drunkenbee

Tom Cruise, You Need a Stronger Thesis Statement

The main thing that strikes me about Tom Cruise's Scientology babbling (you can watch the controversial video here) is that he is in dire need of a Freshman Composition course. Here are some quotes:

"We have the ability to create new and better realities"
"I know that we have an opportunity to really help the first time, to effectively change people's lives."
"It's looking at what needs to be done and saying 'okay! Am I gonna do it or not gonna do it?'"
"Go and learn it! Don't pretend you know it, it's, like, we're here to help!"
"You see things the way they are. In all its glory, in all its complexity."

Passive voice? Check. Inspecific pronouns? Check. Vague assertions without accompanying concrete examples? Check. It's like the worst paper on "how the media affects your perceptions of things" I've ever encountered. Tom Cruise, get thee to a Strunk and White and report back when you have something to say! (Because if you can sound so crazy saying nothing, I'll pretty much listen to you say anything....)

Live by the Sword, Die By the Sword

Some folks over at Slate are debating whether their lukewarm reception of the first episode of the last season of The Wire is due to the show's content or merely their own too-close relation to the world of journalism. I don't think it is the latter. The minute I heard that the final season would move us from public schools to the Baltimore Sun offices I thought such a focus was likely a narrative mistake. Obviously, it will still be the best thing currently on television, but, I think, in the same way that the "campus novel" is never good, the "media" focus of Season 5 will be too meta, too once-removed. The Wire has always been emotionally straightforward, never posturing. I think it will be difficult for writers to write about writers without coming off like college freshmen discovering what "ideology" is (omg, you can never be outside of it!).

My dream for the final season was that we would return to the projects (maybe the residents are being "relocated?"). Something about the abrupt shift from the projects to the dock workers at the beginning of Season Two left me in a state of complete arrested something-or-other, always longing to get back to the lowrises and towers. And as perfect as the rowhouse kids in Season Four were, no scene will ever compare, in my mind, to one from the first season, in Episode 6 to be exact. The cops barely even knew what Avon Barksdale looked like, and though we, the viewers, did, we didn't really know him either. The scene I love is when Avon shows up in the lowrises, shot from a distance moving in slow motion, a motherfucking lion surveying its kingdom. From that moment, I knew that stoop shortie or not, I was an Avon girl (not Stringer, like most of my shortie associates). That little bit of visual lyricism set up oppositions between heart/mind, instinct/rationality, which played out beautifully in the Avon/Stringer arc. I thought a return to such a narrative "home" might be a fascinating way to wrap up the series, which, admittedly, I really just wish would go on forever.

Resolved in '08

...Don't go so long between posting that you forget the log-in process. Okay, so.

So I'm just over here mooning and dreaming about Obama, like everyone else on the internet. Yesterday morning, I watched a video that his campaign delivered to my inbox, and tears welled up from a place of joy inside and streamed down my face (of course you might say the meaning of such an emotional experience is mitigated by my proceeding to also cry while watching an episode of The Dog Whisperer at lunch -- the one with the dog with post-traumatic stress syndrome from being in Iraq). Anyway, Obama makes me think of Sarah Vowell's comment on her childhood experience of Presidential history: ""The teachers taught us to like Washington and to respect Jefferson. But Lincoln—him they taught us to love."

I feel like Obama is someone I could love. Or maybe already love. It's a completely nineteenth-century sentiment -- perhaps antithetical to a rational public sphere mode of political engagement that I thought would be the best counter to Bush/Cheney's perverse relativism. Obama makes me weep; he makes my heart sing, he makes me believe and feel. As a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, I know the reasons to be skeptical or wary of appeals to the heart. And having watched George Bush use and abuse people's "hearts and minds" for so long, I know how calculated and cynical the approach can be. But I'm choosing to not let the miserly prevail. It's different when it's your heart, you know? It just feels so good to have it be my heart appealed to, finally.