New York’s Town Hall is a janky half-decrepit theater founded by suffragists in 1921, famous for hosting Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and more recently, A Prairie Home Companion, coming to you live from the tourist-scrum of midtown Manhattan. I was here in January, to get talked at by Senator Bernie Sanders, democratic-socialist, ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee, former Vermont representative in the House, former mayor of Burlington, civil rights activist, husband, grandfather, Jew, and at the time of this writing, contender for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

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Settling into my seat, I was panicked. I’d received an email from the campaign’s communications staff indicating that today’s speech was going to be the senator’s yuge (huge) speech on the economy—a subject I’ve always found so abstract, so speculatively mad, determined by so many numbers and percentages and decimal points, bound by so many holding companies and corporate ties, that it seemed to hop, skip, and jump over the human and dwell instead amid the empyrean of the unmentionable, or at least undiscussable, alongside such topics as comparative eschatology and the relationship between free will and the godhead. To speak about the economy with any efficacy, or so as to provide any entertainment, the senator would have to take all the ugly, corrupt, almost animal malfeasance that lurks below the shiny machined surfaces of terminology like “mortgage-backed securities” and “predatory lending,” and breathe it into life, into lives, into real-seeming sagas of real people who’d been duped, indebted, and dispossessed—hardworking, American, etc. people who’d lost their savings, and lost their homes, in a tragic confrontation with a cipher.



And frankly, I didn’t think the senator had that in him. Sanders, at least the Sanders I’d been tuned to, cannot tell a story. Though he’s always invoking regular folks, he never names them, and in fact the only folks he ever names are far from regular and are entered into the record strictly for the purposes of citation, or indictment: politicians, military personnel, academics, business executives, and bankers. Sanders has none of (Bill) Clinton’s charm, and regardless of his reluctance to be a deficit spender, less than none of (Hillary) Clinton’s faux charm—that ability, or willingness, shared by Obama and even George W., to give a State of the Union in which the tale is told of a Mr. X who’d worked for X number of years at X type of job, only to get laid off when his employer moved to Mexico or China. And then suddenly, as if by magic, the camera pans to the balcony . . . and there’s Mr. X, beaming along with Mrs. X, and the X children, who have all miraculously benefited from Y and Z policies.

I hate that cornpone crap—but not like Sanders hates it. And his inability, or unwillingness, to crassify like that seems to derive from some deep inner trust in the logical, some sense that if a policy is honest and intelligent enough, it doesn’t need to be justified by a name or face—it doesn’t need to be sold to you. And while this might never be a feasible way to publicize a movie or TV show, let alone a novel or even a work of election journalism, just such an approach might be the only way to get a socialist elected to the presidency.

White Balance

A lot of things have to happen to ensure the successful filming and broadcast of a major address: Electricity has to be adequate; coverage angles and obstructions must be negotiated. There are sound checks. And finally, once all that’s been put to bed, the last thing that has to be attended to goes by the wonderfully polysemic term, “white balance.” Now, it’s important to remember not to trust everything we see, or hear, or read. Perception is relative, as the Sophists and Roger Ailes have always told us; observation skews. Color temperatures, or intensities, are never absolute, but depend on the device sensing them: the rods and cones of eyes, and cameras. This means that they have to be transformed, or, in film terms, “corrected,” into new intensities appropriate to the display medium—say, the sRGB internet, or HD cable news. The color white, that reflector of light, is the simultaneous combination of all colors. This makes white the standard by which all other colors are judged. To “white balance” an image is to ensure that its white looks white. If that’s the case, then all the other colors will look like themselves too. This, at least in film, generally is regarded as positive.