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.
Monday, November 28, 2005
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
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.
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.
Monday, November 21, 2005
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.
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.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
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!
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!
Thursday, November 17, 2005
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.
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.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
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.
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.
Friday, November 11, 2005
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.
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.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
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.
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.
Monday, November 07, 2005
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"?
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"?
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