The New York Times reports that big-discount clothing stores such as Steve and Barry's are having great success by keeping expenses low and charging bargain-basement prices:

Steve & Barry’s, for the uninitiated, is to fashion what Tower once was to music. Steve & Barry’s is manna, a store that sells stylish celebrity-branded clothes at prices that are absurdly inexpensive, lower than those at Old Navy, H & M or Forever 21, undercutting even Wal-Mart by as much as half.

The fact is, clothes tend to cost a good deal more than most other fashionable cultural items such as movies, books, music, and the like. The celebrity culture and social pressures, however, always incite people, especially the young, to emulate the styles they see in media presentations, as an easy way of establishing a quickly readable identity for themselves.

Thus the rise of budget-friendly clothing fashions. The owners of Steve and Barry's have found success by making a virtue of necessity and selling aesthetic beauty on a budget, by keeping expenses to the bare minimum. Whereas most clothing designers charge a huge fortune in licensing fees, the designers stocking Steve and Barry's stores make their money on volume, as do the stores themselves:

[Steve and Barry's owners] Mr. Shore and Mr. Prevor, dressed in chinos and rumpled shirts, frequently described the company as “the Google of fashion” and rattled off several ways they had devised to make a high-quality product at the low prices. The clothes appear to be well made — several of the Bitten dresses, made in India, were lined, and the strapless dress Ms. Parker wore is constructed with an internal elastic band to hold it up. And the basketball shoes appear sturdy, although they are made with fake leather (well, so are Stella McCartney’s).

Steve & Barry’s saves big, for example, by opening stores in underperforming malls, where the owners are more likely to negotiate rents and offer other incentives; by building its own bare-bones store displays; by maintaining only a small public relations office in Manhattan; and by manufacturing in countries like China, India, Madagascar and more than 20 others, including the United States.

This is surely no return to the early years of the Christian church or an expression of Buddhist self-denial. It's simply a smart way for young people to do what they have always done: use every possible means to give themselves a strong and hopefully likeable social identity. The Times story quotes actress Sarah Jessica Parker, whose inexpensive clothing line is sold at Steve and Barry's as acknowledging that point:

“What has changed,” Ms. Parker said, “is that now people have bragging rights about what they paid. I admired a woman’s pair of pants at a party recently and she said, ‘Fourteen dollars! H & M!’ It really is, among the people I know, part of what they do now.”

Mr. Shore and Mr. Prevor again likened the change to a revolution.

“When you look at clothing now,” Mr. Prevor said, “price is not the arbiter of what is good. It’s the clothes themselves.”

Valuing things on the basis of their real benefits is indeed a good thing, and good fashions do bring aesthetic beauty into the world. That is certainly better than utilitarian drabness, provided it isn't done wastefully, and that is clearly the point behind the cheap chic—beauty on a budget.

The film will be set in Boston and will be directed by Martin Campbell (Casino Royale, The Mask of Zorro, Goldeneye) from a screenplay by William Monahan (The Departed, Kingdom of Heaven).

It will be Gibson's first starring role since 2002, when he appeared in Signs and We Were Soldiers.

Hollywood insiders will be interested in seeing whether Gibson's box office appeal as an actor remains strong after his widely publicized incident of two years ago when he made caustic, anti-Semitic remarks to police officers who had arrested him for drunken driving. Gibson apologized publicly for the incident, met with Jewish leaders for reconciliation, and entered treatment for alcoholism.

Audiences will undoubtedly just be looking for a good movie and will run out to see it if it's a quality film.

At a speech in North Carolina today, Obama Obama addressed his Wright problem. Here's a report from the Los Angeles Times:

"Yesterday, we saw a very different vision," Obama said of Wright's Washington appearance, which at one point he termed a "performance."

He could hardly have distanced himself farther from the man who officiated at his  wedding ceremony  and baptized his two children.

Obama described himself as "outraged" by many of Wright's remarks and "saddened" by what he termed "the spectacle of what we saw yesterday."

He characterized as "ridiculous" Wright's notion that the AIDS epidemic may have been a conspiracy inflicted on blacks by the federal government and that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan should be considered a leading voice in modern times.

Such views ...

"offend me. They rightly offend all Americans. They should be denounced."

And in line after line, he did so.

"When I say I find (Wright's comments) appalling, I mean it," Obama said.

And during a Q & A with reporters following his statement, Obama came back -- unprompted -- to Wright's opinions on AIDS and other matters, calling them "rants that aren't grounded in truth."

This is a welcome change in Obama's attitude toward the Rev. Mr. Wright. Why the junior senator from Illinois was not outraged or saddened when Wright peppered his sermons and other speeches with such "thoughts" during the many years in which Obama attended Wright's church, Obama did not say.

Of course, we already knew the answer: Obama recognized that voters were giving him a free ride in the case, as their desire to cast a symbolic vote for racial reconciliation was far stronger than reason.

But given Wright's recent very high profile in the media—including a thoroughly unrepentant speech before the National Press Club yesterday, in which Wright reiterated the very ideas and claims that had been threatening to disturb Obama's image as a squeaky clean reformer out to lead all Americans in a crusade to kick the baddies out of Washington, D.C. and replace them with a new generation of JFK-style idealists—Obama clearly realized that Wright was not going to go away but was instead going to take advantage of his new public forum as the much-admired presidential candidate's crazy ex-pastor.

In addition, Wright suggested on the Bill Moyers show on PBS last Friday that Obama still agrees with him and that the Illinois senator's mid-March speech distancing himself from Wright's most inflammatory statements was a pack of lies: "If Sen. Obama did not say what he said, he would not get elected."

All of that was much too much, and Obama finally did what he should have done many years ago: consigned the Rev. Wright to the landfill where he belongs.

Now we shall see whether the voters will do the same with Obama himself. 

A fine example is the Grand Theft Auto videogame series, which world-savers on both the political left and right have lambasted for years as encouraging violence among young people.

One might politely suggest that the real culprits are disgracefully poor public education systems staffed largely by unionized time-servers; weak sentencing given to youthful offenders; and draconian drug laws that make the narcotics trade immensely profitable—but one would be quickly shouted down as a child-killer.

Such is the fate of those cursed with common sense in our contemporary world.

Nonetheless, because people are still free to purchase such games, there is money in it and an eager audience for sensible critiques of them. Thank Heaven for the market economy.

In a very enlightening review of the newly released Grand Theft Auto IV in today's Chicago Sun-Times, Misha Davenport covers both the game action and the highly interesting setting and ideas behind Grand Theft Auto IV. Yes, the game has ideas, and they are handled very well indeed, according to Davenport's report:

“Grand Theft Auto IV” is a modern masterpiece that attempts to address what it means to be an American in a post-9/11 world.

The script by Rockstar founder Dan Houser distills and condenses both our hopes and fears during these confusing times as it captures the seedy underbelly of a major city. The game shares much in common with E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime. In that book, a Jewish immigrant family finds the turn-of-the-century tenements of New York to be a harsh place. A hundred years later, immigrants are still drawn to this country by the allure of freedom; but the good life of the “American Dream” dissipates when you wake to the bitter reality of life in a big city.

The comparison to Doctorow will undoubtedly offend those who dismiss video games as inherently non-intellectual, but the novel itself, after all, was originally considered to be a debased form of writing, grossly inferior to epic poetry and theatrical drama. Davenport continues with a description of the game action:

“GTA IV” follows Niko Bellic, an illegal immigrant from an unnamed eastern European country who is trying to escape the horrors of the Bosnian war by starting over in Liberty City (the game’s fictionalized version of New York). He no sooner meets his cousin Roman on the docks when he realizes the good life promised to him was a lie, his cousin’s letters about the good life mere exaggerations.

There is no mansion. Roman lives in a roach-infested studio walk-up located in Hove Beach (Brighton Beach) in the borough of Broker (Brooklyn). Roman has a gambling problem, he’s heavily in debt, and he needs some muscle to provide protection and even the score.

As Roman, players can take up various odd jobs, date and woo a girl, play darts, go bowling or even get stinking drunk with the cousin until neither of you can walk or see straight. (I’ve never driven drunk, but I can only imagine that programmers have done their research. The car is impossible to handle.)

The new game shows a further maturity from the series' raucous beginnings, Davenport notes: 

While the main characters in the initial entries in the franchise were thugs and gangsters, things took a different turn in the last game. CJ, the hero of “GTA: San Andreas,” was basically a decent guy who, in true Hitchcock fashion, found himself mixed up in some very bad things.

But this time around, gamers hold Niko’s morality in their hands. Sure, you're beating up the loan sharks who are hassling your cousin, but beyond that, things are again fairly open-ended, leaving it up to you to decide just what Niko will do as he chases the elusive American Dream.

The Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series is by no means unique in introducing challenging thoughts and ideas into video games. Countless other games do the same thing, and even those that seem to be nothing but action, such as the GTA series, can have serious implications and strong, positive educational components.

I've never played video games, or other parlor games either, as it's just something I have never enjoyed, so I appreciate the views of people who do like these things. Although I don't play the games myself, millions of other people do, and I'm glad to know that the makers of many of these games are serious about making them as good as possible on all levels of engagement.

Truly, they seem far more serious and responsible than the people who run our public schools.

No official announcement has been made. 

It seems likely that Late Night will be less "edgy" and bizarre than it has been during O'Brien's tenure, and that the Tonight Show will be much more of both than it has been while in Leno's hands.

Stuttaford writes: 

The most distinctive thing about this Macbeth may be the way that it is haunted not by one ghost, but two. We never see the second. It is glimpsed only in hint, in gesture, in the laughter that accompanies a savage joke, in flickering newsreel of past parades and, mostly, in our own memories of the cruelties of all our day-before-yesterdays, cruelties which Shakespeare never lived long enough to see—except, perhaps, in his imagination—but which we will not, should not, live long enough to forget.

The first traces of this malign presence can be detected in the appearance of the soldiers in the opening scenes: leather coats, leather boots, flat caps, uniforms more usually associated with Kursk than Cawdor, with cattle trucks rather than cavalry. It’s evoked again by the basement, moral and physical, within which the action unfolds, a miserable space that does duty as hospital, kitchen, torture chamber, bar, palace, banqueting hall and (underlining the way that this play never escapes the lower depths—even when the drama supposedly moves outside) the moors, forests, and battlefields of Macbeth’s much contested kingdom. Huis Clos. No exit. This bunker, this arena is a bleak, clinical, claustrophobic place, its white-tiled walls efficient in a cheerless mid-century way, easy to swab down after who knows what. It’s best reached by an old-fashioned concertina-gated elevator, a mechanized entrance to some sort of hell, to the Lubyanka of our nightmares.

But it’s when we arrive at the play’s core, with Macbeth ascendant and regnant, the former king dead, and the search for traitors well underway, that this second ghost, that of Joseph Stalin, comes closest into view. Beyond a moustache, Stewart never really attempts impersonation; The rest is just suggestion, the sometimes uncanny resonance of the play’s own lines, and the adroit use that Goold makes of the gaps left between them. Thus we see Macbeth making his plans in the wake of what has clearly been a good day out at the hunt. He is pleasant, cheery, his hat pushed back at the casual angle that Stalin (a man who could pantomime relaxation) sometimes favored when out in the field. He is holding a shotgun, and as he talks, he jovially swings the weapon out towards the audience, pointing here, pointing there, randomly, precisely, playfully, maliciously, aiming at you, at me, at Banquo, at Duncan, at Bukharin, at Trotsky, at tens, at thousands, at millions.

The Guardian review of last fall's presentation of the production in England made the same observations without explicitly making the connection to Stalin:

Lady Macbeth greets Duncan in her kitchen pinny; Banquo is murdered in a rocking railway carriage compartment; and Malcolm flees to a court where a whitetied tenor sings a Novello number. Far from being whimsical or tricksy, this roots the action in a plausible world of escalating terror to which England provides a tonal contrast.

According to this and other accounts, it seems evident that the production and performance make this connection quite openly, so Stuttaford is clearly on solid ground in his analysis. The details he provides are quite interesting and enlightening regarding the underlying truths that great art so frequently lays bare.

In so doing, works such as this production of Macbeth (according to those who have seen it) push against the relativism so common in our contemporary culture and point toward a greater understanding of human nature and the human condition. Thus they provide strong forces for cultural and social renewal.