The Torture Twelve

Speaking of being pissed off...

Yesterday, late in the day, the U.S. Senate approved the reprehensible and un-American Military Commissions Act of 2006. This is the one that allows for the suspension of habeas corpus, which has been, as so many others have noted, a crucial part of civilized jurisprudence since the Magna Carta was adopted in 1215. It took a long time before I really understood why habeas corpus is important, but it's the Bush administration that has really hammered the lesson home. See, when you've suffered a terrorist attack and, in your national mood of panic, have arrested hundreds of people for the crime of being Muslim, a petition of habeas corpus is the mechanism by which those people arrested have the right to challenge their arrests. (In Latin, it literally means "You have the body.") It prevents the government from simply tossing people in prison and forgetting about them.

To pick only one example, if lawyers hadn't appointed themselves to argue on Jose Padilla's behalf, he would almost certainly still be held in a military trial without any rights whatsoever--and Padilla is an American citizen. The current legislation strips habeas rights from non-citizens, who already have less rights to begin with. Now there are those who will argue that non-citizens don't deserve the rights of citizens--and in truth, the original Greek definition of a citizen did indeed specify a set of rights--and obligations--that were reserved only for those born in that city-state, rights that were specifically excluded from non-citizens such as, for example, slaves. But the concept of human rights is one that only ever grows, and in the 2000 years-plus since the demos was first exalted in Athens, the idea has expanded, slowly but irrevocably, until we in our lifetime have a far broader view of citizenship than the Athenians did. Slaves, for instance. We're not real fond of the idea of slavery anymore.

It is a common truism among civil rights advocates that the truest test of an idea is when it is applied to the worst among us. That's why the ACLU always finds itself abused for defending the rights of, say, Ku Klux Klan members to march through a town. Defending the rights of a white supremacist in no way means that you are defending the point of view of that white supremacist; it simply defends Voltaire's assertion that "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." (Actually it wasn't Voltaire, but let's not get bogged down just now.)

So the whole idea that Democrats want to "coddle terrorists" by protecting their right to habeas corpus is not only wrong, it is willfully dishonest, election-year pandering of the worst kind. Hastert and Boehner know it isn't true, but as fear-mongers of the first order they know that it scares a few voters their way and that is the only thing they care about. This new Military Commissions bill actually legislates this sort of fear-mongering, while depriving thousands of human beings of basic civil rights observed by civilized nations around the world (a class of nations that used to include the United States).

And, to my utter disgust, twelve Democrats actually voted for this monstrous legislation. Salon is referring to them as "the Torture Twelve," and I think it's a good name for them. Senators Tom Carper, Tim Johnson, Mary Landrieu, Frank Lautenberg, Joe Lieberman, Robert Menendez, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Ken Salazar and Debbie Stabenow--these are the dozen representatives of the so-called opposition party who, for craven political reasons, have willfully abandoned a whole host of bedrock American principles.

I am particularly ashamed to see Joe Lieberman's name among the Torture Twelve. I have deliberately stayed away from those calling for Joe's head because I think the Democratic party mustn't succumb to ideological purity tests for its members (that's something Republicans do). So I kept out of the Lieberman-Lamont race, despite contacts from organizations like moveon.org suggesting that I support Lamont. It seemed to me that Joe had earned the right to be a Senator, he was "loyal" on all sorts of important issues and I wasn't about to penalize just because of his regrettable lapses with regard to the Iraq war. But this one, this is finally too much. Now, at last, I hope he gets defeated--because he deserves to be. Anyone who would vote in favor of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 deserves to be sent home, to be chucked out of their seat of power at the earliest possible opportunity.

I have already said as much to my own elected representatives. I sent e-mails just the other day, warning that if they vote for unlawful detentions, or for expanded torture rights, or for warrantless wiretapping, then I would never vote for them again, no matter what other positions they might hold. I have never before been a one-issue voter, but I am now. And while I believe that even a Bush-appointed Supreme Court will strike down this awful legislation pretty damn fast, I am nonetheless disgusted that it was ever passed in the first place.

It really is time to clean house in the halls of Congress.

The Hubbub

The robbery took about a minute. Following up has taken hours.

Monday night, of course, there were seven or eight phone calls to get credit and debit cards canceled, plus time on the internet adding fraud alerts to my credit reports, and so on. At one of the credit reporting agencies, the woman on the phone actually tried to hard-sell me one of their services. After listening to her entire spiel I said "You know, this is really the wrong time to be trying to sell me something." After which she actually tried to sell me harder.

Then there was the guy at one of the credit card companies. I called, said my card had been stolen and that it needed to be canceled. "Yes sir, I can take care of that right now for you." Short pause. "And sir, may I ask why you are canceling the card?"

I paused. Had he really just asked that? "Yeah, it's because the card was stolen. During the robbery portion of my evening."

So after all that I watched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and then part of The Daily Show, and it took that long before I felt sleepy at all. Finally got only four hours of sleep, and then the next day realized I would have to take the day off from work. So I went to the Social Security office to replace my card (hey, you're not supposed to carry the card with you--but I don't think they told me that when I got the card at age 13, and I'd had that thing with me ever since), I went to the DMV to replace my driver's license, and finally everything seemed pretty well taken care of. There would still be some foofaraw once I got all the replacement cards, and had to notify various merchants of changed accounts numbers. But for the most part, the adventure was over.

(Except that yesterday I found myself in the Anger phase of my post-robbery mental adjustment, and it wasn't fun spending a whole day just plain pissed off, but that's a whole other story.)

Then this morning, I got a call from Bank of America's fraud department. The guy wanted to check on some charges, and he led with one from this week--definitely post-robbery--from a merchant I have definitely never used. How on earth had that happened? Turns out that when I called Monday night, BOA simply set me down for a replacement card and didn't cancel the old one. In fact the replacement has the same number as the old one.

Another hour of my life passed, because now I had to double-check my BOA business cards as well--and sure enough, the same foolishness had gone on there, too. No charges on those cards, but still, it looks like the rat-bastards did in fact get away with using one of my cards.

My only hope now is that I can get the name of that merchant to the police, and if one of the robbers actually went to this place to use the card, maybe the police can make some headway in tracking these piss-ants down.

Oh, and by the way--the card they used? It was one of those that had my picture on it. A friend asked, "Well did the robbers look like you?" "Yeah," I said, "I was robbed by Ed Begley Jr. No they didn't look anything like me."

And all of this at a time when the release of the movie is still churning forward and there are a billion things to do. With Marc flying out to Colorado today, I'm left to take care of all the things he would ordinarily do, plus my own stuff. Plus, now, the seemingly endless hubbub following the robbery. Hell, no wonder I'm feeling so damn pissed off.

By the Way...

Just a quick note that Zen Noir is shifting its Los Angeles screenings from the Westside Pavilion to the Beverly Center. Advance tickets are available here.

A little bit of good over here, a little bad over there. I suppose it balances, though frankly I could have done without the bit on Monday night.

Robbery

On Monday night, it came time to take one of my every-other-day walks. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was about to come on, but I left the TiVo to do its job and figured I'd catch the show when I got back. I meant to take the garbage out, but forgot; remembered just after leaving the apartment and almost turned back, to take those extra couple minutes to get it done, but didn't.

But the crucial decision was this one: on Sunday, I bought myself a new iPod, one of the new 80 gig models, because I'd been working hard and I deserved a present. Monday night, about to leave for my walk, I thought "Hey, I never take my iPod when I go for these walks, wouldn't it be fun to have music?" Even as I thought this, that little voice in the back of my head was shouting as loudly as it could, "There's a reason why you don't do that! Remember? Late at night? Why you don't--ah, hell, there he goes."

I have always prided myself on having good street awareness. I've done these late-night walks for years and years--when they took me through Boston's Combat Zone, I had no problems. When I walked down a pre-cleanup 42nd Street at 1:00 a.m. wearing a tuxedo, still no problem. (There was a pool of silence that moved with me as not-quite-seen people stopped and stared, but no one bothered me.) This sense of street awareness has everything to do with paying attention to what's going on around me--and being seen to be paying attention to what's going on around me. I'm very tall, I move fast, and my eyes look everywhere.

But the iPod, that alone changed my profile. Suddenly, I wasn't the tall guy with his eyes open, I was the shlub strolling down the street listening to his tunes. That's what the little voice in the back of my head was hollering about. I wish I'd listened to it. I wish I'd taken out the trash so that the timing of my night would have changed. I wish a lot of things. Instead, this happened:

The police believe that the two young men, both Latino but without noticeable accents, were driving by looking for easy marks. They spotted me, with the distinctive white wires from the iPod headphones trailing down. They took the next left, parked in an open space on Westgate right next to University High School, and started heading north on foot. I was heading west on Texas, and we reached the intersection at the same time. They gave a little, allowing me to pass in front of them, and at this point I had a tiny alarm bell ringing because something about them was a little off. I kept my eyes on them, and once they were behind me, I saw them turn, accelerate and separate.

Fight or flight. Here's another wish: I wish I'd picked flight, because it might have worked. Instead I turned toward them, and I was shouting an expletive and now so were they. But faster than I could blink, one of them was in front of me, one was behind me, and they both had knives. "Gimme what you got," they said, with a few curse words tacked on at the end. I didn't bother trying to fight anymore once I saw the knives, so I dropped the iPod to the ground and reached for my wallet. My fingers wouldn't grip it. "Hurry it up," they hollered, and a few more curses; and for emphasis, the guy in front of me put the knifeblade in my mouth. Finally I got a grip on the wallet, pulled it out, and in the one smart thing I did all night, instead of handing it to them I tossed it away from me.

The wallet landed on the sidewalk to my left, and by pure dumb luck that happened to be exactly the direction in which their car was waiting. They scooped up the wallet, left the iPod where it had fallen on my right, and as they ran away I had an utterly mad impulse to shout "Hey, what about the iPod?" Because after all, I only had $8 in my wallet and it just seemed idiotic not to take my day-old $350 iPod. But I said nothing, and instead reached for the cellphone in my pants pocket (nope, they didn't get that either). Even as they drove off I was already dialing 911.

And no, I didn't get a look at the license plate. The car was just far enough away, and they didn't turn on their lights till they were well down the block. I'm guessing these guys have done this a time or two before.

With the danger gone, I could start thinking again. While waiting for the police to arrive I called Marc Rosenbush and had him immediately starting canceling the Zenmovie debit and credit cards that were in my wallet (since we just had the party, I happened to have a lot of cards on me), so within ten minutes those cards were already dead. After filling out the police report (we did it at the site, instead of going to the station) I hurried home and started calling my personal credit card providers, canceling all of those cards. Within ninety minutes of the robbery, every card was canceled, the debit cards were useless, a fraud alert was out with all three credit agencies, and I knew for sure that there had been no activity on those cards before I canceled them.

The robbers, they got squat. Eight bucks. In exchange, if they weren't armed felons before, they are now.

If only all those cop-show cliches weren't so damn true. "It was dark," I found myself saying to the officer. "It all happened pretty fast, I didn't really get a good look at them." I've heard those lines a million times on TV, and always said to myself "Ah, but I'm a writer, I'm observant. If it ever happens to me, I will give a terrific description." Turns out, not so much. Because the knife as a weapon of intimidation is obvious; but its other function is to serve as a distraction. As soon as the knives appeared, they were all I could see. Where were the knives? What were they about to do? Why was one of them in my mouth? During all of that, I could spare no brainpower at all for what my assailants looked like. Consequently, my description to the police was probably no better than anyone's would have been. So much for my keen powers of observation.

Every once in a while I try to think of the Jean Valjean defense: maybe these guys live in poverty and they have no choice but to steal. Families to support and nothing has ever worked but crime. But then I immediately think this: pulling a knife on someone is simply beyond the pale. Whatever desperate motivations might lie behind their actions, pulling a knife, pulling two knives, makes all those motivations meaningless. They went way over the line, and if given the opportunity to testify against them, to send those two rat-bastards to jail, you can be damn sure I'll do it.

In the meantime, I revel in the fact that they got nothing of value. And then there's this, too: the iPod survived unharmed. Go figure.

Zero-Sum

When someone tells me they want to go into any of the arts, I always have a one-word answer for them: "Don't." My reasoning is this: the arts are, collectively and individually, brutal, cut-throat, vicious and nasty. On good days. There are certainly those people who are born to be artists and who will, therefore, pursue their craft no matter what I say, in which case more power to them--but if someone can possibly be talked out of a career in the arts, then by gum they should be.

How exactly, you ask, are the arts brutal, cut-throat, vicious and nasty? Here's one example.

The Los Angeles opening of Zen Noir went perfectly well. There was a bit of projector craziness at the Westside Pavilion, but these things happen, and because that particular audience included a lot of cast, crew and friends, they were in one of those jovial moods where a little bit of craziness just makes the party atmosphere swell. Certainly we were all having fun, as this picture taken just outside the lobby of the theater, showing your humble scribe peeking in, demonstrates.

And then the after-party, at a gallery in Santa Monica, was really great fun in a cool space, as we finally got to unwind from all the stress and worry. The film had opened in three theaters now, the numbers weren't bad, we'd already gotten one extension, we could afford to relax and have a nice night celebrating.

Time passes. Overall, our weekend numbers were a bit depressed, but that was because it was Rosh Hashanah and our theaters were in neighborhoods with large Jewish populations. Even with that, the manager at the Pavilion told us that of the four movies they had running, ours was doing the best this weekend. So it certainly seemed that we were likely to extend into a second week, at least there.

Instead, this morning there came the news that we had been booted from the Pavilion. The fact that we did the best of the movies playing there didn't matter because every movie playing there got booted. Even Lassie!

What happened? An increasingly crowded schedule, in part--no one really cares why a film's numbers were a little depressed, they just look at the fact that there's a bunch of new movies that might do better, and that's that. (Actually, now that I think about it, it isn't actually vicious or nasty, it's just brutal: it's hard cold business, the dollar triumphant, and of course that's true in any business. Still, they booted Lassie!)

But something else happened, something we couldn't do a thing about: The Science of Sleep.

Now bear in mind, I'm a big fan of Michel Gondry's work (Eternal Sunshine is easily one of my favorite movies of the last ten years), and when I saw this movie a couple months ago I really enjoyed it. Thus, when I looked at the calendar of films to be released on the weekend of September 22nd, and saw this one, a little part of me said "Oh, crap." Because if our audience was going to be attracted to weird, off-beat art movies, those same people would be just as attracted to a new Gondry film. More so, in fact, because Gondry is a proven entity, an artist whose work is always interesting.

As it turns out, the movie-releasing business is what they call in the investment world a "zero-sum game." If one person wins, it's because someone else lost. Science of Sleep averaged about $25,000 per theater, so it's going wide. And for it to move into a theater, something else has to move out. Our movie, like a whole bunch of others, is moving out. It's the nature of the business: one man's success is, almost without fail, at some other man's expense.

A tough business, but we're learning fast how this stuff works. We're already close to being able to announce a new theater in the L.A. area, we still have our opening in Denver/Boulder on the 29th, and having won the Moondance Festival there a couple years ago, we have high hopes as returning champions. So we're not dead yet, not by a long shot; still, there isn't a bit of this process that has been easy. Then again, if it were easy everyone would be doing it. Plus, there's the thing I haven't talked about yet: our audiences.

One woman at a screening came up to Marc and told him that her husband had recently died, and that the film had helped her deal with it a little better. People have even come up and hugged me after a screening, and I was just one of the several producers. Maybe we're not getting the sort of numbers that set Hollywood atwitter, but we're reaching people. Here and there, one or two at a time, we're reaching people.

And how much is that worth?

Best Review So Far

Now here's what we like to see.

The L.A. Times is one of the nation's biggest papers, there's a little picture from the movie on the front page of the "Calendar" section, and the review inside is the best one we've had so far. (Our distributor is very happy indeed.) More to the point, this is a review that actually reviews the film Marc made. All too often you get reviewers who wish the film had been something else, perhaps because they get too caught up in the idea of genre. The presence of "Noir" in the title, for example, causes them to believe that the film can only be This and This but definitely not This, when in fact the film uses Noir as a starting point and then veers way off in another direction.

(This is exactly why, as a writer, I've always hated the idea of genre: as soon as you label a work as being part of a particular genre, you either have to conform to the conventions of that genre--and your readers' heavy weight of expectations--or work very hard indeed to hack your way past all those conventions. My novel Thereby Hangs a Tale deliberately begins with four chapters written in vastly different styles, precisely so a reader will have any genre expectations thrashed out of them and can then approach the novel on its own terms.)

But Mr. Thomas, the Times reviewer, seems to have understood exactly what Zen Noir is--and what it isn't. He describes it as "a provocative, witty--and admittedly esoteric--experimental comedy." That's exactly right, and I think that helps prospective viewers: the movie isn't being sold as a mainstream noir, so--we hope--we won't end up with people who simply read a great review, walked in, and then were disappointed because they had been expecting something different.

Mr. Thomas is also complimentary toward a lot of the things that Marc is proudest of, like the crucial contributions from his collaborators Christopher Gosch (as Director of Photography) and Steve Chesne (who composed the fabulous music). He calls it "a high-styled film that is visually rich and stunning," and notes that "it could scarcely look richer or more elegant yet probably was made on a minuscule budget." Right all around--in fact, one of our earliest hints that we were doing a good job was that the people at the post house (the ones developing the raw footage after each day's shooting) started to comment on how great the footage looked, that there was a sumptuousness that belied its budget.

So here's hoping--we open in L.A. tonight, and now is when we see exactly what the power of a good review in a major paper can be. Will there be big crowds? Hope so. But more to the point, will there be big crowds walking away from the movie with the kind of reaction we saw from so many people in San Francisco? People for whom the film might just mean something? That's what we really hope for; that would be the best of all possible worlds.

One Weekend Down

Quite an experience, all told.

It's easy to get discouraged when your very first screening is early in the afternoon on a Friday, and you poke your head in to find that no, in terms of audience numbers, you have not yet begun to set the world on fire. But that was Friday afternoon; by Friday evening, when I sat down to watch the movie with the kids arrayed next to me, the theater was nearly full. And more importantly, it was full of receptive, discerning people who "got" the film and took the journey the film asks them to take. They laughed in the places we always hope people will laugh, and the Q&A afterward was lively and detailed. It made me extra happy that the screening the kids saw was clearly the best one so far.

What's remarkable is how well our distributor, Marc Halperin, was able to predict the entire weekend's numbers from just the first day's numbers. I won't reveal his formula, lest it turn out to be a state secret, but suffice it to say that what he predicted on Friday night for Saturday and Sunday was incredibly accurate. This, right now, is when we really begin to appreciate what a smart distributor does; this is the moment when he begins to orchestrate the release of the film, like a conductor with a baton in his hand.

The good news is that we made the first set of numbers we needed to make: we are able to extend into a second week in San Francisco. Advertising costs will drop a little, so we might be able to make some extra money even if our numbers only stay the same. And the best part about extra weeks is that if word-of-mouth does its thing, there might just be enough time for those numbers to grow.

So Los Angeles and Pasadena are next, this Friday. We're throwing a little party Friday night, all our friends are coming, and we have high hopes for a decent set of numbers here as well. If so, maybe we'll be able to extend the L.A. run as well, and then Denver/Boulder opens and it just grows and grows.

A very good start; but this isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. And I can't wait to see what happens next.

The Day Of

First screening of the first day (of the rest of our lives!) is in four hours. No, five hours, I just can't count. You'd think I'd be better at that by now.

I'm in San Francisco for the first time, which turns out to have been a good idea in all sorts of ways: because San Francisco is just plain fun, because the trip lends an extra sense of occasion to this first day, and because coming to a different place has lent that little extra sense of transformation to the experience. I am not in my comfortable every-day environment, I am somewhere else, doing this different thing, putting the movie before people who are entire strangers to me. A tiny little rite of passage; even when I go back to L.A. and return to my every-day environment, no matter how much the same it is, there is still that new fact: that I helped produce a motion picture that played in theaters across the country, and I know it did because, at least this little bit, I went out and saw it happen.

And then, yeah, with that new fact in my life, I go home and do the usual stuff and work hard on the next project. Just last night I worked on the "Beaudry" script, here in the hotel room. It felt like a very sound thing to do.

But of course, who wants to go through something like this without his people around? So I'm way-happy that my brother and sister flew out, and that Adam's girlfriend Lauren came as well. For them, it was a fairly outrageous trip: since Lauren is in school in Tallahassee, they all decided to meet in the middle of the state, in Orlando, and to fly out from there. So they did that drive, then had the long flight to L.A., arriving late Wednesday night; the next morning came, for them, another even longer drive, up to San Francisco. It was a long enough trip for me, and I didn't have to do any of the rest of what they did. And then, of course, they'll have the whole process in reverse starting tomorrow night.

Marc Rosenbush drove up yesterday as well, separately, dealing along the way with a bit of last-minute drama that added some bizarre suspense to the trip, but eventually it all got sorted out and then we were in San Francisco. He went off and met up with an old friend; we set out from our hotel and just kinda wandered, being tourists. The kids are much better at being tourists than I am, they're less self-conscious about it, unafraid to pull out a map in the middle of a street and try to figure out where the hell to go next, and completely happy staging goofy pictures in front of Grace Cathedral, or posing in front of one of those completely insane downhill ski-slopes of a street. (I'll get copies of their pictures later and see if I can post one here.)

Eventually we wandered over to Fisherman's Wharf, enjoyed the crowds, tried to get tickets for Alcatraz (they'll be able to go but I won't), tried to spot some sea lions but didn't (wrong time of year?), and had an unexpectedly great meal at Boudin's. Then they went out late at night, trying to find some nightlife, and I stayed in the room and worked on my script. A bit of club-hopping made them happy, and spending time with words (after a lovely day with the family) made me happy. Good things all around.

Tickets Now on Sale

Yep, that moment you've all been waiting for, when you can sluice through the internets and buy tickets for a screening of Zen Noir. Here is one handy place where you can make your important and eternally rewarding purchase.

So go ahead, if you live in the San Francisco area and you'll be in town next weekend, why don't you get that taken care of now. (Because as we all know, Now is all there is.) Satisfy that Buddhist-film craving you didn't even know you had. You know you want to.

Thank you.

Watching United 93

As I wrote back in April, I was deeply reluctant to go and see Paul Greengrass's United 93 in a movie theater. Just watching the trailer had been a nearly overwhelming emotional experience; I could barely stand the thought of sitting through a whole movie's worth, surrounded by strangers. It would be better, I thought, to do that privately, at home, once the DVD came out.

The DVD came out on Tuesday. The good people at Netflix zipped it right along to me, and I watched it last night. And I had just about the emotional reaction I'd expected to have. Except not quite...

Make no mistake: watching this movie is a harrowing experience. As I wrote before, Greengrass excels at immersive, you-are-there filmmaking, and he is a nearly perfect match to the material. After all, none of us can quite stop ourselves from queasily wondering what it must have felt like to be on that plane, and Greengrass answers this question for us, as closely as it can ever be answered. For the families of the victimes, of course, that "What must it have been like?" question was agonizing; so it was no surprise, then, that in the documentary about their reactions to the movie after a private screening, several of them remarked that it felt as if many of their questions had finally been answered.

Still, I have to wonder: is United 93 a work of art, or is it the cinematic equivalent of staring at a car wreck on the highway? In other words, is it enough to satisfy our morbid curiosity, or does a work of art need to reach higher in order to actually become art? (As Stephanie Zacharek noted in her Salon review in April, "...while 'United 93' offers a horrifyingly realistic evocation of pain and fear, it doesn't open itself out to any greater, more expansive truth.") On his DVD commentary (another advantage to waiting until the disk was released), Greengrass early on notes that one idea he wanted to bring out with this work was that two hijackings occurred on September 11th: one the hijacking of the planes that we all know about, but the other an attempt to hijack a religion, to try to hijack Islam itself, to say to the Muslim world "You must follow us and not your own conscience." That's a very interesting and useful thought; but I have to say, as a reasonably intelligent movie-watcher, I didn't pick up on that idea at all until listening to the commentary.

Maybe that's because the movie requires multiple viewings: the first time, you're so overwhelmed by the emotional whump of the story that you simply cannot think about it thematically. But if that's so, then the movie's emotional impact might actually work against it, because who on earth would want to watch this twice?

Now it may also be possible that some of the distance I felt had to do with the fact that, though Greengrass tried hard to cast unknown actors so as not to interfere with his audience's identification with the characters, I'm too much a student of actors for that to work. I recognized three of them right away, and as I mentioned before, I went to school with David Alan Basche, who played Todd Beamer. Having acted with David, and seen him in plays, and having caught most of his movie and TV work, it took off some of the edge when watching him in peril here. "David's doing a great job," I thought a couple times. But I don't think so--I know lots of actors, and I've never had any trouble responding appropriately to their work before. I might even argue that knowing David should have heightened my response to the movie: that seeing this guy I knew and liked in this most horrible of situations should have made me feel the story even more.

What I'm trying to get at here is a sense of subtle, but disquieting, disappointment. So much about the movie is so very good, and its emotional wallop is so undeniable, that it becomes that much worse to find that, having had a good sleep, I woke up and felt that nothing about the movie had lingered at all. It was almost as if I'd watched some Jerry Bruckheimer explosion-fest, something that made the time go by but meant nothing six hours later. That can't possibly be true with a movie as good as this one, can it?

Actually, a more apt comparison is with Apollo 13. The stories are nearly identical, up to a point: real-life events in which something goes very wrong, and the audience sees, intercut, the efforts of people on the ground and in the air (or not-air) to deal with the problem. The difference, of course, is that one story is uplifting--the heroic efforts succeed, and the crew are rescued--and the other story is not. The efforts on the ground fail, and despite a very valiant effort in the air, no one is saved. Being at heart optimistic, we naturally gravitate toward the happier ending, even if it does smack of wish fulfillment; but United 93 represents, unfortunately, what Greengrass flatly says it does in his commentary: the new reality. "We are all passengers on that plane now," he says (that's not a perfect quote, but close enough), "trying desperately to take back control of our own destiny."

Which, finally, answers my own question. The thing I had felt was missing from the movie, namely a point of view, an opinion about the story being told, is in fact there; but like I said above, as an audience we get so overwhelmed that you simply can't reach these sorts of conclusions upon first viewing. And believe me, it's essential that a filmmaker have an opinion about the story he's telling, even while trying to get the facts right for a story such as this. (The current furor over the mini-series "The Path to 9/11" represents the flip-side: a writer apparently indulged his point of view at the expense of the facts.) Greengrass was extraordinarily scrupulous in his fidelity to the facts, he exercised great care in refusing to sensationalize the violence, and he was smart not to try and over-explain the logistics or the jargon of the efforts on the ground; if he erred, it was in being just that little bit too scrupulous, too careful, too smart. His movie raises great questions, but it's so unsettling that I'm afraid most of them will slip past as we all cringe in our seats.

Closer and Closer

It's been a few days since I blogged, largely because I've been Doing Things. And when I'm not Doing Things, I've been just as busy Not Doing Things, i.e., Resting. But the movie opens in San Francisco in exactly two weeks, and we're already getting little tastes of what the experience might be like.

Over on MySpace, last week the movie got listed as one of the "top picks" on the homepage of their Film section; we'd had about 170 viewings of the trailer prior to that, and after it the viewings have increased tenfold. At more or less the same time, we started hearing from the zenmovie.com site host that they were very angry with us, because our bandwidth usage had suddenly spiked like crazy--again, all from people watching the trailer. And as a long-time patron of Apple's QuickTime trailers page, it was peculiarly satisfying to see our movie show up in their list recently (and optimized beautifully, I might add--it looks absolutely spectacular).

Marc Rosenbush went to a screening hosted by the San Francisco Film Society last week, and a few reviews started popping up on the internet within a day. Some were great, some not so; the ones that were not so great were clearly from people who just didn't connect with the film, and that's something I am perfectly okay with. Always have been: I learned a long time ago that there's no such thing as a story that everyone connects with, so the thing that really matters is telling your story the best you can, then stepping back and letting it find whomever it will find.

Obviously, that laissez-faire attitude is about to get a major test...

There haven't yet been any official reviews, but press kits just went out recently (after all that time doing stuff ourselves, it's kind of amazing that now there's this team of people, some of whom I've never met, who are now busy busy doing stuff like press kits, not to mention the whole process of actually getting the movie to the various theaters); Marc did an interview with someone from the San Francisco Chronicle that he completely enjoyed, and that should appear just before the opening; and we've got various events that we're trying to put together to celebrate the occasion. Seriously fun; seriously busy.

Onward, upward...

Territory

Oh, the world today. Strife and discontent everywhere you look. What, I sometimes wonder, what is it deep down that causes this sort of thing? What is fundamental to all this savage aggression?

By way of a possible answer, I present the story of the Finch at Barrington Corner.

A little earlier in the year, as I walked to or from work, I passed a certain corner on Barrington Avenue here in West Los Angeles. And one day, with my iPod playing away, I felt a peculiar bumping sensation on my right arm, as if someone was trying to tap my arm. I looked over, saw nothing, and continued my walk. A moment later I felt it again; and noticed a driver in her car, staring in amazement; and then looked on the ground and saw my shadow with something small flitting around it. Whipping around, I saw the finch retreat to its perch atop a guy wire. "Now that was bizarre," I said to myself, and continued on home. The finch did not follow.

(By the way, I'm assuming it was a finch. I know next to nothing about birding, and my cursory examination of a field guide suggests that a finch is the closest thing, but I could easily be wrong.)

Several days later, it happened again, in exactly the same spot. When I turned, the finch retreated and stared; if I again turned away from the finch, it would attack again. Then a few weeks passed, and suddenly the finch was defending the opposite side of the street, head-butting me in the arm over and over again until I was out of its territory. One morning I saw a yard worker dancing on the sidewalk, trying to figure out what on earth kept poking him. "That," I thought, "is one relentless bird." Soon I got to the point where I could spot the finch, perched on that guywire, looking out for trouble; and sure enough, as soon as I passed, the flitting and the head-butting would begin, and would keep on until I rounded the corner.

Of course it's absurd; and of course the bird doesn't know it. It (probably a she defending a nest that I've never been able to spot) cannot know that I have no intention whatsoever of disturbing her nest; she only knows that something large has entered her territory, and that's enough. No matter that I'm much, much larger, that her entire body would fit in my hand, that I intend no harm: she will attack in the only manner available to her, until I leave. Period.

Time passes and I haven't seen the finch for a few weeks; I sorta miss that crazy bird, now. But it strikes me that there's something illustrative in the way that bird will defend her territory against all reason. Think of Jerusalem, for instance, as a nesting territory, and try to imagine: how will you convince these birds not to attack? What logic can possibly accomplish the task when set against an instinct that strong?

Yeah, I don't know either.

Celebrating the Awful Occasion

A Quote

We've been soliciting quotes for the film, and just got a whim-whammer from Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote Ghost, My Life and the wonderful Jacob's Ladder. (I just watched My Life recently and liked it much more than I thought I would--it's always in danger of plunging into sentimentality but somehow manages to pull through. A tricky little dance, and Rubin handled it pretty well.)

Anyway, here's what he had to say about Zen Noir:

Zen Noir represents a new idea in film, a story that is itself the very essence of its teaching. This is a smart and entrancing film that leads from the realm of worldly mystery into something larger and even more mysterious. It is a fascinating journey into the mystery of mystery itself.

Yep. That instantly becomes our lead quote. A thousand thanks to Mr. Rubin.

(And by the way, the trailer is now up at Apple's trailers site. We're everywhere!


The Birthday

It's been a good birthday so far. The MySpace thing has been loads of fun, with messages and comments from all sorts of people wishing me happy returns, some of whom I haven't actually seen in years. It's dead easy for them to do a nice thing, and it makes me feel good; winners all around. This morning I took a nice bike ride, doing laps around West L.A.'s V.A. Center, then did some errands that led me to Santa Monica. Since I was already there I decided to jump in and catch a movie, and so finally watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

Now I don't particularly feel like waxing political today, so I'll save the whole environmental question for later (though I do recommend going to the movie's website and visiting this page, which allows you to measure how much carbon you yourself are contributing to the atmosphere). But I will say this: if Mr. Gore had been really smart, the slide lecture at the center of this movie would have been the bulk of his presidential campaign, and I swear that man would be President now.

But anyway. After the movie was out, it was still early afternoon and I realized that I was only a couple short blocks from the Pacific Ocean. Just like that the sea started calling me, and I answered. The weather was perfect, as if the L.A. Chamber of Commerce had ordered it up special; consequently, there were thousands of people on the beach, and wandering the Santa Monica Pier. The ocean was one kind of blue, the sky another; and any birthday with an ocean in it is a good one, far as I'm concerned.

Yippee!

Headline in the New York Times: "Federal Judge Orders End to Warrantless Wiretapping"

This whole checks and balances thing--it may be slow, but by gum it works. Now we just have to survive the appeals process, and at last some small measure of sanity will begin to return to government.

It's ridiculous just how happy this makes me...

Charity

I have this friend in her early 60s (we'll call her Friend) who recently lamented the financial difficulties of her life. Her granddaughter had recently visited, so of course money was spent and gladly so; and when Friend's birthday came, after a year of scrimping she went and bought herself a little something because dammit, she deserved it. But since she lives the definition of a paycheck-to-paycheck life, these extra expenses simply had to go on a credit card.

Bear in mind: she lives in the fortunate position of being unburdened by credit card debt, which is better than most of us. (In the fourth quarter of 2005, 13.86% of Americans' disposable personal income went toward debt payments. You could almost look at it as a kind of Debt Tax.) So when Friend puts something on a credit card, at least it doesn't join the expenses of all the other times she had to do that. Again, compared to most of the rest of us, that's not bad. (I live for the day when I can pay off my credit cards.)

But. Since Friend's day-to-day finances are stretched so thin, the only way she can pay off this new credit card debt is by doing a balance transfer with a 12-month no-interest-payment deal, then divide her total by 12 and take that amount out of what she would ordinarily put into savings. The effective result: her credit card will be paid off in good time, but she won't be able to save any money for a year. When you're in your 60s, saving money is unbelievably important, but what else can she do?

I have written before about the challenges of what I called being "not-yet-rich." (And thankfully, with the movie coming out, things are starting to look up for me. But that's an avenue that isn't open to most people.) The paycheck-to-paycheck life is terribly difficult--I can tell you from experience that the psychic burden of knowing you can't even go to a movie with friends unless someone else pays just gets bigger and bigger. It's one thing to live with this reality at my age, with my prospects; it's quite another at Friend's age, without those prospects. When your budget is as finely tuned, as carefully crafted, as it can possibly be, but life still keeps throwing you curve balls.

But here's the one wrinkle in all of this: Friend happens to be a deeply religious person, and every month she tithes a significant portion of her income to church-related organizations. It's an extremely worthy thing to do, and I'm not writing in order to denigrate in any way those people who, say, sponsor impoverished children in Africa. After all, compared to their situation, Friend is living the high life. But I do wonder whether there ought to be a little leeway in these churches, so that people whose circumstances are in fact as tight as Friend's could maybe be let off the hook a little.

(I must also, however, note that one of the organizations to which she tithes is the odious Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, which is, sad to say, just a revolting waste of good money.)

In that same blog entry from January I wrote about how unsettling it was that I couldn't donate to an environmental organization; but given the state of my finances, it was a sacrifice I had to make and did. At least there wasn't some minister doling out guilt by the bucket for my stinginess of spirit.

It's one thing to be Warren Buffett. His act of unheard-of generosity is, as far as I'm concerned, the single greatest thing anyone has done for the world all year, if not all decade. His gift, combined with the activities of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will do enormous good in all sorts of places that need good to be done. But you know what? If Mr. Buffett does indeed give away 85% of his $44 billion fortune, that still leaves him with $6.6 billion. For someone who lives as responsibly, as unostenatiously, as he does, that kind of money will last a nice long time. I think most of us would be very happy indeed with $6.6 billion, no?

But if you're a wage slave like Friend, can't it be enough to just live your life? Not extravagantly but comfortably; particularly in the later years, after a lifetime of devotion and charity. Does Pat Robertson's network really have to keep leaning so hard on people like Friend? People at or nearing retirement age who really need to start taking care of themselves now. Can't it be enough to let the Warren Buffetts of the world take over for a while? Charity is a good and important thing; but what on earth is the point if (a) your charity is in part coerced by your faith, and (b) if it comes at the expense of your own well-being?

Don't Panic

So it seems that this time the bad men in caves were bad men in apartment flats. What they had in mind was completely awful, and I won't comment on it here because I can't imagine anyone arguing the point that the plot was completely awful.

But the investigation that led to the arrests is interesting and worthy of discussion; so is the response of the air-travel industry to the revelation of the plot. First, the investigation.

I have written before (here and here, among other entries) about what I believe to be gross violations of civil liberties that have been committed in the name of the never-ending War on Terror. But at least from what we know now, none of the tactics that are so offensive--warrant-free wiretaps, torture of prisoners, detention without trial or representation, etc.--had anything to do with the investigation that revealed this latest plot. The Time article mentions that U.S. signals intelligence (the fancy name for wiretapping) was involved in the investigation but doesn't specify whether the communications being intercepted were international or domestic; and in any event, it seems beyond belief that a warrant for wiretapping of these communications would have been denied by a FISA court. (Since the investigation was underway for months, it's also difficult to argue that the "slowness" of the FISA courts would have been an issue--while the last stage of the investigation apparently happened very fast indeed, the initial stages when wiretapping would have been set up seem to have allowed plenty of time to follow the legalities.) There is also no indication whatsoever that detained prisoners from any of our worldwide conflicts provided information relating to this plot; rather, the key tip seems to have come from a member of the British Muslim community, and then good old-fashioned police/intelligence work put one of our people, under deep cover, into their operation.

In other words, the old stand-bys, the legal means of investigation that have worked for years, seem to have come through again. If anything, this latest plot argues that the things we've been lax on--like improving inter-agency communications so that the CIA and FBI aren't working at odds, or improving international cooperation between the western intelligence services--are exactly what produced results this time. And the whole argument about fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here is severely weakened as we see the continued rise of "homegrown" terrorists like those involved in both the London subway bombing and this latest plot. These were terrorists who don't have to come here because they're already here, they were born here--moreover, their perception of our hatred of Islam, as represented by the conflict in Iraq, was almost certainly part of what inflamed them in the first place.

And now, after revelation of the plot, we are predictably freaking out again. But as this interesting Salon article, written by a commercial pilot named Patrick Smith, points out, this information about liquid explosives isn't new at all. Security experts have known about it for at least twelve years, and it's safe to assume that the reason they didn't make an issue out of it was because they realized how disruptive it would be to travelers. As we saw yesterday. But Smith goes on to make the larger point: "What we need to get through our terror-addled heads is this: It has been, and it will always be, relatively easy to smuggle a potentially deadly weapon onto an aircraft." The man's a pilot; I have to take his word on this.

There is no such thing as perfect security, either in an airplane or on a bus or in a public square. We can only do what we can, as well as we can, but with the knowledge that every once in a while, something is going to slip through. "Acceptable risk" is a bit cold, but it describes the situation we all live in. And it has nothing to do with terrorism, at heart--sometimes planes suffer simple mechanical failures, too, and fall out of the sky. Sometimes a switching mistake happens and one train crashes into another. Sometimes there's something on the road that makes your tire blow out, and next thing you know you're upside down in a creek. Life is risk. Most of the time we know this, but when you add in the looming specter of terrorism, we go all goofy and pretend that if only we sacrifice this, this, this and this, and then this and this as well, we will finally achieve Perfect Safety.

Can't happen. Won't ever happen. And it may seem trivial that you shouldn't ever wear a belt to the airport anymore because it sets off the metal detectors and then you have to get wanded; but we've already accepted a whole series of little compromises, and now we're about to be asked to accept a whole new series of little compromises, and then a couple more years will pass and there'll be some new plot and yet another series of little compromises. Pretty soon we're all putting thousands of miles on our cars because no one wants the hassle of flying anymore, and one of the great conveniences of the last century will be effectively wiped out. All in pursuit of the unattainable goal of Perfect Safety.

Screening Dates

Here are the first few confirmed dates when Zen Noir will be opening:

September 15, San Francisco - Lumiere Theater
September 22, Los Angeles - Westside Pavilion
October 13 - Austin, Texas
October 27 - St. Louis and Seattle
November 10 - Minneapolis

Obviously there's more to come--I don't even know yet which specific theaters the movie will be playing in for most of those cities, and other cities are most definitely in the works. The good people at Magic Lamp are busy busy, and I'll know more soon. (This list on the website should be consistently updated with the newest info on where and when.)

The Heart That is Hard

I've written often enough about the illegal immigration issue (here, here and here, particularly), so I would have been interested anyway when I saw that Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days program was focusing its second-season opener on the question. But I happen to like the show a lot, so I would've watched anyway. Spurlock is all about life in the real world: he isn't an ideologue, he's someone who asks a question and then tries to find a real, practical answer, usually by going out and living the question and its consequences. In his breakthrough documentary Super Size Me, he subjected his own body to a month of nothing but McDonald's food to see what would happen (it wasn't good); and when he started 30 Days on the fx Channel, he and his girlfriend moved into a crappy apartment for thirty days and lived on nothing but the minimum wage jobs they could get. Again, it was unpleasant for them but revelatory for the audience. Subsequent episodes usually found other participants because Spurlock would probably die if he pulled this stunt too often; but it turned out to be inspired, because putting someone of one viewpoint into the life of someone with another viewpoint may just be the best way, in our media culture, to produce a real Socratic dialogue.

Even so, I found myself deeply moved by this particular episode. The premise was simple: a member of the Minutemen named Frank George moved in with a family of undocumented Mexicans in East L.A. Frank, in an example of particularly good casting, turned out to be a Cuban-born legal immigrant who came to the U.S. with his parents after Fidel happened. (No one ever comments on the fact that his parents apparently had contacts with a U.S. corporation that helped them get documentation--just the sort of wealthy contacts that most Mexican and Central American workers simply don't have. If they did, they wouldn't need to cross the border illegally in the first place. It is the absence of other choices that makes them illegal, as this program would go on to demonstrate convincingly.) What this meant was that, on the one hand, Frank spoke fluent Spanish and was able to communicate easily with the family that took him in; on the other hand, it made him a little self-righteous sometimes about how the path he took to legal status was the one everyone should take. Again: I'm sure most people would, if that option was realistically available to them.

I thought both sides of the issue were well-represented: Frank seemed a true representative of his ideology, although his arguments were a bit limited, usually turning on the idea that this is a nation of laws and, by definition, illegal immigrants are here illegally, therefore they should be deported. The "Gonzalez" family were warm, welcoming, hard-working people making slow steps toward achieving what everyone refers to as the American Dream: opportunity and hard work equals advancement. Their daughter Armida, a 3.8 honors student at her school, was the standout child, widely liked by her teachers and with a wealth of possibilities opening up to her. At the beginning of Frank's time with the family, Armida was hoping to be accepted to Princeton. (How she can be accepted into any college when she's here illegally was never addressed; presumably there's something I don't know about how one's citizenship status interacts with admissions policies.) The Gonzalezes simply insisted that all they wanted was a better life and more opportunities for their children; and the father, Rigoberto, was perfectly up-front about hoping, after a hypothetical amnesty, to one day be able to open his own business, when he would without compunction hire more undocumented workers like himself. (Whether he would then be exploiting his own people is also a question that was never addressed.)

Frank, despite personally liking the Gonzalezes, wasn't about to bend on his principles; then someone came up with the brilliant idea of sending him to Mexico to meet the family the Gonzalezes left behind. This is when the show became really powerful. He saw the hovel the family had once lived in, a roofless pile of cinder blocks without any electricity or plumbing, where water was provided by running a hose from a brackish, almost-certainly infested well dozens of yards away. The conditions were horrifying, and suddenly that 500 square-foot apartment they live in now in East L.A. seemed palatial. Frank met the grandparents who some of the kids have never met, and as a basically decent guy he took some video and showed it to them when he got back to the States.

The question then became: would this experience change Frank's mind? Strictly from watching the show, yes he did, but not entirely: he decided not to go to the border anymore but still supports the stricter version of immigration legislation that was passed by the House. Since the show aired I have seen some reports that Frank felt his "change of heart" was taken out of context, and maybe that's so. But that doesn't diminish the effectiveness of the experience on a random viewer like myself.

Before this gets too long, just a couple points. If, as Frank kept insisting, the problem with illegals is that they're illegal, then what happens if, say, the Senate version of immigration policy is made into law? That would allow a "path to citizenship," and in one of the show's more interesting moments he declared that he was firmly opposed to this version of legislation. But if it did pass, and became law, then would he as a law-abiding citizen support and enforce it? Unfortunately, the participants in this discussion veered away from that question, so I can only guess that Frank would declare it a "bad law" and agitate against it. Trouble is, that in itself pokes a giant hole in his "nation of laws" argument--apparently, we are only to be a nation of laws that Frank likes. And with that, much of the strength of his arguments collapses.

Laws, after all, are not monolithic: we are not meant to serve the law, the law is meant to serve us. If you feel a law is good, great; if you feel a law is bad, then argue against it. Fight against it if you must. (If, for example, a law was ever passed that abridged the freedom of speech, you can bet I would fight against it vigorously.) The question of whether one should simply slavishly follow any law was dealt with pretty effectively at Nuremburg. So, then, Frank does not dislike illegal immigration because it's illegal, he dislikes it because he dislikes it. That's fine, I have no problem with his not liking something; but he needs to be honest with himself and realize that the core of his argument is hollow and he needs a better argument.

Then there's the practical question, which cannot and should not be disassociated from emotional issues. Should we let our raw sentimentality dissuade us from a carefully-considered ethical position? Not usually, no. But after seeing the awful conditions this one family faced when they lived in Mexico, how could anyone with any kind of a soul possibly want to send them back? And given that there are something like eleven million undocumented workers in America, if you sent them all back en masse, where do you think they would live? Probably in conditions that would make that wretched hovel look like a palace.

I absolutely agree that something must be done in Mexico to improve the lives of its citizens. But I say that instead of getting all worked up about the poor workers driven to the desperate point of becoming criminals just to improve their lives a little, I say let's turn our energies to the betterment of Mexico as a whole. That would solve the problem in a way that's good for absolutely everybody, and I just can't imagine why this isn't what everyone is talking about.

POSTSCRIPT: I went on the internet looking for other responses to this powerful program, wanting to read a few reviews from people who had been as moved as I was. Instead, I found this. Oh my heavens. It didn't seem possible that anyone could watch that program and not be moved, and yet here they are, in their numbers. One commenter wrote "[M]y question is why did they not use a red blooded white American person from the Minutemen? Not to be a racist but, Frank did mention he was from Cuba." Yep, that's not racist at all. Oy.

In a web posting, Frank declares that his real change of heart comes in the shape of deciding to start lobbying politicians directly to close down the border, rather than patrolling the border himself. "This change in me was caused by living in a former USA city [East L.A.] that is now a Mexican city to the point that as I wandered the streets I asked the illegals if this city reminded them of a Mexican city and they said yes, Guadalajara Mexico." This, apparently, was a great shock to him.

But parts of Chicago once looked a lot like Krakow. Parts of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other major cities still look a lot like parts of China and/or Korea. And Boston, as I can tell you from personal experience, looks a hell of a lot like Dublin. So what? That's kinda what they mean by "melting pot." The Polish part of Chicago has been mostly assimilated; the assimilation of the Irish and Italians was completed long ago. That's how this works. The fact that part of a U.S. city has changed recently so that it resembles a Mexican city is really not a big deal. I live in L.A., and trust me, it ain't no "former USA city," and the overwhelming majority of it doesn't look like Guadalajara.

Four Old Guys Singin' Real Nice

When I finally started listening to music around the age of 12 or so, the Beatles came first, as I have written before. When at last my musical tastes began to broaden (ever so slightly), there were three acts that quickly took up second position: The Doors, Simon & Garfunkel, and Crosby Stills & Nash (and Young). On Sunday night, I got to go to a show and see all four members of CSN&Y, in a concert overwhelmingly devoted to protest songs. All the better, I say.

The show was down in Irvine, and we went there because you could get better seats for less money than at the Hollywood Bowl concert Monday night. A bit of a drive, sure, but with nice people and a bunch of CDs, so what? It's a nice venue: yet another of those great Southern California spots where an amphitheatre is built out of a hillside, with trees and grass and very good acoustics. And the weather was fabulous: the awful heat of the last several weeks finally broke a few days ago, and it was so nice to be outside for a while without melting.

What with traffic on the 405, we arrived late--and were just walking to our seats when CSN&Y took the stage, which made for pretty great timing. It took us a little while to get situated and comfortable, and it took the band a little while to get really warmed up, so we were ready for them at about the same time they were ready for us.

The rap against Crosby Stills & Nash, with our without Neil Young, has always been that their live shows can be a bit spotty. It's no great surprise: they are defined by the quality of those gorgeous harmonies, those incredibly well-matched voices, but those harmonies are tough to pull off outside a studio. And indeed, on the second song of the evening, "Carry On," the harmonies weren't working and I was rapidly getting worried. But then they moved into "Wooden Ships," and suddenly it all started to gel.

The problem, we decided, is that Stephen Stills really doesn't have much of a voice anymore. At full volume he can do tough rock numbers pretty well (in fact on one solo turn he sounded almost like Ray Charles), but more delicate numbers seem to be beyond him now. The man is in his early 60s, and it's a shame but these things happen. (He also looks as if the flesh is slowly sliding off his face and onto his neck--who would've thought that David Crosby would be the one looking hale and healthy out of that group?) With one of those four voices struggling, the real close-harmony stuff gets problematic ("Helplessly Hoping," in the second half of the show, didn't come off very well at all); but for songs where Stills could sing out strongly, the four voices mixed very well. And given that there were so many protest songs being played, there actually weren't too many times when delicacy was required of Mr. Stills.

The tour is clearly taking its cue from Neil Young, whose recent album, Living With War, dominates the first half of their show (eight out of ten tracks were played). And since that record, released less than three months ago, is already notorious for its anger toward the current political climate and features a track titled "Let's Impeach the President," small wonder that this CSN&Y tour would lean heavily on tracks like "Ohio," "Almost Cut My Hair," "Immigration Man," "Find the Cost (of Freedom)" and "Rockin' in the Free World." They even played Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," which was a special treat. (And on which Mr. Stills sounded just fine, thank you.)

The second half of the show made room for more delicate numbers, plus some solo turns or smaller groupings of the four: Crosby and Graham Nash backing up Neil Young for "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," Young and Stills doing another great Buffalo Springfield number, "Treetop Flyer," Nash's "Our House," and maybe the single best performance of the evening, Crosby and Nash doing a delicate, perfect rendering of "Guinivere." (Indeed, Crosby sounded fantastic through the whole night, and a long night it was--35 songs were played, and through all of it, when not playing a guitar Crosby would stand there, his hands in his pockets as if it were all the easiest thing in the world, singing so incredibly well that after his first solo turn I leaned over to Buffie and said "I'm so glad he's not dead!")

Of course, the other candidate for best performance of the evening was "Rockin' in the Free World," which got played about as hard as it could possibly be played, and for a while it seemed the song would never end, that it would just build and build until we all fell over and died, but eventually every single string on Neil Young's guitar got busted and they simply had to stop.

All in all, it was one of the best concerts I've seen. There was a particularly nice segue when everyone left the stage and the legendary recording of Hendrix's Woodstock performance of the Star Spangled Banner was played, which then moved straight into "Let's Impeach the President." Several audience members stood for the Star Spangled Banner, their hands over their hearts as Jimi wailed; then some of the same audience members (it was Orange County, after all) left once "Let's Impeach" got rolling, with its wicked "Flip! Flop!" bridge while video of the President contradicting himself was played on the screens.

Hell of a show. And for my friend Buffie, a musician herself who recently celebrated a birthday, it made for a hell of a nice suprise.

Not My iPod

Okay, I love the iPod as much as anybody, but come on...

Do products have "jump the shark" moments like TV shows? 'Cause it's hard to imagine a better one for the iPod. (And yes, as far as I can tell, this is completely legit.)