If a judge's spouse is politically active, does it "test" his "impartiality"?

Surely, the answer can't be, only if the judge is conservative.

"I've never been in TIME Magazine. I don't need TIME Magazine."

An early rejection of mainstream media, from the movie "Don't Look Back" (which we watched again on New Year's Eve):



This is one of my favorite scenes in the great old documentary by D.A. Pennebaker. Bob Dylan is ranting — for the cameras? — and the TIME reporter looks like he walked into the room with his pencil in his hand, trying to understand but not knowing just what he will say when he gets home.

Does the film invite us to laugh at the reporter's cluelessness? I don't think it's that simple. Presumably, we're identifying with Dylan, the central character in the film we've chosen to watch, but gradually, and certainly by this point, we've been given cues to detach ourselves from our pop star hero. Do we think Dylan is being a jerk, mistreating the reporter? The reporter, whose bland doughiness makes a funny contrast to Dylan's intensity, might look as though he doesn't know what is happening here, but I got to thinking that the gears in that head were turning, and he was judging and gathering material. Who was that guy?

His name Horace Freeland Judson, and he's no dummy. He worked for TIME for 7 years, but he is also — I'm relying on Wikipedia — a historian of molecular biology and a expert on the "deliberate manipulation of scientific data." He's been on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, and he's won a MacArthur Fellowship. As for the film:

[H]e was subjected to what he believes to be a contrived tirade of abuse from Dylan. During Judson's interview, Dylan launched into a verbal attack on Time magazine, and Judson himself. The film's producer Pennebaker does not believe the tirade was planned, but notes that Dylan backed off, not wanting to come across as being too cruel. However, Judson believes the confrontation was contrived to make the sequence more entertaining. "That evening," says Judson, "I went to the concert. My opinion then and now was that the music was unpleasant, the lyrics inflated, and Dylan, a self-indulgent whining show off."

Here's a 2007 interview — in TIME Magazine, of all places — with Pennebaker:

Much of the film is devoted to Dylan tangling with the press. Why do you think he played so hard-to-get with reporters?

The poor souls, they were sent out to interview him and they didn't know much about him. He turned it into a circus. He was enjoying himself. But I never felt that he was being particularly mean in those interviews.

There's a scene, though, in which Dylan directs a lengthy recrimination of the media at TIME magazine correspondent Horace Judson. I have to be honest: I would have hated to be in Judson's shoes.

I have the story [Judson] wrote. He wrote a very good piece on Dylan. I thought Dylan was kind of nice in the end. He made jokes out of it. When I show the film, especially to kids, they want to see that as someone thrashing TIME. But it isn't that. He's thrashing a whole system of media that people had been thrashing for a long time. I never thought of it as mean-spirited.

A whole system of media that people had been thrashing for a long time... Ha ha. So much for my "early rejection of mainstream media"! People have been bitching about journalists forever, haven't they? And it's not as though Bob Dylan would have been kinder to bloggers if they'd been around and managed to infiltrate his entourage.

***

I'm following the TIME Magazine convention of writing "TIME" in all caps, which I haven't done in the past. I'm just for the first time noticing that's what TIME Magazine expects from me. Not that I need TIME Magazine, just that I'm noticing. And I'm wondering: Is in an acronym for something? "The [something with an "i"] Magazine Ever"?

Instead of shouting "You lie," try: "I’m incredulous at that utterly preposterous spewing of fiction."

That is: talk like Tim Gunn.

(Commenting, last night on "Project Runway," about Johnny's story about the spluttering iron ruining the newspaper dress.)

Yes, the task last night was to make something out of newspapers — the L.A. Times to be specific. And you thought the L.A. Times had become useless.

"Marijuana seems to be marching mainstream at a fairly rapid pace."

Observes the possibly drug-addled Los Angeles Times:

At least in urban areas such as Los Angeles, cannabis culture is coming out of the closet.

At fashion-insider parties, joints are passed nearly as freely as hors d'oeuvres. Traces of the acrid smoke waft from restaurant patios, car windows and passing pedestrians on the city streets -- in broad daylight. Even the art of name-dropping in casual conversation -- once limited to celebrity sightings and designer shoe purchases -- now includes the occasional boast of recently discovered weed strains such as "Strawberry Cough" and "Purple Kush."...

Marijuana's presence on TV and in the movies has moved from the harbinger of bad things including murderous rage ("Reefer Madness" in 1936) to full-scale hauntings ("Poltergeist" in 1982) and burger runs gone awry ("Harold & Kumar go to White Castle" in 2001) to being just another fixture in the pop-culture firmament. Cannabis crops up on shows such as "Entourage," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "True Blood" and "Desperate Housewives," and even on animated shows such as "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy."...

Well, then, legalization must be right around the corner. Remember thinking that around 1969? I do. In 20 or 30 years, people said, we'll be the ones in Congress, and — ha ha ha ha — there's no way we won't legalize marijuana! It's 40 years now, and what happened?

Back to the LA Times hallucination:

Richard Laermer, a media and pop culture trend watcher and author of several books, including "2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade," ... points to a ... subtle shift: aging baby boomers — a generation famous for tuning in, turning on and dropping out — who are keeping their party habits going into their golden years.

"It's hard to fathom that the fifty- and sixtysomethings would be against pot after all the pot they smoked," Laermer said, "Their kids would laugh them out of the room if they started telling them not to smoke pot."

Hello? The Boomers have been in power for decades, so I guess we are hard to fathom. Hey, we're deep and complex and... just as hypocritical as every other generation that ever flowered and went to seed. You can laugh at us all you want, but you actually can't laugh us out of the room... or out of Congress.

Quit laughing. Quit whining. Here. You can watch the entire movie "Reefer Madness" (originally titled "Tell Your Children"). It's so old it's in in the public domain...



... and yet marijuana is still illegal.

ADDED: Jonah Lehrer:

I recently moved to Los Angeles and I'm still adjusting to all the medical marijuana stores - there are two within a mile of my apartment. And it's not just the dispensaries, with their parking lots full of fancy cars - it's the Amsterdamesque attitude. Light up a joint and people ask for a hit; light up a cigarette and they give you a dirty look.

Speaking of hypocrisy... "medical" marijuana....

"This country has already alienated allies and seen its moral standing crumble."

"Now, as we try to get to the bottom of what happened during those years, we have to acknowledge that doing so might put us in further danger."

The LA Times thinks we need to see more of those graphic photos.