Rejection of History

“I never agreed with the idea of the fairly stuffy Edwardian-type gentleman,” Mr. Wigram said. “It wasn’t my idea of Sherlock Holmes.” --WIGRAM, NYT

Der epiphane Charakter der Kulturindustrie

“Even though the stories are a joy to read and reread, they do tend to be fairly small, contained murder mysteries,” he said. “And so for the big mainstream audiences these days, I knew we would have to come up with something where the stakes were bigger and that had a big fantasy element.” -WIGRAM, producer of new Sherlock Holmes movie, NYT

person no more

In the synopsis for the headline "Michelle Obama, Reluctant No More" the New York Times employs a terrible neologistic phrase (italics added):

Michelle Obama is at the center of what may be the most closely managed spousal rollout in history.

the beauty of translation

From the New York Times article about Estonian discus gold-medalist, Gerd Kanter:

“For a cracker, the wind was too strong,” he said. “If there was no wind I could probably add a couple of meters. Now it comes backward.”

table turning*

Everything was going so well in this sweet New York Times story about "tattooed bikers" who rescue animals from abusive caretakers until this sneaked in:

The group was joined by a man from the Humane Society and an investor from Canada, a tall, slim figure with gelled hair who saw Rescue Ink on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” in May and flew down from Vancouver to ride along and talk about branding.

The presence of investors and "branding" lends everything else the sour taste of cynical marketing ploys and the ugly, morally decrepit mechanisms of capitalism; the insatiable desire to reduce--in the interest of reducing costs and raising profits--complexity to the greatest degree of singular, universally recognizable graphic simplicity.

*From Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of commodities and the Secret thereof":

The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

seriously, no joke, watch your step

Those "tech-artist" protesters who were detained by the Chinese received a ten-day jail sentence, according to Boing Boing. This doesn't exactly burnish China's free-speech credentials, but, on the other hand, anyone identified as a "tech-artist/student/protester/activist" is probably young, healthy and of at least middle-class origins (also likely annoying). A ten-day stint in a jail surely isn't pleasant for anyone, but it seems like they will get out and probably have a solid support system at home. They can blog/twitter/facebook/myspace and otherwise relate their experience and express their righteous discontent.

But now, reports Deadspin and the New York Times, China has arrested two septuagenarians and sent them to "re-education" camps. No one is happy about this:

The two women, both in their late 70s, have never spoken out against China’s authoritarian government. Both walk with the help of a cane, and Ms. Wang is blind in one eye. Their grievance, receiving insufficient compensation when their homes were seized for redevelopment, is perhaps the most common complaint among Chinese displaced during the country’s long streak of fast economic growth.

But the Beijing police still sentenced the two women to an extrajudicial term of “re-education through labor” this week for applying to hold a legal protest in a designated area in Beijing, where officials promised that Chinese could hold demonstrations during the Olympic Games.