Day and Date

I have to assume that Mark Cuban is a solid businessman who know what he's doing, but for the life of me I just can't figure out why he's promoting this whole day-and-date movie release scheme of his.

Cuban runs HDNet, one of the few cable channels that broadcasts exclusively in high definition. I've had a hi-def set for a few months now, attached to my hi-def Series 3 TiVo (one of the great inventions), and I love it. I'm a movie guy, so of course I love it, but what's not to love? Widescreen, great image detail, and it's attached to a good stereo with good speakers. I've even started pulling DVDs off my Netflix list if I saw they were going to be broadcast on an HD channel because they look better there. (And yes, I too am one of those waiting on the sidelines for the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray thing to work itself out before I commit to one machine or another.) So HDNet is one of my mainstays, and I particularly love it when they show some NASA footage--simply spectacular. (Though nothing so far has beat the recent Planet Earth specials on Discovery HD Theatre.)

But HDNet also has a movies-only hi-def channel, and the other night they ran a movie called Diggers. As it happens, I had heard about this movie a couple days before and thought it looked interesting: an offbeat indie about clam diggers, with a good cast including Paul Rudd, Sarah Paulson, Lauren Ambrose and Maura Tierney, all of whom I like. I noticed it was going to be playing at a theater only a few blocks away--a theater for which I have a free admission pass. So it was within easy walking distance and wouldn't cost me anything to go and see the movie. "Well maybe I'll do that," I said--but then I checked the TV listings and discovered that Diggers was also playing on HDNet, that same night.

I ask you, why would I want to go to the theater, then? It's more comfortable at home, my equipment is all first-rate, and I can watch when I want. About the only thing that might have made me go to a theater in such a circumstance would have been if I'd had a date, but that didn't happen to be the case. So I stayed home and recorded it on the TiVo and was completely happy. But, as I say, baffled.

Because bear in mind: I'm a movie guy. And I certainly have a keen appreciation for the power of a shared theatrical experience by an audience of strangers experiencing something together (by the way, for the record, Zen Noir works best on a movie screen; I'm just saying, I've seen it happen over and over, that really is the ideal way to see it). I was already motivated to see this particular film, the theater was in easy walking distance, I like to walk, and I had a pass to see the movie for free. It was, in short, about as easy as going to a movie theater can possibly be--but I didn't go, and the only reason I didn't is because that same movie was showing that same night on my TV.

That's what day-and-date means, and it mystifies me. It refers to a newfangled way to release movies in which the movie is broadcast and shown in theaters on the same night, then gets released on DVD the next Tuesday: all formats show up at once, and people can have their choice of watching it in any way they prefer. Nice for we the viewers, but where is the business model? How is Cuban making any money off this?

Sure, Wagner gets my money as a subscriber to the channel, but he gets that anyway; and now he's lost my theater-going money (well, except for that free admission pass, but that's not really germane). The one thing you most don't want to happen is what happens: one format cannibalizes the possibility for success of another format. I paid nothing to watch it on TV, and did not pay anything to watch it in a theater. They tried this with Steven Soderbergh's Bubble several months ago, and lo and behold, that movie did lousy at the box office. (According to Box Office Mojo, it made $145,000, with a production budget of $1.6 million.)

I don't think I'm being a stuffy old traditionalist about this, and I admit the possibility that Cuban is smarter than I am, but I just don't see how he's making any money here. But in the meantime, what the heck: I've got this lovely movie sitting on my TiVo, I think I'll go watch it now.

Where Could They Bee?

Since I was just writing recently about bees, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the bees seem to be going on vacation. Or, to be a little more scientific about it, they're disappearing. By the billions.

As the various articles point out, food crops that rely on honeybees for pollination are worth about $15 billion and include a lot of the fruits and nuts that we all love the most: apples, cherries, almonds, and so forth. There is no adequate mechanical substitute for the pollinating prowess of the honeybee, so if this unknown process should continue, it is reasonable to expect that these staples of our diet will not disappear but will become very expensive from simple scarcity. (Imagine a ten dollar slice of pie.) (Okay, in Los Angeles that's not so far from the truth, but imagine it in Dubuque.)

Bee colonies started to collapse last October: huge numbers of worker bees would simply never return to the hive, up to 50% of the colony in many cases. As CNN reports, most of these bees just plain vanished, and their little bee bodies were never found. Since their failure to return was possibly a failure in their navigation systems, speculation ran rampant on all sorts of causes, including cellphone towers (leading Bill Maher last week to ask, "will we choose to literally blather ourselves to death?"). This New York Times article goes into more detail on the science involved, including this disturbing photo of cross-sections of diseased (left) and healthy (right) bee thoraxes:

A chemical trigger for all this seems most likely, particularly since some hives treated with gamma radiation have begun to recover, suggesting that the gamma is killing some yet-unknown pathogen. But research has barely begun on the problem, and all the while, the bees keep disappearing; and despite some lucky breaks, like the fact that Baylor College of Medicine recently happened to finish sequencing bee DNA (thus speeding up immeasurably a search for genetic triggers), we have no idea how long it will take to find answers to this problem.

Diseased bees are being found to be contaminated with fungi common in humans whose immune systems have been depressed by AIDS or cancer. Thus we learn yet again, we're all connected. The question then becomes, if the bees go, what happens to us?

I Have No Mouth and I Must Kvetch

Meanwhile, on a lighter note...

Went last night to a screening of an unfinished documentary called "Dreams With Sharp Teeth," about the inimitable Harlan Ellison. (Does anyone ever just write his name, or is there always some sort of adverb in front of it?) (Just found the trailer, here.) I've been a fan of Harlan's for way over twenty years now, since my mom read Shatterdaythen handed it over to me. It was one of those thunderbolts from the blue you get sometimes: words on a page with such vigor and imagination that you immediately respond by going out and buying every other book by this guy you can possibly find.

It's hard to describe Harlan, because there are so many colors to his gigantic personality. Well into his 70s now, he is on the one hand a short, cranky Jew from Painesville, Ohio with the emotional life of an 11 year old; he is also an extremely serious artist in a complex, lifelong pas de deux with his muse; he is a raconteur of the first order, a fearsome debater who will absolutely get right up in your face, one of the most honored writers of his time, a moralist who is utterly unafraid to be offensive, a fanboy collector with a house full of stuff called, no kidding, "Ellison Wonderland," and a sweet guy who loves his friends like crazy. Which is exactly why a documentary about him is such a great idea.

The screening was at the Writers Guild Theatre on the wrong part of Doheny Drive. (Woe to you if you plug in the address on your Mapquest search with "Los Angeles" rather than "Beverly Hills." O woe!) The director, who I believe is Erik Nelson (there isn't yet an imdb listing for the film), has been following Harlan around with a camera since 1981 ("I always just thought he was a fanboy!" cracked Ellison), so clearly this was a labor of love--because believe me, if there wasn't love, Harlan would've driven anyone else away within about ten minutes. Because I was so late (damn you, Doheny!) I missed the first fifteen minutes or so, arriving just in time for the section where Harlan joined the army. By this point the audience--full of Harlan's friends--was already laughing hysterically. They barely needed the film's pithy sidebars (re: Ellison and the army, "It was not a relationship destined for success"), but it was a night for laughter, the loving kind: a guy who's lived a full life, surrounded by people he loved (and name-dropping like crazy), getting what amounted to a valedictory celebration of his life.

It may be a fault of the film that it is in fact too valedictory, that none of Harlan's many enemies weren't interviewed--but then, Harlan is so firm in his convictions that you get the impression he regrets nothing and will defiantly stand behind everything he has ever done in his entire life. And when you start to talk about his enemies, the man just cackles with glee, already rolling up his sleeves and preparing for a new battle. He is that rarest of things in this passive-aggressive world of surface politeness but hidden meanness of spirit: a man who plants his feet and stands behind everything he says, who sugarcoats nothing, and who is so much smarter than pretty much anyone that if said anyone gets caught on the wrong side of an argument with Harlan, well, good luck. But if you are a friend, he is just as passionate: he will come up, embrace you in a bear hug and kiss you on the cheek while saying the most wildly flattering things (there's a section of the film about Harlan the ladies' man that, again, got a good rolling laugh out of the crowd).

Josh Olson, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of A History of Violence, moderated the discussion with Harlan after the film and could barely hold it together because Harlan was (literally) all over the place, with Erik Nelson's cameraman and boom guy following desperately, trying to keep up. Werner Herzog was in the audience, so was the great musician Richard Thompson, along with Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore and of course Harlan's marvelous wife Susan. Harlan was profane and raucous, and if there's any justice some of this material will get folded into the documentary before it gets released because jeez what a night.

But really, when you talk about Harlan you must talk about the work. Shatterday is a good place to begin: it contains some very good short stories like the famous "Jeffty is Five," the title story, and the delicious "All the Birds Come Home to Roost" in which a man encounters all his ex-girlfriends in reverse chronological order, leading inevitably to the first and worst. There are probably better collections (Strange Wine and Deathbird Stories immediately come to mind) (and man, it's a crime how many of his books are out of print), but I might particularly recommend Stalking the Nightmare, the second book of his I read, the one that really cemented my love for the man and his work. Because this time, in addition to some very good short stories, there are also three tales directly from his life, including the hilarious one in which he worked at Disney for exactly one morning then got himself fired.

In some ways, I like Ellison the essay writer even more than Ellison the short story writer. An Edge in My Voicestands as the absolute best of his essay collections, although the two Glass Teat books (about television) are better known. But really, you should probably start with The Essential Ellison, a fifty-year overview of his work containing much of the best of everything. Then go watch the documentary when it comes out, and start agitating various publishers to get these books back in the marketplace, damn it!

A Stain Upon the Silence

There came from Virginia Tech the awful silence that follows; and then it was broken when that wretched child whose tantrum took all those lives got the final word. I had just finished reading his so-called plays and felt pretty lousy for having done so, and I was about to come on here and talk a little about what I'd just read; but then I checked the news pages and saw the video package that got sent to NBC. And I realized that this is all exactly what that petulant monster wants: he wants his image everywhere, he wants to become some sort of iconic figure in the awful tradition of "Charlie" Manson and Jim Jones. To hell with him, I refuse to even name his name. He's no writer, he's no artist, and he sure isn't Jesus redeeming his "children." To Hell with him.

Let's talk about this man instead: Liviu Librescu. He of course was the engineering professor at Virginia Tech who held the door while his students leaped from high windows and escaped; then bullets came through the door and Prof. Librescu died. He lived in Romania under the Nazis, and was ghettoized and/or sent to a labor camp (I've seen it reported both ways); then he lived under the Communists, who tried to marginalize him for his support of Israel by refusing to allow him to publish outside of Romania, but he defied the Ceaucescu regime and published anyway. At last a personal intervention by Menachem Begin in 1978 allowed Prof. Librescu to emigrate to Israel, and then while on sabbatical in the U.S. he decided to stay here. There was no mandatory retirement age for U.S. professors, so he could go on teaching for as long as he liked.

It's clear from the above that he always felt there wasn't enough time. A colleague at Tel Aviv University said "He wanted to write many books and have a lot of students," and his wife claims that Librescu published more papers in his field than any of his contemporaries. So much time was stolen from him in Romania that he must have felt positively impelled to transmit as much as he could to as many people as he could; but he always did so, according to his students, in a gentlemanly fashion, always wearing a suit, always feeling the privilege of his position.

Prof. Librescu was buried today in Israel. There is a lovely Times of London tribute to him here, and a Chabad on Campus family condolence page here.

In Which Nothing Happens

I live close enough to the VA hospital complex in West L.A. that when the California National Guard decided to stage a bio-terrorism exercise there, a notice got slipped under my door warning me about it. Lest I freak out when a Blackhawk helicopter flew over the apartment at 5:00 in the morning, although really, in Los Angeles having a helicopter fly over is as common as common can be. Still, the notice made it all sound awfully intriguing: "Operation Vector, a large-scale interstate and interagency exercise" that would include a simulated earthquake, then a simulated chemical attack over the Hollywood Hills. I mean hey, why watch Apocalypse Now when you can have all that military bang-bang going on in your back yard?

Alas, nothing happened. Or rather, what did happen seems to have been far enough away that I never noticed any of it. (The place is huge, so it wouldn't surprise me.) With the exercise scheduled to start at 5:00 this morning, I wandered out there around 7:00 and could find no trace of anything at all; later I took a long walk all through the complex and it was as if nothing had ever happened there at all, the place was just as it always is: busy in clusters, sleepy and quiet in others. Disappointing, really; now I'll have to go watch Robert Duvall and the helicopters after all.

Something else is worth noting, though: the VA center was created in the late 19th century as a bequest to the city from someone whose name I can't remember, under the stipulation that the land be used for the benefit of America's soldiers of any war. But now, there is a fierce local fight going on between evil developers salivating over all that open land in the middle of Los Angeles (beyond-prime real estate) and those like me who think that a promise is a promise. I'm not one to automatically inveigh against real estate developers--none of us would live in anything other than tents and caves if developers didn't develop--but this place is a bright spot in the city and it ought to stay that way. As I walked today there were open fields with lush green grass, trees and birds, bikers and joggers, the UCLA baseball team was warming up for a game against Pepperdine on the athletic field, fathers had taken their sons out to play ball on a different field, and people were golfing on a compact public course. There is a little Japanese garden out there, and of course the hospital, numerous in-patient and out-patient facilities, and residential dormitories to provide long-term care for the men and women who risked everything for us.

The VA Center is good for the soldiers, it's good for the locals, it's good for the soul of the city to continue to do what it promised to do over a century ago. Those developers should just bug off and go someplace else.

Bees

In honor of Easter, something a little springy, something with fresh air and sunlight.

On Thursday, I was in Topanga State Park with a camera crew. We were doing camera tests for the next Lightwheel project, a feature that Marc wrote and is directing called Making Love. We had to figure out whether to shoot the movie in 35 mm or hi-def, and the big question with hi-def is how well it performs out of doors. Since a huge portion of the movie must be shot outside, this question had to be settled; so Marc got together with his Zen Noir cinematographer, Chris Gosch, and I went through an amazing amount of rigamarole to get a permit for us to shoot in the park, and on Thursday we went out and did it.

At the ranger station, bees were swarming under the eaves of the building. I wondered why the rangers hadn't gotten rid of the hive, but figured that this being a park, a place devoted to nature, they had simply decided that as long as the bees weren't bothering, they would just leave them be. So the bees buzzed and danced from flower to hive, and everyone went about their busy business as well.

As a producer, once the shoot began there really wasn't anything for me to do except guard the equipment by the side of the road. I sat there for a long while, under a shady tree, with a lush green field just to the left of me, watching seven deer as they slowly grazed their way closer, closer. Above my head, a bee moved from branch to branch, collecting and pollinating.

I was ridiculously happy.

Now bees, I've always been a little wary of. Childhood experiences have their effect, and here are just two of them: once, walking to school, a bee somehow flew inside my shoe and then stung me on the instep, a particularly painful place to get stung; and once when my dad lived in Atlanta, I was up there visiting for a month and was sledding down those red clay hills with some friends when we went right over a yellowjackets' nest. The wasps swarmed, we all got stung multiple times and spent the rest of the afternoon watching the Batman TV show with baking soda caked all over us.

Thus bees (and their even-scarier cousins of the wasp family) became equated with Pain. And since I have spent a remarkable portion of my life trying to avoid Pain in every way possible, I've generally reacted negatively to the mere appearance of a bee. Swatting it away, jumping myself away, whatever it took. (And of course, bees just love me. Maybe it's my very blond hair gleaming in the sun like some gigantic daffodil? Who knows.)

But I recently read a review, by whom and of what and where it was I cannot remember, that talked about bees and their long-standing place in culture. Of the bees that supposedly swarmed the mouth of the infant Plato, indicating the greatness of the man-to-be; of the bee's essential role in pollinating most flowering plants (there would be no almond industry, to pick just one example, without the honeybee); of the symbolic nature of the bee as a crucial part of the cycle of life. With me, if you want to turn my head around on something, just give me material like this, I'm a complete sucker for it.

And so I sat there on Thursday, a bee buzzing just above my head, and for once I was happy to just sit there. And the bee, I discovered, wasn't at all interested in me or my daffodil head, and that we were both perfectly content to do what we were doing, now near and now far apart.

The very next day, I went outside my apartment, around the back and up the stairs to finally clean out my car of all the stuff that had gathered for the shoot. (Two wooden planks, an air mattress, leftover craft-service food, and a power inverter, to name just a few of the oddments.) As I marched up the stairs, I saw several honeybees on the ground, writhing; then heard a fearsome buzzing just above my head. Stepping into the clear of the parking lot, I saw that a hive had taken up residence under the eaves of my building, just as they had at the distant ranger station. And apparently an exterminator had just been there, had just sprayed, so the bees were agitated and dying.

My old thinking was that maybe I should clean out the car later. An angry swarm is an entirely different thing from a lone bee dancing around a fragrant tree. But I felt a new sympathy for them, as they lie there dying by the dozen, literally dropping out of the air. I knew that I no longer bore any animosity toward them, and that they would not wreak their vengeance on me. So I did what I had to do, made several trips slowly carrying things right under the dying hive, and by the time I was done, so too, alas, were the bees.

It felt very like a loss. But at the same time, I have to admit--I'm glad they hadn't built a hive in my walls....