Sunday night was Oscar's night. Thankfully, Canal + kept me from watching it as they broadcast the show encrypted. If you don't pay you don't have to suffer through it. Fair enough, especially considering that it didn't start until two in the morning.
What I learned in the next day made me happy. The best movie of the year won the award for ... Best Movie of the Year. Go figure. I've said it before, and I'm happy to repeat it to whoever cares to ask that for me, "Crash" was the outstanding movie of 2005. In honor of the occassion, The New Yorker, Best Magazine of the Year for five years running as far as I'm concerned, put their review of the film back online. Read it and go see the movie.
I cannot help but recommend another article that has been retired from retirement, scavenged from the dustbin of the history, in other words retrieved from the deep bowels of the New Yorker's archive. In it, some dude (no idea who he is but presumably important judging from whom he gets to talk to) retraces the recent history of Iran. Since the article was written at the end of 1978, it's not so recent anymore, but all the more insightful. There are plenty of books that try to make sense of the past, with the power of hindsight, but this essay reports history in the making. Written less than a year before the Islamic revolution, it analyzes the political situation and offers predictions that one is surprised to hear, 27 years later. Like that Khomeini isn't popular, just crazy, and that that the communists are taking advantage of organized religion to overthrow the Shah. If you had gone to bed with this article and woken up a few years later, and you would not have recognized the world.
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