On November 3rd, a man named Malachi Ritscher set himself on fire near the off-ramp of a Chicago freeway. (Here's the AP story.) Apparently he was a long-time political activist who had suffered from bouts of depression; and, plainly emulating the 1963 death of Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Duc, Mr. Ritscher made the unimaginable decision to emulate Duc's act of extraordinary protest.
I just went through a Google search for Mr. Ritscher's name, and of the first 100 results, not a single one was for a mainstream news source: no CNN, no New York Times, not even the Chicago Tribune or Sun-Times covered a local story. Only the indie paper Chicago Reader, which I remember well from my years there, picked up the story. (To be more precise: according to the Reader, apparently the Sun-Times ran a small article before it knew who had immolated himself or why; since then, nothing until it reran the AP article this morning.)
Mr. Ritscher's suicide note read, in part, "If I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country.... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country." Much of the discussion, what there has been of it, has turned on the question of whether Mr. Ritscher's problems with depression somehow invalidate his act of protest. Was he, some wonder, ever clinically diagnosed, or was it an undiagnosed mental illness, or was it perhaps a simple low-level depression such as many suffer through from time to time? I suppose that some of this results from the example set by Thich Quang Duc, a monk who suffered from no mental illness, who indeed, according to witness David Halberstam, never once moved or cried out during his ordeal. Thus Duc's motives are pure, thus his act had meaning. By implication, then, Ritscher's motives were impure (because he was, you know, sick in the head, a mental defective, CRAAAAAZYYYYY), therefore his act had no meaning.
This argument is absurd--particularly when put forth in the usual blunt-instrument terms of conservative bloggers. (Read and weep.) If it was purely a question of depression driving someone to suicide, then why was it so politically overt? Typically, when someone attempts suicide in order to get attention, it is exactly that: an attempt, a cry for help. The method chosen would therefore be something with a reasonable chance of suriving; self-immolation ain't that. Once you pour gasoline on yourself and light a match, well, that's all there is to it, you're gonna die.
Plainly, Ritscher was trying, in his last moments on earth, to make his death mean something. And even if it was partially motivated by the awful circumstances of depression, making his death a political act was a last attempt to make his life, and his death, meaningful and effective, just as Duc's death had been. It must follow, then, that this was not a petty, self-involved death, a kind of mental implosion, a black hole of personality collapsing in on itself; it was a last attempt at expansion, at significance, from a man who had devoted much of his life to political activism. In his suicide note he wrote, "My position is that I only get one death, I want it to be a good one. Wouldn't it be better to stand for something or make a statement, rather than a fiery collision with some drunk driver?"
Mr. Ritscher was not a "moonbat," not "an aging hippie loser" who recognized the pointlessness of his liberal life and just decided to end it all. He voluntarily chose to endure what is perhaps the most painful of all deaths in the last hope that it might mean something. The fact that the mass media have so thoroughly ignored that sacrifice makes it all the more tragic.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Friday, November 24, 2006
The Happy Place
It's hard to overstate how much I love the Thanksgiving holiday. Four-plus days off from work; I don't have to travel anywhere, and what with my friend Ezra's fondness for taking in Thanksgiving orphans such as myself, I don't even have to do anything--just show up at a specific time, carrying a bottle of wine, then sit back with friends and eat, drink and maketh the merry.
It wasn't always thus. Back in college, the holiday was too short to fly home, but the dorms closed so I always had to find someplace to stay. This was particularly awkward my Freshman year, when I found myself at a cast party the weeked before Thanksgiving, essentially begging the gathering for a place to stay. I found one (and ended up having a memorable vegetarian Thanksgiving that consisted, as I recall, of rice, rice and rice); but the next year I ended up staying at the YMCA on Huntington for the holiday, which was a whole different kind of memorable. (The infamous "Hail Mary" pass from Doug Flutie to Gerard Phelan came that particular weekend, and I watched the game on a tiny TV in a tiny room at the Y, sitting on my tiny bed and staring at the screen--remember, I'm a Miamian, so I was rooting for the Hurricanes, not for B.C.--while yelling things in complete shock.)
But things change, and my Thanksgivings slowly got better and better, until I am now where I am, ridiculously happy with my holiday. I ended up seated next to the utterly wonderful Sarah Underwood (she was also in Outta Sync), whom I hadn't seen in months; and at a certain point during dessert, I felt it come over me. "Ah, there it is," I said to the nice people near me (it was a very long table that covered, I think, at least two time zones), "my stomach just reached its happy place."
And then, as is always the way of things, instead of stopping there I finished what was on my plate and my stomach promptly moved to the "overstuffed and overwhelmed" place. But so what? It's not like I had any place to be; or any place I would rather be.
Then today, I scratched an itch: the single most distressing casualty of the Zen Noir distribution has been that for weeks I have had absolutely no time to do any writing. (Although I have to say--the fact that our DVD kept selling all through Thanksgiving day, in surprisingly good numbers, was also extremely pleasant.) So this morning, I sat down with my "Marathon" script and made just a tiny little change; a texture thing, really, although it does tie up a storyline that had been left dangling, and without a line of dialogue being spoken. I'd realized weeks ago that I needed to tie up that loose thread, I even knew what to do; even so, it wasn't till today that I could actually sit down and do it. It felt spectacularly satisfying.
The release of the movie will end quite soon, when we open in Chicago. I won't be traveling for that, and after that we only have to keep DVD sales moving along. At last, I should be able to get back to what I really do, writing. About bloody time.
At the same time, the stories out of Iraq today are so horrifying that I simply can't look at them. Maybe tomorrow I'll be able to think about such things, but not now, no, not now.
It wasn't always thus. Back in college, the holiday was too short to fly home, but the dorms closed so I always had to find someplace to stay. This was particularly awkward my Freshman year, when I found myself at a cast party the weeked before Thanksgiving, essentially begging the gathering for a place to stay. I found one (and ended up having a memorable vegetarian Thanksgiving that consisted, as I recall, of rice, rice and rice); but the next year I ended up staying at the YMCA on Huntington for the holiday, which was a whole different kind of memorable. (The infamous "Hail Mary" pass from Doug Flutie to Gerard Phelan came that particular weekend, and I watched the game on a tiny TV in a tiny room at the Y, sitting on my tiny bed and staring at the screen--remember, I'm a Miamian, so I was rooting for the Hurricanes, not for B.C.--while yelling things in complete shock.)
But things change, and my Thanksgivings slowly got better and better, until I am now where I am, ridiculously happy with my holiday. I ended up seated next to the utterly wonderful Sarah Underwood (she was also in Outta Sync), whom I hadn't seen in months; and at a certain point during dessert, I felt it come over me. "Ah, there it is," I said to the nice people near me (it was a very long table that covered, I think, at least two time zones), "my stomach just reached its happy place."
And then, as is always the way of things, instead of stopping there I finished what was on my plate and my stomach promptly moved to the "overstuffed and overwhelmed" place. But so what? It's not like I had any place to be; or any place I would rather be.
Then today, I scratched an itch: the single most distressing casualty of the Zen Noir distribution has been that for weeks I have had absolutely no time to do any writing. (Although I have to say--the fact that our DVD kept selling all through Thanksgiving day, in surprisingly good numbers, was also extremely pleasant.) So this morning, I sat down with my "Marathon" script and made just a tiny little change; a texture thing, really, although it does tie up a storyline that had been left dangling, and without a line of dialogue being spoken. I'd realized weeks ago that I needed to tie up that loose thread, I even knew what to do; even so, it wasn't till today that I could actually sit down and do it. It felt spectacularly satisfying.
The release of the movie will end quite soon, when we open in Chicago. I won't be traveling for that, and after that we only have to keep DVD sales moving along. At last, I should be able to get back to what I really do, writing. About bloody time.
At the same time, the stories out of Iraq today are so horrifying that I simply can't look at them. Maybe tomorrow I'll be able to think about such things, but not now, no, not now.
Friday, November 17, 2006
All Around the World
It's pretty amazing, the thought that people around the world will soon be watching Zen Noir. The DVD went on sale Tuesday (you can order it right here, with a host of free special gifts, for a limited time) and there was a lovely stretch of the day when we were selling something like 100 copies per hour. But even more remarkable was the thought of where those DVDs are going: all across the United States, of course, particularly to those places where the theatrical release could never reach; and it's not such a surprise to find them going to Canada and the U.K. and (particularly) to Australia, where sales have been particularly strong; but there are also sales to Israel and Jordan, to Malaysia, to Brazil and Sweden and South Africa, and that's just from a haphazard look at today's sales.
This is where film has it all over theatre, frankly. The reason to make art, in any form, is to have it seen and appreciated by an audience. In theatre, unless you have a mega-blockbuster like Phantom of the Opera that can set up a dozen road companies while also playing for years in London and New York so that tourists from across the world can come see it, even the best play will only be seen by people within, probably, no more than 100 miles of the theatre. (And the people who would travel that far are rare--we had a few who traveled when we did Signal to Noise, but that was really to see Neil Gaiman when he came to our special preview.) Then of course there's the time limit--a play is doing very well if it lasts longer than six weeks, but people can watch Zen Noir six decades from now. On six continents, no less.
This is really blowing my mind right now; it also leaves me seriously humble. And all I did was work on the film--it's Marc who's really responsible for it, whose story and ideas are right now being shipped across the world.
For the time being, the DVD is only available on our site, at the link above. It'll probably end up on Amazon and Netflix someday, although really truly I have no idea when that might happen; but for now, since there are still plenty of production expenses, etc. to recoup before we can start sharing the wealth with the actors and producers (who worked and have seen no rewards yet), we're understandably eager to rack up as many sales as we can--and not at Amazon's discounted rate. And so far it's working out just fine, as those little boxes make their way around the globe.
(One woman bought twelve copies, and in her "Comments" space she wrote "Well that's Christmas taken care of." Not that I'm trying to plant ideas in your head or anything...)
This is where film has it all over theatre, frankly. The reason to make art, in any form, is to have it seen and appreciated by an audience. In theatre, unless you have a mega-blockbuster like Phantom of the Opera that can set up a dozen road companies while also playing for years in London and New York so that tourists from across the world can come see it, even the best play will only be seen by people within, probably, no more than 100 miles of the theatre. (And the people who would travel that far are rare--we had a few who traveled when we did Signal to Noise, but that was really to see Neil Gaiman when he came to our special preview.) Then of course there's the time limit--a play is doing very well if it lasts longer than six weeks, but people can watch Zen Noir six decades from now. On six continents, no less.
This is really blowing my mind right now; it also leaves me seriously humble. And all I did was work on the film--it's Marc who's really responsible for it, whose story and ideas are right now being shipped across the world.
For the time being, the DVD is only available on our site, at the link above. It'll probably end up on Amazon and Netflix someday, although really truly I have no idea when that might happen; but for now, since there are still plenty of production expenses, etc. to recoup before we can start sharing the wealth with the actors and producers (who worked and have seen no rewards yet), we're understandably eager to rack up as many sales as we can--and not at Amazon's discounted rate. And so far it's working out just fine, as those little boxes make their way around the globe.
(One woman bought twelve copies, and in her "Comments" space she wrote "Well that's Christmas taken care of." Not that I'm trying to plant ideas in your head or anything...)
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Did Dean Do It?
Well, yay.
But it's curious that in all the self-congratulation I've heard from Democrats and the various media mouths, I haven't heard Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean's name mentioned once. (I know he was on The Daily Show last night, but I haven't yet had a chance to watch it.) All the attention was going to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Clinton-era insider who oversaw the national Congressional effort, and to Chuck Schumer, Emanuel's counterpart in the Senate. It's deserved praise, to be sure, but still it seemed a bit peculiar that Dean wasn't being mentioned. Can it be a coincidence that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid had both opposed Dean's chairmanship? (I'm not trying to spin out some kind of conspiracy theory here, I'm just trying to give some credit where it might be due.)
There was an interesting article in the New York Times last month about Dean, in which writer Matt Bai followed Dean to Alaska as he sought to further implement his "fifty-state strategy." The basis of the idea, according to Mr. Bai (paraphrasing Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher), is simple: "...Democrats do better with rural and small-town voters when they frame their positions as values rather than as policy prescriptions. This is not an entirely new insight, but to Dean it is critically important. In his mind, it means that any voter in any state can be a Democrat, if only you bother to talk to him, and if only you make the right kind of argument." And after the upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s, as demographics and political allegiances shifted, the once-mighty Democratic machine started ceding whole swaths of the country's electorate to the Republicans. Instead of adapting to the new reality their focus narrowed, a little bit at a time, election after election, finally reaching the point that during the 2004 election, 18 states were completely ignored by John Kerry and the Democratic Party.
Dean sought to do a 180 on that idea, hence the fifty-state strategy. Even places like Alaska, a sparsely-populated state where Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-to-1, needed Democratic party organizers on the ground, raising money and directing it to the right places. I won't summarize Mr. Bai's main points any more than that, instead just referring you again to his article, but will instead pivot to my own main point:
How much of the responsibility for this historic Democratic sweep belongs to Howard Dean?
Obviously, there are certain realities this election cycle that weren't so real just two years ago: the disgust of the electorate with just about every aspect of the Bush White House is plainly the dominant factor. Republican scandals that just kept on comin' had a hell of a lot to do with it, too. And without the public perception that the wheels were coming off the Republican train, Dean's strategy might have died an early death: it was dependent upon raising a sufficient amount of money to fund all those new state organizations, and without local Democrats getting excited about their prospects and therefore donating more money to the cause, Dean could never have executed his grand plan. (Indeed, as Bai reports, the Congressional fund-raising wings of the party were much more successful at keeping parity with their Republican counterparts than Dean's apparatus was--which is why the Republicans were able to spend so much more money on advertising in the last days of the campaign. Not that it ended up helping.)
There were significant gains in states like Iowa, Kansas and Colorado, which the conventional wisdom would have listed as solidly red states, the kind where a party doesn't bother wasting money because there's no way for a Democrat to win. And again, a lot of that can be attributed to the Republican implosion (what effect, for example, did the Ted Haggard debacle have in his home state of Colorado?), but how much did it help that there was a stronger Democratic field organization already in place in Colorado, and in Kansas and Iowa and elsewhere, to take advantage of such opportunities when they arose?
Remember: only a few months ago, conventional wisdom proclaimed that the chances of Democrats taking back the House were fair to decent, with a 15-seat gain "within the realm of possibility," but that retaking the Senate was nearly impossible. But more and more races--in more and more unlikely states--just kept opening up. And the party was able to capitalize on a big percentage of those opportunities.
So I'm just asking: with all due thanks to Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, how much should we also be thanking the outsider who no one else seems to be thanking?
(P.S. Sidney Blumenthal's post-election dissection of the "house of kitsch" that is the Bush Administration is extraordinary. I hadn't seen these clowns in this light before, but I think Blumenthal nails it.)
But it's curious that in all the self-congratulation I've heard from Democrats and the various media mouths, I haven't heard Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean's name mentioned once. (I know he was on The Daily Show last night, but I haven't yet had a chance to watch it.) All the attention was going to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Clinton-era insider who oversaw the national Congressional effort, and to Chuck Schumer, Emanuel's counterpart in the Senate. It's deserved praise, to be sure, but still it seemed a bit peculiar that Dean wasn't being mentioned. Can it be a coincidence that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid had both opposed Dean's chairmanship? (I'm not trying to spin out some kind of conspiracy theory here, I'm just trying to give some credit where it might be due.)
There was an interesting article in the New York Times last month about Dean, in which writer Matt Bai followed Dean to Alaska as he sought to further implement his "fifty-state strategy." The basis of the idea, according to Mr. Bai (paraphrasing Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher), is simple: "...Democrats do better with rural and small-town voters when they frame their positions as values rather than as policy prescriptions. This is not an entirely new insight, but to Dean it is critically important. In his mind, it means that any voter in any state can be a Democrat, if only you bother to talk to him, and if only you make the right kind of argument." And after the upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s, as demographics and political allegiances shifted, the once-mighty Democratic machine started ceding whole swaths of the country's electorate to the Republicans. Instead of adapting to the new reality their focus narrowed, a little bit at a time, election after election, finally reaching the point that during the 2004 election, 18 states were completely ignored by John Kerry and the Democratic Party.
Dean sought to do a 180 on that idea, hence the fifty-state strategy. Even places like Alaska, a sparsely-populated state where Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-to-1, needed Democratic party organizers on the ground, raising money and directing it to the right places. I won't summarize Mr. Bai's main points any more than that, instead just referring you again to his article, but will instead pivot to my own main point:
How much of the responsibility for this historic Democratic sweep belongs to Howard Dean?
Obviously, there are certain realities this election cycle that weren't so real just two years ago: the disgust of the electorate with just about every aspect of the Bush White House is plainly the dominant factor. Republican scandals that just kept on comin' had a hell of a lot to do with it, too. And without the public perception that the wheels were coming off the Republican train, Dean's strategy might have died an early death: it was dependent upon raising a sufficient amount of money to fund all those new state organizations, and without local Democrats getting excited about their prospects and therefore donating more money to the cause, Dean could never have executed his grand plan. (Indeed, as Bai reports, the Congressional fund-raising wings of the party were much more successful at keeping parity with their Republican counterparts than Dean's apparatus was--which is why the Republicans were able to spend so much more money on advertising in the last days of the campaign. Not that it ended up helping.)
There were significant gains in states like Iowa, Kansas and Colorado, which the conventional wisdom would have listed as solidly red states, the kind where a party doesn't bother wasting money because there's no way for a Democrat to win. And again, a lot of that can be attributed to the Republican implosion (what effect, for example, did the Ted Haggard debacle have in his home state of Colorado?), but how much did it help that there was a stronger Democratic field organization already in place in Colorado, and in Kansas and Iowa and elsewhere, to take advantage of such opportunities when they arose?
Remember: only a few months ago, conventional wisdom proclaimed that the chances of Democrats taking back the House were fair to decent, with a 15-seat gain "within the realm of possibility," but that retaking the Senate was nearly impossible. But more and more races--in more and more unlikely states--just kept opening up. And the party was able to capitalize on a big percentage of those opportunities.
So I'm just asking: with all due thanks to Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, how much should we also be thanking the outsider who no one else seems to be thanking?
(P.S. Sidney Blumenthal's post-election dissection of the "house of kitsch" that is the Bush Administration is extraordinary. I hadn't seen these clowns in this light before, but I think Blumenthal nails it.)
Monday, November 06, 2006
Oddments
The Zen Noir DVD
It will be released on November 14th. The best place to purchase it, for the time being, is from our very own website, here. (There won't be an actual "click here to purchase" link till the 14th, but the link above should at least get you in the neighborhood.)
The commentary tracks are a lot of fun--particularly Marc's conversation with Brad Warner, author of Hardcore Zen, about the Buddhist principles underlying the film. I'm not a Buddhist but, as you might guess, I've learned a lot about it from working on the movie, and the part about Buddhism that I find the most attractive is exactly what Brad talks about in his book: the imperative for every Buddhist to question authority, to accept nothing as writ. As a punk-rocker (and not a "former" punk-rocker, either), Brad's discussion with Marc is definitely not polite and New Age-y, it's irreverent and a little blasphemous and a hell of a lot of fun. We could have loaded up the DVD with deleted scenes and whatnot, but for my money, this particular commentary track is alone worth the price of admission.
Don't Forget to Vote
I am just about the biggest believer in voting you will ever find. For one thing, I keenly appreciate the part of citizenship that most people like to ignore: the responsibilities incumbent upon every citizen. It's why I'm such a fan of jury duty, for instance: we get plenty of benefits from being American citizens, and aside from paying taxes we rarely get asked to give anything back. But voting is the number one, tip-top item on that list, and I never miss a chance.
Besides--if you don't vote, you give up any right to complain about the government. Simple as that.
Am I excited about Democratic prospects? Not quite. For one thing, rampant gerrymandering has me worried (I really wish that last year's attempt to revamp California's redistricting process had passed); and the possibility of election fraud has me worried as well. Besides, even if Democrats do regain control of one or both houses of Congress, then they have to actually govern--and given how rotten things are at the moment, there are so many gigantic problems to fix that it may be too late for anyone to do any good. Thus allowing Republicans, in two years, to claim that Democrats didn't do any better than they did, thus allowing people to go back to voting for the Republicans who screwed things up in the first place.
Sadly, perception is everything in an election, and recent reports that Republicans are making a last-minute surge in the polls suggest they might actually be able to pull themselves out of the fire. Because if people start to think the Republicans will win again, then the Republicans will probably win again. Here's an example of why:
Back in the 1980 election (Reagan/Carter), there was a significant third-party challenge from Illinois Congressman John Anderson. I was still too young to vote, but my mother was an Anderson supporter. On voting day, she found herself in line with the usual assortment of fellow neighbors, and they got to talking. People asked Mom who she was going to vote for and she said Anderson. "Oh, I like him," they almost all said.
So Mom naturally asked, "And are you voting for him?"
"Oh, no, no."
"But if you like him, why don't you--"
"Because he's not going to win."
So there you are. If it looks the Republicans might win, they will probably win. No one wants to "waste" a vote by voting for a loser, because apparently being part of the winning team is more important than actually making sure your team wins.
Yes, a Very Nice Weekend, How 'Bout You?
It's freakishly warm for November, but surely that's just an anomaly and not part of, let's say, global warming. In any event, it made for a nice weekend, even if I did have to spend almost all of Saturday going over accounting issues for the upcoming DVD release (got to know the right way to count our money!) and a good part of Sunday indoors yet again, working in Final Cut to put together what will eventually a director's reel for Marc. (We will send it out with copies of our next script, for maximum impact.)
But even with all of that, there was more time this weekend for catching up on movies, and even for some reading, than there has been in quite a while, and I'm awfully grateful for it.
And you?
It will be released on November 14th. The best place to purchase it, for the time being, is from our very own website, here. (There won't be an actual "click here to purchase" link till the 14th, but the link above should at least get you in the neighborhood.)
The commentary tracks are a lot of fun--particularly Marc's conversation with Brad Warner, author of Hardcore Zen, about the Buddhist principles underlying the film. I'm not a Buddhist but, as you might guess, I've learned a lot about it from working on the movie, and the part about Buddhism that I find the most attractive is exactly what Brad talks about in his book: the imperative for every Buddhist to question authority, to accept nothing as writ. As a punk-rocker (and not a "former" punk-rocker, either), Brad's discussion with Marc is definitely not polite and New Age-y, it's irreverent and a little blasphemous and a hell of a lot of fun. We could have loaded up the DVD with deleted scenes and whatnot, but for my money, this particular commentary track is alone worth the price of admission.
Don't Forget to Vote
I am just about the biggest believer in voting you will ever find. For one thing, I keenly appreciate the part of citizenship that most people like to ignore: the responsibilities incumbent upon every citizen. It's why I'm such a fan of jury duty, for instance: we get plenty of benefits from being American citizens, and aside from paying taxes we rarely get asked to give anything back. But voting is the number one, tip-top item on that list, and I never miss a chance.
Besides--if you don't vote, you give up any right to complain about the government. Simple as that.
Am I excited about Democratic prospects? Not quite. For one thing, rampant gerrymandering has me worried (I really wish that last year's attempt to revamp California's redistricting process had passed); and the possibility of election fraud has me worried as well. Besides, even if Democrats do regain control of one or both houses of Congress, then they have to actually govern--and given how rotten things are at the moment, there are so many gigantic problems to fix that it may be too late for anyone to do any good. Thus allowing Republicans, in two years, to claim that Democrats didn't do any better than they did, thus allowing people to go back to voting for the Republicans who screwed things up in the first place.
Sadly, perception is everything in an election, and recent reports that Republicans are making a last-minute surge in the polls suggest they might actually be able to pull themselves out of the fire. Because if people start to think the Republicans will win again, then the Republicans will probably win again. Here's an example of why:
Back in the 1980 election (Reagan/Carter), there was a significant third-party challenge from Illinois Congressman John Anderson. I was still too young to vote, but my mother was an Anderson supporter. On voting day, she found herself in line with the usual assortment of fellow neighbors, and they got to talking. People asked Mom who she was going to vote for and she said Anderson. "Oh, I like him," they almost all said.
So Mom naturally asked, "And are you voting for him?"
"Oh, no, no."
"But if you like him, why don't you--"
"Because he's not going to win."
So there you are. If it looks the Republicans might win, they will probably win. No one wants to "waste" a vote by voting for a loser, because apparently being part of the winning team is more important than actually making sure your team wins.
Yes, a Very Nice Weekend, How 'Bout You?
It's freakishly warm for November, but surely that's just an anomaly and not part of, let's say, global warming. In any event, it made for a nice weekend, even if I did have to spend almost all of Saturday going over accounting issues for the upcoming DVD release (got to know the right way to count our money!) and a good part of Sunday indoors yet again, working in Final Cut to put together what will eventually a director's reel for Marc. (We will send it out with copies of our next script, for maximum impact.)
But even with all of that, there was more time this weekend for catching up on movies, and even for some reading, than there has been in quite a while, and I'm awfully grateful for it.
And you?
Friday, November 03, 2006
A Break in the Case?
Some time has passed, and now a perfect storm of identity-theft action seems to be beginning. After the robbery on Sept. 25th, there was one use of a stolen credit card, but that charge, for whatever reason, never fully posted with the bank and so it was impossible to track it. Then nothing at all happened, except at my end, as I tried to deal with all the unexpected ramifications of the theft.
But when I came home Wednesday night, there were a half-dozen messages on my answering machine. One was from Cingular Wireless, which told me that someone had tried to open one or more cellphone accounts using my information; and another was from my bank, telling me that someone had tried to ask the bank to mail a replacement credit card to an address in the Bronx. There was also a call yesterday from Dell Computer, which had someone on the other line at that very moment, trying to open an account in my name. Thanks to the fraud alerts I placed with all the credit-reporting agencies, these merchants all contacted me and I sure as hell told them that the other people on the line were bad, bad people.
But the way I look at it, each of these attempts represents another opportunity to catch the bastids. For example, the attempt to have a replacement credit card mailed to the Bronx means that I now have an actual street address in the Bronx, plus a couple of phone numbers. Now it could turn out that that address is a vacant lot or something, because it sure does seem stupid for the thieves to actually give their address in a traceable manner. Then again, thieves are not always rocket scientists, so maybe they really are that stupid.
(As proof, I offer this from the always-delightful News of the Weird: "New Yorkers Donald Ray Bilby, 30, in July, and Abdullah Date, 18, in August, were, respectively, convicted and arrested for sending anthrax threats to authorities in envelopes that each contained their correct return addresses. (Date allegedly also included a taunting note reading, 'Catch me if you can.')")
Of course, I don't hold out much hope that anyone at that New York address will lead back to the two guys out in front of University High School that night. Most likely, they sold my wallet to someone for maybe a hundred bucks cash, and the buyer sent it on to his contact in New York, and there's probably an identity-theft ring that processes information from thefts all across the country. In which case, it becomes less likely that they're stupid enough to actually give out an address, but you never know, and it's all worth following up.
This morning, by coincidence, I got called in by the police to look at a photo line-up. I have given the address and the phone numbers and all the particulars to the detectives, and we'll see what happens. That's all I can do: try to keep ahead of the ID theft brigade, and relay anything potentially useful to the authorities. I really truly wish this all weren't so damn time-consuming, but that's my new reality so okay, that's what I'll do.
In the Meantime...
...there's this, a photo I took of the Getty Villa on the coast. Went there yesterday with some friends and, despite occasional interruptions by phone calls relating to the bad people, it was a very nice day. As you can probably tell.
But when I came home Wednesday night, there were a half-dozen messages on my answering machine. One was from Cingular Wireless, which told me that someone had tried to open one or more cellphone accounts using my information; and another was from my bank, telling me that someone had tried to ask the bank to mail a replacement credit card to an address in the Bronx. There was also a call yesterday from Dell Computer, which had someone on the other line at that very moment, trying to open an account in my name. Thanks to the fraud alerts I placed with all the credit-reporting agencies, these merchants all contacted me and I sure as hell told them that the other people on the line were bad, bad people.
But the way I look at it, each of these attempts represents another opportunity to catch the bastids. For example, the attempt to have a replacement credit card mailed to the Bronx means that I now have an actual street address in the Bronx, plus a couple of phone numbers. Now it could turn out that that address is a vacant lot or something, because it sure does seem stupid for the thieves to actually give their address in a traceable manner. Then again, thieves are not always rocket scientists, so maybe they really are that stupid.
(As proof, I offer this from the always-delightful News of the Weird: "New Yorkers Donald Ray Bilby, 30, in July, and Abdullah Date, 18, in August, were, respectively, convicted and arrested for sending anthrax threats to authorities in envelopes that each contained their correct return addresses. (Date allegedly also included a taunting note reading, 'Catch me if you can.')")
Of course, I don't hold out much hope that anyone at that New York address will lead back to the two guys out in front of University High School that night. Most likely, they sold my wallet to someone for maybe a hundred bucks cash, and the buyer sent it on to his contact in New York, and there's probably an identity-theft ring that processes information from thefts all across the country. In which case, it becomes less likely that they're stupid enough to actually give out an address, but you never know, and it's all worth following up.
This morning, by coincidence, I got called in by the police to look at a photo line-up. I have given the address and the phone numbers and all the particulars to the detectives, and we'll see what happens. That's all I can do: try to keep ahead of the ID theft brigade, and relay anything potentially useful to the authorities. I really truly wish this all weren't so damn time-consuming, but that's my new reality so okay, that's what I'll do.
In the Meantime...
...there's this, a photo I took of the Getty Villa on the coast. Went there yesterday with some friends and, despite occasional interruptions by phone calls relating to the bad people, it was a very nice day. As you can probably tell.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
The Candy Calendar
Aaaaiiiieeeee! It's the day after Halloween and there's candy everywhere! Heeeeellllp!
When I moved out here to Californ-eye-ay, I promptly gained about fifteen pounds. After all, I'd never had a car before, so in Boston and Chicago I walked everywhere; now suddenly I became one of those SoCal drive-around-the-corner types. Plus, age does what it does, and that robust metabolism that used to just burn weight whether I exercised or not slowly became less effective, something I could could keep in check in Chicago because I belonged to a health club across the street from where I worked. But here, I couldn't afford a health club and the weight practically leaped onto me. It was a bit like standing on a scale and watching as the dial just kept moving.
The weight gain seemed to stabilize at fifteen-plus, and then with a little bit of effort I dropped five--but there it stayed, for a long while. Until a couple months ago, when I watched Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me and had a little bit of a freak-out. I went into the kitchen and did a little basic math: looked at everything I had eaten on just that one day, how many calories, how many grams of fat, etc. Made a few adjustments, mostly simple things like removing potato chips from my diet, that sort of thing--taking the absolute worst parts of what I ate, losing them, but not trying to fundamentally alter the diet itself. I had no inclination to go vegetarian or anything like that; I just wanted to see if little steps could produce measurable gains.
They did. Slowly slowly, pounds began to slip away. From week to week there was little difference when I got on the scale; but over the course of the past several months, I realized I had lost five pounds, then seven, then ten--I was back to my pre-Los Angeles weight. My belt was two notches tighter. I didn't feel so damned self-conscious about certain types of clothing. This, of course, made me ambitious: could I perhaps keep the trend going? Why, if I could lose another fifteen pounds, that would put me back at college weight! Wouldn't that be great?
But it's the day after Halloween, and everyone with excess candy is leaving it out in places where I can, you know, see it. I mean, what's a fella to do in the face of such endless temptation? Exercise some impulse control? Oh, please!
It's interesting, though--after a couple of those tiny M&M's packs, I began to feel a sugar buzz rushing up on me. Used to be I could pound back M&M's for hours; now I'm really feeling them. That, I think, is probably a very good thing; if anything is to help me master that particular impulse, feeling sick after too much candy can only be to my benefit.
But geez--Christmas is coming up, and that's when vendors start sending boxes of candy and donuts and cookies and things. Aaaaiiieeee!
When I moved out here to Californ-eye-ay, I promptly gained about fifteen pounds. After all, I'd never had a car before, so in Boston and Chicago I walked everywhere; now suddenly I became one of those SoCal drive-around-the-corner types. Plus, age does what it does, and that robust metabolism that used to just burn weight whether I exercised or not slowly became less effective, something I could could keep in check in Chicago because I belonged to a health club across the street from where I worked. But here, I couldn't afford a health club and the weight practically leaped onto me. It was a bit like standing on a scale and watching as the dial just kept moving.
The weight gain seemed to stabilize at fifteen-plus, and then with a little bit of effort I dropped five--but there it stayed, for a long while. Until a couple months ago, when I watched Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me and had a little bit of a freak-out. I went into the kitchen and did a little basic math: looked at everything I had eaten on just that one day, how many calories, how many grams of fat, etc. Made a few adjustments, mostly simple things like removing potato chips from my diet, that sort of thing--taking the absolute worst parts of what I ate, losing them, but not trying to fundamentally alter the diet itself. I had no inclination to go vegetarian or anything like that; I just wanted to see if little steps could produce measurable gains.
They did. Slowly slowly, pounds began to slip away. From week to week there was little difference when I got on the scale; but over the course of the past several months, I realized I had lost five pounds, then seven, then ten--I was back to my pre-Los Angeles weight. My belt was two notches tighter. I didn't feel so damned self-conscious about certain types of clothing. This, of course, made me ambitious: could I perhaps keep the trend going? Why, if I could lose another fifteen pounds, that would put me back at college weight! Wouldn't that be great?
But it's the day after Halloween, and everyone with excess candy is leaving it out in places where I can, you know, see it. I mean, what's a fella to do in the face of such endless temptation? Exercise some impulse control? Oh, please!
It's interesting, though--after a couple of those tiny M&M's packs, I began to feel a sugar buzz rushing up on me. Used to be I could pound back M&M's for hours; now I'm really feeling them. That, I think, is probably a very good thing; if anything is to help me master that particular impulse, feeling sick after too much candy can only be to my benefit.
But geez--Christmas is coming up, and that's when vendors start sending boxes of candy and donuts and cookies and things. Aaaaiiieeee!
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
A Ha!
Now I know why I’ve been reading so much Joseph Campbell lately! Originally, I picked up Hero With a Thousand Faces because so many screenwriting people have been reading Christopher Vogler’s book The Writer’s Journey, which uses Campbell’s mythic outline as a template for writing scripts. It seemed to me, why read Vogler’s take on Campbell when I can just read Campbell himself and draw my own conclusions? Which is certainly a valid point of view; but about midway through the book, suddenly I discovered that all of this reading about myth was really so that I can finish The Salamander.
The Salamander is a novel I started writing a couple years ago. And, before I go any further, let’s go ahead and make this my third excerpt, after Thereby Hangs a Tale and “Absinthe”:
Shortly after this, Billy Ward is working on a script on Catalina Island when a unicorn shows up. Then he begins to discover some peculiar links between geology and alchemy, and it turns out that the producers of the film he’s writing might just have a peculiar interest in these mythological beasties who’ve been showing up. I was having great fun writing it, setting up the story, but then I bogged down badly—because now that the story was set up, I found I didn’t know what the story was. In scriptwriting terms, I had the first act and an idea about the third act, but no second act at all. And since the second act is the bulk of the story, really the story itself, that’s kind of a problem.
I needed to think something through, but wasn’t even sure what that something was supposed to be. And in the meantime I got involved with other stuff, and time passed.
Then I read the following in Hero With a Thousand Faces:
In other words, if I’m reading this correctly, all myths and stories are reflections of our unconscious group mind (the many ways in which humans tend to think like other humans no matter where they’re born). The world we see around us is not the world but a reflection of it, condensed and simplified so that we can grasp it (indeed, I once had a vision while listening to The Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” that led me to exactly this conclusion), but the hero’s task is to find his way to this real world in such a manner as to reveal something of its nature to everyone. (Finding the “magic elixir” or the Golden Fleece or whatever it is that represents the deeper truth is one thing; but it’s useless if the hero doesn’t bring the elixir/Fleece/whatever back home.)
All of which means that Billy Ward has to go on a pure hero’s journey, right into the heart of myth and magic. Now, with that little nugget in my head, now I know how to get started. There’s plenty of work still to be done, and a lot more about myth that I need to understand better before I can start constructing my own version of it, but now at least I know where the beginning of the road is.
Now all I need is the time to do all this in....
Another Review
I hadn’t ever visited culturevulture.com before, but now that I have, I like it a lot. This review, by Les Wright, may be the most accurate yet--one of the few reviewers who dared to assume that maybe Marc actually knew what he was doing when he made Zen Noir, that he had a reason for his choices and that, even if this decision or that one did or didn’t work, still it was done for a reason. Perhaps the best review we’ve had so far.
The Salamander is a novel I started writing a couple years ago. And, before I go any further, let’s go ahead and make this my third excerpt, after Thereby Hangs a Tale and “Absinthe”:
At 2:30 in the morning somebody knocked at my door. He had to knock very hard and very long for me to hear him at all, but he did that, he knocked very hard and very long so eventually the sound reached me. I moaned something that wasn’t quite in English, and even from that far away he heard my moan, and he knocked even louder, even more insistently.
I disentangled myself from What's-Her-Name and went through, around and down to the front door. Where I found it was Alan, my sometimes-friend Alan, standing there knocking, with a shoebox in his free hand.
"Morning," he said, frowning as usual. "Merry Christmas." He held out the shoebox. Something scuttled heavily inside.
“Alan, for fucksake it's 2:30 in the morning. And it's June."
"Apogee, perigee, who cares. Here."
"Whuthefuck is this?"
"Just take it. Telling you would spoil the opening."
I took the box and the something scuttled again, back to front, so that I damn near dropped the box and now my heart was going. "Alan! There's something alive in here!"
"Yes." He stood there, his beard very black in the black night, looking more than a little Mansonesque, but you get used to that eventually.
I stood for a moment, completely at a loss, but at 2:30 nothing seems quite so absurd as it would in daylight, so I put the box down, opened it, and looked inside. Something livid and red stared back at me, hotly appraising.
"You gave me a lizard," I said.
"I gave you a salamander," he said back. "Merry Christmas." And he turned and left.
I stood for another minute, watching him disappear into the dark, and said something useless like “Oh.” Then shut the door, went into the kitchen and put the box down on the floor. The whatsit, the gerrymander, would surely be fine till morning, and I could deal with it then. Or it’d scare the shit out of Maria when she came in to clean, whatever. I put a chair against the door to make sure it kept closed and went back upstairs.
Climbed into bed and What’s-Her-Name mumbled. “Hey,” I said. “Wanna see my lizard?”
“Yeah, sure, Billy” she said, so I climbed on top of her.
* * *
Maria’s scream woke me up. What’s-Her-Name was already gone, good. I went down, making sure my robe was good and tight because Maria was already freaked, and found her sitting in the dining room, opposite the closed kitchen door, staring at it and gibbering in Spanish--something low and dark, and in the middle of it she was definitely taking my name in vain. “Blah blah blah Señor Ward blah blah blah.” The chair was lying on its side. I tried to tell her it was okay but she wasn’t listening.
I went into the kitchen and found only this: the box had been reduced to ash. Scorch marks extended halfway across the faux marble floor then stopped in the middle of nothing. The lizard was nowhere to be seen.
Shortly after this, Billy Ward is working on a script on Catalina Island when a unicorn shows up. Then he begins to discover some peculiar links between geology and alchemy, and it turns out that the producers of the film he’s writing might just have a peculiar interest in these mythological beasties who’ve been showing up. I was having great fun writing it, setting up the story, but then I bogged down badly—because now that the story was set up, I found I didn’t know what the story was. In scriptwriting terms, I had the first act and an idea about the third act, but no second act at all. And since the second act is the bulk of the story, really the story itself, that’s kind of a problem.
I needed to think something through, but wasn’t even sure what that something was supposed to be. And in the meantime I got involved with other stuff, and time passed.
Then I read the following in Hero With a Thousand Faces:
Heaven, hell, the mythological age, Olympus and all the other habitations of the gods, are interpreted by psychoanalysis as symbols of the unconscious.... The constriction of consciousness, to which we owe the fact that we see not the source of the universal power but only the phenomenal forms reflected from that power, turns superconsciousness into unconsciousness and, at the same instant and by the same token, creates the world.... The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination--the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death.
In other words, if I’m reading this correctly, all myths and stories are reflections of our unconscious group mind (the many ways in which humans tend to think like other humans no matter where they’re born). The world we see around us is not the world but a reflection of it, condensed and simplified so that we can grasp it (indeed, I once had a vision while listening to The Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” that led me to exactly this conclusion), but the hero’s task is to find his way to this real world in such a manner as to reveal something of its nature to everyone. (Finding the “magic elixir” or the Golden Fleece or whatever it is that represents the deeper truth is one thing; but it’s useless if the hero doesn’t bring the elixir/Fleece/whatever back home.)
All of which means that Billy Ward has to go on a pure hero’s journey, right into the heart of myth and magic. Now, with that little nugget in my head, now I know how to get started. There’s plenty of work still to be done, and a lot more about myth that I need to understand better before I can start constructing my own version of it, but now at least I know where the beginning of the road is.
Now all I need is the time to do all this in....
Another Review
I hadn’t ever visited culturevulture.com before, but now that I have, I like it a lot. This review, by Les Wright, may be the most accurate yet--one of the few reviewers who dared to assume that maybe Marc actually knew what he was doing when he made Zen Noir, that he had a reason for his choices and that, even if this decision or that one did or didn’t work, still it was done for a reason. Perhaps the best review we’ve had so far.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
The Trouble With Studio 60
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is, never mind its awkward, too-long title, a good show that frustrates because it ought to be better. There’s the pedigree, for one thing: the Aaron Sorkin-Thomas Schlamme pairing that gave us Sports Night and West Wing. Now this show clearly owes more to Sports Night than it does to West Wing, focusing as it does on the backstage shenanigans of a sketch-comedy show; but the feel of it all is more like West Wing, and that’s a problem right there. I find myself wondering whether maybe Studio 60 should have been a half-hour program, like Sports Night was. It would force Sorkin to write tighter and leaner, and there would be less of a tendency to try and fill time with storylines like the one last night, where the studio president (Amanda Peet’s character) walked into a dressing room and declared “I don’t have any friends.”
(For the record, I think Sorkin has written himself into a corner with that character: a studio president simply would not spend that much time with the people from any one show, she just doesn’t have that kind of time. People come to her, not the other way around, otherwise she undercuts her power and fritters away her energy--not to mention becoming so attached to the creators that she might not be able to judge their work dispassionately. So increasingly, Sorkin is going to have invent excuses for her to be there if Jordan McDeere is to be anything more than a recurring character; but if last night’s episode is any indication, that situation is already getting desperate.)
Obviously, the quality of the sketches-within-a-show is the biggest problem. I finally realized: Sorkin simply doesn’t have the skill set required to write sketch comedy. What he writes is often very funny, but it’s always situational and character-driven; sketch comedy is the opposite, it’s concept-driven. A good sketch takes a crazy idea and wrings it dry, preferably in less than three minutes. There’s no time for character development, no time to set up where people are and why they’re there. “Two goofballs in their basement doing a cable-access show” is about as complicated as you can get in a sketch; even better if you’ve got something extremely high-concept, like “Julia Child cuts her hand and can’t stop the bleeding.” But high-concept has never been Sorkin’s strength, and that’s fine--except when he creates a show that depends on it. I’ve read that he brought on Mark McKinney, from Kids in the Hall, to help with the sketches, but that was the wrong choice: McKinney himself readily admits that he likes to write more character-driven, actor-y comedy, so all Sorkin has accomplished is to bring on someone who approaches comedy like he does. He needs to buckle down and steal someone from the real SNL, that’s really all there is to it--then get out of that guy’s way and let him write sketches.
But with the exception of the Amanda Peet problem, last night’s episode was the first one all season that I’ve really liked. I think Sorkin may have stumbled at last into what the show is about, its reason for being: why is comedy important? On the one hand, there was Simon (D.L. Hughley), desperate to rescue people from the same kinds of dire circumstances he grew up in, dragging Matt (Matthew Perry) to a comedy club to see a black comic, only to find that the comic was regurgitating the same sort of self-hating stereotypes that perpetuate narrow racial stereotypes. On the other hand, there was Nate Corddry’s character, showing his sheltered parents around the studio when clearly they don’t share any of the same references he does, and don’t revere anything that he reveres. They’ve never even heard of “Who’s on First,” perhaps the most famous sketch of all time. I’ve seen a lot of people online complaining that this storyline seemed far-fetched to them, but believe me, I’ve had just that conversation many times, both with family and friends. Now granted, it’s usually someone who hasn’t heard of, say, John Gielgud, but the principle is the same: someone whose work seems like bedrock to me is almost unknown in our fast-moving culture: Gielgud has been dead for years now, and if he hadn’t done Arthur, he would probably be almost entirely forgotten except for high-culture aesthetes like me. But in the context of the scene and the show, it was the disconnect itself that mattered: Nate Corddry loves what he does, but his father shuts him up cold by firing back that his younger brother is fighting in Afghanistan. And then on the third hand, there was the completely welcome appearance of Eli Wallach, playing a writer on a Studio 60-like show from the 1950s who got blacklisted after writing only one sketch--a clear reminder that not so long ago, comedy was considered so subversive that the government got people blackballed for it.
This, I think, is what the show wants to be about. And certainly Sorkin’s been talking around the question since the first episode, beginning with the Judd Hirsch Network-style tirade on the struggle between art and commerce in which “commerce is kicking art’s ass.” But here’s where his problems with writing sketch comedy are actively interfering with his ability to tell the story he wants to tell: the value of comedy, which here stands in for the value of art, should speak for itself. We shouldn’t need a character to tell us why comedy is important, we should be able to watch something carefully crafted that demonstrates exactly why it matters.
Personally, I think stories are an essential need for mankind; on the Maslow hierarchy of needs they may come behind food and shelter and sex, but not far behind at all; personally, I’d put our need for stories fourth on that list. And Sorkin could certainly have a character actually say something like that in an episode, but then he’s just lecturing us, he’s just writing an essay; he needs to find a way to show us, and since his sketches aren’t very good, the crucial part of the puzzle isn’t working.
That’s a great big howling problem, and that, I submit, is why so many people are finding this show unsatisfying.
(For the record, I think Sorkin has written himself into a corner with that character: a studio president simply would not spend that much time with the people from any one show, she just doesn’t have that kind of time. People come to her, not the other way around, otherwise she undercuts her power and fritters away her energy--not to mention becoming so attached to the creators that she might not be able to judge their work dispassionately. So increasingly, Sorkin is going to have invent excuses for her to be there if Jordan McDeere is to be anything more than a recurring character; but if last night’s episode is any indication, that situation is already getting desperate.)
Obviously, the quality of the sketches-within-a-show is the biggest problem. I finally realized: Sorkin simply doesn’t have the skill set required to write sketch comedy. What he writes is often very funny, but it’s always situational and character-driven; sketch comedy is the opposite, it’s concept-driven. A good sketch takes a crazy idea and wrings it dry, preferably in less than three minutes. There’s no time for character development, no time to set up where people are and why they’re there. “Two goofballs in their basement doing a cable-access show” is about as complicated as you can get in a sketch; even better if you’ve got something extremely high-concept, like “Julia Child cuts her hand and can’t stop the bleeding.” But high-concept has never been Sorkin’s strength, and that’s fine--except when he creates a show that depends on it. I’ve read that he brought on Mark McKinney, from Kids in the Hall, to help with the sketches, but that was the wrong choice: McKinney himself readily admits that he likes to write more character-driven, actor-y comedy, so all Sorkin has accomplished is to bring on someone who approaches comedy like he does. He needs to buckle down and steal someone from the real SNL, that’s really all there is to it--then get out of that guy’s way and let him write sketches.
But with the exception of the Amanda Peet problem, last night’s episode was the first one all season that I’ve really liked. I think Sorkin may have stumbled at last into what the show is about, its reason for being: why is comedy important? On the one hand, there was Simon (D.L. Hughley), desperate to rescue people from the same kinds of dire circumstances he grew up in, dragging Matt (Matthew Perry) to a comedy club to see a black comic, only to find that the comic was regurgitating the same sort of self-hating stereotypes that perpetuate narrow racial stereotypes. On the other hand, there was Nate Corddry’s character, showing his sheltered parents around the studio when clearly they don’t share any of the same references he does, and don’t revere anything that he reveres. They’ve never even heard of “Who’s on First,” perhaps the most famous sketch of all time. I’ve seen a lot of people online complaining that this storyline seemed far-fetched to them, but believe me, I’ve had just that conversation many times, both with family and friends. Now granted, it’s usually someone who hasn’t heard of, say, John Gielgud, but the principle is the same: someone whose work seems like bedrock to me is almost unknown in our fast-moving culture: Gielgud has been dead for years now, and if he hadn’t done Arthur, he would probably be almost entirely forgotten except for high-culture aesthetes like me. But in the context of the scene and the show, it was the disconnect itself that mattered: Nate Corddry loves what he does, but his father shuts him up cold by firing back that his younger brother is fighting in Afghanistan. And then on the third hand, there was the completely welcome appearance of Eli Wallach, playing a writer on a Studio 60-like show from the 1950s who got blacklisted after writing only one sketch--a clear reminder that not so long ago, comedy was considered so subversive that the government got people blackballed for it.
This, I think, is what the show wants to be about. And certainly Sorkin’s been talking around the question since the first episode, beginning with the Judd Hirsch Network-style tirade on the struggle between art and commerce in which “commerce is kicking art’s ass.” But here’s where his problems with writing sketch comedy are actively interfering with his ability to tell the story he wants to tell: the value of comedy, which here stands in for the value of art, should speak for itself. We shouldn’t need a character to tell us why comedy is important, we should be able to watch something carefully crafted that demonstrates exactly why it matters.
Personally, I think stories are an essential need for mankind; on the Maslow hierarchy of needs they may come behind food and shelter and sex, but not far behind at all; personally, I’d put our need for stories fourth on that list. And Sorkin could certainly have a character actually say something like that in an episode, but then he’s just lecturing us, he’s just writing an essay; he needs to find a way to show us, and since his sketches aren’t very good, the crucial part of the puzzle isn’t working.
That’s a great big howling problem, and that, I submit, is why so many people are finding this show unsatisfying.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Where the Time Goes
I used to have time to read, but then I moved to Los Angeles. And bought a car. This machine for speedy transit, it turns out, has just about killed off one of my chiefest pleasures. And sure, the fact that I've got a movie out and there are a billion things to do has contributed as well, but this loss of reading time has been going on ever since I moved out here. Now it's worse because of the other demands on my time, but it's really just a matter of degree.
In Boston and Chicago, I took public transportation. Walked to the T or the L, found a comfortable place to stand amidst all the other rush-hour commuters, and opened up a book. And I wasn't reading lightweight fluff on these trips, no, I read Beckett's trilogy almost entirely on the subway, and most of Proust's a la recherche du temps perdu. My other best reading time was the lunch hour, and even that has been reduced now--after all, who can keep his weight in check if the only places available are either too expensive or too fast-foody?
Reading at home really doesn't work: too many distractions. (And now there's something that is being referred to as "TiVo guilt," as your TiVo playlist gets longer and longer.) Of the books I said I was reading when I first started blogging, back in July or so of 2005, I'm still working my way through two of them: the Gore Vidal essays and the Bill Clinton biography. (Granted, they're both huge.)
Put it this way, though: last night my free time was taken up at dinner with a friend who just turned forty; tonight there is a "check disc" of Zen Noir to look at, the prototype of the DVD, and we have to press every button, listen to every track, watch the movie multiple times to make sure it all works as it's supposed to; tomorrow night is a dinner at a club called Aqua with, supposedly, a bunch of production-company people and managers and agents and whatnot. Plus, somewhere in all this, I have to pull scenes from the movie that TV stations can use as clips if they run a review of the DVD. Time, time, time, can anyone please send me the gift of a little more time?
All of this is, of course, in aid of the big push, the fierce quest to finally achieve what I've been wanting to achieve all my life. What does it mean, though, that reading time, one of my greatest pleasures, was the first thing to be sacrificed?
Things Officially Get Worse
Remember this moment, when all the fat cats smiled and applauded as the dream of America was officially dumped into the trash:
In Boston and Chicago, I took public transportation. Walked to the T or the L, found a comfortable place to stand amidst all the other rush-hour commuters, and opened up a book. And I wasn't reading lightweight fluff on these trips, no, I read Beckett's trilogy almost entirely on the subway, and most of Proust's a la recherche du temps perdu. My other best reading time was the lunch hour, and even that has been reduced now--after all, who can keep his weight in check if the only places available are either too expensive or too fast-foody?
Reading at home really doesn't work: too many distractions. (And now there's something that is being referred to as "TiVo guilt," as your TiVo playlist gets longer and longer.) Of the books I said I was reading when I first started blogging, back in July or so of 2005, I'm still working my way through two of them: the Gore Vidal essays and the Bill Clinton biography. (Granted, they're both huge.)
Put it this way, though: last night my free time was taken up at dinner with a friend who just turned forty; tonight there is a "check disc" of Zen Noir to look at, the prototype of the DVD, and we have to press every button, listen to every track, watch the movie multiple times to make sure it all works as it's supposed to; tomorrow night is a dinner at a club called Aqua with, supposedly, a bunch of production-company people and managers and agents and whatnot. Plus, somewhere in all this, I have to pull scenes from the movie that TV stations can use as clips if they run a review of the DVD. Time, time, time, can anyone please send me the gift of a little more time?
All of this is, of course, in aid of the big push, the fierce quest to finally achieve what I've been wanting to achieve all my life. What does it mean, though, that reading time, one of my greatest pleasures, was the first thing to be sacrificed?
Things Officially Get Worse
Remember this moment, when all the fat cats smiled and applauded as the dream of America was officially dumped into the trash:
Friday, October 13, 2006
Poverty and Peace
I have written before about my growing awareness of the poverty problem, and its link to violence. Today the Nobel Peace Prize committee has made that link explicit yet again, by awarding this most estimable of prizes to Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who pioneered microcredit.
I won't repeat my arguments about the crucial importance of poverty from July, except to add that nothing I've learned since then has changed my opinion--unless deepening that opinion constitutes a change. (And by the way, this is completely gratuitous, but Stephen Baldwin's idiotic rantings that efforts to end global poverty and violence are "stupid arrogance" just leave me breathless with stupefaction.)
I happened to catch the 60 Minutes report in 1989 about Dr. Yunus, and the self-evident brilliance--and inspired simplicity--of the microcredit idea were immediately impressive, even though at the time I had not yet had my "conversion" to the depth of the poverty problem. So I was just plain thrilled this morning when I heard the news--it was pretty much the first thing I heard when my radio/alarm came on--and of course it's no surprise at all that Dr. Yunus has already pledged to use the prize money for the furtherance of his work.
For years, it was the Literature prize that most caught my attention. But there's been a little change in my perspective lately, and now it's the Peace prize I'm most interested in. And this year's selection, with its implicit recognition of the links between poverty and violence, and how fighting the one fights the other, is dead right.
I won't repeat my arguments about the crucial importance of poverty from July, except to add that nothing I've learned since then has changed my opinion--unless deepening that opinion constitutes a change. (And by the way, this is completely gratuitous, but Stephen Baldwin's idiotic rantings that efforts to end global poverty and violence are "stupid arrogance" just leave me breathless with stupefaction.)
I happened to catch the 60 Minutes report in 1989 about Dr. Yunus, and the self-evident brilliance--and inspired simplicity--of the microcredit idea were immediately impressive, even though at the time I had not yet had my "conversion" to the depth of the poverty problem. So I was just plain thrilled this morning when I heard the news--it was pretty much the first thing I heard when my radio/alarm came on--and of course it's no surprise at all that Dr. Yunus has already pledged to use the prize money for the furtherance of his work.
For years, it was the Literature prize that most caught my attention. But there's been a little change in my perspective lately, and now it's the Peace prize I'm most interested in. And this year's selection, with its implicit recognition of the links between poverty and violence, and how fighting the one fights the other, is dead right.
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Diplomacy and Bluster
Who's at fault for the current North Korean problem? Ultimately, Kim Jong Il is responsible. You cannot fairly say it's Clinton's fault or Bush's fault because really, Kim is the one who made these decisions and took these actions and who now pretty much holds every card he ever wanted in his relations with the rest of the world.
But of course, with proper diplomatic efforts, Kim might have been guided toward making different decisions, and that's part of what we're arguing about nowadays. To a certain extent it's a pointless argument: who cares how we got here, the point is that we're here and now what do we do? But at the same time, an examination of how we got here offers strong indications of what we ought to do next (assuming that anything can be done anymore). It also might suggest what we might do about that other looming problem, Iran's quest for a similar nuclear capacity. Because make no mistake, Iran is watching closely how the U.S. responds to North Korea's crashing of the nuclear party; and if North Korea gets away with it, nothing will stop from Iran from doing the same.
So: is it Clinton's fault, or Bush's? There is definitely blame to be spread all around, as there usually is; but judging by the limited research I've done so far, the most convincing timeline of what happened and why is Fred Kaplan's in the May 2004 Washington Monthly. Is it slanted toward Clinton's side of things? Of course it is: the title is "Rolling Blunder," and the subtitle is "How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes." But opinions aside, the facts as they are laid out suggest some interesting conclusions.
One conclusion: diplomacy does work, and should not be automatically dismissed as appeasement. (By the way, an interesting note about Neville Chamberlain's much-reviled appeasement policy toward Nazi Germany: as this BBC biography suggests, appeasement might have gotten a bum rap--"Current thinking has shifted, however, believing Chamberlain to have shrewdly agreed to appeasement to give the British armed forces the time they desperately needed to prepare for full-blown war.") Appeasement, then, in those circumstances was not an end in itself but a quiet recognition that war was inevitable and that time was desperately needed to prepare conventional forces for what must surely come. Given that we are now in the nuclear era, delay doesn't really serve much purpose anymore because the aim is not to match North Korea in firepower--we already vastly outmatch any other nation in firepower, both conventional and nuclear--but to prevent even one use of a nuclear weapon by anyone under any circumstances.
Enter diplomacy. I think it's fair to argue that technologically, the nuclear genie is right now escaping from the bottle, and that this was bound to happen someday, that no president, no nation, no ideology can prevent it from happening. Any technology eventually becomes pervasive. So the only policy that really helps in the long term is persuasion, i.e., diplomacy. Give a country, a nation, a rogue state, whatever you want to call it, an alternative to nuclear war and, because MADD isn't altogether a bad idea, that nation will probably take the alternative. But if you back that nation into a corner where it believes there are no other alternatives, and it has a nuke in its pocket, chances are the unthinkable will happen. And I'll tell you, when I was watching Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech and heard him drop the line about the Axis of Evil, I cringed. I knew in an instant that this could only lead to desperate trouble down the line, as indeed it has.
Because Bush & Co. only seem to understand the persuasive powers of force; it's the only weapon, so to speak, in their arsenal. We already know that the Bushies never really believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that--in keeping with a long-standing neocon theory about spreading democracy in the Middle East--as soon as September 11th happened, the Bushies knew they had all the excuse they needed and, despite all Bush's blather about exhausting diplomatic options, really they had settled on war pretty much from the git-go. (We know this because Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, among others, have told us so.) But so far, all their saber-rattling has only resulted in spectacular failures: the now-endless war in Iraq, the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a powerful spokesman for the Muslim world (precisely because of his bellicose opposition to Washington's bellicosity, a clear-cut case of like spawning like), and now North Korea's development of nuclear weaponry. Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." With their one-note response to every situation, the Bush administration certainly seems to meet that definition. (Contrast with the FDR administration, wherein Roosevelt would, famously, try absolutely anything to see if it would work; if it didn't, he dropped it and tried something new. When have you ever seen George W. Bush abandon any idea and try something new?)
In Mr. Kaplan's timeline (there is an update of his positions here, dated yesterday, in Slate), it seems to me that one moment stands out more than any other: on October 21, 1994, after Clinton sent Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang to negotiate with Kim Jong Il, Carter came back with the Agreed Framework, under which, as Kaplan writes, "North Korea would renew its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, lock up the fuel rods, and let the IAEA inspectors back in to monitor the facility. In exchange, the United States, with financial backing from South Korea and Japan, would provide two light-water nuclear reactors for electricity (explicitly allowed under the NPT), a huge supply of fuel oil, and a pledge not to invade North Korea." This is the agreement that the current administration claims has failed, thus leaving them no choice but to pursue other options--when they say that "bilateral talks failed," this is what they're referring to.
But it's interesting to note the timing: October 21, 1994, only a couple weeks before the "Republican Revolution" that swept control of Congress away from the Democrats. With their new power, as Kaplan writes, "Since the accord was not a formal treaty, Congress did not have to ratify the terms, but it did balk on the financial commitment." (Check out this interview with Robert Gallucci, the chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea at the time; about halfway down, he talks about the Congressional reaction to the Agreed Framework.) Thus the agreement was crippled from the start, and once the North Koreans saw that we weren't honoring the agreement from our side, what possible reason did they have to honor it on theirs? In fact, no matter what you're hearing today, it is not the North Koreans who first broke their word, we did. The newly-Republican U.S. Congress did.
Then, almost immediately upon taking office, the Bush administration started upping the ante. The Axis of Evil, and so forth. Leading us to where we are now.
And what do we do next? Well that's the billion-dollar question, isn't it? But from my consideration of all the above, I have to think that sitting down at the table with these guys, even if it's exactly what they want, must be a pretty good idea. I'm not sure whether we have any good carrots or sticks anymore, but it sure as hell seems obvious that threatening the North Koreans just ain't working and we desperately need to try something different.
And if we should reach some sort of compromise, howsabout this time we actually keep our word?
But of course, with proper diplomatic efforts, Kim might have been guided toward making different decisions, and that's part of what we're arguing about nowadays. To a certain extent it's a pointless argument: who cares how we got here, the point is that we're here and now what do we do? But at the same time, an examination of how we got here offers strong indications of what we ought to do next (assuming that anything can be done anymore). It also might suggest what we might do about that other looming problem, Iran's quest for a similar nuclear capacity. Because make no mistake, Iran is watching closely how the U.S. responds to North Korea's crashing of the nuclear party; and if North Korea gets away with it, nothing will stop from Iran from doing the same.
So: is it Clinton's fault, or Bush's? There is definitely blame to be spread all around, as there usually is; but judging by the limited research I've done so far, the most convincing timeline of what happened and why is Fred Kaplan's in the May 2004 Washington Monthly. Is it slanted toward Clinton's side of things? Of course it is: the title is "Rolling Blunder," and the subtitle is "How the Bush administration let North Korea get nukes." But opinions aside, the facts as they are laid out suggest some interesting conclusions.
One conclusion: diplomacy does work, and should not be automatically dismissed as appeasement. (By the way, an interesting note about Neville Chamberlain's much-reviled appeasement policy toward Nazi Germany: as this BBC biography suggests, appeasement might have gotten a bum rap--"Current thinking has shifted, however, believing Chamberlain to have shrewdly agreed to appeasement to give the British armed forces the time they desperately needed to prepare for full-blown war.") Appeasement, then, in those circumstances was not an end in itself but a quiet recognition that war was inevitable and that time was desperately needed to prepare conventional forces for what must surely come. Given that we are now in the nuclear era, delay doesn't really serve much purpose anymore because the aim is not to match North Korea in firepower--we already vastly outmatch any other nation in firepower, both conventional and nuclear--but to prevent even one use of a nuclear weapon by anyone under any circumstances.
Enter diplomacy. I think it's fair to argue that technologically, the nuclear genie is right now escaping from the bottle, and that this was bound to happen someday, that no president, no nation, no ideology can prevent it from happening. Any technology eventually becomes pervasive. So the only policy that really helps in the long term is persuasion, i.e., diplomacy. Give a country, a nation, a rogue state, whatever you want to call it, an alternative to nuclear war and, because MADD isn't altogether a bad idea, that nation will probably take the alternative. But if you back that nation into a corner where it believes there are no other alternatives, and it has a nuke in its pocket, chances are the unthinkable will happen. And I'll tell you, when I was watching Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech and heard him drop the line about the Axis of Evil, I cringed. I knew in an instant that this could only lead to desperate trouble down the line, as indeed it has.
Because Bush & Co. only seem to understand the persuasive powers of force; it's the only weapon, so to speak, in their arsenal. We already know that the Bushies never really believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that--in keeping with a long-standing neocon theory about spreading democracy in the Middle East--as soon as September 11th happened, the Bushies knew they had all the excuse they needed and, despite all Bush's blather about exhausting diplomatic options, really they had settled on war pretty much from the git-go. (We know this because Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, among others, have told us so.) But so far, all their saber-rattling has only resulted in spectacular failures: the now-endless war in Iraq, the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a powerful spokesman for the Muslim world (precisely because of his bellicose opposition to Washington's bellicosity, a clear-cut case of like spawning like), and now North Korea's development of nuclear weaponry. Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." With their one-note response to every situation, the Bush administration certainly seems to meet that definition. (Contrast with the FDR administration, wherein Roosevelt would, famously, try absolutely anything to see if it would work; if it didn't, he dropped it and tried something new. When have you ever seen George W. Bush abandon any idea and try something new?)
In Mr. Kaplan's timeline (there is an update of his positions here, dated yesterday, in Slate), it seems to me that one moment stands out more than any other: on October 21, 1994, after Clinton sent Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang to negotiate with Kim Jong Il, Carter came back with the Agreed Framework, under which, as Kaplan writes, "North Korea would renew its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, lock up the fuel rods, and let the IAEA inspectors back in to monitor the facility. In exchange, the United States, with financial backing from South Korea and Japan, would provide two light-water nuclear reactors for electricity (explicitly allowed under the NPT), a huge supply of fuel oil, and a pledge not to invade North Korea." This is the agreement that the current administration claims has failed, thus leaving them no choice but to pursue other options--when they say that "bilateral talks failed," this is what they're referring to.
But it's interesting to note the timing: October 21, 1994, only a couple weeks before the "Republican Revolution" that swept control of Congress away from the Democrats. With their new power, as Kaplan writes, "Since the accord was not a formal treaty, Congress did not have to ratify the terms, but it did balk on the financial commitment." (Check out this interview with Robert Gallucci, the chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea at the time; about halfway down, he talks about the Congressional reaction to the Agreed Framework.) Thus the agreement was crippled from the start, and once the North Koreans saw that we weren't honoring the agreement from our side, what possible reason did they have to honor it on theirs? In fact, no matter what you're hearing today, it is not the North Koreans who first broke their word, we did. The newly-Republican U.S. Congress did.
Then, almost immediately upon taking office, the Bush administration started upping the ante. The Axis of Evil, and so forth. Leading us to where we are now.
And what do we do next? Well that's the billion-dollar question, isn't it? But from my consideration of all the above, I have to think that sitting down at the table with these guys, even if it's exactly what they want, must be a pretty good idea. I'm not sure whether we have any good carrots or sticks anymore, but it sure as hell seems obvious that threatening the North Koreans just ain't working and we desperately need to try something different.
And if we should reach some sort of compromise, howsabout this time we actually keep our word?
Monday, October 09, 2006
Catching Up
The Movie
It's going fine. Still playing in Colorado, and will continue there as this weekend we add Austin, Texas. Marc will fly out to Austin for some Q&As, so if you live in the area, stop on by. So far we're averaging two weeks at each location, so if you want to go, it's probably best to go sooner than later.
And yeah, we've been losing money (which is to say, we're spending more on advertising in toto than the film has taken in), but we always knew we were going to lose money, that's how these things work nowadays. A couple years ago I attended a seminar conducted by Peter Broderick, who explained that with the exception of the really big Hollywood blockbusters, all theatrical releases these days are really looked upon as "loss-leaders" for the DVD. That definitely opened my eyes: the idea that a theatrical release is really just advertising, designed to raise awareness of a movie so that people will buy the DVD. With that in mind, all along we knew we were going to lose money by putting Zen Noir in theaters; our budget always reflected a loss from this release.
Still, there's a difference emotionally between understanding a thing intellectually, and watching the reality of the numbers as they come in every week. But hey, that's when you do a gut-check and keep your eyes forward.
The DVD, by the way, will probably be released fairly soon. I can't make the announcement yet, but believe me, when I can, I will announce it loudly.
Starstruck or Just Plain Desperate?
Last week I went to an event at The Egyptian sponsored by the No-Budget Film Club, during which director Christopher Nolan screened his first film, Following, and then previewed his new one, The Prestige. Nolan stood up with Peter Broderick (what, him again?) to introduce his movie; the second he was done, as he headed for his seat and the lights started to dim, some guy hurtled up the aisle with something in his hand. So now all those people, in their hundreds, had to wait till this guy was done wasting Nolan's time; but no sooner had Nolan somewhat grudgingly accepted whatever it was this guy had foisted upon him, than the guy started to actually pitch a project. In the aisle, as Nolan tried to get to his seat, this guy actually starts nattering on about whatever the idea was that he hasn't been able to get anyone else to listen to. So one of the event's organizers warns the guy that he's gonna have to return to his seat or get thrown out, and there's a little tiny scuffle, and then the guy finally retreats--all the way out of the theater. As he harrumphed up the aisle, he started shouting something about "this goddamned incestuous industry" not letting the average guy get a break, then he punched a wall and was gone.
And of course he's right, but still. Behavior like that will get you exactly nowhere, ever. If this guy can't figure that out, he might as well just go home now.
Post-Robbery
The hard part is fighting against the almost overwhelming impulse to cast blame. I know perfectly well that the crime against me was not a Latino crime just because it was committed by Latinos. I knew that before I got robbed, and I know it after. But that deep, awful reptilian part of our brains wants very much to cast a wide net so that anyone who is like the robbers becomes a robber. And once that process starts, it only ever expands. I was walking around the other night and my internal radar was pinging like crazy off practically everyone. Dark corners got darker; innocuous alleways suddenly loomed with danger. I refuse to give in to this sort of thing; still, it can't be accidental that lately, most of my walks have come during the daytime because, you know, I had errands to run and they were all fairly close by so why not walk? And of course these places are closed at night so what can I do but go during the daytime? And so forth and so on. This is how we explain things to ourselves so that we don't have to admit that we've become a little more fearful than we used to be.
At the same time, there is the still-astonishing example of the Amish. And with that shining before me, fear is forced to retreat back into those dark dingy corners. It's been an interesting internal struggle lately, the light and dark more fiercely at odds than usual.
Roger Waters
Given all the above, the recent series of Roger Waters concerts at the Hollywood Bowl was well-timed. Great music, well-played, in a great venue. I went with Marc Rosenbush (who then went twice more, catching all of the L.A. shows with different people), and at one point Marc commented that Waters needs two guitarists to recreate what David Gilmour can do by himself. True enough; but at the same time, having two guitarists opens up some Lynyrd Skynyrd-like possibilities that produced some great results--particularly when Pink Floyd's drummer, the great Nick Mason, came onstage for the second half of the show. (I've now seen all four! Yay!) That meant two lead guitars and two drummers working away, as the sound filled the space and made my chest vibrate.
The political content has been controversial, but in Southern California there were no complaints--and the floating pig, with "Impeach Bush" written across its ass, was greeted with delight. (Check the link above for a photo.) My real complaint about Waters, though, is that for some reason he has abandoned metaphor in his songwriting. It's not like "All in all you're just another brick in the wall" was terribly subtle to begin with; but now even that level of metaphor is gone. He performed his new song "Leaving Beirut," and it's a completely straightforward, on-the-nose number that says exactly what it says and nothing more--prose rather than poetry. On top of that, he had artist Bill Sienkiewicz (whose work I've always liked a lot) put together a comic strip to illustrate the story of when Waters was a young man visiting Beirut. Put that together with the overtly-political flying pig which was being walked around at the same time, and you get three layers of obvious when one would have been enough.
Still, nothing beats "Comfortably Numb" for closing out a nice evening of music.
It's going fine. Still playing in Colorado, and will continue there as this weekend we add Austin, Texas. Marc will fly out to Austin for some Q&As, so if you live in the area, stop on by. So far we're averaging two weeks at each location, so if you want to go, it's probably best to go sooner than later.
And yeah, we've been losing money (which is to say, we're spending more on advertising in toto than the film has taken in), but we always knew we were going to lose money, that's how these things work nowadays. A couple years ago I attended a seminar conducted by Peter Broderick, who explained that with the exception of the really big Hollywood blockbusters, all theatrical releases these days are really looked upon as "loss-leaders" for the DVD. That definitely opened my eyes: the idea that a theatrical release is really just advertising, designed to raise awareness of a movie so that people will buy the DVD. With that in mind, all along we knew we were going to lose money by putting Zen Noir in theaters; our budget always reflected a loss from this release.
Still, there's a difference emotionally between understanding a thing intellectually, and watching the reality of the numbers as they come in every week. But hey, that's when you do a gut-check and keep your eyes forward.
The DVD, by the way, will probably be released fairly soon. I can't make the announcement yet, but believe me, when I can, I will announce it loudly.
Starstruck or Just Plain Desperate?
Last week I went to an event at The Egyptian sponsored by the No-Budget Film Club, during which director Christopher Nolan screened his first film, Following, and then previewed his new one, The Prestige. Nolan stood up with Peter Broderick (what, him again?) to introduce his movie; the second he was done, as he headed for his seat and the lights started to dim, some guy hurtled up the aisle with something in his hand. So now all those people, in their hundreds, had to wait till this guy was done wasting Nolan's time; but no sooner had Nolan somewhat grudgingly accepted whatever it was this guy had foisted upon him, than the guy started to actually pitch a project. In the aisle, as Nolan tried to get to his seat, this guy actually starts nattering on about whatever the idea was that he hasn't been able to get anyone else to listen to. So one of the event's organizers warns the guy that he's gonna have to return to his seat or get thrown out, and there's a little tiny scuffle, and then the guy finally retreats--all the way out of the theater. As he harrumphed up the aisle, he started shouting something about "this goddamned incestuous industry" not letting the average guy get a break, then he punched a wall and was gone.
And of course he's right, but still. Behavior like that will get you exactly nowhere, ever. If this guy can't figure that out, he might as well just go home now.
Post-Robbery
The hard part is fighting against the almost overwhelming impulse to cast blame. I know perfectly well that the crime against me was not a Latino crime just because it was committed by Latinos. I knew that before I got robbed, and I know it after. But that deep, awful reptilian part of our brains wants very much to cast a wide net so that anyone who is like the robbers becomes a robber. And once that process starts, it only ever expands. I was walking around the other night and my internal radar was pinging like crazy off practically everyone. Dark corners got darker; innocuous alleways suddenly loomed with danger. I refuse to give in to this sort of thing; still, it can't be accidental that lately, most of my walks have come during the daytime because, you know, I had errands to run and they were all fairly close by so why not walk? And of course these places are closed at night so what can I do but go during the daytime? And so forth and so on. This is how we explain things to ourselves so that we don't have to admit that we've become a little more fearful than we used to be.
At the same time, there is the still-astonishing example of the Amish. And with that shining before me, fear is forced to retreat back into those dark dingy corners. It's been an interesting internal struggle lately, the light and dark more fiercely at odds than usual.
Roger Waters
Given all the above, the recent series of Roger Waters concerts at the Hollywood Bowl was well-timed. Great music, well-played, in a great venue. I went with Marc Rosenbush (who then went twice more, catching all of the L.A. shows with different people), and at one point Marc commented that Waters needs two guitarists to recreate what David Gilmour can do by himself. True enough; but at the same time, having two guitarists opens up some Lynyrd Skynyrd-like possibilities that produced some great results--particularly when Pink Floyd's drummer, the great Nick Mason, came onstage for the second half of the show. (I've now seen all four! Yay!) That meant two lead guitars and two drummers working away, as the sound filled the space and made my chest vibrate.
The political content has been controversial, but in Southern California there were no complaints--and the floating pig, with "Impeach Bush" written across its ass, was greeted with delight. (Check the link above for a photo.) My real complaint about Waters, though, is that for some reason he has abandoned metaphor in his songwriting. It's not like "All in all you're just another brick in the wall" was terribly subtle to begin with; but now even that level of metaphor is gone. He performed his new song "Leaving Beirut," and it's a completely straightforward, on-the-nose number that says exactly what it says and nothing more--prose rather than poetry. On top of that, he had artist Bill Sienkiewicz (whose work I've always liked a lot) put together a comic strip to illustrate the story of when Waters was a young man visiting Beirut. Put that together with the overtly-political flying pig which was being walked around at the same time, and you get three layers of obvious when one would have been enough.
Still, nothing beats "Comfortably Numb" for closing out a nice evening of music.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Awestruck
Everything I've heard about the nightmare in the Amish schoolhouse has simply knocked me out--on the one hand, I simply cannot comprehend what would ever have possessed Mr. Roberts to act as he did, and the details of his communications only make it more unfathomable; on the other hand, the response of the Amish themselves, both during and after the crisis, has been exemplary.
But this, this sends me to my knees:
Young Marian Fisher, only 13 years old, "asked the killer to shoot her first in an apparent bid to save the younger girls."
I have nothing to say. I could attempt to draw some lame comparison about how our leaders ought to blah blah blah, and we could all learn a lesson from blah blah blah, but it all pales next to this example of love in action. So I think I'll just stand here in silence and marvel at it, and hope that the ravages of daily life don't ever knock it from my head.
But this, this sends me to my knees:
Young Marian Fisher, only 13 years old, "asked the killer to shoot her first in an apparent bid to save the younger girls."
I have nothing to say. I could attempt to draw some lame comparison about how our leaders ought to blah blah blah, and we could all learn a lesson from blah blah blah, but it all pales next to this example of love in action. So I think I'll just stand here in silence and marvel at it, and hope that the ravages of daily life don't ever knock it from my head.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
The Divorce of Love and Hate
I hope the Joseph Campbell estate will forgive me for quoting at such length from Hero With a Thousand Faces, but what I read yesterday was so marvelous, and so directly applicable to our current world situation, that I just can’t bring myself to edit it down to something pithy yet incomplete. It’s from the “Apotheosis” section of Chapter 1:
And we need look no further for an illustration of this love in action than yesterday’s horrific murders in the Amish schoolhouse. The Amish community is shocked and devastated, yes; but as a USA Today article quotes an expert saying, “They’ll try to express to their forgiveness” to the gunman’s widow. In a time when sorrow and tragedy can be found in every direction, only the Amish seem to have remembered the truest teaching of their religion.
...Hence, too, the irresistible compulsion to make war: the impulse to destroy the father is continually transforming itself into public violence.... A new and larger paradise is thus established. But this paradise does not include the traditional enemy tribes, or races, against whom aggression is still systematically projected. All of the “good” father-mother content is saved for home, while the “bad” is flung abroad and about: “for who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” “And slacken not in following up the enemy: if ye are suffering hardships, they are suffering similar hardships; but ye have hope from Allah, while they have none.”
Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, “native,” or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor.
...Even the so-called Christian nations--which are supposed to be following a “World” Redeemer--are better known to history for their colonial barbarity and internecine strife than for any practical display of that unconditioned love, synonymous with the effective conquest of ego, ego’s world, and ego’s tribal god, which was taught by their professed supreme Lord....
The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo…are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching.... One would think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom, of all of us, the Father prefers. Whereas, the teaching is much less flattering: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” The World Savior’s cross, in spite of the behavior of its professed priests, is a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag.
And we need look no further for an illustration of this love in action than yesterday’s horrific murders in the Amish schoolhouse. The Amish community is shocked and devastated, yes; but as a USA Today article quotes an expert saying, “They’ll try to express to their forgiveness” to the gunman’s widow. In a time when sorrow and tragedy can be found in every direction, only the Amish seem to have remembered the truest teaching of their religion.
Friday, September 29, 2006
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
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.
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.
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.
Monday, September 25, 2006
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?
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?
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