Thursday, February 12, 2009 - Posts
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I agree with Emily 100 percent about Diane Keaton's $2 million book deal. Maybe her Random House editors can persuade her to write a Hollywood memoir and give those 90 diaries her mother kept, the ones "chronicling the upbringing of her children and her frustrating marriage," a rest. The New York Times reported that Keaton read the journals aloud to her mother during the final years of Dorothy Keaton Hall's battle with Alzheimer's. I imagine her work on this book, which Keaton started last year after Hall succumbed to her illness, must be therapeutic but nevertheless quite painful. I shudder at the thought of my daughter exhuming my spent life out of hundreds of notebooks, particularly if I had had the poor luck to leave the building early.
As an aside, if I do lose ability to remember who I used to be, I hope I do so as elegantly as the Alzheimer's patient in the 2007 film Away From Her played by Julie Christie (coincidently also once romantically linked with Warren Beatty). For obsessed boomers, Christie's character is a role model for going gaga gracefully.
Getting back to Diane Keaton, Jessica is quite right the Academy Award-winning movie star has a platform of readers no matter what her topic. If she must pay tribute to her mother, we all understand where she's coming from. But let's hear how mom let her audition for the Broadway rock musical Hair, only insisted her daughter keep her clothes on, or maybe write Hall's observations about her daughter's ex-boyfriend and frequent co-star who later settled down with his teenage stepdaughter.
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I wanted to flag that touching exchange at President Obama’s town hall in Fort Myers, Fla., on Tuesday, wherein a homeless woman named Henrietta Hughes told the nation of her employment troubles, and begged the president for action: “We need something more than the vehicle and the parks to go to,” she said. “We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom. Please help.” Rather brilliantly, Obama showed he can channel Bill Clinton whenever he wants—as he pulled her close for an embrace, he was definitely feeling that woman’s pain.
But more than showcasing Obama’s talents as both stimulus salesman- and empathizer-in-chief, the video footage of that event reveals a woman, just to Hughes’ right, in, um, well—in heat. Practically. Watch as she aggressively mouths “I love you, Barack” in his general direction. While Hughes is now being trumpeted as “the face of the economic crisis” (which has hit women of color particularly hard), this white, middle-aged, pant-suited, brooched woman stole the show. She just loves him—and, this Valentine's Day, she doesn’t care who knows.
This reminded me simultaneously of two things: One, the absurd Judith Warner column that was essentially an inbox dump of lusty/ envious notes from friends detailing their fantasies—mainly, it seems, sexual—about Obama. Choice excerpt:
Another Washington woman, a global health care consultant, expressed her sense of Obama-inadequacy in a dream: “I dreamed I was an Obama girl. I had a chance to be in the same room with him for the first time. There were dark velvet chairs and he was standing there with all this dark and mist around him. His lips so purple and sensuous as if to be otherworldly,” she wrote to me. “I moved gently toward him and then I said the wrong thing. Obama tamped it down like some vapor that didn’t register. He wasn’t even flattered.”
“Purple?” Must have been from all the grape drink. … But seriously—creep show! During the primary, Web sites encouraging readers to write in their dreams about Obama and about Hillary Clinton served as an entertaining, if voyeuristic testament to the nation’s collective, REM-altering election fatigue (which was only to begin—no word on whether similar sites sprang up for John McCain and Sarah Palin). And the question of whether “Ab-bama” deserves the title will certainly provoke strong responses at your next dinner party. But this is just grist for more inane articles about women fainting and slavering over a mere politician. At least repressed 1960s women kept their feelings toward the last hot president under wraps.
And two: What a weird, yet timely subversion of the old racial fixation with black men whistling at white women—which, when you get down to it, has caused an unbearable share of violence over the years. Now chicks with almost-mullets and in Sidwell book clubs are suddenly hollering back? Sure, it’s change we can believe in—but is this “faux-familiarity,” as Warner puts it, not a little much? Barack is going to get a big head.
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Calling all intellectually curious, engaged, and excited readers: We're looking for two summer research assistants to help us at Double X, the new website that is developing out of Slate's XX Factor blog (For more on Double X, click here). One of these assistants will be in the DC office, the other will be New York based. Interested applicants should send a résumé, three clips (published articles, blog entries, and classroom assignments all acceptable), and a short critique of the XXFactor blog. Email this to doublex.slate@gmail.com with Research Assistant in the subject, and please specify whether you want to be considered for the DC or NYC position.
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Dahlia, thank you for pointing to that poll. One of the things that makes me feel ashamed, occasionally, is that I lived through an era in which my country tortured—and I did nothing about it. Seeing these numbers helps lift that feeling of shame. You point out that 38 percent of those polled want a criminal investigation. The more moving thing, to me, is that an additional 24 percent want an independent panel to investigate. Only 34 percent want us to forget all about it and move on.
The best reasoning I've heard yet for investigating instead of pretending that now everything is peachy keen, despite the fact that our nation violated some core Constitutional principles, international laws, and moral foundations: without an investigation, all the people and principles that brought us to torture will remain unquestioned—and can easily return to power in another era. Let's air the dirty laundry and name the dirty launderers. Nixon's pardon left us with Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Do we want the likes of John Yoo, David Addington, and their own pro-torture followers waiting in public life for decades, saying that no authority ever explicitly rejected the horrific moral reasoning that they put in place—and taking their places in future administrations?
Speaking of which: In a few weeks, I'll be at a weekend seminar on constitutional issues with Prof. John (Torture Memo) Yoo himself, along with a panel of other legal luminaries. If anyone wants to send me some homework and reading, and perhaps some questions you'd like me to ask Mr. Torture, please, please do.
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Emily, I don't think that a memoir of Diane Keaton's relationship to her dementia-suffering mother is what readers of any age necessarily want. I think publishers are grasping at straws in this economy and are willing to publish anything with a celebrity name attached. The common wisdom is probably that a book by Diane Keaton on any subject—from Alzheimer's to zoology—will sell more than the latest literary tome from Richard Ford or any similarly revered author.
With news yesterday that HarperCollins is cutting staff and offering buyouts, after a winter of similarly depressing news from other publishing houses, people are getting desperate to sell books. Which might explain the just-announced book deal for Alexandra Penney, the former Self editor who lost a ton of money with Madoff and then complained about having to lay off her maid, Yolanda, and take the subway in a much-reviled story in the Daily Beast. As Hamilton Nolan at Gawker puts it, " 'Notorious' is the new 'Deserving.' " It remains to be seen whether or not this attitude will save the publishing industry, but I guess at this point anything is worth a shot.
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I’ve posted on this before but this amazing new poll from USA Today/Gallup reveals that 38 percent of Americans support launching criminal investigations into the Bush administration's use of torture and warrantless wiretapping. Oh, and 41 percent are in favor of a criminal investigation into their use of the Justice Department for partisan purposes. To the extent that the Obama Administration is of the view that there is no political mandate for such investigations, or that the tanking economy has diverted our attention, these numbers would suggest otherwise. We seem to be able to find the time for bloodlust. Emily and I just finished a Washingtonpost.com chat that showed readers about evenly split between those demanding accountability for Bush era misconduct, and those who encouraged anyone seeking such accountability to be medicated.
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The New York Times just ran a piece about Julia Roberts, who's coming out of self-imposed semiretirement in March with Duplicity, a comedic caper co-starring grizzly man Clive Owen. Roberts has been taking it relatively easy since 2001, in which time Hollywood suits have been desperately, futilely searching for the "Next Julia Roberts" (all they've found are various Witherspoons, Heigls, Garners, Adams, and Hathaways): Have audiences missed her as much? The Times' story floats a tentative yes, quoting one of the film's producers as saying the audience goodwill for Roberts "is just so clearly there ... I don't know how we know it, but we do."
That sounds about right to me. Maybe that's because, as the Times puts it, Roberts has successfully left audiences wanting more; maybe that's because I still really, really love Pretty Woman (my bad?). Roberts strikes me as a movie star who still makes sense—what was appealing about her in her heyday she still has (which boils down, in her case, basically to that smile), and even more importantly, it still seems appealing. As a counter-example (a movie star who no longer makes sense), think about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even if he wasn't busy governing, he wouldn't have a blooming film career: What was appealing about him at his peak (something like, very macho, life-saving-yet-kindhearted muscles) he still has (if they're a little deflated), but they couldn't woo audiences anymore: We've moved onto schlubs, twerps, and pretty boys, not a muscle-bound or heavily accented action hero among them.
At least I can remember what was once charming about Ahnold. What about the formerly appealing movie stars whose former appeal is now totally inexplicable? I got a real brain cramp watching Renee Zellweger totter around in a mermaid's mourning garb at this year's Golden Globes: How had I ever found her anything less than 100 percent unhinged and annoying? Then Jerry Maguire and Bridget Jones nudged their way into my consciousness, and I had to admit to myself, I liked her once. Damned if I could remember why.
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Diane Keaton has just sold her memoir for a reported $2 million. You'd think getting the dish about her famous affairs with Woody Allen, Al Pacino, etc., would be worth the publishing world's bidding war even in these strapped days. But the subject of her memoir is how she cared for her late mother during her 15 years with Alzheimer's disease. I know these are depressing times and all, and we boomers have become obsessed with the sense that if we're lucky we might make it to the end of the month without going completely gaga. But now it's come to this: What we want from Diane Keaton is the story of how she lovingly attended to her mother's bodily needs, rather than how Warren Beatty lovingly attended to hers.