Washington, District of New York.
By http://ussc.edu.au/people/jonathan-bradley in Seattle, WA
21 August 2010
The Washington Post's Reliable Source blog has a problem with the new Daniel Craig/Nicole Kidman movie The Invasion, and it's not that someone decided to remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's that a movie set, and even partly shot in D.C. makes a number of fairly simple errors about the city's geography. Leave aside nitpicking complaints about an excess of parking available in Georgetown, or apparently circuitous routes between different neighbourhoods; I figure if the proudly New York "Gossip Girl" can get away with shuttling its characters back and forth between Brooklyn and the Upper East Side every fifteen minutes, we should just assume fictional characters have magic transportation methods available to them. But some blunders identified by the WaPo are less forgivable:
- "Kidman, who plays a D.C. psychiatrist, buys magazines at one of those big sidewalk newsstand kiosks -- the ones all over New York but not on any corner in this town."
- "Her fabulous downtown office window looks out on a bunch of skyscrapers."
- On the Metro, the announcer says, "The subway doors are now closing." Subway?
It reminds me of a complaint Spencer Ackerman had about the Angelina Jolie spy movie Salt:
Among the film’s silver-screen miracles is to transport a block of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, with its majestic and towering gothic (right?) residential apartment buildings, down onto Indiana and 6th Street NW. It’s a cinematic achievement on par with whatever Christopher Nolan will pull off with Inception. By sheer force of imagination, something that building codes could never allow to appear in downtown Washington D.C. actually appears in downtown Washington D.C., and we are to believe it. I wanted to run down to the intersection and marvel at its impossible transformation and then I remembered that it was lazy, condescending filmmaking. Similarly, the Archives Metro station? Reimagined as a stunning replica of the sort of subway stations commonly seen in… New York City.
This kind of thing goes beyond lazy filmmaking. Washington, D.C. is a very distinctive looking city (as you can see above in the trailer for Invasion), and it's difficult to imagine a movie set in L.A., or New York, or London or Paris including egregious errors equivalent to D.C. having downtown skyscrapers or a Metro anything like the Subway. (D.C. is, like London and Paris, a national capital, after all.) America doesn't seem fond of remembering that its capital isn't just a storage site for politicians, that it's a city home to a mostly poor, mostly black population whose citizens still don't have voting representation in Congress. Of course, Hollywood transformations of D.C. into a culture-less expanse of urban anonymity that exists only for the sake of plots revolving around government intrigue isn't responsible for any social problems the city has. But the D.C. area is a culturally vibrant metropolis of 5.5 million, with unique characteristics that should spring easily to any American's mind. And I wonder if the fact that they apparently do not has anything to do with the way the city's more pressing problems are ignored.
NOTE: I wrote this post after following a link trail, and failed to notice I followed it back in time to 2007, when The Invasion was actually released. So, if you're wondering why I'm posting about an old movie that flopped... yeah. Anyway, I think the fact that, Salt, a current, successful movie, repeats the same problems three years later proves my point.
Why doesn't Australia have a Sarah Palin?
By http://ussc.edu.au/people/jonathan-bradley in Seattle, WA
27 July 2010
Hidden in a smart post about Australian politics, Jonathan Holmes makes a smart point about American politics:
In a much smaller way, Canberra shares some of the characteristics of Washington. Both are cities that owe their existence to politics, artificial capitals created to house the government of a federation of states. But whereas Washington has many hubs of power - the Congress on Capitol Hill, the White House and its annexes, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon across the river, K Street with its army of lobbyists - at the heart of Canberra is one world-within-a-world: New Parliament House, encircled by its own little Beltway, State Circle, is the purely political citadel within a city inhabited largely by public servants.
This is a feature of American politics that makes its operation entirely different from what we are used to seeing in Australian government. In Canberra, as Holmes points out, anyone with influence is largely confined to the government itself. For the most part, the important people in Australian politics are the elected Members of Parliament. From time to time a former PM, a well-known media figure, or a member of the public with a heart-tugging special interest story will be able to actively shape the nation's political direction, but most of the time, the federal politicians are firmly in charge.
In D.C., however, nothing is so clear cut. Holmes describes well the lack of a political focal point within D.C.: one week the Supreme Court may find states cannot ban Americans from owning guns, the next Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid may push a piece of legislation designed to reform the financial markets, and after that a member of the Administration might ill-advisedly fire an employee. But the haze extends beyond the separation of powers, and beyond, even, the Beltway bubble.
The best example at the moment is Sarah Palin, a politician who manages to exert sizable political influence in America despite holding no office, and having never held any office higher than governor of a lightly populated, geographically distant state. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wields a similar power, though his is less characterized by celebrity. It is near unimaginable that an Australian figure could hold a role like that of either Gingrich or Palin.
Chairpeople of party national committees like Howard Dean and Michael Steele aren't strangers to political influence, either, despite being more involved with fundraising than legislating. Single-issue activists like Al Gore put new issues on the agenda, and media figures like Glenn Beck have constituencies unimaginable in the Australian system. Political power in America is far more dissolute than in Australia, particularly for opposition parties, who do not have the advantage of the shadow cabinet structure to attract attention to themselves.
This has both advantages and disadvantages. In America, ideas and influence are not restricted to the halls of Congress or the meeting rooms of the White House. If anyone who can attract a constituency can become a national player, the political culture will be more inclusive and open to unexpected innovations. In Australia, meanwhile, those in charge are there because they've worked their way steadily up through a party system, made connections and insinuated themselves into the workings of existing political apparatus.
The down side? Well, the Australian system might turn out more than a few party hacks, but then again, it hasn't turned out any Sarah Palins, either.
The District sleeps alone tonight
By http://ussc.edu.au/people/jonathan-bradley in Seattle, WA
27 April 2010
I enjoyed the Times magazine's profile of Politico journalist Mike Allen, the man behind the politics website's Playbook feature, a daily missive exhaustively detailing the latest in D.C. news, speculation, gossip and ephemera. The blast gets emailed round to, well, I'll let the Times explain:
Playbook has become the principal early-morning document for an elite set of political and news-media thrivers and strivers. Playbook is an insider’s hodgepodge of predawn news, talking-point previews, scooplets, birthday greetings to people you’ve never heard of, random sightings (“spotted”) around town and inside jokes. It is, in essence, Allen’s morning distillation of the Nation’s Business in the form of a summer-camp newsletter.
But though Allen is an unusual and elusive character, the story is more interesting as an insight into the small town nature of the nation's capital, from the slightly too-intimate details revealed by Allen's readers —
Readers describe their allegiance with a conspicuous degree of oversharing. “I definitely read it in bed,” Katie Couric told me. “Doesn’t everybody read it in bed?” Margaret Carlson, a columnist for Bloomberg News and the Washington editor at large for The Week magazine, said in a video tribute to Allen for his 45th birthday party last June. (For the record, the Republican lobbyist and party hostess Juleanna Glover said in the video that she reads Playbook “in my boudoir and while I’m blow-drying my hair.”)
— to the descriptions of power broker-heavy house parties:
McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, arrived after the former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie left. Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren had David Axelrod pinned into a corner near a tower of cupcakes. In the basement, a very white, bipartisan Soul Train was getting down to hip-hop. David Gregory, the “Meet the Press” host, and Newsweek’s Jon Meacham gave speeches about Fischer. Over by the jambalaya, Alan Greenspan picked up some Mardi Gras beads and placed them around the neck of his wife, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who bristled and quickly removed them. Allen was there too, of course, but he vanished after a while — sending an e-mail message later, thanking me for coming.
It's also a celebration of the way Politico has shaken up American political reporting, though even this has its detractors. Matt Yglesias critiques the Allen model as valuing short-term scoops over in depth reporting (Ian Shapira does likewise), while the White House, according to the Times, sees Politico as "shorthand for everything the administration claims to dislike about Washington — Beltway myopia, politics as daily sport."
But while everyone claims to despise the "horse race" nature of American political coverage, which treats government as a battle of opposing interests rather than the pursuit of policy, D.C. essentially demands it be covered in this way. The Times goes on:
Yet most of the president’s top aides are as steeped in this culture as anyone else — and work hard to manipulate it. “What’s notable about this administration is how ostentatiously its people proclaim to be uninterested in things they are plainly interested in,” Harris, Politico’s editor in chief, told me in an e-mail message.
Folks mightn't like it, but often politics is a horse race, and its little surprise that the media outlets willing to be racetrack callers end up doing well.
And as for D.C.? Well, as I've alluded to before, it's important to remember that it isn't only a political town, but that doesn't mean it isn't apolitical town, one that delights in receiving updates as to which couple the rest of us have never heard of has just had a baby. And though I was only a part of this specific aspect of the town long enough to at best be considered on its periphery, I did delight in one example the Allen article claimed was an example of Politico's obsession with minutiae:
Politico’s comprehensive aims can make it goofy and unapologetically trivial at times. A recent item by a Congressional blogger for the site consisted of the following: “Lights are out throughout much of the Longworth House Office Building, a denizen tells me. UPDATE: They are back on.”
The lights at Longworth were off? What was the story behind that? Many of the Congressional officers are there, and I had friends who worked there. This was big news, as far as I was concerned.
And that's the nature of D.C. It's the kind of place where you can report that a building has temporarily gone dark, and some people will be interested. Multiply that by scores of little tidbits a day, and you see why Politico is such a success and why Playbook is being written up in the Times. It's a small, small town.
The man with his hand on the button: A week in the life of a DC intern
By http://ussc.edu.au/people/jonathan-bradley in Washington DC
12 February 2010
Here's something a little trivial, but highly illustrative of my life as a Capitol Hill intern this past week:
Photo by the USSC's Erin Riley
I was fascinated to see in the New York Times a story that's been affecting us D.C. interns this week. See, those of us in the D.C. area have been experiencing a bit of snow lately; in fact, this winter has been the snowiest on record. And so, like thousands of others who live and work in the D.C. area, each night, as the TV networks report on the day's Dupont Circle snow ball fight, online vendors pitch Snowmageddon 2010 t-shirts, and the plows putter pathetically into service, we fire up the Internet and see whether work will be cancelled the following day. The routine of checking the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and D.C. Metro Web sites has become a regular routine, and while neither can predict with complete certainty whether our offices will be running in the morning, we Australian interns have grown reliant on their capacity for clairvoyance.
The more mysterious of these is the OPM, which indicates whether Federal employees, though not necessarily Congressional offices, will be closed the next day. Frequently crashing from excessive demand on its servers, it would flicker into life late each evening to announce that the government has closed, or, in the case of tomorrow, that it had shuddered back into life. (Believe me, having gone to work one day this week, I'm more than pleased by this news.) After the jump, the Times reveals the man behind the curtain:
WASHINGTON — Dressed in flannel-lined blue jeans to guard against the chill, John Berry was in the second-floor bedroom of his Dupont Circle townhouse, about a mile from the White House, when he picked up the phone to make a call, minutes before the Super Bowl kickoff on Sunday evening.
Moments later, the word went out: the bulk of the 270,000 federal workers in and around the nation’s capital did not have to report to work the next day.
It was a decision that Mr. Berry, as director of the Office of Personnel Management, has repeated day after day this week, after methodical consultation with other officials, in response to two blizzards that brought Washington’s total snowfall so far this winter to 55.9 inches, shattering a record set in 1898-99.
At four days on Thursday, the weather-related shutdown — which really began last Friday afternoon, at the start of the first storm, when Mr. Berry dismissed government workers four hours early — is already the longest in the history of the personnel office, which has its origins in the late 19th century.
Mr. Berry decided Thursday evening to allow government workers to come in two hours late or take unscheduled leave on Friday. Either way, the workers will have a long weekend because Monday is Washington's birthday.
“Shutting the government,” as most people here call it, is probably the biggest decision Mr. Berry faces, and yet he is modest about its significance, noting that only 10 percent to 13 percent of the federal work force lives in the Washington area.
For those of us in the DMV, that's a little like finding out what's being kept in Area 51.
15 inches of pure white snow
By http://ussc.edu.au/people/jonathan-bradley in Washington DC
6 February 2010
What you're seeing there is the USA right now, and D.C. is right in the centre of that great big mass of cloud. We're expecting 20-30 inches of snow over the next couple days. Capitol Hill has slowed to a standstill, shoppers have stripped supermarkets of stock, and folks are preparing to get snowed in for the weekend. We could be looking at something even bigger than the infamous Christmas storms of last year. I'm headed to the Washington Capitals hockey game tonight, blog-readers, but after that, it's just going to be you and me. Settle in.
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