2b+3s will be on hiatus until Oct. 1.

Mr. Podesta believes that his most consequential decisions on domestic policy stemmed from one overarching conviction — that the president’s most important job in a crisis, requiring nearly single-minded attention, was to pass huge legislation.

“By focusing on getting big legislative accomplishments, which was understandable, they necessarily gave up a larger image of him as president,” Mr. Podesta said, referring to White House advisers. “They cast him as the prime minister. They were kind of locked into the day-to-day workings on the Hill.”

This was not a given. All presidents have laws they want to pass, but they have broader thematic priorities, too.

I’m discouraged whenever I’m reminded that such professional politicos as Bai and Podesta fail to grasp that Obama’s “broader thematic” priority is — and probably will be for the entirety of his presidency — to mitigate our losses from his predecessor’s eight-year reign of stupidity, negligence, slavish corporate attitude, and outright constitutional malfeasance.

Forget all that. Go read Ebert’s reviews online, especially of good movies, movies you particularly enjoyed (i.e., if you enjoy good movies; if you don’t enjoy good movies, don’t bother). Simply put, the man is a master critic. Even better than his current reviews, read Ebert’s periodic re-reviews of older, favorite, good movies, e.g., last week, “Lost in Translation” (2003), set in Tokyo, starring Bill Murray as Bob and Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte. Reading Ebert’s re-review conjures up the same chills that led me to pay three times for the joy of  watching the film in theaters.  

We understand Charlotte loves her husband, and we understand how he wounds her, and why she cries on the phone. There’s no possibility he will cheat on her. [... He] is simply a moth fluttering around [another woman’s] fame. That’s what hurts Charlotte; he leaves her alone in the hotel for silly reasons that betray him as callow. We understand that Bob loves his wife and especially his children at home in America, but after years and years he knows and says that marriage and children are “hard.” So they are. We know that. Few movie characters know it in the sense he means. [...]

I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they just don’t get “Lost in Translation.” They want to know what it’s about. They complain “nothing happens.” They’ve been trained by movies that tell them where to look and what to feel, in stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end. “Lost in Translation” offers an experience in the exercise of empathy. The characters empathize with each other (that’s what it’s about), and we can empathize with them going through that process. It’s not a question of reading our own emotions into Murray’s blank slate. The slate isn’t blank. It’s on hold. He doesn’t choose to wear his heart on his sleeve for Charlotte, and he doesn’t choose to make a move. But he is very lonely and not without sympathy for her. She would plausibly have sex with him, casually, to be “nice,” and because she’s mad at her husband and it might be fun. But she doesn’t know as he does that if you cheat it shouldn’t be with someone it would make a difference to. [...]

What is lost in translation? [Her husband] understands nothing of what Charlotte says or feels, nor does he understand how he’s behaving. [...] Bob’s wife [doesn’t] understand how desperately indifferent he is to the carpet samples. And so on. What does get translated, finally, is what Bob and Charlotte are really thinking. The whole movie is about that act of translation taking place.

Read Ebert’s Journal, too. Less about movies, but just as masterfully written.

Our Hoya carnosa Krinkle Kurl, or Hindu Rope, is in full bloom this weekend. Here’s a close-up (and extreme close-ups). Click to enlarge. Enjoy.

Today’s moderately restless or mildly discontented couples tend to go to couples therapy and “work” on their relationships instead of drinking so much they don’t know where they are, or slipping into a back room with a man they meet in a bar. But can we be sure our own malaise and alienation is better than theirs? Are we happier than Don and Betty Draper, or are we just doing yoga or Pilates or “working” on our relationships?

You don't have to buy his suit to be Don Draper.

Yes to both her rhetorical questions. We can be sure we are happier because nothing real is stopping us from behaving exactly as the characters of Mad Men. We can drink and smoke and have sex as recklessly and casually as our 1960s counterparts, but most of us, it seems, choose not to. Not because society forbids us (which it doesn’t — it’s far more liberal now than 1964), but because we know the unavoidable risks (alcholism, cancer, STDs, the trama of divorce, etc.) are the inevitable by-products of all that “messiness.” In other words, we have foresaken the carnal pleasures of the now to avoid the physical and emotional pains of tomorrow. 

Also worth reading each week is Walter Dellinger’s WSJ conversation (yes, the Walter Dellinger) and Slate TV Club’s episodic colloquy. Most everything else is woefully un-insightful by comparison.

Jennifer Lawrence et al. in "Winter's Bone"

Escaped the unforgiving furnace that is D.C.’s July 2010 for two blissfully air-conditioned hours, Sunday, watching Winter’s Bone, perhaps the finest, best-acted film in (my) recent memory. You’ll have to see it for yourself to know the plot details, but please allow me a few words of reflection upon its grim pallete of characters — the very rural poor of southern Missouri — surviving along the blurred periphery of American civilization.

I spent my high-school years casting about the eastern half of Washington state, an area of the country where you can easily drive for a few miles in any direction on any state highway and soon enough come upon an unnamed gravel road leading up into the hils, and off that gravel road, one if not more unmarked dirt roads leading farther up into the hills, and off those dirt roads, the homesteads of the very rural poor.

You’d be camping with your friends in the backwoods and suddenly find evidence you’re on private property. Catch glimpses of kids hunting squirrel for dinner. Discarded toxins from a busted meth lab, or a stand of poorly tended marijuana plants going to seed. Abandoned cars and trucks rusted solid to the pine-needled forest floor. Houses more or less stapled together but with smoke nonetheless rising from the chimneys.

Thousands of miles away, the winding country road connecting my fiancée’s family farm in southern Virginia to the antebellum county seat twists past a neighborhood of sorts unofficially and unaffectionately known as Wildcat Hollow, notable by its collection of ramshackle mobile homes taken root in the wasteland between crops and pasture. 

I’ve never met any of these folk, but I’d guess they’re a lot like the characters in Winter’s Bone. That is, men, women, and children who exist in modern America just like you and me, but with little reason to know it’s the most prosperous nation in the world. Men, women, and children whose lives are stories all the more worth knowing.