3rd February 2012
The Devil in Greg Dark
“I met him four years ago. He was making pornography then. He was famous for it, sort of—famous for making the worst pornography, a pornography of transgression and violation, a pornography that seemed intended less to glorify sex than to advertise the death of the soul. People were calling him the devil back then—in fact, that’s exactly what he said when I met him: “People call me the devil”—but I liked him immediately. He was solicitous, and he was smart. He talked about surrealism and breaking down the wall between viewer and participant. Then I went to watch him make a pornographic movie out in the Valley and saw something so irredeemably obscene that I figured, Okay, Gregory Dark really is the devil, or at least someone I should stay away from.
Then, last year, I watched a Britney Spears video for a song called “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart” on MTV. I kept waiting for that adorable little cutlet to break out into a suggestive hootchy-koo, but she never did. The video was aggressively wholesome—given over to a wholesomeness that was unreal and fetishized—and at the end of it, when I looked for the name of its director, I saw that it was Gregory Dark. Then I saw a video by Mandy Moore, another teenage glamour-puss, who is marketed to little girls who are still too innocent for the coy come-ons of Britney Spears and the frank sexual howling of Christina Aguilera. Gregory Dark directed the Mandy Moore video, too. I called him up, and he said, “Oh, yes, I remember you—we were sort of friends.” He said that he didn’t make pornography anymore but had, in the years since, made about a hundred music videos. He said that he was in great demand, and that in fact he was trying to work out a deal to direct a feature film for New Line. I asked him what he was doing next, and he said he was directing a video for a fourteen-year-old girl. I asked whether I could come out and see him, and he hesitated—he was, he said, a changed man, and he didn’t want to be judged as a pornographer anymore. I pressed. I said, C’mon, man, you know me. At last he gave in, and I went out to see whether Gregory Dark was indeed a changed man or had simply cut some kind of crafty deal to take control of the hearts of America’s virgin daughters.
20th January 2012
Counter-Terrorism Is Getting Complicated
“It is the central mystery of the case, one even more perplexing than the mystery of whether the old conspirators would ever have been capable of doing what they were talking about doing, or whether, if they weren’t capable, they could be guilty of any crimes. By all accounts, Fred Thomas had lived an exemplary life of loyalty and leadership, with a devoted wife, a son nearby, a secure pension income, and a dream home to show for it. Joe Sims, by all accounts, had lived a slippery and slovenly life that made him the equivalent of his cell-phone stamp — unknown. He was a man of unsavory associations and catastrophic divorces, a man who when he tells the truth, tells it slant, a man who stands accused of raping his stepdaughter in a house with her old swing set still planted in the backyard.
6th October 2011
Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible
“One day, Steve Jobs is going to die.
First, he is mortal. Second, the odds against him are not only actuarial — the inevitable odds we all face — they are clinical. Four years ago, he announced in a memo to his employees that he had undergone surgery, that the surgery was for the removal of a malignant tumor, that the tumor was on his pancreas, and that the surgery was, as he put it, successful. An exceptional man who specializes in exceptionalizing himself — he has been an economic force for thirty years, and it’s still hard to put him in a category, or even to say exactly what he does — he responded to his disease by exceptionalizing it as well. He was at pains to say that the pancreatic cancer he had was not that kind of pancreatic cancer — not the kind that kills you, without much room for exception, in six months or so — but rather “a very rare form of pancreatic cancer… which represents about 1 percent of the total cases…each year, and can be cured by surgical removal.” Even in extremis, Jobs was being Jobs: He was telling the truth, he was simplifying the truth, he was exaggerating the truth, he was leaving part of the truth out. It is true that his cancer, originating not in the ductwork of the pancreas but rather in the islets of Langerhans, is slow growing and, in the words of one expert, can be addressed “with curative intent”; it is also true that even after surgery, the average patient lives about five years.
7th March 2011
Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?
“For forty years, he has stood astride the intertwined worlds of media and politics like a veritable colossus, making sure the worlds of media and politics stay intertwined, the better to control them. He has used his considerable powers of persuasion to persuade us to elect presidents, and, if they’re not following the “Ailes Agenda,” to turn against them. At seventy years of age, when most hardworking American seniors have had enough of the rat race and are looking forward to spending some more quality time with the grandkids, Roger Ailes is at the height, perhaps the apogee, maybe even — some say — the very zenith of his power. Indeed, with most of the potential Republican candidates for president in 2012 on his payroll, he may be said to be just getting started. Hmmm. Maybe we don’t know this Roger Ailes as well as we think we do. Maybe we don’t know him very well at all, which is, of course, just the way he likes it.
2nd September 2010
The Rapist Says He's Sorry
“Mitch lives in a special place. A facility the state of Washington created for sexual predators. Mitch’s therapists think there’s a chance that Mitch won’t go raping again next time he has the opportunity. Which is a good thing. Because, soon, Mitch and the thirty men who live with him are getting out
31st August 2010
Eleven Lives
“The oil will have stopped gushing into the Gulf. The shoreline and the estuaries and the beaches will have been scrubbed clean by man and nature. BP and Transocean will have resumed business as usual. But the original wound will never heal. This is the story of what’s been lost.
