FUBAR

I look at the world, and all I can say is "Holy crap!"

Hamas wanted to provoke Israel and it succeeded. Hezbollah then decided on a copycat provocation and also succeeded.

In India, train bombings. In Afghanistan, eighteen U.S. soldiers died last month after a wave of fresh Taliban violence (yes, they're still out there); the Afghani defense minister is pleading for tens of thousands more troops to get the country back under control. In Somalia, complete chaos. There is governmental chaos in Ukraine, and in Russia there are worrisome signs that the old ways have not disappeared. And it's too depressing even to think about North Korea or Iran.

The planet is hot and getting hotter. Oil may be running out. And the Big One could hit Los Angeles at any time.

I could go on and on but it's just too depressing. Over at Salon, Sidney Blumenthal blames pretty much everything on the Bush administration; and although he's a former Clinton official who would be expected to say such a thing, still his broad-strokes condemnation is disturbingly convincing. And if you feel like having your heart broken, read any of reporter Phillip Robertson's articles from Iraq, here, here or here.

I have nothing to say about any of this just now, it's all too numbing. But hey, don't worry--here in the U.S. we have a new season of Project Runway, so everything must be okay after all, right?

Yeah, That's Right, Comic Books

... ya wanna make somethin' out of it?

(Me, defensive? Oh, no.) I read comic books. I'm not going to write "I still read comic books" because that would imply that it's something I already should have grown out of. No, it's simply this: I read comic books. I also read the great classics, books of essays, biographies, contemporary fiction, plays and screenplays, magazines, and the backs of cereal boxes. I read everything, and comics are just a part of the whole constellation. But for no particular reason, today I'm going on about comics.

I learned to read through comic books. When I was in the first grade they decided it was time to teach us to read, and for a while there, things were going badly with me. Eventually my school sent a note home saying that there might be some sort of learning disability involved. Mom, who knew me and didn't give a shit about statistics and studies, knew that a learning disability was utter nonsense. Pretty soon, she got cagey and smart. I came up to her one night, holding a "Legion of Super Heroes" comic, and asked if she would read it to me. "Well," she said, "I've got some things to do still, so maybe a little later." Slight pause. "But you know, if you learned how to read, you wouldn't have to wait for me to read it to you."

Within a week I had passed the rest of the class in reading skills. It was just a question of motivation, plain and simple. But it was my love for those four-color strips on cheap paper that got me over that hump, and I won't ever forget that.

Given the prevalence of super heroes in pop culture lately, it might seem absurd to even bother defending the value of comics. But three objections to that pop up immediately: (1) super heroes are not the only subjects of comic books, and indeed some of the best comics-related movies, like Ghost World, have been non-super hero works; (2) how many people attending Superman Returns wouldn't be caught dead reading a Superman comic on the bus?; and (3) there are still stories like this one:

Castillo was sentenced to 180 days in jail, a year probation, and a $4,000 fine. Again – in the eyes of Texas, selling a comic book created for adults, from the adult section of the shop, to an adult was deemed a crime because, in the prosecutor’s eyes, all comics are for kids.

That is from a Newsarama story in 2003 about the case of a Txas comic book retailer named Jesus Castillo, who in 2000 was arrested, tried and convicted of selling an adult comic book to an adult. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. Still think that comics don't need defending? Talk to Peter Kuper, whose George Bush parody "Richie Bush" (a riff on the Richie Rich character) got his work seized by U.S. Customs agents.

The above news articles, by the way, were found through the website of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a not-for-profit that specializes in First Amendment defenses for comics creators. They are, alas, very busy people, and deserve your support.

The list of truly gifted writers working in comics continues to grow. I've already talked about Neil Gaiman here, but of course Neil owes a great deal to Alan Moore (Wikipedia article here, and a nice long interview here). There are also notables like Paul Chadwick, Art Spiegelman, Eddie Campbell, Marjane Satrapi or the late great Will Eisner, father to them all.

But there's been some great super hero stuff as well. I'm a bit tired of all the linking, so I'll just mention Brian Michael Bendis, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis and Kurt Busiek, and that the stuff Marvel has been doing lately, particularly in its "Ultimates" line, has been spectacular.

So yeah, that's right, I read comic books. They taught me a very clear-cut sense of right and wrong, Stan Lee's insistence on using a college-level vocabulary helped me learn new words, and Gaiman's Signal to Noise gave me my first full-length stage play, while Pat McGreal's collaboration on Veils is moving ever closer to a really fine completed screenplay. You'll never catch me saying a word against the delights of a good comic book, no sir.

The British Museum/Library

After years of desperate longing, I finally went to Europe for the first time in 1989. My mother paid for the trip--she had sold the house after I graduated from high school two years before, and the balloon payment came due in '89. The smart, sensible thing would have been to invest. We traveled.

She had last been there when she was 16, traveling alone and staying in the YWCA in Bloomsbury, directly across from the British Museum. (Things change--the Y no longer provides accommodations, there or anywhere else in the U.K.) Our trip was to take us to England, Wales and Ireland--where we would meet up with my grandparents, who ran a B&B in Kinsale that they closed literally days before we finally got there (but that's a story for another day). Naturally, when we stayed in London, Mom wanted to stay in Bloomsbury.

So we booked a room at the Hotel Russell, which I remember with a warmth it may or may not entirely deserve. (It's "only" a four-star hotel, and seems to be frowned upon in London hotel circles--but the location is spectacular, and I can't remember any complaints from our stay.) We were flying from different locations, Mom from Miami and me from Boston, and my plane got in first.

After a minor adventure with a gypsy cab driver at Heathrow, I reached the hotel and checked in. By this time I was thrumming with excitement, and it was simply impossible to wait a couple hours, stuck in the room, till Mom arrived, so I dumped my bags and immediately hurtled across Russell Square. Looking for the British Museum.

(By the way, apropos of nothing, here's my recipe for avoiding jet lag problems, at least when going to Europe--nothing really helps on the trip back--don't sleep on the plane. Do whatever you have to do to make sure you don't sleep on that long flight over, because once you arrive your natural excitement will keep you awake till nightfall. Then you'll have no trouble getting to sleep through sheer exhaustion, and once you awaken in the morning your internal clock will be pretty well reset. You're welcome.)

Now bear in mind: I was used to Miami museums, which (particularly when I was a kid) barely deserved the name, and the vastly superior Boston museums. Still, I had never seen anything on the scale of the British Museum, so I had no idea what to expect. And although I certainly must have seen pictures of the front facade of the museum, I didn't remember any of it. And by chance, the route I took across the square led me somewhere else--to the old British Library location next to (and connecting to) the museum.

(Looking at a Google map (you have to drill down to the largest magnificatin, then switch to the Hybrid view), the hotel is at what I presume is the northeast corner of the park, directly across the street; I know I walked diagonally across the park, and probably went down Montague Place--essentially, the back of the museum--rather than Great Russell Street.)

This entrance was singularly unimpressive. A door, basically, with I think a guard or two standing on either side of it. A banner maybe. That was it. "Well," I thought to myself. "This should go pretty quickly, then. Good. I'll easily be back at the hotel before Mom gets there."

Just inside the door, a wall was painted with a floor plan for the Library/Museum structure, and certain exhibition highlights noted. I stood there, my eyes going very wide, and started mumbling things. "The Magna Carta. The Gutenberg Bible. The Rosetta Stone. Holy sh--."

Given my literary proclivities, this was perfect. Like God dumping me in literary heaven and saying "Here, have fun." One of the original copies of Shakespeare's first folio was on display, and I stood in front of its display case for a very long time, trying to guess how many productions had been borne from that book. (One of Shakespeare's four known original signatures was right next to it.) And yes, the Magna Carta, and yes, one of Gutenberg's surviving Bibles, the oldest printed books in the world, the genesis of mass communication, right there. There was also sheet music by Beethoven and Mozart; letters from Queen Victoria, from Nelson to Lady Hamilton; and the original handwritten manuscripts for books by Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, James Joyce.

Eventually I realized that I hadn't even reached the British Museum proper yet, so I forced myself to move along and, basically, sprinted through the exhibitions in easy reach, but by then I had to get back to the hotel. I reached our room, plopped myself on the bed, and only a few minutes later there was the sound of a key in a lock, the door opened, a suitcase got flung into the room, and my mother stumbled in over it.

I had not seen her in months. "Mom!" I said at once, without preamble. "Do you know what they have over at the British Museum?!?"

She smiled. It was going to be a good trip.

Postscript: Mom and I went back to the museum together the next day, and I saw the front facade, saying "Oh, that."

I went back again with Dad several years later, and explored more. But I know for a fact that I've barely explored a hundredth of what is available. The British Library consolidated its London collections into a facility in St. Pancras a few years ago, so that odd little side entrance to the museum probably doesn't exist anymore. But I know that admission to the museum is still free, which is so completely civilized and it's a damn shame that the same isn't true of museums in the U.S.

And now, having relived that charming little experience, I wanna go back real bad...

The Golden Flag

CNN ran an article collecting people's letters about the Congress's most recent attempt to pass an Amendment to the Constitution that would ban flag-burning. And in most of the pro-Amendment letters, there seemed something--well, the only word that fits is idolatrous.

But isn't there an injunction somewhere that says something like "Thou shalt not worship false idols"? Wait, yes, here it is, in Exodus 20: 3-5:

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.

The flag is a symbol, and worthy of respect, yes, absolutely. But so is the bald eagle, which was so endangered by good Americans' use of DDT that it had to be placed on the Endangered Species list. A symbol is only valuable, and it seems absurd to say this, symbolically. In the same way that a bald eagle in Alaska is just as valuable--symbolically--as one in Cleveland (are there any in Cleveland?), so too is the flag on your lawn just as valuable--as a symbol--as the one that flies above the White House. And symbols are most valuable when they are flexible, when they serve multiple purposes: when they can serve both as a token of national pride while also serving as an instrument of protest. Seems to me that something so powerful is only enhanced by an occasional burning: it says, look at how free we are that we can even do this.
And getting all worked up over the physical object rather than what it represents, well hell, that's just idolatry.

Besides, if you want to talk about the desecration of a symbol, how about taking a mountain sacred to the natives who have worshipped there for centuries and then carving a bunch of faces into it?

The Middle Path

I've been watching, again, Bill Moyers's interviews with Joseph Campbell, collectively titled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. And, as always when I pay attention to Campbell's teachings, my head is exploding. (But in a good way. The best way.)

In the second episode, "The Message of the Myth," they talk about a statue of Shiva in a cave near Mumbai in India. You enter the cave, which is carved with friezes in every direction, and at first you are blinded by the darkness. As your eyes adjust, you begin to see the central carving of the cave, at the end of the path. Nineteen feet high, its most important feature is the depiction of three faces. In the middle, a serene face looks out, toward you. Behind it, two other faces look away from you, to the left and right. These faces represent duality: good and evil, male and female, even mortal and immortal. But that face in the middle represents the unity of transcendance, the perfect oneness from which we have come and must return. "We always think in terms of opposites," Campbell says. "But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it."

Now bear in mind that here Campbell means not the Christian God but the larger, more difficult idea. "The ultimate word in our English language for that which is transcendant is God. But then you have a concept, don't you see?" He quotes Meister Eckhart: "...the ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God, leaving your notion of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions."

At first, upon hearing this, I was tempted to look upon it judgmentally in terms of my own religion. "Well," I thought, "here's a place where the Eastern religions get it right. Again. They begin and end with the idea of transcendance, whereas in Christianity, they're stuck on the ethics of good and evil, trapped in duality." But it only took a moment to see past that narrow view. Look at the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: at first Adam and Eve knew nothing of shame, knew nothing of the differences between them, until they ate of the fruit of knowledge and were cast out. This is, of course, all metaphorical: they existed in bliss, innately transcendant, and then were corrupted by this knowledge of duality, and ever since their descendants have been trying to find their way back to that original perfect bliss. This perfectly mirrors the experience we all have as individual human beings: whatever we were before we were born, that was our Garden of Eden, our perfect bliss, and as infants we retain much of that transcendance, completely content to eat and breathe and love and be loved; then we learn about the world, we acquire knowledge, and the rest of our lives mirror the journey of the descendants of Adam and Eve, trying to find our way back to the Garden.

This ain't New Age babble, friends. As Moyers notes during the interview, "Far from undermining my faith, your work in mythology has liberated my faith from the cultural prisons to which it had been sentenced." The evils of the world can be directly traced to these cultural prisons. "...[M]y notion of the real horror today," Campbell said in 1987, "is what you see in Beirut. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can't get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don't realize its reference. They haven't allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, "We are the chosen group, and we have God.'"

I wonder sometimes whether I am open to these ideas because I am a writer or whether I am a writer because I have always been open to these ideas. Probably the latter. This is not to say I'm better than anyone else; I tend to think of the writerly impulse as a gift and a task together. Maybe I am able to see, for example, the conflict in the Middle East from an infinitesimally larger perspective; but that also means that I have the responsibility to try, in my very limited fashion, to report back to the world what that perspective is. (And I already regret what I wrote about the death of al-Zarqawi a couple weeks ago.) In "City of Truth," the screenplay that Marc and I just finished (the first responses are coming in from people we sent it to, and it's been very positive so far), we tried to deal with exactly the ideas Campbell and Moyers talk about. There is a City of Truth in which no one can lie, and a City of Lies in which people take the opposite path and will only lie; our protagonist starts in the first, journeys to the second, and at the end of the story he leaves both behind as they destroy each other. Taking the middle path into the unknown. In our next draft, Campbell has already shown me one change we will need to make: our protagonist, when he enters the City of Lies, must really embrace it whole-heartedly, must be seen to swing wildly from one opposite to the other before he can have the transcendant revelation that leads him away from both opposites, away from dogma, and into the truer, unknowable path that lies beyond the end of our story.

To end, Campbell on the idea of sin:

Ramakrishna once said that if all you think of are your sins, then you are a sinner. And when I read that, I thought of my boyhood, going to confession on Saturdays, meditating on all the little sins that I had committed during the week. Now I think one should say, "Bless me, Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week." Identify your notion of yourself with the positive, rather than with the negative.
You see, religion is really a kind of second womb. It's designed to bring this extremely complicated thing, which is a human being, to maturity, which means to be self-motivating, self-acting. But the idea of sin puts you in a servile condition throughout your life.

Libertarianism

There's no question: government budgets are, by their very nature, just like that fat guy on the sofa. He knows he shouldn't eat that bag of potato chips, that he should lay off the Snickers and that having cheeseburgers every night is really truly not a good idea. He can feel the flesh jiggle when he walks and he gets embarrassed at the sight of himself--but still he eats. From time to time he puts himself on a diet and loses some weight and tells all his friends about how much weight he's lost. His friends congratulate him and then politely look the other way when the diet just kinda disappears and the weight just kinda reappears. Governments, and their budgets, are exactly like that.

So I am, in principle, sympathetic to the broad aims of the libertarian movement. I can walk down the movement's list of principal aims and check them off one by one. "Government should be smaller?" Yep, it really should. "Government should be less intrusive?" Oh my lordy yes. "Government should not be enslaved to corporate interests?" Yes, yes and yes. "Government should not be in the business of aggressive, imperial war?" Halleleujah!

But then that pesky little question asserts itself: "How exactly do you go about achieving these ends?" And, more importantly, "Just how small a government are we talking, here?"

So I did a little research today (and yes, maybe it's true that a little research is a dangerous thing). The best summary I've yet found of the ideals of the Libertarian Party of America (which is not quite the same thing as libertarianism) is here, in a Wall Street Journal article written by the late Harry Browne when he was running for President in 2000. And there are some serious places where I find myself saying "Whoa, wait a second."

Browne writes, "I want to get the federal government completely out of every area where it's made such a mess--health care, education, law enforcement, welfare, foreign aid, corporate welfare, highway boondoggles, farm subsidies." Farm subsidies and corporate welfare, yes; but if you take the federal government out of law enforcement, does that mean there is no longer an FBI to hunt for missing persons who have been taken across state lines? Does it mean there is no longer a federal grand jury to prosecute multistate crimes like those perpetrated by Enron? Highways may inevitably incite graft and corruption, but isn't it better to have a national highway system than not?

And what's wrong with welfare for people who've fallen on hard times? When I was very young, my mom got sick for a while and we had to accept food stamps. Then she got better and went back to work and didn't have to take the food stamps anymore; but it sure was nice that we didn't starve in the meantime. As Jimmy Stewart says in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, it's important that there always be "a little bit of lookin' out for the other fella." I feel the same way about foreign aid: sure it gets abused, but if we can help then we should, and I just don't believe that private charities and free trade would take up all of the slack.

Besides, people really aren't so good at regulating themselves. Remember what I wrote about Miami drivers after the hurricane? When authority disappeared, there was chaos, and it persisted for months. Harry Browne and I, as good citizens, are pretty damn good at understanding and practicing our place in the social contract; but in a population this large, even a small percentage of those who don't give a shit about the social contract can really fuck things up for the rest of us.

It boils down to this, for me: there are certain things that only a nationwide governmental effort can really accomplish. The shining example from our recent history is federal legislation that put in place many of the goals of the civil rights movement, namely the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There's no way Southern states were going to allow such measures to pass on a state-by-state basis. (And I say that as a native who loves the South.) Read almost any page at random from Taylor Branch's superb Parting the Waters for ample evidence of this. Only a concerted federal effort, with law enforcement backing, was going to get the George Wallaces of the world to ever back down.

So I just can't bring myself to actually become a capital-L Libertarian. For grins, I took "The World's Smallest Political Quiz," a ten-question Q&A that then scores you on the Nolan scale of political thought, and I came out as a Centrist--but right on the border between Liberal and Centrist, with a leaning toward Libertarianism. Pretty damn accurate for such a short quiz.

Plus ca change...

Here is a quote from a book I'm reading. See if any of this sounds familiar.

[After the conquest of Baghdad, it] was evident that [the conquering power] either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi'ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, [and] the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces...made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.

The quote is from David Fromkin's wonderful (but seriously dense) 1989 book A Peace to End All Peace, and the circumstances described concern the period after March 1917 when the British took Baghdad from the Ottoman Empire.

Do I even need to quote Santayana here?

Onstage

It has been, I just realized, eleven years since I last gave any kind of performance on a stage in front of an audience. I did not know, when we did that last show of the 1995 "Buckets O'Beckett" festival for Splinter Group in Chicago (here's a story about their later transformation into Irish Rep), that that would be the effective end of my performing life, but it was. I had always given specific advice to any young person who said they wanted to be an actor: Don't do it. Ordinarily I'm not that blunt, and if someone wants to try something then they should; but any profession in the arts is so brutal that I have come to firmly believe that if someone isn't driven by mortal necessity to do it, then for the sake of their sanity they shouldn't. In other words, "If you're not gonna fall down dead because you're not onstage, then for God's sake don't get on a stage." Therefore, if some young person can be dissuaded from seeking the actor's life, then s/he should be. But a real actor, that poor unfortunate who just can't help it, won't listen to me and will go on and do it anyway, and good for them.

Some time after that last Beckett performance (in the sublime "Ohio Impromptu"), I realized that it had been a few months since I had even gone to an audition, and that I really hadn't even noticed for a long time that I wasn't auditioning. In other words, I wasn't onstage, and I wasn't falling over dead because of it. Sometimes you just have to take your own advice, so I did, and I quit. (It helps, by the way, that that final performance of "Ohio Impromptu" was terrific, maybe the only performance I ever gave that I was completely happy with.)

About a month ago, my friend Ezra Buzzington sent an e-mail. He is a company member at Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood, a 25-year old group whose recent anniversary video I edited. Their focus, as represented in the acronym NOTE (New One-Act Theatre Ensemble), is on original work, so every year they have a weeks-long vetting process wherein the various plays under consideration for the next year are given readings in front of the company members, who then vote on which productions they want to mount.

Ezra wanted to do Barry Rowell's "Before I Wake," a fascinating retelling of Stoker's Dracula novel in which, amazingly, the character of Dracula never appears. He is an unseen, offstage, felt presence who constantly influences what's happening onstage without ever being seen as an active participant. The play is short, and constructed like some kind of intricate chamber orchestra piece; indeed, Ezra's direction cast us all for the quality of our voices, and he gave us all instruments to keep in mind (as the Narrator reading stage directions, I was a cello). We rehearsed several times because this just isn't the sort of thing you can slap together in an afternoon, and on Saturday we performed it.

About halfway through, I began to remember--yeah, this is what this used to feel like. An audience sinking into an experience, their reactions transforming the work of the actors, all those live bodies and minds interacting to create something different, something far more interesting, than the piece that had been rehearsed. There was also, again, the impulse to play into the audience's reactions rather than to play with them, and it's an important distinction: the former is indulgent, while the latter can be revelatory. And I'm happy that even after all these years, I was able to spot that impulse as it happened, to avoid the easy laugh and to at least try to reach for the deeper response. (As much as a guy reading stage directions can.)

In other words, it felt good. And for just a second, I thought, Wouldn't it be kinda fun to maybe do this again? But then I also remembered: night after night of rehearsal, traveling across town through lousy traffic to fight for a parking space within a mile of the theatre, weeks of performances when maybe your audience is ten people or fewer, all the time spent and then the performance is gone into thin air as if never been.

It may be another eleven years, then, before I step on a stage again. But it was awfully nice to have done it again, just this once. Made me feel like a guy in my 20s again, and that's pretty nice too.

The Other Cheek

I don't call myself a Christian, mostly because people who do call themselves Christians, i.e. the ones who make a big fuss out of telling everyone how Christian they are, usually just piss me off. But when it comes to what I think is the single most important facet of Christian teaching, namely "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer to him the other also," well shut my mouth and call me a Jesus freak.

Actually, even better than that passage from Matthew is this one from Luke:

But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,
Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.

Now, none of this is easy to live up to. The tendency toward anger, the impulse toward revenge, is powerful and easy, and all too often I fail to live up to this best of principles. But I'm always trying, I always hold it uppermost in my mind, even when I fail. Particularly when I fail.

Two years ago, I made the horrible mistake of watching the video of Nicholas Berg's beheading. (No, I damn well won't include a link to it.) It was truly horrifying, perhaps the most devastatatingly awful thing I've ever seen, and I instantly regretted the "see something for myself and render my own judgments" idea that led me to watch it. The only consolation is that I watched the video without sound; if I'd actually had to hear poor Nick Berg screaming, I don't think I could have stood it.

The man who claimed "credit" for that horrible crime was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Today, as probably everyone has seen, the papers are all leading with the story that al-Zarqawi was killed in a massive U.S. bombing raid.

And I really only have one reaction to al-Zarqawi's death: I'm glad he's dead, and I hope it hurt.

...and another one down

Another draft finished. This time, over the weekend Marc Rosenbush and I finished our adaptation of James Morrow's City of Truth. (And by the way, Morrow has a new book out called The Last Witchfinder. I haven't read it yet but Marc has--he finished Sunday, the same day we finished our script--and he reports that it's wonderful, definitely Morrow's best work.)

This was an incredibly tricky piece, and the problems were all built in. I can't say too much about it at this stage, prior to agents and managers and studios seeing it, but anyone who's read the book knows the essential premise: there is a City of Truth where citizens are conditioned to only be able to tell the truth; and there is an underground of liars, to whom the main character turns when his son becomes desperately ill, and the father finds he can't give his son hope without also lying to him. To us, the story was about dogma, and we pushed even further the fundamental sameness between the competing dogma of truth and lies. (I was fascinated to discover, during all this, that during the most recent British elections, there was a new political party called the Veritas Party, which seeks to be "honest, open and straight" and avoid the old parties' "lies and spin." Life imitating art?)

What it meant for us was that, to pick just one example, characters' language became extremely tricky. You cannot have someone in the City of Truth say "Good morning" unless he really truly believes the morning is notably good. Nor can a character say "I'm afraid I can't do that," because of course he wouldn't be afraid therefore he wouldn't say it. We long ago lost track of the number of times we wrote something like that then had to backtrack and correct it.

So now the revision process will begin; but we took so much time mapping everything out in advance that, with any luck at all, revisions will go pretty quickly. We're already putting together a cast list of friends for a reading, and hope to have this ready to go out by the Fall. Similarly, I'm nearly halfway through touch-ups on Beaudry, and--again, with a little bit of luck--that might be ready by Fall as well. It would be very nice indeed to have three scripts, then (including Marathon), ready to roll out the door at once.

Jury Duty

I am a big fan of jury duty. Honoring one's civic responsibilities is crucial to the functioning of a democracy, so I have always taken very seriously a lot of the things that people like to complain about: voting, paying taxes, sitting on a jury when called. The nation doesn't really ask much of us anymore--in a time of war there is no military draft, our taxes were not raised but cut, we have not been asked to compile steel or rubber or anything at all, we have not been urged to buy war bonds. Being a citizen of the United States has become one of the cushiest gigs on the planet, which is probably exactly why the few times we are asked to do something for our community, we get so damned grumpy about it.

Obviously there are times when the citizenry has stepped up in a big way--the aftermath of September 11th was, obviously, America at its best. And I've always been inclined to think that the way people grumble about jury duty was in the same spirit as grumbling about Mondays--it's just one of those things people say as idle conversation, but that for the most part, when Monday comes it's not really all that bad, you go and do your thing and then you go home and that's just how things are, no big deal.

Maybe things have changed; maybe all the wartime burdens we have not been asked to share have made us lose something essential in our civic spirit. Or maybe I just got a bad bunch of jurors, I don't know. But my most recent spin through the jury selection process was--there's really no other word for it--shameful.

I am sympathetic, to a point. The case for which we were being selected looked to be about as boring as it could possibly be: a stupid little auto-accident where one of the vehicles happened to be leased from a major auto manufacturer, thus leading that company's Sales division to be named as a defendant. For this, the court was anticipating a seven-day trial. When we were surveyed as to whether we recognized the names of any of the defendants or witnesses, the list of medical experts went on for about ten minutes. It was going to be a long, deadly dull case, the sort of thing that would cure an insomniac. I did not want to be seated on that jury. Particularly since I had originally been slated to go to the Criminal Courts building downtown, where there would have been a nice juicy crime to consider, but then at the last minute was diverted to this dull civil matter way the hell up in the Valley. (The courts aren't supposed to send you more than twenty miles from home. This was twenty miles to the dot.)

(Plus--the temperature in the Valley the last couple days was about 157,000 degrees. Celsius. And the air conditioner in my car just ran out of whatsit-fluid.)

California operates under a one day/one trial system (so does Illinois). The idea is supposed to be that when you report, if you are not seated on a jury by the end of that day, you are sent home and your responsibility to the jury system is fulfilled for at least twelve months. Since I haven't lived here for that long, my only prior experience with this process went exactly as advertised. About a month ago, however, a friend of mine was summoned and found the exception to the one day/one trial system: if you've been called into a courtroom but they have not been able to select twelve jurors and two alternates by the end of the day, then you have to return the next morning.

Between Chicago and L.A., this was my fourth (maybe fifth?) time through jury selection. And it sure seems to me as if the mere process of getting people out of the jury assembly room has become increasingly complex and time-consuming. Before anyone could be called to a courtroom, everyone who thought they might have an excuse had to make their case; medical excuses had to be reviewed by a judge. Never mind that most of those excuses are laid out in the summons form we were all sent several weeks before our reporting date; most people hadn't even bothered to fill out their names and addresses yet. You'd think that if it was so all-fired important for them to get out of jury duty, they would have done that little bit of work in advance so that they wouldn't even have to show up, but no--I guess this way they at least get one day off work, then get themselves excused without having to actually, you know, do anything.

All these preliminaries--only the first round of shirkers and malingerers trying to weasel out of their duty--took so long that by the time my group got called up to a courtroom, there was exactly enough time to seat the first eighteen people for consideration in the jury box, then send us all to lunch. With a ninety-minute lunch break, it was nearly 2:00 p.m. before a single potential juror was asked a question. Then we got dismissed for the day at 4:00. So let's do the math: we were called at 8:30, had ninety minutes for lunch, and left at 4:00. That's six hours total of working time, out of which four were completely wasted by the weasels.

So there's one obvious result right there: the preliminary round of eliminations takes so long that it's probably impossible to get a jury seated in one day, so that those people who are determined not to have their time wasted thus guarantee that those of us who are willing to stay and do what needs doing end up having our time wasted. As I said--used to be I always in and out in a day. Now, that no longer seems to be true. Abuses of the system always lead to the breakdown of the system, and penalties falling on the people who are trying to play by the rules.

I came back the next day, fully expecting that we would done by noon. Ho ho ho, it is to laugh. At the beginning of the process, the judge had volunteered to allow any juror who had an "embarrassing" problem to discuss the matter in private in the jury room; that happened at least half a dozen times, requiring the judge, the two attorneys, the clerk and the court reporter to disappear into the back for several minutes at a time. On at least three separate occasions, the judge asked the supposedly-fixed jury to rise and be sworn in, and suddenly there would be a sea of hands shooting into the air as people suddenly thought of a new way they might be able to squirm out from under.

The excuses became increasingly idiotic. "I just hate big corporations, man," one juror really did say, referring to the big auto dealership. "I'd be really inclined to go for the plaintiff 'cause I just hate the multinational corporations." And it became apparent, as time went on, that once a couple of jurors were allowed to get away with this nonsense, more and more of them decided that they would be allowed to as well. Hence the sea of hands.

But hell--I'm not crazy about the multinationals, either. And I tend to think that punitive damages are often excessive. I have all sorts of opinions that I could have trucked out, but I wouldn't have even thought to do so. Everybody has opinions; it's your responsibility as a juror to rise above them and judge the individual case solely on its own merits. You can't blame Wal-Mart for what Enron did, just as you can't blame Sony for the labor practices of Wal-Mart; and the fact that your cousin once filed a frivolous slip-and-fall lawsuit doesn't mean that the guy in front of you wearing the neck brace did as well. It's really just as simple as can be: listen to the facts, look at the law, do your duty and do it well.

Out of a jury pool of forty people, there were only four left by the time the jury was finally seated. And me, with my fierce devotion to civic responsibility, by luck of the draw I was never called at all. Thirty-six people were required to seat only fourteen, and I was never one of those at all. The judge finally started getting tough with people toward the end of the day, which is the only reason we didn't go through all forty. And I didn't leave that courtroom till somewhere past 3:30, which meant that probably the trial didn't actually start at all that day--and their seven-day trial probably got extended to eight.

Just as a last little touch--the folks back in the jury assembly room who do the paperwork accidentally typed the wrong dates on our certificates and had to do them over.

Stepin Fetchit

Turner Classic Movies (one of the best channels on television) has been elevating its game this month with a Tuesdays-and-Thursdays series called "Race & Hollywood: Black Images on Film." The idea is to show a host of movies that run the gamut, from the pro-KKK storyline of Birth of a Nation to post-civil rights films like Spike Lee's Get On the Bus. It is, of course, the early stuff that fascinates, like the only movie Amos and Andy ever made, Check and Double Check. (I only caught about three minutes of that one, and yep, it's pretty grotesque.)

The other night I watched a movie called Judge Priest, not because it was part of this series but because I had never seen a Will Rogers movie and, living as close as I do to Will Rogers State Park, I was curious. As an added bonus, the film was directed by John Ford, whose work I've been exploring ever since creating a TiVo "wish list" (one of my favorite features of the TiVo, by the way).

I'm not sure this film quite reveals what the big deal was about Will Rogers. Sure he's folksy and amiable, and you definitely get the sense that he's warm and likable, and even finds a way to enjoy the company of the blowhards and the self-important. But the plot of this particular movie is just plain silly, Ford's direction is remarkably unremarkable (except for a bit of business with his brother Francis and a spitoon), and nowadays pretty much everything else gets lost amidst all those Kentucky-fried images of happy darkies singin' and struttin' in the South of the 1890s.

You get Hattie McDaniel (a superfluous "s" tacked onto her name because somebody at the studio couldn't be bothered to get it right), five years before Gone With the Wind, singing as she works, sometimes with three other black serving-women harmonizing behind her. (Although, notably, Rogers himself joins in a couple times, maybe not singing perfectly but certainly getting into the spirit.) You get the white characters, who all wear their Confederate memorial badges, practically bursting into tears every time their Glorious Cause is mentioned--and the stars-and-bars flag plays a major emotional role. (Please remember--my Confederate bona fides are substantial--but I remain wholly ambivalent about that flag.) You get a climactic moment when Judge Priest, having been forced to recuse himself from the really stupid trial at the center of the plot, urges a band of blacks to start playing "Dixie" outside the courthouse in order to help sway the jury. And in the middle of all that, you get Stepin Fetchit.

I had never seen one of his movies, either; only brief clips of him, here and there. His shambling "coon" act is really amazing to behold: damn near incomprehensible from the slurring, but then that may have been the point of it. (The idea of "coons" is controversial: on the one hand, it represents degrading white perceptions of blacks as shiftless and lazy; on the other hand, it may also be true that many blacks used this idea to their own advantage by playing up to these preconceptions and thus, essentially, flying under the radar. There is also the possibility that in all that incomprehensible muttering, often the blacks were finding a way to comment on their white bosses without the bosses ever knowing a thing about it.) Fetchit slumps and shuffles, stares with big vacant eyes, and tries to connive or steal whenever he can get away with it. There is even one startling moment when our hero Judge Priest, the much-revered Will Rogers, hears Fetchit's character Jeff refer to a song that isn't quite edifying to the Confederacy and jokes that if Jeff mentions that song again, he (Judge Priest) might just join in with the lynch mob. It's very obviously meant as a joke; but boy, talk about the passage of time sucking all the funny away.

Stepin Fetchit wasn't the man's real name, of course. He was Lincoln Perry, a Key West native who was every bit as literate and intelligent as Stepin Fetchit wasn't. (He was once a writer for the Chicago Defender.) The Fetchit character was created on the vaudeville circuit, and eventually it made Perry a millionaire. He was in fact the first black millionaire actor, and even though he squandered the money on pink Rolls Royces and Chinese servants, the fact remains that his success opened a door for subsequent black actors. He later became a Nation of Islam member and received a Special Image award from the NAACP.

Now, in context, I have come to see the tragic dimensions of Stepin Fetchit. Playing down to whites' low expectations made Lincoln Perry a millionaire; but he did his job so well that he became emblematic of the worst of white prejudices and, as a result, couldn't get work anymore. A true case of someone who was destroyed by his own success. From a fleet of twelve cars to the charity ward at Cook County Hospital, Lincoln Perry was a smart man who nonetheless couldn't keep up with the times. White prejudice elevated him, and it's a cruel irony that the slow fade of those prejudices helped to tear him down. There's a movie in this story, if anyone ever dares to make it.

Lingua Franca

It's no surprise, really, that with all this recent immigration fervor, there now comes a concomitant Congressional effort to "protect" English from those hordes of Others speaking whatever barbarian tongues they speak. (Do you ever get the feeling you're living in Rome and there are a bunch of Huns and Visigoths strapping on saddles? Do you ever get the feeling that there are vested interests who want you to feel that way?)

There is a surprisingly good AP report on the issue (ordinarily I think of the AP as a place to go for pure hard news, but this piece is a well-considered analysis). As a linguist named Walt Wolfram notes in the article, "Language (policy) is never about language." It's about feeling like a Roman citizen, hearing these Frankish tongues around the corner. It's about that American insularity that comes with having oceans on either side of us and a (mostly) English-speaking neighbor to the north. It's about feeling so comfortable with what you have that any perceived incursion by something Other becomes intimidating.

I've lived with the issue for a long time, coming as I do from Miami where Cubans are now the majority population. Even among good, open-minded and -hearted liberal Anglos there have always been natterings of discontent about how you "just can't go into a store anymore without hearing Spanish." In 1981 or so, when Senator Hayakawa first introduced a bill seeking to establish English as our national language, I wrote to him trying to set forth my reasons why our lingua franca should be left to find its own way, and he (or a staffer, probably) replied with a very polite letter sticking to his guns. Twenty-five years later, he still thinks what he thinks and I still think what I think, and I don't know that the "language problem" in Miami (or San Diego, or Santa Fe, or wherever) is really so much worse now than it was then.

The pattern I've seen has always been pretty consistent. Someone comes over as an adult from Mexico, from Cuba, from wherever, and they're already pretty firmly fixed in their habits. They establish localized communities where they can buy their own kind of food and, most importantly, speak their own language. Someplace where they feel comfortable in this alien land. Then they have children who grow up learning both languages and are much more Americanized. Then those kids have their own kids who are, almost universally, fully Americanized and speak only the one language. All this without any legislation trying to force the issue.

(The same thing has already happened, successfully, with previous waves of immigration--the Polish and the Germans, for example. In Chicago the Polish neighborhood still survives, but it's slowly shrinking, and I'm sure will eventually be gentrified right out of existence. But in their time, people were just as concerned that the Germans were threatening our good English tongue. Never mind that English is a Germanic tongue to begin with....)

I don't know that I have any real objection to Senator Salazar's version of the Congressional amendment declaring English to be a "common and unifying language"; I just don't see what the point is. Maybe it's like one of those declarations the Congress makes from time to time honoring the contributions of a retired general or politician, a formal We Like You sort of thing that doesn't actually mean anything but makes someone feel good. Nothing wrong with that--unless it takes too much time from other issues in a crowded Congressional docket.

Now, I readily admit that I only speak English. (But I speak it very well.) In Europe, where there are other nations and languages in every direction, it's extremely common for natives to speak more than one language, and I've always wished that in my younger days I had made the effort to learn some other language. I had a little bit of elementary-school Spanish and two years of poorly-taught high school French, so that I can do little more than ask where the bathroom is in a couple of languages. I am therefore just as guilty as any other American of allowing the isolation of monolinguialism to occur, so I feel ever so slightly uncomfortable about the whole notion of insisting that someone else learn my language so that I won't have to learn theirs. And I love English, I think it's a beautiful, supple, expressive (and maddeningly complex) language, plus it has Shakespeare to recommend and that's no small thing. Still, I just can't get behind the notion that the language needs to be protected.

All languages grow and evolve. That's how we got so many languages in the first place. Latin spawned German, French and Spanish, German spawned English, and so forth. Read a little Shakespeare and you will soon realize just how much English has changed in 400-plus years (not to mention how many words and common turns of phrase Shakespeare himself introduced into the language). This evolution is entirely fit and proper, and trying to stem that tide is, it seems to me, a bit like standing on the dock in New Orleans as the storm comes in, holding a single sandbag.

Gitmo Gotta Go

Been a while since I blogged 'bout politics, hasn't it? Wellllll then.... (Cracks knuckles with glee.)

This morning, four prisoners attempted suicide at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba. When guards intervened in the attempted hanging of the fourth prisoner, other prisoners attacked them with "improvised weapons." Now don't get me wrong--in no way am I condoning the idea of suicide as political statement, but isn't that exactly what this feels like? Commander Robert Durand said he had "no idea of any intended message," but when you hear about four suicide attempts on the same day, don't you kinda get the feeling that it's a coordinated effort?

The United Nations Committee on Torture has called on the United States to close down the Guantanamo facility entirely, and I agree. My reasons are largely the same as those cited by the Committee in its report. Right from the start I have vehemently opposed the whole idea of detaining prisoners without any legal rights; it seems completely unAmerican to me, a violation of everything that I think most precious about this nation of ours. It is a particular travesty when U.S. citizens are held without rights, as Jose Padilla was. And as this article points out, the Bush administration escaped a judgment on the issue by finally allowing Padilla to enter the justice system just before the Supreme Court considered his case. Once that happened, by a 6-3 vote the Justices ruled the issue was moot.

Yes, I know there's precedent. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt all committed civil liberties violations during wartime, and as this interesting 2002 article from the New Republic asserts, the Bush administration's abuses were (as of 2002) less egregious. (I wonder if Mr. Rosen would say the same today.) But it doesn't matter: much as I revere FDR in toto, there were things he did that I just can't condone. (Mass Japanese detentions, anyone?) And really, wouldn't we as a society like to think that we're improving to the point that we don't make those same mistakes over and over again? Wouldn't that be nice?

Military tribunals for foreign nationals suspected of terrorist involvement? Fine, I have no problem with that. But there have been too many mistakes to just allow the government to lock up whomever it wants. And if the person suspected as a terrorist is an American citizen, then he/she deserves full access to the American justice system. Period, end of sentence. Anything different makes us, and there's no other way to say it, just as bad as the people we're fighting against.

New Ways to Stuff a Theater

Last night I went to see the David Gilmour concert again. Sort of.

A company called Big Screen Concerts has, for about a year now, been showing filmed concerts in regular movie theaters, and last night the David Gilmour show was screened in select theaters in select cities across the country. (No previews or commercials, either--we walked in at 8:02 for an 8:00 screening and it had already begun.) As this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution points out, there are several advantages to this sort of thing: a close-up view of the performers (when I saw Gilmour, I brought my binoculars but left them in the car because I do that sort of thing all the time), great sound, and--a particular advantage, given my complaints about the width of the chairs at the Gibson Amphitheatre--nice comfy seats.

There are advantages to concert promoters as well, not to mention theater owners. As is noted in the article, these concerts can either capture overflow audience for a sold-out show, or can recapture people like me who saw a show but now want a taste of that experience again. The presentation last night started, at first, a bit worrisomely, with the studio-produced video from Gilmour's new album and then a short documentary about the album that looked exactly like what you would see as a DVD extra. Only after this introductory material did they get into the concert footage, which in this case was shot at the Mermaid Theatre* in London. The introductory stuff, though, reveals the other great advantage to the artists and their promoters: psyching people up so that they will want to buy the album in question. (In our group of six last night, three had not gone to the live show; all of them came out of the film concert saying they would definitely buy the new album. Mission accomplished.)

And for theater owners, there are considerable advantages. Overall box office receipts are down this year from last, and last year from the year before. If the advent of good home theaters is leading to the slow death of the movie-going experience, then owners will increasingly feel compelled to find other ways to get audiences to come out and buy overpriced popcorn. Also, during the period when digital projection was first proposed, there was a mighty struggle between studios and theater owners over who would pay to have the equipment installed; and one of the arguments for owners to pay was that they could use the equipment for other purposes, like showing concerts or sporting events. Indeed, it looks like exactly that sort of thing is now starting to happen, and you'll probably see a lot more of it over the next couple years.

The concert last night was definitely digitally projected, although I don't think it was high-def. But the sound was good, the seats were comfy, and I was able to watch David Gilmour work the fretboard to my heart's content. Definitely worth the ten-dollar ticket. Gilmour gets more record sales, and the theater filled more seats on an off-night. Wins for everybody. Welcome to the latest wrinkle in the world of entertainment.



* In case you noticed that sometimes I write "theatre" and sometimes "theater," it isn't accidental: in recognition of the European origins of the theatrical craft, I use the French spelling to denote a space devoted to the legit stage; and since movies are essentially an American creation, I use the American spelling for movie houses. And yes, I really do think that hard about that sort of thing.

Da Vinci Crude

So I was in the grocery store and the paperback of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code had been released so I bought it. Had one of those 25%-off stickers on it, so what the hell.

I had already read another of his books, Angels and Demons, because someone handed it to me. It's a fair measure of a book to ask how much of it you remember a year after reading it, and this is what I remember about Angels and Demons: the writing itself was very bad, the historical stuff fairly interesting, the climax completely preposterous and unbelievable, but nonetheless it moved very fast, kept the pages turning. As for what the plot actually was, what happened in it, the only part of that I remember is the climax, precisely because it was so utterly absurd. (I mean, come on: Robert Langdon in freefall with only a coat or a blanket or whatever the hell it was? Gimme a great big break, please.)

I could say almost exactly the same thing about Da Vinci Code. I saw an article somewhere saying that Mr. Brown handles the writing and the plotting, while his wife does the historical research. This means that the person really responsible for the book's success is Mrs. Brown. The theory generating so much controversy is, after all, not Brown's; he acknowledges this himself, in the text of the novel. But the background, starting from the works of Leonardo and then expanding from there, is undeniably fascinating. (Leonardo is fascinating, period.) So even though those sections of Mr. Brown's novel that are purely expository can be a bit of a slog sometimes (is it realistic that these characters, under duress, would spend that much time laying everything out so damn thoroughly?), at least it's an interesting slog.

But the writing itself, qua writing? Really, really rotten. I have another way of measuring a book, one that I employ in bookstores before I ever buy: I call it the first-paragraph test. A book has an interesting cover, or it's by an author I've heard of but never read, whatever; I flip to the first page and read the first paragraph. If it sounds like something I've read before, I don't buy the book. Simple as that. And Da Vinci Code? It fails the first sentence test. If the first sentence of the first paragraph begins proper noun then verb, I'm outta there. It's a standard trope of thriller writing, and mystery-novel writing, and many other kinds of genre writing, most of it quite bad; and while there are exceptions to this rule, on the whole it serves me very well. And Mr. Brown's first sentence? "Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery." Blah.

Let us take, for contrast, an earlier historical thriller that was also made into a movie, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Straight off the top, he begins his work of fiction with a second layer of fiction: "On August 16, 1968, I was handed a book written by a certain Abbe Vallet...." Eco then lays out his narrator's history with the supposed book, what the book deals with, and how he approached his "translation" of the book. All this before ever beginning his plot, which is even more historically complex--not to mention being more credible as history per se. (And yes, I know--the sentence quoted above has a proper noun and a verb, right there up front; but Eco knows he's working in genre territory, and immediately tweaks it with that layer of interesting metafiction. Therefore, it works for me.)

And yet, as I said, the book moves fast. On my flight to Florida I read a hundred pages; on the flight back I read another hundred and finished it. (All this while also working on a rewrite of Beaudry, till my laptop battery died.) The guy in the row ahead of me was reading the book too. There's no denying that it holds your attention and keeps the pages turning, even if you're saying to yourself "Okay, could Sophie possibly sound less French?" Obviously this strength, together with the historical research of Mrs. Brown, has made the book a raging success; and there's an old rule of thumb that bad books make good movies, so who knows, it could turn out to be a great Hollywood thriller. Fair enough. Obviously it all works: even with my steadfast rule about bad writing, I made an exception, read the book and, on the whole, enjoyed it well enough. Bravo to Mr. Brown for that, at least.

I am, however, firmly on Mr. Brown's side when it comes to the legal argument over whether he plagiarized Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and again on his side as the Vatican tries to convince people to boycott the movie. As the Slate article linked above points out, if writers are presenting a theory as truth, then they have to accept that other writers must be free to then cite that theory and present it in their own fashion. I wrote a screenplay based on the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C.; some of my sources are seriously in the public domain (Herodotus, Plutarch, etc.); some are not. The more contemporary histories of Marathon differ on what exactly took place during the fighting; if it were true that I chose to go with one historian's set of facts more than another's, would that leave me open to plagiarism charges? If I didn't use his language but simply accepted his version of what we know about the facts, how could that be plagiarism?

And the Vatican? Well, they just don't get it. The book isn't anti-Christian, it's anti-Catholic church. It suggests (and here perhaps is the novel's real value) that the importance of Christ was not his divinity but his message, which is unsullied by any questions of whether he married or not, had children or not. With this I am in complete agreement. But the Vatican has never liked having its turf challenged, and so, as they did with Last Temptation of Christ, they are trying to organize a boycott. But it didn't work then and it won't work now; in truth, Last Temptation isn't a very good movie, and if they had just left it alone it wouldn't have drawn nearly as much attention as it did. Granted, a Ron Howard film starring Tom Hanks based on an incredibly popular novel is going to draw attention no matter what; but the Vatican's attempts to reduce the number of attendees is, again, just about certain to have the opposite effect. Those of us who might be on the fence about going to see a simple thriller are probably more inclined to go, just to thumb our noses at this attempt at artistic repression.

The Vatican certainly has every right to argue that the novel is based on a whole series of flawed assumptions and bogus history, and in fact I'm inclined to think that they're probably right. But a boycott is just plain silly, and counter-productive; what's worse, it makes people that much more inclined to think that maybe the book's right, otherwise why would the Vatican be expending so much effort to try and suppress it? Silly, silly Vatican.

Surprise!

Q: Hey, Bob, where've you been lately?

A: Well, Robert, I was on the road.

Q: Really? I had no idea! Where were you?

A: I went home to too-sunny Florida, in order to surprise the family.

Q: Surprises? We like surprises!

A: Everybody likes surprises. In this case, my dad and my step-mother just celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary, so I conspired with my brother and sister to just kinda show up at a restaurant and surprise the heck out of them.

Q: And did it work? Boy, I sure hope so!

A: Yep, it worked just great. The trick was, because I was using frequent-flier miles, I had to take whichever flight American Airlines would give me, and the one I got put me in Ft. Lauderdale at 6:45 p.m. Saturday night. That meant I had to go from the airport straight to the restaurant, and if my flight was delayed, the whole thing could go south in a hurry.

Q: But that didn't happen, did it?

A: In fact the flight got in half an hour early. Clearly, the stars were aligned right. My step-mother was surprised, my dad was surprised, everything turned out just perfectly.

Q: Perfectly? So there wasn't a single glitch?

A: Well, okay, a little one--there was no way of knowing that Dad had a business trip on Monday, so actually I got to see very little of him. But hey, what can you do?

Q: Sounds like a terrific trip.

A: That's not really a question, is it?

Q: Work with me here.

A: Okay, fine. It was a terrific trip. As an added bonus, my grandfather and aunt (both on my mother's side) each have milestone birthdays in May, so on Sunday Mom and I drove up to Port St. Lucie to see them. I was therefore able to celebrate several occasions all at once, for what you might call family bonus points. A good time all around.

Q: Nifty keen. And your flight back? How was that?

A: You would have to bring that up. Turns out President Bush was also in South Florida, and he managed to delay me twice. First when his motorcade shut down parts of the freeway and snarled traffic, so that I got to the airport later than I had planned and made it to my plane with less than ten minutes to spare; then, after the plane pulled away from the gate, we were informed that because Air Force One was about to take off, all other flights would have to wait. That meant a further 45-minute delay, just sitting there on the tarmac, wedged in next to the football player with shoulders out to here.

Q: Does this mean you're about to wax political? Take some cheap shots at the President?

A: No I'm not, as a matter of fact. When the captain made his announcement he stressed that this is standard operating procedure with Air Force One, as true for Bush as for Clinton. It's a fair point, and you won't catch me trying to make hay out of it. (Much.)

Q: That's very admirable of you.

A: You know, it really is.

Cardio Pulmonary Recrimination

Sometime after the Twitchy Adventure, I realized it would be a very good idea to re-up my CPR skills. Yesterday I took the class, earning my re-certification twenty-plus years after the fact.

The classes are a bit different now. The dolls are different, for one thing: they don't have limbs anymore. Presumably this is because if you ever have to perform CPR on someone, it will most likely be a quadruple amputee. And why the doll is called "Anne" when it looks more like one of the male robots from I, Robot is beyond me. Also, the idea of "breath shields" had never occurred to anyone twenty years ago: you swabbed the doll's mouth with alcohol each time a new student took over, and that was that. Now you use these thin plastic doo-dads that bunch up awkwardly as you use them and encourage you even more to see the doll as an object rather than a person. (The instructor kept noting that the chief difference between class and real CPR would be the rescuer's adrenaline.)

But there was another new thing that I found particularly interesting: coverage of Good Samaritan laws. In yet another example of the woes of the litigious society (which I see not as the fault of the GOP's much-hated trial lawyers but as a result of a society that teaches people that it's your obligation to try to get something for nothing, anytime you can), apparently people have been sued for trying to render aid and not succeeding. This prompted the state legislatures of, I'm told, every single state to enact Good Samaritan laws to protect the legal rights of those who attempt to render aid. Because it does no good at all if someone decides not to help a dying person because he's afraid he might get sued.

The key term in Good Samaritan legislation seems to be that the rescuer should not attempt to render aid that "exceeds the scope" of his abilities. In other words, just because you saw a character on a TV show do a tracheotomy doesn't mean you should try to dig a hole in someone's throat and insert a pen tube. Now, when I was in the midst of the Twitchy Adventure the thought of litigation never once entered my mind because it almost never does: I am resolutely non-litigious, and would much rather see people try to work things out between themselves than holler out "I'm gonna sue!" over the least little thing.

Still, it's an interesting question. Given that I was more than twenty years past my CPR certification, if I had done what Twitchy was begging me to do, would I have been exceeding the scope of my training in attempting CPR? (God knows, at the time I was terrified of compressing the wrong part of her sternum.) Then there is the other issue: given that Twitchy's heart was clearly beating and blood was circulating just fine, if I had gone ahead and done CPR and something awful had happened, would her family have been able to claim wrongful death? Even though I was only doing what she had instructed me to do?

Who knows; it never came to that, and I'm even happier now that it didn't. But here's the danger: now the thought of litigation, which as I said never occurred to me before, might very well occur to me the next time. And then what decisions do I make in the heat of the moment, with all that adrenaline pumping?

Pink or Floyd?

Last week, I went to the final show of David Gilmour's U.S. tour, at the Gibson Amphitheatre. There, Gilmour played with Pink Floyd bandmate Richard Wright, with guest performances from David Crosby and Graham Nash. This meant that for the first few songs, I was barely conscious of the music being played, what with being starstruck and all. Two-thirds of Crosby Stills & Nash! (Not to mention parts of The Byrds and The Hollies.) The rythm guitarist Phil Manzanera, he was part of Roxy Music! And half of Pink Floyd! Woo hoo! (But which half? The Pink half or the Floyd half? Or maybe PiFlo, or NkYd.)

I have put myself on record before as a fan of the Floyd. I was surprised and delighted at the strength of the Australian tribute band that I saw last November, and now I was seeing (half of) the real thing. It was a very solid show, with some fabulous highlights (for me, the performance of "Comfortably Numb" sent me onto the street very happy indeed); but for some reason, it wasn't as transcendant as I'd hoped. Not sure why, either.

Maybe it was the venue. The Gibson Amphitheatre is, as a space, wonderful--good sightlines, fabulous acoustics. There are, however, two strikes against it: the location, and the seats. The location is pretty bad, right bang up against the Universal Theme Park. This means that you have to walk a narrow, windy path to reach the doors, and when you leave, every single person gets channeled into that narrow stream and it takes probably half an hour to get to your car. (Although, with an entrance for the 101 right there, once you get to your car you're out pretty fast.) But the seats are really problematic. I am not at all a fat person (6'3", 205 pounds), but sitting in those seats made me feel like one. They may be even narrower than on airplanes, and that's saying something. So whenever I was seated, I felt terribly constrained, my arms folded awkwardly in front of me because of the closeness of the people on either side; and every time we stood or sat again, there was the gripping of the seat-arms on my hips, trying to keep me from doing either. It's hard to really relax into a performance when you can't find a decent place to put your arms.

Or maybe it was the new album. Gilmour structured the show into halves, with the entirety of his new album, On an Island, comprising the first half, and then Floyd material in the second half. (Although partway through the tour he came up with the clever idea of starting the show with a three-song journey through Dark Side of the Moon, just to get people warmed up. Which might've worked better if I hadn't been sitting there wondering just what to call that particular half of Pink Floyd.) Now, there's nothing wrong with Gilmour's new album--there are some very good tracks, but I find it to be stronger in the first half than in the second, when it gets a little--noodly. The songs get very bucolic and gentle, and seem to meander a little. Which meant that I actually started to fade out a little as the first half of the show progressed, and that meant having to rev up again for the second half. In my uncomfortable chair.

And then, although I am a fan of the Floyd, I'm not a huge fan. I do not own copies of every album, I have not sought out the rarities and the B-sides, and although I ripped into iTunes the first disk of Umagumma I sure as hell didn't rip the second. And in the show, Gilmour paid considerable attention to some of the more obscure tracks, with stuff from albums like Atom Heart Mother.

In short, I'll admit it: I wanted the big hits, and didn't quite get them. I was very happy when "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" and "Wish You Were Here" were played, and the full presentation of the 23-minutes-plus "Echoes" was a real highlight. (The call-and-response section between Gilmour and Wright was incredibly tight, so much so that they often seemed to be improvising right on top of each other, while meshing perfectly.) The musicianship throughout was spectacular, Gilmour really is one of the great guitarists of all time, and it was fun to watch Graham Nash, for example, standing onstage and just having a great time watching Gilmour play. But I wanted more of the hits, I did; I wanted that feeling I got as "Comfortably Numb" played us out to go on all night, and didn't get it. In my uncomortable chair.

Isn't it a shame that a great experience can be so easily diminished? And not necessarily because of anything the musicians did or didn't do--because of the particular set of expectations I carried with me, and the years-ago design of a bunch of chairs, and so forth. But maybe there's still some hope--I see that AMC Theatres is showing a big-screen presentation of this very concert next month, so maybe I get a second chance to have the experience I'd hoped for the first time. A nice big immersive screen, good sound, better seats, plus expectations exactly in line with the show because I've already seen it. Here's hoping.

United 93

Paul Greengrass's film United 93 will premiere at Tribeca next Tuesday, then open nationwide three days later. I have several excellent reasons for wanting to see the movie: first, a friend of mine from college, David Basche, is playing Todd Beamer, which is potentially a career-making role for him. (He played my doppelganger in an adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Shadow. So naturally, I taught him everything he knows. Yep. You bet.)

The second reason is that I really like director Paul Greengrass. Bourne Supremacy was terrific, and his docudrama Bloody Sunday, about The Troubles, was absolutely wonderful. He has a very potent, you-are-there style that makes for visceral, immersive movies, and I think he was a great choice for this movie.

But maybe too great. And maybe his style is exactly the problem. Think of that scene in Bourne Supremacy when Jason Bourne is in his car and gets broadsided, spins out, recovers and gets away. The quick cutting, from hand on stick to foot on pedal to tight on his face as his attention never wavers, really makes you feel like you're in that car with him, experiencing what he experiences. Greengrass is great at this stuff. But this is Flight 93 we're talking about.

There have been a bunch of articles lately, wondering whether the public is ready for this movie (including a good article that Yahoo pulled from The Hollywood Reporter), and it's a question I can't answer. Certainly I can't speak for anyone else, or guess what "the public" may or may not be ready for; but I have seen the trailer on Apple's QuickTime site, it's about three minutes long and it is a very emotional experience. Am I ready for a ninety-minute movie of this stuff? In public, with a theater full of strangers? That, for me, is exactly the question, and it may be the question a lot of people are quietly asking themselves. Do I want to go into a theater and sit there and be overcome by this experience? Or do I want to just wait till it comes out on DVD and experience it privately, at home? My guess is that most people will opt for the latter: that the movie won't do so well at the box office, but that the DVD release will go through the roof.

Then again, who knows? I vividly remember going to see Dead Man Walking in a theater, and at exactly the moment when the curtains in the death chamber are pulled open, some woman in the back of the theater let out one strangled sob, then choked it all back. It was a powerful reminder of the potency of a communal experience, of the fact that an audience is comprised of people who carry their own stories into the room with them, experiences that can sometimes react with the story onscreen in surprising and compelling ways. My own memory of the movie is now intertwined with that woman's reaction to it: did she have a relative who was on Death Row somewhere? Had someone she known been murdered? I'll never know, but it made the movie itself less abstract. The same thing can happen with United 93, and there's a real value to that kind of experience.

So maybe I'll suck it up and risk my manliness and go see the movie in a theater. Maybe; still haven't decided. The question is how many others will do the same? I guess we'll know in a week.

And, on an unrelated note: there is an excellent, thought-provoking article on the immigration debate in Salon, noting how it challenges progressive thinking but ultimately may provide a solution to the labor movement's slow decline. Definitely worth reading.

The Best of the Worst

From time to time, one must simply stop and marvel at a sentence such as this:

She smoothed the hair back from her elfin ears, making it tumble down her back, past her shoulders, broad but not too broad, broad enough to support the luxurious breasts that filled the front of her scarlet sun dress, glowing in the afternoon sun, the hot Georgia orb of fire, that came through the window, as she admired her trim shape and flat tummy, in the mirror.

This comes from a deliberately bad book called Atlanta Nights (on sale here), which was a team project designed to put the lie to a bad publisher. (The story, plus an excerpted chapter, can be found on Teresa Nielsen Hayden's site here.)

In short, it goes like this: an organization called the Science Fiction Writers of America hosts, as a part of its website, the valuable "Writer Beware" section, the purpose of which is to help novice writers avoid various scams and pitfalls. (It includes the most recent edition of the Twenty Worst Agents in America; and offers all the sound reasons why, for instance, you should never ever pay "reading fees" to agents.) The good folks at the SFWA had been keeping an eye on a so-called publisher called "PublishAmerica," and noted one day that PublishAmerica had seen fit to assail the credibility of science fiction and fantasy writers, saying that writers in these genres are hacks because they supposedly believe that "SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters." The implication was that PublishAmerica stands for real literature and couldn't be bothered with such lame storytelling. Naturally, for members of an organization called the Science Fiction Writers of America, the game was afoot.

A group of SFWA members decidedly to collectively test the high standards of PublishAmerica. They split between them the chapters of a deliberately awful book, the above-mentioned Atlanta Nights, and spent a happy weekend writing just as badly as they possibly could. Naturally, this high-falutin' publisher was happy to accept the book for publication, and a certain kind of literary history was born. Go ahead and read the more detailed version of the story at Ms. Hayden's site, but above all, be sure to read the excerpted chapter. It will brighten anyone's day, I promise.

Oh, and for more bad writing, there is always the Bulwer-Lytton Society's legendary "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" contest.

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.