Yes and No

I am not going to join in on the chorus of people criticizing the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. There were mistakes made, sure, but it's dangerous to ever let ourselves believe any government is going to do everything perfectly, every time. The storm was a big one, and in all fairness, it didn't look like it was going to be as big as it was until shortly before it reached landfall.

Bear in mind what my mother reported from Miami, when Katrina was only a Category 1 storm: "Everyone is shocked," she wrote, "at the amount of damage done by this small Cat. 1 hurricane. They are saying that the damage looks more like a Cat. 3 or 4." The storm then lost strength as it traveled over the peninsula and, as experts had predicted, it got stronger again once it reached open water in the Gulf of Mexico. But I don't believe anyone predicted it would gain that much strength--and by the time it did, it was almost on top of everyone already. There was enough time, really, for only one thing: to order the evacuation of New Orleans and get everybody out. Every effort had to bend toward that goal; then as the storm came on, really the only thing anyone can do is batten down the hatches and wait till it's over. Then there were the living to help, but the living numbered in the tens of thousands, and no matter how much we might like to believe otherwise, it takes time to mobilize troops and get them in place.

Much as I hate to agree with anyone in this crummy administration, the argument that local authorities are always going to be the first responders in such a situation is absolutely right. And comparisons to September 11th (pause to reflect; and move on) aren't fair, because as horrible as that was, it was still pretty localized--if it hadn't been, my friend Ann who lived three blocks away would not still be alive. Hurricane Katrina affected the Gulf coasts of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, along with the major city of New Orleans. That's a huge territory to try and deal with all at once. So no: I will not jump on the backs of the administration for having been slow to respond. It was terrible watching those people suffer for all those days, but I refuse to use their misery to score cheap political points.

Particularly when there are plenty of political points to be scored that aren't at all cheap. President Bush, for example, demonstrated stunning political tone-deafness by trying to keep to his schedule that first day, by giving speeches on Social Security and picking up that idiotic guitar. (His version of Dukakis in the tank, if you ask me.) Having just seen again footage of that moment when Bush was informed that a second plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I think we definitively know now that Bush is not quick on his feet. To put it mildly. Which would be okay, really, if the people around him--like, say, the people in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency--were quick on their feet.

I know, I just got through with a long defense of why the federal response wasn't as awful as everyone's claiming. But at the same time, it was no model of efficiency, either. But here's what happens when you hire your pals to run important government agencies. I won't belabor what others have written about so well, but clearly Michael Brown has no business even being an employee at FEMA, let alone its director. But in George Bush's world, loyalty is valued above all else, and Michael Brown had worshipped at the Republican altar sufficiently to be rewarded. Whether or not his appointment constituted good governance was, clearly, never once considered.

But worst of all was all those years of neglect before the storm ever came. As I noted before, John McPhee wrote powerfully of New Orleans's vulnerability to a major storm in 1989, and it was old news even then. But even though the city and state--not to mention the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers--had been pleading for money to reinforce the levee system, instead President Bush cut those funds. Why? Because he had a false war to pay for--and yes, I absolutely agree that those National Guardsmen should be at home defending their communities, and not overseas spilling their blood in a war of choice.

There's a new book called The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney. I haven't read it yet because it was only released two days ago, but I'm definitely interested because there seems to be a concerted effort by this administration in particular to dismiss science when it interferes with ideology. The warmer ocean water clearly contributed to Katrina's power, but Bush still insists that global warming is an unproven theory that needs "more study" (a few decades' more, if he could have his way). His U.S. Army Corps of Engineers knew the levee system could not stand up to a Category 4 storm, but he cut their funding because he needed the money for other, ideologically-driven purposes: tax cuts in a time of war; a war on the wrong people that only increases the national vulnerability to terrorism. And that's to say nothing of the utterly absurd "debate" over evolution.

As Salon writer Joe Conason asserts in a recent article (subscription required), Bush is unfit for command. Plain and simple. And the next three years look to be very long indeed.

Things

Zen Noir recently screened during the Venice Film Festival, with our sales reps (Marc and Marla Halperin of Magic Lamp Releasing) attending and doing that magic thing they do. Some interesting people saw it, there are some interesting nibbles from distributors, and that's all very nice; the odd thing for me is the difference between this and the theatre experience. As a playwright I wasn't what you'd call screamingly successful--there were a couple of plays I wrote that got produced, but only locally in Chicago. So I never had the experience of something I wrote being produced elsewhere, that strange sensation I'm getting now, of something I helped to create that is finding its own life and journeying around the country, around the world. This thing we made over the course of a few very hot weeks in Topanga Canyon just played in Venice, and in Cannes before that. I've never been to Venice, but this movie I produced has. What an odd and delightful feeling. The closest to it I've ever felt was one year when my short play "Poised" was running at one theatre while at the same time I was performing in some Beckett one-acts at another theatre. That too was odd and delightful. I could get used to this sort of thing pretty easily.

Mr. Rosenbush is in Idaho this weekend at another festival, this one in Sun Valley, where, this being a spiritual film festival, there will be a lot of Buddhists, our key target audience. The Dalai Lama will be in town at the same time and Marc will be attending some sort of mass ceremony. The screening itself is Saturday night, during which I will be--

--at a party! Outta Sync's wrap party finally happens on Saturday night, four-plus months after we actually wrapped. The nice bit is that there is some footage edited together that everyone can see at the party; the odd bit is that we'll be celebrating the wrapping of principal photography just before some of us get involved again in reshoots and whatnot. In particular, on Tuesday the boys of the band begin rehearsing the final version of our hit single, "2 B neXt 2 U." We had a rough, recorded by Bill Robens, but now we're all going to participate. Time to find out how badly my voice has deteriorated since the last time I did any real singing, in 1989.

(Hey, wow--I went to Amazon to pull up the listing for "Fine Young Madrigals," and they're actually showing a couple copies in stock! I was given a few copies of the cassette tapes at the time but never got a CD--tried a couple months ago and Amazon couldn't find any. By gum, maybe this time it'll actually work out.)

And finally: editing in Final Cut Pro works much, much better if you begin with QuickTime movie clips. I accidentally skipped that little step recently, importing some iMovie clips (in .dv format) that we shot a couple months ago, and had endless trouble till Apple's invaluable message boards finally got me straightened out. But after spending all this time with Final Cut, and the manuals, I still feel like an absolute idiot most of the time. Very discouraging.

Eyes

If eyes are the window to the soul, what does it mean when my eyes must look out through bifocals?

So I'm having lunch today and a friend of mine needs a pain reliever out of the little first-aid box. "Which kind?" she wonders, and takes out a little packet which she holds under the light, directly over a table. Being the snarky fellow I am, I ask "What, you can only read over tables?" She laughs and tells the tale of how she discovered she needed glasses: how in her early twenties she always wondered why movies were never focused properly, and why anyone bought digital clocks when the numbers were unreadable, until a bit of night driving when she finally realized that she needed glasses.

For me, it was younger, but much the same. I was driving somewhere with Mom, who asked me what a sign on the right side of the road said (she was looking at something else). My answer was "How would I know? No one can read those things." Mom, whose eyesight stayed good into her forties, suddenly realized: at the age of 13, I already needed glasses.

Yeah, 13 was a fun age. I moved to a new neighborhood, started a new school, and got glasses and truly nasty acne, pretty much all at once. Puberty was a freight train straight to hell. Curiously, at exactly the same time I discovered theatre--so even though in my real life I was wearing neutral-colored, nondescript clothes, trying desperately to just blend in and not be noticed, I was also discovering that I was an actor, that I could stand in front of people and be noticed and even admired. That was the lifeline, the one thing that enabled me to survive.

The eyes, as they do, continued to slide, slowly. Each time I went to the doctor, the prescription was just slightly stronger. I tried variations on the eyeglasses, like those horrid indoor/outdoor glasses that would darken when you stepped into the sunlight; that only meant that they were a little too grey indoors, and not grey enough outdoors, neither one thing or another; and since they were made of glass rather than plastic, they were heavier and more uncomfortable and eventually started digging holes in the flesh of my face where they rested.

During college, I got contact lenses. True bliss, except for one thing: I couldn't get them in. When the doctor put them in, fine; removing them was a chore, but I could do it. But I just could not put the damn things in on my own. I sat there at the doctor's office in front of a mirror, trying and trying and failing and failing. In the meantime, this young girl waltzed in, sat at another mirror, popped in her lenses and waltzed back out. "Stupid girl," I murmured, and kept trying. The nurse was ready to declare that I couldn't do it and take my contacts back; I asked her to let me take them home overnight.

Much more time at the mirror, sitting at the kitchen table. Finally, Mom watched me for a couple minutes, then had an idea: with the left hand, two fingers hold the eye open while the right hand gets the contact on the eye; then use the left hand to grab the eyelid, lift it over the lens, and close the eye. The pressure of the closed eyelid would squeeze out the air bubble, and the lifting prevented the lens from getting caught and dislodged when I blinked. Pure parental brilliance, and now I could wear contacts.

All I had to do was remember to clean the contacts. Because that time when I didn't, it got bad. Ignored the whole enzyme cleaning process for weeks, then one night I was ushering for a show and noticed that each time the lights changed my eyes would feel a short sharp stab of pain. "Huh," I said. "Guess I should clean the contacts." I went home, cleaned the contacts, and went to bed. When I awoke the next morning I opened my eyes and shrieked with pain. The dirty lenses had actually scraped my corneas. I was in the dorms then, and had to get an R.A. to lead me like a blind man to a doctor's office, with big sunglasses on and my hands over my eyes.

But the eyes, they heal remarkably well. Remind me to tell you someday the story about the time I got a lit cigarette in my eye.

Now I wear "progressive" eyeglasses--the fancy-pants version of bifocals. With lenses getting smaller and smaller each time I buy them because that's the fashion, now I have these lenses where one region is for close, one region is for normal, one region is for distance, and the regions on the sides seem to just be for blurriness because that's all they ever really seem to do. It mostly means that I turn my head a lot, in order to look at something through the appropriate part of the lens; and sometimes when I drive and really need my peripheral vision, it's like I'm not wearing glasses at all.

I remember wondering when I was a kid: knowing that people's vision tends to get worse with age, maybe there would come a point when my original near-sightedness would meet up with my developing far-sightedness and I would have perfect vision again.

Yeah, it sounds stupid now, mostly because it is. I claim the folly of youth, and quite subtly the head cranes forward just a little so that I can look at the screen and see, really see, whether I'm spelling everything correctly. Does the screen need to be closer, or am I already discovering that new glasses will be required?

How to Fix The Brothers Grimm

In which yr. humble author suggests how a big Hollywood flop went wrong, and how it might, at enormous expense, be repaired.

First off: I love Terry Gilliam. I've already written about the pivotal role the Python boys played in my life, and of them, by far the best filmmaker is Gilliam. Brazil in particular is a movie whose influence on me has been enormous--in fact one of the biggest challenges Marc and I have in adapting City of Truth is keeping it away from Brazil territory. So everything I'm going to say about the movie comes from the position of a true fan, someone who wishes that Gilliam had a Spielberg-sized following so that Gilliam could always find the financing and support to do whatever on earth he feels like.

Marc and I went to see the movie last night, at the gorgeous Mann Village theater in Westwood, a true movie palace and one of the great perks about living in L.A. I was dismayed to walk in, on a Friday night of only the second weekend for this movie, and find the theater was nearly empty. The crowd, once the movie started, was probably no more than thirty people, maybe closer to twenty. Which means that the second-weekend falloff, to which Hollywood people pay close attention, is going to be dreadful, and the powers-that-pay will say "See? That Gilliam bastard is nothing but trouble, and he keeps losing money." (Never mind that his movies sell consistently on DVD, and I'm sure that in the long run he has always ended up making money for his backers.) But the reviews were middling, and on this particular weekend--when the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is far more absorbing, and terrifying, than any Hollywood movie, this kind of attendance was probably inevitable.

So what to do about the middling reviews? First off, as Marc noted after the movie, a filmmaker has to be allowed to strike out from time to time, particularly one who keeps reaching like Gilliam does. Gilliam films have never been modest: they always stretch out as far as they can, they're always audacious and original, and when they work they are spectacular (think Brazil, 12 Monkeys or The Fisher King). When they don't work (think The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), they're still interesting as hell, and on the whole I'd rather see a failure like Munchausen than a "success" like Armageddon. (Okay, that was an unfair comparison.) Here, I think, is how the movie could have been fixed (and yes, there are spoilers, so if you think you may rent this someday, you might want to stop right about now).

Perhaps the most glaring error is the lack of simplicity. I'm fascinated by the old folk tales too, and from time to time I've tried to write one. They are fearsomely difficult, because they are compact like a poem, they are plain-spoken even when their content is florid, and while their metaphorical content is often quite deep, on the surface they are all plot. A character is introduced (very quickly), finds him/herself in a situation (very quickly), there is a turn or two, and then some sort of resolution happens (very quickly). In Brothers Grimm, nothing happens quickly, none of it is clean and compact, and the style is even more florid than the content. The first half meanders badly: the brothers go into the forest, they come out of the forest, they go back in, they come back out, they go back in, etc. All this endless back-and-forthing before the story ever really starts to happen. The first bit of the movie is fine, and I like the idea of the brothers as shysters who find themselves in a real situation; their introduction to the accursed village of Marbaden works fine, for the most part; but once they go into the forest with Angelika, they should have just stayed there and had their adventure.

Granted, this means the movie is an hour long and no studio would ever back it. That's one of the problems with a fairy tale-based project like this one. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine faced a similar problem with the somewhat similar Into the Woods, and their brilliant solution was to have the characters' adventures take up the first act; then the second act is devoted to the "ever after" period when ever after turns out to be not so great as the characters had hoped. So there are solutions to be found, but Gilliam (and screenwriter Ehren Kruger) didn't find one. Padding the first half is simply a recipe for disaster.

There are also tone problems, particularly in the performances. There isn't much characterization going on here: the brothers are never more than lightly sketched in, which is in keeping with the fairy-tale nature of the stories (and I don't know that the "magic beans" backstory really adds all that much), so Heath Ledger substitutes a kind of frenzied hyperactivity for characterization, with awful results. His performance is just like Brad Pitt's in 12 Monkeys, all flurry without foundation. In the hands of a really good character actor, all that frenzy might have been grounded in something, but in Ledger's hands it just felt arbitrary and annoying and distracting--the most aggravating performance of the year. Where you do have real character actors, like Jonathan Pryce and Peter Stormare, there is just as much cartoonish clowning, but it's easier to buy into. Even with these two, though, there is a problem: the cartoonishness keeps you from taking them seriously, thus seriously undercutting their effectiveness as villains. (And I never bought into Stormare's conversion into a good guy toward the end.)

Fortunately, I know how to fix that: when Cavaldi and Delatombe first interrogate the brothers, the brothers' two dim-witted assistants are threatened with death in order to goad the brothers into confessing that they are frauds. Much later in the film, the dim-witted assistants are killed by Delatombe; but if they were killed during that first interrogation, then Delatombe has real credibility as a villain. We know what he's capable of, and all the clowning suddenly has some credibility--he's now a dangerous clown. This would also add some tension to the later moment when Delatombe is threatening Angelika--but since the dim-wits got through it okay, we never worry about Angelika's fate.

So there you are: how to fix The Brothers Grimm. Streamline the first half and get the characters into their adventure much faster; make the villains more credible by having them do something actually villainous right at the top; and forget all the fussiness and let the brothers be real people surrounded by the supernatural and the outrageous (note that Lena Headey's Angelika feels completely real throughout, and is the one character we ever feel anything for). Make these changes, while keeping the spectacular visual style and the high-stakes adventure that makes the second half work so well, and I think you could have a pretty damn good movie here.

And hell, the reshoots should only cost five or six million. A pittance!

An Excerpt

I think that from time to time I'll run little excerpts from things I'm working on. There probably won't be much from scripts, because the formatting just doesn't feel like it would fit here; but prose pieces should be dandy. So to start, here are the opening paragraphs from a novel I've been working on for forever, titled Thereby Hangs a Tale. Bear in mind that "Thereby" here is the name of a character, and that it rhymes with the word "therapy."

Thereby thereby sailed the open sea, sailed said sea on his broad flat feet, spray and spume to windward and yon. An honest fellow Thereby, a royal he yet common too, hair a maze of ratnest, feet the scope of schooners, lungs that bellowed in out in two three four. He carried nestled in his mouth thirty-one teeth and one acorn, lodged in a neatly nesting right-side space where once had been a thirty-second tooth.

Flying fish flew into his mouth, happy salmon jumped and spawned and died, eggs rectumed back into the roeing sea, Thereby a fertile fecund fellow of twelvehand high. Locomotion was a puzzle. Thereby galloped across the mist-coated nymphish sea, legs long and loggish, bones of anthracite, lips marbled and eyes lashed to the ever-distant horizon.

Thereby was undeniably in motion, for otherwise would surely sink the ship of foot; yet progress was problematic, as the horizon always remained a horizon. It was always ahead, a thin strip of land always visible; but after all this time, it never had grown the least bit closer. Forward he had sailed for a time past memory; but he was no closer than at the beginning of his improbable journey. Had he only ever traveled round and round, or was there another explanation not yet found?

And then, in the very next chapter, you have this about a guy in Chicago at the Oak Street Beach:

And in this public place, both surrounded and ignored, Honest Ave walked parallel to the shoreline for a time, right through the remaining bathers, stepped on some beach towels, knocked over a small sandcastle, blithely walked through a volleyball game, broke someone’s sunglasses, and reached the farthest end of the beach where none were any longer. Without losing stride, Avery O’Neill pressed forward, felt the water gush quickly into his shoes, pants and underwear, felt his shirt bellying with air, and eagerly sucked in the water once it reached his mouth. By then he could not walk but had to swim a little, his shoes falling off and away, till he reached a good depth and then pushed himself below.

Staying under was a tremendous effort, and he realized why his predecessors put stones in their pockets.

What's that you say? These sound like they're chapters from entirely different stories, you say? Huh. How very interesting. Wonder why that would be?

Can I Be Brief?

Recent blog entries certainly have run long, haven't they? Honest, I swear I'm writing as concisely as I can, but maybe there's room for improvement. So let's try to take a stab at dealing with two complex issues very quickly.

Medical Billing Shenanigans

A few months ago I was temping for a while, and had no health insurance. Then I tripped over my own feet and fell on asphalt, scraping the hell out of my hand. (And I'd been the only one not drinking!) A couple days later it was infected, and I had no choice but to go to the emergency room at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. They did just about the simplest procedure possible, cleaning out the wound and putting on a bandage and giving me prescriptions for antibiotics; and then they charged me $766 for it (plus another $183 for the prescriptions). I called their billing department and negotiated a 30% discount, if I would pay immediately, which I did by credit card because that was the only monetary option I had left.

A few days ago, after nearly four months of silence, the hospital sent me a new bill. For the entire supposedly-discounted amount. Now I have to go through the whole argument all over again, and am awaiting their call back in the next round of this.

A few years ago, someone I know went through a similar problem with a hospital billing department, as they claimed that her insurance didn't cover something that she knew it did. Her insurance company, of course, was no help, and she had to resolve the dispute herself, to prove to the hospital that her coverage was adequate just as they should have known it was. During all this, she was also undergoing debilitating chemotherapy treatments.

All of which leads me to wonder: is there some quiet corporate policy at hand here? Disregard your agreements; change your practices; find ways to charge patients more money than they should pay. Yes, you will often find the people like my friend and I who are willing and able to argue the point and demonstrate the rightness of our position; but there will also be some percentage of people who don't argue, who simply see a bill and pay it; some percentage of people whose language skills aren't so good; some percentage who are sick and simply can't summon up enough energy to put up a fight. Put enough of these sorts of people together and you've got a nice little revenue stream going.

Paranoid conspiracy theory? No, I really don't think it is. Not all the time, anyway.

New Orleans: The New Atlantis?

People are gonna hate me for saying this, but I think New Orleans is doomed. Louisiana's governor just ordered the complete evacuation of the city, and colossal efforts are underway by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to at least plug the levee breaches that occurred yesterday. There is all the usual rhetoric about how the heroic citizens of New Orleans will recover and rebuilt, but I can't help thinking that it's a lost cause.

The online magazine Salon yesterday ran a very timely piece excerpting the first chapter of John McPhee's The Control of Nature. (A book that just happens to be on my Amazon Wish List, in case anyone wants to send me a belated birthday present.) In it, McPhee wrote about the absurd lengths the city of New Orleans had gone to in order to stave off the inevitable. "Every drop of rain that falls on New Orleans," McPhee writes, "evaporates or is pumped out. Its removal lowers the water table and accelerates the city's subsidence. Where marshes have been drained to create tracts for new housing, ground will shrink, too. People buy landfill to keep up with the Joneses."

In this book written in 1989, McPhee goes on: "As sediments slide down the continental slope and the river is prevented from building a proper lobe--as the delta plain subsides and is not replenished--erosion eats into the coastal marshes, and quantities of Louisiana steadily disappear. The net loss is over fifty square miles a year."

I've never been to New Orleans and have no sentimental attachment to it. Once I flew over the city, and changed planes at the airport, and as I stared out the window of the plane at all those canals and dikes and levees, at all that water snaking around absolutely everything, I wondered why on earth anyone would want to put a major city there. Now, in the wake of the storm, with everything I'm seeing, I think the only sane decision is to declare the city a goner, and to let it slowly disappear into the silt and water. The New York Times disagrees with me, running a staff editorial today (subscription required) that declares "New Orleans...is one of the places that belongs to every American's heart--even for people who have never been there." I don't for a second argue that it isn't one of America's great cities; I just don't think there's any practical way to keep it viable, given its geographical challenges. It's a horrific shame to lose such a unique city with its old-world atmosphere, but I'm sure Pompeii was a great loss as well, once upon a time.

With the city emptying out, and repair estimates extending over months, I'm simply saying that this might be the best time to face up to the realities and declare the city a loss. Because otherwise, some year there will be another hurricane, and the damage will be even worse, and when exactly do you declare an end to it all?

Gdyeh Hermitage?

Last night I watched a couple episodes of the Sundance documentary series Hermitage-niks, about the history of the fabled Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, and the devoted people who work there. This has been running all month but I only just heard about it, and the episodes I saw were wonderful. (And yes, I did do something other than watch TV, I worked on Beaudry too, just because I've mentioned TV shows a couple times recently doesn't mean that all I do is watch TV.) (Okay, yes I do, but never mind that.)

I visited Petersburg when it was still Leningrad, in September 1990, just a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was acting in a production of Chekhov's The Wood Demon (first draft of Uncle Vanya), directed by a mad Russian emigré named Alexander Chirkov. (Note: saying "a mad Russian" is a little like saying "a tall basketball player"--it just sorta goes with the territory.) Sasha was born in 1939, right at the outbreak of World War II; he lived through the Nazi blockade of Leningrad only because his father died after choosing to give his allotment of food to his children. When you would go to Sasha with a problem he would usually say this: "So this problem, it is big problem?" Yes, it's a big--. "This problem, it will kill you?" Well no, it's not gonna--. "Then it's okay!" Big smile, arms spread wide. And considering the sort of history the man had had, when he told you something wasn't a problem then how could you argue with him? Very frustrating.

And so we went to the Soviet Union. The production was tailor-made for the Russians, and not at all for the Americans--my favorite review of all time came from our performances in Boston, when one reviewer wrote "We understand the troupe is taking this production behind the Iron Curtain. We hope it closes again behind them." But the Russians absolutely loved us, and loved the show--after our first Leningrad performance we got a ten-minute standing ovation (even though we performed in English--but these people know Chekhov like I know Shakespeare). Sasha understood his home crowd, and it was fascinating to be a performer in something that felt so "wrong" from an American standpoint--the declamatory style, the grand gestures, being miles from a fellow actor in what felt like an intimate scene. But there's no denying that it worked for the Russians.


But I digress. (Man, I can tell Russia stories all day.) Our hosts in Leningrad were members of a local theatre company (can't remember the name), and so we lived with them in their homes for the entire two weeks of our visit. Hospitality like you would not believe--parties every night, despite the shortages and the difficulties of obtaining even basic foods. My host was Tanya Kolosova, a gifted pianist for whom I was happy to return the favor, sponsoring her trip to the U.S. the next year. When we first met, Tanya barely spoke any English, and I knew nothing beyond the basic hellos and goodbyes. I relied on my little phrasebook; she relied on interpreters; and as time passed, we learned to communicate.

Tanya took us to the Hermitage several times. But because we always had rehearsals or performances, there was never much time to play tourist, and I don't think I ever had more than 45 minutes in the museum at any one time. So my impressions of the place are like a fever dream; what really sticks is what Tanya would tell us. "From this window the tsar's soldiers, they shoot into people below." But what I really remember is that we never had enough time, and Tanya, having discovered that art-related words bridged the language gap very effectively, would walk along behind us, trying to keep us moving, slapping me on the back and saying "Tempo tempo tempo!"

What I really wanted, though, was to become independent. To be able to travel the city on my own. This is harder than you think--when the language is alien, and the alphabet is alien, so that even reading street signs becomes a laborious process of first puzzling out what the letters are and then what they mean, finding your way around becomes very difficult. I got lost once, trying to find my way to the Jazz Club, on a day when I had loaned my phrasebook to someone else (with all my phone numbers written on the front cover). If the club hadn't had a neon sign that I could spot from blocks away, I'd've been in deep trouble.

On our last full day, I felt confident. I knew where the local Metro station was (gorgeous train stations, all of them; with signs counting down how many seconds it would be before the next train arrived), I knew which stop I needed, and I had been to the Hermitage enough times that I felt reasonably confident going on my own. Missed my stop once because I didn't accurately count the number of stations I'd gone through, but was able to successfully backtrack; and on the street I had at least learned enough of the language to politely interrupt two men and ask "Gdyeh Hermitage?" "Where Hermitage?" They pointed, I walked, and found my way there. Counted out the meager price to get in, and finally got the chance to walk the museum on my own time, with nowhere that I particularly had to be, and without anyone slapping me on the back saying "Tempo tempo!"

Later, I learned that if you step in front of a bus that then decides to start moving forward, it is not the driver's job to stop, it is your job to get the hell out of the way. In America you can stare the guy down; not there. A good thing to know, I think.

When I got back, Tanya was furious, but she forgave me. When the coup happened in 1991 I found that watching the news reports was a very different experience: with fighting in the streets that you once have walked, and friends who live in those very neighborhoods, you can't just watch the news passively anymore. It made me very happy to get Tanya out, and to connect her with the music program at Harvard.

Watching Hermitage-niks, it all came back. Not just those fever-dream images of the museum itself but the Russian people, the way they talk, the things they care about. The feel of the city, the history that still lives in its streets.

Damn, now I want to go back again!

Reports From the Hurricane

Here's what Mom had to say about the Miami end of Hurricane Katrina. Bear in mind that this was a piddling little storm at this stage--at exactly the same time on Friday when Mom was suffering her damage in Miami, my brother in Ft. Lauderdale was telling me "this storm sucks" because it wasn't dramatic enough. Also: names have been changed to protect those whose names have been changed. Who is "Troy"? Who are the local and state politicians with exploding insides? I'll never tell. (Psst--see me after class!)

Katrina, Chapter 1, Friday, August 26, 2005

Well, we got through the storm. It was way, way worse than anticipated in our area and the damage in our immediate area is way worse than in Andrew. However, we were pretty lucky by not having any structural damage that we can see. We were some of the first people to lose power. We've been without power since 4:30 yesterday afternoon. Our entire yard (and roof) are thick with debris: leaves and small branches mostly. We didn't lose any trees and the roof looks intact; we'll know more when we get the stuff cleared off. Our neighbors lost a lot of trees. Guess there's something to be said for native vegetation. I'll bet that Fairchild Garden is going to look really bad.

We got hammered from about 5:30 pm yesterday until about 3:00 am today. We opened the curtain for the sliding glass door and watched. Sometimes it was just a big grey blur out there with heavy wind and rain. Sometimes the rain came in horizontally. That's when our sliders that sit behind about 10 feet of roofing got wet.

Everyone is shocked at the amount of damage done by this small Cat. 1 hurricane. They are saying that the damage looks more like at Cat. 3 or 4. In some places it does, in others it doesn't. Must have been some pretty powerful micro-bursts that hit our area. I didn't see nearly the same damage while I traveled to work. But the area around work got pretty hammered too.

It's amazingly hot. I guess I'm lucky that I got called in to work where they have power and food.

Katrina, Chapter 2, Saturday, August 27, 2005

We still don't have power back at the house. I worked for nearly 10 hours yesterday, a good thing altogether since they have a generator here and A/C. The not-quite-so-good thing was the free lunch from B. S. Catering. About an hour after lunch, our insides started exploding. I'm not sure whether they all ate or not, but it is entirely possible that various politicians from local and state levels all had exploding insides yesterday. Hopefully, they got better food.

We camped out for the night in Troy's office on a comforter on the floor. A bunch of us without power camped out in different offices. It kinda appears that maybe it wasn't exactly, shall we say, company-approved since we were always on the lookout for security patrols. FPL says maybe 90% of the power will be restored by Tuesday. Anyone want to make bets on whether our power will be back by then?

Most of the traffic lights are still out. Most of the people treat the intersections as if they and they alone had a green light. If you stop at the intersection where there's no working light, you get rear-ended. I haven't seen any widespread flooding, though I hear there was quite a bit in the deep south around Homestead and the Redlands.

So, I am back here at work this morning, 6:30 am. I'm half hoping that they let me go early so I can help with the clean-up. I'm kinda half hoping that they don't, so I don't have to help with the clean-up until tomorrow. There's no way to cool off after hard work in the yard, except to take that cold, cold shower.

Katrina, Chapter 3, Sunday, August 29, 2005

I worked a full day again yesterday, then bought an air mattress on the way home at Wal-Mart. Troy worked around the house and yard and getting the generator going. Anyway, the power was still out and we spent Saturday night in Troy's office again.

Katrina, Chapter 4, Monday, August 30, 2005

On Sunday morning, Lee found a Starbucks open in Broward County and brought us cappuccinos and cranberry scones. It felt like luxury. We worked in the yard, moving the orchids, palms, and tomato plants back in their places, and picking up debris. My knee and hip are killing me with all the lifting. Troy and Teddy got the generator going. It's too small to power much, but we were able to get the refrigerator in the garage going for a while.

We threw out most of the contents of the house refrigerator and the mangos from the freezer in the garage refrigerator. We had hopes at one time of making mango wine.

We took our cold showers and looked for a hotel room. Nothing available, not even at the hotel that is always vacant because it's tucked in an improbable location. We can't stay long at Troy's work, so we are starting to be concerned. Maybe we'll have to get a bigger generator.

Back to Troy's office. All the other campers were gone. We turned in early, though Troy read by lantern light for a while. The air mattress was not as comfortable as the night before. We added more air, but I guess we were just pretty beat up and wouldn't have been comfortable anywhere.

As we pulled in to the house just before 6:00 am today, we saw that power was on. Yippee! It hasn't been since Hurricane Andrew that I looked forward more to doing laundry and vacuuming the floor. But, since it's back to work, I'll have to defer that pleasure until later.

Now we are standing vigil for New Orleans.

TV is Good for You...

...at least some of the time it is. Sometimes, yes, TV is one of the things you use to silence the silence, to fill the empty spaces so that you're not ever left with the dread prospect of being alone with yourself. Lord knows I'm as guilty of this as anyone else, with either music or the televison always on whenever I'm home--and even when I go to bed, I usually set iTunes to run for another thirty minutes as a kind of musical night-light. Obviously I can't bear the silence, and even though I understand this intellectually, I still need those things that drive the silence away. (This is part of what Ezra/The Alien was talking about when he mentioned "a head/heart thing"--there's plenty that I understand intellectually but seem powerless to deal with emotionally.)

Sometimes, though, TV is good for you. The other night I was planning to go to a meeting of the L.A. Final Cut Pro Users Group, which is apparently a pretty big organization dedicated to providing a place for L.A.-based editors to get out of their editing suites and see the light of day once a month. I was, as always, vacillating about going--it takes something enormous for me to actually leave home, but I had just decided that yes, I was definitely going, but first I'd stop home to change clothes. Then I saw a box from Amazon, which I knew contained the DVD set for season two of Once and Again, and that was it, I knew I would be staying home that night.

What TV can do, when it is very, very good, is to take its time with something and really dig in deep. Let's assume the same premise for both a movie and a TV series: two divorcees meet, fall in love, and try to work through the enormous difficulties of melding their separate families. In a movie, the various issues raised would have to be either eliminated (in favor of a sharp clear focus on one or two major problems) or dealt with very quickly. In a TV series, you can take all the time you want. Something that gets five or ten minutes in a movie, if that, can take a whole hour or two hours or more, and thus dealt with fully. Take the issue of Jessie's anorexia in season two of Once and Again. First the groundwork is laid in previous episodes, a little at a time; then you get a full hour just to get the character to admit she has the problem; then subsequent episodes can deal with the long process of resolving the problem. All this for what is, strictly speaking, a supporting character.

I enjoy the stand-alone shows as much as anyone, I guess--CSI and Law and Order, etc. But I can't imagine myself ever buying DVDs of these shows, because in the end they're really just about keeping the silence at bay, they are pictures that do not illuminate, noise that is never signal. Once and Again, however, falls into the same category as the dearly-departed Six Feet Under, the the recent ending of which stands as one of the most moving visions of mortality I've ever seen.

I stayed in that first night, watching several episodes. Last night I stayed in again, watching a few more episodes. And it was not about driving away the silence, it was about sinking into a rich and worthwhile experience, and after three years of waiting for the season two DVDs I just want to know from Buena Vista, when the hell does season three come out?

A Little Bit About Iraq

As of the most recent news reports, the draft Iraqi constitution (which is no Jeffersonian masterpiece to begin with) has inflamed the Sunni minority, and it's looking as if the Shiite/Kurdish coalition is going to have to approve the constitution entirely on their own. Thus leaving out in the cold the sizeable Sunni population of Iraq, the ones who are already supporting the deadly insurgency we know and loathe; and in the end it may not matter, because once the document is put to referendum (sometime in October), the Sunnis may just have enough votes in enough provinces to defeat the measure. This would then require new elections, and a new constitution would have to be drafted, and everything starts all over.

In the meantime, insurgents staged an attack in Baghdad itself that looks like it was the first serious test of the native Iraqi police. The police were driven back, and have called for U.S. reinforcements.

Or, in other words, chaos.

But really, what else could anyone have expected? Even before the U.S. launched its attack on Iraq, I could only see civil war as the likely outcome. Now it may just be true that civil war was inevitable whether we attacked or not. Take a look at David Fromkin's book A Peace to End All Peace, in which the history of Western meddling in the Middle East is detailed. The nation of Iraq was created during the period following World War I and, to make a long story short, its boundaries were drawn without regard to cultural and ethnic borders, but only on the basis of natural resources that could be exploited, and short-term political benefits to be gained. The result was a nation in name only, with Kurds to the north, Sunnis in the central and western regions, and a large Shiite majority in the south. The Kurds were essentially an extension of their brethren in Turkey; the Shiites were essentially an extension of their brethren in the similarly-created nation of Iran. This schizophrenic conglomeration was held together mainly by force of arms: first British, then eventually Saddam Hussein.

Much the same was true in Yugoslavia, where Tito held together a nation built of warring ethnicities, most notably the Serbs and Croats, who put aside, but did not forget, old grievances. Once Tito died, they went to war with each other, and atrocities like Kosovo resulted. It seems safe to say that eventually something similar would have happened in Iraq; but that hardly excuses the looming civil war that American intervention seems to be bringing forth.

More soldiers? Fewer? Complete withdrawal? I bounce back and forth. When thinking rationally, it seems to me that we need more troops in Iraq, to just get in there and get the job done; but then there are days when I think all that would accomplish would be to substitute our force for Saddam's, postponing but not eliminating the risk of civil war. Probably all we can do is, unfortunately, what the Bush administration now seems to be proposing: get them set up with some kind of constitution, however flawed, then get the hell out and let things fall apart so that we can blame the Iraqis for having allowed it to fall apart.

There's another part of me that thinks that maybe it's not such a bad thing if the Shiites take over and create an Islamic republic. For my reasons why, look at Iran. It's no secret that the ruling mullahs do not enjoy much popular support. The mullahs got their chance to run their nation and didn't do such a great job of it. The people want Western-style freedoms, and it seems only a matter of time before they drum the mullahs out of office. How much time I can't say; but this sort of change, generated internally rather than externally, seems the only kind that can generate truly positive (by Western terms) results. And if we were to just go ahead and let the same thing happen in Iraq, then it might take thirty, forty years, but perhaps at the end of that time we might find a real, genuine democracy taking shape there. If only we had the patience to allow such changes to happen in their own time, I suspect we would find that ultimately, American movies and TV shows are far more powerful weapons than our bombs and tanks.

My Life Made Art

Oh man was I in a crappy mood today. Never mind all the whys and wherefores, it was just one of those mornings you have sometimes when you decide no one actually gives a shit whether you live or die. Then, as I went through the morning I had scheduled, some calls came and my morning got all unscheduled. Snapping and snarling, I headed off for a meeting with Ezra and the rest of the Alien crew.

It was a lunch meeting, and my friends sang "Happy Birthday" to me with exceptional harmony, and Shelley Winters was one table over, and I really wanted to stay in a crappy mood but it was just impossible. At one point, Ezra, who has been reading my blog (what, somebody's actually reading this stuff?), started asking me about--nay, grilling me about--my absurd farce of a love life. "So what kind of a woman do you want?" he asked repeatedly.

The interesting thing is that I ducked the question and never answered. Because after I left, he went on to his Dear Alien blog and wrote up this. Go ahead and read it; that's definitely me he's talking about, and even though it's severely unnerving to see your life made art (public art), I have to admit: what he wrote is a damned beautiful piece of work, and it actually made me sit up and see myself spun around from this whole different angle.

The New Reality

It was a beautiful day yesterday, up in the Santa Monica Mountains. The dreaded marine layer had covered much of the city in fog, but even as we drove up to the trailhead we could see small patches of blue beginning to emerge. It ended up being a nearly ideal situation: since most of the trail is under direct sunlight, the slowly-thinning fog gave us cover and cool temperatures; but at the same time we could watch more and more of it burning off as we approached the top, until finally we reached what felt very much like the dome of the world, and were treated to the incredible deep blue that you see in the picture. By the time it started to get really hot, we were already on our way back down, with great quiet sympathy for those late starters who were only just beginning that steep hot climb.

And oh yes, it sure was steep. As Jamie had warned me, "It's almost all uphill, and it kicks your ass." But I was doing pretty well, although Jamie carefully set a slow and steady pace. (One which also allowed time to appreciate the growth of the blue over our heads.) I got winded, and then caught my second breath, and survived the trip up very well. Coming down, Jamie had said, was easier, but I found it harder, as I always have: being absurdly tall, gravity hits me in different ways than it does 5'4" Jamie; plus I have a center of gravity that is way north of something called a "center" ought to be, so that I have always been very easy to tip over. Walking downslope, then, always becomes something of a battle against gravity. But she told me about a way to use the thighs rather than the back, which I was able to discover pretty easily in my own body. Then we would get to chatting about things and I would promptly forget to do it.

Jamie was in good spirits, despite having worked till late last night. When I arranged our little hike it simply never occurred to me that in order for her to drive in from Pasadena in time to pick me up at 8:00, she would have to get up pretty early; and if she was working late, well that really wasn't ideal. But it had certainly occurred to her, and she was fine with it; she brought with her nothing but enthusiasm and delight, so everything went swimmingly. The only wrinkle was that she had a scene to shoot in the afternoon, way out in Riverside, so her time this morning was limited, and as we worked our way back down the trail she began to grow increasingly concerned about time. I knew she wasn't working tonight so I'd been hoping to maybe make a day of it; so much for that idea. Our pace on the way down quickened and then quickened a little more, and then there was the pell-mell drive down Sunset and a very quick goodbye in the car outside my apartment. Slam wave whoosh and she was gone.

Unfortunately, it turns out I had a pretty damn busy day myself. A quick shower, a little time out to watch last night's episode of the improbably brilliant Battlestar Galactica, and then I was off again. Into Santa Monica, where I spent far too much time in Borders looking for a book that the screens said was there but which actually wasn't: Walter Murch's In the Blink of an Eye. It's a book about editing, by one of the best editors in the business (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, and so on). I've been paying a lot of attention to learning the software, but it's important that I also pay some attention to the art of editing itself. But since the book wasn't there, I actually ended up buying a slim little book called Grammar of the Edit, by a German named Roy Thompson. It's all about the fundamental theories of editing, how you make a cut and why, and the use of "Grammar" in the title is appropriate: as with grammar, I've always believed that you must first know, and really understand and appreciate, the rules before you start breaking them. (Trust me: if I do something grammatically incorrect in this here blog, I'm doing it deliberately. Thus the effect is precise and not chaotic.) (I hope.)


Then it was off to the Valley, and now the day was very hot and I had the air conditioner going--and my body was beginning to say words to me. Words like "Hey, what did you this morning? We don't like this." Knees and hips were complaining particularly loudly. I ignored all this and went about my day.

I haven't yet mentioned Outta Sync. This is another of Ezra's projects, an improvised feature film about a group of guys plucked from the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles by one Phaedra Lee, who is inspired by the voice of God (who sounds remarkably like Tippi Hedren, we're told) to take these five random guys and turn them into a boy band. Never mind that we're all in our thirties and forties. I play Sergei, who says he is from a never-mentioned country somewhere deep in Europe. ("Small. Very small. Never heard of it you have not. So small. Name of country is larger than actual country.") We shot it in March and April, and apparently the editing is going well, and the piece is turning out to be great; so suddenly, the producers realized how important it was to actually get us under contract.

Ah, the independent world. Someone was supposed to deal with the contracts before we ever started shooting, and the one producer just kinda figured the other producer had taken care of it, then discovered we were all still floating out there, unsigned, and a mad scramble ensued, with the result that I had to take this trip into the depths of Studio City just to sign this damned piece of paper. It would've been fine on a day when I had nothing else to do, but instead it was a bit of a slog--particularly with my body complaining more and more loudly as the day wore on. (Oh, and my pale Scandinavian skin had already turned a bright pink.)

And when I got home? Marc, in his new apartment, needed help putting together his new desk. Oy.

By evening's end my legs were just plain screaming at me. Marc and I stopped at a pharmacy where everything he needed was down this long flight of stairs (the cramped quarters of Westwood, y'see), and as soon as we started down my knees just erupted in pain. I survived, but it wasn't much fun. And this morning everything is a little bit better, though I'm still hearing from the various joints involved.

The hike, you see. It seemed a perfect way to celebrate turning forty, by going off and doing something physical and vigorous, admitting no concessions to the new age. And within a few hours of it I was feeling nothing but pain. I realized that this is it, the new reality as time advances on me. Pain becomes the new constant companion, and there isn't much you can do about it but accept it.

Or go off hiking again. Whip the body back into shape and fight fight fight against the dying of the light. This sounds like a better plan to me. But do I have the resolve to actually do it? Ah, there's the interesting question.

Ah Crap, I'm 40

Okay, it's really not such an awful thing to turn forty. The plainest truth is this: the last day of 39 and the first day of 40 feel not at all different. Sure there are tectonic stresses building up over time, but the day-to-day difference is negligible, so there's no reason at all to go weirding out over the flipping of a number.

Right? Right. It doesn't sound like I'm trying desperately to convince myself of something, does it? Oh no, of course not.

Well there's always this thought: George Bernard Shaw's career didn't really get going till he was forty; he didn't even get married (or move out of his mother's house!) till he was forty. And the actor Wilfrid Hyde-White didn't start acting until he was in his sixties, as I recall. (Nope, turns out that's a myth--his imdb entry clearly demonstrates that he was an actor his entire life. So there goes another cherished myth.)

Here's the story of my birth day, complete with photo. On that cheery Thursday morning in Miami, I was, or so I'm told, about three weeks late. The doctors said to my mother, "Mrs. Toombs, we need to do a C-section." She said "Oh no you won't," and they said back to her, "Listen lady, this kid is huge. You want a C-section. Really." And she said back to them, "Nope. Let's go."

Now bear in mind: her wisdom teeth had started coming in when she was about six months pregnant. Impacted. So because she was pregnant, they really couldn't do anything until she wasn't pregnant anymore, which meant living with the impacted teeth for three-plus months till I finally decided to be coaxed out. And by the time I did come out, I was 10 pounds 6 ounces, and damn near two feet tall already. Plus I was breach: as I've joked ever since, I came into the world ass-first and I've lived that way ever since.

Mom never had any more children, and really, do you blame her?

Here's the picture, taken at the hospital that very day:



Yep, that's me. Feisty from the start. But I mean come on, it was comfy in there, who were these people to go dragging me out like that?

But never mind. Now I am forty. Not doing anything, really, to observe the occasion today (aside from this here blog entry), but I did get a present: an NTSC monitor for my editing work, which is only exciting if you're another editor, but hey, these things don't come cheap. Tomorrow morning Jamie will pick me up and we'll go for a hike that takes in one of the most spectacular ocean views in Los Angeles, and that seems a very fine way to turn 40. Assuming I survive what is supposed to be a very steep climb, I'll make sure to take some pictures.

Challenging My Own Assumptions

Finally, just when I had decided once and for all that Guns, Germs and Steel was an interesting idea for a book half its size but deadly dull at its present length, and just as I was reaching the end of the book only because I'm stubborn and will not quit a book unless it's really incredibly dreadful; just at this point, the book finally gets interesting.

Prof. Diamond talks about why Europe rather than China came to dominate the modern world when China had a clear head start in the development of its civilization. (The Fertile Crescent failed early on, largely because its inhabitants exhausted the local environment, a clear lesson for today.) He suggests that despite China's big head start, and its plethora of important inventions (like paper, gunpowder and the compass), its geographical advantages became disadvantages: China developed a unified political system that repeatedly stifled and sometimes reversed technological developments. In the early 15th Century, Chinese treasure ships dominated the seas, but between 1405 and 1433 a squabble between two Chinese political factions ended up halting naval exploration when the anti-exploration faction gained the upper hand. This faction also dismantled the shipyards, so that even when interest in exploration might have been renewed, there were no facilities for supplying new ships.

The Europeans, however, benefited from their political instability. Geographical disadvantages became an advantage: individual regions were more fragmented and thus, in comparative isolation, developed stronger regional and ethnic identities, thus resisting political unification. As a result, even if one local ruler went a little soft in the head and decided to repress naval exploration, another neighboring principality would gleefully step into the void (which in turn would force other countries to follow suit, just to keep pace). And with Chinese ships absent from the scene, several decades later the Spanish sent Christopher Columbus sailing toward the edge of the world, which may be why you and I don't speak Mandarin.

I find this fascinating. For my whole life I have assumed that globalism is a good thing, that the consolidation of individual regions into larger confederations could only have salutary long-term benefits. It's borne of my deep-seated belief that as human beings, we all have far more in common than the petty little nonsense that divides us, and that we will all be better off when we find ways to live together as people first and Africans/Americans/Asians/Europeans second. The American experience seemed to bear this out: clearly the United States benefited enormously from the difficult process of knitting together the various colonies into one political entity, even though that involved the awful consequence of a civil war.

But Prof. Diamond has made me wonder whether it's a good idea to take my assumptions to their ultimate conclusion. If all the world were to be united as one political entity, do we then lose the benefits of competition? Do we lose the value of contrasting voices? If the world becomes one monolithic colossus, does it simultaneously lose its ability to innovate and advance?

An interesting question. Maybe it's the basis for a science fiction story I'll have to write someday. Something to drop into the back of my mind and let it germinate for a while; then, some months from now, it will emerge as--whatever. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where stories come from.

Enemies

When I was a kid, the Cold War loomed over our heads so menacingly that one night, as I slept the sleep of the young, a lightning storm rolled in over Miami as they so often do; it announced its presence with a flash of light and an instantaneous clap of sharp thunder, and I was instantly awake, and instantly thinking this: it’s The Bomb! That was all it took, in those fraught times: the flash of light seen through my eyelids, the pistol-shot thunder heard through my dreams, made me think not of the storms that we see constantly in Florida, but of the nuclear death we had never seen but always feared. After my heart had stopped racing, as I lay back down and tried to find sleep, I first thought that it was just wrong that a kid had to wake up in the middle of the night terrified of nuclear bombs; and then I thought that there was something even more wrong with what we were being told about everything. If “the Russians” were the ones who were going to send over The Bomb, then the Russians must be our enemies. But how could our enemy, these Russians, be something other than—-well, people. Because it was never said explicitly, but clearly it was what “they” (our leaders) wanted us to believe: that our Soviet opponents were something Other, our mortal enemies, who lived only for our destruction, and that we were locked in a struggle for our lives and our souls.

But for whatever reason—-and I don’t believe it’s just that I was surrounded by hippies because this was a thought I kept very close, very private, and never discussed with anyone—-I didn’t ever believe what “they” were telling me. It just couldn’t be possible: surely there was some kid in Russia who also awoke in the night thinking that the lightning was a nuclear bomb going off, lobbed into the Motherland by those heartless American bastards. Long before critics chastised Sting for writing something so naïve and idealistic as “We share the same biology / Regardless of ideology / What might save us, me and you / Is that the Russians love their children too,” I was thinking exactly the same thing. And I don’t think it’s naïve, and I don’t think it’s idealistic, I think it’s the simplest, sanest truth there is.

There is no enemy. Not then, not now.

In high school we were required—-the State of Florida actually required all high school Seniors, as recently as 1983—-to take a class called “Americanism Versus Communism.” No, really, this is true. It was taught by a red-blooded zealot named Malafronte, who was fond of throwing erasers at students who didn’t toe the party line fast enough. Me, I was a good little student (plus I was on closed-circuit TV every morning, delivering the morning announcements, so as a sorta-kinda member of the third estate I was treated well), I kept my mouth shut and just got through the class. The one time I was required to actively participate in the nonsense was when it came time to do a book report and say, in my own words, something of what I thought about the subject. I chose Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich because (A) it was easy to take a stand against the Soviet gulags, and (B) it was a really short book that I could read in a night. This report got me high marks, and I sailed through the rest of the class. But I never for a second believed the malarkey that Dr. Malafronte flung around as casually as his erasers.

Eventually I started to realize: if the Soviet people are just people like we are, and not really our enemies, then the real problem has to be a leadership problem. And not just the Russians’ leadership but ours too, for so actively promulgating the notion that the Soviet people were our enemies. Why would they do such a thing? As Gore Vidal tells us over and over, it’s about power. If you can define an enemy, then you can lead us against that enemy and we will have no choice but to follow—-and to keep you in power through the whole empty struggle that must ensue.

And then, look what happened: the Soviets got new leadership. Not us, them; our so-called enemies. Mikhail Gorbachev dared to bring a new kind of thinking to the table, and all of a sudden the Russians weren’t so scary anymore. Now we can argue all day about why that happened, about whether Reagan’s arms race so bankrupted the Soviet state that they had no choice, economically, but to take another path, but in the end it doesn’t matter: a true-blue ideologue would have never admitted to such a defeat. (Can you imagine George Bush ever admitting that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake?) Gorbachev was faced with a choice and he made the one that was actually good for his people and our people both. To me at least, it was perfectly plain: leadership had been the problem, and now maybe there was a chance to get things right.

During that very period, in September 1990, I traveled to Leningrad with a theatre troupe, performing a Chekhov play, and was lucky enough to avoid the hotels and Intourist, and to stay with our hosts in their homes for two weeks, living their lives, drinking vodka and eating blini and talking about the changes of glasnost. I knew then, knew directly so that I never needed to question it again, that the Russian people are wonderful people, and that they had never been our enemies.

Eventually I realized that even with Gorbachev in power, change was never going to come as fast I hoped. The world does change, but it changes in something like geologic time: over hundreds, thousands, millions of years. In the eyeblink that is a human life, real change is no more noticeable than the extra millimeter carved out of the Grand Canyon over the last however many years.

I should think that by now it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with this. The Muslim people are not our enemies, and never were. Yeah, there are some bad men holed up in caves, suckling their weapons and their hate, but their real aim is to become the new leaders of their part of the world; and they’re trying to do it by defining an enemy (us) and then leading their people against that awful enemy. And our response to this? We play right into it. We kill a few of our enemy at the cost of some “collateral damage” (i.e., civilians), and the people of the Arab world sit up and say “Wait a moment, these Americans are killing us.” The bad men in their caves snicker and plot some more.

We have a leadership problem. And it’s not just those chickenhawk ideologues currently stalking our halls of power, it’s also the supposedly peace-loving Democrats who don’t dare even peep the idea that maybe our enemy isn’t really our enemy; it’s also the independents who claim to be above it all while allowing “it all” to keep happening; it’s those people who don’t vote because they say voting is a waste of time when all their non-participation really accomplishes is to allow the ideologues to keep voting for the other ideologues and thus control the destiny of our nation. It’s our fault, for allowing ourselves to have these kinds of leaders.

Let me say it bluntly: there is no difference between Osama bin Laden, a conservative religious zealot seeking power, and George W. Bush, a conservative religious zealot maintaining power, except that Bush has a higher body count.

Someone has to step forward and seek a new path. And I think a good way to begin goes something like this: a new American leader, a new Gorbachev if you will, stands up and speaks directly to the Arab people, to Muslims across the world. He says, "Clearly there is a problem. You believe we are your enemy, but we’re not. Our people and yours are People of the Book, we believe in the same God and seek only peace in our lands and prosperity for our families. But we have reached a point where your people don’t believe any of this; your people have become so afraid of us that they are willing to strap bombs around their chests and die. Because of us. Well I’m here today to say to you that we are not your enemies, and that we are sorry you ever thought we were; and I’m here today to ask, What can we do to make your lives better?"

Because that is what an enlightened foreign policy should be about. Make better the lives of people in Iraq and Palestine, make better the lives of people in Rwanda and Columbia and everywhere, and we will in turn make our own lives better. Then there won’t be so many people willing to hijack planes and fly them into our prominent buildings; then there will only be the men of hate, huddling in their caves and wondering why no one is paying attention to them anymore.

We have to do this because someone has to, and it might as well be us. More to the point: if we are the great, enlightened nation we claim to be, then it must be us. But it doesn’t seem likely. On September 11, 2001, the bad men in caves scored an undeniable victory; but since that day we have only ourselves to blame for what has followed. We allowed ourselves to sink into fear and paranoia, and have only succeeded in making the entire world worse off. It has to stop, and we’re the ones who need to stop it.

It will happen, someday. I’m enough of an idealist to believe, to really believe, that someday someone will step up and do what must be done. But I’m also enough of a realist to know that these sorts of changes will occur in geologic time, and that you and I are likelier to see Mount Everest erode to a foothill than to see such an enlightened peace spread across the land.

Oh, and by the way: the business of America is not business. The business of America is Americans. But that's a subject for another day.

The Scottish Play

Apropos of nothing, a Macbeth story.

In the theatre, Macbeth is thought to be cursed. Here is one of many explanations as to why. As time goes by you encounter people who don't take the curse very seriously at all (that would be me), and those who don't particularly care much one way or the other, and then those who take it very seriously indeed.

Enter Gary Kramer. A proud member of the latter category.

We were doing a production of Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem at Emerson College in Boston. Here's a picture of the two of us from that very production, in which I played Boniface, the creepy innkeeper, and Gary was one of the titular Beaux:



I soon discovered that Gary really did not like hearing the Scottish play mentioned in any way, ever, while we were within, say, six miles of a theatre. This meant nothing but fun for me. I already had a habit of quietly reciting a few lines from Macbeth backstage during any show I was in (hey, wait, why did my acting career never go anywhere...?), but this time was going to be special.

Some props person found a pack of Shakespeare playing cards and put them on a table for set dressing. They served no practical purpose, they were just there. And during a dress rehearsal, I was in a scene with Gary where we were seated at that very table. I picked up the cards and started shuffling through them, oh-so casually, and soon enough came across a Queen card with a picture of Lady Macbeth. Extra helpful: the words "Lady Macbeth" were written across the bottom. I flashed the card at Gary so that only he could see it, and then quickly shuffled it back into the deck.

Ahhhh. Gary stood up as if he'd been bitten by a badger, backed away, and started shouting--nay, shrieking in a little girl's voice--"Get it out! Get it out!" And then for good measure, "Get it out!" The dress rehearsal stopped cold, the director came up, the crew all came out, and of course my response was "What's he talking about?" We were obliged to go through the entire deck until Gary was satisfied that there were no more accursed playing cards, and then of course there was the debate about whether, since I hadn't actually said the name Macbeth or quoted any lines, would I have to go outside, spin three times and spit?

Seemed the least I could do. I don't imagine the director was too amused, but I enjoyed it. And now I offer it here. Question for discussion: was I an ass for interrupting an important dress rehearsal, or was it Gary's fault for overreacting to a stupid little superstition? Discuss amongst yourselves.

Blogs Within Blogs

It's worth mentioning that the Alien has now spawned its own blog here. Must be seen to be fully appreciated, so go on and take a look; I'll wait here till you come back.

There now, wasn't that fun?

I'm typing on my new Final Cut keyboard, which is a pretty cool device: colored keycaps preprinted with all the keyboard shortcuts to use Final Cut effectively, plus a shuttle/jog wheel built in. It also has the normal letters and numbers where they ought to be, but since I'm a good touch-typist I don't really need those anymore, and I can keep the Final Cut keyboard as my permanent keyboard. Now if only the driver for said keyboard didn't keep crashing my computer, I would be very much happified.

My back hurts like crazy. It's been hurting for weeks, and I have no idea why because I'm one of those guys who won't go to the doctor till, you know, my spine starts breaking through the skin or something. There's someone else I know with back pain who was telling me today how much her chiropractor helped last night, and I thought to myself, "Hey, wow, my back isn't hurting too much right now. Great, it must be getting better at last."

And then by nightfall I was lying flat on my back in front of the TV because that was the only position I could stand. So it goes.

What is This Stuff?

The Final Cut learning process continues.

Our most recent Alien piece is almost done (and is not yet available online as this one has a different, secret purpose). It's taking much longer than the others for a whole host of reasons: the reconceptualization of the piece which required reshoots, then a day of reediting the piece itself, then I went and experimented with using LiveType to do the end titles before discovering that Final Cut has some Boris titling filters already included in the package that would have handled our simple titles very easily. Once Marc saw the end titles there was some rejiggering of the whole piece, which we then burned onto four DVDs so we could distribute them to our people.

And only after burning the DVDs, as we looked at the piece on my TV set, did I realize that yeah, when editors say that the image on your computer monitor looks a lot different from what will be on a TV screen, they're absolutely right. It's a huge difference. And one of the things I didn't notice at all on the computer screen is that on a TV, the MiniDV footage we shot really obviously looks like video.

I first started to learn the Final Cut software itself, then got just far enough in to feel mildly comfortable with the interface, then I started playing around with LiveType. Now we're into what are called "film look" filters, designed to make video look, as you'd guess, more like film. But in order to understand why video looks like video, and why film looks like film, you have to start learning about interlacing and why it works the way it does, and why the 30 frames per second of video are so different from the 24 frames per second of film, and how you have to change things so that the one will look like the other. (There's a pretty decent explanation of a lot of this here.)

But filters don't come cheap, at least not by my standards of cheap. Boris's Continuum package looked great, but cost $795. Marc and I found the Digital Film Labs package for $295 and spent the night playing around with their filters in demo mode. Next I went on Apple's message boards for Final Cut Pro, where I found plenty of people asking some of the same questions I am. Eventually I came across numerous references to the Nattress plug-ins as being particularly great, and extra-great because they only cost $100. I ran the de-interlacing filter and sure enough, there it was: a film look began to emerge. A little more playing around with grain and diffusion, and now we had something we could work with. When was the last time the cheapest product turned out to be one of the best?

So one thing leads to another, and I learn a little bit more about the process only to learn how many more things I need to learn. Because even though I think I've found a good set of film-look filters, I also realize that I need to have what's called an NTSC monitor on my desk next to the computer display, so that I can always have a real tube image to look at for a true idea of what our footage will look like. But these monitors aren't cheap--$500 on Craigs List is the cheapest I've found so far--and then you get into questions about which kind of monitor is best, and it just all turns into one big muddle very fast.

But having a monitor sure would save me from having to burn a DVD every time I want to see how a project looks.

The Creative Process

Okay, back to my Beaudry script. As I wrote a few days ago, the script began with my asking the question "What if a white guy and a black guy who share the same last name were to meet each other?" It was a moment I didn't experience, but the question itself was interesting--particularly if the name is rare enough that most people who bear it can be safely assumed to be closely connected, like Toombs. Why did I pick the name Beaudry? I liked the Frenchness of it--the history I concocted has the Beaudrys arriving during the Revolution with Lafayette--but I was also working downtown at the time, and the cheapo parking lot I found was bordered on one side by Beaudry Avenue. So there you go: a name. (Betcha dollars to doughnuts that the Bundys of Married With Children were named for the street in West L.A.)

But that was a couple years ago. Since then, the story has kept evolving, often in major ways. The first take on it was co-written with Marc Rosenbush and more directly reflected the circumstances of the idea's inception, as a couple of actors named Beaudry ended up together in the cast of a touring production of Beckett's Endgame. (That's how you can tell Marc was involved--Endgame is his obsession. But it's a great thing to be obsessed over, and the themes of the play worked rather well with our story.) Then I decided that I really needed to explore this family-related idea on my own, so I did the next version myself.

This time it became a tragedy, in which racial bias and simple misunderstandings cost a man his son and his soul. There were nice parts to this treatment, but I couldn't escape the feeling that variations on that story have already been told often enough, and that the central idea got shoved to the side for a traditional racial drama. "It should be a road movie," Marc suggested, picking up on one of the elements of our original attempt at the script, and it made some sense: get these two guys stuck in a car together, and you've got an inescapable situation where their problems would have to come to the fore.

Now, of course, there were structural problems: for a screenplay, you would really have to get these guys on the road together by the end of the first act, which really isn't a long time at all (only about twenty minutes), during which we had to be introduced to both characters, have them meet, establish their antagonism, then find a way to get them both in a car together, driving somewhere that would be relevant to the story. Not so easy; my first several tries at this took fully half the script just to get them together.

But films can be marvels of economy. I watched Jane Campion's Holy Smoke and was amazed at how quickly the first act moves along: Kate Winslet's character is introduced already on her trip to India, and her discovery of and interest in the cult happens in just a couple of minutes, almost entirely without dialogue. Inspired, I went back for another pass. The final crucial story element was the addition of a third character: a young black woman, Samuel's cousin, who would go on the road trip with the other two men and develop a difficult romantic relationship with the white character, Whit. (Why is he called Whit? I honestly can't remember; but I'm pretty sure it's not because the name is "White" with the e left off. I pretty much pick a name out of the air and go with the first one that comes to me.)

A script has a three-act structure; now I had a three-legged character structure as well. Things started to work, and I was able to get everyone on the road together by page 25. The most recent draft was critiqued by Marc and then by Buffie Groves when she was here, and as always Buffie was just brilliant. She pointed me toward an examination of Whit's need to find nobility in his life by claiming a famous ancestor; then Samuel and Elise, who are also connected to this famous ancestor, tell him what the man was really like, and Whit is forced to find his own nobility on his own terms.

So that's what I'm doing now, hoping very much that this will be the last major revision. But as Marc points out, every time I do one of these I hand it to people saying "Okay, now it's finished!" In this way, years have passed of constant disappointment because the damn thing never manages to be finished.

"This is John, speaking to you with his voice."

So said John Lennon in a typically pithy Christmas hello to the Beatles' fans, in 1963 or 1964. I had been planning to write about the voiceover world and my classes at Kalmenson & Kalmenson, but then the John Lennon line occurred to me and I would really rather talk about the Beatles, who saved me from disco.

I turned 12 in 1977, the year Saturday Night Fever came out. I had mostly avoided music, probably in reaction to all the hippies around me when I was a kid who thought music was gonna save the world. But at the age of 11/12, my inherent love of music started to assert itself anyway--and suddenly, most of what was out there in the popular culture was disco, thanks to that damned Travolta movie. I turned my radio to the station the other kids listened to, and started tapping my feet to Donna Summer and Yvonne Elliman and the Bee Gees. But my mom--the hippie herself--decided, quietly, that this just would not do. So without saying why she was doing it, she started playing her own music much more than usual, in the hope that something would snag my attention.

She had original LP pressings of Revolver, Let It Be and Abbey Road. She also had jazz and classical and all sorts of classic rock bands, but it was those three albums that did the trick. I can still remember getting ready to leave for school one morning with Abbey Road just beginning. The first track is "Come Together," and although I'd heard the song before, this time the lyrics started to sink in. "He got hair down to his knees / Hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease." I was at the door, the big sliding door at the back of the house, and I stopped cold. "What does that mean?" I asked my mother. She didn't know either, but it didn't matter. And just like that, something crucial was starting to happen inside my head.

It wasn't just a matter of learning to love the "right" kind of music. (In the past couple years I've been picking up, through iTunes, all sorts of "inconsequential" music just because I liked it--and when Entertainment Weekly recently sent me an 80s CD with music by the likes of Spandau Ballet, Wang Chung and Culture Club, I was secretly delighted. The music is fun, and listening to a song just because it's fun is perfectly okay.

But the Beatles, they turned my head right around. In particular, the way they broke rules, musically and lyrically, became terribly significant to me. What, after all, did those words in "Come Together" mean? I soon decided that it didn't actually matter--but the fact that John could write that way, the free-form beauty of what he created, mattered a whole lot. (It also helped that on that particular song the Beatles' rhythm section hits its apex: the way Ringo's drumming interacts with Paul's bass is still, hundreds if not thousands of listens later, utterly amazing.) At around the same time I discovered the equally free-form brilliance of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and just like that my aesthetic sensibility was formed.

Ever hear Cleese's "Word Association" piece? It appears on the Matching Tie and Handkerchief record, and begins "Tonight's the night I shall be talking about of flu the subject of word association football," and continues on in that vein for two delightful minutes. (If you go to the Amazon page linked above, you will find an enthusiastic review I wrote five years ago.) It didn't take long before I had found my way to James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, and then I wrote a free-form novel called Thereby Hangs a Tale, but that's a tale for another day.

John is gone, and so is George, and that still startles me when I think of it because their work is still so present in my life. I bought a CD player in the mid-eighties specifically so I could listen to Beatlemusic, then discovered that their records weren't yet out on CD. When the first four were finally released, I hit the stores that day and snapped them up. I now have recordings of pretty much everything the Beatles ever even thought about recording, and I know for sure that when the day comes that I'm lying on my deathbed, my instructions will be simple: hold my hand and put on Abbey Road, and let me pass away happy.

What's in a Name

Oh man do I hate rewriting. It's one of the things I only really discovered a couple years ago: when I'm doing the first draft of something, it's free-form and exciting, and I never outline, I just start putting words down and they just kinda go. Word leads to word, thought leads to thought, I don't know how it works and I don't want to.

The result, however, was always a bit of a mess (structurally most of all). A creative mess to be sure, but a mess. It was hard enough dealing with the mess when I was working on a novel or a short story; but in a screenplay, where everything is about structure, it becomes a gigantic problem.

Thus, Beaudry. The genesis of the idea came from Marc Rosenbush, when we were both working with the Splinter Group Theatre in Chicago. (Splinter Group has since morphed into Irish Rep, and is still run by our old friend Matt O'Brien.) While Marc and I were working on the Beckett stuff (it's what Splinter Group was known for, back then), the theatre had a touring children's production of a Harriet Tubman piece going. One of the actors they hired was named Horace Toombs, and he was a young black actor. I never actually met him, but as soon as I hear the name Toombs associated with any black people I know there's a fairly high likelihood that their family was once owned by my family.

Which of course brings up who my family is and was. Now we don't know for sure, but my great-grandmother (whose stories always turn out to be essentially true, even if the details have, shall we say, drifted) always said that we Toombses were related to Robert Augustus Toombs, the first Secretary of State for the Confederacy. We are thus about as classically Southern as it's possible to be--Toombs's father, also a Robert, was a major during the Revolution, and we've lived in the South for at least three hundred years. And yes, they owned slaves.

As I said, we've never proved the connection to these famous Toombses, but I tend to assume that it's true. (Genealogical research has hit a dead end with a widow named Sallie Toombs, my great-great-great grandmother, listed as a widow in the 1880 Census in Richmond, Virginia--if anyone has any info on her, hey, I'm listening.) And although it's not always true that slaves automatically took the last names of their masters, still it did happen, and it seems safe to assume that black people bearing my last name have that name for the obvious reason.

So, back to Horace Toombs. Like I said, I never met him. But Marc was fascinated. "That would make a great story," he said, "if you two met." And so a script was born.

Or rather, six scripts were born, because that's how many times I've tried to crack this damn thing. And I'm running out of time, so I'll have to pick this up later.

Busy-Ness

The Final Cut Pro education continues. The real tutorial is on the second disk; the first disk is really just a broad, broad overview. So by following the step-by-step .pdf file and using their media, I have successfully put together my first little 30-second promo piece. Little acorns, doncha know. A couple times the program didn't respond quite how the tutorial said it would; once I was able to work my way around the problem, once I wasn't. So it goes. Right now I'm focusing on LiveType, the titling program, in order to finish off the current Alien project--I'm told LiveType files can be used in iMovie, which is a relief since iMovie's titling is the most limited aspect of that program. But I still feel, when using the program, as if I'm embroidering lace with a harpoon.

And I must mention a truly bad movie I watched last night: He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not. It starred the utterly adorable Audrey Tautou and I fully expected to enjoy it; and for about the first forty minutes, I did. Then there is a rather clever little cinematic trick, and the whole thing kinda spins right around and becomes a different movie. Which is exactly where things go wrong--because the kind of movie it becomes is one of those idiotic Hollywood thrillers that doesn't make even the least bit of sense, relying on coincidence and character stupidity to achieve its belabored effects. And just because it's French doesn't make it good. (I mean come on: don't you think a cardiologist would have some idea where the human heart is while performing CPR? And then the orderly at the end, blithely missing the significance of--well, if you see the movie you'll know what I mean.) And while I liked the idea of casting Tautou against type, it wasn't nearly enough. A bad, bad movie--and I don't say that just because I was in a bad mood last night, though this "entertainment" sure didn't help.

Yep. Enough talk. Back to work.