August 2008
Good Night, Shyamalan
A review of The Happening (produced and distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox and UTV Motion Pictures; written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan)
The star of M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, The Happening, demonstrates once more how unaccountably loathe producers are to give their boom microphones top billing.
During the showing I attended last night, the boom mike kept playfully piercing the top edge of the screen. After ten minutes, I left the auditorium to talk to the theater manager. “We tried lowering the screen’s top mask line,” she explained, “but it cut off most of the actors’ heads.” I returned to my seat resigned to put up with this assault on my always willing suspension of disbelief.
The Ultimate Insider
Who are the spear-carriers of government policies? This is a tale that puts pieces together over the course of a few decades. Neocons eat stories like this for breakfast.
Like most teachers, I have learned at least as much from my students as they have learned from me. An Argentinian graduate student at St. Louis University came to me for help on his M.A. thesis in 1970 or so, having heard that I supposedly knew something about contemporary American foreign policy. He was a communist, he said, whose brother was a Jesuit fighting the revolution (with machine guns) in northeastern Brazil. He wanted to prove that the burden of U.S. policy in Latin America was not economic (as all of us were taught in those days) but political.
No More Girls in Bikinis
Just after the Berlin wall came down, I flew to Berlin with my German-Austrian wife and traveled around the city and its eastern parts. On visiting the Olympic stadium I told the taxi driver that my uncle, a hurdler, was the first athlete the Führer’s gaze fell upon as the parade of the 1936 games began, because we Greeks always go in first, having started the games back in 776 B.C., and because my uncle was the flag carrier. The taxi driver did not seem impressed in the least.
Bad Whitey 101
In this space in the June issue, readers learned about a flock of students from the American Studies program at Randolph College who flapped off to the Chicken Ranch Brothel in Nevada to study the profundities of the cathouse. They also learned about yet another aesthete who believes emissions from the nether regions of the human anatomy constitute art. But these two contributions to the chronicles of the campus have nothing on the University of Delaware’s failed Residence Life Program. Whereas the other schools joined the culture war with attacks on erudition and art, UD is battling against the White Man—not that the other schools haven’t honed their ideological tomahawks to lift a white scalp or two.
A Perfect Storm Over Iowa
Take one part high fuel prices. Mix in stagnant wages and high consumer prices generally. Stir in global uncertainty and an ever-exploding human population. Add misplaced production and chimera-chasing. Add to all that the floods of May and June 2008 that inundated much of Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, and you have a perfect storm—at least as far as corn is concerned. When it clears, corporate business will be the richer, but the world will be in chaos—and hungry.
The Fabulous Fifties—August 2008
PERSPECTIVE
Lost in the 50’s
by Thomas Fleming
VIEWS
Yankee, Go Home
by James O. Tate
Yankee, come home—Yankee, get lost.
Videites
by Roger D. McGrath
An alien invader from the 50’s.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Empty Suit
by George McCartney
50’s counterculture.
