Watching Star Wars

One of the ways I spent the lovely long Thanksgiving weekend was by watching all six Star Wars movies, in order, episode one through episode six. I also completely failed to achieve my real goal of working on a particular script, but for that I can blame the length of the movies I was watching, so it's all George Lucas's fault. Yep, that's it.

One of the things I was wondering, and can never really know, is how the movies play when they aren't watched in the wrong order. I imagine a day when I have a son, and he reaches the right age and we sit down together to watch the movies in the "right" order. There is much that might confuse him: in "A New Hope," Obi-Wan Kenobi says he can't remember ever owning a droid, when clearly R2-D2 was by his side almost non-stop through almost every moment of the first three episodes. Obviously these sorts of little errors are the inevitable result of making episode four in 1977 and not getting around to episode one till more than twenty years later. Inconsistencies will happen, and I will just have to explain why to my young viewer. But the real mythos of the Jedi doesn't really emerge until episode five, "Empire Strikes Back," which in context emerges even more clearly as the best of the bunch. This was fine for those of us who saw episode five as the second in the series: we get a taste of what the Jedi are about from Alec Guinness in "A New Hope," then in "Empire" we get really grounded in the straight-from-Japan mythos of the Jedi. But if you're watching in the "right" order and don't get this grounding till the fifth episode, that's a bit late in the game. Those of us watching in the "wrong" order accepted the nobility of the Jedi in the first three episodes because we'd already been primed for it; a new viewer might likely see them as simply another political faction who are just a little too fond of themselves.

But there are bigger problems, and let's not even dwell on the dialogue. (It was nice to see Lucas, when accepting his AFI lifetime achievement award, poke fun at himself as the "king of wooden dialogue," but it would be even nicer if he could have done something to actually, you know, fix the problem. Just look at the huge leap in quality, dialogue-wise, when Leigh Brackett and Larry Kasdan wrote the script for "Empire.") Let's also not dwell on Lucas's failures as a director of actors (again, note the improvement in "Empire" when one of Lucas's professors at USC, Irvin Kershner, directed.)

No, the bigger problems have everything to do with the character arc of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. You do see very clearly, as the episodes progress one to another, how the character fell, and that is rewarding--as far as it goes. The trouble is, you don't care. What's more, the Anakin/Padme romance completely fails; I for one kept finding myself watching the scenes between the two of them and wondering why this intelligent, grounded young woman would possibly fall for this petulant, whiny brat of a Jedi. (And saying that woman often fall for the bad boy just isn't sufficient here--these stories are supposed to operate as myth, and there's nothing mythical about this romance.)

The reason you don't care about Anakin is because there are never any moments of--here's that word again--nobility. There is skill--clearly the character is a phenomenally gifted pilot and fighter. But he completely lacks the humility that ought to go with those skills--he is, in fact, nothing at all like the noble Jedi Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan or Yoda. So when the collective Jedi Council denies Anakin the rank of master you think it's absolutely right and fitting; this whiny little jerk simply doesn't deserve it. Yeah it's sad what happened to his mother and all, but look at Luke Skywalker--his father murdered (or so he's told), his aunt and uncle reduced to smoldering skeletons, and he seems to find his way from whiny teenager to noble adult without any trouble.

It's not that hard to do, ultimately. You just need a couple moments in each of the first three episodes, when Anakin is tempted to do something wrong but rises above it. You also have to see Padme witness a couple of these moments, to see her realize that there is enormous human potential in this young man, and then their romance makes sense: she falls in love with the man he could be, but he fails and dooms them both. Now that would have made for a great tragedy. Instead, we're left not liking Anakin at all, and not much liking Padme either--this despite the fact that Natalie Portman is an inherently likable actor, but since the majority of her scenes are with Anakin, there's really nothing she can do.

With all that said, there's still plenty to like, particularly if you saw the films in the "wrong" order. (Is it possible to get the same kind of thrill from the Frankenstein-like first sight of Darth Vader in episode three if you've never seen episodes four, five and six?) The battle scenes are almost uniformly thrilling--and in one case where the first three episodes clearly outshine the last three, the lightsaber battles are clearly better in the earlier episodes. From 1977 to 1983, everyone was locked into this awkward two-handed fighting style, but after that movie fights in general began to absorb Oriental martial-arts styles, as in The Matrix, so that by the time Lucas got back to the series in 1999, the hand-to-hand work had improved significantly. Much more fluid, much faster, much more exciting.

And speaking of thrilling, all six episodes are worth the trip for just one perfect moment: in "Empire," when Luke tries to lift his x-wing out of the swamp with his Jedi powers but can't, and then little Yoda does it without trouble, Luke stares at his ship, turns to Yoda and says "I can't believe it." Yoda then says "That is why you fail." A perfect moment, one of those magnificently right movie moments, mythic and powerful in all the best ways, that makes you wish the rest of the series had been that good.

Still, I can't end without a few more complaints. Like the disturbing overtones of racism in the portrayals of Jar-Jar Binks and those weird Trade Federation guys, the ones with vaguely Japanese accents whose mouths never move right. I also wish that Lucas, in his fervor over new technologies, hadn't made all his scenes so damn busy--there always has to be a window in the background, and that window always has to be filled with distracting stuff. Not just a couple speeders flying past but thousands of the damn things, an endless stream of "lookie what we can do!" distractions that have nothing to do with the scene we're supposed to be watching. But nothing, absolutely nothing is worse than the midichlorians (or however the hell the name is spelled--frankly I can't be bothered to try looking it up). If there were five minutes of any movie that I wish I could wipe out with a wave of Harry Potter's magic wand, this bit of nonsense is top of the list. By attempting to provide a rational explanation for why the Jedi have their powers, where the Force comes from, Lucas damn near ruined the entire concept. It's okay, George--it's a movie, and we were perfectly prepared to accept the religious overtones of the Force. In fact we already had--to then hit us with this bit of preposterous blather was to very nearly ruin the entire series.

All in all, I'm still looking forward to the day when I can screen the series for a young child of mine. But until that time, it's doubtful I will find myself inclined to pull them out again.

Science and Religion, Part Two

When I was but a wee baby boy, my mother used to take me to church. (Officially, I'm Episcopalian.) She was of the "take him and let him make up his own mind" school. And one day we tried a new church, one where there was a hideously ugly plaster statue of Christ on the cross, and as people proceeded down the aisle toward their pews, they were expected to make some kind of obeisance to the effigy behind the altar. Well, to me it looked as if everyone was curtsying to this horrid looming statue, and I didn't want to do it. But suddenly there was this massive wave of disapproval from everyone nearby, this burden of expectation and outrage that seemed to come out of nowhere. In that instant, I knew this church thing was not for me.

Confirmation came a few years later. A friend of my mother's, hearing that we had not been to church in a while, said that we ought to go with him the next Sunday. We essentially said Why Not, and got dressed up and bundled ourselves into his car. On the way to the church, the police pulled us over. The driver, it turned out, had a bunch of unpaid tickets or something, there was a bench warrant for his arrest, and the police took him away. They asked whether we wanted to be dropped off at the church or at home, and we most definitely went home. "God has spoken," we said. "And He says that we don't have to go to church anymore." Which was perfectly fine with us.

Which leaves me, as the singles ads put it, "spiritual but not religious." Certainly not an atheist, and not really an agnostic either. I believe in something, but on the whole I'm perfectly happy not knowing what that something is. For me, Shaw's definition of a Life Force works just as well as anything else. My belief does not need to be specific to be real. At the same time, I am completely resistant to the blandishments of any and all churches when they try to tell me that they alone know what is true and right. Thanks very much, I think I can decide that for myself--and live just as virtuous, just as spiritual, a life in the process.

My attitude toward science is kinda sorta similar, now that I think of it. I don't understand most of it, and numbers have always made my head spin. I once read something to the effect of "We don't know for sure that the sun will rise tomorrow morning--it's only a very high probability." Which means that in the end, nothing is completely provable, you can only "prove" anything to a high degree of probability. Good scientists understand this, and are always prepared for a new theory to come along that might unseat the old theories, and this to me seems a healthy way to look at things.

We cannot prove that man descended from apes through a process of natural selection. As everyone knows, there is a missing link in that chain. To those who are particularly vehement in their support of intelligent design (or creationism, or whatever other stalking horse is put forth by those who really seek to assert that the Bible is literally true in all its aspects), this demonstrates that evolution (already a misnomer, as I noted yesterday) is unproven and is therefore no more "scientific" than intelligent design.

But the thing is, it is. We already know that evolution happens--just look at bacterial infections. It's been all over the news for several years now that various bacteria are developing resistance to our overused antibiotics. That's evolution in action right there--and further, it's natural selection in action. Want proof of evolution? Walk into a hospital's emergency room during flu season.

It may only be a high probability that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I'm confident enough in that probability--I have enough faith in that probability, as established scientifically in ways I do not fully understand--to go to sleep at night without worrying about whether the sun will be there in the morning. As most of us do, without a second thought.

So. Why is it that I find myself more or less in agreement with the broad thinking behind intelligent design? Because I do believe in that Life Force, or whatever it is you prefer to call it; and because, though I do not understand mathematics, I know that in its broad strokes, what math accomplishes comes close to godliness. The pattern of tines on a pine cone can be described by a mathematical sequence called the Fibonacci series; an equation perfectly describes every spiral you've ever seen, from the swirl of two paints mixing together to the steam rising from your coffee cup; light moves at a constant, measurable speed, as does sound. In short, even things that seem to be random turn out to have some sort of pattern to them, some sort of--for lack of a better word--design. The patterns fit together, the design works. And if there is a design, it's reasonable to infer some sort of designer--even though I refuse to anthropomorphize the designer into a god. For all I know, mathematics may itself be the god we seek.

But intelligent design is not provable, not even to a low degree of certainty. It rests, finally and fundamentally, on belief, in your willingness (nay, your eagerness) to infer a designer from the design. And in a school setting, I would be very happy to discuss intelligent design in a philosophy class, a comparative religion class, I would even be happy to study it in a biology class--at the individual teacher's discretion. But what I don't want is for some busybody to come along and tell an entire school district that in science class this non-scientific idea must be studied on an equivalent basis to evolution.

That is when, as Einstein said, we see "...an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science...." Yet Einstein is also correct when he asserts that religion and science are dependent on each other--the Fibonacci series does not diminish my spiritual appreciation of a pine cone, rather it enhances it by pointing out how magnificent that seemingly-simple design is.

Those who have for so long inveighed against evolution often seem to be doing so because they're personally offended at the notion of descent from apes. This is, to put the nicest possible face on it, a kind of anthropological snobbery. Me, I'm fascinated by the ways we fit into the greater design, and the fact of evolution, the way simpler structures tend to transform into more complex structures, fills me with hope that we're all on an emergent path, toward not just greater complexity, but greater greatness.

But in the meantime, I'll thank you to keep your grubby little mitts off my science curricula.

Science and Religion, Part One

There's this nice lady I know who is both more conservative and more religious than I am. We get along marvelously, and every once in a while we have interesting debates in which we each fail to convince the other, but pleasantly and without rancor. As happens so often, I usually end up realizing that in truth our positions aren't so far apart as they seem. Case in point: intelligent design.

The other day, a bunch of us were discussing earthquakes, and someone whose father was a geologist got to talking about deep time (one of my favorite aspects of geology, as it happens, because the perspective it provides is so mind-bending: for a geologist, the smallest unit of time even worth thinking about is a million years). I then cracked a little joke: "But wait, the earth is only 10,000 years old." Jo (we'll call her Jo, because her real name is--well, Jo) then proclaimed that this little "crack" was aimed at her. (Well okay, it was a little, but it was more a "rib" than a "crack," and suddenly I find myself wondering why the names for types of jokes seem to be so anatomical....) A few minutes later, Jo printed an article from a website and handed it to me. "Here," she said. "This is very interesting."

The website is an online magazine called Science and Spirit, and the article was the text of a speech that Albert Einstein delivered in 1941 to a conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion. Jo even highlighted a sentence for me, in which Einstein asserted that "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." For me, though, at least with regard to the intelligent design question (the most interesting current conflict between science and religion), the more interesting sentence was this: "...a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs."

Jo and I began to have a discussion on these issues, in which I asserted what seems to me to be the accepted liberal position, namely that intelligent design should not be mandated in science classes precisely because it is not science; but that anyone is free to teach it in Sunday school, or in a philosophy class, anywhere that isn't strictly about science. Jo responded by beginning to attack the notion that evolution is proven science, to which I noted that "natural selection" and "evolution" are not the same thing. This last was an attempt to keep the conversation pointed in the right direction, but Jo instead accused me of splitting hairs, reducing the argument so that I could win it. And then, alas, our merry conversation was interrupted, and never resumed.

(For the record: natural selection is essentially a subset of evolution. Evolution posits that organisms change from less-complex to more-complex over time; natural selection is one of the theories as to exactly how that change is accomplished. It is fair to say that natural selection as a theory wobbles a little from time to time; but evolution itself stands on much firmer ground.)

But here's the bit that would probably surprise Jo: in fact, I generally find myself in agreement with the general thinking behind intelligent design, but I still don't think it ought to be taught in science classrooms.

Why? Well, that's for Part II.

Comfortably Numb

A quick update to my November 7 entry about tribute bands--I was dismissive of the efforts of Australian Pink Floyd after seeing only one song on their recent PBS broadcast. I would now like to apologize--they were utterly sensational.

My friend Pat McGreal (whose comic series Chiaroscuro: The Private Lives of Leonardo DaVinci has been recently re-released by DC, and is well worth picking up) asked the sensible question even before the show started: Is there, finally, any difference between a group of very good musicians choosing to play very good music they did not write, and the Chicago Symphony playing an evening of Beethoven? No, there isn't--particularly when the music being played is, like Pink Floyd's, orchestral in scope to begin with.

Thus the whole question of the validity of a tribute band is dismissed in a stroke, and the only thing that matters is whether the experience of the concert was a good one.

Ohmyjeezus yes.

They start the show with a complete recreation of Dark Side of the Moon, then they take a break and come back with individual singles--from early stuff like "Careful With That Ax, Eugene" to the bigger numbers everyone knows. The singing was much, much, much better than on the PBS show--when they got to "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," the tune I saw on PBS and turned off in disinterest because the singing lacked passion, this time there was nothing lacking. The musicianship was stellar, and when they would into second-level Floyd tunes like "Learning to Fly," it was suddenly okay for them to stray from the note-for-note thing that you expect with the pillars of the Floyd catalogue.

What APF really understands, though, is the dynamic range of Pink Floyd's music. The build in "Us and Them" didn't quite happen, which was disappointing; but in the second half of the show things really clicked together, and song after song built beautifully. There were moments when the sound seemed to be playing me like a harpstring, and my ears are still ringing this morning. The point of a good build, of course, is to try to reach a transcendant moment, and they did a great job of it. The audience was wildly enthusiastic, and on the whole I think I must conclude that this was one of the best rock concerts I've seen. No, really!

Whether

Wow, what a glorious day it was here in the City of Angles (not a typo). I walked to the dayjob under a sky so blue that it felt like I had only just discovered what blue was, and everywhere the trees were that perfect tree-ish green, and the little flowers were whatever colors the little flowers were, and the smog was only a distant haze burning my eyes all day long. It's the sort of day when you are happy to be taking a nice long walk, happy for the perfect degree of coolness in the air, happy that Thanksgiving is just a week away, happy to be living in a place like L.A., downright happy just to be alive.

And then I waited endlessly at an intersection for a traffic light to change, gave up, walked to the next light and waited endlessly for that one; a driver nearly mowed me down because she was looking the other way as she approached an intersection I was crossing; my shoelaces just wouldn't stay tied; and I tripped on a bump in the sidewalk, sending me galumphing forward ungracefully. The nice mood instilled in me by the nice weather, it was just as quickly gone.

They are fragile things, these moments of beauty. The weather itself is, obviously, mutable--just ask anyone anywhere along the gulf coast. But beauty itself is just as transitory (I once met a Hollywood actress, beautiful in her day, whose face betrayed all the ravages not of time itself, but of trying to defeat time). Photographs yellow and curl, books flake or burn, paint fades, marble chips, mountains crumble, the oceans dry up and eventually the universe contracts. Will Shakespeare be forgotten, five hundred years from now? More to the point: will I ever stop caring that I can't keep my shoelaces tied?

The older I get, the more I appreciate sand painting. I remember my days as a stage actor, and the fact that the best performance I ever gave was for an audience of maybe 100 people, only a few of whom probably remember it, and that no record of that performance exists in any form whatsoever. Now I'm moving into the film world, where a performance does not disappear the moment it is complete, but even so, this city is awash with film preservation organizations fighting against the inevitable aging of the old nitrates used in film. Is a DVD really as durable as they tell us?

My friend the Buddhist would surely say this: the moment of beauty I enjoyed this morning was exactly what it was, a moment of beauty, entirely sufficient unto itself. The moment of annoyance when I tripped on the sidewalk was what it was, entirely sufficient unto itself. Be here now, live the moment, and don't forget to breathe. Treat everything I do as if it were a sand painting, and don't get caught up in believing it will ever be more than that.

Yep, that's what he would say all right. And I would smile and nod and know that I am far more likely to let the moment of annoyance linger, to forget the taste of beauty in the air, to daydream of the lasting appeal of the screenplays I write. Knowing all the while that my Buddhist friend is right, but still trapped into being a product of a certain time, a certain place, a certain way of life that has never been about Now except in the sense of I Want This Now!

Just another go-get-'em day here in the U.S. of A.

Mother Toombs

At Christmas, back home in Florida, I'll be attending a family reunion for Mom's mom's side, which in a roundabout way makes me want to tell a tale or two about someone from Dad's side of the family. Chiefly because she has some of the best stories, and because I feel like blogging today but for the life of me can't settle on anything worth saying. Therefore: Mother Toombs.

Mary Catherine Lacy Toombs Hudson was my great-grandmother, born, as she often told us, the day the U.S.S. Maine was sunk in Havana harbor, thus "beginning" the Spanish-American War; actually she was born the day after, February 16, 1898. But that was characteristic of her stories: they were always just a little bit off somehow. She was also fond of saying, for example, that a Lacy ancestor of hers had been executed in the 15th Century for being a Protestant. (Given that Mother Toombs was a Southern Baptist, there was something about an ancestor being persecuted for religious reasons that appealed to her sense of melodrama.) We, being oh so clever, snickered and scorned: after all the Protestant reformation didn't begin until the 16th Century!

Much later, well after Mother Toombs (a name I invented for her, as the matriarch of the family) died, I discovered that our Lacy ancestors had been French Huguenots, and that although her century may have been a little off, her facts were pretty much spot-on. Now, of course, I wish that I had recorded the tales she told, because I'm doing genealogical research and her stories are one of the best resources I could find, if only they hadn't died with her. (Her Lacy ancestors--also spelled Lacey or Lassey or de Lassey--may also have been Normans who helped William the Conqueror defeat the English in 1066. Indeed, Hugh de Lacy was one of the guys who conquered Ireland for Henry II.)

She was from Richmond, Virginia, part of a typically large family, although the only sibling I ever knew was her younger sister Edna. Mother Toombs married my great-grandfather, RLT Sr. (I'm number four), a Richmond dentist who made her, as she proudly proclaimed, the first female dental technician in the U.S. But her longevity became something of a curse: she lost her first husband to, as I recall, a heart attack or a stroke; her second husband, Mr. Hudson, died apparently in a train wreck; and then her son, the Marine Corps major, died in his early sixties from lung cancer that was a plain result of years of smoking. I can remember her sitting in her chair after his funeral, saying to no one, to the world, "A mother is not supposed to outlive her son." But she did, by nearly fifteen lonely years. And although her own family was numerous, her descendants were not: one son, two grandchildren, and only five great-grandchildren.

Her last years were difficult: her local Miami doctor proclaimed that she had Alzheimer's, and never bothered to question whether that might be right. Certainly it seemed like Alzheimer's: I was staying with her during one summer home from school, and I would hear a sudden loud clattering from her room. I would find her rattling a cup against the window shutters, scared out of her wits and demanding to be taken away from this strange place and brought back to her real home. Dad tried to find a decent facility where she could stay, but she was miserable at every one of them, and eventually he sent her to Montana, where my aunt lives. There, a small-town doctor thought to ask some simple questions and, on the basis of little more than a family history, determined that Mother Toombs actually had diabetes, which was what was affecting her mental state. He began to treat her properly, and suddenly she regained lucidity for several more years. So much for our big-city Miami doctor.

But here's my favorite Mother Toombs story: in May 1984, my newborn brother Adam was going to be baptised, and it was my job to drive to Mother Toombs's house (which was in the opposite direction), pick her up, and get her to the ceremony. I was driving my step-mother's old Corolla, a nine-year old car colored an unusual shade of green that only had a couple more years in it; Dad had loaned me the car once I came of age, with one proviso: if I ever got a traffic ticket, my driving privileges would disappear. So I get to Mother Toombs's house and she's plenty old and doesn't move that fast, which means we're running late. I tried to make up the time on the freeway, and promptly got pulled over by the state troopers.

I explained to the officer why I was speeding. "Yes sir," I said, "I know, I was driving too fast, but you see my baby brother's baptism is this morning and it's very important to me, and--well, and the traffic is very light and I was being very careful but yes sir, I understand, I'll slow down and I won't speed any more and I'm very sorry sir."

The trooper looked like he was just about to let the whole thing slide when Mother Toombs, who had not said one word the entire trip, suddenly decided to help. She leaned over toward the trooper and declared, in her beautiful Richmond accent, "I told him not to drive so fast."

Oh yeah, you bet I got the ticket. The trooper looked at me as if I was this evil person, for imperiling this sweet little old lady, but how could he possibly have known the truth? (That's a picture of her below, taken only a few hours later, with baby Adam.) All I could was slump into my seat and accept the ticket and then drive, slowly and deliberately, to my brother's ceremony--which I still reached on time, as it happens.


She never said a word to Dad, though, and I didn't either until only a few years ago, when the Corolla and Mother Toombs were both long gone. Then, it was safe to tell the story; and Dad laughed long and hard, because he'd known her too and it sounded just like something she'd have done.

Redistricting and Torture

Two quickies:

Redistricting

So everyone knows by now that Gov. Schwarzenegger's entire slate of initiatives was defeated on Tuesdy, which was a clear statement by the electorate that $50 million for an off-year election was a waste of government money and we won't stand for it. My first inclination, in fact, was to do exactly what the state as a whole did, and just vote against everything. But in the end I just can't help myself: I studied these proposals just as I study all of them, and read the little pamphlets they send, and in two cases voted Yes. Once was for the second of the prescription drug proposals; the other, which was decidedly against the wishes of the state Democratic party, was in favor of redistricting.

Now I don't know for sure whether this was, on its merits, a good or a bad proposal. Maybe three retired judges, picked by the legislature with apparently little or no oversight, would have ended up doing just as bad a job as the legislature in drawing district lines. But it seemed to me that anything that takes redistricting powers out of the hands of politicians can only be a good thing. And Democrats should be the first to applaud: if they want to regain control of the Congress, there needs to be some serious redistricting across the country. Every single legislative district is so appallingly gerrymandered that even with sentiment rising massively against incumbents in general and Republicans specifically, it's a safe bet that neither house will change hands in 2006. There are simply too few contestable seats to be had. It's good for the politicians already in office, and certainly the Democrats lobbied me hard against this proposal; and had it passed, Democrats would have probably lost a couple of California congressional seats to Republicans, which would not thrill me. But the big picture seems so clear to me that I would have voted for any redistricting proposal. And if a bandwagon should ever start to develop for the idea, you can count on me to bang the drum.

Torture

Even more brief: torture is bad. End of sentence. The idea that my government would in any way resist legislation that clearly says so is simply appalling. But don't take my word for it, go read this spot-on editorial in The Economist instead.

Thank you, and good night.

Art vs. Craft

So last month I edited a 9-minute documentary about the history of a local theatre company. A pretty easy gig, all things considered: almost all of the images were still photos, done Ken Burns style, slow zooms in or out, slow pans this way or that, with music under and a voiceover that the director wrote. In Illustration No. 473 of the precipitous learning curve for Final Cut, I worked my little a$$ off and the result, sadly, was only half-a$$ed. I mean it looks fine, but there aren't nearly enough moments of zing and zazz, editorially speaking.

There are a few moments I liked--an actor descending through a trap door in the stage floor, walking into darkness just before a segment about the Northridge earthquake. But when a director friend of mine watched the piece, he immediately pointed out how much more effective the moment would have been if I had simply slowed the footage down, extending the actor's descent. A great idea, and something I hadn't even thought of, largely because I don't yet have those tools really burned into my head. I now know they're there, and I more or less know how to use them, but the skill doesn't matter if your imagination doesn't lead you to employ those tools in the first place.

A frequent point of debate in filmmaking circles is whether an editor is an artist or a craftsman. Theoretically, I categorically believe they are artists, and should be recognized as such--a movie can have everything else going for it, but if the editing is clumsy the movie won't work; contrariwise, a poor movie can often seem better than it is with good editing. I just watched Coppola's Gardens of Stone, an interesting movie that doesn't really work, and I think editing is one of the reasons why: too often the dots don't seem to be connected, not in a cool Tarantino sort of way but in a "What's going on here?" sort of way. Good actors start weeping almost out of nowhere because the moment doesn't build properly, while other moments seem to build and build but go nowhere, to no purpose. Somewhere, way deep down, there is an interesting story being told, but the presentation of it left me confused and indifferent.

My editing job on this documentary could only be craftsmanlike (and not very impressively craftsmanlike either) because I'm not yet ready to be an artist. It's the old Carnegie Hall joke: guy goes up to a cop in Manhattan and asks "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice, practice, practice!" You can't think about your pizzicato technique when you're playing in Carnegie Hall, it has to be a part of you, practiced until it's second nature. A writer has to know the rules of grammar inside and out before he can be allowed to break them. An actor in Beckett's "Play" who hasn't completely internalized the lines will get lost, disastrously, in front of a paying audience. It is never enough to rely solely on your craftsmanship. Good enough is never good enough.

Questions in Search of an Answer

There was a fascinating and frightening Salon/Der Spiegel article yesterday, "Generation Jihad?" (subscription required), concerning the recent wave of riots in and around Paris. It puts the rioting in context with the rest of Europe, where decades-long attempts at multiculturalism and inclusion seem to have failed appallingly, leaving thousands of unintegrated communities, ghettos where Muslims and other minorities are unable to break through economic barriers, where rage and frustration boil and blister. Consider this, then, a companion to my August 16, 2005 blog wherein I wrote of my "deep-seated belief that as human beings, we all have far more in common than the petty little nonsense that divides us, and that we will all be better off when we find ways to live together as people first and Africans/Americans/Asians/Europeans second." In that entry, I considered Jared Diamond's theory as to whether the experience of a politically-unified China is what caused it to fall behind the disparate Europeans, whose political disunity resulted in constant competition and advancement. Perhaps, I mused, my lifelong impulse toward increasing global unity might in fact lead to the stifling creativity and competition. Then I veered off into a weak conclusion, musing about maybe writing a story someday that might deal with the issue fictionally. To hell with that--let's go ahead and ask the difficult questions now. And questions are all I have--answers are far, far away.

Question 1: Must There Be Ghettos? Recently, President Bush has been touting his "guest worker" program for immigrants, in which illegals would be granted three-year work visas, during which time they could apply for--but not necessarily be granted--green cards. (Convenient, isn't it? Get a few years of cheap labor out of someone then ship them back. The cold calculations of immigration policy.) In a radio address last month, Bush said "If an employer has a job that no American is willing to take, we need to find a way to fill that demand." This always struck me as a peculiar notion--why would Americans be so unwilling to take certain jobs? Granted, ditch-digging and sanitation work aren't what you would call glamorous, but are we Americans so inherently Grand that such jobs are beneath us? Or to put it another way, why would an unemployed American be any less likely than an unemployed emigrant to take a dirty job? If you need a job and that's the only thing you can get, why wouldn't you take the job? Buried in President Bush's statement is exactly that implication.

But look around you. Here in L.A., how often are you going to see a crew working on a lawn that isn't Mexican? How many hot, rotten, dirty jobs are filled by people whose skin isn't white, whose language is not English? What is the percentage, exactly? Is it fair to say that in our supposed melting pot of a nation, as many as 80% of our most rotten jobs are being taken by people who are not white anglo-saxon protestants? It raises a very uncomfortable question: for we who live in the "majority," who enjoy the relatively placid life with cars and computers and time to blog our thoughts to the world, must there be a wretched underclass laboring to do the jobs that, in fact, we wouldn't do in a million years?

If my power goes out I want it fixed pronto; if the cable TV goes kerflooey I want it back right now before Lost comes on; I want my new book from Amazon to arrive in 24 hours; if nearby tree roots again invade my plumbing, I want it taken care of before my next flush; and I want all this to happen invisibly so as not to disturb my tranquil little life--or my blogging time.

But I wouldn't take those jobs, precisely because I don't have to. I'm fond of saying that my life hasn't been peaches and cream, that we were on food stamps (briefly) when I was a kid, that I'm miles from rich now. But I would not be a sanitation worker in a million years, and I've got the education and the background to make damn sure that I don't ever have to. Let's leave aside the question of whether I am inherently more or less capable than anyone else: I'm a good typist, I've got decent organizational skills, and if I walk into an office as a presentable WASPy guy with a Bachelor's degree, I will get the job. Change only one part of that equation, make me a recently-arrived Mexican with the same typing and organizational skills, with an equivalent degree, and my chances of getting that job are seriously diminished. Utterly unfair, but a fact of life. How many Eastern bloc émigrés who were once doctors in the old country are now driving cabs?

Question 2: Do the Parisian Riots Mean We're All Doomed? The Salon/Der Spiegel article asserts that the suburban center of the riots, Clichy-sous-Bois, "serves as evidence that the French route of soft integration has failed miserably." Its mayor, Claude Dilain, "has been a proactive mayor, setting up free soccer training for local youth, appointing youth leaders as mediators and making sure that the community's waste collection service functions properly.... By any measure, Dilain has done everything right." Yet his city is aflame night after night, as rioters, mostly immigrants or the children of immigrants from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, assert their anger over their overwhelming lack of economic prospects. The article quotes a police officer as saying "The logic behind this unrest...is secession."

There was a smaller-scale riot in Birmingham, England recently; the London bombers seemed to be well-integrated children of immigrants; even in Amsterdam, friendly, laid-back, pot-smoking Amsterdam, where 1 out of 10 Dutch citizens was born somewhere else, quiet racial and economic divisions have been festering under the surface of what was supposedly the most liberal, culturally-advanced nation in the European Union; and since the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh last year there have so far been 106 "reciprocal acts of revenge" against Dutch Muslims. The question has to be asked: if the Dutch can't pull off cultural integration, is there any reason to think we can?

Question 3: The Breeding Problem. No liberal likes to talk about population patterns because it sounds uncomfortably like advocacy of eugenics. But I know for a fact that in Miami, the majority population is Cuban, and if you want a job there you would be very well advised to learn Spanish. Now mostly these are Americanized Cubans, and as a native of the city I don't think the way of life is really all that different than it was 30 years ago; but there are subtle differences, and as time passes there is no reason to expect those differences to diminish.

But what if our Cuban neighbors in Miami weren't so well integrated? What if there were just as many and they were really truly pissed off about economic hardships? If our majority population ever decided to rise up in revolt as these French Arabs have done, what would happen to the City of Miami? Would it in effect secede, as the French policeman asserted? Might it not be argued that here in L.A., there are parts of town that are effectively independent, where the police do not go? Both L.A. and Miami have seen riots, big nasty powerful riots. And who's to say that one of these days, the residents of Watts and Compton won't have the numbers and the strength to really make their voices heard?

Well then, we say, we would just have to find a way to do a better job of welcoming these people into the broader population, just as the French are going to have to do. But admit it: doesn't the prospect make you just a teeny bit nervous? It's nice being part of the majority; and are you really prepared to make room in the club for those guys standing on the street corner looking for day work? Not just one or two, here and there; but in their thousands, all of them wanting a little of what you have.

If you run with Jared Diamond's argument, all this is, in the long run, good for us: population, cultural and economic competition lead to a greater rate of innovation and advancement for everyone. Modern ghettos are hell-holes to be sure (I have stark memories of Chicago's Cabrini-Green, a place I drove past often but never ever went inside), but at least there is running water and electricity, yes? Surely that represents some kind of progress, doesn't it? Can we comfort ourselves that modern ghettos are better than the older ones? That even if progress for everyone is slow (glacially slow; geologically slow), still it's progress, so we're not ultimately doomed. The short-term, though, it doesn't look as comfortable as we might like it to.

As I said: lots of questions, and I'm nowhere near an answer on any of it. I have no conclusions to offer, nothing to wrap this up, just a growing sense of unease and ever more questions.

Tribute Bands

So this friend of mine is a huge, huge Pink Floyd fan, and why not because they are pretty much awesome. (Me, I arrived at the Floyd late--something about deliberately disliking anything my mom liked, simply to be different. As time has passed, absolutely everything she liked is now at the top of my list. Ain't it always the way.) But several days ago, said friend saw on PBS a performance by a group calling itself Australian Pink Floyd--a tribute band. (Their website is fun--I particularly like the mock album cover for Wish You Were Here, with the flaming guy shaking hands with a big pink kangaroo.) Yon friend grew very excited, and knowing that I too am a fan of the Floyd, he purchased tickets for the both of us. Which will represent the first time I have ever gone to see a tribute band of any stripe. This of course sets me a-wonderin'.

Being a writerly sort, it's probably natural that my first thought on almost any new subject is, "What's it like for someone to go through X?" Obviously these musicians love Pink Floyd music, which is unquestionably great music well worth loving. Isn't it an odd thing, though, to turn that love into a career? It's the same question you might ask of an Elvis impersonator: what's it like when your chief means of artistic expression involves the close mimickry of someone else's chief means of artistic expression?

I do understand it a little. I was enormously impressed by seeing Richard Burton when I was 15, and in an acting class I once did a scene from Night of the Iguana with Burton's Welsh-English accent, completely ignoring the fact that Tennessee Williams wrote the character to be an American Southerner. And once, when Peter O'Toole came to Chicago to sign his first book (which is marvelous, by the way), and after shaking his hand (and marveling that he's my height, which is to say quite tall indeed) I said that it had taken me years to get his acting style out of my system. O'Toole smiled and said "Oh, why bother."

Yeah, that's right, I'm name-dropping. You got a problem with that? This is a blog, after all--self-indulgence is the name of the game.

So. You love an artist, and you wish you could somehow achieve something like what they achieved. The most obvious, direct route is to just do what they do exactly. Any writer can tell you that they had several periods when their work closely resembled that of another writer whom they admired--my own such periods ranged from Harlan Ellison to G.B. Shaw. But most artists eventually find that mimickry isn't terribly fulfilling, plus it has certain dangers--to this day, even after his well-deserved Nobel Prize, there are still many critics who can't help comparing Harold Pinter to Samuel Beckett. (But then there are those who accuse Beckett of aping James Joyce, a chain you could probably follow backward forever--and you also get into the thorny area of influence rather than mimickry, and let's not go there or I'll digress forever.)

What's it like, then, to be Aussie Floyd? To know, as you walk onstage, that your audience is applauding for ghosts who are not in the room? To know that the sole criterion on which you will be judged is not your musicianship, but your ability to sound like those other guys?

I caught a little of the band's PBS performance, watching their take on "Shine On You Crazy Diamond." It was, in fact, extremely well played--they are both capable musicians and capable mimics, even if they needed two guitarists to play what David Gilmour can play alone. But then the bass player started singing, and suddenly my interest plummeted. His voice didn't sound right; and what's even worse, the passion wasn't there. Roger Waters may not be a great singer, but undeniably there is passion--and this guy singing with Aussie Floyd, he didn't even sound like he was trying. I turned off the TV and went to do something else.

Therein lies the danger. Maybe the bass player is a good singer with different kinds of songs; maybe, in the end, he should go off and do those kinds of songs. Because my only interest in his work was in how well he sounded like a band I'll probably never see play live (you have to believe that the Live 8 performance won't be repeated), on the principle that if the next-best-thing is all you have, then you go for the next-best-thing and make do. With such a formulation in mind, however, disappointment is always lurking close behind.

But what the heck. The tickets are bought, so I'll go and see what there is to see, and on the whole I'll probably enjoy it. And then other thoughts come to mind as well: do tribute bands get girls in the same manner as "real" rock bands? Or do they get, say, "Hungarian Pamela Des Barres The Tribute Groupie"?

Miami Drivers

They're doing it again.

About four months after Hurricane Andrew, I went home for a visit. And as my mother was driving me home from the airport, we reached an intersection where the traffic light was still dead. She needed to turn left, so she did what she was supposed to do: stopped at the intersection, waited for traffic to clear, started to nudge forward and then stopped again. "Wait for it," she said, and I had no idea what she was talking about.

A moment later, a car tore through the intersection from the direction we were about to take. It didn't stop, it didn't slow down, it just barreled through at top speed. "Okay," Mom said, "now we can go."

As a passenger, I was never so terrified in my life. Mom explained that once the traffic lights went out, many Miami drivers simply decided that what that meant was that they now had carte blanche to do whatever the hell they wanted. They had utterly abandoned the rules of the road, and if we wanted to stay alive, it was our responsibility to look out for them because they sure as shootin' weren't looking out for us.

The same thing happened after Hurricane Katrina took her little practice-swing at South Florida before moving on to her New Orleans grand slam. And in the wake of Wilma, Miami drivers are doing it again.

I have never understood this; maybe I don't understand such behavior because I do understand why we have traffic laws. Traffic laws, you see, are not there to personally inconvenience you; they are there to make sure we don't kill each other, plain and simple. Traffic laws are one of the purest examples of how we are all interdependent on each other, particularly in a big city. If drivers just do what they want, without a thought for anyone else, then accidents are guaranteed. Big bad nasty accidents. One driver in a hurry goes through an intersection and meets another driver in a hurry, the hard way. As sure as the night follows the day.

Here in L.A., the liquid nature of traffic patterns is particularly apparent. There is so much traffic around here that if one driver, only one, does something that is, shall we say, not quite enlightened, traffic will immediately back up right down the line. Here's an example:

On the Pacific Coast Highway (one of the world's great roads), right at the intersection with Sunset Boulevard, when driving south-to-north a lane opens up just before the intersection. Its purpose is to allow drivers to turn right onto Sunset, but it is not marked as a right-turn-only lane. Just past the intersection, the road is also widened for a short distance, to allow room for drivers to turn from Sunset onto the PCH; they must merge almost immediately into the regular flow of traffic. But what inevitably happens is this: south-to-north drivers on PCH swing into the open lane and, when the light turns green, they charge forward, thus allowing them to cut in front of most of the people in the real lane who waited their turn. When these drivers then have to merge in, the rest of us have to slow in order to make room. This makes the real lane back up, and when other unenlightened drivers see how long the line is at the intersection, they swing into the open lane.

All they see is their convenience. They do not see, or choose not to see, that in fact they are the reason why the lane is so backed-up in the first place. If no one pulled that little stunt, there wouldn't be nearly so much merging, and traffic would move better. Their personal convenience becomes a great deal of inconvenience for dozens, sometimes hundreds of people who do actually appreciate how this stuff is supposed to work.

Same with these Miami intersection-crashers. They want to go as fast as they want; the traffic lights are dead, which means that they are free to do as they want, particularly with the police so busy, you know, helping people; in the process, everyone else gets delayed, and lives are put at serious risk.

There's a word for people like this. Starts with an A, ends with an E, and has SSHOL in the middle.

Holocausts in Art

I recently watched Atom Egoyan's film Ararat, which deals (not quite directly) with the Armenian genocide. Egoyan is himself of Armenian descent, and after The Sweet Hereafter I have been a fan of his work. (Even so, it took me a couple years to get around to seeing this film--my Netflix list is very, very long.) I've seen some reviews complaining that this movie "could have been Egoyan's Schindler's List," given the superficial resemblance of genocide at the heart of both stories. But Schindler's List was about doing good in a time of great evil; Ararat is about the weight of the past on those who cannot escape the burdens of history. Different subjects altogether, and I think that taken solely as a work of art, Ararat stands very well on its own.

But one of the responsibilities of this burden, as the movie makes very clear, and as Egoyan clearly believes, is the duty to show the world what happened during the Armenian genocide. (Here is a Wikipedia article on the subject.) The trouble with Egoyan's effort, as I see it, is that no one has ever made a version of Schindler's List dealing directly with the Armenian story. What Egoyan presents is a multilayered tale (including a film within a film in which a director is making a movie that does in fact aim to tell the story of the genocide) about a young man whose mother is an art historian who has written a book about an artist whose mother was a victim of the genocide (see how complicated these story-threads already are?); about an actor in the film, a Turk playing the worst of the Turks; about a Customs inspector trying to wrangle a secret out of the young man; and about the young man's half-sister, who has her own crusade, her own truth she is trying to reveal to the world.

I know an Armenian and was discussing the movie with him. I asked if he had seen Ararat and he said "I think every Armenian has seen it." But what he wanted to know from me was how the movie played to someone unfamiliar with the subject of the genocide--he has lived with this knowledge all his life, and therefore comes to the movie with full awareness of its background and viewpoints; I saw the movie simply as a work of art, and liked it very much on that basis. But as a testament to the atrocities of the Armenian genocide, I think that Egoyan was too much the artist and not enough the historian.

If there had been some Armenian version of Schindler's List, then Egoyan's work might have succeeded better--then, you see, there would have been room for a more complex treatment of the peripheral themes. But to an audience that knows nothing of the genocide, Egoyan's attempts to be even-handed only succeed in muddling the history lesson. He is, for example, scrupulously fair in allowing the Turkish actor (played by Elias Koteas, whom I always confuse with Christopher Meloni because they could be brothers) to express his view that the genocide might not have been a genocide, that it was simply one of the horrors of a more straightforward civil war. In his director's commentary, Egoyan notes that he lifted direct quotes from the official Turkish position on the genocide question (Turkey's ongoing denial that it ever happened is one of the things that most rankles Armenians today) and assigned them to Koteas's character. So I'm sure that what the character says resonates with an Armenian audience very differently than it does with me--to my ears, it all sounded reasonable. Koteas's character then goes further: he says to the young Armenian man, in essence, Listen, we were both born here in Canada and what's past is past; let's go share this bottle of champagne and be friends. In his commentary, Egoyan nearly shudders in horror at the idea; to me it sounds like the only way through such difficulties.

But then, denial of the truth is one of the principal themes of the film, and Egoyan is very interested in how people's lives are affected when they can't get at the truth of something, or when others try to deny what they believe is true. This, again, is a great subject for a film--but it interferes with the history lesson Egoyan was trying to get across. He urges viewers to go and research the subject themselves and make up their own minds, which is fair enough as far as it goes, but really, how many people will actually do that?

In short, Ararat makes for a curious object lesson. It tries to be both a polemic and a work of art, but it can't be both. If someone else had first made the polemic, then there might have been room for the work of art; but Egoyan really should have made up his mind which was more important to him, to tell the tale of the Armenian genocide or to tell the tale of the people affected by it. Films are surprisingly compact things, more like short stories than novels, and in most cases they really only have room to do one thing well. Egoyan's artistic ambitions ended up sabotaging his desire to tell a story that needs telling. Which is a shame, really, because that just leads to a sense of disappointment with the film itself, which then spreads to the subject matter and leaves me that little bit less anxious to do the research myself and determine what happened. This too would probably make Egoyan shudder with horror, but there it is.

Briefly

Roberts v. Miers

Lord knows, I wasn't crazy about the John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court--but my objections were purely ideological. Even a casual look at his credentials made it evident that the President had done an admirable job of selecting a stealth candidate: one whose conservative bona fides were obscure, but whose qualifications were impeccable. And it didn't take long at all for me to realize that this is how the process is supposed to work: the President gets to name his nominee, and has every right to pick someone whose views conform with his own; the Senate may decline to confirm the nominee, but they have no real say in who gets nominated in the first place. (The "advise" part of "advise and consent" is by far the weaker part of the equation.) So, as much as I may dislike it, I was obliged to admit that the selection/confirmation process was followed fairly, and that in the end a qualified candidate was seated on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Then came Aunt Harriet. And by now you already know where I'm going with this, so do I really need to continue on?

The interesting question for Democrats is this: should they oppose or embrace her? Ideologically, she may end up being more moderate than the other "strict constructionists" whom Bush could have named; but she is plainly not qualified for the job, and to my mind that's the part that really matters. Call me crazy, but I never have been able to work up the kind of high dudgeon that most liberals feel about Antonin Scalia because I've seen Scalia's mind at work and I know that he's brilliant and thoughtful, even though I disagree with him almost all the time.

To me, the thing that really matters on the Supreme Court is that it be comprised of the best and brightest legal minds. Agreement or disagreement ideologically is a distant second. Therefore, if I were a Democrat--and wait, I am!--then I would take a stand against Ms. Miers, even knowing that Bush is likely to then nominate Ms. Rogers Brown or someone like her. But at least the candidate would have something resembling the ability to do the job, which has to be the part that really matters.

Murrow and Friendly

I saw Good Night, and Good Luck last week, and enjoyed it a bunch. The movie is exactly what I said was needed after the last election: more political art. I realized last November that over the last several years, liberals I think decided that on many of the important social issues they had already won the national argument. Their thinking, I think, went something like this: "My position on [fill in the blank--abortion, religion in the classes/courts, etc.] is so demonstrably right, so logically unassailable, that surely everyone can see it, and I can go back to my cheese-and-wine parties." Trouble is, the conservatives never for an instant stopped making their arguments, and in the absence of a real debate, the side that never stopped yammering slowly made inroads in the public consciousness.

Therefore I welcome a film like Good Night, and Good Luck. And even while I recognize that it is not fair and balanced (despite being scrupulously fact-checked), I rejoice in the fact that it doesn't try to be. Clooney had something he wants to say, and he's got a right to say it. Sure, you can make the argument that Murrow's role in McCarthy's downfall wasn't as central as Clooney makes it out to be, but I don't really care: it's a good story that makes a compelling point worth making, and that to me is the part that matters. We need more art like this, and I hope that writers and musicians and moviemakers all across the land are hard at work putting out their unvarnished, deeply-felt viewpoints just as Clooney did.

And while I'm on the subject, I felt like mentioning that Fred Friendly (Murrow's producer, played by Clooney, who literally sat at Murrow's feet during the McCarthy broadcasts) was the commencement speaker when I graduated from Emerson in 1987. He gave a great speech about journalistic ethics and I became an instant fan. I highly, highly recommend that if you ever get the chance, you should watch his brilliant 13-part PBS series called "The Constitution: That Delicate Balance." As Friendly himself put it, the aim of the programs was to "make the agony of decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking." He accomplished this by gathering together in a round-table format top minds of the time, from former President Ford to Supreme Court justices like the aforementioned Antonin Scalia and Potter Stewart, plus others like the then-head of Planned Parenthood, Faye Wattleton, and the brilliant think-tanker Willard Gaylin. A moderator, usually Harvard's Arthur Miller (not the playwright), would pose a theoretical question and the panelists would begin to discuss how they might approach the problem; then the moderator would turn the screw and make the problem harder to deal with, then yet harder again. The results were often brilliantly revealing, and consistently challenging. Very, very much worth seeing if you ever get the chance.

Talking About Walking

For the past several months I have done that unheard-of thing in Los Angeles: gone for a walk. I started walking mostly for health reasons, since I was obliged to quit my old health club in February and had not been getting any consistent exercise since then. But since I never owned a car until three years ago, walking is something I've always done a lot of and always enjoyed--until the car came. Then, despite my best efforts not to, I became a typical Angeleno, driving to anything that wasn't extremely close. Indeed, one of the great surprises has been how easy it is to walk to places that seemed distant--from my apartment to Westwood, with all its movie theaters (a couple miles away), is about twenty minutes. (Bear in mind, twenty minutes on the 405 may not cover even that much ground.) I even discovered that I could walk to and from work in just over half an hour, and on a nice cool day, that's no hardship at all.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that if you want to get to know your neighborhood, there is no substitute for learning on foot. Already, my walks have shown me where, as a driver, the best escape routes are when the obvious ones get backed up (and here in West L.A., it doesn't take much for these roads to get clogged). (Although if you think I'm gonna tell you what that escape route is, you're crazy. Crazy I tell ya, crazy!) Sometimes, walking around can be a lot like going into a bar and checking out the women: "Yeah, I wouldn't mind inhabiting that space," or "God no, not in a million years."

But you can also learn a lot about the history of a neighborhood by walking it, in ways that might not seem so obvious. The population density of West L.A. has been increasing in recent years, and it becomes easy to see why as I wander from block to block. Most structures are now small apartment buildings, with some upscale (but modestly-sized) condos here and there; the bigger condo towers are just a little further north and east, lining Wilshire. So for the most part the neighborhood still feels pleasantly residential, but then you start noticing that there are some scattered single-family homes dotting the area, and then you notice some lots where a structure has been recently torn down, and where construction is beginning on a small apartment building. Clearly, then, this neighborhood used to be filled with those classic L.A. bungalow-styled houses, modest little homes with modest little yards, but as real estate values rose, the owners probably sold for a big profit and moved somewhere more upscale. Those homes were torn down, and the same space was made to hold more people (more people paying more rent, further increasing local property values and the pressure on homeowners to sell and move).

In this way, the area's population density never has a big spike upward; rather, the pressures of more people and more cars ratchet up slowly, one small apartment at a time. It's not so awful when the neighborhood manages to retain its calm residential flavor; but locals react with considerable alarm when some ham-handed developer comes along with a scheme to build a massive apartment complex in the heart of the neighborhood--namely, on a section of the nearby VA Center. Bear in mind, the land for the VA Center was donated over a hundred years ago on the strict provision that it only be used for the benefit of local veterans; but now, with funding being cut and property values high, it must be a nearly-unbearable temptation for the land's trustees to sell off a portion and reap big profits.

Locals, though, have watched the slow ratcheting-up of population pressures, the increased traffic on the roads, the fact that you really can't add new roads to relieve those pressures, and they react aggresstively to the notion of a giant new complex coming in.

And now, after several weeks of prowling this neighborhood I've been living in for nearly three years, I am finally beginning to really feel like one of those locals. I'm beginning to feel the slow, quiet pulse of the place, to value these little streets and the few little homes that remain. Quite suddenly, simply because I needed a little exercise and wanted to do a bit of walking, I have gained something I never expected: a whole community that I can call my own. I no longer say that I have an apartment that happens to be in West L.A.; now I say that West L.A. is my home.

The California State Tax Ripoff

What was that about me waiting to blog till I find a subject that won't piss someone off? To hell with that. I have every intention of pissing someone off.

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The following is a public service message for anyone contemplating the formation of an LLC in the State of California. Please follow closely; you will thank me for it later.

A Limited Liability Company offers some important legal protections, particularly for a small organization with limited resources, in any state; in California, most of the little film companies form as LLCs. (Look at the end-credits of any movie, and there will almost always be a line about, say, "Good Night and Good Luck LLC." That means that although there were various producers and studios involved, the "author" of the movie is this LLC that was formed for this one purpose.) Obviously, that means there are an awful lot of LLCs in California, maybe a disproportionately higher number than in other states. I don't know for sure, but maybe.

In any event, in the State of Californa there is a price to be paid for forming an LLC, and that price is a minimum of $800. What they don't tell you is that unless you can afford to pay professional accountants right from the git-go, your $800 will be, to put too nice a word on it, supplemented by some extra money: penalties and fees. This is because the state's Franchise Tax Board, the entity that oversees California's tax-collection efforts, has rigged the game long before you ever got here.

There are two principal ways they do this. They are both tax variations on a shell game: while you're looking over here, they get you over there.

Trap No. 1: Let's say your new LLC was incorporated in mid-November of this year. You don't know it yet because no one tells you, and the information that does tell you is buried miles deep under tax-code language that you are required to find yourself, but at the moment you incorporate you already owe $800 to the state. That amount is not pro rated at all: you owe $800, no questions, period. (The only exception is if you incorporate within the last 15 days of the calendar year--after Dec. 17, as long as you don't actually conduct any business, you're fine.)

So. You incorporated in mid-November of 2005, and you do what seems to you to be due diligence, and you find out that in April of 2006 you must file Form 568 with the Franchise Tax Board. You work very hard to interpret all the language and to fill out what is a very complicated form, and you write your check and you pay your $800 and you forget about it all until next year. You don't know it, but you're already screwed.

Here's what you probably won't have noticed: the tax return, the Form 568, will read at the top "2005." But the voucher that accompanies your payment will read "2006." Turns out there's a reason for this: your payment was due the moment you incorporated, as I said. It was supposed to have been paid by January 15 of the following calendar year. The FTB will do one of two things: apply your check to 2005 and then charge you penalties for paying in April rather than January, or apply your check to 2006 and charge you penalties for never having paid for 2005.

And bear in mind, they wait at least six months before sending these notices out. This allows the interest to build up nice and high before you even know there's a problem. And the notice they send to inform you of these penalties and interest? It will contain a single line to "explain" the problem, with reference to a set of codes that supposedly explain the explanation, but good luck because those codes are even more arcane than anything you've seen heretofore. (And these contain yet further references, to FTB publications that supposedly make it all clear.) Long story short: if you happen to get caught in Trap No. 2, you may think that that is why you're being penalized, and never realize till the next year that instead you got caught in this other trap. (Which is exactly what happened to us.)

So what is Trap No. 2? Glad you asked.

That $800 amount is due regardless of whether your LLC has generated any income or not. If you've made nothing whatsoever, too bad, you still owe $800. Now there are two lines on Form 568, one right below the other. Line 2 is where you report the LLC fee amount; line 3 is where you report the LLC tax amount. Now anyone would think this: a flat amount due regardless of whether there is or is not income, that would be a fee; an amount that applies only after you have income above a certain amount, and then varies depending on how much income there is, obviously that would be a tax.

Wrong. Reverse it. The $800 amount is the tax; the other variable amount is the fee. So when you fill out your form and put $800 on line 2, you have just filled out your form incorrectly. The FTB will wait six months, then send you a notice that you filled out your form incorrectly and owe penalties and interest. (That's what happened to us last year.)

Why does the FTB do this? I'm convinced that this offense against logic has only one reason: to generate more money for the State of California. The $800 amount would seem to be egregious enough, but by inserting this blatant bit of illogic into the code they are guaranteed to confuse a very high number of small businesses that cannot yet afford professional accounting help, and really the only way to discover the problem is to get fined for it. It's what I call official extortion, and there oughta be a law against it, but the legislature writes the laws and the legislature writes the tax code, so guess what? Too bad for you and me.

Rat bastards.

Please, I beg you: if you're thinking about ever forming an LLC in California, print out this post and keep it somewhere safe and close. Because the only way to get back at the FTB is for everyone to get this nonsense right; that would then force them to rewrite the tax code in some other massively confusing way, which might actually succeed in causing them ten minutes of trouble.

That's about the only solace we get. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go find a ridiculous amount of money that does not actually exist in any of my accounts. Good luck to you--you're gonna need it.

An Interruption

Blogging herein is to be suspended, until I can come up with a topic that doesn't piss somebody the hell off.

Which is to say, see you in a coupla months or so. Maybe.

American Idyll

Making bad music is hard.

Outta Sync is, as you may recall, about a brand-new boy band comprised of middle-aged geezers like me. The footage we saw at the party was delightful, and it included a rough cut of the music video that the boys made. That we made. But for music, we've only ever had the ragged demo that Bill Robens cut, ages ago. When we shot the video that's what we were all singing to, and no one had ever given any thought to whether there would be solo lines or any of that, so we all just sang everything.

Well, now there are solo lines--based mostly on who happens to be front-and-center in a given shot. (Has there ever been a case where the video was made before the song?) The tempo can't change without also having to futz around with film speeds; and if Bill comes up with a great new line, well too bad, we just can't change the song at this point. You might think that none of this really matters, because the song and the video are supposed to be bad, so why not just slap something together and let it be what it is?

To answer that, let me tell you a brief story.

Several years ago, freshly arrived in Chicago, Marc Rosenbush cast me in a one-act he was directing. (We knew each other at Emerson and didn't much care for each other; then happened to move to Chicago on the same weekend and he needed an actor but didn't know anyone, so that's the start of that.) It was a play called "cont(r)act," written by our friend Max Burbank (who may be a distant relative, since my grandmother was a Burbank). In it, there were these dance interludes where the girl (Suzanne Carney) dances elegantly and I dance comically. Easy enough for Suzanne, who is an actual dancer. Me, I tried very hard to dance comically. After only a couple rounds of this, Marc took me to one side. "Just dance the best you can. Trust me, it'll be funny." So I did, and it was, because I am not a dancer and my best efforts are just plain comical.

The lesson, of course, is that you can't just slap something together and hope it'll work. You have to work very hard to get the result you want, and if that result is supposed to be a bad song, then you achieve it by treating the song exactly as if it were a cut for Sgt. Pepper. And last night, we met for our first rehearsal.

There are all the usual problems: Doug Clayton is directing a play and had call-backs tonight so he couldn't be there; Ezra was cutting film all day and was wiped out so he couldn't be there, even though he's the only true tenor in the group; and future rehearsals are still tenuous because Bill Robens and Dan Wingard are starting a show at Theatre of NOTE. I wish the phrase "herding cats" hadn't become such a cliché, because that's exactly what it's like trying to coordinate actors' schedules.

Now bear in mind, I am not musical. I love music, but I am not a musician. I love to sing, but I am not a singer. My pitch can wander if I don't pay careful attention, and my sense of rhythm is not what you'd call accurate. I took music theory in college and didn't do very well, not because the teacher was bad (in fact Tony Tommasini is now one of the music critics for the New York Times), but because I just couldn't wrap my head around the mathematical complexities of music.

With that said, I still have certain minor gifts that enable me to get along. I have a decent voice with a decent range, and my time singing madrigals taught me how to listen. But with this song, "2BX2U," much of what I learned with the madrigals is working against me: I learned to blend, but now they want our voices to compete; I learned to sing prettily, but now they want us rough; and of course I learned to sing in Latin, but now we sing of "Like a Roman in a roamin' region" for no good reason at all.

Nonetheless, there were moments. The guy who cowrote the song, Bill Newlin, would lead each of us through our individual melodies then we would put it all together--and suddenly, out would come this big great chord, and even with two voices missing we would all suddenly get very excited about the work we were doing.

Because it feels good to make a really good bad song. Remember that when you hear the final product, and please, forgive us for it.

On Liberalism

Let's start with Churchill. He is reputed to have said "Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain." (This might be apocryphal, and after searching through several Google pages I have yet to find this quote properly attributed to a particular speech or moment in time--it isn't even consistently worded.) Now this can certainly be taken at face value--Churchill was the toriest of Tories, and played highly partisan politics all his life. But I'm also tempted to look at this as something of an excuse he might once have made for the period when he ditched the Tory Party and joined Lloyd George's Labour Party--which was not so much an ideological decision as it was practical: the Tories had collectively dismissed Churchill to the corner of the room, so to speak, and only Lloyd George was offering him any chance at influence and power. So it's definitely tempting to think that, whenever Churchill said this (if he said it), he might have been trying to assign loftier goals to his period with Labour.

But I've often wondered whether there might be yet another way to look at what Churchill said. Was Churchill speaking strictly of parties, or was he perhaps speaking more broadly than that? Liberalism can be defined as a broadness of approach, a belief that there is more than one way to skin a cat, that it is in one's best interest to try any number of solutions to a problem. Conservatism, on the other hand, can be defined as holding fast to certain core principles and not wasting time and resources on other methods. To put it in modern political terms, the capital-C Conservative approach to the economy seems to revolve principally around tax cuts, in the belief that if The People have more money and The Government less, The People will do a better job of spending that money and so buoying the econonmy than The Government ever could. Liberals, however, might argue that The Government's higher taxation, when directed to a wide variety of socially beneficial programs, creates a safety net for all of The People that allows them to better flourish in the long run.

So maybe Churchill meant this: maybe in your youth, when you don't really know anything, you are inclined to just keep trying things in the hope that they'll work; but by the time you've grown and matured, you've already experimented and you have a clearer, more practical experience of what and does not work. To put it another way: Ted Kennedy, at his advanced age, is as conservative in his Liberalism as Ronald Reagan was conservative in his Conservatism. It's not that Kennedy is necessarily right, or that Reagan was necessarily wrong, or vice versa; it's that they lived their lives and made certain decisions and reached certain conclusions, but in the end they both were/are very conservative even while standing on opposite sides of the ideological fence.

Me, I'm a liberal Liberal. But I'm definitely getting more conservative, now that I'm forty--I've seen a lot of things tried that didn't really pan out that well. But there's this live John Lennon recording when he spoke to an audience and said (I'm quoting from memory) "Okay, so flower power didn't work out, big deal, let's try something else." I'm a confirmed Roosevelt Democrat and always have been--and remember that in the first several years of his administration, FDR was willing to try anything and everything to resolve the Depression. When something didn't work out, he discarded it and tried something different. That may make governance a bit more chaotic (a bit?), but when it yields bonanzas like Social Security, then it's hard to argue with the approach. I think of it as governmental empiricism: the evidence of things seen. If an idea works, you will see the results you want to see; if it doesn't work, you see results you don't want to see and you move on. It is, as near as can be, the scientific method applied to government: create a theory, test it, and if the experiment doesn't work then you create a new theory. This, to me, is Liberalism--in the inherently chaotic world of government, it is the most creative and the most scientific approach to the host of problems that government must deal with.

And as you would guess from calling myself a Roosevelt Democrat, yes, I do generally believe in a big federal government. There are things that only the feds can do: if left to their own devices, the Southern states would have never ratified any civil rights legislation. It took, let's be blunt about it, considerable federal bullying for the South to toe that particular line, and I firmly believe that the nation is a better nation because of it--even though the Democrats clearly paid a price for doing the right thing (Nixon's infamous, and highly effective, Southern Strategy).

All of which is in aid of my saying Yes, I am a proud Liberal. And anybody who wants to demonize the word "liberal," or the deeply-considered, deeply-felt reasons I have for being a Liberal, is just wasting my time. You won't ever catch me criticizing a Conservative for being a Conservative per se; there's nothing wrong with the philosophy, even if I disagree with its practical applications. And I wish like crazy that Democrats would wake up and stand up and declare that yes, they too are Liberals, and proud of it. Then maybe we could start to get something done around here.

Addendum, Sept. 19th: Just ran across a website dedicated to true-blue liberals; it'll even allow you to buy t-shirts and blue wristbands proclaiming your pride in liberal ideals. If you're one of us, the site is worth checking out.

Yes and No

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things

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

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

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

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

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