stammitti

movies.philosophy.religion.art

[stammitti]

#2017viewings - Silence

Scorsese’s long, illustrious career might be characterized by a fascination with capitalism, and a fascination with faith. In this way he has consistently been one of the great chroniclers of American ideology, and, if accounts are true, The Wolf of Wall Street was his attempt at full subjective immersion in the brutality and inhumanity of the former interest—capitalism—which could make sense of this film, Silence, one he has been trying to make for 30 years, his attempt at that depiction of subjectivity in the latter—faith.

A similar repulsion emerges that I imagine is similar to, if ultimately distinct from, what people felt while watching Wolf of Wall Street: it would seem we are watching the full self-flagellation and prideful agony of the religious zealot acting in full force, and as tends to happen when Scorsese allows for such blatant one-sided subjectivity, it’s very easy to feel as if such religious extremism is being glorified. It left a bad taste in my mouth. It prevents me from fully admiring the movie that Scorsese so radically turns toward this subjectivity, particularly because it is so devoted to the literary narrative from which it was adapted that attempts to evaluate it as somehow “ambiguous” are rendered extremely frustrating by a denouement that presents all of what we’ve seen as some sort of triumph of Catholic faith, even though one can reasonably assume Scorsese is much more skeptical of such radicalism, just as he could reasonably be thought not to be literally propping up Jordan Belfort by crafting a 3-hour narrative around his heinous perspective.

However, for much of the movie Scorsese does what he does best. Despite the long runtime and the cold, slow manner in which the narrative unfolds, it moves at a steady and percussive clip, and episodes that drive the majority of the film, detailing the various ways Christianity has been disseminated into Japan, absorbed into its culture, and been violently fought and quashed by its Buddhist elite, are consistently fascinating and harrowing, with Andrew Garfield and (the sadly underused) Adam Driver serving as solid perspectives to clash and coalesce with the various Japanese perspectives, all of which, Christian or Buddhist or whatever else, are represented in stunning bravura performances from one of the best ensembles of non-American actors in an American-produced film in recent memory. Tadanobu Asano and Issey Ogata get the most to do and are amazing as the film’s “villains,” a Buddhist judge & executioner of Japanese Christians and his interpreter, respectively, but Yoshi Oida and Shinya Tsukamoto as the two Japanese Christians closest to Garfield’s character and Yosuke Kobozuka as his bizarre sometimes guide, sometimes pathetic nemesis, also carry many sequences of enormous emotional and spiritual power.

[stammitti]

thoughts on La La Land

Damien Chazelle loves art. He loves the act of creation, he loves the romanticism of the artist's life, he loves the tension which exists between the artist and the world, the struggle of balancing the creation of art with the creation of a product which can be commodified, the tension between the artist and the art itself, which demands dedication and seriousness and sacrifice. Chazelle, like few other mainstream American directors, recognizes and digs into the filthy depths of what it means to make art, and what it looks and feels like when one wants to make art but doesn't have the guts, and the luck, to see it through. He explored all of this with great directness and ferocity in Whiplash. La La Land is his follow-up to that astonishing breakout, and in many ways, it is the same story told as a diptych. He flexes his newly minted cinematic muscles immediately upon the film's opening, nearly bragging in Tarantino-esque fashion that his lavish production will be presented in CINEMASCOPE before proceeding to preface his narrative with a massive, one-take musical extravaganza that, despite only being narrowly involved with the story at hand, presents one of Chazelle's theses as bluntly as possible: movies are really cool.

This sounds dismissive, but ultimately it gets at where Chazelle's interests lie, and where he is both limited and deeply skilled as a filmmaker and storyteller. Whiplash works on predominately one level, insofar as it chooses to depict, as viscerally as possible, what it means to aspire to artistic greatness. Miles Teller, amazing in the movie (though frequently overshadowed by J.K. Simmons' terrifying and genius performance), isn't really playing a human being, he's playing a vehicle--Chazelle uses his body, often abstractly, to depict a concept--sacrifice, dedication, greatness--surging outwardly from soul to body. The result, particularly in the film's masterful conclusion, is a universalization of a particular and rare thing: plain, artistic accomplishment, and, paired with Simmons' role throughout but especially in the ending, the pure artistic collaboration that cultivates this accomplishment.

Chazelle still uses actors as vehicles in La La Land. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, both skilled in their own ways, portray characters that are occasionally relatable and engaging, but their respective arcs, and especially their romance, are more window dressing than compelling stories to latch onto. When Chazelle stages a pair of disparate dance sequences between the pair--one before they are a couple, one as they become one--he does so more as a statement of an ideal than as an attempt to tell a single story. In the former, a playful little tap-off between the characters depicts a battle of wills and wits, their multiple prior meet-cutes cleverly transformed from humorous verbal jousts to subtle, gently choreographed ebbs and flows, the pair dancing around each other, attracted then repelled then attracted, rarely touching but ever gravitating around each other, one showing off then passing off to the other. In their next dance, their mutual affection for one another grown across just a few minutes of shared screentime overall, they fantastically waltz among the stars at Griffiths Observatory, and, smartly, Chazelle bathes them in shadow--whereas they once merely danced around each other (literally and figuratively), now they appear and move as one. It is a dazzling, clever depiction of the early stages of a romance; again, Chazelle flexing his muscles, using his much grander budget and the benefit of sophisticated choreography and a gorgeous score to do in just two sequences what many romances struggle to do in their entire length.

But the scenes which surround these sequences, and particularly the middle act which handles this romance dramatically, point to Chazelle's real interest. Less than a relationship or a collaboration, Chazelle's script entails a kind of manifesto, and Gosling and Stone's characters are mouthpieces for it. The things Chazelle wants to explore, which includes, as in Whiplash, the sacrifices that have to be made in order to achieve greatness, don't require that their romance be substantive or deep, they only require that it exist as a contrivance for the sake of depicting, ultimately, a number of abstract notions: that some artists accomplish more than others arbitrarily, that artistic accomplishment can come at the cost of those we care about, and, perhaps most pointedly, that sometimes artistic accomplishment is not as fulfilling as we expect it to be.

This last point Chazelle explores in a masterful homage to 40s musicals, my own predilections particularly pointing me toward Singin' in the Rain's Broadway melody sequence. Sparing too much detail, it suffices to say that the sequence builds on the film's entire narrative and reframes all of it in the microcosm of a single musical sequence, and again, it becomes clear what Chazelle values most: the cinematic image as the incarnation of an idea, rather than as a means to explore a psychology or a story. The sequence is like a film in the film, itself already self-consciously a film knowing it's a film (*exhale*), and it provides an alternative to what has preceded it; but its meaning to its characters is strange and ambiguous and, ultimately, kind of empty. This doesn't necessarily speak to a fault of the film, though it does beg the question why Chazelle chose this particular story, and its particular trajectory, to explore these ideas--it begs this question, at least, until you realize, perhaps, that Chazelle is himself inspired by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, another classic musical that has a similar narrative but does, unlike Chazelle, interest itself in psychology as much as it does spectacle.

This is Chazelle's dilemma, and, again, it is reminiscent of Tarantino--deeply indebted to the cinema which birthed it, his film stands on shaky ground when attempting to operate independently, an issue his Whiplash suffered less from because of its partial autobiographical, and therefore fresh and original, basis. Because of this La La Land is often emotional without pointing exactly to why it's emotional; manipulative in the classic sense, and effectively so, a testament to the fact, probably to Chazelle's delight, to the power of pure cinematic spectacle, independent of what this spectacle points towards. You are affected by it because it speaks to something fundamental, not because you are psychologically attached to what is occurring. But it results in a movie partially bloated by the necessity of building up its contrived romance, when it might have succeeded more handily with less drama and more music.

Ryan Gosling, an exemplar of the actor as an abstract since Drive, has an easier time shouldering this burden; we are used to seeing Ryan Gosling as a statuesque symbol, and he balances this primary use of his talents with the more basic demands of the script with an expected ease. He's charming, and compelling, despite never really feeling completely human. Emma Stone, quite good and sometimes great in the musical sequences, suffers more outside of these moments, occasionally relatable in a basic, fundamental way, insofar as everyone wants to live up to their dreams, but for the most part reduced to a cliche of Hollywood ambition, whose arc is driven too much by the romance to register once it needs to be about what it's ostensibly really about (success, talent, the drive to dream, etc.)

So back to the opening sequence--"movies are really cool"--the success of La La Land comes, then, in spite of a great deal of Chazelle's efforts to craft a classical Hollywood romance in this more intellectual or elementally aesthetic exercise. He is a lover of movies, but in staging a massive, traditionalist tribute to their power, he inadvertently depicts where they can easily fail. Fortunately, his immense technical talents often easily trump this fact, and even in the movie's most contrived moments, the charm and excitement and beauty of his enterprise envelop the faultier, phonier aspects of his project in a cloak of pure aesthetic bliss. It's not Singin' in the Rain, but few movies are, and it's satisfying enough that such a nerd for art and movies and dreams is handily taking part in the slow but sure effort to bring one of the great genres of Hollywood history back from the dead. 

[stammitti]

Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens; a review in brief

Carrie & Lowell is, in many ways, the natural outgrowth and companion of Sufjan Stevens’ previous decade of work—a steady deep breath after the nerve-wracked panic attack of The Age of Adz; a more personal, internal brand of Americana after the epic scope of Illinois; deeply spiritual, like Seven Swans, but, like his myriad Christmas-themed records, brought down to earth, examined, reevaluated, cleared of its oblique mysticism; and all the time synthesizing the sounds of each, evoking yet more Elliot Smith comparisons with the minimal guitar and piano that characterized his earliest work, pulling the dense electronics from Adz and Enjoy Your Rabbit and simplifying them, rendering them more grounded and atmospheric, employing them more sparingly.

In these ways and others, this is Stevens at his most immediate and essential, for the first time allowing himself to appear through the cracks, whereas much of his past work kept the listener at arms length, letting the emotions and narratives of his music reach the listener without any clear picture of what of Stevens himself was reflected in the music. Here, there is no wall between Stevens and us—the nakedness of the work is immediately apparent, from the cover of the album picturing Stevens’ mother and stepfather to the first-person accounts of his childhood (“When I was three, maybe four, she left us at that video store.”)

Like traipsing through an old photo album, Stevens guides us through his past, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the truly terrible, figuring out for himself what this past means at the same time we are. Like Adz, C&L rejects an immediate narrative in favor of underlying concepts and feelings. Only occasionally is the desire for closure satisfied, as in “The Only Thing,” where Stevens recalls those minute details, those small pleasures of life, which allow him to continue going despite life’s many sadnesses; mostly there is no end, no resolution. The final track, “Blue Bucket of Gold,” ends abruptly, the final chorus quieting to a whisper and then a wall of ghostly strings and hums, bathed in the atmospheric electronics that appear occasionally throughout, slowly leading the album to its close, none of the work’s stories or emotions or conflicts remotely complete. The album’s 44 minutes--his shortest work, with all but Swans going well over an hour--flies by, often never really feeling like it’s landing. 

The album displays an obsession with death—“We’re all gonna die,” he repeats in the heartbreaking “Fourth of July,” a sentiment mirrored in a despair-infused later line, “I’m only a shadow of me; in a manner of speaking I’m dead" in “John My Beloved.” These show a recognition of finality that Stevens, despite all the dread and depression, ultimately rejects in favor of an understanding of these issues as collages of emotion and meaning, fragments which can be grasped and appropriated, resulting in something which is impermanent (“What’s the point of singing songs if they’ll never even hear you?” Stevens laments, after describing a series of small moments he shared with his father Eugene in a track named for him) but whose impermanence is unimportant, beside the point. Stevens supposes that something must not last forever, nor fit into tidy and discrete narratives, to have real meaning.

[stammitti]

Beat the Champ by The Mountain Goats; a review in brief

I was relatively excited for this album, like any new Mountain Goats, but I surely did not expect Darnielle's greatest achievement since Tallahassee and one of the greatest concept albums of all time. His music is the great humanizer, a unifier of all human experience, in this case taking professional wrestling of all bizarre things and using it to explore the nature of fiction and escapism, low-to-middle class American life, desperation, self-worth, the quiet beauty of the American landscape (whether that landscape be on a country road or a parking lot stuffed with cheap cars), blind hatred and violence, and living a compromised existence for the sake of those you care for. And these subjects are explored in a variety of ways, from the outrageously comic ("Werewolf Gimmick") to the brutally tragic ("Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan") to the quietly and humanly devastating ("Heel Turn 2," one of the finest and most gorgeously arranged Mountain Goats songs of their entire 20+ year history). He crafts incredibly rich characters--desperate fathers stuck constantly on the road looking for new stages on which to be brutalized, seeking any means to support their families; marginalized children who find hope and heroism in the theatricality of wrestling; retired wrestlers who have used their fame and savings for the good of their families and communities; individuals torn between identities, true and fictional. And the act of wrestling itself emerges with immense poetry, its athleticism and grace contrasted with its brutality and superficiality. All of this with MG's standard musical motifs: the intimate acoustic guitar and piano, simplified compositions with a balance between the minimal and still and the driving and pop-infused, this time accompanied by gorgeous and heartwrenching slide guitar, wind instruments, and possibly the pinnacle of the more controlled and elegant vocals Darnielle has been cultivating since The Life of the World to Come.

[thepeoplesrecord]

Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

Howard Zinn, "Whom will we honor Memorial Day?" in 1976 (via thepeoplesrecord)

[stammitti]

The Means to Real Peace

"No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one’s own morality and the neighbor’s immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor’s bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests.

And perhaps the great day will come when people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, “We break the sword," and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling—that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one’s neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.

Our liberal representatives, as is well known, lack the time for reflecting on the nature of man: else they would know that they work in vain when they work for a “gradual decrease of the military burden." Rather, only when this kind of need has become greatest will the kind of god be nearest who alone can help here. The tree of war—glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud—and from up high."

- Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, Aphorism 284

Happy Memorial Day!

[yoisthisracist]

To You Internet Misogynists

First of all, fuck you. It’s always been like, you know, an irritating thing that you’d attempted to co-opt the language of feminism and other civil rights struggles to cloak your sexist ideas in bullshit like “Men’s Rights” and calling this sexist garbage “activism.” And for a long time, I think a lot of people like me were down with ignoring this shit because it was juvenile and stupid, but also because it seemed like this tactic was clearly the same as racists whining about why there isn’t White History Month, or homophobes trying to have a Straight Pride Parade, something that anyone with half a brain could see is transparently a way to prop up the bigotry of people who already control the balance of power in this world.

But this UC Santa Barbara killer brings up a way that this type of shit can affect people. Because, when you co-opt the rhetoric of revolution and struggle, it’s more than just “trolling” or some bullshit to make, you know, actual decent people angry. It’s language that can make a disturbed person think that defending bigotry is a legitimate struggle, that, in this case, that owning and subjugating women is a cause worth killing and dying for. Because that’s what those words mean, you fucking garbage assholes, those words are for people who struggle from real oppression, to inspire people to sacrifice and never give up. The fact that straight white men have taken these words to rally around calcifying the bigotry that’s slipping from their fingers is truly disgusting, and now it’s more clear that it has fucking consequences.

Fuck you, you pieces of shit, fuck you.

[stammitti]

Right on.

[stammitti]

NOAH

[stammitti]

I'm not sure I understand what people are finding so outrageous/funny/parodyable about Kanye and Kim Kardashian's Vogue cover. Is it just that they themselves are clownish and thus anything they do is inherently funny or what? It seems like pretty standard Hollywood-worship fluff to me.

[stammitti]

Here I am at the summit of the aesthetic.

"Here I am at the summit of the aesthetic. And in truth, he who has humility and courage enough to let himself be aesthetically transformed, he who feels himself present as a character in a drama the deity is writing, in which the poet and the prompter are not different persons, in which the individual, as the experienced actor who has lived into his character and his lines is not disturbed by the prompter but feels that he himself wants to say what is being whispered to him, so that it almost becomes a question whether he is putting the words in the prompter's mouth or the prompter in his, he who in the most profound sense feels himself creating and created, who in the moment he feels himself creating has the original pathos of the lines, and in the moment he feels himself created has the erotic ear that picks up every sound--he and he alone has brought into actual existence the highest in aesthetics."

- Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous Judge William describing the presence of beauty in the ethical life in Either/Or.

To live "in the moment" is to deny personal continuity, or personal narrative. Living "in the moment" is to fragment yourself. Embrace life as a continuous struggle and striving, a building of character, personality, and behavior; embrace life as the narrative you yourself may create, in concert with the infinite. And as such you are experiencing the beauty in its highest form, a living, lived artwork which is one with the infinite.

[stammitti]

Cry in public.

[stammitti]

The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage

"Marital love...has its enemy in time, its victory in time, its eternity in time--therefore, even if I were to imagine away all its so-called outer and inner trials, it would always have its task...it is obvious that this love cannot be portrayed. It always moves inward and spends itself (in the good sense) in time, but that which is to be portrayed by reproduction must be lured forth, and its time must be foreshortened. You will be further persuaded of this by pondering the adjectives used to describe marital love. It is faithful, constant, humble, patient, long-suffering, tolerant, honest, content with little, alert, persevering, willing, happy. All these virtues have the characteristic that they are qualifications within the individual. The individual is not fighting against external enemies but is struggling with himself, struggling to bring his love out of himself. And these virtues have the qualification of time, for their veracity consists not in this, that they are once and for all, but that they are continually. And by means of these virtues, nothing else is acquired; only they themselves are acquired. Therefore, marital love is simultaneously commonplace...and also divine, and it is divine by virtue of being commonplace. Marital love does not come with external signs, not like that bird of fortune with rustling and bustling, but is the incorruptible essence of a quiet spirit."

- Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Judge Williams on "The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage"

[stammitti]

pondering...

As human beings we are fortunate enough to have the ability to know and understand, to a certain extent, our relationship with nature, and more fundamentally our intimate connection and origination from it. It seems that a natural implication then is that we do not have to think of ourselves as "individuals" or discrete parts which must exercise our own individual need to survive and, as an inevitable result, cast the concerns of other people and living things aside. It may be the case that we are naturally inclined to act in our interests or in the interests of those close to us, but the fact that we are psychologically and physiologically "designed" to act and behave a certain way doesn't mean we have to disregard the actual truth: that from both a top-down or bottom-up perspective, we are not individuals, that the breaking down of the universe into discrete parts is a uniquely human activity that actively alienates us from the reality of our interconnection and--a term I'll use at the risk of sounding cheesy or hokey--our "one"-ness, spiritually-speaking or otherwise. We should make it an obligation as human beings to regularly acknowledge this fact: that despite our relative uniqueness, we are ultimately connected in a way decidedly not unique, but in a way just like every other creature or object in the universe. It may not prevent us from regularly asserting our individuality and dominance over other things (animal, mineral or vegetable, etc.) but at the very least it may occasionally knock us out of our insular ways of thinking and slowly move us ever closer to a more communitarian or cosmopolitan ethic, or at the very least to a more generally compassionate one.

[stammitti]

"The Fates guide the willing; the unwilling, they drag."

"Man's life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born without his own consent; his organization does in nowise depend upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode of existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, reasonable or irrational, without his will being for any thing in these various states...Man, in running over, frequently without his own knowledge, often in despite of himself, the route which nature has marked out for him, resembles a swimmer who is obliged to follow the current that carries him along: he believes himself a free agent, because he sometimes consents, sometimes does not consent, to glide with the stream, which, notwithstanding, always hurries him forward; he believes himself the master of his condition, because he is obliged to use his arms under the fear of sinking."

preach it

[nevver]

Foreign Words We Could Use in English

Kummerspeck (German) Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.

Shemomedjamo (Georgian) You know when you’re really full, but your meal is just so delicious, you can’t stop eating it?

Backpfeifengesicht (German) A face badly in need of a fist.

Iktsuarpok (Inuit) You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet?

Fremdschämen (German) ; Myötähäpeä (Finnish) The kindler, gentler cousins of Schadenfreude, both these words mean something akin to “vicarious embarrassment.”

Seigneur-terraces (French) Coffee shop dwellers who sit at tables a long time but spend little money.

Ya’arburnee (Arabic) This word is the hopeful declaration that you will die before someone you love deeply, because you cannot stand to live without them. Literally, may you bury me.

Slampadato (Italian) Addicted to the UV glow of tanning salons? This word describes you.

Koi No Yokan (Japanese) The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall in love.

Boketto (Japanese) It’s nice to know that the Japanese think enough of the act of gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking to give it a name.

L’esprit de l’escalier (French) Literally, stairwell wit—a too-late retort thought of only after departure.

Hygge (Danish) Denmark’s mantra, hygge is the pleasant, genial, and intimate feeling associated with sitting around a fire in the winter with close friends.

Luftmensch (Yiddish) There are several Yiddish words to describe social misfits. This one is for an impractical dreamer with no business sense.

[stammitti]

2013 Reading: Animal Liberation (Singer, 2002)

The core of this book is the claim that to discriminate against beings solely on account of their species is a form of prejudice, immoral and indefensible in the same way that discrimination on the basis of race is immoral and indefensible. I have not been content to put forward this claim as a bare assertion, or as a statement of my own personal view, which others may or may not choose to accept. I have argued for it, appealing to reason rather than to emotion or sentiment. I have chosen this path, not because I am unaware of the importance of kind feelings and sentiments of respect toward other creatures, but because reason is more universal and compelling in its appeal...

Unless you can refute the central argument of this book, you should now recognize that speciecism is wrong, and this means that, if you take morality seriously, you should try to eliminate speciesist practices from your own life, and oppose them elsewhere. Otherwise no basis remains from which you can, without hypocrisy, criticize racism or sexism.

...

We have seen that speciesism has historical roots that go deep into the consciousness of Western society. We have seen that the elimination of speciesist practices would threaten the vested interests of the giant agribusiness corporations, and the professional associations of research workers and veterinarians....Moreover the public has--or thinks it has--an interest in the continuance of the speciesist practice of raising and killing animals for food and this makes people ready to accept reassurances that, in this respect at least, there is little cruelty. As we have seen, people are also ready to accept fallacious forms of reasoning...which they would never entertain for a moment were it not for the fact that these fallacies appear to justify their preferred diet.

That comes from the conclusion of Animal Liberation, definitely one of the best books I've ever read. Incredibly insightful and hard-hitting, it'd be hard to justify eating meat after reading the whole thing; even if you kept doing it, I can't imagine you'd actually think it was ethically justified (religious beliefs are the only thing I can see trumping Singer's arguments). Wonderful read. Highly recommended to anyone--vegetarian, vegan, on the fence, totally not-on-the-fence-at-all "bone collector," etc.

[stammitti]

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.  To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

I'm sure he's not but Anthony Bourdain seems like kind of an idiot.