Compare and Contrast

All right, class, now listen up: here is your--Ashley, please put that away--here is your assignment. Two famous people just died, so we are going to--Ashley, I said to, okay, thank you--we are going to compare and contrast. So open up your laptops, pick whichever websites most appeal to you--please don't all use Wikipedia, okay?--and let's discuss--Ashley! Please!--let's compare and contrast our two recent dearly departed: James Brown and Gerald R. Ford.

What's that? Yes, I know, celebrities usually die in threes, but no third person seems to have offered themselves up to complete the troika, so--it's a word, look it up, Ashley, you know how to do that, right?--so we're just going to limit ourselves to these two. Of course, heh, you know, if there were going to be a third, given how completely unlike Ford and Brown are, you'd have to find someone completey unlike them, and who knows, maybe this guy will be the third.

So now let's--yes, Ashley? Why yes, I did just say that James Brown and Gerald Ford were completely unlike. That's actually--did you notice that all by yourself? Huh. Imagine that. So yes, comparing them will be something of a challenge, won't it? You'll just have to assume that this challenge is exactly why I--no, you may not go to the restroom. Because I said so. Because class will be out in ten minutes. So let's just--listen, can we just get down to it, please? Thank you.

First off, James Brown and Gerald Ford were both famous. That's definitely something they had in common. And as we have all recently learned, there is nothing in the world better than being famous. Both of them were famous for falling: President Ford fell once, and was mocked for it for years by Chevy Chase; Mr. Brown fell to his knees all the time while performing "Please Please Please," but it was all just part of the act. James Brown elevated the pride of black people through his song "Say it Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud," and Gerald Ford saw black people through the window of his limousine sometimes.

And for contrast? Anyone? Yes, Ashley, what--yes indeed, that's quite true. James Brown helped invent funk music, he did indeed. But Gerald Ford--who was many things, and who we all should honor for ending the Watergate nightmare--Gerald Ford was never funky. A gold star for Ashley!

East Coast Time

Last Christmas, the weather was mild and the trees were down; this year, it keeps raining pretty much every day, and the humidity is back to what I remember from my long damp childhood, but at least the trees are back up (or carted away). Haven't seen a single blue tarp across a single wind-ravaged roof. And unlike last year, this year I had plenty of time to spend at home in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale.

Which was good, considering the cats.

Last Christmas, my mother had two-and-a-half cats (one was indoor part of the time and out in the garage part of the time), plus a brace of outdoor cats who were being fed but never allowed inside the house. No problem. This year, one of the outdoor cats had died, the indoor/outdoor cat was entirely indoors, and the two remaining outdoor cats had also come indoors, for a total of five. I walked into the house, I sat down, said hello to the very bashful two new cats, began the getting-reacquainted process, and then started sneezing. Two hours later my defenses had been wiped out and a cold was beginning. (My mom was sick; my sister was sick; the bugs were just waiting for their opening, and boy did they get one.)

So for several days I had all the get-up-and-go of a tree stump. It was a good thing I had all those extra days at home, because I needed them to get the shopping done. Friday and Saturday were the most intense, as if I hadn't already been down here for a week. But now it's all done, and I get to relax and enjoy the season. Just had the Christmas Eve dinner at Mom's house, with the lovely roast beast, then tomorrow I go to Dad's, and if I'm lucky my brother will be able to get me into the Dolphins game on the cheap, since he's bartending there. (The last time I went to a Dolphins game was probably in 1973, when they were rather better than they are now.)

It may be my last simple Christmas. Mom in Miami, Dad in Ft. Lauderdale, and my aunt and grandfather up in Port St. Lucie. (In fact, even this year it wasn't so simple--my Mom's cold and mine preclude us from going up to Port St. Lucie this year, which is a very great shame.) But Dad will be moving to Dallas next year for business reasons, and suddenly I can't just fly to one airport and be within driving distance of everyone. Holiday-time life gets more complicated after this, which I have been terribly aware of the whole time I've been down here, trying to enjoy the moments as well as I can before things change.

But who knew? Who could ever have guessed that among all the traditional holiday pursuits I would also end up eating homemade beef jerky and watching a young idiot shoot a bottle rocket out of his ass?

And on that note: Merry Christmas!

Four Days of Accounting

I am, to put it mildly, arithmetically-challenged. Failed four straight semesters of math during junior high, partly because I was just plain lazy and never did the homework, but the underlying reason for that was that it was just so damn hard that, given my recent discovery of acting, there were other things I found much more interesting. (And by the way, summer school in Florida in the late 1970s was a joke--the math classes were so simple that they in no way made up for what I hadn't learned during the normal school year. I was able to advance from one grade to another on time, but I learned nothing.)

The company I run with Marc Rosenbush, Zenmovie LLC, exists in part to oversee the distribution of Zen Noir both theatrically and on DVD. (The theatrical run just officially ended in Chicago last week, by the way--so if you want to see it, DVD is now your only option, unless you live in New York City. And hey, the DVD just happens to be for sale right here! Isn't that incredibly convenient?) One of my functions within the company, for the moment, is the bookkeeping. Once we've made a little more progress toward recoupment, we'll hire someone who actually understands what they're doing to keep the books. But until then, it's just me and Marc, working our way through stuff a little at a time.

Bear in mind, though: math and I are not on speaking terms. With words, I can pretty do what I want. They are concrete yet pliable, their structures and possibilities perfectly clear in my mind. But numbers, which are supposedly these solid, dependable things--the number 2 always means the same thing no matter what its context--still, somehow, slip and slide from my grasp. They're liquid, and any time I try to work my way through a formula, it always dances away from me. Programs like Excel and QuickBooks help a lot, but it's still always Garbage In Garbage Out, and I am, unfortunately, all too capable of inputting an awful lot of garbage.

Nonetheless, on a couple occasions we've been able to get some help. Our friend Kellie over at the Spiritual Cinema Circle is an accounting whiz, and on Sunday, Marc and I drove up to her home and spent a few hours discovering how everything we'd done had been wrong. She showed up how we really needed to set up our accounting, then Marc and I met up again several times this week and executed her changes--a process that is, as of this morning, still not quite finished, but it's almost there.

Plenty of things I still don't fully understand. How is a Cost of Goods Sold category different from a normal Expense? Dunno. What exactly constitutes a Selling Expense and what an Operating Expense? I sorta-kinda understand this one, but there are still plenty of entries that seem to straddle both possibilities. But the nice thing is that after Kellie's help, I don't necessarily have to understand everything--I can just do again what we did before, in exactly the same way, and it should all work out.

Of course, I imagine that back in junior high I kept thinking something like "it should all work out" too, and we saw how that went.

Muslimania!

Even before he takes office, I'm starting to really like newly-elected Congressman Keith Ellison. As has been extensively reported, Mr. Ellison will become next month the nation's first Muslim member of Congress, and this alone has been enough to draw to the surface some of the worst of our ordinarily-repressed prejudices. Supposedly-upstanding media commentators, the self-appointed guardians of our nation's soul, have managed to flatfoot themselves over and over again concerning Mr. Ellison.

Take, for example, the already-infamous interview that CNN's Glenn Beck conducted with Mr. Ellison on November 14th. In it, there was this delightful attempt to not sound prejudiced despite the fact that the question was inextricably bound up in, and inspired by, Mr. Beck's prejudices:

BECK: OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. I've been to mosques. I really don't believe that Islam is a religion of evil. I -- you know, I think it's being hijacked, quite frankly.
With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying, "Let's cut and run." And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."
And I know you're not. I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.

Let's see now, where to begin? Shall we start with the whole "Some of my best friends are Muslims!" preamble? No, that one's self-evident. Certainly Mr. Beck has a point in asserting that Islam has been hijacked by extremists, although I think it's truer that we in America don't pay attention to the millions of good practicing Muslims except when a few of them do something extreme; and then we make that awful leap we have made so many times, in assuming that all Muslims must think like the extremists.

(Note that I have been careful not to assume that Mr. Beck represents the thinking of all Republicans or conservatives. He's out on the fringe, even if he is a member of "mainstream media" stalwart CNN--and the whole point of this blog entry is to demonstrate how the mere fact of Mr. Ellison's election has been drawing these bald-faced bigotries out into the open for once.)

Then there is Mr. Beck's conflation of Democrats with "cut-and-run" appeasers who must therefore be secretly in league with the terrorists, a spectacular three-way failure of logic because none of those things follows from any of the others. Democrats are not ipso facto appeasers; appeasers are not ipso facto in league with terrorists; people in league with terrorists are not ipso facto Democrats; and so on. But unless you are willing to automatically assume that all three elements of that so-called syllogism are in fact congruent, then Mr. Beck's next question--nay, his next demand--"Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies" becomes impossible.

Any by the way, Mr. Ellison's response to this bit of blatant bigotry was remarkable for its grace, as he seemed to immediately forgive the undertones of the question and, in fact, willingly dignified it with a dignified answer:

ELLISON: Well, let me tell you, the people of the Fifth Congressional District know that I have a deep love and affection for my country. There's no one who is more patriotic than I am. And so, you know, I don't need to -- need to prove my patriotic stripes.

To which Mr. Beck, backpedaling like crazy, responded "I understand that. And I'm not asking you to," then moved on to talk about Somalians in Mr. Ellison's district. But of course he was asking exactly that, and bravo to Mr. Ellison for how well he handled this embarrassing interview.

Two weeks later, along came Dennis Prager in his column on Townhall.com, in which he harrumphed about the fact that Mr. Ellison plans to use a copy of the Koran when he is sworn in next month. This is a little better argued from a logical point of view, but it still amounts to one giant whopper. Where does Mr. Prager go horribly wrong? Right here: "America is interested in only one book, the Bible."

Well no, not really. Even Mr. Prager, later on in his column, notes that the collective Bible includes both the Talmudic Old Testament and a New Testament that is not a part of the Jewish religion, and no one denies that Jews have been a major part of American life for centuries. So Jews are not "interested" in "the Bible" per se, only a portion of it. There are perhaps three million Muslims living in the U.S., and of course they respect the Bible but it is the Koran they are most "interested" in. And let us not forget the Native Americans we displaced, who have never had any interest in the Holy Book we so often used as justification for stealing their land.

From this assertion, everything else follows. "If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don't serve in Congress." But in fact, setting aside the Congress for a moment, two Presidents did not swear on a Bible: Theodore Roosevelt didn't use a book at all, and John Quincy Adams was sworn in using a lawbook as his preferred text. Furthermore, another incoming member of the next Congress, Hawaiian representative Mazie Hirono, plans to use no religious text at all next month. The Constitution--which is the only text that matters, the one whose primacy all elected officials are required to affirm--specifically requires that "no religious test" be used to determine whether a citizen can serve as an elected official.

(Again, not all conservatives think alike--elsewhere on Townhall.com, Michael Medved quite properly argued against Mr. Prager's conclusions, and Tucker Carlson has done so as well.)

Mr. Prager then argues as follows:

...imagine a racist elected to Congress. Would they allow him to choose Hitler's "Mein Kampf," the Nazis' bible, for his oath? And if not, why not? On what grounds will those defending Ellison's right to choose his favorite book deny that same right to a racist who is elected to public office?

An interesting question, but more than a little specious. For one thing, anyone so devoted to their racism that they would insist on using "Mein Kampf" as their swearing-in text probably has enough of a history as that kind of a racist that they are extremely unlikely to actually get elected. In other words, even a mildly-informed electorate would prevent such a swearing-in by never electing the guy in the first place. But if such a person should be elected, then sure, let him use whatever book he wants. But because "Mein Kampf" is genuinely and legitimately offensive to millions of Americans--let alone other members of Congress--such a person would be instantly marginalized in Congress and, almost certainly, thrown out of office two years later. That's the logical fallacy, you see: "Mein Kampf" is inherently offensive; the Koran is not. Mr. Prager doesn't seem to understand this either--or perhaps, despite his many protestations to the contrary, he really does equate the Koran with "Mein Kampf."

And that would just be sad. Enough with him. But bravo to Mr. Ellison, a genuinely progressive voice in the Congress. Recently a news crew followed him around Washington during his orientation, and he seemed like a completely decent guy, a little disoriented as he tried to figure his way around the halls of power. I like him already, and I look forward to his contributions to the national discourse.

Wealth

I am, as I have said before, not-yet-rich. I live from paycheck-to-paycheck like so many people do, and when a change in my expenses happens (as it will next month when my rent goes up--even though it's rent control--and my parking space gets more expensive as well), then it's a real struggle to find the extra money. Extra money that buys me nothing extra, it just keeps things as they are. This struggle gets truly depressing sometimes, like when friends invite me somewhere and I don't go because I can't afford it.

But for perspective, there's this: the Global Rich List, a website that allows you to plug in your annual salary and see where your income ranks against the rest of the world. My income--my not-yet-rich income that just barely covers what I need it to cover, with almost nothing left over--nonetheless puts me in the top 1% of everyone on the planet. And if that don't turn your head and make you feel a little stupid about your belly-aching, then there's no hope for you.

Go to the site. Put in your income. Marvel at the result. Then go and donate some money somewhere--you are far more blessed than you ever realized, and it's time to give something back.

Interpreting Shakespeare

Recently I've been watching a lot of Shakespeare. The estimable people at Janus Films, who run the Criterion Collection of DVD releases, put out a set of Laurence Olivier's three Shakespeare films (Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III), and I got a copy as a birthday present. (For the record, Olivier also filmed Othello, Merchant of Venice and King Lear, and appeared in an early film of As You Like It, but he didn't direct any of these--and the Othello film was essentially a taping of his stage production.)

It occurs to me that not everyone may remember who Olivier is. I often fall victim to this problem--as one of the great actors of the 20th century, Olivier looms as large in my awareness as, let's say, the Pope does for Catholics. (Plus I'm a bit of an Anglophile, and I've always loved British actors--even today, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Hopkins and the impossibly brilliant Ian Holm are among my favorite actors, while the Australians have lately become a force unto themselves.)

Since I have often acted in Shakespeare's plays, and I've read everything at least once, it was by no means the first time I had seen these three films. But it was interesting nonetheless to see them in order like that--and in the Richard III film, there is the particular opportunity to compare Olivier's approach to Shakespeare with that of his great rival, John Gielgud, who plays the Duke of Clarence in that film.

Acting styles come and go like clothing fashions, and if you doubt me, just find a recording of John Barrymore doing soliloquies from Hamlet. In 1936, Gielgud directed a production of Romeo and Juliet in which he had the unusual idea of casting himself as Romeo and Olivier as Mercutio; then after six weeks, they switched roles. The production has become legendary as one of those moments when acting styles seemed to turn on a dime, because Gielgud's Romeo was all beauty and grace, while Olivier stressed the physical and the dynamic. There are no recordings of these performances; but in Richard III, you can watch Gielgud performing (very beautifully) Clarence's long dream speech, and then watch any of Olivier's speeches as Richard, and get a very clear sense of the difference between the two styles.

When I was younger, I appreciated Gielgud but I adored Olivier. Lately, those impressions have switched places. It makes sense: as a young man, Olivier's vigorous, youthful approach was thrilling, while Gielgud's more refined performances didn't have the same immediate, visceral impact. But in Olivier's autobiography, he wrote something that I found particularly interesting (sorry, I don't have the book in front of me so I can't quote it directly): he said that in his approach to the soliloquies, he often picked certain specific lines and really hammered away at them while, in a sense, glossing over the rest of the speech. He cited one of Lear's speeches, writing that in his own head, the speech was essentially "Dad-dah dah-dah dah-dah dah-dah dah-dah / How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child!"


It may be the most honest thing he ever wrote about his own work--because with that in mind, suddenly I can see this approach in just about every aspect of these films. They are all collections of great moments, with somewhat loose connections between them. And those great moments are usually designed to showcase Olivier himself to great advantage, and are usually announced by a particular stentorian yell that is essentially identical from production to production. It became the chief weapon in his arsenal of acting tricks, and after hearing it a few times, I have to admit, I began to dread its appearance.


Gielgud, on the other hand, was the most beautiful speaker of verse in the twentieth century, with a velvet voice and a subtlety of approach that I have never seen equaled. He was a member of the great Terry family (Ellen Terry was his great-aunt), and as such represents perhaps the apotheosis of that late-19th century style: forceful but never florid, refined but never precious, and with a complete command of his craft so that every line received its due weight rather than rushing on to the next big moment.

It's interesting that Olivier's reputation is as a very natural, realistic actor of Shakespeare (at least compared to Gielgud), because now I find his work particularly mannered. Maybe that's because Kenneth Branagh's recent performances have been quite a bit more realistic and natural than Olivier's ever were, as I think anyone could see by comparing his 1989 Henry V to Olivier's in 1944. Speaking as a child of the Vietnam generation, as Branagh is as well, I find his anti-war interpretation of the play considerably more interesting than Olivier's rah-rah rouse the troops version, and I love the fact that when he filmed Hamlet he did the whole thing, leaving the script essentially uncut. (Yes, I know, it's a long script, which is why most directors cut it from four and a half hours down to about three; but there have been any number of uncut productions that have demonstrated, over and over again, that the play in its entirety works brilliantly, beginning with Maurice Evans's reportedly-sensational production in 1938.)


But what's particularly interesting, to me at least, is that if you look at Branagh's as the third great interpretive style of Shakespeare performance, it is almost full circle back to Gielgud--or maybe it's more accurate to say that his work represents a successful melding of both Gielgud and Olivier: frequently thrilling like Olivier, but with the yearning and the beauty of a Gielgud performance. Alas, as a director, Branagh suffers in comparison to Olivier, largely because of an unfortunate fondness for too-low comedy (witness Michael Keaton's awful Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing).

The cycle will spin on, of course. One day, Branagh's performances will seem mannered and unrealistic just as Olivier's are beginning to now; and what I think magical in my forties may seem tired when I have reached my sixties (and am, perhaps, more than a little tired myself). It is all, as Shakespeare said, a part of the very purpose of theatre, "...whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." And that's why this stuff matters, not just to me: an acting style is as much a reflection of its time as anything else; it hints at who we are at a given moment. Once upon a time, the value of a beautiful Gielgud performance was self-evident; then, during World War II and immediately after, we valued a man of action such as Olivier, even in the refined setting of a Shakespeare play; and now we appreciate a natural, unmannered performance like Branagh's, in this time when mannerism and affectation are so out of favor and "authenticity" is all. (Never mind that much of what we think of as authentic is in fact exactly the opposite--Eminem is not Marshall Mathers, no matter what he says.) What's unfortunate is that Branagh's Shakespeare work, while popular, doesn't matter in the way a Shakespeare performance once mattered--now we want the overheated bang-bang of What's-his-name's Romeo + Juliet, with action and guns substituting for the text. That's a damn shame, but it is, again, a reflection of its time. A movie may seem fixed and immovable, but as one's own perceptions shift with time and age, one realizes that even a movie is malleable, a constantly shifting mirror reflecting not only its own age but ours as well.

Burning Man

On November 3rd, a man named Malachi Ritscher set himself on fire near the off-ramp of a Chicago freeway. (Here's the AP story.) Apparently he was a long-time political activist who had suffered from bouts of depression; and, plainly emulating the 1963 death of Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc, Mr. Ritscher made the unimaginable decision to emulate Duc's act of extraordinary protest.

I just went through a Google search for Mr. Ritscher's name, and of the first 100 results, not a single one was for a mainstream news source: no CNN, no New York Times, not even the Chicago Tribune or Sun-Times covered a local story. Only the indie paper Chicago Reader, which I remember well from my years there, picked up the story. (To be more precise: according to the Reader, apparently the Sun-Times ran a small article before it knew who had immolated himself or why; since then, nothing until it reran the AP article this morning.)

Mr. Ritscher's suicide note read, in part, "If I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country.... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country." Much of the discussion, what there has been of it, has turned on the question of whether Mr. Ritscher's problems with depression somehow invalidate his act of protest. Was he, some wonder, ever clinically diagnosed, or was it an undiagnosed mental illness, or was it perhaps a simple low-level depression such as many suffer through from time to time? I suppose that some of this results from the example set by Thich Quang Duc, a monk who suffered from no mental illness, who indeed, according to witness David Halberstam, never once moved or cried out during his ordeal. Thus Duc's motives are pure, thus his act had meaning. By implication, then, Ritscher's motives were impure (because he was, you know, sick in the head, a mental defective, CRAAAAAZYYYYY), therefore his act had no meaning.

This argument is absurd--particularly when put forth in the usual blunt-instrument terms of conservative bloggers. (Read and weep.) If it was purely a question of depression driving someone to suicide, then why was it so politically overt? Typically, when someone attempts suicide in order to get attention, it is exactly that: an attempt, a cry for help. The method chosen would therefore be something with a reasonable chance of suriving; self-immolation ain't that. Once you pour gasoline on yourself and light a match, well, that's all there is to it, you're gonna die.

Plainly, Ritscher was trying, in his last moments on earth, to make his death mean something. And even if it was partially motivated by the awful circumstances of depression, making his death a political act was a last attempt to make his life, and his death, meaningful and effective, just as Duc's death had been. It must follow, then, that this was not a petty, self-involved death, a kind of mental implosion, a black hole of personality collapsing in on itself; it was a last attempt at expansion, at significance, from a man who had devoted much of his life to political activism. In his suicide note he wrote, "My position is that I only get one death, I want it to be a good one. Wouldn't it be better to stand for something or make a statement, rather than a fiery collision with some drunk driver?"

Mr. Ritscher was not a "moonbat," not "an aging hippie loser" who recognized the pointlessness of his liberal life and just decided to end it all. He voluntarily chose to endure what is perhaps the most painful of all deaths in the last hope that it might mean something. The fact that the mass media have so thoroughly ignored that sacrifice makes it all the more tragic.

The Happy Place

It's hard to overstate how much I love the Thanksgiving holiday. Four-plus days off from work; I don't have to travel anywhere, and what with my friend Ezra's fondness for taking in Thanksgiving orphans such as myself, I don't even have to do anything--just show up at a specific time, carrying a bottle of wine, then sit back with friends and eat, drink and maketh the merry.

It wasn't always thus. Back in college, the holiday was too short to fly home, but the dorms closed so I always had to find someplace to stay. This was particularly awkward my Freshman year, when I found myself at a cast party the weeked before Thanksgiving, essentially begging the gathering for a place to stay. I found one (and ended up having a memorable vegetarian Thanksgiving that consisted, as I recall, of rice, rice and rice); but the next year I ended up staying at the YMCA on Huntington for the holiday, which was a whole different kind of memorable. (The infamous "Hail Mary" pass from Doug Flutie to Gerard Phelan came that particular weekend, and I watched the game on a tiny TV in a tiny room at the Y, sitting on my tiny bed and staring at the screen--remember, I'm a Miamian, so I was rooting for the Hurricanes, not for B.C.--while yelling things in complete shock.)

But things change, and my Thanksgivings slowly got better and better, until I am now where I am, ridiculously happy with my holiday. I ended up seated next to the utterly wonderful Sarah Underwood (she was also in Outta Sync), whom I hadn't seen in months; and at a certain point during dessert, I felt it come over me. "Ah, there it is," I said to the nice people near me (it was a very long table that covered, I think, at least two time zones), "my stomach just reached its happy place."

And then, as is always the way of things, instead of stopping there I finished what was on my plate and my stomach promptly moved to the "overstuffed and overwhelmed" place. But so what? It's not like I had any place to be; or any place I would rather be.

Then today, I scratched an itch: the single most distressing casualty of the Zen Noir distribution has been that for weeks I have had absolutely no time to do any writing. (Although I have to say--the fact that our DVD kept selling all through Thanksgiving day, in surprisingly good numbers, was also extremely pleasant.) So this morning, I sat down with my "Marathon" script and made just a tiny little change; a texture thing, really, although it does tie up a storyline that had been left dangling, and without a line of dialogue being spoken. I'd realized weeks ago that I needed to tie up that loose thread, I even knew what to do; even so, it wasn't till today that I could actually sit down and do it. It felt spectacularly satisfying.

The release of the movie will end quite soon, when we open in Chicago. I won't be traveling for that, and after that we only have to keep DVD sales moving along. At last, I should be able to get back to what I really do, writing. About bloody time.

At the same time, the stories out of Iraq today are so horrifying that I simply can't look at them. Maybe tomorrow I'll be able to think about such things, but not now, no, not now.

All Around the World

It's pretty amazing, the thought that people around the world will soon be watching Zen Noir. The DVD went on sale Tuesday (you can order it right here, with a host of free special gifts, for a limited time) and there was a lovely stretch of the day when we were selling something like 100 copies per hour. But even more remarkable was the thought of where those DVDs are going: all across the United States, of course, particularly to those places where the theatrical release could never reach; and it's not such a surprise to find them going to Canada and the U.K. and (particularly) to Australia, where sales have been particularly strong; but there are also sales to Israel and Jordan, to Malaysia, to Brazil and Sweden and South Africa, and that's just from a haphazard look at today's sales.

This is where film has it all over theatre, frankly. The reason to make art, in any form, is to have it seen and appreciated by an audience. In theatre, unless you have a mega-blockbuster like Phantom of the Opera that can set up a dozen road companies while also playing for years in London and New York so that tourists from across the world can come see it, even the best play will only be seen by people within, probably, no more than 100 miles of the theatre. (And the people who would travel that far are rare--we had a few who traveled when we did Signal to Noise, but that was really to see Neil Gaiman when he came to our special preview.) Then of course there's the time limit--a play is doing very well if it lasts longer than six weeks, but people can watch Zen Noir six decades from now. On six continents, no less.

This is really blowing my mind right now; it also leaves me seriously humble. And all I did was work on the film--it's Marc who's really responsible for it, whose story and ideas are right now being shipped across the world.

For the time being, the DVD is only available on our site, at the link above. It'll probably end up on Amazon and Netflix someday, although really truly I have no idea when that might happen; but for now, since there are still plenty of production expenses, etc. to recoup before we can start sharing the wealth with the actors and producers (who worked and have seen no rewards yet), we're understandably eager to rack up as many sales as we can--and not at Amazon's discounted rate. And so far it's working out just fine, as those little boxes make their way around the globe.

(One woman bought twelve copies, and in her "Comments" space she wrote "Well that's Christmas taken care of." Not that I'm trying to plant ideas in your head or anything...)

Did Dean Do It?

Well, yay.

But it's curious that in all the self-congratulation I've heard from Democrats and the various media mouths, I haven't heard Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean's name mentioned once. (I know he was on The Daily Show last night, but I haven't yet had a chance to watch it.) All the attention was going to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Clinton-era insider who oversaw the national Congressional effort, and to Chuck Schumer, Emanuel's counterpart in the Senate. It's deserved praise, to be sure, but still it seemed a bit peculiar that Dean wasn't being mentioned. Can it be a coincidence that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid had both opposed Dean's chairmanship? (I'm not trying to spin out some kind of conspiracy theory here, I'm just trying to give some credit where it might be due.)

There was an interesting article in the New York Times last month about Dean, in which writer Matt Bai followed Dean to Alaska as he sought to further implement his "fifty-state strategy." The basis of the idea, according to Mr. Bai (paraphrasing Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher), is simple: "...Democrats do better with rural and small-town voters when they frame their positions as values rather than as policy prescriptions. This is not an entirely new insight, but to Dean it is critically important. In his mind, it means that any voter in any state can be a Democrat, if only you bother to talk to him, and if only you make the right kind of argument." And after the upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s, as demographics and political allegiances shifted, the once-mighty Democratic machine started ceding whole swaths of the country's electorate to the Republicans. Instead of adapting to the new reality their focus narrowed, a little bit at a time, election after election, finally reaching the point that during the 2004 election, 18 states were completely ignored by John Kerry and the Democratic Party.

Dean sought to do a 180 on that idea, hence the fifty-state strategy. Even places like Alaska, a sparsely-populated state where Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-to-1, needed Democratic party organizers on the ground, raising money and directing it to the right places. I won't summarize Mr. Bai's main points any more than that, instead just referring you again to his article, but will instead pivot to my own main point:

How much of the responsibility for this historic Democratic sweep belongs to Howard Dean?

Obviously, there are certain realities this election cycle that weren't so real just two years ago: the disgust of the electorate with just about every aspect of the Bush White House is plainly the dominant factor. Republican scandals that just kept on comin' had a hell of a lot to do with it, too. And without the public perception that the wheels were coming off the Republican train, Dean's strategy might have died an early death: it was dependent upon raising a sufficient amount of money to fund all those new state organizations, and without local Democrats getting excited about their prospects and therefore donating more money to the cause, Dean could never have executed his grand plan. (Indeed, as Bai reports, the Congressional fund-raising wings of the party were much more successful at keeping parity with their Republican counterparts than Dean's apparatus was--which is why the Republicans were able to spend so much more money on advertising in the last days of the campaign. Not that it ended up helping.)

There were significant gains in states like Iowa, Kansas and Colorado, which the conventional wisdom would have listed as solidly red states, the kind where a party doesn't bother wasting money because there's no way for a Democrat to win. And again, a lot of that can be attributed to the Republican implosion (what effect, for example, did the Ted Haggard debacle have in his home state of Colorado?), but how much did it help that there was a stronger Democratic field organization already in place in Colorado, and in Kansas and Iowa and elsewhere, to take advantage of such opportunities when they arose?

Remember: only a few months ago, conventional wisdom proclaimed that the chances of Democrats taking back the House were fair to decent, with a 15-seat gain "within the realm of possibility," but that retaking the Senate was nearly impossible. But more and more races--in more and more unlikely states--just kept opening up. And the party was able to capitalize on a big percentage of those opportunities.

So I'm just asking: with all due thanks to Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, how much should we also be thanking the outsider who no one else seems to be thanking?

(P.S. Sidney Blumenthal's post-election dissection of the "house of kitsch" that is the Bush Administration is extraordinary. I hadn't seen these clowns in this light before, but I think Blumenthal nails it.)

Oddments

The Zen Noir DVD

It will be released on November 14th. The best place to purchase it, for the time being, is from our very own website, here. (There won't be an actual "click here to purchase" link till the 14th, but the link above should at least get you in the neighborhood.)

The commentary tracks are a lot of fun--particularly Marc's conversation with Brad Warner, author of Hardcore Zen, about the Buddhist principles underlying the film. I'm not a Buddhist but, as you might guess, I've learned a lot about it from working on the movie, and the part about Buddhism that I find the most attractive is exactly what Brad talks about in his book: the imperative for every Buddhist to question authority, to accept nothing as writ. As a punk-rocker (and not a "former" punk-rocker, either), Brad's discussion with Marc is definitely not polite and New Age-y, it's irreverent and a little blasphemous and a hell of a lot of fun. We could have loaded up the DVD with deleted scenes and whatnot, but for my money, this particular commentary track is alone worth the price of admission.

Don't Forget to Vote

I am just about the biggest believer in voting you will ever find. For one thing, I keenly appreciate the part of citizenship that most people like to ignore: the responsibilities incumbent upon every citizen. It's why I'm such a fan of jury duty, for instance: we get plenty of benefits from being American citizens, and aside from paying taxes we rarely get asked to give anything back. But voting is the number one, tip-top item on that list, and I never miss a chance.

Besides--if you don't vote, you give up any right to complain about the government. Simple as that.

Am I excited about Democratic prospects? Not quite. For one thing, rampant gerrymandering has me worried (I really wish that last year's attempt to revamp California's redistricting process had passed); and the possibility of election fraud has me worried as well. Besides, even if Democrats do regain control of one or both houses of Congress, then they have to actually govern--and given how rotten things are at the moment, there are so many gigantic problems to fix that it may be too late for anyone to do any good. Thus allowing Republicans, in two years, to claim that Democrats didn't do any better than they did, thus allowing people to go back to voting for the Republicans who screwed things up in the first place.

Sadly, perception is everything in an election, and recent reports that Republicans are making a last-minute surge in the polls suggest they might actually be able to pull themselves out of the fire. Because if people start to think the Republicans will win again, then the Republicans will probably win again. Here's an example of why:

Back in the 1980 election (Reagan/Carter), there was a significant third-party challenge from Illinois Congressman John Anderson. I was still too young to vote, but my mother was an Anderson supporter. On voting day, she found herself in line with the usual assortment of fellow neighbors, and they got to talking. People asked Mom who she was going to vote for and she said Anderson. "Oh, I like him," they almost all said.

So Mom naturally asked, "And are you voting for him?"

"Oh, no, no."

"But if you like him, why don't you--"

"Because he's not going to win."

So there you are. If it looks the Republicans might win, they will probably win. No one wants to "waste" a vote by voting for a loser, because apparently being part of the winning team is more important than actually making sure your team wins.

Yes, a Very Nice Weekend, How 'Bout You?

It's freakishly warm for November, but surely that's just an anomaly and not part of, let's say, global warming. In any event, it made for a nice weekend, even if I did have to spend almost all of Saturday going over accounting issues for the upcoming DVD release (got to know the right way to count our money!) and a good part of Sunday indoors yet again, working in Final Cut to put together what will eventually a director's reel for Marc. (We will send it out with copies of our next script, for maximum impact.)

But even with all of that, there was more time this weekend for catching up on movies, and even for some reading, than there has been in quite a while, and I'm awfully grateful for it.

And you?

A Break in the Case?

Some time has passed, and now a perfect storm of identity-theft action seems to be beginning. After the robbery on Sept. 25th, there was one use of a stolen credit card, but that charge, for whatever reason, never fully posted with the bank and so it was impossible to track it. Then nothing at all happened, except at my end, as I tried to deal with all the unexpected ramifications of the theft.

But when I came home Wednesday night, there were a half-dozen messages on my answering machine. One was from Cingular Wireless, which told me that someone had tried to open one or more cellphone accounts using my information; and another was from my bank, telling me that someone had tried to ask the bank to mail a replacement credit card to an address in the Bronx. There was also a call yesterday from Dell Computer, which had someone on the other line at that very moment, trying to open an account in my name. Thanks to the fraud alerts I placed with all the credit-reporting agencies, these merchants all contacted me and I sure as hell told them that the other people on the line were bad, bad people.

But the way I look at it, each of these attempts represents another opportunity to catch the bastids. For example, the attempt to have a replacement credit card mailed to the Bronx means that I now have an actual street address in the Bronx, plus a couple of phone numbers. Now it could turn out that that address is a vacant lot or something, because it sure does seem stupid for the thieves to actually give their address in a traceable manner. Then again, thieves are not always rocket scientists, so maybe they really are that stupid.

(As proof, I offer this from the always-delightful News of the Weird: "New Yorkers Donald Ray Bilby, 30, in July, and Abdullah Date, 18, in August, were, respectively, convicted and arrested for sending anthrax threats to authorities in envelopes that each contained their correct return addresses. (Date allegedly also included a taunting note reading, 'Catch me if you can.')")

Of course, I don't hold out much hope that anyone at that New York address will lead back to the two guys out in front of University High School that night. Most likely, they sold my wallet to someone for maybe a hundred bucks cash, and the buyer sent it on to his contact in New York, and there's probably an identity-theft ring that processes information from thefts all across the country. In which case, it becomes less likely that they're stupid enough to actually give out an address, but you never know, and it's all worth following up.

This morning, by coincidence, I got called in by the police to look at a photo line-up. I have given the address and the phone numbers and all the particulars to the detectives, and we'll see what happens. That's all I can do: try to keep ahead of the ID theft brigade, and relay anything potentially useful to the authorities. I really truly wish this all weren't so damn time-consuming, but that's my new reality so okay, that's what I'll do.

In the Meantime...

...there's this, a photo I took of the Getty Villa on the coast. Went there yesterday with some friends and, despite occasional interruptions by phone calls relating to the bad people, it was a very nice day. As you can probably tell.

The Candy Calendar

Aaaaiiiieeeee! It's the day after Halloween and there's candy everywhere! Heeeeellllp!

When I moved out here to Californ-eye-ay, I promptly gained about fifteen pounds. After all, I'd never had a car before, so in Boston and Chicago I walked everywhere; now suddenly I became one of those SoCal drive-around-the-corner types. Plus, age does what it does, and that robust metabolism that used to just burn weight whether I exercised or not slowly became less effective, something I could could keep in check in Chicago because I belonged to a health club across the street from where I worked. But here, I couldn't afford a health club and the weight practically leaped onto me. It was a bit like standing on a scale and watching as the dial just kept moving.

The weight gain seemed to stabilize at fifteen-plus, and then with a little bit of effort I dropped five--but there it stayed, for a long while. Until a couple months ago, when I watched Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me and had a little bit of a freak-out. I went into the kitchen and did a little basic math: looked at everything I had eaten on just that one day, how many calories, how many grams of fat, etc. Made a few adjustments, mostly simple things like removing potato chips from my diet, that sort of thing--taking the absolute worst parts of what I ate, losing them, but not trying to fundamentally alter the diet itself. I had no inclination to go vegetarian or anything like that; I just wanted to see if little steps could produce measurable gains.

They did. Slowly slowly, pounds began to slip away. From week to week there was little difference when I got on the scale; but over the course of the past several months, I realized I had lost five pounds, then seven, then ten--I was back to my pre-Los Angeles weight. My belt was two notches tighter. I didn't feel so damned self-conscious about certain types of clothing. This, of course, made me ambitious: could I perhaps keep the trend going? Why, if I could lose another fifteen pounds, that would put me back at college weight! Wouldn't that be great?

But it's the day after Halloween, and everyone with excess candy is leaving it out in places where I can, you know, see it. I mean, what's a fella to do in the face of such endless temptation? Exercise some impulse control? Oh, please!

It's interesting, though--after a couple of those tiny M&M's packs, I began to feel a sugar buzz rushing up on me. Used to be I could pound back M&M's for hours; now I'm really feeling them. That, I think, is probably a very good thing; if anything is to help me master that particular impulse, feeling sick after too much candy can only be to my benefit.

But geez--Christmas is coming up, and that's when vendors start sending boxes of candy and donuts and cookies and things. Aaaaiiieeee!

A Ha!

Now I know why I’ve been reading so much Joseph Campbell lately! Originally, I picked up Hero With a Thousand Faces because so many screenwriting people have been reading Christopher Vogler’s book The Writer’s Journey, which uses Campbell’s mythic outline as a template for writing scripts. It seemed to me, why read Vogler’s take on Campbell when I can just read Campbell himself and draw my own conclusions? Which is certainly a valid point of view; but about midway through the book, suddenly I discovered that all of this reading about myth was really so that I can finish The Salamander.

The Salamander is a novel I started writing a couple years ago. And, before I go any further, let’s go ahead and make this my third excerpt, after Thereby Hangs a Tale and “Absinthe”:

At 2:30 in the morning somebody knocked at my door. He had to knock very hard and very long for me to hear him at all, but he did that, he knocked very hard and very long so eventually the sound reached me. I moaned something that wasn’t quite in English, and even from that far away he heard my moan, and he knocked even louder, even more insistently.

I disentangled myself from What's-Her-Name and went through, around and down to the front door. Where I found it was Alan, my sometimes-friend Alan, standing there knocking, with a shoebox in his free hand.

"Morning," he said, frowning as usual. "Merry Christmas." He held out the shoebox. Something scuttled heavily inside.

“Alan, for fucksake it's 2:30 in the morning. And it's June."

"Apogee, perigee, who cares. Here."

"Whuthefuck is this?"

"Just take it. Telling you would spoil the opening."

I took the box and the something scuttled again, back to front, so that I damn near dropped the box and now my heart was going. "Alan! There's something alive in here!"

"Yes." He stood there, his beard very black in the black night, looking more than a little Mansonesque, but you get used to that eventually.

I stood for a moment, completely at a loss, but at 2:30 nothing seems quite so absurd as it would in daylight, so I put the box down, opened it, and looked inside. Something livid and red stared back at me, hotly appraising.

"You gave me a lizard," I said.

"I gave you a salamander," he said back. "Merry Christmas." And he turned and left.

I stood for another minute, watching him disappear into the dark, and said something useless like “Oh.” Then shut the door, went into the kitchen and put the box down on the floor. The whatsit, the gerrymander, would surely be fine till morning, and I could deal with it then. Or it’d scare the shit out of Maria when she came in to clean, whatever. I put a chair against the door to make sure it kept closed and went back upstairs.

Climbed into bed and What’s-Her-Name mumbled. “Hey,” I said. “Wanna see my lizard?”

“Yeah, sure, Billy” she said, so I climbed on top of her.

* * *

Maria’s scream woke me up. What’s-Her-Name was already gone, good. I went down, making sure my robe was good and tight because Maria was already freaked, and found her sitting in the dining room, opposite the closed kitchen door, staring at it and gibbering in Spanish--something low and dark, and in the middle of it she was definitely taking my name in vain. “Blah blah blah Señor Ward blah blah blah.” The chair was lying on its side. I tried to tell her it was okay but she wasn’t listening.

I went into the kitchen and found only this: the box had been reduced to ash. Scorch marks extended halfway across the faux marble floor then stopped in the middle of nothing. The lizard was nowhere to be seen.

Shortly after this, Billy Ward is working on a script on Catalina Island when a unicorn shows up. Then he begins to discover some peculiar links between geology and alchemy, and it turns out that the producers of the film he’s writing might just have a peculiar interest in these mythological beasties who’ve been showing up. I was having great fun writing it, setting up the story, but then I bogged down badly—because now that the story was set up, I found I didn’t know what the story was. In scriptwriting terms, I had the first act and an idea about the third act, but no second act at all. And since the second act is the bulk of the story, really the story itself, that’s kind of a problem.

I needed to think something through, but wasn’t even sure what that something was supposed to be. And in the meantime I got involved with other stuff, and time passed.

Then I read the following in Hero With a Thousand Faces:

Heaven, hell, the mythological age, Olympus and all the other habitations of the gods, are interpreted by psychoanalysis as symbols of the unconscious.... The constriction of consciousness, to which we owe the fact that we see not the source of the universal power but only the phenomenal forms reflected from that power, turns superconsciousness into unconsciousness and, at the same instant and by the same token, creates the world.... The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination--the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death.

In other words, if I’m reading this correctly, all myths and stories are reflections of our unconscious group mind (the many ways in which humans tend to think like other humans no matter where they’re born). The world we see around us is not the world but a reflection of it, condensed and simplified so that we can grasp it (indeed, I once had a vision while listening to The Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” that led me to exactly this conclusion), but the hero’s task is to find his way to this real world in such a manner as to reveal something of its nature to everyone. (Finding the “magic elixir” or the Golden Fleece or whatever it is that represents the deeper truth is one thing; but it’s useless if the hero doesn’t bring the elixir/Fleece/whatever back home.)

All of which means that Billy Ward has to go on a pure hero’s journey, right into the heart of myth and magic. Now, with that little nugget in my head, now I know how to get started. There’s plenty of work still to be done, and a lot more about myth that I need to understand better before I can start constructing my own version of it, but now at least I know where the beginning of the road is.

Now all I need is the time to do all this in....

Another Review

I hadn’t ever visited culturevulture.com before, but now that I have, I like it a lot. This review, by Les Wright, may be the most accurate yet--one of the few reviewers who dared to assume that maybe Marc actually knew what he was doing when he made Zen Noir, that he had a reason for his choices and that, even if this decision or that one did or didn’t work, still it was done for a reason. Perhaps the best review we’ve had so far.

The Trouble With Studio 60

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is, never mind its awkward, too-long title, a good show that frustrates because it ought to be better. There’s the pedigree, for one thing: the Aaron Sorkin-Thomas Schlamme pairing that gave us Sports Night and West Wing. Now this show clearly owes more to Sports Night than it does to West Wing, focusing as it does on the backstage shenanigans of a sketch-comedy show; but the feel of it all is more like West Wing, and that’s a problem right there. I find myself wondering whether maybe Studio 60 should have been a half-hour program, like Sports Night was. It would force Sorkin to write tighter and leaner, and there would be less of a tendency to try and fill time with storylines like the one last night, where the studio president (Amanda Peet’s character) walked into a dressing room and declared “I don’t have any friends.”

(For the record, I think Sorkin has written himself into a corner with that character: a studio president simply would not spend that much time with the people from any one show, she just doesn’t have that kind of time. People come to her, not the other way around, otherwise she undercuts her power and fritters away her energy--not to mention becoming so attached to the creators that she might not be able to judge their work dispassionately. So increasingly, Sorkin is going to have invent excuses for her to be there if Jordan McDeere is to be anything more than a recurring character; but if last night’s episode is any indication, that situation is already getting desperate.)

Obviously, the quality of the sketches-within-a-show is the biggest problem. I finally realized: Sorkin simply doesn’t have the skill set required to write sketch comedy. What he writes is often very funny, but it’s always situational and character-driven; sketch comedy is the opposite, it’s concept-driven. A good sketch takes a crazy idea and wrings it dry, preferably in less than three minutes. There’s no time for character development, no time to set up where people are and why they’re there. “Two goofballs in their basement doing a cable-access show” is about as complicated as you can get in a sketch; even better if you’ve got something extremely high-concept, like “Julia Child cuts her hand and can’t stop the bleeding.” But high-concept has never been Sorkin’s strength, and that’s fine--except when he creates a show that depends on it. I’ve read that he brought on Mark McKinney, from Kids in the Hall, to help with the sketches, but that was the wrong choice: McKinney himself readily admits that he likes to write more character-driven, actor-y comedy, so all Sorkin has accomplished is to bring on someone who approaches comedy like he does. He needs to buckle down and steal someone from the real SNL, that’s really all there is to it--then get out of that guy’s way and let him write sketches.

But with the exception of the Amanda Peet problem, last night’s episode was the first one all season that I’ve really liked. I think Sorkin may have stumbled at last into what the show is about, its reason for being: why is comedy important? On the one hand, there was Simon (D.L. Hughley), desperate to rescue people from the same kinds of dire circumstances he grew up in, dragging Matt (Matthew Perry) to a comedy club to see a black comic, only to find that the comic was regurgitating the same sort of self-hating stereotypes that perpetuate narrow racial stereotypes. On the other hand, there was Nate Corddry’s character, showing his sheltered parents around the studio when clearly they don’t share any of the same references he does, and don’t revere anything that he reveres. They’ve never even heard of “Who’s on First,” perhaps the most famous sketch of all time. I’ve seen a lot of people online complaining that this storyline seemed far-fetched to them, but believe me, I’ve had just that conversation many times, both with family and friends. Now granted, it’s usually someone who hasn’t heard of, say, John Gielgud, but the principle is the same: someone whose work seems like bedrock to me is almost unknown in our fast-moving culture: Gielgud has been dead for years now, and if he hadn’t done Arthur, he would probably be almost entirely forgotten except for high-culture aesthetes like me. But in the context of the scene and the show, it was the disconnect itself that mattered: Nate Corddry loves what he does, but his father shuts him up cold by firing back that his younger brother is fighting in Afghanistan. And then on the third hand, there was the completely welcome appearance of Eli Wallach, playing a writer on a Studio 60-like show from the 1950s who got blacklisted after writing only one sketch--a clear reminder that not so long ago, comedy was considered so subversive that the government got people blackballed for it.

This, I think, is what the show wants to be about. And certainly Sorkin’s been talking around the question since the first episode, beginning with the Judd Hirsch Network-style tirade on the struggle between art and commerce in which “commerce is kicking art’s ass.” But here’s where his problems with writing sketch comedy are actively interfering with his ability to tell the story he wants to tell: the value of comedy, which here stands in for the value of art, should speak for itself. We shouldn’t need a character to tell us why comedy is important, we should be able to watch something carefully crafted that demonstrates exactly why it matters.

Personally, I think stories are an essential need for mankind; on the Maslow hierarchy of needs they may come behind food and shelter and sex, but not far behind at all; personally, I’d put our need for stories fourth on that list. And Sorkin could certainly have a character actually say something like that in an episode, but then he’s just lecturing us, he’s just writing an essay; he needs to find a way to show us, and since his sketches aren’t very good, the crucial part of the puzzle isn’t working.

That’s a great big howling problem, and that, I submit, is why so many people are finding this show unsatisfying.

Where the Time Goes

I used to have time to read, but then I moved to Los Angeles. And bought a car. This machine for speedy transit, it turns out, has just about killed off one of my chiefest pleasures. And sure, the fact that I've got a movie out and there are a billion things to do has contributed as well, but this loss of reading time has been going on ever since I moved out here. Now it's worse because of the other demands on my time, but it's really just a matter of degree.

In Boston and Chicago, I took public transportation. Walked to the T or the L, found a comfortable place to stand amidst all the other rush-hour commuters, and opened up a book. And I wasn't reading lightweight fluff on these trips, no, I read Beckett's trilogy almost entirely on the subway, and most of Proust's a la recherche du temps perdu. My other best reading time was the lunch hour, and even that has been reduced now--after all, who can keep his weight in check if the only places available are either too expensive or too fast-foody?

Reading at home really doesn't work: too many distractions. (And now there's something that is being referred to as "TiVo guilt," as your TiVo playlist gets longer and longer.) Of the books I said I was reading when I first started blogging, back in July or so of 2005, I'm still working my way through two of them: the Gore Vidal essays and the Bill Clinton biography. (Granted, they're both huge.)

Put it this way, though: last night my free time was taken up at dinner with a friend who just turned forty; tonight there is a "check disc" of Zen Noir to look at, the prototype of the DVD, and we have to press every button, listen to every track, watch the movie multiple times to make sure it all works as it's supposed to; tomorrow night is a dinner at a club called Aqua with, supposedly, a bunch of production-company people and managers and agents and whatnot. Plus, somewhere in all this, I have to pull scenes from the movie that TV stations can use as clips if they run a review of the DVD. Time, time, time, can anyone please send me the gift of a little more time?

All of this is, of course, in aid of the big push, the fierce quest to finally achieve what I've been wanting to achieve all my life. What does it mean, though, that reading time, one of my greatest pleasures, was the first thing to be sacrificed?

Things Officially Get Worse

Remember this moment, when all the fat cats smiled and applauded as the dream of America was officially dumped into the trash:

Poverty and Peace

I have written before about my growing awareness of the poverty problem, and its link to violence. Today the Nobel Peace Prize committee has made that link explicit yet again, by awarding this most estimable of prizes to Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who pioneered microcredit.

I won't repeat my arguments about the crucial importance of poverty from July, except to add that nothing I've learned since then has changed my opinion--unless deepening that opinion constitutes a change. (And by the way, this is completely gratuitous, but Stephen Baldwin's idiotic rantings that efforts to end global poverty and violence are "stupid arrogance" just leave me breathless with stupefaction.)

I happened to catch the 60 Minutes report in 1989 about Dr. Yunus, and the self-evident brilliance--and inspired simplicity--of the microcredit idea were immediately impressive, even though at the time I had not yet had my "conversion" to the depth of the poverty problem. So I was just plain thrilled this morning when I heard the news--it was pretty much the first thing I heard when my radio/alarm came on--and of course it's no surprise at all that Dr. Yunus has already pledged to use the prize money for the furtherance of his work.

For years, it was the Literature prize that most caught my attention. But there's been a little change in my perspective lately, and now it's the Peace prize I'm most interested in. And this year's selection, with its implicit recognition of the links between poverty and violence, and how fighting the one fights the other, is dead right.

Diplomacy and Bluster

Who's at fault for the current North Korean problem? Ultimately, Kim Jong Il is responsible. You cannot fairly say it's Clinton's fault or Bush's fault because really, Kim is the one who made these decisions and took these actions and who now pretty much holds every card he ever wanted in his relations with the rest of the world.

But of course, with proper diplomatic efforts, Kim might have been guided toward making different decisions, and that's part of what we're arguing about nowadays. To a certain extent it's a pointless argument: who cares how we got here, the point is that we're here and now what do we do? But at the same time, an examination of how we got here offers strong indications of what we ought to do next (assuming that anything can be done anymore). It also might suggest what we might do about that other looming problem, Iran's quest for a similar nuclear capacity. Because make no mistake, Iran is watching closely how the U.S. responds to North Korea's crashing of the nuclear party; and if North Korea gets away with it, nothing will stop from Iran from doing the same.

So: is it Clinton's fault, or Bush's? There is definitely blame to be spread all around, as there usually is; but judging by the limited research I've done so far, the most convincing timeline of what happened and why is Fred Kaplan's in the May 2004 Washington Monthly. Is it slanted toward Clinton's side of things? Of course it is: the title is "Rolling Blunder," and the subtitle is "How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes." But opinions aside, the facts as they are laid out suggest some interesting conclusions.

One conclusion: diplomacy does work, and should not be automatically dismissed as appeasement. (By the way, an interesting note about Neville Chamberlain's much-reviled appeasement policy toward Nazi Germany: as this BBC biography suggests, appeasement might have gotten a bum rap--"Current thinking has shifted, however, believing Chamberlain to have shrewdly agreed to appeasement to give the British armed forces the time they desperately needed to prepare for full-blown war.") Appeasement, then, in those circumstances was not an end in itself but a quiet recognition that war was inevitable and that time was desperately needed to prepare conventional forces for what must surely come. Given that we are now in the nuclear era, delay doesn't really serve much purpose anymore because the aim is not to match North Korea in firepower--we already vastly outmatch any other nation in firepower, both conventional and nuclear--but to prevent even one use of a nuclear weapon by anyone under any circumstances.

Enter diplomacy. I think it's fair to argue that technologically, the nuclear genie is right now escaping from the bottle, and that this was bound to happen someday, that no president, no nation, no ideology can prevent it from happening. Any technology eventually becomes pervasive. So the only policy that really helps in the long term is persuasion, i.e., diplomacy. Give a country, a nation, a rogue state, whatever you want to call it, an alternative to nuclear war and, because MADD isn't altogether a bad idea, that nation will probably take the alternative. But if you back that nation into a corner where it believes there are no other alternatives, and it has a nuke in its pocket, chances are the unthinkable will happen. And I'll tell you, when I was watching Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech and heard him drop the line about the Axis of Evil, I cringed. I knew in an instant that this could only lead to desperate trouble down the line, as indeed it has.

Because Bush & Co. only seem to understand the persuasive powers of force; it's the only weapon, so to speak, in their arsenal. We already know that the Bushies never really believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that--in keeping with a long-standing neocon theory about spreading democracy in the Middle East--as soon as September 11th happened, the Bushies knew they had all the excuse they needed and, despite all Bush's blather about exhausting diplomatic options, really they had settled on war pretty much from the git-go. (We know this because Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, among others, have told us so.) But so far, all their saber-rattling has only resulted in spectacular failures: the now-endless war in Iraq, the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a powerful spokesman for the Muslim world (precisely because of his bellicose opposition to Washington's bellicosity, a clear-cut case of like spawning like), and now North Korea's development of nuclear weaponry. Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." With their one-note response to every situation, the Bush administration certainly seems to meet that definition. (Contrast with the FDR administration, wherein Roosevelt would, famously, try absolutely anything to see if it would work; if it didn't, he dropped it and tried something new. When have you ever seen George W. Bush abandon any idea and try something new?)

In Mr. Kaplan's timeline (there is an update of his positions here, dated yesterday, in Slate), it seems to me that one moment stands out more than any other: on October 21, 1994, after Clinton sent Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang to negotiate with Kim Jong Il, Carter came back with the Agreed Framework, under which, as Kaplan writes, "North Korea would renew its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, lock up the fuel rods, and let the IAEA inspectors back in to monitor the facility. In exchange, the United States, with financial backing from South Korea and Japan, would provide two light-water nuclear reactors for electricity (explicitly allowed under the NPT), a huge supply of fuel oil, and a pledge not to invade North Korea." This is the agreement that the current administration claims has failed, thus leaving them no choice but to pursue other options--when they say that "bilateral talks failed," this is what they're referring to.

But it's interesting to note the timing: October 21, 1994, only a couple weeks before the "Republican Revolution" that swept control of Congress away from the Democrats. With their new power, as Kaplan writes, "Since the accord was not a formal treaty, Congress did not have to ratify the terms, but it did balk on the financial commitment." (Check out this interview with Robert Gallucci, the chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea at the time; about halfway down, he talks about the Congressional reaction to the Agreed Framework.) Thus the agreement was crippled from the start, and once the North Koreans saw that we weren't honoring the agreement from our side, what possible reason did they have to honor it on theirs? In fact, no matter what you're hearing today, it is not the North Koreans who first broke their word, we did. The newly-Republican U.S. Congress did.

Then, almost immediately upon taking office, the Bush administration started upping the ante. The Axis of Evil, and so forth. Leading us to where we are now.

And what do we do next? Well that's the billion-dollar question, isn't it? But from my consideration of all the above, I have to think that sitting down at the table with these guys, even if it's exactly what they want, must be a pretty good idea. I'm not sure whether we have any good carrots or sticks anymore, but it sure as hell seems obvious that threatening the North Koreans just ain't working and we desperately need to try something different.

And if we should reach some sort of compromise, howsabout this time we actually keep our word?

Catching Up

The Movie

It's going fine. Still playing in Colorado, and will continue there as this weekend we add Austin, Texas. Marc will fly out to Austin for some Q&As, so if you live in the area, stop on by. So far we're averaging two weeks at each location, so if you want to go, it's probably best to go sooner than later.

And yeah, we've been losing money (which is to say, we're spending more on advertising in toto than the film has taken in), but we always knew we were going to lose money, that's how these things work nowadays. A couple years ago I attended a seminar conducted by Peter Broderick, who explained that with the exception of the really big Hollywood blockbusters, all theatrical releases these days are really looked upon as "loss-leaders" for the DVD. That definitely opened my eyes: the idea that a theatrical release is really just advertising, designed to raise awareness of a movie so that people will buy the DVD. With that in mind, all along we knew we were going to lose money by putting Zen Noir in theaters; our budget always reflected a loss from this release.

Still, there's a difference emotionally between understanding a thing intellectually, and watching the reality of the numbers as they come in every week. But hey, that's when you do a gut-check and keep your eyes forward.

The DVD, by the way, will probably be released fairly soon. I can't make the announcement yet, but believe me, when I can, I will announce it loudly.

Starstruck or Just Plain Desperate?

Last week I went to an event at The Egyptian sponsored by the No-Budget Film Club, during which director Christopher Nolan screened his first film, Following, and then previewed his new one, The Prestige. Nolan stood up with Peter Broderick (what, him again?) to introduce his movie; the second he was done, as he headed for his seat and the lights started to dim, some guy hurtled up the aisle with something in his hand. So now all those people, in their hundreds, had to wait till this guy was done wasting Nolan's time; but no sooner had Nolan somewhat grudgingly accepted whatever it was this guy had foisted upon him, than the guy started to actually pitch a project. In the aisle, as Nolan tried to get to his seat, this guy actually starts nattering on about whatever the idea was that he hasn't been able to get anyone else to listen to. So one of the event's organizers warns the guy that he's gonna have to return to his seat or get thrown out, and there's a little tiny scuffle, and then the guy finally retreats--all the way out of the theater. As he harrumphed up the aisle, he started shouting something about "this goddamned incestuous industry" not letting the average guy get a break, then he punched a wall and was gone.

And of course he's right, but still. Behavior like that will get you exactly nowhere, ever. If this guy can't figure that out, he might as well just go home now.

Post-Robbery

The hard part is fighting against the almost overwhelming impulse to cast blame. I know perfectly well that the crime against me was not a Latino crime just because it was committed by Latinos. I knew that before I got robbed, and I know it after. But that deep, awful reptilian part of our brains wants very much to cast a wide net so that anyone who is like the robbers becomes a robber. And once that process starts, it only ever expands. I was walking around the other night and my internal radar was pinging like crazy off practically everyone. Dark corners got darker; innocuous alleways suddenly loomed with danger. I refuse to give in to this sort of thing; still, it can't be accidental that lately, most of my walks have come during the daytime because, you know, I had errands to run and they were all fairly close by so why not walk? And of course these places are closed at night so what can I do but go during the daytime? And so forth and so on. This is how we explain things to ourselves so that we don't have to admit that we've become a little more fearful than we used to be.

At the same time, there is the still-astonishing example of the Amish. And with that shining before me, fear is forced to retreat back into those dark dingy corners. It's been an interesting internal struggle lately, the light and dark more fiercely at odds than usual.

Roger Waters

Given all the above, the recent series of Roger Waters concerts at the Hollywood Bowl was well-timed. Great music, well-played, in a great venue. I went with Marc Rosenbush (who then went twice more, catching all of the L.A. shows with different people), and at one point Marc commented that Waters needs two guitarists to recreate what David Gilmour can do by himself. True enough; but at the same time, having two guitarists opens up some Lynyrd Skynyrd-like possibilities that produced some great results--particularly when Pink Floyd's drummer, the great Nick Mason, came onstage for the second half of the show. (I've now seen all four! Yay!) That meant two lead guitars and two drummers working away, as the sound filled the space and made my chest vibrate.

The political content has been controversial, but in Southern California there were no complaints--and the floating pig, with "Impeach Bush" written across its ass, was greeted with delight. (Check the link above for a photo.) My real complaint about Waters, though, is that for some reason he has abandoned metaphor in his songwriting. It's not like "All in all you're just another brick in the wall" was terribly subtle to begin with; but now even that level of metaphor is gone. He performed his new song "Leaving Beirut," and it's a completely straightforward, on-the-nose number that says exactly what it says and nothing more--prose rather than poetry. On top of that, he had artist Bill Sienkiewicz (whose work I've always liked a lot) put together a comic strip to illustrate the story of when Waters was a young man visiting Beirut. Put that together with the overtly-political flying pig which was being walked around at the same time, and you get three layers of obvious when one would have been enough.

Still, nothing beats "Comfortably Numb" for closing out a nice evening of music.

Awestruck

Everything I've heard about the nightmare in the Amish schoolhouse has simply knocked me out--on the one hand, I simply cannot comprehend what would ever have possessed Mr. Roberts to act as he did, and the details of his communications only make it more unfathomable; on the other hand, the response of the Amish themselves, both during and after the crisis, has been exemplary.

But this, this sends me to my knees:

Young Marian Fisher, only 13 years old, "asked the killer to shoot her first in an apparent bid to save the younger girls."

I have nothing to say. I could attempt to draw some lame comparison about how our leaders ought to blah blah blah, and we could all learn a lesson from blah blah blah, but it all pales next to this example of love in action. So I think I'll just stand here in silence and marvel at it, and hope that the ravages of daily life don't ever knock it from my head.

The Divorce of Love and Hate

I hope the Joseph Campbell estate will forgive me for quoting at such length from Hero With a Thousand Faces, but what I read yesterday was so marvelous, and so directly applicable to our current world situation, that I just can’t bring myself to edit it down to something pithy yet incomplete. It’s from the “Apotheosis” section of Chapter 1:

...Hence, too, the irresistible compulsion to make war: the impulse to destroy the father is continually transforming itself into public violence.... A new and larger paradise is thus established. But this paradise does not include the traditional enemy tribes, or races, against whom aggression is still systematically projected. All of the “good” father-mother content is saved for home, while the “bad” is flung abroad and about: “for who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” “And slacken not in following up the enemy: if ye are suffering hardships, they are suffering similar hardships; but ye have hope from Allah, while they have none.”

Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, “native,” or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor.

...Even the so-called Christian nations--which are supposed to be following a “World” Redeemer--are better known to history for their colonial barbarity and internecine strife than for any practical display of that unconditioned love, synonymous with the effective conquest of ego, ego’s world, and ego’s tribal god, which was taught by their professed supreme Lord....

The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo…are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching.... One would think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom, of all of us, the Father prefers. Whereas, the teaching is much less flattering: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” The World Savior’s cross, in spite of the behavior of its professed priests, is a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag.

And we need look no further for an illustration of this love in action than yesterday’s horrific murders in the Amish schoolhouse. The Amish community is shocked and devastated, yes; but as a USA Today article quotes an expert saying, “They’ll try to express to their forgiveness” to the gunman’s widow. In a time when sorrow and tragedy can be found in every direction, only the Amish seem to have remembered the truest teaching of their religion.