Tracking shots be damned

Why is is that every director who wants to put their artistic signature on a movie — the indelible stamp that bears his creative DNA and no other fool's — always chooses exactly the same thing? It's always a bloody tracking shot. Andrew Sullivan's recent gallery of famous tracking shots has been great: maybe the best way to enjoy these things. Everybody holds them up as God's gift to cinema, undeniable proof that an auteur is in the house, and so on, but all I think when I'm watching one is, "I'm watching a tracking shot." Yes, I feel admiration, but my admiration jolts me out of the movie. That's a pretty big drawback, in my book — artistry be damned. Which is why the best ones are to be found in the first five minutes, or during the credits (Boogie Nights, A Touch Of Evil, The Player), where they can happily draw attention to themselves, advertise their creator's genius, etc, without ruining the film. (The world's worst offender, by several ions: the Dunkirk tracking shot in Atonement).

Writing a novel

I am about halfway through the 12th draft — or thereabouts — of writing a novel. Whoever knew that writing fiction was such a long-distance slog? I thought that creative writing had to be about the lightning strike of inspiration, with much clutching of the forehead, pacing and gnashing of teeth. Instead it has turned out to be exactly like mowing the lawn: you go up one side, pivot, and come back the way you came. Then you repeat the exercise. Actually the thing it's most like is one of those electrons (?) that shoot across your TV screen, first one row, then the next, putting in a blob of light here, a blob of light there, until a picture begins to emerge. Except slower. And with occasional breaks to stand back from the screen and squint at the snow, to see if there's anything there. In this metaphor, note, the electron inside the TV is also watching the TV, which suggests that I should steer clear of ever writing poetry, or fixing televisions.

No more baby nation

I think some of his disgust with Bush's middle-east misadventure comes down to his disapproval of bad parenting. And it lends extra urgency to his current desire to show the Iraqis some tough love, to take the training wheels off, in order to more properly see what we have given birth to. It seems appropriate that America may be about to exchange one leader with lingering father issues for another who has cleared his up. As Obama says in closing, "I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle."

Best Songs of 2001: Digital Love by Daft Punk

1. Digital Love — Daft Punk

2. Poses — Rufus Wainwright

3. New Slang – The Shins

4. Love Letter — Nick Cave

5. Someone to Call My Lover — Janet Jackson

6. Flame Turns Blue — David Gray

7. Johnny Appleseed – Joe Strummer and the Mescarelos

8. Cowboy Dreams — Prefab Sprout

9. Nature Boy — David Bowie

10. La Cienega Just Smiled — Ryan Adams

• Best Songs of 2009
• Best Songs of 2008
• Best Songs of 2007
• Best Songs of 2006
• Best Songs of 2005
• Best Songs of 2004
• Best Songs of 2003
• Best Songs of 2002
• Best Songs of 2000

Will you look at Texas?

Better opinions than mine say that Obama cannot win Texas — or rather that's is not worth the money he would have to pour into it. Still, of all Hillary's so-called firewall states, Texas was the one he cracked. I wondered at the time whether there wasn't a certain amount of Bush-shame at work in the state. Obama is spending money there, has a significant ground operation in place, and recently told the NYT “A place that I’ve come to love, which I did not expect until this campaign, is Texas. I ended up loving Texas." Supposedly, he's got his eye on helping out Democrat in the senate race. Hmm.

Words, words, words

It's been fun (my idea of fun anyway) to chart the migratory patterns of certain words over this election cycle. For more than a year, most of the nation has watched and responded to the same news events, featuring the same players, whose most frequent act is to talk, publically and at length. We've probably listened to more words, from the same people, than at any other time in American history. It's not surprising that some of those words have lodged in the heads of the media, or even snagged in the popular imagination.

Most of them have come from Obama. Slate keeps a running talling of what it calls Obamisms, most of them jokey portamantaus, but there have been other, more significant contributions to the lingua franca. After the debate in which Obama "rejected and denounced" Louis Farrakhan ("If the word 'reject' Senator Clinton feels is stronger than the word 'denounce,' then I'm happy to concede the point and I would reject and denounce"), the airwaves were suddenly awash with people rejecting and denouncing one another.

A website called rejectanddenounce.org was even set up for people who wanted to reject and denounce whatever they liked — "Dexy's Midnight Runners," for instance, or "toothpaste on my pants before work." McCain "rejected and repudiated" reverend James Hagee, a more alliterative formulation repeated this week by Jesse's Jackson's son. "I thoroughly reject and repudiate his ugly rhetoric."

Jackson Jr also called his father's rhetoric "divisive" — another Obama favorite, usually coupled with "distracting" to denote trivial non-substantive matters (“divisions and distractions and drama that passes for politics”). He has used it to talk about everything from Jeremiah Wright ("these divisions that distract us from our common challenges and our common opportunities and move the country forward"), to Hillary Clinton ("the attacks and distortions that try to distract us from the issues that matter to people's lives") to gay marriage ("the heightened focus on marriage is a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination and gays and lesbians").

Much as it seems to double as a term signifying "stuff I don't want to talk about", it has a wonderfully stern, pre-TV, Lincolnesque feel to it. On his show, Steven Colbert put"distractions" on notice. Someone else put "distractions" on a t-shirt. It tells you something about Obama: it's the sort of word useful to someone with an intense, laser-like focus.

The latest Obamaism to catch on: his recent use of "refine" last week to talk about Iraq ("I'm sure I'll have more information and continue to refine my policy") which caused such a fuss. That word, too, seems to have worked its way under newscaster's skins. I just watched an MSNBC news reporter refer to the Democrats "refining, if you will" their energy plans. It's one of the more immediate side-effects of Obama's candidacy, whether he wins or loses: the nation's literacy levels have taken a small bump.

Not that it's all high-fallutin' refinement. As William Safire noted recently, of Obama's use of "gummed up" (“politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence"), "Here was a presidential candidate unafraid to use a slang verb with verve." Safire also admired his use of the word "bone-headed" to describe his dealings with Tony Rezko ( “I am the first one to acknowledge that it was a boneheaded move"). Wrote Safire: "Boneheaded was a perfect choice: not as condemnatory or self-flagellating as stupid, nor as dismissive as foolish, nor as formal as ignorant, nor carrying a secondary drug connotation as dopey, nor as frivolous as silly, nor as inapt as dumb."

Cut his nuts 'out' or 'off'?

Jesse Jackson's recent offer to cut off Barack Obama's nuts places an unusually prickly matter of journalistic etiquette before the American media. The Los Angeles Times went with: “crude language.” The AP mentioned “regretfully crude" language and "a slang reference to his wanting to cut off Obama's testicles." The New York Times, the guardians of 'all the news that's fit to print' put it with even more masterful aplomb: “Mr. Jackson made disparaging remarks, apparently including a crude reference to male genitalia.” Only The New York Post printed it in full, slapping it in a bold 50-point headline: JESSE JACKSON SAYS HE WANTS TO CUT OBAMA'S 'NUTS OUT'

Hang on — "out" or "off"? Reuters went with "out". Other went with "off." Tradition would suggest the latter. As George Stephanopolous said of Al Gore "He was good to me, but the threat was implicit: 'Don't even think about trying to shut me out; if it comes down to you or me, I'll cut your nuts off.'" Or as Al Haig, speaking to Richard Nixon, said of Mark Felt aka Deep Throat: "We've got to be careful as to when to cut his nuts off."

Cutting someone's nuts "out" on the other hand, is favored only by thugs and gangsters, according to the Post. The actual clip — finally aired on Fox news — revealed the good Reverend to be a traditionalist.