If I Ran "The West Wing"

That's West Wing the TV show, not the real thing...

On the 16th, John Spencer died. A damned fine actor, and it was a real shock that he went as suddenly as he did. It brings up, all over again, that peculiar intimacy you sometimes feel with celebrities you've never met--all that time they spent in your living room, etc. But in the real world, this is as close as I ever got to John Spencer:

Back in 1989, I spent a summer as an intern at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, which mostly means that I was an unpaid laborer who was occasionally allowed to do something that maybe resembled acting. At the same time, one of the real actors, Leland Gantt, was playing Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus for us then going off to shoot Presumed Innocent. He came back talking about how great it had been, not the work itself, but just hanging out with Harrison Ford and with this other actor I'd never heard of named John Spencer. That's it, that's as close as I ever got to the man--but I think it's telling that even before I became aware of him as an actor, I was already hearing about what a great guy John Spencer was.

But now he's gone, and that's a damned awful shame but it happens. As a fan of "West Wing," though (the Season 5 DVDs are currently on the way--yes, even without Aaron Sorkin I'm still getting the DVDs), I inevitably start to wonder what all the other fans of the show are wondering: how does the show treat the loss of a much-beloved principal character? Which is my roundabout way of getting to my hypothetical of the day: if I were John Wells, how would I choose to deal with the show's biggest challenge to date?

First off, John Spencer's character, Leo McGarry, has to die. You can't just push a Vice Presidential candidate off to the wings and pretend he's just not onscreen for several weeks. The most important piece of information, which I don't have, is how many unaired episodes Spencer shot before he died. If filming is complete through the election that is the center of this season, then you go one way; if it's not, you have to go another way. Put it this way: Democratic candidate Matt Santos loses his VP candidate just days before the election. Either he loses the election because a key part of his team has just disappeared (it happened just that way to William Howard Taft in 1912), or he wins but then has to wonder forever after whether he won on his own merits or because of a sympathy vote. Which is actually an interesting character question that could be fun for the writers to play with. On the other hand, if the election has already been filmed, then the show has to deal with a transition that is suddenly radically different than everyone expected--which can also be very interesting dramatically.

There's a second question, too, which is largely unrelated to Spencer's death: is this the show's last season? Again, there are two ways to go. The obvious one is, Yes this is the last season. This show was always about the Bartlet White House, and the obvious way to end it is to show Bartlet and his team handling the transition and then going off into that good night. In that case, it doesn't really matter which character wins the election--though it would certainly be interesting to see how Bartlet reacts to having hand off his administration to someone who approaches it from a different ideological point of view (which was already touched on in the episodes when Bartlet resigned in the wake of his daughter's kidnapping).

That's probably how I would handle it--the show has been very interesting lately in its in-depth exploration of a presidential candidate, but already it is straying far from what defined the show in the first place. On "West Wing" you were always led up to the point where the President made a big speech or launched into a debate, but the focus was always on what happened backstage. When the show did its live debate stunt, all the backstage stuff went out the window, and the essential character of the show went with it.

If NBC gets greedy (not likely, given the ratings lately) and pressures the producers into sticking around for another year, then I think Alan Alda's character has to win the election. It's the only way to keep the show dramatically interesting: go backstage with a whole different kind of administration. But that doesn't seem likely--in that "three years later" teaser at the beginning of this season, I could swear that the President about to get out of that limo had dark hair. Thus Santos wins. And as much as I like the character, and as much as I wish that someone like him could someday become President, haven't we already had seven years of wish fulfillment with the Bartlet administration?

Ah well. It's all completely idle talk, of course. The inescapable fact is that when the show resumes new episodes on January 8th, I'll be sitting there like everyone else, waiting and watching, and still terribly sad that John Spencer isn't around anymore.

There and Back Again

I left home and went home; then after a few days, I came home again. Brief impressions:

I left sunny L.A. with temperatures in the 60s and low 70s, and palm trees swaying in the breeze, and flew to sunny Miami, with lower-than-usual humidity and temperatures in the 60s and low 70s as palm trees swayed in the breeze--those that weren't knocked over by the hurricanes. Even though Florida wasn't hit nearly as badly as the gulf coast states, still there was plenty of damage--both my dad's and my mom's houses had considerable landscaping damage, and piles of debris still waiting to be carted away; those trees still standing had been severely pruned because of branch damage. (Hard woods had a harder time than the more supple palms.) There were lines of trees along the road where it seemed every other one had been knocked down, and crews were still slowly working their down, standing and replanting these trees. At one point I drove past a housing development and wondered why anyone would build houses with blue roofs, before Mom pointed out that they were all FEMA-issued blue tarps.

Dad's house is slowly emptying--my sister was out of town for the first few days of my visit, getting herself established in Gainesville as she transfers to a new school; and in the next few months it is reasonable to assume that my brother will be moving out as well. The population at Mom's house, however, has at last stabilized: two people, three indoor cats and three outdoor cats. For a while there the cat population seemed to be exploding, but everything seems to have settled for a while.

My long losing streak at last ended. For years--since roughly 1986--every time I have attended a sporting event, the home team has lost. The Red Sox at Fenway, the Cubs at Wrigley, the White Sox at the new Comiskey, the Blackhawks at the United Center, every single time: if I went, they lost. But my brother had tickets to a Florida Panthers game (against the Buffalo Sabres), and for various reasons we couldn't get there till the game was already half over--and the Panthers were up 3-0. Barely two minutes after I sat down (with excellent 14th row seats) the Sabres scored, and I got that sinking feeling. But the game was already half over, which may be the key--there wasn't really time for the Panthers to crash dramatically. In the end the score was 4-1, and my losing streak had been snapped. That is very happy news--now maybe I can bring myself to go to a Dodgers game.

I drove my brother's new Hummer H3 and was actually impressed--that behemoth (which is actually smaller than an Expedition) handles very nicely, and has a very impressive turning radius, not to mention gas mileage that isn't so much worse than my little Subaru. Now if only I could convince him that having a DVD player/display in the front seat isn't such a great idea...

Lots of nice presents, given and received; quality time spent with everyone; and my sister had a spectacularly good idea, but I can't talk about it here because--well, because I can't talk about it here. Now I'm home and life is already back to normal--but with weeks of good cheer to come, what with the books to read, the music to listen to, the DVDs to watch. Life ain't so bad this particular yuletide.

He Spies

I keep wondering, over and over: how much does it take for people to figure out that this is a bad president? When several former Bush officials, most notably Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, came out publicly with information critical of their former boss, I wondered how many insider reports does it take before people start to believe what's actually going on behind those very closed Oval Office doors? It took an act of God called Katrina to finally strip away the level of incompetence in an administration where loyalty counts more than qualifications, and Bush's poll numbers dropped, but then they started to rise again.

Now comes news that is not news. Secret National Security Agency wiretaps on unnamed Americans. Exactly the sort of thing that those of us who worry about civil liberties were worried about when legislation like the Patriot Act was being proposed. Salon's David Cole does a good job of dissecting why Bush's legal arguments are preposterous, and it seems inevitable that the question will make its way to the Supreme Court, which, no matter how conservative its members may be by then, will almost certainly declare the president's actions to be illegal.

I am not one of those calling for impeachment hearings. For one thing, I don't think it does the nation any good to have to endure the awful procedure a second (actually third) time, particularly if it then threatens to become standard procedure for one party to try to impeach any president of another party. Let's try to keep the bar raised as high as possible on impeachment, shall we? (Although if the Clinton impeachment had never happened, I might in fact be calling for Bush to be impeached.) But also, impeachment does no good because look at the line of succession: if Bush goes you get Cheney; behind him, Dennis Hastert; behind him, Ted Stevens. No, the only solution is to hamstring these clowns and try to keep them from doing too much more damage over the next three years, then vote them the hell out of town and try someone who actually, you know, cares about the Constitution.

How bad is it? Lately I've been finding myself thinking with warm nostalgia about the days of the Nixon administration. That's how bad it is.

The Actor's Nightmare

The actor's nightmare has always been very simple: he is thrust onstage, before a large audience, and he has absolutely no idea what his lines are. There is a long, awful moment as these people all stare at him, blinking, waiting for what he'll do to entertain them, and then the actor wakes up sweating.

Oh--and often in this dream, the actor is also naked.

So on Friday, my dayjob held its office Christmas party, and I was subjected to an almost perfect version of the actor's nightmare. Somehow everyone kept quiet about the fact that at the Christmas party, the new people are expected to get up and perform something, so it came as a complete surprise to all three of us. Easy enough for the other two: they're not in The Biz, and they're not as invested in the whole notion of performing well. One person sang two short verses of a Christmas carol; one sang "My Darling Clementine" while substituting "Honey bunny" for every word. (No, really.) And then it was my turn, and they just wouldn't let me squirm out of it.

Now bear in mind, I quit the acting game several years ago, so it's been a long time since I had to go to an audition. Thus everything I used to keep in my head has pretty much left my head, a piece at a time. Thus I really couldn't come up with anything at all--unless you think Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, the only text I could remember completely, is appropriate holiday fare. (I damn near did it anyway, out of sheer spite.)

Also bear in mind: phoning it in was not an option. If you put me in front of an audience, I cannot help taking very seriously my responsibility toward an audience, a responsibility that boils down to two simple words: don't suck. Even if I'm not an actor anymore, when I find myself in front of a crowd, I always find that although the monologues may have faded, the Don't Suck ethos still has a potent grip.

Long story short: I sucked. The only piece that came to mind at all was the Scarecrow's song from "Wizard of Oz," but I didn't have time to go through the verses to make sure I knew them, and once I got up there I almost immediately skipped to the wrong place in the song--which made it very hard for people who were trying to sing along. A funny happened, though: as I hit the line "If I only had a brain" I suddenly found myself ad-libbing "Then I wouldn't work here!" which got a laugh, and I realized that a whole avenue of improv had just opened up.

Still. At that point I couldn't even remember the structure of the song, let alone what any of the rest of the lyrics were, and it's hard to adapt lyrics if you can't remember what they were. So no, I did not strike out on a path of brilliant improvisation like Ella Fitzgerald when she forgot the words to "Mack the Knife," instead I just wrapped it up as fast as possible and sat down, as fast as possible, wiping the sweat from my brow and desperately hoping that the person with the camera phone (Twitchy, as it turns out) hadn't recorded the whole damn thing. (She had.)

But hey, at least I wasn't naked.

I Heard the News Today

I was 15 years old on that wretched day in December 1980, and I had been a rabid Beatles fan for about two years. I already wrote about my Beatles obsession in August, but in December 1980 it was so potent that I listened to nothing else. When I chose to listen to music, I chose to listen to The Beatles. I was in the process of getting all the albums and was chiefly focusing on the group's work; of their solo albums, I think I had only purchased a McCartney/Wings greatest hits album by then, and although John's new record had recently been released, I wasn't in any particular hurry to buy it. (Hey, I was still on an allowance back then.)

On the night of December 8th I either went to bed early, or simply didn't have the TV on that night, or something. I was a Sophomore in high school and although school started at 7:30, I liked to get there at 7:00 in order to hang out with friends. So on that night, I did not hear the news, and slept the sleep of angels.

Except that the next morning, Mom woke me up early. Here's where memory kicks in, sharp and clear. I remember that it was dark out, I remember her calling for me through the closed door, I remember looking at my clock and seeing that it was about fifteen minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off, I remember the usual morning confusion being amplified because suddenly I was getting more morning than usual. But you see, my alarm was a radio alarm, and she didn't want me to hear the news over the radio.

I slumped my way into the living room as Mom leaned over the stereo, which rested on a wooden plank laid over white concrete blocks. The needle slipped into the groove of the last track on the Hey Jude compilation--"Ballad of John and Yoko." Only then did Mom begin to tell me why she had awoken me so early. And just as she told me that John had been shot, and that John was dead, that was when the song reached this particular line, John's voice saying to me:

The way things are going, they're gonna crucify me.

Oh, the burdens of having a dramatic parent. No wonder I remember every second of this, eh? I mean the news itself was bad enough, but the delivery, yikes.

The rest of the day does not remain in memory. I can recall finding a friend in the school's library, a fellow Beatles fan who felt just as hollow, just as mystified as I did. I can remember standing next to that same stereo in the living room a few days later as the minute of silence that Yoko had asked for was observed by radio stations around the country. I can remember going into the store with everyone else and buying Double Fantasy, taking it home and being more than a little puzzled by Yoko's songs but refusing to join in on all that "Yoko destroyed the Beatles" nonsense. And I can remember being in New York several years later, walking around the city on my own and realizing that I was close to the Dakota. I walked past, saw the entrance to the building, the gilded guard's tower, the small crowd of people who still lingered there, playing music and sharing stories.

But time passes, and the news doesn't have the sting it once did, and really, I never met the man so it's hard to get so worked up any more. (The irony does not escape me that the other day I waxed ironic about a real emergency happening to someone I actually know, whereas my tone today is mournful and sad about this man I never knew.) So really, what matters to me is John's music, and I have that in spades: every one of his songs on records, on CDs, on the computer, on my iPod. The John Lennon who really matters is, at least in my own personal universe, beyond life and death, an unvanquished truth. Mark David Chapman is still in jail and John's still singing to me, practically every day. It's not perfect, but it's enough.

Panic in the Halls!

So the other day (yesterotherday), this lady in the office where I work was having a normal sort of a day: getting coffee, shooting the breeze, showing off her new Richard Nixon doll, that sort of thing. (Personally, being a liberal, I think everything that followed musta been Nixon's fault.) Now this lady--we'll call her Lady A, although her real name is Louise Smith-Smythe Smithington and she lives at 1423 Smithenfield Road in Schmitty, Oregon, which makes her commute to Santa Monica pure hell--turns out that Lady A has a history of epilepsy, which means that she can't drive, which of course makes her commute from Smithlyville even more difficult. But given the whole epileptic thing, let's not call her Lady A, let's just call her Twitchy.

So, Twitchy. Turns out the epilepsy thing has nothing to do with what followed, it's just kinda interesting. (Like I said, it was all Nixon's fault.) Now me, I'm going through my typical day as well: getting decaf coffee (lest I get a little twitchy myself), shooting the breeze, trying desperately to banish the memory of that damned Richard Nixon doll, that sort of thing. I see Twitchy walk hurriedly down the long hallway, looking in each office and finding them empty (ah, Christmastime--the only time of year when you actually spend more time with your family than with your coworkers). I think nothing of Twitchy's perambulation, because of course I'm still suffering Nixon flashbacks. A moment later, there is a commotion from down the hall. A lot of hollering, something about calling paramedics and a heart attack.

"Well gee," I think. "That sounds peculiar. I should go see what it is all about. Maybe the Nixon doll has come to life and is attacking people." I mosey on down the hall and find Twitchy in someone's office, lying flat on her back and doing some up-tempo variation of Lamaze breathing. People are running hither and yon, the paramedics are being called, people rush in to tell Twitchy that the paramedics are on their way, and then people just stand around because of course no one actually knows what the hell is going on and that's what you do in those situations, you just kinda stand there and hope the person doesn't, you know, die.

Twitchy sees me. "Robert!" she says. "Do CPR on me!"

Me being me, I had to argue the point. "Hell, it's been twenty years since I took a CPR class, you really don't--"

"Do CPR on me now!"

In a situtation like that you don't really have time to stop and work things out. You can't take a second and say to yourself "Wait, if a person actually needs CPR would they be in any condition to say 'Hey, I need CPR'?" (Answer: nope.) So I got on my knees next to Twitchy and took her wrist, hoping that maybe I could feel a pulse even though I'm lousy at feeling for people's pulses so really all I was doing was trying to buy myself some time. But instead Twitchy took my hand and put it on her chest. "Do CPR now!"

"Gosh, I hardly know you," I said, and then got as far as lacing my fingers together in what I hoped was a place on her sternum that wouldn't crush her to death with the first compression. But with my hands there I could feel her heart thumping, racing, and now there was no question: if I did what Twitchy was demanding, I would probably in fact give her the heart attack she was afraid of. And fear, as I soon realized, was the real problem here, blind unreasoning fear. So I started asking her specific questions about specific symptoms, trying to get her to focus in on something, suspecting that that in itself might begin to reduce her symptoms.

But Twitchy decided that since I refused to compress her chest I was useless, so she turned to others and sent them scrambling for aspirin. (Helpful hint, learned later: if you are in fact having a heart attack, taking aspirin during the attack will not help; neither will lying flat. Someday you'll thank me. Just don't ask me to do CPR.) Turns out the office's first aid kit was completely out of aspirin, which resulted in further scrambling around, and the substitution of a pain medication containing a little bit of acetaminophen and a little bit of aspirin, but instead of swallowing them with water she mostly ended up just pouring cold water all over her face. (Which probably helped, now that I think of it.) And then she started sobbing on someone's shoulder and kicked the rest of us out until the paramedics came. By the time they wheeled her out on a gurney, she looked fine.

According to WebMD, it was a textbook example of panic disorder. Which makes perfect sense in retrospect, though when you're in the moment and you're not a doctor and you don't happen to know what the precise symptoms of a panic attack are, you're pretty much left just standing there with nothing more to go on than the vague instinct that maybe you shouldn't crush this woman's heart today.

As Twitchy was being wheeled out she asked someone to get her purse and her cellphone. The purse was produced and the Nixon doll was in it, providing one last surreal moment before the story ended (and, unfortunately, reviving in me all the horror of having seen a Richard Nixon doll). Twitchy went away to the hospital and the rest of us stood around, feeling a little better about the quality of our day than we had been feeling half an hour before, and with something quite new to shoot the breeze about. End of story. Go in peace.

(By the way: a surprising amount of the above is actually true.)

Screenplay Structure

I think that if my writing life over the past year has been about any one thing, it's been about reconciling myself to the requirements of structure. Because, you see, I'm one of those creative right-brain people, so I have a certain ingrained bias against anything that feels like a template for creative work. Why does there have to be a Catalyst on exactly page 12? What's wrong with page 13 or 14? And who says that your protagonist has to have likable traits even if he's supposed to be a son-of-a-bitch? I was instinctively certain that all these things were just crutches for people who don't really know how to write.

But in Hollywood, you face certain challenges. Like script readers, people paid a set amount of money per script to read whatever comes in and make that first basic decision as to whether the script is worth someone more important reading it. If the script reader who happens to be assigned your script is one of those who looks for certain elements in the first ten pages then throws the script away if s/he doesn't get those elements, then you're hosed and it doesn't make one bit of difference whether the rest is good or not. And if your script does get passed up the line, the development person at a production company could do exactly the same thing: look for an interesting Catalyst moment on page 12, then look for a big, decisive act break on page 25, and if they're not there, in the trash it goes.

Fair? Phooey on fair. Just imagine that you've been assigned to read ten scripts over the weekend, and a full reading takes around ninety minutes. That's fifteen hours out of your weekend, reading what are probably bad scripts. Anyone, even us hoity-toity right-brain types, would soon find ourselves begging for a system that gives us more of our lives back.

But there is an even more inescapable reason why these screenplay-structure outlines exist: they work. Whether it's because audiences have been trained to react to this specific structure, or the structure emerged because audiences instinctively respond to it, I don't know and it doesn't matter. The structure works. There are exceptions, but you don't get to write those exceptional screenplays until you're already an established writer who will be given the latitude to stray and try something new. Until then, if you want to get anywhere near the door, you are strongly, strongly advised to pay attention to the classic structure.

Does it feel like selling out? A little bit--but there's another way of looking at it. Think about what poets often say: the requirements of writing a sonnet actually force them to be more creative. Anyone can string together fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with an AB-AB rhyme scheme and a couplet at the end, but writing a good sonnet is hard. The words that first come to mind don't exactly fit the meter, and simply switching them around doesn't fit. Now you have to find another way to say the same thing that does fit the meter, and along the way the thing you want to say starts to shift. Quite often you'll find that this shift is toward something deeper and truer and better. Before long, all those damned pesky restrictions on your creativity have forced you to be more creative, and the work is better and you're a better writer for it.

Or put it this way: when you have a thousand choices available, you tend to go for the easy ones. When you have only three or four choices, you tend to go for the better ones. (My crazy novel, Thereby Hangs a Tale, is monumentally difficult precisely because it deliberately discards a bunch of rules and then makes up a bunch of new ones. Since it can go anywhere and do anything, it is very hard to figure out exactly where it should go and what it should do. I find myself suffering as a writer precisely because I don't have a structure to hang my hat on.)

The outline that Marc and I have been following lately--and which has indeed spurred our creativity--has been Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! Which is funny, since he's a romantic-comedy writer and we definitely do not write those sorts of scripts--but if the aim is to be "bulletproof" when your script goes before a reader, then this outline seems pretty damn tight. Marc found it first, and practically had to hold a gun to my head to get me to buy my own copy, but now I'm (grudgingly) glad I did. Other writer-friends have now encountered the book through us and picked up their own copies, so there does seem to be something about it that speaks to us in the right way.

And by the way, I've been reading John August's weblog this morning, and I like it a lot. I finally got around to watching Big Fish this weekend, and I'm amazed that I hadn't seen it before because it is exactly my kind of movie. I completely loved it, a five-star movie for sure, and Mr. August wrote one hell of a script. If you're interested in screenwriting, his blog is entertaining and informative; and that movie in particular is a gem. Highly recommended.

Oh My Aching Back!

All my best pain comes out of nowhere. Take my back (please).

One April morning in the late Eighties, I was living in Boston and looking forward to visiting my roommate's family for Easter dinner. I had never had a moment of back pain in my life, but on this particular morning I woke up and couldn't move. There had been no injury, no twisting or lifting the day before, it came straight out of nowhere and knocked me flat. The pain quickly subsided that day, and ever since then I have lived with the possibility that it could come back for no good reason. Like it did last week.

Then on Saturday, the mysterious back pain decided to top itself. I spent the entire day howling, basically, and even when I did find a position that was comfortable (no, not comfortable--not painful is the best that can be said), even then I would occasionally suffer muscle spasms that would make me howl anyway.

All my life I have avoided taking any sorts of pills unless ordered to by a doctor, or forced by urgent necessity. For years I never even kept over-the-counter painkillers in the apartment, and when a headache came I would always try to just ride it out. Lie down with the lights out, try to fall asleep, and hope it would be gone when I awoke. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't, and then I would find an Advil somewhere. (This got harder to do as time passed, whether because my tolerance diminished or the headaches strengthened, who knows. Now I keep a bottle of Advil at home, and one at work.)

This practice is so ingrained that it took a full day of this howling before the thought even occurred: Hey, I can take an Advil! The thought woke me up Sunday morning, after a fitful night of "sleep" that mostly consisted of trying and failing to find a position that worked. I took the Advil, I put an ice pack on my back, and over the course of the morning the pain subsided at last. I've been taking Advil every six hours ever since, and the pain is manageable and I'm doing the things that I do.

I'm sure that one of those amazing doctors you see on TV could dig through layers of symptoms and find that in fact these pains don't come out of nowhere; but in practice, I find that doctors aren't usually looking to be Dr. House. On the one hand, symptoms are almost always what they appear to be on the surface, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning" really does get the problem fixed. On the other hand, the doctor has a full day of appointments and you have to keep these things moving along. So whatever arcane thing is causing my back to hurt, sometimes a little sometimes a lot, irregularly and unpredictably, will probably never be explained. And me, I'll just have to remember to keep a bottle of something at hand, always.

Here's to hoping this particular episode decides to end itself soon.

Watching Star Wars

One of the ways I spent the lovely long Thanksgiving weekend was by watching all six Star Wars movies, in order, episode one through episode six. I also completely failed to achieve my real goal of working on a particular script, but for that I can blame the length of the movies I was watching, so it's all George Lucas's fault. Yep, that's it.

One of the things I was wondering, and can never really know, is how the movies play when they aren't watched in the wrong order. I imagine a day when I have a son, and he reaches the right age and we sit down together to watch the movies in the "right" order. There is much that might confuse him: in "A New Hope," Obi-Wan Kenobi says he can't remember ever owning a droid, when clearly R2-D2 was by his side almost non-stop through almost every moment of the first three episodes. Obviously these sorts of little errors are the inevitable result of making episode four in 1977 and not getting around to episode one till more than twenty years later. Inconsistencies will happen, and I will just have to explain why to my young viewer. But the real mythos of the Jedi doesn't really emerge until episode five, "Empire Strikes Back," which in context emerges even more clearly as the best of the bunch. This was fine for those of us who saw episode five as the second in the series: we get a taste of what the Jedi are about from Alec Guinness in "A New Hope," then in "Empire" we get really grounded in the straight-from-Japan mythos of the Jedi. But if you're watching in the "right" order and don't get this grounding till the fifth episode, that's a bit late in the game. Those of us watching in the "wrong" order accepted the nobility of the Jedi in the first three episodes because we'd already been primed for it; a new viewer might likely see them as simply another political faction who are just a little too fond of themselves.

But there are bigger problems, and let's not even dwell on the dialogue. (It was nice to see Lucas, when accepting his AFI lifetime achievement award, poke fun at himself as the "king of wooden dialogue," but it would be even nicer if he could have done something to actually, you know, fix the problem. Just look at the huge leap in quality, dialogue-wise, when Leigh Brackett and Larry Kasdan wrote the script for "Empire.") Let's also not dwell on Lucas's failures as a director of actors (again, note the improvement in "Empire" when one of Lucas's professors at USC, Irvin Kershner, directed.)

No, the bigger problems have everything to do with the character arc of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. You do see very clearly, as the episodes progress one to another, how the character fell, and that is rewarding--as far as it goes. The trouble is, you don't care. What's more, the Anakin/Padme romance completely fails; I for one kept finding myself watching the scenes between the two of them and wondering why this intelligent, grounded young woman would possibly fall for this petulant, whiny brat of a Jedi. (And saying that woman often fall for the bad boy just isn't sufficient here--these stories are supposed to operate as myth, and there's nothing mythical about this romance.)

The reason you don't care about Anakin is because there are never any moments of--here's that word again--nobility. There is skill--clearly the character is a phenomenally gifted pilot and fighter. But he completely lacks the humility that ought to go with those skills--he is, in fact, nothing at all like the noble Jedi Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan or Yoda. So when the collective Jedi Council denies Anakin the rank of master you think it's absolutely right and fitting; this whiny little jerk simply doesn't deserve it. Yeah it's sad what happened to his mother and all, but look at Luke Skywalker--his father murdered (or so he's told), his aunt and uncle reduced to smoldering skeletons, and he seems to find his way from whiny teenager to noble adult without any trouble.

It's not that hard to do, ultimately. You just need a couple moments in each of the first three episodes, when Anakin is tempted to do something wrong but rises above it. You also have to see Padme witness a couple of these moments, to see her realize that there is enormous human potential in this young man, and then their romance makes sense: she falls in love with the man he could be, but he fails and dooms them both. Now that would have made for a great tragedy. Instead, we're left not liking Anakin at all, and not much liking Padme either--this despite the fact that Natalie Portman is an inherently likable actor, but since the majority of her scenes are with Anakin, there's really nothing she can do.

With all that said, there's still plenty to like, particularly if you saw the films in the "wrong" order. (Is it possible to get the same kind of thrill from the Frankenstein-like first sight of Darth Vader in episode three if you've never seen episodes four, five and six?) The battle scenes are almost uniformly thrilling--and in one case where the first three episodes clearly outshine the last three, the lightsaber battles are clearly better in the earlier episodes. From 1977 to 1983, everyone was locked into this awkward two-handed fighting style, but after that movie fights in general began to absorb Oriental martial-arts styles, as in The Matrix, so that by the time Lucas got back to the series in 1999, the hand-to-hand work had improved significantly. Much more fluid, much faster, much more exciting.

And speaking of thrilling, all six episodes are worth the trip for just one perfect moment: in "Empire," when Luke tries to lift his x-wing out of the swamp with his Jedi powers but can't, and then little Yoda does it without trouble, Luke stares at his ship, turns to Yoda and says "I can't believe it." Yoda then says "That is why you fail." A perfect moment, one of those magnificently right movie moments, mythic and powerful in all the best ways, that makes you wish the rest of the series had been that good.

Still, I can't end without a few more complaints. Like the disturbing overtones of racism in the portrayals of Jar-Jar Binks and those weird Trade Federation guys, the ones with vaguely Japanese accents whose mouths never move right. I also wish that Lucas, in his fervor over new technologies, hadn't made all his scenes so damn busy--there always has to be a window in the background, and that window always has to be filled with distracting stuff. Not just a couple speeders flying past but thousands of the damn things, an endless stream of "lookie what we can do!" distractions that have nothing to do with the scene we're supposed to be watching. But nothing, absolutely nothing is worse than the midichlorians (or however the hell the name is spelled--frankly I can't be bothered to try looking it up). If there were five minutes of any movie that I wish I could wipe out with a wave of Harry Potter's magic wand, this bit of nonsense is top of the list. By attempting to provide a rational explanation for why the Jedi have their powers, where the Force comes from, Lucas damn near ruined the entire concept. It's okay, George--it's a movie, and we were perfectly prepared to accept the religious overtones of the Force. In fact we already had--to then hit us with this bit of preposterous blather was to very nearly ruin the entire series.

All in all, I'm still looking forward to the day when I can screen the series for a young child of mine. But until that time, it's doubtful I will find myself inclined to pull them out again.

Science and Religion, Part Two

When I was but a wee baby boy, my mother used to take me to church. (Officially, I'm Episcopalian.) She was of the "take him and let him make up his own mind" school. And one day we tried a new church, one where there was a hideously ugly plaster statue of Christ on the cross, and as people proceeded down the aisle toward their pews, they were expected to make some kind of obeisance to the effigy behind the altar. Well, to me it looked as if everyone was curtsying to this horrid looming statue, and I didn't want to do it. But suddenly there was this massive wave of disapproval from everyone nearby, this burden of expectation and outrage that seemed to come out of nowhere. In that instant, I knew this church thing was not for me.

Confirmation came a few years later. A friend of my mother's, hearing that we had not been to church in a while, said that we ought to go with him the next Sunday. We essentially said Why Not, and got dressed up and bundled ourselves into his car. On the way to the church, the police pulled us over. The driver, it turned out, had a bunch of unpaid tickets or something, there was a bench warrant for his arrest, and the police took him away. They asked whether we wanted to be dropped off at the church or at home, and we most definitely went home. "God has spoken," we said. "And He says that we don't have to go to church anymore." Which was perfectly fine with us.

Which leaves me, as the singles ads put it, "spiritual but not religious." Certainly not an atheist, and not really an agnostic either. I believe in something, but on the whole I'm perfectly happy not knowing what that something is. For me, Shaw's definition of a Life Force works just as well as anything else. My belief does not need to be specific to be real. At the same time, I am completely resistant to the blandishments of any and all churches when they try to tell me that they alone know what is true and right. Thanks very much, I think I can decide that for myself--and live just as virtuous, just as spiritual, a life in the process.

My attitude toward science is kinda sorta similar, now that I think of it. I don't understand most of it, and numbers have always made my head spin. I once read something to the effect of "We don't know for sure that the sun will rise tomorrow morning--it's only a very high probability." Which means that in the end, nothing is completely provable, you can only "prove" anything to a high degree of probability. Good scientists understand this, and are always prepared for a new theory to come along that might unseat the old theories, and this to me seems a healthy way to look at things.

We cannot prove that man descended from apes through a process of natural selection. As everyone knows, there is a missing link in that chain. To those who are particularly vehement in their support of intelligent design (or creationism, or whatever other stalking horse is put forth by those who really seek to assert that the Bible is literally true in all its aspects), this demonstrates that evolution (already a misnomer, as I noted yesterday) is unproven and is therefore no more "scientific" than intelligent design.

But the thing is, it is. We already know that evolution happens--just look at bacterial infections. It's been all over the news for several years now that various bacteria are developing resistance to our overused antibiotics. That's evolution in action right there--and further, it's natural selection in action. Want proof of evolution? Walk into a hospital's emergency room during flu season.

It may only be a high probability that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I'm confident enough in that probability--I have enough faith in that probability, as established scientifically in ways I do not fully understand--to go to sleep at night without worrying about whether the sun will be there in the morning. As most of us do, without a second thought.

So. Why is it that I find myself more or less in agreement with the broad thinking behind intelligent design? Because I do believe in that Life Force, or whatever it is you prefer to call it; and because, though I do not understand mathematics, I know that in its broad strokes, what math accomplishes comes close to godliness. The pattern of tines on a pine cone can be described by a mathematical sequence called the Fibonacci series; an equation perfectly describes every spiral you've ever seen, from the swirl of two paints mixing together to the steam rising from your coffee cup; light moves at a constant, measurable speed, as does sound. In short, even things that seem to be random turn out to have some sort of pattern to them, some sort of--for lack of a better word--design. The patterns fit together, the design works. And if there is a design, it's reasonable to infer some sort of designer--even though I refuse to anthropomorphize the designer into a god. For all I know, mathematics may itself be the god we seek.

But intelligent design is not provable, not even to a low degree of certainty. It rests, finally and fundamentally, on belief, in your willingness (nay, your eagerness) to infer a designer from the design. And in a school setting, I would be very happy to discuss intelligent design in a philosophy class, a comparative religion class, I would even be happy to study it in a biology class--at the individual teacher's discretion. But what I don't want is for some busybody to come along and tell an entire school district that in science class this non-scientific idea must be studied on an equivalent basis to evolution.

That is when, as Einstein said, we see "...an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science...." Yet Einstein is also correct when he asserts that religion and science are dependent on each other--the Fibonacci series does not diminish my spiritual appreciation of a pine cone, rather it enhances it by pointing out how magnificent that seemingly-simple design is.

Those who have for so long inveighed against evolution often seem to be doing so because they're personally offended at the notion of descent from apes. This is, to put the nicest possible face on it, a kind of anthropological snobbery. Me, I'm fascinated by the ways we fit into the greater design, and the fact of evolution, the way simpler structures tend to transform into more complex structures, fills me with hope that we're all on an emergent path, toward not just greater complexity, but greater greatness.

But in the meantime, I'll thank you to keep your grubby little mitts off my science curricula.

Science and Religion, Part One

There's this nice lady I know who is both more conservative and more religious than I am. We get along marvelously, and every once in a while we have interesting debates in which we each fail to convince the other, but pleasantly and without rancor. As happens so often, I usually end up realizing that in truth our positions aren't so far apart as they seem. Case in point: intelligent design.

The other day, a bunch of us were discussing earthquakes, and someone whose father was a geologist got to talking about deep time (one of my favorite aspects of geology, as it happens, because the perspective it provides is so mind-bending: for a geologist, the smallest unit of time even worth thinking about is a million years). I then cracked a little joke: "But wait, the earth is only 10,000 years old." Jo (we'll call her Jo, because her real name is--well, Jo) then proclaimed that this little "crack" was aimed at her. (Well okay, it was a little, but it was more a "rib" than a "crack," and suddenly I find myself wondering why the names for types of jokes seem to be so anatomical....) A few minutes later, Jo printed an article from a website and handed it to me. "Here," she said. "This is very interesting."

The website is an online magazine called Science and Spirit, and the article was the text of a speech that Albert Einstein delivered in 1941 to a conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion. Jo even highlighted a sentence for me, in which Einstein asserted that "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." For me, though, at least with regard to the intelligent design question (the most interesting current conflict between science and religion), the more interesting sentence was this: "...a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs."

Jo and I began to have a discussion on these issues, in which I asserted what seems to me to be the accepted liberal position, namely that intelligent design should not be mandated in science classes precisely because it is not science; but that anyone is free to teach it in Sunday school, or in a philosophy class, anywhere that isn't strictly about science. Jo responded by beginning to attack the notion that evolution is proven science, to which I noted that "natural selection" and "evolution" are not the same thing. This last was an attempt to keep the conversation pointed in the right direction, but Jo instead accused me of splitting hairs, reducing the argument so that I could win it. And then, alas, our merry conversation was interrupted, and never resumed.

(For the record: natural selection is essentially a subset of evolution. Evolution posits that organisms change from less-complex to more-complex over time; natural selection is one of the theories as to exactly how that change is accomplished. It is fair to say that natural selection as a theory wobbles a little from time to time; but evolution itself stands on much firmer ground.)

But here's the bit that would probably surprise Jo: in fact, I generally find myself in agreement with the general thinking behind intelligent design, but I still don't think it ought to be taught in science classrooms.

Why? Well, that's for Part II.

Comfortably Numb

A quick update to my November 7 entry about tribute bands--I was dismissive of the efforts of Australian Pink Floyd after seeing only one song on their recent PBS broadcast. I would now like to apologize--they were utterly sensational.

My friend Pat McGreal (whose comic series Chiaroscuro: The Private Lives of Leonardo DaVinci has been recently re-released by DC, and is well worth picking up) asked the sensible question even before the show started: Is there, finally, any difference between a group of very good musicians choosing to play very good music they did not write, and the Chicago Symphony playing an evening of Beethoven? No, there isn't--particularly when the music being played is, like Pink Floyd's, orchestral in scope to begin with.

Thus the whole question of the validity of a tribute band is dismissed in a stroke, and the only thing that matters is whether the experience of the concert was a good one.

Ohmyjeezus yes.

They start the show with a complete recreation of Dark Side of the Moon, then they take a break and come back with individual singles--from early stuff like "Careful With That Ax, Eugene" to the bigger numbers everyone knows. The singing was much, much, much better than on the PBS show--when they got to "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," the tune I saw on PBS and turned off in disinterest because the singing lacked passion, this time there was nothing lacking. The musicianship was stellar, and when they would into second-level Floyd tunes like "Learning to Fly," it was suddenly okay for them to stray from the note-for-note thing that you expect with the pillars of the Floyd catalogue.

What APF really understands, though, is the dynamic range of Pink Floyd's music. The build in "Us and Them" didn't quite happen, which was disappointing; but in the second half of the show things really clicked together, and song after song built beautifully. There were moments when the sound seemed to be playing me like a harpstring, and my ears are still ringing this morning. The point of a good build, of course, is to try to reach a transcendant moment, and they did a great job of it. The audience was wildly enthusiastic, and on the whole I think I must conclude that this was one of the best rock concerts I've seen. No, really!

Whether

Wow, what a glorious day it was here in the City of Angles (not a typo). I walked to the dayjob under a sky so blue that it felt like I had only just discovered what blue was, and everywhere the trees were that perfect tree-ish green, and the little flowers were whatever colors the little flowers were, and the smog was only a distant haze burning my eyes all day long. It's the sort of day when you are happy to be taking a nice long walk, happy for the perfect degree of coolness in the air, happy that Thanksgiving is just a week away, happy to be living in a place like L.A., downright happy just to be alive.

And then I waited endlessly at an intersection for a traffic light to change, gave up, walked to the next light and waited endlessly for that one; a driver nearly mowed me down because she was looking the other way as she approached an intersection I was crossing; my shoelaces just wouldn't stay tied; and I tripped on a bump in the sidewalk, sending me galumphing forward ungracefully. The nice mood instilled in me by the nice weather, it was just as quickly gone.

They are fragile things, these moments of beauty. The weather itself is, obviously, mutable--just ask anyone anywhere along the gulf coast. But beauty itself is just as transitory (I once met a Hollywood actress, beautiful in her day, whose face betrayed all the ravages not of time itself, but of trying to defeat time). Photographs yellow and curl, books flake or burn, paint fades, marble chips, mountains crumble, the oceans dry up and eventually the universe contracts. Will Shakespeare be forgotten, five hundred years from now? More to the point: will I ever stop caring that I can't keep my shoelaces tied?

The older I get, the more I appreciate sand painting. I remember my days as a stage actor, and the fact that the best performance I ever gave was for an audience of maybe 100 people, only a few of whom probably remember it, and that no record of that performance exists in any form whatsoever. Now I'm moving into the film world, where a performance does not disappear the moment it is complete, but even so, this city is awash with film preservation organizations fighting against the inevitable aging of the old nitrates used in film. Is a DVD really as durable as they tell us?

My friend the Buddhist would surely say this: the moment of beauty I enjoyed this morning was exactly what it was, a moment of beauty, entirely sufficient unto itself. The moment of annoyance when I tripped on the sidewalk was what it was, entirely sufficient unto itself. Be here now, live the moment, and don't forget to breathe. Treat everything I do as if it were a sand painting, and don't get caught up in believing it will ever be more than that.

Yep, that's what he would say all right. And I would smile and nod and know that I am far more likely to let the moment of annoyance linger, to forget the taste of beauty in the air, to daydream of the lasting appeal of the screenplays I write. Knowing all the while that my Buddhist friend is right, but still trapped into being a product of a certain time, a certain place, a certain way of life that has never been about Now except in the sense of I Want This Now!

Just another go-get-'em day here in the U.S. of A.

Mother Toombs

At Christmas, back home in Florida, I'll be attending a family reunion for Mom's mom's side, which in a roundabout way makes me want to tell a tale or two about someone from Dad's side of the family. Chiefly because she has some of the best stories, and because I feel like blogging today but for the life of me can't settle on anything worth saying. Therefore: Mother Toombs.

Mary Catherine Lacy Toombs Hudson was my great-grandmother, born, as she often told us, the day the U.S.S. Maine was sunk in Havana harbor, thus "beginning" the Spanish-American War; actually she was born the day after, February 16, 1898. But that was characteristic of her stories: they were always just a little bit off somehow. She was also fond of saying, for example, that a Lacy ancestor of hers had been executed in the 15th Century for being a Protestant. (Given that Mother Toombs was a Southern Baptist, there was something about an ancestor being persecuted for religious reasons that appealed to her sense of melodrama.) We, being oh so clever, snickered and scorned: after all the Protestant reformation didn't begin until the 16th Century!

Much later, well after Mother Toombs (a name I invented for her, as the matriarch of the family) died, I discovered that our Lacy ancestors had been French Huguenots, and that although her century may have been a little off, her facts were pretty much spot-on. Now, of course, I wish that I had recorded the tales she told, because I'm doing genealogical research and her stories are one of the best resources I could find, if only they hadn't died with her. (Her Lacy ancestors--also spelled Lacey or Lassey or de Lassey--may also have been Normans who helped William the Conqueror defeat the English in 1066. Indeed, Hugh de Lacy was one of the guys who conquered Ireland for Henry II.)

She was from Richmond, Virginia, part of a typically large family, although the only sibling I ever knew was her younger sister Edna. Mother Toombs married my great-grandfather, RLT Sr. (I'm number four), a Richmond dentist who made her, as she proudly proclaimed, the first female dental technician in the U.S. But her longevity became something of a curse: she lost her first husband to, as I recall, a heart attack or a stroke; her second husband, Mr. Hudson, died apparently in a train wreck; and then her son, the Marine Corps major, died in his early sixties from lung cancer that was a plain result of years of smoking. I can remember her sitting in her chair after his funeral, saying to no one, to the world, "A mother is not supposed to outlive her son." But she did, by nearly fifteen lonely years. And although her own family was numerous, her descendants were not: one son, two grandchildren, and only five great-grandchildren.

Her last years were difficult: her local Miami doctor proclaimed that she had Alzheimer's, and never bothered to question whether that might be right. Certainly it seemed like Alzheimer's: I was staying with her during one summer home from school, and I would hear a sudden loud clattering from her room. I would find her rattling a cup against the window shutters, scared out of her wits and demanding to be taken away from this strange place and brought back to her real home. Dad tried to find a decent facility where she could stay, but she was miserable at every one of them, and eventually he sent her to Montana, where my aunt lives. There, a small-town doctor thought to ask some simple questions and, on the basis of little more than a family history, determined that Mother Toombs actually had diabetes, which was what was affecting her mental state. He began to treat her properly, and suddenly she regained lucidity for several more years. So much for our big-city Miami doctor.

But here's my favorite Mother Toombs story: in May 1984, my newborn brother Adam was going to be baptised, and it was my job to drive to Mother Toombs's house (which was in the opposite direction), pick her up, and get her to the ceremony. I was driving my step-mother's old Corolla, a nine-year old car colored an unusual shade of green that only had a couple more years in it; Dad had loaned me the car once I came of age, with one proviso: if I ever got a traffic ticket, my driving privileges would disappear. So I get to Mother Toombs's house and she's plenty old and doesn't move that fast, which means we're running late. I tried to make up the time on the freeway, and promptly got pulled over by the state troopers.

I explained to the officer why I was speeding. "Yes sir," I said, "I know, I was driving too fast, but you see my baby brother's baptism is this morning and it's very important to me, and--well, and the traffic is very light and I was being very careful but yes sir, I understand, I'll slow down and I won't speed any more and I'm very sorry sir."

The trooper looked like he was just about to let the whole thing slide when Mother Toombs, who had not said one word the entire trip, suddenly decided to help. She leaned over toward the trooper and declared, in her beautiful Richmond accent, "I told him not to drive so fast."

Oh yeah, you bet I got the ticket. The trooper looked at me as if I was this evil person, for imperiling this sweet little old lady, but how could he possibly have known the truth? (That's a picture of her below, taken only a few hours later, with baby Adam.) All I could was slump into my seat and accept the ticket and then drive, slowly and deliberately, to my brother's ceremony--which I still reached on time, as it happens.


She never said a word to Dad, though, and I didn't either until only a few years ago, when the Corolla and Mother Toombs were both long gone. Then, it was safe to tell the story; and Dad laughed long and hard, because he'd known her too and it sounded just like something she'd have done.

Redistricting and Torture

Two quickies:

Redistricting

So everyone knows by now that Gov. Schwarzenegger's entire slate of initiatives was defeated on Tuesdy, which was a clear statement by the electorate that $50 million for an off-year election was a waste of government money and we won't stand for it. My first inclination, in fact, was to do exactly what the state as a whole did, and just vote against everything. But in the end I just can't help myself: I studied these proposals just as I study all of them, and read the little pamphlets they send, and in two cases voted Yes. Once was for the second of the prescription drug proposals; the other, which was decidedly against the wishes of the state Democratic party, was in favor of redistricting.

Now I don't know for sure whether this was, on its merits, a good or a bad proposal. Maybe three retired judges, picked by the legislature with apparently little or no oversight, would have ended up doing just as bad a job as the legislature in drawing district lines. But it seemed to me that anything that takes redistricting powers out of the hands of politicians can only be a good thing. And Democrats should be the first to applaud: if they want to regain control of the Congress, there needs to be some serious redistricting across the country. Every single legislative district is so appallingly gerrymandered that even with sentiment rising massively against incumbents in general and Republicans specifically, it's a safe bet that neither house will change hands in 2006. There are simply too few contestable seats to be had. It's good for the politicians already in office, and certainly the Democrats lobbied me hard against this proposal; and had it passed, Democrats would have probably lost a couple of California congressional seats to Republicans, which would not thrill me. But the big picture seems so clear to me that I would have voted for any redistricting proposal. And if a bandwagon should ever start to develop for the idea, you can count on me to bang the drum.

Torture

Even more brief: torture is bad. End of sentence. The idea that my government would in any way resist legislation that clearly says so is simply appalling. But don't take my word for it, go read this spot-on editorial in The Economist instead.

Thank you, and good night.

Art vs. Craft

So last month I edited a 9-minute documentary about the history of a local theatre company. A pretty easy gig, all things considered: almost all of the images were still photos, done Ken Burns style, slow zooms in or out, slow pans this way or that, with music under and a voiceover that the director wrote. In Illustration No. 473 of the precipitous learning curve for Final Cut, I worked my little a$$ off and the result, sadly, was only half-a$$ed. I mean it looks fine, but there aren't nearly enough moments of zing and zazz, editorially speaking.

There are a few moments I liked--an actor descending through a trap door in the stage floor, walking into darkness just before a segment about the Northridge earthquake. But when a director friend of mine watched the piece, he immediately pointed out how much more effective the moment would have been if I had simply slowed the footage down, extending the actor's descent. A great idea, and something I hadn't even thought of, largely because I don't yet have those tools really burned into my head. I now know they're there, and I more or less know how to use them, but the skill doesn't matter if your imagination doesn't lead you to employ those tools in the first place.

A frequent point of debate in filmmaking circles is whether an editor is an artist or a craftsman. Theoretically, I categorically believe they are artists, and should be recognized as such--a movie can have everything else going for it, but if the editing is clumsy the movie won't work; contrariwise, a poor movie can often seem better than it is with good editing. I just watched Coppola's Gardens of Stone, an interesting movie that doesn't really work, and I think editing is one of the reasons why: too often the dots don't seem to be connected, not in a cool Tarantino sort of way but in a "What's going on here?" sort of way. Good actors start weeping almost out of nowhere because the moment doesn't build properly, while other moments seem to build and build but go nowhere, to no purpose. Somewhere, way deep down, there is an interesting story being told, but the presentation of it left me confused and indifferent.

My editing job on this documentary could only be craftsmanlike (and not very impressively craftsmanlike either) because I'm not yet ready to be an artist. It's the old Carnegie Hall joke: guy goes up to a cop in Manhattan and asks "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice, practice, practice!" You can't think about your pizzicato technique when you're playing in Carnegie Hall, it has to be a part of you, practiced until it's second nature. A writer has to know the rules of grammar inside and out before he can be allowed to break them. An actor in Beckett's "Play" who hasn't completely internalized the lines will get lost, disastrously, in front of a paying audience. It is never enough to rely solely on your craftsmanship. Good enough is never good enough.

Questions in Search of an Answer

There was a fascinating and frightening Salon/Der Spiegel article yesterday, "Generation Jihad?" (subscription required), concerning the recent wave of riots in and around Paris. It puts the rioting in context with the rest of Europe, where decades-long attempts at multiculturalism and inclusion seem to have failed appallingly, leaving thousands of unintegrated communities, ghettos where Muslims and other minorities are unable to break through economic barriers, where rage and frustration boil and blister. Consider this, then, a companion to my August 16, 2005 blog wherein I wrote of my "deep-seated belief that as human beings, we all have far more in common than the petty little nonsense that divides us, and that we will all be better off when we find ways to live together as people first and Africans/Americans/Asians/Europeans second." In that entry, I considered Jared Diamond's theory as to whether the experience of a politically-unified China is what caused it to fall behind the disparate Europeans, whose political disunity resulted in constant competition and advancement. Perhaps, I mused, my lifelong impulse toward increasing global unity might in fact lead to the stifling creativity and competition. Then I veered off into a weak conclusion, musing about maybe writing a story someday that might deal with the issue fictionally. To hell with that--let's go ahead and ask the difficult questions now. And questions are all I have--answers are far, far away.

Question 1: Must There Be Ghettos? Recently, President Bush has been touting his "guest worker" program for immigrants, in which illegals would be granted three-year work visas, during which time they could apply for--but not necessarily be granted--green cards. (Convenient, isn't it? Get a few years of cheap labor out of someone then ship them back. The cold calculations of immigration policy.) In a radio address last month, Bush said "If an employer has a job that no American is willing to take, we need to find a way to fill that demand." This always struck me as a peculiar notion--why would Americans be so unwilling to take certain jobs? Granted, ditch-digging and sanitation work aren't what you would call glamorous, but are we Americans so inherently Grand that such jobs are beneath us? Or to put it another way, why would an unemployed American be any less likely than an unemployed emigrant to take a dirty job? If you need a job and that's the only thing you can get, why wouldn't you take the job? Buried in President Bush's statement is exactly that implication.

But look around you. Here in L.A., how often are you going to see a crew working on a lawn that isn't Mexican? How many hot, rotten, dirty jobs are filled by people whose skin isn't white, whose language is not English? What is the percentage, exactly? Is it fair to say that in our supposed melting pot of a nation, as many as 80% of our most rotten jobs are being taken by people who are not white anglo-saxon protestants? It raises a very uncomfortable question: for we who live in the "majority," who enjoy the relatively placid life with cars and computers and time to blog our thoughts to the world, must there be a wretched underclass laboring to do the jobs that, in fact, we wouldn't do in a million years?

If my power goes out I want it fixed pronto; if the cable TV goes kerflooey I want it back right now before Lost comes on; I want my new book from Amazon to arrive in 24 hours; if nearby tree roots again invade my plumbing, I want it taken care of before my next flush; and I want all this to happen invisibly so as not to disturb my tranquil little life--or my blogging time.

But I wouldn't take those jobs, precisely because I don't have to. I'm fond of saying that my life hasn't been peaches and cream, that we were on food stamps (briefly) when I was a kid, that I'm miles from rich now. But I would not be a sanitation worker in a million years, and I've got the education and the background to make damn sure that I don't ever have to. Let's leave aside the question of whether I am inherently more or less capable than anyone else: I'm a good typist, I've got decent organizational skills, and if I walk into an office as a presentable WASPy guy with a Bachelor's degree, I will get the job. Change only one part of that equation, make me a recently-arrived Mexican with the same typing and organizational skills, with an equivalent degree, and my chances of getting that job are seriously diminished. Utterly unfair, but a fact of life. How many Eastern bloc émigrés who were once doctors in the old country are now driving cabs?

Question 2: Do the Parisian Riots Mean We're All Doomed? The Salon/Der Spiegel article asserts that the suburban center of the riots, Clichy-sous-Bois, "serves as evidence that the French route of soft integration has failed miserably." Its mayor, Claude Dilain, "has been a proactive mayor, setting up free soccer training for local youth, appointing youth leaders as mediators and making sure that the community's waste collection service functions properly.... By any measure, Dilain has done everything right." Yet his city is aflame night after night, as rioters, mostly immigrants or the children of immigrants from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, assert their anger over their overwhelming lack of economic prospects. The article quotes a police officer as saying "The logic behind this unrest...is secession."

There was a smaller-scale riot in Birmingham, England recently; the London bombers seemed to be well-integrated children of immigrants; even in Amsterdam, friendly, laid-back, pot-smoking Amsterdam, where 1 out of 10 Dutch citizens was born somewhere else, quiet racial and economic divisions have been festering under the surface of what was supposedly the most liberal, culturally-advanced nation in the European Union; and since the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh last year there have so far been 106 "reciprocal acts of revenge" against Dutch Muslims. The question has to be asked: if the Dutch can't pull off cultural integration, is there any reason to think we can?

Question 3: The Breeding Problem. No liberal likes to talk about population patterns because it sounds uncomfortably like advocacy of eugenics. But I know for a fact that in Miami, the majority population is Cuban, and if you want a job there you would be very well advised to learn Spanish. Now mostly these are Americanized Cubans, and as a native of the city I don't think the way of life is really all that different than it was 30 years ago; but there are subtle differences, and as time passes there is no reason to expect those differences to diminish.

But what if our Cuban neighbors in Miami weren't so well integrated? What if there were just as many and they were really truly pissed off about economic hardships? If our majority population ever decided to rise up in revolt as these French Arabs have done, what would happen to the City of Miami? Would it in effect secede, as the French policeman asserted? Might it not be argued that here in L.A., there are parts of town that are effectively independent, where the police do not go? Both L.A. and Miami have seen riots, big nasty powerful riots. And who's to say that one of these days, the residents of Watts and Compton won't have the numbers and the strength to really make their voices heard?

Well then, we say, we would just have to find a way to do a better job of welcoming these people into the broader population, just as the French are going to have to do. But admit it: doesn't the prospect make you just a teeny bit nervous? It's nice being part of the majority; and are you really prepared to make room in the club for those guys standing on the street corner looking for day work? Not just one or two, here and there; but in their thousands, all of them wanting a little of what you have.

If you run with Jared Diamond's argument, all this is, in the long run, good for us: population, cultural and economic competition lead to a greater rate of innovation and advancement for everyone. Modern ghettos are hell-holes to be sure (I have stark memories of Chicago's Cabrini-Green, a place I drove past often but never ever went inside), but at least there is running water and electricity, yes? Surely that represents some kind of progress, doesn't it? Can we comfort ourselves that modern ghettos are better than the older ones? That even if progress for everyone is slow (glacially slow; geologically slow), still it's progress, so we're not ultimately doomed. The short-term, though, it doesn't look as comfortable as we might like it to.

As I said: lots of questions, and I'm nowhere near an answer on any of it. I have no conclusions to offer, nothing to wrap this up, just a growing sense of unease and ever more questions.

Tribute Bands

So this friend of mine is a huge, huge Pink Floyd fan, and why not because they are pretty much awesome. (Me, I arrived at the Floyd late--something about deliberately disliking anything my mom liked, simply to be different. As time has passed, absolutely everything she liked is now at the top of my list. Ain't it always the way.) But several days ago, said friend saw on PBS a performance by a group calling itself Australian Pink Floyd--a tribute band. (Their website is fun--I particularly like the mock album cover for Wish You Were Here, with the flaming guy shaking hands with a big pink kangaroo.) Yon friend grew very excited, and knowing that I too am a fan of the Floyd, he purchased tickets for the both of us. Which will represent the first time I have ever gone to see a tribute band of any stripe. This of course sets me a-wonderin'.

Being a writerly sort, it's probably natural that my first thought on almost any new subject is, "What's it like for someone to go through X?" Obviously these musicians love Pink Floyd music, which is unquestionably great music well worth loving. Isn't it an odd thing, though, to turn that love into a career? It's the same question you might ask of an Elvis impersonator: what's it like when your chief means of artistic expression involves the close mimickry of someone else's chief means of artistic expression?

I do understand it a little. I was enormously impressed by seeing Richard Burton when I was 15, and in an acting class I once did a scene from Night of the Iguana with Burton's Welsh-English accent, completely ignoring the fact that Tennessee Williams wrote the character to be an American Southerner. And once, when Peter O'Toole came to Chicago to sign his first book (which is marvelous, by the way), and after shaking his hand (and marveling that he's my height, which is to say quite tall indeed) I said that it had taken me years to get his acting style out of my system. O'Toole smiled and said "Oh, why bother."

Yeah, that's right, I'm name-dropping. You got a problem with that? This is a blog, after all--self-indulgence is the name of the game.

So. You love an artist, and you wish you could somehow achieve something like what they achieved. The most obvious, direct route is to just do what they do exactly. Any writer can tell you that they had several periods when their work closely resembled that of another writer whom they admired--my own such periods ranged from Harlan Ellison to G.B. Shaw. But most artists eventually find that mimickry isn't terribly fulfilling, plus it has certain dangers--to this day, even after his well-deserved Nobel Prize, there are still many critics who can't help comparing Harold Pinter to Samuel Beckett. (But then there are those who accuse Beckett of aping James Joyce, a chain you could probably follow backward forever--and you also get into the thorny area of influence rather than mimickry, and let's not go there or I'll digress forever.)

What's it like, then, to be Aussie Floyd? To know, as you walk onstage, that your audience is applauding for ghosts who are not in the room? To know that the sole criterion on which you will be judged is not your musicianship, but your ability to sound like those other guys?

I caught a little of the band's PBS performance, watching their take on "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." It was, in fact, extremely well played--they are both capable musicians and capable mimics, even if they needed two guitarists to play what David Gilmour can play alone. But then the bass player started singing, and suddenly my interest plummeted. His voice didn't sound right; and what's even worse, the passion wasn't there. Roger Waters may not be a great singer, but undeniably there is passion--and this guy singing with Aussie Floyd, he didn't even sound like he was trying. I turned off the TV and went to do something else.

Therein lies the danger. Maybe the bass player is a good singer with different kinds of songs; maybe, in the end, he should go off and do those kinds of songs. Because my only interest in his work was in how well he sounded like a band I'll probably never see play live (you have to believe that the Live 8 performance won't be repeated), on the principle that if the next-best-thing is all you have, then you go for the next-best-thing and make do. With such a formulation in mind, however, disappointment is always lurking close behind.

But what the heck. The tickets are bought, so I'll go and see what there is to see, and on the whole I'll probably enjoy it. And then other thoughts come to mind as well: do tribute bands get girls in the same manner as "real" rock bands? Or do they get, say, "Hungarian Pamela Des Barres The Tribute Groupie"?

Miami Drivers

They're doing it again.

About four months after Hurricane Andrew, I went home for a visit. And as my mother was driving me home from the airport, we reached an intersection where the traffic light was still dead. She needed to turn left, so she did what she was supposed to do: stopped at the intersection, waited for traffic to clear, started to nudge forward and then stopped again. "Wait for it," she said, and I had no idea what she was talking about.

A moment later, a car tore through the intersection from the direction we were about to take. It didn't stop, it didn't slow down, it just barreled through at top speed. "Okay," Mom said, "now we can go."

As a passenger, I was never so terrified in my life. Mom explained that once the traffic lights went out, many Miami drivers simply decided that what that meant was that they now had carte blanche to do whatever the hell they wanted. They had utterly abandoned the rules of the road, and if we wanted to stay alive, it was our responsibility to look out for them because they sure as shootin' weren't looking out for us.

The same thing happened after Hurricane Katrina took her little practice-swing at South Florida before moving on to her New Orleans grand slam. And in the wake of Wilma, Miami drivers are doing it again.

I have never understood this; maybe I don't understand such behavior because I do understand why we have traffic laws. Traffic laws, you see, are not there to personally inconvenience you; they are there to make sure we don't kill each other, plain and simple. Traffic laws are one of the purest examples of how we are all interdependent on each other, particularly in a big city. If drivers just do what they want, without a thought for anyone else, then accidents are guaranteed. Big bad nasty accidents. One driver in a hurry goes through an intersection and meets another driver in a hurry, the hard way. As sure as the night follows the day.

Here in L.A., the liquid nature of traffic patterns is particularly apparent. There is so much traffic around here that if one driver, only one, does something that is, shall we say, not quite enlightened, traffic will immediately back up right down the line. Here's an example:

On the Pacific Coast Highway (one of the world's great roads), right at the intersection with Sunset Boulevard, when driving south-to-north a lane opens up just before the intersection. Its purpose is to allow drivers to turn right onto Sunset, but it is not marked as a right-turn-only lane. Just past the intersection, the road is also widened for a short distance, to allow room for drivers to turn from Sunset onto the PCH; they must merge almost immediately into the regular flow of traffic. But what inevitably happens is this: south-to-north drivers on PCH swing into the open lane and, when the light turns green, they charge forward, thus allowing them to cut in front of most of the people in the real lane who waited their turn. When these drivers then have to merge in, the rest of us have to slow in order to make room. This makes the real lane back up, and when other unenlightened drivers see how long the line is at the intersection, they swing into the open lane.

All they see is their convenience. They do not see, or choose not to see, that in fact they are the reason why the lane is so backed-up in the first place. If no one pulled that little stunt, there wouldn't be nearly so much merging, and traffic would move better. Their personal convenience becomes a great deal of inconvenience for dozens, sometimes hundreds of people who do actually appreciate how this stuff is supposed to work.

Same with these Miami intersection-crashers. They want to go as fast as they want; the traffic lights are dead, which means that they are free to do as they want, particularly with the police so busy, you know, helping people; in the process, everyone else gets delayed, and lives are put at serious risk.

There's a word for people like this. Starts with an A, ends with an E, and has SSHOL in the middle.

Holocausts in Art

I recently watched Atom Egoyan's film Ararat, which deals (not quite directly) with the Armenian genocide. Egoyan is himself of Armenian descent, and after The Sweet Hereafter I have been a fan of his work. (Even so, it took me a couple years to get around to seeing this film--my Netflix list is very, very long.) I've seen some reviews complaining that this movie "could have been Egoyan's Schindler's List," given the superficial resemblance of genocide at the heart of both stories. But Schindler's List was about doing good in a time of great evil; Ararat is about the weight of the past on those who cannot escape the burdens of history. Different subjects altogether, and I think that taken solely as a work of art, Ararat stands very well on its own.

But one of the responsibilities of this burden, as the movie makes very clear, and as Egoyan clearly believes, is the duty to show the world what happened during the Armenian genocide. (Here is a Wikipedia article on the subject.) The trouble with Egoyan's effort, as I see it, is that no one has ever made a version of Schindler's List dealing directly with the Armenian story. What Egoyan presents is a multilayered tale (including a film within a film in which a director is making a movie that does in fact aim to tell the story of the genocide) about a young man whose mother is an art historian who has written a book about an artist whose mother was a victim of the genocide (see how complicated these story-threads already are?); about an actor in the film, a Turk playing the worst of the Turks; about a Customs inspector trying to wrangle a secret out of the young man; and about the young man's half-sister, who has her own crusade, her own truth she is trying to reveal to the world.

I know an Armenian and was discussing the movie with him. I asked if he had seen Ararat and he said "I think every Armenian has seen it." But what he wanted to know from me was how the movie played to someone unfamiliar with the subject of the genocide--he has lived with this knowledge all his life, and therefore comes to the movie with full awareness of its background and viewpoints; I saw the movie simply as a work of art, and liked it very much on that basis. But as a testament to the atrocities of the Armenian genocide, I think that Egoyan was too much the artist and not enough the historian.

If there had been some Armenian version of Schindler's List, then Egoyan's work might have succeeded better--then, you see, there would have been room for a more complex treatment of the peripheral themes. But to an audience that knows nothing of the genocide, Egoyan's attempts to be even-handed only succeed in muddling the history lesson. He is, for example, scrupulously fair in allowing the Turkish actor (played by Elias Koteas, whom I always confuse with Christopher Meloni because they could be brothers) to express his view that the genocide might not have been a genocide, that it was simply one of the horrors of a more straightforward civil war. In his director's commentary, Egoyan notes that he lifted direct quotes from the official Turkish position on the genocide question (Turkey's ongoing denial that it ever happened is one of the things that most rankles Armenians today) and assigned them to Koteas's character. So I'm sure that what the character says resonates with an Armenian audience very differently than it does with me--to my ears, it all sounded reasonable. Koteas's character then goes further: he says to the young Armenian man, in essence, Listen, we were both born here in Canada and what's past is past; let's go share this bottle of champagne and be friends. In his commentary, Egoyan nearly shudders in horror at the idea; to me it sounds like the only way through such difficulties.

But then, denial of the truth is one of the principal themes of the film, and Egoyan is very interested in how people's lives are affected when they can't get at the truth of something, or when others try to deny what they believe is true. This, again, is a great subject for a film--but it interferes with the history lesson Egoyan was trying to get across. He urges viewers to go and research the subject themselves and make up their own minds, which is fair enough as far as it goes, but really, how many people will actually do that?

In short, Ararat makes for a curious object lesson. It tries to be both a polemic and a work of art, but it can't be both. If someone else had first made the polemic, then there might have been room for the work of art; but Egoyan really should have made up his mind which was more important to him, to tell the tale of the Armenian genocide or to tell the tale of the people affected by it. Films are surprisingly compact things, more like short stories than novels, and in most cases they really only have room to do one thing well. Egoyan's artistic ambitions ended up sabotaging his desire to tell a story that needs telling. Which is a shame, really, because that just leads to a sense of disappointment with the film itself, which then spreads to the subject matter and leaves me that little bit less anxious to do the research myself and determine what happened. This too would probably make Egoyan shudder with horror, but there it is.

Briefly

Roberts v. Miers

Lord knows, I wasn't crazy about the John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court--but my objections were purely ideological. Even a casual look at his credentials made it evident that the President had done an admirable job of selecting a stealth candidate: one whose conservative bona fides were obscure, but whose qualifications were impeccable. And it didn't take long at all for me to realize that this is how the process is supposed to work: the President gets to name his nominee, and has every right to pick someone whose views conform with his own; the Senate may decline to confirm the nominee, but they have no real say in who gets nominated in the first place. (The "advise" part of "advise and consent" is by far the weaker part of the equation.) So, as much as I may dislike it, I was obliged to admit that the selection/confirmation process was followed fairly, and that in the end a qualified candidate was seated on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Then came Aunt Harriet. And by now you already know where I'm going with this, so do I really need to continue on?

The interesting question for Democrats is this: should they oppose or embrace her? Ideologically, she may end up being more moderate than the other "strict constructionists" whom Bush could have named; but she is plainly not qualified for the job, and to my mind that's the part that really matters. Call me crazy, but I never have been able to work up the kind of high dudgeon that most liberals feel about Antonin Scalia because I've seen Scalia's mind at work and I know that he's brilliant and thoughtful, even though I disagree with him almost all the time.

To me, the thing that really matters on the Supreme Court is that it be comprised of the best and brightest legal minds. Agreement or disagreement ideologically is a distant second. Therefore, if I were a Democrat--and wait, I am!--then I would take a stand against Ms. Miers, even knowing that Bush is likely to then nominate Ms. Rogers Brown or someone like her. But at least the candidate would have something resembling the ability to do the job, which has to be the part that really matters.

Murrow and Friendly

I saw Good Night, and Good Luck last week, and enjoyed it a bunch. The movie is exactly what I said was needed after the last election: more political art. I realized last November that over the last several years, liberals I think decided that on many of the important social issues they had already won the national argument. Their thinking, I think, went something like this: "My position on [fill in the blank--abortion, religion in the classes/courts, etc.] is so demonstrably right, so logically unassailable, that surely everyone can see it, and I can go back to my cheese-and-wine parties." Trouble is, the conservatives never for an instant stopped making their arguments, and in the absence of a real debate, the side that never stopped yammering slowly made inroads in the public consciousness.

Therefore I welcome a film like Good Night, and Good Luck. And even while I recognize that it is not fair and balanced (despite being scrupulously fact-checked), I rejoice in the fact that it doesn't try to be. Clooney had something he wants to say, and he's got a right to say it. Sure, you can make the argument that Murrow's role in McCarthy's downfall wasn't as central as Clooney makes it out to be, but I don't really care: it's a good story that makes a compelling point worth making, and that to me is the part that matters. We need more art like this, and I hope that writers and musicians and moviemakers all across the land are hard at work putting out their unvarnished, deeply-felt viewpoints just as Clooney did.

And while I'm on the subject, I felt like mentioning that Fred Friendly (Murrow's producer, played by Clooney, who literally sat at Murrow's feet during the McCarthy broadcasts) was the commencement speaker when I graduated from Emerson in 1987. He gave a great speech about journalistic ethics and I became an instant fan. I highly, highly recommend that if you ever get the chance, you should watch his brilliant 13-part PBS series called "The Constitution: That Delicate Balance." As Friendly himself put it, the aim of the programs was to "make the agony of decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking." He accomplished this by gathering together in a round-table format top minds of the time, from former President Ford to Supreme Court justices like the aforementioned Antonin Scalia and Potter Stewart, plus others like the then-head of Planned Parenthood, Faye Wattleton, and the brilliant think-tanker Willard Gaylin. A moderator, usually Harvard's Arthur Miller (not the playwright), would pose a theoretical question and the panelists would begin to discuss how they might approach the problem; then the moderator would turn the screw and make the problem harder to deal with, then yet harder again. The results were often brilliantly revealing, and consistently challenging. Very, very much worth seeing if you ever get the chance.

Talking About Walking

For the past several months I have done that unheard-of thing in Los Angeles: gone for a walk. I started walking mostly for health reasons, since I was obliged to quit my old health club in February and had not been getting any consistent exercise since then. But since I never owned a car until three years ago, walking is something I've always done a lot of and always enjoyed--until the car came. Then, despite my best efforts not to, I became a typical Angeleno, driving to anything that wasn't extremely close. Indeed, one of the great surprises has been how easy it is to walk to places that seemed distant--from my apartment to Westwood, with all its movie theaters (a couple miles away), is about twenty minutes. (Bear in mind, twenty minutes on the 405 may not cover even that much ground.) I even discovered that I could walk to and from work in just over half an hour, and on a nice cool day, that's no hardship at all.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that if you want to get to know your neighborhood, there is no substitute for learning on foot. Already, my walks have shown me where, as a driver, the best escape routes are when the obvious ones get backed up (and here in West L.A., it doesn't take much for these roads to get clogged). (Although if you think I'm gonna tell you what that escape route is, you're crazy. Crazy I tell ya, crazy!) Sometimes, walking around can be a lot like going into a bar and checking out the women: "Yeah, I wouldn't mind inhabiting that space," or "God no, not in a million years."

But you can also learn a lot about the history of a neighborhood by walking it, in ways that might not seem so obvious. The population density of West L.A. has been increasing in recent years, and it becomes easy to see why as I wander from block to block. Most structures are now small apartment buildings, with some upscale (but modestly-sized) condos here and there; the bigger condo towers are just a little further north and east, lining Wilshire. So for the most part the neighborhood still feels pleasantly residential, but then you start noticing that there are some scattered single-family homes dotting the area, and then you notice some lots where a structure has been recently torn down, and where construction is beginning on a small apartment building. Clearly, then, this neighborhood used to be filled with those classic L.A. bungalow-styled houses, modest little homes with modest little yards, but as real estate values rose, the owners probably sold for a big profit and moved somewhere more upscale. Those homes were torn down, and the same space was made to hold more people (more people paying more rent, further increasing local property values and the pressure on homeowners to sell and move).

In this way, the area's population density never has a big spike upward; rather, the pressures of more people and more cars ratchet up slowly, one small apartment at a time. It's not so awful when the neighborhood manages to retain its calm residential flavor; but locals react with considerable alarm when some ham-handed developer comes along with a scheme to build a massive apartment complex in the heart of the neighborhood--namely, on a section of the nearby VA Center. Bear in mind, the land for the VA Center was donated over a hundred years ago on the strict provision that it only be used for the benefit of local veterans; but now, with funding being cut and property values high, it must be a nearly-unbearable temptation for the land's trustees to sell off a portion and reap big profits.

Locals, though, have watched the slow ratcheting-up of population pressures, the increased traffic on the roads, the fact that you really can't add new roads to relieve those pressures, and they react aggresstively to the notion of a giant new complex coming in.

And now, after several weeks of prowling this neighborhood I've been living in for nearly three years, I am finally beginning to really feel like one of those locals. I'm beginning to feel the slow, quiet pulse of the place, to value these little streets and the few little homes that remain. Quite suddenly, simply because I needed a little exercise and wanted to do a bit of walking, I have gained something I never expected: a whole community that I can call my own. I no longer say that I have an apartment that happens to be in West L.A.; now I say that West L.A. is my home.