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.