Day and Date

I have to assume that Mark Cuban is a solid businessman who know what he's doing, but for the life of me I just can't figure out why he's promoting this whole day-and-date movie release scheme of his.

Cuban runs HDNet, one of the few cable channels that broadcasts exclusively in high definition. I've had a hi-def set for a few months now, attached to my hi-def Series 3 TiVo (one of the great inventions), and I love it. I'm a movie guy, so of course I love it, but what's not to love? Widescreen, great image detail, and it's attached to a good stereo with good speakers. I've even started pulling DVDs off my Netflix list if I saw they were going to be broadcast on an HD channel because they look better there. (And yes, I too am one of those waiting on the sidelines for the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray thing to work itself out before I commit to one machine or another.) So HDNet is one of my mainstays, and I particularly love it when they show some NASA footage--simply spectacular. (Though nothing so far has beat the recent Planet Earth specials on Discovery HD Theatre.)

But HDNet also has a movies-only hi-def channel, and the other night they ran a movie called Diggers. As it happens, I had heard about this movie a couple days before and thought it looked interesting: an offbeat indie about clam diggers, with a good cast including Paul Rudd, Sarah Paulson, Lauren Ambrose and Maura Tierney, all of whom I like. I noticed it was going to be playing at a theater only a few blocks away--a theater for which I have a free admission pass. So it was within easy walking distance and wouldn't cost me anything to go and see the movie. "Well maybe I'll do that," I said--but then I checked the TV listings and discovered that Diggers was also playing on HDNet, that same night.

I ask you, why would I want to go to the theater, then? It's more comfortable at home, my equipment is all first-rate, and I can watch when I want. About the only thing that might have made me go to a theater in such a circumstance would have been if I'd had a date, but that didn't happen to be the case. So I stayed home and recorded it on the TiVo and was completely happy. But, as I say, baffled.

Because bear in mind: I'm a movie guy. And I certainly have a keen appreciation for the power of a shared theatrical experience by an audience of strangers experiencing something together (by the way, for the record, Zen Noir works best on a movie screen; I'm just saying, I've seen it happen over and over, that really is the ideal way to see it). I was already motivated to see this particular film, the theater was in easy walking distance, I like to walk, and I had a pass to see the movie for free. It was, in short, about as easy as going to a movie theater can possibly be--but I didn't go, and the only reason I didn't is because that same movie was showing that same night on my TV.

That's what day-and-date means, and it mystifies me. It refers to a newfangled way to release movies in which the movie is broadcast and shown in theaters on the same night, then gets released on DVD the next Tuesday: all formats show up at once, and people can have their choice of watching it in any way they prefer. Nice for we the viewers, but where is the business model? How is Cuban making any money off this?

Sure, Wagner gets my money as a subscriber to the channel, but he gets that anyway; and now he's lost my theater-going money (well, except for that free admission pass, but that's not really germane). The one thing you most don't want to happen is what happens: one format cannibalizes the possibility for success of another format. I paid nothing to watch it on TV, and did not pay anything to watch it in a theater. They tried this with Steven Soderbergh's Bubble several months ago, and lo and behold, that movie did lousy at the box office. (According to Box Office Mojo, it made $145,000, with a production budget of $1.6 million.)

I don't think I'm being a stuffy old traditionalist about this, and I admit the possibility that Cuban is smarter than I am, but I just don't see how he's making any money here. But in the meantime, what the heck: I've got this lovely movie sitting on my TiVo, I think I'll go watch it now.

Where Could They Bee?

Since I was just writing recently about bees, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the bees seem to be going on vacation. Or, to be a little more scientific about it, they're disappearing. By the billions.

As the various articles point out, food crops that rely on honeybees for pollination are worth about $15 billion and include a lot of the fruits and nuts that we all love the most: apples, cherries, almonds, and so forth. There is no adequate mechanical substitute for the pollinating prowess of the honeybee, so if this unknown process should continue, it is reasonable to expect that these staples of our diet will not disappear but will become very expensive from simple scarcity. (Imagine a ten dollar slice of pie.) (Okay, in Los Angeles that's not so far from the truth, but imagine it in Dubuque.)

Bee colonies started to collapse last October: huge numbers of worker bees would simply never return to the hive, up to 50% of the colony in many cases. As CNN reports, most of these bees just plain vanished, and their little bee bodies were never found. Since their failure to return was possibly a failure in their navigation systems, speculation ran rampant on all sorts of causes, including cellphone towers (leading Bill Maher last week to ask, "will we choose to literally blather ourselves to death?"). This New York Times article goes into more detail on the science involved, including this disturbing photo of cross-sections of diseased (left) and healthy (right) bee thoraxes:

A chemical trigger for all this seems most likely, particularly since some hives treated with gamma radiation have begun to recover, suggesting that the gamma is killing some yet-unknown pathogen. But research has barely begun on the problem, and all the while, the bees keep disappearing; and despite some lucky breaks, like the fact that Baylor College of Medicine recently happened to finish sequencing bee DNA (thus speeding up immeasurably a search for genetic triggers), we have no idea how long it will take to find answers to this problem.

Diseased bees are being found to be contaminated with fungi common in humans whose immune systems have been depressed by AIDS or cancer. Thus we learn yet again, we're all connected. The question then becomes, if the bees go, what happens to us?

I Have No Mouth and I Must Kvetch

Meanwhile, on a lighter note...

Went last night to a screening of an unfinished documentary called "Dreams With Sharp Teeth," about the inimitable Harlan Ellison. (Does anyone ever just write his name, or is there always some sort of adverb in front of it?) (Just found the trailer, here.) I've been a fan of Harlan's for way over twenty years now, since my mom read Shatterdaythen handed it over to me. It was one of those thunderbolts from the blue you get sometimes: words on a page with such vigor and imagination that you immediately respond by going out and buying every other book by this guy you can possibly find.

It's hard to describe Harlan, because there are so many colors to his gigantic personality. Well into his 70s now, he is on the one hand a short, cranky Jew from Painesville, Ohio with the emotional life of an 11 year old; he is also an extremely serious artist in a complex, lifelong pas de deux with his muse; he is a raconteur of the first order, a fearsome debater who will absolutely get right up in your face, one of the most honored writers of his time, a moralist who is utterly unafraid to be offensive, a fanboy collector with a house full of stuff called, no kidding, "Ellison Wonderland," and a sweet guy who loves his friends like crazy. Which is exactly why a documentary about him is such a great idea.

The screening was at the Writers Guild Theatre on the wrong part of Doheny Drive. (Woe to you if you plug in the address on your Mapquest search with "Los Angeles" rather than "Beverly Hills." O woe!) The director, who I believe is Erik Nelson (there isn't yet an imdb listing for the film), has been following Harlan around with a camera since 1981 ("I always just thought he was a fanboy!" cracked Ellison), so clearly this was a labor of love--because believe me, if there wasn't love, Harlan would've driven anyone else away within about ten minutes. Because I was so late (damn you, Doheny!) I missed the first fifteen minutes or so, arriving just in time for the section where Harlan joined the army. By this point the audience--full of Harlan's friends--was already laughing hysterically. They barely needed the film's pithy sidebars (re: Ellison and the army, "It was not a relationship destined for success"), but it was a night for laughter, the loving kind: a guy who's lived a full life, surrounded by people he loved (and name-dropping like crazy), getting what amounted to a valedictory celebration of his life.

It may be a fault of the film that it is in fact too valedictory, that none of Harlan's many enemies weren't interviewed--but then, Harlan is so firm in his convictions that you get the impression he regrets nothing and will defiantly stand behind everything he has ever done in his entire life. And when you start to talk about his enemies, the man just cackles with glee, already rolling up his sleeves and preparing for a new battle. He is that rarest of things in this passive-aggressive world of surface politeness but hidden meanness of spirit: a man who plants his feet and stands behind everything he says, who sugarcoats nothing, and who is so much smarter than pretty much anyone that if said anyone gets caught on the wrong side of an argument with Harlan, well, good luck. But if you are a friend, he is just as passionate: he will come up, embrace you in a bear hug and kiss you on the cheek while saying the most wildly flattering things (there's a section of the film about Harlan the ladies' man that, again, got a good rolling laugh out of the crowd).

Josh Olson, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of A History of Violence, moderated the discussion with Harlan after the film and could barely hold it together because Harlan was (literally) all over the place, with Erik Nelson's cameraman and boom guy following desperately, trying to keep up. Werner Herzog was in the audience, so was the great musician Richard Thompson, along with Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore and of course Harlan's marvelous wife Susan. Harlan was profane and raucous, and if there's any justice some of this material will get folded into the documentary before it gets released because jeez what a night.

But really, when you talk about Harlan you must talk about the work. Shatterday is a good place to begin: it contains some very good short stories like the famous "Jeffty is Five," the title story, and the delicious "All the Birds Come Home to Roost" in which a man encounters all his ex-girlfriends in reverse chronological order, leading inevitably to the first and worst. There are probably better collections (Strange Wine and Deathbird Stories immediately come to mind) (and man, it's a crime how many of his books are out of print), but I might particularly recommend Stalking the Nightmare, the second book of his I read, the one that really cemented my love for the man and his work. Because this time, in addition to some very good short stories, there are also three tales directly from his life, including the hilarious one in which he worked at Disney for exactly one morning then got himself fired.

In some ways, I like Ellison the essay writer even more than Ellison the short story writer. An Edge in My Voicestands as the absolute best of his essay collections, although the two Glass Teat books (about television) are better known. But really, you should probably start with The Essential Ellison, a fifty-year overview of his work containing much of the best of everything. Then go watch the documentary when it comes out, and start agitating various publishers to get these books back in the marketplace, damn it!

A Stain Upon the Silence

There came from Virginia Tech the awful silence that follows; and then it was broken when that wretched child whose tantrum took all those lives got the final word. I had just finished reading his so-called plays and felt pretty lousy for having done so, and I was about to come on here and talk a little about what I'd just read; but then I checked the news pages and saw the video package that got sent to NBC. And I realized that this is all exactly what that petulant monster wants: he wants his image everywhere, he wants to become some sort of iconic figure in the awful tradition of "Charlie" Manson and Jim Jones. To hell with him, I refuse to even name his name. He's no writer, he's no artist, and he sure isn't Jesus redeeming his "children." To Hell with him.

Let's talk about this man instead: Liviu Librescu. He of course was the engineering professor at Virginia Tech who held the door while his students leaped from high windows and escaped; then bullets came through the door and Prof. Librescu died. He lived in Romania under the Nazis, and was ghettoized and/or sent to a labor camp (I've seen it reported both ways); then he lived under the Communists, who tried to marginalize him for his support of Israel by refusing to allow him to publish outside of Romania, but he defied the Ceaucescu regime and published anyway. At last a personal intervention by Menachem Begin in 1978 allowed Prof. Librescu to emigrate to Israel, and then while on sabbatical in the U.S. he decided to stay here. There was no mandatory retirement age for U.S. professors, so he could go on teaching for as long as he liked.

It's clear from the above that he always felt there wasn't enough time. A colleague at Tel Aviv University said "He wanted to write many books and have a lot of students," and his wife claims that Librescu published more papers in his field than any of his contemporaries. So much time was stolen from him in Romania that he must have felt positively impelled to transmit as much as he could to as many people as he could; but he always did so, according to his students, in a gentlemanly fashion, always wearing a suit, always feeling the privilege of his position.

Prof. Librescu was buried today in Israel. There is a lovely Times of London tribute to him here, and a Chabad on Campus family condolence page here.

In Which Nothing Happens

I live close enough to the VA hospital complex in West L.A. that when the California National Guard decided to stage a bio-terrorism exercise there, a notice got slipped under my door warning me about it. Lest I freak out when a Blackhawk helicopter flew over the apartment at 5:00 in the morning, although really, in Los Angeles having a helicopter fly over is as common as common can be. Still, the notice made it all sound awfully intriguing: "Operation Vector, a large-scale interstate and interagency exercise" that would include a simulated earthquake, then a simulated chemical attack over the Hollywood Hills. I mean hey, why watch Apocalypse Now when you can have all that military bang-bang going on in your back yard?

Alas, nothing happened. Or rather, what did happen seems to have been far enough away that I never noticed any of it. (The place is huge, so it wouldn't surprise me.) With the exercise scheduled to start at 5:00 this morning, I wandered out there around 7:00 and could find no trace of anything at all; later I took a long walk all through the complex and it was as if nothing had ever happened there at all, the place was just as it always is: busy in clusters, sleepy and quiet in others. Disappointing, really; now I'll have to go watch Robert Duvall and the helicopters after all.

Something else is worth noting, though: the VA center was created in the late 19th century as a bequest to the city from someone whose name I can't remember, under the stipulation that the land be used for the benefit of America's soldiers of any war. But now, there is a fierce local fight going on between evil developers salivating over all that open land in the middle of Los Angeles (beyond-prime real estate) and those like me who think that a promise is a promise. I'm not one to automatically inveigh against real estate developers--none of us would live in anything other than tents and caves if developers didn't develop--but this place is a bright spot in the city and it ought to stay that way. As I walked today there were open fields with lush green grass, trees and birds, bikers and joggers, the UCLA baseball team was warming up for a game against Pepperdine on the athletic field, fathers had taken their sons out to play ball on a different field, and people were golfing on a compact public course. There is a little Japanese garden out there, and of course the hospital, numerous in-patient and out-patient facilities, and residential dormitories to provide long-term care for the men and women who risked everything for us.

The VA Center is good for the soldiers, it's good for the locals, it's good for the soul of the city to continue to do what it promised to do over a century ago. Those developers should just bug off and go someplace else.

Bees

In honor of Easter, something a little springy, something with fresh air and sunlight.

On Thursday, I was in Topanga State Park with a camera crew. We were doing camera tests for the next Lightwheel project, a feature that Marc wrote and is directing called Making Love. We had to figure out whether to shoot the movie in 35 mm or hi-def, and the big question with hi-def is how well it performs out of doors. Since a huge portion of the movie must be shot outside, this question had to be settled; so Marc got together with his Zen Noir cinematographer, Chris Gosch, and I went through an amazing amount of rigamarole to get a permit for us to shoot in the park, and on Thursday we went out and did it.

At the ranger station, bees were swarming under the eaves of the building. I wondered why the rangers hadn't gotten rid of the hive, but figured that this being a park, a place devoted to nature, they had simply decided that as long as the bees weren't bothering, they would just leave them be. So the bees buzzed and danced from flower to hive, and everyone went about their busy business as well.

As a producer, once the shoot began there really wasn't anything for me to do except guard the equipment by the side of the road. I sat there for a long while, under a shady tree, with a lush green field just to the left of me, watching seven deer as they slowly grazed their way closer, closer. Above my head, a bee moved from branch to branch, collecting and pollinating.

I was ridiculously happy.

Now bees, I've always been a little wary of. Childhood experiences have their effect, and here are just two of them: once, walking to school, a bee somehow flew inside my shoe and then stung me on the instep, a particularly painful place to get stung; and once when my dad lived in Atlanta, I was up there visiting for a month and was sledding down those red clay hills with some friends when we went right over a yellowjackets' nest. The wasps swarmed, we all got stung multiple times and spent the rest of the afternoon watching the Batman TV show with baking soda caked all over us.

Thus bees (and their even-scarier cousins of the wasp family) became equated with Pain. And since I have spent a remarkable portion of my life trying to avoid Pain in every way possible, I've generally reacted negatively to the mere appearance of a bee. Swatting it away, jumping myself away, whatever it took. (And of course, bees just love me. Maybe it's my very blond hair gleaming in the sun like some gigantic daffodil? Who knows.)

But I recently read a review, by whom and of what and where it was I cannot remember, that talked about bees and their long-standing place in culture. Of the bees that supposedly swarmed the mouth of the infant Plato, indicating the greatness of the man-to-be; of the bee's essential role in pollinating most flowering plants (there would be no almond industry, to pick just one example, without the honeybee); of the symbolic nature of the bee as a crucial part of the cycle of life. With me, if you want to turn my head around on something, just give me material like this, I'm a complete sucker for it.

And so I sat there on Thursday, a bee buzzing just above my head, and for once I was happy to just sit there. And the bee, I discovered, wasn't at all interested in me or my daffodil head, and that we were both perfectly content to do what we were doing, now near and now far apart.

The very next day, I went outside my apartment, around the back and up the stairs to finally clean out my car of all the stuff that had gathered for the shoot. (Two wooden planks, an air mattress, leftover craft-service food, and a power inverter, to name just a few of the oddments.) As I marched up the stairs, I saw several honeybees on the ground, writhing; then heard a fearsome buzzing just above my head. Stepping into the clear of the parking lot, I saw that a hive had taken up residence under the eaves of my building, just as they had at the distant ranger station. And apparently an exterminator had just been there, had just sprayed, so the bees were agitated and dying.

My old thinking was that maybe I should clean out the car later. An angry swarm is an entirely different thing from a lone bee dancing around a fragrant tree. But I felt a new sympathy for them, as they lie there dying by the dozen, literally dropping out of the air. I knew that I no longer bore any animosity toward them, and that they would not wreak their vengeance on me. So I did what I had to do, made several trips slowly carrying things right under the dying hive, and by the time I was done, so too, alas, were the bees.

It felt very like a loss. But at the same time, I have to admit--I'm glad they hadn't built a hive in my walls....

We Are Preparing to Take Your Call

Idle thoughts while on hold with the Screen Actors Guild:

Minute 10
...okay, one last time through the thing I'm calling about--find exactly the right language to describe it so the call will go fast--okay, yeah, that should do, yeah, good...

Minute 25
...damn but I'm good at computer solitaire...

Minute 33
...they keep repeating "We are preparing to take your call." What the hell are they doing to prepare? Repainting the office? Stretching a tin can and a string to my apartment?

Minute 47
...if I ever play one more game of solitaire in my life, I swear I'll scream my damn fool head off. Okay, there are a couple federal and state forms that I need to prepare today, I'll just go online and get those done.

Minute 71
...okay, the forms are done, and hey, look how much time passed! Why the hell am I still on hold? And what to do about the growing bathroom problem?...

Minute 77
...my shoulder hurts. Why haven't I put this call on the speakerphone before now? Now, is there any way to put the handset back in the base that doesn't create a hellish feedbaYOOOOWWW! No, apparently not...

Minute 80
...what am I calling them for again? Jeez, I have absolutely no idea...

Minute 91
...what's my name? Why is there disembodied piano music playing the same tune over and over? Why do these voices keep telling me comforting things that only make me ag-ag-ag-agitated?

Minute 97
mind blister sell aromatic potions lost lost lost (no no no more voices!) can't linger can't delay can't wait can't cant or keen (piano no piano, no please no piano!) phosphorescent pastaaaaahhh...

Minute 103
blink
blink
blink


Minute ...

Babies!

So last Saturday, we three who comprise Lightwheel had a meeting, did some stuff, etc. Monica, quite pregnant, had reached the stage of perpetual discomfort. Once she bounced up and down on the balls of her feet, instructing the kid "Get out!" We all had lunch, and arranged for her last visit with us on Tuesday before her due date swooped upon her.

Never happened. Monday morning, around 12:30, the smoke detector in her bedroom went off. Wasn't the sort of thing where the battery is going low so it beeps periodically: it all-out went off. No fire anywhere, no smoke anywhere. She and her husband Kent got up, got the device to stop screeching, and went back to bed. Half an hour later it went off again. No one knows why--the device had no history of false alarms. But a couple hours later, she awoke Kent again: the contractions, they weren't stopping. And so off they went.

We've started calling the device a "birth detector."

Little Madeleine Anne was born later Monday morning, and on Thursday Marc and I went over to meet the newest member of our little Lightwheel family. An adorable child, as you can see, and remarkably mellow: not a crier at all, I barely heard a peep from her during the hour or so we were there. Monica is tired but resting and recovering; her first child, Alexander, has already declared he's "tired of being a big brother," and Kent was a mixture of pride and weariness. Madeleine, meanwhile, just laid there, being passed from person to person with complete equanimity, her huge baby eyes taking in absolutely everything without any sign of fear or anxiety. A perfect child in a perfect world, while we filled in her mom on all the things that had gone on in the perfect world during the days when she wasn't paying attention.

The Dove Lieth

I was hard at work, setting up some wholesale sales of Zen Noir, when the phone rang. Caller ID showed it was some telemarketer so I ignored it and kept working; about ten minutes later it rang again, same thing, I ignored it again; then ten minutes later it rang yet again. Just to shut the wretched thing up, this time I answered. A too-cheerful woman on the other end first asked for "the lady of the house" (a particularly archaic construction, I thought), then assured me that the call wasn't a solicitation (thus getting her around the Do Not Call Registry), and that the call would take only ninety seconds. "Do you agree," she then asked, "that movie ratings have gotten too lenient?"

Ah, jeez. One of those.

She was definitely not prepared to get an earful, but come on, she'd called to solicit my complaints about the entertainment industry, and I'm in the entertainment industry. With very strong feelings about a particular subject.

The woman was with something called the Dove Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of "family-friendly" entertainment. Their website says:

Our standards and criteria are based on Judeo/Christian values, free from the pressure of commercial interests. We believe in a positive approach of commending high-quality, wholesome movies rather than condemning filmmakers for not meeting those standards.

But of course that's exactly what they're doing. There's language all over their site condemning filmmakers, in that sweetly passive-aggressive tone that these people should get patented. "Moms and dads are concerned about the gratuitous sex, violence and anti-family values that their children are exposed to," they say, and "For years we have watched the morals and attitudes of the entertainment industry slowly creep into our society." They refer to the "increasingly salacious" content of most contemporary entertainment; and there are prominent links to the FamilySafeDVD site, which offers edited versions of mainstream movies--edited versions that were not created by the creators but chopped up by oh-so concerned busybodies with no right to do so. The Dove Foundation's website offers links to an edited version of Finding Neverland, and this one in particular boggles the mind: what on earth can there be to edit out of Finding Neverland?

The woman was completely surprised when, in answer to her question, I flatly said "Nope." She should be thankful that I didn't continue with the thought, because in truth I feel the MPAA's restrictions are too stringent. Quite aside from their sheer arbitrariness (see the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated for the whole absurd story), I'm just not a big fan of self-censorship, which is exactly what the MPAA is. It was created by the entertainment industry for the purpose of convincing the public that the entertainment industry is responsible enough to monitor its own content.

I say that the best way to convince the public of your responsibility is to actually be responsible. And with that said, it might surprise the people at the Dove Foundation that I really don't have much use for movies that revel in gratuitous violence, like any of the Rambo films, or anything with Dolph Lundgren in it. I don't have much use for gratuitous sex, either, although come on, I'm a guy, I don't mind exactly, but... well, you know.

(Actually, good sex in a movie can be a glorious thing. The Spanish film Sex and Lucia, which my friends the Halperins distributed, is a wonderful movie with interesting characters who love each other and engage in loving, playful sex that has kinda ruined sex scenes in most other movies for me.

Nor am I one of those who routinely denies that movies (or any kind of art, videogames included) can have a harmful effect on the young. Hell, a movie can have a harmful effect on anyone--it's a necessary corollary of what I do that if I choose to believe a story can have a positive effect, it must also be possible that it have a harmful effect. Artists do have a responsibility to their audience, it's that simple.

The thing I don't believe in--and here I am adamant--is that we should shelter our children from such things. Case in point: when I went with the family to Europe about nine years ago, my brother and sister were I think 12 and 14, something like that. We reached Amsterdam and, when the parents went off somewhere, I took Adam and Amanda down to de Wallen, the infamous Red Light District. Then we hit a torture museum just off the Dam. I did this because I firmly believe that children should be exposed to everything--so long as there's an adult present. If they had wandered into de Wallen on their own, that would have been bad; but with me there, both keeping an eye on things and answering any questions they might have, then I think it is exactly the sort of education kids ought to have. (I made sure we all went to the Anne Frank House, too, which the Dove people would probably approve.)

The same with movies and books and whatnot. Experience them under supervision and I think pretty much anything goes--and if it's uncomfortable for the parent, well, that's the parent's problem. The artist has a responsibility to be a good artist, to tell his stories responsibly; and parents have a responsibility to be good parents, to make sure their kids are actually prepared for life--which they cannot be if they've been sheltered from everything dark their whole lives.

This is why I think organizations like the Dove Foundation are just plain wrong. In truth, I would like to see more family-oriented films--and the Foundation's assertion that family films tend to make better profits has some real merit. But it's also true that if that balance were to change--if there were a lot more family films and a lot fewer violent films, then the family films would be seen as a dime a dozen, and the more, shall we say, exotic material would seem rare and exciting and would make terrific profits. That's just how things are.

The woman cut off the call before I was done saying my piece, and I rather suspected that she hadn't included my response in the opinion poll she was taking, because she seemed like the sort who only wanted to hear opinions that matched with her own. So I went online and took their web-based poll, just to make sure they had some dissenting opinions. You can do that, too: just go here. Wouldn't it be fun if we could completely throw their numbers off, and restore a little sanity to this particular conversation?

Experimental Theatre

Last night I went to see two plays, one after the other, something I haven't done in ages, since those days when theatre was my whole life. One play was relatively straightforward but flawed; the second, a late-night at the Met Theatre in Hollywood, was not at all straightforward, and deeply flawed--but interesting.

The play is called "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (here's their MySpace page), and it begins with two different things: director Dara Weinberg's desire to explore improvisational theatre, and then her decision to use William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" section from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The paradoxical nature of Blake's diabolical inversion of biblical proverbs seems to have inspired her to cast away one of the defining elements of theatre, namely narrative, in favor of a celebration of moment and instinct. (It's entirely Buddhist in its devotion to Now--and yet, paradoxically, Marc Rosenbush, both a Buddhist and a longtime practitioner of avant-garde theatre, found it all infuriating. But then, so did I, for reasons I'll get to in a second.)

In her Director's Note, Ms. Weinberg describes her approach as "a chemical reaction between the past and the present," further writes that

We believe that part of what makes live performance special is spontaneity.
The other part is madness. The irrational, the Dionysian. We ask you to join us there, to be both spontaneous and irrational, and to surrender to a dream.

All of which immediately caught my attention, because I have long-standing complaints with the shape of most contemporary theatrical productions. When film does Realism so well, what on earth is the point of doing Realism on a stage as well? When I walk into a theatre and see a set consisting of some walls, a sofa and a dining table upstage, I'm immediately tempted to just give up there and then, and get out fast.

Now, people are comfortable with Realism because it looks like their lives, so it won't ever go away from theatre, from novels, from any of the plastic arts, and certainly not from film. But there are other possibilities in a theatre, in that living, breathing, communal space, possibilities that I happen to think are best exemplified by the work of Samuel Beckett, which is exactly why I spent so much time in Chicago as an actor working with Splinter Group, the Beckett specialists (now they are Irish Rep of Chicago). Once I'd found people who saw theatre pretty much the same way I did, I happily abandoned thoughts of developing a career in order to do work that consistently excited me. (Then I abandoned acting, but that wasn't Beckett's fault at all, that was just me realizing that there was something else I needed to be doing.)

Theatre should be stark, and surprising, and unsettling; it should resemble but not imitate real life; it should be poetic, not prosaic; it should be an island unto itself, each theatre space a rotating wheel of worlds. So as I looked at the program for "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," standing there in the lobby with friends and minor celebrities (the wonderful Kirsten Vangsness from Criminal Minds), I read mini-articles with titles like "What's Wrong With Theatre?" and thought Great! My people!

And what I expected was perhaps something a little like Mary Zimmerman's Proust celebration in Chicago a few years ago, an installation piece titled "Eleven Rooms of Proust," or maybe Peter Handke's play "Offending the Audience" (which Marc once directed at Emerson). I imagined a theatre space without chairs, in which we audience members became a part of the production.

My friend Ezra Buzzington, one of the producers of the show, would tell us nothing about the production, wanting it all to be a complete surprise. So I was mildly disappointed to walk in and find a standard seating section where, since I was in the back row, it would be impossible for me to interact with the show at all. (Not that I was entirely up for that--it was a late-night, after all, and I'm a morning person.) Still, there were interesting things going on: several video monitors and TV sets were placed around the remaining three walls of the theatre, and a crew member with a camera was pointing it at the audience, at the set, wherever her fancy suggested. Another crew member was in a kind of dangling crow's nest, with wires that would enable her to cause parts of the set to move whenever she felt like it. Two musicians were perched above the action, improvising music that was alternately heavenly and hellish. The result was a fluid space that was designed to be as improvisational as the performance scheduled to happen within it.

Then the performance began. The actors came out, dressed in some rather silly costumes that suggested a cheap Berlin nightclub's costume party (although I liked the guy with the gas mask on sideways), and the house manager flipped a coin to determine which actors would be "in heaven" and which "in hell." They went to their respective corners, the music came up, and the show began. Almost immediately I had one of those "Oh no" reactions.

First off, the music was too loud, so many of the actors were completely inaudible. Not that it mattered--they had all memorized all seventy of Blake's proverbs, and repeated them randomly throughout the performance--and clearly a few of them were particular favorites of the group, because they got repeated a lot. (Only occasionally did these recitations seem meaningful in any way.) Thus you were left to watch the movement work onstage, and that was just as improvisational, in that "I've seen Bob Fosse's work but never actually studied it" way. Windmilling arms, ungracefully undulating bodies, kinda sorta in time with the music.

From moment to moment, one actor was supposed to take the lead while the others imitated or responded to that lead (mostly imitated); then, organically, a moment would lead some different actor to take the lead. But if such an organic moment didn't happen, then the particular undulation would go on for a while as the group collectively tried to figure out "Okay, now what?" Even worse, only a few of the actors seemed to have any real dance and/or movement experience; one actor in particular was so ungainly, so completely disengaged, that he badly dragged down the entire production. I think he only spoke a line once, never took the lead movement-wise, he simply lingered in the background and awkwardly imitated what others were doing. It felt like watching a jazz ensemble perform when one member of the group only picked up his instrument a week before, has no particular feel for it, and has never improvised before, either.

Jazz is the best analogue for what was attempted last night; and bad jazz nicely describes the result. Jazz is, of course, defined by its improvisational nature, and the good stuff is sublime--but that's because it takes place within a structure. When musicians "trade fours," they improvise solos for four bars while the rest of the band supports them, usually by vamping in such a way that the overall structure of the song remains essentially static, leaving room for the soloist's exploration within that shape; then after those four bars are done, the next soloist will jump in and the first soloist becomes a supporting player. The mathematical precision of the four-bar structure is essential to the freedom and artistry of the solo. But when jazz got too sophisticated, when it moved into the Free Jazz era, then the music became so esoteric that only other musicians could appreciate it. And at that moment, jazz began to die.

Talking to Ezra after the show, he could just as easily have been to a free jazz concert as this theatre performance. When we complained about the utter lack of narrative, he said that he doesn't give a fig about narrative, he wants to watch the actors' exploration of the moment. He's an artist watching artists explore their art. Which is fine for we artists, but if we want the form to survive, if we want theatre to still be here in a hundred years, it can't just be some masturbatory exercise only intended for ourselves and our friends. (I used to joke that in Chicago, the only money anyone ever made was the same ten dollar bill--our friends paid ten bucks to see our shows, then we paid ten bucks to see theirs, and it was always the same bill.)

There is room for improvisation in theatre, of course there is--but it needs to be more bebop than free jazz, it needs some kind of shape within which it can flourish. These guys, they keep throwing out the baby with the bathwater every time, reinventing the whole thing almost from scratch, meaning that by the time they begin to get any sense of what they're about on that particular night, the show is already over.

There was one nice moment. An actor had picked up a flat metal washer from somewhere, was at the head of a line of other actors undulating together, and seemed to be about to pass the washer to the actor behind him; but instead he dropped the washer in her pocket, which produced some amusing responses as people tried to get to it. It meant nothing but it was, in an evening of entirely improvised theatre, the only moment that was actually surprising. And a sense of surprise, of joyous discovery, is exactly what was missing from a show that should have been filled with it.

It's an interesting premise, and I celebrate Ms. Weinberg's attempt to explore it. But this show needs six months of rehearsal before it ever goes in front of an audience again. For now, it's just an indulgent mess that, to an outsider who has the misfortune to wander into it, makes the entire theatre community look bad; that seems to confirm that whole "selfishly self-absorbed" rap that keeps hanging over artists.

The Great Leap

There comes a moment when you just have to let it all fly. Sometimes you choose the moment, sometimes the moment chooses you. And here I am, at the moment.

No longer a wage slave, I now toil solely for myself and my partners at Zenmovie and Lightwheel. It is, of course, utterly terrifying. And there are so many things to do that I'm still a bit flustered, trying to sort out how to get it all done efficiently. The result, at least for now, seems to involve flitting from one project to another, getting a little bit accomplished in several tasks but not quite finishing anything. I'll surely get a better feel for it, but right now I think I'm still a little flummoxed at the idea that there isn't much difference anymore between Friday and Saturday. All that easy built-in structure, gone, leaving just Me and Time. Little Me; Big, Big Vasty Time.

I've got money laid aside for a couple months, and something has to happen during that time. I've always hated deadlines but I just gave myself the mother of all deadlines. And it won't be catastrophic if it doesn't work (after an unpaid summer internship with the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival I got home with $35 in my bank account and a huge stack of bills, but came out from under that just fine); but oh man, I really need it to work. It's time to get down to it, to take that risk, to do what I've always said I was going to do.

Started working on a short story over the weekend, the first time I've worked in straight prose for a remarkably long while. I had a tiny little idea that has already blossomed into something mysterious and strange, and it has definitely been a challenge to write. Which is good: the best way to deal with my new life-challenge is with an art-challenge. And if I pull it off, there's a little money coming in--from writing. From that which I must do.

We've had some interesting meetings with some interesting people concerning City of Truth, and we're going to be workshopping it tomorrow night with some more interesting people. Already we have a host of ideas to make the script better and deeper, and they're all good character ideas, not just showy set pieces. So I'm hopeful there will be good news to report, pretty soon.

Because man. Now there's no choice--there has to be good news, and sooner than soon. I so don't want to have to go back to someone else's office, ever ever again.

Free Day

It has reached the point that this is what I now describe as a "day off":

The usual run of Sunday errands in the morning. Laundry, the grocery store, exercising, that sort of thing. Then settle down at the computer for about ten pages of typing in Lightwheel's business plan, adding comments for review by the partners. A considerable amount of reading with regard to a future dream project. In the evening, a logistical problem crops up requiring a lengthy phone call to sort out how much our plans for the next film might have to change. (As we realize that the stories Marc will tell on the DVD Director's Commentary track have already begun.) And then the usual evening's-end washing of dishes, brushing of teeth, etc.

This, by comparison with every other day for the past couple months, felt like blessed luxury, and I came out of it feeling remarkably relaxed. And yet, right there in the middle, at about 3:00, I suddenly found myself with nothing in particular to do, and just kind of stood there, spinning, trying to figure out how to kill some time till the Oscars began. It was a very strange feeling, the idea that I had more time than I knew what to do with. It didn't last, but it made for a nice change of pace.

Can Van the Man Do What Van Can?

I grew disheartened before leaving for the Van Morrison concert Wednesday night. After poking around on the internet, I was reminded that Mr. Morrison has what some have called a prickly personality, probably a result of an intense shyness, that onstage can lead to unpleasant behavior. He has been known to spend most of a concert facing upstage, away from the audience; he has been known to berate an audience for perceived misconduct; and he has been known to perform for just ten minutes, get angry at something, then stalk offstage. So when I left for the concert, it was with a sense of real trepidation: would I get Good Van, or the other one? Would my expensive ticket turn out to be a complete waste of money and time?

Traffic was typically horrible, and just as I searched for the right door into the Gibson Amphitheatre I could hear from within "Please welcome to the stage...!" I found the door, found the right aisle, found the right seat, and the first number was already underway, with the band's lead guitarist handling the vocals. Immediately I could tell that the band was a good one: sharp and solid, just as you'd expect from the notoriously demanding Van Morrison. For the second number they launched into the sublime "Into the Mystic," which was handled by Van's daughter Shana. I wasn't quite impressed--she has a big voice, smoky and dark, but I also thought her voice a little harsh.

The third number, and out he came, Van the Man, stalking centerstage with his now-trademark hat covering his bald spot. He took up his place behind his microphone and rarely moved from there. Van does not dance, he does not smile, he rarely interacts with the audience more than to say "Thank you" when people applaud. But I've seen this sort of thing before: Lou Reed's performance in Chicago a few years ago was almost identical, and it came off not as arrogance but confidence. The same here: Van knows what he does, isn't at all interested in empty showmanship, and simply focuses strictly on the music.

And on Wednesday, the result was terrific. There was only a minimal lightshow, nothing like the Pink Floyd concerts I saw recently; there was no set, and in fact the band was clustered tightly in the center of the stage, leaving vast empty areas all around them, as if they were a safe musical cocoon for Van to hide inside. The Man's voice was flawless, and even though I only recognized about half the numbers he performed (geez, what a deep catalogue of tunes he's built up in 40 years!) it was all an example of the perfect mastery of songcraft. He epitomizes the performer who "makes it look easy," even though we know how torturous he finds it onstage--but since he was due to get an award the very next night, I think that overall Van was feeling pretty good about things, and it showed in his performance. There was energy, there was enthusiasm, even if he never smiled, even if he never said "You guys are great!" or anything pandering like that. It all was made manifest in the performance, in the music, in that one true place where Van Morrison has lived his entire life.

Review vs. Critique

I've always hated those "There are two kinds of people" comparisons, because they are inevitably reductionist, often to the point of absurdity. With that said, there are definitely two types of movie reviewers: those who critique a film, and those who simply review it. To me, a critique is the more stringent of the two forms, comprising a critical (from the same root, obviously) appraisal of the movie's relative merits and demerits, while a review is exactly that: a re-view, a going-over-again of the movie's contents, with a particular emphasis on the reviewer's experience of the movie rather than a more objective evaluation of the movie's content and themes. Or to put it another way, a critique is about the movie; a review is about the reviewer.

Here are a couple illustrations, pulled from the Rotten Tomatoes site's collection of critiques and reviews of a truly superior movie, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both from critics/reviewers who didn't like the film:

Stephanie Zacharek of Salon says that Eternal Sunshine "represents a failure of nerve," complaining that its intricate structure interferes with the aching beauty of the relationship at the heart of the movie. She writes:

It's as if young filmmakers fear that their audiences will become bored with a movie if they don't have a clever mind-boggler to wrestle with along the way (the equivalent of a magnetic bingo game on a long car trip). In grappling with these perplexing riddles, we're supposedly exercising our intellect. But isn't it also possible that we're using them as a handy diversion, a way of distancing ourselves from emotions that might be too strong for us to deal with easily? Labyrinthine plots are supposed to stimulate us. But are they really just distracting us from the work at hand -- the work of feeling?

A fair point, in which Ms. Zacharek brings her concerns from the specific to the general, asking whether modern moviemakers are afraid to just Go There. Now, by contrast, the reviewer who calls himself "The Cranky Critic" also grouses about the movie's stylistic conceits, but in a manner that never rises above itself:

...Kaufman has now moved into the realm of rubbing the viewer's nose in how clever he is. It's a very strange feeling to walk out of a screening thinking little of the actors or the story or its gimmick; the only thought wafting through our deteriorating gray matter was "gee, that was clever writing." Good writing is only the starting point for good film making. We should not be thinking about the writing, and only the writing, when all is said and done. That was the case with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film so dead on target with the mind set taught in film school that it will have cinerati dancing in the aisles. Everyone else gets some chuckles and a whole mess'a clever visual effects to drive the story along.

Which begs the question: why does this guy take the time to set himself up as a movie critic when he doesn't seem to like movies? Or rather, when his view of what movies can or ought to be is so rudimentary, so narrow? There is all over his review that rampant anti-intellectualism that disguises itself as a reverence for "authenticity," but betrays itself over and over again as what it is: a fear of intellect, of challenge, of being asked to participate in the artistic experience at hand.

Consider this, from Cranky's "about me" page: "There is no applause for intellectual musings over entertainment value in Cranky's world, 'cuz Cranky doesn't live in the stratified world of private screenings and lavish PR parties." It is, of course, a false comparison: plenty of people don't get invited to private screenings or PR parties, but they're perfectly happy to engage a film on its own merits, however challenging (or not) those merits might be. It's a potent reverse snobbery in which a reviewer represents himself as an Ordinary Guy, claiming that in a democracy, the Ordinary Guy is king. Anything else is elitism, oligarchy, and that smacks of, you know, Socialism or even Commie-dom.

Then, of course, there is the fact that on the internet, anybody can start a website and call himself a critic. For these people, the art of the review deteriorates completely: "This movie was boring and it sucked" becomes the be-all and end-all of criticism: I didn't like it, therefore it sucks. No appreciation for other points of view, and any point of view that does differ from the reviewer's is automatically pretentious and elitist.

Zacharek's concerns, however, are exactly the opposite: "...there are moments in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" that bring us as close as anyone should ever come to staring at the sun. The movie's warmth is irresistible; the risk of getting burned should have been left to us." This is (a) better writing in and of itself; and (b) an urgent plea for this artful movie to be both simpler and more complex, all at the same time--simpler in its artifice but more complex in its emotional search. Zacharek is frustrated because the movie isn't artful enough, her frustrations with complexity a result of a sense that they interfered with (and obscured) the beautiful story at the center of it all.

Now me, I loved the movie almost unreservedly, and didn't find myself distracted by the things that distracted Ms. Zacharek, so I don't happen to agree with her criticism--but I respect it, and it makes me take an even harder look at a film I love, to see if maybe there's something I should have been paying better attention to. That's good criticism; Cranky, he does nothing to elevate my experience of the movie, he just makes me awfully glad that I'm not him.

Lightwheel Entertainment

We have begun a new company--arising from and yet unrelated to Zenmovie, LLC. The new entity will, in future, serve as the umbrella for everything we do, and it is for this company that we recruited Monica Kim to serve as our third partner. After several days of running through every name we could possibly imagine (I'm still annoyed that Mythos was taken), we finally settled on Lightwheel Entertainment, Inc.

What does it mean? Well, we were initially thinking about spinning wheels, turning straw into film, and saw the wheel itself as a reel of film, a wheel of light. But then I discovered this--a phenomenon known as a marine lightwheel, one of those unexplained wonders that is probably just bioluminescent algae or plankton, organized into colonies, set into motion in the sea. But I loved the image, and found that it suited our mission very well, that a broad description of one phenomenon matched with the kind of movies we want to make: something mysterious, just below the surface.

And so we are named. Filed the papers last week, got our employer ID number, all that. We all have murderous to-do lists already, we have registered several versions of the domain name, we don't yet have a website but we will when the time is right. Lightwheel will be a production company above all else, probably working on co-productions with other production companies, and we have already begun the process of getting our first project off the ground--maybe even our first two projects.

Can't wait for the day when we first see our logo, a wheel of light turning beneath the surface of the sea, flickering across a movie screen. The start of something, right here.

"All Access"

There's this quark-like organization called the Sherwood Oaks Experimental College, which simultaneously does and does not exist. It has no physical presence except in the body of its founder, Gary Shusett. This virtual school exists to serve the creative community in Los Angeles, chiefly by creating the usual sorts of seminars, but with built-in opportunities to meet the participants and/or pitch to them. (The all-important "pitch" is where you briefly describe your project, hopefully in such a way as to make the pitchee decide that it sounds like the greatest movie idea since Gunga Din and should be filmed immediately. Which, of course, almost never actually happens.) This past weekend, partly in conjunction with the Writers Guild Awards, Gary staged what was called the "Screenwriters All Access" weekend.

The basic idea was simple: he would invite Hollywood players of all stripes to participate in panel discussions, and afterward, we participants would mob the front of the room in an unholy mass and try to get some face time with whichever panelist we thought might best Make Our Dreams Come True. But sometimes this basic model was improved upon: a lunch wherein a panelist would sit at your table and you could have a conversation at length; or breakout sessions in which the mob would break into smaller groups that could sit down with an individual panelist for a while. There were also traditional pitching sessions, and sometimes these elements could combine: thus, on Saturday Marc and I pitched City of Truth to Bridget Tyler from Red Wagon, then half an hour later Bridget ended up at our lunch table.

There was a kind of Socratic dialectic happening when all the panels were considered together. On the one hand there were the agents and the executives, who were all about numbers and trends; on the other hand were the writers and the directors, the people talking about art. If you were able to reconcile these very different discussions, you might begin to construct a synthesis, a framework for navigating your way through this town where both sides of the equation are inescapable.

Just one example of the numbers-and-trends people: a production company executive who flat-out told all we young screenwriters, "Don't write what you're passionate about." This guy was only interested in the surefire thing, the movie that did not resemble some past hit but was a carbon copy of some past hit. In other words, he doesn't give a fig for the artistic side of the equation and only wants to look at properties that will make his company, and him, more money. What was worse, he was proud of his position, and clearly considered himself quite daring and bold for having the guts to Speak Truth unto us.

He is, of course, a moron. A smart moron but still a moron. When introducing himself, he made an exaggerated claim about some software he helped design that is now quite famous, and said that now that he had all that money he could turn his attentions to whatever he wanted; and this is what he's choosing to do with his time on earth. All that money, all those possibilities, everything he could be doing with wealth and power, and he chooses to make cookie-cutter movies that say nothing, and then to go sit on panels, crush the dreams of dreamers, and act all proud of himself as some kind of innovator. He is the worst that Hollywood has to offer, and I was glad when Bridget-from-Red Wagon (a company with some real movies to its credit, and good ones, like Gladiator, Jarhead and Memoirs of a Geisha) told me that this guy will almost certainly be out of the industry within three years. It's a damn shame that someone just like him will certainly move in to take his place.

But by happy chance, after this panel finally concluded (I eventually exercised my critic's prerogative, and fell asleep on them), another came up comprised of the directors Nicholas Meyer, Richard Benjamin, Pen Densham and Henry Jaglom. They proved to be an unexpectedly great combination, with some serious credits to their name: Meyer is a terrific writer/director whose work includes Star Trek II (the best of them all), The Day After and Time After Time; Benjamin, the well-known comic actor, also directed the utterly wonderful My Favorite Year, with Peter O'Toole gallavanting gloriously; Densham is probably best known as the screenwriter of Kevin Costner's Robin Hood movie (the end result was not his fault, he didn't direct it); and Jaglom is a longtime indie stalwart who is probably best known for directing Orson Welles in his last screen role. They were all very bright, with well-considered opinions about directing, about film, about art.

But it was Nick Meyer who said the most valuable thing I heard the whole weekend. It was, simply, this: "There is no formula." As he said it, I realized that every seminar of this sort is crammed full of people who are trying to find The Formula, the to-do list that will, once completed, make them into Hollywood players. They believe that this formula is a closely-guarded secret, kept in a vault somewhere in the Valley, but that every once in a rare while someone might just decide to spill the beans and reveal the formula, if only you can schmooze them well enough at an event like this one. But Meyer said it plainly and inescapably: "There is no formula." There is no single path through the Hollywood jungle, everyone's experience will be unique to him/herself, and there's really nothing he can tell anyone about how to make films or how to succeed in the film industry.

I talked to him afterward and he only reinforced the point. He came up in the biz back in 1971, and it's all so different now that his story would be meaningless to anyone today. It's exactly for this reason that he avoids ever telling personal anecdotes at events like this one (and anecdotes are the life's blood of pretty much everyone in town when he gets up in front of a crowd): because he doesn't want people to think for a second that if they just do what he did in a given circumstance, then they too will succeed like he did. But it's not true.

Eventually the "all access" part of the weekend just kinda disappears: by Sunday evening, as the Writers Guild Awards were gearing up one floor down, Gary Shusett started rounding up the Big Names and herding them in to talk to us for a few minutes. But by then there was no chance of actually talking to any of these folks: David Milch, J.J. Abrams, Oscar nominees Michael Arndt and Guillermo Arriaga, Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry, Jon Cassar from 24 and B.J. Novak from The Office, even CAA chairman Rick Nicita, they came in for a few or for several minutes, said whatever was on their minds, maybe answered a question or two, and then they were gone with the next celebrity on his/her way in. It was fun, but I had already learned everything I needed to learn two days before.

Eventually, Marc ended up as a panelist himself. As a writer/producer who actually had gotten his movie into theaters, he was one step ahead of most of the other attendees, so Gary put him on an early-Sunday directors' panel. We worked out a joke before he went up: "Yesterday I was one of you guys, sitting out there, which is an example of how fast the industry can turn." (Laugh number one.) "And in about an hour I'll be sitting with you guys again, which is also an example of how fast the industry can turn." (Laugh number two.) Funny how people were treating him just that little bit differently after he'd been one of the panelists....

Really, the most valuable part of such a weekend is networking. We met some tremendous people, such as Autumn McAlpin, a terrific columnist from the Orange County Register whose work I've been enjoying today, and Maurice Daniel Oulay, an African-born filmmaker currently working on a documentary about poverty in Africa that I'm looking forward to seeing. (To name only two of the many.) It's impossible to know which of these new contacts might prove invaluable someday; a few years ago, Marc was at a Film Independent event and happened to be seated next to someone who is now our new business partner, Monica Kim. Any chance encounter at such an event could prove to be the crucial turning point in a career; and since we now know that there is no formula, these contacts are really the best--perhaps the only--reason to go.

The Wheels of Justice

The court appearance was down by the airport, and as it happens, I've got a friend who lives close by: Monica Kim, the production designer on Zen Noir and, as it happens, our new business partner. (Say wha? Yeah, I'll get to that in a couple days--not much time to write today, for reasons that I will also talk about in a couple other days.) And since Monica has a three year old (the delightful Alexander), she's always up pretty early. So I was able to beat the worst of the morning traffic, visit with nice people, have a gooey cinnamon bun, and then went off to the courthouse to do my part in making a Bad Guy go away.

Or not.

See, a while back I picked a face out of a photo line-up, but only with about 60% confidence that he was actually the right person (turns out that when there's a knife involved, the only thing you really pay attention to is the knife). The person that face belongs to was arrested for a home-invasion robbery. But since my ID wasn't conclusive, he was never charged with my robbery--therefore there was no reason for my being there. Or, as the young and harried Assistant D.A. said to me, "Geez, I have no idea how you ended up on the subpoena list. I'm very sorry."

And so I nodded, assured them I am happy to help in any way I possibly can with any other aspect of, you know, my case, got back in my car and drove away in what was now height-of-rush-hour traffic.

Never even got to see the accused. Maybe the sight of a real person, rather than a photo, might have triggered my memory more effectively, but I'll never know. The wheels of justice, they are made of stone. Grinding slowly along a stone road. And they're square.

J'accuse!

There was that first twinge of worry when I came home last week and found an envelope from the L.A. Police Department wedged into the doorjamb, because that's just one of those things that will always make you nervous, like your phone ringing at three in the morning. But inside the envelope, I was delighted to find a witness subpoena from the detective in charge of my robbery case. (This link should bring you to a page with all my previous posts on this subject.)

Someone has been arrested and arraigned, and the preliminary hearing is tomorrow. Curiously, his name isn't Hispanic at all, which might just mean that the person arraigned is the ringleader, which would suit me just fine. (I will hold off on actually recording his name in a public place until he's a little further along the road toward establishing his massive, overwhelming guilt.)

(I am so tempted to pull a Python here [from "The Mouse Problem" in episode two]--"A typical case, whom we shall refer to as Mr A, although his real name is Arthur Jackson, 32A Milton Avenue, Hounslow, Middlesex." But I won't.)

At the prelim, they are (according to the court's website) chiefly interested in determining whether there is sufficient evidence to bind the accused over for trial, and I hear from the detective that there is one other victim who will be testifying. So this is just the beginning of a long process, and there are a thousand ways it could all fritter away into nothing. But here's hoping that tomorrow I get to do my part, my tiny part, to make it that much less likely that someone else out for a nice walk doesn't have to deal with thugs with knives.

The North Ring Road

Been a while since I blogged, hasn't it? That's largely because I've been busy doing essentially the same stuff: pushing along sales of the Zen Noir DVD and soundtrack. (The DVD is now available on Amazon, and the soundtrack can be downloaded from iTunes, either as a whole album or by the single track. Go on, spend some money, you know you want to!)

So there hasn't been much new to report on from that front, and I haven't really had time to discuss, say, the President's recent State of the Union or anything like that. (Though I will mention how disappointed I was--advance word had been that Bush might actually say something significant about the environment, but in the end he had almost nothing new to say, even with an important new report about to appear--a stark reading of our collective future that already appears to have been watered down.)

But that's all the stuff I don't have time to talk about. Instead, I'm going to tell a little story, about asking directions in Ireland, simply because it's amusing and I like to tell it.

Several years ago, my grandparents were living in Kinsale, County Cork, Republic of Ireland. It's a beautiful little coastal town with the best food in the country (the cooperative they created, called the Good Food Circle, was a stroke of genius), and for several years after their retirement, my grandparents ran a bed & breakfast. By the time of this story, however, they had already retired from their retirement, moved to a smaller house on Worlds End, and I went over by myself to pay a little visit. Spent a few days in Dublin, then rented a car to drive down.

As you can see from the map, Kinsale is just south of the City of Cork; and having made the trip before, I was hoping there might be a way to avoid having to drive through the city center, some sort of country road that might bypass the city altogether. So I stopped in a little town just north of Cork, and ran into a pub in order to use the Gents'.

Long metal trough; sound of rain on a tin roof. As I stood there, one of the bar's patrons, a regular if ever I saw one, came wandering in and stood next to me. Torrential downpour on a tin roof. As I stepped away and washed my hands, he zipped up, looked over and said something that sounded more or less like "Wassonweeyuh?"

I blinked, looked at my watch, and said "A little after three."

"No no," he said. "What's on with ye?"

"Oh!" Been a while since I've heard a good "ye," so I figured the guy was friendly, let's ask him about the roads 'round Cork.

"Ah. What ye do, you see, is you take the Nort' Ring Road to the east do y'see, that'll bring you right round the town."

But as he said this, another of the pub's regulars had come in; gutterspout emptying into a tin can. But he heard what the first guy had said and suddenly interjected: "No, no, no. If he takes the Nort' Ring Road it'll bring him right t'rough the center of town, which is just what he said he was tryin' t'avoid." Zip, step back, advance. "No, what you yis do is you take the Nort' Ring Road to the west, d'ye see, and that'll take yis right round the town."

Back to the first gentle soul: "Are ye mad, Liam? If he takes the Nort' Ring Road to the west it'll take him to fuckin' Kilkenny!"

I left them there, continuing to argue about the best way to go right 'round the town, and set off again in the car. Reached the North Ring Road and headed east. Sure enough, it looked like it was bringing me right into the center of town, so I stopped and doubled back. Retraced my route and, this time, went west on the North Ring Road. The miles passed, I was indeed avoiding the city, the land was all the gentle rolling green of Ireland with no sign of stone cities and traffic. But the signs, they weren't right--by now, shouldn't I be seeing signs for Kinsale? Why instead was I seeing--"Oh crap!" I said, and stopped and turned around, shortly after the first sight of a sign reading "Kilkenny."

I retraced my steps yet again, went east again, went right through the very heart of the City of Cork, dealt with all the traffic, and finally reached my grandparents in Kinsale. Warming up with a nice cuppa, I asked them, "How exactly do you get 'round the city?"

"Oh heavens," said my grandmother. "You can't do that."

In Which I Watch American Idol So You Won't Have To

So here I am, the last guy in America who's never seen American Idol. Until now. (And no, I'm not going to post a link to it. You can just go find it yourself. So there.) Their new season has begun, and the crew are on the road, visiting Minneapolis and Seattle in search of talent--or the opposite of talent, in many cases. Most of you probably already know this, but it's all new to me. So I watched about twenty minutes of Tuesday's show in Minneapolis, and about an hour of last night's Seattle program. But bear in mind that a lot of that hour was spent fast-forwarding through the many many commercials (geez but I love my TiVo!), and then fast-forwarding through the worst of the very bad singers.

Which brings up Point No. 1: if in Minneapolis they began with a stadium full of 10,000 contestants, then clearly there's a screening process before anyone ever gets into the room with Simon, Paula and Randy. Just as clearly, then, the screeners are deliberately letting in some awful, awful singers. The only reason for this is, plain and simple, exploitation. Put them in a room with mean ol' Simon (and man is he mean--as a person who has often sat on Simon's side of an audition table, I would like to apologize for Simon and swear to you that most of us would never behave like that to an auditioner--and anyone who does is simply an asshole and you don't want to work with him) and let him abuse that person so that we in our comfy little homes can feel all superior because at least we're not that doofus. This is what you call exploitation: the ritual abuse of some poor schmuck so that we can feel better about ourselves. It is also monstrously conformist: the strange and the hapless are willfully preyed upon, thus reinforcing standards of "normalcy" and further ostracizing those poor souls who don't quite fit in--all this in a show that is supposedly about finding unique talents, people who stand out from the crowd. Sure the winners stand out--but only in the right way. You can see it happening in these roadshow tryouts: some poor girl with a weight problem and a penchant for pink fishnet walks in, and already Simon and his cohorts are smirking, already they're coming up with something awful they can say to this poor person.

What's saddest is that on some level, at least a few of these sad sacks must know they're going to be abused, but they accept it so they can get on television. That's the quiet agreement that allows shows like this to exist at all, a cruel compact between abuser and abused; television as the ultimate Enabler.

On the flip side, there is Point No. 2: stardom ain't as easy as all that. Take the juggling kid in Minneapolis. (If Simon is ever murdered there's going to be a long list of suspects, and this kid would have to be on the list.) When he got rejected, brutally of course, he ran out of the room swearing a blue streak; and when a family member reminded him he's only 16, he wailed "But I wanted to start out famous!" To which the only real response is "Well there's your problem right there, kid." Because if there's any one thing that I learned above all else during my years as an actor, it's this: your performance isn't for you, it's for the audience. The only reason to get up in front of people and do a song or a dance or a recitation or whatever is to provide entertainment and, even better, a little enlightenment. To make people laugh or cry or sigh with recognition; to make them lean forward in their seats, transfixed by what they're seeing on the stage. But if you're performing because you get off on applause, then please, Simon, go ahead and say whatever you want to say because these are the sorts of people who need to be shunted well clear of the performing arts.

This is not to say that you shouldn't enjoy what you do; in fact you should, you should totally get off on the performance. But your pleasure in the work should be directly proportional to the audience's pleasure in the work, and that may be hard to measure sometimes: everyone's faced a dead audience from time to time, only to discover after the fact that what seemed dead was in fact a deep but undemonstrative appreciation. Then of course there are the artists who are doomed to be misunderstood in their own lifetimes, the Van Goghs of the world; but the trouble here is that way too many lousy artists convince themselves that they're the new Van Gogh and continue on much longer than they should. And you could see these people, too, on the Idol shows the past two nights: the ones who vowed that despite their brutal rejection at the hands of Simon, Paula and Randy, they would go on undeterred, their resolve only strengthened by the cruel hand of societal rejection. Only one guy said, when interviewed, that his rejection had been a wake-up call; he may have been the only realist in that entire crowd of 10,000 people.

So. Is American Idol evil? Well of course it is. Is it addictive anyway? Of course it is; that's why it's so evil, because once you start to watch it's very hard to pull yourself away again. Does it manage to make points about the American obsession with stardom and self-delusion? Yes it does, but it makes that point while at the same time reinforcing the problem on a scale previously unimagined. Even more to the point: will I watch this program again?

Damn. Yeah, I probably will.

P.S.: After American Idol ended last night, I then pivoted to a movie I had recorded a few weeks ago, Everything is Illuminated, which Liev Schreiber adapted and directed from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Now this, this is art. Really truly Art, and why on earth I spent so much time talking about the pop claptrap of American Idol when I could have been talking about the illuminations of this movie is beyond me.