I want to bring up a handful of things that seem to me to deserve to be mentioned in the midst of the Weinstein madness. Not that Harvey doesn’t seem to be a pig, of course!
The thousands of hot young women who are on the make in showbiz are often shamelessly aggressive about using their sexiness to get ahead. In my own years in the NYC media and arts worlds I didn’t run into many young women who’d strike anyone as passive, naive, born victims. (One of the things I love about a lot of performers, fwiw, is the way they so often manage to keep a kind of fizz and innocence alive while participating actively in a sleazy, exploitative business. More of us should have that ability.)
A lot of showbiz people who are ruthlessly using and exploiting each other are having a great time doing so, females and males both. The heartless, egocentric carrying-on may be horrifying at times, especially to civilians, but it’s often very exciting for the participants. Success, money, drugs, sex, showbiz and fame — and the pursuit of the above by any means necessary — can be incredible highs for all parties concerned.
Another angle that hasn’t been discussed enough is what’s up with Ronan Farrow, the author of the New Yorker piece that set the entire Weinstein affair off? Maybe it’s just me, but Ronan seems to be working out his own weird-and-personal agenda. Here’s how I put it together. Ronan 1) is very ambitious for his own career, and 2) has been a big supporter of the Woody daughter who has accused Woody of molesting her as a child.
I turn these hints into something like: Ronan thinks of fame as something that should belong to him by right of inheritance, but since it isn’t simply coming his way he has set out to achieve fame and wealth by bringing down an older establishment that he sees (and/or is just willing to portray) as repulsive and super-corrupt. Ronan’s both fame-hungry and obsessed by sexual abuse committed by movieworld people, in other words. Or maybe it’s just his own big opportunity. Ronan may have failed to put Woody in jail (and thereby achieve big fame for himself), but now he’s found a lot more success by attacking Harvey.
Is it wicked of me to notice too that 1) Ronan is gay or at least bisexual, and 2) if Ronan is Woody’s kid — there have long been rumors that Ronan’s real dad was Frank Sinatra — that makes him half-Jewish, while nearly all the other male players in the Weinstein drama, good guys and bad guys alike, are straight and fully Jewish? That would include not just Woody and Weinstein but Noah Oppenheim, the screenwriter/head of NBC News, who turned the story down, and David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who finally ran the story. It’s all very, well, Biblical, isn’t it?
In any case, even though I’m bugged a lot less than many people are by the idea that an uncouth, pushy movie producer/executive was prone to demanding sexual favors from young actresses in exchange for career favors, now that the brushfire is definitively running its course I confess that I’m having a good time watching it burn. Will the naming-and-shaming stop with Harvey Weinstein or will it spread throughout the entire movie business? And maybe even beyond?
This dark-eyed Ukrainian beauty was a popular nude model for about 10 years. She’s a compelling combo of the natural and the elegant — poised, but in a way that’s direct, unfussy.
She pulls off the narrow-hipped look pretty well, doesn’t she? Her midriff is almost boyish, yet not disconcertingly so. Though I suppose there’s always room for complaint. One fan writes:
With a bottom just a little rounder, she would be the wonder of the wonders…
Well, one wonder out of two ain’t bad. And I like her bottom just fine.
Yes, I’m talking about the high school extracurricular activity but waitasecond, hear me out before you click over to the most recent Naked Lady of the Week.
The GF and I were working our way through PARKS & RECREATION (funny show!) when we got to an episode that takes place during a high school Model United Nations conference. I started thinking about the Model UN and what an odd program it is. Kids pretending to be diplomatic delegates, negotiating in committees, and studying parliamentary procedure? Sure, I guess, but the whole thing strikes me as more than a little weird considering that 0.00001% of the population becomes a professional diplomat. “Yes, but the Model UN prepares them for the business world generally!” you may say. To which I respond, “Then why not just have a club where kids start their own business?” Anyway, maybe I’ve been in an unusually conspiratorial cast of mind lately, but I started wondering if the Model UN isn’t some kind of government psyops program. We know that the CIA funded cultural weapons like modern art and The Paris Review, so is it really that big of a leap to believe that they funded (or otherwise encouraged) something to brainwash, er, educate, our future leaders? Off to Wikipedia!
The first Model United Nations was held at St. Lawrence University from February 11–13, 1949.[8] It was initiated by Dr. Harry Reiff, Head of the History and Government Department, with the assistance of departmental colleague Otto L. George.[9] Dr. Reiff was a technical advisor on the United States delegation to the 1945 San Francisco Conference (where the UN Charter was written) and the UN Organizational Conference in London in 1945-46 (where the UN was established).[10]
First step was to look up Dr. Harry Reiff of St. Lawrence University. The most substantive thing I could find was a FB post about a self-published biography written by his son. Maybe the book reveals that Dr. Reiff was actually Wild Bill Donovan’s right-hand man codenamed “Jason Bourne,” but I wasn’t about to order it to find out. So what about Otto L. George? WELL WELL WELL — WHAT DO WE HAVE HERE?
Otto L. George, 66, a senior intelligence officer and Asian analyst and editor with the CIA for 23 years before retiring in 1976, died of a heart ailment May 12 in a hospital in Leesburg. He had lived in Leesburg since 1980.
Mr. George was born in Dunellen, N.J., and reared in White Plains, N.Y. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Columbia University, and taught Asian history at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y.
He served as a Japanese language officer with the Navy in the Pacific during World War II, and joined the Navy reserves after the war. He was recalled to active duty during the Korean conflict, serving as an intelligence officer at the Pacific Fleet headquarters at Pearl Harbor. He retired from the service in 1953.
Mr. George moved to Washington in 1953 when he joined the CIA. He received the CIA’s Certificate of Distinction in 1976.
But not so fast, a quick check of the dates shows the timing is off. The United Nations was founded in 1945 while the CIA was founded in 1947. The first Model UN meeting was held in 1949 and George didn’t join the CIA until 1953, four years later. However, George was an intelligence officer during WWII through the Korean War, so it’s reasonable to assume he had intelligence (OWI? OSS? CIA?) contacts from 1945 to 1953. Might the government have funneled money through George? Seems possible. Hard to know how likely without knowing more details.
Look, I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid. I realize this is all insinuation and speculation that doesn’t prove anything. Still, it strikes me as an interesting, nontrivial connection worth investigating further. Not that I have any intention of doing so.
In the meantime, allow me to recommend a movie. It’s a 1943 picture called MISSION TO MOSCOW, written by Howard Koch, directed by Michael Curtiz, and produced by Warner Bros, the same creative team that gave us CASABLANCA. In fact, MTM was their immediate follow-up to CASABLANCA. The movie is a slog, but it’s also the most jaw-dropping piece of pro-Soviet propaganda you’ve ever seen in your life. Toward the end, our hero, the U.S.’s ambassador to Russia played by Walter Huston, meets kindly Uncle Joe who, along with the spirit of Uncle Karl, explains what great friends the U.S. and Soviets are.
It ends with a rousing vision of the future, the United States and Soviet Union creating the fabled City on the Hill after defeating the dastardly Germans.
As part of his contract with Warner Bros., Davies had absolute control over the script and could veto any dialogue not to his liking.[5]
During production, Office of War Information officials reviewed screenplay revisions and prints of the film and commented on them. By reviewing the scripts and prints, OWI officials exercised authority over Mission to Moscow, ensuring that it promoted the “United Nations” theme.[emphasis mine] An administration official advised the film’s producers to offer explanations for the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Red Army’s invasion of Finland. After reading the final script, in November 1942 the OWI expressed its hope that Mission to Moscow would “make one of the most remarkable pictures of this war” and “a very great contribution to the war information program”.[6]
…
Government information specialists were equally enthusiastic about the completed print. Judging it “a magnificent contribution” to wartime propaganda, the OWI believed the picture would “do much to bring understanding of Soviet international policy in the past years and dispel the fears which many honest persons have felt with regard to our alliance with Russia”. That was particularly so since “the possibility for the friendly alliance of the Capitalist United States and the Socialist Russia is shown to be firmly rooted in the mutual desire for peace of the two great countries”.[7]
Prior to its Russian release, the film was screened for Joseph Stalin at a banquet at the Kremlin attended by Joseph Davies and the British legation in Moscow.[8]
I love this part:
Called to testify under oath before Congress, Jack L. Warner at first claimed that the film was made at the request of Davies, who with the approval of FDR had asked Warner Bros. to make the film (this version of the facts was confirmed by Davies’ letter as well).[21] Warner later recanted this version, stating that Harry Warner first read Mission to Moscow and then contacted Davies to discuss movie rights.[21]
Probably my favorite detail in the movie is that, while Stalin and Churchill are played by actors, an actor plays FDR’s voice only but we never see his face. God forbid anyone should try to portray his sacred image.
His reading ran the gamut, from radical progressive to moderate progressive, along with the occasional conservative progressive to ensure that all sides were heard from.
won’t be the last word on the issue, mainly because there can never be a last word on the broader questions of artistic intent and integrity that are the main subjects of the piece.
Sure enough she is back, politics in tow again.
The Voice article on which I was commenting had its fair share of bullsh*t but digging deep into it I found the smallest of ponies. I found it refreshing that the paper used its old left voice, chastising State Street, the statue’s corporate sponsor, for standard issue corporate greed rather than relying on trendier charges based on new new left identity politics.
Even then State Street was in trouble with the feds over gender and race discrimination in compensation. But the Voice argued
(l)et’s leave aside State Street’s own recurring trouble with the law . . .
. . . going on to charge State Street with operating in the
grand Wall Street tradition is chasing profits wherever they may be found, a pursuit outside of moral distinctions.
It says something about the relative weights put on old left ideas versus identity politics nowadays that no one really cared much about the capitalism argument but that the feds made good on their discrimination charges. At the moment, identity is king, if you will excuse that term in this context.
The State Street Corporation, a financial services company that put the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street to promote the importance of women working in corporate leadership roles, will pay $5 million after an investigation found that it underpaid female and black executives.
The press loves this of course since it not only fits the narrative but the story has embedded right in it a lovely little ironic hook that gives the story added zip: the sponsor of the brave little girl standing up to Wall Street’s overly masculine energies is itself outed as a sexist cabal. Or, as the New York Post put it: Fearless Girl or Fearless Beard?
But the irony never stops in today’s world. Like the taco wrapped in a gordita shell wrapped in a crepe wrapped in a pizza irony comes in endless layers. Here, while the press has mostly presented State Street as guilty as charged the bank continues to maintain that it did not discriminate in compensation, and that the settlement was done to put the matter behind them, in the now-routine legal fashion we have adopted on such things.
According to the conciliation agreement
State Street denies that it has . . . discriminated in any manner against any of its current or former employees on the basis of race, gender, or any other protected classification. . . This agreement does not constitute an admission or denial by State Street of any violation of . . . laws nor has there been an adjudicated finding that State Street violated or did not violate any laws.
Well, you say, that’s just the way the game is played. The feds had them dead to rights and it suited the purposes of all the parties, including those who allegedly faced compensation discrimination, to just settle.
It does not seem that clean a matter to me.
Recall that the females alleging discrimination carried the titles of Managing Director, Senior Vice President and Vice President, and compensation is significantly a matter of discretion and performance. Compensation is typically provided by means of a base salary plus bonus. Determining whether discrimination exists is no simple matter in a more rigidly structured personnel system comprised of defined grades and salary ranges. It gets more difficult when discretion plays a large role.
I wrote here about the extreme difficulty of demonstrating a Hollywood pay gap given that compensation at the level of stars is as far as one can get from a mechanistic approach. Compensation for a State Street Managing Director is not that unmoored from easy metrics but it tilts in that direction. It is akin to the Google problem: fire Jim Damore for his heretical views while trumpeting the virtues of “paying unfairly”, a somewhat loaded term that signifies a deep commitment to performance and perceived contribution, and which can easily result in two people in the same role earning dramatically different amounts. Google still seems to be trying to square paying unfairly fairly by its lights and paying unfairly unfairly by the fed’s lights.
Perhaps it is technically not all that difficult to locate and analyze the necessary data. I dunno. For its part the feds say they ran a regression analysis that demonstrated a “statistically significant disparity even when legitimate factors affecting pay were taken into account.” The agreement does not describe the methodology in detail and the actual analysis undertaken does not seem to be public. I’d be interested in seeing how DOL auditors make sense of things like performance evaluations, and whether these are cranked into the regression analysis. Meantime State Street ain’t spilling the beans either. They have put this behind them.
I am not sure the Facebook like button is yet a threat to democracy but I do think there is something to this engineer’s concerns. I don’t like the intentionally addictive quality of some social media. It is possible that shortened attention spans may result and that on balance is not going to be a good thing for deliberative democracy. You can’t do democracy effectively with Twitter’s 140 character limit.
I am much more bothered by technology’s centralizing tendencies overall. When Apple did its famous 1984 ad, it was still possible with a straight face to hold up technology companies as engines of personal liberation. Since then it has been a coin toss as to whether technology will break in the direction of autonomy or control, and it seems pretty clear to me that it is breaking in the latter direction. The near future of such things was captured brilliantly in the Black Mirror episode entitled Nosedive, which you should see if you have not.
The linkage between private social media and government surveillance is a pretty chilling marriage. The idea of Mark Zuckerberg for President is horrifying.
Already we are seeing Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other big players beginning a soft censorship that will almost certainly morph in a harder direction. China seems to be mostly successful in throttling autonomy and fashioning an authoritarian approach to technology. And Europe is not far behind, with its increasingly tough approaches to speech in public and on the web. Our own up and coming younger generation seems much too casual about privacy and its louder members seem much to willing to trim back free speech in favor of a prim curation.
The entire history of mankind has involved a conflict between our natures and the direction we are pushed by civilization-building objective forces. There is no law that says we must make our natures subservient to the direction of change but there is the Darwinian realization that, as with biological evolution, some behavioral and technical patterns are more adaptive than others. Cultural beliefs are more than an afterthought–we are still agents of a sort. But the future belongs to those who show up.
If new technologies are in the final analysis centralizing then the future will one way or another, by hook or by crook, for good or ill and with many bumps in the road be collective. The large fights we are now witnessing over culture and politics may represent a felt sense that there is an Oklahoma land rush of a sort going on, and the people who determine what you get to see on Facebook today will be the precursors to the people who will be in charge of a lot more than that in the future.
Sophia is a British model who appears to be quite the entrepreneur. She’s been working for 10 years, has a few commercial sites to her name, and is an expert user of Twitter, at which she’s posted a list of goodies that admirers can purchase from Amazon and have sent to her. Hey, a girl’s gotta eat — and she’s also gotta have a set of giant garden dominoes.
Am I wrong to think she looks a bit like Barbara Stanwyck? I do love Barbara Stanwyck.
She describes herself thusly: “Naughty little nakedy model. Playboy. Chat Girl. Nuff Said.”
Naughty little nakedy model below. Have a great weekend.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 