The Guitar Goes Plural

I was definitely not going to buy a new guitar. Even though for the past couple days I’ve been roaming the internet, looking at prices and models of electric basses, it wasn’t because I was planning to buy one. When my birthday comes around in a few months, then, sure, a nice cheap starter bass would be a wonderful present for myself. But not now. Nope, definitely not now.

Oh why do we persist in lying to ourselves so?

I had just been to the post office, mailing off the last of the tax forms. (One drawback to being self-employed: paying estimated taxes every quarter. Blah.) After months of work, the whole tax thing was finally completely done. And as it happens, the nearest post office branch is quite close to the venerable West L.A. Music.

“Well,” said I to my lying self, feeling good about the end of the whole tax thing, “when I do get a bass, I’ll definitely need a metronome with which to practice. It is a rhythm instrument, after all. Maybe I should just go get a metronome now, so that I’ll have it when the time comes.” While trying to decide this I was walking home, in the opposite direction from the music store, so that I ended up making a long tortured loop to get back to the store. Where I was definitely going to only buy a metronome. And maybe a pickup for the acoustic guitar, but that was it, for sure.

And the guy behind the counter--who happened to be their bass guitar expert--had to enter some stuff in his computer, during which I just kinda looked around, around, drums, keyboards, guitars, basses, and . . . “Hey, I’m not gonna buy today, but do you think I could maybe try out a couple of your basses?” Just so I could get a feel for a model I might like. You know. When the time comes.

Now, I’ve never played so much as a single note on a bass. But it is, really, the instrument I’ve always been drawn to. When I listen to music, it’s the bass line that my ear always follows, the bass line I always find myself humming. It’s probably true that I only bought the acoustic in order to learn the rudiments of stringed instruments before getting a bass. And being such a rank beginner, I wasn’t even considering a fretless bass because, really, you need to be an expert to play one of those. But the guy at the store, he asked what kind of bass work I was likely to want to play, and, thinking of the ne plus ultra bass work in “Come Together,” I said that I probably wanted something with a really fluid sound.

He immediately picked up a fretless bass. But it turns out that Squier (the cheap division of Fender) makes a fretless bass where, and this is just brilliant, the fret lines are painted on the neck. All the sound of a fretless bass, but there are still guides for beginners like me to follow. Dead simple—and as soon as I hit a couple notes and ran my fingers up and down the neck, well hell, I was completely hooked.

But still, I said “This is great, I’m definitely gonna want one of these in a couple months.” The clever guy, he said maybe he could drop the price a little, and went off to check. At exactly this moment, my phone happened to ring with some very good news about a meeting Marc Rosenbush had just had that went really quite remarkably well. Suddenly I was feeling, oh that most horrible of things, optimistic.

Twenty minutes later, I walked out with a bass. And an amp too, of course. And a strap. Plus that bloody metronome.

The acoustic is a complex instrument--six strings, and lots of chord-playing in infinite variations. A bass has only four strings, and you can get away with a lot by just playing one string at a time. It just sorta works for me, it makes an immediate kind of sense, in a way that the guitar still doesn’t. After only one day of practice--mostly spent endlessly repeating the various notes along the E string, trying to drill them into my brain, and keeping time with the metronome--I still don’t know much at all. But I’m having a hell of a time.

(And now I have to go down to San Diego for the weekend, and leave the bass behind. Which suddenly seems like a very great sacrifice indeed.)

Not buying a bass. Yeah, right. Tell me another one.

In Which I Do My Bit for the Alumni Association

Went to an alumni event for Emerson College the other night, one that targeted people from the years when I attended. (1820 to 1743.) So it was fun to see some folks I had sorta-kinda known back in the day, and extra-fun to see someone I really truly did know (and acted with). Emerson, though a Boston school, has a good alumni group out here, in fact the motion picture industry sometimes refers to an “Emerson mafia” of grads spread throughout the biz, networking through events just like this one. And hey, who wouldn’t want to work his way into a mafia that doesn’t involve actually, you know, killing people? Executives from a couple of the major studios, fellow graduates, were in the room, and happy to talk to other alumni. That’s a good room to be in.

I was of course reminded of my halcyon schooldays, there in the heart of Boston’s Back Bay, right across from the Public Gardens and the Common. I went to the school sight-unseen--a friend of a friend had recommended it, and the more I heard, the more I knew that this kind of school was exactly what I wanted. Emerson has always been a hands-on place, which makes it, unfortunately, a rare commodity in the higher-ed world. I auditioned, for example, at Boston University, and was told that I couldn’t possibly expect to get into a mainstage show until my junior year. At Emerson, I was cast in a mainstage show, doing Shakespeare, before orientation week was done. Which meant that I spent all four years working like crazy, in every space they had, doing classics and new pieces, and discovering, among other things, Samuel Beckett, who became one of my theatre gods. (A thousand thanks to Ron Jenkins, who handed me a copy of “Krapp’s Last Tape” and said “Here, you should do this.”)

For the last many years, Emerson has run something called The L.A. Center out here, in rented space in Toluca Lake. This is of course ground zero for the Emerson mafia, but last week they announced that they’ve bought property in Hollywood (near the Sunset Gower Studios) in order to build a permanent facility with much greater capacity. Which means the Emerson mafia should only grow, and it gives my company a great resource for new interns. We alumni have been encouraged to submit our ideas for how the new space should be constituted, and I think I’m going to do exactly that--something about the idea of finding ways to mix students from the various disciplines has a lot of appeal to me.

See, back when I was a student, the theatre department was in a building on Brimmer Street (just around the corner from the Bull and Finch, the outside of which was seen every week on Cheers). The film people were part of the mass communications department, which was in a different building, and there really wasn’t much mingling. (And none of us ever saw the communications disorders people.) I had a couple friends who managed to bridge the various departments, but I was so theatre-centric that I rarely left what we called “Brimmer World.” And as I wandered around the room at that alumni event, I saw people who graduated my year who I had really never known. Since I’m a big believer that artists should have interests that are as broad as possible, the fact that I essentially sequestered myself for four years means that I probably missed out on a lot of interesting possibilities. (I only acted in one student film that whole time, f’r instance.)

So I think I will make that suggestion. And I’m thinking that maybe I should volunteer to talk to prospective students from time to time--after all, it was a dinner held by a South Florida alum when I was just a prospect that made me realize, finally, that this was the school I wanted. That’s a favor I would really enjoy returning. And given that the school is still just as hands-on as it ever was, I can still recommend it just as heartily as ever. So if you're interested in a communications field and you believe that the best way to learn something is to get your hands dirty, here you go, here's the place for you.

There you go. Does this mean I don't have to contribute cash now when they call?

Hey Mikey! and Other Myths

Stories Persist

So I was talking to my brother last night, and somehow we got onto the subject of Pop Rocks. These, of course, are the fizzy candies that make little sizzling sounds on your tongue. They were introduced to the public when I was 10 years old, and I was a little surprised that Adam even knew what they were, because that meant they were still around--seeing as he's 18-plus years younger than I. I was even more surprised that he knew the Mikey story.

As reported here on Snopes, the Mikey story is completely false. The kid from the LIFE cereal commercials ("He likes it! Hey Mikey!") most emphatically did not die from eating a combination of Pop Rocks and soda pop, indeed he is still really most sincerely alive, and I knew the story had been debunked when I was a kid, lo those many, many (many!) years ago. Which is why it was amazing to find that the story still circulates, that my 20-years-younger brother was just as familiar with it as I had been.

Even Older

I shouldn't have been surprised. In the theatre, there are people who still get nervous if you whistle inside a theatre space. Sometimes they don't know why, but they've been told they should and so, actors in particular being big bundles of hypochondria and paranoia, they start to thrum and hum. The reason for it all is simple: back in the day (way back in the day), the people who worked the riggings in a theatre--the ones raising and lowering backdrops and set pieces--were former sailors, and they communicated with each other using, yes, whistles. So that if one were to casually whistle a jaunty tune inside a theatre, he or she was somewhat likely to have a sandbag dropped on his or her no-longer-whistling head.

We haven't had sailors in the flies for eons. We still avoid the whistling thing.

Something in a Name

It can get even stranger. I've told the Macbeth story before, but there's a variation on it: I have now met not one but two unrelated people whose last name just happens to be, really truly, Macbeth. So of course I had to ask the question: when inside a theatre, how do they introduce themselves? And yes, they are indeed reduced to having to say something like "Hi, I'm Mary the Scottish play."

I'm sure there are popular myths that are even older. (Black cat crossing your path, perhaps? I'll bet that one's got centuries on it.) But really, when I think about it, sure these things are nonsense--but they add some whimsy to life. They may be aggravating to the Mikeys of the world, and anyone who shares a name with the Scottish play, but there's never enough whimsy in life. And so, knowing I am in error, here's to poor dead Mikey, may he fizz in peace.

A Tale of Two Transcripts (Part 2)

The Jabbering Class

The Privileged Few, they will have their say. Years ago, they ensconced one of their own, Roger Ailes, as the head of Fox News. As everyone knows, Fox News has ever since been the Pravda of the conservative right, their “fair and balanced” being no more fair and balanced than Pravda ever actually represented “truth.”

In the wake of Sen. Obama’s speech, Sean Hannity seized the occasion. He responded to Obama’s challenging speech on race by not at all dealing with race. It also ended on an astonishing note of self-adulation, but I’ll get to that later.

Hannity invited Frank Luntz to dissect the Obama speech. Luntz is a very smart man who bills himself as a pollster, even though the kinds of polls he runs are the ones designed to make people answer questions the way the pollster wants them to. (He himself has said so.) What Luntz really is, is a semantician. He’s a manipulator of language, highly in demand in the Republican party for his ability to make language bend the people to its will. But calling himself a pollster (even though he has been frequently sanctioned by polling organizations) allows him to pretend he is impartial and above the fray. In other words, calling himself a pollster is itself a semantician’s manipulation of language.

The First Absurd Salvo

Luntz’s very first critique of the Obama speech was in itself pretty astonishing:

Well, the first thing is that he read it on the telemprompter and, frankly, he didn’t read it that well. When you are in a situation where you’re being challenged, when your credibility is under attack.... Don’t ever read a teleprompter. Look at them straight in the eye.

Sounds like an interesting left-field critique, but it’s simply an attempt to diminish Obama’s vaunted oratorical skill. (Which scares the bejeebers out of his political opponents.) When one is speaking on a subject as charged as race, where time and again we have seen people make tiny off-the-cuff misstatements that have been seized upon and wrung dry (as Obama himself did with his “typical white woman” remark a couple days later), the last thing on earth you want to do is stand in front of the nation and wing it. (Wouldn’t they have just loved it if he had. Because then, then they’d have had something they could’ve worked with. Some bone they could have gnawed for months.)

Also, it seemed plain to me that Obama deliberately kept his delivery flat in order to stay away from anything that sounded, in a word, preachery. It was necessary for him to draw as a sharp a contrast as he could between his calm, measured oratory and the flights of passion that seized Rev. Wright. We know from Obama’s other speeches that he can wind up a crowd real good, but this wasn’t the time. Luntz deliberately ignores all this in order to make the false claim that Obama’s speech was (a) insincere and (b) dull.

(Of course, insincere and dull is exactly what we get every time our current president reads from the teleprompter, but let’s stick to the subject.)

But Wait, There's More

Mr. Luntz then dares the following, referring to Obama’s comment that Rev. Wright “contains within him the contradictions, the good and the bad of the community that he has served”:

This is not your hairdresser. This is not the guy who does your nails. This is your pastor. This is your rabbi; this is your priest. This is a spiritual leader of a community.

In response to that, one need only say: Jerry Falwell. Pat Robertson. Both of whom claimed, as Rev. Wright did, that America deserved 9/11 for its sins, except that for Falwell and Robertson those sins were liberalism and homosexuality, while for Wright the sin was slavery and racism. Pick your poison.

Luntz and Hannity then engaged in a very poorly-defined critique of this line from Obama: “I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother....” Seizing, inevitably, on the word “disown,” they said, essentially, that it was bad without ever actually saying why. Frequent cohost Kristin Powers, a Democratic Party operative, tried to weigh in, without much effect.

LUNTZ: ... Barack Obama is an outstanding communicator.... But I now follow the words that he chooses. And if you watch his speech overall, it is Kennedy-esque. But the moment that you start to look at the language—and I’ve got the text here. That word “disown”...

HANNITY: Yes.

LUNTZ: ... he’s going to pay a price for that in that he brings in his own family and tries to do that.

HANNITY: Because he stays friends when he says he doesn’t disown. He’s still friends with the guy.

POWERS: But wasn’t he talking about the...

LUNTZ: More than just friends.

POWERS: Wasn’t he talking about the complexities of people? That’s the way I heard that.

LUNTZ: You are correct. And he’s trying to explain it. But the problem is when you get to words like “disown,” it’s a rationalization. It’s a defense rather than an explanation.

Is it? Why? After all the clamor for Obama to do exactly that, to disown his pastor, now when he refuses to do so suddenly the word “disown” is really a meaningless rationalization? It’s the semantic version of sour grapes, basically. But of course Luntz doesn’t really explain what he’s trying to say effectively, except for a very vague complaint that Obama equates his grandmother with his pastor. Which was, of course, entirely the point: as Ms. Powers correctly tried to note, Obama was stating that his pastor is imperfect and complex just as his grandmother was, but that he wasn’t about to abandon someone so important in his life just because of some disagreements. (My own great-grandmother, born in Virginia in 1898, once referred to some black children as “pickaninnies.” Should I disown or disavow her?)

This whole thing with Rev. Wright has been a massive attempt to create guilt by association. It is thus disingenuous (at best) to complain when Obama associates his imperfect grandmother with his imperfect pastor.

And by the way, Gary Kamiya has an excellent response to Rev. Wright’s comments in today’s Salon, asserting that “Wright isn’t the problem. Stupid patriotism is the problem.” With which I entirely agree.

Saying Much, Doing Nothing

Luntz then raises a question that seems to deal with the issue, but doesn’t. It has the effect of making him sound high-minded without his having to actually, you know, be high-minded.

Can we have a discussion in this country about race where we don’t have an approach that tries to level accusations? And can we have a discussion that doesn’t say that whites are racist and African-Americans are not? [Obama neither said nor implied any such thing. Plainly.] Are we going to have this kind of open conversation?
And one other point.... There are issues of economy. Our economy is melting down... and yet, Barack Obama is now responding to his pastor....

You’ve gotta love it. Let’s have an open and frank discussion about race, he seems to say, and then he pivots to the economy. And as to that point, Obama delivered another major address the very next day, on the subject of the Iraq war, then dealt with the economy the day after that. So you can’t say that Obama is getting distracted from other issues, since the very next day he turned to other issues. The thing is--nobody paid any attention to these speeches. Race is a red-meat issue, and that’s all anyone wanted to report on. Obama asked whether we were going to allow ourselves to continue to be distracted, and the media then proceeded to try very hard to distract us.

Then, of course, there was the section of the speech where Obama said that the people trying to distract us, The Privileged Few, include “talkshow hosts and political commentators.” No surprise, Luntz found that personally offensive.

Now, look, let’s talk about class warfare, which is what the Democrats have always tried to do against the Republicans. [Because it’s what the Republicans have been actually doing for lo these many years—the upper class successfully dominating every other class. The Democrats take the trouble to point this out, and get accused of attempting to wage class warfare.] ... This is not about Republicans talking about affirmative action or welfare or Democrats or whatever. This is about a religious figure, a very important person in Senator Obama’s life, who has a point of view that is frightening.

Again: Robertson and Falwell. If you’re going to make the guilt-by-association argument, you have to be open to the possibility that your side is just as tainted, if not more so.

Sean Hannity Ventures an Opinion

Mr. Hannity went on to say:

What if Barack Obama, for the entire year that the MoveOn media out there has ignored any scrutiny of him, and they’ve gone along with the bumper sticker of change and the slogans. What if he really deep down in his heart thinks like Pastor Wright? ... I think that would be dangerous. That would mean we would have—if he agreed with Wright, and I don’t know that he does, but if he did, that would mean a racist and an anti-Semite would be president of the United States.

Note how artfully that was phrased (Luntz must have helped on this before the show)--while at the same time appearing to be fair by noting that he has no idea whether Obama actually feels that way, Hannity nonetheless found a way to state forcefully and affirmatively, in solid declarative language, “that would mean a racist and an anti-Semite would be president of the United States.”

Do you feel scared yet? Well why not?! What are you, stupid? A racist and an anti-Semite would be president! You should be terrified of that! Vote Republican!

It went on like that for a while, mixing the “we don’t really know whether he feels that way” language with more fear-mongering, until finally they got weirdly self-congratulatory.

The Grand Finale

Hannity claimed that he was the one who got the Rev. Wright scoop in the first place. Which may be true, I don’t know and I don’t particularly care who scooped whom. But he used this claim to further assert that McCain and Clinton should “stay away from this [issue] and let those of us that have led from the beginning continue to talk about it.”

Yes, it’s true: Sean Hannity, a leading voice for racial dialogue. Bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you?

LUNTZ: And you’ve got the evidence. You’ve got the tape that proves it. Congratulations, Sean.

HANNITY: Thanks. We’ll talk more in the future.

And... commercial break!

I have nothing further to say.

A Tale of Two Transcripts (Part 1)

In Philadelphia

Across the street from Independence Hall on Tuesday morning, there was a moment when, as observers as disparate as David Gergen and Jon Stewart noted, a major American politician spoke to us as if we were adults.

There are two transcripts related to that moment in our American life that I want to deal with. The first is of Senator Obama’s speech, delivered at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia; then I’ll talk about a certain response to it that exemplifies from where the fight is going to come.

The transcript of Obama’s speech is here; there is YouTube video of it here.

Unclean Hands

Let me first start by saying that Senator Obama does not have clean hands on this issue. His campaign has been just as guilty of “playing the race card” as Senator Clinton’s--if not more so. To pick just one example, there was the moment when Senator Clinton said in a speech, “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” To me, that never read as a denigration of Dr. King’s role in the civil rights movement, it was simply a realistic reading of the often-necessary interplay between visionaries and institutions, and it was also just what she said it was: a recognition of the role that governments can play when they are run well. (Not to say that the Johnson administration was always well run, but let’s not get distracted by that argument.) I’ve said for years now, when small-government activists get all up in my face about how government should keep out of everything except defense and trade, that the Civil Rights Act is a prime example of something that a powerful central government can do beyond the initial scope of its powers--the southern states clearly didn’t want to enact any such legislation, but were forced to by the combined strength of the northern and western states, to everyone’s long-term benefit. Dr. King could not have done it alone, and that’s exactly the point Sen. Clinton was trying to make.

But the Obama campaign took it as an attempt to downplay Dr. King’s importance, which I for one never thought it was, and it bothered me--a lot--that the Obama campaign was willing to go there.

So when I heard that Sen. Obama was going to deliver a “major address” on the subject of race, I did not approach it with the same sort of “Obamatry” that characterizes some of his more ardent supporters--an unquestioning adoration that is in itself a little worrisome. No, I simply wanted to hear what he had to say, hoping against hope that he might just say something valuable.

The Race Problem

Scapegoating of The Other is a problem that has been long with us--for exactly as long as The Many have been exploited by The Powerful Few. Limiting our discussion to the American experience, Howard Zinn has pointed out how white landowners in the southern colonies pitted their black slaves against the local native tribes in order to keep both in line. None of this is new; our current “immigration debate” was sparked by absolutely nothing--except for a desire by those in power to invent an argument by which they could keep themselves in power. There was no actual event that set it in motion, the number of people illegally crossing the border is pretty much the same as it has been for quite a while now, but some bright spark realized that by exploiting fear of The Other, s/he could make plenty of good political hay. And so we continue to fuss and fret over the issue, all the while dancing to the tune of The Powerful Few.

Through it all, at least since the Civil Rights Act (1964), race has been much spoken of, but almost never with any seriousness. Opportunities for minorities slowly grew over time, and as we (by “we” I mean white people such as me, which in its broader sense means those of us who happen to have been born into the “right” club) saw those opportunities expand, we allowed ourselves to believe, without ever really questioning whether it was actually true or not, that the problem was resolved or, at least, resolving.

But all that meant was that we grew fat and self-satisfied, ignoring whatever subterranean currents still remained, hiding away in our desperate little souls. When a Michael Richards came along, a comedian taking outrageousness past the point of comedy, we jumped on that poor man with a word that has become every bit as bad as “pedophile,” calling him “racist” without ever questioning whether maybe we all had some Michael Richards in us.

Actually, that’s probably exactly why we jumped on him so hard--how dare he say what we know we’re not supposed to say! That breaks the code, it brings something into the open that we’d prefer remain buried. And as a result, Michael Richards’s career is destroyed--and we once again manage to avoid having the real discussion about race that we desperately need to have.

But then on Tuesday, Barack Obama stepped up to the podium.

The Speech

Running about forty minutes long and delivered, deliberately, without preacher-like fervor, the speech was clearly a bit of damage control in the wake of comments by Sen. Obama’s longtime, pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But there are lots of ways to approach damage control, and Sen. Obama took the high road, using Rev. Wright’s inflammatory preaching (“God damn America!”) to search for the pain beneath it--and then to reach even higher and seek for the pain that underlies the myriad forms of racism in every American’s soul. He worked just as hard to find the resentments felt by underprivileged whites as he did in elucidating the long history of subjugation and oppression felt by blacks in America.

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience--as far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything. They built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

Perhaps Obama is uniquely qualified to make such a speech, coming from a racially-mixed background that makes him both black and white, with relatives, as he noted, spread across three continents. (Lord knows George Bush could never have given a speech such as this--setting aside the question of whether he’s even capable of it, he simply wouldn’t be credible.)

The whole purpose of the speech was to take the broader view. Rev. Wright said some reprehensible things, but Obama also told of the man he’s known for more than twenty years...

As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.... He contains within him the contradictions--the good and the bad--of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

Which of course reminds me of that greatest of American poets, Walt Whitman, who gloried in the rich complexities of life, and who of course said “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Whitman understood this over a century ago; Obama understands it now. But The Powerful Few need us to wallow in false certainty; they peddle a Manichaean, black-and-white (literally) worldview in which a “wrong” word automatically equates to a wrong person, in which no one is allowed to be complex but must be perfectly simple--or else immediately and categorically denied. Often these Powerful Few are professed Christians, but they have of course entirely forgotten--willfully forgotten--Christ’s warning: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

Or, as Obama put it himself:

Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze--a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.

(Within minutes of this you heard conservative pundits proclaiming how offended they were that Obama had “stooped” to the political in this passage. The Powerful Few will do what they must to protect their privileges--but that’s for the next installment of this little essay.)

Obama’s best passage is also his most insightful:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress had been made; as if this country--a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old--is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen--is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope--the audacity to hope--for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

It is here that his endlessly-repeated leitmotif of change shifts its shape, metamorphosing from a political slogan to something like a real ideology--a vision of an America that is never static, that, as Obama said in his speech, “...may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.” America represents an ongoing evolution in the idea of human rights, a constant expansion from the limited sense that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote “all men are created equal,” an expansion that continues today with all its attendant strains--Jefferson surely never imagined that transgendered individuals would one day seek their equal rights, but once that door of equality was opened, it was inevitable that one day everyone, absolutely everyone, would insist on passing through. The process is never easy, but it becomes impossible if we look at the nation as something static and constant and cold, something that does not evolve or change.

Obama himself is the change he seeks; and if there’s any justice at all in the world, the challenge he posed on Tuesday--implicitly asking us, by treating us as adults, whether or not we will in fact act like adults--will end with him in the White House. Where my most fervent hope is that he will continue to lead through challenge for the next many years, exactly as he did this week.

Now that, that would be the kind of president I’ve been waiting my whole life for.

Next time... the Powerful Few jabber back.

Oh, Shut Up

A recent story in USA Today reported on an Associated Press/Ipsos poll that found, not so surprisingly, that Americans don't read much. The most widely quoted statistic was that one person in four read no books at all last year. This was widely noted when the story came out, and much lamented. But that's not what I want to talk about.

No, there was a companion story that I found more interesting, though not in a good way. In it, former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, who is now president of the American Association of Publishers, was asked about a statistic from the study that seems to show liberals read more than conservatives. What she said was, basically, idiotic:

"The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes.'... It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page."... She said liberals tend to be policy wonks who "can't say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion."

Now see, it seems to me that if books are imperiled, the president of an association that seeks to promote books probably shouldn't go around insulting any potential readers. Because that is of course the only thing she accomplished: she insulted the intelligence of anyone who has ever thought of himself or herself as a conservative. (The late William F. Buckley, to pick only one example, was in no way a man who limited himself to sloganeering.)

Her quote is on its face utter nonsense, and it's no surprise that it drew an immediate, equally idiotic, response from the other side of the ideological divide.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Schroeder was "confusing volume with quality" with her remarks. "Obfuscation usually requires a lot more words than if you simply focus on fundamental principles, so I'm not at all surprised by the loquaciousness of liberals," he said.

Nice use of big words in a quote insulting people who use big words, but that's where the fun stops.

What it all demonstrates is that the culture wars rage on because too many people just can't let go. Ms. Schroeder can't stop being a Democratic Congresswoman, even though she hasn't actually been one for eleven years. She is still attached to her old "glory" days, and in the process is doing a major disservice to the very institution she's supposed to be promoting in the here and now. Conservative Mary Matalin said it correctly in the same article: "As head of a book publishing association, she probably shouldn't malign any readers."

No, Ms. Schroeder damn well shouldn't. The fact that people aren't reading is serious stuff, and she damn well ought to know better than to make things worse by pretending to be what she isn't anymore. Let's please drop the partisan bullshit and focus on what really matters, shall we?

On Netflix

By the way...

For those of you who've been curious about Zen Noir (still available for purchase on our website!), you will I'm sure be delighted to know that it is at last available for rental on Netflix.

And just to make things extra-easy, here's a link straight to it. Because I'm nice that way, y'see.

Peas Blaze Significantly

Ignoring for the moment the other controversy surrounding the New York Times, I will note that last Sunday they published a piece asking the question "Is PBS Still Necessary?" Written by Charles McGrath, former editor of the Times's Book Review, the piece manages to mostly avoid the old conservatives-hate-PBS nonsense, and focuses instead on whether, in the cable era, PBS is still relevant. Okay, fair question. Let's look at it.

Ratings - McGrath writes,

The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or roughly what the wrestling show “Friday Night Smackdown” gets.

But what he doesn't tell us is anything about how those ratings numbers change over time. Do they show a steady decline to this 1.4 million number? Or are there peaks and valleys? It's entirely possible that he has picked the lowest number of a valley and claimed it as representative of PBS's ratings--just as it's equally possible that he picked the highest number of a peak. There's no way to tell from this article. (And of course I'm altogether too lazy to go and find out.)

So on the question of ratings, I can only look at my own experience. Yes, there was a long period when I watched very little of what was on PBS. Cable channels had indeed stolen my attention away. But the funny thing is that lately, I've been finding my way back (which is probably why I chose to write this today). It wasn't a conscious decision--it just happened on its own. I would flip through channels looking for something interesting, and more and more it would be something on PBS. Not new shows, either, so I don't think it's a result of programming changes to attract bigger audiences, I think it's just that my own tastes have brought me back to what was always there. This is why I ask what the ratings trends are, since I clearly see in my own viewing habits just the sort of valley and peak I was talking about. And as far as I'm concerned, PBS is on the uptick.

Content - After a quick survey of PBS's involvement in the culture wars, McGrath writes,

Scanning the PBS lineup, in fact, it’s hard to detect much of a bias toward anything at all, except possibly mustiness. Except for “Antiques Roadshow,” all the prime-time stalwarts — “The NewsHour,” “Nova,” “Nature,” “Masterpiece” — are into their third or fourth decade, and they look it.

Funny thing, though: "NewsHour" is one of the programs I've recently rediscovered. True enough, the program looks like a dinosaur in the modern visual age, with a complete absence of the sort of visual flair you can find on even mid-market local newscasts. But that's exactly why I've rediscovered it: I've been watching more news programming, what with the presidential campaign and all, and it took very little time for me to grow--well, disgusted is the only word I can use for network content. I used to be a big Peter Jennings fan but of course he's gone, and even on the best of the current crop, NBC's program with Brian Williams, the news floats by like that paper bag in American Beauty: beautiful in its strange little way, but as soon as the wind dies down it's just a scrap of trash again.

No, NewsHour, with musty old Jim Lehrer, is news for adults. It covers more in sixty minutes than CNN does in 24 hours, with no frills, just a whole lot of content. And on Fridays there is the best public-affairs program on television, Bill Moyers Journal. The other night, Moyers did an eye-opening interview with former NPR journalist Sarah Chayes on Afghanistan that would, if there was any justice at all, entirely change the conversation on what's happening over there. An overview, plus a complete transcript, can be found on the Journal's website, and is completely worth your time. Believe me: if you want to know what's actually going on in the world, Bill Moyers is your man. (Which is of course exactly why the conservatives in power hate him so much.)

McGrath also takes a potshot at what used to be called "Masterpiece Theatre" but is now simply "Masterpiece," writing that PBS is "so strapped for cash that ['Masterpiece'] has pretty much settled into an all-Jane Austen format." Which is, again, a cherry-picking of a single recent offering, a slate of Jane Austen adaptations, some new and some repeats like the fabulous Pride and Prejudice adaptation of ten years ago with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. But of course "Masterpiece" also ran, about a year ago, a brilliant BBC adaptation of Bleak House that in fact entirely undercuts McGrath's argument--because this Bleak House ran on PBS, not on its cable competitor BBC America, which you would think would be a natural conduit for BBC content such as this.

Similarly, just this past week I've been engrossed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s African American Lives 2, which is not on BET or any other cable channel, but on PBS. I'm grateful to have it on any channel--but here, once again, is PBS bringing me something incredibly enriching that I didn't even know I wanted to see till I saw it.

The glaring omissison - I can't quote what he gets most wrong, because he simply never touches on it at all, even though it remains PBS's greatest, most enduring strength: Sesame Street is simply not mentioned. Which I think speaks for itself.

On the other hand - McGrath also notes,

"...and that’s not to mention pledge programs, the fund-raising equivalent of water-boarding."

Granted. No argument from me there.

Added, ten minutes later - Just as I finished revising this entry, my iTunes library (which has almost 9,000 tracks) randomly chose to play "The Prince of Denmark's March" by Jeremiah Clarke, which of course happens to be the music used as the intro for "Masterpiece Theatre." Weird.

Well, Yay

So the strike is over. Pardon me while I quietly stand for a moment and say: "Yippee."

The terms aren't ideal, but on a macro level, the most important elements of the deal were resolved in the writers' favor. As an example, if I'm reading this correctly, a formula was created for internet content whereby writers will receive a percentage of distributor's gross revenue--something about which the producers definitely had their backs up. What it means, in brief, is that money generated by a program on the internet will get split with its writers--money that is usually generated mostly through advertising. The producers kept claiming that writers have never taken a direct share of advertising money before (that point is arguable--depends on how you define revenues from commercials) and that they shouldn't now; but it appears the producers caved on that point.

The overriding thing is this: everybody went back to work today. Jon Stewart should have his writers improving his show as soon as tonight (and he needs them...), CBS has already announced return dates for 14 of their shows, and I'm sure that every production company in town has been buried under phone calls. We've got some calls to make ourselves... to see whether any of the people we were talking to before the strike are still employed. (We already know of a couple who were fired, meaning we're basically back to square one with those companies. So it goes.)

The Screen Actors Guild is next, with a contract expiration date of June 30th. Some A-list talent (George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and so forth) are already agitating for early negotiations with the producers, in hopes of getting all the issues resolved way in advance without any risk of work slowdowns. (It's been standard practice for months now to make sure that any production will be done by June 30th.)

I figure that SAG will indeed get their issues resolved pretty quickly, or at least well in advance of June 30th. Between the DGA and WGA deals, there's already a fair consensus over what the new numbers look like in Hollywood. There shouldn't be too much left for the actors to have to wrangle over.

So there we are. Something very like success for my dear writer friends, and now everyone leaps back to work with a vengeance. Well, yay.

No Electioneering Within 100 Feet of This Blog

I've always been an early-morning voter. Just seems the sort of thing that, when it comes around, I like to get under my belt first thing. Makes the rest of the day seem a little brighter, at least until the actual results come in and then, you know, generally cloudy skies and thunderbolts.

And see, the whole problem with front-loading the primary schedule is that I didn't get to vote for the guy I actually wanted to vote for. John Edwards pulled out last week, to my great surprise and disappointment. And since, in a two-way contest, I have a clear preference for Obama over Clinton, and since the polls have it so very close between them, this didn't seem the right occasion to be casting symbolic votes. Therefore I voted Obama, and am happy to have done so--but would have been even happier to have voted for Edwards.

My polling place is in a National Guard station, with a big, I don't know, a howitzer or something stationed outside and, inside, a lovely picture of weapons of war shooting at each other. (Which is okay, because of course that's what these guys do--but there were no pictures of people anywhere, nothing human on display.) (Although there was a vending machine where you could buy Fresca, so there you go.)

Some arcane rule seems to have been put in place, the intent of which was to allow independents to vote Democrat if they wish. But the result was pure confusion: there were booths set aside for independent voters, clearly marked as such; but every time someone went into one of them, a poll worker had to pop out of her chair and pull them out, telling them to go into one of the marked "DEM" booths. I predict stories will soon emerge about large numbers of spoiled independent ballots.

What this meant was that independents and Democrats had to line up to wait for a free DEM booth--and this neighborhood being what it is, the whole notion of an equal number of REP and DEM booths is simply absurd. The booths for Republicans stood empty the whole time I was there, and Democrats stood in line. Pure silliness.

Still, I've done my bit. Got my sticker, and now it's off to the rest of my bright, bright day.

iTunes at Work

So it's gettin' on tax time hereabouts, and there's things gotta be done. 1099s and W2s to send out, and so forth. Exactly the sorts of things I like doing the least, but they've got to get done and I'm the guy's got to do it. Okey-doke.

Making it all survivable are the lovely random offerings served up by iTunes all morning long. For no reason except that I needed a five-minute break from it all, here's a list of the last ten numbers I've been treated to this morning:

1) "Serve Yourself," a home-recorded screed from John Lennon shortly before he died
2) "Underdog World Strike" by Gogol Bordello--the irresistible combination of punk rock and gypsy fiddle
3) "Galaxy of Emptiness," Beth Orton--too long at ten minutes-plus, but nice to zone out to while working the numbers
4) "The Good Intent," Rosanne Cash--from her devastating tribute album to both her parents and her step-mother as well
5) "Waltz in A Minor" by Chopin, played by Vladimir Ashkenazy--simply great
6) "Contemplation Rose," Van Morrison--from his ridiculously strong collection of "cast-offs" called "The Philosopher's Stone"
7) "Earth Angel," the classic recorded by The Penguins in 1954
8) "Fancy Free - Finale," by Bernstein--not my favorite of his pieces, but still pretty good
9) "Baci, soavi, e cari," a 16th-century song recorded by The Deller Consort
10) "Song Song Song," by an outfit called Final Fantasy (yes, after the videogame)--I have two tracks from this album and they're both catchy as hell

And playing right now? Well, when I started it was Wyclef Jean's "Fresh Interlude" from his first "Carnival" album, but now it's the first movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, conducted by Karl Bohm.

Quite a lot of variety. No jazz on the list, though this morning I've had some Mingus and some Ellington. But now, alack and alas, numbers beckon and I am obliged to respond.

Optimism vs. Cynicism: A Polite Smackdown

The Strike

So there's good news regarding the Writers Guild strike. As has now been reported broadly (but I heard it first from Nikki Finke), United Artists struck its own deal with the WGA, reportedly agreeing to all the proposals the WGA was about to make when the producers walked out of the last negotiation.

And why is that good news? Neil Gaiman tells us why in his blog, reporting Monday that he had just gotten "a phone call from my agent letting me know that United Artists was the first studio to sign a deal with the Writer's Guild, and that if I wanted to write a film for them, or sell them the rights to a book, I could." UA has now become, essentially, the only game in town for feature writers, thus giving the studio first access to every screenwriter on earth, basically. (Or at least those not locked into first-look deals with other companies, who are truly screwed.) It makes a world of sense: since taking over UA, Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner (she too started out as an actor) have had only one major release, Lions for Lambs, which, to put it politely, didn't do well. And since they only just took over, that's a lousy track record--with investors breathing down their necks. So anything that gets them back in the producing game, particularly with exclusive access to primo material, had to be like a deal from heaven. (It also honors the original imprimatur of United Artists, which was created by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford precisely to honor the work of artists rather than businessmen.)

It sounds fantastic. The optimist in me is thrilled.

But there's also the cynic in me. And he got busy fast. What if? I wondered. What if this is just a cynical ploy by the big conglomerates who run the studios? Sure, we heard rumors that the other moguls were royally pissed at MGM's Harry Sloan (a major investor in UA) for "allowing" the deal to happen, but what if that was actually the plan all along? Because the studios are clearly unified under the banner of the AMPTP, and that smacks a little too much of collusion, which is of course illegal under federal labor laws. What if the studios are allowing their smallest fish to make this one deal, so that they can then claim there can't possibly be collusion because, come on, look at UA!

Rumors abound that other companies, most notably Lionsgate, The Weinstein Company and Lucasfilm, are now also considering side deals. If one or all of those happen, fantastic. But if nothing further happens, if there are no more side deals, I'm afraid the cynic in me will start exulting in victory.

UPDATE: The Weinstein Company just announced their own side deal. So hey, maybe there is a little domino thing happening here after all. Reason to be cautiously optimistic.

The Primaries

So Hillary won New Hampshire. Good for her. That tearful moment certainly answered the craving for authenticity that people feel--particularly when she has seemed so lamentably inauthentic all along. It's almost as if people have been waiting for her to give them some reason, any reason, to vote for her, and all along she's been doing exactly the opposite--but finally succumbed, just in time, with spectacular results. Bravo Hillary.

But here's the thing. As much as I love Bill Clinton, I can't help remembering that infamous moment when he was attending the funeral of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, his good friend who had died in a plane crash. He was laughing with someone, then spotted a camera and immediately turned to tears. Politicians are politicians, and, as I said, though I am overall a big supporter of Big Bill and would love to see him back in the White House, still, it cannot be denied that he understands the PR value of emotion and might have advised Hillary at some point that a few tears couldn't hurt.


HD DVD vs. Blu Ray

Several months back, despite knowing the dangers, I bought an HD DVD player. The price had dropped dramatically, into the under-$300 range, which turned out to be my trigger point, while Blu Ray players were all still well above that price. And it seemed to me, optimistically, that if the under-$300 range was my trigger, that would probably be true for a lot of other people, too.

Then Universal went exclusively with the HD DVD camp, and that seemed a justification of my decision. Now Warner Bros.--the big fish in home video--has announced an exclusive deal with the Blu Ray people, and news reports trumpet the end of the format war in favor of Blu Ray. They may be right.

But there have also been plenty of sales reports that sales of HD DVD players have been exploding lately--and it can't be such a stretch to imagine that sales of the discs themselves will soon follow suit sales-wise. So why does Warner Bros. pick this moment, this particularly unsettled moment, to make its major announcement? They swear that no money changed hands, that they weren't paid off by any Blu Ray backers, but I mean come on.

Insult to injury: my HD DVD player is currently broken, and today I'm going to have to ship it off for repairs.

The cynic in me dances its happy-joy dance.

For What It's Worth

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear

As the winner was quick to point out last night, something very like a revolution--the clean, mostly bloodless small-d democratic kind--may have begun at last. "Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope," Senator Obama said last night. Wouldn't it be great if that were true? If it were actually true?

John Edwards, who came in second in the Iowa caucuses, pointed out that by a two-thirds majority, the people of a staid, mostly-white, conservative state have voted for "a change candidate," by which he of course included himself. The same can be said on the Republican side, where Mike Huckabee (whose name, I just can't help it, always makes me think of Python's "Eric the Half-a-Bee" song) posted a win that the Wall Street Journal snarked was a victory for the evangelical left. And if the very idea of an evangelical left makes your head spin a little, then that could be taken as yet another endorsement of this notion that there's a groundswell for change, beginning right there in little ol' boring ol' Iowa.

It's the sort of thing that a lot of us dared to hope, just a little bit, after Obama's now-legendary keynote speech at the Democratic convention in 2004. His rise was so meteoric that, even as a former Chicagoan (I moved away in 2002), I really wasn't aware of him till that keynote moment. But I sure was aware of him after it, and I was delighted when he was elected to the Senate--but found his actual career in the Senate a little disappointing. I was hoping for fireworks, but he seemed to settle into the career Washington path a little too easily.

So when he announced for President, I was, initially, a supporter. Then came the Jefferson-Jackson event on November 10th last year. Purely by chance, I was home that night doing nothing, just switching channels at random, which I really don't do much since the advent of TiVo (I've got 20-plus movies stored on it right now, waiting for me to get to them). Even less often do I check in on C-Span, but that night I did, just in time for the Jefferson-Jackson speeches. Where I was surprised to find that Obama's speech, while excellent (right from the git-go, with the Chicago Bulls-style loudspeaker announcement), was only the second-best of the night.

The best? For me, it was John Edwards. (You can catch the whole thing here.) Now this, this was a man breathing fire. And given how bad things have gotten over the past eight years, fire was and is my minimum requirement for taking office. (For the record, my mom is a Ron Paul supporter, who is also most definitely a fire-breather--but I just can't quite bring myself around to the whole libertarian thing.)

As I've said any number of times here, I am now firmly of the belief that poverty is, worldwide, the key problem that sits underneath every other problem--and all along, for years now, Edwards has been talking about poverty in much the same way that Al Gore talked about the environment. He has credibility on this issue because it's not just something he tossed into a stump speech while running for office, it's something he's been actively working on for years. And yes, I know there have been presidents who've tried to tackle poverty before--most notably Lyndon Johnson's failed "War on Poverty" forty years ago. But past failure doesn't at all mean that the fight should be abandoned, and even a good effort that doesn't accomplish what it seeks is vastly superior to no effort at all--which is what we've had for way too long now.

So I already knew this about Edwards, and every once in a while I would think to myself that I really should take a closer look at him. But the Jefferson-Jackson event was the moment that did what the 12,000 debates didn't--it allowed every candidate to speak for several minutes at a time, not several seconds at a time, but the evening was still compact enough that everyone could get a turn without wearing out the audience. So that where the debates did nothing to change my thinking about any of the candidates, this event did. Because although Obama's speech was good (and so was Hillary's), Edwards was fired up and saying things I believe desperately need sayng. For example: "...we do not believe in allowing lobbyists to write the laws of the United States of America...."

This was part of a rhetorical run in which Edwards attempted to define what progressives like himself stand for, in a speech I've wished for years that a Democrat would make. It's a truism that he who defines an argument wins the argument, and for too long now, conservatives have been brilliant at defining the argument. "If you don't support the war in Iraq, you're not a patriot" is only one absurd example. By making that argument stick, they made every reasoned objection to the war into an emotionally-packed declaration of anti-Americanism, so that reason went out the window and people only heard what they had already been emotionally primed to hear. In such an environment, for years now I've been desperate for a progressive to make a positive affirmation of what we're for, and why we're for it. Edwards finally did that.

So I came away from that C-Span session with a new candidate to back. And although he only came in second last night, I think he's right that he and Obama represent the "change candidates." And that although Obama was speaking specifically of his candidacy, this night may in fact represent that broader change that could signify a real revolution in what this nation is about--a change to something that might actually represent the promise of America, the fulfilled promise rather than the promise betrayed over the last eight years.

"Hope," Obama said last night, "is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be." Every single commentator last night seemed awestruck by this speech, and while it's still much too early to declare that a revolution is really underway, still, I feel just enough cautious optimism to dare to set it forth in print.

Edwards or Obama, in the end I will enthusiastically vote for either one. And if in the end they could maybe pair up somehow, well, that would be pretty great too.

DIY

A quote from WGA west president Patric Verrone ran in Friday's Wall Street Journal, saying that the current strike is creating new "entrepreneurial possibilities for the talent community to go directly into production and distribution.... The ability to explore this business without media conglomerates is becoming a real possibility.”

He was speaking specifically about internet TV, but his statement has broader reach than that. As any number of small, truly independent filmmakers have demonstrated in the last few years, it's entirely possible to get a film into theaters and then do a DVD release largely over the internet, without ever becoming beholden to a studio or a distributor. Marc Rosenbush and I have done exactly that with Zen Noir, and our success is by no means the most dramatic. Peter Broderick is probably the most recognized authority in town on these issues, and there is an excellent article on his website dealing with all of this.

More and more, I've come to be a believer in the whole Do It Yourself model, across the board. Incorporation for Artists is, I have no doubt, good enough to secure a modest deal at least with a niche publisher like Silman-James, which focuses on film-related books. But if I went that route, I would get a small advance, and then I would get small royalties spread out over a few years, and then at some point the book would be moved off the shelves for something newer and that would be the end of it. But I can sell it online, keep all the profits (after very modest expenses because there's so little overhead), and keep doing that year after year.

And the above-mentioned Marc Rosenbush recently launched an online course called Internet Marketing for Filmmakers, in which he teaches exactly how we put together the Zen Noir DVD launch. It is, so far, the farthest step we've taken in our growing conviction on the value of Doing It Yourself: a statement of what we believe, why we believe it, and how it might help others, as well.

Think of the possibilities: do a simple, small film (I just saw Miranda July's Me, You and Everyone We Know, which is a great movie and perfect example of a film that would fit this paradigm) (here's her blog); release it in theaters or don't, you'll probably make more money, actually, if you don't; then do your homework, identify your audience really well, put up a website and start selling. Thousands of people will see your work, they'll buy it for their friends, the story you want to tell will get told to a much wider audience than ever saw anything I did in the theatre, and all the profits belong to you and your partners. All of the profits.

The strike demonstrates the dangers of being owned by the media conglomerates. Because it's not just the writers risking their livelihoods: there are also uncounted thousands of jobs that are, simply, collateral damage. Some of the production company executives we pitched to just before the strike, for example, have already been fired. And if they're gone, so are their assistants. Hollywood's famous mailroom jobs have probably been whittled down, as well. A friend of mine who runs a temp agency tells me that even normal lawfirm staffing jobs have dried up, at Christmastime when people are going on vacation, almost certainly because everyone in town is simply buckling down and trying to get through this whole thing. There's pain out there, and it's spreading, and it has everything to do with a few big, big companies owning almost everything there is to own in this business.

Now imagine if enough frustrated indie film guys decided to start taking matters into their own hands. Internet TV, self-distributed DVDs, books online, all of it. Then it wouldn't matter what the Sumner Redstones or the Rupert Murdochs of the world, the media conglomerates who own almost all of everything, have to say about our work. Our work is ours, that's how it always should have been and now, just maybe, we can make this oughta-be into a really-truly-is.

There are dangers, to be sure, and some real challenges--not only do you have to be a good artist who makes good work, but you have to become a real businessman, and believe me, I know exactly how much that idea reduces most artists to a pile of jelly. But the alternative is becoming a slave to Rupert Murdoch, and come on, when you think about it for even a second, isn't it worth anything to avoid that particular trap?

The Guns of Dealey Plaza

This is true: at the entrance to the Sixth Floor Museum, which is what has become of the Texas Book Depository in the years since President Kennedy was assassinated, there is a sign reminding people that they shouldn't bring guns inside.

And for some reason, I was the only person in the immediate vicinity who found that ironic.

My father and step-mother recently moved to Dallas for work, and I flew out for Thanksgiving. Shortly after reaching the airport I saw one of those red crawl-displays displaying the date, November 22, and realized that I was making my first visit to Dallas on the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination in that same city. So I had JFK on my mind practically from the first moment, and it's not such a surprise, really, that the one thing we all decided to do the Friday after Thanksgiving, before we all flew off to our different places again, was to visit Dealey Plaza.

Since the anniversary itself happened to fall on Thanksgiving, most people visited the next day, as I did, and there was a circus going on all across Dealey Plaza. (Here's a photo of the crowd on the grassy knoll.) There were guys selling things near the entrance, the same sorts of guys you'll see hawking t-shirts outside concerts or selling maps of the stars' homes in Beverly Hills. I leaned over to my sister and said "Hey, one of the great tragedies of American history happened here! Let's exploit it!" My step-mother politely declined to spend five bucks on one of their printed maps of the area.

We paid $13.50 per adult, which seemed a little steep, but it included an audio thingie that you hung around your neck. There really wasn't anything on the tape that added to the materials already on display, and the crowds were so large that the tape was moving way faster than I was; about halfway through I turned it off for good and explored at my own pace.

And yes, right at the entrance, where the young guy took our tickets, there was a posted sign reminding people not to bring guns inside. I asked if anyone found that ironic, and the young ticket-taker said "Well, this is Texas," and my dad pointed out that Texas is a concealed-carry state. All of which I knew perfectly well: it was the fact that in this place dedicated to perhaps the most notorious shooting of all time, people needed to be reminded that bringing a gun was perhaps in bad taste.

Apparently I hadn't sufficiently learned from the map-sellers outside that where money is to be made, bad taste really doesn't enter into the equation.

The exhibition itself strives for good taste by broadening its reach beyond the assassination: brief portraits of the Sixties, of Kennedy himself, and of his administration (prompting Dad to recollect when he was serving on an aircraft carrier during the Cuban Missile Crisis, right at the front line at what turned out to be the moment of greatest tension, almost entirely unaware of what was actually going on). But of course the museum doesn't have much in the way of artifacts to go along with these displays: the Kennedy Library in Boston, quite naturally, has all of that, together with the National Archives.

The plain truth, then, is that this is a museum about one event: an assassination. Here too the curators strive to be as tasteful as possible, given what the museum is: blown-up still frames from the Zapruder film don't show quite the worst moment, though they come close. There is a photo of President Kennedy's dark suit jacket showing the bullet hole, but not of his white shirt, which shows the blood much more obviously. And of course there are no autopsy photos or diagrams, for which many thanks. (Yes, you can find all of that on the internet, if you must.)

And there is plenty on the investigation itself, including the FBI's scale mock-up of Dealey Plaza. But what matters most, of course, is the window itself, from where Oswald fired. A giant glass box surrounds the area now, and empty book boxes seek to recreate the situation: boxes stacked high in order to conceal someone crouching behind, peering out through a rifle's telescopic sight, waiting for the right moment.

And I have to say, all conspiracy theories aside: if you were going to do such a thing, that was a perfect place for it. Coming along Houston Street, the motorcade made a sharp left onto Elm Street, which immediately curves back almost in the same direction they just came from before proceeding on toward the highways. This means the motorcade would have had to slow down to make the turn, then curved away from the Book Depository, a perfect shot getting better and better with each second. It's all perfectly obvious when you look down through those windows; there's a tree in the way that would make the shot harder now, but from the original photos that tree wasn't nearly so expansive in 1963. (Oliver Stone had it trimmed back when he filmed JFK there, but that was 16 years ago and the tree has filled out again.)

Of course, the grassy knoll would make a pretty good spot, too. There are actually three such pergolas on all sides of the plaza, any of which would have made a good sniper's perch. I won't go into the various theories, except to say that even though I do believe governments are capable of attempting most anything, I'm not nearly as convinced that they're actually capable of accomplishing such grand conspiracies.

But at least I know I can say this: now, in a concealed-carry state like Texas, I can rest assured that in this one place, the Texas School Book Depository, I am reasonably safe from getting shot. Good to know.

Reading Devices

On the one hand, I'm an old-fashioned bibliophile, one of those people who has books spilling out from every conceivable corner. (Go ahead, open my kitchen cabinets, I dare you.) I've always agreed with Isaac Asimov that a book is a perfect invention: it requires no batteries, it starts when you want it to start, stops when you want it to stop, waits for you with endless patience, and picks up right where you left it every time. Hours of entertainment, hours of education, a truly perfect invention, no question. And as Borges once wrote, "I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books." Exactly right.

But every time I move, I fill dozens of boxes with books. Hundreds of pounds of them, growing every year. Not to mention the aforementioned kitchen cabinets. When I travel, I generally limit myself to bringing two books, simply because of the weight and the bulk. This is no problem when traveling for a couple days; but for a month-long trip, two books might not be enough. And what if I'm on the road but need one of my many reference books?

This is why the idea of a "reading device" (there isn't a good name for these things yet) has some appeal. And since Amazon has just released the Kindle, I figured I'd take the occasion to write about this whole class of gadget a little.

The first e-book readers were basically limited-function computers, with LCD displays that had the same problems as computer screens: tough to read in daylight, and a glare that would absolutely hurt the eyes after too much reading. I liked the idea of them, but none of that early wave of devices was anywhere near as good as a book.

Then came this whole eInk development. Now we were starting to get somewhere: an LCD-like screen without glare, easily readable in daylight, something that really resembled a piece of paper, but one that you didn't have to flip in order to read what was printed on the other side of it. The Sony Reader was first, and it has a lot of advantages: it's light, it has decent capacity, and if you buy you get some books for free to get you started. One gigantic problem, though: it's not compatible with Macs, and in order to get books onto the Reader, you have to first interface with your computer. So much for that idea.

Now Amazon has released the Kindle, and it has one immediate advantage: no computers are involved at all, it operates wirelessly by downloading books from Amazon's servers, using what is basically Sprint's cellphone network--except that Amazon absorbs the cost of the wireless connection (and of course bundles it into the price of each individual book). (By the way, there's a decent comparison of the Reader and the Kindle here, on CNET's site.)

But there's a new problem: the Kindle itself is godawful ugly. I mean, look at it. It's horrifically, incomprehensibly ugly. And there are so many buttons, it looks almost impossible to hold without accidentally triggering something. This ugliness problem is no small thing--like it or not, the hip factor matters, and the Kindle could absolutely learn some things from, say, the iPhone (it could also use the iPhone's touch screen, which would help straightaway by removing that clunky keyboard). The Reader looks much cleaner, and that's good--we shouldn't be distracted by the package, the reading experience should be all about the words, and every other distraction should simply vanish. Accidentally hitting the Next Page button a hundred times is also a pretty bad thing.

And, as with the Reader, it's still too expensive. I'd be willing to spend about $100 on a "reading device," but $400 is way beyond the pale. Particularly when you're not saving that much on the books themselves. It would be even nicer if you could get a bundle discount on the books--buy it in print and for the Kindle, and get a special price for both. That would be nifty.

Still--in his video promo for the Kindle, Neil Gaiman talks about how, when he traveled to Florida to write American Gods, he had to drive rather than fly, because of the hundred pounds of reference books he took with him. This sort of argument carries an awful lot of weight (sorry) with me, and makes the idea of a device of this sort that much more attractive.

But all in all: we're not there yet. We're getting tantalizingly close to a device that could actually bring a significant part of my much-loved library on the road with me, but we ain't quite there yet. Maybe in its second generation of the Kindle, Amazon can drop the price and pretty it up significantly. That might just make the crucial, final difference...

Strike Striking Struck

So you may have heard that some writers are making a lot of noise, and the world holds its breath lest it be forced to endure life without TV shows.

There is a very good WGA-produced video explaining what it's all about that can be found here on a MySpace page...

And the best reporting I've seen on the strike, on a day-to-day basis, is definitely Nikki Finke's LA Weekly column, which can be found at her Deadline Hollywood Daily site...

As a writer, I'm (almost) completely on the WGA's side. As the above video demonstrates, the issue at hand is one that will only get larger as time passes--and the pay inequities, already pretty outrageous, will become intolerable. Since I plan to have a nice long future writing for media including film and television, this is a fight whose worth is self-evident.

So why did I say (almost)? Well, you know. Self-interest takes its toll. And just a week before the strike began, Marc and I pitched City of Truth to several production companies, getting enthusiastic responses from every one of them. Three companies, to date, have asked for copies of the script, so it is now being read in some lovely places. But with the strike, even though I'm not a WGA member, I still can't sell anything to a signatory company (and all the interested parties are signatories). I can't pitch to anyone new, can't have a meeting with anyone from any of these companies. So if we get a call next week from someone saying he loves the script and wants to pay me money, I have to say no. This is whattayacallit--frustrating.

Why am I not a WGA member? Partly because playwrights aren't covered, and partly because I have tried to keep away from unions for as long as possible, ever since seeing what happened to some actor-friends in Chicago who joined Equity too soon--suddenly they couldn't work for the non-union theatres anymore, but they didn't yet have a solid enough reputation to get steady work at the union theatres. End result: an endless string of dayjobs.

Plus there's a whole discussion we could have about when unions are essential, and when they overstay their welcome. But that's for another day. For now, writers are on strike over something they need to strike about, and I'm behind them for this fight--hell, I may even go out and hold up a picket sign once or twice.

Even so... like every other writer, I really hope this one can get settled soon. It won't, but I sure wish it would.

Catching Up

Some random stuff...

The guitar playing is going along reasonably well. There was a point about a month ago when the very thing I'd predicted happened: my usual learning curve curved when it should, and suddenly the things I'd been doing badly just kinda got better. It was definitely sudden: one day I was as bad as I'd always been, and the next day I picked up the guitar and started playing as if I'd been doing it for years. The trick is, the stuff I was good at was only the stuff I'd been practicing--so now I've added a couple more chords to learn, and I still haven't got any single song all the way down, so there are still miles and miles to go before I begin to feel any sort of real competence. Still--when I pick up the guitar, something resembling music does actually happen. This is the first great step. Now comes the trick of keeping up my enthusiasm over the long haul...

Sales of Incorporation for Artists are going along reasonably well--I'd made back the expenses of putting it together in just a couple hours on the first day--but it hasn't quite taken off yet. It's just a question of figuring out the advertising--I was at the big Screenwriters' Expo for the last few days, and when I mentioned the book to some people they got very enthusiastic, so I'm pretty sure it's just a question of getting it in front of the right people. The very definition of advertising.

The skies are slowly turning blue again. And I can pretty well breathe again. The fires aren't out, not by a long shot, but the Malibu fire is contained and the bad ones down south, by San Diego, are slowly being brought under control. Even a couple days ago, the skies were still yellow, and the air quality was decidedly awful. But it's getting better, each day a little better than the one before. This is a decidedly good thing.

Plus the Red Sox won the World Series again, and that's just great all over. Maybe next time I'll tell my version of the Bill Buckner story...

Not on Fire

As bad as it is, it could be worse. The pictures from Southern California these past couple days have looked literally hellish, but the fires are not universal. Geography has everything to do with it.

L.A. proper sits in a bowl, surrounded by mountains on three sides (the Santa Monicas, the San Gabriels), with the Pacific Ocean on the fourth side. The fires are in the mountains and canyons, to the north and south. Malibu is to to the north, a case where canyons essentially run right down to the sea, which is how residents get those spectacular views. There are canyon communities all over the area, and they are, most of the time, spectacular places to live (when I first came here, I stayed for three months with some friends in Topanga Canyon, immediately south of Malibu, and loved it). But if there's a fire, those canyons becomes rivers of flame, with results that have been seen time and again.

So if you live there, it can get very bad very fast, because the geography of the canyons provides channels that essentially funnel the flames in a specific direction. At the same time, the mountains doing the funnelling typically protect other areas, unless the flames climb to a ridgeline and flying embers set another area on fire. (Which has in fact been happening quite a lot, which is why three fires became thirteen so quickly.)

But I live in the bowl that is L.A. proper. The mountains are visibly in every direction, and I live toward the northern end of the bowl--on my bike, I can start climbing the Sepulveda Pass into the Santa Monica Mountains in about twenty minutes. (And a mighty workout it is, although the trip back is fabulous--three miles without peddling!) But the only scenario by which my place could catch fire would be the true nightmare: a Chicago-in-1871 conflagration where the whole city is aflame, embers leaping from rooftop to rooftop. It's not impossible, but it is unlikely.

In fact, just standing outside, I can barely see any evidence of the fires. The sky to the west is a little yellow, but to the east it's a lovely blue. My throat has been burning since late Sunday night, and my breathing seems a little shallow sometimes, but that's it. The same Santa Ana winds that caused all of this are blowing most of the smoke due west, out over the ocean. So that's something, at least.

But for now, no real problems here. (Note the qualifier...)

Family and Funerals

Here's why last weekend I flew to Pittsburgh on a Friday and back to L.A. the next day. Hint: it ain't because I love the good people with the TSA so damn much.

The story requires a boatload of exposition. My dad and my step-mother have for the last several years taken care of my step-mother's mother, Marian (universally known, even by her children, as "Grandma"). She was a very sweet, very gentle, very quiet woman who, since her husband died more than 25 years ago, always seemed to be one of those people left behind in a different era. Never really adjusted to the modern world, but it didn't much matter: she had a lot of family, she did some traveling, and she was, it turns out, tougher than she looked--on a skiing trip she was riding behind Dad on a snowmobile that he flipped, and she popped right up, laughing. So it was agonizing when, a couple years ago, she developed Alzheimer's. Her hearing went, too, so that even when she knew where she was, she couldn't hear anything you said and communication became nearly impossible. Eventually she became a walking ghost in her daughter's house, needing constant care. On October 5, in what can only be considered a relief to everyone, herself included, she passed on.

The world being what it is, there are odd coincidences. Dad, at an age when most men would be retiring, has just sold the house because his job needs to move him to Dallas. My brother and sister have moved into their own places, and everyone else was about to pick up and move to Dallas--but the night before the move, Grandma died. You can't tell me that people don't know when the right moment comes.

Now, Dad is one of the world's great stoics. When something happens, he becomes a no-muss no-fuss get-things-done sort of guy, which makes him a great guy to have around in a crisis. For something like this, though, it's not necessarily an ideal approach. His initial take on the whole situation was that he and my step-mother and her brothers would fly to Pittsburgh for the funeral, but that no one else should stop their lives to attend. He was considering all sorts of factors, like my siblings' new financial constraints now that they're living on their own, and figured it made eminent fiscal sense for them not to go. Which of course it did. But the kids were born late enough that they only ever had one living grandparent, and Grandma was it. I knew after ten seconds of talking to them that they needed to go, and the way to make sure that happened was for me to go myself. (And it didn't take long for Dad to figure all of this out as well, at which point he swung into action, arranging hotel rooms and rental cars.)

Hence four airports in two days. Because of course nothing was flying direct from L.A. to Pittsburgh, so I had to go through Detroit on the outbound leg, and Minneapolis on the way back. (Wondering, the whole time I was that particular airport, "I wonder which bathroom it was?" A friend joked "Keep your feet inside the stall at all times!")

Our planes got in last, so by the time we reached the Comfort Inn in Penn Hills, the rest of the family had a good loud wake going on in the hotel lounge. Tears and tales as the liquor flowed, and we were up till 3:00 a.m. with a 6:30 wakeup call.

Now 3:00 a.m. wasn't a big deal--it was only midnight, L.A. time. But that 6:30 wakeup, that one was a killer. Particularly because (a) our non-smoking room had just had a smoker in it, so everything reeked of cigarette, and (b) my brother, with whom I shared the room, loves cold weather even more than I do, so on a cold night he opened the sliding glass door, and by the time 6:30 rolled around I could barely move what with being near frozen to death. Hands shaking, I immediately started a very hot shower and stood under it for a long long time.

And when my brother woke up? He was frozen too. And we still hadn't managed to clear out the cigarette stench.

The service was quiet and small. And the funeral home was running things at peak efficiency, so that once we reached the cemetery, we didn't have a graveside ceremony at all, we simply filed into a covered room with a nice view for a few words; and as soon as we were done, another family swooped in for their own ceremony. I very nearly served as a pallbearer, but one of Marian's sons appeared at the last moment and I happily gave my space to him.

We ended up graveside anyway. Marian was to be buried next to her husband Walter, and we found the space just as the backhoe arrived. So a slightly macabre scene followed as some family members did (and others decidedly did not) stand around, watching, as Marian was in fact laid to rest. Gorgeous view, right at the top of a hill, with trees and a great big sky all around.

And then back again. The kids and I went into Pittsburgh, which we discovered is one of those cities that rolls up the sidewalks on weekends, then we found ourselves a bar at the airport, watched a college football game, and spent just a little bit of time with each other before getting on planes and planes and going our separate ways again.