In Praise of Cynicism

If there's one thing that makes me cynical, it's optimists. They are just far too cynical about cynicism. If only they could see that cynics can be happy, constructive, even fun to hang out with, they might learn a thing or two.

Perhaps this is because I'm 44, which, according to a new survey, is the age at which cynicism starts to rise. But this survey itself merely illustrates the importance of being cynical. The cynic, after all, is inclined to question people's motives and assume that they are acting self-servingly unless proven otherwise. Which is just as well, as it turns out the "study" in question is just another bit of corporate PR to promote a brand whose pseudo-scientific stunt I won't reward by naming. Once again, cynicism proves its worth as one of our best defences against spin and manipulation.

I often feel that "cynical" is a term of abuse hurled at people who are judged to be insufficiently "positive" by those who believe that negativity is the real cause of almost all the world's ills. This allows them to breezily sweep aside sceptical doubts without having to go to the bother of checking if they are well-grounded. In this way, for example, Edward Snowden's leaks about the CIA's surveillance practices have been dismissed because they contribute to "the corrosive spread of cynicism".

In December 1999, Tony Blair hailed the hugely disappointing Millennium Dome as "a triumph of confidence over cynicism". All those legitimate concerns about the expense and vacuity of the end result were brushed off as examples of sheer, wilful negativity.

A more balanced definition of a cynic, courtesy of the trusty Oxford English Dictionary, is someone who is "distrustful or incredulous of human goodness and sincerity", sceptical of human merit, often mocking or sarcastic. Now what's not to love about that?

Of course, cynicism is neither wholly good nor bad. It's easy to see how you can be too cynical, but it's also possible to be not cynical enough. Indeed, although the word itself is now largely pejorative, you'll find almost everyone revels in a certain amount of cynicism. It's the lifeblood of the satirical comedy of the likes of Ian Hislop, Mark Steel and Jeremy Hardy. Great fictional cynics such as Malcolm Tucker are born of cynicism about politics. It can provide the impulse for the most important investigative journalism. If Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had been more trustful and credulous of human goodness and sincerity, they would never have broken the Watergate story.

It can provide the impulse for the most important investigative journalism. If we were all habitually trustful and credulous of human goodness and sincerity, then there would be no questioning of dubious foreign interventions, infringements of civil liberties or sharp business practices.

Perhaps the greatest slur against cynicism is that it nurtures a fatalistic pessimism, a belief that nothing can ever be improved. There are lazy forms of cynicism of which this is certainly true. But at its best, cynicism is a greater force for progress than optimism. The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success. Progress is more of a challenge for the cynic but also more important and urgent, since for the optimist things aren't that bad and are bound to get better anyway.

by Julian Baggini, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: guardian.co.uk

Golf in China Is Younger Than Tiger Woods, but Growing Up Fast

Xie Chengfeng had a fever. Otherwise, the Chinese golfer would have been driving his orange coupe to the practice range on this June morning rather than languishing in bed, cold towel on his forehead, in his four-story mansion. Five years ago, Xie (pronounced “shee-eh”) and his family uprooted themselves and moved to Mission Hills, a sprawling golf resort in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen for just one purpose: so he could become the next Tiger Woods.

Nearly every day of the year, when he’s not competing in a tournament, Xie works out in the morning, using the punching bag, medicine balls and bull whip (to strengthen his wrists) in the second-floor living room overlooking a quiet lagoon. Then he’s off to the members-only driving range for two hours of training, hitting balls with every club in his bag. After lunch, Xie works on chipping and putting before playing a round on one of Mission Hills’ 22 courses (it bills itself as the world’s largest golf club). Nearly every other activity is designed to benefit Xie’s golf game: piano lessons to strengthen his fingers; math tutorials to help him calculate distances, wind speeds and green breaks; and a daily English class to prepare him for his eventual arrival on the PGA Tour.

Xie is 8 years old. (...)

The People’s Republic might seem an unlikely incubator for golf prodigies. Chairman Mao, after all, banned the game in 1949 as so much bourgeois frippery and had the handful of golf courses that predated the Communist revolution plowed under. The taboo lasted 35 years. China’s first golf course built since then is not yet three decades old — younger than Tiger Woods. Even today, the state ostensibly outlaws the construction of new courses in mainland China, lest they gobble up too much scarce land and water — an edict that, though flouted in places, still limits the growth of the game. Then there’s the paucity of role models: though the country churns out Olympic champions in sports from diving to table tennis, China has just four professional golfers — two men, two women — ranked in the world’s top 300.

And yet Chinese wunderkinds are now beginning to infiltrate some of the highest levels of golf. First came 14-year-old Andy Zhang, who played in last year’s U.S. Open. Then, in April, Guan Tianlang, also 14, dazzled at the Masters. The boy in popsicle-colored pants — the youngest ever to tee off at the tournament — made the cut despite a rare slow-play penalty that angered his new fans (the rapper Lil Wayne tweeted: “Shame on the Masters”). With disarming maturity, the eighth-grader never scored worse than a bogey in four rounds and became the toast of the tournament. Gary Player said: “Mark my words: we are witnessing the most historic moment golf has experienced in my lifetime.” (...)

Obsessive parenting exists everywhere, of course. But in China, the sudden explosion of wealth and the preponderance of only children (because of the restrictive one-child policy still prevalent in many parts of the country) intensifies the anxiety of parents willing to go to almost any extreme to turn their child into the next Tiger Woods. Many foreign pros worry that children who are pushed to train so hard will burn out long before they reach their prime. Yet the tantalizing sight of a Chinese boy at the Masters has compelled some parents to push even harder. “Guan has inspired a lot of people,” says a foreign pro in Beijing. “But I now have parents of 13-year-olds asking me, ‘Does my son have the ability to play in the Masters?’ With that kind of attitude, you either quit or double down.”

by Brook Larmer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sim Chi Yin/VII Mentor Program, for The New York Times

Border tile with cintamani design, second half of the 16th century, Ottoman
Princeton University Art Museum
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Jack Leynnwood, Memphis Belle
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“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” — Franz Kafka
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The Undeniable Facts About the Safety of Diet Coke

I sat down at the table with friends, enjoying our get-together at the diner. The waitress took my order for a Diet Coke. She left. A friend spoke up.

“They say that Diet Coke increases your chance of getting diabetes by a factor of seven.”

“I heard people were getting seizures from the aspartame in it.”

“Today the news said a lady died after drinking 10 liters of Coke.”

“That’s nice. Enjoy your glass of city water filled with chemicals like fluoride,” I replied.

Are you kidding me?

Not much for alcohol. Never smoked. Don’t do drugs, and barely take aspirin. I exercise at the gym three times a week. I walk to work briskly every day, which comes to around 3/4 of a mile daily. When I get home, I try to avoid sitting and work at a standing desk. I go for walks when weather allows. I don’t eat much red meat at all, mainly poultry if any. I drink plenty of water, and often it is in the form of green, white, or herbal teas. I don’t drink coffee. In other words, I’m not health-obsessed, but I do alright.

My two vices?

An occasional Diet Coke as a treat a couple of times a week (and not even full cans!) and chocolate.

There are two important facts about life:

• I am going to die.
• You are going to die.

Let’s just be honest: people who point out the inadequacies in my eating and health regimen are merely quibbling over the bet they’re placing that I’ll die first. You’re telling me I’m killing myself and it’s my fault. You almost hint that I can take the blame for any physical ailment coming my way. I propose that cellular degeneration and the natural order of things might get some blame, and not just that Snickers I ate yesterday.

“Oh, but it’s a quality of life thing.”

The fact that I’m not fixating on the perfect purity of my food and not doing it to those around me means I have a pretty good quality of life.

When I eat a burger, I am thankful I have food, and that I don’t have to go out and gut the cow myself.

As I’m standing in the grocery store, I think of some of the poorest people in Nicaragua I’ve seen living and scrounging for food near the garbage dump. I get a bit upset at the arrogance that says the strawberries or apples or oranges stacked in heaping piles before me are “not good enough” because they are not organic.

I am repulsed by the idolatry that my body is so precious that I must find something more healthy and pure, that these non-organic fruits lack enough nutritional value for the little god that is me.

How does it work, that having a bountiful supply of food before me is seen as the enemy instead of a blessing?

Do I think I’m better than those people in poverty, so I deserve optimal “natural” food? Or, do I think that everyone deserves it, but because not everyone is in a place to access it, rice and corn mash are good enough for their kids but definitely not mine? When you donate food to the food pantry, do you donate the expensive organic carefully-sourced food that you insist is the only acceptable thing to put in your body and that you feed yourself and your family, or do you get the cheapest canned and boxed food at the store?

If your diet requires it, great. If you prefer it, fine. If you think it’s the only way to go, have at it. But don’t lecture me especially while we’re in the process of eating. I shouldn’t have to defend my digestive history. (...)

Maybe people ought to be more concerned about what they’re allowing in their head, rather than just their mouth. Shall I get after you for what you do and don’t read? Shall I lecture you on the shallow life of pursuing bodily health and not a robust mental existence?

Turn the TV off, unplug the internet, and shut out the voices convincing you that a world of unimaginable plenty isn’t good enough, isn’t healthy enough. Eat the food you have in moderation. The quality of my life, and my health, is fine. Someday it might not be. The same is true for you. Whether I drop over dead tomorrow or live to be 104, I’m not going to enjoy it any more by skipping the Diet Coke or excessive chocolate consumption. Keep your own guilt.

by Julie R. Neidlinger, Lone Prairie |  Read more:
Photo: uncredited

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The Woodpecker - Mirko Hanák illustration from Alfred Könner’s ‘Bilderzoo’
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The palanquin was a form of taxi during 19th century Japan - for those that could afford such luxuries. Hand-colored photo, 1870’s, Japan. Photographer Felice Beato
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[ed. Which reminds me of this very, very good book: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell]

On Suicide

[ed. See also: Staying Alive - Is a Long Life Necessarily a Good Life?]

The recent brouhaha over a spread in Vice magazine featuring artistic representations of women writers who took their own lives has me thinking about suicide. For years, growing up, I was obsessed with the thought; among my earliest memories is the desire, at age three or four, to run in front of an oncoming bus. Not because I wanted to see what would happen, but because I was sure I knew what would happen: I wouldn’t have to live any longer. I suspect there may be a suicide gene. My elder brother reports of wanting to kill himself from a very early age, and of having had to battle with the desire many times in his life. We know that suicide often “runs in the family”; three of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s four brothers killed themselves, and Wittgenstein at various points contemplated doing so — this despite his family’s enormous wealth and intelligence and its privileged position in Viennese society.

We tend to talk about suicide most when a famous person kills himself. There was, we all remember, the flurry of argument about suicide — much of it indignant, even outraged — when David Foster Wallace took his own life. His friends were deeply hurt, and many of them were writers, so they wrote about it. “[E]very suicide’s an asshole,” wrote Mary Karr, in a poem about Wallace’s death. “There is a good reason I am not/ God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten.” Suicide, seen as among the most selfish of acts, pushes a button in us that even murder doesn’t.

That self-destruction should be morally blameworthy because of its selfishness is, if not paradoxical, at least a bit odd. After all, if there is one thing I am entitled to as a human being, only one right I am permitted, it ought to be the right to life: this right, it has often been argued, is a kind of necessary precondition for any other right one might claim. But does it make sense to say that I have the right to life if I don’t have the right to end it when and as I choose?

by Clancy Martin, Harpers |  Read more:

Image: The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David

Desert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever Created

The drive from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, takes approximately eight hours when travelling in a vehicle whose top speed is forty-five miles per hour. In Desert Bus, an unreleased video game from 1995 conceived by the American illusionists and entertainers Penn Jillette and Teller, players must complete that journey in real time. Finishing a single leg of the trip requires considerable stamina and concentration in the face of arch boredom: the vehicle constantly lists to the right, so players cannot take their hands off the virtual wheel; swerving from the road will cause the bus’s engine to stall, forcing the player to be towed back to the beginning. The game cannot be paused. The bus carries no virtual passengers to add human interest, and there is no traffic to negotiate. The only scenery is the odd sand-pocked rock or road sign. Players earn a single point for each eight-hour trip completed between the two cities, making a Desert Bus high score perhaps the most costly in gaming. (...)

“Every few years, video games are blamed in the media for all of the ills in society,” said Teller. “In the early nineteen-nineties, I wrote an article for the New York Times citing all the studies that show video games have no effect on a child’s morals. But we wanted to create some entertainment that helped make the point.” The conversation with Gorodetsky seeded the idea of a video game that casts the player as a bus driver in a rote simulation. “The route between Las Vegas and Phoenix is long,” said Teller. “It’s a boring job that just goes on and on repetitiously, and your task is simply to remain conscious. That was one of the big keys—we would make no cheats about time, so people like the Attorney General could get a good idea of how valuable and worthwhile a game that just reflects reality would be.” (The U.S. Attorney General at the time, Janet Reno, was a critic of on-screen violence.)

The New Jersey–based video-game developer Imagineering created Desert Bus as one component of a larger game collection, called Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, for the Sega CD, a short-lived add-on for the Sega Genesis console. Penn, Teller, and the game’s publisher, Absolute Entertainment, planned a lavish prize for any player that scored a hundred points, a feat that would require eight hundred continuous hours of play: a real-life trip from Tucson to Las Vegas on a desert bus carrying showgirls and a live band.

“But by the time the game was finished, the format was dead,” said Teller. “We were unable to find anybody interested in acquiring the game.” Imagineering went out of business, and Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors was never released. The only record of the game’s existence was a handful of review copies that had been sent out to journalists in the weeks before the publisher went bust, in 1995. (...)

Van Humbeck is a former member of LoadingReadyRun, an Internet sketch-comedy group founded by Graham Stark and Paul Saunders in 2003. “I heard about Desert Bus in early 2006, on a Web site called waxy.org,” said Saunders. “The blog post linked to an extensive description of the main game, as well as the various mini-games included on the disc—and, most importantly, it had a torrent of the entire game available for download.”

Saunders wanted to film the group as it attempted to complete Desert Bus for a sketch. “At this same time,” he said, “one of the other team members, James Turner, brought up the idea of using our minor Internet fame to do something to benefit Child’s Play,” a charity that donates video games and consoles to children’s wards in hospitals around the world. “His idea was a live competition event where we would take pledges depending on how far we made it in various video games. We decided to combine both ideas and play Desert Bus for charity.”

by Simon Parkin, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Roberto Bolano: The Savage Detectives

[ed. Just finished reading Bolano's 2666 a few weeks ago. This, The Savage Detectives, is next.]

Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño's reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, "The Savage Detectives," will ensure that few are now untouched. Until recently there was even something a little Masonic about the way Bolaño's name was passed along between readers in this country; I owe my awareness of him to a friend who excitedly lent me a now never-to-be-returned copy of Bolaño's extraordinary novella "By Night in Chile." This wonderfully strange Chilean imaginer, at once a grounded realist and a lyricist of the speculative, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, has been acknowledged for a few years now in the Spanish-speaking world as one of the greatest and most influential modern writers. Those without Spanish have had to rely on the loyal intermittence of translation, beginning with "By Night in Chile" (2003), two more short novels — "Distant Star" (2004) and "Amulet" (2007) — and a book of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth" (2006), all translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions.

The best way to offer a sense of this writer might be to take a scene, and a sentence, from "By Night in Chile," still his greatest work. The book is narrated by Father Urrutia, a dying priest and conservative literary critic, a member of Opus Dei, who comes to emblematize, by the novella's end, the silent complicity of the Chilean literary establishment with the murderous Pinochet regime. In one episode, Father Urrutia is sent to Europe, by Opus Dei agents, to report on the preservation of the churches there.

This is where Bolaño's imagination suddenly expands into a magical diorama. Father Urrutia discovers that the chief threat to the churches comes from pigeon excrement, and that all over Europe churches have been using falcons to kill the pests. In Turin, Father Angelo has a fearsome falcon called Othello; in Strasbourg, Father Joseph has one named Xenophon; in Avignon, the murderous falcon is named Ta Gueule, and the narrator watches it in action:

"Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet's femoral artery, or the planet's aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Guele splashing color like an Abstract Expressionist painter."

Much of the most successfully daring postwar fiction has been by writers committed to the long dramatic sentence (Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, José Saramago). Bolaño is in their company: the quotation here is broken off of a phrase that takes about a page in the book. The musical control is impeccable, and one is struck by Bolaño's ability to nudge on his long, light, ethereal sentence — impossibly, like someone punting a leaf — image by image: the falcon, the red hue, the sunset, the dawn, the dawn seen from a plane, the femoral artery, the blood vessel, the abstract painter. It could so easily be too much, and somehow isn't, the flight of fancy anchored by precision and a just-suppressed comedy. (In Spain, amusingly, the falcons are too old or docile for killing, and the priests have none of the dangerous elegance of their French or Italian counterparts.) Likewise, this fantasia about falcons in every European city might have been thuddingly allegorical or irritatingly whimsical, and isn't. It is comically plausible, and concretely evoked; the surrealism lies in the systematic elaboration of the image. The Catholic Church is likened to a bird of prey, murderous and blood-red in its second capital, Avignon, and we are free to link this, without coercion, to the Chilean situation and the ethical somnolence of Father Urrutia.

That long sentence is a poem, really, proceeding by foliation; in fact the entire novella is a poem of a kind. It will not surprise you to learn that Roberto Bolaño wrote poetry before he wrote fiction. Even in a long novel like "The Savage Detectives," his favorite unit is the discrete, Browning-like monologue, not the extended scene. He was born in Chile in 1953, but came of age in Mexico City, where his family had moved in 1968. Returning to Chile in 1973 to help with the socialist revolution as he saw it, he was caught in the Pinochet coup and briefly arrested. He went back to Mexico, where he published two books of verse, and then began a long period of displacement and travel and drug-taking and odd jobs in France and Spain. He died of liver failure, in Barcelona, a far violin among near balalaikas (to adapt Nabokov's words on a fellow exiled writer). He knew time was short: the fiction that is currently being translated — there are more novellas to come, and a huge novel, "2666," will appear in English next year — was written in a spasm of activity in his last years.

by James Wood, NY Times (2007) |  Read more:

Image: Mathieu Bourgois

Rhys Owens
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Einsamer Angler, Rüdiger Fritsche
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Rodrigo y Gabriela

Let’s Consider Kate

As the new governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, takes up his job, it’s a good moment to reflect on the nature and scale of the work ahead of him. In the rear-view mirror, he can see how our banks reached their current condition – a story full of failure, scandal, greed and incompetence. That, as far as the overall picture of modern Britain is concerned, is the fun part. The difficult thing is looking forward and trying to work out what to do next. That’s because in their current condition our banks are an existential threat to British democracy, a more serious one than terrorism, either external or internal (...)

The reason for that is that in the UK bank assets are 492 per cent of GDP. In plain English, our banks are five times bigger than our entire economy. (When the Icelandic and Cypriot banking systems collapsed the respective figures were 880 and 700 per cent.) We know from the events of 2008 and subsequently that the financial sector, indeed the whole world economy, is in an inherently unstable condition. Put the size together with the instability, and we are facing a danger that is no less real for not being on the front page this exact second. This has to be fixed, and it has to be fixed soon, and nothing about fixing it is easy.

We need two things from our banks. One of them is to keep lending money, especially to small businesses, which are essential as the engine of economic activity – the route out of the state we’re in. The government has poured unprecedented amounts of money into the economy in an attempt to get it moving. It’s done so through quantitative easing, which involves buying back its own bonds using money that doesn’t actually exist. It’s like borrowing money from somebody and then paying them back with a piece of paper on which you’ve written the word ‘Money’ – and then, magically, it turns out that the piece of paper with ‘Money’ on it is real money. (Note: don’t try this.) Another way of describing quantitative easing would be that it is as if, when you look up your bank balance online, you had the additional ability to add to it just by typing numbers on your keyboard. Ordinary punters can’t do this, obviously, but governments can; then they use this newly created magic money to buy back their own debt. That’s what quantitative easing is.

by John Lanchester, LRB | Read more:
Image: BBC

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Ana Elisa Egreja
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Ron Terner
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Someboy Has to be in Control

George Clooney was at home in Los Angeles one afternoon in mid-January, a few days before he flew to Sudan in his new role as a United Nations “Messenger of Peace” (an appointment that overlooked reports of a recent public scuffle with Fabio, the leonine model). Clooney, who is unusual in being both very famous and, apparently, at ease with the fact—he can sometimes look like a spokesman for celebrity itself—was sitting on a long pale sofa, alongside Sarah Larson, his girlfriend. Bowls of chopped salad were on the coffee table in front of them: when Clooney’s electronic pepper grinder was activated, it sent a beam of light shining down onto the lettuce, like a police helicopter.

It was the “for your consideration” season—the run-up to the Oscars, when film studios lobby for the votes of Academy members, using means of varying subtlety. For some days, Clooney had been driven here and there in the back of a black Mercedes, and his presence at promotional cocktail parties had served as an advertisement for “Michael Clayton,” last year’s chilly corruption drama, in which he starred. (The film went on to be nominated in seven categories, including Best Actor; it received one Oscar, for Tilda Swinton, in a supporting part.) I had seen Clooney that morning, still in the role of candidate, in front of a bright-pink curtain on the stage of a theatre at the Hammer Museum, in Westwood, taking part in an Oscar-related panel discussion about acting and filmmaking, with Angelina Jolie, Daniel Day-Lewis, James McAvoy, and others. The event, organized by Newsweek,was leisurely, designed to encourage a degree of self-analysis, but Clooney (looking about as skinny as a young Sinatra, his sunglasses hooked over the opening of his collar) seemed to have set himself the task of resisting group drift toward actorly grandeur or celebrity griping. He was unremittingly affable. “We have time for one more question,” he said, after taking his seat. He traded running jokes with McAvoy, and made mock-scornful comments about Day-Lewis’s exalted reputation. (“You just kill it for the rest of us; we’ll take care of you, pal.”) He capped a conversation about paparazzi intrusions with a politic acknowledgment of the privileges of fame. His manner—nonchalance underpinned, it seemed, by vigilance and self-scrutiny—carried the suggestion that almost any divergence from banter was unforgivable artsy narcissism.

This is probably the performance for which Clooney, now forty-six, is still best known, even as he has become a Hollywood emperor, not to mention a left-leaning activist and a friend of Senator Barack Obama’s. Clooney is America’s national flirt, a pitchman on talk shows and red carpets who, against the background hum of the world’s lust and envy, is lightly ironic, clever, and self-deprecating, with furrowed brow and bobbing head, and a gyration in the lower jaw suggesting something being moved around under his tongue. This busy charm—a man on his way out to a party, feeling pretty good about his hair—was profitably packaged in “Ocean’s Eleven” and its two sequels, films that, more than anything, seemed to be oblique views of the A-list esprit de corps, real or imagined, that went into making them; they were fictions yearning to be “making of” documentaries. (Together, they earned more than a billion dollars.) And that charm was largely withheld, to effect, in the downbeat roles that Clooney took in “Syriana” and “Michael Clayton.” There he played hurting, unanchored men. In both cases, he was assigned a romantic partner—played by Greta Scacchi and Jennifer Ehle, in turn—who was edited out of the movie, with Clooney’s blessing. (Referring to his “Clayton” character—a back-room fixer in a New York law firm—Clooney explained to me, “If he’s loved, then he has a buffer, and somehow it isn’t as awful.”) (...)

I was introduced to Clooney after the panel discussion; his handshake became a shoulder squeeze, and he apologized for the thing taking so long. We got into his car. He was wearing jeans and a thin black sweater and high-laced black work boots. He looked tanned and a little worn, and my mind turned for a moment to “Leatherheads”—his latest film, a comedy about nineteen-twenties football, which he also directed—where it’s sometimes hard to see where his face ends and his beautifully thin brown leather jacket begins. He had a headache, the legacy of a gruesome spinal injury incurred in 2004, while filming a torture scene for “Syriana.” (He hit his head on a concrete floor; not long afterward, cerebrospinal fluid began to leak out of his nose.) His discomfort, which is fairly persistent, was today at the level of “eating ice cream too fast.” The panel discussion had lasted two hours, but he kept talking anyway, in a quiet, dry voice—about a guest saying “Listen, you’ve got my vote” at a “Michael Clayton” Oscar party (“That’s saying out loud what you were pretending wasn’t happening,” he told me, laughing), and a recent night out at a bar in Santa Monica after an award-giving event, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Javier Bardem, Benicio Del Toro, and Sean Penn, during which “we got hammered and we all came to the conclusion we wanted to be Javier Bardem.” He then carefully made the point that none of his closest friends are movie stars. “There are people you spend a lot of time with, and people you enjoy seeing at the office party,” he said—the office party, in this context, being the Venice Film Festival. Speaking of his “Ocean’s” co-stars Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, he said, “Brad and I talk, and Matt and I talk, on a fairly regular basis—text each other, give each other shit.” But, he continued, “I have my friends, nine guys for twenty-five years; they’re the guys I see every Sunday.”

by Ian Parker, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Martin Schoeller.