The North Ring Road

Been a while since I blogged, hasn't it? That's largely because I've been busy doing essentially the same stuff: pushing along sales of the Zen Noir DVD and soundtrack. (The DVD is now available on Amazon, and the soundtrack can be downloaded from iTunes, either as a whole album or by the single track. Go on, spend some money, you know you want to!)

So there hasn't been much new to report on from that front, and I haven't really had time to discuss, say, the President's recent State of the Union or anything like that. (Though I will mention how disappointed I was--advance word had been that Bush might actually say something significant about the environment, but in the end he had almost nothing new to say, even with an important new report about to appear--a stark reading of our collective future that already appears to have been watered down.)

But that's all the stuff I don't have time to talk about. Instead, I'm going to tell a little story, about asking directions in Ireland, simply because it's amusing and I like to tell it.

Several years ago, my grandparents were living in Kinsale, County Cork, Republic of Ireland. It's a beautiful little coastal town with the best food in the country (the cooperative they created, called the Good Food Circle, was a stroke of genius), and for several years after their retirement, my grandparents ran a bed & breakfast. By the time of this story, however, they had already retired from their retirement, moved to a smaller house on Worlds End, and I went over by myself to pay a little visit. Spent a few days in Dublin, then rented a car to drive down.

As you can see from the map, Kinsale is just south of the City of Cork; and having made the trip before, I was hoping there might be a way to avoid having to drive through the city center, some sort of country road that might bypass the city altogether. So I stopped in a little town just north of Cork, and ran into a pub in order to use the Gents'.

Long metal trough; sound of rain on a tin roof. As I stood there, one of the bar's patrons, a regular if ever I saw one, came wandering in and stood next to me. Torrential downpour on a tin roof. As I stepped away and washed my hands, he zipped up, looked over and said something that sounded more or less like "Wassonweeyuh?"

I blinked, looked at my watch, and said "A little after three."

"No no," he said. "What's on with ye?"

"Oh!" Been a while since I've heard a good "ye," so I figured the guy was friendly, let's ask him about the roads 'round Cork.

"Ah. What ye do, you see, is you take the Nort' Ring Road to the east do y'see, that'll bring you right round the town."

But as he said this, another of the pub's regulars had come in; gutterspout emptying into a tin can. But he heard what the first guy had said and suddenly interjected: "No, no, no. If he takes the Nort' Ring Road it'll bring him right t'rough the center of town, which is just what he said he was tryin' t'avoid." Zip, step back, advance. "No, what you yis do is you take the Nort' Ring Road to the west, d'ye see, and that'll take yis right round the town."

Back to the first gentle soul: "Are ye mad, Liam? If he takes the Nort' Ring Road to the west it'll take him to fuckin' Kilkenny!"

I left them there, continuing to argue about the best way to go right 'round the town, and set off again in the car. Reached the North Ring Road and headed east. Sure enough, it looked like it was bringing me right into the center of town, so I stopped and doubled back. Retraced my route and, this time, went west on the North Ring Road. The miles passed, I was indeed avoiding the city, the land was all the gentle rolling green of Ireland with no sign of stone cities and traffic. But the signs, they weren't right--by now, shouldn't I be seeing signs for Kinsale? Why instead was I seeing--"Oh crap!" I said, and stopped and turned around, shortly after the first sight of a sign reading "Kilkenny."

I retraced my steps yet again, went east again, went right through the very heart of the City of Cork, dealt with all the traffic, and finally reached my grandparents in Kinsale. Warming up with a nice cuppa, I asked them, "How exactly do you get 'round the city?"

"Oh heavens," said my grandmother. "You can't do that."

In Which I Watch American Idol So You Won't Have To

So here I am, the last guy in America who's never seen American Idol. Until now. (And no, I'm not going to post a link to it. You can just go find it yourself. So there.) Their new season has begun, and the crew are on the road, visiting Minneapolis and Seattle in search of talent--or the opposite of talent, in many cases. Most of you probably already know this, but it's all new to me. So I watched about twenty minutes of Tuesday's show in Minneapolis, and about an hour of last night's Seattle program. But bear in mind that a lot of that hour was spent fast-forwarding through the many many commercials (geez but I love my TiVo!), and then fast-forwarding through the worst of the very bad singers.

Which brings up Point No. 1: if in Minneapolis they began with a stadium full of 10,000 contestants, then clearly there's a screening process before anyone ever gets into the room with Simon, Paula and Randy. Just as clearly, then, the screeners are deliberately letting in some awful, awful singers. The only reason for this is, plain and simple, exploitation. Put them in a room with mean ol' Simon (and man is he mean--as a person who has often sat on Simon's side of an audition table, I would like to apologize for Simon and swear to you that most of us would never behave like that to an auditioner--and anyone who does is simply an asshole and you don't want to work with him) and let him abuse that person so that we in our comfy little homes can feel all superior because at least we're not that doofus. This is what you call exploitation: the ritual abuse of some poor schmuck so that we can feel better about ourselves. It is also monstrously conformist: the strange and the hapless are willfully preyed upon, thus reinforcing standards of "normalcy" and further ostracizing those poor souls who don't quite fit in--all this in a show that is supposedly about finding unique talents, people who stand out from the crowd. Sure the winners stand out--but only in the right way. You can see it happening in these roadshow tryouts: some poor girl with a weight problem and a penchant for pink fishnet walks in, and already Simon and his cohorts are smirking, already they're coming up with something awful they can say to this poor person.

What's saddest is that on some level, at least a few of these sad sacks must know they're going to be abused, but they accept it so they can get on television. That's the quiet agreement that allows shows like this to exist at all, a cruel compact between abuser and abused; television as the ultimate Enabler.

On the flip side, there is Point No. 2: stardom ain't as easy as all that. Take the juggling kid in Minneapolis. (If Simon is ever murdered there's going to be a long list of suspects, and this kid would have to be on the list.) When he got rejected, brutally of course, he ran out of the room swearing a blue streak; and when a family member reminded him he's only 16, he wailed "But I wanted to start out famous!" To which the only real response is "Well there's your problem right there, kid." Because if there's any one thing that I learned above all else during my years as an actor, it's this: your performance isn't for you, it's for the audience. The only reason to get up in front of people and do a song or a dance or a recitation or whatever is to provide entertainment and, even better, a little enlightenment. To make people laugh or cry or sigh with recognition; to make them lean forward in their seats, transfixed by what they're seeing on the stage. But if you're performing because you get off on applause, then please, Simon, go ahead and say whatever you want to say because these are the sorts of people who need to be shunted well clear of the performing arts.

This is not to say that you shouldn't enjoy what you do; in fact you should, you should totally get off on the performance. But your pleasure in the work should be directly proportional to the audience's pleasure in the work, and that may be hard to measure sometimes: everyone's faced a dead audience from time to time, only to discover after the fact that what seemed dead was in fact a deep but undemonstrative appreciation. Then of course there are the artists who are doomed to be misunderstood in their own lifetimes, the Van Goghs of the world; but the trouble here is that way too many lousy artists convince themselves that they're the new Van Gogh and continue on much longer than they should. And you could see these people, too, on the Idol shows the past two nights: the ones who vowed that despite their brutal rejection at the hands of Simon, Paula and Randy, they would go on undeterred, their resolve only strengthened by the cruel hand of societal rejection. Only one guy said, when interviewed, that his rejection had been a wake-up call; he may have been the only realist in that entire crowd of 10,000 people.

So. Is American Idol evil? Well of course it is. Is it addictive anyway? Of course it is; that's why it's so evil, because once you start to watch it's very hard to pull yourself away again. Does it manage to make points about the American obsession with stardom and self-delusion? Yes it does, but it makes that point while at the same time reinforcing the problem on a scale previously unimagined. Even more to the point: will I watch this program again?

Damn. Yeah, I probably will.

P.S.: After American Idol ended last night, I then pivoted to a movie I had recorded a few weeks ago, Everything is Illuminated, which Liev Schreiber adapted and directed from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Now this, this is art. Really truly Art, and why on earth I spent so much time talking about the pop claptrap of American Idol when I could have been talking about the illuminations of this movie is beyond me.

A Good Step in the Right Direction

FISA Warrants

Extremely welcome news from the Bush administration today: they have apparently given up on the idea of conducting warrantless wiretaps on whomever they choose. But the phrasing, at least as reported by the Associated Press, just kills me: the Justice Department "has decided to give an independent body authority to monitor the government's controversial domestic spying program." Which is of course complete nonsense: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court always had the authority to monitor the government's surveillance activities; in fact the FISA Court was set up specifically for that purpose, and the only reason the Justice Department is "giving" the authority to the court is because the Justice Department illegally stole it in the first place. It's a bit like a thief stealing your car and then demanding gratitude when he gives it back to you.

Particularly when the thief gives it back only because he's afraid of prosecution. I suspect rather strongly that this action was only taken because of the the new Democratic Congress, and the prospect of harsh legislative review (in fact, Mr. Gonzalez is scheduled to appear tomorrow before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Pat Leahy was for sure going to have some strong questions about FISA). Surely the Attorney General and the White House Counsel's office understand perfectly well that no matter what sophistries they employed to justify their willing defiance of FISA regulations, it was all completely unconstitutional; and so, knowing that the Congress was about to actually do what it's supposed to do and put the brakes on this travesty, they decided to be, oh I guess they'd call it magnanimous and "give" the authority back to the FISA court. Isn't that just peachy of them?

That's one small step for a lawyer; one giant leap for freedomkind. (Even if all it does is get us back where we started.)

A Simple Plan

The Bush Administration is fond of claiming that those who oppose their Iraq war policies fail to offer any plans of their own, that they are quick to judge but never offer anything constructive in return. They justify this nonsense with some mildly-clever semantics: Bush said in his radio address Saturday, "Members of Congress have a right to express their views, and express them forcefully. But those who refuse to give this plan a chance to work have an obligation to offer an alternative that has a better chance for success."

But of course it's all in how you define success, isn't it? And if you declare over and over again that a troop withdrawal amounts to "cutting and running," then it cannot possibly result in success and is, therefore, not really a plan at all. "To oppose everything," Bush said, "while proposing nothing is irresponsible." This allows the President and his henchmen to claim that only they are offering any real, cogent plan for the disposition of Iraq and that complaints from Democrats and/or Congress are mere politicking at the expense of our valiant boys (and girls) in uniform.

Pure poppycock. There have been plenty of alternative plans proposed. I promised a plan of my own yesterday, and it's pretty simple: this one right here, from the Iraq Study Group. I won't get into all the ins and outs of why it's a better plan, because I just don't have enough time right now (see below), but take a look at it--I really think it speaks pretty well for itself.

Buy Our CD!

Meanwhile, off in a completely different direction, I will take just a moment to note that the Zen Noir soundtrack, composed by Steven Chesne, is now on sale on our website (we've got some samples up, too, so you can hear a bit for yourself). People who've seen the movie almost universally praise the soundtrack, so we're very happy to put Steve's superb work out in a format where people can enjoy it in its own right.

Purge the Surge

In an interview Sunday night on 60 Minutes, our president worked hard to justify the "surge" in troop levels that will send another 21,500 soldiers into harm's way in Iraq. It was part of a PR blitz following his speech last Wednesday, in which he announced his decision. And maybe I was still in an indulgent holiday mood, because I really tried to give this latest plan a fair shake, to look at it from every angle and try to decide whether or not it represents any kind of possibility for success. I even had myself half-convinced. But now, no. Not anymore. I kept working it all over, and finally decided that it was just the latest in a long series of bad ideas.

On the face of it, it doesn't seem like an awful idea. At its heart it seemed to admit that things had been done wrong in Iraq and that, even more unusually, we were prepared to learn from our mistakes. The president said as much in his speech: "Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: there were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have." If you accept this premise, then Mr. Bush's plan does indeed seem to address these deficiencies: more troops, in order to hold areas that have been cleared of insurgents; and political restrictions removed so that troops can enter areas that had previously been declared out of bounds and clear out any insurgents who might be hiding there.

But there are major problems with all of this, and straight off the bat there is this: a third major factor in why the U.S. has heretofore failed in its nation-building effort in Iraq, namely, American incompetence and cronyism. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran has detailed in his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Americans recruited for administrative/oversight jobs in Baghdad, the very people responsible for the reubilding efforts that were crucial for restoring a sense of normalcy to the country, were hired not because they had expertise in these tasks (in some cases no expertise in anything) but because they were Bush loyalists. Because they gave the right answer when asked who they had voted for in 2000 (an actual question to some job applicants).

As for the additional troops, there is a major, and obvious, objection that the President did not address: adding 21,500 troops brings us back up to a number we've already had in the country before. If it wasn't enough then, why would it be enough now? Because of the "restrictions" that will now supposedly be removed? Well then that brings up my third principal objection: does anyone believe that the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq will really allow U.S. troops to enter Shiite areas hunting for death squads? Will any squadron ever be allowed to pursue and capture Moqtada al-Sadr? Of course not; we all know that there will be cosmetic "restrictions" wiped clean, but nothing substantive will change. Meaning that these fresh troops simply restore us to levels we've already seen, with no effect; and the meaningful restrictions in place before will remain in place. Net effect: zero. But with a yet-unknown toll in American lives.

So, then, what is Bush's real purpose? It can only be this: A) force Democrats, now in control of Congress, to take a stand against the surge so that they can be painted as soft on terrorism in the next general election; and B) delay the inevitable failure of the Iraq mission till Bush is out of office, so that said failure can be blamed on the next guy. That is why 21,500 more American lives are being put at risk.

Then there's this howler: on 60 Minutes, President Bush said this, which deserves to be quoted in full:

We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude, and I believe most Iraqis express that. I mean, the people understand that we've endured great sacrifice to help them. That's the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq.
PELLEY: Americans wonder whether . . .
BUSH: Yeah, they wonder whether or not the Iraqis are willing to do hard work necessary to get this democratic experience to survive. That's what they want.

That made me start hollering at the TV set. We bomb their country, ruin their society, kill tens of thousands (current estimates are of 34,000 Iraqi dead last year alone), and they're supposed to be grateful? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

No, he's not kidding. This, this is how he thinks. President Bush really truly believes that by getting rid of Saddam Hussein, he has liberated the Iraqi people and set them on the road to freedom and democracy--American-style freedom and democracy, which is the only kind that counts. It demonstrates a complete failure to understand a different culture, not to mention a truly breathtaking arrogance and paternalism that is, unfortunately, typical of imperialists throughout history. ("Take up the White Man's burden, / And reap his old reward-- / The blame of those ye better / The hate of those ye guard--" Kipling, "The White Man's Burden.")

Next time: a plan for victory that has nothing to do with a troop surge.

Candlelit

Friday morning I woke up early to the voice of an unsettling wind. Since I was planning to walk to work that day, I wondered whether the wind betokened rain; and once that thought had entered my head, it was impossible to get to sleep again. Since it was only half an hour before my alarm was supposed to go off, I got out of bed and looked out the front door: trees whipping, debris scampering, sound roaring from here to there, but no rain. Okay then. I sat down at the computer and was just about to check e-mail when the power went out. Then came on. Then went out. And this time, stayed out.

But one of the great things about home is how well you can maneuver in the dark. I made my way to the drawer with my wonderful LED flashlight, then dug out the candles and lit them. The time came for my alarm to go off but of course it didn't, because suddenly it wasn't that sort of a world anymore. It was a world where an atomic clock-linked alarm means nothing, and if I hadn't happened to awaken early I might have slumbered on long past my time--unless the deeper, more mysterious internal clock (which is frightfully accurate) had kicked in, which it probably would have.

I'm not sure how well I would take to a several-days outage (no TV? Aaaaghhh!), but for a morning, or a couple hours in the evening, it can be wonderful. (Although I remember an all-nighter back in Chicago at the height of summer when the only thing to do was get out of my boiling apartment and go to a movie--along with absolutely everyone else in the neighborhood.) Lighting a candle reminds me of what the world was like for almost all our history, before Mr. Edison had another of his fiendish ideas and transformed everything. For one thing, it reminds me how different the world is at night, or in those pre-dawn hours when the sun is still just a promise. The world is quieter at night, and it should be: something about night demands quiet, which is why loudmouths shouting on the Sunset Strip are so offensive. As a definitive Morning Person, my whole psyche is shackled to sunlight: when the sun comes up, I begin my day (alarm clocks really are almost beside the point); and when the sun goes down, it's only through the intervention of electric lights that I am able to fool myself into going on for a while--but as any of my friends can tell you, my head doesn't usually work as well once the sun sinks away, I'm not as productive, not as creative, not much good at much of anything, which is why so often I find the blinking lights of a TV set about all that interest me come nightfall.

Except, again, when the power goes off. I light a candle and the world is transformed: the light is not steady, it dances, and the shadows jump and twirl. Suddenly nothing is fixed, nothing is certain; and the front door seems less solid, and every sound is infused with meaning and danger. And you know what? All this is good for me; good for us. The electric light has made the world too certain, too knowable; we need a little more uncertainty in our lives.

Because certainty breeds security, and security breeds the need for more security. Once we feel safe, we get addicted to it and demand to feel yet more safe. Next thing you know, we're putting leashes on our children, sacrificing our freedoms and tolerating utter nonsense at our airports. If it weren't for electric light, we would not be so obsessed with tyrannical safety because safety (the electric illusion of it, not the real thing) would not be a constant; it (the real thing, not its glowing simulacrum) would be occasional, and fleeting, and we would know on a regular basis what it is to have that thrill of fear when something goes bump in the night.

(Our scary movies are almost never about the creatures of the night, and the music they make, not anymore; now they are more often about the ways in which our ordered society can break down and fall apart. Sociopaths and maniacs with saws, people who have stepped outside of ordered society and brought their knives with them.)

So I lit my candles, ignored the television, and did some reading. By candlelight, and by the growing sunlight of an unsual dawn, with the wind howling outside, as if to remind me, loudly and vigorously, that it can all be taken away. For more than just a morning, some day.