezebel, I’m too busy kicking ass on the platform and in the courtroom, and playing with my beautiful 4-month old daughter.

Of Prefects and Punishment Drills

In my ninth and tenth grades, I attended boarding school in India. Like many boarding schools of its type, it incorporated the disciplinary mechanism of the prefect: senior schoolboys placed in charge of those junior to them, armed with the rule book, and cricket bats and hockey sticks with which to hand out six of the best. And the punishment drill. They, and we, the subjects of their not-so-benign rule, called these ‘PDs’.

A PD was an exercise routine designed and implemented on the fly by those who administered it; it felt like a boot-camp workout, a candidate for inclusion in Hell Week, a lung-busting, muscle-burning series of movements that had only one objective in mind: to exhaust you till you could no longer perform it correctly. The contours of a PD were determined by the fiendish imagination of the prefect(s) in charge of the PD: they dreamed up the sequence of exercises–perhaps a series of duck walks across the length of a football field, followed by running up a flight stairs, and then a series of pushups with legs on an elevated platform, followed by…you get the picture.

No normal human being could perform these movements without muscle failure setting in eventually. When it did, you were reprimanded and punished more: perhaps bya ‘shot’, a smack on your backside with a cricket bat or a hockey stick. If you were lucky, the prefect wouldn’t swing too hard. If you weren’t, you were hit hard enough to bring tears to your eyes and a patch of skin that smarted so fiercely that sitting down on a wooden chair became a painful experience.

A PD was handed out for violations of the school’s disciplinary code: perhaps talking during prep, or wearing the wrong uniform, or smoking cigarettes, or something else altogether. It began with a peremptory command to change into sports uniform–shorts, sneakers, short-sleeved shirts–in two minutes and report to the prefect. Some prefects never administered PDs. Yet others loved to, and their drills acquired a reputation all of their own. These were young men who loved to punish and seemed to derive a sadistic pleasure from it; the PD was invented for them.

More often than not, a PD was conducted at night.  Perhaps those who conducted them had figured out a long time ago that darkness and cold always made the PD more intimidating. Its venues were various: sometimes a football field, sometimes the school’s quadrangle, sometimes a paved road. It didn’t matter. Physical pain and discomfort could be inflicted anywhere.

I suffered many PDs in my two years in my boarding school; there was little chance I would escape its distinct ‘pleasures’ during my tenure there. Sometimes I was swept up in a prefect’s dragnet; sometimes I was part of a select bunch of miscreants picked out for chastisement. I grew to fear the sensation of my body giving way, collapsing from the abuse sent its way. I learned to ‘cheat’ on a PD, to perform it in a way that protected me.

I do not know if I ever became more ‘disciplined’; I do know I grew to despise those who so casually inflicted such misery on those weaker than them.

Big Business and its Friends on the US Supreme Court

An academic study conducted by Lee Epstein, William Landes and Richard Posner confirms something many of us have only intuited till now:

[T]he business docket reflects something truly distinctive about the court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. While the current court’s decisions, over all, are only slightly more conservative than those from the courts led by Chief Justices Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist, according to political scientists who study the court, its business rulings are another matter. They have been, a new study finds, far friendlier to business than those of any court since at least World War II.

In the eight years since Chief Justice Roberts joined the court, it has allowed corporations to spend freely in elections in the Citizens United case, has shielded them from class actions and human rights suits, and has made arbitration the favored way to resolve many disputes. Business groups say the Roberts court’s decisions have helped combat frivolous lawsuits, while plaintiffs’ lawyers say the rulings have destroyed legitimate claims for harm from faulty products, discriminatory practices and fraud.

Whether the Roberts court is unusually friendly to business has been the subject of repeated discussion, much of it based on anecdotes and studies based on small slices of empirical evidence. The new study, by contrast, takes a careful and comprehensive look at some 2,000 decisions from 1946 to 2011.

Published last month in The Minnesota Law Review, the study ranked the 36 justices who served on the court over those 65 years by the proportion of their pro-business votes; all five of the current court’s more conservative members were in the top 10. But the study’s most striking finding was that the two justices most likely to vote in favor of business interests since 1946 are the most recent conservative additions to the court, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., both appointed by President George W. Bush.

The Supreme Courts’ pro-business orientation finds its most vivid expression in its ruling in an antitrust class action brought against Comcast by its subscribers who had charged that ‘the company had swapped territory with other cable companies to gain market power and raise prices.’ Justice Scalia ruled that plaintiff’s evidence did not permit them to proceed as a class; that they should pursue instead, individual litigation unlikely to be attractive to trial lawyers because of the smaller damages involved (thus effectively ensuring such litigation would not occur):

Plaintiffs’ lawyers…say class actions are the only way to vindicate small harms caused to many people. The victim of, say, a fraudulent charge for a few dollars on a billing statement will never sue. But a lawyer representing a million such people has an incentive to press the claim.

“Realistically,” Professor Miller wrote, “the choice for class members is between collective access to the judicial system or no access at all.”

So the Supreme Court’s rulings making it harder to cross the class-certification threshold have had profound consequences in the legal balance of power between businesses and people who say they have been harmed.

Furthermore, by reaffirming Wal-Mart v. Dukes, which had also thrown out a class-action suit, it further narrowed the scope of class-action suits and made them even more unlikely in the future.

All in all, a grand slam for big business.  Dubya is gone, but not forgotten.

CUNY Administrators: Hanging with the Powerful

Readers of my ‘With Trustees Like These, Who Needs Enemies‘ series of posts will know that I’m not overly fond of CUNY administration. From interfering with faculty governance, to cracking down on academic freedom, to awarding golden parachutes to overpaid, retiring vice-chancellors, they appear to have most bases covered in their drive to subvert the mission of a public university.

What is it that animates this herd so much? A small clue presents itself for perusal in propaganda missives that are issued by the Office of University Relations, an office presumably dedicated to showing this university in the ‘best light’, and charged, possibly, with highlighting the university’s achievements in all matters academic and cultural. That its publications often serve to echo 80th Street’s party line is, I’m sure, purely accidental. One of the Office of University Relations’ publications is CUNYMatters. In its Spring 2013 issue, on page 5 of the print edition, (i,.e., five pages on from the front page story that glorifies the detested–and contested by faculty–initiative Pathways), we have a photo, prominently placed and highlighted with the tag ‘Inauguration Day 2013′. The caption for the photo reads:

First Lady Michelle Obama, leaves the White House with CUNY Vice Chancellor for Facilities Planning Iris Weinshall en route to the U.S. Capitol for President Obama’s ceremonial swearing-in for his second term. Weinshall is married to New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who headed the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.

Elsewhere, in the same issue of CUNYMatters, we have stories on faculty book publications, grants, student awards, and the other items of news showcasing the life of the mind. But, as noted, we also have this photo noted above.

And what’s the photo about? It shows a CUNY administrator in the presence of Someone Powerful at an Important Event. This ‘powerful’ person is not an elected representative of the people, but the spouse of one, the American President. Nevertheless, this person is the closest we’ll get to American Royalty, so presumably our CUNY Administrator is blessed, and consequently, so are we, her minions. But what has the CUNY Administrator done to deserve this entrée to the corridors of power? She is the Vice Chancellor for Facilities Planning at CUNY; is she being recognized for stellar planning of facilities? The caption does not say so. Rather the caption merely notes that she is the spouse of Someone Powerful, a US senator in this case.

So there you have it folks: this is a photo worth publishing in an official publication of the Office of University Relations because a CUNY Administrator, who happens to be the spouse of the US Senator that heads the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, and thus was able to score an invite for the inauguration, happened to walk out of the White House–that palace in which American Royalty lives–with the spouse of the President of the US.

Fawning, bended knees to power; basking in reflected glory; these, apparently, are the values of the CUNY Administration, worth highlighting to all and sundry.

Mukul Kesavan on Making the Familiar Strange

Mukul Kesavan concludes a wonderful essay on Lucknow, the English language, Indian writing in English, the Indian summer, and ice-cream with:

[T]the point of writing isn’t to make things familiar; it is to make them strange.

Kesavan is right. To read is a form of escapism and what good would it be if we all we encountered on our reading adventures was more of the mundane? To write too, is a form of escapism, and again, what good would that do if all we felt and experienced through that act was a return to what we had left behind? This departure can, as Graham Greene memorably pointed out, serve as therapeutic relief from what would otherwise be the unmitigated grimness of weekday existence:

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. [From: Ways of Escape, Pocket Books, New York, 1980]

Kesavan’s observation alerts us to the fact that in writing, in seeking to describe either the existent, the elapsed, the imaginary or the yet-to-be realized, we seek to go beyond its bare particulars, to dress it up with our words and imagination. But that isn’t all. A good writer sees things we don’t, he is able to match words to objects in ways we can’t. In this new vision, which makes the previously invisible visible, in these new correspondences, which establish unimagined linkages, the familiar becomes strange. This works because the world from day to day is never the world unmediated, raw, unfiltered or ‘given’ or anything like that. It’s already dressed up for us; by the languages we learned, by our histories, our experiences. The writer steps into this neat arrangement and disorders it all. He cannot but if he is any good.

The writer reminds us there are other conceptualizations of the world possible, other ways of drawing meaning from the world’s meaninglessness. The poet, a species of writer, does this in the most radical of ways because he shows us that the language that has served as descriptor and tabulator of the world can itself be drastically reconfigured and pressed into new tasks and responsibilities. This can be captivating and fearful alike. We wonder: how much of the hard-earned and constructed stability of the world, erected as a bulwark against the peculiarity that otherwise peeks at us around its corners, will be diminished by a new description afforded us by a radically different piece of writing? The writer and the poet become peddlers of magic potions, a sip of which induces visions.

This power of the writer is most commonly visible in the novel, of course, but it is perhaps most dramatically visible in the travel essay, written about one’s most familiar habitations, perhaps one’s hometown, by a visitor.  Even the most well-traveled of paths can appear spanking new and mysterious all over again as the traveler fits a new garb to the old land.

Letters to the Editor, Big Mouths, and Getting Slapped Down

By definition, a blogger is a bigmouth. He or she wants to say things out loud, write them down, and have others read them. As I noted in my ‘Happy Birthday Blog’ post last year, I intended this blog to be a ‘letter-to-the-editor plus notebook and scrapbook space,’ one where I could sound off and be sure of my ‘complaints’ being published. Part of the reason for that desire was that my publication track record with letters to the editor was pretty dismal: 2-for-God knows how many. But one of those two got me into trouble.

In 1988, having finished my first year of graduate school and cohabitation with three other graduate students in a small tw0-bedroom apartment, I was ready for a change. My living quarters felt both cramped and expensive. An advertisement for a graduate resident assistant at my graduate school promised deliverance; I’d get room and board. And not just any old ‘room and board’, I’d have my own room. I promptly filled out an application, sent it in, and was called in for an interview.

The interview went well. I met the director of student affairs and a couple of the current resident assistants; I was quizzed about hypothetical disciplinary situations and my responses seemed to evoke favorable responses from my interlocutors. I emerged from the meeting feeling mildly optimistic about my chances. A day or so later, one of the resident assistants contacted me to tell me that he thought my chances were outstanding, that I had ‘impressed everyone.’ I was ecstatic. A better living and financial situation awaited.

Around the same time, an event described as ‘World Week’ was being staged in our graduate school. This was a pretty generic business, designed to cater, somehow, to the diverse international student body: there were posters, food stands, music performances. You get the picture. But on the very first day of this carnival of conviviality, I noticed something amiss: a poster, issued by the Chinese Ministry of Tourism, featuring a Tibetan landscape with the slogan: ‘Beautiful, Mysterious, Tibet’.

I was enraged. An occupied territory being advertised thus? Why had the organizers permitted this propaganda mongering? I walked over to the nearest computer lab, sat down and dashed off a letter to the student newspaper, one brimming with pique at this slight to the Tibetan people, finishing off with a flourish: ‘It is ironic that an event which purports to increase our knowledge of other cultures has served instead to showcase the organizers’ ignorance.’

A few days later, my letter ran in the student newspaper. I picked up a copy, saw my letter and my name in print, and feeling absurdly pleased, carried it home with me to show to my roommates. My elation didn’t last long. My friend, the incumbent resident assistant, accosted me in a hallway a day later: ‘Are you fucking nuts?! Do you know who organized World Week? R____, the director of student affairs, who interviewed you for the RA job. He’s mad as all hell. He can’t believe someone wrote such a nasty letter to the student paper.’ My response was equal parts incredulity and dismay: ‘Are you serious? He’s not going to hire me for the RA position because of this?’ Was the director of student affairs really so thin-skinned?

Two days later, I had my answer; I received a polite rejection letter in the mail. No rent-free room; no room of my own on campus. Back to the shared bedroom, the suburban commute. And whenever I ran into R___ again on campus, he walked past me with nary a trace of recognition on his face. I never applied for a RA position again.

But I’m not sorry I wrote that letter to the editor.

Writing: The Tools Change, the Neurosis Endures

Philip Hensher has written a book–The Missing Ink–on handwriting. In it, according to Jeremy Harding, he:

[T]akes the view that we impress our individuality on a page when we make signs with a pen or pencil, that our culture is reaffirmed as we persist in the practice, and that the production of handwritten texts is a rich expression of both. If handwriting disappears, he warns, ‘some other elements of civilised life may die with this art, or skill, or habit.’

Like most people I know, I write on a word processor. The quality of my writing, when it comes up for judgment, is almost always a matter of content, not form. But there was a time when the form of my written word was a subject of active external critique too: my handwriting used to be the subject of commentary, feedback, revision and sometimes, intense attempts at makeovers.

I learned cursive writing the way most students of my generation did: by filling out workbooks supplied to me by parents. I traced out, steadily and persistently, page after page of model sentences, showing them to my parents when done, and then moving on to the next assignment. Fortunately, this drudgery did not last too long. There was ample opportunity for practice with my school assignments, the finished versions of which invariably provoked comments on the handwriting on display from those who graded them.

My handwriting’s quality occupied a steady middle point between the truly excellent and the dreadful. I was dimly aware of the abyss below and the summits above; I struggled to stay out of the former but could never quite make it to the latter. Not that I tried too hard.  A steadfast devotion to the adequate seems to have been a hallmark of my academic work even back then. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t envious of those whose writing was excellent; I craved the gasps of admiration from our peers and the praise of my teachers. I just couldn’t rouse myself to do anything about it. In that sense, perhaps, my handwriting is revelatory: it often starts off strong and then trails off, its form decaying as the page progresses, thus perhaps acting as revelation of my lack of commitment to tasks undertaken but not completed.

I did mount a couple of serious attempts to change my handwriting. Most notably in the tenth grade, when struck by the pristine beauty of a classmate’s ‘printed’ style, I ditched the flowing model I was most accustomed to, and took his style on. I stuck with it for a year before finding a retreat to my original form more conducive to my sanity. The change had been too much work.

I began using a word processor late: in graduate school. The undergraduate years had consisted almost entirely of  mathematics, statistics and the occasional essay-based exam, all of which I completed with a fountain pen. Since then, my handwriting has, I think, deteriorated, a process I have attempted to rectify on a periodic basis–most notably, by using a fountain pen again–but with little success.

To get back to Hensher’s point, I do not think my ‘individuality’ has been lost by my exclusively writing on a word processor; what is most distinctive about my thoughts comes through in that medium too. But what we do lose by the effacement of handwriting is a distinctive aesthetic pleasure that comes from the beautifully handwritten page. And by taking on the possibility of revisions allowed by the word processor perhaps we do shackle ourselves to the endless draft. And yet, as Harding points out, this can scarcely be blamed on technology; the non-stop reviser of writing came well before the wordprocessor.

The tools change, the neurosis endures.

Ben Jonson on Doctors

A few weeks ago, I had made note here of a brief excerpt from Molière’s Love’s the Best Doctor, which rather pungently satirized doctors. Today, here is another master of comedy–Ben Jonson–on doctors. (A personal reminiscence follows.) As an added bonus there is some skepticism directed at the cost of medicine, the products of the pharmaceutical industry, and the legal system. (Sort of.)

From Volpone, Act One:

CORBACCIO: How does your patron?

MOSCA: Troth, as he did sir; no amends

CORBACCIO [deaf]: What? Mends he?

MOSCA: [shouting]: No, sir. He is rather worse.

CORBACCIO: That’s well. Where is he?

MOSCA: Upon his couch, sir, newly fall’n asleep.

CORBACCIO: Does he sleep well?

MOSCA: No wink, sir, all this night.  Nor yesterday, but slumbers.

CORBACCIO: Good! He should take

Some counsel of physicians. I have brought him

An opiate here, from mine own doctor -

MOSCA: He will not hear of drugs.

CORBACCIO: Why? I myself

Stood by while ‘t was made, saw all th’ ingredients,

And know it cannot but most gently work.

My life for his, ’tis but to make him sleep.

VOLPONE: [aside]: Ay, his last sleep, if he would take it.

MOSCA: He has no faith in physic.

CORBACCIO: Say you, say you?

MOSCA: He has no faith in physic: he does think

Most of your doctors are the greatest danger,

And worse disease t’ escape. I often have

Heard him protest that your physician

Should never be his heir.

CORBACCIO: Not I his heir?

MOSCA: Not your physician, sir.

CORBACCIO: O, no, no, no,

I do not mean it.

MOSCA: No, sir, nor their fees.

He cannot brook; he says they flay a man

Before they kill him.

CORBACCIO: Right, I do conceive you.

MOSCA: And then, they do it by experiment,

For which the law not only doth absolve ‘em

But gives them great reward; as he is loath

To hire his death so.

CORBACCIO: It is true, they kill

With as much license as a judge.

MOSCA: Nay, more;

For he but kills, sir, where the law condemns,

And these can kill him too.

Possibly irrelevant aside: In my time here in the US, I have been misdiagnosed precisely twice. These occasions still remain the only two such instances in my life thus far. In the first case, I was living in Harlem and sought treatment at a doctor’s office that promised walk-in consultations. A brusque, cursory check-up later, I was presented with a diagnosis that seemed wildly off-base. Despite my protestations, I was quickly shown the door. Shaken at this treatment, I made an appointment with an Upper West Side physician who was on the money. In the second case, I was living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and desperate to secure a doctor’s appointment quickly, wandered over to Myrtle Avenue and sauntered into a rather dingy looking clinic. I was only a few blocks away from the considerably more well-heeled DeKalb Avenue. The doctor conducted a rushed examination, pronounced his diagnosis, and once again, I was ushered out the door quickly. I was diagnosed correctly a week or so later after I had sought a second opinion.  The common element to these encounters was that in each case I was seeking medical help in what might be termed a ‘not-so-fortunate’ neighborhood.

Excerpt from: Ben Jonson, Three Comedies, Penguin Classics, London, 1985. (ed. Michael Jamieson) pp. 60-61

The Artist: An Eloquent Homage to the Silent

Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, a five-time Oscar winner for Best Picture (only the second ever silent movie to do so), Best Director, Best Score, Best Costume and Best Actor is a tasty little homage to silent movies, 1920s Hollywood, Douglas Fairbank-style swashbuckle, faithful chauffeurs and dogs, romantic comedies and plenty else. Its success at the Academy Awards seemed improbable–a silent movie circa 2011-2012?–till one realizes that Hollywood loves being loved.  Whatever the reason, these awards do not seem to have been miscarriages of justice.

The Artist‘s storyline is relatively uncomplicated. George Valentin (the French actor Jean Dujardin), a dashing Hollywood star with a mustache and a smile to kill for, reigns supreme on the silver screen, the darling of moviegoers even if not that of his leading ladies, who might find his showboating excessive. Silent movies are his domain, and he has mastered them; he loves the movies and the chance to show off his wares in them.  Then, a chance encounter with a  hopeful starlet Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) leads the two to flirtation; Valentin might have an outsized ego but he has plenty of affection and little arrogance. But the romance that might have lain in store for the two is interrupted by the march of events: the talkies are coming to Hollywood, eagerly awaited by producers, studio executives, and distributors. As an auteur of the silent, Valentin disdains them and makes his feelings plain; as an aspirant hopeful of riding the next wave to stardom, Miller embraces them. Their paths and fortunes diverge: Valentin heads for Skid Row, Miller for Beverly Hills. But redemption is still possible, and after a few twists and turns, we have a happy ending. Roughly.

The Artist works because it is, how you say?, fun.  Among other things, it has comedy, heartbreak, tap-dancing, the aforementioned clever dog, and of course, a pair of wonderful actors in Dujardin and Bejo. (I knew little about the movie before I sat down for a viewing and almost immediately on seeing Dujardin’s acting, realized I was in the presence of a master of the jocular.) It lets us revisit, briefly, the charm of the silent, as we recognize, once again with amazement, the storytelling that is possible with such a seemingly limited palette. It reminds us of how many masterpieces were made before sound ever made it to cinema; it shows how laughter could be evoked by visible action with nary a single spoken word. It shows us how a great deal can be said by visible expression and action, by bodily gesture and movement. It takes us back to a time when the technical limitations and constraints of the cinematic medium were mastered by the moviemakers of the time, thus letting us once again, acknowledge their craft and skill.  It does not moralize about progress; indeed, its ending suggests a reconciliation with the onward march of time and technique.

Movies about movies can be bores. The best ones remind us why we fell in love with them in the first place. The Artist manages to do that in style.