We have to remember that what we observe is not nature but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
—Werner Heisenberg
Greetings from the far left coast where I pause for a moment to reflect on the Portland International Film Festival, which was allowed to fade into the aether in 2022. Maybe it was pushed. The NW Film Center was toppled and the Portland Art Museum Center for an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT) installed in its place. Yes. A branding outfit was paid to come up with "PAM CUT." Full disclosure: I am a tad cranky on this subject.
The cultural loss goes unremarked and unacknowledged by the new regime. The film center and the festival's history were purged from the art museum's website. PAM CUT markets itself to a younger, hipper audience than I am as a “home for cultural snackers” with "cinematic storytelling in all its forms," which includes any "creatively undefinable cultural happening that feels cinematic—and these days, that’s certainly a longer list than just film." Creatively undefined cultural happenings range from virtual reality events to the upcoming West Coast premiere of SMARTPHONE ORCHESTRA // Music for Smartphones & Emojiii on April 5 and 6, plugged as "incredible interactive experiences and games that play out on mobile phones, but connect us to one another IRL." An April 13 screening of Desperately Seeking Susan in the series Social Cinema is billed as Madonna Dress Up Night. Gaming, DJs, and drag queens pop up in a "vaudeville variety show" approach.
There is a place for PAM CUT's vision of "a home for cultural snackers." But as Emerson put it, nothing is got for nothing. The film component is much diminished. Disingenuous marketing hype and bastardization of the terms cinema and cinematic to mean anything and everything, and thus in the end become meaningless, does not change that. There appears to be no place for a cinephile who just wants to watch a movie without the distraction of sideshow and spectacle. Maybe I am the only one.
PAM CUT is a reflection of an aesthetic sensibility in ascendance at the Portland Art Museum, which is itself I suppose a reflection of the wider culture. These developments are much on my mind. I may take them up later in an expanded format if I can pull it together. More anon, perhaps.
I suspect I was not alone in my sigh of relief after Joe Biden delivered a strong State of the Union address. MAGA Republicans of course think otherwise. From Biden's left flank came quibbling about reference to the undocumented immigrant accused to murdering U of Georgia student Laken Riley as an illegal. It is not a word I would use in that context, and ill-advised because it plays to Republican talking points, but the man is in the country illegally and that is all Biden was getting at. With friends like the progressive comrades who needs Republicans?
I felt some sympathy for Katie Britt when her rebuttal was panned across the board. PBS NewsHour regular David Brooks was a rare exception outside the MAGA Republican hive. He dubbed himself her last defender and argued that she did an adequate job. Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capeheart countered by saying that his fellow Post columnist Hugh Hewitt, one of the most conservative people out there, thought Britt was bad, and if he and Hewitt agree, you know she was bad.
It baffles me that Republican leadership would send her out so ill prepared. It is not as if this has not happened before. Whatever became of Bobby Jindal? Then came the story behind Britt’s story about the woman sex trafficked by a cartel from ages twelve to sixteen and I retracted any feeling of sympathy I may have expressed. Britt got the story dead wrong on multiple counts. According to Karla Jacinto Romero, she was trafficked by a pimp who operated separately, not by a drug cartel; it took place in Mexico, not the US:, and it happened during the George W. Bush administration. When questioned about the inaccuracies in her account, Britt changed the subject.
Katie Britt, SOTU Republican Response, March 7, 2024
Brooks and Capeheart, PBS NewsHour, March 8, 2024
Ximena Bustillo, Anti-sex trafficking advocate accuses GOP Sen. Katie Britt of distorting her story, NPR, March 11, 2024
State of the Union Cold Open—SNL, with Scarlett Johansson as Katie Britt (pick up at the 2:28 mark)
Hur report. I have read about seventy pages of the Hur-Biden interview transcript for October 8, 2023, and skimmed the rest of its 159 pages. My take on it is in line with reporting by Tamara Keith at NPR, Andrew Prokop at Vox, and a growing chorus of reputable journalists.
The special counsel's report, released February 5, 2024, opens with the conclusion that no criminal charges are warranted, but that was not the focus of reporting in the much maligned mainstream liberal, socialist, Marxist press where headlines screeched that Biden presented himself during the interviews "as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." I agree with Prokop when he writes that the transcripts "make Hur’s claims about Biden’s memory appear cherry-picked and exaggerated."
Ultimately, Hur didn’t have the evidence to prove Biden’s intent. So, following in the footsteps of former special counsel John Durham, who labored without success to prove theories of Democratic malfeasance in the Trump-Russia investigation, he released a report that kind of swipes at his target anyway.
Rather than simply admit to failing to prove his case, Hur used the standard 'don’t recall' answers to try and advance a larger narrative about Biden’s age and memory.
Hur's report explicitly provides numerous examples where insufficient evidence and plausible explanations could create reasonable doubt. Biden's remarks are rambling, with many digressions, no different in this regard from interviews conducted throughout his public life. He is nonetheless coherent and thoughtful and appears to be diligent about responding accurately to questions. The "do not recall" answers often relate to minutiae that occurred years ago or to actions that would have been taken care of by staff without his direct involvement and oversight unless he were an obsessive micromanager. Hur acknowledges that Biden provided significant cooperation with the investigation.
One thing that jumps out from reports about classified documents that ended up in the possession of Biden, Pence, and Trump is the chaotic the process of moving out of residences and offices during a change of administrations. A review of this process as well as the process for handling and classifying sensitive material would be in order.
When the going gets weird…A conspiracy theory making the rounds has it that Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game in 1962 is a hoax. David Head reports that this stuff has been around for years, news to me, and is now enjoying a resurgence. For those of you who are not basketball fans, and maybe some younger readers who are, Chamberlain racked up 100 points against the New York Knicks on March 2, 1962. His Philadelphia Warriors defeated the Knicks 169–147 in a game where there was no shot clock, no three-point shot, and apparently not much defense.
Conspiracy dingbats, I mean, skeptics, find the absence of a visual recording of the game and the fact that it was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with only 4,000 spectators in the stands suspicious. It was 1962. I was nine years old at the time. The NBA may have been the third major professional sports league, but it was a distant third behind Major League Baseball and the NFL. "The game was played in Hershey because NBA owners, desperate to grow the game outside their cities, routinely took their show on the road, like the NFL does now with games in Europe" (Head).
The absence of a visual recording is no more mysterious or suspect than the site of the game. A single NBA game of the week on Sunday afternoon shown nationally on one of the three major networks would have been the most we got. According to Head, the Warriors had a radio broadcast of the game, but the Knicks did not broadcast road games. "There were no national media deals, and archiving video and audio recordings would have taken a warehouse piled high with reel upon reel, not terabytes on a server."
Conspiracy theories swirling around Chamberlain's feat would merit no more than some Johnsonian invective about dolts and clodpates if they did not illustrate an unfortunate feature of the present era:
IT’S EASY TO DISMISS the internet noise about the 100-point game as just internet people doing internet things. Yet, the case for conspiracy, such as it is, rests on the denial of a key insight of historical study: that the past is a different place full of people with assumptions that differ, often subtly but profoundly, from our own. (Head)
There is a lot of that going around.
Jr Kennedy is eyeballing the cream of his crop as he decides on a vice presidential running mate. He is reportedly close to announcing the pick "from a short list that includes NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers and former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura." Rand Paul and Tulsi Gabbard are also said to be to have been approached by Kennedy. Nothing but the best and the brightest from a population where the bar is not set notably high.
I confess that I do not know where to come down on the TikTok legislation that the House passed by a whopping 352–65 margin in a vote that was bipartisan on both sides. My eyes tend to glaze over when I read about issues swirling around TikTok. I do find it amusing to see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Nancy Mace locking arms in opposition to the bill. Well. Sort of.
Ocasio-Cortez cited the rush from committee to vote in just four days. "There are serious antitrust and privacy questions here," she said, "and any national security concerns should be laid out to the public prior to a vote." Fair enough. Mace was moved by her inner libertarian, while Taylor Greene drew on her experience of being banned from other social media platforms.
Of the three, Ocasio-Cortez is the one not jousting for the VP slot on the MAGA Republican Party ticket.
Memo from the editorial desk. In the March 1 newsletter, I mistakenly referred to Ethan Coen as the director of Drive-Away Dolls. I have since learned that while he is credited as sole director for technical reasons, he and wife Tricia Cooke "in fact made every part of it together—as he and Joel do on their films. 'It’s very equal. We at every stage talk the movie back and forth, in terms of the writing, and then on the set, and then cutting. It’s all just making the movie.'"
New at Portable Bohemia Substack:
The Zany Zeitgeist of the Silicon Valley Cognitive Elite (Part 2), March 7, 2024 …read more>>
I Go These Days to Find the Dawn (a poem), March 11, 2024. “I Go These Days to Find the Dawn” was previously published in the Spring 2012 issue of Fault Lines…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
