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A Dowd-y view of indie film

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New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has her fans, but I am not one of them. Her pieces usually read to me like a series of drafts of alternate leads: She keeps trying out one-liners and fine-tuning her jokes, but seems uninterested in actually building an argument. Often she has her finger on the pulse of a narrow spectrum of Beltway (and, lately, Hollwood) insiders; she aggressively distances herself from her subjects via a barricade of wisecracks, but they seem to be the only stratum of society she is actually interested in.

Her piece
today on Soderbergh’s new “Full Frontal” (which I have not seen, but Stephanie Zacharek reviews here) is actually somewhat more linear than the norm for her; this time, the problem is that her argument — that “indie” does not necessarily equal “good,” or, as she says, “just because something is grainy doesn’t mean it’s cooler” — is about 30 years old. There is nothing novel or innovative in pointing out that being low-budget crude, or art-house obscure, does not in itself render a movie worthy of one’s attention or ticket dollar.
Pauline Kael established this essential critical stance early on in her career, and several generations of critics — myself very much included — grew up accepting it as a given. Cheap movies succeed or fail artistically in much the same ratio as expensive ones. There is no correlation between budget size and quality (or virtue). About the only indictment of big Hollywood movies that does not apply equally to small indie movies is that they squander huge sums of money and cultural attention. When an indie flops, the waste is less egregious.

Lee Felsenstein’s blog

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Lee Felsenstein is blogging at Lee Felsenstein Ad Seriatim.
Subtitle: “Thoughts of an Industry Character who’s been around since Year
Minus One.” Lee was a pioneer of the dawn of the personal-computer era; I
learned to program assembly language (or was it machine language? I
certainly can’t remember, and it was the only time in my life I’ve ever
done so!) in 1978 on one of the Sol
computers he created. This weekend he offers a memoriam to
Bob Bickford.

Party of the pocketbook

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As the latest Bush recession heads into its second dip, it’s washing away one of the oldest truisms in American politics.

When I was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, conventional wisdom about our political parties was clear: Democrats stuck up for working people and minorities, but you couldn’t trust them with your money. For that, you wanted a Republican. This reached a head in the late ’70s, as Jimmy Carter faced runaway inflation, oil shocks and unemployment, and couldn’t seem to make headway against them. Reagan’s election brought a recession, a tax cut and a deepening federal deficit — but one way or another he got credit in the national mythology for dispelling the Carter malaise and putting the economy right.

Since Reagan, though, a new pattern has emerged, not just in the reality of the economy’s numbers but in the shorthand of the popular mind. Bush I: Recession. Clinton: Economic growth. Bush II: Recession.

Circumstance and luck play a huge part in all this, to be sure. But patterns like these are what build popular myths. If Bush doesn’t begin improving the fumbling performance of his economic team, or break free of his “tax cut or die” ideology, he could inherit a cruel variation on James Carville’s mantra from the 1992 election — as “It’s the economy, stupid” gets transformed in the popular mind to “It’s stupid’s economy.”

Opera’s handy

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John Robb asks for a tool that would put his most-visited sites into a Web ring and let him click from one to the next. Opera — my favorite browser, hands down — handles this nicely: You can tell it to open all the sites in a bookmark folder in a series of windows, then just click from one to the next.

Reorganizing the back catalog

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If you haven’t checked out Salon’s spiffy new upgraded article directory, you’re missing out. In its seven-year history Salon has published tens of thousands of articles on every subject under the sun. The directory helps you find your way through this. You’ll also find a nifty “most popular topics” feature at the bottom of the directory’s main page.

When you access most older Salon stories you will now find them reformatted at a dir.salon.com URL. If you want to see the page in its original format, there’s a link at the bottom — or just change the URL to archive.salon.com.

On the other hand, apologies are in order for the state of our search engine, which actually indexes Salon well but does not handle multi-word searches well — and that’s the most common kind of search. We’re still working on it; in the meantime, Google does a fantastic job of searching Salon, as it always has.

Salon Blog watch

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Rich Kuslan is blogging business news from Asia.
Lena Diethelm’s ToonieTimes offers money tips and tax news, like these notes on the usefulness of Section 529 college savings plans.
Do newspapers aspire to be dull? Dave Cullen thinks so.
On Golf for Cats, Peter Wilson laments selling his collection of science-fiction pulps, and longs for their “unmatched pulpy smell.”
She’s Actual Size, Nationwide, Believe: I will happily link to any blog named from a They Might Be Giants song.

Character assassination of SpamAssassin

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There are many unpleasant new developments in the world of the Internet to bemoan, but the growing prevalence of spam filters is not one of them. We installed one of the best, SpamAssassin, here at Salon internally earlier this year, and it is a godsend. More recently we installed it on the mail server at the Well so users of Well e-mail accounts could benefit from SpamAssassin’s capabilities.

So why is online-news pundit Steve Outing complaining about spam filters? Outing suggests that spam filters will somehow censor content on the Net because people will avoid using the controversial words that “trigger” the filters. He writes from the perspective of an e-mail newsletter publisher who’s worried that his product is being improperly blocked by the filters, and singles out SpamAssassin as the main offender.

The trouble is, he misunderstands the way SpamAssassin is installed by people who know what they’re doing. One of the great things about it is that it doesn’t automatically delete spam; the way we use it, it tags incoming e-mails as probable spam. The user can then use his e-mail client to filter these probable spams into a separate mailbox for review and deletion. This is, in fact, the way the Well uses it too (Outing misreports this).

A bad spam filter can indeed raise the danger of “false positives” — filtering out e-mail that you wanted to receive. But in truth, there’s little danger of Outing’s newsletter, or anyone else’s, being invisibly trashed by SpamAssassin. You can “whitelist” mail from any recipient you want — basically telling the filter, “Don’t tag this person’s mail as spam, no matter what.”

SpamAssassin isn’t perfect, but it’s a step up the evolutionary ladder. It regularly sifts out hundreds of spams a day from my inbox. And after the first day’s fine-tuning, it hasn’t delivered a single “false positive.” I’m sorry to see it unfairly maligned.

Blogalalia

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Dave Winer recently pointed to this essay by Meg Hourihan, “What we do when we blog,” which contests the notion that blogging is exclusively a phenomenon associated with political debate or post-9/11 “war” commentary. Hourihan — one of the original folks behind Pyra, the company that brought Blogger into the world — writes thoughtfully on the subject, pointing out that the reverse-chronological structure of blogs can be, and is, a vehicle for any topic imaginable.

One line really jumped out at me:

  Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of “page”), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.

I spent years writing overnight theater reviews for the San Francisco Examiner to an exact word count (we’d agree on a number of column-inches the day before, and then I had to fill that space precisely, or write short, unless I wanted to risk having the review chopped to fit “on the flat” by a late-night copy editor’s x-acto knife). Moving to the Web in 1995, I already felt “liberated from word count” — my stories could now fill as little or as much room on the Web page as they demanded. The constraint was now not room on a piece of paper, but rather the reader’s attention span.

This is a writer’s paradise. It can also be a reader’s hell. Word count is a discipline as well as a yoke. It forces writers to make choices; deciding what to leave out is as or more important than deciding what to put in. The discipline may matter less when one is writing for an intimate few than for a mass audience, but it remains central to effective writing. When everyone is liberated from word count, who will read the ensuing torrent of verbiage?

Maybe, of course, it doesn’t matter: A blog with only a handful of readers has succeeded as long as they’re the readers the writer cares about — and who care about what the writer is saying.

Odds and ends

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The very phrase “Dow 36000” evokes guffaws these days, but the guys who wrote the book with that title — James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett — offer some cogent defense of their work in today’s Wall Street Journal. Their position, in brief: They never said stocks couldn’t be volatile in the short run; stocks are still undervalued; in the long run, the Dow will reach 36000. In the long run, of course, as Keynes reminded us, we’re all dead.
Phillip Pearson of Second p0st has built some scripts to trawl blogland and build a snapshot of the “blogging ecosystem,” collecting and ranking sites based on number of links in and out.
At tresproducers, Eric Olsen is organizing Blogcritics.com — free music CDs from music companies looking to get their products reviewed by bloggers.

Barons of bankruptcy

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How much money did executives at now-bankrupt companies pocket while their firms were circling the drain? The Financial Times investigates and offers this eye-opening table. (Thanks to Rafe Colburn for the link.) (Warning — those FT links won’t open if you use Opera or any other offbeat browser. Don’t you hate that?) (And in the time between my posting this morning and now, 6 p.m., the Financial Times has made these articles “subscription only.”)