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.

Cry Foul

Okay, one more thing about the immigration issue.

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

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

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

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

La Migra, Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La Migra, Part One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coppers and Choppers

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

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

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

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

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

Molar! The Musical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not an Ocelot in Sight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funny Scary Sad Maybe

Funny Scary

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

Sad Maybe

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

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

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

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

Hey, I Know an Oscar Winner!

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

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

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


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

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

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

Congratulations to Corinne. Very richly deserved.