How Arnold Won the West : Pumping Irony

In the summer of 2003, the world witnessed an unprecedented media spectacle when fading movie superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he was running for Governor of California. The announcement – like everything else about the campaign – was aimed not at the electorate of California, where an obscure law allowing the recall of a previous election was being manipulated by a wealthy Republican congressman to overturn the results of Governor Gray Davis’ re-election, but at the entire world; suitably, it took place on “The Tonight Show”, whose host, Jay Leno, would later appear at Arnold’s victory party.
Schwarzenegger’s campaign was a made-for-tv event and the media cameras turned their heads and drooled in response. Alex Cooke’s documentary “How Arnold Won the West”, which comes out on video on January 25th, is a part of that Pavlovian reaction, even as it tries to maintain a tongue-clicking disapproval of the absurdities of the recall. Shot with that eye-rolling “you won’t believe what those Americans are up to now” tone that only British journalists can master, the film documents a bizarre interlude in American politics but only hints at its real meaning.
The recall was an open door to marginal candidates and anyone who could come up with the necessary fee was an authentic candidate, - including some who campaigned solely to point out the ludicrousness of the election. The 135 recognized candidates became part of the show – in fact they even had their own show, a quickly devised competition on the Game Show Network – and while Cooke seems to look down at the spectacle, her film gives far more time to publicity seekers like former child star Gary Coleman and porno actress Mary Carey than to Arianna Huffington or Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamente, the challengers who posed a legitimate threat to Schwarzenegger’s ambitions. Though the film derides the media circus, it can’t help standing in the sidelines and gawking.
And who could? Part of the genius of Schwarzenegger’s success was that he and his handlers clearly knew how ridiculous the spectacle was, even while pretending to keep a straight face. Even the media efforts to ridicule the movie star’s past was hijacked by the campaign, who seized upon making puns using the titles of his own films before the headline writers got a chance..(The obvious title for the entire election?: “Total Recall”)
Though many would like to look at Schwarzenegger’s election as the kind of aberration that could only happen in California, “How Arnold Won the West” raises two issues that will be of increasing importance in politics over the next few years, neither of which speak well of the future of democracy. The first is the tendency to use political clout or plain old buying power to overturn election results, whether through the long quest to find some reason to impeach President Clinton, the play of an almost unknown law to unseat Gray Davis (if Cooke’s film has a villain, it’s clearly the smarmy Darrell Issa, the congressman who financed the recall motion to further his own career, only to have his plan hijacked by the Terminator) or the ever-growing battles over how votes are counted and delivered. The second is that argument over the media “packaging” of politics, a favorite for pundits ever since Nixon sweated his way to defeat in 1960, is over and the answer isn’t a pretty one. The secret of Schwarzenegger’s success lies within the circus it generated. He knew it all along and kept stirring it up even while pretending to stay above it. While reporters and other candidates remained stirring about in the dirt of ordinary political concerns, Arnold looked high over their heads, directly into the tv cameras, and dominated the moment. He deflected debates, ignored questions, and skillfully turned potential scandals into talking points, all the while giving a pretty good performance as a man too busy campaigning to address his critics. It was a campaign designed to stir emotions and ignore issues. As we continue in a political climate where a presidential administration can dismiss its critics as “reality based”, don’t think that the lessons of Schwarzenegger’s success are being ignored.

Another day, another censorship squabble
Last weekend innocent television audiences in England were subjected to a live broadcast of ... an opera! (Gasp!) But not just any opera. It was Jerry Springer: The Opera, a musical version of the once controversial and now merely desperate talk show. Though the performance drew only slightly more viewers than the average televised opera, the BBC received thousands of complaints, mostly of the organised click-here-to-wail-and-moan variety. How offended were right-thinking Britons by the programme, which featured, among other things, a liberal use of the F-word and a Jesus impersonator? Well, since most of them sent their complaints before the program aired, it's hard to say. But the estimable Timothy Garton Ash - not a likely Springer guest - offers a common-sense endorsement of sorts and says that a society needs to be shocked every once in a while. Read it here.

The Mystery of Luis Bunuel
Dead for two decades, still missing

I'm sure that many people have been in a Bunuelian mood lately due to the welcome DVD releases last month of Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or. To add to the surreal mood, this story from the Guardian adds a twist that the master himself could have created.

Susan Sontag

"Because this country's so anti-intellectual, I want to be perverse and say proudly 'I'm an intellectual'. There are these words that everyone professes to be superior to. One word is 'intellectual' and the other is 'feminist'. Because these words are not fashionable, I want to say 'Yes, I'm an intellectual. I'm a feminist.' I don't want to be superior to those categories."

As you probably already know, Susan Sontag, one of the most significant intellectual figures of the last fifty years, died this week. Tributes are appearing in many places, such as Christopher Hitchen's in Slate and this 2001 interview in Salon. The New York Times has a special section, including links to many reviews, interviews and articles they've published over the years, though there's no guarantee as to how long it will be available. Of special interest, if you haven't read them before, are her misunderstood essay on cinephilia, "http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/25/books/booksspecial/sontag-cinema.html?ex=1104469200&en=1228ced8d1fa3403&ei=5070", and a brilliant look at last spring's torture stories, "Regarding the Torture of Others".

I was fortunate enough to interview Sontag about twenty years ago when she came to town for a reading as the guest of a local literary group. The publicist went out of her way to make arrangements for me - even calling one of the local daily papers and getting them to accept my story when Sontag told her that she would only do interviews for the area's major publications. (I was writing for a small, unknown weekly at the time.) There was always the threat of cancellation, and when I arrived at the hotel I overheard some of the staff talking about how irritable Sontag had been when she arrived. An earlier interview with a reporter who was clearly unfamiliar with Sontag's work had evidently went badly. But when I got to her room, she proved to be gracious, friendly and generous with her time and her opinions. In fact, the final interview is still one of my favorites from my not-so-spectacular career as a free-lance semi-journalist.

(The quote at the top of this entry is from that afternoon. The paper that originally printed it has been out of business for over fifteen years, so I could probably reprint it if I wanted. Perhaps I'll add some more excerpts later.)

Godard speaks...Spongebob squeaks

The New York Times features a brief interview with Jean-Luc Godard about his new film Notre Musique.

I'll be posting a review soon, but in the meantime, here's one of The Spongebob Squarepants Movie.

Don't let a word of this slip out to the advertising business!
Amazon.com has launched a something called Amazon Theatre, with the assistance of director Tony Scott (though if you look at the list of filmmakers, it may that the whole thing is just a way for Scott to get his kids out of the house....). Apprently, they've come up with a novel idea of using short films to sell things. Isn't that clever?

This just in... Special Sunday Times edition:

A long time ago my Sunday morning ritual was the same as that of many others: spending hours going over the New York Times. Then I moved to a different neighborhood and when I asked about changing my subscription, the good folks at the NYT acted like I was crazy. "You don't think we deliver there, do you?" "Besides", they pointed out, "you can subscribe to our on-line edition." Well, yes, but I can also read it for free. Yeah, I know it's not quite the same as having the real, 17-pound thing on the table but it still brings us news like this:

Pee-Wee strikes back!! (...and while you're at it, check out Pee-Wee's own website...)

DVD killed the straight-to-video star...
Will Dolph Lundgren have to return to his real love, the theatre?

The Polar Express: The Last Temptation of Santa?
Near the end of The Polar Express, when the film is starting to get dangerously close to the sentimentality and false nostalgia that inevitably enters even the best Christmastime movies, the young hero finally sees Santa Claus. (Yes, when he gets to the North Pole he meets Santa Claus; if you are shocked by this or consider it a "spoiler", deal with it.) Having already made much of the need to "believe", director Robert Zemeckis seems to be pushing the religious allusions a bit heavily by making a glowing bearded Santa who almost resembles Max Von Sydow's Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told. As the hero looks up in awe, the screen turned white...What the hey? An animated Christmas dropping a nod to The Last Temptation of Christ?
As it turned out, the film really had broken, not from the mystical force of Santa's appearance but from an overloaded platter in the projection booth. That amazingly coincidental interruption aside, The Polar Express is a fast-moving and frequently amazing film, perhaps the most ambitious CGI feature to date. I was skeptical that Chris Van Allsburg's slim book (32 pages, half of which are illustrations) could be turned into a feature-length film without a lot of unnecessary dead weight added but Zemeckis major invention, turning the train voyage into a series of action-filled setpieces, makes sense. The quasi-realistic style, is a little unsettling at first, but corresponds to the rich texture of Van Allsburgs' own excellent artwork and eventually gives the characters more human-like dimensions than usual for an animated film. Another addition, a hobo who dispatches advice from above the train, is equally well-placed.
So despite getting a bit carried away with Christmas nostalgia (Why does this holiday make filmmakers think that the entire world is a suburban village landscaped by Norman Rockwell? And what is it about Christmas that makes the hero of almost every seasonal movie or tv special worry that he's celebrating it incorrectly?) The Polar Express is an impressive visual adventure, modeled,like many other fantasies, on a theme park ride but also giving the non-stop ride a sense of spiritual meaning. (There are many moments that recall the consderably slower but no less loaded ride of a floating feather in an earlier Zemeckis film...)
Fans of Van Allburg's book will be relieved: The Polar Express complements its source beautifully, (and considerably more gracefully than an earlier Van Allsburg adaptation Jumanji)but won't displace it on the shelves of childrens literature. But if there are any producers out there holding on to options on Goodnight Moon or Pat the Bunny, don't expect to be so lucky.

Weekend roundup: Borges, Pullman, Rivette, Antonioni

"The root of the matter...is that theocracies don't know how to read, and democracies do." Philip Pullman writes about The War on Words (will it ever end?) in the Guardian. It's an extract from the current issue of Index on Censorship.

The latest issue of Rouge is online with articles about Hitchcock, Antonioni, Rivette, Bob Dylan and the other John Hughes.

David Foster Wallace reviews a new biography of Borges, and doesn't like the idea of using speculation about an author's personal life to interpret his works. Or maybe it's the other way around. Anyway, he also wants you to see that he's persuaded the New York Times to allow footnotes.

Duck! Cover! Rinse! Repeat!
Conelrad, comic strips and Henry James...

This is only a test: In one of those how-did-I-end-up-at-this-site moments, I ran across Conelrad, a great tribute to the wonderful world of nuclear hysteria and the Emergency Broadcast System. You could spend hours here. Check out the sound clips and the revelation of Mia Farrow's past as a "Duck and Cover" child.

Meanwhile, if you can get over the annoyance of its name, something called Indy Magazine has prepared a special issue on comics and politics. I'll forgive the (tr)indy name as long as they continue to publish stuff like this:

Art Spiegelman on his Towers !

an interview with Jules Feiffer !

Henry James on Honore Daumier !

The Incredibles:Living up to its name...
With all of the disgust and loathing dredged up by this week's political events, I forgot about reviewing The Incredibles. The memory of Monday night's screening had been almost completely wiped out by Tuesday night's disaster. Which is a shame, since The Incredibles is a witty, imaginative film. It's not as gag-loaded as Shrek or Shark Tale, as ready to wink at the audience for getting it. It's not sentimental like Monsters, Inc. And all of these things work to its advantage, even though at times the reworked evil-villain-with-jungle-island-hideout plot of its final actlooked so familiar that I though someone must have stolen storyboards for Thunderbirds. In spite of it all, The Incredibles makes a relatively familiar idea (superheroes who live mundane lives) actually work as both an action movie and a character piece.
It certainly helps that it's the work of a single writer and director, Brad Bird (who also directed The Iron Giant). While the Dreamworks animated features often seem like the work of a committee - and a committee that's more concerned poking the audience in the ribs while slipping in as much product placement as possible, The Incredibles, like Bird's previous feature, sticks to a strong narrative path, filmed in a style that toys with an ersatz nostalgic style (50s/60s suburbia) without deriding it. Yes, it's colorful and fun to watch, but the heart of the premise - that a superhero forced into retirement simply loves his job saving the world too much to ever really give it up -is brought to life more by Bird's writing and the fine vocal performances of Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter and Samuel L. Jackson. Sure, it's stunning (this is a Pixar film, after all, ) but it's also smart and believable.
The Incredibles isn't a masterpiece on the level of the Toy Story films, but it's a strong piece of animated work from a filmmaker with a distinctive voice. I won't go so far as to say that it offers an escape from the ghastly political news - or even suggest that we need a hero in this ugly time. See it for its own merits and let your judgment remain unsullied by the current political state.

Finally, a movie so good
...that you'll want to throw it away!

Why are is at least a small portion of the film industry so determined to convince its customers that movies are disposable? Yes, most movies are just that, subject to Sturgeon's Law, but now we have a company that takes the idea of a disposable movie literally. In fact, they're not just disposable - they're recylable!
In the next few weeks, a Christmas drama called Noel, directed by Chazz Palminteri and featuring Susan Sarandon and Penelope Cruz, will open for a theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles. On November 28th, it will be aired on Turner Network Television.
But starting November 17th, you can pick up a DVD of Noel from Amazon - exclusively- for only $4.99. Here's the catch. The film is being released in a format called Flexplay (previously tested on a handful of Disney and Miramax titles as EZ-D)which offers, according to the packaging "total convenience!". Which means that even though the film is, according to the package, "sure to become a holiday classic", they're also pretty sure you won't be thinking too much about it later. 48 hours after you unwrap the disc, a red circle in the center will turn black, telling you that the disc has "expired".
This is not the first time that the film industry has played around with the idea of movies that self-destruct - and I doubt that it will be any more successful than previous attempts - but it seems more blatant and misguided than most. If movies are no more than an impulse item, purchased at the same cost as a rental and easily discarded, then they should be placing these in supermarkets, not exclusively at Amazon. And why would Disney, of all companies - a company which was forced kicking and screaming into the home video market but has probably benefited from it more than anyone - be marketing time-sensitive copies of movies like Freaky Friday and Pirates of the Caribbean at the same time that they've made point-of-purchase the most lively part of the distribution chain?
Okay, I'm probably carrying on needlessly. Flexplay will probably go onto the technological scrapheap within a year. It's a stupid, bad idea. But why do dumb ideas like this keep coming back?

Cinema Scope is finally online.!

Arguably the most ambitious if not the best film magazine in North America, the Canadian Cinema Scope finally has a website. Go there immediately.

Thanks to the also irreplacable GreenCine Daily for bringing this to my attention.
Now if someone would convince CineAction to get in on the action.....

Keaton: Finding the joke in reality

The Times Literary Supplement offers Muriel Zagha's review of a new biography of Buster Keaton, though it looks like there's not a scheduled US publication date yet.
(But look below: Tom Dardis' excellent biography and Keaton's own autobiography are still available and well worth your attention...)

Beheadings: Halloween horror vs. the real thing;
Also: Scariest movie villain chosen

(The following item comes courtesy of Sightings, a publicaton of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.)
Beheading: Horror in Film and War
-- David L. Simmons

Halloween, one of my favorite holidays, will be overshadowed this year by the presidential election and the all-too-present horrors of Iraq. Prayers were offered in the worship service I attended on Sunday for the children's aid worker Margaret Hassan, whose heart-wrenching pleas were broadcast around the world that weekend. "I don't want to die like Bigley," she said.

Since the beheading of Nicholas Berg in May, I have been reflecting on the cultural significance of representations of decapitation in film and on television. It is a classic trope of the horror movies that are frequently shown in the weeks before Halloween, and since I am a fan of the genre, I have done some soul-searching about the fears and desires that are encoded in such popular entertainments.

These thoughts led me back to Tim Burton's 1999 film Sleepy Hollow. As an adaptation of Washington Irving's short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the American ancestor of all Halloween thrillers, the film is a powerful piece of mythmaking. It wraps the story of the Headless Horseman into a myth about the origins of our nation in a way that is surprisingly revelatory when compared to the discourse about war, religion, and politics currently circulating in our media.

Although tinged with Burton's macabre humor, Sleepy Hollow is a grim fairy tale whose gruesome representation of eighteen beheadings has become impossible to imagine as entertainment. Purists have noted that the script departs from the original story, but the innovations make it much more relevant. In the story, Ichabod Crane is a "Connecticut Yankee" schoolteacher with morbid fantasies who can quote Cotton Mather's "history of New England witchcraft" (Wonders of the Invisible World) from memory.

In the film, Ichabod (whose Hebraic name means "the glory of God is gone") is a character out of Poe, a New York City constable sent to Sleepy Hollow to solve the Horseman's murders using forensic science and deductive reasoning. It is later revealed that his mother was a practicing witch who was tortured to death by his own puritanical father. In Burton's revision, then, scientific reason and enlightened skepticism are pitted against Dutch Reform piety and a capitalist social hierarchy on one hand, and a kind of "folk religion" of black and white magic, which turns out to be very real, on the other.

In both versions, the Headless Horseman was, in life, a Hessian mercenary fighting for the British in the Revolutionary War. In the film, the Hessian is a demonic, barbaric figure, foreign and brutal, a professional warrior whose bloodlust has survived the grave. He is a baroque emblem of war itself, suggested by his resemblance to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The relentless decapitations are Burton's invention, an homage to Roger Corman and the Hammer horror movies that popularized these blood and gore effects. But the nightmarish identification of the Horseman with war and witchcraft is not. In the original story, the war is still a fresh trauma, Salem more than a memory, and the Horseman finally appears as the scourge of Ichabod's hidden appetites: lust, jealousy, greed, and gluttony.

"Heads Will Roll," the ad slogan when Sleepy Hollow was released, today seems a bleakly ironic comment on the many jingoistic rallying cries for U.S. military engagement. On the other hand, the image of Irving's Hessian mercenary has returned in the form of the Afghani warlords in Democratic campaign rhetoric. In this context, the myth of Sleepy Hollow reads like a cautionary tale. Wherever the horror of war is systematically repressed by the demonization and persecution of the innocent, couched in appeals to God, Providence, and prosperity, the specter of the Horseman rises.

In the real world, it is no longer phantoms and fairy tales that terrify us. This Halloween we pray that the pleas of the compassionate will dispel the imminent threat that hangs over the heads of all of those being held hostage.


David L. Simmons is a doctoral candidate in Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a current Marty Center dissertation fellow.



And from the Internet Movie Database:

Bush Voted Year's Top Film Villain

American President George W. Bush has topped an unlikely poll in Britain - as this year's top screen villain. Bush won the dubious accolade for his unauthorized appearance in Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. The politician beat out the likes of Doc Ock, played by Alfred Molina, in Spider-Man 2; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Leatherface; Andy Serkis' Gollum from Lord Of The Rings trilogy; and Elle Driver, the assassin played by Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill. Almost 10,000 people voted in the poll, conducted by Total Film Magazine.

Eric Rohmer: "All of my films are spy films".

Eric Rohmer talks to the Guardian's Stuart Jeffries about his new film Triple Agent. Not a lot of information..but it's still Rohmer. (Too bad Jeffries had to revive that tired old Night Moves quote.)

Other miscellaneous cinematic notes:

This is hardly news, but Asian cinema is suddenly this year's model; Mark Cousins, writing in Prospect, has a few ideas about why that is.

The latest edition of Senses of Cinema is online. Of special interest: a section on comedy that includes pieces on Keaton, Clair, Soviet humor and Shallow Hal.

Silent Ashlee stirs memories of Spice Girls

Our veteran stargazer Lina Lamont charts the path of Jessica's sibling meteorite and miscounts Spice Girls:

It occurred to me this morning that I could no longer recall the names of the Spice Girls. Posh Spice still turns up in the papers from time to time, of course, but only because of her on-and-off marriage to someone more famous to herself. I remembered that Ginger Spice had left the group and done some sort of charitable work for the United Nations, so she probably shows up in public service announcement from time to time. But it took me several minutes to realize that the one who favored athletic outfits was called - obviously - Sporty Spice, because I kept wanting to call her Scary. Then I remembered that there really was a Scary Spice as well. At which point my memory gave up. Wasn't there a fifth one? I had actually seen Spice World, so I should know these things. (The missing piece, Baby Spice, eventually came to me, but having assembled the complete set, I then became aware - to my relief - that I couldn't remember a single one of their songs.)
This hard-won exercise in 90s nostalgia came as I was contemplating the recent troubles of Ashlee Simpson, a celebrity whose primary claim to fame as the younger (I'm guessing) sister of an equally dubious celebrity was already causing me to confuse her with Nicky Hilton. (Yes, I know that Ashlee, like Jessica, Hilary, Britney and Lindsay, is a "recording artist", at least in theory, but musical product seems to be no more significant an aspect of their public images than their books, designer fragrances or whatever other trinkets they are willing to garb with their faces and names: the primary occupation of these women, as far as I can determine, appears to be posing for magazine covers.)
Ashlee's current PR disaster - as if you didn't know - stems from her recent appearance on "Saturday Night Live" where it was revealed not only that she lip-synchs her performances - was this much of a surprise? - but that she doesn't even do it very well.
Ashlee was introduced by host Jude Law to perform her second song of the night. Music began, though no one was playing an istrument. Ashlee's voice was heard, briefly, though her lips weren't moving. She started doing some kind of goofy clog-dancing routine. (It this a regular pert of her stage act?) The band tries to recover. Ashlee repeats her drunken-clown-at-Riverdance move, then walks off the stage.
The excuses came almost immediately and keep growing. Ashlee was flustered because the band started playing the wrong song (even though they weren't playing anything). The drummer accidentally turned the tape on (but why was the tape there?) Ashlee was suffering from acid reflux but didn't want to disappoint the audience. The spin from "it never happened" to "it was somebody else's fault" to "I did it for the fans" is simply breathtaking. (Click here for Ashlee's own non-explanation - assuming that she really writes this stuff.)
But in Ashlee's defense, I have to say that there's something awfully disingenuous about the way the infotainment world is clucking over this incident. How shocking! The curtain comes down and a manufactured pre-fab pop commodity is revealed to be... manufactured pre-fab pop commodity. Simon Cowell must be shocked. Come on, guys! Aging baby boomer purists may cling to some hazy (and historically inaccurate) picture of pop music as a source of integrity, but it's been nearly 25 years since MTV blurred the barrier between performance and advertising and made being photogenic as important a factor to a musical career as a good ear. Why would anyone in the post-Milli Vanilli world pretend otherwise? Frankly, if I had paid $75.00 for a ticket to hear Ashlee's howling, I'd be a little steamed, (but I'd have only P.T. Barnum to blame). But if she treats a forgettable tv appearance as something she can just toss off, my only advice is lay off the fried food before showtime.
So Ashley, don't despair. Your career may be able to survive this Wizard of Oz moment. Why not? Yes, they're all being so mean to you now, but that's not all your fault. There is a strangely nihilistic quality to the current trend of nubile pop stardom, and the sheer vapidity of your sister, the Hilton girls and yes even Britney herself is somehow central to the very nature of their celebrity. If your sister can turn her apparent stupidity into credentials for a career as an advertising spokesperson, then why can't your failure - inability? - to sing become your own gimmick? Spare us the embarassment of another awards show performance and go straight to the next "Maxim" layout. Your Warholian fifteen minutes are running out, Ashlee. They're too precious to waste on something so tiresome as performing live.

Hitting the Books: Bob Dylan hits the Village, Woody Allen visits George S. Kaufman's Broadway.

Tom Carson, writing in the New York Times, calls Bob Dylan's "Chronicles: Volume One" "some of the best fake Huckleberry Finn I've ever read", and we think he means it as a compliment.

Henry Porter, a man with no alibi, puts his two cents in here.

Meanwhile, one of our favorite institutions The Library of America has set its sights on one of Broadway's wittiest legends, George S. Kaufman, and Woody Allen pays tribute.

Ed Wood resurfaces on DVD! And so does Ed Wood!

By now you've probably already heard that the late, angora-loving director Ed Wood's long-lost porno film Necromania has been discovered and is coming to your home, courtesy of Wood biographer Rudolph Grey and blog entrepreneur Nick Denton's Fleshbot. The New Yorker provides a good introduction here .
But in the midst of this sea of love for the director of Glen or Glenda, a better introduction can be found (along with a brilliant performance by Johnny Depp) in Tim Burton's biopic, finally available on DVD. Burton's film presents an unflappable Wood, relentlessly full of faith in his own talent and that of his associates. For the film's Wood, life is a talent show, and junkies, drag queens and gargantuan wrestlers all get to be finalists.

Coincidence? Trend? Psychic blip?

Just as I was mentioning the prophetic nature of his last novel a few days ago, cyberpunk avatar and professional coolchaser William Gibson decided to resume his blog. Gibson fans may recall that he started posting while on a publicity tour, but reluctantly gave it up to focus on his writing once the tour was done. So what provoked him to return to the blogosphere? Like a lot of other people these days, he's worked up about the sorry state of democracy these days...