The Hungarian artist who writes personal inscriptions in English

In our white male privilege, we often forget or ignore many little details. For example, that women can own art, and also that everybody knows English but it's not everybody's first language. Well, not everybody, but a significant majority of people in the world know at least a little English, which is more than we can say for a language like Nahuatl or Slovak.

There is a good illustration of this in an early episode of White Collar, Lisa's favorite show. The Season 1 episode "The Portrait" is about a painting, Young Girl with Locket, by Haustenburg, stolen at least twice before the episode begins. The first theft occurred at some point prior to 1967, when Walter (Peter McRobbie) from the Channing Museum ignores Haustenberg's will and an inscription on the back of the painting ("to my dearest Julianna, keep this forever"), and puts it into the Channing's collection instead of giving it to Haustenberg's illegitimate daughter Julianna. In 1967, Julianna somehow took the painting out of the Channing.

Fast forward to 2009 (I'm assuming episodes of this show are contemporaneous with their original airdates). Julianna Laszlo (Kim Shaw), the great-granddaughter of Haustenburg, owned the painting until it was stolen out of her house. FBI agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) and felon-turned-consultant Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer) are on the case. As arrogant forgers go, Neal Caffrey is one of the most likable. After various twists and turns, Neal winds up in possession of the painting and knowledge of to whom the painting rightfully belongs, and he keeps both of these to himself until notorious loan shark Gerard Dorsett (Michael Crane) threatens the life of Taryn Vandersant (Deanna Russo), who had earlier helped Peter and Neal.

Neal confesses to Peter that he has the painting, and agrees to give it up so that Gerard can be busted and Taryn can be safe. But Neal knows that Peter, as an agent of an organization that enforces white male privilege, is duty-bound to return the painting to the Channing. However, Neal has a trick up his sleeve. He deliberately makes a forgery of the painting good enough to fool the casual observer but not a museum expert like Walter.

When Peter hands Walter the painting, he believes he's handing over the genuine original, but gets worried as Walter just keeps looking and looking at the painting. Walter turns it over, and instead of seeing Haustenburg's inscription, sees a special message from Neal:

My dear Walter, I know what you saw here last time. NC

Walter is forced to accept the painting as authentic.

It's a brilliant episode of a very good show. However, I have some nits (which is of course the point of this blog). First of all, why was Haustenburg's inscription in English? Shouldn't it be in Hungarian? Or did Haustenburg foresee that the inscription needed to be intelligible to a dishonest museum curator and a forger with a heart of gold in New York? Unless maybe the title girl with the locket was born in England or in America (Julianna Laszlo does say that Haustenburg had a family in Hungary, which doesn't rule out a love child anywhere in the world). Also, how exactly is it that the painting came to be in the possession of the Channing? How could Neal be so sure Walter was the one who read the original inscription and chose to ignore it?

My fellow nitpickers at WhiteCollarLexicon.com have a few more nits, including: why does Dorsett try to sell the painting to an art gallery in the same city in which it was stolen?

Metronome lost in the whiplash

I just got around to seeing Whiplash, a movie the critics are raving about as "exhilarating," "outstanding" and "electrifying." But I just want to go yell at writer-director Damien Chazelle: "Do you know what a [expletive] metronome is? Maybe if I stick one up your [expletive] you'll be [expletive]ing quarter notes for the rest of your miserable uncle-[expletive]ing life! Maybe I should also stick a jazz history book up in there while I'm at it!"

As Drill Sergeant Fletcher (J. K. Simmons) berates the young drummer Andrew (Miles Teller) about his failure to keep proper tempo, yell-asking "Are you rushing or dragging?", he points to the metronome marking at the top of the chart, but it doesn't occur to anyone to take out a metronome to see what the real tempo is supposed to be. If it's so important to have your music conservatory professor yelling at the student, the results of the metronome comparison leave plenty of room for further berating: if it turns out Andrew had the right tempo after all, Fletcher could just berate him for not sticking to his guts.

But I'm a nitpicker, not a critic. There are much more fundamental problems with this movie than forgetting a piece of technology or fumbling a music history factoid. J. R. Jones hits the nail on the head with his review in the Chicago Reader.

My opponent is taking money from billionaires!!! (but shhh: so am I)

So I'm in Michigan for a couple of weeks researching women candidates in national politics. Just as with men, there is good and bad among women. In the race to take Carl Levin's Senate seat, Republican Terri Lynn Land is duking it out with Democrat Gary Peters.

An ad for Gary Peters claims that Land is taking campaign money from the notorious Koch brothers but of course makes no mention of Peters taking money from out-of-state billionaire Tom Steyer. And of course an ad for Land makes sure to trumpet Steyer's money going into Peters's campaign without mentioning the Kochs.

But hey, look, any serious Republican or Democratic contender for a Senate seat has got to be taking money from billionaires. It's just the way things are.

Tazed in the brain

Maybe Chuck Lorre is putting all his scientific and technological consultants on The Big Bang Theory. But he ought to put at least one of those on Two and a Half Men, since Ashton Kutcher's character Walden is supposed to be some sort of computer genius turned millionaire. The technobabble does not quite come up to Star Trek levels, but since this show takes place in the present, there is the definite danger of the show's writers making a serious gaffe.

On tonight's Men rerun, Nicole (Odette Annable) asks Walden for help with her software start-up, presumably coding and capital. After some haggling, Walden agrees. After reviewing the computer code, Walden has a suggestion: "if we reconfigure this kernel, we're gonna save a lot of time and money." Sounds vague enough that it could apply to anything, right?

Well, I did a Google search for "reconfigure the kernel," and it seems that it's mostly a Linux or Unix thing. Of course the episode doesn't tell us what exactly it is that Nicole's software company is working on. A website? A database? An operating system? A mobile app? Not that Men is all that funny a show to begin with, but failing to pay attention to details like these does not help matters.

Apparently, this kernel reconfiguration business is antiquated, like, say, mobile pagers. "It's good, you know, for 2002," says Barry (Clark Duke). You know what else was available in 2002? Source code control. Despite Barry and Nicole's criticism, Walden goes ahead with the kernel reconfiguration, causing Nicole to complain that it's going to take her a day to undo Walden's "help." Walden claims he can undo it in an hour. Um, excuse me, does this mean that Nicole's start-up doesn't use source code control?

Microsoft's MSDN summarizes source code control thus: "Source code control ... allows different developers to work on the same project, with reduced fears of lost code or overwritten changes. Source code control also implies a version control system that can manage files through the development lifecycle, keeping track of which changes were made, who made them, when they were made, and why." So if Nicole uses source code control, shouldn't she be able to undo Walden's changes in a matter of minutes if not seconds? Unless maybe both Barry and Nicole think source code control is such an antiquated concept not worthy of their use. It's possible there are developers like that in real life, but in this context it diminishes credibility in the tech cred of these characters.

By the way, TV Guide made a mistake. The episode described above, bearing the classy (not!) title "Tazed in the Lady Nuts," was what reran tonight, and not "West Side Story."

Family Guy to jump shark after Simpsons crossover

Many years ago, Seth Macfarlane joked about Family Guy lasting twenty seasons, getting to a point the writers are so bereft of ideas they decide to do an entire episode about Greg the Weather-Mime. That doesn't sound as awful as the crap that's on the horizon for the show's thirteenth season.

The show's producers have released a 5-minute clip of the upcoming season premiere, which is a crossover with The Simpsons. That clip is actually pretty funny, in my opinion, and bodes very well for the show if it is indicative of the quality of the rest of the episode.

What the writers have planned after that episode is what makes me wonder if the show will become so pathetically lame that I stop watching it. There's apparently going to be an episode in which Stewie becomes pregnant with Brian's baby. Yeah, yeah, I accept the idea of a talking dog. I even accept the idea of Brian having a human son by a human woman. But a human baby boy becoming pregnant with a dog's baby? That sounds just way too idiotic to me.

Nitpicking the Vincent Chin memorial mural

About a week ago, Jim Fore asked me if he could write a blog post nitpicking the new Vincent Chin memorial mural in Detroit. He thought I would object, because on this blog we usually nitpick such low-brow fare as G. I. Joe movies and Republican political ads. A memorial mural would seem to be out of our depth here.

But given how seldom we publish posts on this blog, I think that maybe we should try to fire off a post every time we come across half-baked concepts and poorly communicated messages in whatever media we find them. The Vincent Chin memorial mural abounds in both. But part of the reason we publish so infrequently is just not having time. Jim sent me some photos of the mural, but now he started a second job so he really doesn't have time to write for this blog anymore.

So I'm going to write the post about the Vincent Chin memorial mural by Andrew Pisacane, a.k.a. GAIA in Detroit. Now, Jim lives in Detroit, I don't, so I'm less qualified than he is to write this blog post. But when he gets a chance to read it, he'll let me know if I've made any mistakes. Bringing GAIA to Detroit was sponsored by the Great River Creative Corridor (GRCC), which has also sponsored murals by Detroit artists.

Good art is supposed to communicate profound messages encoded with obscure references, right? The Vincent Chin memorial mural abounds in obscure references, portraying, in addition to Vincent Chin, these three other guys: Ludwig Erhard, Sun Yun-Suan and Hayato Ikeda.

Who was Vincent Chin? According to RememberingVincentChin.com, he was a Chinese American raised in metro Detroit who was killed by two white American auto workers a week before his wedding. The two idiots thought that Chin was Japanese and therefore responsible for the American car companies' problems. The two killers spent many days in court but never a day in prison.

Who was Ludwig Erhard? Was he one of the killers? Nope. Not even related. According to the Brooklyn Street Art blog, "Ludwig Erhard was a German politician notable for his role in Germany’s robust post war recovery." Huh? What?

Alright, moving on to Yun-suan: he "was credited for overseeing the transformation of Taiwan from being a mainly agricultural economy to an export powerhouse." Again: huh? What?

Then Ikeda: "the single most important figure in Japan’s rapid growth." Right. Okay. Sure. Whatever.

I'm confused. If I'm understanding correctly, according to the artist, GAIA, these three men represent "post war economic miracles as a portrait of global competition that led to layoffs in Detroit and fueled the frustration and xenophobia behind Vincent Chin's murder." Is GAIA making excuses for the two people who actually killed Chin and shifting the blame to three politicians who most likely never met Chin in person? This is disgraceful scapegoating.

GAIA goes around the country painting murals. In Greenville, North Carolina, he painted a nice mural with calla lilies. In Atlanta, Georgia, he painted a mural with a beautiful sky and many colors. In Detroit, Michigan, he painted a gray mural tying the death of a Chinese American to three foreign politicians. Jim says "this is your typical New York artist coming to Detroit to bash this city." Jim also told me that GAIA painted over a mural by a Detroit artist.

I don't know who this GAIA is, but I wager that he is a clueless white artist operating under his own set of misconceptions. Is he that different from the men who actually killed Vincent Chin? Maybe someone should paint a mural of Ronald Ebens, Michael Nitz, Judge Charles Kaufman and GAIA, see how GAIA likes that.

No, that's a bad idea. Two wrongs don't make a right. Here's a wild, crazy idea: if you really want to paint a mural that honors Vincent Chin, try thinking about the kind of man he was and the kind of man he could have become. Maybe then the Chin family will endorse your mural.

UPDATE, August 19, 2014: Pisacane's mural has now been painted over by Sintex. Of course GRCC money man Derek Weaver has put out a statement expressing condolences to Chin's family (hey, if I was an immigrant and my son was murdered by racist idiots, I should be very sad about a mural by some clueless, privileged white man-child getting painted over, right?).

Weaver's statement also paints Sintex as an ungrateful bastard. Also of course Sintex has not been given an opportunity to present his side of the story in a coherent way. No word yet on whether Sintex will simply repaint his original mural or do something different.

Thanks for the cash, but I'll pass on the duck

Aflac pays you cash if you're injured. There's a new commercial (I don't know when it started airing) that shows a woman in her garage telling a man about how Aflac is paying her cash as the Aflac duck makes a bit of a mess playing with the tools. "He doesn't know anything about tools," the woman tells the man in response to a question from him.

Insurance commercials these days seem to feel this need to be humorous. There's GEICO, with their ads that say everyone already knows that GEICO can "save you 15% or more on car insurance." "But did you know Old McDonald was a really bad speller?" It's irrelevant, but at least it's amusing.

Compare the GEICO Old McDonald commercial to the Aflac "he doesn't know anything about tools" ad. The duck at one point attempts to start a chainsaw that could potentially slice his belly. Then with a caulk gun, he shoots the woman's coffee cup and an overhead light. The woman reminisces about how when she broke her arm, Aflac paid her claim in just four days. But with that duck fooling around in her garage, she could soon have a new claim to file.

Maybe that's amusing to you, but it's not irrelevant. "He doesn't have to know tools when he pays claims this fast," says a heading on the Aflac website. Yeah, but he does have to know tools if he's going to even think about touching any of the tools in my garage. If I chose insurance based on commercials alone, I think I'd have to go with GEICO, not Aflac.

The obvious genius

One of the most tired tropes in movies and TV is this idea of the genius whose talent in a particular field is instantly obvious to any other practitioner in the field who sees an example of the genius's work. This conceit occurs frequently with writers. In the case of The Words (2012), the genius is a novelist played by two different actors (Ben Barnes in youth, Jeremy Irons in old age), yet for some reason he doesn't get a name.

Some time after World War II, the young man moved to France, took up a job writing for an English language publication for "expats," and married a French waitress. After the tragic loss of their baby, the young man was inspired to write a brilliant novel, but the novel was misplaced on a train and lost for many years.

Until it is discovered by Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), a mediocre writer who has gotten enough rejection letters to fill up a binder and is marking time as a low-ranking employee at a publishing company. Rory is so impressed by the typewritten novel that he is compelled to type it on his computer verbatim. His wife Dora (Zoe Saldana) convinces him to show it to someone at his workplace. Rory does, leading to inevitable success.

And an inevitable confrontation with the true author, who claims to want neither byline nor payment. Rory comes clean to his publisher, who is understandably angry. After some convincing from the publisher and from the true author, Rory decides to continue the charade, and the secret of the true authorship of The Window Tears dies with the author.

Here I have presented the story of the movie in a straight line. But the way the story is presented in the movie, you'd be forgiven for initially thinking that Rory might actually be a very good writer who just hasn't caught the break he so desperately needs.

That's because in real life, the work of a genius is not immediately obvious to everyone. Try googling "rejection letters to famous authors." You probably won't even have to type the whole thing. Animal Farm by George Orwell and Moby Dick by Herman Melville are but two bestsellers to have gotten rejection letters your search will turn up. And a book we're led to believe was a source of inspiration for The Window Tears, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, was deemed "tedious and offensive" by Peacock & Peacock in 1925.

So it's not just amazing that the misplaced novel was found by a novelist, it's also amazing that a novel which was so spontaneously written was also immediately recognized as a work of genius by the very first publisher it was shown to. Genius or hack, any novelist who makes any effort to get published will get rejection letters. Only in the movies will the publishers who pass on brilliant first time authors feel like idiots. In real life, publishers of print books have become very risk-averse, something this movie's screenwriters should have known back in the 1990s when they started working on this story.

A couple of things they're probably not gonna teach you in screenwriting class

"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Nowhere has that aphorism been truer than when it comes to screenwriting. My young cousin Jim took a screenwriting class with Joel Silvers at Wayne State University, and told me that Silvers is the worst washed up has-been to ever teach screenwriting (though I doubt he would have gotten a much better instructor if he hadn't gone out of state).

From what Jimmy has told me, Silvers is quite awful. But if you go to almost any university that has screenwriting courses, you will find that the screenwriting instructor is a hack more interested in telling stories from his long-gone glory days than in critiquing the dozens and dozens of pages he's made you write for nothing.

Anyone who seriously wants to be a screenwriter needs to know these two things:

• A successful screenplay has more than one author. A hack teaching screenwriting will put a lot of pressure on you to write an excellent screenplay. Not by offering insightful critique, mind you, but simply by repeatedly saying worthless things like "It has to be good!" The hack won't explicitly say so, but he might occasionally make the very subtle acknowledgement that most of Hollywood's most successful screenplays have at least two credited authors and who knows how many uncredited. It's true that most Oscar-winning screenplays have only one credited author (usually a famous director, like Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino or Woody Allen), and it's also true that some of the worst movies have had as many as five credited screenwriters. But in general, if your screenplay gets made into a movie and you're not the director, your screenplay's gonna get rewritten by someone else. Plus the director may cut out some scenes and let the actors ad-lib.
• Not everyone watching a movie is a completely ignorant moron. The hack screenwriting instructor will pressure you to do lots and lots of research but he will also pressure you to not actually use it in your screenplay. For example, the student might be expected to read an entire book about whist (it's a card game, more like bridge than like poker, from what I understand) and write a complete set of biographies for every single character in the screenplay before the next time the class meets. But then, when the student screenwriter writes a whist scene with authentic, believable whist play, the hack teacher tells the student to change it to something more dramatic, and to sacrifice the whist authenticity, because "no one watching this movie knows anything about whist." But this is a false dilemma. High drama does not rule out authenticity, and authenticity doesn't rule out high drama. The director doesn't need to show every hand being played. But there will be someone watching who does know about whist, even if just enough to notice if something is not quite right about the game. If the movie gets the whist wrong, that might make someone not want to watch the rest of the movie. Of course some of these things cross over into the job of the continuity staff. If the screenwriter can make things easier for the continuity staff, he should.