The Nukular Nightmare

What is to be done about Iran? I'll say it up front: I don't know. It's a big, tough, horrifying problem, and I don't have any answers. But there is one thing I know for sure: attacking them with nukes would be wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

Seymour Hersh, at the New Yorker, filed an article the other day laying out Bush administration plans for military strikes against Iran, in order to, as a former defense official told Hersh, "'humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.'" But this former defense official then added, “'I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, "What are they smoking?"'" And then there was this paragraph:

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon...against underground nuclear sites.... The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.

Hersh is one of the great reporters, with impeccable sources, which is why he infuriates the Bush administration--he keeps saying in public things they want to keep very, very private. So when Sy Hersh writes that the Pentagon is considering tactical nuclear strikes on Iran, I have to take such an allegation seriously.

As I said up front, I don't know what the right solution is to the Iran problem. I have a hard time believing we're even capable of military action anywhere else in the world right now; and if we're fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, wouldn't we all be forced to admit, finally, that our leaders have engaged in a new Crusade against the Muslim world?

There is a point to be made that, in the event air strikes are in fact called for (a point I am not yet willing to concede), the tactical difficulty of striking a target deeply buried under rock and concrete is daunting, and that a nuclear device might be the only weapon capable of penetrating deeply enough to be truly effective. But there is a bigger question that the Pentagon does not seem to be considering: the moral question.

After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the use of nuclear weapons became the new Rubicon, the barrier that, once crossed, changes everything. MAD was mad, but it also seems to be effective. A nuclear strike became the one place no one dared to go, understanding that even if a military victory resulted, the loss of moral authority would be total and irreversible. Put it this way: if the United States should ever use a nuclear device in any Islamic country, we can forget about winning over any hearts and minds in the region for the next century at least. So anyone who thinks that such a strike in Iran would "lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government" is suffering the worst kind of delusion and needs to be replaced in his job immediately.

MoveOn.org has started an online petition urging our legislators to make very clear their opposition to this nonsense. I don't sign everything that MoveOn sends me, but for this one there was no hesitation. Here's hoping it does some kind of good, somehow.

(Oh, and by the way: I'm fairly convinced that President Bush's mispronunciation of "nukular" is deliberate, a down-home touch from the mind of Karl Rove. Because they really do think that little of us.)

This Plus That

Some random stuff, in no particular order:

Rental madness

In last Friday's Variety, there was a "Weekend" article declaring "renting is the new luxury." A local mortgage banker was interviewed about the approximately $450 per month she spends renting purses from a company called Bag Borrow or Steal, in which she said "What I'm renting my Gucci purse for now, I could buy it for in about five months. But it's not like I can't afford to buy what I want. I just don't want to make a commitment right now."

To a purse? I am not one of those who like to make fun of "Hollywood types," in fact I go out of my way to assert the basic normalcy and decency of the vast majority of people who live here. But come on, you can't commit to an effin' purse? Geez, people, you sure do make this hard.

No entiendo cordura

A quick note on the latest in the immigration wars: as CNN reports, the Senate is all wet. Not that I was completely happy with their compromise bill, so maybe when (if) they get back to it, it'll be a better bill that finally passes--but come on, this is the Senate we're talking about. But still, it was the Congress that raised this whole foofaraw in the first place; if they now allow it to languish, it will become abundantly clear that conservatives only brought up the matter to score political points about how tough-minded they are, not because they actually wanted to, you know, accomplish something. In an election year.

(Actually, they did accomplish something, which as usual is exactly the opposite of what they had intended: they awoke the sleeping giant. No one will soon forget the peaceful mass demonstrations of the past few weeks, and I suspect that more than a few Congressmen will be hearing from their Latino constituents come election day.)

Hey Bob, what've you been up to?

Gosh, I sure am glad you asked. Trouble is, I can't really talk about anything right now. Beaudry is in good shape and will soon get better, Veils is moving along nicely, and the rest of it is still secret--including something new that is super-duper-secret.

But hey, the weather is terrific on this Spring day in L.A., I'm reading an interesting book someone handed me by Bruce Feiler about Abraham and his place in three of the world's major religions, and the recent film of Pride and Prejudice was really surprisingly good. Life, it ain't so bad.

Cry Foul

Okay, one more thing about the immigration issue.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, whose district is just south of me in Orange County, said this the other day, as reported by Bill Kristol of all people: he "decried the Senate's guest worker proposal as 'the foul odor that's coming out of the United States Senate.' After all, he explained, if illegal aliens who do many farm jobs were deported, 'the millions of young men who are prisoners around our country can pick the fruits and vegetables. I say, let the prisoners pick the fruits.'"

Yep, now there's a plan. And if we make being in the country without documentation a felony, as the House's bill proposes, why then we can catch those immigrants, toss them in prison, and then we get the benefit of their labor anyway! It's perfect!

Rep. Rohrabacher was on Real Time With Bill Maher tonight, bloviating that immigrants depress the wages of poor Americans by working for below the minimum wage. He might have a point if he wasn't simultaneously extolling this idiotic "let the prisoners pick the fruits" idea, which would simply replace the below-minimum-wage immigrants with below-minimum-wage prisoners (who I believe get something like twenty cents per hour). So, then, it's not really about protecting poor Americans, and if it's not that, then what do you think he's really concerned about?

Also on Bill Maher's show tonight: Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who noted that demographically, in X number of years (sorry, a transcript isn't available yet) Hispanics will be the majority population in the United States. You don't suppose that may be what gives Rep. Rohrabacher the heebie-jeebies, do ya?

La Migra, Part Two

What a huge subject this has turned out to be--I was so struck by the demonstrations last weekend that I felt compelled to blog about immigration, then quickly realized how little I know about it, and now I'm overwhelmed by the extent and the complexity of the problem. I'm half-tempted to just collect a bunch of quotes from different sources and let them speak for themselves, but since when have I ever allowed something to just speak for itself?

The first thing I did was to speak to a Latina friend of mine, a lawyer who is Cuban-born and married to a Mexican. She was the one who first told me about the bracero program, which in a nutshell was a twenty-year attempt to codify and regulate immigration practices. Mexican citizens were, or so I'm told, invited to do agricultural work in the U.S. for six-month stretches, then they would return to Mexico and, at some point, would be allowed back in for another six months. As my Latina friend put it, this was on the whole a pretty good program: Mexican workers were paid better than they would be at home, we got the benefit of cheap labor and could track who was coming and going, and the workers didn't get trapped in an alien country living in impoverished conditions. Not a perfect situation, but there was benefit on both sides.

The key assertion my Latina friend makes (I was tempted to use an acronym for "my Latina friend," but MLF already stands for something else and I just ain't goin' there) is that for the most part, Mexican workers don't actually want to live in the United States, they want to stay in Mexico. Where they grew up, where their extended families are, and so forth. The bracero program, she said, was therefore welcome: workers came by themselves for that six-month span rather than dragging their whole families with them over the border because they never knew when they might be able to get home again, if ever. This is something I haven't seen covered anywhere else: every commentary, article or editorial I've read seems to assume that all those workers would, as a matter of course, wish to remain in the United States. If my Latina friend is correct, that may be an overstatement.

Now, she admitted that there were abuses of bracero, "but then there will always be abuses of any program." Which is, of course, true. But the advantages are great, she said: since you are documenting who is coming and going, then obviously it becomes easier (though still not easy) to filter out the potential terrorists; plus, if you don't have that constant stream of people sneaking over the border, then any terrorists trying to sneak over the border stand out and are more easily caught. Good and good.

It all seems fairly reasonable (though it would be even better if there were some wage guarantees, and means of enforcing that employers treat their workers as they should). So it was quite a surprise to realize that President Bush's guest worker program sounds quite a lot like the old bracero program, because the idea of George Bush proposing anything sensible is, you know, absurd. And yet there it was, indisputably. It became one of those moments when I happily realized that I'm not one of those blinkered partisans: with perfect ease, I found myself in agreement with the President and accepted it. Okay-doke, easy as that.

Where I disagree is on this whole "amnesty" question. (For one thing, as the New York Times points out, it isn't amnesty.) Because when it comes right down to it, I firmly believe that if someone is contributing to the economic growth of the nation, that person ought to have the right to apply for citizenship if he wishes--to participate in the advantages of that growth. As my Latina friend suggests, maybe a lot of the workers really don't want to stay here, they just want to make good money and go home--but for those who want to stay, they should be entitled to ask. The process should be as hard as it is for anyone, I'm not suggesting that special privileges be accorded; but it just seems unassailably fair, inarguably American, that someone whose labor makes our lives better should be afforded the chance to make their own life better as well.

And now I'm out of time, and can't even comment on people like The National Review's Mark Krikorian, who says "What we’re seeing in the streets is a naked assertion of power by outsiders against the American nation. They demand that we comply with their wishes and submit our immigration policies for their approval, and implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met." That's the sort of thing that just makes me mad, but as I said, I'm out of time. Maybe later.

La Migra, Part One

So half a million people took to the streets of Los Angeles over the weekend to protest Congressional efforts to further restrict and criminalize illegal immigration; both Friday and Monday, students from L.A.-area schools walked out of classes and marched as well, including groups that went to City Hall to talk with Mayor Villaraigosa. In a democracy, numbers that big are hard to ignore, and the Senate panel contemplating these matters took serious notice. Good for them.

As a child of the Sixties, I have a visceral reaction to the sight of such completely peaceful mass protests: unalloyed delight. This right here, this is democracy in action. It is The People, making damn sure their voice is heard past all the baffles and blinders of official Washington. The marches instantly put me on the side of the protesters, and it took a couple days for me to be able to sit back and look at the whole issue from a more dispassionate perspective.

First off: there is, alas, no denying that there already exists in the United States a large and economically crucial underclass of cheap labor. Historically, this is nothing new: first we had slaves, then we had sharecroppers who were basically the same slaves with a different name and some "rights" they were rarely allowed to exercise, and now we have illegal immigrants performing that work. If you want to buy cheap oranges at the grocery store, you absolutely depend on the labor of these migrant workers--the purchase of a carton of orange juice is, in effect, your sanction and subsidy of what was once called slave labor. (In fact, according to a recent Pew Hispanic Center report, the majority of unauthorized workers are employed in construction--that summer house you're building, for example.) Can we, in our greatness, stop exploting these people? Sure, but there will be consequences: the prices of a whole lot of things will rise sharply; a number of American businesses will fail; and the economy of Mexico would take a drastic hit and could well collapse entirely. (Because the Mexican immigrants send money back home, which goes a long way toward invigorating their home country's national economy.)

I have written before about my Russian friend Tanya Kolosova; after I brought her to the U.S., she applied for and was granted a student visa, and did some maid work to help bring in cash. She told me once that sending back $50 U.S. to her family in Russia every month amounted to far more than she could possibly earn living there at home, and the same is true for Mexican workers. The dollar is a potent thing in a lot of places, and that money heading home makes a crucial difference in the lives of an awful lot of Mexican families.

The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, created by former civil rights associates of Dr. King including Andrew Young, has put out a remarkable policy paper that summarizes the various issues far more effectively than I ever could. It is worth noting the very first bullet point of their executive summary:

On average, immigrants pay more in taxes each year than they use in government services, and these taxes fund programs like Social Security that strengthen and expand the middle class.

The essential argument for stricter immigration policies has always been that "these people" (there's a hint right there) are creating a drain on local governmental resources by, for example, demanding health care they can't pay for. But the DMI's research clearly demonstrates that the opposite is true, that their contributions to the tax base more than outweigh any strain on resources. Bear in mind that anything these workers purchase here in the U.S. comes with a sales tax, which they pay; and that those who have fake Social Security numbers are in fact paying income taxes into the system.

Are these workers illegal? Yes they are. I'm not trying to deny that at all. But nonetheless, we rely on them and they rely on us--there is benefit on both sides. So isn't it better to seek to legitimize their efforts? Instead, Congressional efforts through last week all seemed to be about criminalizing and demonizing. I roundly applaud Cardinal Mahoney for taking a very strong position against the idea of making a criminal out of anyone who gives aid to illegal immigrants, including churches: that idea was about as unAmerican as anything I've ever heard, downright disgraceful, and bravo to Cardinal Mahoney for flat-out promising to ignore any such law if enacted.

It was this sort of absurd overreaching that prompted the weekend's demonstrations and, happily, the Congress seems to have hastily backed off. So for now, there seems to be real improvement--but Senator Frist could still upset the apple cart by ignoring the committee's recommendations and substituting for the Senate's consideration a more punitive bill of his own. And if such a thing should actually pass, well I can't imagine that the resulting demonstrations would remain peaceful for long.

Next time: the bracero program; plus, in a sign of the Apocalypse, I find myself agreeing with President Bush. Yikes!

Coppers and Choppers

I was just winding down, thinking about going to bed after a pretty busy week. Sat down to watch an episode of My Name is Earl that I TiVod last night, but it was hard to hear the show on account of the helicopters whirring endlessly overhead. Eventually I put on some shoes and wandered outside to find out why in the world there was so much noise going on this late at night.

I found an LAPD motorcycle cop standing in the middle of the street, his bike blocking the road. Down at the intersection there was a cluster of people and more cops; and two police helicopters were circling, their spotlights stabbing the streets. The motorcycle cop told me that someone had been held up with a gun just down the road, and that they were looking for the bad dude with the gun. Officers, helicopters, dogs, everything, all out in force, and not about to relent until they found the guy. I thanked the officer, watched for another minute, and wandered back inside, behind my nice locked door.

Now, I take walks through this neighborhood all the time. And late-night walks are my favorite; almost never earlier than 9:30, and just Wednesday I walked home at one in the morning. I've never had a moment's trouble in all that walking around, and I guess now I know why. Apparently the LAPD believes in shock-and-awe policing: it's a fair bet that if they don't find the assailant tonight, that guy will think long and hard before coming back here again.

Kind of amazing, actually. I've never seen a police response this intense before; the liberal in me wonders whether parts of town that don't have quite as solid a tax base would get this sort of police turnout for a single robbery; and the part of me that wants to continue taking my nice safe walks at night is damned happy to have those choppers in the air.

I turned on the local news but there was nothing; I guess it's no big deal, citywide, just a neighborhood thing. Hope no one got hurt in the robbery, but I probably won't know anything more till I check the paper tomorrow. For now, I guess I just go to sleep and dream of dogs and police and the whirring of rotors in the air.

Molar! The Musical

Saturday night I'm lying there in bed, happily tired after my Cleesian excursion, and I thought that I felt something as my face pressed into the pillow. Digging a finger inside my cheek, running it along the gum, suddenly I really did feel something: a lump, right below the tooth that got worked on two weeks ago, and when I pressed on said lump it made me go "Yikes!" There was a metallic taste in my mouth, and I had noticed that the tooth seemed a little extra-sensitive to temperature. Plus, all along I had been feeling a stab of pressure any time I bit down on that tooth. I got out of bed, went to the computer, navigated to WebMD and looked at the list of symptoms for an abscess.

Then cursed and growled and went back to bed, but did not sleep.

As I turned it and turned it in my head, one thought gave me mild comfort: the location of that painful lump on the gum. When I got the fillings done, as you'll recall, I told Doc Gordon to "numb me the hell up," and he did. And after the novocaine wore off, the only spot that still hurt was where he had injected me with the needle that last time. For several days, that particular spot remained sore; and now there was a lump there. So maybe the needle had done something? Maybe some of the bacteria that live in the mouth had seen this lovely little tunnel and gone spelunking, causing an infection?

I went to see Dr. Gordon today, and here's the value of telling a doctor every symptom, no matter how weird: after describing everything else, I then said "And I could swear the tooth is up higher than it used to be." That turned out to be important.

He took a look, and as I tried to point out where the lump was, I realized it wasn't there anymore. There was a bit of mild tenderness, but it was hard to pinpoint exactly where. He poked me with a sharp instrument and it was no big deal; he took an x-ray and could no see abscess of any kind.

Our best guess? That two things were happening at once: (1) yes, something happened with the needle, but my immune system was already dealing with the infection, well enough that he didn't even see a need to prescribe antibiotics; and (2) my impression that the tooth was higher than it used to be indicated that in fact it was, so that every time I bit down it was getting compressed and, therefore, hurting. So he took his little drill, smoothed out the high spot, and the difference was much more dramatic than I would ever have expected. Go in peace, the doc said, and I did.

There's another lesson in all of this, though--eventually I will need a root canal. It's just one of those things that happen. Pain, it happens. And as you get older, it happens more. Muscle pain lingers longer (I got my first professional massage last week, and felt great for about a day, then it was back to normal). Your shoulder starts to hurt when you move it, and never stops. One day a simple fall will break something that had always been solid before. A hip will need replacing. A cold won't go away like it used to. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This stuff just happens. So at a certain point you have to just learn how to live with pain, to accept that it happens, and the longer you resist the harder it becomes to resist.

But enough with the life lessons. Let's just mention that I saw V For Vendetta last night and liked it a lot, and that now I'm going to get back to Beaudry and do some touch-up work before doing a reading/critique session with Marc and Buffie on Friday.

Not an Ocelot in Sight

It's no secret that the Monty Python crew are among my personal heroes. So when I heard that John Cleese was doing a California tour with a one-man show called Seven Ways to Skin an Ocelot, there was no question: I was going. And I took my compatriot and fellow Python-obsessive, Marc Rosenbush, as a late birthday present. (Marc enjoyed it so much that when our friend Buffie comes to town this week, he may take her down to Cleese's next performance in Long Beach.)

Quite a number of years ago, Cleese delivered a Rectorial Address to the students of St. Andrews, which is apparently a school somewhere on Earth. In it, he said:

I've always had the strongest dislike of public speeches of almost any kind. Why I should have this prejudice against public speaking I don't know. Perhaps, because many years ago I noticed that on pages of advertisement in newspapers, offers of tuition in the art of public speaking always seemed to be sandwiched between cures for stammering and blushing on one hand, and recommended treatments for haemorrhoids and nocturnal enuresis on the other. This association has remained so strongly in my mind that I think I may subconsciously assume that people speak in public only to compensate for the humiliating nature of their private lives.

Apparently he got over it. Or his private life has become so humiliating that he felt he had no choice but to go out in public and do some compensating. Certainly the dominant figure mentioned in his peroration is his mother, about whom he has nothing whatsoever nice to say--except to thank her for making his life so rotten that he had no choice but to become a comedian. Indeed, almost the entire show consisted of an onstage autobiography, moving more-or-less chronologically from birth in the stupefyingly dull "seaside resort" of Weston-Super-Mare through the Python days, Fawlty Towers, and on into the later career, with deliciously biting mentions of Fierce Creatures and poor Graham Chapman's boondoggle Yellowbeard. Now even I will readily admit that little of this was what you might call brilliant writing--it was wry, it had some bite, it was all consistently amusing, but little of it was out-of-the-park funny. (Two notable exceptions: a section in which he statistically analyzed how many members of the audience would die from various ailments, indicating with a flashlight how many rows would be done in by heart disease or car crashes; and the concluding section on how completely fucking hopeless the world is nowadays. Trust me, it was hysterical.) In short: it would be easy to look upon this show as one of those pieces that actors sometimes do, late in life when they don't have the energy for an all-out play, to pick up some money on the hustings. (Cary Grant died in the middle of one such tour.)

Not that it matters. I've said for years that Cleese is one of the funniest men on the planet, and the fact that he was doing ordinary material only demonstrated how astonishingly good his comedic skills are. Of course, something else might be true: since I've spent so many years watching and rewatching his work, listening to the records, buying and reading the script books, imitating his cadences and his timing, I'm probably primed to respond positively to anything he does. I might, in fact, laugh like crazy at his reading of a phone book. So perhaps I'm not the best person to judge; but if I'm not, then neither was anyone else in the crowd, because everyone seemed to be having a pretty great time.

There was a moment when Cleese did an audience read-along, in which we all read off a screen the words we might say if we were to meet him in person one day (so that, if we ever do actually meet him, we won't have to bother him by saying any of it). Naturally it all turns nasty, so that we ended up collectively saying some quite rude things as he affected shock and dismay. But I realized during the show that he was quite right--having seen this show, if I ever were to meet the man, the sorts of questions I would be inclined to ask were pretty much covered during the show (which included a Q&A session afterward). It's like meeting the man, and getting everything I could want from him, without having met him. Nice for me, and I'm sure delightful for him. Happy happy on both sides.

Next time: That Pesky Molar, Part Two. In which my delightful buzz after the Cleese performance went right down the tubes.

Funny Scary Sad Maybe

Funny Scary

This link is to a very funny flash animation, sponsored by the ACLU. It's funny and it's scary; scary because it's true, and funny because it's scary (laughter being, after all, the shock of recognition). It wouldn't take much for this animation to move from satire to documentary.

Sad Maybe

Senator Russell Feingold on Monday introduced a resolution in the Senate, calling for the censure of President Bush over the NSA's illegal wiretapping. This drew the expected response from Republicans; but, sadly, it has also drawn no support whatsoever from Feingold's fellow Democrats. (Or rather, non-support support: a condescending indulgence, as if the other Senators are older and wiser, while Sen. Feingold is too naive to know any better.)

Me, I think it's a pretty good idea. I am already on record as opposing impeachment proceedings against the President, and that opinion hasn't changed; but censure is a good idea, a proportional response if you will, calling out the President on his illegal activities without the wrenching upset of impeachment. It has no practical value but it would have some political impact, and would (ideally) represent a clear statement that presidents must observe the rule of law.

(Of course you know how the argument will run: eventually, after years of court fights, the NSA's warrantless domestic wiretapping will in fact be ruled unconstitutional; but because the President ran the program through the White House counsel's office, he has his cover already in place: his lawyers may have been adjudged wrong, but proving they acted in bad faith is nearly impossible, and since the President acted on advice of counsel he cannot be held officially culpable. That, practically speaking, is why impeachment will never work; it also suggests that, with someone sufficiently pliable as White House counsel--and Harriet Myers is certainly that--a president can essentially break any law he wants and then he claims he did so in good faith, on advice of counsel. This is particularly pernicious, and I see no way of stopping it.)

The censure resolution will probably fail, which is sad; but it has made me sit up and take notice of Senator Feingold, and I find him to be, in the 2008 presidental sweepstakes, a serious Maybe. Republicans immediately suggested that his censure resolution was a stunt to improve his presidential aspirations; if it was, it worked. But his history suggests that all along he has been a maverick following his own conscience, frequently voting against the Democratic majority, making his censure resolution seem completely in keeping with the character of the man. Obviously it's a long, long way till the 2008 elections, and there are other Maybes to consider, Wesley Clark and Joe Biden in particular. (Even Al Gore, if he can be induced to try again.) But Sen. Feingold seems immune to the sort of pandering that has so infected Hillary Clinton of late, and in my book that stands as a huge plus in his column.

Hey, I Know an Oscar Winner!

Way the hell back in third grade, I was in some dopey play in which I had only one line ("I am at the back of the bus!"), standing behind a painted cardboard bus. Rather than print up programs, at the end of the play they decided to simply have the principal take center stage, read off the characters' names, and then whoever played that part would step forward, take a bow, and exit through the audience. In no time at all, the principal got to my character. "Mr. Brown," she said, and nothing happened. I stood there. "Mr. Brown," she said again (having no idea who had played the part), and still I stood there. In my head I was thinking, and this is absolutely true, "I wonder who this idiot is who played Mr. Brown? It can't be me, I played Mr. Brown. (One, two, three.) Oh, shit!" Then, after all that time, I had to step forward and exit through the audience as absolutely everybody thought "Geez, what a maroon!" But sometimes the brain just misses something really incredibly obvious, what can I say?

Marc Rosenbush called me this afternoon and said "Why didn't you tell me Corinne won an Oscar?" and I suddenly felt just as I had in third grade. See, Marc was on a plane Sunday night so he didn't see the Oscar ceremonies, but I did, and when he called later I told him the major winners. But I didn't tell him Corinne was one of the winners because I simply hadn't noticed.

Here's a picture of what I saw but did not register:


That's director Eric Simonson on the left, and producer Corinne Marrinan on the right, clutching her Oscar. They won for Best Documentary Short, for A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin (which I have not yet seen). Eric Simonson is a noted stage director, a Tony nominee some years ago, and I met him once, maybe twice back in Chicago. So on the Oscars, when Eric's name was called I immediately said "Wait a second, is that the same Eric Simonson?" Because the name is just common enough that I couldn't be sure. And then when they won, and went up onstage, I was still stuck in trying to figure out if that Eric Simonson was the same Eric Simonson from Chicago. He looked like him, but I still wasn't entirely sure. This process was so absorbing that I completely failed to notice that the person standing next to him, whose name had also been called, was someone who in fact I do know.

It's not that I know Corinne all that well--for a while she dated my friend Marc Vann, who is also a Chicago guy, so I had met Corinne several times through him, plus Marc Rosenbush hired her to stage manage the big Beckett festival that Splinter Group mounted ten years ago. I last saw Corinne when she and Marc Vann held a joint birthday party here in L.A., maybe two years ago. But she is an absolute gem, I always liked her plenty, and since her name is of course far more distinctive than Eric Simonson's, how on earth did I completely fail to notice her even when she was standing up there on international TV?

Because I once played Mr. Brown, that's why.

Congratulations to Corinne. Very richly deserved.

Finished It's Finished

The script for Beaudry is done. Or rather, the script for Beaudry 7.0 is done. And believe me, there will be a Beaudry 7.1, and probably a 7.2, etc., before I can start sending it out to agents. Because, as George Lucas wisely noted, "Films aren't released, they escape," and the same is true of a screenplay--given my druthers, I could tinker with this thing for years to come. But at a certain point it will start screaming at me to send it out into the world, and I will do so.

I already know there are some structural problems. The midpoint of the script is on page 60, but the script in toto is only 104 pages. What that reflects is probably my stage background: your first act will almost always be longer than your second act. Build to a peak, send the audience out to get liquored up, and then drive drive drive toward the conclusion. The Beaudry script perfectly reflects that kind of thinking (except that the audience won't be sent out for intermission): once a certain turning point is reached, everything starts to move very fast indeed.

Which works for me, but the trick comes in remembering that the thing first has to be sold, and there are, beyond question, lots and lots of readers in town whose first response to any new script is to open it to page 12, then page 24 or 25, then to page 55, and so forth. They want to see big events happening on those pages; they want the assurance that the script conforms to the standard structure and is, therefore, professional enough to merit their time. If I fail to meet that test, it is not just possible but likely that no matter whatever the other merits of the script, it will get tossed away.

So there's work still to be done. But considering that this version 7.0 represented probably a 75% rewrite, there came a point when I just needed to let the story find its groove and thrash itself out. I wrote over twenty pages in the last two days--more than 4,000 words. Most of that came very fast--I had earlier sketched out what would happen, from scene to scene, and then it was a matter of just sinking into it and letting it happen. I like what I've got, quite a bit, but I've said that before with prior versions of this script. (Particularly version 6.0, the one that got a 75% rewrite.)

So the trick now is to just let it sit for a few days, then read the whole thing and see if any structural solutions offer themselves. Then I have people read it, particularly some wise friends who have read previous drafts, and hear what they have to say, and make those changes. After that? Maybe get a bunch of actors together for a formal reading, some more changes, and then--then, it will be time to start sending to agents.

Should only be a matter of a couple more months, then, before I can do that. My goal this year, of getting an agent and selling a script, is reasonably on track. A fine day for me, then, to happily and proudly proclaim that it's finished.

Now, on to the next.

That Pesky Molar

For months now, I've been having trouble with a tooth, a molar on the right lower jaw. Biting down, I would often feel a sharp stab of pain. For a while, I pretended it wasn't a big deal. But at some point the words "root canal" took up residence in my head, and I went even further into denial. Because I am, to put it mildly, a great big chicken when it comes to dental work. But the stabs of pain kept coming; and then I started having a more or less constant taste of metal in my mouth.

Last August, I had a little filling done, and I worked up my courage and asked the dentist to take a look at that pesky molar. He said that it seemed an old silver filling was degrading, and that a little slot may have opened up through which a new cavity might be forming. I screwed my courage up a little further and asked whether it would need a root canal. "I don't expect so," he said--but then said further that he couldn't be sure till he drilled out the old filling and took a look.

And then, right there, he said that as long as he was doing the one little filling, he could go ahead and take care of the molar as well. I just couldn't do it. One filling (on the other side of the mouth) was bad enough; I simply couldn't handle any more that day. Knowing that it was stupid to let the problem linger, I let the problem linger.

Last night, Monday evening, I went back and dealt with it. All these months I kept trying to hold onto my dentist's assertion that he "didn't expect" my problem to require a root canal, but of course what I really obsessed over was his uncertainty on that score. Besides, having given the problem another six-plus months to get worse, even if it wasn't that bad before, surely it would be now. All through the weekend I kept a running countdown--not of the days and hours till the appointment was to begin, but of that moment when the appointment would be past. I can't think of a time when I have so longed for it to be Tuesday.

And after all that? It wasn't really a big deal. I asked my dentist (the marvelous Randall Gordon, DDS) to "numb the hell out of me." He injected me once with the novocaine and the effect was only so-so. "Really," I said to him. "I don't care if I can't eat till tomorrow." So he did two more injections, and then he went to work.

You know, every once in a while I lament that I was born in the wrong century. I should have been born during the Enlightement, when the world actually cared about learning and accomplishment. When Willoughby makes Kate Winslet's character swoon in Sense and Sensibility because he carries along a little volume of Shakespeare, I lament all over again that I was born in a time when that would just seem kinda gay. But whenever I go to the dentist, I exult in the wonders of the year 2006, and would not wish to be anywhere else. Novocaine, man, that's some of the best stuff on earth!

(Plumbing, too. Modern toilets and hot showers are pretty damn great.)

Dr. Gordon went at that tooth with a vengeance; drilled out the three fillings that had accumulated over the years, and replaced them with some material that is colored the same as my tooth, so it even looks better than it did. (That must be an L.A. thing, because I didn't ask for it, he just did it.) I walked home through the rain feeling completely thrilled--but also more than a little shocked that it really was over.

Turns out I really couldn't eat till the next day--by 10:00 p.m. the numbness had only just begun to subside, enough that I could manage some cottage cheese, and that was my dinner for the night. With the numbness gone there came some pain, because he really had been grinding away at that tooth for a while, but I took an Advil and went to bed and by morning it was mostly all better.

And now it's all done, and I have nothing more to worry about. Which only means this: now I will sit there dreading what the next thing will be. This is how a hypochondriac is born, isn't it?

Can't Live Without iTunes

I never thought I would listen to music on the computer. It offended the purist in me: compressed files by definition lose part of the music, and after spending money on a decent stereo why on earth would I then throw all that aside to listen to music on cheap computer speakers?

Turns out convenience is everything. And being able to turn on iTunes, set it to Shuffle, and have it play for the next three weeks without repeating a track is so appealing that all other questions became irrelevant. Then I found music blogs that offered free legal downloads, to help keep me current with new music, and I even became a downloader. Another thing I never thought I'd be. Life is long, and full of surprises.

Here, apropos of nothing at all, are the last ten songs, picked by iTunes entirely at random from the 7,598 tracks I own, that have played this morning:

Beatles, "Please Please Me"
Steve Miller Band, "True Fine Love"
The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"
Janis Joplin, "Tell Mamma"
Lou Reed, "Wild Child"
Arctic Monkeys, "Knock a Door Run"
Diane Cluck, "Hover Not"
Peter Gabriel, "The Promise of Shadows"
Paul Simon, "Can't Run But"
U2, "Surrender"

And Billie Holiday is playing right now, singing "I Wished on the Moon," a song composed partly by Dorothy Parker, of all people. The thing that fascinates is me is trying to find patterns in the supposedly-random Shuffling of my music, but I suspect that has more to do with how I look for patterns in everything, and not with the algorithms that randomize my music files.

Okay. Things to do, so off I go.

Not About Politics

A friend of mine was looking over the blog recently (there's one!) and said that she liked the pictures, which reminded me that I haven't put up any pictures in a long time. So here, for no other reason than that, is one from Alaska:



And to accompany it, a wee story about those halcyon Alaska days of yore. I took the picture about ten years ago, in Glacier Bay, on a trip with the family; but for me it was a return. When I was only a few months old, my dad needed a good job, and his Navy credentials hadn't helped as much as he'd hoped. But then RCA hired him for a very good job--trouble was, it was way deep in Alaska. Eighty miles southwest of Fairbanks, to be specific, deep in the interior, at the Clear Air Force Base. He was hired to service radar terminals watching for those pesky Soviet missiles that never came, so we piled everything we owned (and by we I mean my parents, because I was, as I said, a little young to be piling things other than poop) into and on top of a VW bug, and took off--for New Jersey. (Training first, for a couple months.) After that, then we drove on to Alaska. I leave it to you to decide whether Alaska or Jersey is the wilder place.

(And by the way: if you remember what the VW bug was shaped like, let me just say that strapping a big wooden toy chest filled with your stuff on top of the car doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore when you're going up a very steep hill, you know what I'm saying?)

We were there for a year and a half, all those miles away from Fairbanks, which is where the nearest grocery store was. So you shopped once a month and bought a lot of powdered milk. There was a river between here and there, and no bridge, only a ferry in the summer or a place to drive across the ice in the winter; so if the ice was either forming or breaking up, you did not get across the river for a while and had better hope you bought enough food the last time you went to the store.

Dad had a job; Mom didn't. And there wasn't much to do where we lived (even when I went back ten years ago, the place was little better than a trailer park outside the AFB). When I knocked the radio off the table, afterward it would only get Russian radio, so Mom learned some Russian because believe me, she had the time for it. Television was mostly soap operas and travel documentaries on places like, say, Miami. I think Mom once said that for a while she found herself teaching Spanish to the natives, so if you're ever up there and you encounter a fiftyish Athabascan who speaks Spanish, now you know why.

Snow drifts so high we could open our second-floor windows and go for a walk; bears that would come up and knock on the front door because they wanted to share your nice warm apartment with you; days of eternal sunshine, and nights that would never end. After about a year and a half, we went back to Miami and that was the end of that. But for Dad, it had done what it was supposed to: once he had RCA on his CV, he was pretty much all set.

And for me, despite the fact that I can't remember a bit of it (that's why the trip back was so important to me), Alaska has always had a romantic appeal that no other place on earth has. For me, at least--I don't think Mom feels quite the same, but then she has real memories and not just the amusing stories that substitute for memory in my head.

Bad Words

Last week, in railing against an effort to force cable companies to offer "a la carte" pricing, I asserted that the real reason behind the effort was not lowering the price of cable TV for American consumers but, rather, the desire of certain prudes to force their decency standards on the rest of us. But I did not make any effort to defend why it is that televised filth is worth keeping where it is.

Up front: if I were a parent, I would be a permissive parent. When the family went to Europe in 1998 and visited Amsterdam, I took my then-12 year old sister and 14 year old brother to visit the red light district. We walked through, we saw the ladies in the windows (my sister's only real comment was "Ewww" at a particularly hefty lady), we did double-takes at some of the statuary, and we did not take pictures because we had been warned not to. Why would I do such a thing? Because I very strongly believe that it's more valuable to safely experience something than to be sheltered from it. It's better to see for yourself what the world is than to be told about it from a distance, through someone else's perhaps-biased filter. I would not have sent them there on their own, and was ready to have any sort of discussion they wanted to have. As it turns out, the whole experience pretty much slid right off their backs, and after a little while we turned back toward the hotel and met our parents for dinner.

This is my attitude toward TV shows, painting, movies, literature, music, the whole shebang of art and culture. It doesn't mean I'm going to show a porn flick to a five year old, but if a fifteen year old wants to see one, well, fine: I'd rather s/he see it with me than on their own. Besides, I can remember one time when I was a kid, and my mother accidentally took me to see a movie called Zardoz, which had nudity on a scale she just hadn't imagined. (It was 1974, so I was eight or nine.) It was a little embarrassing, and Mom was uncomfortable enough that she asked whether I wanted to leave, but I would have found it even more embarrassing to leave. Mostly, though, it was just--opaque, I think, would be the best way to describe it. I didn't understand what was going on, didn't know why those people were so very naked, and the whole experience just became a mildly uncomfortable, undigestible wash. And that's kinda what happens: if a child isn't prepared to experience something (and bear in mind that I'm only speaking here of cultural experiences; cases of abuse or violence are, of course, a whole different thing), it doesn't really penetrate; and if they are prepared, and if you're there to guide them through the experience, then they know more and understand more than they did going in, which can only be a good thing.

Now here's where upright parents will jump all over me: the adult is not always there, but the TV always is, and it is difficult if not impossible to fully monitor what kids are exposed to on their TVs. It's a fair point--and I will note here that, through experience, I am utterly determined that when I do have kids, they will not be allowed to have televisions in their rooms. This is not to limit their exposure to what's available, but because I know, through experience, that if given a choice between a book and a TV set, kids will pick the TV set every time, and I really, really want to give books a chance by removing the competition as much as possible.

So: the point is granted, you cannot control what your kids will see on TV. Here's the thing, though: if you establish your household as one in which all issues are open for discussion, and programs are not segregated as "appropriate" or "inappopriate," then I believe that kids are much less likely to try and hide what they're watching. And if my kids want to watch, say, "nip/tuck" then I would prefer that they feel comfortable enough to watch it out in the living room where I know they're watching it. And if something on the show disturbs them, well then, let's all talk about it. It is, after all, well understood that trying to forbid a thing only makes it more attractive; so if nothing is forbidden, then your kids approach cultural material on its own merits--or lack thereof. This is an atmosphere in which reason can prevail, where true learning can happen.

How do you protect your kids? I mean really protect them? By teaching them as much as you possibly can during your brief time with them so that they will be strong and able and smart; then they can protect themselves, and there's nothing better than that.

Art and Politics

I am not the first (by a wide margin) to note that films got more political this year, but it's a fact that is still worth celebrating. The day of the 2004 election, as the exit polls turned out to be wrong, I realized then and there: it was time to start focusing on politically-themed art again. Why has the "culture war" become so important in determining the results of elections, and why are we Liberals so often on the losing side of the culture war? Seems to me that it's because at some point, we Liberals got complacent; we decided, at some undetermined moment in time, that our position on various issues was so unassailable that we no longer needed to keep arguing the point. (Once Bill Clinton said that abortion, for example, should be "safe, legal and rare," didn't it seem to you so eminently sensible that there wasn't any point in arguing the matter further? Come on, didn't it seem just that way, just a little?)

Trouble is, the Other Guys never stopped setting forth their side of the various arguments. And in the vacuum, their voices were the only ones being heard. Of course there was also some mind-boggling timidity involved: the moment George Bush Sr. called Michael Dukakis "a card-carrying member of the ACLU," Dukakis should have immediately squared his shoulders and said "Of course I am. The real question is, why aren't you?"

As clever as I want to feel for having had this minor-key epiphany in early November 2004, obviously some of my Hollywood brethren were way ahead of me. Crash; Good Night, and Good Luck; Syriana; Brokeback Mountain (which does have a political point to make no matter how much the filmmakers talk about its being "just a love story"); Munich; and The Constant Gardener, to name only the most prominent films of the past year, would obviously have been at least in pre-production in November 2004, so I wasn't at all alone in thinking that the time had come for us to stand up and start making some noise again. (Hell, even Star Wars was getting political--whatever else you may think about the last movie, Amidala's line about democracy ending "to the thunderous sound of applause" does have some bite.)

And this notion that Hollywood's "liberal elite" should just stick to making mass entertainments and keep their big yaps shut is of course the most blatantly dishonest form of hypocrisy. We all revere Frank Capra's blatantly political films now that they're safely in the decades-ago past, now that they're no longer dangerous; we all talk about the Great Works of Art that were "ahead of their time," once upon a time, and how brave and how bold those artists were--back in the day. I suppose it's part of the rose-hued nostalgia that everyone feels, that sense that things were better in the past but that now, everything is simply screwed up. But there is also, as I said, pure hypocrisy involved: George Clooney should keep his big yap shut, but Arnold Schwarzenegger is a hero. It has nothing to do with Hollywood types not having a right to speak out, and it has everything to do with Hollywood types speaking out about things you don't agree with.

(Personally, I could take or leave Mr. Clooney back when he was just a fidgety actor on ER, but now that he is a capital-A Artist doing his damnedest to create work that means something, he's become one of my favorites. And his company with Steven Soderbergh, Section 8, is consistently doing the sort of stuff I find most interesting.)

I'm not going to get into which film should win the Oscar this year (though I may succumb as the date draws nearer because everyone does), and that's because the films are so very different, and they're all really quite good this year, and they all succeed at what they want to accomplish. (Caveat: I haven't yet seen Capote.) But I just saw Munich the other night, and if you want my guess as to which film means the most, that one is it. The box office for this film may never have taken off, which makes it a failure in Hollywood terms and it will probably get punished accordingly by the Academy; but I think that in twenty or thirty years, this will be the film that people end up remembering, the one that feels really significant. It may even go down as Spielberg's great achievement; because as the New York Times review noted, "Mr. Spielberg has been pummeling audiences with his virtuosity for nearly as long as he has been making movies; now, he tenders an invitation to a discussion." And what is present in Munich, what makes it difficult for an audience to take but is exactly why it is so good at inciting discussion, is ambiguity, the absence of easy answers, the unadorned presentation of multiple points of view. Eric Bana's character Avner is supposed to represent us: in these times, don't we all feel a little of his paranoia, his regret, his unease? All the way through the movie, we keep hearing about the virtues of home and family; but we keep hearing it from both sides. (There is a brilliant scene when a safehouse gets double-booked, and our undercover Mossad agents find themselves sharing a room with, among others, an agent of the PLO, who reveals that he wants for his people exactly what Avner wants for his.) And after I walked out of the theater, I was torn neatly in half: on the one hand, I felt yet again that Gandhi was right, that violence only breeds violence; at the same time, I knew that if I were the leader of a country, I would have to do exactly as Golda Meir did.

That's good art. That's significant, powerful, meaningful art. It's been a great year for movies, no matter what the box office numbers say, and I for one am hugely gratified that once again, the culture war is beginning to resemble a dialogue and not a monologue.

(Note: Apparently I've said some of this before, back in October. But what the hey, it deserves repeating.)

Cable Prices

Since the price of cable TV here in West L.A. is absurdly high (Adelphia charges about $82 per month for expanded basic plus HBO, and those prices are due to rise yet again next month), one might think that I would welcome any initiative that might lower that cost. But when I saw a headline in the L.A. Times the other day, "Study Finds Savings in Cable Choice," instead I just found my blood boiling. Here's why:

The article reflects a recent FCC initiative to create what is called "a la carte" pricing for cable television channels. The idea is to eliminate the blocks of channels that most cable providers include as a matter of course, and to allow viewers to pick and choose which channels they do and do not want to pay for. On the face of it, this makes some sense: to pick only one example, since I don't speak Spanish, why would I want to pay for SiTV? If a low price could be found that, taken together, gives me only the channels I do actually watch at a lower price, why wouldn't that be a great idea? The L.A. Times article refers to an FCC report suggesting that, on average, consumers would find their cable bills reduced by about 13%. Sounds terrific.

Funny thing, though. An FCC report from 2004 (before Kevin Martin took over the reins of the Commission) concluded that a la carte pricing would in fact drive prices up. Mr. Martin, however, asserts that "the first [report] contained 'mistaken calculations,' relied on 'unsupported and problematic assumptions' and presented an 'incomplete analysis.'" That's Republican-speak for "it didn't come to the conclusions we wanted, so we changed the terms of the argument till it did."

First, let's deal with the basic economics, and how cable TV works under bundled pricing. Like most people, I pay a flat fee for what Adelphia calls Expanded Basic, meaning I get a couple hundred channels of programming for the same cost every month. And as I said before, if I find that I never watch, say, the PAX channel, why isn't it a good idea for me to be able to say No, and get it off my line-up? Isn't that just good ol' American competition, the marketplace in action? Not with cable TV, no. Because for one thing, there's already competition--for advertising dollars, and that is ratings-driven, just as it is for the free network channels like CBS, NBC and ABC. If enough people aren't watching a channel, it doesn't have good ratings and it doesn't make the big advertising bucks. Now to a certain extent these channels are subsidized by the fact that they're bundled together in the first place, which is how niche channels survive--would Trio still exist, otherwise? A couple years ago, I never watched anything on FX; then they started running interesting original programming like Nip/Tuck and, particularly, the wonderful Rescue Me. That's competition in action: now I watch their channel, their ratings have jumped, and I'm sure they're making more advertising money. But if, a couple years ago, I had been on an a la carte plan, I would have probably decided not to keep FX, and would have never been able to sample Rescue Me and would be missing out on a great show. (Sometimes there are downsides to this competition: Bravo used to be a great channel, with a broad focus on the arts; now it mostly shows pop-culture crap.)

As a Disney spokesman noted in the L.A. Times article, the "Disney Channel was once offered a la carte, and only a privileged few bought it despite the strength of our brand." This tells me that, in practical terms, if people are asked to affirmatively pay on a channel-by-channel basis, they will consistently make conservative choices whose purpose is to keep their bill low. In the process there will be less of what cable has to offer that is available, because if the Disney Channel can't draw subscribers, how will C-Span? Thus, consumer choice is actually restricted under a la carte pricing. And as the article noted, minority-focused channels like SiTV would be hit particularly hard, leaving those communities unrepresented.

And if I were to decide that having all those choices was important to me, then it's a pretty safe bet that I would end up paying more for those channels individually than I ever did when they were bundled. I have to conclude that the 2004 FCC report was correct; so then what's going on now?

Decency. That's what it's about. A la carte pricing is a stalking horse for enabling a small number of decency-obsessed viewers to keep the smut off their televisions. Heaven forfend they should take the trouble to learn how to use their V chips; no, they just don't want this stuff to exist at all. They don't want the naughtiness of Drawn Together, they don't want the harsh language and adult situations of Nip/Tuck, they don't want that damned Howard Stern anywhere anyhow. And they know that if you can starve out the stuff on the margins, eventually you start to starve the beast itself.

And that's when I start to turn red in the face. A la carte pricing isn't about the health of my wallet in the least; it's about a few overly-touchy ideologues trying to dictate the content of the airwaves. (Here's a Washington Post article from March 2005 about Senator Stevens's efforts to extend the ability of the FCC to fine cable programming on the same basis as free-over-the-air channels.)

Now if the FCC really wanted to lower my cable bill, then they would do something about the fact that Adelphia has a monopoly in my part of town. That's why my bill is so damn high, because I simply have no other options. (Satellite TV, alas, isn't an option where I live.) The very high price that Adelphia charges has nothing to do with how much programming comes in over my cable lines, or what kind of programming; it has everything to do with the fact that Adelphia can pretty much charge whatever the hell it wants, and what other option do I have but to bend over and take it?

Ciao, Torino

Well, I tried. Tried watching a little of NBC's Winter Olympics coverage. But as I was watching today, I noticed that there sure did seem to be a lot of commercials. Finding that seriously discouraging, and with other things to do, I went off and did those other things. (The second half of City of Truth just became very significantly different from what we had originally planned. So it goes.)

Then tried again tonight, after watching Part Five of the completely terrific BBC adaptation of Bleak House. (Anna Maxwell Martin is doing superb work, and is my favorite recent discovery--and oh, how I love discovering great new actors.) And since I'd had the earlier impression that the Olympics coverage/advertising ratio was skewed, I kept an eye on the clock.

The result: six minutes of half-pipe coverage, then four minutes of commercials; five minutes of short-track racing, then three minutes of commercials. And you know what? Nothing that I saw of the actual competition set my heart to beating faster in the least; now maybe I could find myself settling in just to see what happens, if not for the fact that the coverage is being constantly interrupted by commercials. Too much advertising, far too much, for far too little reward.

Ciao, Torino. Ciao, Winter Olympics. I've got better things to do.

(And on a related note, I heartily recommend Laura Penny's impassioned book Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit.)

Sometimes I Am Despondent

There was a line in a news story about Coretta Scott King's funeral that made me say "What on earth?" and so I went searching, and I found this. And at that point, all you can do is hang your head and apologize to the Lord for being part of the same species as these people.

(Please, whatever you do: don't go wandering around the main site. It's just not worth what it will cost your soul.)

Absurdity Upon Absurdity

As follow-up to my earlier post, I note this article from CNN about how an Iranian newspaper plans to run a contest seeking cartoons about the Holocaust as a test of just how tolerant the West really is. (Actually, quite aside from my gut reaction that I'd rather not see such a thing, it's actually a fair question.)

But really, doesn't all this beg the question of whether anyone outside Denmark would have ever seen these cartoons in the first place if there hadn't been such a big stink raised? By protesting so loudly, haven't Muslims in fact ensured that these "blasphemous" cartoons have now been seen broadly, all across the world? (I have seen them; if not for all of this, I would have never sought them out.) How does that serve the honor of the Prophet?

Cartoon Bloodshed

Am I the only person who thinks that a headline like "Afghan Police Kill Four in Cartoon Bloodshed" sounds as if Yosemite Sam has taken up a career in Afghani law enforcement?

Fareed Zakaria wrote a superb column about American misconceptions about the Middle East; his column touched on the current imbroglio over a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons depicting Mohammad in what is seen by many to be a blasphemous manner. (Interestingly, the below-mentioned Neil Gaiman refers to the possibility that "...three of the images that upset people the most were apparently created by the people who were showing them," in other words that the people protesting the cartoons may have created some of them, but I haven't found any corroboration of that anywhere.)

Now I'm the last guy to make value judgments of a culture, and I sure as hell won't do so here. But I will happily talk about perceptions of a culture. The Americans, for example, have for years now been doing a piss-poor job of "winning the hearts and minds" of the Middle East. (Cf. Mr. Zakaria, again.) When the Bush administration pushes free elections as the perfect exemplar of liberty, then refuses to acknowledge an Islamist party when it wins said free elections, it is fair to assume that the people of Palestine and Iraq might see that as yet another example of a pervasive Western hatred of Islam.

But. When Muslims in Europe and the Middle East see a few cartoons and start burning embassies, it also fair to assume that we in the West might see those good Muslims as intolerant, narrow-minded children whose customary reaction to anything that challenges their worldview is to set it on fire.

An interesting parallel: a couple weeks ago, Rolling Stone ran the instantly-infamous cover photo of Kanye West as Jesus. There were certainly plenty of good Christians who found this offensive, and they certainly had something to say about it. (For the record: I do not find the image of Mr. West blasphemous, but I do find it to be in remarkably poor taste.) But you didn't see Catholics setting fire to the offices of Rolling Stone.

So while I readily acknowledge that we in the West are doing a miserable job of presenting the virtues of our way of life, including our tolerance, to those in the Middle East; at the same time, those in the Middle East are not at present doing anything to help their image in the West. It would be awfully nice if both sides would just calm down a little and not be so damn reactive about everything, but clearly I just moved into the realm of pipe dreams and it's time to stop now.

New From Neil

I'm a long-standing fan of Neil Gaiman's work, and just thought I'd take a second to note that his excellent website has just been redesigned. Neil is of course the writer of the comic par excellence, The Sandman, and has also turned into quite a good novelist. Back in '99, Marc and I wrote the stage adaptation of Neil's graphic novel with Dave McKean, Signal to Noise, and Neil, in keeping with his broad reputation as a thoroughly nice guy, encouraged us to make the changes that needed to be made to translate the material into another medium; he provided some of his notes and unpublished scenes; and when we opened, he came down to Chicago for a benefit performance in aid of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

(An amusing note: a couple years later, the BBC had Neil and Dave do a radio adaptation of Signal to Noise, then released a CD of it; in the booklet for the CD, Neil wrote a short story in which time has passed, and the characters respond to a stage play based on their lives that is clearly a reflection of our own play. Neil's criticisms of our work were valid, and the whole post-modern reflection of a reflection of a reflection was fascinating--and frequently hilarious, at least for me.)

Neil's blog is superb (I particularly admire his light-handed brevity--he's brilliant at boiling something down to its crystalline essence), and has as much to do with why I started blogging as anything else. And while we're on the subject, Mr. McKean is an artist of the highest order, and one of my dreams is to get one of his works for my walls.

SOTU, Brute

In a world increasingly riddled with acronyms (or WIRWA, for short), the other day POTUS delivered the SOTU for the fifth time. West Wing has already taught us that POTUS stands for the President of the United States; now SOTU, for State of the Union, seems to be becoming common. I'm waiting for the day when we have acronyms inside of acronyms, the whole damn thing boiling down to PS5, for POTUS's fifth SOTU.

But that's neither here nor there (BTNHNT). I've always made a point of watching the SOTUs, just as I've always made a point of watching as much as possible of both the Democratic and Republican nominating conventions. This isn't because I'm a political junkie; more like an interested observer. (One of the important themes in my script based on the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. is an emphasis on the responsibilities of an individual citizen--the Greeks, who were so badly outnumbered by the Persians in that fight, had probably twice as many men at hand, but half of them were slaves, i.e. not citizens, therefore they were never asked to fight. Contrast that with this.) But on Tuesday, which was also the day the Oscar nominations were announced, I had it in my head to go see Brokeback Mountain--at the same time as the POTU. Should I keep a long-standing bargain with myself, or go see the movie that I needed to see? (Needed to see? Yep--there's a scene in the movie that is almost identical to one I've had in Beaudry for a year, and damn it all, there is now no way I can use my scene and will have to come up with something else.)

In the end, the decision was easy. Watching the SOTU, after all, is not an end in itself; it's about obtaining the information necessary to be a responsible citizen. But when the entire transcript can be found within hours at the New York Times, the information is the easy part. More to the point, the question became this: is there, at this late stage, anything that George W. Bush can say that I will believe? Does the man have any credibility with me at all? And the answer is: nope. So I went to see the movie.

And it was good, and in the end none of it mattered: I got home at 10:00, turned on the TV and CNN was just beginning a complete replay of the entire SOTU. So I got to have my movie and get pissed off at the President! Such a deal! (I must confess, it was nice to be able to see the whole thing--the moment when he complained about Congress not passing his Social Security "reform" and the Democrats started cheering definitely had me cackling.)

Now--what did I think of the speech itself? Well, it boils down to some pretty simple stuff. First, you have to admire the skill of his speechwriters, whose skill at making night seem day and day night is extraordinary, an artistry of bullshit that I think has never been matched. Bush is a dualist right down to his toenails, a black-and-white ideologue who seems incapable of comprehending anything that might be complex. His early statement that "...the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting, yet it ends in danger and decline" was typical of the whole speech. His path is presented as "[t]he only way to protect our people, the only way to secure the peace, the only way to control our destiny," and anything that is not his path can only end "in danger and decline." It was particularly astounding to hear this President--who during the 2000 campaign sounded like such an isolationist--suddenly beating the drum against the dangers of isolationism. But then it has long been evident that the son of the man who railed against a "new world order" is in fact trying to create a new world order, with himself as its head.

Now it might seem that in changing his position on isolationism, Bush is doing exactly what his critics always accuse him of never doing: changing his mind to accept a new reality. September 11th clearly demonstrated that a problem festering somewhere else in the world can now wreak havoc on our shores all too easily, so that isolationism is simply an unviable option. Trouble is, everyone agrees with that, Democrats and Republicans alike. But where George Bush sees freedom "on the march," wearing the boots of soldiers, there are other ways to advance freedom. Martin Luther King understood this, so did Gandhi, so did Jesus Christ. The thing that continually astounds me is how unChristian these Christians are, how incapable they seem to be of embracing Christ's most revolutionary idea: turning the other cheek. Greet hostility with love. The path will be hard, and unclear, and fraught with danger (it is serendipitous that the final volume of Taylor Branch's magnificent biography of Dr. King has just been released, reminding us of just how dangerous and hopeless Dr. King's path of non-violence became), but in the end it is (not to get too dualistic about it) the best way to achieve peace. Freedom need not march forward on the boots of a soldier; it can also take flight on the wings of a dove.

The Runner Stumbles

Okay, so the thing about a thirty-day sprint is that keeping up that pace for a full thirty days is, you know, hard. And this week, I just kinda sat down where I was, blinked a few times, and watched the world pass me by.

City of Truth has to wait till Marc gets freed up again, after Sundance and several meetings with production companies; Beaudry is moving slowly because I'm having classic third-act problems (i.e., I don't actually know what on earth happens during the third act); and although I've also been working on my taxes, at the moment I'm stymied because filling out one form requires first filling out another form which requires first filling out yet another form. It means, for mathematically-challenged persons such as myself (or numerically impaired, or just plain 'rithmetic-stupid), that you really need a big block of time with no distractions when you can just get in there and grind it out. This thought is in and of itself deeply depressing.

It got so bad the other night that I looked at the Sunday newspaper, sitting there unread on the floor next to the sofa, and thought that I really ought to just dump the whole thing in the recycling bag and get it off the floor. I leaned down for the paper and then stood again, thinking it was just too damn hard. The paper still sits there, waiting for me to find some giddyup somewhere.

Exercises? No, those fell away for a couple days, though I was able to force myself back on track by Wednesday. Mostly I have sat on the sofa, watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and cackling over "Hillbilly Hare."

And I could write more, but suddenly it all seems so... so very...

Another Excerpt

It's been a while since I last excerpted something from my writing; here's something else, then. It's from a short story called "Absinthe," and if you're familiar with Degas's painting then you know everything you need to know. The story came from my having this on my wall for years (erm, a copy, of course--a cheap print in a cheap frame, to be honest) as, slowly, it started to tell me a story. Oh, and by the way, the language is just a wee bit blue. But we're all adults, yes?

Blindness would come first.

First the dimming, then the fade then gone, and after it death. She always had known this but drank the drink anyway. It made no difference.

Alois sat next to her, smoking his pipe. Once he had explored her with its stem, but she had protested and he did not attempt it again. The other things, though, on these he would from time to time insist. It had been a long time and perhaps tonight he would wish one of these again. The scarlet cords or the kneeling with her eyes shut.

Suzanne wore her prettiest bonnet but that no longer meant anything to anyone but her. It had long ago gone as grey as her skin. Across the bar, in the smoked mirror, she saw her face, blank and grey and immobile, like a bust made of dead ash from Alois’s pipe. Or perhaps her face only seemed to wane when it was in truth her sight that was sinking. Was it possible that she still shone as once she had, only now she alone unable to perceive it?

She looked down to the green, almost viscous liqueur before her and even this effort was an effort, even this cost energy and seemed wasteful. No. She no longer shone.

Alois sniffled from his cold. In the heat of their fucking his nose would run and he would not notice. They had lain together so often that she knew this past doubt, and past caring. Everything was so vague, the edges indistinct, objects blurred together until even shape became difficult to distinguish. She knew of the painters who spoke of such things as a virtue but she could not see how or why. A painting ought not to make people feel as she always felt. Why would anyone wish this? Monsieur there in the corner—oh what was he sketching now?—, he told people he was a painter. She might ask him. But last week he had said he would paint her portrait one day, which could only mean he hoped to take her upstairs and pay with something else, with lines on paper. She had since refrained from meeting his eyes. The question was not so important.

The glass stood before her. She picked it up, sipped. Another mote lost forever, she thought, and sipped again.

On Being Not-Yet-Rich

So here's the thing: I am at present extremely not-yet-rich, and sometimes this is not-yet-fun. Take for example: the date January 20th recently passed, and for those who do not take pause to observe the moment, January 20th is the date assigned for the inauguration of the President of the United States--in those years when a President is inaugurated. Five years ago, when George II was inaugurated, I made a little pact with myself: on that day I donated money to an organization dedicated to the environment, because I figured that with a Republican in office, such organizations were going to need every dime they could get. (For the record: originally I donated to The Nature Conservancy, but as time passed I decided I needed someone a little more militant and switched over to the Natural Resources Defense Council--but don't worry, you'll never find me becoming an Earth First!er.) And then every year thereafter, for at least as long as George II was in office, I would donate money on the 20th of January. (Alas, as time passed it began to feel important to donate to a whole host of organizations: the ACLU, Amnesty International, and so on. So many important things at risk these days, and so little money to spread around.)

But this year, I just plain don't have the money, and the 20th of January passed with my pledge broken. It was not a happy moment. But you won't hear me calling myself poor, oh no. I am proudly not-yet-rich, that's what I am. I'm doing the 30-day sprint, I've got balls in the air (so to speak), and eventually something is going to happen somewhere. It's just a matter of time and continued application of effort.

In the meantime, there are things to learn. I got fired from a dayjob a while back, and with everything in my life in real jeopardy I suddenly found myself feeling a real hostility toward, to pick only one example, drivers in their fancy cars. Those smug little SOBs hurtling around L.A. in their Jaguars, their Mercedeses and their Lexi, the ostentatious overly-manicured women behind the wheels of their ginormous Escalades. There are a lot of aggressive, downright obnoxious drivers in Los Angeles, and there's a lot of wealth on conspicuous display. But it took me no time at all to find myself one of those people shut out of that world, and even if it was only temporary, it came as a revelation: there are an awful lot of people out there who are not not-yet-rich, who are instead ain't-never-gonna-be-rich, and I know firsthand how they feel sometimes (not all the time, but sometimes) when they see the wealthy tooling around town. I had a little taste of desperation, and it's not pretty. When I reach the position of being finally-really-truly-rich, I need to make damn sure I remember that feeling; and make damn sure that my money goes out into the world in places where it does some good. Habitat for Humanity, for instance. Add it to the list, and not just when a Republican's in office.

In the meantime, there is joy to be found for free if you know where to look. The internet has opened up a world of free downloadable music, and sometimes this yields extraordinary dividends. There's a music blog called Said the Gramophone that features some really fine writing (sometimes), and that recently led me to this: a Hungarian gypsy band called Félix Lajkó playing nearly fourteen minutes of the most heart-stopping, can't-stop-dancing music you've ever heard in your life. Go and listen. Geez but are you gonna thank me for this one.

Still Sprinting

It was a good weekend, productivity-wise. Both City of Truth and Beaudry have reached the halfway point, and I don't think it's an accident that they are suddenly marching along at the same rate. As I continue to figure out exactly how my work relates to standard movie outlines, it makes a certain sense that I would focus on one chunk at a time. In other words, now that I've reached the midpoint in two very different scripts, what's the next set of beats? It actually helps that I'm working two scripts at once--in Save the Cat! terms, how does "The Bad Guys Close In" apply to both scripts? Figuring this out, how to apply one principle to two different sets of requirements, forces me to really absorb the underlying principle.

All of this meant that my nice three-day weekend was largely sacrificed. I was up at 6:15 each morning in order to be ready to work by 9:00, I've had the DVD of Mr. and Mrs. Smith in my player for days but simply haven't been able to get around to it, and then there were the bizarre moments--twice this weekend I tried to go somewhere and found myself trapped in the parking lot because some nimrod had parked their car so as to block the only exit. Not once, twice: Saturday night and Monday night. Kinda hard to go pick up food if you can't get your car onto the street, isn't it?

But the next two weekends, I get my life back: Marc will be at Sundance, and then he'll be busily pitching to production companies and attending the DGA Awards. I'll still be writing, of course--we work together on City of Truth, but Beaudry is all mine--but I won't have to get up quite so early, and won't have someone else's schedule to consider.

One political note before I go: if Al Gore had delivered speeches like this back in 2000, I would've voted for him. And at the moment, he seems to be one of the few Democrats not afflicted with foot-in-mouth disease. But enough of that for today--now I've got to get back to writing.

One Two

The 30-Day Sprint

Lately I haven't been writing here because I've been writing elsewhere. A friend of mine calls it "the 30-day sprint," a serious focus on career that tries to cram in as much work and as much opportunity as possible. It kinda sorta came about by accident: some events in the immediate future where it would be useful to have a completed City of Truth script ready at hand. Which is a little tricky, since as of the end of the year we were only through the first act. But now, after some 9-to-5 days, we're almost at the midpoint, and I'm only slightly exhausted.

Therein lies the whole problem with having a day job to pay the bills: it also sucks up time and energy and resolve. If one must also do things like laundry, where exactly does one find the time? And then, since I live in an apartment complex with laundry rooms, how does one find workable time? On Friday night, at a quarter to eleven, I tried to bring laundry to the only laundry room that is available late at night. Someone else has just put in their laundry ten minutes before. This left me to do mine Saturday morning, getting up at 6:00 in order to be sure everything was done before meeting Marc at 9:00. And then, of course, after we worked all day, there was still exercising to be done, and dishes to wash, and groceries to buy at 10:00 p.m.

But there is also another way I'm spending my time: visualizing. Picturing the outcome in my head, not in a general sense but very specifically. At various times I imagine the meeting with my future agent, I imagine signing the contract, I imagine depositing the check, I imagine spending the check. When I take walks around the neighborhood, I look at the houses and I pick this design element over here, this one over here, and I construct in my head exactly the sort of house I want, and where it should be. I imagine first table read with the actors, I see the first screenings in my head. Every bit of it is as specific and as concrete as I can make it. And if all this seems a little new agey, well, here's a story for you:

Several weeks ago we did some pick-up scenes for Outta Sync. (By the way, the website has been redesigned and looks terrific--you can also see the band's video there, just follow the link.) There was a scene the director wanted, just a quick shot of Sergei getting into a limousine. But in the ebb and flow of the day, we weren't able to make those particular arrangements. The director was disappointed, but figured we'd put it together later. Then we're standing in front of the producer's apartment, waiting for our director of photography to walk up, camera in hand, and just as she arrives, suddenly a limo pulls up. Someone who lived in the building was just coming back from a trip, and had taken a limo home. Our producer immediately pulled out some cash, stepped over to the driver, our DP put the camera to her shoulder, I was already in costume, and we shot it. One take, five minutes, done. Visualization: the director wanted the shot, and the world provided. If the limo had arrived two minutes earlier, we wouldn't have been there yet; two minutes later and we'd have already been inside. Picture a thing, see it clearly in your mind, and the world very often finds a way to make it happen. You cannot tell me that this isn't true.

A Musical Interlude

But last night, because Marc had an event at Sony to attend, I actually had a little bit of time free. A friend of mine told me about a musical series at the L.A. County Museum of Art called Sundays Live. These are one-hour concerts by national artists, completely free, of classical music. If one is, shall we say, temporarily financially challenged, this is a great way to get a little culture back into one's life. Last night it was the pianist Inna Faliks, a Ukrainian-born musician. She played pieces by Scarlatti, Rachmaninov and Schubert. I've never really heard anything by Scarlatti, but the two very short piano sonatas she played were delightful, and I'll have to pick up some of his work. The real topper was Schubert's C-Minor Sonata, which I also hadn't heard before. The most fun, though, was watching Ms. Faliks work. All the reviews I've seen focus on her expressiveness, and that's exactly what struck me as well. There were a few moments here and there when it seemed the music got a little bit ahead of her fingers, or a chord didn't quite resolve the way it was supposed to, but these were tiny technical details that I just didn't care about because the whole of her work was so wonderfully expressive. Her face is mobile and alive, and I found myself delighted just to watch her as she played, her features a window into her experience of the music she was playing which then informed and enriched my own experience of the music.

I see that in March there's going to be a performance of Dvorak--I think I'll definitely put that on my calendar. By which time, I hope to have seen one or two of my visualizations, my fully-imagined life to come, come fully to life.

Snappy New Year

Congratulations to everyone: the earth has successfully gone round the sun once more, and most of us have lived to tell the tale. And since one point on a circle is as good as any other to serve as your starting point, well then, welcome to the new.

There's a Scots saying that I heard once (or at least I heard it was the Scots, but this could all be dead wrong): the way you spend the first day of the year will determine the shape of your year to come. Last year, on January 1st, I remember thinking it was very important that I spend the day getting some writing done, and I did--but there were distractions, and I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped. What I didn't do that day was anything that might have helped me to actually sell the writing I was doing, or to establish myself in my career. I didn't even spend any time visualizing the success that would surely follow. And sure enough, my year was exactly like that: I got some writing done, but not as much as I'd hoped; and although there are interesting tides rising here and there, my career in the year 2005 advanced exactly nowhere. Then there were certain events that turned out to be a great eduation, but that sure as hell made it difficult going much of the time.

Today? I'm spending today differently. Let's see how it goes.