The year ended with several fun experiences, including chances to see performances by Chris Rock, Dave Chapelle, and Adam Sandler. I was also honored to participate in a conference at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution on the constitutional thought of Frederick Douglass; and while there, got a chance to see the D.C. Shakespeare Theater Company’s production of Much Ado About Nothing (which I’m sorry to say was a little too slapsticky; the play doesn’t work unless Benedick is sympathetic, and nothing was done in this performance to make the audience care about him or applaud his union with Beatrice). Then we went to see The Menu…
Did every critic miss the point of The Menu?
When I read the reviews of the new horror/satire film The Menu, I was surprised to see that every critic had failed to get what it was about—at least, it seems so to me. I explain on my blog:
If I’m right in my interpretation of The Menu, it may be among the cleverest satires ever made: one that has escaped the notice of precisely those who are being speared. And yet at the same time, that may make it all the more infuriating—in that even in puncturing the most grotesque of Hollywood’s current-day illusions, it is engaging in just another illusion. Preaching against the inanity of the film industry’s recent decades of Message Films is, after all, just another message. Margot is right that what we should expect of Hollywood—what we, as consumers have a right to demand of Hollywood—is a simple and well-made cheeseburger, rather than being insulted by hypocrites whose knowledge of justice is hand-me-downs from John Rawls or Herbert Marcuse.
California turned a constitutional shield into a government sword
California’s “Anti-SLAPP” law was written to protect people’s right to speak out against government wrongdoing. But thanks to judicial interpretations that have held that the government itself has free speech rights, it’s now become a tool cities use to intimidate people who dare to do just that. I wrote about it in the Orange County Register. Excerpt:
California judges aren’t blind to the dangers of the bizarre “Anti-SLAPP” precedent. In 2004, one appellate court warned against politicians using “Anti-SLAPP” to “impose an undue burden upon the very right[s]” that it was intended to protect.But city officials now routinely abuse the law in just that way. In 2016, when property owners sued Santa Barbara over a similar anti-rental ordinance, the city filed an “Anti-SLAPP” motion against them. The trial judge rejected it—but only after more than a year of legal wrangling that cost the property owners $30,000 in legal bills. That same year, a citizen sued Siskiyou County officials for meeting in secret, in violation of state open-meeting laws. They retaliated with an “Anti-SLAPP” motion—which the judge granted. An appellate court later reversed that decision, but it took more than two years—and only then could the initial lawsuit start.
Last year’s reading roundup
Here’s my list of the books I read in 2022 and what I thought of them. Overall, it was a good reading year, and it was hard to pick a single favorite. But I settled on Midnight in Chernobyl as the best book I read this year; an absolutely stunning book. I also really loved Daniel Okrent’s book on the building of Rockefeller Center, which was full of all sorts of fascinating tidbits about this architectural icon and the city that surrounds it. Also on the list of best books of the year was:
A rave review
It’s rare that I get to write an unqualified rave review, but I did so for A.E. Stallings’s new collection of poems, entitled This Afterlife, which I reviewed for The Objective Standard. I think Stallings is the best living American poet, and her book is superb:
W. H. Auden said a good lyric poem is like an algebraic equation, which the poet solves for an unknown variable. He meant that a successful poem sets up a sequence of thought in the reader’s mind so that he feels himself drawing his own conclusions—at just the instant, and in just the manner, that the poet has planned. The result is an almost telepathic union between artist and audience. At her best, Stallings’s poems are carved with just such precision that this quality of aptness can leave a reader stunned—or laughing, not at their humor (although some are quite funny) but at the cleverness of their architecture.
Boot Straps and Atlas Shrugged
Speaking of books, here’s a fun item from my library: a signed copy of Boot Straps, the autobiography of Tom Girdler, who was the president of Republic Steel in Pittsburgh. Girdler resisted efforts by the far-left Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations) to unionize the company. Actually, the companies were already unionized, but CIO leaders called it a “company union,” and they marched on Republic Steel’s facilities in 1937. When the protestors became violent, there ensued the infamous “Memorial Day Massacre.” Girdler was unjustly blamed for the violence, and in 1943, he published this memoir to set the record straight.
When a pre-publication copy landed on Isabel Paterson’s desk at the New York Herald Tribune, she was struck by what she called Girdler’s “absence of ideas”—by which she meant his naïveté about the true nature of socialism and the New Deal—and she sent it to her friend Ayn Rand, who had recently moved back to California to begin work on the movie version of The Fountainhead. Rand, too, was disappointed in Girdler’s failure to grasp the philosophical nature of the attacks against him, and was moved to write him a letter about his book, which was then still unfinished. Girdler and Rand corresponded a bit, and Girdler read and admired The Fountainhead; he later sent her an inscribed copy of his book (which you can purchase for $3,500!)
Rand would later use Girdler as a model for the character of the philosophically naïve steel magnate Hank Rearden in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.
“Ukraine will rise again”
In last month’s newsletter I mentioned the composer Sergei Bortkiewicz. In a new fundraising video for aid to Ukraine, the pianist Margaret Fingerhut performs a piece of Bortkewicz, accompanied by video of the war. Check it out:
Moving into 2023…
The Rose Parade is tomorrow, since today’s a Sunday. That gives this native Pasadenan an opportunity to remind you all that it’s “The Rose Parade” or “The Tournament of Roses,” not “The Rose Bowl Parade.” And here’s a little thing I wrote a fwe years ago about the Parade and the grouches who hate it.
Wishing you and yours a happy and prosperous new year….