A Book by Its Cover, A Movie by Its Poster

February 14, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Whose Heart Is in the Right Place?


You know this movie without even seeing it, don’t you? And that may be the problem. The message in the poster is already raising hackles. The movie’s not scheduled for release until July, but Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, knows that it’s a bad film.

Katherine Heigel[’s] . . . talents are being wasted on this shit. . . .

But obviously, this poster just about beats all. It’s the classic modern attempt to mollify women about vicious gender stereotyping

Marcotte already knows who the characters are – their motivations and the assumptions that drive the plot. She even knows how the film ends. (Duh – it’s a romantic comedy.)

Marcotte agrees with the movie’s title that the stereotype is ugly. It’s the truth part where they disagree. Of course, even if the idea in the poster were generally true, Marcotte would still object to its “vicious gender stereotyping.” Other stereotyping is O.K. It’s only this particular stereotype that outrages her. She herself has no problem stereotyping the people who go to movies like this. (“The audience for those has been whittled down to women who buy into this sexist crap, probably because they live in communities where they really don’t get much respect.”)

Lisa at Sociological Images also blogs this poster in terms of stereotypes. The trouble with stereotypes is that even when they may be generally accurate, they do not apply to all people. This poster tells us to think in terms of stereotypes. It doesn’t give us people. It gives us those universal figures that are designed explicitly not to look like real people. They’re intended to be recognizable the world over for a single characteristic – gender – so that we don’t go into the wrong rest room at the airport.

For all I know, “The Ugly Truth” may turn out to be as bad as Marcotte says. But maybe not. It might wind up giving the characters a more realistic and complicated relationship to this conflict between lust and love. (Interestingly, two recent films that used simple, monochromatic, comic-book-like drawings – “Persepolis” and “Waltzing with Bashir” – were intellectually complex and challenging.) With any luck, the characters in the movie will seem more like people than like stick figures. And we’ll get a different poster.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Getting Tough on Juvenile Crime

February 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The conservative view on courts and corrections advocates several ideas, among them

• courts should hand out harsher punishments
• private, for-profit jails are preferable to state-run facilities
• defendants have too many procedural rights (in the case of juveniles, these unececessary and deleterious rights include the right to counsel)

These three ideas, put into practice, came together nicely in Wilkes-Barre, PA.

Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit

By Ian Urbina and Sean D. Hamill

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

Full story here.

Stops - In the Name of the Law

February 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

On TV and in the movies, street cops rarely make a mistake. They have a sixth sense that they develop from years of experience on the streets. It tells them who’s dangerous and who’s not, who’s a criminal and who’s not, who’s holding (drugs, weapons) and who’s not.

On the real streets, things don’t always turn out that way. A few months ago, I posted some data from a study of the LAPD showing that the blue sixth sense was especially faulty when white cops suspected non-whites.

Now we have data on street stops by the NYPD. It’s not exactly the stuff of television.

(I know there’s a Pac-Man joke lurking here, but I just can’t come up with it.)

Of the roughly 530,000 stops, 465,000 led to no further official action. Only 12% led to an arrest or a summons.

No wonder the NYPD wanted to keep the numbers secret, as they had up until seven years ago. Now the law requires them to publish the information – a law passed in the wake of a celebrated case of New York police killing an innocent man (four cops fired 41 bullets at him).

Elkhart Economics - A View from the Sax Section

February 10, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

President Obama spoke in Elkhart, Indiana yesterday trying to rally support for his stimulus package. He chose Elkhart because unemployment there has risen rapidly of late. Especially hard hit is the town’s main industry – RVs.

I don’t keep up to date on Indiana economics. When I heard the name Elkhart, I thought of my saxophone.

When I was a in fifth or sixth grade, I started on sax. I used a school-owned instrument. The school system also employed a man who went from school to school giving lessons (Hi, Mr. Prestia, wherever you are). He advised my parents to buy me a good horn, and they did – a Selmer Balanced Action, one of the last ones made. (Selmer was about to come out with an improved model, the Mark VI). Every so often I would look at the fancy engraving on the bell of the horn – the flowery patterns, the name Selmer, and Elkhart, Indiana.

In junior high, I played in the band, and somewhere along the line I noticed that a lot of the other horns – trumpets and saxophones, flutes, baritone horns, clarinets – were also made in Elkhart, even those that were other brands – Buescher, Armstrong, Conn,* and others. It seemed strange to me at the time that all these companies would choose to set up shop in the same small Indiana town that nobody ever heard of.

Economists have a word for this – agglomeration. Usually, it refers to the clustering of industries in a city. I know that in New York if you want to shop for musical instruments, you go to 48th Street. That’s where all the music stores are. Jewelers are on W. 47th and on Canal St. Even wholesalers cluster together too – clothing and accessories in the garment district, cardboard boxes in the west twenties, and so on. But it holds for cities too – Akron was tires, Detroit is (was?) cars. And Elkhart was band instruments.

What happened to Selmer and Conn and the rest in the decades since I got my alto parallels the curve of other industries. Some of the horn makers were bought up and absorbed into larger companies. These companies eventually sent the manufacturing out of the US to countries where labor was cheaper (the Elkhart workers were highly skilled, and they were unionized) – Mexico and Asia. At the same time, the Japanese developed their own high quality horns. Some pros have put down their Selmers and are playing horns made by Yamaha, which along with Yanagisawa also makes solid mid-range instruments. And now even the Japanese saxes may be manufactured in China.


*In the 1950s, Conn ads featured a picture of Robert Preston, who played Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man (on Broadway and in the movie) in his bandmaster’s uniform with the caption, “The Music Man is a Conn man.” Nice pun. But I always wondered why that show’s song “Gary, Indiana” wasn't “Elkhart, Indiana.”