It’s about fucking time!
So said Jon LeibowitzStewart of the White House press corp’s recent conversion from stenographers to journalists, with regard to the President’s murky National Guard service record.
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
Yesterday, Gwen and I saw Aileen, a documentary about the eponymous woman immortalized in Monster (which I also want to see).
It is unfortunate that this story is in the hands of Nick Broomfield, the documentarist. He’s just not very good at his job. He’s clearly wrapped up in his subject, he asks leading questions and occasionally, he practically answers his own questions for the interviewee. He fails to follow up on potentially interesting points that his subjects bring up. He has too much face-time and is too much a part of the story. To some extent, this is inevitable: he made a previous documentary about Aileen Wournos, which was introduced as evidence at a hearing shown in this film, and he was deposed as a witness in it as well. Setting that aside, though, he’s still too much in the movie. Though he clearly takes a dim view of other people who exploited Wournos’ story for money (a group that included several cops who were on her case), he’s in the same boat, and we see him onscreen paying $25,000 to her onetime lawyer for the right to film her. The camera work is also shoddy (not that the camera is necessarily his hands).
But Wournos herself is the real story, and she’s plenty interesting to make the movie worth seeing. Like some other documentaries that focus on crimes, we are left unsure of what really happened. Wournos, a hooker, killed seven men in the space of one year. The first had a history of sex crimes, and her initial defense was that he had brutalized her, so she was acting in self-defense. By the time this film was being made, she had been sentenced to death, and had publicly recanted her earlier story, saying she killed all of them for the money and no other reason. When she thought she was off-camera, however, she whispered that it was her original story that was true–that each of the men she killed had brutalized her–and she just recanted to get her execution over with. She couldn’t stand being in prison anymore, and she knew she’d never get out.
Wournos was also clearly mad. She said the prison was using “sonic pressure” on her brain. That the police knew about her after her first killing, but that they let her continue to kill six more men to create a more sensational case, and that the subsequent killings were really, somehow, the fault of the cops. Despite this, she passed a psych evaluation to determine her competence a few days before her execution. The evaluation lasted all of 15 minutes. Certainly, as long as the evaluation was carefully constructed of questions like “do you know what day it is?” (ie, the kinds of questions they ask to determine whether you’ve suffered recent brain trauma) she would pass.
We were unsure what really happened, but we speculated anyhow. Wournos had a shockingly awful upbringing–her mother running away at 6 months, losing her virginity at 9, having a child at the age of 13 (probably by a pederast), her father dying, her grandfather throwing her out of the house, and her living in the Michigan woods until she hitchhiked down to Florida at 16. It is not hard to imagine this putting a person in a fragile state of sanity. And it is not hard to believe that she really was brutalized by the first man she killed. Perhaps that’s what pushed her over the edge.
After this, we needed something to clear our heads out, so we rented The Magic Christian, the sixties anti-war/anti-capitalism/anti-authority semi-linear hippy freakout starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr.
My Architect
Saw My Architect last night with Gwen and a bunch of her co-workers. This is a documentary about the architect Louis Kahn by his son.
Kahn’s family life was complex, to put it gently. He was married and had two mistresses, and had one child by each of the ladies in his life–the filmmaker’s mother was the second of his mistresses, and to this day entertains the fantasy that he would have left his wife to live with her. Apparently all of the women knew of each other, but (unsurprisingly) had nothing to do with each other. Kahn’s cousin (who was interviewed in the film) disbelieved that the filmmaker could be Kahn’s son, since Kahn didn’t have a son, legitimately–apparently he wasn’t in on the whole story, though almost everyone else was.
The filmmaker didn’t know his father very well, since Kahn was rarely around–not only did he have a legit family, he apparently spent most of his time either at the office or travelling. So the movie is not just to document Kahn’s life: it’s a more personal project for the filmmaker to learn about his father, and inevitably, it winds up being a little self-regarding as a result.
Despite this, and despite the fact that it drags in spots, it’s a fascinating movie. Interviews with other leading architects of his generation (I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, etc) give us the sense that Kahn was “an architect’s architect” even though he had far fewer completed commissions than his peers. Kahn’s work is interesting to learn about: his schtick was monumental architecture. Some of his buildings are just plain ugly. Others, like the Salk Library, are beautiful but don’t seem to work well on a human scale–in that sense, they are monumental, but formalized, abstract, and not entirely functional.
At the end of the movie, however, we see Kahn’s last big project, which wasn’t completed until a decade after his death in 1974: the parliament and capital complex for Bangladesh. It is enormous, sprawling, and wonderful. A deliberative chamber is like a giant cylinder capped by a skylight, with a constellation of lights underneath. There is little to distract the eye, and it is easy to imagine being in that room removes you from petty everyday concerns and subconsciously reminds you of the importance of what happens there. The filmmaker interviews the Bangladeshi architect Shamsul Wares, who openly cries at what Kahn did for Bangladesh: by giving them this building, he says, Kahn gave them the institutions for democracy. Putting Kahn’s legacy in human terms as well as academic terms.
Tread lightly and fly under the radar
Yesterday, I paid my property taxes. Close to $7000, and rising. I can’t afford this.
Yesterday, I also ran across the Fab Prefab website, which carries news about avant-garde prefab housing.
Growing up in Chicago–and then leaving–gave me an appreciation for good architecture. There’s so much good architecture in Chicago, and so little around Austin, that it became conspicuous by its absence. I’ve always loved the traditional townhouses around Chicago, but Buckminster Fuller’s Wichita House, which I first learned of back in college, has always struck me as something special, and the stuff featured at Fab Prefab is in that same spirit.
Another interesting aspect of many of the projects featured there is that they qualify as mobile homes. The way property tax works, some of the tax is on the land itself, but in most cases, more than half is on the “improvements” (ie, fixed structures). A mobile home doesn’t count as an improvement–I’m not sure what the make-or-break criterion is, but my guess is that it would be a fixed foundation.
I’m very attracted to the idea of a futuristic pod-home that lets me avoid perhaps two-thirds of my property taxes. Obviously there’s an ethics question here. I will let Socrates and Achilles debate this for me:
Socrates Is it ethical to work the system this way when most schmucks are paying their fair share?
Achilles When you put it that way, no. Then again, there’s nothing stopping other people from doing the same.
Socrates If everybody did that, then the school system would go bankrupt. After all, it’s property taxes that pay for the schools.
Achilles And why is that, anyhow? I always thought that was unfair, as the level of taxation is not tied to one’s ability to pay. People of modest means get priced out of their homes. (And about those schools–I gotta tell ya, we’re not getting our money’s worth out of them.)
Socrates Well, that’s not very fair either, I guess. But they knew the way the system worked when they bought, so they’ve got nothing to complain about.
Achilles What about renters? Landlords just pass through their property-tax increases, so unless you are a bum, there’s no way to completely escape property taxes.
Socrates I concede the point. Still, where’s the money going to come from if everybody lives in mobile dwellings, even if they’re only nominally mobile?
Achilles Well, the state could pass a state income tax.
Socrates You know that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
Achilles Yeah…
Socrates So in the meantime, do you think you can ethically avoid your tax burden this way?
Achilles Well, yes. If the taxing authorities decide they don’t like it, they can close the loophole. In the meantime, it’s there, and I’m under no obligation to pay as much in taxes as possible.
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
bin Laden caught?
My mother, not known for her tinfoil millinery, mentioned to me that someone official had predicted that the U.S. would nab Osama bin Laden within the year.
She speculates that if this is being publicly predicted, then the government already has him in the bag and is waiting to unveil him at the moment when it will do GW’s poll results the most good (say, November). On the one hand, I don’t put anything past the current administration. On the other, I pointed out to her that a number of people speculated that the U.S. military captured Saddam long before it was made public. This apparently was not the case, but what’s interesting is the number of stories (mostly outside the USA) indicating that the Kurds caught him and then handed him off.
So who knows what the hell is going on. The source of the ObL prediction is a Lt Colonel. I have no idea how I should read that. What to make of the fact that it’s not a senior officer or senior administration official? Clearly senior administration officials are quite happy to stick their feet in their mouths to score political points. So I wouldn’t put it past them to leak this if it were true. Then again, intentionally leaking it via a Lt. Col. would be smart, as it keeps the higher-ups out of the mess, makes it easier to bury the story, and may give it more credibility because the leaker is close to the action. Then again, this may just be an officer being cocky. The military may have some useful intel on him, but his mouth is writing checks that his troops may not be able to cash. Certainly, this is the most plausible scenario. Or perhaps this is an officer being sloppy. ObL really is in the bag, and this guy can’t keep a secret.
You just can’t tell with these guys.
The Cooler
Saw The Cooler with Gwen yesterday. Good movie. William H. Macy has made a good career out of playing the nice-guy schnook, and he does so here in a role that has a little more meat than those roles usually do. Alec Baldwin is perfect as the tough-guy casino operator who is, in his own way, more pathetic than his schnook employee.
The story is a little disjointed–the interlude with the long-lost son is just sort of plunked down without really fitting in, and some of the backstory is never filled in–but it mixes the fantastic and hard-bitten reality in a way that I like, and kept me guessing how it would turn out until the end (which you might say is more because of my suspension of disbelief than anything else).
The movie is about gambling and luck: Macy’s character Bernie Lootz has such impossibly bad luck that any table in a casino he walks past instantly starts losing, making him an asset to the casino that employs him.
After the movie we threw some trout and veggies on the grill. I’ve never been much of a gambler in the customary sense, but I think barbecuing is where I give vent to my gambling urge: there’s always an element of chance with a grill, and every time a meal turns out well, I feel like I’ve beaten the odds.
Museum of Ephemerata
Acting on a tip from Prentiss, Gwen and I saw the amazing and mysterious Museum of Ephemerata.
The Museum is only open to the public rarely, but is chock full of curiosities, many of which are (dare I say) entirely invented and false, such as the “yeti toy.” This itself has a long history dating back to P.T. Barnum’s Dime Museum, as they informed us on the tour. But it is presented with such panache that you enjoy going along for the ride. If the curators were more pretentious, I’d have to call what they’re doing “performance art.” But they aren’t, so I won’t.
Tokyo Godfathers
Catching up on some belated blogging here, I saw Tokyo Godfathers with Jenny a few days ago. Enjoyable, good animation that mixed traditional flat drawing with rotoscoped backgrounds. Very schmaltzy story with an overload of astonishing coincidences (“….Dad??”) that (as Jenny points out) seems to be a sendup of coincidence-laden Japanese dramas.