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White Hot: The Boys in the Waistband

There's a fascinating word missing from White Hot, Netflix's new documentary about the Abercrombie and Fitch years: the word is Aryan. And it dovetails with a similar elision in examining Bruce Weber's visual aesthetic - which the documentary rightly centers much of its grim fascination and derision upon - as the film also elides comparing Weber to Leni Riefenstahl.

And yeah, I get it: "Nazis? Can't you see why that might be a problem?" The point is, yes I do, and frankly I am neither the first, nor the last, to have brought up those comparisons. The other point is, the very reluctance of this doc to follow its own through line to some logical, difficult and obviously uncomfortable ends is why the film, which dances adroitly around the hard questions, never really lands a solid indictment of what was, and is, most deeply problematic about the whole moment when A&F dominated our popular culture.

And boy (cute boy), did it ever. I can tell you because I was there: The whole Abercrombie and Fitch thing was a little nuts. The cadre of topless boys outside their flagship stores! They literally sold a softcore porn catalog 4 times a year! They ran an ad of a naked man on a horse! (BTW - bareback? Get it?)

The first 30 minutes or so of White Hot get at, mostly well, but somewhat imperfectly, what it was to live through the madness. How desirable the bran was at its height. The weird, oversexed vibe of the stores. The even weirder, even more oversexed vibe of the advertising. After that the documentary delves, more deeply, into the underpinnings of how the venerated brand was reshaped by owner Mike Jeffries, and the role, especially, played by Bruce Weber, in creating the brand's visual identity.

Left surprisingly unspoken, really, is the role of the changing culture around the brand, and specifically, the sudden, newfound openness of the American culture to explicitly gay iconography. A&F spoke, as a brand, to teens and college kids... but even more obviously, it spoke to a generation of young, often recently out, gay men in their twenties and thirties, newly positioned in urban enclaves and white collar work. Largely white, heavily professional and service working, these gay men knew Weber, knew what he was doing, and knew it was aimed at them. And they, in turn, helped propel "A&F style" into a cultural watchword.

That the documentary misses, or at least sits quietly, around these dynamics is part of the major hole in its presentation. Because it's the very white, very oblivious nature of this gay community to its own internal racism, that helped create the problems the documentary points to: a culture within A&F focused on lookism and frankly racist definitions of attractiveness that affected hiring, store staffing, as well as advertising and marketing. It's partly why all of this was a merry little game   part of which was merrily avoiding asking why images weren't just overwhelmingly white, but so very male. Or asking why "Fierce" the store's signature fragrance, was a men's cologne. Or asking, eventually, whether straight frat boys understood how gay all of this really was?

The film unpacks, cleanly and effectively, the unravelings of the brand as lawsuits over representation, hiring policies and the like came home to roost. It helps, but also hurts, that key players like Jeffries and Weber don't participate in the documentary, thus making convenient, easily blamed bad guys.

But questions linger: why does the film absolve virtually every staffer in the film of any role in perpetuating just this kind of racist iconography? What does it say about a top to bottom corporate culture that hid, minimized and mistreated its minority work force? What does it say about our culture that the brand was so dominant, so revered, so damn hot? And can we not, at the very least,, take a moment and unpack that difficult and uncomfortable role of Aryan ideals luring in Weber's work?

No, by the end of White Hot, everything has vanished: the images from the bad years, the voices of the minority workers, the omnipresent, overly easy moralizing of folks like Robin Givhan.... in favor of corporate branding that literally tries to paper over the past. It's okay, the film says, because A&F now runs ads with a wide mix of body types and skin colors and... blah blah blah... world peace. That the film soft pedals its own outrage and runs away from the hard questions is, unfortunately indicative of how this mess came to be in the first place: if we don't examine our idealized views of these perfect fit bodies and sexualization of youth, we really aren't trying to sort out how this all worked to sell the brand to begin with. And that's the real problem we need to solve. not run from. Or at least, not continue, in our dirtiest secrets, to ogle them while claiming pious purpose. Cause boy, you still look hot in dem jeans.

Moon Unit

The most surprising Trump news from this weekend wasn't, surprisingly, his abject failure to show up to any of the solemn memorials (like every other living former President save the Carters), choosing instead to pay a Reality Celebrity appearance at the police and fire units near his apartment. Nor was it, drunken Rudy Giuliani's rabid ramblings at a memorial dinner that evening (though these were a sure sign of Rudy's falling into a sad Joe McCarthy-like final decline).

No, Trump managed to upstage himself by making a paid video appearance in promotional materials for the Unification Church of (the now deceased) Sun Myung Moon.

The Church - now led by Moon's wife and sons - has long been staunchly right wing in America. Among other things, they own The Washington Times. Still, Trump's taped remarks were, at the very least, disconcerting, and raised long simmering questions about the Church's malign influence.

Also, Donald Trump is a financially desperate hack who'd take money from anyone who will prop up his fragile ego and fan his delusions of self importance.

In my youth, the notion of "Moonies" - those who had surrendered their independence of thought and finance to the Unification Church - was part of a general concern about cults and the danger they posed. In the sixties, these concerns had started with the Helter Skelter killings of the "Manson kids", followers of Charles Manson. In the seventies, cut concerns took on added urgency partly because of the odd behaviors of Unification church members, Hare Krishnas, and ultimately, with the tragedy of Jim Jones and his followers in Guyana, after they'd fled the San Francisco Bay Area claiming persecution.

Like so many things that have become weirdly politicized, it's hard to know where cult acceptance bifurcated on party lines. Probably, one could point to David Koresh and conservatives trying to suggest "live and let live" libertarianism about a doomsday cult with odd notions about Christianity and some clear implications of underage sexual abuse of children. Whether it's of a piece with a blind spot about authoritarianism combined with "anything goes" notions of religious freedom (especially for anything nominally claiming to be Christian)... who can say. But the failure of conservatives to get tough and stay tough on religious cults does seemed to have moved form merely curious to oddly problematic.

Liberals, being the more comfortable home for religious skepticism, have a somewhat different problem: there's a decidedly passive, impotent approach to tackling cults once they are found out, also having to do with a confusion over choice versus coercion. Cults are marked by the work they do to brainwash adherents (well documented, clearly identifiable tactics like "love bombing", isolation, and deprivation), but often, cult involvement is treated as more of a personal weakness than a dangerous exploitation... until, well after the fact, the exploitation is all too clear. Most recently, that trajectory seems to explain how the NXIVM cult quietly destroyed many young women until its tactics were brought out into the open.

And what does this have to do with the Unification Church? Well, for one thing, like Scientology, the Moon family has worked hard to shroud the cult like aspects of the organization in order to put a more benign, quasi-religious face on its operations to avoid deep scrutiny. That includes using its Wash Times mouthpiece to whitewash potential allegations, courting conservative political cover, and most recently, going full MAGA to gain trust from Trump. Trump's paid appearance is, apparently, something of the culmination of those efforts.   

Trump's Moon Unit this weekend, might have played badly in conservative circles at one time; but at this point, the cult-like atmosphere of conservatism itself, never mind the more specific contours of MAGA support, probably slough this off as some liberal conspiracy to trash Trump by calling the speech benign, at best. Everyone else's views of Trump are so low at this point, one more round of him trolling for a check is hardly a blip.

Still, I wouldn't lose sight entirely of this momentary weirdness and the ways it could, and probably should, blow back on Trump and the right. Despite its own efforts to camouflage its cult aspects, conservatism generally likes to keep its Unification Church connections at arms length - plausibly deniable, while happily pocketing (some might say laundering) the Church's lavish cash. And while this moment, like so many isn't in itself enough to derail Trump's weak if noisy plotting for a political comeback... I wouldn't be too surprised if, should he really try to come back, that a lot of Moon-related questions suddenly appear. While Trump's sleazy business of talking to anyone with a dollar and a scheme worked once... this time, all those sleazy associations could be his, never mind the GOP generally, undoing.

 

You’ll Have Another Governor Next Week

The problem was best illustrated not when Andrew Cuomo responded to Tish James by sending out his own lady lawyer to do the only thing he knows - attack his accusers and try to discredit a process he probably put in place himself. No… the problem was best illustrated months earlier when Andrew Cuomo responded to allegations from more than a dozen former employees by suddenly ending his daily self congratulatory press appearances celebrating the magnificence of his response to the Covid pandemic.

Indeed, by March it was clear that the “Masterful Pandemic Response Show” had well overstayed its welcome anyway.  Not that Cuomo wasn’t an effective and commanding executive during the initial response; despite conservative complaining, virtually no executive had done more in worse circumstances in 2020 at a time when Trump’s uselessness was especially pronounced. Still, the revelations of “managed” statistics of nursing home deaths, if not objections to policy choices made for that population were simply too much to ignore, and at least deserved a comprehensive response.

There’s a lot of giving Cuomo a hard time for things that are not, necessarily the bad things about him: yes, he’s tetchy and high handed and sure, he’ll steamroll anything in his path to achieve whatever end he thinks is a priority at the given moment. But that’s basically Being A New Yorker, and it’s not necessarily bad, to New Yorkers. Cuomo’s self aggrandizing press wasn’t a failing… it was his Achilles heel: as long as you were buying it, he was happy to sell. When you stopped buying it… well, no more press conferences for you, babe.

No, what destroyed Cuomo was simpler: a terrible manager who made a series of incomprehensible decisions meant solely to either consolidate his power or achieve his political aims or most likely both, discovered that years of built up ill will and repeated examples were simply too much to ignore. That story, too, is very New York. And at this late date, it’s a problem, bigger than Cuomo, about the state’s failures in governance.

Had Cuomo stayed, he was very likely to become the 2nd Governor we’d impeach; as it was, he was the 4th resignation under uncomfortable circumstances in a string of state level scandals that have hit both parties and almost all of the state’s leaders from the mid to late 20th Century. It’s embarrassing, dismaying, and a subject that deserves more thoughtful conversation than has been attempted across 30 years at least of reeling from scandal tp scandal. At some point; this isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of our leaders.

Sure, we can make this about Cuomo’s personal failings - that ego! The nerve! The seek and destroy approach to politics… yes, all that and so much more. But that elides the reality that in April 2020, perfectly reasonable New Yorkers who knew damn well of multiple scandals Cuomo had played a part in were portraying the man as a genius who was all we had standing between us and the abyss. And that was his genius, his secret power - he’d so scorched the earth of New York politics, there was no one but him. 

But was that so different from Elliot Spitzer? Al D’Amato? Nelson Rockefeller? Alan Hevesi? Joe Bruno? Over and over…. New Yorkers ensconce power mad narcissists in senior roles and then wonder how it all goes so wrong (but hey, we tried to tell you Donald Trump was bad news), turn around… and do the same thing again. In part, it’s because we’ve never (ever) developed a healthy leadership bench. But more than a little of it is, why even bother? There’s a fatalism to our self governance that no one, really, should envy or emulate. We have quietly and calmly expected - over the course of my lifetime, to be sure - that Albany is just a cesspool of corruption and bad faith. Fix it? We don’t even know if government runs without it!

So now we look to Kathy Hochul - try to squint hard enough so you ignore her central role in Cuomo’s “Women’s Party” meant to derail Zephyr Teachout!~ as hopefully not more of the same. Or maybe Tish James rides her ambition that much further now that she’s iced Cuomo. Even now New Yorkers are quietly convincing themselves that women and/or minorities represent the hope for government beyond self interest and scandal. Because, as you can see, we have done so well, convincing ourselves of things.

What we need, really, is not so much a new star, but less corrupt and healthier institutions. Better, more effective policing of corruption. Dismantling the various personal fiefdoms that help individuals aggrandize power to themselves. A less sprawling, more manageable system of local governance. Election reforms. There’s plenty we could do. But we won’t, most likely, as we stand by, looking helpless and stunned that another shining hope let us down. The dysfunction isn’t the lying liars who lie to us… it’s us, the lied to, who put the Empire in Empire State, who put the scepter into the Emperor’s hands and say “be kind.” Get another governor? We’ll have another governor next week. And another one… probably soon after.

Halston: The Boys In The Bland

My best friend suggested that it's possible Ryan Murphy was put here to destroy all our icons, but I'll be slightly more charitable. Halston means well - unlike, say, Glee - but the combination of Murphy's expansive deal with Netflix and his usual hangups and tics when it comes to storytelling lay waste to what clearly could have been a dazzling, messy epic of gay life in the seventies.

Halston is, of course, one of fashion's great stories of success and self destruction, played out against the backdrop of Studio 54, the cocaine years, and too much too soon careers. Originally a hat designer much loved by the ladies who lunch crowd, Halston had to reinvent himself as hats fell out of favor in the mid sixties, and he launched a high end fashion line noted for his easy, breezy use of flowing fabric and a keen eye for distilling the key elements of American style. I remember the first time I saw Halstons at the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum in New York - what amazed was not the sense of their time, the height of seventies style, but the way most of them could have been taken out of a closet and worn today without a second thought.

It's very obvious that part of what's missing in Halston is just that sense of the clothes. The show keeps sort of showing them, as if somewhere, in a room just off camera, there's a collection of stunning clothes we've only been allowed to glance at. It's frustrating, and eventually exasperating - especially in key moments like the famous "Versailles Show" of 1973 - that what was boldly beautiful about Halston's work is mostly merely sketched at.

Yet the other frustrating element is that if this was then meant to be a juicy, dishy tell all of famous messes and their excessive ways, the series only sketches at that, as well. Halstoin swans around a lonely, oddly depopulated Manhattan that lacks grit or glamour or a sense of the city's energy, and that's just deadly for the story of someone who clawed his way to the top of New York's ultimate importance. Wearing Halston, knowing Halston, being Halston... it's hard to understate how off the wall his celebrity as a fashion icon was... and yet, somehow, that's what Murphy manages to pull off.

And all of that makes what works here all the more puzzling. Halston's genuine closeness to Liza Minnelli is beautifully portrayed, as is Liza's intelligence and sense of herself. Halston's ability to see women, and to get what they're looking for in clothes and style is instinctive and that clearly comes across. But too often the film both madly name drops and yet not enough. Where's Diana Vreeland? Grace MIrabella? Why is Eleanor Lambert coyly half revealed when every fashion person on earth will love the character on display here? why two mentions of Jackie O and then... nothing?

Meanwhile, what could and should be a frank assessment of drugs and louche behavior is just... wasted. Too often Halston's descent into addiction has the feel of the kind of music biopic lampooned in the Dewey Cox Story: some man of color Halston is having sex with pulls out poppers or coke... and off he goes. Clearly Halston's tastes were well established, but it's hardly surprising that more white gay men trying to make sense of Halston's dark skinned boyfriends comes off as pretty much as problematic as it could possibly be.

None of which is to fault the performers Krysta Rodriguez' Liza is indeed a delight, Rebecca Dayan's Elsa Peretti floats around the edges of scenes like any good Italian heiress of the seventies would. Halston's various louche bedmates are fine. And Ewan McGregor? It's not the first time he's played a toppy (not necessarily bossy) bottom - that would be Todd Haynes' lovely Velvet Underground, where he finishes the film getting railed by Christian Bale on a London rooftop - but I sure hope the intimacy coach made sure he had a safe word here in Halston. I've rarely worried so much for a star in sex scene after sex scene - getting pounded never looked so, well, pounding, and God knows, Murphy should know enough about that. To his credit McGregor goes balls to the wall (no, literally) on playing Halston at every level, but it's hard when a key role like this is so emotionally cut off from himself that it becomes hard to know what's going on in side his head at all. A better film wouldn't leave us wondering, if only by distracting with endless falderal, a party that seems to neither start nor end. Because that's what the seventies were, and the film just fails at it, utterly.

I suspect Murphy tried to impose all the lessons learned from remaking The Boys in the Band - itself a reminder that, armed with solid material, this Netflix deal gives Murphy room to fly - and on the one hand he's right: Halston, too, is a stunted boy from a deeply repressed background covering it up with style, wit and a lot of drugs and sex in pre and post Stonewall realities.  The trouble is, you can't tell Halston's story and mistake the former for the latter... that is, the story needs a lot of style and drugs and sex... and probably less psychologizing about What Made Him That Way. Halston - which could yes, use a lot less of people walking into rooms saying "Halston" - takes the racy, sexy undercurrent that both defined the seventies and the stylist who dressed it, and trades it for a morality tragedy of lonely people looking to connect. As Halston - or Steve Rubell or Liza or any number of seventies icons would say - "how boring." And, well, they had a point.

Then, too, a crowded messy orgy of a superstar existence is probably the absolutely wrong thing to expect to tell well when filming into the teeth of the pandemic. One wonders why launch a project like Halston right now, really, at all. And still, the bigger struggle of a Halston is when and how someone will step in and give Murphy the kind of feedback he needs to balance his ambitions in ways that deal more constructively with his limitations as a storyteller and producer. Big, beautiful, yet emotionally inert and off the mark, almost anyone can see what Halston lacks... except apparently, the person making it.

So... Is The Problem Nursing Homes? Or Andrew Cuomo? (Or Both, And Then Some?)

Like many, I knew it wouldn't last.

When the pandemic broke wide a year ago (I know, what is time, at this point), for New Yorkers events moved at a bewildering pace. And in the midst of madness, it was  both surprising and relieving to discover that Andrew Cuomo was able to step forward, lay out clear information on where things stood, explain what state government was doing in response, and generally try to provide a sense of calm optimism that we could get through for as long as it took. It was a great show (heck it won an Emmy.)

It was also never going to last.

Cuomo's skillset is especially strong on crisis management, he's the ultimate in "I gotta guy" politics, hates unnecessary red tape, and is especially ruthless in getting his way. All very helpful when things are bad. When they're not, people tend to notice things like cronyism, excessive ruthlessness and... hey, what's that red tape hiding in that box over there? And that, as much as anything, goes a long way to explaining why what looked so bright and shiny six months ago, is looking damaged and on life support now.

At first blush, it seemed, and still seems to some that the big scandal is "nursing homes." It's clear that, from the beginning of the pandemic, New York tried hard to minimize the count of deaths in long term care facilities, apparently by (somewhat reasonably) suggesting that dying in a hospital is not dying in a nursing home. While there have been suggestions of "massive undercounting," the overall death toll in New York is quite accurate. It's just that nursing home patients who were taken to hospitals and died there, were not counted, at all, as nursing home resident deaths. Other states (mostly) did. Hence a somewhat large discrepancy.

Moreover, there has been considerable debate that a decision, early on, to release nursing home residents back to nursing homes after they recovered from life threatening conditions that sent them to hospitals, coupled with a policy of not sending residents to hospitals unless they needed life saving care, may have exposed more residents to Covid and contributed to additional deaths.  That part of the story - heavily flogged by Fox and other Murdoch owned outlets - is driven in significant part by Janice Dean, Fox's chief meteorologist, whose in laws died in a nursing home in New York state, Dean though is not necessarily keen on making an especially fact based case (and Cuomo, for his part, is all too happy to attack Dean rather than mount a factual defense). And indeed, while several investigations are ongoing, the overall nursing home story is much more complicated. But... let's get back to Cuomo for a moment.

As I said, Cuomo has several problems, and the nursing home zealots have been flummoxed by additional scandals which have overtaken any nursing home issues and become the real driver of Cuomo's problems; namely, allegations from a number of women of predatory behavior and larger concerns about an especially toxic office environment in the state's executive branch. What began, seemingly, as a bit of a publicity stunt by Lindsay Boylan, running for Manhattan Borough President, offering up some vague allegations has morphed into a serious, damaging look at longstanding problems with Cuomo's management style.

Whether Cuomo can survive any or all of this is mostly unclear at this point - Cuomo's style has been to double down in the face of adversity and he's done that on all fronts... but with New York's leading democrats almost entirely aligned in calling for his resignation, investigations aplenty and an impeachment process starting in the Assembly... it's hard to see how this doesn't end, and soon. Cuomo has resorted mostly to hiding, or pandering to popular sentiments, but it's not clear he can smooth talk or smooth pander his way out of this. Given the moribund state of Republican party politics in the state, Democrats can hold onto power easily and put Cuomo behind them... but let this fester, and all bets are off.

Which leaves one to wonder how much of this current outrage is just Cuomo, and how much is other issues, whether state governance (losing Cuomo is just step 1 in cleaning up Albany's sleazy rep) or... well, that whole nursing home story. Because, to get back to that large messy issue - there's a much longer, much harder conversation to be had, should we get serious about it.

Because the fact is that a disease which was especially deadly for older folks was tailor made to rip through long term care facilities. Lest we forget, the first Covid mass death event was a Washington state nursing home.And that story was repeated, literally countless times, in every state in the country. To get a real sense of the horrific nature of this, loop in prisons -- the other "congregant care" facilities most states operate - and you have the epicenters of death across this pandemic. Should one want to raise this topic. Which, not surprisingly, almost no one does.

We could, in fact, go back and point out that "nursing homes" are in fact, a questionable approach to care to begin with. It's demonstrably clear that warehousing the elderly isn't a good solution for the elderly, or their families, or for the costs associated with care. It's also clear that, in scandal after scandal, states have failed to regulate, protect, or assure proper care in those settings. Oregon, in fact, this week reported that the state has failed, in the year of Covid to even try to address the obvious failures identified in the pandemic. And they are clearly not alone.

Of course, the conversation that results from looking into this is horrendous. And for any number of reasons - not least of which the fact that he served as Trump's main pandemic response foil - making Cuomo the sole issue in this story serves a lot of needs. It will be much harder to face up to, never mind actually deal with, even thinking about revamping the nursing home based approach to elder care. The same, only more so, for a better more humane approach to prisons. Why even start to look when... hey? did another woman just say Cuomo touched her?

And yes, Cuomo honestly makes all too easy - at best, he's been the placeholder for a better leader in New York state for nearly 12 years, and it's no wonder people are tired of putting up with so much bad for the occasional good. Sure, we've got a great safety net, great civil rights protections, gay marriage, and more coming down the pike. But nearly every New Yorker knows we could have all that, and better, without him. More to the point, though, the conversations we need to face - about how to deal with the next pandemic, starting a hard conversation about elder care, really drilling down on the prison problem... all of these will be harder to paper over if Cuomo is gone. So sure... he's gotta go. But be careful what you wish for... because the hard part is what comes after he's gone.

The Mauritanian: Knowing May Not Be Enough

Is it enough that The Mauritanian provides one of those all too rare (these days) moments when Jodie Foster reminds us she can carry a picture? It ought to be, really; Foster is that rarest of Hollywood stars, the one who can remind us, in moments, how we've missed her intelligence and that calm knowing presence behind her eyes. If she picked it, well, you know there must be something to it.

And yes, there's a lot here, in The Mauritanian, the first film to tackle the stories out of Guantanamo Bay and the prisoners held there. Unfortunately, most of what's there is largely sketched at, suggested and implied. Well designed, and ably directed by Kevin Macdonald to provide just the right amount of fresh outrage, The Mauritanian, for all of Foster's best efforts, is just not quite big enough, or surprising enough, for the searing indictment it seems to hope to be.

Foster plays Nancy Hollander, a prominent human rights attorney based in New Mexico who was asked to look into the case of a Mauritanian man being held by the American government at the request of his mother, via officials of the Mauritanian government. Mohamadou Slahi had been picked up for some suspicious phone activity in the aftermath of 9/11 and, as it turned out, had been transferred to Guatanamo Bay shortly after the base had been converted to receive the various Muslim prisoners held in the Middle East and elsewhere.

One doesn't have to be very well informed to know where the film is headed, but Slahi's case turns out to be a good Example A of how broken and perverted the search for justice has been and will be at Gitmo. Hollander's methodical approach to compiling a record of Slahi's confinement, combined with Slahi's own intelligence, positive attitude and storytelling, makes for a compelling narrative of a heavy handed process that quickly lost its way. Gradually, as the layers peel away, it becomes clear that whatever tangential case federal authorities might have put together on Slahi, or anyone else, has been lost in the ugly morass of "extreme measures" - or more accurately, torture - used on him.

And here's where the film, well intentioned as it is, runs into a bit of a snag: depicting torture is hard, especially in a way that both dramatizes the brutality without, well, reveling in it. For better and worse, The Mauritanian sketches at the worst of Slahi's treatment, and while it's intense and uncomfortable, it's also a bit third hand and cautious. Slahi's story, while deeply compelling, and clearly drawn around his inner strengths, is at heart an intimate look at the difficult journey of one man. For what it is, the film tells that small story well. In terms of being a full-on, wholesale indictment of the whole ugly ball of wax that GItmo was and is... there's just not quite enough here to make that larger argument.

In some ways, this is a talky two hander between Foster's Hollander and Slahi, and she is well matched by Tahar Rahim, probably most familiar to American audiences from A Prophet on Netflix. Rahim does terrific work finding and holding onto Slahi's humanity through what was clearly a nightmarish, horrific series of events. And, as I said, Foster is such a welcome presence onscreen that she makes her tough, no nonsense work here look easy, and necessary. Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley also provide fine performances as the marine lawyer and Hollander's second chair, respectively, both gradually radicalized by the injustices they are forced to confront.

Will an audience be similarly radicalized? I'm not sure The Mauritanian, for all it's strengths, winds up telling most people something they didn't already know. Nor does it really address or resolve the questions that linger - knowing what we do know, what do we do now? What do we do with the prisoners who remain? Can anything, really, make an entirely messed up moment right again? At best, the film gives us one man's poignant journey. What it can't fix - or really even comprehend - is how so many did so many bad things trying to... well, whatever it was, we lost sight of it, long ago. No one, really, should have been treated like The Mauritanian. Being forced, via The Mauritanian to confront those events, unfortunately, doesn't necessarily tell us what to do with what we now know.

This Year, To Save Me From Tears, I'll Give It To Someone Special...

I didn't intend to go quiet on blogging for over six months... but then, I didn't exactly plan on a global pandemic on top of what was already a disastrous presidency either. Life is funny that way. Things don't always work out as planned.

Like so many, it has been a tumultuous year, one of those years that underlines you will end a year not in the place you started. When we started I was mainly concerned about what we could do to make sure we had a better President. Now, that's kind of a distant second to figuring out what steps will be best to
protect the life of my 85 year old mother.

She's fine, and we're coping - which has definitely been the saving grace of all of this. And we did our part in supporting and pushing for what is now, ultimately, the start of a Biden era, the era many of us didn't know we wanted going in, but seems like the only option after all that's happened. Who knew Joe Biden's mix of unspectacular competence and lack of ego would suddenly be superpowers? The very things that, for years, had made him not quite a star among Democrats - the guy who with good ideas but just not quite enough pizzazz to be President - suddenly became not just the best answer, but pretty much the only answer. There will be time enough to lament various aspects of Biden - he wears his flaws as openly as his strengths -  but his calm, effective, and competent manner of showing up and doing the work is very much the right thing at just the right moment.

Its all over but the shouting... and goodness, what shouting. Trump was never going to leave quietly or rationally, and like everything in this 4 year tragicomedy of massive errors, knowing that this would go badly is still not the same as going through it. "Coup" or not, "challenge to democracy" or simply desperate attempts to get your way... Trump remains, to the (very) bitter end a Tyrant of the Toy Shop whose tantrums could be checked, if only the Republican party had a competent grown up to step in.

But they didn't and they don't and we continue to reap the whirlwinds, such as they are. As I write, we await word from the Supreme Court that they will (likely) turn away the last gasp lawsuit of the Texas Attorney General whose "pandering for pardons" gambit had to be sufficiently Texas sized to break through. Ken Paxton's lawsuit will be laughed out of court, but with sufficient seriousness to all but guarantee his Christmas wish of a pardon broad enough to make his federal investigations go away. And like so many of these upcoming pardons, it raises the interesting question of "how you can be pardoned for something you said you didn't even do?"

But of course, we will be living in Trumpworld until midnight on January 19th, a fantasy world where criminality is just a dressy outfit at the Grifters Ball. These terrible people, and their awful ways are just part of how life is, for now, anyway. We shall see what the new era, the return to decency looks like come next month -- and not a moment before. But when we do, I suspect a lot of what has been quietly put up with, not talked about, or not brought to justice, will likely face a comeuppance. I know, it doesn't look like that now. Not yet, anyway. But part of why Trump lost -- and despite our "it was too close" anxiety, was pretty much inevitable -- was how much of this indecency was simply unsustainable. Short of walking into stores, opening the registers and simply putting the cash in their wife's purse, how much more could we pretend was just acceptable? 

It's been a hard year. It's been a gross, atrocious 4 years of living the nightmare of this presidency. And while the way out of this will not be a sudden snap of waking up... I do suspect that the transition will be more of a whiplash than we can see from here. There is, of course, the last stages of disease and death we have yet to face before, hopefully, the vaccines and a real public health operation help us, finally, get past the pandemic. But there is a sense, calmly, of order being restored. With each announcement, every press appearance, Joe Biden reasserts the power of a presidency most of us remember as the Real Thing. And slowly, steadily, even sadly, the farce of Trump returns to its rightful place -- on the fringes, a sideshow for true believers and sycophantic saps too proud or too bitter to admit that, yet again, they've been had.

Last Christmas, for my family anyway, it was barely a Christmas. We had health issues, and work/life balance to contend with. This year, like so many, we are trying to create Christmas, and find a Christmas spirit, early and brightly. This year really is becoming a season of light - literally, all over town, all over America. Decorations are going up. Tress are coming out. This year.. to save us from a pandemic, we are trying to make Christmas actually special. And really... isn't that reason enough to have at least a little bit of hope?

The New Normal

Hello, yeah, it's been awhile...

At first, it seemed like a weird, interesting foreign news story gone terribly wrong. When reporters first described an epidemic in the Wuhan province of China spreading rapidly and causing concerns, it was hard to see what was coming.

The things you realize, after the fact.

I think of Phuket, Thailand and the tsunami, the people who headed out into dry seabed as the ocean receded so far out that people couldn't believe the water had vanished from the shore. It means "run" but who knows that, in the moment?

I now feel like, maybe, I would have been one of those standing on the beach. Maybe a little too long.

As things go, I was maybe sort of lucky. Yes, the panic shopping was already underway, the virus most likely already out and about in my Westchester community, north of New Rochelle. As international travelers came home and cruise lines started to implode, it's hard not to realize that the people who live those lives and take those trips... are your neighbors. Like maybe we should worry. Like maybe we need to take some steps. We were too late. I see that now. Asking questions days, weeks after they needed to start being asked.

(And still, yesterday, the Governor of Florida finally thought, hey, maybe it's time we told that state to stay at home. Yesterday.) 

Still, as I often do, I had a vacation planned for my birthday, the second week of March. Maybe a side trip to Boston to see old friends. Needless to say, that didn't happen as "the Biogen Meeting" blew up. And come the end of that week, staring down the obvious implications of an epidemic now underway in my state, in my county, in the town three towns away... suddenly, living with an 85 year old mother with complicating conditions didn't seem incidental. Not anymore.

Three weeks (and counting) later, the world is... different. In so many ways. Life is lived at home, as we do now, communicating by phone and videoconference and Zoom and watching cable news with agitation and alarm.

There are, of course, many things to be said, many observations to be made. And suddenly, again, I find myself with all the time in the world to write them down. Interesting, that. Some have suggested that Gen X is uniquely equipped to handle this epidemic... I don't feel as confident as all that. I can say that, much like Rachel Maddow and numerous friends of a certain age, living through 9/11 and the early days of the AIDS epidemic does at least give one some markers to work from as this unfolds... not necessarily good or happy ones. You learn some things about people, and groups, in emergencies. Not a lot of them are good.

I think of And The Band Played On (I really must dig up my copy from the basement) -- the story of Anthony Fauci's other big job -- and that moment when one of the CDC shouted at Blood Center execs "how many dead bodies do you need, because we can come back then" about instituting testing controls over blood donations. I think of the leaders putting off stay at home orders, keeping all kinds of falderal open, not doing enough to convince people they, too, are at risk.

I think of those panicked calls on 9/11, when people didn't know where friends, family, spouses were - on a plane, in the Tower, somewhere in Manhattan. How empty Times Square was on the morning of 9/12 (I was there, virtually alone). I look at that empty Times Square and those darkened theaters and empty hotels and I know they come back... eventually. But we are different. We are changed. We just don't know quite how. Not yet.

We try to find the light in this darkness - it's Christmas for introverts! Your cat never wanted you home this much! - but there's a lot of darkness, and so little light. We can't begin to admit, even to ourselves, a lot, how long this could go on, how bad it will get, the people we may very likely lose. Keep calm and carry on. Try to order the groceries online. Try to remember what six feet apart looks like. Try not to panic when you cough. Or someone else coughs. Try not to lie awake, mentally ticking off every cramp, every breath... because who knows if we got it. Or have it. Or will get it.

Gloria Gaynor showed us you can sing I Will Survive when you wash your hands. I mean... we will, right? And so I'm back, from outer space. Back at my desk. Back to the future. Back against the wall. I have no idea how we get through this, how we get used to the new normal. I wasn't really all that keen on the old normal. But like 9/11, like life before AIDS... it does always seem to go that you don't know what you... well, you get the idea.

The Trials Of Nixon

Let's just get this out of the way up front: I think Cynthia Nixon is immensely talented. She has had an amazing career. I'm sorry I missed her and Laura Linney - who I also admire - trading roles in The Little Foxes. Hers is the most wondrous role of Sex and the City, from the very first minutes of the pilot, to the brilliant Models and Mortals, and on and on - even if she couldn't salvage the misbegotten sequel feature film.

None of that, nor her moves into political activism I'm afraid, makes her a necessarily great choice to be the next Governor of New York.

Just how formidable an opponent she might or might not be to Andrew Cuomo isn't entirely clear, and likely never will be. Since she announced her intention to run, backed by the array of allies who backed Zephyr Teachout's more left field challenge to Cuomo that unleashed a torrent of bad feeling for our current Governor, Cuomo has responded with the kind of machine gun to kill a mouse approach that seems to suggest that he's at least looking to not repeat the last debacle. What's less clear is whether Nixon really poses a threat even on par with Teachout, never mind beyond that.

Cuomo's side started early and hard, with Christine Quinn coming out before Nixon even officially entered the race to term Nixon an "unqualified lesbian" who'd been especially unhelpful in Quinn's run for Mayor (as the "qualified lesbian"). Quinn's score settling was so heavy handed that she had to back away from the implications that she was knocking Nixon's later life coming out for fear of ruining her political ties to gay activism (God knows, she's never going to run again in New York for anything, ever). But that episode wasn't helped by a slow-footed response from Nixon and her team that spoke to her challenges as a campaign neophyte... underlining the very things Quinn raised.

New York politics - especially in the city, but really, across the state - is not a nice or pleasant business. Set aside the sense of general sleaze in Albany - which animates the dissatisfaction with Cuomo - and there's still the everyday unpleasantness of a statewide web of political clubs and organizations who use arcane rules and complex procedure to handicap all but the most dogged of political ambitions. It is not for the faint of heart, the delicate of sensibilities or the naive. And Nixon isn't the first, or last, New Yorker with a name to get tossed into a maelstrom of political storms based on a well meaning attempt to ride fame and recognition to glory.

And so it was that Nixon found herself this week managing to get the endorsement of the Working Families Party - a key endorsement for lefties unhappy with traditional Democratic Party machine politics - in a battle that may well have undone the whole party's existence. Before dropping out of the contest entirely, Cuomo used his weight as their chief negotiator to...well, who can say, exactly, but let's try "encourage" WFP's main union backers - SEIU and the downstate local of the CWA - to walk away from their support. Thus Nixon now has a party endorsement from a party that, without it's basic coalition of  activists and union groups, doesn't quite have a reason to exist at all.

The existence of the WFP, and a number of similar small parties not familiar to many outside the state, is just one of our interesting wrinkles. It's why, for instance, the well meaning insurgents on Team Sanders found themselves blindsided by not gearing up early or actively enough in 2016, when the state's arcane rules left them without lines on the small party ballots and voters who hadn't known early enough to switch their party allegiances had no way to vote in the state's primary (that 10 month window - which has passed this year as well - will also hurt Nixon). "Reformers" talk a good game of attacking the interconnected web of New York rules (don't get me started on petitioning, our time honored extra hurdle), but the fact is, the people who benefit from those rules are the ones who'd have to vote to change them. And that, as we say, ain't happening.

There's no reason to fault Nixon for not knowing what many newcomers don't know... but that doesn't excuse a savvy operator like Teachout, who is Nixon's treasurer, from having some insight into the potential messes long before now (like the way, for instance, Cuomo started a "Women's Party" to help stall her chances, and headed it up with... Christine Quinn). And it is a point that Nixon's fame and name recognition is also her Achilles heel - because she's more visible, her name likely to attract readers to New York's splashy but struggling tabloids, every shudder and misstep plays out very publicly. That's the problem of a celebrity neophyte - and a New Yorker doesn't need to look much farther than Donald Trump to see how bad that can be. Sure Trump, more or less steamrolled his way into office... but his campaign was marked, repeatedly, by dumb, unforced errors played out in splashy fashion because of his name recognition (and just as splashily, are stlll likely to get him remove from office sooner rather than later).

Worse still is the fact that Andrew Cuomo's lumpish, disliked presence as Governor is ripe for a strong, thoughtful challenge; it beggars belief that Teachout herself, coming off a surprisingly strong finish against him last time, didn't just re-up herself, even with her more painful loss in an upstate Congressional race in 2016. Teachout's laserlike focus on a platform of combined governmental reform and pledge to focus on the needs of everyday New Yorkers played especially well. Nixon, by contrast, has embraced a set of proposals that seem tailored to both the narrow swath of Sanders stye lefties and a city specific audience happy to hear about lowering apartment rents and tackling the MTA. Missing from that is the basic core of Democratic party success - threading the needs of economically challenged upstate communities with the appeal to minority interests needed to prevail across the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. So far, Nixon is shaping up to be Teachout lite: an amiable protest vote that will never pose much threat to Cuomo, and that he can easily co-opt by adapting her more attractive proposals to his placating whims. Which is exactly what he did to her this week on recreational marijuana.

The simpler fact is that Nixon, for many, doesn't cross the threshold to be Governor; this is a state of active, thoughtful voters (especially in primaries) with a high bar and serious criteria. Nothing in Nixon's fine resume as a performer suggests the skills needed in a Governor, and nothing in the early days of her run suggests the kind of nerve and political savvy needed in a state as complex and diverse as New York. If she'd started small, if she'd started earlier... who can say? But sadly - and cynically - her run seems to be exactly, well, what it seems: plucking a name brand celebrity with some lefty cred and throwing her out there in the hopes that she can thrown Cuomo off balance enough to pose a real threat. Sure it's deeply unfair to voters to play them like that... but ultimately I'm a little more sad for Nixon herself - she didn't, and doesn't, deserve this.

And so, we'll get what we'll always get: more time with a connected guy from a political family who long ago ceded his integrity for power and some limited prestige. Cuomo is so badly damaged - if nothing else, he's an ethical disaster - that he has no chance on the national stage, yet he commands the levers of a well oiled political machine so skillfully that no ordinary opponent can stop him in state. Zephyr Teachout was the kind of wild card that threw a wrench into that machine. Nixon, quite simply, isn't. And knowing that now, with so much yet to unfurl, is the real trial we all face, here in the Empire State.

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What in the World, Matt Lauer?

Lest we get too carried to near tears as Savannah Guthrie was this morning, let's try to remember that there's a reasonable case to be made that firing Matt Lauer from the Today show could also be presented as overdue, and necessary.

Lauer, the highest paid anchor on NBC, at $25 million a year was the longstanding face of a cash cow, but beyond that... well, discussions of his role there were often kind to say the least. His immediate predecessors went on to host the NIghtly News (Brokaw) or be the face of NBC Sports (Gumbel), but no one ever suggested Lauer was good for any of that Indeed, it's hard to say, even now, just what he was good at. His interviews were never called "must see" or memorable, he wasn't the go-to person for major "gets," as they say. He wasn't especially insightful and did little in the way of political moderation (and when he did push his way into the format, last election season, his inartful pestering of HIllary Clinton was widely panned).

Lauer sat with several cohosts - Katie Couric's star power was undeniable, Meredith Vieira's quietly assured, Savannah Guthrie's enthusiasm widely admired. Lauer was none of these, and worse, really, in helping to wreck Ann Curry. Lauer was the face of endless self satisfaction, of having nailed the catbird seat on a money train no one was prepared to stop. He was the nonthreatening, disinterested, slightly sarcastic face of a show that gave up on hard news and settled comfortably into puff pieces and cross promotion, soldiering on through Olympic mornings and Macy's parades without ever rising above expectations. No wonder, on his watch, Today fell from first to third (briefly) in morning shows, the subject of endless backstage gossip and production team shakeups, full of senior executives too nervous of change or too scared of anger to point out that the thing most in need of a revamp was sitting at the main desk.

He started blandly handsome and never especially developed into anything more, and arguably helped immeasurably in making morning television exponentially worse. Weddings on beaches, travelogues from across the globe... and of course another day of diets and that book everybody's reading and that movie that opens at $150 million or more. Lauer's tenure turned Today into People and people into marketing ploys. Hard news? Why even bother?

And for all of this he was known and seen all over New York as one of those guys who had it all and expected more. The ever growing absurd salary. The helicopter to the Hamptons just to go to work. That house and the perfect wife and those puffy articles in magazines you never read at the doctor's office (like, erm, People, the print equivalent of Today). He was never especially loved - tabloids were all too happy to attribute internal strife at Today to his ever growing ego - but post enough publicists on the project and from a certain light, not examined too closely, he was just an ordinary guy doing another day's work. Or something. And hey, check out that mansion!

It took less than 3 hours for Guthrie's "we had no idea" innocence (and hey, how better to elicit that reaction than to tell her an hour or so before going on air) to be subsumed by reports that both Variety and the New York Times had been working, for some time, on reports of complaints against Lauer - and that NBC knew of those allegations. That's gonna sting, and gives some indication, still, of how on air female talent is treated next to male costars. I'm thinking less of Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell than I am of Kelly Ripa, who finally put her foot down after repeated attempts to be written off while carrying ABC's syndicated "Live!" NBC has wasted years perpetuating this TV "husband and wife" silliness of Today cohosts, despite a storied history of women - Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley through now - perfectly able to carry the show alone.

But more than that, more than the way Lauer's story dovetails so neatly with all the "we're shocked, shocked" responses to power male misbehavior, the real test it seems to me is if someone takes note of the way Lauer's endless mediocrity warped and degraded the very fabric of the Today show itself, into the fluffy, pointless, four hour monstrosity he leaves behind. It's that glossy, false fun patina of endless morning cheer that really deserves to die, sacrificed on the alter of the sacred monsters allowed to thrive in its fake living rooms and rope line courtyards. No more Matt Lauers. Is that really too much to hope?

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