What Female Journalists Really Care About XLIV

There's always the Washington Post's XX featurette for heaping mounds of Taking Everything Personally:

To Be Young, Gifted, and White in Hollywood

• By Nina Shen Rastogi

The blogosphere is a-twitter about Vanity Fair’s latest “New Hollywood” cover. Specifically, its stark lily-whiteness. As Dlisted put it, this year’s annual Annie Leibovitz shot “makes a BYU class picture look like a Benetton ad.”

Bloggers have pointed out a few obvious, non-white actresses who could have been included, like Gaby Sidibe, who is featured in the portfolio inside the magazine, but not on the cover.

The star of Precious weighs 300 pounds. No woman is going to be drawn to make an impulse purchase of a fashion and lifestyle magazine because there's a 300 pounder on the cover.

There’s also Zoe Saldana, who starred in the two biggest sci-fi movies of the year, Star Trek and Avatar.

This Dominican-American is really good in Avatar as Manute Bol's big blue sister, or whatever she's supposed to be. On the other hand, would anybody who saw her in Avatar recognize her?

Nobody gives credit to acting performances in special effects blockbusters, but it's probably technically harder to act well in a huge movie than in a low budget film where you get to act with other people and do more lines per day on the set. A big challenge in acting is adrenaline management. It's easiest in the theater where you just have to be on from 8 to 10pm each evening. You can arrange your day to peak then. It might be hardest in technically complicated films where its hard to foresee when they'll finally be ready for you back on the set after a long day of the crew twiddling with technology. On the other hand, maybe part of Cameron's new techniques are ones to make it easier on actors?

Yes, Saldana was featured on the cover of the 2008 Hollywood issue—behind the gatefold, natch, along with Alice Braga and America Ferrera—but then, they put ScarJo on the cover of the Hollywood issue THREE YEARS in a row. (2004, ‘05, and ‘06.) And can I make a retroactive vote for Charlyne Yi? Admittedly, I don’t think she glams up all that often, but the prospect is so delicious.

Hmmhmm, why would Nina Shen think Charlyne Yi should be put on magazine covers?

Try to play this game too long, though, and you run out of steam. After all, as Dodai Stewart points out on Jezebel, it’s not as if Hollywood is exactly teeming with hotly-tipped [excuse me?] young actresses of color. Maybe it’s just a numbers thing, and those of us who feel angry at VF really are just shooting the messenger. Most American movie ingénues, after all, are white, pretty, and thin. But it’s a chicken-and-the-egg kind of scenario. Is Hollywood to blame for not putting more actresses of color in its movies? Or are magazines like VF to blame for perpetuating the idea that young, worthy actresses are naturally thin, pretty, and Ivory soap-white?

Or maybe the overseas market, which now accounts for a large majority of American box office, is to be blamed? Maybe the Japanese, the world's #2 movie market, just like looking at Scarlett Johansson more than they like looking at Charlene Yi? (And in foreign markets where American films are dubbed into the local language, audiences don't have to listen to Scarlett's grating voice.)

Or maybe actresses of color should be blamed for not being, on average, glamorous and talented enough to sell as many movie tickets? Nah, by definition, it couldn't be that!

As momentarily satisfying as it feels, I also don’t feel entirely comfortable cherry-picking actresses of color and then waving them around, yelling, “Here’s one you could have put in there!” It makes it sound like we’re pushing for a kind of tokenism, some quota-based notion of “diversity,” when really it’s just sad that someone could look at an image like that and not see race written all over it.

I was chatting with a friend about the brouhaha today, and she was reminded of this line in Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker obit of J.D. Salinger:

In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Now, I happened to hate The Catcher in the Rye, and The Great Gatsby left me cold when I finally read it, years and years after I should have. So maybe Gopnik and I have different literary tastes. That’s all fine and good; I’m not obligated to buy his assertion that these are “perfect” novels. But the notion that these books should “speak” to me and my “condition”—that I will naturally find something resonant and familiar in the experiences described therein—makes me feel strangely claustrophobic. (And I can only imagine what a black person who finds Huck Finn deeply problematic is supposed feel.) It’s not that I think Gopnik should have added some books with minority characters to that short list. It’s just upsetting to be reminded that “white and male” is still seen as some kind of universal solvent—a category that everyone else can be dissolved into.

Damn white males have just written too many good books. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

My November 18 Super Bowl Prediction

I wrote in Taki's Magazine last November:

The things that we most like to argue about are those that are most inherently arguable ...

As you may have noticed by now, I’m like that: clueless about most subjects that most people are most desperate to discuss. Who will win the Super Bowl? Will the stock market go up or down tomorrow? Will the health bill pass? Which party will win the next election?

Don’t ask me.

Those questions concern competitive institutions that are structured in ways that make their outcomes hard to foresee … and therefore captivating.

Paradoxically, that means that my being profoundly ignorant about these concerns wouldn’t keep me from making quick predictions that would be almost as accurate as if I did nothing else but study the subject.

Who will win the Super Bowl? Well, two minutes on Google leads me to a betting site that says the New Orleans Saints are +360, while the Indianapolis Colts are +385. (I don’t even know what those numbers are supposed to mean.) Here’s another site that has the Colts at 3:1 and the Saints at 4:1, which at least I understand.

So, there you have my fearless forecast: the Saints will meet the Colts in the 2010 Super Bowl, and one of them will win.

You heard it here first.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

America's Drunkest Cities

From USAToday:

Fresno, Calif. tops Men's Health magazine's list of America's "drunkest" cities while Boston, home to the "Cheers" bar where everyone knows your name, was deemed the "least drunk," besting even Salt Lake City.

I've been lied to by my Dropkick Murphys albums.

The magazine, which will publish the list of 100 major cities in it's March edition, drew upon such data as death rates from alcoholic liver disease, booze-fueled car crashes, frequency of binge-drinking in the past month, number of DUI arrests, and severity of DUI penalties.

"Drunkest" cities:

1. Fresno, Calif.
2. Reno, Nev.
3. Billings, Mont.
4. Riverside, Calif.
5. Austin
6. St. Louis
7. San Antonio
8. Lubbock, Texas
9. Tucson
10. Bakersfield, Calif.

"Least drunk" cities:

1. Boston
2. Yonkers, N.Y.
3. Rochester, N.Y.
4. Salt Lake City
5. Miami
6. Newark
7. Durham, N.C.
8. New York City
9. Fort Wayne, Ind.
10. Manchester, N.H.

See full list, including grades for each city from A to F.

Maybe somebody should pitch NBC on doing a new version of "Cheers" set in Fresno? With the track record of fine profit-making judgment that NBC's current management has, they might go for it...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Temple Grandin" on HBO

On Saturday night at 8pm, HBO is putting on a biopic with Claire Danes playing Temple Grandin, the high-functioning autistic animal sciences professor who is so interesting from a sort of sci-fi point of view, like HAL 9000 come to life. Her view, however, is that autistic people tend to have brains that function not like computers but like animals -- they can't see the forest for the trees. Animals are constantly spooked by small visual details that don't bother non-autistic humans because we barely notice much of what goes on around us that isn't relevant to our main trains of thought.

Here's a very positive review of the Temple Grandin film by Dorothy Rabinowitz in the WSJ.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Kathryn Bigelow v. James Cameron

From my new Taki's Magazine column about the ex-spouses who are contending for the Best Director Oscar:

Is it a coincidence that in Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker the name of the hero, a technical genius who loves his job more than his wife, is "James?" Bigelow's great theme over the last two decades is male obsessiveness, and who embodies that more than James Cameron?

Or is it a coincidence that Bigelow rather resembles a real-life version of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, that classic nerd’s heroine in Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi film Aliens? Like Weaver (whom Cameron also cast in Avatar), Bigelow is almost six feet tall. (Unsurprisingly, Cameron, to whom too much is never enough, digitally rendered Avatar’s butt-kicking blue babe to be ten feet tall.)

Both Weaver and Bigelow are well bred, lady-like, and attractive, but Bigelow is also an expert at blowing stuff up. When doing publicity for Aliens and Avatar, the actress has had to bluff her way past all the fanboys who hope that Sigourney, who majored in English at Stanford, shares their techy obsessions.

Unlike Weaver, Bigelow is a real Ripley. For example, like the Explosive Ordinance Specialists specialists whom The Hurt Locker portrays, Bigelow disdains typical Hollywood gas fireball explosions. She strove to make her blasts “a very dense, black, thick, almost completely opaque explosion filled with lots of particulate matter and shrapnel.”

Bigelow can talk explosions and lenses all day long. And that’s what The Hurt Locker is: soldiers filmed in Baghdad-like Amman, Jordan through telephoto lenses that deliver the exact opposite of Avatar’s famously immersive 3D.

The telephoto effect compresses the apparent distance between the near and the far. For instance, in this typical street scene, if an Improvised Explosive Device were concealed within that hulk of the car behind the U.S. G.I., would he be within the blast zone? The viewer can’t even guess how far away the car is from the soldier due to the telephoto lens foreshortening distance.

Thus, this art house action flick transpires in a disorientatingly flat and cluttered pictorial space. Bigelow’s telephoto shots keep the viewer from being able to discern what’s safely far away from the three heroes and what’s close enough to kill them, much like the potentially lethal environment confronting the soldiers as they try to disarm IEDs of unknown magnitudes.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

New York City's IQ Testing Mania

For years, I've been pointing out that the irony that so many of the New York City media types who are always pooh-poohing the entire concept of IQ in the press are simultaneously paying lots of money to have tested the IQs of their four-year-olds (four-year-olds!). Almost every prestigious private elementary school in NYC requires that applicants for kindergarten take the Wechsler IQ test, and the public gifted and talented schools use the more achievement test-like Otis-Lennon. It's a pretty hilarious irony.

Now, Jennifer Senior has a long article in New York, The Junior Meritocracy, questioning the wisdom of handing out lifetime prizes at age four. Surely, she asks, wouldn't it be better to, say, test at age seven, when IQ testing is more accurate?

I'm familiar with a public high school program only open to kids with stratospheric IQs of 145 or higher. Within the school there tend to be two groups of kids: those who scored >=145 on an IQ test in 8th grade, who are really smart; and those who got into this program's feeder programs in third grade. The kids who are in this high school because they scored >=145+ in second grade tend to be smart, but often not outlandishly smart, simply because of the lower accuracy in testing at earlier ages and a tendency toward regression toward the mean over time. Testing 4-year-olds just exacerbates all this.

My guess is that testing at age 4, despite its high degree of arbitrariness, is popular with New York City parents because it lets them decide whether they will stay in Manhattan / Brooklyn or move to a suburb where the open enrollment schools have good students on average. If your kid gets into an exclusive public program or into a famous private school, then we'll stay in the city. Otherwise, Fort Lee, here we come!

The summer before he starts school is a pretty easy time to move a kid. After that, he'll have school friends, and he'll be old enough to complain more.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Prince of Darkness"

I recently read The Prince of Darkness, the 2007 autobiography of the late Washington reporter and TV commentator Robert D. Novak, who died last August. It's a quite distinctive memoir that nicely conveys Novak's love of ferreting out individual facts -- it's a book that will prove useful to future historians of politics and the press in understanding how reporters got scoops and what their incentives were -- and his aversion to the kind of Big Picture synthesizing that's the norm in an autobiography.

It's the opposite of Dreams from My Father: Novak realizes the reader is mostly interested in accounts of what the big names he met over the years (from JFK through GWB) were really like, and limits himself to giving his side of various historical events he was involved in, such as the Valerie Plame affair, and recounting data about himself that is useful in understanding the media.

Although he dislikes summing up, Novak is candid that getting a scoop (and Novak probably got more Washington scoops, large and small, than anybody) depends upon serving the self-interest of whoever is doing the leaking. (Lead and Gold has more about Novak's book here.) Still, knowledge is better than ignorance.

For example, Novak reports how much money he made at various points in his life: e.g., when he works for the AP in Omaha in 1954, he made $68 per week. In a characteristic touch that I've never seen in any other autobiography, Novak almost always adjusts his income for inflation. That mythological-sounding $68 per week turns out to be the rather more prosaic equivalent of "$512 in 2006 purchasing power."

On the last page, Novak writes:

Memoirists often are explicit in reporting their skimpy salaries in their early years and become reticent when monetary success comes. Breaking that pattern, I will disclose that my adjusted gross income for 2004 reached a high of $1.2 million.

The dyspeptic Novak's general impressions are few but worth recounting. After leaving sportswriting, the first major politician he ever met as a political reporter, the governor of Nebraska, turned out to be "considerably less impressive than the athletic coaches who up until then had been my most intimate news sources. But so were nearly all the legislators. This first impression of the political class did not change appreciably in a half century of sustained contact. ... I did not find the caliber of politicians in Washington generally any higher than what I had encountered in Indianapolis and Lincoln."

The President who seems to have impressed the conservative journalist the most for general caliber is one he liked little politically: Bill Clinton. Strikingly, Novak's blunt opinions extended to himself. He recounts sitting next to Clinton for four hours at a Gridiron Club dinner during the Monica Lewinsky year. Clinton deftly talked to Novak about his passion, college basketball, but mostly talked to the guest on his other side, conservative press baron Conrad Black (who later went to jail over his finances), about Black's interest, FDR. Novak modestly writes:

That night, these two strong, complicated men enjoyed themselves talking about another strong complicated man. Beyond that, I think Clinton and Black liked each other because they both were intelligent, reckless, charismatic risk-takers. I simply was not in their class.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Class"

I never got around to posting my old review from The American Conservative of the 2009 French movie "The Class." So, for completists:

“The Class,” a slice-of-life drama tracking a year in an inner city Parisian junior high school, has been greeted rapturously, winning the top prize at the Cannes film festival. The critical acclaim stems mostly from “The Class” not being Hilary Swank’s 2007 “Freedom Writers” or all those other tiresome Nice White Lady movies in which heroic teachers overcome “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and turn their charges into Nobel Laureates.

In contrast, this French film offers a refreshingly realistic depiction of the frustrations of teaching. It’s not wholly plausible—as in all school movies, there is only a single class in “The Class”—but it’s almost unique in suggesting that student quality matters.

“The Class” is based on an autobiographical novel by schoolteacher François Bégaudeau. In the manner of WWII hero Audie Murphy, who played himself in the film version of his memoir “To Hell and Back,” Bégaudeau portrays a teacher named M. Marin. “The Class” could be called “To Heck and Back” because “inner city” doesn’t mean quite the same thing in Paris as it does in Detroit. The French like their cities, so the riotous public housing projects are out in Paris’s dreary suburbs. The Parisian 14-year-olds in “The Class” aren’t gun-packing gangbangers, as in Hollywood movies. They’re just mouthy adolescents, lazy, not terribly bright, and full of ressentiment at the dominance of elitist French culture.

M. Marin’s French literature class is half-French and half-minority, with the unrulier Muslims, black and white, absorbing most of his attention. The smartest and most respectful student is a Chinese immigrant, while the worst troublemaker is Souleymane from Mali in sub-Saharan Africa. One well-spoken lad who hopes to win admission to the elite Lycée Henri IV goes largely ignored in the turmoil caused by his less intelligent classmates. They constantly monitor whether they are being disrespected, so they can get off task. Griping about being dissed is more fun than being forced to reveal to the other kids that they can’t do the work. Marin banters with them, but he’s too genteel to thrive amidst all the dominance struggles.

Now in his fifth year, Marin is no longer an idealist. When a naive colleague suggests that Marin should assign Voltaire’s Candide, he demurs, “The Enlightenment will be tough for them.” Marin tries to get the class to read The Diary of Anne Frank instead (which, in “Freedom Writers,” turns teacher Erin Gruwell’s slum students into prodigies of literary creativity), but it mostly annoys Marin’s heavily Muslim class.

The triumph of multiculturalist ideology is less complete in France than in most other Western countries. Having successfully assimilated European immigrants by immersion in the French language, the French tend to assume that these latest newcomers must eventually wake up and appreciate the inherent superiority of French culture. In his grammatical examples illustrating the imperfect subjunctive (which is employed solely in upscale written French), Marin uses only European names. (That’s a habit that has been drilled out of American teachers.) The students, however, subscribe to American ideas about multiculturalism. An obnoxious girl of North African descent objects to the teacher’s Eurocentric names as “Honkies, Frenchies, Frogs!”

And why do they need to learn the imperfect subjunctive, anyway? “It’s bourgeois,” the children argue, parroting generations of celebrated French leftist intellectuals, not realizing that you can’t get to be a celebrated French leftist intellectual unless you’ve mastered French grammar.

At a teacher’s meeting attended (bizarrely) by two bored student representatives who giggle in the back row, the faculty plots to suspend Souleymane. Marin urges mercy, arguing that Souleymane's not bad, he’s just reached his limits academically. The two students sit upright, scandalized that a teacher would suggest that any student is below average in intelligence. The next day, the girls start a brouhaha in class over this, which worsens when Marin responds using grammar too sophisticated for them to interpret correctly. In the ensuing melee, Souleymane unintentionally smacks a bystander in the eye.

After he is expelled, the classroom atmosphere improves. Still, by the end of the year, only the smart students have learned much.

“The Class” is filmed in that unattractive quasi-documentary style—claustrophobic close-ups on cheap digital video—that has become de rigueur for prestige films. There’s no music on the soundtrack, and almost no humor, either. The slow “real-time” pacing effectively conveys the boredom felt by many students, but the opportunity cost is that there’s no room for an engaging plot.

Rated PG-13 for language.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer