The phantoms of “Phantom Thread”

The New Neo Posted on by

I used to enjoy watching the Oscars. Long long ago I actually cared about the movies themselves. But after that ended, I enjoyed the fashions.

Now the sanctimonious political posturings of most of Hollywood have become relentless rather than episodic, making it less likely I’ll watch the Oscars at all, although I may still report on the fashions through after-Oscars photos.

But—speaking of fashions and movies—I recently saw a favored “Best Picture” nominee with a fashion theme: “Phantom Thread.” And what a puzzling movie it is, with strange shifts of tone in a film whose tone was already strange to begin with.

I didn’t like it much at all, although I admired some things about it. This puts me in a distinct minority for this highly-praised film. I’m not a film buff, but even I could see the beauty of the movie, especially the sets and period costumes (I’d place the period at around 1954 by the fashions) as well as the music (one of my favorite Brahms waltzes, for example). The script was complex and didn’t pander to the audience, and the acting was great.

Or was it? But more about that later. On the surface, the acting seemed great.

On the surface is the operative phrase for this movie. Of course; it’s about people who deal in the glossy surface of high fashion. But in a movie, we need to care about those people. And I didn’t.

Daniel Day-Lewis’ character “Reynolds Woodcock” is supposed to be a tormented genius. The clothes he designs are very nice, but they’re not incredible for the fashions of those times, although we’re supposed to accept the premise that they are. His art isn’t the sort of thing that would justify the fact that he treats people like shit, although we’re apparently supposed to forgive him because he’s a tormented genius—or to sort-of forgive him, or at least to believe that his paramour loves him in the deepest of ways and he loves her that way too even though it takes him a while [SPOILERS!] to be able to show it.

But when he does finally show it he’s still cold, cold, cold as ice. And she—well, she starts out kind of likeable but at a certain point she becomes so distinctly unlikable you might begin to think that even he doesn’t deserve that sort of punishment.

Why should I care about these two people who some critic called “monsters”? (And that was a critic who liked them—unfortunately, however, I can’t find the link at the moment.) I’m in agreement. And they’re not entertaining, fun monsters. They’re repellent.

In fact, there was no major character in “Phantom Thread” who was likeable, and no minor character either. And although I already said that Daniel Day-Lewis’ acting was very good, towards the end of the movie I began to wonder whether that was true. Even when this guy supposedly melts he seems cold as ice, and so I didn’t believe for a single moment what was supposed to be an important plot point.

It’s not that I need a movie to be sweetness and light. But who wants to see a movie that has no one to root for by its end? And who wants to invest so much time and energy and talent and skill and care (all of which were abundantly evident) in making such a movie?

Brennan’s next in line

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The investigations go on:

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes next plans to investigate the role former CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials played in promoting the salacious and unverified Steele dossier on Donald Trump — including whether Brennan perjured himself in public testimony about it.

In his May 2017 testimony before the intelligence panel, Brennan emphatically denied the dossier factored into the intelligence community’s publicly released conclusion last year that Russia meddled in the 2016 election “to help Trump’s chances of victory.”

Brennan also swore that he did not know who commissioned the anti-Trump research document (excerpt here), even though senior national security and counterintelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Nunes has apparently also written a document that details the involvement of the State Department “in creating and disseminating the dossier.” Phase I was about the FBI; that will be Phase II. Phase III involves the role of the intelligence community, including not just Brennan but also Leon Panetta and James Clapper.

Several Capitol Hill sources say Brennan, a fiercely loyal Obama appointee, talked up the dossier to Democratic leaders, as well as the press, during the campaign. They say he also fed allegations about Trump-Russia contacts directly to the FBI, while pressuring the bureau to conduct an investigation of several Trump campaign figures starting in the summer of 2016…

In early January, just weeks before Trump was inaugurated, investigators say Brennan saw to it that the contents from the dossier were attached to an official daily intelligence briefing for Obama. The special classified briefing was then leaked to the major Washington media, allowing them to use the presidential briefing to justify the publication of claims they had up to that point not been able to substantiate and had been reluctant to run.

Please read the whole thing.

The Democrats claim that this is all an unwarranted attack on important and trustworthy institutions that are the bulwark of our government. And it certainly does sound like a wild conspiracy-theory movie. Nonetheless, at least so far it appears to be true.

If true, this sort of widespread misuse of the government apparatus and the press to disseminate sketchy information to hurt a candidate and then incoming president is far worse than anything Richard Nixon did. Two things that stopped Nixon were that the government agencies involved wouldn’t go along with his desires and the press wasn’t on his side. For the Obama administration, those obstacles did not exist.

Happy Birthday, President Lincoln

The New Neo Posted on by

Lincoln is one of the smallish number of presidents who can truly be called “great.” For me, his greatness isn’t confined to what he accomplished as president, or to his formal speeches, which were as brilliant as Churchill’s although in a different tone. He also was an incredible human being, a self-made man who spoke with wit, humor, poetry, and wisdom.

I recommend two pieces at Powerline by Scott Johnson that pay tribute to Lincoln: here and here.

The special qualities of ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn: Part II

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[Part I can be found here.]

This next clip is an example of an element of Fonteyn’s specialness that’s extremely subtle. It’s not even a dance step; it’s more a bit of acting expressed through movement (acting through dance was her specialty). Though small, effects like this are important in setting the tone and telling us what’s going on emotionally rather than being a mere physical exercise.

Audiences want to know (or used to want to know) why the dancer is doing something, particularly in old-fashioned classical ballet. After all, aren’t the princess and her cavalier supposed to be in love, or falling in love? Shouldn’t they be looking at each other, for example? Relating to each other, rather than just making pretty shapes with their bodies in space?

So just before Fonteyn and her Prince begin to dance here, she turns and pauses to look at him and give him her hand. Here’s the moment:

It may not seem like much, I grant you. But the more modern (and modern-style) dancer Vishneva barely even glances at her Prince. Who are these two people to each other, besides dance partners on a stage? Nothing much, it seems (the photography is much better though, of course):

And then there are those balances at the end of the Rose Adagio, the ones you saw at the end of that first Fonteyn segment in Part I. Fonteyn apparently began the tradition of putting both arms up for the balance that comes after each of her suitors takes turns circling her around in attitude (“attitude” is when the leg is up in the back and bent, as opposed to arabesque where it’s straight).

Here’s the passage again; note how secure and relaxed she appears, and how each suitor waits his turn before he approaches her. It seems she’s balancing out of sheer exuberance (unfortunately the clip is so blurry we can’t really see her face):

Here’s Svetlana Zakharova, a modern “extreme ballet” practitioner who is at her best (IMHO) in other-worldly roles such as “Swan Lake,” where her near-freakish extensions serve her well (but whose interpretations are nevertheless not my cup of tea). She doesn’t put both arms up, but nevertheless each suitor in turn lines up very close to her previous one and to Zakharova, in order to be able to rescue her quickly in case she falters:

Here’s a version from the Royal Ballet (Fonteyn’s old company) recorded in 1999, with a dancer who was supposedly a great success in the role. She puts her arms up as Fonteyn did, but you can see a problem:

I have little doubt that Fonteyn sometimes wavered in the Rose Adagio, too, particularly as she got older. But she never wavered in her ability to impart charm and grace and believability to everything she danced. She never seemed to have that frozen, deer-in-the-headlights look (or the downcast eyes, looking at the floor) I saw in the eyes of almost every more recent dancer I watched on YouTube performing this adagio, in order to research this post. And believe me, I watched many.

Here’s one of the best recent dancers I found in terms of the ability to balance. Nevertheless, why on earth is she balancing—what is she trying to express? Why is she looking at the floor, and then smiling afterward for a nanosecond, and then looking at the floor again? It seems to me as though she’s saying “Oh-oh, now I have to concentrate; whew! I made it! Smile! Oh-oh, now I have to concentrate again…”

This next clip of Fonteyn is included because it has many closeups, which showcase her acting ability. She was subtle and never hammy, but projected to the furthest reaches of the theater. Just how she accomplished that I will never know:

And here Fonteyn is on her 60th birthday, proving that technique can fade but Fonteyn went on:

I’ll give these former Royal Ballet dancers the last word:

Schiff memo delayed; McCarthy on the Grassley-Graham memo

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Yesterday I wrote a post that pointed out the following:

The Democrats protested mightily that the Nunes memo could not be released because it would expose too much secret and/or classified information and compromise our national security.

But the Schiff memo””ah, the Schiff memo! If you redact parts of it we will accuse you of playing politics.

Today we have this article:

On Friday, White House counsel Don McGahn informed the committee of the President’s decision, writing in a letter that although Trump is “inclined to declassify” the memo spearheaded by the panel’s ranking member, California Rep. Adam Schiff, “he is unable to do so at this time.”

“However, given the public interest in transparency in these unprecedented circumstances, the President has directed that Justice Department personnel be available to give technical assistance to the Committee, should the Committee wish to revise the February 5th Memorandum to mitigate the risks identified by the Department,” McGahn wrote.

What follows is the predictable back and forth of accusations. You can read the details at the link, if you’re so inclined.

And Trump tweeted this morning:

If you look at most of the headlines about this topic at today’s memeorandum, you can see that for the most part they are written to suggest that the block is not temporary but permanent. This is no accident; the MSM knows full well that a lot of people just read the headlines.

Now, perhaps it will be permanent. Perhaps the Democrats will decline to redact it further, and will milk the propaganda value of “Trump blocked the memo.”

We’ll…see.

And in a very related topic, Andrew C. McCarthy points out something that has probably occurred to just about everyone on the right, but that bears repeating:

Rest assured: If a Republican administration had used unverifiable hearsay from a patently suspect agent of the Republican presidential candidate to gull the FISA court into granting a warrant to spy on an associate of the Democratic nominee’s campaign, it would be covered as the greatest political scandal in a half-century.

Instead, it was the other way around…

McCarthy was even more impressed by the information in Grassley-Graham than in Nunes:

With its verification by the Grassley-Graham memo, the Nunes memo now has about a thousand times more corroboration than the Steele dossier, the basis of the heinous allegations used by the Justice Department and FBI to get the FISA warrants.

What the Grassley-Graham memo tells us is that the Nunes memo, for all the hysteria about it, was tame. The Grassley-Graham memo tells us that we need not only a full-blown investigation of what possessed the Obama administration to submit such shoddy applications to the FISA court, but of how a judge ”” or perhaps as many as four judges ”” rationalized signing the warrants…

We need full disclosure ”” the warrants, the applications, the court proceedings. No more games…

But the games will undoubtedly continue.

And please, please, please read the entire McCarthy piece. He is very clear about the Grassley-Graham memo, what it reveals and its significance. His outrage on behalf of the rule of law is palpable. McCarthy is a former prosecutor (see this) with a wealth of information on how it’s supposed to work, and he is clearly stunned at the egregious liberties taken by the FBI in seeking FISA’s go-ahead to surveil Page and at the court’s acquiescence.

I’ll offer just one more quote from McCarthy on this:

For purposes of justifying a warrant, it does not matter that, in a totally unrelated investigation (involving corruption at FIFA, the international soccer organization), the FBI judged that the hearsay information provided by Steele, then a British agent, checked out. In his anti-Trump research, Steele could not verify his sources. Furthermore, he was now a former foreign intelligence officer who was then working for private clients ”” which is the advocacy business, not the search-for-truth business.

Let that sink in, then think about this contrast: No actual FBI agent, no matter how renowned, would be able to get a judicial warrant based solely on his own reliability as an investigator. Jim Comey, despite having a résumé geometrically more impressive than Steele’s, including Senate confirmations to some of federal law-enforcement’s loftiest positions, would not be given a warrant based on representations to the court that the FBI, the Justice Department, the president, and the Senate all attested to his impeccable reliability.

The only reliability that counts is the reliability of the factual informants, not of the investigator who purports to channel the informants. The judge wants to know why the court should believe the specific factual claims: Was the informant truly in a position to witness what is alleged, and if so, does the informant have a track record of providing verified information? The track record of the investigator who locates the sources is beside the point. A judge would need to know whether Steele’s sources were reliable, not whether Steele himself was reliable.

As I said, please read the whole thing.

I wish it was required reading for everyone, but of course most people will never see it.

Update on my foot and mouth

The New Neo Posted on by

That is, my ankle and teeth—

Both are progressing, as far as I can tell. I can put a bit more weight on the ankle, although it will definitely take time before I’m not limping. The teeth are actually amazing, because I’ve had virtually no pain. Of course, I’m not supposed to eat anything hard, particularly on that side. But it’s surprising to me that I could have a pretty invasive procedure and three stitches and really not feel much of anything afterward.

They gave me a prescription for Vicodin, too. I can’t imagine taking anything for the amount of pain I feel, which is none, so Vicodin for this is really shocking. I’m sure, though, that it’s a “just in case” thing, because the amount of pain after the procedure is probably highly variable. But if I was the type of person who wanted to make some illicit money on the side, I could easily fill that prescription and abuse it.

I’m not that sort of person, and I hate taking drugs if I don’t have to. I’m counting the days till I can stop taking this incredibly strong antibiotic, too.

Jordan Peterson’s new book is #1 on Amazon

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It’s called 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, and it’s been #1 for much of the time since it was released on January 23, 2018. As I write this it has over 600 customer reviews and, astoundingly, almost all of them are five-star. And that’s despite the fact that among much of the left Peterson is quite a hated figure.

Peterson already had a large and loyal following prior to the book’s publication, and no doubt that has much to do with its popularity and the overwhelmingly positive reviews so far. And no, I haven’t read the book yet. But I also believe that another reason this book is so popular—and that Peterson himself has become so popular—is that he fills a need, a hunger, for his tough-love combination of common sense and wisdom as well as seriousness. His wisdom also encompasses timeless wisdoms from sources like the Bible and mythology, and that’s appealing too, particularly in people previously unfamiliar with what those sources have to offer.

In a world that’s loaded with jargon, shallow and predictable thinking, and encouragement to claims of victimhood, Peterson offers a refreshing call to responsibility. Responsibility might be difficult, but it is also hopeful because it puts more of the reins of a person’s life in his/her own hands.

[NOTE: And of course, if you’re inclined to buy his book, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to click on the above link to the book’s title and buy through neo.]

Principled liberal

The New Neo Posted on by

This is the way I remember liberals thinking long ago. Not all of them, of course; but a lot more of them compared to these days, when statements like these from liberals have become awfully scarce [hat tip: Powerline]:

Garrow has also written a biography of Obama. It’s very long; about 1000 pages, and so I very much doubt I’ll read it. He talks about it here, and in my opinion displays a curious naivete about Obama’s early character in politics, despite the fact that he probably knows more than anyone on earth about him:

I’d be curious to know how Garrow treats the Alice Palmer incident in his book. For me, that was the key to Obama’s cold and ruthless character, and it seemed odd to me that not only was it ignored by the left, but also by the right. Another telling moment for me was Obama’s Rev. Wright speech in which he used his grandmother as an example of a racist, something I called “one of the single most revoltingly self-serving statements I’ve ever heard in a speech.”

Trump has certainly provided us with many revolting moments since. But at least everyone on both sides agrees that he’s ruthless and insulting. In contrast, Obama was thought to be a real nice guy, which puzzled me because he’d demonstrated that this was just not true.

Dueling redactions

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats protested mightily that the Nunes memo could not be released because it would expose too much secret and/or classified information and compromise our national security.

But the Schiff memo—ah, the Schiff memo! If you redact parts of it we will accuse you of playing politics. In fact, Schiff is already setting the stage:

Rep. Adam Schiff predicted Tuesday that the White House would not block the release of a Democratic memo related to the Russia investigation, but he warned the administration against trying to obfuscate the document by redacting portions that could embarrass President Donald Trump.

In addition, all the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee have voted to release the Schiff memo, making the decision unanimous (after initially voting against it, saying they had just received it and needed more time to study it). All the Democrat members of the House Intelligence Committee had voted against releasing the Nunes memo.

Update on my dental surgery

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So far, the dental ordeal wasn’t too much of an ordeal. The novocaine has worn off now, and as yet the pain isn’t too bad. But it’ll be a bit funky to eat for a while. Soft foods today—I never quite know what that means, because even though I’ve written a lot about jello, I don’t particularly care for it (basically, sugar and food coloring), and the kind of soups I like have big chunks of food in them and I think that’s verbotan.

The dental surgeon said that things were worse in there than he’d expected, whatever that means. But that guy is quick, which I appreciate. He also has an old-fashioned tendency to call his patients terms like “sweetheart,” (I assume only his female patients). But since I was brought up in a different world, I can’t say it bothers me at all. He’s a nice guy who keeps saying encouraging things like “You’re doing great!” as he moves along at dental lightening speed. The cheerleader-ish updates have a very reassuring quality as you sit there, helpless, in that chair.

I have to avoid flossing there, avoid eating there, swish around some saline now and then there (starting tomorrow), and take the vile antibiotics (funny taste in mouth) longer than originally planned. But if it all goes well I’ll be happy.

But hey, that’s not enough about me, because you know what happened late yesterday afternoon? I was on a walkway outside, slipped on some stealth ice, and sprained my ankle. I know it’s just a sprain and not a break because this morning I managed to beg an appointment at the orthopedist in order to have an X-ray and find out.

They were amazingly accommodating. I was ushered into the X-ray room at around 9:55 AM and was out of the entire place at around 10:12 AM. That must be some sort of record. Good thing, too, because my dental surgery was at 10:30 AM, and luckily not too far away.

Actually, I was lucky with the ankle in other ways because I had gone down in such an odd, out-of-control manner (this was very slick ice) that I ended up in one of those positions I don’t think people ordinarily get into. Somehow my entire leg was bent under me, the ankle bent somewhat alarmingly at another angle, and I was sitting right on top of it. I wish I had a video of the episode so I could understand what on earth happened. But fortunately, I can hobble around with an ace bandage now, and don’t even need crutches.

The dental assistant suggested I do the ice pack on the ankle for a half hour and then switch it to the mouth for a half hour. She wasn’t kidding, either.

I know that on the scale of things this isn’t such a big deal. But I wouldn’t call it fun, either.

Byron York on why the FBI had so much faith in Christopher Steele

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Recommended. I think York’s got a point:

[After discovering Steele had violated his contract with them not to talk to the media, and suspending their relationship with him over it] “The FBI still seemed to believe Mr. Steele’s earlier claim that he had only provided the dossier information to the FBI and Fusion ”” and not to the media ”” prior to his October media contact that resulted in the FBI suspending the relationship,” Grassley and Graham wrote. “Accordingly, the FBI still deemed the information he provided prior to the October disclosure to be reliable.”

Why? The FBI went into the relationship with Steele believing he was reliable. His information about Trump was spectacular, and if true would be the basis of a historically important FBI investigation. And Steele had denied talking to the press. And one more thing, Grassley and Graham drily noted: “Lying to the FBI is a crime.” FBI officials did not want to admit that Steele had lied to them, in part because if they did, their prized informant would be in legal jeopardy, instead of the investigation’s real target, Donald Trump.

So in the end, the FBI vouched for Steele and his information without verification and without fully grappling with the question of Steele’s honesty. “The FBI relied on admittedly uncorroborated information, funded by and obtained for Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to conduct surveillance of an associate of the opposing candidate,” the Grassley-Graham referral said. “It did so based on Mr. Steele’s personal credibility and presumably having faith in his process of obtaining the information.”

Top FBI officials wanted to believe Steele. They needed to believe Steele. So they believed Steele.

If so, this would be a form of confirmation bias that’s very very common and very very human. But investigators need to be very very aware of it and very very guarded against it. In this case, the FBI apparently violated that caveat.

Of course, that’s if you subscribe to the “fools” theory rather than the “knaves” theory. Then again, it might be “knaves and fools.”

You might think that the FBI never expected Trump to be elected when all of this happened. But some of the requests for renewal of the FISA surveillance occurred after Trump’s election.

Meeting cute in New York apartments

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Here’s an article in the NY Post about couples who met because they lived near one another in apartment buildings. Then they fell in love and got married.

It used to be a somewhat common way to meet. Apparently it still happens now and then, despite the vast inroads of internet dating.

I was reading and enjoying the article and the stories and thinking how nice that was, but I had almost finished it before I remembered: that’s how I met my husband!

Serendipity. I was starting law school and looking for a place to live. I was 21 years old, and while I was searching for a permanent apartment I was living in another apartment temporarily, staying in one of four bedrooms and paying them weekly rent for it. A guy who was a friend of a friend of one of the roommates who was away in Europe was staying in the next room.

It was love at first sight, I must say, something that had never happened to me before or since. It led to a three-decades-long marriage and a wonderful son. Also a divorce. But still, not a bad stint of apartment-hunting.

Oh, and I did find a wonderful house with five bedrooms and moved into one of them, staying there for two pleasant years.