To an Absent Friend (Batman Has Fallen)

That first year of high school, back when dinosaurs roamed the converted swampland of South Miami, I arrived at school with the glorious awareness that I was Special. That I was an actor of the highest caliber and that soon all would see the greatness that was Me.

Trouble was, there was this other guy who seemed like he might just be able to give me some competition. His name was David Hernandez, and where I was tall and fair and authoritarian, he was smaller and darker and earthier. Which meant, of course, that we weren't competitors at all, rather we were natural and perfect complements who should be working together all the time. But I was far too dim to see that immediately, and so I was cautious.

Humility began to set in. The seniors refused to recognize my obvious superiority. And soon enough, there I was at the audition for the big annual musical. Suddenly I became very aware that as a singer, I was, well, not so good. (Sure enough: after my vocal audition, the musical director basically said "Please don't ever do that in front of me again.") So I sat there on the floor, feeling decidedly uncertain, with that annoying David guy sitting a little over thataway, chatting away with some girl and looking very relaxed and comfortable. (He wasn't. Singing was not his best strength either, I later learned.)

To this day, I don't quite know why I did what I did next. Maybe some small screaming part of me recognized that the best way to deal with an enemy is to make him your friend. Who knows. But abruptly I stood up, walked over to David, stuck out my hand and said, in a bright chipper voice, "Hi! I'm anti-social!"

He looked up at me, at my out-thrust hand. He blinked a couple of times. Then he started to roar with laughter. We were friends from that moment. Turns out, if you want to make an impression on someone like David, "that weird impulse you usually ignore" is exactly the right way to go.

We soon learned that we were a perfect pairing, and we worked together all the time. We did plays together, scenework in class together, we did the televised morning announcements together, we traveled together across the state to drama competitions, and of course we started hanging out together. He drew me out of my impossibly stuffy self-seriousness and made me looser, more fun (if only there were pictures of the outfit he stuffed me into when he finally convinced me to go see Rocky Horror...). I think I gave him a little stability, a sense of certainty and direction and purpose, that kept him from flying off after every little impulse that assailed him. (There were many impulses. So, so many of them.)

Most important of all, from my perspective: after a series of "friends" who had betrayed me in one way or another, David was constant. Unwavering. Endlessly loyal. He was the first friend who stayed, who I could count on. Who I could trust. Trust meant a lot back then, and of course it does now.

Eventually, of course, things happened. Graduation. I went to school out of state, David stayed behind. Time and distance worked their malicious fingers into our friendship. David had issues with certain substances, and because I didn't know how to help, it became easier to just let him slip away. We drifted, as people do.

A few years ago, during the first flowering of that great eternal high school reunion that is called Facebook, someone told me that David had died.

The intel was wrong--someone from our school named David Fernandez, F not H, had in fact died several years earlier.  But during the few days before I could get that cleared up, I found myself feeling guilty and upset.  I had not done enough to help my friend, and now he might be gone.  So I started doing some research, and a friend helped.  We tracked David down, and found a phone number, and with considerable nervousness I left a message.

Soon thereafter, a return call.  That distinctive baritone, bellowing "Bob Tooooooombs!  How you doin', man!"  Time and drift vanished in the face of his mighty enthusiasm.  We were friends again.

I dragged him onto Facebook.  We shared pictures and stories, and he found other old friends too.  When I went home for a visit, I cleared out an afternoon and went to see him.  Took him to lunch, talked about the things I'd done and he'd done, and we made lovely, unspecific plans about things we might do together some day.  (A revival of Albee's The Zoo Story came up the most often.)  He and his apartment smelled strongly of cigarette smoke.  My grandmother's place had smelled like that, and she had died of cancer.  It made me nervous.

In April, he announced on Facebook that he was going to get a biopsy and he was worried about the results.  The news, when it came, was pretty damn bad: lung cancer in several places, including an inoperable tumor behind his sternum.  He would need both radiation and chemo; and he would probably need chemo for the rest of his life.  He checked into the hospital and I called on a Saturday afternoon.

"Bob Tooooooombs!" he said with the same enthusiasm, but his voice had changed.  Ragged and raspy, and there was a tiredness that seemed to have moved in full-time.  But he was adamant about beating the cancer.  "I'm Batman," he said.  "I'm gonna kick cancer's ass!"

His sister Deanna, from whom he had once been estranged, became his rock throughout his illness, and he was incredibly moved by her devotion to him.  Old friends, too, started showing up at the hospital or calling, and he was just as moved by every bit of attention that came his way.  I think he was a little surprised that people cared about him so much.  They usually arrived with Batman gifts, and I'm sure his hospital room must have been stuffed with Bat-paraphernalia.  Someone set up a GoFundMe account to help with his medical expenses, because he probably wouldn't be able to work again for a long time, if ever.

One day I checked with Deanna whether I might call again, but she said he wasn't feeling great that day and maybe I should wait a little.  This worried me, so I started looking at flights back east.  Maybe the weekend of May 16th would work.

David died on May 9th, overwhelmed by illness and treatment.  Batman had fallen.

He was one of those irreplaceable people.  If we're lucky, we get one or two of those in a lifetime.  I'm tempted, incredibly tempted, to fill about a dozen more paragraphs with stories about David--probably anyone who ever met him could tell just as many stories, because he was one of those guys to whom things happened.  The phrase "Never a dull moment" was invented, I'm sure, to describe a life with David Hernandez in it.  But I think that for now, it's enough to say this:

David was my first true friend.  He meant so much to me, and I miss him immeasurably.

Goodbye, old companion.  Hope to see you again someday.  And then we will have merry adventures indeed.

A Random Thought About the Second Amendment--No, Two Thoughts--Three!

First thought: the argument over guns has become so fraught and emotional that it has moved entirely out of the realm of rational argument for many people.  Alex Jones's infamous tirade on Piers Morgan's program is just one example.  As I watched it, a thought occurred: guns, for this man and many of his like-minded followers, have become a fetish, in most if not all of the categories listed by Merriam-Webster in its definition:

1.a : an object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; broadly: a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverenceb : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion...c : an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression2: a rite or cult of fetish worshipers

(Including c, above, may be the biggest stretch, but somehow I don't think so.)

And the problem with the fetishization of guns, the so-called gun culture, is that it pushes people into modes of thinking that are of the "from my cold dead hands!" sort.  The successful Australian gun-control effort strongly suggests that a similar effort here could save a lot of lives (a lot of lives).  But given that the rhetoric of the gun culture sounds frighteningly similar to what was heard from slave owners in the run-up to the Civil War (guns, like slaves, being abstracted into a "defense of lifestyle" mindset), I'm afraid that any attempt to repeat the Australian experiment here would end up with massive casualties.

Second thought: a huge part of the argument over the Second Amendment, whether people realize it or not, has to do with commas, and where they are placed.  This New York Times article from 2007 sums it up nicely.  In short, it is this: the version of the Bill of Rights in the National Archives reads as follows, with three commas:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

But the one in the Library of Congress, which was supposedly directly supervised and approved by Thomas Jefferson, has only one comma (and fewer capitalized letters):

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The fun part is that the states ratified different versions, with greater or fewer commas; and if comma placement affects meaning, does that indicate that the states never actually ratified the same amendment?  If that were ever determined to be true, the entire amendment would be null and void.

To everyone's great relief I will avoid a close dissection of the grammatical implications of differing comma placements.  Suffice it to say--from where I stand, yeah, actually, the extra commas do make a substantial difference.

(Wait, can't help myself!  The short version: the phrase "the right of the people to bear arms," when set off by the extra commas, becomes a subordinate clause to the phrase "being necessary to the security of a free State," thus aligning the rights of the people with the notion of a free state; without the extra commas, it is merely an extension of "A well regulated militia...")

Third thought: what about those three words, "well regulated militia"?  At first glance, it would seem to upend the gun-control argument altogether.  The screamers--the people shrieking about any limitation on the Second Amendment being an unconstitutional infringement of their liberty--would seem to be ignoring the fact that the notion of regulation is right there in the language of the amendment.  That was certainly my first reaction when I looked at it.  But there is a somewhat archaic definition of "regulated" that seems to have been what the framers intended, namely that a well-regulated militia was one that was well-trained and highly-skilled.  (There's a nice summary here.)  What we think of as regulation now, like environmental or financial regulations, is not what was intended then.

Damn!

But that brings us back to the whole argument over how we interpret militias.  If the framers intended militias to mean military or paramilitary operations that are well-trained and highly-skilled (the National Guard, basically), doesn't that argue against the idea of something like the Minutemen, ad hoc citizens' brigades defending their homes on an impromptu basis against--almost certainly--exactly the sort of professional, government-sponsored militia that is contemplated by the amendment?

Thoughtful responses are welcomed.  Shouting will be vigorously ignored.

The Guilt of "Innocence of Muslims"

As a rule, I stand firm against every variation of "He went on a killing spree because he played Grand Theft Auto all the time."  Works of art, be they movies, books, video games, songs or whatever, do not make anyone do anything.  James Holmes dying his hair to look like the Joker doesn't make the Batman films responsible for the massacre in Colorado, any more than The Beatles are responsible for the Sharon Tate murders, no matter what Charles Manson says about "Helter Skelter."

And yet, with that said, artists are not absolved of responsibility.  If we create art in the hope of effecting a positive change in the world, then we must also be aware of the possibility of effecting a negative change.  Yes, freedom of speech still has to be absolute--we have to protect Salman Rushdie and we have to protect the Nazis marching in Skokie--but that freedom can still be abused, a line crossed, with horrific consequences.  Particularly when art is not art, is never intended as art, but is instead propaganda, with a decidedly political purpose and the clear intention of inciting disruption.

Angry demonstrations continue across the Muslim world in reaction to an appallingly awful so-called "movie trailer" for a "film" called Innocence of Muslims.  (No, I will not link to it.)  No one knows whether a full movie was ever actually made, or whether the trailer (actually two trailers, but I only looked at one) is all there is.  My guess is the movie is non-existent, because the "filmmaker" didn't need to make a movie in order to accomplish his idiotic purpose: to enflame Muslims.  Here, courtesy of Neil Gaiman (an unexected source),  is a compelling first-hand account from one of the actors in this appalling piece of propaganda, Anna Gurji, detailing how she and everyone else involved were completely duped by the producer:

The movie that we were doing in Duarte was called “Desert Warrior” and it was a fictional adventure drama. The character GEORGE was a leader of one of those tribes fighting for the comet.

There was no mention EVER by anyone of MUHAMMAD and no mention of religion during the entire time I was on the set. I am hundred percent certain nobody in the cast and nobody in the US artistic side of the crew knew what was really planned for this “Desert Warrior”.

The atmosphere at the set was as friendly as possible. We all knew that we were doing an adventure drama for a very low budget financing. The director Alan Roberts even had plans that with this low budget product he would be able to get some more money to make a good quality version (by shooting it in the real desert and having better product in every category) of the “Desert Warrior”.

I had interactions with the man known as Sam Bassil on the set. He was very amiable, respectful, soft-spoken, always making sure that the filming was running smoothly and everyone was satisfied. He even told me the premiere of the movie was going to happen sometime soon and I would get a good amount of tickets to invite my friends and family.

But it is completely apparent from the trailer that the lines the actors spoke were (badly) overdubbed with other lines, in which this George character was transformed into a grotesque caricature of Mohammed.  It's not even subtle: the crappy overdubbing is obvious from first moment to last.  It's like Woody Allen's infamous What's Up, Tiger Lily?, except that instead of doing it for comedy, the producer (notice how I refuse to use the man's name--not to protect him but because I will not dignify his name by repeating it) did it in order to make Muslims angry.  As The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw speculates, the trailer "was almost certainly timed for the American election, in this case to incite Muslim communities and then provoke macho responses from the presidential candidates."

The reaction, of course, got out of hand.  Anyone with even a vague memory of the 2006 riots over Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed could have predicted that.  The difference is that the cartoons were published with a serious public purpose and then were distorted by two Danish imams who decided to stir up trouble (and who also goosed the issue by including trumped-up images and cartoons that had nothing to do with the Danish newspaper).  In this case, yes, there are clearly people in the Muslim world who have seized upon Innocence of Muslims to further their own political ends; but the film itself has no serious purpose, it is propaganda whose sole reason for being is to incite anger.  (I quite like The Guardian's description of it as "a bigoted piece of poison.")  The people exploiting it didn't have to goose anything because it was pre-goosed.  The producer, a Coptic Christian from Egypt with a major grudge against Islam, apparently wanted to strike a blow against Muslim fundamentalism; instead he might as well have collaborated with the terrorists, because it would have been tough to create a more effective recruiting tool for jihadists worldwide.

The producer, in short, is an imbecile of the worst sort: an imbecile who thinks he's clever.

And now, having lit a match, he cries and moans and begs for rescue because he set his house on fire.  The appalling thing is that, in order to be a truly free society, we actually have to protect him.  And to defend the piece of crap he made.

As Noam Chomsky once wrote, "If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise."  I recognize that, I support that, I defend that.  But man does it hurt in cases like this.  As one who toils in the vineyards of the arts, I find myself incredibly riled up by this exercise in non-art.  By lying to his cast and crew about what they were making, the producer has completely perverted the purpose of art, and it makes me want to find the man and strangle him.  I won't, and I support all efforts to protect him and his family, but good lord how I despise this miserable excuse for humanity.

A Wasted Vote?

But first, a brief tale of an election well past.  In 1980, before I was old enough to vote, my mother went down to the polling place on her own and came back with this tale.  Her choice was independent candidate John Anderson, a 20-year veteran of the House of Representatives from Illinois.  While standing in line, the people around her asked the usual "Who are you voting for?" question.  When she gave her answer, several people said "Oh yeah, I like him."

"So you're going to vote for him?"

"Oh my, no."

"Why not?"

"Because he's not going to win."

Because apparently, voting has nothing to do with making a crucial choice for your country, it has to do with being on The Winning Side.  But when the nation is evenly split down the middle and a clear Winning Side isn't immediately apparent, then what?

Twelve years ago, I voted for Ralph Nader rather than Al Gore.  (There will now be a short pause while I duck the vegetables thrown by various Democrats.)

Everyone--and I do mean everyone, including close friends whose opinions I highly respect--tell me that not only did I waste a vote, but I helped contribute to the utter hideousness of the 2000 election debacle.  I remind those people that I was living in Illinois at the time, a state that was considered safe for Al Gore, and that I was trying to accomplish two things...

First, I wanted to say to the Democrats, my usual party of choice, that they were being particularly namby-pamby that year.  They were rattled by Bill Clinton's sex scandal and impeachment, and Al Gore seemed to be so determined to appear unClintonesque that he wasn't really anything, including himself.  (I remember going to a campaign rally in Daley Plaza in 1992, with the Clintons and the Gores, and it was Al Gore who gave the best speech that day.  He had it in him to be great, he always did; but when the time came, he got cautious. Fatally cautious, I would say.)  As a lifelong Democrat, I wanted to say to the party that my vote was not guaranteed, and that if they didn't earn it they weren't gonna get it.  But also...

Second.  There's no question that we are not well-served by this endless bouncing between two parties, both of which are owned by corporate interests.  (Look, it's my blog.  You're going to have accept as true my strong assertion that we are living in an oligarchy, otherwise this thing will go on for forever.)  So I wanted to support a credible third party, the Greens were pretty well aligned with the things I wished the Democrats were talking about, and if they could reach at least 5% nationally, they would not only qualify for federal funding in the next election cycle but they would go a long way toward proving their viability as a party/movement.

So I voted Nader.  Gore won Illinois as expected, Nader failed to reach 5% for the Greens, and Florida happened.  But I continue to maintain that if Gore had just been more Gore-like, had taken a stronger stand on, well, anydamnthing, he would have won.  It wasn't Nader's fault, it was Gore's.

Now, a brief detour.  For several years, during each presidential election cycle I have sought out various newspaper/magazine lists of the candidates' stands on various issues and put together a little scorecard for each candidate.  It was laborious and imperfect, and I could really only do it for the two major guys of each party.

But three cheers for the internet--now there's isidewith.com, which automates that process and includes all the candidates.  You answer a short series of questions (make sure to check out the alternative positions offered for each question) and it gives you a handy little summary of who you side with, in order from most to least.  I've taken the test twice, and the first time got a surprising score of 94% for Barack Obama.  (Surprising because I'm one of those who have been disappointed with him, and I did not expect that number to be so high.)  But I just took it again, being a little extra-thorough in my answers, and got a different result that was perhaps even more surprising...

The Green Party candidate again.  She just barely ekes out Obama in my results, but my worries about two-party oligarchy have only grown (massively) since the 2000 election.  Plus, here's one of those moments when I have to decide whether or not I'm a hypocrite.  Did I take this test in order to justify making the easy, popular choice?  Did I just want to be on The Winning Side?  (Well, maybe....)  Or did I take the test for a reason, and was I willing to run with the results?

I haven't quite decided.  But I will note this--I live in California now, which is a pretty safe state for Obama.  In whom I have been disappointed.  It's feeling a little like 2000 again, hopefully in a good way and not in a Supreme Court intervention sorta way.  Hmmmm.

But just imagine this for a moment: if every voter in America could reliably determine which candidate they really identify with the most strongly; and if every voter then actually voted that way.  Then we might, emphasis on the word "might," end up with something like a democracy again.

Before I go, here's a link to Dr. Stein's website, and here's one to an excellent Bill Moyers interview with the Green candidates from just the other night.

A Thought or Two About #occupywallstreet

As the Occupy Wall Street folks in Zuccotti Park move into winter, circumstances are about to force a big decision on them--whether to tough it out through a long miserable New York winter, or find a reason to disband, which would almost certainly spark a similar disbanding at many if not all of the other Occupy sites.  So as the movement reaches this pivotal moment, it's worth asking what they've accomplished, if anything.

I hear two principal complaints about the protestors (aside from the boringly obvious "hippies having sex in the park" blather): first, that the OWS people have too many demands, or incoherent demands; and second, that all they're doing is complaining, they're not doing anything to present possible solutions.  So let's deal with the question of incoherence.

OWS is a deliberately-disorganized mass protest that began in New York and then spawned spinoffs across the globe.  Their essential message has always been crystal clear: they were there to occupy Wall Street because the actions of Wall Street have done so much, globally, to wreck the world economy, drive millions of people out of work, leave unknown thousands of people homeless, etc.  Wall Street greed, which is intended to represent absurd levels of income inequality, is a cancer on the body politic, and a lot of people aren't prepared to just sit idly by and be victimized anymore.  (Insert the obvious quote from Network here.)  Without even paying much attention to OWS when it first started, I understood all of this perfectly well.

But of course it's a mass movement, deliberately without spokespeople, and as any mass movement becomes truly massive, the bandwagon effect happens and people start to show up with a boatload of crazy-time.  And because there are no spokespeople, any random nitwit in the crowd is seen as just as valid as anyone else.  So while there have in fact been plenty of coherent statements made about OWS's goals, there have also been just as many interviews with chowderheads who have no business discussing a recipe for chowder, let alone a global movement about income inequality.  And every time a moron is handed a microphone, political opponents gleefully point fingers and start shouting about the incoherence of the movement itself.  (The same is true of the various Tea Party gatherings, of course.  They have their fair share of nitwits and chowderheads as well, and certainly their opponents have done their fair share of finger-pointing and shouting.)

Let's be clear, then.  Here is a moron.

Here is a non-moron.  There's a difference.

Much more interesting, though, is the criticism that OWS doesn't offer any solutions.  And I find it interesting because it ties in with Story Theory, something I happen to be rather fond of.  What I'm talking about boils down to this: there's an idea in the arts that a story doesn't have to solve a problem, it's enough to point out that a problem exists.  What an audience takes away from the story, once the problem has been presented to them, is their own business.  And the reason why this is important is because an issue can be talked about generally, but it has to be solved specifically--and each audience member has to find their own solution, something that works in their lives and takes into account their individual circumstances. I'll use one of my favorite examples: Dead Man Walking.  There's a movie that works very hard to present every side of the death-penalty issue, and in the end, the only "solution" is that the criminal is put to death.  But what that means in the world at large is left open.  "Think about this," the filmmakers are saying, "then make up your own mind."

The same argument can be made for Occupy Wall Street.  I can't say whether it's deliberate or not, but they've ended up crafting an open, enigmatic storyline in which a problem is cleary presented but solutions are not offered.  (Actually, some are--the reinstatement of Glass-Steagal has been advocated for from the beginning, and I think it's a very good idea.)  And the more the general public argues about what OWS stands for, the more we wonder what solutions OWS would like us to make, the closer we come to devising our own solutions--ones that will probably turn out to be far more creative and coherent than anything that could come from a bunch of cold, numb-fingered people shivering in a New York park.

21st Century Communion

A friend from college, V Kingsley, died on April 1st after a six-year, horrific and awe-inspiring battle against cancer.  Most people would have succumbed long before, but V was never one to go gentle into that good night, which will come as no surprise to anyone who met her for even five minutes.  The memorial service was yesterday up in Santa Cruz, and I couldn't attend--but the service was streamed live over the web, so I was able to participate in a little bit of the experience.  A few words about that in a minute--but first, a quick story about V.

We never particularly hung out--but as a frequent Tech Director on shows I was acting in, we worked together often.  And I quickly learned a respect for her that made her more memorable than a lot of the people I did hang out with.  We had a Sociology class together, and it should have been a great class because it's a great subject--but the teacher was bad.  Really remarkably bad.  Never taught anything that wasn't in the book, and his lectures always always always expounded on the obvious with a slowness so extreme it bordered on the surreal.  "Max Weber's... conflict theory... stated... that people... are... in... conflict."  (Truly, you cannot imagine how long it would take him to get those words out.)  It was so bad that the rest of us quietly gathered into groups of four so that only one at a time would have to actually attend the class and take notes.  And when we were there, we just sat and felt our brains dying.  But V, she was different.  She would stand up and say to this bad, bad teacher, "What the hell are you talking about?"

Which would invariably leave him confused--and me immensely grateful.  (His usual response, when thus challenged, was to repeat exactly what he had just said.  Slower.)  V eventually transferred out of the class to something that wouldn't waste her time, which was a very great sadness because now it was just us sheep and that very bad shepherd.

Graduation happened, we all went our various ways, and I never saw V again.  But with Facebook, I was able to reconnect with her a little, to say nice things to her that I'm now very glad I said.  She responded with typical warmth and grace.  I read a few of the entries in her excellent blog and my mind reeled.  Blindness.  Pain beyond imagining.  But she kept soldiering on through it all, with her sense of humor intact.  And then on April 1st she finally succumbed, leaving behind her partner Dani and her son Parker and a huge number of devoted friends and family.

The service, as I mentioned, was streamed live.  There were severe technical problems, but let me just say up front that even a poor experience beats the heck out of no experience at all.  I'm glad I was able to kinda sorta be there as people said goodbye to V.  But the online experience also led to some thinking about what community is becoming in These Times of Ours, and there are few things more likely to make me start setting words down.

The church (unitarian universalist, the most enlightened of the Christian churches) had set up a single camera hanging from the ceiling.  It was locked down, never moving, never zooming, the image was static and distant and distinctly low-res, particularly after being compressed for live streaming.  The sound was just as distant, with echo and reflection and distortion that made it very hard to hear anything that was being said--while the songs were almost robbed of anything resembling musicality.  I had the stream on for about an hour, and soon realized that the fact that I was up and making a sandwich during the service really didn't say much for the quality of the internet stream.

But was it purely a technical problem?  If the tech had been as good as it was for, say, the recent royal wedding, with high-def closeups and multiple expensive microphones capturing every nuance of sound, while commentators babbled on in the background with context and opinions, then maybe I'd have felt a greater sense of communion with the others assembled for the service.  But is there an essential limitation inherent in the nature of the service itself?  In other words: is it really possible to have a shared, communal experience without actually being there?

Bear in mind that without Facebook I'd have never been able to reconnect with V in the first place, so clearly the social media have their place.  But a memorial is a very particular kind of experience.  From my grandmother's service, I still have a vivid memory of when the bells began to peal, summoning people to a place where such services had been held since, in that case, the 11th century.  As soon as the sound of those bells began, I suddenly felt the presence of everyone who had gone before in that place: the people who had been baptised there, the people who had married there, the people memorialized, the people who rested in the cemetery just outside.  There is an argument to be made, even by those of us who aren't particularly religious, for the notion of a patch of land made sacred by its use for exactly these sorts of ceremonies over time--and obviously none of that can be transmitted over the internet.

And while there were certainly moments in V's service that resonated--such as her former partner talking about how she had not been strong enough to continue supporting V throughout her long illness, even though she never stopped loving her--there was never anything that could compare with the impact of sitting in a room together as lives intersected and resonated.  In a different (but comparable) direction, I remember going to see the movie Dead Man Walking, and at the moment when Sean Penn's character is revealed strapped to the execution table, someone in the audience, for just a moment before she choked it off, let out a single anguished sob.  Perhaps she had a loved one who had been executed; perhaps she had a loved one who had been murdered; I can never know.  But the story in the movie had just set off bells in her and for a moment, she could not help but resonate with them.  If I'd watched the movie at home, the movie would still have had power, but not that kind of power.

Communion--here in its broadest definition as "an act or instance of sharing" or, even better, "intimate fellowship or rapport"--requires community.  I am, as I said before, glad to have been able to share the experience at all, but technology is still no substitute for a gathering of souls in a place sanctified by prior gatherings of souls, be it a church or even a movie theater or a baseball field.  I have a long and somewhat odd history of writing and delivering very well-received eulogies at such services, but there was a moment yesterday when the experience of watching other people's eulogies over the internet came to feel so unnatural that I (momentarily) resolved to never deliver another one in my life--but the fault there was not with the thing itself, but with the manner in which it was received.  The next time I seek a gathering of souls, I shall deliver my own soul unto the appropriate place at the appropriate time, and be with everyone else.

It looks like it was a great service.  I wish I could've been there.

A Morning's Bloodletting

A quick story, to illustrate my remarkable lack of fondness for needles:

During my senior year of high school, there was a measles outbreak.  Or mumps.  Whatever.  Since I've never had measles or mumps or chicken pox or any of that, I was one of the students required to get reinoculated, or I wouldn't be allowed back into classes or any school activities.  And as one of the leads in a show about to go off and compete in one of the Florida Thespian conferences, I absolutely had to get cleared of this silliness as fast as possible.  My friend Krys was in a similar boat--and she disliked needles just as much as I did.  Shots were being offered at a nearby school, so off we went together, both doing a fine job of revving each other into a fine state of outright phobia.  Rehearsal for my show was already underway, and I was missing it.

We reach the school, and there's a line stretching outside and around, at least 200 people waiting for shots.  Claiming desperate need, and pulling Krys behind me, I cut in front of almost all those hundreds of people, which did not go over well, and soon enough was in the auditorium watching the nurse stick a needle into the arm of a toddler.  The toddler shrieked.  Krys and I went very, very pale, and I'm gonna say she grabbed my hand but it could just as easily have been the other way round.

I'm male, so I go first.  The swab of alcohol.  I turn my head away.  There is the slightest sensation, then I'm being bandaged up.  Stunned, I turn to the nurse.  "Wait, that's it?  No, that can't....  Do it again."

Krys of course thinks I'm just lying in order to make her feel better, which makes her feel worse.  She sits, she gets swabbed, she grips my hand with bone-crushing strength, the nurse does the injection, and Krys turns to her, aghast, and says "No, come on, that's not--do that again."

So no.  I do not like needles.  And over the years I've had various opportunities to donate blood, but never have.  I mastered several excuses and used them all, repeatedly.  When I moved to L.A., I happened to select an apartment that is, literally, a stone's throw from a Red Cross station, yet I never wandered over to donate.  Even after September 11th, when the need was clear and overwhelming, I knew I should donate but did not, and that time in particular, it bothered me a lot.

But I've been considering lately the importance of giving, just giving for its own sake without expectation of return.  (I suppose you might call it a faint glimmering of something resembling maturity, all these many years in.)  So I decided to donate at last, went on the Red Cross's website, and set up an appointment for Saturday morning.  (This was, by the way, a couple days before the earthquake in Japan.  I really did decide because I decided, not because of an external event that shamed me into it.  I shamed myself just fine, thank you.)

Turns out there was some sort of event going on that day, so there were volunteers on the road putting up signs, barriers and balloons.  Tables set up out front of the Red Cross station offering raffle tickets and first-aid kits, and a black-draped booth whose purpose I wouldn't learn till a little later.  I found the room, carefully did not look at the people in the big chairs with blood draining out of them, filled out some paperwork, was given a pamphlet to read that I'd already read online, and sat down to wait.

This is Los Angeles, so I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when a celebrity walked in, but suddenly there was Jamie Lee Curtis, who it turns out is one of the Red Cross's celebrity spokespersons and who'd decided to just wander in that morning and donate again.  Which meant of course that a Red Cross photographer soon showed up to document the occasion.  (Ms. Curtis blogged about it on the Huffington Post here.)  She was very nice, we had a little conversation after I was handed a button reading "It's My First Time," discussing where the blood might go and how, even though it almost certainly wouldn't go to Japan, it could very well free up resources that in turn help the Japanese.  And then my name was called, and in I went for the pre-bloodletting interview.  No turning back now, not with Jamie Lee Curtis from Fish Called Wanda staring, oh hell no.

I was mildly bothered by the assertion that if I had ever in my life had sex with one male partner I would be put on a list and my blood probably wouldn't be used--particularly since they routinely test the blood for HIV anyway--but neither that nor any other question barred me from participating, and soon enough I was in one of those big chairs as the very nice nurse--who does this twenty times a day, every day--did her level best to put me at ease while swabbing me with iodine.

I was next to a window, and peered out.  To discover that the big black-draped booth was for a puppet show.  Elmo, the Count, several of the Henson muppets, and I happened to be situated behind them so that I could watch the volunteers muppeteers at work, scripts in one hand, muppets on the other, crouching and dancing around each other, swapping muppets as fast as they could, great big smiles on their faces, having a fabulous time.  Almost time for a very large needle to get jabbed into my arm.

At this point my friend Tonyalyn sends me a text about something or other.  So I respond to it then tell her where I am.  She, only five feet tall in her bare feet, texts back that the last time she tried to donate they told her she didn't weigh enough.  So as the needle goes in, I am now marvelously distracted: muppets performing over there, and over here I've got Tonyalyn texting me, saying "bet I could give now!! ;)"

Which is of course brilliant in its own way, since it's impossible to respond to.  Do I say "Yes, I believe you have gained so much weight [a bad thing] that you could now give blood [a good thing]," or do I say "Nonsense, whatever weight you might have gained is so negligible [a good--and true--thing] that I'm sure they still would not let you donate blood [a bad thing]"?  I just stared at the text for a while, marveling at it, and barely noticed that a pint of blood was draining away from me.  I sent off something like "noticeable lack of comment," watched the Muppets for a little while, did a Facebook status update from the chair, and that was it, it was all over.  I'd barely noticed a thing.

One little surprise, though.  Because it was my first time, there would be some bonus bloodletting!  Four tubes that had to be filled in order to test my blood type and other such purposes.  "Shall we draw from your other arm?" the nurse asked.  So they moved me to a different chair where I could no longer see the Muppets, they stuck me again, and this time I felt it more because even though it was a smaller needle, it was necessarily jiggling around a little as they attached and detached all those vials.  Plus, you know--I couldn't see the Muppets anymore, and Tonyalyn wasn't texting me anymore.  Which just left me, the nurse, and the needle.

But having done it, I'll never have to do that part again.  And I'm finding that I'm now really psyched about donating blood.  Giving without expectation of return proves, once again, that in fact there are enormous returns.  Pride in oneself for having done an absolute good, that's pretty potent.  And it beats the crap out of the shame felt for not donating after September 11th.  The nurses are brilliant at what they do, the blood could very well save a life somewhere down the road, there is absolutely nothing about the experience that should keep anyone away for any reason, even if that person is needlephobic like me.  They won't let you donate for two months after you've given blood.  I suspect I'll be in there again, not long after those two months have run.  I'm even thinking how great it might be to become one of those cheerful volunteers outside.  After all, I've never worked a Muppet before, and a volunteer job that lets you save a life with a Muppet on your hand?

Priceless.

Naming Names

Was watching a movie last night--A Single Man, which features Colin Firth's previous Oscar-nominated role. (And for my money, a subtler, richer and deeper performance than the excellent one he just got the award for.)  I liked the movie, and after it was over, as the end credits rolled, for whatever reason I sat there and watched all those names roll by.

Now bear in mind--I'm in the business, I actually know what all those people do, I know how valuable their work is, and sometimes I even know some of the people whose names scroll by five minutes in.  But even I don't generally sit and watch all the credits, for all the obvious reasons.  Last night, though, I had the impulse to give those names their due, so I did.

I'm not suggesting we should all do the same thing all the time.  But every now and then.  Be that person still sitting in the darkened theater while everyone else files out, from time to time.  Give all those names their due.  Because when they say that movies are a collaborative medium, man, they're not kidding.  It really does take all those hands to make the final product that gets on the screen, and they're all people who worked hard and they deserve to have their names up there--even if does extend the running time of a movie by another six minutes or whatever.

One argument against having all those names up there is, Why should these movie people get their names up there when, f'r instance, the people who make cars don't get to put their names on their product?

And I think that's an excellent question.  Why don't they?  When you see one of those labels that says Such-and-Such was reviewed by Inspector #32, don't you wonder who that is?  And what sort of day they were having when they inspected your This-or-That?  Movies are one of the great American exports--they're also a rare exception in American industry where the company gets its name on the product, but so do all the craftsmen who contributed to that product.  Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that the pride generated by such recognition is part of why the product is in such demand around the world?

Imagine if every car had a plate in it somewhere--like the one telling you what tire pressure you need--with a list of the workers who assembled that car?  The writing would be pretty tiny, and most people would never look at it, but so what?  A key grip watching a movie he worked on, he still sits in the theater as the others leave, and he sees his name roll across, and yeah he feels proud about what he did and it makes him a better key grip when he goes back to work.

Strictly speaking, none of us should need that.  The work should be its own reward.  The paycheck should also be its own reward.  Is it not best to do good work for its own sake?  Of course it should.  And of course almost none of us are so enlightened.  When I sat in a theater, surrounded by strangers, and watched my name roll across a screen for the first time, that was a truly great moment in my life.  I remember it often--and as we gear up for the next movie (casting director hired, some interesting names begin to circle), I stop every now and then, and remember the sight of my name in the credits, and I know it'll be there again and that I need to do a really great job because that's my name up there.

Here's a thought: once a year, each of the Detroit carmakers creates one special-edition car.  With all the bells and whistles, the best car they make--but on this one vehicle, each part is etched with the name of the person who made it.  Then they can either auction it off, with money going to the workers' pension funds, or they can simply hold a sweepstakes where one of the listed workers gets to drive off in that car.  It'd probably be one of the most popular things they do every year--and I'll bet those vehicles would become highly sought-after collector's items.

Any manufacturer could do something like that.  A little slip of paper in the box, telling us not just that Inspector #32 is named Marisol, or Joe, or whatever, but that 13 other people actually made the thing you just bought, and here are their names.  I wouldn't read that slip of paper every time, but sometimes I would.  Giving honor where due, and credit where due.  And I'll bet the thing I bought has a slightly better chance of being of good quality because the people who made it knew--those are their names on there.

In Which I Am Uncled

The thing about a small family is, it's small. And sometimes it gets smaller before it gets larger. Since the birth of my baby sister Amanda in 1986, there have been five funerals--and zero babies born.

Until last Saturday, when the youngest of us, Amanda herself, started to right the scales.

When the news came that she was pregnant, Amanda moved in with our parents in Dallas while the father, a chef of Cajun extraction named Patrick Couvillon, went into basic training as a Coast Guard reservist. From time to time I would get a text with a new ultrasound image--and being who I am, I would send a text back to her, asking why she was sending me pictures of sweet potatoes.

Now Amanda, she works with children with disabilities, but she didn't get her final certification till she was already pregnant, so there was no point looking for a job in her field right away. Which explains how she ended up playing the part of a dancing pregnant elf.

(Oh how I wish I had a picture to insert here. I've been begging for one. She won't give it to me.)

It was Christmastime, y'see, and a nearby hotel had a program that they described as helping kids bake holiday cookies and whatnot. A bit of outreach for their guests with children. What the hotel did not tell her was that she'd be wearing a costume. Or that there would be some dancing involved. With fake plastic elf ears. All set to a minute-long song that she would have to listen to, and dance to, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And then again. Till she became a dancing, pregnant, murderous elf.

But eventually that ended, and her fellow elves threw her a party, and then she was done, in those last weeks before the baby came, growing larger and, it need hardly be said, grumpier with each passing day. Patrick finished basic training and joined her in Dallas, which helped a lot. (He now has a job as a chef at a nearby Hyatt--where they do not make him wear elf ears.) And me, the uncle-to-be, I started looking for dates when I could come out and visit. Ideally, a date as close to the birth as possible.

Because when my brother and sister were born, I wasn't there. In both cases I was supposed to be there, I had plane tickets from Boston that would have gotten me to Miami in time for both due dates--but they both showed up early, and I had to hear about their births second-hand, from a few thousand miles away. "Not this time!" I declared, and started examining the calendar. The due date was right at the end of January. Since the kids were both early, I settled on the weekend before the end of the month: January 21-23. I knew the unlikelihood of actually pegging the birth date, the baby could still be born before I could get there, or he would come afterward so that my entire visit would consist of marveling at how gigantic my sister was and why was she being so grumpy?

(Okay, I suppose I may be overstating her grumpiness a little. But I'm telling the story and I'll tell it how I like, so there.)

My dad talked me out of that particular weekend. I would almost certainly miss the birth, there was nothing I could actually do to help during a visit, it would be much smarter and more sensible to wait a couple extra weeks till all the excitement was over, and I could be certain of meeting my brand-new baby nephew. Reluctantly, I agreed and pushed the date back.

Six a.m. Saturday morning, the 22nd of January. My sister calls. She's at the hospital. And instead of being there to help, as I might've been, I was locked in Los Angeles, hearing it all from very far away. Again.

But maybe it was for the best, after all. Sitting in a hospital waiting room wouldn't really have been an improvement on sitting in my living room--I heard all the news almost as soon as there was any news, and by not being there I was spared the terror of that stretch at the end, when the baby was in distress and Amanda was in distress and the baby came out looking distinctly blue. By the time I heard any of that, Amanda was feeling fine and the baby was already starting to pink up nicely. Cellphone photos were promptly sent to me, and I just as promptly posted them on Facebook, so that little Hunter Cole Couvillon was announced to the world, with photos and details, very shortly after he was born.

There were some days in the NICU, but mother and child left the hospital together a few days ago, and have settled into their new life at home. We did a family Skype yesterday morning where I was able to see the baby move and squawk for the first time, and I was able to tell him "I'm your Uncle Robert. Everything I say is wise and good." (Amanda had a few words to say about that, but I'm telling the story here and they're not important.)

And so I am uncled, for the very first time in my life. The doctors say all visitors should wait for six weeks, which seems intolerably long. ("He'll be in college before I can get out there," I whined yesterday.) But it's okay, there will be a baptism in Louisiana (Cajun country!) in March and it looks like I'll wait till then. With Skype and cellphone photos and all the other marvelous doodads of the information age, I'll still get to participate a little, even from all the way out here.

And since no such tale is complete without a baby picture, here you go: Momma 'Manda and baby Hunter, doing his best impression of an evil scientist (in a dinosaur costume, no less):

A Movie Called Blood

The news you didn't know you'd been waiting to hear: in 2012, a movie will be released called "Blood," and I'm the Executive Producer. You can find all kinds of information all over the place: the website is here, and there are also pages and channels for Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, among others.

Obviously I'll be talking about this a lot from now on, after months of strict silence. So let's start with how and why.

The how, of course, is that writer/director Marc Rosenbush may claim it's his project, but really it's all because of me. (Me! Me! Me!) Because I've read comics off and on since I was a kid, in fact I learned to read with comic books. And after giving them up for a while during high school, shortly after college a friend showed me a copy of "Watchmen" and said "Things have changed."

Boy had they ever. Soon there was Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison and a whole crowd of really gifted writers doing things with comics that no one had ever even really thought about before. And in short order, I discovered my own personal favorite graphic novel of all time: "Moonshadow," by J.M. DeMatteis and Jon J. Muth.

It's basically "Candide" in outer space, but it's also filled with poetry and whimsy and, despite the fact that none of the events in it are remotely like anything in my life, it still felt, while I read it, as if it was my own biography somehow. An emotional biography, perhaps. So I started reading DeMatteis's other work, and he turned out to be an interesting guy: a musician at one time who moves easily between straight-up comics work on Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and so forth (his Spidey storyline "Kraven's Last Hunt" may be his standout), and very adult, very deep, very emotional works like "Moonshadow," "Mercy," "Seekers Into the Mystery" and "Blood: A Tale," done with the fabulous painter Kent Williams.

And at some point, as one does with works one loves, I said to my friend Marc, "You've absolutely got to read "Moonshadow." So he did, and he loved it, and then he started looking for more stuff by that DeMatteis guy. Before too long, he got to "Blood."

And here's where he did what I didn't: he read it and he said "Jesus, this would make a fantastic movie."

So here we are. With a script written, and the deals being put together, and the website and the Twitter feed and all the rest of it, with a team being rapidly assembled and contracts signed and a lot of people getting very excited indeed.

Yep. All because of me. (And maybe a little bit because of the brilliance of J.M. DeMatteis.)

More to come, fer shure.

The Impossible Question

About twenty years ago, Fred Friendly, now made famous by George Clooney in Good Night, and Good Luck, created a wonderful PBS program called The Constitution: That Delicate Balance. What he did was to put together a preeminent group of people: Supreme Court Justices, Senators and Congressmen, the then-president of Planned Parenthood, theologians and philosophers, etc., and to pose to them an escalating series of hypotheticals. The moderator (often it was Harvard’s Arthur Miller, no relation to the playwright) would ask a “What if?” question and ask people to respond to it, from legal, moral and ethical points of view. He would then turn up the heat. He would make the question worse. Make the hypothetical harder to bear. Pretty soon he and the panel would reach that eternally-difficult place where human logic runs smack into human emotion, and logic doesn’t always win; that place where we know what we should think, but the situation posed strikes us in such a central place that the deep, primal, damn-it-this-hurts part of us rises up and will not be denied.

In that spirit, then...

A few weeks ago I posed a hypothetical of my own. If Mark David Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon, were to be paroled from prison and he ended up sitting in front of you asking for a job, would you give him one? I asked it as a lifelong rabid fan of John Lennon, whose influence on my own life has been gigantic. (Put it this way: when I am on my deathbed, my brother has standing instructions to play The Beatles.) A lively discussion ensued on Facebook, and of course what I was going after was the notion of redemption. Do we believe, do we actually believe, in the possibility of rehabilitation. And just to be clear, the question is not whether Chapman, as a specific person, can be made again into a productive, non-murderous non-whacko member of society; the question is whether those of us who love and loved John Lennon can ever find it in ourselves to believe that that man has actually reformed.

But now, let’s do the difficult thing. Let’s turn up the heat.

Mark David Chapman is your cousin. You grew up with him, you played together when you were kids, and damn it all, you loved him. You knew he had withdrawn, you knew he was obsessed with Catcher in the Rye, but you still never imagined for a second that he could actually hurt anyone, let alone kill anyone, let alone John Lennon. But he did, and he’s been in prison all these years, and you’ve had to endure the stigma of being Mark David Chapman’s cousin, and now he’s out and he hopes that you can forgive him. He seems completely fine, he even seems kinda like the cousin you once knew and loved. But can you ever trust your own impressions of him ever again? Can you believe, right down to your core, that he has truly reformed?

The heat. Turning it up.

It’s not Mark David Chapman, but it’s still your cousin, and you grew up together and you loved him. But now the person he hurt wasn’t some public figure who you loved in the way we love certain public figures; now he has hurt your sister. Someone you love has done something awful, truly awful, to someone you love.

Hate the sin but love the sinner. That’s what we’re taught, and it’s right, we know it’s right. We know that it’s right. But someone you love has done something truly awful to someone you love. How can you possibly resolve this in your own soul without your mind cracking open? This question has shattered marriages and torn families apart.

Let me emphasize, right here: I have a sister, and I love her beyond description. Nothing like this has ever happened to her, and I pray that nothing like it ever, ever will, and the mere thought of something happening to her makes my mind skitter away in horror. I do not, for a moment, intend of any of what follows to diminish the hideous pain and anguish of the hypothetical awful thing described.

Because the situation can still get worse. There’s one more layer.

The something awful that was done to someone you loved, it was a sexual offense of some kind. The kind of thing that gets people listed as sexual offenders--for forever. Twenty years have passed since the horrible thing that happened, and your sister was deeply scarred by it and no one has talked to your cousin’s mother for years now. But you have somehow done the heroic, the truly heroic, thing: you’ve found a way to forgive your cousin, in your own heart. You’ve actually achieved that. Your sister doesn’t understand it, but you’ve done it.

And now your cousin has been released from prison. By every indication, prison has done the thing we supposedly create prisons for: your cousin has been chastened, he’s found religion, he is gentle and peaceful and there’s a sense of calm about him that you would have never thought possible.

But he’s on that list. And you’ve found a way to forgive him, but society hasn’t. Society has found a way to continue to punish, even after the punishment is supposed to have ended. It’s easy for them: they don’t know your cousin, they didn’t grow up with him, he’s just another guy on a list and they don’t have to consider whether or not he might be reformed. As a friend of mine put it on Facebook (I’m paraphrasing), why should we use real people as a laboratory to find out whether this guy has actually reformed? Why run the risk to innocents when we can’t ever be truly certain that someone on a list of sexual offenders is actually rehabilitated?

But you know. You know him better than anyone, and you’ve forgiven him, and you can see what he’s become now. You know he’s okay. Still: the list, and his name, and the websites that list sexual offenders in any given neighborhood. Your cousin can’t find an apartment, he can’t get a job.

He comes to you. He begs you. Put in a good word for him, or he’s gonna be out on the street. He will die, out there on the street. You’ve already done the impossible heroic thing, you’ve forgiven the unforgivable, but now he’s begging for that one thing more. Stand up in public, even in front of your sister who cannot understand any of this, and say to the world that you believe this person is okay. That we should stop punishing him. That a person, even a person who has done that truly awful thing, can in fact change. Even though some people don’t change; even though rapists are sometimes released from prison and go back to raping; even though, even though, even though. In this case, this one specific case about this one specific human being, you know reform has actually happened, but the world doesn’t and the world has a million reasons not to believe you.

Will you stand up? Can you?

And here’s where any hypothetical breaks down, because there is no general answer that can ever satisfy the question. It’s personal, and it can only be answered by you, and the answer is almost certainly one thing when it’s a hypothetical but if it actually happened that way you would get swamped by emotion and your real answer in the moment will almost certainly be fuck no.

In one direction, horrible consequences to your cousin. In the other direction, a scar on your sister’s soul is ripped open and she can’t face you anymore. You know what you know, but there are no good consequences in any conceivable direction. So. Will you?

In Which I Am Kindled

It was a most-welcome late birthday present: the new Kindle 3. I’ve written about e-book readers several times, beginning with the very first Kindle and a lamentation over its astonishing ugliness. But Amazon has fixed the ugliness problem, and made a host of other improvements--most notably dropping its price down to a level that people can actually sorta kinda afford. The device arrived on Wednesday so I am now an expert, because fiddling with new gadgets is way more fun than it ought to be.

The whole premise of eInk, and the extra crispness of this new screen, definitely live up to expectations. I’ve had Kindle’s app on my iPhone for months, but I never did much reading on it because of the tiny screen size and the massive, overpowering glare if I tried to read outside. (Which I often do.) In no time at all, I already find myself treating the Kindle almost (almost) exactly like a book. I read indoors, I read outdoors, and if it’s dark I need some light. (No, I did not buy that nifty-looking but expensive cover with the light built in.) The turning of pages is almost automatic, and I find that the length of the screen flash between pages is no worse than the length of time it would take to turn an actual page—often faster, since you never have that problem where several pages get bunched together and you can’t get quite the first one separated, so you spend what feels like twenty minutes trying to flick it loose.

The magnificent difference, of course, is that in a gizmo smaller and thinner than most hardcovers (and weighing about the same, in a cover) I am currently carrying seven books. Which barely scratches the surface of how many books I can actually carry.

Considering that I’m usually in the middle of five or six books at once? This is impossibly cool.

And most of those books were free—material written before 1923 is in the public domain, and there are often multiple sources for copies that can be downloaded at no cost. I’m a little wary of downloading anything that originated in another language, since there’s no telling the quality of the translation, and that leaves out Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Voltaire and hundreds of others; but the whole of English literature pre-1923 is available. Dickens, Forster, Austen, the Brontes, Henry James, the list goes on and on. I even picked up the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Right now I’m reading Silas Marner, and enjoying it a lot. The only book I’ve purchased so far? A complete Shakespeare for $2.65. It looks so good, I can easily imagine a bunch of actors at a Shakespeare festival, standing around in rehearsal, reading from their Kindles.

I particularly like the ability to highlight a chunk of text that I like, and the Kindle will keep it both marked in the book, and stored in a separate area where I can look only at things I’ve marked in various books. If I had Proust on the Kindle, for instance, there’s a quote I’ve been trying to find in it for years without success--but if I could search for it, and then mark it, that would be fantastic. All without “defacing” the book by scribbling in it.

There are things that I miss. The specific thumping sound that a book makes when you tap on it, a sound that nothing else quite makes. (Books make decent drums, actually.) The feel of the paper that changes subtly from one book to another. The pleasant conundrum of what to do with the bookmark while you’re reading. People talk a lot about the smell of a book and I’m sure that’s true, but my sniffer isn’t very powerful so that one doesn’t really work for me. The feel, though--plastic ain’t paper, and that’s definitely a loss. But compared to the ability to easily lug around an ever-growing library in one slim device? I’ll happily accept the loss.

When Mark David Chapman Gets Paroled…

... would you hire him? If he’s been set free after all these years, and comes to you looking for a job, and is qualified in every way except that he’s Mark David Chapman and he not only killed a man, he killed John Lennon. Would you give Chapman a job?

It might depend on how old you are--if John’s murder is as distant to you as JFK’s is to me, then you might be (slightly) more inclined to hire MDC. Except of course that there’s still that bothersome history of mental illness, and the fact of a murder in his past. Not to mention how your customers might feel--if you’ve got a bunch of Beatles fans and they find out that man is working for you, might they decide to boycott your business? They might. They definitely might.

Or maybe it might depend on how much you love John Lennon. If you don’t at all, you might not even recognize MDC’s name. But even a cursory background check will reveal the truth, and you’ll then have all the peripheral objections I just mentioned.

(One odd and ironic fact: John Lennon wrote “Attica State” in solidarity with the inmates after the ’71 riot. Attica State is where his killer ended up being incarcerated.)

So I suppose you have to ask yourself, Do I believe people can be rehabilitated? Or, do I rather believe that some people are what they are and can never be changed and therefore should never be let out of prison? In which case, you might as well execute them because there’s no place for them in society therefore society is better off without them. With someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, that argument carries some weight.

But is Mark David Chapman in that same camp? Is he another Dahmer or Bundy or Manson? If we believe at all in the possibility of rehabilitation, mustn’t we extend that hope even to someone like Chapman?

But John’s death is not distant to me. I have been a rabid fan for decades, and I can’t stop wondering what John might have had to say about September 11th, and the war in Iraq, and the current wave of Islamophobia, and all the rest of it. I wish I could hear the songs he hadn’t written yet. Mark David Chapman, with his absurd Holden Caulfield fixation, took all of that away from all of us, and is it the sort of thing I can ever forgive?

(Here’s a recent piece in Time where Yoko Ono talks briefly about the difficulty of forgiving the man who murdered her husband.)

But there’s the beauty of a hypothetical (for me at least--for Yoko, it can never be hypothetical). Chapman was denied parole for the sixth time the other day, and it’ll be at least two years before he’s eligible again. I don’t have to answer this question in real life, and honestly, I have no idea how I would answer if it did come up. Would my deep-rooted sorrow over the loss of John Lennon outweigh an impulse I believe John would have supported, to believe that someone like that can be brought round again, to believe in second chances and the possibility that we can become better than we currently are? Or would I find myself fighting waves of nausea at the idea that that man was sitting in front of me?

What about you? If he came to you looking for a job, what do you think you might do? Hit me in the comments.

The Daily Beatle

What are friends for? Some days, they're about showing you stuff you hadn't seen before. Therefore, courtesy of my friend Rachel Coburn's recent Facebook post, I bring you catnip for a Beatles fan, Barry Lenser's encyclopedic, and massively entertaining, The Daily Beatle.

Enjoy.

You, Me and the Mythos

Here’s one advantage of keeping two blogs: linked entries. I’ll talk about the documentary I just watched here, but I’ll discuss one of the ideas it raises over on the Damn Lies blog. Collect the full set!

Over at Internet Marketing for Filmmakers, our current clients include Steven and Whitney Boe, two charming and clever folks who have created a film called Mythic Journeys. And though we’ve worked on some fine films, this one happens to come closest to my own sensibilities, so I want to rave about it a little, not to try and goose its sales (though its sales deserve to be spectacular), but simply because I like it a lot and feel like raving a little.

Okay, I always feel like raving a little. But here it’ll be specific raving.



It’s an odd duck of a film, part talking-heads interviews, and part narrative. With puppets. The backbone of the film is a retelling of a famous Indian story translated as “The Bone Orchard,” in which a king must rescue a corpse dangling from a tree and bring it back to a powerful magician—but the corpse keeps telling stories with complex moral questions, and every time the king’s answer is insufficient, the corpse reappears at the end of its rope, dangling from the same tree. So what you get is a very interesting documentary, punctuated by a really good stop-animation film using puppets by Brian and Wendy Froud, with voice work by Mark Hamill, Tim Curry and Lance Henriksen. (And each of the stories told by the corpse is done in yet another animation style.) It had the potential to be a mess, but it totally works.

It’s also one of the very few films where I ever sat there with a notepad out, scribbling things down. It’s obviously about myth, but the tag line is “Every life is a story, and a story can change the world,” which is exactly in line with my wacky novel. So I’ve thought about this stuff a lot, and am always eager to hear more—which is why the density of the material in this film has such great appeal for me. It gave me ideas, it sparked my imagination, and I will happily watch it more than once, then set it on my DVD shelf next to the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell set, with which it clearly belongs.

I won’t say any more. But it’s available through their site, through Amazon, all kinds of places. Check out a copy: it’s got the Bob Toombs Seal of Approval, so you know it’s top-notch.

Just Had to Mention...

...this new Facebook group. Plugging the Gulf Oil Leak With the Works of Ayn Rand. At last, a solution that cures two major problems!

A Thing Seen While Walking

A sign on a gate to someone’s backyard, nicely etched into a small piece of painted wood:

RABID DOG’S
KEEP-OUT

Being who I am, my eye is instantly drawn to spelling and grammatical errors, so this one with its pair of problems really leaped out. But for whatever reason, I started to dwell on this particular sign, and three possibilities suggest themselves:

1. The sign-maker is illiterate, and has no business making signs. The owners of the house aren’t terribly literate themselves, so I guess they got what they deserve. (Given the notion that the simplest solution is usually the best, this one has to get high marks.)

2. The sign is in fact correct. If the yard is being called a “keep-out,” which would be unusual but not impossible, and if there is only one dog who effectively owns the yard, then the grammar would be correct: it would in fact be the rabid dog’s keep-out. (This does not seem likely at all, but is my personal favorite alternative.)

3. The sign-maker is a crook who charges by the character. Of the eighteen characters on that sign, two shouldn’t be there but are. So if he’s charging, say, one dollar per character carved, those two extra bucks represent a significant markup in the real price of the work. And if he does that systematically, he’s conning a lot of people out of a lot of cash they don’t need to spend. (This one? More likely than it ought to be.)

The real curiosity here? The fact that my brain is wired in such a way that I will spend this much time pondering bad grammar without ever bothering to wonder--are there really rabid dogs back there? Do they ever jump the fence to maul passing strangers obsessed with grammar? Maybe that’s why the sign is as it is, to lure the grammatically-obsessed close enough that they can be picked off by rabid dog’s!

So yeah, man. Keep-out, please.