for 31 January 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

Dear Polly.

Or, you could apply for the position of office manager here at sophisticated market research. Our current office manager, Latifa Kott, is being fired for failing to do the job. (She seems unaware of this, being a cat and all, but yes...she's being fired.) The job is undemanding, requiring only that you answer the phones and not sleep in the laser printer, but she seems unable to perform either of these tasks.

So, if YOU can answer phones and not sleep in a laser printer, apply today. Pay is poor, but working conditions are excellent, you get two corporate credit cards (the cat had credit cards, why not you?), nobody is expected to be functional before 10:00, and we use only the best Zabar's coffee in the coffee machine.

Don't wait...the job is going to be filled fast. Call Latifa; if she answers, she'll give you all the details.

Alan Kornheiser
<askornheiser@prodigy.net>

Alan,

I spoke with your feline assistant, and I can see why you're replacing her. She was a really insolent to me on the phone, acting like she didn't understand my questions, and totally mispronouncing my name. In fact, she called me. Did you give her my number? There was this long, awkward pause before she spoke, and a beep, like she was recording the call. She tried to find out stuff about me, but wouldn't tell me anything about why she was calling. Finally she got all nervous and thought of an excuse — she pretended she was calling from Citibank! Tell her I see right through her little ploy.

Anyway, are either of those corporate credit cards Citibank, because Latifa mentioned that they have this Travel Lover's program where I charge hotel rooms and dinners onto the corporate card (I'll pay you back, I promise) and the company gets 25% off! I bet you never thought you'd find an office manager as proactive as this one, huh? I'm already saving you money, and you haven't either hired me yet!

Oh, but I don't answer phones, and I'd prefer you put in some kind of a daybed for my naps, as the laser printer isn't quite as squishy and soft as I would like. That won't be a problem, will it?

Polly

Polly,

As the most sensical female in my little corner of the pop culture universe, I want your opinion on things. My new girlfriend has lots and lots of male friends, some of them are ex-boyfriends, some are ex one night stands. Some of them just friends with no overt sexual history to speak of. But they're all guys. And she goes out drinking with them. And drunk people do things that they might not otherwise do if they weren't drunk... I'm sure her friends are all nice guys, and I know she doesn't want to cheat on me, but really... males, female, alcohol, mix liberally... sounds like a recipe for things that I don't want to happen.

So am I just an insecure little sniveling boy with man-titties? Or is she going to bring to fruition all that my mind fears most?

"Trust" ... bah!

Keith
<keith@sway.org>

Trust is pretty overrated, you're right. You can't just will yourself to trust someone, and if you can, you're quite possibly a good candidate for a swift kick in the soft, unguarded regions. As a distrustful jealous type like yourself, I generally try to break out my flirtation litmus test early on, to get a feeling for how much flirty winky wink behavior my special little love oppressor engages in with the appropriate (in this case, opposite) sex. But it's also very important to figure out the exact flavor of the attentions given. After all, we all like good listeners who make eye contact and act like we're the center of the universe, right? So, is it really fair to complain when our little love muffins trot out self-same behavior for someone far less deserving and delectable than ourselves? My current little love sadist is quite earnest and direct in manner, leading many wanton sluts to the false conclusion that he thinks they're more than just quirky roadside fruit stands to my megamall of delights.

In the early days, this raised my hackles. But then I noticed how my darling oppressor didn't feed these sad sluts' delusions in any way. Which was important. He also seemed just as intense when talking to men, and he didn't seem to get an overly dramatic ego buzz out of being around attentive women.

It's important to get a read on how hungry your little demon friend is for attention from these men. How much does her ego depend on their fawning and and frolicking with her? We all need some fawning and frolicking, and we all have dependent, hungry egos. But some egos just want a snack and others will eat and eat and never feel satiated.

If your girlfriend seems to really relish the attention these foul pig-dogs lavish on her (of course, it will always SEEM like she relishes it, given your perspective — get someone else to observe for you) then you have to ask yourself if she's just the first tragic betrayal of your short life waiting to happen. Tragic betrayals are tough to get over, too, especially for distrustful jealous types like us.

So, is her ego slightly hungry, or is it bulimic?

Also, does she have any female friends at all? I'm not saying I don't have lots of male friends myself, but the healthiest man-centric women have a few female friends in their arsenals. If she doesn't have one, your problems with her will stretch far beyond jealousy issues, I guarantee it.

Sternly,

Polly

Fuckin A,

Have you just gone through this in the past few months? You really have all of the stages down except for one- the feeling of getting hired. It goes pretty much like this for me:

Them: "You're hired- start Monday"

Me: "Yay!" (pause two seconds) "Damn!"

Being out of work is really fun until the money starts to run out. I should know. I was too stupid to get on unemployment otherwise I could have rode it out for a few more weeks.

Cisco
<ciscov@avaya.com>

Too stupid to get on unemployment, but not too stupid to find a job?

That's it. I'm selling my Avaya stock right now...

Polly

You were really on to something today. Harris' interest in Jack the Dripper is as a laconic, Sam Sheperdized western character, caught in a snotty east coast milieu. I loved the painting scenes, and I did feel that the movie communicated how hard it is to be a serious artist, in the scenes of Pollock heading off wordlessly into his studio in the snow. But I left the theater thinking that the movie was a lock without a key. The key is, I think, in the 900 page bio by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the source for Pollock. The book suggests (with a lot of convincing evidence) that the reason why Pollock took it out on himself with boozing and fighting was because of his bisexuality. Ed Harris, stern actor that he is, wasn't about to get into that matter. Also, it can be strongly argued that de Sade was much more than just a head case; and if you don't have the time or inclination for some of the arguments (especially Angela Carter's witty, pro-porn book The Sadean Woman), it should be noted that De Sade was actually very funny at times, just like his spiritual disciple William S. Burroughs. De Sade does repeat himself a lot — maybe he didn't use an eraser after all.... It's the way the writer's life is treated in the movies that really makes my blood boil, though. It was bad enough to go into Finding Forrester and discovering that it actually wasn't the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie. The writing scenes in Finding Forrester are action writing, and what good comes out of that? Did you ever get a sense of what it was that Connery's Forrester had written? (His famous novel was called "Avalon Landing", which ought to be subtitled "Estate Homes from $250,000"). Movie shorthand (vide Forrester and State and Main) has it that real writers use manual typewriters; the rest of us fakers have computers. And when was the last time you saw a writer in a movie reading a book? Rant, rave, snarl...

Richard von Busack
<regisgoat@earthlink.net>

RVB!

Are you related in anyway to the ECW former TV heavyweight wrestling champ Rob Van Dam, who goes by the moniker RVD?

Maybe movies about artists fascinate movie directors because, unlike Pollack or de Sade, the movie director is so dependent on everyone around him.

My main point about Pollack and the rest is context. Why was the work important at that time? A bunch of responses I've seen to "The Artless Bastards" assume it would take hours to explain and be painfully dull, but as Ken Burns' Jazz is showing, Wynton Marsalis can illustrate the difference between pre-Armstrong trumpet and post-Armstrong trumpet in about thirty seconds. My main complaint with these films isn't watching them dab paint, but simply, show me a little of the world before and after them. Why bore me with all the temper tantrums, booze, and violence if you can't give me one minute of enlightenment? They should have just called these movies "VH-1's Behind the Muse" and be done with it.

Bertram Blaht

While this gent's no Terry, the point illustrated in the attached is a good one.

If the movie misses the point of Pollack, you and the critics seemed to get it. I recall David Lee Roth kvetching about the critics and how they liked Elvis Costello better'n him, but Diamond Dave et al. sold more records than Elvis and Slim Whitman combined.

Sometimes the critics know best, other times it's the public. Is it ever Hollywood?

Hope all is well. Stay off the motorcycles -

Steve McNally
<steve@ultradigital.com>

Thanks, Steve.

That's probably my favorite Rockwell in the whole wide world. Pollack wasn't such a bad abstracter himself. I think the David Lee Roth line was something like "The reason most rock critics better than me is that most rock critics look like Elvis Costello," or something to that effect.

Bert

Dear BB:

Quills — At least in the original stage play, where I saw it — wasn't actually about the historical deSade at all. Rather, it was a wonderfully violent, intensely theatrical argument about the appropriate limitations society may put upon art and the artist. Very much Grand Guignol, it dramatized that which it argued. Unfortunately, film is a much more literal medium than is live theater (odd, that...you'd think having real people close enough to spit on you would make it the other way around, but it ain't), and something got lost in the movement to the screen, even though the playwright did the moving. Poetry, as they say, is that which is lost in translation.

But I really want to talk about Pollock. There was an enormous retrospective of his work a few years back at MOMA, and it provided an opportunity to see the work that led up to the drip paintings and the work that followed them. It was instructive. Up until the drip paintings, Pollock was a competent, smart, arrogant, derivative painter, doing skillful and attractive work that really was no better than a dozen others working at the same time. His work was getting steadily better and better, but you could still walk up to almost anything he worked on and say "nice, but Miro/Picasso/Matisse/Braque/ whoever did it better."

And then it changed. The drip paintings are so much better than what went before that if you couldn't see how the earlier work informed the later you would swear they were done by a different painter. While one can look at the work done just a few years before the drip paintings and see logical consistencies, you just can't imagine that the same guy could be good enough to create the beauty of those paintings.

Sure, one can argue that a new technique merged with a limited talent to create something totally new and wonderful. It's probably true. You still can't believe it. I don't think Pollock could either. I believe, without — to be sure — a shred of evidence, that Pollock was as amazed, stunned, and confused by what he had created as was anyone else.

It gets worse. Pollack — again, judging only by the artistic evidence — really didn't have much to say, and the drip technique wasn't (and isn't) all that flexible a tool anyway. In a very few years, he had exhausted it and stopped doing drip paintings. Go ahead and look at what he produced then...art every bit as competent and as boring as the stuff before the drip paintings.

The story of Pollock isn't that of a mad genius inscrutably creating great art...as you say, that's an idiot and trivializing cliché. But neither is it the story of a skilled, educated, artistic master carefully building on his skills: the work won't support that version either. No...it's the story of a competent artist on whose shoulder an angel chose to sit for a few years and then went away. Imagine what it felt like to be Pollock when the angel left. It's a tragedy. Somebody should make a movie out of it.

Alan Kornheiser
<askornheiser@prodigy.net>

Kornheiser?

Aren't you the same Kornheiser who wrote me recently kvetching I should change my name because you didn't like the other BB? Now you write in to talk about your love for creeps like Pollock and de Sade? Boy, you must really hate old Brecht!

I agree, Pollock might have been a limited talent compared to Picasso, but then, who isn't? Pollock's breakthrough concept reminds me of three-chord punk bands I grew up loving. As my friend Paul likes to say, maybe they can only play three chords, but they're the best three chords. Pollock is technically accomplished in some areas, all of which he used perfectly in the drip work. The idea drove it all, just like concept more than anything else drove Godard's Breathless or Kerouac's On the Road. Looking back we can see their limits, but each was a jolt in their day. And it's the why of that jolt that I missed in each of these films.

Bertolt Blintz

Liked the piece — good punchline, but perhaps inaccurate? "Maintain the standard" probably means "Maintain the flag," that of the U.S. or of the Army.

Chris Klick
<cklick@mindspring.com>

Nah, it's a really common army usage. The motto at officer candidate school — two buildings down from PLDC — is "Standards, No Compromise," and the 2/29th Infantry has a sign outside their command offices that proudly says: "Second Battalion trains TO STANDARD."

So, yeah. That's what kind of standard they're talking about. Like 2Lt. Crevey says: Hey, god forbid we set out to exceed the thing. TO STANDARD it is, then.

Standardized and regimented,

Ambrose Beers

Nonsense.

The idea that the U.S. military is going into the crapper because it has repetitive, demeaning tasks (this is new?) rather than because it's been gendered-down for political correctness (yes, a very new concern) violates the rules of logic. And yes, PC IS a bad thing, despite being the polluted intellectual sea that liberals much like to swim in (better go — starting to mix my metaphors).

Ralph Ward
<rward@boardroominsider.com>

Well, you've managed to notice a grand total of one of the reasons why I argued that the military has become mediocre (again) — but, again, what can you say about the many, many, many times when we haven't been ready when war broke out? Or maybe you think I'm just making all of that up, I guess.

And, by the way, every time I ever write anything that was critical of the military, I get email accusing me of being, oooh, a "liberal" (or a peacenik, or a pacifist, or blah blah blah.) I'm not. And I'm in the Army — enlisted infantry. So. Yeah. But labeling saves on the thinking, doesn't it?

Ambrose Beers

Mr. Beers:

Hi. Nice article. You neatly captured several of the issues and brought a no-nonsense outlook too their discussion. Too many people buy into that political-correctness-is-the-problem line. Those hot-blooded pilots will exit the Air Force (or Navy) and go get better-paying jobs as pudgy guys flying 747s for United.

I must put in one thing, however: you missed the point about maintaining the standard. That is, in the Army at any rate, how you achieve excellence, and not a sure sign you're not achieving excellence. I don't mean how you get noticed and get ahead, though that's somewhat true. Maintaining the standard means making sure everyone is physically fit, follows orders, can fire their weapons, can don their gas masks in the appropriate amount of time, etc. It means you can do the minimum daily requirement of soldiering.

But doing the minimum daily requirement doesn't lead to standardized half-assed robots. People tend to focus on the minimums and things like haircuts and shoe shines, but the system is deeper than that. For instance, while the standard for push-ups might be 50 (or whatever), the standard for PT is doing it three times a week in a manner designed to prepare soldiers for battle. So if you maintain the training standard the actual testing standard is easy to the point of being silly. The same for common task training (using a radio, NBC gear, doing first aid, etc.) and Sergeants Time training (job-based skills). It's long and involved, but the point is that the whole system is designed so we don't have any more Task Force Smith disasters.

I first came in the Army in 1975 and spent my first enlistment watching people get fat, smoke hash and tell sergeants to fuck off. We don't have that kind of Army anymore. People don't like the fact that it takes attention to detail and maintaining a set of standards, but that's what does it.

Anyway, if you're read this far I'm amazed. Nice article.

Thanks,

Joseph Ferrare
<jferrare@mac.com>

I read that far, so be amazed. Thanks for some worthwhile insight.

Maintaining the standard,

Ambrose Beers

Monsieur Beers —

An excellent trouncing of silly neo-conservative Stephanie Gutmann. By her own admission, much of her work comes from the guilt she feels at the slights she perceives she (and her peers in Ann Arbor) heaped upon military folk in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. That military personnel got a raw deal from "elite civilians" might well be conceded; in those days, as now, lots of people who actually work for a living have caught hell from America's upper crust (ah, how well I remember the days of Reagan--which seem to be back upon us...). As is common with buzzword-happy bestseller-wannabes like Gutmann, however, she overlooks a more insidious and possibly more threatening trend: elite military members who feel that their primary allegiance is to their branch of service and their immediate comrades, rather than to the civilian government. This group has popped up in the professional journals of the services from time to time, and had its biggest brush with the media when Bill Clinton was warned that his safety could not be guaranteed is he visited certain military bases. There have been writers who have commented on the rise of this neo-Praetorianism, but none come to mind at the moment--might just be the drugs, but it certainly might be because Gutmann's ilk is treated to much more media exposure.

Yrs,

Michael Treece
<nonwhiz@earthlink.net>

Yes, and I know that at least Thomas Ricks has written about that very thing — and about the general politicizing of the military. Two generations back, senior soldiers considered it inappropriate to be seen as partisan — Eisenhower never voted until he left the army and ran for president, Ricks has written (if I'm remembering this correctly, duh), because he didn't think it was appropriate for him to be taking sides on the question of who his commander-in-chief was supposed to be. Annnd now the officer corps is becoming much more closely aligned with the positions and politicians of the Republican party. How much of that has to do with Bill Clinton, I don't know, but we'll see if the trend continues now that he's gone.

Ambrose Beers

My own theory is that the military is pissed about political correctness not so much because it has no taste for it — quite the opposite, in fact — but because it's not their brand of political correctness. The same operative explains why, in the seventh grade, Steve Ropczyky could tell all the Polack jokes you ever heard and then some, but God help you if you ever told one yourself. It's one thing to have your own martinets (your examples were mid-ranking officers) enforcing idiotic orders, but it's quite another when an outsider orders the He-Man Girl-Haters Club to admit skirts into the treehouse.

I have a suspicion that Gutman may have a valid point or two hiding betwixt the covers of her book. In the end, homocidal mania (the good kind) is a guy thing. Unlike the Israelis, we do not need a kick-ass military as a matter of national existence. And this is probably Good: the salient feature of good soldiers is the ability to kill, efficiently, on command, not something conducive to peacetime. But feminizing the military for the sake of keeping Hillary Clinton smiling is a bad idea, the same as with any other kind of political correctness.

Rob McMillin
<rlm@pricegrabber.com>

So Steve Ropczyky goes into a bar, right, and he says to the bartender...

But, yes: Stephanie Gutmann does have a couple of valid points hiding in her book, buried in the pile of stupidity. But she's not smart enough to make them.

Susan Faludi actually waded into this same water with Stiffed, but Susan Faludi is smart and insightful and a careful observer. Much better book, that one. There's even a good deal in it that I don't particularly agree with, but she argues it so well that it's difficult to really raise much of an objection.

So, I mean, I think maybe a fair part of my disgust with Gutmann has to do with her dumbness ("the six-level imperious tower"), rather than her outlook. Uh, as if those weren't connected in any way. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's much more pleasant to disagree with interesting smart people.

(And Steve Ropczyky replies, "no thanks — if six don't kill the taste, nothing will!")

Ambrose Beers

The Shit

Physical Strength and How to Obtain It, by Eugen Sandow

Bamboozled, A Spectacular New Film by Mr. Spike Lee

G. Beato's all-new Soundbitten

William Demarest, Sultan of Snarl, in The Lady Eve (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)

George Wallace: Settin' The Woods On Fire, directed by Daniel McCabe and Paul Stekler

1995

Bobby Darin, Darin at the Copa (Atlantic)

Shinji-San in the floating world of indeterminate duration, by Peter Richardson

American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation, by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor

Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (1996, Merge)

45, by Bill Drummond

Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards, Singing in the Rain (ASV)

Do you know of stuff that doesn't actively suck? Things so good they deserve to make the Shitlist? Send your suggestions to us.