In the weeks leading up to the final round of the 2010 Chilean presidential elections, Eduardo Frei, the candidate for the center-left Concertación coalition, ran a political advertisement in which an invisible hand scribbled words such as "ass" and "go to hell" on a white ballot. A sober voiceover stated: "You may be angry and you may think there's no way out, but submitting a blank or annulled ballot is a vote for the Right." Similar ads concluded with a pencil sharply crossing the line next to Frei's name, as if reminding viewers of the proper way to mark a ballot. The underlying sentiment was equal parts desperation and exhaustion, as the coalition that has governed Chile for twenty years was reduced to begging voters not to graffiti their ballots. Read More

It was at another conference some twenty-eight years ago, just before the moderator's opening remarks, that the Rome-born architect and theorist Bruno Zevi pushed back from the roundtable and rose from his seat to declare, "I denounce the presence at this symposium of the fascist Philip Johnson." The audience at Harvard's Graduate School of Design shifted nervously in their chairs. Zevi was referring to the events of fifty year prior, when Johnson had left the directorship of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art to write a series of glowing dispatches from the parade grounds at Nuremberg. On his return, Johnson followed this adventure with a trip in a Chrysler touring car through the American Mid-West, on a mission to establish National Socialism in the US.              

Of course, the conference-goers were aware of all this. Johnson's politics in the period 1933-1939 had been—remain—the subject of as much speculation and opprobrium among Johnson's peers as of evasion and oblique apology on the part of Johnson himself; no rapt auto da fé of Zevi's that morning was likely to elicit any further contrition from the accused, nor reveal anything not already known to most of the audience. But it wasn't supposed to. For Zevi, it had been a kind of ritual, a formality of opposition that legalized his participation in the Cambridge panel under the provisions of his own conscience. Having performed it, he sat down, and the symposium resumed as scheduled. Nothing more was said about it by either party. Read More

Drift

Someone is walking somewhere from someplace else—so begins an Eric Rohmer movie. Two secretaries in an office chat about nothing in particular; mail is sorted; a boat is at sea. The pointless opening is crucial for establishing the rhythm of these movies, and what happens as they unfold is not that events get more exciting but that the pointless events grow richer in meaning.

These movies capture the formless sequentiality of life, which moves us along until we find ourselves somewhere other than where we thought we were, or thought we might end up. Jean-Louis's conversation during My Night at Maud's feels like those real late-night sessions, mostly in college, which you can never plan in advance or later quite recall; in The Aviator's Wife, after hours of brooding and planning and anticipating the effects of what he has to say to his girlfriend, François never dreams that one thing he says will make her defensive, another will make her jealous, and a third will make her cry, so their talk shifts back and forth and it bewilders the boy, and perhaps the older woman too. Rohmer's understated theory of the relations between the sexes is nothing more than this: men and women drift farthest, and fastest, and most mysteriously, in their dealings with each other. Read More

Full disclosure from Dan Albert: n+1 hasn't had the funds this year to send its car correspondent to the Detroit Auto Show. Between the slide in the journal's endowment and the prohibition against wearing underwear when flying into Detroit Metro, it just hasn't seemed worth the trouble. What follows is "uncoverage" of the 2010 North American Auto Show, reporting from the safety of my suede slippers.

Here's what you need to know about the auto show if you only have a minute: Ford has been having a great show, winning both Car and Truck of the Year awards. There's nothing special about Ford's truck winner, the Transit Connect van—it is nearly identical to GM's Combo, Fiat's Fiorino, Peugeot's Partner, or Citroen's Berlingo, to name a few. Unfortunately, all of these machines are stuck in Europe without passports. Perhaps the success of the Transit will lead their manufacturers to import these competitors. The Ford Focus won the car award, deservedly so for the company's bread and butter world car. Read More

I am not the best skateboarder, have not been the best skateboarder. I mean that literally—there are loads of tricks I cannot do—but I also mean I've also never felt an obligation to the culture of skateboarding. I've never loved the scene. Some kids, you name a spot and they will tell you every famous trick landed there, by which famous skater, in which video, and, if you have the time, list all the skater's sponsors. Not me. Most of the time I was not interested. The culture I saw—both the one invented for TV ads and the one in Thrasher and Transworld, all gossip and buying and striving—never felt like it had much to do with the way skateboarding felt. Read More

In the NFL this season, passing dominated as never before. Ten quarterbacks threw for over 4,000 yards, besting by three the old record set in 2007. Seven of those quarterbacks led their teams to the playoffs—and they're joined there by Donovan McNabb and Kurt Warner, each of whom failed to reach the 4,000-yard mark only because they missed games early in the season. (Warner also sat out most of the Cardinals' final game, with a playoff spot secured.) It was—due to offensive trends, dominant receivers, stricter rules protecting QBs, and a host of other factors—The Year of the Pass. Read More

James Cameron's 3-D movie Avatar gave me a four-hour headache. Probably the headache was caused by a combination of the 3-D effect, a seat near the front and at the far edge of the theater, the way the 3-D glasses skewed my plain old glasses beneath, and the dark in which I biked home afterward, my bike light having been stolen while I was in the theater. But I can't help but also attribute the headache to the movie's moral corruptness.

It's a finished corruptness. The easiest way I can think of to describe it is by comparison with The Matrix, a movie which is merely disingenuous, and to some extent struggling with its disingenuousness. The moral lesson that The Matrix purports to offer is that the glossy magic of life inside a simulation distracts from painful truth. But the moral problem faced by the Matrix is that this lesson is betrayed by the fun that the movie has in playing inside the simulation. A viewer enjoys the scenes of jumping over buildings, and of freezing explosions and fistfights in midair and then rotoscoping through them. In fact, the viewer enjoys them much more than the scenes of what, within the conceit of the movie, is considered reality. There may be a brief yucky thrill to learning that in reality people are grown in pods so their energy can be harvested by robots, but as a matter of aesthetics, reality in The Matrix turns out to be drab and constricted by gravity and other laws of physics. The closing sequence, where Neo (Keanu Reeves) plugs back in to the matrix and runs a sort of special-effects victory lap, makes no sense, in terms of the moral victory he is supposed to have won. If he has really joined the blue-pill team, he ought to be sitting down to another bowl of bacterial gruel with his ragged, unshowered friends, and recommitting himself to the struggle. Instead he's leaping around in a Prada suit. So the viewer departs from the movie with a slightly queasy feeling, a suspicion that visual pleasures aren't to be trusted. That queasiness is the trace of the movie's attenuated honesty.